Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 

• Table of contents
• First discussion
• End of page
• New post

The proposals section of the village pump is used to discuss new ideas and proposal that are not policy related (see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) for that).

Recurring policy proposals are discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals). If you have a proposal for something that sounds overwhelmingly obvious and are amazed that Wikipedia doesn't have it, please check there first before posting it, as someone else might have found it obvious, too.

Please sign and date your post (by typing "~~~~" or clicking the signature icon in the edit toolbar).

Please add new topics at the bottom of the page.

« Archives, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215

Before posting your proposal:

• If the proposal is a change to the software, file a bug at Bugzilla instead. Your proposal is unlikely to be noticed by a developer unless it is placed there.
• If the proposal is a change in policy, be sure to also post the proposal to, say, Wikipedia:Manual of style, and ask people to discuss it there.
• If the proposal is for a new wiki-style project outside of Wikipedia, please go to m:Proposals for new projects and follow the guidelines there. Please do not post it here. These are different from WikiProjects.

Proposals archive

Discussions older than 7 days (date of last made comment) are moved here. These discussions will be kept archived for 7 more days. During this period the discussion can be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate. After 7 days the discussion will be permanently removed.

Excessive Wiki-linking

The other day, someone went through the Joseph Stalin article and practically wiki-linked every second word. Can we please stop this? For example, the word "bar", the word "books"...I could go on and on...

Do we really think that someone would look up Stalin, and then while reading the article, have the urge to link to the article on "bar" with its myriad meanings, or the generic "books"?

I do hope that this is not gonna become a trend...it adds nothing to any article.

Camillus^{talk|contribs} 23:58, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Some misinformed newbies like to do this. Just revert the changes, keeping any appropriate additions. If there have been more edits in the interim you'll just have to go through and clean up the mess. Also watch out for the more insidious "surprise links" where the visible text has no clear connection to the linked article or is trying to be clever/funny. Deco 01:19, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Don't you mean cases where the link is trying to be clever/funny? :) -User:Fennec (はさばくのきつね)

• When I first started looking at Wikipedia I found the copious linking really annoying. Partly this was due to the underlining which was very visually distracting but has now gone (congratulations to whoever did that). But, apart from that, I have shifted my point of view a little. I find that links lead me on to other interesting articles that I would never have otherwise looked at, and generally give me a picture of the breadth (if not always depth) of Wikipedia which I would otherwise not have formed. So, I say, except for extreme excesses (or, obviously, links to articles that aren't relevant), leave the links alone. Matt 23:40, 7 December 2005 (UTC).

• • I agree - links are very important and useful, however, I'm talking about what you call "extreme excesses" - links to irrelevant articles. Camillus^{talk|contribs} 09:43, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

• • • My rules of thumb for linking: link proper names, link topics the reader might need background about, link topics expanding on a topic discussed briefly in the article, link the topics that the subject has an immediate relationship to such as "is a" or "is a kind of", and link major lists related to the article. If there's any chance in your mind a link might be going to the wrong place, double check it and disambiguate it if necessary. Things not to link: common words that happen to appear in the article and, more controversially, topics which the reader could be reasonably expected to not require background on. For example, it's doubtful that someone reading about Fourier series needs to know what addition is. Deco 08:18, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

• • • • This is kind of where I disagree. I think that having links to "topics which the reader could be reasonably expected to not require background on" encourages people to browse Wikipedia, look at things they otherwise might not look at, and quite possibly contribute more as well. Matt 00:01, 10 December 2005 (UTC).

There is guidance at:

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (links)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)

One of the root causes of overlinking is that square brackets are used for two entirely different functions (date preferences, article linking). This leads to a popular misconception that all date elements must be linked, including solitary years such as 2004. The Joseph Stalin example article suffers from this problem right now. Another root cause is that we have no objective data on which links are useful to readers, so we rely on subjective judgement of each editor. Thus there is an inherent tendancy for linking and an inherent opposition to delinking. Bobblewik 15:57, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

HOW ABOUT THIS: Wikilink every word. Turn off all the links and make every word effectively a wikilink. Of course some words will not point anywhere but then those are less likely to be words clicked on..but not always. Besides, if someone wants to click on any word, they may just need a definition or something. Who knows, we all have different interests and needs.

AN ANSWER: I have a suggestion that which might be a good compromise and make everyone happy. I created a software called LinkZu a while ago. What it does is basically allow any text on a webpage become a link by hilighting the text. It would effectively make every word on a page capable of being a wikilink but at the discretion of each individual visitor. It is javascript and I've tested it out in just about every browser and it works well. I know when I am looking at wiki articles I use the wikilinks a lot and even copy and paste text that isn't linked into the wiki search. I do sell the software, but I'd be willing to GPL the thing for use on wiki, no one buys it anyway. Check out the website(www.linzku.com) for a demonstration of how it works. I think once you educate wiki users on its functionality it would be an awesome addition to wikipedia. --Schirinos 22:39, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

This is a very bad idea - the number of incorrect, misleading links thus created would number in the millions and destroy all useful value in links. Deco 20:00, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Ability to change edit summeries

It sometimes happens that defmaatory contnet, information that violates privacy, copyvio content, or a personal attack can be placed in an edit summery. In this case there is no way to get rid of the damaging content short of compeltely deleting the articel and recreatign it at a different name without its history, or else having a developer make direct changes in the DB. This is true sience even deleted edit summeries are now visible to any user who looks at the history and clicks "view nn deleted edits". See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive50# Edit Summery Vandalism on Judith Krug for an example.

Also, rather more often, an edit summery can be highly misleading.

I propose that the software be changed so that admins, or some more limited group (perhaps B'crats?) be enabled to change existing edit summeries. Use of this feature should of course be logged: the log should should the articel title, the revision timestamp, and the old and new edit summeries. (Alternatively this feature might be limited to the summeries of deleted revisions.)

I know this will require a software change, and must be propsoed on MediaZilla, but there is no point in askign the developers for this unless there is soem support for havign such a feature. If this proposal gets soem support, i will log a feature request. DES ^(talk) 21:20, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree. I'd like to be able to change edit comments - if we can edit everything else after the fact, why not those? Sometimes we wish we'd been more descriptive or less misleading, or said something we regret in an edit comment. That said, I would consider this relatively low priority, since you can always correct an edit comment with a subsequent trivial edit ("Last edit was really [blah blah]") and because I don't think I've recently seen a New York Times article about some defamatory statements in an article's history. Deco 08:05, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

It hasn't made the outside media, no. But it has been used ot "out" a contributor, and it has been used to make personal attacks on editors, and it has been used to make false statements about article content, and there is nothing, not even delteting the revisions, that fully removes or hides such comments from anyone. Nothing but database hacks will do so at present. See the case linked to above where an editor has complained several times about an edit summery that disclsoes her legal name contrary to her wishes and to our privicy policy. DES ^(talk) 18:37, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I have wished I could edit an edit summary after the fact more than once. Seems to me that there are a couple of potentially messy issues: clearly one should only be able to edit one's own summaries. But then, anons with floating IPs would be unable to get back to their own summaries (on the other hand, this becomes one more good reason to get an account). More troubling, though-- presumably there should be an edit history of the edit summary edits-- kept where, accessed how? Would we have edit summaries for the edit summary edits? Ech! -- Mwanner | Talk 00:23, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

An Annon could always simply edit again with a summery "previous edit actually was..." Just as anyone can do now. i am actually more worried about cases where there is a need to correct a malicious or blkatently incorrect summery by another. That is why I suggested a change log, simialr to the delete log. That is also why limiting this to edits of the summeries for deleted revisions might be enough IMO. DES ^(talk) 00:30, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Hm. Should we have edit histories for our edit comments? (Presumably, edit comments would be disallowed while editing edit comments to prevent the Universe from imploding). Otherwise the wiki principle of recoverability goes out of the window somewhat, it seems to me. This could usher in a new era of edit summary vandalism, too. Lupin|talk|popups 23:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I suggest that if this is done we make edit comments append only (with a limited exception for admins suppressing vandalism and/or removing sensitive/private information) - you can append to them to correct incomplete or misleading comments, but can't change what's already there. This would keep from having a "revisionist" edit summary, as well as discourage someone from making unneeded/pointless corrections in the edit summary (the project is better served by editors that are producing content rather than by editors producing log entries!). It might also be helpful to be able to automatically create pointers between an item in the edit summary and the article's talk page (maybe let anyone do this via a "discuss this change" type link?) Triona 09:31, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

another proposal: If an registered user has edited an article and left the summary field blank he should get the chance to add a summary later for his own edits.--84.169.52.4 19:02, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

And while we're at it, how about the ability to preview the summary. If I put a misspelled link in it there is no way to know or fix it until it is too late. -- Samuel Wantman 11:43, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Move FA tag back into the article?

Some time ago several tags were moved from the articles to the relevant talk pages since they were considered to be editors' tools and not relevant for the reader. However lack of credibility is and will continue to be a major critisism against Wikipedia. That an article has received more than the average level of scrutiny is not irrelevant for reader. Currently it's left to the new user to discover that FA process exist at all. Fornadan (t) 03:18, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

• Agreed. Some form of the Featured Article tag should be somewhere in the article itself. There's no reason to hinder our encyclopedia under the guise of "keeping the content free of self-references for compatability with mirrors." — ₀₉₁₈^BRIAN • 2005-12-15 03:19
• "Some time ago several tags were moved from the articles to the relevant talk pages since they were considered to be editors' tools and not relevant for the reader." - No, this is flatly wrong -- they have never been in the article. The reason it's on the talk page is that a featured article is supposed to exemplify our best practices. This includes keeping metadata out of the article. Raul654 05:36, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
• Oppose move back. I don't believe that providing a measure of article quality is something we should do on the page itself, particularly since these articles are still vulnerable to vandalism at any instant. I prefer the ideas discussed at Wikipedia: Stable versions, where good articles would have good versions branched off into a separate namespace (or whatever) and protected against disruptive edits. The location of these articles would implicitly assert their quality. FA still serves the legitimate purpose of selecting articles to feature on the Main Page, even if readers at large know nothing about the process. Deco 05:46, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
• Isn't there some sort of star that appears on featured articles on some non-en wikipedia? (On the article itself, not just the interwiki links as we currently have). I quite like that - it's fairly unobtrusive. I think it's javascript, so it could also be easily disabled on a per-user basis. Lupin|talk|popups 23:40, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
• Whatever the history, I wouldn't mind something reasonably discreet. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:58, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
• Perhaps a note could be worked into the subtitle. "A featured article from Wikipedia..." ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 03:34, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
• Pro: Many Wikipedias have got the FA tag on the article page, see German de:Todesstrafe or French fr:Yogh. Icelandic and Dutch have also got it, if I'm not mistaken. I think it makes people more aware on the quality of the article they're reading. German wikpedia has also got the votes for nomiation to and removal from the FA list on the article page (see de:Wikipedia:Exzellente Artikel, which can make newcomers become more involved into Wikipedia and create some awareness of the "process character" of our encyclopedia. The German label (de:Vorlage:Exzellent) is pretty unobtrusive and still rather nice, imho. We could just take it over for English, after changing the language, of course. The French FA tag has got two more nice features that are great to have on the article page, given especially the present discussions about certification of quality and about protection against vandalism: It links to the version that was chosen as a FA (this would be kind of a stable version), and it links to the discussion that led to the designation of the article. --Robin.rueth 15:53, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
• Strongly support. Adding a small tag will show the reader this article is one of our best and most credible, will caution editors to be careful when doing bold changes, and is a significant step forward towards an article appraisal system. See my proposal concerning adding the StarSmall template (down below). Elvarg 21:04, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
  • This is precisely what I disagree with. Editors should be bold, even in featured articles. I've seen some featured articles drastically improved in the past. But attempting to make it into some kind of "final version" that people should be afraid to touch defeats the purpose of open editing and content growth. It's better to have a separate "release version" for this. Deco 19:55, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Change "Editing" Page to Encourage Citing Sources

As a relatively inexperienced user, I notice that one of the things I don't really know how to do is to cite sources for an article, especially non-Internet ones. There is no button or text box for inserting citations, and no link to information on what style of bibliographic citation I should use to cite a book or article. If I follow the "help" link on the far left, I'm taken to a page with a multitude of links, many of which seem like they *might* help me with citing sources, but it's hard to be sure. (I'm not even sure what a wiki-bibliography should be called: "Sources"? "Bibliography"? "Further Reading"?).

Since the lack of internet and, especially, non-internet, sources is a big problem for wikipedia articles, I would suggest considering how the "edit" page might be changed to make it easier to cite articles, and to indicate that such citations are generally expected, and appreciated. Changes might include a text-box for citations, or buttons for "add web citation" or "add non-internet citation" or just prominant "Adding Citations" help button located near the "save page" button. I'm not sure how this could best be implemented. But in my humble opinon, it would be very beneficial to wikipedia to encourage people to include better citations by making it easier to do so.

[On preview: Ok I just noticed that the "edit" page includes a helpful link from the word "sources." But it's hidden in what seems like legal fine-print: ("Content must not violate any copyright and must be based on verifiable sources. By editing here, you agree to license your contributions under the GFDL.") But this info should be more visible, and citing should be made a more integrated and normal part of the editing process, I think.] --ThaddeusFrye 17:09, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I would support such a text box to encourage adding sources. I'm not sure exactly how it should work though; should urls just be pasted in and then magically appear in the ==References== section? There should also be an option to let more experienced users turn it off. Once the details are settled on, I could do this in javascript, I think, or (better yet) we could get a dev to do it server-side. Lupin|talk|popups 23:36, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

It should be included only on new pages as a seperate box, and perhaps javascript or something for edits. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 00:25, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

A simple text box would be very nice. Here's an additional idea, though, too: It might be nice to incorporate (or make available as a tool/tools) some way of importing print citations from Google Book, or Google Scholar, or the LOC or World Cat or other such sources. Like, you could paste in a URL for a book or article you searched for on one of these sources, and Wikipedia would find the citation info from Google Book or another database, and insert a properly formated citation into the articles "References" section. Maybe that's a programing nightmare, but it's an interesting thought! ThaddeusFrye 05:12, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Page validiation

Page validiation, but not as on the tin. All edits would still emediately come out on the page, but they would have to be approved by a wikipedia admin. If the current version is not a accepted one, a note is put on the top of the page with a link to the last approved version of the article. Such a feauture could make the world for Wikipedias credibility. Aye? ThorRune 10:25, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

There is an article validation feature in progress, see m:Article validation feature. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:47, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, but despite the name, the article validation feature (which is really a rating system) and what ThorRune is proposing are two separate things.the1physicist 21:06, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

The article validation system is also intended to hide versions that have not yet been rated positively, if my understanding is correct. Deco 04:08, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Your proposal for admin approval implies that admins have a better understanding of content than non-admins. This is not a correct assumption and presents an inappropriate expansion of admin responsibilities and powers. Courtland 03:31, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

As an admin, I have to agree with Courtland on this. Zoe (216.234.130.130 18:21, 20 December 2005 (UTC))

Administrators are users more experienced witht eh project, and that are trusted enough to gain the rank. All administrators should be trustable enough, and this future should only be used to not accept things that are oubeously wrong like spam, pedofile-accusations to the norwegian prime ministar (that got on Wikipedia on the frint page of norways bigest (or secound bigest, not sure) online newspaper), random odd sentances ("Ducks don't eat soap" in the what-they-eat part of the artice), and such things. Things that _might_ be false should be discussed, but those things will be spotted easyer with trusted people allways checking. I know administrators are not over the other users in any way, but being a administrator indicates that you know how stuff works around here, and that you behave properly. That's the criteria for admin promotion, ain't it? ThorRune 01:20, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

MIT's OpenCourseWare

I just ran across MIT's OpenCourseWare. Darned impressive resource. I was thinking that we should probably add to External Links wherever relevant, but I don't want to be accused of spamming (on behalf of an institution to which I have no connection, by the way) so I thought I'd come here first and see what others think. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:40, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Inspect the site more closely. It was just a publicity ploy--the links lead to empty shell pages. Lotsofissues 05:06, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

MIT, and especially the MIT Media Lab, is keen on hyped-up "world-saving" project ideas which get huge amounts of positive media publicity around the world (great for fundraising and brandbuilding), whether or not the ideas are actually that substantive and dramatic. I'm sure they'll eventually fill out the categories for OCW a lot more, but if its more of the same now (i.e. those few categories now which have something more than just MIT course syllabuses) it's still basically downloadable lists (literally lists) of lecture notes / questions /reading recommendations and some (also just text ) instructional cribs sheets. Remember OCW was launched with generous funding in 2001. over 4 years later, and its still downloadable lecture notes that cover only some subjects. (I'm a former MIT grad student) Bwithh 15:50, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

More annoyingly, they are essentially attempting to recreate already existing infrastructure without working with the various pre-existing MIT courseware projects. On the bright side, the translation project part of it is pretty cool. Glasser 15:52, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm glad I checked in here! -- Jmabel | Talk 01:09, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Include this template on Featured Articles (actual articles, not talk pages)

WHEREAS Featured Articles represent the best work of Wikipedia, and

WHEREAS Featured Articles should be edited with extra care if doing major revisions, as community consensus has approved of the current version, and

WHEREAS Featured Articles are a major step forward Wikipedia 1.0+, and ultimately printed/CD-based wikipedias, where all articles go through community appraisal

THEREFORE, Featured Articles should be visibly distinguished; and

WHEREAS the English Wikipedia has no distinguishment of Featued Articles on the article itself (only on talk pages), and

WHEREAS other Wikipedias have successfully adopted various distinguishments,

NOW, THEREFORE,

I propose all articles to include the template FeaturedSmall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:FeaturedSmall

What it does: It places a small yellow star in the top right corner of featured articles, followed by the text "ARTICLENAME is a Featured Article"

This template is already successfully used on other wikipedias, such as the Italian Wikipedia, for distinguishment of featured articles (see http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6rfuknattleikur).

The template is not overly pompeous, it does not "brag" the article excessively, and does NOT convey the message that it is "elite" compared to others. As well, it does NOT look restrictive or critical of change. It does, however, display the featured status of the article right ON the article, without need to go to the talk page.

I propose that all Wikipedia Featured Articles use this template.

It would need to be minorly adjusted (from "top:72px" to "top:10px") once the Fundraising Drive is over, for proper layout, but otherwise it will be stable.

Articles having the template would look exactly like the article on the Italian wikipedia I gave the link to. I also chose ONE (since there was no community consensus yet) English article to use the template on, and it will be there unless someone decides to revert it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond

Some discussion has already occured at the Technical board, where I inquired why don't we use them, and I found out it is used in some wikipedias but not others. So, I propose we use it here.

If adopted, the FeaturedSmall template should be locked, since it would be present on over 700 pages. Elvarg 03:01, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

I like this implemtation. It's small, elegant, and doesn't seem to have the problems people have mentioned with other options. Good idea. JesseW, the juggling janitor 22:23, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

I like this idea, too. I propose a text that contains some more vital information namely:

"This article [[(link to the page with the FA vote for this article)|was identified]] as a [[(link to FA page|featured article]] on [link to the historical version of the article that was chosen | date when it was chosen]. "

This should not be too long and gives some more vital information. Alternatively, we could just add a link to the talk page.--Robin.rueth 14:20, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, I could try that, but people who already object to including metadata on the article may raise further objections (and they may be right to some extent). Since the article tag (as opposed to talkpage tag) is intended primarily for the readers, rather than editors, the main thing they need to know is that the article is accurate, neutral, and well-referenced. It may not be the place to display the inner-workings of WP, such as our FA selection process. On another note, it may present technical difficulties -- namely lack of space. Already I realized I must either replace FULLPAGENAME with "this article", or create a second template (such as StarSmallLong) for articles with long names that doesn't have FULLPAGENAME, or face the problem of this tag overlapping some other text or not fitting on one line at all. Elvarg 20:33, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

For the 977th time, NO. One of the important things about Wikipedia is that it be easily replicable. This means it is very important to keep metadata out of articles -- metadata makes replicating our content elsewhere very difficult. Featured articles are (by definition) supposed to explify our best standards and practicies. This means keeping them free of metadata. Raul654 20:40, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Is it that difficult to mark metadata in such a way that whatever bots perform the replication don't pick it up? We already have {selfref}. There is enough value in such metadata that defining a simple standard for "metadata specific to wikipedia - you probably don't want this" is worthwhile and probably not difficult. Stevage 20:58, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Do we not have a ZILLION of tags that we put on articles anyways? Cleanup, COTW, AFD, RefsNeeded, NPOV, and HUNDREDS of others? Oh, and what about the TENS OF THOUSANDS of stub notices? At any given time about 20%-30% of Wikipedia articles have some kind of metatag. And besides, if a website wants to copy WP contents as a mirror, its really up to them, not to WP, to ensure a good copy. It is REALLY not that hard to program a bot to ignore STARSMALL templates (as they alrady ignore the mentioned tens of thousands of other stubs). "Free of metadata" is NOT holy scripture, and is not even a wikipedia policy (if anything, its a guideline), and to every guideline there are MANY valid exceptions. Elvarg 21:50, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

(1) Just because other articles break the standard does not mean the best ones should. (2) What is really needed is a technical solution - e.g, something implimented in the mediawiki markup that can be used to exclude certain data from dumps. Until and unless that gets done, we won't be putting metadata into the featured articles. Raul654 07:45, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

I have to agree with Raul here. We're here primarily as an encyclopedia; you don't see "featured article" tags on EB articles. Then again, they don't have talk pages, either... Flcelloguy (A note?) 21:56, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Did you ever see on EB "this article is a stub" notice?Elvarg 21:59, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Since this discussion doesn't progress: Raul, do you have the final word on questions like these ones? If not, whats the next step I should take in deciding this question? Elvarg 19:58, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Raul, do you have the final word on questions like these ones? - pretty much, yes. Raul654 20:57, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

New suggestion to stop Vandalism

Hi

I was a bit disappointed regarding the negative publicity surrounding the Wikipedia recently Although I have used the site many times when looking for something from simple to complex topics and found it great I have not contributed to a post

I would like to suggest the following to prevent further abuse of a very good tool and concept.

Charge any user who wants to contribute an article a 1 time deposit fee of 50 USD. For every article which they submit they are billed 5 dollars which is deducted from this amount. If the article goes through a time period of six months without anyone proclaiming it to be false or incorrect. The 5 dollars are added back to the persons account. Should the article be found to be false. The person who entered it is offered the opportunity to correct the entry. Should they refuse to do so they lose the 50 dollars. Where mistakes are innocent the user loses the 5 dollars but may submit the next article for free.

This covers admin costs and prevents those intent on destroying the wikipedia from succeeding. Good Luck ! Uven

That goes against the 'spirit' of Wikipedia, and will deter people from contributing. Any cost to the contributor should be avoided. But thanks anyway! Yellowmellow45 18:18, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree, any cost, even if refunded, would only hamper the project. I know I wouldn't contribute under those conditions. --Falcorian 18:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

This would dimnish contributions by 95%-99%. Not workable. Lotsofissues 00:14, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

2 things to note here A) Wikipedia is a non-profit orginazation so if we started charging people money that could get us in some legal trouble and B) A large percentage of contributers are teenagers or young adult who eithier don't have access to a credit card or can't risk loosing $5 an article. Deathawk 02:22, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

I appreciate that you're thinking about the problem Uven; I think the site needs some out-of-the-box ideas like yours. Petty "edit wars" are already are already a problem. Imagine how bad the arguments would become if people were screaming about their five bucks! Mikeblas 18:22, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Fundraising

Here is a modest proposal which is bound to get me flamed to a crisp: Why not use the space under the toolbox for google pageads? It would not be invasive, there is blank space there anyway, and it would bring in so much money that it could be discontinued after one year, leaving enough funding to keep the foundation in hardware for a decade. Maybe we could, instead of having a fundraiser every now and then, make December the PageAd month. --Slashme 11:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Generally I don't like advertisments, but google page ads *are* nicely unobtrusive. Are page ads pay-per-view, or pay-per-click though? I rarely (one in a thousand or whatever) bother to click through.

Also if we could maybe give an option to turn the ads on or off for registered users. Then maybe there could be a trial period in which anonomous users don't get ads and registered users can opt-in to them. Depending on user response and income generated the scheme could remain opt-in, or be extended to all unregistered users. --Neo 11:23, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Maybe it's just because I'm a registered user, but wouldn't it be wiser to make the ads visible to anon. users before registered users? After all, registered users tend to contribute more than anonymous users, and we're less likely to click on the ads. But I would say the best would simply be to make the ads visible to all. The faster we make our target, the faster we can ditch the ads. Here's a thought: Make the ads come on at the same time as a fundraiser. If the ads irritate you enough, you'll pay to get rid of them ;-)

As an aside, to see what they would look like, see the Uncyclopedia main page. --Slashme 12:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

The community response to advertising in the past has been very, very strong - the mere discussion of funding the project through advertising was enough to cause the Spanish wikipedia to split, forming the Enciclopedia Libre; this didn't do either project any favours, really. We can get the money through private donations, people are happy to donate, and there are no major cashflow problems. Starting advertising may bring in money, but the possible side-effects are not at all promising. Shimgray | talk | 12:26, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

It seems to me that:

• The split was caused by more than just the threat of advertising.
• It would be a shame if Wikipedia were to split due to the threat of advertising. I for one hereby pledge not to form a splinter encyclopedia over this issue.
• The fundraising ad at the top of the screen is rather more distracting than google ads down the side of the pages of Uncyclopedia (and more monotonous).

But if the community is dead set against it, who am I to stand against the masses? When was the last vote held? How overwhelming was the vote? --Slashme 13:52, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

There was a big fuss back in October as a result of this announcement, which kicked off Wikipedia:Wikiproject no ads - it wasn't a proposal to add ads, but it got interpreted as one, and there was much screaming. A glance at the associated talk pages should give you an idea of the size of hornets nest this tends to kick up... Shimgray | talk | 14:07, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I for one would rather tolerate google adsense ads than fundraising drives. And I'd definitely rather put up with them than pay WP. I'm not sure what the economics of it are though - how much money I would generate for WP over a year of watching adsense ads. Stevage 14:39, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Wow. After reading that petition, I realized just how hypersensitive some wikipedians are, and just what a hornets nest it indeed is (thanks Shimgray!). Is it just a vocal minority that believes that the trustees of WikiMedia are here for personal enrichment, or would a couple of PageAds really cause a large rebellion? Maybe if they took a closer look at the WikiMedia Budget, and compared it to any real-world company, they'd be a bit more understanding. Really, $33,000 is not a lot of money to pay 2 full-time and 2 part-time staff. Almost all the money goes to hardware!

Anyway, the reason that I raised this here was that I didn't know where to find this kind of information. Is this not by now a frequently-enough asked question to go into the FAQ? --Slashme 17:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

For the foreseeable future, fundraising alone should be able to continue to pay to keep the server farm humming and the foundation running at minimally acceptable levels (that is, if we spend 25% of the year fundraising). Doing more than that will require grants and large donations. At the same time we *all* need to understand that, by choosing to *not* have something like GoogleAds we are giving up millions of dollars of revenue each quarter. The mission of the foundation is to freely give every single person access to the sum of human knowledge and to do so in their own language. Revenue from something like GoogleAds could be used to expand our reach outside of areas where cheap high-speed Internet access is ubiquitous. We often forget that that still accounts for the great majority of humanity. But we can't do something like that without community support. Just make sure your decisions in this matter are fully informed and not the result of a gut reaction against advertising. BTW, I'm talking for myself and not at all in any official capacity as a foundation officer. --mav 18:14, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi mav. You say "millions of dollars...each quarter". Was that an official figure someone came up with, or just a guess? If it's for real, that is a ridiculous amount of money to be turning down for the sake of...uh...what exactly. And hell, if ads are brought in, sell 'premium accounts' for like $5 a year to turn the ads off. Hell, $1 a year and you'd still probably come out in front. Stevage 21:02, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

IIRC, the last estimate I heard about this is a couple months old; it stated we'd make - at that time - several hundred thousand dollars per month. Traffic has increased significantly since that estimate was given. I think it would be safe to now say the figure is at least a million dollars per quarter. --mav 22:43, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

This sort of figure gives a bit more perspective to the surprisingly insistent levels of linkspam we get... Shimgray | talk | 23:02, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Not that I'm against the whole idea, but it is worth pointing out why people don't like it. Wikipedia's trustworthiness (such as it is) depends on it's only being subject to the sway of its editors and not external forces. Suppose we become dependent on Google Ads, and an article criticizes one of google's endeavors. What do we do if Google says, remove the critical article or we will pull the ads from your page? I'm not saying google would do that, but it would put wikipedia in quite a bind. Either we sacrifice the encyclopedia or change our content slightly. Even if this were to never happen, people would definately accuse us of doing it. This is why Consumer Reports doesn't do advertising. Not because they couldn't still be objective, but because no one could trust that they were. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 02:04, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

I do not understand this argument, currently Wikipedia depends upon minuscule amount of donations (around 1M p.a). Certainly if somebody will offer say $100K donation in exchange to some POV (say protect George Bush or Microsoft in a particular state) it would be hard to resist. If Wikimedia would have a budget of 20M/p.a. it would be much easier to resist such an offer. Alternatively, for $100K the POV-pusher can employ quite a number of web monkeys that would push the POV, in my own experience resistance against even a single determined POV-pusher is almost futile unless you want to spend all your life in a revert war over a single article. Frankly side ads on Google does not bother me (sometimes I even follow them), I do not see why they should bother other peopleabakharev 03:51, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

I think that unless there is an official proposal here, there shouldn't be a drawn out (likely very heated) discussion at the VP. I just wanted to be sure that the objections to advertisement were not dismissed without at least a brief defense. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 04:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Maybe if we just had PageAds on during our fundraisers, it would on the one hand allay fears of manipulation, and also make the fundraisers shorter. As for the discussion at the VP, where is the best place to discuss issues like this? --Slashme 06:26, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

I've written a page at User:NeilTarrant/PageAds trying to summarise thoughts on this topic. Maybe discussion can be moved there? --Neo 12:32, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

For us, money is not nearly as important as goodwill. We are doing fine on the money side, so gambling with goodwill is unnecessary and dangerous. The Spanish Wikipedia broke off when Larry Sanger mentioned the possibility of his salary being covered by advertising in the future. I am sure that the German Wikipedia would break off if advertising were initiated; indeed their fundraising message right now says "Help us keep Wikipedia and its sister project in the public domain and free of advertising in the future".

If you want to see Wikipedia with ads, check out about.com. They have good content, but everybody hates it. Nobody contributes to such a site: deep down, you're afraid that somebody will profit from your work other than you. (Which is true: the advertisers profit.)

Advertisements are inherently POV. It doesn't make sense to remove spammed links from the articles, and then invite them back in to the highest bidder in the form of Google ads.

And regarding the point that mav raises above (it's also one of Jimbo's talking points): we might need advertising money in the future to distribute encyclopedias to people without net access. To that I say: If we ever got our act together and produced anything that's worthy of distribution, philanthropic organizations would be more than happy to fund it. Money is never an issue in these things, there are plenty of rich foundations eager to give it away; you just write up a decent proposal and that's that. AxelBoldt 16:49, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Listen to this article (help)

Noticed its placement when reverting something on Jimmy Wales, could that link be moved to the same line and font size (right justified) as "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." - RoyBoy ⁸⁰⁰ 20:59, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Image upload (source)

As including a source is now (and has been for some time) required, I think it'd make sense to include a "Source" edit box (in addition to the box for "Description"). This would encourage users to include a source (be it a URL or a note saying it was scanned from a newspaper or screencapped by the uploader, or whatever). Ideally this "Source" box would add a new section (similar to how the license drop down box adds a "License" section) called, logically, "Source". :P As a side note, is there anyplace else I should suggest this (and future image upload suggestions)? —Locke Cole 02:00, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, this must have been the wrong spot. :-| —Locke Cole 19:12, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Review boards

We want to have all the articles reviewed, to prevent hoaxes and increase the quality of the articles. I propose to form boards of reviewers at each WikiProject and Wikiportal each board adopts a group of categories related to their Project/Portal. We can also form a wildcard review board for the categories that are not adopted by any project.

A member of a review board should be a registered user with at least a few months of experience, never founded to commit hoaxes and other bad faith editions, who has some good quality contributions in the field of the board. The board can be originally elected by the participants of the project/portal and then co-opted by the consensus of the board members or by additional voting. For the wildcard review board lets say that the administrators are the original wildcard board.

What do the reviewers - they review articles on their adopted categories. If an article is reviewed does not mean that it is a perfect article. It only means that it is not a hoax, that it is not in a vandalized stage and that all the applicable tags are there. If it a stub, than it labelled as a stub, it it POV then it is labelled as POV, if it needs clean up - it labelled for clean up, if a minor fact is dubious - than it clearly marked as dubious, etc. If an article already was reviewed, than the next review means that it is clearly in better state than it was at the previous review. If the article became worse since the last review the reviewed status should be withdrawn. If there are arguments between the reviewers, than the decision should be voted (probably by consensus as with the adminships), if there is no consensus it goes in RfC, Arb com etc.

After reviewing an article, the reviewer leaves a template message, showing the name of the board, his own name and the date at the bottom of the article. He/she also clearly marks "Article was reviewed by the board member" in the edit summary. Reviewer can not review an article if he was a major contributor to it ( or the major contributor to the changes since the last review, if the article was already reviewed). For people who are not official reviewers leave messages masquerading as a review should be a blockable offence.

In future, if we will have a large pull of reviewed article we could have a GUI switch between the latest reviewed version and the development version as well as "revert to the latest reviewed version" button. We could also have a separate colors for the links to the reviewed and non-reviewed articles, toolbox for the reviewers, etc.

Advantages: improves quality by forcing systematical reviews, starting point for checking - comparing with the latest reviewed version, CD distributions should be done based on the latest reviewed version if they are available. I also hope the decision would curb revert wars and give some recognition to good participants of particular projects abakharev 09:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea, which is (in part) already being worked on. An article validation system is currently in development and is scheduled to be deployed here in January (I think). There is also the {{Maintained}} template which is currently under threat of deletion which does a similar thing (although with individuals as well as boards). No one has thought to add the restriction that non-authors review it, but that wouldn't be a bad idea. I think once article validation goes live there will be a lot of policy discussions surrounding it. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 16:54, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Second-hand hardware

One of the major costs for wikipedia is currently hardware. For the expendable computers lower down in the information chain, would it be practical to use second-hand computers donated by wikipedians? Andjam 12:38, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

This has been suggested before. I can't remember the page, but apparently the WikiMedia foundation has filled up its racks already, and a larger computer room would be more expensive than more computers. Or something of the kind. I'll check this out soon... --Slashme 12:56, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

It is my distinct impression that there is not a surplus of sysadmin time. Trying to maintain a large quantity of diverse, non-standard, old slow hardware seems like a bad idea. Thue | talk 22:32, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Google, last I checked, runs with a "deploy lots of them and deploy 'em cheap" mentality, which, in the end, offers better redundancy, as one high-end server will fail more easily then lots of cheap ones. This could be a long-term server administration project, I suppose. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 01:16, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Go ask them then, but I have been lurking around the tech team for some time, and I really doubt they want a bunch a old computers. Thue | talk 08:42, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Google does use cheap / lots, but that is relative. Their systems end up as rather custom; e.g. no cases; specially built racks etc. They also use new hardware all the time and have hundreds of identical systems. I believe that, by the time they have removed things like graphics cards etc. the systems end up as quite competitive with high end servers in terms of compute power per square meter and per unit of energy. Second hand systems would a) have to be very high level (e.g. very fast SCSI disk arrays with many spares would probably be useful) b) have to be power efficient. For almost any reasonable "second hand" hardware, I think the only use would be in office space or contributors homes. I don't think this would solve the problems of hardware cost for Wikipedia that much. Perhaps, though, they could help with wikipedia outreach somehow? Make a page with a list of hardware available for donation, then people can suggest what could be done with it. Remember though, instead of five second hand servers, one new server with the same functions consolidated to it will be easier and cheaper to maintain. Mozzerati 11:43, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Keep in mind that Google also has no problem replicating their content, as it's updated much more infrequently. Every edit has to become immediately visible to all readers, which makes parallelism quite difficult. If they were using a better database engine supporting replication it wouldn't be such a big deal, but well, they're stuck with MySQL for now. Deco 19:47, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikiproject Cuba?

Is there a Wikiproject: Cuba around here? If not, I propose we have one. --Antonio Not Marti but Martin

There doesn't seem to be one, but feel free to start one - see Wikipedia:WikiProject. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:41, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:WikiProject Countries. Courtland 04:13, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Simple enhancement could be useful?

When a page is displayed in edit mode, would it be possible to display the contributor's name or IP address of that particulr edit. At present, if one views the history, a contributor's name is available, but if reverting to a previous version, as soon as you go to edit mode, the information isn't on your screen. Therefore if you want to write an edit comment such as 'revert to last version by so-and-so', you have to flip back to the history (or have a good memory, not easy for IP addresses, I find). This surely would be a very small change that would streamline reversion quite nicely. Or is there a way to do it already thaty I haven't spotted? Comments? Graham 01:18, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree that it would be useful. In the meantime, cultivate the habit of copying the name or IP address to your clipboard before diving into edit mode. Chris the speller 03:27, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Defending Wikipaedia from commercial advertising

Fresh from a discussion about commercial advertising masquerading as legitimate articles (User talk:HasBeen), I come with a proposal to help reduce abuse of the Wikipaedia project as I see it from the invasion of both professional marketing and grass-roots covert advertising from e-teams.

The proposal: all articles about individual music albums and singles be copied into the relevant group or individual's biography, the deleted as stand-alone entries.

Is this important? Yes, it is very important indeed. With Wikipaedia set to be a global source of information, the inclusion of a stand-alone article in the project legitimises its contents for almost all-time! Given that the source material for most of these entries are the press releases of the various big music corporations, what was a marketing lie yesterday suddenly becomes music history tommorrow just by cut and paste into one of our user-friendly fields.

This proposal would help stem the tide of blatant advertising that is choking this excellent project. By way of example (and please don't feel victimised, it's just that this article was the first one that caught my attention being on the front page (!)) please see Cool (song). This is nothing more than a commercial for a product, and also begs the question, who is going to type the word "cool" into our search engine in the future specifically looking for this ephemeral pop song?

By moving the contents of this stand-alone article to the bio the information adds to the whole body of data on the particular group or individual, and the impact of the advert is massively reduced. Yes, the same would apply for the Beatles too, their estates still make money from promoting products (as does Michael Jackson, for the time being...)

Other marketing professionals: please note the e-teamers at work in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rich Girl, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/What You Waiting For?, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Luxurious (song). Could you or I boast such an army of vigilant subjects to spread brand loyalty? Also note the personalisation of the argument in favour of addressing the points made: they have been coached well. (I hasten to add that not all respondents were e-teamers! Some very helpfully guided my argument here.)

Now I ask the nightmare question: what if one of our internet-junkie, wikiholic admin team was also an e-teamer? They could pass blatant advertising off as legitimate, and there would be precious little we could say in defence.

I appreciate that this is only a small step, and that there is an argument that this seems a strange place to "draw the line" as it were. (Indeed, could such a policy work for films? Probably not...) However, by chasing away overt marketing ploys in the music industry, we can be more vigilant for a similar abuses in, say, the field of books or politics.--HasBeen 09:31, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

This proposal has much going for it, and I agree that a lot of songs that have their own pages at the moment should be merged into their author's pages with extreme prejudice.

I would, however, question cutting off all song and album pages. For example, are you seriously suggesting that the page on the song American Pie should to be merged into the main Don McLean page? It's an iconic song, that has been subjected to massive interpretation, and would definitely be a topic that would be searched on its own. What about the album The Wall by Pink Floyd? It has been made into a motion picture and has a wide influence on people who don't listen to any other Pink Floyd. I think that songs and albums should just be subject to the same notability criteria as other pages. And just being no. 1 on the Billboard Chart is not enough, in my opinion.

• Again: why does including the information in the bio diminish it as encyclopaedic? I will give you a for instance: if you forgot the name of Lee and Herring's television show, would you type in a list of random words hoping to strike lucky, or would you type in, err, Lee and Herring? Please, anyone, explain to me why putting Yellow Submarine into The Beatles is going to diminish either article from the point of view of a user. The hotlinks in the contents instantly zoom to the relevant information; why have a ready-for-marketing-abuse, stand-alone article too? --HasBeen 10:26, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

If you look at the American Pie article, and imagine what the Don McLean article would look like with that added to it, you'll see that it becomes a monster of a page. Similarly, imagine if you will the size of the Pink Floyd page with the pages on The Wall (the album) and The Wall (the motion picture) tagged onto it. Your "Yellow Submarine" example is a case in point. How long would a user with a modem have to wait for the Grand Unified Beatles page to load if it had to contain Yellow Submarine the song, the album and the motion picture, as well as the White album, and all the other Beatles-related pages?

Further, what do you do about songs that have been recorded by many artists? Would you put Blue Suede Shoes under Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins? There will always be splitters and lumpers, but some songs and albums are notable enough to warrant their own pages. I agree that Wikipedia-based advertising by creating pages for non-notable pop songs is an evil that we must fight, but maybe requiring all songs to be lumped into the pages of their respective composers is a cure that is worse than the disease. --Slashme 10:47, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

• Thank you for your views. Given that wiki articles have that handy Contents hot link to sub-titles, I would disagree that including album and single information into a bio would make it unwieldable. And, yes indeed, who should get the credit for a team collaboration (the Elvis example is inspired)? Who indeed is more famous, or "noteworthy" of the pair in question? I think a discussion of individual cases would not take too long to sort out, with a link to the other's bio for the other (the John Cale/Lou Reed bios might start fighting, but do they ever stop?) This added bit of talk is a very small price to pay for defending the project against the commercial interests of corporate music. What is better: informed conversation between legitimate contributors, or rabid e-team posting every surface they can find with a press release? --HasBeen 11:25, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

The issue of where to place a song could in principle be decided quite easily: Put it under the page of the person who physically wrote the music (Making for very few difficult decisions: "It's now or never" goes under Eduardo di Capua, The Lion Sleeps Tonight would go under Solomon Linda, and The House of the Rising Sun and most of Steeleye Span's work would go under "Anonymous"), and any others just get a link to the relevant subsection. But that is not the main issue for me. I have a 56k modem at home, and downloading the whole Pink Floyd page takes a while already. Downloading it along with all their album and song information would be an irritating, slow, expensive endeavour.

Also, simply from the standpoint of data organization and readability, it is simply less elegant to lump songs along with their composers. Think of the load on the servers, for example. Every time someone wants to research the Beatles, the server has to send them all that information. Divide the article up, and someone who was just doing a school project on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band can click on the link to that album and save the server having to send out about six times as much data.

Another point - Page size policies would rather limit the information that one could put on a page about an influential musician if all the songs and albums had to be listed on the main page. I know that everybody ignores page size anyway, but this would just make it worse. --Slashme 12:10, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

• I absolutely agree with you Slashme, and feel that a lot of the PR fluff that pervades the stand-alone single and album articles would have to be editted out under the new proposal in order to maximise the use of space, thus protecting the project further from corporate marketing. Thank you so much for addressing the question. There are so many press releases currently masquerading as articles that would be purged from the project, thus leaving the quality information behind. Does anyone have an argument against this point? PS do see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Honey (Mariah Carey song) for an example of an e-team in full mob action.--HasBeen 09:28, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

E-teamers, eh? I took a look at the guys voting to keep the page in question:

• Everyking: An admin with a good record of vandal fighting
• Badlydrawnjeff: A wikipedian with an impressive list of edits
• Capitalistroadster: A wikipedian with more awards than I have edits (this is hyperbole, not irony, Hasbeen!)
• Extraordinary Machine: A refugee from IMDB with a deletionist barnstar for his work on Mariah Carey yet.
• Jcuk: He's an avowed inclusionist, so no surprises here.
• Howcheng: A Wikipedian who has voted for deletion of non-notable bands.

And as for construing my comments as support for your position, that was either disingenuous or inattentive of you. I would be willing to support a policy of keeping only very notable songs, but my personal position is that it is reasonable to keep pages on all but the least-notable of songs, but to keep the non-notable entries short. If you think that the page on a particular song is bloated with marketing, explain your position on the talk page and take a hatchet to the page, cutting out all but the facts. Then defend your edits against those that you so blithely call "e-teamers".

As for your proposal to solve the problem of marketing puff about pop songs masquerading as wikipedia entries by removing all pages on songs, the words of Piet Hein spring to mind:

Stupidity's true opposite's the opposite stupidity

--Slashme 10:19, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

• And that is such a traditional e-teamer response as to be textbook: personalise the attack to disuade debate... That you did accidentally put your finger on the positive side effect of excluding stand-alone single and album entries should not necessarily be viewed as a bad thing. Many of these pop bios are heaving with conjecture, advertising and fluff that could well do with trimming. If the emphasis is on accuracy and brevity, then this proposal to protect wiki from commercial advertising will have many additional positive side effects. --HasBeen 10:19, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

So, now I am also an e-teamer, working from the e-teamer textbook (please direct me to it). And I am trying to "dissuade debate". Please, don't let me "dissuade" you. Kindly respond to my points, and thereby continue the debate that I am "dissuading":

• Which of the people that were voting to keep those songs were e-teamers?
• Why not just edit the fluff out of those song pages that you so dislike? It's much easier and more defensible than trying to get them deleted.

As for my Piet Hein quote, I was not personalising the attack. The fact that I think your proposal is the "opposite stupidity" to having bloated wikipages on every pop-song that comes out, does not mean that I think that you personally are stupid.

--Slashme 10:44, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. A blanket ban on albums or singles sounds like an unnecessary rule. Instead, each album and single should be judged on its merits. Andjam 14:06, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Where would you go from here? Deletion of all movies and television shows? Deletion of all articles about books? Zoe (216.234.130.130 17:42, 23 December 2005 (UTC))

I am sure that there are many singles and albums that have articles of their own and don't need them. I'm equally sure that I wouldn't want to make a rule to say that no singles or albums deserve articles of their own. Are you really saying that we should make The Beatles into Wikipedia's largest article? Or that featured article Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me) should be rolled into The Tempations? Or that Kind of Blue should be rolled into Miles Davis, despite the role that John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Cannonball Adderley played on the album? This seems like just a bad idea. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:05, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

This proposal is simply ridiculous. There are countless singles that are ingrained in American culture and have been for decades, like "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "American Pie". Likewise there are albums that have had wide-reaching influence in the development of genres, such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. You can't say these don't stand on their own. That said, I'm unsure whether many ephemeral pop singles are any more notable than a single issue of a magazine, but like the latter they certainly get a lot of exposure. Deco 19:43, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Ellipsis markup

It's my opinion that an ellipsis operator would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. Good expository writing is always a balance between telling too much and telling too little, between crisp prose and thorough explanation.

The tensions arise largely because readers come to articles with a wide range of needs, knowledge and interpretive skills. Consider, as an extreme example, the information content of an article about a new heart-bypass surgery technique. The text and vocabulary that is (immediately) useful to a patient with a high-school education is very different from the text that is useful to a cardiac surgeon.

For the extreme example above, the best compromise possible in a single article is copious hyperlinking in the context of a summary discussion. For less extreme cases, however, an ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.

For example, the three paragraphs above might appear in elided form as shown below.

It's my opinion that an ellipsis operator would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. ... An ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.

In the above paragraph, the elision required the word 'an' to be capitalized in the elided form. This is a small example of a general case. To be useful, a well-defined ellipsis markup needs to support replacement text so that both the elided and expanded versions are grammatically correct.

The exact markup syntax should, of course, be determined by the WikiMedia developers. The visual indicators should clearly indicate the presence of an expandable elision and yet be minimal enough that normal reading is not disrupted. I've used the tradition three-dot ellipsis in my example but it is not clear whether this is the best choice for an indicator that is also a hyperlink that expands inline. At the very least, the ellipsis indicator should be obedient to browser settings for hyperlink coloring and decoration.

From an editor's point of view, ellipsis markup offers an alternative way to compress long articles without information loss. For the reader, expanding an ellipsis would, in my opinion, be less disruptive to the flow of comprehension than transitioning away from the page under consideration via hyperlinks.

--Michael.f.ellis 16:13, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Translations: Status, tutorials

I'd like to contribute to the French to English translations and am having a hard time understanding what is going on!

One of my confusions comes from the translation status. I seem to be finding several articles which are listed under the "Requested" translations, even though they appear to be status "Done". I noticed someone else found it a "shambles" in their words, so I'm not the only one!

Is there a way to move these articles automatically, or does someone need to monitor/clean it up? Should the choice of status be limited by using a pull-down menu?

Having a tutorial called "How to translate an article" would also be very helpful, as the instructions are written from the point of view of the person requesting the translation, but not the person who's going to do it.

Thanks for all your thoughts & help (I've a headache trying to get to grips with it all)

--Carolille 17:00, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

There's no way to handle status automatically. For the first year that we were trying to systematize translation requests at Wikipedia:Requests for translation I tried to keep it running smoothly, and mostly succeeded. French-to-English was always the worst, mainly because a lot of people signed up for things and didn't follow through. Since approximately March 2005, I've been too busy on other things to focus on this. I know several people have been trying to keep it smooth, but I'm not surprised if French-to-English has turned into a particular mess.

Does someone want to look into this? If no one takes it on in the next week or so, "ping" my user talk page, and I'll try to give it a few hours and see what I can do.

By the way, a lot of what it takes is simply following through with people who've started something and haven't obviously finished, and asking them what's going on. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:10, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Aniversary

For Wikipedia's 5th anniversary, I think it would be nice to have the featured article to be Wikipedia. --Wookiebaca 22:06, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

It seems like a pretty gratitious self reference (see wikipedia:Avoid self references) Raul654 20:58, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

It's not really a self reference if our article is good enough to merit inclusion in Britannica. I don't think 'self referencing' policy applies any more to the wikipedia article than it does to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Wilmington. I do think that while having wikipedia as a featured article might be nice... but to become a fully respectable encyclopedia it might be better to have science or something core featured first. gren グレン 18:08, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Using OpenID to logon to sister projects

Wikimedia should use a system similar to OpenID to avoid the hassle of needing to sign up for a separate account on each sister project. It would mean that if I want to post on fr:, just to make some minor adjustment but I can't be bothered opening an account, I would be able to post as "pfctdayelise from en:w:", more or less. You would still be able to open a separate account if you had a serious interest in multiple projects, but it could be very handy especially for a project like commons, where most people are not interested in hanging around, but just uploading their photos and then going back to their "main" project. It would also mean people with accounts on other wikis could start articles here without needing to sign up for an account.

It is used at the moment on blogs/livejournal. It would probably require some modification for the wikimedia projects, but I think it could be a workable solution to this annoying problem, and it seems more realistic than scrapping everyone's account and starting again with a centralised database, or somehow merging all the existing accounts together into a centralised database. pfctdayelise 03:57, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

See [1]. r3m0t ^talk 18:46, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

make user logs and deleted more accessible?

I think that it would be nice if the logs and deleted edits (Kate's Tool) for blocked users were accessible from the block list. Often times, blocked users would have nothing showing up in their contributions. If the user wasn't blocked for an inappropriate username, it can be very time-consuming to check what they have done. This mainly applies to image-upload vandals and users who create nonsense pages. Anyone agree with me? --Ixfd64 04:11, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Link to concrete news articles on Main Page

As of now, the news items on the main page do not link to any concrete article that would contain further information. Ofen I read a news item and would like to find out more, but don't know where. The link to the sister project Wikinews below the items is of course prominent, but not all of the news items are also listed on Wikinews and if, they have to be found.
I would propose to create some kind of link ("more info here"/"more"/...) to a full article on Wikinews for every Main Page news item. mmtux talk 23:00, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

But... maybe they don't link to further articles because further articles don't exist (yet)? pfctdayelise 14:20, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

If they already exist, link them, if they don't exist, encourage people to create them... If the latter is not possible, at least simply link the ones which have matching articles on Wikinews. --mmtux talk 00:03, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Regional noticeboards?

I was thinking about all of the pictures that needed to be taken of Delaware and I was wondering if noticeboards for regions should be created? My first thought was making the noticeboard (basically a request board too) in the wikipedian category. I'll create a little example that should be tweaked a lot in Category talk:Wikipedians in Delaware. I want to know what other users think. I think it would be useful since I pass a bunch of these things on a weekly basis but I have no clue what Delaware related articles are on wikipedia because Delaware is not the most interesting thing in my mind. Is there a better place than category pages? Should this be done? What uses beyong localized image requests does it have? etc. etc. gren グレン 17:56, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

They already exist, although not to such fine detail. See Wikipedia:Regional notice boards. You might also be interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities/Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states. pfctdayelise 20:07, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Oh. Some admin I am... hmm, with the breadth of images that need to be taken and the fact that the most localized one (for me) is Wikipedia:U.S. Northern Wikipedians' notice board would it be worthwhile to create either through location categories like I did... or through some other way (like Wikipedia:Delaware Wikipedians' notice board) a way to let users know important local things? I think this is mainly important for pictures since localized picture notifications would motivate me some at least. That noticeboard is more collaboration based... not pending tasks based. It's an interest board... and I'm not interested in Delaware so I'm unlikely to participate in any COTW, but I would take pictures. I can't tell if I make any sense. gren グレン 20:51, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Massive De-Wikification of Years and Dates Campaign

I propose an officially sanctioned campaign to rid Wikipedia of excessive wikification of years and dates on the grounds that:

1. Only wikifying dates of the initial statement of the year and possibly the initial statement of the date if there is a significant anniversary related to the article subject is useful. All else is pointless and unnecessary.

2. There are many articles out there where not only are the first instance of dates and years wikified, regardless of whether these are significant dates or not, but every single date in the article, down to the day is wikified. Sometimes people even wikify the month and the day separately, for every single time the date is mentioned. All this should be clearly redundant - repeat wikification of the exact same phrase that isn't a date every time it occurs in an article is typically targetted for editing quickly. But repeat wikification of dates is very widespread and generally goes unedited.

3. There is a widespread misperception that excessive repeat wikification of dates is some kind of Wikipedia standard, when its not. It should be made clear that it isn't.

4. Overwikification of dates reduces the visual emphasis on properly wikified terms and phrases. Overwikfication of dates damages the user-friendliness of Wikipedia rather than enhances it.

What do other people think?

Bwithh 21:27, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Would this include birth years? like in... Tintin (November 8, 1923 – December 27, 2045) ....? I agree that in article text many times it shouldn't be wikified... I think you could do this rather well by checking wikification of links beyond 100 bytes with some bot. I'm not sure about this... I think it'd be best to create a uniform and specific policy on this (or has this been done?) gren グレン 21:32, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

I personally don't have a problem with birth and death dates. Bwithh

This is an inherently bad idea. The proposer utterly fails to mention that the reason we link those dates is so that automated date preferences kick in. Raul654 21:43, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

While it IS a bad idea for that reason, it doesn't address the (technical?) reasons that we have to do this for date preferences in the first place. That's probably why people feel dates are overlinked; because they are (just not for the reason that would seem apparent at first). -- nae'blis _(talk) 21:47, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Is it technically necessary for every or almost every single date and year (i.e. not just key dates, but dates for minor incidents and references too) in an article to be wikified, even ones which have been wikified already, even more than once, in the same article? For instance, take a look at a page currently linked from the front page - Hwang Woo-Suk where besides the usual overwikification of dates, someone has even wikified the "AM" in a time reference, 4:30 AM (at least in the current version I'm looking at now). I "utterly failed" at mentioning the technical side of automated date preferences (what are these?) because I have no idea what the technical side is. Can you explain why wikification for every single date in an article is technically necessary and efficient? thanks. Bwithh

The Manual of Style encourages linking all dates, because linked dates can rearrange themselves to match the user's date preferences, no matter whether the editor uses the form "December 24, 2005" or "24 December 2005". See Help:Editing#Links. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 23:47, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

That makes sense (at least until we have a better mechanism) when month and day is given, but makes no sense for years in isolation. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:05, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Not at all, the MoS specifically says not to link dates, unless it is for the date preferences reason or for another specific reason, which in other words means that individual day, month or year links should almost always be unlinked. Martin 19:44, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't think years should be linked. However, I link the first mention of years while wikifying because people often put on the tag specifically so that years and such will be linked and they complain when I don't wikify the years or the put the wikify tag back on. We need to come up with a policy so that we don't end up linking and delinking the years over and over. It should be specifically mentioned in the Manual of Style, for the regular reasons and so that those who delink or leave years unlinked while wikifying will have something to refer to in a disagreement. It should specifically mention what should be linked or unlinked, like the first mention of a year, what qualifies as an important year for linking purposes and whether unimportant dates should be linked merely so that the user's preferences work. -- Kjkolb 13:46, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

I think what this ultimately comes down to is, is Wikipedia just an encyclopedia, or is it an almanac/encyclopedia? I've seen the latter stated on some official project pages. If it is an almanac as well, it makes sense to have the year entries and to have many links to those entries so that they're useful (and truly relevant links are likely to be quite rare). On the other hand, a person clicking the link might be misled into thinking they'll receive an actual encyclopedia entry about the year - maybe we should distinguish encyclopedia articles from almanac entries more explicitly. Deco 19:33, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

I oppose this proposal becuase, as Raul said, this would cause the date preference not to function and we'd be involved in more edit wars like the BC/BCE mess. Leave well enough alone. User:Zoe|^(talk) 01:14, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

However, none of the above argumentns apply to unlinking year and otehr date elementsa that are not part of complete dates, and on which date prefereces do not work anyway. The Manual of Style already strongly discourages linking such dates. Have a look at recent edits to User:DESiegel/Date Test to see the kinds of things I am referring to. DES ^(talk) 01:19, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I totally agree. The only catch is that some sort of alternate date preferences formatting that doesn't require linking must be done first. --Cyde Weys _vote^talk 01:30, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Note that such new syntax is not required when unlinking date elements which do not activate date preferences in any case. That is all that i think should be done until and unless such alternate syntax is implemted. DES ^(talk) 01:34, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

• Ohh yes, totally agreed. I already do unlink such things as "2005", "December, 2005", or "December". It's just the tricky circumstances of "December 25, 2005" or "December 25" where I feel the new date syntax needs to come into place before we do something about it. --Cyde Weys _vote^talk 01:43, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I support the proposal. The source of the problem is that two entirely different things (links and date preferences) have been implemented with identical mechanisms. The date preference mechanism is not even available to most readers (the many without an account and those not logged in). The benefit is limited to resolving ambiguous numeric dates like 5/4/2001. Dates like Dec 25 and 25 Dec are not ambiguous so we have paid a high price for an aesthetic change. Anyone that suggests most existing date links are needed for context should provide a different explanation for why we have thousands of links to Tuesday and January. Anyone that suggests the current implementation of date preferences is worth the price should explain why non-logged in readers can manage without. I think the current massive overlinking makes Wikipedia look silly.

Dates are the most linked articles. They rank highly on:

• the list of articles with multiple links to the same article.
• the list of most referenced articles
• the list of most incoming links

Some editors just add links because they can, not because of an encyclopedic benefit to the reader.

Bobblewik 20:18, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I personally prefer a healthy amount of linking redundancy. Just because a link is in the same article, if it is three sections down, it doesn't do me much good to have to go searching for the link. Link to the same article in the same paragraph is likely overkill, but once in a section, I think, is not a bad redundancy. If a date is repeated more than once in a paragraph, the paragraph likely needs to be rewritten. Disclaimer:this is a quick, not thought-out-very much opinion — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 20:27, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Gift Certificates

I was looking for Christmas and birthday presents lately, and since the subject is as much a Wikipedian as I am, I was looking into the possibility of somehow combining the fundraising with the Christmas/Birthday aspect. However, I did not find any such way. Why is there no possibility to present someone with a donation to Wikipedia as a gift? The person in question would have loved to get a certificate saying "You're holding 20€ worth of free knowledge in your hands." or something. Of course, I could easily produce something like that myself, but that's not the same thing. I'd want to give out something official.

Shezoid 15:41, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Sponsored article

There seems to be no possibility of sponsoring a single article or a category of articles now. However, I'd propose a mechanism to to just that, which would work in conjunction with the above-mentioned gift certificates. It would work as follows:

1. I donate some money to Wikipedia, associated to an article/a category. I get a certificate for that, or not, depending on the availability for certificates.
2. The money would go to a special "pending" account or be marked "pending" or something, so that Wikipedia would not use it. At the same time, the article/category would get a small box saying "This article has xx$ pending."
3. As soon as that special article enters the list of excellent articles/that category has $n$ articles in the excellent list, Wikipedia un-pends the money and finally "receives" my donation.

This way, I could make sure that a certain article of my interest would get special attention, donate money to Wikipedia and give out small portions of Wikipedia as presents. Three flies in one strike!

Shezoid 16:06, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

I think this is a bad idea all around. Do we really want to go down the road of having articles with template tags saying "article development supported by Joes' Used Car Emporium", which is exactly where this would lead? User:Ceyockey 16:18, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Actually, we already have this in a slightly different implementation: Wikipedia:Bounty board. And, as far as I'm concerned, Joes' Used Car Emporium is welcome, at least on the talk page. See: Talk:Mário de Andrade for an example.--Pharos 16:25, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

The reality of this having been done already doesn't change my opinion that it is a bad idea. My main objections are (1) that monetary compensation involvement demands extra scrutiny over the balance of the piece (with respect to NPOV/POV matters) and (2) putting "thanks to Joes' Used Car Emporium" in association with an article invites people to start using Wikipedia for commercial enhancement, in particular with regard to corporate image. It would be easy as anything for someone to come in and add their company imprint to a thousand talk pages - it is no different in my opinion from using Wikipedia as a platform for advertising. User:Ceyockey 17:57, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

How about not putting any names to the sponsorings? How about just saying "There is a $$$ Bounty on this article." right next to it? The certificate wouldn't be publicly available, just for oneself. To frame it, say. How about someone going over the pages right now putting a "I wrote this article and I was paid for by Joey's Used Cars." on the talk pages, what would you think about that? What stops me? Point is: Without the built-in ability to associate names to a sponsoring/bounty, how are you going to use it for advertisment?! Shouldn't we be talking about the potential of an idea to improve the article quality instead of devising hypothetical ways to use it for advertising, that aren't even possible in the original implementation? Shezoid 20:07, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Creating syntax for date preference formatting that isn't linking

This has come up in repeated discussions and I think it's important enough that something needs to be done. Currently, the only way to get date preference formatting to work is to link the date. While this works, it has the unsightly side effect of cluttering up a page with unnecessary links. Wikipedia:Make only links relevant to the context is a good guide in this regard. Unfortunately, because of the desire to get date formatting preferences to work, you end up seeing lots of unnecessary links. Let's take the high profile Christmas article. It has over a dozen links to December 25 and all sorts of links to other dates as well. It's ugly and it clutters up the page. Links should only be used when the user would actually have some valid reason to click through and find out about a topic. But I can't think of any reason anyone would need to be able to click through to December 25 a dozen times from the Christmas article. The desire to get dates working with the date preferences formatting is causing our Wikipedia pages to unnecessarily be cluttered with useless links.

Also, keep in mind that the majority of the people browsing or viewing Wikipedia either do not have user accounts or are not logged in, so they are not receiving any kind of benefit from the date preferences formatting. They're only perceiving the negative aspect of it: articles that are way overlinked to irrelevant dates and years.

I am therefore proposing the creation of a new kind of syntax or function in Wiki source that identifies a phrase as a date so that it can be properly formatted without having to have a date be linked. I don't exactly have something in mind, so for now let's just call it <date> and </date>. I'm sure someone else around here can figure out the appropriate way to implement it. With this feature implemented our article could be a lot better. We could link the first occurrence of December 25 on the Christmas page as [[December 25]] because it is conceivable that someone may want to know what else happened on that date, but for subsequent uses of December 25 we would use <date>December 25</date>. This would help to drastically cut down on the number of unnecessary links.

I'd link to point out one more area in which my proposal would be useful: chronological lists. Many, many articles have them, and typically they consist of bulleted lists starting with the date and then a description of what happened on that day. And those dates are always linked for the sole reason of getting the date preferences formatting to work. Wikipedia:Make only links relevant to the context makes it very clear that something should only be linked when it's relevant to the context; a date link is pretty much never relevant to the context as who exactly is going to want to randomly click through and see what else happened on that day in any other number of thousands of years? So what if the first launch of the Ariane rocket occurred on the same day as the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. Who cares? It's not relevant to the context!

One more thing I'd like to add - it's not obvious to me why date preferences formatting was implemented in the fashion it is now. There are two separate issues: linking to other articles and automatically formatting dates. Why the two were conflated as in the current implementation is beyond me. From the current state of matters one thing appears to me: the situation must be fixed. That is all. --Cyde Weys _vote^talk 21:47, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Addendum: Please see Talk:Christmas#Snipping extraneous links for relevant discussion. --Cyde Weys _vote^talk 21:49, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

simple suggestion; ISO format dates (2005-12-25) could just be auto detected. Surpression with some simple sequence (2005-12‐25) in the very rare case it's needed. These have the advantage that they are reasonably country neutral and understandable for all when seen in edit mode. Mozzerati 21:56, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

• So your suggestion is to not have any special formatting but just recognize ISO 8601 dates via some sort of regex, i.e. /\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d/ (yyyy-mm-dd in common English). I'm not sure if this will work. Anonymous users, which describes the majority of the people who use Wikipedia, are always going to be seeing ISO 8601, which isn't necessarily as clear as spelling out the month. It might be possible to detect which country the IP address belongs to and format the dating appropriately, i.e. "December 25, 2005" for Americans and "25 December 2005" for Europeans. But I still think the best solution would be some kind of added syntax. It doesn't seem right that it should be done automatically (and only for ISO dates). Wikipedia as it is is very explicit: words are only linked when you specifically say they should be linked, etc. A lot of this could be done automatically but there is going to be some error rate. A workaround like 2005-12‐25 in the situation where you wouldn't want auto-formatting seems very clumsy. I think the easiest way to resolve this issue is to just create the <date> and </date> tags (or whatever they end up being called). That way as you're editing articles that have too many repetitive linkings you simply convert [[ and ]] to <date> and </date>. You wouldn't have to go around changing all of the dates to match ISO format. --Cyde Weys _vote^talk 22:10, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

(after edit conflict) I strongly support the addition of such a feature. The "simple" suggestion above is a start, but the vast majority of dates are NOT in ISO format, and that format is not the most helpful one for people without any prefernces (which is the majority of users) so i think it is unlikely to become the dominant format any time in the near future. The mechanics of the synmtax don't matter to me -- it could be pesudo-HTML as shown above or soem more wiki-like markup such as <<5 March 2003>>. Ideally, whatever methos is used, it would involve a single markup for each complete date. DES ^(talk) 22:13, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) and Wikipedia Talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) for more related discussions. DES ^(talk) 00:12, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Someone tell me why we should add new syntax to the parser to replace something that is intuitive and works already, just because it's "ugly". rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 04:56, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

It's intuitive to you because you've 'grown up' learning how to do it that way. If you had learned to enclose dates in #12/25/2005#, do you really think it would be all that much harder to figure out? Some of us have a problem with overdetermining the bracket syntax. -- nae'blis _(talk) 09:35, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Strong support; I've been meaning to propose this myself. I also strongly support auto-parsing yyyy-mm-dd syntax. The default date format can be something other than yyyy-mm-dd. Other possibilities like {{yyyy-mm-dd}} or {yyyy-mm-dd}.

Related date gripes/suggestions:

• Signature timestamps should obey date locales.
• This is probably assumed by the <date></date> proposal: [[December 25, 2005]] should work like [[December 25]], [[2005]].
• Group linked yyyy-mm-dd dates by yyyy-mm in addition to mm-dd
• Format any date such as year-month or just year in addition to year-month-date
  • e.g. <date>December 2005</date> should show up as 2005-12 in ISO8601 locales.
  • e.g. <date>567 AD</date> should show up as "0567" in ISO8601 locales.
• Dates in various article names/categories would be better as yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy-mm instead of spelled-out or American "middle-endian" style (e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005-12-26, Category:Cleanup from 2005-12)

--Quarl 10:18, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Special:Newpages should indicate already-deleted articles

In Special:Newpages, articles already deleted should be redlinked or otherwise indicate they no longer exist. --Quarl 10:10, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

templates for linked location names

I find myself often changing links like "San Francisco, California" to "San Francisco, California, USA". How about we use templates like {{San Francisco, California}} becomes [[San Francisco, California|San Francisco]], [[California]], [[United States|USA]]. --Quarl 10:31, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Seeing only the last edit in Special:Contributions

I'm suggesting something that makes Special:Contributions displays only the last edit made in a page (like the Watchlist). CG 14:16, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

May I ask why? For the things I use Special:Contributions for (cleaning up after vandals, investigating disputes, etc) this would be quite bad. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 18:20, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I'd actually rather it was the opposite; make the Watchlist function like Related changes and Contributions, so you can see older edits than just the last one. Vandals can often get lost in the shuffle. -- nae'blis _(talk) 19:33, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Seconding Nae'blis's request. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 20:24, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Anontalkpagetext

I propose changing the mediawiki boiler text for anon talk pages, along with a suggestion to add lookup information. Please see The talk page for details, including suggested markup and a sample link. xaosflux ^Talk/_CVU 18:18, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Searches in US/Commonwealth English

It would be soooo useful if all Wikisearches for one spelling (eg colour) automatically also searched the other (color). Failing that, stick an automatic reminder on the search results page?

I know it should be obvious to search both, but how many readers will think of this? I'm a professional editor who has worked in both genres, and it's taken me two days to remember to check the US spellings (was editing existing articles about printing - written in C'wealth sp). Apologies if this is an oldie, tho I haven't found refs anywhere. JackyR 18:59, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Article Menu

To automate several tasks, a drop down menu could be displayed on the top of every article. This would simplify processes such as the deletion process. --mmtux\^talk 00:40, 27 December 2005 (UTC)