Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive E

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Village pump (proposals) archive

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Move log

Would a page listing recently moved articles, along the lines of our already existing logs, be technically possible? This would be a great help for admins cleaning up after move vandals. Rje 01:58, May 1, 2005 (UTC)

I don't know, but it would help if a summary field were available. It would help if people could indicate a reason for the move. Bobblewik (talk) 19:53, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

I believe this feature will become available in MediaWiki 1.5. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 18:10, May 2, 2005 (UTC)

Get your votes in now!

Final two days of the vote on Wikipedia:Template standardisation. Ends 23:59 on 01MAY05. Noisy | Talk 12:34, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

Always fill the summary field

A proposal for edit summaries to be automatically filled in from the diff when the editor doesn't enter anything.

(Discussion moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals).)

Category capture at image load

I have been trying to populate the Category:U.S. history images (which was all but empty) and I was surprised to discover that the majority of images used in U.S. history articles had no category assigned to them at all. Thinking about it, I realized that there is no attempt whatever to get users to assign a category when the image is loaded.

Now granted, categorization is a can of worms not to be opened unwarily, but at least an initial gross categorization would seem reasonable and useful to grab at image load time. What I would propose is that the top level categories on the Wikipedia:List_of_images page be presented on the Special:Upload page either as checkboxes (so that multiple categories could be chosen) or, if space is an issue, a dropdown list from which one category could be selected.

Though this would hardly provide a complete solution to the image categoriztion problem, it would at least seem to make a starting point from which more specific categorization could proceed. It has to be a better method than looking for uncategorized images in every articles in a given area and adding cats one by one.

Of course, there is a very low tech solution-- using text in the instructions, something like:

Please include at least one of the following, as appropriate in the Summary text below

[[Category:Architecture]] [[Category:Art]] [[Category:Biology]] [[Category:Flags]] [[Category:History]] [[Category:Logos]] [[Category:Food and drink]] [[Category:Mathematics]] [[Category:Movies]] [[Category:Music]] [[Category:Nature]] [[Category:Objects]] [[Category:People]] [[Category:Places]] [[Category:Stereotypes]] [[Category:Transportation]]

but I think far more users would ignore the request, and/or screw up adding the text (omitting brackets, typos, etc., etc.,) so that the automated process would be worthwhile. -- Mwanner 22:28, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

Be careful not to categorize images in article categories. If you do categorize images make sure the word images is in its name. Mgm|^(talk) 09:56, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)
- Good point. And in looking around a bit, it appears that image categorization barely exists-- there is no highest-level category for images in culture, e.g., and although there exist categories for images of art and images of clothing, none exist for images of dance or images of architecture (there is a cat for images of buildings, but none for images of churches).

Either my proposal is premature, or a lot of ground work would need to be done building image category hierarchies before it could be undertaken. Anyone see the effort as worthwhile, or should I just keep toiling away in my chosen corner? Mwanner 16:15, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

I think image categories are very worthwhile. I belive they are properly instituted on commons:. As there is significant preference to have free images on the commons, it seems unlikely that image categorisation will take off in a big way over here. Nevertheless, I would by no means oppose you if you tried. Indeed, I would probably come and help... Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 16:25, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I wish I could be as sanguine about the state of categories in Commons, or even the likelihood that most images will end up there any time soon. Though Commons is all of, what, seven months old? we have situations there like the one in Commons:Category:History where subcategories of Commons:Category:History by country and Commons:Category:History by nation both exist, and both are in use. At the same high level are Commons:Category:Battles and Commons:Category:Revolutions which, I would suggest, ought to be subcategories of individual country categories.

The more I puzzle over it, the more inclined I am just to keep working away in one small corner. With a little luck, other people will adopt other little corners and in no time at all... (well, it could happen) -- Mwanner 18:06, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

PLEASE MAKE UPLOADING IMAGES EASIER!

I don't want to have to save the pictures onto my computer to be able to upload them. They should be able to be uploaded from the internet. It's so much of a hassle to have to save images for articles on my computer and then have to delete them later on because they take up too much space. - Stancel April 28,2005 17:49 (UTC)

I can't think of any site that allows uploading of content that allows uploading directly from another website - to do so opens up all kinds of technical and intellectual property hassles, I'd think. --Golbez 22:11, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

Many sites, in fact, but not Wikipedia. If you want Wikipedia to be more efficient, it would make sense to let picture uploading be less of a hassle. - Stancel 28:48 Apr 28,2005 (UTC)

This is silly, because most pictures you acquire online are not under a suitable license anyway, and you should spend more time writing a description than it would take to download it. On the other hand it would be convenient for doing lots of fair use uploads such as album covers. Deco 23:24, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Agreed - should make it as hard as possible to upload unlicenced material. What would be nice is a "save as" function. Wikipedia insists on a useful name, but I don't want to have to manually change it just for one upload. -- Tomhab 00:05, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

A lot of our uploaded material comes from the Library of Congress and other sites which do allow reuse of their content which is in public domain. It is definitely a hassle to transfer such LoC content. Also, there are a number of other US government sites which have photographs taken by US Govt photographers. These photos are also public domain. Anyway, lots of software allows linked uploads. Gallery is a commonly used opensource program which allows you to grab images from a url into the gallery. Since I often upload files from my own website, I also see a number of sites which do allow me to just put a link from my site in the form and upload that way. --Sketchee 22:45, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

The thing I'd like improved about image uploading is to enable more than one image to be uploaded at one time. Thryduulf 20:26, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Like Wikimedia Commonplace? -guety is talking english bad 01:02, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

We should not make it easy for new users to upload images that are copyrighted. Keep it the same as it is. However, there are a few applications where this would be useful, so maybe make it hard to find, or limited to only users with special priveleges, or just put huge warnings all over and make them click three checkboxes that say they agree first... - Omegatron 23:12, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

PD material request project

I have a set of National Geographic 112 Years CD-ROMs and another set of National Geographic Maps. They include many pre-1923 NG photographs and maps. These public domain materials can be very useful if I have time to upload them.

See, these images are useful.

No, I don't have to time to see if this picture is useful to that article. So can we create a request page that allows someone with a special demand ask for other people's help?

Let's say I need a picture on page 33 of Nature magazine of March 23, 1876 (I made this up), I'll post a request. Maybe someday someone can get me that information. -- Toytoy 15:02, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

Question: How are people going to know that they want a picture from a particular page of a particular magazine that, presumably, they don't have? Or do you mean they would request an image of, say, peasants and somebody with images could find one? Nickptar 19:02, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Just upload them. If they're useful for other language Wikipedias, consider uploading them to the Commons. Provide a good caption describing the source and context and let others worry about how to use them. If you don't have the time to do all this, tell other Wikipedians where they can buy this CD-ROM so they can help out. :-) Deco 23:30, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Let's say if you're doing research in a library, you may not be able to scan, and color photocopy can be too expensive, or your copy of the book/magazine is too damaged, you may need someone else to supply you that information.

If you are working on a historical project, you tell people you need a PD image of BLAH ... BLAH ... BLAH, possibly I'll look it up in my National Geographics CDs. Maybe someone else who has another PD data souce can do the research.

It took me more than 10 minutes to create and upload each of the above images. I cropped them, added contrast, redone the captions, ... . It is simply impossible that I upload a lot of them and see if anyone wants to use any of them. -- Toytoy 01:38, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

biography problem/new tier proposal

having returned I am rather distraught. this idea is so "out there", that I was actually hoping for someone to explain to me why it is bad. I have given it some though and there are some potential drawbacks. I have come up with few of these and they are so trivial I can't recall them now. the least problematic and most beneficial would likely be the first thing I suggested, the idea of a Wiki-based biography project. I still do like the other two though. while there may be some ramifications, In the end I feel the Wiki community could definately benefit. Wiki is becoming such a popular sensation these days that it would likely advance the fields for all of human kind. the art idea, while probably least practical, would also likely have the most impact. the visual arts especially have been falling into the background of society. it would likely help at leas to build and expand a wikibook or wikiversity course on the arts. I will have to investigate. but the bio thing has some serious potential!! MethodicEvolution 04:44, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

below I have made two crazy proposals: a Wiki-project that is a compendium of biographies and also one that is geographical, including all kinds of useful population, demographic, seizmic, and whatever information about a location will be posted.

two individules have provided rebuttle, but niether appears to carry much weight. origionally, my proposal was for a biography project in order to expand on wikibiographies(Wikiraphies/Wikiographies)while at the same time taking some of the pressure off of Wikipedia. upon later consideration, I though a geographical or atlas type project sounds like it has some potential as well.

now, while I am making zainy proposals I figure I might as well add another. It would be interesting to have an entire opensourced compendium of art ect. and even artists (or links to their biographies) there could be visual and auditory bits and pieces as well as information. this sounds odd at first, I must say. espeically when various other mediaWiki projects already serve the purpouse. it just seems that if a whole tier were set aside for art, it would grow more then that subject does in this system. biographies, geographies, and maybe even art could be given some special attention while clearing space and navagational integrity for more scholastic material here in Wikipedia.

I realize that people naturally fear change, and that traditions and habits run deep here in the Wiki community. I am one of an apparent few who has conquered the fear of change and in fact prefer it these days. something new is quite often better then what came before. it seems at least possible that the wiki community and the system as a whole could benefit from and even be enriched by such a dramatic change. it is also possible that such a change could be absolutely detrimental, but I just can't see that too well.

in any case, such a change would inevitably require a great deal of effort and even skill on the part of wikians, namely the administrator class of us. this is another factor to take into consideration, but it may just be worth it. . .

again, I am open to refutations from as well as the support of my fellow wikians. for more detailed conversation, please contact me on my user talk page. otherwise, please free your speech here. . . MethodicEvolution 04:52, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think a new wikimedia project should be implimented to house biographies. something akin to "wikiography" would suffice.

I have noticed that there are a great many biographies on wikipedia. in fact, when I press "random page" I have (believe it or not) never ever gotten anything other then biographies! I will assume this is due to a predominance of biographies here. now, I do think it is important for wikians to produce and post biographies, I just don't think it's appropriate for an encyclopedia to be dominated by them. . . it would be nice if they could all be nicely collected in a biography project. I may expand later on this proposal, but any other suggestions or remidies or even stark contradictions are quite welcome. . . (ME) (about 2 hours before his post. . .)

All general encyclopaedias I know of have lots of biographies. Wikipedia should be no different. Properly linked, a biographical article is a window on many other general articles, so broadening the reader's knowledge. Would this be the case if they were collected into 'Wikiography? Apwoolrich 07:24, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I do agree with this notion now that you mention it, but. . . as far as I can tell, this would indeed be the case if they were collected into a 'Wikiography'. it seems that links between wikimedia projects are not uncommon. I would even emphasize a collective attempt to interlink two such wikimedia projects. in fact, with the growth of projects such as 'Wikibooks' and it's sub-project 'Wikiversity,' and even 'Wiktionary' or is it 'Wikitionary', and others. . . I would emphasize an attempt to interlink all thiese things. MethodicEvolution 08:40, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC) (ME)

I don't see a particular problem. Normal encyclopedias have loads of bios too. Here, we can provide lists of related names and link them to organizations, years and companies. Breaking it out will only cause people to misplace more of their entries on the wrong project. Mgm|^(talk) 09:04, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

yes, this was simply an idea. if it is the continued subject of widespread dispute and rejection, I will subdue. I would though like to clarify my position. I am in favor of biographies, but see the wiki system as a whole. I did an expreiment tonight and tested the frequency response of the random page link I indeed came to the linked article by way of some odd forces. I still contend though that a significant portion of the articles here are biographies and it would be nice to see them all collected into their own tier for growth and expantion. I am a major advocate of organizing information into more expandable, digestable, and navigatable patterns. I reject the notion of Wikipedia as a "normal" encyclopedia. it just seems to me that if one category such as biographies becomes predominant, then maybe it should branch off. also, in this way they would not only clutter this space less, but in their new home could expand into a more complete and diverse (and yet specific) project. it is likely in fact that such a project branch would grow extremely fast, allowing wiki-based biographies to grow even faster then they are here. I am simply suggesting that a collection of biographies may have more use as just that then as an addition to this. also, links between biographies and wiki articles could be maintained and any misplaced entries, much like those moved to the dictionary project, could be moved to the biography project. (I am very tired, nearly 3:00AM here) MethodicEvolution 09:55, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

in addintion, another interesting idea would be a geography project, or an atlas. a wikilas. . . though possibly a less notable proposalMethodicEvolution 09:59, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

See Wikitravel. RickK 66.60.159.190 17:40, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

The Wiki-based biography is hot hot hot. Send 12 year olds into retirement homes and hospices to document the wisdom within, and otherwise lost. Notables and less-notables alike may enjoy dropping their little tidbits into an open-source info-bank like this. Let me know where you go with it, I'll point it out to people. TTLightningRod 18:02, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

wikiProject Ports

I would like to suggest the new wikiProject Ports. with infoboxes and categories and simply expand the whole subject. Since i find there is no article on the biggest port in the world: Port of Shangai The Article Port of Singapore is a good guidline to start but it would need to be expanded too.Mexaguil 23:59, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Block compress errors

There are quite a few articles in the main namespace with block compression errors on them. Given that we don't want these pages at all (and particularly not when there might be articles to go instead) I think we could move them out of the main namespace (perhaps into a subpage of VfD?) and delete the redirects. This frees up the main namespace nicely. What do people think? Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 18:51, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What are block compress errors? What do these articles look like to us? Why don't we want those pages? Why do we need to free up the main namespace? r3m0t ^talk 22:19, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

Block compression is the method introduced in the latest version of MediaWiki to reduce the size of the database - older revisions (pre 1 December 2004?) have been compressed.
Unfortunately, articles that have been so compresed cannot presently be deteled. This is the error, and it should (will?) be fixed in the next version of the software.
Articles (or templates, etc) that have been voted for deletion but cannot be deleted at present should have the content replaced with the {{pending deletion}} template and protected against further edits.
I don't know why we need to free up the main namespace.
see also: Wikipedia:Deletion process Thryduulf 12:05, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Just to add to that, articles that are to be deleted often have their name appended with "(delete)". It's not really a problem because they are all listed in the deletion category and and not linked to from any article. Moving them out of the main namespace, while avoiding the (highly unlikely) possibility of them coming up as a random page, probably won't help much. The main problem arises when we need to merge the histories of two articles but can't because they are both block compressed – in that case it's dealt with as detailed at WP:RM. violet/riga (t) 12:14, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

A "Featured Stub" section in the Community Portal

What do you think about that? - Stancel

It is oxymoronicMexaguil 00:02, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

How is it oxymoronic? It would simply be a place where notable stubs could be shown so more people could improve them. - Stancel

"Featured" implies a relationship to featured article. As if it was already fully developed. If you want to have such a section on the Community Portal, you'd have to start a project for it first, so a link can be added there. Be sure to give it a more appropriate name, though. How about: Wikipedia:Stub improvement? Mgm|^(talk) 09:48, May 6, 2005 (UTC)

Edit Counts next to names

I mainly reside in the new articles area where I find that nearly every single anon contribution either must be deleted/reformatted/wikied/blanked and redirected - or sent to potential copyright violations. This sorting/work is tedious and overwhelming because of volume and the few editors who seem to be doing this. The volume of anons is so overwhelming that there is no opportunity for me to regularly check the articles of those created by red-link registered users. Occassionally I do check and often find the same problems. If an edit count was included next to the names of all contributers in RC and new articles then I would have a good tool for discerning what work to check - we have limited eyes, we need to rely on these indicators.

Also - Another idea: What about granting admins the power to insert a red dot next to a name that has been warned for malicious vandalism? (hello, does this work? would be spared but sophmoric "David s a big farter!!!" clowns, unlikely to ever contribute anything of value, should be marked for quick examination after edits. Lotsofissues 07:33, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hi. I like the second idea a lot. Perhaps you could put a feature request on SourgeForge (I don't know the link). As for the first: I doubt that will be possible, certainly at the moment. I'm not a developer (or a MediaWiki expert) but I understand that Kate's tool, which counts contributions, is not actually part of Mediawiki, but a sort of addon. I expect other users around here would get a little annoyed about judging people by edit count as well. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 18:40, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think they are both good ideas, but I agree with Smoddy on the second one. Howabout1 01:46, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'd actually like to see if a certain user was recently blocked (not just warned) when checking Newpages and Recentchanges. It only takes extra time to search VIP and the block log. Mgm|^(talk) 08:57, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

Ingredient Listings on food items

(Discussion was moved to Talk:Twix) —Sean κ. ⇔ 03:31, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Article rescue contest?

As per a discussion on IRC, there are plenty of people who vote keep on WP:VFD with the reasoning that there is the potential for an article to be encyclopedic—even Brilliant Prose—even though the article that currently exists there is in serious need of cleanup, and frankly, is usually downright awful. Then the VfD is closed, the article is kept, and nobody touches it ever again. (Disclosing biases: I am an eventualist, but an impatient one!) So I'd like to propose Wikipedia:Article rescue contest, to encourage people to actually put their money where their mouths are and do something when they say an article topic has potential. I'll even kick in for a WP coffeemug or something for the winner and do a writeup for the Signpost. Anyone else think this is a good idea? Come on over and help me get it started. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 00:01, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Maybe if we put more articles on a warning list (we already have the templates) instead of just jumping the gun to Vfd, less good articles would get on Vfd in the first place, and concerned people could spend their time improving the article instead of defending it on Vfd.

I like the idea of an targeted article improvement drive. I do have one minor concern... don't we have something like this already? There already is a "Collaboration of the Week". However, I don't see anything wrong with having multiple collaborations going on simultaneously. The more teamwork, the better. The more I think about it, the more I like this idea. - Pioneer-12 00:21, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As mentioned on the page itself, I have borrowed liberally from the idea of Wikipedia:Danny's contest (which he doesn't seem to be running anymore), and yes, there's an article improvement drive, but this one is directly targeted in response to something that bothers me. I think there's enough of an editor pool to draw from who might consider this one interesting; we'll see, anyhow. One problem with VfDs is that while the tags exist rarely does anyone jump to save anything until it risks immediate deletion, and then once its continued existence is assured (for a while!) it's not urgent anymore. There are some articles that I think should definitely in theory exist, but need a complete rewrite to be worth existing; however, I also think that sometimes it's better to start afresh from nothing than to keep what's there. So this is a "put your money where your mouth is"; prove that it really should have been kept, and that someone really does think the article really is worth doing something to improve. Besides, I like sending things through the mail. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 00:34, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Great idea. We need to back off from the deletionist agenda -- and not into the far-left inclusionist, either. It's easy to vote either way, harder to actually work to improve something -- but that's what needs to be encouraged. — Xiong 熊 talk 05:24, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)

Mindspillage, if you don't mind, I'll repeat what I wrote on your talk page: "What a great idea! I wish I thought of that..." [1] Zzyzx11 | Talk 05:27, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

We have an article improvement drive and a Collaboration of the Week, but these requires enormous waits and massive voting. The article you'd want to save would be deleted before it was even chosen. I'm all for a project to save VFD candidates. Mgm|^(talk) 08:53, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

WikiLifeGuide and WikiCivicActivator

I apologize in advance for the self-promotion, but I recently came up with a couple new wiki project ideas. Of course, I really don't know if these ideas are realistic or worthy of even becoming projects, but I just wanted to let everyone know about them and perhaps comment about them on their respective talk pages so I can either refine the proposals or decide that they're not worth pursuing. They are follows:

WikiLifeGuide — a project that attempts to harness all the How-to guides related to managing one's life that currently exist and maybe even many that don't exist at this time. Alternative names could include WikiLifeManual and WikiLife101. This will ultimately become the How to Do Everything in Your Life Guide. This proposal borrows from the now-deceased Know-How Wiki as well as the current proposal for HowDoesItWorkWiki.

WikiCivicActivator — a project that attempts to create a repository of all ongoing and past civic efforts and organization techniques used at all polity levels around the world related to progressive change. Alternative names could include WikiCivicMotivator and WikiActiveCommons. Unlike the Wikipedia, this project could also include theories and original research into ideas for new efforts and yet-to-be-tried techniques.

Thanks in advance for your comments. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 19:50, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You might get more comments at m:Proposals for new projects than here. Thryduulf 22:08, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

They're already referred to on the Proposals' talk page. I was concerned though that not enough eyes were hitting them over on Meta. I assume that most Wikipedians aren't even aware of Meta, for that matter. Thus, my "advertising" here. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 22:24, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The name WikiLife101 is too US-centric. I don't understand the second suggestion. r3m0t ^talk 23:48, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)

I agree re: WikiLife101, which is one reason why I thought WikiLifeGuide sounded best (so far). Re: WikiCivicActivator, there are more in-depth descriptions for both these proposals if you follow the links to the Meta site. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 19:09, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikiproject Graphical content problem

I couldnt think of a better name. The template may need improevement. --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 11:17, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Please read Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_censored — J3ff 12:25, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

USACOM

Hi, there is no English language post on USACOM. I've been following links from a Slate article (http://slate.msn.com/id/2117172/fr/rss/) and have come across a bunch of U.S. acronyms that I have know idea about.

USACOM is one, ATK is another. ATK kicked me off their site as I wrote this to ensure security, hence they scare me.

I'd love to see you guys post something on the above.

The DARPA entry is fantastic,"ARPA was its original name, then it was renamed DARPA (for Defense) in 1972, then back to ARPA in 1993, and then back to DARPA again on March 11, 1996."

Love the work that is done here.

ruz

Template:Disambig and Image:Disambig.png

Halló! I spend a lot of time that most of the disambiguation templates listed at de:Bild Diskussion:Logo Begriffsklärung.png#Vorlagen - Templates should use commons:Image:Disambig.png. The image should give an indication about the nature of the page and avoid linking between "normal" articles and disambiguation pages. I would be very happy if en: would use one of the images listed in that page. 75% of the 60 listed templates using such an image you can find also ja:Template:Aimai, ka:თარგი:არაორაზროვნება, vi:Template:Trang định hướng etc. Best regards Gangleri | Th | T 06:17, 2005 Apr 23 (UTC)

I like the image. I support. (though I do feel it could do with a nice drop shadow ;) —Sean κ. ⇔ 16:46, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I like the idea of an image; the suggestion is pretty, but why does it show one through route and two dead ends? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 17:13, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I guess because the red route is the one you go down to find the article you were looking for when you arrived at the disambiguation page, and the blue ones represent other links that were presented to you but were not what you were looking for. I also like the idea of having this, and it can be easily slotted in at the side of the {{disambig}} template. I've always thought it looked nice in the German version. — Trilobite (Talk) 17:35, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I also like it, and would put it in the template immediately. But weren't most of these "decoration" images removed to ease the pressure on the image server? What's the latest on that? -- grm_wnr Esc 22:45, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Maybe, but this image is so simple it can surely be compressed to 1K. —Sean κ. ⇔ 22:55, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The original can't be compressed more, but I could do a much better job of compressing the reduced image used in the templates. 211 bytes:

File:40px-Disambig-1bit.png

Of course, this does nothing about the extra server load from having to send out an additional file for each disambig page. --Carnildo 03:34, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

A disambiguation page icon. What a wonderful idea! Disambig pages are probably the most common special page type on Wikipedia. If any pages deserve "decoration images" (and we have about a thousand of them for stubs now), then disambiguation pages do. Looks pretty, and affirms to the reader that this page is of a special type. Bravo! And the basic "divergent paths" metaphor is excellent. (Someone can add a drop shadow or such if they want.) As for server pressure, not only is this image small, but its reuse (and thus caching by browsers) will mean almost no drain on the server at all. By comparison, a single large image on a popular page can cause a substantial strain on the servers. - Pioneer-12 23:37, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think its great, can you make the background trasparent? --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 11:18, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It looks rather similar to File:LOGO USB.png the USB logo. -- John Fader (talk | contribs) 23:42, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I like the image, but until the image server overload problem is resolved it shouldn't be added to such a massively-used template. violet/riga (t) 11:25, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The idea is to have also a second icon mirrored verticaly for "RTL" wiki's as ar:, fa:, he:, yi: and possibly some others. BTW: There are three icons at commons: to "emulate" a reditect:

All are made by commons:User:Get It. (See usage at ar:, hi:, he: etc.) Best regards Gangleri | Th | T 16:38, 2005 Apr 24 (UTC)

Sorry; I think it's a great idea, but an unfortunate image. If there's any interest, I will work to put out something better -- talk or email me. But as it stands, it's ugly and, as mentioned, conflicts with USB.

I agree that now is not the time to drop this into en:WP. Jamesday says new servers are on the way, and this is just the sort of thing we should use to eat up the new bandwidth. — Xiong 熊 talk 05:57, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)

When we get new servers, can we have a contest to design the new icon? It's always so much fun. —Sean κ. ⇔ 03:41, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think we can live without these purely decorative icons. Either we stop the trend right now, or we'll be buried alive by them someday. -- Toytoy 02:22, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

Lewis: He's not breathing Sir, but I can't determine the cause of death.

Morse: Well that's for the coroner to decide... but I strongly suspect, that what we have here, Lewis, is an icon related death.

Lewis: Icons Sir?

Morse: Yes Lewis, icons... innocent enough little creatures on their own, but you have to keep an eye on them. Left to their own devices they can turn feral — and if they start congregating in large numbers the consequences can be fatal. From the look of bewilderment on this poor man's face, I'm quite sure we will find he was buried alive by icons.

Lewis: No point trying to resuscitate him then Sir.

Morse: No Lewis.

;-) -- Solipsist 07:48, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The whole "slippery slope" argument is weak. Having a page identification icon does not translate into having hundreds of icons per page. Furthermore, this is not a "purely decorative" icon; it's very useful. The bandwidth cost is minimal while the practical and aesthetic advantages are high. Thus a standard cost-benefit analysis shows that this icon is a clear winner.

- Pioneer-12 20:59, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

I'd noticed this on other languages' disambig templates, and like it a lot. -- Tetraminoe 06:27, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

Assuming it wouldn't put strain on the servers or whatnot, I think this would be a nice idea—I do like this icon. — Knowledge Seeker দ 06:20, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Has anyone started an independent wikipedia community board?

The discussion needs of wikipedia are abundant - this edit page format is ungainly in its extra technical barrier to newbies and also slow loading. A php forum site would spurn not only useful discussion but would immeasureably help other members introduce themselves as chit chat would be encouraged. I can understand if the community wouldn't want policy discussion divided across sites, but how about just an explicitly limited chit chat function? Has it been done? Well if not I'll volunteer to buy the domain and setup the board. Is there any interest?

Lotsofissues 13:09, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

another interesting idea is to introduce a real-time chat function to further interpersonal discussion on wiki topiks MethodicEvolution 10:31, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You might want to check out Wikipedia:Mailing lists and Wikipedia:IRC. Be warned, though--that mailing list is very active. Meelar (talk) 13:19, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Cool there are other options. But I crave for that phpbb style community - does anyone share my sentiments? Lotsofissues 15:48, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If you don't like the deluge of mail, you can read the WP mailing lists in web-forum format or via NNTP at the incredibly useful gmane.org. (I don't think a web-forum format exists that comes close to modern NNTP clients in terms of user-friendliness, speed, and features, but I digress.) jdb ❋ (talk) 19:19, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

That would be useful, but talk pages do most of that. Howabout1 18:41, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Lotsofissues.... Ideally, the talk pages should be converted into a forum format (or at least co-linked to forums). But, since the wiki software evolves slowly, a forum site would be nice. It would have to be well-advertized on wikipedia to be of any use, though. Since there already exists mailing lists and IRC for people who prefer those formats, there is definite precidence for this. I think we need a Wikiproject Forums! - Pioneer-12 01:25, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Custom already seems to dictate that we treat talk pages like discussion boards (don't edit others' comments, etc.). It would be all the better if the Mediawiki software could turn them into real discussion boards, with support for inline wiki syntax in messages. It could perform archiving automatically, and maybe even allow for summarizations of threads to be inserted. I would find such features a welcome relief, but it'd be a hell of a project to add it all. Deco 02:11, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Deco and Pioneer-12, you be interested in the comments by r3mot and Tony Sideway above under the heading Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Discussion_Pages_-_Bring_Modern_Interface, which discuss the advantages of the wiki-style approach. jdb ❋ (talk) 05:08, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Somebody could create a Yahoogroup for Wikipedia discussion, but there would probably be disagreement as to who could moderate it. Rick K 23:38, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

Proposed Pokémerge

Please contribute to Wikipedia:Poképrosal, a proposal on merging stubs on individual Pokemon characters into comprehensive lists.

WikiProject General Election

The United Kingdom general elections are approaching. Considering the popularity and content growth which has resulted from high-interest topics such as the Pope, should we consider having a project to make Wikipedia the definitive source for information relating to the UK general election, in general, and this year's in particular? The national and international interest created by a closely contested and highly charged election tends to get people talking about it, and people like to know what they're talking about (or at least seem to ;-). If the media picked up on the quality of our articles relating to the election, we could harness this interest to bring more readers, editors and content. I personally consider this a great way to combine making Wikipedia better with making the election more interesting, and thus meaningful for people, not to mention the importance of neutral information regarding politics. Here are some things we could do:

Create a WikiPortal for this year's election, to provide a nice interface to finding out more
Create custom articles for comparison of candidates, platforms, manifestos, etc. using templates.
Increase coverage of the developments as the election takes place.
Organise and promote election-night coverage (emphasise speed, etc)

Any comments?

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a news outlet. --Carnildo 23:25, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes, but being a rapidly-updated encyclopedia is still an excellent aspiration. I'm not sure about creating custom comparison articles etc., but if people are interested in updating our UK-election-related articles as events unfold, then that sounds like a good idea to me. — Matt Crypto 02:30, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If there is substantial interest in doing so, by all means. But please specify WikiProject U.K. General Election 2005, or the like to avoid confusion. - Banyan Tree 13:27, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Publish Unsuccessful Queries

To improve the creation of redirects, can wiki release a list of all user queries that did not land into an entry? Lotsofissues 07:51, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

And rank them in descending order by number of tries. Good idea! — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 18:00, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

We used to have this capability, but it went away a couple of releases ago. Rick K 23:36, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

Excellent idea. I want one. — Xiong 熊 talk 06:03, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)

Modify Noarticletext?

I propose that we should remove "yet" from the sentence "Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name." (see Mediawiki:Noarticletext). To me, this implies that we don't have the article now but we should have one. I suggested this at the talk page a couple weeks ago, but there wasn't much response. If anyone has an opinion, please share it at Mediawiki talk:Noarticletext. — Knowledge Seeker দ 06:08, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Knowledge Seeker on this one. The implications should go, as should the word "yet". Mgm|^(talk) 08:28, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

I removed "yet". We may add "However, you can create one."--Patrick 12:47, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

In which case add something along the lines of "Before creating a new article please check the spelling of the title and whether there is already an article here covering the same subject using a slightly different title or name" (only shorter!) --Vamp:Willow 17:19, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

And maybe add something about being sure to use proper capitalization. Rick K 23:35, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

Spell Checker at Edit Pages

(Discussion moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals).)

How about a separate scientific Wikipedia?

Hi,

I am a scientist and find this website to be a great resource. But when searching scientific words that have nonscientific counterparts, you have to wade through large numbers of entries before finding what you are looking for. I propose establishing a separate scientific Wikipedia.

--B

Articles with titles that have more than one potential meaning should either be disambiguation pages (pages that list the topics you could be searching for - e.g. Sublime) or should have a link at the top of the page to alternate uses (e.g. Carbon). If they aren't there then you can add them, and if a page links to the wrong article you can change it. If we are missing an article, write it. This is the beauty of wiki. Thryduulf 19:49, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

B, due to a miriad of reason, there will never be a "scientific Wikipedia". The problems you are having are because Wikipedia has a horrible search engine. I personally prefer to use Google (e.g., type in "buffer chemistry site:en.wikipedia.org" to get articles about buffers in chemistry). However, the fastest way to find articles is to guess at what the title would be. A lot of articles have multiple names for that purpose. Thus, if you're looking for Earthquake the movie instead of the event, you would probably type in "Earthquake (movie)". —Sean κ. ⇔ 22:02, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There's nothing preventing you from setting up your own Wiki, but the idea of splitting off scientific articles seems elitist, to me. Rick K 23:34, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

I agree - lots of browsing of search results. But I hope the solution will be to develop a better search algo. and release of a list of queries that failed to garner a direct hit - that way we can create redirects for nearly all major queries without a matching title. Lotsofissues 05:33, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes, the solution is a combination of (1) better searches and (2) clear page organization. Though it sounds like he is able to find what he's looking for, but is just bugged by the presence of disambiguation pages. - Pioneer-12 10:18, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Not really elitism; just a waste of energy. You might try searching with Wikipedia:Categories. If you find a term that has multiple contexts, just disambiguate it properly. - Omegatron 23:27, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Oh no, we couldn't possibly have a scientific Wikipedia... unless we're talking about Wikispecies, which isn't remotley more scientific that regular animal articles... -Munchkinguy 23:44, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Then again, maybe it just needs a better name

For anyone interested in the wiki forms of civil debate, concentrated think tanks, classical Greek and Roman "Forum", or other wikireason developments taking shape... please feel free to drop me a line. Although quite young and still developing, this project is intended to offer neutral structure for the incipient manifestations and conflict seen under almost any "discussion" tab. More so, the structure is a listing of current topics of sociological study and public policy, scientific logic process, and reasoned debate by pro/con weights and measures. Y'all gona love it!!! TTLightningRod 23:56, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

After the DC field trip this weekend, I hope to have even more ideas and vectors for this proposal. Please stay tuned for further developments. TTLightningRod 13:59, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

old stuff below...

Meatball has some very interesting things going on in terms of conflict resolution. Politeness, among just a few other things, seems to go a long way. Boldness is fine, but should be thin as possible when directing to a group or activity. Offering solution or suggestion instead of calling out the problem, becomes Herculean with positive results.

So those are some of the wikithink outputs to date. The comments below relate to my first winding (now in edit history). Oh, so painful for the reader, I do apologize. I wish to compliment all those I've met here. I'll be haunting wiki for years to come. TTLightningRod 21:41, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Neat. I think you should cross-post this to http://www.halfbakery.com , which is itself a think tank. - Pioneer-12 21:06, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've seen some good ideas there, and some good feedback. (Of course there are also some silly ideas and some poor feedback there too.) I just thought it would be a good place to advertize and refine your theories. (A good "target audience".) You could always just post an entry there inviting people here. - Pioneer-12 22:24, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The rewrite looks good. The proposal is much more cogent and persuasive now. It sounds like you are proposing the equivalent of a new Wikimedia project. See meta:Proposals for new projects. - Pioneer-12 23:05, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

No problem, we all had to learn sometime. As far as your proposal, you should be aware that Wikipedia is not a forum, as noted in Wikipedia is not a soapbox. --Sean κ. ⇔ 23:07, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Renaming List of people known by one name

The title of this list is just wrong.

Talk:List_of_people_known_by_one_name#Changing_the_article_title As someone has pointed out with "Christ" and "Jesus" being listed; people with single word pseudonyms are not known by one name — in fact, having a pseudonym often ends up with you being known by several names.

I propose this article be moved to List of people known by single word names or List of people who have names consisting of a single word ors oemthing similar.

Most people are known by only "one name".--ZayZayEM 03:40, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Nobody has responded to this on the pages talk page. Hopefully this is okay to place here.

These people are not known by "one name", they are known by "one-word pseudonyms". Wikipedia should aim to have titles which actually reflect article content. I'm know in favour of a title akin to List of people known by single word pseudonyms--ZayZayEM 08:16, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Agree with ZayZayEM. Mgm|^(talk) 08:33, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)
For future reference, Wikipedia:Requested moves exists just for this purpose. —Korath (Talk) 10:36, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)
"List of people with a single-name moniker" — RJH 19:38, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- single-name is not the same as word, name and moniker are similar enough that title is redundant. however, I like the word moniker - how about List of people with a single-word monker--ZayZayEM 11:15, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I might choose something like "List of people known by a one-word name". Either way, dispense the current title. Deco 03:29, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

apple OS 10.4 wikipedia dashboard widget

I like to make a proposal for someone to develop an apple OS 10.4 tiger dashboard widget that connects to wikipedia. I am not sure what politics are involved with developing such an application, but I believe that many people will use this and find it very convienent.

I would develop this widget myself and post it as an open source widget under a GPL if given the permission from wikipedia and obtain a copy of the operating system.

All the widget needs to consist of is the wikipedia title, a search bar to enter search requests, a language choosing system and a random page link. This widget would then be placed on the dashboard application for easy access.

Please someone begin working on this soon and post it some where for the general public; or give me the permission to start.

Thanks,

Fung

PS i can be reached at fung81@gmail.com for any questions, suggestions, spamming or communications

You do not need to recieve permission. r3m0t ^talk 16:08, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

And you can download the software at mediawiki.org. See mediawiki-agora for other MediaWiki-related extensions. Angela . 01:16, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

I've started work on a wikipedia widget, it's not complete yet, but it does everything you've requested. You can grab it at DashboardWidgets. seenyer User talk:seenyer 19:10, Apr 28, 2005

Template Flux

I think that Template:Flux was a good idea...Old Text:

This article is in a state of Wikipedia:Flux due to recent heavy editing. Therefore, the article may temporarily appear disorganized.

although I would say something like

This article is in a state of Wikipedia:Flux due to recent heavy editing. Therefore, the article may temporarily appear disorganized or have factual errors.

and I think that perhaps it should be reinstated? — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 16:28, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Looks like someone did earlier today, although the wording's slightly different. JYolkowski // talk 16:55, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Contributions List

Not highest priority, but it would be nice to have a switch between ascending/descending order on the list so that you can see what is your nth edit (w/ numbering etc.) — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 03:40, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sorting on different fields, multiple find criteria, switch on sorting order -- all nice bells and whistles. When the time comes, I want them all -- in a to go cup, with Xmas lights on. — Xiong 熊 talk 05:50, 2005 Apr 20 (UTC)

Either way, it would be nice to see at a glance how many contributions I have made. Perhaps a number at the top, like how on my watchlist it says how many are being watched. CoolGuy 04:15, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Discussion Pages - Bring Modern Interface

moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)

Filter or Site for Young Students

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals).

Policy for links in Wiki pages

I am a newcomer to this project. I find that many pages have a lot of useless links to very generic pages. For instance, on this page The_Life_and_Times_of_Scrooge_McDuck which is about the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck (a comic-book series), you have a link to the world gold, because gold is mentioned in the page. The page on gold explains that gold is a chemical element in the periodic table. This is pointless, just like adding a link to every single word in a page in case we don't know what's a chair or a boat. This is just one of many examples in many pages. Useful links are sometimes lost in a sea of un-needed links. I don't know if these links are generated or manually updated, but I suggest to be much more strict in adding them and on-topic.

I agree with your example. Fell free to edit the page and fix it. See also the policy page Wikipedia:Make only links relevant to the context (though I would not link to three is the triangle article, as the policy page suggests). Thue | talk 11:49, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

I think the problem may be worsened by people like me who turn off the "Underline links" option. I just don't realise how heavily things are linked, but for anonymous users, over-linking hampers reading. r3m0t ^talk 13:45, May 21, 2005 (UTC)

New category proposal

I have been thinking about a new category, but I don't want to add it to Wikipedia before having consulted my brethren here. There are now many <year> births and <year> deaths categories. I personally think that <date> births and <date> deaths (for instance September 5 births and July 15 deaths) could be added to Wikipedia as well. It would be less bothersome than the categorization by year, since there are only 365 days to categorize, while thousands of years have now been categorized. What do you think of this? Aecis 18:58, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Year is far more useful than date. Date is random chance and has nothing to do with your life; year does. That Hitler was born on April 20 matters much less than being born in 1889, or whenever he was. He could easily have been born on April 21 and his life wouldn't have changed a whit. --Golbez 19:05, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

Aside from the point already aluded to by Golbez, that people are more closely linked to those born in the same year than those born on the same day, these date of birth categories would be huge (even larger than some of the year of birth cats.). Also there is the added confusion caused by the difference in the Gregorian and Julian calendars. Rje 19:59, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

See #Birth_categories_according_to_month_and_day_of_birth on the same page. Why do people never look? r3m0t ^talk 21:09, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps because of the insane length of this page? It's impossible to read every single proposal on here, let alone every proposal in the archives. Aecis 22:12, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Uploading Flash Movies

I think that there should be some way for people to upload Flash movies onto Wekipedia. Or can it be done already? - Flamedude 7:38 May 17, 2005

It would be nice. MS Encarta has many nice such movies illustrating some articles. Ultramarine 16:09, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Flash movies opens up a whole Pandora's box of bad stuff. Animated GIFs work just as well for an encyclopedia. Also, SVG will be the optimal solution for our uses when it becomes more standard. —Sean κ. + 03:06, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

I've seen people who uses two GIFs in a signature. Now I see a squadron of 20-mega-byte Flash signatures diving ... -- Toytoy 04:56, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Removing stubs from the Random page function

The Random page function unfortunately leads to countless stub articles about high schools, obscure bands and not-VIPs. A feature where one could exclude articles smaller than a user-defined limit would be very nice. Ultramarine 10:32, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree. Wikipedia is indeed being drowned by countless stubs. JoJan 13:43, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

But I use random page to find articles to improve or otherwise fix. Random page shows the Good, the Bad and the just plain Ugly on Wikipedia. Evil Monkey∴Hello 01:33, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

I don't think it is a good idea. Stubs are an important part of wikipedia, even if they are short. Howabout1 02:26, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Evil Monkey — on a number of occasions I've either expanded, merged, or even just stub-sorted a stub that I found while randomly paging. That's an argument against removing stubs from "Random page" altogether, though, not against providing an option (like the option for excluding minor edits from one's watch list). Why not ask this question on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 08:22, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Image:Village pump clear.png

File:Village pump clear.png

What? Another useless server-breaking image? -- Toytoy 02:54, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

Proposal to reorganize the Village pump

Considering the size of the Village Pump (some of which is due to lack of maintenance), I'm wondering if maybe we should reorganize it in a way similar to how VfD has recently been organized. The "Main page" of the pump would have only the introductory paragraph, the table of and links to the different sections and the table of "where else you might want to look for answers." It could also (maybe) have a short paragraph about how to maintain the pages, including the part about how any editor can do it. Thoughts? Comments? Soundguy99 18:00, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump sections. I guess your proposal would be to swap the main village pump and this page around. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 20:12, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

I dont think that that's what he means: he means make the main VP page be only a map where comments go to specific places. I agree completely, and would add two things: 1. Entries are moved to proper places, within a moved to... tag. 2. Entries are renamed to conform with ease of readability. So while this entry is actually a proposal, and therefore belongs here, others are more like general comments which belong on misc or general -- "General" would replace WP:VP comments, and misc would be for those left-field comments and remarks which need little reply. -SV|t 02:28, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear enough. Up until, what, a week ago? the "standard" VfD main page that you got when you clicked "Deletion" at the top of the Recent changes page was a whole week's worth of votes and comments; it was huge and took forever to load. Then somebody reorganized it so the main VfD page is just a basic introduction/how-to with sub-pages for each day. This is much easier and faster, IMHO.

So, right now, we have a similar issue at Village pump. The standard "main village pump page" (Wikipedia:Village pump) that you get to from everywhere has weeks' worth of comments from 6 different sections; it's huge and takes forever to load. This is annoying if a user just wants to browse. So the idea is that the "Wikipedia:Village pump" page would only have the current intro paragraph and the existing table - actual posts and comments would only appear on the appropriate sub-page, not the main V.P. page. The main V.P. page would be only a "directory" page, or a "map" page, as SV|t put it.

So, yes, it would be very much like Wikipedia:Village pump sections that Smoddy mentioned above. I didn't even know that existed until just now (thanks, Smoddy.) The issue is that getting to Village Pump from Wikipedia:Community portal or Wikipedia:Recent changes plops you down at a very large and slow page, which is probably disconcerting/annoying for many users, especially newer ones.

Having (hopefully) clarified my proposal, let me just comment on SV|t's additions:

AFAIK, V.P. is editable by anyone, and from what I've seen, we don't need any kind of tag to move a question or post to a "more appropriate" section of V.P. Just move it, but for politeness' sake leave the header at the original location, and write "Moved to [[Wikipedia:Village pump (section)]]" underneath it.
I dunno about renaming entries; if you mean renaming postings to V.P. pages by editors, just unilaterlally doing so so you think they're more readable could easily be interpreted as a violation of wikiquette. If you mean renaming the sections/sub-pages of V.P., and maybe reducing the number of sub-pages, I don't really think that's such a hot idea either; I think the six sections and their titles are fine as they are.

Thanks for listening, Soundguy99 07:43, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Neologism

I noticed this policy (Wikipedia:Neologism) was not linked to the village pump so I thought I would bring it here to vote on it. Falphin 00:24, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

The proposal doesn't seem completely formed as it currently stands. Also, Village Pump isn't the appropriate location for votes. I think at this point you should be gathering suggestions for changes to your proposal, and enhance it for a while... then, at some point, take a vote on its talk page or a special vote page. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 03:38, May 15, 2005 (UTC)

Thx, and it wasn't my proposal, I just noticed that it has been there for a while, and no decision has ever been made. Falphin 21:52, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

FWIW:

I dunno if I'd say that eight days is "a while". . . . . ;-)
This "policy" was created by an occasionally problematical user (not Falphin) who's gotten in some trouble in the past for creating neologism articles. This may be sort of a "reminder to himself".
Netoholic was entirely correct in recategorizing it into Category:Wikipedia policy thinktank and putting the {{proposed}} tag on it.
All things considered, especially m:instruction creep, probably better to just leave this as is; no discussion, no voting, not policy.

Soundguy99 08:25, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I've changed my mind; an edit summary by Radiant! has convinced me that this is already policy covered under no original research, and that a page that explains "Neologism" in this context would be very useful. So I'd suggest that any and all editors should have at it and clean it up, although we should probably leave it in the thinktank until it's written more clearly . Soundguy99 16:21, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Medical Marijuana

Te title of the page Medical Marijuana should be changed to Medical Cannabis. Not only does it reflect the proper terminology, it also avoids the use of what is a POV slang word whih was adopted (in the English Language) by agencies agaist the legal use of the substance to evoke a rather racist connotation with the drug. While it may have been subsequently more widely adopted, it is preferable to use the word Cannabis. Dainamo 00:19, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

"Medical marijuana" is far and away the most commonly used term (at least in the U.S.; I don't know what might be most common elsewhere in the English-speaking world). Google shows a ratio of 739,000 to 114,000, and its first hit for "Medical cannabis" is entitled "Medical marijuana (cannabis)". "Medicinal marijuana" gets 82,900 Google hits and "Medicinal cannabis" gets 29,800. So I'm inclined to think the article is where it should be. All obviously should at least be redirects, though. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:31, May 15, 2005 (UTC)

Birth categories according to month and day of birth

Inspired by [[category:YEAR births]], I would like to know if it will be a good idea to categorise people according to day and month of birth, for instance, Bill Clinton be categorised to category:August 19 births. — Insta ntnood 16:47, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

</nowiki>

No, never. I don't like the yearly categories, but at least they have in common with them a timeframe. The date of birth is nothing more than a one in 365.25 coincidence that holds no informative value. -- Netoholic @ 16:57, 2005 May 13 (UTC)

No. It's trivial and has no encylopedic value. I concur with Netoholic (wow - that's a sentence I rarely write). Neutrality^talk 16:23, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

No need for a category. There's already a births section in the August 19 article. Mgm|^(talk) 14:39, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

dynamic information

Hi, why doesnt wikip include dynamic info For example, I came to Wikip just now looking for the current local time in Washington. I was surprised this info wasnt on the page. This is where wikip really can be different from printed media. city pages could even show the current weather company specific pages could show the current share price

Hamish Hutton

FYI: All times are in UTC. If you create an account, you can specify what time zone you are in 10qwerty 21:22, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Also, many articles on cities and the like have external links to local council websites. And many of those websites have pages of current weather information and the like. It is far easier for local concils to keep such things up to date than a global group of volunteers like Wikipedia. Grutness...wha? 06:41, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Another problem is that to provide dynamic information like current local time, Wikipedia would have to incorporate some kind of scripting language into the MediaWiki markup language. Last time I checked, the point of Wiki markup was to hide all the complexity of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

As for current share price, that information is tightly controlled by financial services companies (notice how all the finance news sites always credit their partners who supply the numbers). Even though the prices are probably not really copyrightable, a Wikipedia feature that regularly scraped share prices from existing Web sites might invite unwanted litigation anyway. Of course, one thing that would work is if one of those companies volunteered to donate share price information regularly (say, with a 24 hour delay), and to work with the Wikimedia Foundation to set up an appropriate data transfer mechanism. --Coolcaesar 08:10, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

There's a nice, live time site at http://nist.time.gov/ but it's only good for U.S. locations. I thought about adding it to Time, but it would get lost in the long list of External links. We could add an article called Current time with worldwide links giving current time, but would people look for it? And does it make any sense to have a stubby article devoted to a set of external links. Isn't there a standing policy along the lines of WP is not a web directory? -- Mwanner 02:04, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

Actually http://nist.time gov is a great resource whereever you are with a little trick. For instance here in Sweden the time can be displayed like so (hint: look in the adress-bar). Gkhan 20:26, May 15, 2005 (UTC)

A small error

i just wanted to tell you that i found e small error on the latin phrases page. it's actually AUDACES FORTUNA JUVAT...not AUDENTIS FORTUNA JUVAT I hope you will take apropriate measures. Thanks

This is a wiki; you can fix it yourself by clicking the "Edit this page" tab on the Latin phrases page. See Wikipedia:How to edit a page. And welcome! Nickptar 12:54, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Quizzes

I've created a trial multiple choice quiz. Is there a project running on this matter?

You can try my experiment here: Animal Farm Quiz

Fortinbras 08:40, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

This will probably be deleted if it stays in the main article space (as it's not an article); I suggest moving it to your user space, on a page like User:Fortinbras/Animal Farm Quiz. You can use the "move" tab at the top of the page to do this. Nickptar 12:53, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

I noticed that if you mouse-over the choices, you can see which is wrong and which is right. In addition, I don't think wikipedia is the place for this sort of thing. clarkefreak 02:27, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

I've taken the liberty of userfying this. Mgm|^(talk) 07:33, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

Left hand column capitalisation

Can anyone capitalise the "search" "toolbox" and "in other "languages" headings in the left hand column? 17:13, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

They're probably that way on purpose. The tabs are lowercase, too. - Omegatron 21:46, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, if you know anything about programming Cascading Style Sheets, you can create your own skin so that the tabs and the links are capitalised the way you want them to. See m:Help:User style for details. 10qwerty 07:28, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

The CSS attribute that can change the case of text is "text-transform". 10qwerty 15:48, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree that it looks sort of sloppy. I'm not sure what can be done about it, though. clarkefreak 02:29,?(null) 12 May 2005 (UTC)

A proposal for another revenue stream for Wikipedia

Apologies if this has been discussed before.

I am not a html programmer, nor do I have any skills in creating web pages. I have skills as a writer, and I also am experienced in how to make and edit Wikipedia pages. The problem is that my User Page has essentially become my home page. Realising this about 4-5 months ago, I purchased my own web domain with the intention of using Wikimedia as the way to create my own web pages. Problems ensued - my ISP doesn't support LAMP for hosting and another hosting organisation were willing to do it, but I would be responsible for setting up and maintaining the Wikimedia software. Easy for some, but too much work for me.

And then the idea came to me this morning - why don't I approach Wikipedia and ASK if I can purchase my own home page? It would mean that I would be using the Wikimedia engine already running and being maintained by Wikipedia, but would have my own space to "do my own thing", including the posting of copyrighted information.

And then of course the idea went out further. Wikihome - a wiki-based home page organisation, or even Wikiblog. The idea being that anyone, especially Wikipedia contributors, can have their own little "space" on Wikipedia that they can call theirs. I, for one, would be more than willing to pay for it. Many people pay for their own websites, so they would be happy to pay Wikipedia for the right to have their own wikispace - a page that can ONLY be modified by the user and anyone that he/she has given the password to. Obviously there would be limits, including Mb, but there naturally would be a pricing system that would cope with it.

And the great thing is that this system can be used as a potential revenue stream for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is so big now, and has so many contributors, that "Economies of scale" could make it very profitable - which, of course, is channeled back into Wikipedia.

The advantages for people like me (and others who might be interested) are as follows:

A page editing system that is identical to Wikipedia editing.
A homepage that is hosted by a very large, well known and (supposedly) trustworthy internet phenomenon.
The satisfaction of paying fees for a service that is used to support a charitable organisation.
The satisfaction of NOT having to deal with local ISP and hosting services that don't understand LAMP or are unwilling to support Wikimedia.

Advertising is simple. A small ad would appear on every page of Wikipedia, including the front page. Since the advert is for a Wikipedia-based activity, it should not be classed as "corporate advertising" as such. Users would then click on it and find out about Wikipedia's hosting services. Stern-but-friendly messages would also be sent to users like myself who have gobbled up a bit too much of Wikipedia's space for their own ends, telling them to either reduce the size of the user page or purchase space on wikihome/wikiblog for a very competitive price.

The cost for Wikipedia itself would be minimal. Essentially the exact same software is used, although users would have security measures in place to prevent others from modifying their wikihome/wikiblog page.

I would, for one, be willing to pay Wikipedia for my own "Wikihome" page. Anyone else?

--One Salient Oversight 00:54, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

You're confusing Wikimedia with MediaWiki. MediaWiki might be the software you want to use, but that doesn't make Wikimedia a suitable host, since the Foundation have the goal of providing free educational content and reference materials, not home pages. Since you want "a page that can ONLY be modified by the user", what is the advantage of using wiki software for this? Angela . 22:50, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

See Wikicities.-gadfium 01:17, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikicities doesn't meet the critieria; it is still publically editable and subject to the GNU license. What I would like is a protected version where only trusted members can edit (and perhaps only trust members can view) and I own the copyright. I actually suggested this to Google at their suggestions box as a logical extension of Google-groups. I didn't think to suggest that here. Samw 00:11, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

I just checked Wikicities and yes, my desire for a personal homepage would not fit their criteria. Moreover I can't see any section that seems to indicate pricing either. My idea is not to charge nothing for a heavily regulated something, but to charge something for a fairly secure and "owned" something. --One Salient Oversight 08:30, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

There isn't any section that indicates pricing because all the wikis hosted there are free. Angela . 22:50, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

There essentially needs to be another wiki created - Mywiki. Each person purchasing a Mywiki contract has to pay x amount for a certain mb size, with extra charges each time they exceed a certain limit. Only the owner of the contract can modify and change the text (and anyone he gives the password to). There will also be protected pages that only a correct password will allow entry for. Unless specified, all information provided by the owner will not be subject to the GNUFDL. I would be happy to pay Wikicities a yearly sum if I could have my own personal Wiki Page there. --One Salient Oversight 08:37, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

I've started a proposal at http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/wiki/Business_plans:MyWikicities and notified the Wikicities administrator. Samw 21:48, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikicities aims to support communities, not provide web hosting for individuals or small groups. I don't really see the point in a wiki that isn't editable. If it's locked, why use a wiki at all, and if it's not, who is going to manage the spam and vandalism it will attract if there is no community behind it to monitor the site? Angela . 22:50, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

Wikigames

A whole new nanespace for all the game stuff that seems to have significance for our gamers. There is quite a lot of material that could be assigned to that game namespace. And it could have its own peer review regs which may be more inclusive than the traditional WP protocol. I'm not speaking about traditional games such as checkers, fish, or chess. I'm speaking to computer games which have fervant followers with obscure characters and conections which are in vogue at this time (AD 2000 or so). The third cousin of a famous fighter who is being held in reserve fot the next episode may be an important article in Wikigame but of less relevance in Wikipedia proper. Comment here or on our User talk page. I just would like to know if I'm off th wall on this concept. hydnjo talk 04:03, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

It would be nice to avoid soiling our disambiguation pages with articles on every minor character in every inane video game ever made, but such an approach doesn't seem very well justified. --Smack (talk) 04:54, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps a portal would be a better appraoch? In the case of the obscure character you mention, if its really notable enough in the game community, put it on an article such as minor characters from XYZ First Person Shoot-em-up 4 or somesuch. Thryduulf 07:59, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Fancruft and Wikipedia:Fiction and their talk pages discuss these issues and possible solutions in some detail. jdb ❋ (talk) 14:41, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't think this deserves a namespace. We don't have namespaces for other subjects. They are a meta-organization kind of thing. (I do think tables should have their own namespace, for instance.)

Perhaps the character articles should just be merged into the article of the game they are from. - Omegatron 21:53, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

More elitism. Rick K 22:04, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. A Game Wikicities (if one doesn't already exist) might be a good idea to offload fancruft, but a separate Wikipedia namespace is inappropriate. Nickptar 17:09, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

"Sister project", not namespace. All en:Wikipedia namespaces support a single project. I support moving all the fancruft out to Fantasy Island. Yay! — Xiong 熊 talk * 04:51, 2005 May 13 (UTC)

So, what would stay here? Absolutely nothing having to do with games? Chess? Backgammon? Or only the games you feel sully Wikipedia with their presence? Rick K 05:00, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

Personally, I'd like to see all of pop culture moved off into WikiPopCulture. I'd gladly move all the bands, albums, video games, tv shows, magazines, sports, movies (and yes, even the good movies, albums, etc.) But I fear RickK is probably right-- there will always be the gray areas (the Olympics, e.g.?) that will make such admitted elitism fall down somewhere, somehow. I must be getting old... Mwanner 02:14, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

There's a lot of notable pop culture; almost all culture nowadays seems to be pop, at least in the Western world. Of course there will always be gray areas, but while Star Wars is a film, a universe, and a social phenomenon touching half the human race, Graveler is an obscure element of a card game that has, as far as I know, not even made it onto a lunchbox. Some things are notable in reality and others notable only to fans. Chess has affected the fate of kings; Cosmic Era technology is derivative and has not had a great affect even on science fiction authors.

Many things are not of interest to all -- indeed, few things are of universal interest except Birth, Death, Food, and Sleep. But even remote articles such as Robertson-Seymour theorem are purely factual and do indeed touch reality. This project is an Encyclopedia, a compendium of knowledge, not speculation or imagination.

This proposal is good and valid, falling short on only one point: More than games fall into this class of fictional articles. I don't intend the term fancruft carry more than slight perjorative intent, but the fact is that any article that interests only fans of a fantasy universe belongs in Wikifan. Please visit and comment.

NB: Please don't leave this up to the fans! — Xiong 熊 talk * 04:58, 2005 May 16 (UTC)

Wikimedia Affiliate at Amazon, BN, etc

Discussion moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals).

Wikipedia game

It's pretty easy.

Click on Random Page and then try to get to Kevin Bacon. My best is three clicks.

Thats astoundishly unprobable! Congratulations! Gkhan 14:32, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

I just realised I misread your post. That's not unprobable at all. Still, good on ya!! Gkhan 14:42, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

At first I liked your game, but then it seems like there's always a winning strategy: click on years until you get to, say, 2003, click on 2003 in Film, and Bacon is right there. It takes three clicks to get from any year to 2003, so it looks like the upper bound is 6. —Sean κ. ⇔ 17:17, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid I can't find it now, but there was a website which could automatically find the shortest path using a B-tree or something like that. r3m0t ^talk 20:42, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

A stripped-down graph representation of the English Wikipedia could fit in your average PC's memory without too much trouble (500K vertices, 11M edges, an adjacency list representation using arrays would take up about 46 megabytes). You could then use ordinary breadth-first search on it. Bidirectional breadth-first search (searching out from start and goal simultaneously) would be even faster. I'd suggest A* search, but I don't see any easy way to create a good heuristic, much less an admissable one. Deco 20:54, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

[3]. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 20:59, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Wow! I had no idea how close together unrelated topics are. For example: Array -> ASCII -> 1980s -> Jack Nicholson. Deco 21:11, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

There are a couple of variations on this theme at Wikipedia:Department of Fun. -- Solipsist 21:44, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

The site R3m0t is looking for is The Oracle of Bacon. Rick K 05:19, May 9, 2005 (UTC)

Also try Kate's Six Degrees of Wikipedia. Jesus to Freebase in 5 hops, Autofellatio to Pope John Paul II in 4. —Teknic^{Talk/[[Spe
cial:Emailuser/Teknic|Mail]]} 06:55, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Ten foot pole to autofellatio in six hops :-) --Carnildo 21:24, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Known Vandalizers

It would be nice if known vandalizers had some sort of mark next to there name on the recent changes page and the new pages list. That way, they would be easy to single out and remove any further dammage that they did. --Happyfeet10

I agree - few efforts are spared for counter-vandal programming. Lotsofissues 20:49, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

I concur. Collins.mc 21:19, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree as well, this would quickly reduce the amount of vandalism as well as the time taken to detect this vandalism. However, new users should not be able to get this mark, since they are just starting and may not know the rules. тəzєті 01:16, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

Sounds worthwhile. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 02:12, May 9, 2005 (UTC)

For a run-of-the-mill quarterly vandal such as this (has he bee banned by now?) - the system would be perfect. If it's your 50th time vandalizing the site, you might become tired of addressing everyone as "pigfuckers" or end with a histrionic 6 exclamations. These users would fall under the radar of the already proposed and proposed before vandal countermeasures. A system that identifies almost all vandalism must include this feature. Lotsofissues 14:18, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

^^^Take a look at that occupational vandal's newest edits. He changed the years the war took place. If he had stopped instead of further adding the Nintendo DS to the page, a serious error may have not been noticed for an uncomfortable long time. Who knows how much successful chipping away goes beneath our eyes? I'm sick and tired will someone please throw a bone? IP watchlists, vandal markings, new edit content matching - what could be a higher priority than counter-vandalism? Lotsofissues 07:18, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

sanskrit standard needed - we need your OPINION!

I'm not sure this is the best place to post this, but back at the Technical page they told me we should vote. Beautiful democracy :-)

So: the word Śiva is widely used. It is important in Jung's works, religion, symbolism, Hinduism-, Psychology- and Mythology-related articles.

The problem is that the proper transliteration of the hindu word is Śiva, and throughout Wikipedia it is sometimes spelled as Shiva and sometimes as Siva, in the same article, making it a whole mess. It would be a minor problem, but it extends to saivite / shaivite, sivaya / shivaya, saivism / shaivism, saiva / shaiva. The number of articles which mention these movements, groups, philosophies are too widespread to be corrected by a single person.

So, the options are Ś, sh and s. Proper redirection pages would be created, but we need an agreed standard. Your opinions?

I vote for Śiva, the most correct form, and the article titles could be Sh, as Shiva is the most used form in English and I don't know if unicode can be used in titles. --Subramanian 13:33, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

- Unicode can't be used in titles, but the basic extended characters can. The way to tell if a particular character can be used in a title is to insert it into an edit window. A rule of thumb is that if it appears as the character (e.g. Á) then it can, but if if appears as an html entity code (e.g. Ŵ appears as Ŵ) then it can't. Ś unfortunately can't be used in titles. So I vote for using Śiva in articles, but give the alternative versions at the first use where apropriate. For titles, I think you should use Siva and put the {{Wrongtitle}} template at the top of the page. I would also create redirects for the Sh verisons. Thryduulf 15:50, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
I remember commenting on this, but I'll note it again here. Shiva is the English version of the word and should be used here as the most common form in the English language. Other transliterations could be mentioned in the Shiva article. Mgm|^(talk) 11:38, May 8, 2005 (UTC)
Although the purist in me goes for "Ś", I think that "Sh" is the better bet for Wikipedia ("S" is surely out). It's easier for editors and readers, and with adequate redirects and proper transliterations given in articles there shouldn't be a problem. I certainly don't like the idea of using one form in articles and another form in titles. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 11:59, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
Good arguments; I agree that "Shiva" is the standard of the english language, and if it was a single article it should stay, even if not properly correct. But please note the problem is that we have many other words which come from the original term; should this also adapt to the original translating error? Let me raise some counter-points: 1. The religions are, in English language standards, called some-ism. But the religion of Shiva is not Shivaism, it is Śaivism. Should we also adapt that to English? 2. Śiva became Shiva because of printed difficulties back in the XIX century, and because the English Empire would not specially care for an accurate translation of some pagan deity. These difficulties do not exist anymore. 3. Even though I greately agree that Shiva is the widespread English form, a redirect perfecly handles this. Are we here for conformism or for accuracy? - Subramanian ^talk 14:15, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Conformism -- Eugene van der Pijll 16:04, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

After all this talk I still don't know what is the consensus on this. Could some elder wikipedian enlighten me? Subramanian ^talk 15:05, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
- There isn't one! There are two votes for Śiva and three votes for Shiva (I'd coun't Eugene van der Pijll's comment as an implied vote for Shiva). I can't work out whether Subramanian expressed an opinion one way or the other. I'll make a note at WP:RFC and to try and get some more attention. Thryduulf 15:12, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Shiva, obviously, as it's the spelling of the word in English. (And I say that as someone who studies Sanskrit.) Proteus (Talk) 16:41, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Give the correct ISO 15919 transliteration in parentheses, as well as IPA, if desired, and Devanagari if the contributor can do it.

Panini (Devanagari पाणिनि, Transliteration Pāṇini, IPA [ˈpɑːɳɪn̪ɪ])

Of course we can aim for using the translit everywhere in the article (as done in Panini), and the accent-stripped version only in the title, but this will easily become a maintainance nightmare, with too many contributors unable to write the correct diacritics.

Pjacobi 17:41, 2005 May 12 (UTC)

I would strongly prefer to have no accents (non-base-ASCII characters) in article titles. Radiant_* 08:13, May 13, 2005 (UTC)
- See my note above. Certainly at least until WP changes to unicode, Ś cannot be used in article titles whether we want to or note (unless we want an article at Śiva, that is!). Thryduulf 14:00, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
So, Shiva is the consensual title, with a wrongtitle note. I personally prefer to use Śiva thoughout the article. Does anyone oppose it? Subramanian ^talk 12:50, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
- Shiva is clearly the best option to use in an en-wiki, and the first usage / title of the page should clearly reflect that usage otherwise some 'helpful' editor at a later date will change the first use to match the title! The issue about using codes is exactly as has happened above before it was re-edited - it is easy to get it wrong and just see "346" in the text instead of the correct (unicoded) character and whilst "346" may be meaningful to some people it isn't to me and my (firefox 1.0.4) browser / platform combination. At the risk of maintaining errors, I'd rather see "Sh" used throughout except the introduction to the article (as per User:Pjacobi above) --Vamp:Willow 14:55, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
Shiva. This is how it is properly spelt in English, even in India. -- Emsworth 16:02, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Then we have a consensus (habemus consensam! :-) ): Shiva it is. I appreciate all who helped us on this.

Yes, in titles, and in an English sentence. If an entire phrase is given in Sanskrit, you should still use IAST. dab (ᛏ) 12:17, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

WP:SfD (Stub messages for deletion)

I propose a new deletion page: Wikipedia:Stub messages for deletion WP:SfD, similar to WP:TfD and WP:CfD. Now, some will see this as m:instruction creep, but on the other hand, I (and others) think that it would be worth it. Right now the WP:WSS discovers stub templates at an alarming rate. Since we have an interest in keeping the stub system as clean, lean and straightforward as possible (it's already pretty baroque), we usually discuss deletions, then send the stub template on WP:TfD and the stub category on WP:CfD, meaning three votes and double the discussion time (to make the situation worse, the last two votes depend on each other). Most of the time, concensus is already established by the WSS, and it seems as most other people on the deletion pages don't care much about stubs. However, all that stubcruft (©User:snowspinner) is bloating the two fD pages. If we had one page, where we "vote" (I know...) on stub deletions alone, we could cut out a lot of overhead and focus the people who really care about stub templates (i.e., the WSS). We'd need a proper policy for stub deletion nominations, but writing one is not really a problem. So: Is this useful, or is it a bad idea? -- grm_wnr Esc 16:01, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

As a stub sorter, I'm all in favour. We've discovered over 30 previously unknown stub templates and categories in the last month, and tfd is getting swamped with deletion requests. As stubs work, the templates are automatically paired with categories, so having a separate sfd page would halve the work of putting things on two separate deletion pages, and reduce the risk of having the template deleted but not the category or vice versa. Grutness|^hello?

01:44, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

It seems to me it would be easier to just agree to list stubs only on TfD, and to mention that the category will also be deleted; after all, the category makes little sense once the template is gone/replaced with something else. As a non-stub sorter, I hate having to check multiple pages just to see what is currently up for deletion. 30 a month seems light, btw, considering the traffic on VfD... +sj + 06:30, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, but vfd's articles. Normally tfd only gets about 20 templates in a month, total. Grutness|^hello?

08:05, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

SfD sounds like a good idea to me. Almost all CfD and TfD debates over stubs seem to defer to the WSS opinion at present anyway. Thryduulf 15:13, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree, good idea, it streamlines the stub deletion process as Grutness pointed out. I think it breaks out fairly naturally, and there a lot of people at WSS actively working with stubs. Rx StrangeLove 23:49, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Support, on conditions -- I have never been able to see why stubs come to TfD and CfD anyway. Stubs should be certified by WSS before creation and use; uncertified stubs deleted out of hand without delay or debate. This is an issue that controls the large-scale structure of the project, and TfD should be concerned only with tools.

Additionally, I urge stubs never be created for Polish steam locomotive engineer family tree articles. — Xiong 熊 talk * 00:24, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

- Currently there is a strong recommendation to get WSS certification before cration. I suspect that a fully-fledged proposal may appear here before long on just that subject. As for the Polist steam locomotive engineer family trees, WP:WSS promises never to have a stub template for them if User:Xiong promises not to write any stub articles on them :) Grutness|^hello? 01:29, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
I am in full accordance with the creation of a SfD proccess. --Sn0wflake 01:12, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

No need at all for this. It duplicates the process at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria#Proposed stub deletions, which is a far more appropriate place for decisions to be made about what stub messages should exist and which should be deleted. -- Netoholic @ 01:45, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

Um, no it doesn't. That's the whole point. At the moment, the stub sorters debate what they think should be deleted at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria#Proposed stub deletions, but from there the process has to be repeated tfd and cfd. In other words, everything has to be done three times ("fill in this form in triplicate..."). If there was a separate sfd page, it would replace the Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria#Proposed stub deletions section, and would allow for the deletion to actually go ahead after this debate was carried out, rather than having to wait for confirmation or otherwise at tfd and cfd. Which is the reason it's been suggested in the first place. Grutness|^hello?

03:02, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

It should only have to be discussed once, whether it be at tfd, cfd, or sfd; besides avoiding useless redundancy, this'll prevent absurd situations where the category is deleted and the template kept (as looks to be happening now). Note that the process at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria#Proposed stub deletions doesn't have delete authority at present; sfd, in essence, is a proposal that it should. Both the template and the category should have a marking that it's being considered for deletion, in any case, and just all point at the same page. —Korath (Talk) 23:03, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

Well... that was my original intention behind Wikipedia:Deletion of useless stub templates and stub categories. Still in a draft format... no one bothered to improve on it or whatever.... -- AllyUnion (talk) 01:15, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Working Title: EnHanPedia ? Wiki HanEn? HanEnWiktionarypedia?

The tone of a big wiki chinese word project for en or de or fr readers should take a very fun tone. I think a nice idea is to key to Peng's Chinese Treasury published by Heian out of Singapore to get the idea of it. It just has to be fun, 'cos that's what they are. Fun. I could certainly be a permanent member of a committee to continue writing this material. There should be some kind of sandbox-like area to allow the initial ridiculous sounding material to be viewed by all of wiki. I don't know myself how that would work. There is just so much anecdotal support evidence to create the bases of understanding involved, and these words are always talked about in terms of "I think this one might look like..." or "Does this one look the same to you..." or "I don't think you see what I see." That last one is a quote from Soulside of Dischord Records. There is usually some amount of liberality involved in actually getting to these books, and in my experience romance and moderate amounts of beer or wine have been involved, along with coffee, and even tobacco products, for those who occasionally smoke. Romance in my estimation is a usual upcrop of getting involved in Asian words. It is fun, in other words, and it engenders other fun activities. And under this fun umbrella is it only possible to get to the serious political issues involved, including various characterizational differences between Confucianism and Western religios attitude, and any other hot pepper that might present itself during the course of the fun. There is a lot of back and forth involved, between Ming vases and Conan O'Brien, between Stonehenge and Sailor Moon. It is so interesting. One develops an emotional ability one didn't have before, like learning how to eat peppers, or like guitar players have calluses. The course of thought trends to the group and it trends to the individual. The greatest bug bear is cliche, and realizing how much cliche is involved in our thoughts. One naturally develops a comical attitude to such constructs, and ends up talking and thinking more like Bob Dylan and stand-up comedians than one did before one started. Europe becomes one giant interesting yet newly homogenous place.

If I could offer one suggestion it would be to write En Han material and to forego theorizing, as a time-sink issue. That would be the reason to have a sandboxy place to put the incredibly varied Wikis that would be written about HanEn.

This project direction seems to me to be a central WikiObjective. I hope each and every single one gets in touch with this material. A man once said that each one is like a friendly face.

McDogm--152.163.100.66 07:56, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Despite your hundreds of words above, and as a reader who doesn't speak Chinese, I still have no idea of what you're proposing. Could you tell me in just a few tens of words? What is En Han? Thanks - Adrian Pingstone 08:06, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

En -> English; Han -> Chinese (Hanzi). I know this proposal is truly fun, asbolutely fun and endlessly fun. But I know nothing else about it. :( -- Toytoy 11:06, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

I'm still confused. Nickptar 00:29, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for asking. It is so fun, but Chinese is so unbelievably confusing that one needs this kind of cheerleading. For those who work in en all day, Han really becomes an after work activity. And, regarding En Han, it is just a way to generate discussion: Chinese syllables and en syllables have a lot to do with each other and its good to be a bit relaxed about it. Han is 'Chinese' in Chinese. En is English on the Wikipedia. Sorry to seem so unscientific. And sorry for so many words. In a sentence, its a call for a place to release and discuss the nuttiness that comes from dealing with Asian/European and European/Asian issues. Sometimes it looks a little weird to people who aren't studying. Thanks again. McDogm--172.162.33.57 20:51, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, this is a joke or a proposal translated into English using a bad internet translator. It sounds like a chatroom or message board. Munchkinguy--02:33, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

EN: Can you post this proposal in CHinese on the Chinese Wikipedia? Please do not use the online translator. We really don't understand what you mean.

HAN: 可不可以請您把這個提議用中文發表在中文版的Wikipedia上面？請不要用網路上的中英翻譯系統。我們真的看不懂你在說什麼。 -- Toytoy 11:26, May 2, 2005 (UTC)

Ummm, translating this would mean a lot of work. It actually is a joke, but the Wiki community really needs a place to Hanify, w/o non-students being able to power-kibitz. What I mean is that Occidental culture is as sublime as Oriental culture if one considers Bob Dylan and J Church as being from the same place, artistically. And I am not sure how to take the challenge of not being able to use the on-line translator. It seems a bit heavy.--McDogm 06:45, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

A: I can't imagine translating the above mega-paragraph to ZH at this point, but I can promise that I will continue to struggle with material such as J Church, Brain Failure, Sister Benten Grrl Bands, various precisii of material such as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Italo Calvino and V.S. Naipaul, and stuff that is really Hanophilic such as Guided by Voices, NYPD Blue, Fugees, Seinfeld, WuTang, and the New England Patriots and San Francisco 49ers, as well as the normal geopolitical and scientific stuff that is so important. I would like to translate my proposal in its detail to anyone who seems interested, especially on Asian Wikis, but as a serious person it seems to me that working with accomplished writers like Lance Hahn of J Church and the guy from Brain Failure, and the partially En-ified punk groups Nonstopbody from Seoul and Hang On The Box from Beijing would be more efficient and more professional, from my standpoint. I mean, really, who needs another meta-sincere Asiapositive manifesto to be posted on the web? In a non-native language? It wouldn't make sense to me, the writer. It really boils down to a matter of being safe from non-students (of Han) in one's perambulation thru the workings of language, from an intercontinental viewpoint. Thanks for reading.--McDogm 07:17, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Remove useless template icons

A week ago I proposed that we abolish personalized signatures. You hate it. Now I propose that we remove useless template icons.

Do we need so many templates? I guess most of them are needed. But do we need their icons? I guess not. These icons are bandwidth wasters. If you use a 33.6 kbps modem, you'll hate it. Even if you're using a T3 connection, I still don't think most of these icons would help you in anyway.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference site. It is not an artist's playground. So far I have seen icons possibly unrelated with the contents and many overformatted templates. What are we doing now? I suggest that we remove some icons and get rid of excess HTML tags. -- Toytoy 17:32, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

I think we can get rid of the Wikiquote, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, ... icons. Are they really useful? I don't think so. -- Toytoy 17:53, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the ones you listed, but I would be delighted to see the icons removed from the stub templates. - SimonP 18:25, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

See meta:Image_server_overload_2005-03 (images have been removed from the very common templates) and Wikipedia:Template standardisation. violet/riga (t) 18:30, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I like them. :-) Can't you access the page with a different skin to not see them? - Omegatron 20:53, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid that's not relevant here. Stylesheets are applied after the page is loaded, at the client side. This has no influence on server load. (Assuming "skin" is done wholly by stylesheets, of course, correct me if I'm wrong.) JRM · Talk 21:03, 2005 Apr 28 (UTC)

Oh, and also assuming browsers are too stupid not to load images if they see a "display:none" in the stylesheet they load before the page... That might be incorrect quite a bit sooner. JRM · Talk 21:06, 2005 Apr 28 (UTC)

I personally like the Wikisource, etc. images. Makes those links easier to see, which is a good thing for other Wikimedia projects. --Golbez 23:31, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

I like these images. With a little exposure they become so familiar that you don't have to read the message, you just recognise it. They also help separate it; they say "this is about the article, not about the topic." Deco 23:32, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

They're very useful. Especialy stub icons because they tell you where the country is, fo example. Howabout1 00:35, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Icons can be helpful but they are not informative. I want high-resolution images of plants, animals, minerals, vehicles, tools, places, ... . These images are informative.

Some icons are not helpful. They are only decorative (most stub icons belong to this category). I think we can delete them all. Some icons are created for the icon's sake (see: Template talk:Libertarianism). This is ridiculous.

Many icons are useful one way or another. But it will be insane that you use them to replace texts. You may find it useful but a newbie will find the icons and jargons difficult to understand. This is not the average icon-loaden computer user interface (most of them are just ugly). In my opinion, remove them all. Use text. -- Toytoy 02:17, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

Let's start by using "subst:" when tagging stuff with stub templates. It'll lessen the server load, because it doesn't require to download the template on every visit. I guess some template icons can leave, especially in stub notices, but I find the ones in country articles particularly helpful. We need to find out when something is helpful and when it isn't. Besides a little artistic touch will only make wikipedia look better, and that can't be a bad thing. BTW, who uses 33.6 kbps modems these days? You'd have trouble with the regular pics in articles too. You could just shut them off in your browser. Mgm|^(talk) 09:52, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

This is a gratuitous image -- doubly gratuitous as I had not the first idea what was there when I entered the markup. It costs something to serve, something to load, something to display. It also relieves the eye dragging its way up and down this wasteland of text.

Before I came to this project, I thought I would never tire of telling users that too much eye candy is too much. I constantly get demands for Flash navigation bars and other offensive, broken sillyness. But this project enjoys the distinction of being visually dull in many places and slow to load.

We should raise more money, buy more servers, and hire more developers. We should be prudent in the use of images but not stingy. A picture is, famously, worth 1000 words. — Xiong 熊 talk * 03:26, 2005 May 16 (UTC)

Member Edits Only

I think we have enough members now to enforce this policy. No more IP edits, the problem with vandals and vanity is getting worse.

See Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)#Abolish anonymous users. --cesarb 01:18, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Displaying article size

Hey. According to the WP documents you can only show the file size using the search function or if the page is more than 30kb long. Now that search doesn't work, is there any other way?

--Fred-Chess 22:41, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Only way I know is to Edit, Select all, Copy, Paste into wordprocessor/text_editor, and use that program's byte/char count feature. Niteowlneils 00:07, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. That is the only way I know too. Perhaps a feature to implement into Wikipedia? --Fred-Chess 01:08, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's been requested at our Bug and Feature request page, Bugzilla: see feature request 1723. You can create an account there and add your vote toward getting this feature implemented; the developers don't use the votes to decide what to work on, but it's a small way of letting them know that you're interested in the feature. Having an account also allows you to make feature requests of your own (although always search the bug list first to make sure you're not duplicating someone else's request! That's how I found this one.) Hope that helps — Catherine\^talk 04:51, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

President Administration articles

Several of Wikipedia's articles on Presidents of the United States are getting quite big that I want to see if Wikipedia can do something with its info on the Presidents so that none of them can get big:

For each President, Wikipedia should have articles on the general biography (George Washington,) the presidency specifically (Washington Administration,) and whatever else is available that can be an encyclopedic article by itself. (Also, I want to see which of these is more logical on Calmypal's Presidents tempalate; a link to the general biography or a link to the presidency specifically.) Georgia guy 20:29, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Huh, I never thought of it that way, but you're right - the current President articles are more about the administration than about the person, and they are biography articles, so they should be more about the person. Who was a member of his cabinet would seem to not belong in such an article. The template should link to the people, however, but perhaps you could have a second template that links to the administrations. --Golbez 22:35, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

Bad Article of the Day

When an article is posted on the main page as the featured article of the day, it gets a lot of attention- which includes a stream of potential editors and improvement. Now, every article could use improvement, but why focus that power exclusively on articles we already feal are exemplary? Why not feature one article per day on the main page that needs the most improvement?

Instituting such a measure, it need not appear that wikipedia is bragging about bad articles like it braggs about its feature articles. The section of "Article needing improvement of the Day" need only be a small title in an inconspicuous place in the main page.

If wikipedia editors focus on one bad article a day, we may systematically improve the encyclopedia instead of simply waiting till enough people coincidentally happen upon an article to sufficiently improve it.--Amanaplanacanalpanama 08:15, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week and Wikipedia:Article improvement drive. -- Cyrius|✎ 09:03, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Possibly English Wikipedia had already past the stage where lots of essential articles were stubs. For example, Mars the planet is a truly important subject. Every version should have this article. If it was 3 years ago, when the article Mars was still in its infancy (02/04/2002; the earliest available version of Mars; already sizable), we could post the link on the main page and let people visit that stub.

It takes two factors to make this project work:

Adequate participants.
Many of them knows a little about it.

Many of the stubs today are obscure at best. In fact, I have created some DYK pages that attracted a number of readers but only received a handful edits (many of them are minor ones). If we could systematically uncover topics that we all know a little about but no one bothers to write, we may launch such a project.

I think some non-English Wikipedias may use this idea. However, they need to attract more readers. -- Toytoy 10:24, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

There are currently over 15000 biographical stubs, many for actors, athletes, musicians, and other pop culture personalities. A day were these articles gain some individual attention, instead of just being one of the thousands, would go a long way to helping many of them. I also suspect that there are more articles than just this set of stubs that could benifit from increased exposure. --Allen3 ^talk 14:03, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

Are you sure that this won't offend the author of "todays bad article"? Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:02, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

So it needs a rename. I think the Featured article isn't meant to brag. It shows potential editors that wikipedia can produce great articles and draws in a few new editors along the way. I think the main page should be aimed mainly at readers. Still I think such a thing works great on the community portal, but the projects Cyrius mentioned already do a fine job in this regard. Also, DYK is known to have quickly drawn in editors and such articles went on to be featured anyway. Mgm|^(talk) 11:50, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

How about... creating a box on the main page called something like "Articles needing TLC", and putting links to five, erm, bad articles in there each day? That way maybe a visitor to the main page will see one of their pet interests listed as needing some work and...? Grutness...wha? 12:14, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We already have the Wikipedia:Community portal which prominently displays articles in need of various types of attention. We do try to maintain something of a division between "prime time" content directed at readers and content directed at editors. Which is why the main page is supposed to be more polished. Even though any reader can potentially become an editor, I think I like things the way they are, even though the pages featured on the Community Portal often languish there for weeks. -- Beland 02:50, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Bones

I thinks there is too much skeleton visible in wikipedia its all very messy and a lot of technical stuff seems off putting to potentially useful contributors.

Suppose there is a clever way to hide all the works but still make it highly useable?

Would that be encouraging to more users?

Um, what is it you want to hide? It would be possible, yes, but we want to attract new contributors. Are you suggesting disposing of the "edit" box and things like that? smoddy 21:12, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Did you mean the HTML-like Wiki coding? I couldn't figure out how to simplify the systax. Personally, I think we should use less Wikipedia jargons on talk pages. -- Toytoy 10:28, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

extension of wikitravel

Hi,

is there a possibility to extend wikitravel in a manner, that travellers can share their experiences with hotels, restaurants, tours etc.? It should be possibble to rank all the mentionned categories somehow and an average of the ranks should be dissplaied.

regards

Robert Meyer

Wikipedia is not actually a sister project of WikiTravel, so you would need to ask there. smoddy 21:29, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Time stamp on My Watchlist

I propose putting a time stamp at the top of the My Watchlist page showing the last time the page was refreshed. This will keep me and other Wikipediholics from refreshing it too often. - Rlw (Talk) 16:52, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)

What counts as too often? Not every three minutes? Don't say less than three minutes. I'm sure that three minutes isn't excessive. One minute, yes, even two, but not three, not threeeeeee... Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 21:39, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wait for MediaWiki 1.5 -- should be coming along within a couple of weeks. (Three?? Three's definitely excessive, but not five, not fiiiiiiiive....) — Catherine\^talk 03:28, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Open task week

I visited the French Wikipedia, and I saw that each week, they invite wikipedians for a doing a certain task. This week it was putting categories XXXX births and XXXX deaths to every biographical article. I also suggest Interlangua week, Wikifying week, Disambig week... 500LL 07:11, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)

I checked their equivalent of the Main page and the Community portal, and I couldn't find where this sort of thing was indicated. If people think this is a good idea, I was wondering if the best way to advertise that would be at the top of Template:Opentask. (But I was wondering if the French Wikipedians had a better place.) But I don't know whether or not it's worthwhile going through the bother of selecting a Cleanup Task of the Week...I guess it depends how much additional editing it encourages. -- Beland 19:44, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Occupations Wikiproject

How about creating a large database of possible occupations. I myself would like to create the medical field database featuring the three major occupations (Human Medicine, Dental Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine) and all sub-fields in the three categories. Each database could be categorized alphabetically.

For the top-level of a database in the loose sense, see Category:Occupations. In the technical sense, see the m:Wikidata proposal. -- Beland 02:22, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Creation of terminology lists for the scientific fields of study and other groups

On Wikipedia, there are barely any 'dictionary' sections where one can look up what a term means. Check, for instance, the Scientific field of Linguistics. There's a lot of words that are really just confusing for a lot of folks there and I'd have to check (and perhaps Print if I were to use this information somehow) each and every one of those subjects just to get an Idea of what they're meaning there. It might be a good idea to instead construct an article with every kind of main term right there, either in the Wikictionary, such as (for linguistics), "Tense," "diacritic," and a lot of other terms. I'm not too sure, but I'd like something just to get me on track, and possibly the link for further understanding. There probably are some glaring issues, but it's just really annoying to read a great article, yet not know what really they're trying to say nor have a clue as to what that means for me on the other side and what exactly I need to know or do for any piece of paper for school/work that I might need to do by Monday. Please give feedback/ideas so I don't really make this a stupid trip to the store for nothing. PanzerArizona 03:10, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That is what Wikictionary is for, not Wikipedia. See WP:NOT. DES 07:24, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree wikipedia doesn't do a really good job of explaining technical terms, when it should really be aiming at self-sufficiency. Kappa 02:08, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Box

I edited your info because when you put a space before the first word on your info, it creates an ugly box.

--Admiral Roo 03:57, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)

One stop discography

I wonder, can we make a category of discography and put everyone's disography in it (such as Kylie Minogue's Discography) for a one-point reference?

68.169.113.246 Talk to me, 68.169.113.246 My contributions 68.169.113.246 19:02, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Personally I don't see the use. It would create a massive amount of categories (one for each band or artist) and it would lose the formatting by the order it came out as categories always sort alphabetically. We don't even need it. You can look up someone's discography by looking up the article for the artist in question, which is where discography information is usually located. Mgm|^(talk) 16:35, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)

- I think s/he meant a single Category:Discographies, but I'm not sure where that would fit in the Category:Music hierarchy either. In the meantime, see: List of discographies, it's a complete list of articles with "discography" in the title, according to WikiWax (http://www.wikiwax.com/). — Catherine\^talk 01:24, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Community Project Proposal

Their is a large happeing in my home County that has been in the news since Mother's Day. A church that is being calld a cult has surfaced after a man killed his wife in fron of their five youngest children by beating her to death with the butt of a rifle (the rifle malfunctioned and did not shoot). She reacently won coustody of the five children because she made alligations that the church is a cult, and feared for her life. Because of her winnings, the husband killed her, and not long after the murder the members of the church, including the Rev., came to protest the arrest of the husband.

Now where am I getting at? I propose that a community project be created for all to put their local news on the project page that did not make national or international headlines, and would not clutter Wikinews or Wikipedia's news section with minor news.

What do you think?

68.169.113.246 Talk to me, 68.169.113.246 My contributions 16:34, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This sounds like a perfect use of Wikinews. RickK 66.60.159.190 19:09, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Rick is right. Wikinews wants local news as long as it can be verified. Mgm|^(talk) 16:32, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)

New Template

I think that a new template should be created that says something like "It is requested that this page be locked to prevent further vandalism" to add to pages that have been vandalized to alert administrators to these pages and decide weather or not to protect that page. I also think that when this template is used, a category of "proposed pages to be locked" should be filled so admins can see all the pages that are proposed to be locked. This template should be used for non-admins so admins can make a decision to lock the topic(s) in question or not.

68.169.113.246 Talk to me, 68.169.113.246 My contributions 14:18, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Requests for page protection (WP:RFPP). Thryduulf 14:48, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Thryduulf.

Mental illness and Psychiatric disorders categories

I think these categories should be merged, but I am leaving that up to you all.

68.169.113.246

I agree, these categories should be merged. You could create a DSM-IV category of diagnoses and a category for the international diagnoses thingy (I can't think of the name). --Joseph Wayne Hicks 21:42, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

That would be the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems by the World Health Organization

68.169.113.246 Talk to me, 68.169.113.246 My contributions 12:07, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I just created the Mental illness diagnosis by DSM and ISCDRHP category. If anyone has a better name to that category, pleas rename it.

Category mergers should be proposed on Wikipedia:Categories for deletion. Bot assistance may be available. -- Beland 02:15, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

RFC

Anyone who's a frequenter of WP:RFC would have noticed that it's regularly a lengthy mess of old proposals, and most people only read the top few and comment on those (and watch them if appropriate). Presently, cleanup consists of copy/pasting a bunch of old ones to the archives whenever they get too long. Ideally, people unlist RFCs when they no longer apply, but in practice that rarely happens.

It would be useful to employ a bot to do this work. The process would be simple - once per week, examine all RFC entries and check when they were last edited. If they haven't been edited for two weeks, they can be archived, because that means the discussion has died (and, hopefully, been resolved).

An alternate proposal would be to have them time out one month after creation, on grounds that by that point, the discussion would have gone stale anyway.

Would anyone have a problem with this? It would make the page a lot more legible. R adiant _* 12:25, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea, but I prefer the two-weeks inactive criteria as the discussion might not be old after a month (it might have stalled for a while but been activated again or just be slow moving, for example). The edit summary should make it clear where objections to an archiving should be made (Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment?) Thryduulf 13:17, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I also like this idea - with the no edit in two weeks automatic archive. Thanks Radiant. Trödel|talk 13:48, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikiagraphy: Dictionary of People

I often find the need to look up people, however, some people do not need an entire article dedicate to them. I propose having a wikibiography project for people. Also I think a Gazateer for geography would be great. If we already have these things, I apologize and ask for a hyperlink so I can find them.

Thank you. --Joseph Wayne Hicks 06:44, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

I second that. 68.169.113.246 Talk to me, 68.169.113.246 My contributions 18:41, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Against, because I consider this a duplication of effort. Andrew pmk 00:44, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

- It would not really be a duplication of effort, because each person in the wikibiography would only have a few sentnces.

Support, while Wikipedia has a tendency to delete articles on "unnotable" people. ‣ᓛᖁᑐ 05:59, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

More Support, there are many article stubs that involve people, and they shall forever remain stubs because there is not enough information to expand the articles.-whicky1978 05:16, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Exactly what kind of people you mean? Famous people usually are worthy (or notorious) enough so that there is enough information at least for a short biography, which is definitely an article. - Skysmith 11:34, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Katie Brownell

If you do a search for this girl's name, you get a ton of hits. Check out her article (Katie Brownell) and see if you can find anything to add to it. I tried creating the article myself, but I am disappointed that no-one is helping out with more info. --CGally81 00:46, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This is not a proposal.

As far as helping out, remember that there are almost six hundred thousand pages in the English Wikipedia. There's plenty of odd little corners where most people don't look. You should consider trying to improve the article's visibility some. There's essentially nothing linking to it, and except for the stub category, it's uncategorized. The only way anyone will find it is by random page (unlikely), or specifically looking for the title. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:47, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You could always try sticking {{expansion}} on it - that will at least bring it to the attention of any editors looking through Category:Articles to be expanded. Grutness...wha? 12:33, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. It's hard to find what appropriate places would be to link to it. For example, the Little League article has no list of famous Little Leaguers, so I can't put a link to the article there. --CGally81 15:48, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You could always add such a list to the page. ZacharyS 23:42, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Republic of Macedonia

There is some controversy here because of the area of the same name in Greece. However, to give a direct parrallel, the county of Luxembourg seems to attract no problems being listed as Luxembourg depsite being part of a larger historical area part of which remains as a province of Belgiam and is still called Luxembourg. The controversy created by Greece is a POV issues and something that has no place. I have no axe to grind but things shouold be consistent and thete is a lot of argument on the nameing of this county. Pandering to objections on Macedonia calling itself what it is, is itself POV. The most stupid idea is FYROM. Afterall we don't call the Ukraine FSURU! Call it Macedonia and have a disambiguation page or direction to the area in Greece. Dainamo 14:41, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Heh, I was about to say, let's do the same for Georgia that we do for Macedonia; make Georgia go to the state, and make Republic of Georgia go to the country. But those inconsiderate Georgians removed the "Republic of" ten years ago. :( Oh well. I agree, if we're going to have the penis fight over Georgia, Macedonia deserves equal treatment. (Not saying I necessarily agree with it; but we do have precedent in the Georgia argument) --Golbez 08:30, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

Calling the controversy over the naming of this piece of land (that has never been called macedonia until the collapse of its last government into civil war) a POV is like saying that the Vietnam war was a POV issue. the term FYROM is meant to be stupid, it is a temporary title, it isn't supposed to be useable. the fact that both countries started massing troops on the border a few years ago over the issue is exactly why both the UN and the EU deem it important enough to rule against the provocation by not recognising the name Macedonia for the fyrom.

The subtle difference here is that the cosy (and borderless) interchange between the luxembourgs isn't contested by anyone - Georgia stopped aiming ICBMs at Georgia (in both directions) at about the same time that the eastern one became a country. But a load of former yugoslavs and a load of greeks could end up dead just because of the patriotic zeal that is stirred up by the use of this name Macedonia Wiki recognises partisan propoganda as a vfd issue - all well and good - but when it is about a current issue that potentially has peoples lives at stake leaving wikipedia's definition in direct contravention of the worlds highest diplomatic rulings and the stances of most national governments is crass negligence. DavidP

We currrently have Republic of China for Taiwan. Surely this is as potentially inflamatory for many from the People's Reupublic to the west? I have conceded to the naming of the article as the Republic of Macedonia (Republic of Ireland is used in a similar fashion to describe the nation entity in contrast to the whole of Ireland). It remains down to the country itself to call itself what it wants to and whether you see the Greeks' stance as one of the most petty cases of nationalist anger or as a noble act of protecting a heritage is irrelevent. We should be none partisan at all times. Citing the international use of FYROM by groups who largely need the grip of diplomacy on the slipery pole of politics to suit their own agendas, is a weak defence of its use. Heaven forbid the wrath of J. M. Barrie fans if a country calls itself Neverland Dainamo June 21, 2005

Nah - they'd just hire lawyers and try to get the new Neverland's owner tried for... oh never mind. Grutness...wha? 14:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

HA HE! I wasn't even thinking of that connection. Perhaps there was something subliminal at work Dainamo 09:55, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If it ain't broke... The current solution seems a fair compromise to me. Physchim62 08:16, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Please add Spawn to the database

Could you please add an entry for 'Spawn'. It is a comic book by Todd McFarlane. http://www.spawn.com/comics/series.aspx?series_id=1

and was also made into a movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120177/

We already have an article - see Spawn (comics). Thryduulf 14:20, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Convert entity codes to characters after the MediaWiki 1.5 conversion

Once we upgrade to MediaWiki 1.5, could we have a bot to replace entity codes with characters? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 12:22, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Great, now I have to look up what an entity code is. ;) Mgm|^(talk) 17:16, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)
- It's a character entity. --cesarb 17:18, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  - I've created a redirect from entity code to character entity based on this discussion :) Thryduulf 09:55, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Is it a good idea?

In the English wikipedia, I want to make the section on Romanian cities complete, by writing articles for listed cities that do not have them and editing existing ones, by adding information, etc... What I'm wondering though is, is it worth the effort?

It's worth the effort if you know about the cities. Wikipedia has room for everything. Howabout1 Talk to me! 02:03, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Oh yes, it would be systemic bias if the English 'pedia only described English cities. I'd say go for it. Romanian cities are certainly encyclopedic. R adiant _* 13:11, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

Of course not. No one who speaks English ever goes to Romania. --Golbez 08:35, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

Don't mind Golbez -- by all means, make articles on Romanian cities! — Catherine\^talk 03:51, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Music production tips

Hi, I post frequently on the dogsonacid.com Grid (http://www.dogsonacid.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=4) which is a large forum devoted to the production of Drum & Bass, a style of electronic music. There are alot of threads on this forum that contain very useful information, but it's hard to get all of them in the same place. Recently there has been a discussion about making some sort of document containing all of the various useful posts that we are able to find on the grid. I think that using a wikipedia entry called "Drum & Bass production techniques" would be useful for this, but i don't know how well it would work with wikipedia's policy/purpose as it wouldn't be a direct encyclopedia article, but a collection of organized posts. I personally think it meshes with wikipedia's goal of compiling human knowledge, but i don't want all my hard work deleted for violating POV or something. please get back with some input on this idea.--69.162.177.145 01:59, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

A collection of useful forum posts is almost certainly going to be deleted. Articles must be in essay form, so you would have to actually compile it into a coherent stucture.

On a side note, it is actually a misconception that "Wikipedia's goal" is "compiling human knowledge", one that most of us had at one time. The motto is, "That something is 100% true does not mean it is suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia." You can read more at What Wikipedia is not, a policy which is often referenced. —Sean κ. + 02:18, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

OK... hmmm.. do you know of any wiki-type technology or webpage that might be useful for this? compiling stuff into essay form would be a huge amount of work and you'd invariably lose some of the original poster's personal methods (no one way of doing things is correct). thanks for the help.--69.162.177.145 02:24, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

The software which runs Wikipedia is freely available and very easy to set up; anyone with a good amount of web server experience can do it. If you're not up to that big a project, you may look to see if someone else has something similar. Actually come to think of it, a "How to..." wiki would be a great asset... I'm sure someone has already set one up. Other people here will almost certainly know of something similar. —Sean κ. + 02:37, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

There's also Wikicities. --cesarb 11:53, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Feel free to add it to Wikicities:c:Music. If it takes off, it can move to a more specific Wikicity, such as one on Drum & Bass. Angela . 16:54, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

"New Messages"

Would it be feasible to add a way to prevent the "You have new messages" bar from appearing due to minor edits? It is very annoying to see it and find that the "new message" was a typo correction.

--Bart133 (t) 23:02, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

That would be a good idea. Howabout1 Talk to me! 00:26, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

- The one change I would like to see for the "New Messages" message (besides a lighter color), is an extra link that for the latest diff for the Talk page (or a diff showing all additions since the page was last viewed, if that is possible). BlankVerse ∅ 10:27, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that's a good change at all. A vandal could replace the entire Talk page, or insert something pornographic, and they could just check the minor box, and you wouldn't know it had happened. rickK 66.60.159.190 19:06, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

promote use of {{inuse}}

A while back I began an article, saved it, edited some more, encountered a coundn't save due to conflict, checked it out, found someone had placed a {{delete}}, after a discussion was informed of {{inuse}}, problem solved.

I just read an account of a newbie's troubles spending time and effort and the next day finding his unfinished effort was all ready deleted.

I sugest promoting use of {{inuse}}. Maybe automatically putting it on empty newly created articles. Or maybe some other way of promoting its use. 4.250.33.185 21:04, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

I just

I agree that {{inuse}} should be better publicised. Incidentally, when you refer to templates by name, not wanting them to appear, type {{subst:tl|name of template}} to reference it. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 21:17, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
- I just made almost the same proposal here: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Avoiding_edit_conflicts - Omegatron 21:21, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
I'm a big fan of {{inuse}} myself, especially since I tend to edit slowly in big chunks. However, regarding your initial problem, many editors (especially those who patrol the Recent changes page watching for vandalism) feel that it is unncessary or suspicious if an article is "created" empty. In other words, you probably don't need to "mark your place" by saving a title and one sentence; it is almost certainly safe for you to write most or all of an article and then save it. If you're not finished, and have to quit editing to deal with Real life, you can put a notice of your intentions to quickly return to the article on the article's "discussion" page. Soundguy99 21:37, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
- Agree. If I come across a newly created page that only contains a repeat of the article title, I am likely to just delete it. I know that Wikipedia will never be complete but it is nice to see pages that look complete. To me {{inuse}} means "someone is actively editing this page as we speak" not "I created this page and am coming back to it a couple of hours". Evil Monkey∴Hello 21:44, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
- I agree with soundguy99. The only way for that to work is to promote reading the talk page of a blank article to see if it is in use. Howabout1 22:03, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
- I also agree with Soundguy99 that it is not proper etiquette to create an article with little or no context just to "mark your place". But I also agree with Evil Monkey that {{inuse}} should only indicate "Currently someone is actively making a major edit to this page" and not "I'll be back a few hours later to finish the job." Instead, tag it as a stub, mark it with one of cleanup tags, and leave a note on the talk page. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 22:42, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
  - By the way, many of the cleanup tags do refer to each article's talk page. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 22:51, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
- Erm, just to clarify, I did mean that {{inuse}} should be used only when actively editing a page; "I'll be back later to finish this" notes should go on discussion pages and edit summaries to let other editors know that an incomplete article will be attended to. Soundguy99 16:48, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
IMHO, the whole problem often results because we've all been habituated to "save early and save often" when working on computers. So a newbie creates an article by making a title and one or two sentences, hits "save" and then starts to expand it; meanwhile another editor finds a suspiciously short stub and VfD or speedies it, not knowing that the original author is currently working on it. Wikipedia is pretty unique in that "we" would generally prefer fewer, later saves. It's an "unfamiliar with Wikipedia useage" sort of problem - possibly info about "no need to save so soon" or "use the discussion page to let other editors know you plan to work on this" could be added to some of the basic How-to-edit/contribute pages that newbies are likely to see? Soundguy99 16:48, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Definitely. We should tell the newbies, you need something of substance before saving it, because it runs the risk of being deleted otherwise. There's no need to save something until you're done with it. That's why we've got preview. Mgm|^(talk) 20:29, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

That is not quite true. If you are editing an article, and you have a crash that closes the browser, your work is lost. This has happened to me. Preview lets you see the effect of your work, but gives no protection agaisnt loss. After losign work in this way, and editor is likely to be inclined to save more often than otherwise. Thge inuse tag might be a good idea in such cases. I didn't know it existed until i read this discussion. DES 18:09, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree. This happens to me all the time. What we really need is for the software to collapse multiple subsequent edits by the same author. - Omegatron 19:20, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

I object to the inuse template because people tend to use it to mean "Only *I* am allowed to work on this page", and leave it there for days on end. RickK 66.60.159.190 19:05, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

'Create date object method' independent of 'link method'?

It is impossible to automatically format a date without creating link. This contributes a lot to overlinking.

For example, there are pages with 1000 links to the year 2000. I think that is overlinked. As a category, dates are the most excessively linked articles, as is shown by their ranking on the following lists:

Is it possible to have a 'create date object' that is independent of the 'hyperlink to other article' method? Bobblewik (talk) 16:33, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

The obvious syntax to use for this would be the double underscore, i.e. __30 May__ __2005__ would be equivalent to [[30 May]] [[2005]]. The first occurence of each date, particularly the year, could be linked but the others formated but not linked. I have seen other proposals for this, and I support it. Thryduulf 22:23, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Interesting. I can see why special characters are needed at the beginning and end of the date object i.e. before '30' and after '2005'. Is there a particular reason why special characters need to be placed in the middle of the date object i.e. between 'May' and '2005'? Bobblewik (talk) 13:26, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

hmm, the current format has characters in the middle, [[30 May]] [[2005]], but there is a reason for this - we have articles on every year, and on every day of a year, but not on every day of every year (very sensible, as apparently nothing of note happened on 14 October between 1987 and 1998) and thus it needs to be two links.

I suppose that it would be possible for the software recognise a date in any standard formats (see below) without internal characters. For simplicity though I think it would be preferable to allow both __30 May 2005__ and __30 May__ __2005__.

30 May 2005
30 May, 2005
May 30 2005
May 30, 2005
2005-05-30
30-05-2005
05-30-2005
30 May
May 30

Thryduulf 15:19, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

I did not know that the middle characters were deliberately put there to make two links rather than one. I thought they were an unintended feature. I would personally find it simpler to avoid middle characters when formatting only. If you think it is simpler to allow both, then that is fine by me.

It sounds good. Is it really possible?

As for the middle characters, I think both should be allowed as inevitably people will try to format it as if it were a link, but I agree that without is nicer in the code. If we allow either, neither method will break and users can use whichever is the more intuitive for them.

Is it possible? I think we should try and get a bit more input into its desirability (there are several discussions on dates happening in several places at once, and when I next have time, I propose to bring them all into one) and then make a feature request on bugzilla. I don't have time to do that at the moment. Thryduulf 18:29, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

As to two links being required for date preference, that is simply not correct. If the ISO 8601 format is used, a date such as 2005-03-05 can be linked as 2005-03-05 and will show up with proper preference formatting. I have taken to using this format when I intend a date to be linked for prefernce settins, particularly for dates of birth/death in a biographical article. The seperate links mzy be winted as links but since the proposal is for a way to apply date preference settings without making links, that is irrelavent. I think that ideally such a new construct should allow any of a range of formats (although i think the all-numeric formats should follow ISO 8601). I don't see any advantage in allowing (much less engouraging) two-part constructs. Since this will be a a new constturct, that no one will use without learning new rules in any case the rules don't have to folow the rules for the previous style of date linking, particualrly since those rules are rathey controary to the ways dates are written in other contexts.DES 22:07, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

I support this proposal. I agree that linking to dates is a generally cause of over-linkink. i think thjat shuch links, as links, are usually pointless, and should be removed if there were to be another way to apply date preference formmatting. I also think that most links to partial dates (D/month without year, or year alone) are already pointles, and i have started to remove them when I edit articles that have such links, although i don't go looking for them.

I have no idea if the proposal is technically hard or easy. I find it hard to belive that it is impossible. Note that instead of _10 Jan 2005_ we could have #Date(10 Jan 2005) if that were technically easier to implent. DES 22:07, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

There's no need for special syntax, the software can recognise dates in plain text. -- Tim Starling 09:35, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

That would be much simpler if implemented! I presume that on occasions (such as this) where we want to see a specific format not altered by preference then putting the date in nowiki tags would allow that? (i.e. 01 June 2005 would appear as per your preference and <nowiki>01 June 2005</nowiki> would always appear that way). Thryduulf 12:50, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Excellent. So where does this go now? Bobblewik (talk) 23:13, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Articles with Proper Names

How many articles would be left if one disregarded those with businesses and products as the titles? Should there be a way to label articles as such? Would a "proper" encyclopedia contain such articles? [Left by Anon. User 66.25.162.157 ]

Buisnesses and products are categorized as such. Most people here probably see no reason why an encyclopedia should not contain them. What is this in reference to? —Sean κ. + 04:48, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Early vandalism warning system

Wikipedia articles are increasingly being linked to from external sites, including many gaming news sites and Slashdot. Obviously, enough people visiting these sites have very little respect for the Wiki Way, and this results in massive vandalism sprees and subsequent cleanups. In my opinion it would be very useful to have a sort of 'early warning' page that lists the articles that are currently receiving the most hits from links from external sources so that we may easily be more proactive in preventing vandalism. Please forgive me if this has already been suggested; I did look around, and didn't see anything to this effect. --BratticusPsychosis 05:34, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. JesseW 09:16, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

SVG and vectorial files

It appears that SVG cannot be supported by Wikipedia (Commons). Are there other vector graphic formats which can be supported on Wikipedia? And can we do something to improve the situation, to be able to share SVG and vector files? Yug 22:24, 28 May 2005 (UTC) I'm french, my english is still improving :)

SVG is one of our big hoped-for features in future MediaWiki releases, but because the format supports the inclusion of scripting languages, we need to have security features in place to prevent hostile scripts from being run or hosted on our servers. As you might guess, creating airtight scripting security is hard, painstaking work; I don't know if our developers are working on it now or if they're still searching for someone who already has skill in this area, but I'm sure it's a feature that will be implemented eventually. You can help by inviting software developers with a knowledge of security issues to join our design team.... — Catherine\^talk 02:15, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

From Commons:Village pump

SVG upload is disabled for security reasons (JavaScript...) at the moment. I have contriibuted code to the next version of mediawiki that will make it safe(er) to have SVG files, I hope uploading SVG will be enabled as soon as we go to 1.5 - that is, in a few weeks (hopefully) Until then, the only vector format supported by the commons is PDF, which is not a very good choice :( -- Duesentrieb 01:00, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Ok, thank for this information ~ I will prepare my SVG work this summer and put it on wiki-commons when we will get the 1.5 :) Yug 14:49, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Can't we just disable all scripts? -- Toytoy 05:50, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

Piped links and acronyms

Disclaimer - this idea may have been suggested before.

Pages such as UN redirect to United Nations, and pages such as EU redirect to European Union. It is almost always the acronym used in articles, but if there was a policy to pip the link, so that one would type [[European Union|EU]], then when the mouse was hovered over it, it would expand the acronym like so: EU. If you look at this page, the text underlined in blue dots has this property. Worth a try?-->Energy (talk) 07:23, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I added to Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(links)#Internal_links: "A link going straight to the target is preferred over a link relying on a redirect.", because I think your remark applies more generally.--Patrick 13:53, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

The possibility to have a hover box without a link, or a link with a hover box text with additional info would be nice, e.g. at the word inch a hover box with the text "2.54 cm".--Patrick 14:53, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

In fact, a hover box without a link is possible: <span title="2.54 cm" style="color: red">inch</span> gives inch--Patrick 21:07, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Or combined with a link: inch **.--Patrick 21:36, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I think it is better policy to tell people that they should never use an acronym without expanding it nearby, if they believe some people might not know what it stands for. That is, I would always prefer:

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, commonly known as UNESCO, is a specialized agency of the United Nations system established in 1946

Over:

UNESCO is a specialized agency of the United Nations system established in 1946

Such text would be in an article about UNESCO, for that case I agree, but if it is just mentioned in passing in an article, I might prefer the short form with hover box.--Patrick 21:02, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Let's not forget accessibility concerns; some people can't hover their mouse over text. I don't think we should rely on it. —Sean κ. + 22:23, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree that it should not be used for essential information, but it could be a convenient extra (like it is already for links).--Patrick 06:46, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

I made a template of the non-link hoverbox tags at User:Energy/Hoverbox. There are instructions of how to make it work on my userpage, if you feel the instructions aren't clear, feel free to adapt them.-->Energy (talk) 06:43, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Inactive

The Wikipedia:Entertainment Collaboration of the week and the Wikipedia:Popular Music Collaboration of the Week should be brought back to life. They have become inactive, while so many important actors, directors and musicians have terrible articles. Look at Elton John, and Henry Fonda for example. The Music Collaboration should be open to all bands and musicians though, if brought back. --Carolaman 23:40, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Pokémon articles and WP:FICT

There is a poll open on applying the guidelines at WP:FICT to articles on Pokémon characters at Wikipedia:Poképrosal#Poll: WP:FICT and Pokemon --Carnildo 23:37, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Derry, New Hampshire vs Derry, NH

The following was posted at User talk:Ram-Man:

Could rambot start a #REDIRECT project for abbreviated Statenames. I usually enter the abbreviation and then have to go back and enter the full Statename. I can't be the only one doing this (or am I?). ;-) hydnjo talk 18:03, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Is there a way to do this with a bot instead of a human doing it city/town by city/town? hydnjo talk 01:30, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

How about also adding Derry (NH)? THis makes it a lot easier to link, as you can type [[Derry (NH)|]] and get Derry. I've been doing this manually for Rhode Island and Massachusetts as I've been linking to them. --SPUI (talk) 01:49, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

The Sethbot can do this, as well! The Sethbot is very versatile and loves to help! I'll have its next pass through the alphabet create these; or you can use the Sethbot code to create your own bot. As this sort of redirect would be a new thing, though, I'd think this use should be approved on Wikipedia talk:Bots first. -- Seth Ilys 02:02, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

I thought Sethbot (talk · contribs) was already making these sorts of redirects... --Tabor 01:52, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

The Sethbot does this as we speak. Here's the funny thing, which I wouldn't have noticed had it not been for your query: Sethbot *should* have automatically created this one ages ago. The fact that it didn't lead me to some checking, and I found a... umm... undocumented feature... in the Sethbot such that it hasn't been creating the appropriate redirects for states with spaces in their names. I've tweaked the bot, and it should be fixed now (and I've started it again at the top of the alphabet; you can follow its progress here). -- Seth Ilys 01:57, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

OK, excelent and quick response. I'll be watching for Derry, NH to change from red to blue. Thanks Seth. hydnjo talk 19:40, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

It would be great if a bot could also take care of other entry variations, such as "Derry,NH", "Derry NH", "Derry,N.H.", "Derry, N.H." and "Derry N.H.", and for states that have had traditional abbreviations different from the postal version, take care of those too... like "Fla." and and "Ill.". — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 01:19, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

Since the introduction of the USPS 2 letter state abbreviation code in 1963, there has been a steady increase in its usage. There are probably many younguns out there who don't know how to spell Connecticut and would most likely enter City, CT. That is what prompted my original proposal. All other possible variations and redirects would be a plus but I thinks of less use than the USPS state code. But, if we have the space and the botpower then WTF, why not? hydnjo talk 19:35, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Redirects are cheap, but I agree that your original proposal should take the highest priority, then hopefully the other variations can be done. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 16:25, May 30, 2005 (UTC)

Add google link to stub templates?

In browsing a few stub templates, it struck me that it might be useful to add to the notice that "this page is a stub" an external link to the Google search-results page for the term corresponding to that wikipedia page's title.

For example, in looking this morning at the wikipedia entry for National Sorry Day, I noticed the stub notice at the bottom: "This Australia-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." I wondered if it would be helpful to expand that to something like, "This Australia-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it, perhaps by performing a Google search on the phrase "National Sorry Day".

I guess the same suggestion could be made about any wikipedia article, not just stub pages. But it would seem especially helpful in the case of stubs. On the other hand, the construction of the external link would be subject to breakage in the event Google changed their search interface, and I suppose the singling out of a particular commercial search engine for a proposed "additional information" link like this could bother some people (like those who operate competing search engines, or who just don't want to see a community project like wikipedia tainted by affiliation with a particular commercial site in that way).

Anyway, I'm pretty new to wikipedia, and figure this probably has already been considered, but I was unable to find a mention of it in a quick search. I'm curious what people think about it. -- John Callender 18:39, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Having only a Google link would constitute some sort of endorsement by the Wikimedia Foundation. The thought is interesting, but we'd need to have several links for popular search engines to maintain neutrality. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:01, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure this would help... (I'm rather neutral on it) but... Wikipedia, when their search goes down, links directly to the google search... so, I don't think neutrality or whatnot would be a problem. gren 09:58, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's because Google keeps a cache of WP. smoddy 14:33, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I am in favor of these links, even on every page. Note that the link above should be http://www.google.com/search?q=%22national+sorry+day%22 or http://www.google.com/search?q=%22national%20sorry%20day%22 (searching for the phrase, not just the words). Unfortunately PAGENAME and PAGENAMEE do not provide the "+" or "%20", so we would have to file a feature request for a new version of that variable. We can add Yahoo or so.--Patrick 12:23, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think that a much better way to improve the usefulness of the topic stubs is link to the appropriate WikiProject or Regional notice boards when one exists. For this particular example, you could have the "Australia-related" text link to Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board. From there, each of the WikiProjects and Regional notice boards can create a special subpage that lists topic specific search engines, online reference sources, etc. that are valuable for expanding the stubs for that topic. BlankVerse ∅ 10:03, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That would just be encouraging people to do a straight copyvio/lift from other sites. - SoM 22:28, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think it is an excellent idea. --Arcadian 14:27, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I would suggest that a new section is added under the search box (above the toolbox) that allowed a person to search various resources for page name, including Wikipedia itself, Google and Yahoo. violet/riga (t) 14:36, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Every (sorted) stub already has a link to the category that contains of all the stubs that have the same topic-specific tag. These are in turn members of Category:Stub categories. There's no need to go to Google, which in any case would have an outdated list. Just link to the appropriate category instead. -- Beland 02:13, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

WebLogs analysis for research purposes

Dear community,

this is a proposal of collaboration more than an improvement of actual Wikimedia services. However, one of its results could be some useful additional knowledge on the actual usage of resources -- see the end of the message for some example.

My research group, KDD-Lab (Laboratory on Knowledge Discovery and Delivery: http://www-kdd.isti.cnr.it), is a branch of the ISTI institute of the Italian National Research Centre (CNR), and is recently working on analysis techniques for the logs of web servers. To make it simple, we would like to have the opportunity to apply our analysis techniques to the web logs of Wikipedia. Looking to the Wikipedia access statistics, we believe that an optimal amount of data would be the following: (1) the (raw) weblogs of the English section covering something like a week of usage, or (2) something like a month for the Italian section (... since our group is Italian).

Of course, we are willing to provide all the legal agreements that will be considered necessary, especially those regarding privacy. And, obviously, we will properly acknowledge the contribution of the Wikimedia community in any of our scientifical publications and reports where we use it. Finally, the analysis software we are going to develop will be open source.

Regarding privacy, we do not intend to distribute weblogs to third parties, and for our research we would require only the logs regarding visits to "content" pages, and not personal pages (nor any other kind non-content pages I cannot think of in this moment). Moreover, while weblogs identify users by their IP field, we do not need it, since any equivalent coding would be sufficient. E.g., IPs like 146.48.83.245, which can be easily associated with a physical person, could be replaced by IDs like IP-00321, allowing only Wikimedia webmasters to know the association IP<-->ID.

The results of our research would be (techniques for discovering) usage patterns of the form: "0.3% of users vited the sequence of pages A->B->C", with info on the visiting times. That could be used by Wikimedia in two ways. First, if successful, the analysis we are interested in could reveal users behaviors like: "Often Wikipedia users read page A in depth, then follow a link to B, but then switch immediately to page C (without reading B)", which suggests to check the content of page B or the anchor text of its link in page A (it could be misleading). Second, the patterns found could be added to the actual usage statistics (see "Usage statistics" in Special:Statistics), which at the moment are focused only on the traffic amount.

Hope you find it interesting and will support my proposal!

Best regards,

- Mirco

This sounds like the sort of thing you want to take up at WikiMedia, the parent organization that runs Wikipedia. —Sean κ. + 17:40, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I asked to the Wikimedia board and they (reasonably) suggested me to collect ideas and opinions among the community, since a decision on such topics "really needs to come from the community rather than the board" (quote from last board's message I received). --146.48.83.245 08:54, 27 May 2005 (UTC)- Mirco

Comments

I am only one editor, but I would be happy for you to do as you propose, if you let the community know the results (which I think your message suggests you intend to do otherwise). Thryduulf 09:24, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

I have no problem with this, as long as the steps you mentioned to protect the privacy of our readers are met. —Sean κ. + 12:03, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

If the board and developers are willing to give out the data and if our privacy is guaranteed, I see no problems. Go ahead. Mgm|^(talk) 14:03, May 27, 2005 (UTC)

Given the stipulations you've mentioned, I agree, I'd be very interested to see the results. — Catherine\^talk 01:23, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Unresolved Categories

Is there a project or automated process that tracks down all the pages that have non-existent categories? I.e. categories that have not been created? I often find that such categories already exist, but are not set up correctly on the page. So it just needs somebody to run down a suitable existing category and fix the page. Thanks. — RJH 20:37, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

I was under the impression categories create themselves when you add them to a page, so there can't be "non-existant" categories... Correct me if I'm wrong AlbinoMonkey ^(Talk) 15:41, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I think RJH means that the category description page doesn't exist. -- Cyrius|✎ 16:05, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry I wasn't clear. In a number of cases the category with the non-existent page can simply be changed to an appropriate category that has a description page. — RJH 20:22, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Categories that have articles but no description page will show up as red links on Category:Orphaned categories. -- Beland 13:09, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Categories of people by surname

I've been poking around WP:CfD for an archive of an earlier discussion which apparently happened some months ago about this topic (supposedly located at Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion [Ed-the votes for Category:Anderson, Category:Bauer, Category:Cole, Category:Collins, Category:Fischer, Category:Farmer, and Category:Schmitt]), but I can't find it. Is there a policy on this? If not, I think a new discussion should occur on the true merits of having every last name with its own category. If this sort of thing is necessary at all, it would seem to me to be better served with a list than an unwieldly category. I bring this up now since I see some new categories were started today (Category:Lynch, Category:McCoy, Category:Hanke). --BaronLarf 16:47, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

There is a policy: Wikipedia:Deletion policy/names and surnames. This should be either moved to Wiktionary, or kept in a list – and the list should be a disambiguation page. Maintaining such a list alone is already an effort; no need to start maintaining a category on top of it. — Sebastian (talk) 22:06, 2005 Jun 12 (UTC)

No more IP edits

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals).

Wikipedia:Deletion policy/names and surnames

The discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion policy/names and surnames has been closed as having reached consensus. Maybe I'm dense, but I see no consensus there, nor do I understand just what the result of the discussion is. Rick K 06:18, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Well, Radiant and R.fiend seem to have a sensible view on things and I would've supported them if I was aware of this page in time. Like you, I'm not sure whether this is a real concencus, but I'm pretty sure the conclusions header is for the debate's result. Mgm|^(talk) 20:52, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

- But what is the result? What happens if one encounters a name article? RickK 21:22, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
  - It has a fair list of conclusions. If one encounters a name article, one should slap on a 'move to wiktionary' template. I've reworded the conclusions a bit, do you think this helps? Note that in this case, the conclusions are a reiteration of existing policy (WP:NOT, and Wiktionary founding principles). The idea behind such discussions is not the creation of policy, but to get enough of a consensus to make the matter actionable. R adiant _* 08:38, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Return to section?

When one section of a editing a long article, you press "save" and are returned to the top of the article. Why? Surely it would make far more sense if, the saved article appeared showing the top of the section you had just been editing. It would certainly save a lot of time scrolling down to the place where you've just been working, especially if you are doing a copyedit and therefore want to continue on from the beginning of the following section. Sure, there are times when you want to see the top of the article rather than what you've just been editing, but that's what the "home" button is for on your keyboard. Grutness...wha? 12:59, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Hear! Hear! I've thought the same for a long time. In a long article it can be really irritating. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:21, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

I too would like this to be implemented! Thryduulf 15:58, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

It would make a lot of sense when previewing as well. Thryduulf 07:53, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Great Idea! Howabout1 23:59, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Wiki-Congressional?

An April 22 Guardian article covered a proposal by Demos, a UK think tank, to wikify the legislative process. The ideal vision come to life would be an open process where citizens could edit and insert legislative suggestions in a wiki-draft style. Drafts would unfold in several realms such as a wikipage just for jurists, academics, common citizens, etc.

Fascinating and inspiring isn't it?

[[4] Someone copied and pasted the article onto their page.

Could a Wiki-Congressional be the next Wikimedia project? A wiki that fetches Congressional bills for teh free editing of visitors?

Lotsofissues 12:09, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

It's certainly a neat idea, but I'll hold off on advocacy until WP can reach workable consensus on school deletion policy (for instance) that way... ;) jdb ❋ (talk) 07:06, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Restructure Link Order with Wikiquote, Wikisource, etc.

I think that it'd be more intuitive to have the topmost link in the Wikiquote, Wikisource, etc. boxes to be to the subject rather than to the project themselves. It's just so instinctual to click the first link for the subject. Many assume that the bottom link is a reference to something of a more secondary nature, which the projects are.

I agree. In fact I would prefer having only the subject link, or the general one in a smaller font.--Patrick 06:57, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

"Reference" feature

I think it would be hugely beneficial for Wikipedia to put a "reference this page" link at the top of every Wiki page. It would link to a URL that would always point to the exact entry that the person saw when he clicked that link. In this way, if a researcher wants to cite Wikipedia, he can be sure that if somebody checks using the URL they are looking at the same page that he did. While many pages do not change significantly, it is not unthinkable that a section of a wiki that was cited by a researcher might be removed or otherwise edited, causing confusion when his colleagues look back to check his sources. "Reference" pages wouldn't necessarily be editable since they are intended for reference only. Ryan Prior 00:38, May 19, 2005 (UTC)

Not yet possible. Last I checked, MediaWiki 1.5 will make permanent links to a given article revision much more possible. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:08, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Don't think it'll be done for 1.5, but see feature request 800. — Catherine\^talk 23:01, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

In a nod to the semantic web, there could be a mechanism for pages to contain a very simple definition or tiny summary, for display as a tool tip over the link.Rd232 22:59, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Problem is we've already got tooltips that tell you where a link is actually going to. But that's not to say such a system can't replace it. Problem is where to get the summary from?

Do you use the first paragraph? Some are too short--just a line like "this is a fictional character in the blabla universe"--and others too long--requiring the system to auto-cut off the description after a certain number of characters have been displa...--so that's a problem.
Alternately, do you define a new /Summary subpage of each page? Well that could work but would take many months for the use of this manual summary to be comprehensive.
Do you code in an auto-summary tool akin to Microsoft Word's that will make use of everything between the <summary> and </summary> tags?
- Possible, but how would it generate it?
  - on-the-fly--that's a BIG resource killer
  - sequentially cached cutups--summaries could be wrong for a fair while if it crawls a vandalised version of the page
- Also, how would it be delivered to the end user?
  - Downloaded with the page--LONG loading times
  - Downloaded when pointed over--long wait to download the IFRAME's contents and the user may not even realise that you *can* see a writeup when pointed over

Not to say it's a bad idea, it's in fact quite a good idea... just that it's got some issues. Master Thief Garrett^Talk 06:05, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate that of the three proposals I made, this is by far the hardest to implement. To answer one of your questions, I had envisaged some kind of a {{summary}} tag on each page (or a separate subpage or whatever), with purpose-written content. Efficiently getting that content onto pages linking to it is another matter. Still, sometimes it's worth floating ideas, you never know where they might lead. Rd232 13:55, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Talk pages: permanent Wiki policy header

I think it would be useful to create a small (couple of lines) summary of Wikipedia policy, with appropriate links. Things like WP:NOR, etc. This would be a permanent header at the top of every Talk page. In a relatively unobtrusive way (if kept very short) it would (a) remind regular users of these policies and (b) bring them to the attention of newbies who may well be entering the site via some random content page.Rd232 22:59, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

New request type: copyright examination

Merchendise

I think that in order to help Mediawiki with funding, the creator (I forgot his name now) should allow someone to make Mediawiki merchendise. What do you think? Personally, I would like to have a necklace madallion (sp?) of Wikipedia around my neck. Admiral Roo (Talk to me)(My Contributions) 19:02, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

See this CafePress link - Skysmith 10:28, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Proposal regarding era designations in Manual of Style

I have created a compromise proposal regarding era style (BCE/CE vs BC/AD). Please discuss the proposal on its talk page. Kaldari 20:28, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

User page block

I see alot of vandles (sp?) edit others user page(s). I think that only the user of that page should be able to edit it. Could the wikipedia code be changed to allow such a proposal that I am asking? And if someone has a proposal or suggestion to change the user page, a link on the top of all user pages should be place to let the user know that another has a proposal or suggestion to make in altering the page (perferably a link to make a new note on the users talk page).

--Admiral Roo 14:27, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Disagree. Edits to user pages are easily visible on Recent changes, and tend to get reverted quickly. They can be the first identification of a vandal; many, many edits to articles could have passed by and have to be reverted (I did anonymous IP this week). So on the whole, apart from preserving the WikIdeal, allowing edits to user pages helps flush vandals out of the system. Physchim62 08:44, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it makes vandals ten times easier to spot. I'd be against it. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:02, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

An "Articles needing pictures" category in the Community Portal

I think this is a good idea. There are many articles in need of pictures, such as Ancient Egyptian art. Revolución 04:41, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think we should have a page describing articles needing pictures and what kind of pictures they need (lead picture? diagram? what should it show?) It should also be mentioned on the article's talk page. I like making pictures for articles and would find this helpful. Deco 17:26, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We have Wikipedia:Requested pictures. Note that Category:Articles that need pictures was recently deleted. Bovlb 17:06, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

Combined watchlist

It would be nice if we had one single watchlist for all projects. I guess this is tied into single user login, though. - Omegatron 14:06, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Clueless newbies proposal

I've been watching/editing the Wikipedia:Clueless newbies page, and I'm just wondering if it would be OK to create an archive page for all the anon IPs. Here's my comment (taken from the talk page):

There's been quite a lot of promoting anon IPs as clueless newbies. Most of these newbies are only here for a day or two; the vast majority listed here have not been active in Wikipedia for over a month. Does anyone oppose making a "Clueless newbie" archive page? In addition, does anyone oppose splitting listing registered users from anon IPs when someone lists them here (i.e. list as two different sections?) Thanks!

Thanks, I just wanted to see what everyone else thinks before making a "Clueless newbie" archive for those not "officially" resolved- i.e. an anon or registered user who doesn't come back. Thanks for the input! Flcelloguy 19:19, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Go right ahead with that archive. Once the old request are archived, you'll see there's no real reason to split the listing anymore. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:16, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

Flash articles and spoken articles

Hello all,

I've been very impressed with the self-made Flash animations posted on various web pages, and I got to wondering whether something like that couldn't be incorporated into Wikipedia. For example, an overview of the Physics article might feature a Flash animation of Newton's three laws, or something like that.

I notice also that some articles are being made into "audio articles" by volunteers, but not in any systematic way right now. Is there any way that someone could edit either of these types of media in a similar way that he or she edits articles? (I assume editing a Flash animation would be easier, but the difficulty in both would seem to be matching the voices).

Really I am very impressed by short summaries of topics either in audio or video form, and I think it would add a lot to Wikipedia. What do you all think? Mjklin 03:19, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

The people who are recording spoken versions of wikipedia articles mainly focus featured articles and other pages that interest them. The idea is to make our best articles available to sight disabled people. It's not possibble to upload Flash animations at the moment, but if you find good ones you can always link them. Problem is that most of them are copyrighted and therefore not eligble to being uploaded. Combining the two is a great idea, but would require people making sound files and animators to work together. At the moment we don't seem to have any animators. - Mgm|^(talk) 09:20, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Flash versions would be good in some ways, but anti-wiki because it would require a lot of technical knowledge for people to edit them. If you want to make a flash animation for Wikipedia, then create it, upload it to an external site, then link to it from the relevant article.

Spoken articles are different. They are just snapshots of the text article at a certain point in time. There is no need to change individual lines in them. One individual should record the entire article, and it should then be redone a few months later if significant changes have been made to the article. Only stable articles (not ones likely to caught up in an edit war at any time) should be recorded.

I've tried to make the recording of articles more systematic. I've created Template:Spoken Wikipedia request and I hope to co-ordinate the work a bit more when we have more audio contributors. At the moment we are slowly making our way through the featured articles. — Chameleon 09:39, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

For animation, it would be better to push SVG, which is an open standard (Flash is proprietary). For audio I don't really see a problem, as people browsing the web will have screen readers running; and since Wikipedia keeps its code pretty clean, there should be no problems. ¦ Reisio 03:31, 2005 Jun 23 (UTC)

But is SVG as complete and easy to use as Flash? We don't need the technology to be all flashy and interactive with clicky things, but there are certain features it really needs. Besides the technical side of things, it would be great to see PNG diagrams animated instead and whatnot. Cool stuff. Master Thief Garrett^Talk 05:42, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What certain features? Vector & animation - what else is there? MNG would be great, but afaik that is even less supported than SVG. Eventually they should both be well supported; until then, there's GIF. ¦ Reisio 18:15, 2005 Jun 23 (UTC)