Hydroxonium (talk | contribs) →RfC: Lower the limit of account creation in a 24 hour period by non-autoconfirmed accounts: Please add ''non-autoconfirmed'' to the text |
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===RfC: Lower the limit of account creation in a 24 hour period by non-autoconfirmed accounts=== |
===RfC: Lower the limit of account creation in a 24 hour period by non-autoconfirmed accounts=== |
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A discussion at [[WP:ANI]] on sockpuppets creating other sockpuppets seems to have consensus to lower this limit. The reason not to eliminate this ability altogether is to allow for a bad username to be changed by the user as they familiarize with [[WP:USERNAME]] policy. There are two proposals, one to lower the limit to two accounts per 24 hour period, the other to one account per 24 period.[[User:Cerejota|Cerejota]] ([[User talk:Cerejota|talk]]) 19:43, 1 September 2011 (UTC) |
A discussion at [[WP:ANI]] on sockpuppets creating other sockpuppets seems to have consensus to lower this limit. The reason not to eliminate this ability altogether is to allow for a bad username to be changed by the user as they familiarize with [[WP:USERNAME]] policy. There are two proposals, one to lower the limit for non-autoconfirmed users to two accounts per 24 hour period, the other to one account per 24 period. [[User:Cerejota|Cerejota]] ([[User talk:Cerejota|talk]]) 19:43, 1 September 2011 (UTC) |
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<small>moved from ANI as per [[WP:SNOW]], only moved !vote, not discussion on moving here--[[User:Cerejota|Cerejota]] ([[User talk:Cerejota|talk]]) 20:35, 1 September 2011 (UTC)</small> |
<small>moved from ANI as per [[WP:SNOW]], only moved !vote, not discussion on moving here--[[User:Cerejota|Cerejota]] ([[User talk:Cerejota|talk]]) 20:35, 1 September 2011 (UTC)</small> |
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*'''Two accounts''' in 24 hours per Tnxman. [[User:EdJohnston|EdJohnston]] ([[User talk:EdJohnston|talk]]) 01:45, 2 September 2011 (UTC) |
*'''Two accounts''' in 24 hours per Tnxman. [[User:EdJohnston|EdJohnston]] ([[User talk:EdJohnston|talk]]) 01:45, 2 September 2011 (UTC) |
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*'''Comment''' - Although the title of this section mentions ''non-autoconfirmed'' users, it doesn't state that in the body of the text. Not trying to be nit-picky, but would somebody mind adding ''non-autoconfirmed'' to the body of the text so that this proposal doesn't inadvertently impact the [[WP:ACC|Account Creation Team]]? Thanks in advance. - '''''[[User:Hydroxonium|Hydroxonium]]''''' ([[User talk:Hydroxonium|T]]•[[Special:Contributions/Hydroxonium|C]]•<span class="plainlinks">[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&limit=1&username=Hydroxonium V]</span>) 04:21, 2 September 2011 (UTC) |
*'''Comment''' - Although the title of this section mentions ''non-autoconfirmed'' users, it doesn't state that in the body of the text. Not trying to be nit-picky, but would somebody mind adding ''non-autoconfirmed'' to the body of the text so that this proposal doesn't inadvertently impact the [[WP:ACC|Account Creation Team]]? Thanks in advance. - '''''[[User:Hydroxonium|Hydroxonium]]''''' ([[User talk:Hydroxonium|T]]•[[Special:Contributions/Hydroxonium|C]]•<span class="plainlinks">[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&limit=1&username=Hydroxonium V]</span>) 04:21, 2 September 2011 (UTC) |
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:{{done}}--[[User:Cerejota|Cerejota]] ([[User talk:Cerejota|talk]]) 04:34, 2 September 2011 (UTC) |
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== Move request to make China about the modern nation state == |
== Move request to make China about the modern nation state == |
Revision as of 04:34, 2 September 2011
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Account Deletion
WP:UNAME states: "It is not possible to delete user accounts, as all contributions must be assigned to some identifier; either a username or an IP address." My proposal is that a single, catch-all account be created for the purpose of account deletion. Any user who wishes to delete their account may request that their username be changed to this account's name, which will reassign all their edits to the account. However, they will be unable to log in to the account, as the act of usurpation will remove their password information - or something similar. This will solve the problem of edit assignment and allow any user to remove their influence on Wikipedia permanently. Of course, if this proposal is carried out, it will supersede "right to vanish". Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 22:27, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
- The merging of contributions from multiple users to one account I don't think is technically possible. Steven Zhang The clock is ticking.... 22:31, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
- Will you please elaborate? Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 22:36, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
- Teechnically, that could easily be done (changing a value used in the SQL table(s) is relatively trivial), but doing this would make our license meaningless. The way that I understand it we can't go changing the contributions history at all, especially for the GFDL license. Of course, they're all pseudonyms anyway, but... I don't see anything like this standing a chance of gaining acceptance (I'm certainly willing to be proven wrong, I just doubt that it'll happen).
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 22:41, 27 July 2011 (UTC) - See also bug #17265 and mw:Extension:User Merge and Delete. Helder 22:44, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
- Teechnically, that could easily be done (changing a value used in the SQL table(s) is relatively trivial), but doing this would make our license meaningless. The way that I understand it we can't go changing the contributions history at all, especially for the GFDL license. Of course, they're all pseudonyms anyway, but... I don't see anything like this standing a chance of gaining acceptance (I'm certainly willing to be proven wrong, I just doubt that it'll happen).
- Will you please elaborate? Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 22:36, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
- This would cause huge administration problems should ever the allegedly vanished user return as a sockpuppet (or be suspected of doing so). I wouldn't mind it in cases of extreme harassment or some such thing, but for general hissy fit + vanish, there is too much potential for abuse. --B (talk) 22:55, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
- I don't quite understand how a user who returned under a new name would pose a problem - it is mentioned in WP:ADMINSOCK. The process for account deletion would work much like username changes do now - a user must give a valid reason why they want their account deleted, and the process would have to be reviewed - perhaps they would not be able to delete an account after a certain number of edits (fewer than 50 000)? I also don't understand how there is potential for abuse - as long as the account never actually makes edits of its own, everything should be fine (but I don't understand the system all that well, yet). Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 00:01, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- Suppose some user is under arbcom sanction. They say, "delete my account, I'm leaving". A month later, a new user appears who edits the same topics as the old one. The new user should obviously be subject to the same arbcom sanctions, if, in fact, they are the same person, but because the old account's edits have been added to the slush account, investigating it is no longer possible. This has nothing to do with admin accounts. "Administration problems" != "problems with admin accounts". --B (talk) 00:35, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- A simple solution is that no one under arbcom sanction may delete his or her account. Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 02:56, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- Another problem is looking for systematic bad edits by a former editor in order to fix them. This would be impossible if the edits could no longer be distinguished. Imagine a user creates a large number of copyright or BLP violations and then vanishes before it's cleaned up. It should be possible to see edits by an account whether it's active or not. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:57, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- This actually wouldn't be a problem, as I envision approval being required to delete an account (though things are starting to look grim). Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 02:49, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- All of this is irrelevant, regardless. L i c e n s e.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 07:33, 28 July 2011 (UTC)- By deleting their username, then, users must agree to forfeit all copyrights to every edit they have ever made. Or is this a bit more complex? Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 14:27, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- And what if they come afterwards and claim somebody else accessed their account and illegally forfeited their rights? Or that they were in a bad mental state and not competent to make legal decisions? And I still think my earlier objection is a serious problem. People approving requests for account deletions would get an unreasonable burden if they had to check there were no edits which would later require investigation, and they could still easily overlook something. This proposal has a lot of drawbacks including legal issues (though I'm not a lawyer) and very little benefit compared to renaming the account to a name unconnected to the old name. If we want edits by vanished users to stand out then we could rename the accounts to something systematic like Vanished1729. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:47, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- Policy descisions are frequently willing to take into account extenuating circumstances already. There doesn't really need to be an exception for some hypothetical case like this. i kan reed (talk) 15:11, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- And what if they come afterwards and claim somebody else accessed their account and illegally forfeited their rights? Or that they were in a bad mental state and not competent to make legal decisions? And I still think my earlier objection is a serious problem. People approving requests for account deletions would get an unreasonable burden if they had to check there were no edits which would later require investigation, and they could still easily overlook something. This proposal has a lot of drawbacks including legal issues (though I'm not a lawyer) and very little benefit compared to renaming the account to a name unconnected to the old name. If we want edits by vanished users to stand out then we could rename the accounts to something systematic like Vanished1729. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:47, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- By deleting their username, then, users must agree to forfeit all copyrights to every edit they have ever made. Or is this a bit more complex? Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 14:27, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- All of this is irrelevant, regardless. L i c e n s e.
- This actually wouldn't be a problem, as I envision approval being required to delete an account (though things are starting to look grim). Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 02:49, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- Suppose some user is under arbcom sanction. They say, "delete my account, I'm leaving". A month later, a new user appears who edits the same topics as the old one. The new user should obviously be subject to the same arbcom sanctions, if, in fact, they are the same person, but because the old account's edits have been added to the slush account, investigating it is no longer possible. This has nothing to do with admin accounts. "Administration problems" != "problems with admin accounts". --B (talk) 00:35, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- I don't quite understand how a user who returned under a new name would pose a problem - it is mentioned in WP:ADMINSOCK. The process for account deletion would work much like username changes do now - a user must give a valid reason why they want their account deleted, and the process would have to be reviewed - perhaps they would not be able to delete an account after a certain number of edits (fewer than 50 000)? I also don't understand how there is potential for abuse - as long as the account never actually makes edits of its own, everything should be fine (but I don't understand the system all that well, yet). Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 00:01, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- You can already have the account renamed. Why do the contributions need to be merged with some other vanished user's work? Why isn't it good enough to have a User:Vanished1, a User:Vanished2, a User:Vanished3, etc.? What's the benefit of merging them into one enormous User:All-the-users-who-ever-vanished? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:24, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- It makes identification virtually impossible. By the way, User:Alltheuserswhohaveevervanished is a great idea for the account's name! Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 19:43, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- Yeah, but that sounds like a very good reason not to do this, from where I'm sitting. We have a problem with liars who say that they're going to WP:LEAVE, but then come back days or months later with a new account name and/or as an unregistered user, and cause the same problems. We need to be able to associate individual "vanished" (ab)users with their future abuse.
- And, no, you can't really say "we'll only do this for people who aren't abusing Wikipedia", because it is exceedingly rare for an editor with a perfect track record to vanish. Many simply stop editing, but very few have their accounts renamed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:26, 30 July 2011 (UTC)
- It makes identification virtually impossible. By the way, User:Alltheuserswhohaveevervanished is a great idea for the account's name! Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 19:43, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose There is no good way to implement this. I could, like the people above, try to show examples of why this is a bad idea, why it creates more problems than it could ever possibly solve, but it would all be a waste of time because this is never going to happen. Sven Manguard Wha? 20:00, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose We already have revision deletion that could remove usernames for a limited amount of edits. But the editor has already granted a license to make what they contribute available. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:27, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
- Comment - it's really not clear to me what problem this is trying to solve. Never mind the issues raised with the solution - what's the motivation here? Rd232 talk 12:51, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
- My motivation was seeing that very passage in WP:UNAME listed above. I tried to think of a way to delete accounts while still assigning edits to something, and this was my idea. Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 14:25, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose You can delete accounts on meta! ~~EBE123~~ talkContribs 23:19, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
- Wrong. I'm guessing you're referring to either 1) global account locking, which isn't deleting and can be undone - it's just like a "more powerful" site-wide block, 3) deleting global accounts, which is only to delete the SUL binding info associated with an account - the local accounts are left in place. — Kudu ~I/O~ 23:35, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose - as Ohm's Law says, this would be problematic for our license. Other problems have also been pointed out, and there is little benefit over the current vanished user situation. LadyofShalott 01:22, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
- Support for accounts which have null edits and no SUL. mabdul 17:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
- Actually, that's a great idea. Accounts with zero edits could easily be merged in to the slush account. Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 21:20, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
- Support this suggestion — agree that this is a pretty good idea. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:18, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Why would an account with no edits need deleting in the first place?--Jac16888 Talk 03:00, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
- So that the name could be reused (hopefully by someone that will actually edit). Sven Manguard Wha? 05:20, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
- Yes, that and that if - for example - a user is requesting an account at WP:ACC with a "similar name" the helpers with tool-access don't have to check for accounts and thus unflagged users (so not having the WP:accountcreator-flag) are able to handle these requests. Since the "conflicting" account is already deleted.
- I would also propose for accounts, which should be deleted, get a mail(if they have a mail address saved) with - say - one week time to "reactivate" their account and rescuing it for deletion. mabdul 12:54, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
- Which begs the question, what about accounts without email addresses set? Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 01:34, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
- I would also propose for accounts, which should be deleted, get a mail(if they have a mail address saved) with - say - one week time to "reactivate" their account and rescuing it for deletion. mabdul 12:54, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
- Yes, that and that if - for example - a user is requesting an account at WP:ACC with a "similar name" the helpers with tool-access don't have to check for accounts and thus unflagged users (so not having the WP:accountcreator-flag) are able to handle these requests. Since the "conflicting" account is already deleted.
- So that the name could be reused (hopefully by someone that will actually edit). Sven Manguard Wha? 05:20, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
- Why would an account with no edits need deleting in the first place?--Jac16888 Talk 03:00, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
- This would would only make sense if restricted to accounts that haven't logged in for years. I believe there is a large number of users who don't want to edit (yet?), but who are logging in regularly because it's the best way to change the way various aspects of Wikipedia are displayed. E.g. it's the only way to change how mathematical formulas are displayed. Anyway, a week's notice is way too short for inactive users. There are numerous good reasons (e.g. hospitalisation; international travelling in countries with poor infrastructure) why someone may be completely offline for a month or two. Hans Adler 04:30, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Support this idea. This would ideally be done at the global level, by a bot. It would be integrated to Special:CentralAuth, as "delete global account and all local instances" or something of the kind. The requirements for bot deletion could be, for example, that the account must have been created at least 2 years ago, have 0 edits (including deleted) globally, and have not logged in the past year. — Kudu ~I/O~ 23:37, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Support - The CC BY-SA specifically states (in the short version, at least) that "the above conditions can be waived if one gets permission from the copyright holder (or something along those lines)". The license will not be rendered meaningless. Agreeing to the deletion of an account simply means that you agree to waive your rights to your contributions, which is perfectly in line with CC BY-SA. It's a good way to free up good names that have been seized, although we'll have to keep some obvious ones like JarlaxleArtemis from being deleted. --Σ talkcontribs 04:02, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
- This is simply incorrect. Vanishing users do not (currently) agree to waive all rights to their contributions. The requested attribution may change but the license does not. Dcoetzee 15:04, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
- You are correct. The users who have vanished in the past did not agree to waive their rights. However, if we could require that all users who wish to vanish after this day waive their rights to their contributions, it would be in line with the license. If they refuse to waive their rights to their contributions, they can take the old method of renaming to "User:Vanished 480,904,054". Already-vanished users can be emailed and asked if they would like to relinquish their rights to their contributions, maybe. --Σ talkcontribs 02:35, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- This is simply incorrect. Vanishing users do not (currently) agree to waive all rights to their contributions. The requested attribution may change but the license does not. Dcoetzee 15:04, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose A solution in search of a problem. There's a virtually infinite number of names available for usurped accounts, and it would take about the same (minimal) amount of work to merge accounts in a new process as it currently takes to simply rename to a "vanished" or "usurped" name. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 03:52, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose - Due to licensing concerns. However, I would have no problem deleting old accounts (>1 year old) with no edits at all. Many of these are sockpuppets or just long-forgotten accounts. Reaper Eternal (talk) 12:40, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- I think that we should implement account locking as well, which would be especially effective with sockpuppets.Jasper Deng (talk) 03:56, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- It already exists here. Reaper Eternal (talk) 12:40, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- I mean, for local users, not just unified ones.Jasper Deng (talk) 21:50, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- It already exists here. Reaper Eternal (talk) 12:40, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- I don't think so - will makes things far too confusing. From a bureaucrats' perspective, people are usually satisfied with the explanation that accounts cannot be deleted - but that we can rename them to some (unique) random string of characters. –xenotalk 12:44, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- It's for a different reason why I'm proposing it. I'm sure that accounts like the socks of Grawp and other LTA users should be locked, to avoid even a chance of server overload from the user clicking Preferences and changing things over and over again.Jasper Deng (talk) 21:50, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose — Without thinking really deeply on the matter, I think that the content at Wikipedia:UNAME#Changing your username, WP:VANISH and WP:CLEANSTART adequately cover the matter, but perhaps for the need for some more clearly worded language at Wikipedia:UNAME#Changing your username; for instance, the section could be rewritten to reflect the reasons for changing a username and the ensuing options for retaining original identity vs. anonymizing the account. Further, if the "deleting" subsection is retained, then providing a better accounting of why an account can't be deleted would be helpful. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:13, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose again After considering this further I've come up with a much stronger justification for not doing this, and its name is Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations. If a departed user is later shown to be a serial copyright violator, it's important to review all their past contributions for copyvio problems. Without access to this information, cleaning up the mess is virtually impossible, especially if they used primarily offline sources. Dcoetzee 06:13, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
Clean up the edit page notices
I know right now we're trying to make Wikipedia easier to use and what-not, but the notices and reminders below the edit box and edit summary box seem a little messy (and sometimes redundant)
I think maybe we should simplify it, or at least clean it up into something a bit more manageable, like, say:
- Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. Remember to cite your sources, and maintain a neutral and unbiased point of view.
- Do not just copy and paste text from another web page; it may either be written in an improper style, or lack permission for use. Only text in the public domain, under the same license as Wikipedia itself, or used under fair use can be used in articles.
- By submitting text to Wikipedia, you irrevocably agree to make your contributions available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license and any version of the GNU Free Documentation License, and that a URL or hyperlink to the page will be considered sufficient attribution. If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, do not submit it—Wikipedia's licenses explicitly allow these activities.
Your changes will take effect immediately once the Save page button is clicked. If you wish to experiment or make test edits, please use a sandbox.
Either that, or if we can trim it even further while still keeping the same messages. ViperSnake151 Talk 04:13, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
Support: Simple and brilliant! This is such a completely obvious thing, and I don't know why no one has thought of it before. Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 21:49, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
- I'd support if the bolding were taken out. I think you also have to link the Terms of Use as a requirement, I think. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 21:57, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
- I had an idea of linking "CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL" to that page. ViperSnake151 Talk 05:31, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
- I recall that the WMF uses the existing licensing language ("you irrevocably agree to release your contribution") to make crystal clear the permanent nature of the licensing, and places that snippet where it does on the page to preclude claims by users that they didn't know they were so licensing their contribution. --Cybercobra (talk) 09:02, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
- No, no no.... - that language was written by the office of the General Counsel. It's very specific and legally crafted. You're welcome to propose changes to Geoff (gbrigham@wikimedia.org), but PLEASE don't make changes to that language without doing that. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 15:18, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
- Philippe: is there a reason that it's presented the way it is? Would it be improved without changing what it says by getting rid of its three different formats and two different sizes? Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 15:44, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
- Simply because IANAL, I'm gonna say that I'd strongly prefer that any changes go through the legal department. This stuff is too important to mess around with. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 17:53, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- Philippe: is there a reason that it's presented the way it is? Would it be improved without changing what it says by getting rid of its three different formats and two different sizes? Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 15:44, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
- No, no no.... - that language was written by the office of the General Counsel. It's very specific and legally crafted. You're welcome to propose changes to Geoff (gbrigham@wikimedia.org), but PLEASE don't make changes to that language without doing that. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 15:18, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
- Did tweaks. Still gonna be bold though. ViperSnake151 Talk 23:39, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Appreciate people examining this issue. We need to keep this language: "By clicking the "Save Page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license." Other language above this sentence is possible, but I would appreciate people running it by me. Philippe is right that there are some important legal considerations here. Many thanks. Geoffbrigham (talk) 18:06, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Aesthetic changes
At the moment, it looks something like this:
Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable.
By clicking the "Save Page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here. All text that you did not write yourself, except brief excerpts, must be available under terms consistent with Wikipedia's Terms of Use before you submit it.
Please note:
- When you click Save, your changes will immediately become visible to everyone. If you wish to run a test, please edit the Sandbox instead
- Please post only encyclopedic information that can be verified by external sources. Please maintain a neutral, unbiased point of view.
- Please do not copy and paste from copyrighted websites – only public domain resources can be copied without permission.
Would this be an improvement it's worth asking for:
By clicking the "Save Page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Please note:
- Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable.
- If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here. All text that you did not write yourself, except brief excerpts, must be available under terms consistent with Wikipedia's Terms of Use before you submit it.
- When you click Save, your changes will immediately become visible to everyone. If you wish to run a test, please edit the Sandbox instead
- Please post only encyclopedic information that can be verified by external sources. Please maintain a neutral, unbiased point of view.
- Please do not copy and paste from copyrighted websites – only public domain resources can be copied without permission.
Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 22:22, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Please submit the final version to me when you are ready. There are some sentences where I may propose slightly differently language; for example, I might say: "Content that violates any copyright is not allowed and should be deleted." Big picture, the language "By clicking the "Save Page" button ...." needs to appear immediately above the "Save page" button (or at least above the Edit summary). There should not be additional text between that language and the "Save page" button; additional language can appear under the "Save page" button, however. Many thanks for your review here. Geoffbrigham (talk) 15:30, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- How about we keep the by clicking the save page button notice, add the first suggested update at the top to where the current please note notice is now. We should also keep the If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, etc. notice below the save page button. Does this solve the legal problems? --Nathan2055talk - review 20:57, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
View wikipedia as it was on yyyy-mm-dd
I think this would be a handy feature. It could be used for historical/nostalgia purposes - or it could be used to freeze things in time - or it could be used to understand what someone was seeing in some report... or some other things I haven't thought of.
Obvious issues: 1) Deleted pages 2) Oversighted pages.
There are solutions to either (we could have as an option to see either first rev after deletion, first before, current page etc - this is more problematic when oversight is involved as we may not want to mention the oversight... we could even have a "undelete for nostalgia" option that selectively enables deleted pages on a case by case basis) but I thought best not to be too specific and instead throw the ideas out and say...
...what do you think? Egg Centric 19:41, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- An interesting idea. Since you can already view pages as they were by using the compare pages feature in page histories, all that would be needed would be a user friendly tool to streamline the process. I've been thinking of floating a similar idea, "see this article as it was when it got promoted to GA/FA/etc., which could be achieved through the same tool. Shouldn't take too long for someone to rig up if they use the method I described, would take longer if some other method were needed, as it'd have to be developed. I support this. Sven Manguard Wha? 19:54, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- And there's also the issue that old reviews transclude the most recent version of templates. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:56, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- And the newest versions of files, if there are multiple uploads under one name. I forgot about both of those things, good catch. Sven Manguard Wha? 20:09, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- And there's also the issue that old reviews transclude the most recent version of templates. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:56, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- Would be a cool gimmick, but I don't think it would be useful or cool enough to spend developer time on it. –xenotalk 20:21, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- Wayback Machine seems to already do it for us, but they don't seem to crawl all of Wikipedia, just select articles that have been requested through the site before. I wonder if we could strike a deal with them or something. Equazcion (talk) 20:42, 22 Aug 2011 (UTC)
- Hmm... I seem to remember that being requested before. Something about becoming an archive partner? Sven Manguard Wha? 21:17, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- It would actually be very useful in cases of suspected category emptying. At the moment there is no practical way to find out what was in a category at some given time. The only thing you can do is look at the contributions of accounts you suspect of doing the emptying, if you can figure out which ones they are.
- But saying something would be nice is different from saying it can be done. I don't know how hard it would be; my guess is "kind of hard". --Trovatore (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- Ah sheet, I hadn't considered categories. I have no idea how Mediawiki keeps track of them but if it does so how I would imagine it does then reconstructing them for a given date would be very expensive. Having said that, an appropriate data structure could be implemented to go forward where tis very little trouble at all. Doesn't help us for wiki-2008 though. Egg Centric 21:55, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- ...another reason I think Wayback Machine is the way to go. Category listings are generated on the fly from querying the database, I think, though probably with a caching layer that still won't really help. Generating periodic snapshots of all pages rather than trying to finagle a way to use our internal history system beats all the problems, and Wayback Machine already does this. We'd just have to get them to do it for all of Wikipedia. Equazcion (talk) 22:02, 22 Aug 2011 (UTC)
- Agreed that it would be cool - and that it probably isn't worth wasting much developer time on. I like the idea of asking the folks at Internet Archive if it's something they would be interested in doing, since they presumably already have the infrastructure up - perhaps this is an idea that could be proposed over at meta:, even? On the other hand, the opposite idea - preventing the Internet Archive from archiving us at all - has come up before (apparently unsuccessfully) at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 57#Disabling Wayback Machine archiving on Wikipedia. Perhaps this is the earlier conversation that y'all were remembering? --Philosopher Let us reason together. 01:58, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oversight issues would still be a relevant concern, though, as we wouldn't have any control over removing things from the histories. But that issue applies to any Wikimedia mirror anyway... --Philosopher Let us reason together. 02:00, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- Agreed that it would be cool - and that it probably isn't worth wasting much developer time on. I like the idea of asking the folks at Internet Archive if it's something they would be interested in doing, since they presumably already have the infrastructure up - perhaps this is an idea that could be proposed over at meta:, even? On the other hand, the opposite idea - preventing the Internet Archive from archiving us at all - has come up before (apparently unsuccessfully) at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 57#Disabling Wayback Machine archiving on Wikipedia. Perhaps this is the earlier conversation that y'all were remembering? --Philosopher Let us reason together. 01:58, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- ...another reason I think Wayback Machine is the way to go. Category listings are generated on the fly from querying the database, I think, though probably with a caching layer that still won't really help. Generating periodic snapshots of all pages rather than trying to finagle a way to use our internal history system beats all the problems, and Wayback Machine already does this. We'd just have to get them to do it for all of Wikipedia. Equazcion (talk) 22:02, 22 Aug 2011 (UTC)
- Ah sheet, I hadn't considered categories. I have no idea how Mediawiki keeps track of them but if it does so how I would imagine it does then reconstructing them for a given date would be very expensive. Having said that, an appropriate data structure could be implemented to go forward where tis very little trouble at all. Doesn't help us for wiki-2008 though. Egg Centric 21:55, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
- I don't think this is a terribly good idea; caching snapshots of webpages is a brute force method, which we should not have to resort to given that the user interface content is underlain by a database. Given that we have pretty comprehensive history (albeit with some holes and disjunctions), it should be computationally tractable to recreate a version of, for instance, en-wikipedia based on the history data. This includes category content as a page is place in a category by one of a small number of methods, the most prevalent being addition of [[Category:{some category title}]] to a page; for most categories, an article content timeline should be able to be reconstructed through clever parsing of page histories. I would much prefer to see a computational slice generated on-demand rather than a complete frozen state mirror of every page in every wikipedia for every edit instance (or even for a particular time point each day). --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 03:04, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- Any particular reason why you'd rather that? It seems hard drive space is cheaper than processor time these days, and your method would be more demanding on the latter; plus it would require adding a lot of database queries to the existing db servers for each page request (what with all the different transcluded content to find and retrieve through the transcluded pages' histories). Snapshots seem much simpler and less demanding, especially if a third-party site handles it of course. Equazcion (talk) 03:40, 23 Aug 2011 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:Main Page history has daily snapshots of Main Page in 2011 but doing something similar for millions of pages sounds impractical to me, and the interest in other pages would probably be very low. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:12, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- That long tail effect is a prime reason to go for a computational approach rather than a storage approach. The demand for looking at past snapshots of page sets would, in my opinion, be low. People already have the ability to look at past versions of single pages, which satisfies the vast majority of demand, I think. Storage space is cheap compared to computational power (not in my neck of the woods, but in general it is), but just because something is cheap is no reason to effectively waste it by storing material that will never (or very seldom) be accessed. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:50, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:Main Page history has daily snapshots of Main Page in 2011 but doing something similar for millions of pages sounds impractical to me, and the interest in other pages would probably be very low. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:12, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- There is a userscript TimeTraveller that you could try out. — AlexSm 14:43, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- Another somewhat more serious issue is deleted images and deleted templates - these show up in old revisions of articles as redlinks, resulting in a very odd-looking article. Dcoetzee 03:55, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
Humble Request for a template heading this section
This is just a humble request for a template to head this section, just to clarify the type of edits that should and should not go here I was thinking of something along the lines of "Please make sure that your comments are suited to here and not to the ideas lab" or to the helpdesk. Personally, I think that having a tag heading this section to clarify what should go here and what belongs in Wikipedia: Help desk would be useful, as I am sure that - in all my years of editing Wikipedia - I have at times (in my more youthful days on Wikipedia) put in comments here that should really have gone to Wikipedia: Helpdesk. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 15:32, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- Are you looking for a more extensive WP:Editnotice? (The current one refers users to WP:PEREN.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:58, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Thank you for your feedback. I have just taken a look at the template heading this section of Wikipedia, and I noticed that it does say "Before submitting, considering developing your ideas in the ideas lab". I just wondered whether we should also add a note in that very template to the effect of "If you are seeking help with Wikipedia editing, please do not post comments here, but at
Wikipedia: Help desk. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 14:28, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- I have added to the editnotice text directing users to the help desk (diff).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 21:22, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Many thanks - that looks very neat. Again, thank you for your help, ACEOREVIVED (talk)
23:18, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I see that there is a tag that says "I want.." heading the village pump, which does give people option of logging on to the "Help desk" - that is very neat. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 20:25, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
Add language names in English as tooltip in language links
I think it would be a nice minor convenience to have a tooltip (hover message) on the interlanguage links, allowing English users to easily determine what the different languages are without having to look them up individually:
Current
⋮
|
With tooltip
⋮
|
Or something along those lines. —Designate (talk) 21:48, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
As you have the table above, the words in the right of the column are a mere replication of the words on the left hand side. Did you mean to have the words Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Esperanto and French on the left-hand side of the table? I appreciate your good intentions here, but I feel that if Wikipedians are knowledgeable enough about different languages to be able to edit in different languages, they would almost certainly know that name of a language in its own language (please correct me if I have misunderstood you here!) ACEOREVIVED (talk) 23:00, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- Hover over the words on the right and you can see it gives the English name of the language in the tooltip. –xenotalk 23:02, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
- To translate the interwiki links to English, add this to Special:MyPage/skin.js:
importScript('User:Tra/sidebartranslate.js'); //[[User:Tra/sidebartranslate.js]]
- ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 04:25, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- I would support this for sitewide implementation. Before I figured out an easier way, I can't tell you how many times I went to m:List of Wikipedias to figure out things that this would have made moot, and I can't think of any reasons not to do it except possibly if we were told it was a server strain, which I doubt.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 05:10, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- When I hover over the link, I want the name of the article, not the name of the language. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 05:33, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- It already does this. Hover over the third one down to see.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 06:27, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- That's my point: don't change it. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 11:58, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- In other words, you oppose this because it would add an additional feature that other people would find useful, that you personally would not, but which would not affect the feature you find useful at all?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:21, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- That's my point: don't change it. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 11:58, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- It already does this. Hover over the third one down to see.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 06:27, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- When I hover over the link, I want the name of the article, not the name of the language. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 05:33, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- This looks like an excellent idea. Well worth proposing to the developers (though there's no guarantee they'll act on it, of course).--Kotniski (talk) 10:32, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- Agreed. As long as it retains the name of the article (and it does), adding he name of the language sounds like a great idea. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 11:55, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- It's bugzilla:5231 from 2006. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:45, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- Agreed. As long as it retains the name of the article (and it does), adding he name of the language sounds like a great idea. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 11:55, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- Looks like a good idea to me. bobrayner (talk) 11:30, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Not really sure where this proposal ends up. —Designate (talk) 01:02, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- You could post to bugzilla:5231 with a permanent link to this section to show support for the feature. You could also vote on the bug. I don't know whether it will have any effect. See also Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 August 24#Interlanguage map? I posted an idea for an implementation which may require less work for the developers. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:36, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Cool idea. I've been mystified by certain languages myself. Before I had to make a judgement by looking at the first two letters in the address bar and looking at the particular article ("da.wikipedia.org" for Danish is easy enough when viewing an article, but I still don't know what language "ka.wikipedia.org" is, for example).--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 03:52, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- I like the idea of the double tooltips too. I've had the same problem as Brianann: with Wikipedias in foreign languages, especially foreign writings systems, it's often quite impossible for a non-expert reader to find out what language it actually is by looking at their own pages. ("ka" is Georgian, by the way.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 05:38, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
Shortened links
I suggest that wikipedia institute a shorter form for linking to a page much like youtube provides links to movies at youtu.be/XXXXX Maybe here it can be wi.ki/Page_Title I must admit, though, that the technical aspects of this are beyond me...— Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.122.234.32 (talk • contribs)
- Previous discussion about this can be seen at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 74#Really short Wikipedia URLs.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 05:19, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- For practical purposes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page can be shortened to http://enwp.org/Page (as described in that thread linked above). However, this is not official or operated by Wikimedia / Wikipedia. wctaiwan (talk) 11:39, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Courier New
Why must the font while editing be Courier New? In my opinion the font is intimidating and looks too much like something a sophisticated computer programmer would use, when in fact Wikipedia's controls are very easy. Wikia[1] allows you to change the appearance of the editing window, and their default editing font is the same one as they use on the site. Is it possible to make a user preference for the font in the editing window? Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 04:08, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- MediaWiki / Vector does not style text areas by default (at least, I'm not aware it does). The font is inherited from the settings in your browser. For Wikipedia, you can easily change the preference by adding something like
textarea { font-family: "your desired font here"; }
- to
vector.css
(or whatever your theme is) in your userspace. Respecting browser settings in text areas is fairly standard, and I'm not sure it'd be a good idea to overwrite that by default, or to spend development time on allowing this type of customisation. wctaiwan (talk) 06:19, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- The Editing tab at Special:Preferences#preftab-3 has "Edit area font style" to choose between a few types of browser defaults. If you want to get more creative then you have to change the browser default in your browser settings, or edit a skin file like Special:Mypage/vector.css. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:26, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Watchlist Feature
I recently discovered that I had 14 pages on my watchlist. I looked at it and discovered nine of those pages were AfD pages that I had nominated some time ago, all of which have since been closed. At the risk of sounding lazy, here is my proposal: an AfD, FAC, RfC, or anything along those lines that has been closed should automatically be removed from the watchlists of all users. As (hopefully) they will never be modified again, why should we have them stay on our watchlists for some time? Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 04:14, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Why don't you just edit your own watchlist and remove them? --Jayron32 04:16, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- If the pages aren't going to change, they won't give entries on your watchlist anyways.Jasper Deng (talk) 04:18, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I don't think automatic removal would be a good idea, while closed discussions should not be edited, it has been known to happen, and there is some value to them lingering in watch lists. That said, it would be great if there was a way to set a time before something is automatically removed from your watchlist. There are a decent number of pages I want to keep watchlisted, but most of my list is consumed by pages I want to watch for a few days after doing something, in case anyone objects or has any comments, but then would be happy to forget. But I guess that is really outside the scope of the suggestion here. I would mention that excessive watchlist bloat will cause your watchlist to load much more slowly, though it takes many times more pages then 14 before it becomes an issue. Monty845 04:32, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I seem to recall that the recommended upper limit for a Watchlist is 9,800 pages, so rather more than 14! And even then, I believe that figure dates back to 2006 and one can easily imagine - though it's not necessarily so - that the technical infrastructure can now handle a great deal more (though whether the user can is a different story). --bodnotbod (talk) 07:56, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I am at about 5000 at the Moment, and don't see any particular timelag. I have to filter by namespaces if following something in particular. Altogether though you will find quite some spattering of chatter on old - closed - pages. Agathoclea (talk) 09:04, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I think that automatic housekeeping of watchlists has too many potential downsides, in return for modest benefits. You'd need an opt-out for the kind of people who want to be notified of a change to some page on an issue which ought to be buried. (As well as old AfDs, My watchlist also contains a few redlinks: Problematic articles which got AfD'd but I think there's a risk that the problem might return). bobrayner (talk) 12:12, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- If it helps any I have around 21, 000 pages and it works just fine. --Kumioko (talk) 13:30, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Showoff. TeleComNasSprVen (talk • contribs) 13:44, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- If it helps any I have around 21, 000 pages and it works just fine. --Kumioko (talk) 13:30, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I think that automatic housekeeping of watchlists has too many potential downsides, in return for modest benefits. You'd need an opt-out for the kind of people who want to be notified of a change to some page on an issue which ought to be buried. (As well as old AfDs, My watchlist also contains a few redlinks: Problematic articles which got AfD'd but I think there's a risk that the problem might return). bobrayner (talk) 12:12, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I am at about 5000 at the Moment, and don't see any particular timelag. I have to filter by namespaces if following something in particular. Altogether though you will find quite some spattering of chatter on old - closed - pages. Agathoclea (talk) 09:04, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I seem to recall that the recommended upper limit for a Watchlist is 9,800 pages, so rather more than 14! And even then, I believe that figure dates back to 2006 and one can easily imagine - though it's not necessarily so - that the technical infrastructure can now handle a great deal more (though whether the user can is a different story). --bodnotbod (talk) 07:56, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I don't think automatic removal would be a good idea, while closed discussions should not be edited, it has been known to happen, and there is some value to them lingering in watch lists. That said, it would be great if there was a way to set a time before something is automatically removed from your watchlist. There are a decent number of pages I want to keep watchlisted, but most of my list is consumed by pages I want to watch for a few days after doing something, in case anyone objects or has any comments, but then would be happy to forget. But I guess that is really outside the scope of the suggestion here. I would mention that excessive watchlist bloat will cause your watchlist to load much more slowly, though it takes many times more pages then 14 before it becomes an issue. Monty845 04:32, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- If the pages aren't going to change, they won't give entries on your watchlist anyways.Jasper Deng (talk) 04:18, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't know if something like that would be technically possible, but here goes: It would be really cool to have an option for each watchlisted page to set a timer to automatically remove the page from your watchlist after a customizable time interval. The default should be to watchlist a page indefinitely, but there should be an option like something along the lines of "Automatically remove the page from watchlist after X days". As I am a person who wants other people I leave a message on their talk page to respond there, I will always place that user on my watchlist. However, in most cases, there is no need to witchlist a user indefinitely. I think this would be especially nice for people like me who patrol the help desk. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 13:57, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I personally like the idea of a Wathclisthelperbot to do some things and I think that it would be fairly easy to do both of the suggestions. I think that coding abot to do some of the following things would be fairly easy and there are probably a couple of existing bots that are capable of it with minor coding. Here are a few things that it might be useful for but should be opt in only:
- Remove redlinks
- Remove redirects
- remove closed MFDs, RFD's and other for deletion type things
- Remove FA, A, GA and other for review candidates
- Heres the problem with this though and this is very important. Once an article is removed from the Watchlist there is no undo. Its gone. So I would recommend if a bot removes something it leave a message on the users talk page of the action taken so the user can decide if it was correct. The user can always burn after reading from the talk page but that will give them a recod of what the bot did that they can fix. --Kumioko (talk) 14:36, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- This would be necessarily opt-in, as it would require editors interested in this service periodically posting their watchlist somewhere accessible by a bot, and then copying the edited list back into their private watchlist. –xenotalk 14:38, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- True, I figure the watchlist is stored somewhere on the server and if so it should be accessible via a bot on the toolserver (although perhaps not a Wikipedia run bot). I agree it should be optin.--Kumioko (talk) 14:57, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- See m:Watchlist#Privacy of watchlists. –xenotalk 14:59, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I have also noticed another thing that I find annoying when it comes to watchlists. If I add a category, template, etc It will display on my watchlist but if I try and edit the list to remove it I can't. I have to go to that template, category, etc and select unwatch. It would be great if I had some visibility of that on my watchlist. --Kumioko (talk) 15:02, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks Xeno so that rules out the use of a bot. It would have to be a user run script of gadget then I guess. Although, here is a twist. Although I see why some would not want to share that info I for one could care less who sees my watchlist and I suspect others feel the same way. If a bot edited it, there could be a parameter to prompt the user if they wanted to be notified of the modification. If they say no then it wouldn't post the change to the talk page. I wasn't aware of the privacy factor though and I find that interesting. I would be curious how much space that takes up no the server for Users who have been gone for more than a year. I imagine its quite big. --Kumioko (talk) 15:08, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I do not think the devs would take time to modify the software to allow bots to access the watchlist on an opt-in basis, but a clever bot might be able to use the watchlist token if the editor were willing to disclose it. A bot could also act on a list posted to someone's userspace (i.e. special:mypage/Watchlist) or something. Then the user could copy the list back to their private watchlist. (Useful side effect would be that the history would provide a useful record of pages trimmed by the bot.) –xenotalk 15:16, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Your probably right about the developers not wanting to spend time but I wonder if they would be willing to allow a person to optin use of a subpage in their userspace rather than the hidden watchlist. I wouldn't think that coding in a user preference switch would be too difficult or time consuming. They would just need to prompt the user that the information would be visible and the normal privacy settings in use on the watchlist are nullified by using a subpage. In the meantime (and likely forever) a user could follow your suggestion and create a subpage that could be tweaked but then they still have to update it manually. For very large lists like mine it would be helpful, for short lists of less than 100 I don't know if it would save much time. --Kumioko (talk) 15:59, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I do not think the devs would take time to modify the software to allow bots to access the watchlist on an opt-in basis, but a clever bot might be able to use the watchlist token if the editor were willing to disclose it. A bot could also act on a list posted to someone's userspace (i.e. special:mypage/Watchlist) or something. Then the user could copy the list back to their private watchlist. (Useful side effect would be that the history would provide a useful record of pages trimmed by the bot.) –xenotalk 15:16, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks Xeno so that rules out the use of a bot. It would have to be a user run script of gadget then I guess. Although, here is a twist. Although I see why some would not want to share that info I for one could care less who sees my watchlist and I suspect others feel the same way. If a bot edited it, there could be a parameter to prompt the user if they wanted to be notified of the modification. If they say no then it wouldn't post the change to the talk page. I wasn't aware of the privacy factor though and I find that interesting. I would be curious how much space that takes up no the server for Users who have been gone for more than a year. I imagine its quite big. --Kumioko (talk) 15:08, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I have also noticed another thing that I find annoying when it comes to watchlists. If I add a category, template, etc It will display on my watchlist but if I try and edit the list to remove it I can't. I have to go to that template, category, etc and select unwatch. It would be great if I had some visibility of that on my watchlist. --Kumioko (talk) 15:02, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- See m:Watchlist#Privacy of watchlists. –xenotalk 14:59, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- True, I figure the watchlist is stored somewhere on the server and if so it should be accessible via a bot on the toolserver (although perhaps not a Wikipedia run bot). I agree it should be optin.--Kumioko (talk) 14:57, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- This would be necessarily opt-in, as it would require editors interested in this service periodically posting their watchlist somewhere accessible by a bot, and then copying the edited list back into their private watchlist. –xenotalk 14:38, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Maybe an option that would be a workaround would be some easy way to filter the watchlist beyond the simple namespace separation there is now. Redlinks, redirects, AFDs, etc etc could all be filtered in or out to make it much easier to trim things as needed. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 16:14, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Please, people! I'm just asking for a feature that automatically removes closed discussion pages from watchlists. There's no need to become so complex! Interchangeable|talk to me 18:14, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
- You are right there is no reason to make this complicated. From your watchlist click edit and remove the ones you don't want. Simple. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.252.21.147 (talk) 18:32, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
- Well I for one really WOULD like that filter, were it possible. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 19:53, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
- You forgot to sign, whoever posted that reply. Why is it not possible? Interchangeable|talk to me 02:13, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- Well I for one really WOULD like that filter, were it possible. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 19:53, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
- You are right there is no reason to make this complicated. From your watchlist click edit and remove the ones you don't want. Simple. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.252.21.147 (talk) 18:32, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
- Please, people! I'm just asking for a feature that automatically removes closed discussion pages from watchlists. There's no need to become so complex! Interchangeable|talk to me 18:14, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
High Contrast / HIDEF appearance
I noticed that many websites support Microsoft's High Contrast appearance. Propose making website more accomodating to people with vision problems or eye strain problems so that high contrast can be seen just like on Facebook, where the background color turns black and the colors of text are high contrast colors.
The main reason is because I personally have eye strain issues, and I only hesitatingly go to wiki pedia if I need to view an article, and then only if its life or death.
Regards,
Marc *Going Blind b/c there ain't no High Contrast Options* Noon — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mnoon (talk • contribs)
- I just turned on high-contrast mode on my laptop and it seems mostly everything is visible. What are the elements that you want improved? I'm interested in this. —Designate (talk) 20:52, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
use of the dagger symbol.....
Hi all, see Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Icons#Proposals_x_3 for some discussion on the use of the dagger symbol in articles (scroll up for the discussion or just look at the poll...) Casliber (talk · contribs) 06:34, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
Add "add to watchlist" option to wikilove extension
Not sure if this is a proposal, per se, but I think it would be wise to add a tickbox to the wikilove extension which, if selected, will add a talkpage to ones watchlist much like the ones that exists when making a standard edit. Egg Centric 16:21, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
- Maybe you should file a bug for it. --Yair rand (talk) 04:20, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
Other Language Talk Pages
When you look at an article, you can see links to îts versions in other languages in the sidebar. So how come when we go to a talk page, we cannot jump to the talk pages of other languages? I would like to propose these links. I don't think this is nitpicking; it is very conceivable that a person may want to post the same message to the talk pages of multiple languages, or may want to see what improvements to an article are being discussed in that language. Interchangeable|talk to me 18:19, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose: It would probably be constructive, but less than half the number of people who view articles view the talk page, and even less than quarter would want to see the talk page in another language. Interlanguage links are intended for easy linking to the same article in a different language; the content of talk pages usually vary. Hazard-SJ ± 03:42, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- See bugzilla:26085. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:05, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
Script to compensate for nationality differences in articles
I realize that this is both a proposal and technical but I thought I would put it here to maximize visibility. I am seeing more and more arguments about what nationalities spelling should be used in articles and IMO wasting too much valuable time arguing over symantics so I would like to propose a simple script or feature to fix some of it. It seems like we should be able to create a simple if then switch that would recognize what nationality a person is in and then display the spelling of certain words to match that. This should not change how it appears in the text of the actual article if in edit mode but I think it would cut down on some of the drama. Here is what I was thinking:
There are several ways we could do this including if the person has a certain category (such as United States user), if the user was coming from a certain IP domain, if a certain template was placed on the users page, etc then the switch would 'display certain words differently if viewing the article.
A couple that seem to be commonly argued about would include:
- Honor & Honour
- Color & Colour
- Meters & Metres
- Fueled & Fuelled
- artifacts & artefacts
So in summery if I am viewing the article as a United States user then I would see it as Honor but if I was viewing it as a British user I would see it as Honour. --Kumioko (talk) 15:44, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- The immediate problem I see is you'd have to turn it off in case of quotes and titles. For example, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is full of quotations and titles that use the spelling colored, and it would be incorrect to change those to coloured even in British spelling. Or any article about someone who won a Medal of Honor. Or anyone in a Labour Party in any country. You'd need some kind of superfluous markup surrounding every word, or you'd need an opt-out template that affected the whole page. That'd probably spread to hundreds of thousands of pages. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth. —Designate (talk) 16:01, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose - Thîs is very similar to Perennial Proposal 1.5. In general, we have only three options if we want only one language variety in Wikipedia. We can enforce one spelling throughout the encyclopedia, but that would make the losing side unhappy and be very difficult to enforce. Another option is to split Wikipedia into American English and British English, but that would be a huge shift and a shock to many unregistered users. The third option is what you are proposing. The technical restrictions are one thing (I'm going to assume that this is nearly impossible), but this point is another: does spelling really matter? Are Americans and the British really so at war with each other that simple spelling differences warrant this massive upheaval in Wikipedia? I don't believe this, but I am Canadian, so I can't truly weigh in on the matter, but I'd like some Americans or Brits to support me in this. Interchangeable|talk to me 16:11, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- Good point Designate, although I think it could be set to ignore quotes, html markup and templates which would solve much of the problem. You do bring up a good point that it would be very hard to reduce the false posiives.
- Interchangeable you also bring up good points and you touched on one very important one and that is does it really matter. To you and me, perhaps not. But I see on a daily basis one or 2 discussions, arguments or edit wars over this very thing. We spend too much time here arguing about what spelling and date formatting are used in articles and I thought this might be a way to fix some of that but perhaps the technical and cultural requirements of such a thing are outside our control. --Kumioko (talk) 16:42, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- Interchangeable, I'm an American and I think it's ridiculous. I wouldn't care if the whole site changed to British English overnight.
- Kumioko—where are you seeing one or two discussions a day? I can't even think of the last time I saw one. —Designate (talk) 17:17, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- Well part of the reason I see so many is because I have so many articles on my watchlist (over 21,000) so they pop up rather often. One recent one was LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin. If you review the edit history of the article and the discussion page there are various signs of English differences, date differences (as well as some just blatant stupidity IMO). This is just one example though but I see them all the time. --Kumioko (talk) 17:39, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose I commend the intention, but I can foresee confusion for those that do not realise that scripts are in operation. There is also the issue that a lot of the differences between British and US varieties of English are not just in spelling (for example formal and notional agreement). The suggested script will not address these issues and it will be confusing to have articles with say US spelling and British grammar. British spellings are also quite complex, for example, a large number of British users tend to assume that the suffix -ize is American and -ise British, but in fact the origin of a word in Greek or Latin is more important. I really do not see users of respective forms of English as being at war. Most of my experiences of this tend to follow the form of US users (usually IPS) adjusting British "mispellings" on neutral of British-focused articles and then British users changing it back. A link to WP:ENGVAR tends to end the issue. I see less of this the other way around, probably because users of British English tend to be more aware that American spelling is different (perhaps because they encounter a lot of American cultural products). My feeling is that experienced editors from either side of the pond are well aware of the issues, although like me they may slip up occasionally out of habit. I am a British editor and I am happy when editing US articles using US English spellings. I would like to think most editors work in the same way. The fact is that in the real world there are varieties of English (and remember there are more than two). Wikipedia probably currently has the only possible solution: acknowledge it and work with it.--SabreBD (talk) 16:46, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- We have had this proposal before and it is not technically feasible. We would end up with Lorry Greenberg becoming Truck Greenburg and a myriad of other confusing substitutions. Best I can think of is a template that would contain the various spellings and switch based on the user setting, which is not possible right now as there is not way to read the language setting with a magic word.
- Let me point out another issue: The English Wikipedia uses a myriad of message pages in the MediaWiki namespace. For example, when you upload a file and your language is set to en, you see the message at MediaWiki:Uploadtext. However, if your language is set to en-gb, then you will see MediaWiki:Uploadtext/en-gb. The en message has been customized, as have thousands of other messages but very few en-bg messages have been updated to match. We have had many issues where a user has set en-gb and reported a message that has taken ages to figure out because it is not the en message. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 16:59, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
As far as the technical side is concerned, this is feasible. The Chinese are already doing it. Even though there are two ways of writing Chinese (traditional and simplified), they have only one Wikipedia. What is more, I believe they are also handling lexical variations through systematic replacements.
Assuming that we would only be using the to major variants British and American English, it would work as follows:
- Each article would be tagged somehow for the variant it's written in.
- There would be a small number of rules for regular transformations, e.g. -our <-> -or, -isation <-> -ization.
- There would be a long central list of specific translations e.g. lorry <-> truck.
- Each article would have its own translation list for exending or in some cases overriding these translations.
- There would be rules for determining what should not be translated, e.g. everything in quotation marks and words that are lower case in the translation list but appear upper case in the article without starting a sentence.
- There would be rarely used markup for explicitly coding both variants.
The resulting overhead would be noticeable but feasible. Problems would only lead to a mixture of British and American English, something we already have in many articles, and which is generally not a big problem. But we are not doing it because given the effortless mutual comprehensibility of British and American English there is a lot less incentive for bothering with all this. Hans Adler 19:17, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
- I agree it's not worth it to make an elaborate system, but a few simple substitutions for only the most clearcut words might be beneficial in avoiding all those mini-edit-wars. Aside from quotes and proper names, there's no place where color and colour, or honor and honour, would be substituted accidentally. Quotes are easy to parse and exclude automatically; proper names might need their own tag (on the rare occasion when those words exist in proper names and go untagged and get unwittingly substituted, it still isn't the biggest of deals). Equazcion (talk) 23:05, 28 Aug 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose, agreeing with opposition above.
Strong Oppose if done by relying on user IP domain without providing an option to override or disable this in preferences of logged-in users. I'm a monolingual English speaker residing in the Philippines, and I strongly dislike Google's tendency to presume that I wish to use the Tagalog language. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 00:35, 29 August 2011 (UTC) - 'Oppose right now, without prejudice to later implementation, because the "obvious" words like "color/colour" aren't the problem - we all know that's a regional variation, it is words like "foetid/fetid" where a difficulty arises. However I do support using spelling neutral words where it is not clumsy to do so - and also using a spelling that is acceptable in both US and UK/Commonwealth English, rather than the most common in one that would be an error in the other. Rich Farmbrough, 15:42, 29 August 2011 (UTC).
- Oppose, agreeing with opposition above.
- Partial Support. There may not be a war as such, but I must say that, in my opinion, article with words spelt as the other side of the pond spells them are a tad distracting and irritating, albeit still perfectly legible — I assume this is true whatever side of the pond one finds him/herself. My support is partial as from what I gather (from my limited knowledge) any change would have to come from wikipedia coders and not a users, so this may be a futile pontification... --Squidonius (talk) 00:42, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose I'm neither side of "the pond" presuming your referring to the North Atantic Ocean not one of the Great Lakes. This primary presumption that english speakers have to be one or the other is a falacy, there are many enlgish speakers that have no issue with which version of en is used and would not want to have the spellings or words changed to suit either. Going into details like changing truck/lorry when many UK spelling countries use truck will only add to the confusion, also truck doesnt necessarliy equate to lorry even between US and UK usage of the terms. What I see is a proposal that going to take a lot of effort to impliment with each of the current 3.5 million articles needing their own english interpretational database, add to that significant impact on the toolservers to perform the spelling shift to what end just so that a reader can read the the red colored truck instead of the red coloured lorry and somewhere in there my Ford F100 becomes a Freightliner. Gnangarra 01:18, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose the technical requirements to code something that would account for American, British, Canadian, Australian English, etc., would be ridiculous. Additionally, it would necessitate the addition of template and code syntax directly into thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of articles. This would greatly bloat articles for no real benefit. Resolute 02:56, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose what a waste of time. People can cope with the differences. I wouldn't oppose a tag on pages saying what variant of English they are using though. Perhaps then we could have any text editor automatically use that variant for spell checking new contributions. Dmcq (talk) 08:05, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- I'm an American who is still mad at Scholastic Press for what they did to J.K. Rowling. Oppose LadyofShalott 01:35, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose We should just be aiming at education. What irks me more than "wrong" spelling is edits such as in this diff[2], particularly the Edit summary. The article involved is about an Australian, so should ideally stay in Australian English (closer to UK spelling), but that's not the point. The editor involved seemed unaware that other spelling variants existed. HiLo48 (talk) 02:11, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Many, if not the majority of feature proposals are to aid in dealing with the uneducated, in one aspect or another. It's a reality that has to be dealt with, and fixing it can't be relied on as a solution in the shortrun. Pursue society's underlying problems but implement short-term solutions in the meantime. ...Just an aside; not saying this is so much of a problem that it must be dealt with now. Equazcion (talk) 02:34, 31 Aug 2011 (UTC)
- In the interests of education, a friendly note on the editor's talk page pointing him or her to WP:ENGVAR can be useful. I've just done so for the editor who made the edit you cite. LadyofShalott 02:45, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Oppose, at least until you can explain how it will deal with table versus table versus table. --Carnildo (talk) 23:13, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
Implementation in JavaScript
For those interested, there is a draft of how to configure the modernization script from Portuguese Wikisource (which is based on this one from fr.wikisource) as an user script, so that it can be used for conversion between English variants (analogously to its use on pt.wikipedia, for Portuguese variants), instead of modernization of old texts (which is its purpose on Wikisources). See:
The current version of the dictionaries are just drafts based on WordSubstitution list from Ubuntu wiki and would need to be reviewed by someone with a better understanding of the English language (removing conversions which may cause lots of false positives, adding missing conversion rules, etc...). Helder 15:22, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Account Creation Improvement Project: Test results, one clear suggestion and some vague ones
Hello,
After being busy off-wiki for a while (including being at Wikimania), I can now finally show you the results from the Account Creation Improvement Project: there is one method of introducing new users that leads to a definite increase in editors starting editing. Implementing the most successful method would mean that 9 more people each day would make at least five edits, compared to the current account creation process. No surprise, then, that I recommend that we implement that process now.
To do that, all we have to do is copy the pages in the new account creation process onto the pages in the current ones. That work is trivial, but we should have consensus on that first.
However, the most successful process is of course not perfect, and I would suggest that we continue work to make it even better. My feeling is that we can increase the percentage of people who start editing after they have created their account even more. On an average day, only 7% of newcomers make 5 edits. I believe we, with very little effort, can increase that number to perhaps 10%! Here's how:
- the winning account creation process is not operating system neutral. There have been some problems. Ironing this out may help.
- welcoming the new users in this category may inspire more of them to keep editing. (By substing the template that includes that category on the new users' userpage, we can keep track on who created their account when. That is not done now.) Try finding new people for your cool projects there and invite them.
- changing the placeholder text so that it disappears when the new user clicks on it, may lead more of them to present themselves than if they can just click save on the placeholder text. There is a suggestion on how to do that here.
And I think we can probably tweak the text here and there, too.
One proposal that will decrease the initial barrier to people actually creating an account is to make it easier for them to find out if the username is already taken. In the report (pdf), I have outlined how to do this. Please take a couple of minutes to at least skim the report.
Last of all, I want to thank everybody who didn't block me when I probably deserved it. The work was done a magnificent team of volunteers and staff, so a great thanks go out to them, too. Best wishes//Hannibal (talk) 13:11, 29 August 2011 (UTC) (I will gladly answer any questions and help out if and when the community wants to implement the changes.)
- I agree that Wikipedia needs to attract new users who go on to make useful edits and support your efforts in principle. I note that there is something important missing from your analysis -- whether the extra edits actually improved the encyclopedia. To that extent:
- What portion of these new edits are to mainspace?
- What portion of these are constructive? (e.g. neither vandalism, self-promotion, nor spam) How does this compare to using th eold form?
- What portion of these are deleted?
- Some of the ACIP tests did not explicitly quote the username policy. For those that did not, was there an increase in inappropriate usernames compared to the original sign-up form?
- Did the project result in a relative increase in inappropriate userpages?
- I'm supportive of interface changes that attract constructive editors but not if the cost in terms of more incoming crap is too high. MER-C 04:49, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- "the winning account creation process is not operating system neutral" I skimmed what seemed to be the relevant part of the report and could not figure out what you're referring to. Could you elaborate on this issue? --Cybercobra (talk) 04:52, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- @MER-C: Yes, there are significant points of analysis missing. That was due to the relative short time frame, but I would love to have some those results as well. The first question I can answer: all of them. We only measured mainspace edits. When it comes to 2-5, I'll have to refer to more technical people than myself to see if there's any way to determine that (I'll email them now). I agree that we should experiment further with directing people to make good edits. Cf Jimmy Wales closing "State of the wiki" speech at Wikimania 2011.
- @Cybercobra: Apparently, some OS have problems with the form. They don't "carry with them" the information you added from the form to the text area. But apparently there is a solution. However, I don't know how to test it, since I only have Firefox.//Hannibal (talk) 07:24, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Just a note to say that I can't see the crap factor being too high; some Community Department research showed a vast majority of edits made by anonymous people are good. Since these are (presumably) the people we'd be attracting through streamlining the account creation process and making it more useful, it seems unlikely that a veritable horde of trolls would turn up. Ironholds (talk) 09:03, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Has anyone checked to see how many of these accounts turn out to be vandalism accounts? I know I've found several. One big problem for me is that nothing is put on their talk page. Normally we hope new users will get a talk page welcome message. Looking at the timing of one I just blocked, the user page message was added before their first edit. But when they edited, they will not have seen any banner telling them they had a user page, right? But if there had been a talk page message tailored towards new users, the new message banner would have flashed up when they edited. And when I say tailored towards new users, I mean something that kindly and tactfully says what are constructive edits and what are not, and maybe even gently says non-constructive edits lead to editing priveleges being withdrawn. Dougweller (talk) 05:33, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Judging from the response to my questions, that's most likely a no. This is really unfortunate, because such data is absolutely critical to deciding whether this trial should be continued. There is no way that a talk page message will reduce the number of edit(or)s that are blatantly non-constructive but could help improve the quality of marginal edits (for those who actually bother to read it). There is no harm in trying, though, and it makes sense to do so as part of this process. (P.S. Don't forget to nuke the userpage or blank it with {{indefblockeduser}} if you block indefinitely). MER-C 07:40, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, MER-C, I was detained in other business. Anyway, I would recommend that we would go from having this trial to actually make this the standard account creation process, even if certain data is missing. There is no reason to believe that more new users than usual are vandals, and one good argument for that is that the vandalism patrollers would have been more vocal - like they have been in the past. They haven't now. So for me the choice is between two methods that have the same level of trolls and vandals, while one of them encourage 9 more people a day to start editing (make more than 5 edits). And as you can read above, I also encourage people to experiment and finetune the new process. Are people actually behaving better with the user name policy, for instance, or is that something we only think will make them behave better? I don't know, and neither does anyone else at this point. But let's check it out. We can continue with the tests and have people go different routes and see who behave better. Or we can test whether people become more active if we write to them on their user talk, like Dougweller suggested. Just design your own version of the process (we can start with a text version, and work our way up from that), and we'll test it together. Like before, the results will be public.//Hannibal (talk) 07:57, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks. I think it's important that some sort of welcome with links is on their talk page. I thought it was generally agreed that new editors should be welcomed on their talk page (with an explanation of what the page is for please), and it seems a bit odd that this system doesn't do it. I take you point about the vandalism patrollers. Dougweller (talk) 17:37, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, MER-C, I was detained in other business. Anyway, I would recommend that we would go from having this trial to actually make this the standard account creation process, even if certain data is missing. There is no reason to believe that more new users than usual are vandals, and one good argument for that is that the vandalism patrollers would have been more vocal - like they have been in the past. They haven't now. So for me the choice is between two methods that have the same level of trolls and vandals, while one of them encourage 9 more people a day to start editing (make more than 5 edits). And as you can read above, I also encourage people to experiment and finetune the new process. Are people actually behaving better with the user name policy, for instance, or is that something we only think will make them behave better? I don't know, and neither does anyone else at this point. But let's check it out. We can continue with the tests and have people go different routes and see who behave better. Or we can test whether people become more active if we write to them on their user talk, like Dougweller suggested. Just design your own version of the process (we can start with a text version, and work our way up from that), and we'll test it together. Like before, the results will be public.//Hannibal (talk) 07:57, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Judging from the response to my questions, that's most likely a no. This is really unfortunate, because such data is absolutely critical to deciding whether this trial should be continued. There is no way that a talk page message will reduce the number of edit(or)s that are blatantly non-constructive but could help improve the quality of marginal edits (for those who actually bother to read it). There is no harm in trying, though, and it makes sense to do so as part of this process. (P.S. Don't forget to nuke the userpage or blank it with {{indefblockeduser}} if you block indefinitely). MER-C 07:40, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
Shorter message when contesting deletion
When someone clicks on "Click here to contest this speedy deletion" they are offered a pre-filled message, for example "this article should not be speedy deleted as being about a person, animal, organization or web content but which fails to assert the importance of its subject, because...". Can we please trim this back to the original version: "this article should not be speedily deleted". There is absolutely no reason to reproduce the CSD wording - it just makes it a bit harder for the admin reviewing the message to extract the actual reason to keep the article (if any!) that the message contains. — [[::User:RHaworth|RHaworth]] (talk · contribs) 09:18, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- I understand why it was done, but I also see how it might not be useful. The post about the account creation project above suggests placeholder text. Might that not be a solution in this case as well? (Assuming it is technically possible ofcourse). Yoenit (talk) 10:39, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- I find the new longer messages unwieldy too. Just for the record, the crucial edit was apparently this one [3]. The original text is called in from {{Hangon preload generic}}, and the new longer messages are in a series of templates called "Template:Hangon preload Xyy", where Xyy is the usual speedy criterion number. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:43, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Unwieldy? Unwieldy to whom? Are you having trouble understanding it? Of course not, you know the CSD. Are you blinded by its length? This is not for us, it's for the contesters who more than half the time leave contest messages that have nothing whatsoever to do with the CSD an article is tagged under. Tagged with A3 or G4 or A7 or whatever, we see constantly contests of "it is true subject" or "is entirely factual" or some other misfire. Apparently, and I can only understand it like a person studying aliens, but most people don't read, and so they end up on the talk page with only a vague notion that the article they created is marked for deletion without a clue as to the basis. The whole purpose here is to focus them. When people are going to add to this pre-formatted sentence, tailored for each criterion, they are essentially forced to read that sentence, and lo and behold, they will actually be informed of the basis in doing so. I find it hard to believe any admin will find this text preceding a contest as any sort of barrier "to extracting the actual reason to keep the article". Really?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 12:35, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Well, some of them do get a bit unwieldy syntactically. Take for instance the one for A7: "This article should not be speedy deleted as being about a person, animal, organization or web content but which fails to assert the importance of its subject, because ..." – actually, it's syntactically inconsistent, because there is no grammatical antecedent for the "which". Perhaps it would be better if the sentences were reworded in such a way that they don't just negate the condition named in the CSD, but lead to a positive assertion of the actual counterargument. So, something like:
- "This article should not be deleted according to WP:CSD#A7, because it does in fact state how the subject is important. It is important because ..."
- Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:48, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- I like that idea, but two observations. I originally had the criterion name in each of the preloads, but others thought having the name of the CSD would just be meaningless jargon to people. More importantly, people only come to these contest pages in edit mode. In other words, they never see "WP:CSD#A7", they see "[[WP:CSD#A7]]". I am running and cannot comment back here probably for about 10 hours.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:06, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
There is a RfC going on, and I would greatly appreciate it if editors would take the time to comment there. The question is, roughly, does AWB have enough judgment to remove the {{wikify}} tag. Nolelover Talk·Contribs 13:21, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Add the ability to override the default "this page is protected" edit notice
This is in reference to the box displayed by MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext, which is be seen by non-admins when trying to edit any protected page.
While the default text is certainly useful for articles and most other pages, it is really not helpful for some. For example, at Template talk:Reflist we often get people who presumably try to edit a reference by opening the "References" section of an article, make their way to Template:Reflist, and then try to edit the template itself in order to change a reference on the article they came from. The helpful "Submit an edit request" link generated by MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext then leads to this and this and this and this and this and this and so on. Help talk:Section seems to have the same problem to a lesser extent. Template talk:Citation needed did at one point too (see Archive 10), but this has died off recently.
For these pages, it would be more helpful to replace the standard box with one explicitly telling newbies to go back to the article they are trying to edit, and either edit it directly or discuss it on the talk page there. One simple way to do that would be to allow "Template:Editnotices/Protection/Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)" to override the protection notice in much the same way that "Template:Editnotices/Page/Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)" specifies an editnotice for the page. The required change to MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext is quite simple (although it could probably be prettied up some), but consensus is needed. Anomie⚔ 15:44, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- This makes sense to me and your suggested approach sounds logical. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:42, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Support — Looks like a good solution for this. -— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 20:29, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Can't think of any downsides. NW (Talk) 18:59, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
User rights
my proposal is that user rights for specific admin actions (deleting pages, protecting pages, blocing users, editing protect pages) for user who how have experiences in those areas. For example a user who makes a lot of good AIV request can block users.--Breawycker (talk to me!) 20:38, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Hi Breawycker. Please see Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Hierarchical structures.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:51, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
Transform WP:IB into something more useful
See WP:IB/Proposed. This page seems to have a huge backlog, is ill formatted (some of the entries use Template:Infobox Proposal, while others do not, there is no consistency) and there seems to be no clear guideline on how to respond to proposals. Other boards like WP:MCQ or WP:AFC contain instructions for those who want to respond there. This page does not contain any advice on how to review these proposals. I suggest we transform this page into something more useful with clearer instructions. Also, contrary to many other boards or pages, this page never seems to get archived. There is a section "Proposed but not implemented" that seems to be intended to remain inactive, so shouldn't this be archived somehow? Also, it says at WP:IB/Proposed#Subpaged proposals "Finally remove from this proposal page the subheader & the {{Infobox Proposal | ...}} template." As nobody seems to do any maintenance, shouldn't there be a bot for automatically doing this removal? Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 21:32, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- I propose that what you have said appear to be valid criticisms of the page, and I further propose that you boldly take it upon yourself to write instructions for the page's use and re-organize it in the manner that makes sense to you.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:55, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Ok, thanks. Added to my ToDo list. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 02:10, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
Remove ability for new users to create other accounts
For background, see [4] - it is a common MO of a number of serial vandals to create one account, then use that account to mass-create a bunch of "sleeper" accounts. These accounts have no log entries of their own, which makes detecting them through Checkuser impossible until they are used, thus allowing the vandals to continue attacking the site after the main account is blocked. Even aside from these nefarious purposes, I have noticed a number of new users create an account, get confused, and accidentally create another account. Now they have two accounts, and in rare occasions get blocked as sockpuppets because they start editing with the first, then later log into the second mistakenly thinking it was the one they created in the first place.
To this end, I'd like to propose that the ability for non-autoconfirmed users to create accounts be revoked. This may seem backwards, as anonymous users can still make accounts, but in the first example, the serial vandal would have to make a log entry in the checkuser database for all of the accounts, making them infinitely easier to locate and block all at once. In the second case, the new user may be confused by the "access denied" message, but hopefully with the use of Mediawiki messages, we can make it clear that it's because they already created an account and are free to edit. Thoughts, comments, and concerns are welcome. Hersfold (t/a/c) 01:14, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- It sounds like a good idea but I'm just wondering: once a person sees they can't create multiple accounts while logged in, wouldn't it be just as simple for them to log out and then create whatever number of accounts they'd like to, logging off in between each creation? Maybe the idea is still just as viable because people won't think of this workaround, so it will still be preventative, but I'm just wondering about the mechanics.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:24, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- I saw the ANI thread that led to this proposal, which does sound reasonable. Are there any potential pitfalls of it, besides the "access denied" issue you already raised? I presume the situation of multiple people on one IP address (such as library access, university access) would not have a problem because they'd individually be registering accounts from that IP, right? LadyofShalott 01:28, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- I don't know the Checkuser tools but I suppose you know that public logs show who created an account and which other accounts they have created. For example, [5] shows that User:Kentdorfman was created by Hersfold, and [6] shows other accounts created by Hersfold. If it doesn't exist already then somebody could maybe make a one-click script to get these logs from a user page, or display them by default. But if you say the proposal would make it much easier for Checkusers to find abuse then I believe you. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:59, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- From a technical point of view, it would be easy to modify the throttle limit for account creations from the current 6 accounts to 1 every 24 hours, however, this would place users at WP:ACC at a severe disadvantage. Also, I'm not sure if it would be technically possible to disallow account creations by new users. If the
createaccount
right was restricted in the user group, then anyone in the user group would be unable to create accounts - regardless of whether or not the user had access to the right as part of another user group. To do this, new users would need to be automatically put in a separate group which would then be removed when they became autoconfirmed... and that would take time and effort on part of the devs. Ajraddatz (Talk) 04:16, 31 August 2011 (UTC) - For it to stop the primary offender, we'll need both a ban on new accounts creating accounts and a lower throttle; 2 or 3 for non-ACC people would seem reasonable. The above-linked banned user won't be any less difficult to spot, as anyone who's seen him knows, it'll just make it harder for him. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 06:05, 31 August 2011 (UTC)I must admit, though, I had to laugh when I saw User:Cloudy with a Chance of Mascots; in a strange way, it can be entertaining.
I just wanted to snipe my 2 cents in here too. I also agree that there is no need for someone to be able to create an army of additional accounts on day one. I think the idea of limiting this ability to Autoconfirmed users is good as is the limitation of only creating 1 account per 24 hours. Additionally, it should be possible to write a sql report against the database to see if a user has created another User account and in particular if they haev created multiples. It may even be possible to determine if those accounts have contributed. Let me do some asking around and see if that is possible. --Kumioko (talk) 14:51, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- This seems like a sensible step forward - there is no good reason for non-auto-confirmed users to be able to create multiple accounts. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 20:37, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- I see this a good direction to explore further. I am puzzled at the above comment that users at WP:ACC would be disadvantaged by this change. I assume that the people who handle requests at ACC have the ability to create accounts in large numbers if they are needed. Also, why would the creation of a new account by a registered user not show up in their own log? Can't all users (not just checkusers) see what other accounts someone has created? EdJohnston (talk) 20:54, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- They can (and that's one of the reasons it's so easy to nail MascotGuy socks), but new users probably don't know how to check that. I see that happen with some frequency when I monitor the new user log; a person will join as Davidsmith, then (for instance) create the account David smith, because they thought that's what their account was named in the first place (there are a couple scenarios where that might happen), and they end up confusing themselves. Our logs aren't exactly easy to find if you don't know how to get to them, so although it shows up there, a new user won't realize what they accidentally did. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:43, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- I see this a good direction to explore further. I am puzzled at the above comment that users at WP:ACC would be disadvantaged by this change. I assume that the people who handle requests at ACC have the ability to create accounts in large numbers if they are needed. Also, why would the creation of a new account by a registered user not show up in their own log? Can't all users (not just checkusers) see what other accounts someone has created? EdJohnston (talk) 20:54, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Why not improve the logging so that the account creations appear in the log that the checkuser reviews? Seems overkill to restrict the ability when the real problem seems to be the lack of the log entry for the Checkusers to see. Monty845 22:51, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- How so? What do you mean by appearing in the log that the checkuser reviews? Ajraddatz (Talk) 23:09, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- I think it'd be a simple log that shows each account creation with either a user name or IP address, restrict access to checkuser only. If someone starts making a lot of enteries then the check user will be able to see it easily also by checking thru the log they can identify every account easily. Gnangarra 14:08, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- I would support cutting the limit of accounts that can be created by new accounts (or non autoconfirmed accounts, whichever) to one. TNXMan 14:43, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- I echo Tnxman above for non-autoconfirmed accounts. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 16:43, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Keep in mind that the reason why multiple accounts are "authorized" is due to the fact that the only check here is to see if the same IP address is being used to create multiple accounts. For users at something like an internet cafe, at a school, or some other activity where multiple people can be using the same computers and/or ip address, putting a throttle on new account creation actually can keep some legitimate users from being able to create accounts. Yes, it would be a rare exception for when this situation would happen (such as a classroom assignment for some tech class of non-Wikimedia users simultaneously creating accounts in a short period of time), and the real question would be to ask how many new users with genuine accounts would this impact? It would not be zero people, as I know this has happened, but my experience is that such efforts are usually quite rare, on the order of once or twice per month if I was being extremely generous (more like a couple of times per year). In this exceedingly rare situation, an instructor could also get some cooperation from an admin to help out in terms of simply creating the accounts as well, so I don't think it is necessarily the end of the world. --Robert Horning (talk) 17:50, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- If the root problem here is that these "secondarily created" accounts don't get log entries, surely it would be just as easy to develop a way to make this be logged in the same fashion as normal account creation? Shimgray | talk | 17:58, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- I think there are two issues getting confused here. One is the ability to track account creations with the checkuser tool. Let's leave that aside for the moment.
- The bigger issue here, I think, is someone registering an account and then using that new account to create multiple other accounts (not multiple people registering one account on the same IP address or anything like that). There is simply no reason for someone to create an account, then use that account to create multiple other accounts (see this log entry). TNXMan 18:04, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- That's the problem I have as well. Anyone who watches the new user log will have seen innumerable similar log entries, and the way it's set up now he's allowed to multiply x6 (this is what can be done with the current throttle), making it that much more annoying because admins have to block all the accounts and non-admins can't do anything but report, watch, and wait. I can't think of a good reason why a newly registered account would need to create more than one new account (and then only for things like softerblocked usernames and the like). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 19:14, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
For what its worth I found out that it is possible to create a report that would tell if someone used their account to create another account even if that account has never been used. I don't know how useful it would be since technically its allowed until they do something stupid with it but I thought I would drop a note and let you know. --Kumioko (talk) 19:34, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
RfC: Lower the limit of account creation in a 24 hour period by non-autoconfirmed accounts
A discussion at WP:ANI on sockpuppets creating other sockpuppets seems to have consensus to lower this limit. The reason not to eliminate this ability altogether is to allow for a bad username to be changed by the user as they familiarize with WP:USERNAME policy. There are two proposals, one to lower the limit for non-autoconfirmed users to two accounts per 24 hour period, the other to one account per 24 period. Cerejota (talk) 19:43, 1 September 2011 (UTC) moved from ANI as per WP:SNOW, only moved !vote, not discussion on moving here--Cerejota (talk) 20:35, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Two accounts - Otherwise, inappropriately named accounts cannot create a per-policy account except by waiting 24 hours. Reaper Eternal (talk) 20:03, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Users should be permitted to create one original account and one additional account, if needed. TNXMan 20:49, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- What Tnxman says above. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:05, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Tnxman's proposal sounds sensible. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 21:10, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Agree with Tnxman307, there's a legitimate reason for creating one additional account (if a person is soft-blocked for username violation but encouraged to create a new account) but the only reason I see to create more accounts is sock-puppetry. -- Atama頭 22:52, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Two accounts per twenty four hours, to allow newbies to ACC to be able to do stuff and so that inappropriate usernames can make a new account. Ajraddatz (Talk) 23:18, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Forgot to !vote, lol: yeah what Tnxman said for the reasons Atama said.--Cerejota (talk) 23:20, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- One original and one additional only per Tnxman Beyond My Ken (talk) 01:39, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
- Two accounts in 24 hours per Tnxman. EdJohnston (talk) 01:45, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
- Comment - Although the title of this section mentions non-autoconfirmed users, it doesn't state that in the body of the text. Not trying to be nit-picky, but would somebody mind adding non-autoconfirmed to the body of the text so that this proposal doesn't inadvertently impact the Account Creation Team? Thanks in advance. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 04:21, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
Move request to make China about the modern nation state
There is a Move request to make "China" the title of the article about the modern nation state, the People's Republic of China, rather than about the Chinese civilisation. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 20:44, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
Remove help section from Community portal
Please see Wikipedia talk:Community portal. — Pretzels Hii! 00:30, 1 September 2011 (UTC)