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Risk of inappropriate images appearing

I don't know if someone has already experienced the following issue in Wikipedia to date, but let me comment on it, just in case:

As there is no limitation on the uploading of images to Wikipedia, I believe that there is a chance that images that should not appear on any article (among others, pornography, images of disturbing violence, etc.), could get to appear. Even if this type of images appears for no more than an hour before the page is reverted, the damage is already done to those who come in contact with the material.

Is this risk already managed somehow? I would like to read your comments on this.--Logariasmo 04:39, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

No more than any other risk, I think. Ideally, only one person should come in contact with it - and then they should revert it. --Golbez 04:43, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

I don't think that casual visitors would know how to revert a page. It is even worse if it is children who visit the vandalised article.--JohnWest 04:51, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Que Sera Sera. There is no mechanism set up for it, and I doubt one would be compatible with wiki nature. --Golbez 04:58, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

You're right — images speak louder than words. If we ever move to a system where new articles are queued pending review by a pool of editors, new images will probably among the first parts of the wiki to be locked down. That's probably a long ways off, though. For now, the RC patrol is doing a solid job. • Benc • 10:33, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me -- awhile ago, I noticed that a nude paparazzi photo of Brad Pitt was added to that article, but I had computer trouble before I could alert others to the problem. This is as much a copyvio problem as an inappropriate photo problem though. Tuf-Kat 22:54, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

One partial solution might be use an algorithm that tries to detect "likely pornographic" images. Like spam filters, my understanding of such algorithms is that they're imperfect but often right. I believe they generally work by noticing a lot of flesh tones in a picture that doesn't seem to be a face. For a neural net, you train like crazy, and make sure that faces are in the "okay" list. You could then delay for a short time actual viewing of such 'suspect images', placing them on a "please check this" list (where an admin might okay, or after some period of time it just becomes visible). I agree that many people perceive pictures differently than words. I don't know if people would think this worth implementing or not, nor how hard it would be. But that might be a technical and procedural way to lower the risk a little bit. It's worth noting that in almost all cases, porn images are also copyright violations, so even if you don't care about porn per se, it's still a reasonable idea to have extra controls relating to images. -- Dwheeler 03:45, 2004 Oct 5 (UTC)

I did a little searching on filtering out porn images. I found a OSS/FS implementation of an algortihm to detect porn images, based on a larger project to detect 'bad' things called POESIA. You can see an academic paper on POESIA as a whole. SourceForge has POESIA software; see the "ImageFilter" and "Java" subdirectories for code, and "Documentation" for - well, you can guess. Presumably, you could pass an image to this code, which would tell you if it's likely to be porn or not, and then you could make other decisions based on that. One interesting thing: POESIA can also detect certain symbols, like swaztikas, if you want it to. There may be other such tools; this is just the one I found. -- Dwheeler 02:59, 2004 Oct 8 (UTC)

That sounds like a good technical solution. Like any technical solution, it has rough spots (e.g., we would need some mechanism to stop script kiddies from uploading tons of garbage images thus forcing the filter to eat up CPU cycles). I'd suggest putting in a feature request at MediaZilla and/or the mailing lists. • Benc • 09:48, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Another thought: we could maintain a database of checksums of deleted images. Any uploaded image matching a deleted checksum would be sent to the "check me" queue. This would prevent non-free images from being re-uploaded, excepting malicious users who modify the image slightly to change the checksum. • Benc • 09:56, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

My suggestion would be to restrict the uploading of images to registered users and/or to users who have already participated actively (posted more than once), as they are less likely to post this sort of things. Obviously, it is slightly against the open policy of Wikipedia, but it might be required in the future, and I believe it does more good than harm.

Another reason for such a policy: Inexperienced users are more prone to unknowingly upload copyrighted images.--Lauther 06:56, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This is a terrible idea - how big a problem is this? The algorhythms cannot possibly filter out all offensive images - this will just lead to 'gaming' the system. Much better just to rely on people visiting the recent changes (is there a 'recently uploaded pictures' page? Intrigue 23:33, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

IMHO, the filtering algorithm idea is secondary to the main idea of sending new images to a "waiting for approval" queue, where admins would have to look at it briefly to make sure the image isn't inappropriate. Admins already do this on images that are already publicly accessible. This idea is just adding a safety net; it should catch a lot of the copyvios and outright vandalism — which we get a lot of, as far as images go.

You do have a very good point, though. I can see how implementing the algorithm as an automatic approval mechanism would encourage "gaming". Instead, we could send all new images to the approval queue, with those that the algorithm determines to be porn sending the image to a second queue, "probable porn". If and when a user's image gets sent to the porn queue, a message (or warning) is generated for that user instructing him to contact an admin if the image isn't porn, or to knock it off the image is porn. Unappealed images in the porn queue would be automatically deleted in three days. The regular pending-approval queue would have to be cleared out by admins on a regular basis, but the vast majority would be quick and obvious approvals.

Does this sound like a better solution, or are you entirely against the idea of a new images queue "safety net"? • Benc • 04:22, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've been a fan of wiki before I joined, and I have not once seen a hacking. But a safety net may tax the anti-hacking abilities of the community. Of course, we have the risk of explcit content being put here, that Wiki may even some day be a site of "Cyber Graffiti" or something of that nature. In fact, this may be giving vandals ideas as this is typed. Please forgive me if I am wrong, but it seems like a choice between images and the employee resources of Wiki.

PS- Plese inform me if I have done something wrong (or if I am wrong) here, as I am new.

Eseer Erre 20:20, 09 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It seems to me that this issue is way overstated. The whole idea of the Wikipedia is that ease of edit makes the Wikipedia better. The easy edit policy may makes offensive and copyvio images (as well as other content) easy to add, but it also makes them just as easy to remove. If you try and change the system in a censor-istic attempt to control incoming content, you will remove, or at least dull, the fundamental advantage of the Wikipedia. Sowelilitokiemu 09:31, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Credit for images

For years publications would customarily (US) use images without crediting the creator of that image, but that has changed in the US. Now credit is routinely given for photographs and artwork.

Is this official policy on Wikipedia?

In my view, it should be, unless the creator of the image has contributed it anonymously. Who made what images is a matter of history and knowledge as much as other article content.

This, however, raises another issue. Suppose a contributor to an article on Bugs Bunny (say, one Elmer Fudd) uploads one of his images for use in that article, and refers to himself in the caption in this fashion:

Cwazy Wabbit Eating a Cawwot (Photo by Elmer Fudd, 1999)

Anyone see a problem with this? (Other than Elmer's spelling?)

--NathanHawking 01:17, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)

I see no problem; I credit all images I upload that I make as "Made by User:Golbez." --Golbez 01:27, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

I think he means in the article, not on the image's description page. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:28, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Exactly. In the caption, visible to readers of the article.--NathanHawking 01:43, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)

Oh. In that situation, no, attribution should not be made in the article unless it's somehow relevant to the article. If people want attribution, they can click it. --Golbez 01:31, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

Why do you say this? Is this Wikipedia policy?

Custom in US print publications and even on websites is to give visible credit for the photograph or artwork. See MSNBC Space Plane.--NathanHawking 01:43, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not paper. I don't know where the policy is stated, or even if a policy is stated, but that's generally how it works here, unless it's a corporate source like CNN or the AP. But usually, having attribution on the image page seems sufficient. --Golbez 01:55, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

Noted that Wikipedia is not paper, hence my observation that even online publications generally credit the source or creator of images. We attribute quotations and fair use passages of text from sources.

If articles had sole authors, noting the authorship would seem appropriate. It only becomes impractical because of the large number of contributors and modifiers, thus the history of an article will have to do. Wikipedia documentation seems very clear (to me) on this rationale.

But images do not suffer from that same ambiguity. If corporate sources like CNN or AP are credited in the article text, why not anyone who contributes an original image? Explicit credit might encourage more to create good images for Wikipedia. (Wow! Your name in print! Silly, maybe, but human nature.) --NathanHawking 02:32, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)

Don't quote me on that corporate thing, I was trying to think of any instance friendly to what you're saying. And the credit is just as hidden as it is for the article, so why should people be less motivated to contribute an image as an article? It takes at least one click to see who contributed either to an article or to an image, and in fact, takes more clicks to find out what was specifically contributed by the person. Image attributions are fewer clicks away. --Golbez 04:47, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

It's not explicitly stated that you shouldn't. However, it violates some explicit guidelines implicitly. Wikipedia:Captions has guidelines for what should go in image captions, and a short summary of what goes on image description pages. The short of it is, captions should be short and to the point. Putting a credit in the caption pushes the caption farther from both.

Print publications put credit lines next to images because they have no choice. MSNBC et al does it because they don't make effective use of the technology they have on hand. We have image description pages for voluminous information about the image itself, we don't need to clutter the articles with information that isn't relevant. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:14, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I don't know how you could say that "Image courtesy of NASA." (for example) clutters an article. Now on the other hand if someone wrote a small paragraph on how they created the image, that would be clutter! However "short" captions are not always appropriate. Creating captions of 3 or 4 short sentences can add a lot of value in some cases, but of course this should be used sparingly. We should always avoid being too rigid in our guidelines and always attempt to add value when we can. If you haven't guessed already, I am for including short credits in the captions when appropriate. Authors (and even government agencies) ask to be credited for the images we use, and I doubt most people click through all of the images in an article just to read the credits. —Mike 05:04, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

I don't know about yours, but my encyclopedia (and my dictionary, for that matter) puts the image credits at the end, not in the caption for the image. So I'd say what we're doing is roughly analogous to the online equivalent of that. anthony (see warning) 02:16, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

For me, the chief problem with photo credits in article captions is that they have a negative effect, albeit a very small one, for the reader — it's a tiny bit of distracting and (typically) irrelevant information — I imagine that it's comparatively rare for anyone to have an interest in the authorship of a typical Wikipedia photo. As a courtesy to the photographer we should include the credits in the Image Description page, but as a courtesy to the reader we shouldn't clutter up articles with metadata. — Matt 09:10, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Shouldn't we encourage people to include references with the uploaded images whenever possible? Not only would it make much easier the confirmation whether or not the image is in the public ___domain, it would also be of great interest for people who want to find out more about the image (painter, original publication etc.) – for example, the image of Odin is very nice, and I have no doubt it is indeed in the public ___domain. But how would I proceed if I wanted to determine the painter, and maybe find other paintings by him? That's just a random example, it's very common for images to have no reference. dab 13:18, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Which is what image description pages are for, not captions. An image description page describes the image by itself. Captions describe the image in relation to the article. -- Cyrius|✎ 14:53, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

When I include copyrighted images of experts with permission I often give credit in the article, because this makes the copyright holder happier about giving the permission (exposure for them), and might encourage them to give more permission for stuff in the future. See for example Carl Hiaasen. Amateur work shouldn't usually be credited in the article though. Derrick Coetzee 05:26, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I guess I might agree if I better understood the distinction between "amateur work" and its opposite. When I write for Sky Publishing or Kalmbach Publishing presumably I am a "professional writer" but when I write for Wikipedia, am I an amateur? When I shoot photos for Kalmbach or ANS I am a professional but the other 45 weeks of the year I am an amateur?

I do understand what you are saying, but I think the issue of the professional status of the content creator is of no relevance while the quality of the content is highly relevant. On that view we should credit not for professionalism but for performance. -- Jeff Medkeff

Sometimes a picture gains extra credibility when the creator is known. A picture of some spectacular starscape gives an entirely different impression if the caption says "Hubble Telescope" than some artist, be they ever so well known. --Phil | Talk 08:08, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Virtually all people I've asked about contributing images to Wikipedia are agreeable, as long as they are credited prominently for their contribution.

An idea: many things are now possible with CSS. Would it be possible to have <<Credit:©author name>> tag of some kind included in the image syntax, that could be rendered in very small text under the regular caption, or even in a vertical strip along the side of the picture (as is often seen in newspapers and comic strips)? With css it could be rendered differently with different skins, or suppressed in a user's personal style sheet. What do you think? Catherine | talk 18:34, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Sounds complicated Salasks 02:22, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

Sexuality in biographies

I note that the reference to G. H. Hardy's homosexuality, a trait ascribed to him by a number of people who knew him (Snow, Littlewood, Turing) has been removed from his biography. This has been done not because the information was not correct, but because this sort of information is not regarded ny some people as suitable to a biography. Why is this, and is this any kind of policy? If it is a policy, what precisely is the policy and what is its basis?

I note for example that Michelanglo's biography discusses his sexuality extensively, and Swinburne's mentions masochism. Is this because it is considered relevant to the artist? Hardy was also a literary figure, and his romanticizing of Ramanujan's remarkable gifts might well have something to do with his sexuality both directly and indirectly.

Some random comments: I think it's unquestionably necessary for at least some biographies — Alan_Turing#Prosecution_for_homosexuality.2C_and_Turing.27s_death, for example. For other people, it's less clear cut. My personal opinion is that you have to answer at least two questions:

Why are we interested in this person? Is there interest in the person themselves, or are they primarily known for an important contribution? For example, people are intrigued by Turing's life beyond his contributions to logic, computer science, etc.
What kind of impact does their sexuality have on the "reason for interest"?

For a famous mathematician, such as Hardy, you could argue that his (rumoured?) sexuality was a private matter and of no relevance to his work or how he came to be famous. You could, I guess, also argue that there is now a wider interest in the details of Hardy's life, so it is worth mentioning — it's notable if someone is homosexual in a culture where it was considered atypical, taboo or even illegal (making it much more notable than if he were heterosexual). We do, after all, include other "life-trivia" such as "Hardy never married, and in his final years he was cared for by his sister." — Matt 10:38, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

As I pointed out, Hardy is also a literary figure; his A Mathematician's Apology is still in print after 64 years and is considered a classic; Graham Greene calling it "the best account of what it is like to be a creative artist". To say that he never married amounts to a wink and a nod under the circumstances; isn't it better simply to come right out with it? In any case it seems at least as relevant as his fascination with cricket or his atheism. User: Gene Ward Smith

So long as someone's sexuality is not the focus or most emphasized aspect of their biography on any article here, there is no reason why their sexual and other preferences should not be mentioned, particularly when, as Matt noted, they were taboo or illegal (which was the case with homosexuality in England at the time). It does seem silly to mention it in biographies of very recent Western celebrities however, because they don't face the same challenges and mentioning it seems like overemphasis (IMO)... - Simonides 23:27, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

They don't face the same challenges, but they usually face different ones. For popular entertainers it can influence how closely they guard their privacy; for political figures it has bearing on their policy positions (e.g. either explaining why a conservative Republican favored a gay rights bill, or casting doubt on his integrity if he did not). Shying away from that particular aspect of the person's life when other aspects are discussed implies that it is scandalous or offensive (a POV with which I disagree). In most situations, I don't think that merely mentioning a person's homosexuality is "overemphasis" any more than mentioning another person's apparent heterosexuality (by referring to his wife and seven children). It's simply objective honesty. And I think we're a long way from the point where a homosexual or bisexual orientation really isn't significant to a person's biography; someday when biographers are working on the Wikipedia entries, books, biopics, videogames, and holonovels about me, they're going to find my sexual orientation far more interesting and informative about me than the city or the specific year in which I was born, or what the names of my sisters were. Tverbeek 02:04, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Also don't underestimate the influence this can have on young gay people, who will most likely not be told anyone in history is gay in schools. While it may not be at all relevant to the person's work it is sometimes very relevant to readers as it may give them something on which to relate. - [[User:Cohesion|cohesion ☎]] 06:06, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)

Just to play devil's advocate for a moment; should a person's heterosexuality be mentioned? My own view is that for Oscar Wilde, for example, his sexuality is relevant because it played a major part in his public life, but for many other figures it isn't. Wikipedia is not here to provide role models but to be an encyclopaedia, at the end of the day. Filiocht 11:22, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, if their heterosexuality is somehow notable, yes. For example, if (as I believe) Aubrey Beardsley was heterosexual (and if we can get a reasonably authoritative statement to that effect), that would merit mention, since his close association with Oscar Wilde and the aestheticist movement would probably make people guess otherwise. -- Jmabel 01:58, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

In my opinion, homosexuality or bisexuality should be mentioned if there is some proof of it aside from rumors and urban legends. In the past, when homosexuality have been illegal, there have been truckloads of malicious rumors that have been used for defamatory purposes. They are not necessarily based in fact. I have also seen unfounded claims (althought I have not noticed any in Wikipedia as of yet) that most of the famous historical people have been closet homosexuals, which is about the same thing in reverse. If the persons have clearly had same-sex beloveds or have clearly indicated that they are homosexuals or bisexuals, that should be mentioned. That should be emphasized mainly if their fame or important event of their life or career was due to their sexuality (in Turing's case, the cause of his loss of security rating) - Skysmith 08:18, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm not so sure. If, like Forster, the person's sexuality is of great importance to the work they produce over their lifetime, or emerges as a prominent or constant theme within their work, then yes, their sexuality should be mentioned. Equally, Alan Turing's sexuality is important, as Matt Crypto points out, because it plays an important part in our understanding of his life.

But there is a problem with sticking someone's sexuality in their biography as a minor detail, and/or especially next to their profession. For example,

"Jane Doe is a lesbian playwright..."

as opposed to simply

"Jane Doe is a playwright..."

can, IMHO, be seen as pigeonholing and has no place in an encyclopedia. If you take the view that sexuality is something you are born with, then if it has little influence on our understanding of a person's life and actions, it is no more useful than saying-

"Jane Doe is a blue-eyed playwright...".

Just a thought. Shikasta 18:18, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

What I meant is something like this. If the aforementioned Jane Doe would be famous for writing lesbian-themed plays, she could be specifically listed as "lesbian playwright". In that case her fame would be based on her favorite theme. Otherwise she would be listed as a playwright and the fact that she is a lesbian could be mentioned elsewhere in the article, for example in a context of a same-sex partner. - Skysmith 08:29, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Good point. We wouldn't say "Isaac Asimov was a bisexual writer", we'd say "Isaac Asimov was a science fiction writer" and mention his bisexuality where relevant; but we might say "Freddie Mercury was a musician and gay icon" or use a similar lead. -Sean Curtin 01:49, Oct 9, 2004 (UTC)

Asimov was bi? I guess that explains why he didn't fly and always took a train or drove. --Gbleem 03:06, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

An interesting case study in this question is Rewi Alley, who I've been researching (very little of the article is live, I decided to write offline). Neither Alley nor previous biographers make any definite statement on his sexuality, but the most recent biography is a revisionist history which concludes that 1) he was homosexual and 2) this played a key role in his life's path, e.g. it was his motivation for going to China. Should such a hypothesis be mentioned as an aside? (which implies some doubt in it if we otherwise retell the traditional version of his life, which the new book calls haigography).

If it's in terms of "Jane Doe's lover Joan," for example, then why not? Exploding Boy 21:47, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

Oddly enough, I was just tinkering with Thornton Wilder's biography. I noticed that it did not mention his sexual orientation. I was going to add something, but since he was a closeted gay, I was not sure how appropriate it was. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 22:00, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Queen's v American English

This topic must have been covered before somewhere else. I'm noticing a lot of centres, metres, harbours, and judgements going on in Wikipedia articles alongside centers, meters, harbors, and judgments. Is there an ongoing discussion about using Queen's versus American English, or has this already been decided somewhere? If anyone can just point me to a discussion already in place I'd appreciate it. Thehappysmith 15:10, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I do not remember where I saw it (a quick look around turns up nothing), but I believe the policy is that each article should be consistent. For example, if an article uses "metre" then use the British forms. If an article uses "meter" then use the U.S. versions of words. Do not add "kilometre" to an article talking about "meters" because it is not consistent. John Gaughan 15:17, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The basic standard is, be consistent within the article, and for articles with a clear British interest, go with that spelling (i.e. London), and for articles with a clear American interest (i.e. Mt. St. Helens), go with American spelling. --Golbez

Just a few comments:

I hadn't heard the form of english spelling used outside of North America called "Queens English" before. To me (an Australian) I thought "Queens English" meant a form of english speech, such as using "one" to refer to the first person among others. I normally call what is referred to as "Queens English" in this post, "International English".
I changed cubic kilometer to cubic kilometre in Mt. St. Helens a few days ago, because cubic kilometer was redlinked, and because I thought international measurements should match international spelling, and US measurements should match US spelling. It got changed back, but i didn't stress about it.
"For articles with a clear British interest".. I would think that should be "For articles without a clear US interest", as everywhere else (I'm not sure about Canada) uses that form.
What combination of US/international spelling/measurements does Canada use? Actually nevermind, I'll go read the articles and find out :)

-- Chuq 02:51, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, this person has misinterpreted the term "Queen's English", which refers to a rather specifically aristocratic UK form.
cubic kilometer should redirect to cubic kilometre. The latter looks quite foreign to a U.S. eye.
"For articles with a clear British interest" should probably be something like "For articles with a clear British Commonwealth interest". But if you think that, as a Yank, I'm going to trouble myself to neatly write in Commonwealth English when I'm writing about Argentina or Romania, you're out of your skull. Topics with no strong connection to the English-speaking world are just going to reflect their primary authors' preferences.
Yeah, Canada's somewhere between. I believe that no one but those who've grown up with it cna comfortably reproduce a specifically Canadian English. -- Jmabel 02:04, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

There has been an interesting discussion in the Wikipedia:UK Wikipedians' notice board about this subject under the title Erosion of British English usage and spellings. Dieter Simon 23:15, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Whilst agreeing with the most of the comments raised above, I personally suggest that, wherever possible, words and phrases should be chosen so they aren't particularly UK/US/another form of English. For instance - instead of 'organisation' or 'organization', you can use 'group', don't refer to a 'public' school, but use 'private' school instead. Don't refer to meters or cubic metres, m or m³ is easy enough to have in their stead. Sometimes this isn't possible, and the flow of the article is more important than thinking of a universally accepted alternative word/phrase. But wherever possible, use a linguistically neutral term. jguk 20:54, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I disagree completely, I think that tends to make for flaccid prose. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:46, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)

I also disagree - particularly because of the school thing. A public school and a private school are completely opposite things to me. Chuq 00:23, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

When using the term "public school" you really have to be careful. There are completely different meanings in US and UK usage. If the term is used in an article, a description needs to be added to make it clear what is meant by it. Otherwise the article will be seriously misleading to many. jguk 04:58, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

For that matter, anyone who's dealt with Latin America knows that U.S. English is the dominant form, Limey detractors aside. A. D. Hair 03:34, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

I've copied the following from User talk:Tim Starling#Suggestion I posted on the Village pump bcz of its importance as a policy matter, not merely a no-brainer for Tim to implement. --Jerzy (t) 01:45, 2004 Oct 27 (UTC)

There was a discussion about spelling and punctuation AE vs. BE etc.. on the village pump. I put forward the following suggestion. Tell me what you think.

This whole AE/BE preference problem is something that has probably got up the nose of very many Wikipedians over there years. I'm certainly one of them. I have a proposal for a relatively simple software solution that may be useful in other areas too. Some time ago we managed to kill off the debate about whether to use [[DD Month]] [[YYYY] or [[Month DD]], YYYY by implementing a system whereby wikified dates appear in one or other format depending on what the user has selected in their preferences. This works great but it only works for wikified dates. My solution world also work for unwikified dates. If we had a BE/AE option in preferences we could then have the flag checked when an article is displayed. Problematic words or phrases could be tagged e.g. "... he came to her {[defense/defence]} as soon as he could and ..." - and the appropriate word could be chosen as required.

Mintguy (T) 14:15, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

- IMO, this is a terrible idea because it tries to impose a mechanical solution on a fuzzy problem. For instance, a UK buddy observed that i was mad keen about something. I use American English, so when i say i'm mad keen about anything, it would be a falsification of my intent to say, e.g., that i'm really hot for it. Similarly, i was taught that in AE, the first E is optional in both "judgement" and "arguement", which i take as evidence of reconvergence of the two dialects; the 'Net should logically be expected to be accelerating that in any case. We denigrate machine translations into English, and so we should, even more, unnecessary machine translations between these two mutually intelligible dialects. [Post by Jerzy (t) interrupted here by Mintguy's comment.]

My intention was to put this to Tim and for him to guage the feasibility. I would have preferred if you had not copied this here and then posted negative comments particularly as I don't think you have read my suggestion correctly. I don't quite understand what you are trying to say above. I am not suggesting that we have an automtic machine translation. It would merely be presenting some individually selected words (of the editors' choice) as AE or BE depending on the user's preference. To use your own words - It is a fuzzy solution. Mintguy (T)

This seems like a great solution to me. If an American finds an article that is written completely with British spellings, words, and phrases, or vice versa he or she could go through and edit all offending words to reflect either dialect based viewer preference. Examples: {[br:colour/am:color]}, {[br:centre/am:center/ca:centre]}, {[br:pram/am:stroller]}, I'm {[am:bent on/br:mad keen about]} making this clear. This solution would leave the ultimate decisions to the author(s) and editor(s), but would allow everyone to have it both ways. Sowelilitokiemu 10:21, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Along similar lines:

If editors who use Commonwealth English want a separate 'pedia, perhaps the current en: should become American-English only (and probably become ae: or something), and i'd join a corps of translators shuttling article back and forth, but i prefer that we speak, in our choice about that, for what is probably the future, and stick to pretty much the policies we now have. [Here Mintguy interrupts Jerzy (t) again.]

This comment exemplifies EXACTLY the point that everyone is complaining about. You are inferring the American English is the norm - and that us outsiders should branch off - when infact AE is the exception to most of the rest of the world. Mintguy (T) 09:12, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

BTW, my quick read didn't quite satisfy me that anyone had enunciated what i thot was clear, and what i endorse: if the subject matter doesn't impose a logical choice of language, the original author's dialect should be retained. Two reasons i favor that are that it is even-handed, and that it offers a healthy incentive to Yanks to nurture their grasp of the Mother Tongue.

--Jerzy (t) 01:45, 2004 Oct 27 (UTC)

Or to Brits to nurture their grasp of the fact that their dialect is no more valid than American, especially considering there are almost 300 million of us to less than 100 million of you. Sowelilitokiemu 10:21, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Personally, as an effort to counter the 'perceived America-centric bias' -- even though I am an 'American', I prefer to write in British English when writing, unless it seems to me that doing so will make it seem like a British imposition of viewpoint. I'm not thoroughly versed in the nuances of Britsh spellings versus American, but it's one way I try to fulfill the goals of CSB project. Question: Is 'King's English' similar in connotation to Queen's English'?Pedant 18:23, 2004 Nov 3 (UTC)

Yes - when Charles, Prince of Wales, or Prince William of Wales, becomes King, then we will speak (well, might aspire to speak) the King's English; officers in the British armed forces will take a King's commission; part of the High Court will be the King's Bench Division; we will have King's Counsel rather than QCs; and so on. -- ALoan (Talk) 18:49, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Queen's/King's English is the form of English spoken in England, and in the vast majority of the world. Much as I (being British) prefer to see the international form on pages, I recognise that it could cost Wikipedia contributors, and is thus probably something that all contributors/readers will have to put up with. It seems ridiculous to suggest one Wikipedia for Americans and one for the rest of the world, just as it seems ridiculous to have some articles which need to have American spellings just as the article is American-focused (or focussed!). For example, I expect just as many non-Americans view the George W. Bush page as do Americans. For my part, I shall continue to use the international varient. However, it would not be possible to have the (many) American contributors checked for every article they write. My solution: grin, bear it, and fix any broken links with redirects. --Smoddy 17:06, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It is certainly not true that Queen's English is spoken in the vast majority of the world. I live in France, and have yet to hear a French person speak with the Queen's English! In fact, it is rather rare in the UK as well.... "Estuary English" seems to be far more common. Certainly in the U.S. and Canada, in Central and South America and even in Germany, Taiwan and China, most people speak English with a North American accent, not a British. But this discussion is pointless. Written English is still a single language with only some minor differences, and we all understand each other; that's the most important thing. People who are native English speakers should write in their own VARIANT of correct English; people who are not native English speakers should write in the English they feel comfortable with; everyone should stop casting aspersions on other native speakers who are writing as they were taught in school. Specifically, British people should stop criticizing Americans for not writing British English. There are historical reasons for the difference in our writing. Noah Webster (1758-1843) lived through the American Revolution, created the first American dictionary, and decided while compiling it that Americans should not write English the same way as their former enemies. Even though I, personally, would have preferred to have kept the old British spelling, American spelling is now correct usage for Americans. Words that are different in the two languages have all arisen since Shakespeare and therefore the British cannot claim that "car boot" is intrinsically better English than "car trunk" (although I agree that "lift" is a better word than "elevator"!). Everyone here should realize that there are literate (and polite) people on both sides. --Evangeline

21:41, 18 Nov 2004

I agree with you entirely that we should not worry about others' particular mannerisms of spelling English. I quite agree that we should write in whichever style of English we feel comfortable with. If someone else finds the result difficult to understand, it can be changed. British English is the most common form, but, in general, American English is, at worst, comprehensible to an International English speaker.

Someone suggested American English is the dominant form in light of Latin American speakers. This reasoning is invalid. The whole body of speakers of a language do not make it what it is, any more than the whole body of users of Windows determine what it is. The programmers of a language are those who learn it as their first language (and the speakers don't even vote with their pocketbooks, by helping pay these "programmers" for their services). (A tiny minority of those for whom it is a second-language can also contribute as significantly; such people are so rare as to be notable, and Jack London might be one, for English.)

Even the exception to this principle sharpens the point: when a creole (language) emerges from a pidgin (non-language), the only role that the speakers of the pidgin take in the process is specifying the vocabulary. The pidgin-speakers each learned a different language from their parents, and may have contributed some vocabulary to the pidgin, but if they learn the creole, it is as a second language, from the next generation. It is those who learned that vocabulary from their pidgin-speaking parents who build a language on top of it.

Who are the "programmers" of English? There are some in India, Pakistan,South Africa, and so on, but predominantly the

nearly 290 M in America,
nearly 61 M in UK,
nearly 32 M in Canada,
nearly 20 M in Australlia, and
nearly 4 M in New Zealand.

It's probably far from true that that means 290 M speaking American English and 117 M speaking the same Commonwealth dialect, but even so

these two or five or dozens are just dialects, not languages, and
they are mutually intelligible, and
they have become more mutually intelligible in recent generations, especially since commsats and the 'Net.

I would not consider reading the "Erosion of British English usage and spellings" referred to above (unless someone assures me that it is mistitled and really concerns "Progress in Reunification of the Dialects of English"). Otherwise, its authors are in the dustbin of language history, with

Noah Webster,
a Führer who decreed, for instance, the use of "Fernsehapparat" in lieu of "Television",
the French Academy,
the Serb and Croat politicians who geared up for their respective hours of national glory by inventing two new languages and decreeing which Serbo-Croatian words were insults to each respective national glory,
the Quebecois politicians who are now a quarter century into the emergency that overrode the civil rights guaranteed to their linguistic minority, and
the Bush-leaguers who are doing their best to ensure that ESL elementary-school children sink if they can't swim in English.

Wikipedia is one of the reasons that individual dialects of English are blurring together; the internationalization of film is a far bigger one. Relative populations, the coherance of a single state, and (for a while still) per capita income, are going to give American English an influence in the result that is in many ways excessive and unfortunate. But languages, like species, evolve in response to real needs; don't forget that Yank arrogance has been insufficient to prevent the eager incorporation of "boondocks", "ketchup", "zen", "taco", "karma", and "Wanderjahr", to seize casually upon just a handful.

Any notion that planning how WP should handle dialect differences can matter in the long run is just plain silly, in ignoring the nature both of WP and of language.
--Jerzy (t) 19:04, 2004 Nov 19 (UTC)

Fancruft

I believe the guidelines need to be a tad clearer concerning deletion, redirection, or merging of fancruft articles. Pages have been made on minute characters from shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Animaniacs, DuckTales and Tiny Toon Adventures that do not belong here. Some, like the ones from Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, can be easily deleted, because the same information can be found on the show's main page. Others, like Buffy, have literally dozens of such pages to their name with a lot of information on them. Some have said that they could be moved to "minor character" gatherings on single articles, which has already been accomplished for shows like South Park. I think that's a good idea, but it still remains to be fancruft that makes little sense to anyone else, and even in these circumstances, I don't think deletion is out of the question. Any thoughts? Ian Pugh 17:23, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm noticing a lot of heat (and very little light) on the subject of fancruft lately. It seems to me that a lot of people are forgetting that Wikipedia is not simply a place to find out information on subjects of which one already knows: it is also a place to discover new information. Wikipedia is not paper. Something to be borne in mind is the plan to make Wikipedia available—presumably on DVD—in places where there is no connection to the Internet; in this context Wikipedia needs to be able to stand more alone than usual. --Phil | Talk 10:29, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)
One compromise that has been reached, in the case of The Apprentice, has been to do just as you described -- move minor character information into a list page, or the main page, if sufficiently small in amount. One of the problems in making this kind of judgement is finding a principled position covering, say, Mr. Spock, Jigglypuff, and Kylantha. Figures such as Mr. Spock may have some significance to the general populance -- it could be said that he's the most famous fictional character from sci-fi. On the other hand, there's little reason we should know the entire fictional career. This brings to mind a question -- should the content of the article be related to the scope of notability? Particular, if person A, real or not, is notable for X, should we go much beyond X in describing them? How much detail do we want? We might, for example, decide that blood type, date of birth, first love, favourite foods, resume, family tree, and similar all belong on Wikipedia for someone who happens to be notable for something, or we might establish a rule of thumb to deal with this kind of thing. This is what I'd advocate, roughly -- if we can't explain why Jugglypuff or Kylantha are notable to society, they should not have an article, and if they do have an article, it should not go too far beyond a through exploration of the ties to notability. Thoughts? --Improv 18:12, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I don't mind including fan information on various fictional universes. Wikipedia doesn't have a page count limit, and it frankly makes it a richer encyclopedia. The widespread coverage of J.R.R. Tolkein's fictional universe, for example, has probably brought in a lot of Wikipedia users, who then go on to edit other (even non-fiction) articles. In my mind, the biggest problem is that if minor characters have their very own article entry, and they might intersect with other entries, soon just about any entry will be ambiguous. If they're a minor character, it's probably worth considering putting them in a main article on their source. In any case, I think Wikipedia should cover all knowledge... even the knowledge of fictional universes. Let's face it, the world of literature is wide and influential, and ignoring it will ignore things that are important to many. To deal with size of printed materials, the real need will be to make sure that these things are categorized well.. then a printer can automatically remove them if desired. Besides, if this is the worst problem for Wikipedia, things are going really well. -- Dwheeler 03:13, 2004 Oct 8 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not paper. Fancruft is fine IMO if the article is really well written and if the subject deserves an article longer than a stub. Tempshill 00:01, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
- It's also important for the writers to maintain a sense of context. This is, after all, a general encyclopedia. People need to remember that a wolverine was a species of carnivore long before it was the name of a Canadian mutant. MK 04:25, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
- Since we don't currently have a problem with too much content, I think minor character fancruft should be left alone unless it requires a disambiguation page, at which time those involved should decide if it should be consolidated. Otherwise, leave it alone. It lets people get angry about how biased wikipedia is, favoring US TV shows over whole continents. (This is reasonable, but the answer is too add more material, not remove existing material.) ;-) JesseW 07:41, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Has anyone considered moving the stuff over to wikibooks? That seems like the best and most appropriate place for the minutiae that don't fall into the "encyclopedic" category. —Mike 00:42, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

If an article about fancruft has potential to become encyclopedic or is encyclopedic, and the piece of fancruft is of reasonable notability within the surrounding fandom, I see absolutely no reason to delete it. If its a stub, you can of course merge it to some list. Wikipedia is not paper, and one of its greatest attributes is being able to have thousands upon thousands of articles about topics that people enjoy but a normal encyclopedia doesn't have space for. I don't understand the need to purify Wikipedia of any unimportant and not-so-notable topic. Half the point of it is to include all of those. —siro χ o 11:36, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

The idea of a separate wiki for such material is sort of appealing (mostly because hopefully there no one would use the term fancruft, which has very negative connotations in my mind). However, I don't like it as any sort of solution the way the current system works. (How does one move articles from one to the other? How does one get to one from the other? What if I want to link to information about Maglor from the Wikipedia article on Fëanor? For that matter, how to do I find the article on Maglor if I'm searching from here? What if I don't know enough about the subject to know which wiki I should look it up in?) We would also have to determine where to draw the line, which would be just as messy as the VFD notability discussions are today.

Of course, I do believe in merging small articles into larger, more useful articles. I'm working on convincing enough of the other Middle-earth editors. ;) [[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 00:20, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Solution suggestion: I believe in classification. If everything has a classification then when making a CD or custom version of wikipedia one may automate the process of selection. I would assume such automatic selection would work better if things are in separate articles. --Gbleem 03:00, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Template inside signature

There are problems about use of this type of template in signature? --[[User:Archenzo|Archenzo >>

Revenue passenger traffic, in millions of passenger-miles (scheduled flights only)

Year	Pax-Miles
{{{1}}}	{{{2}}}

]] 13:32, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I believe there is a limit as to how many times templates can be repeated on a page, so if you were to sign the same page multiple times, the template will stop working after the fifth occurance. I believe the name of the template is then shown instead. zoney ♣ talk 13:55, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Um, what sort of problems? One that I know of (and why I stopped using a template in my sig) is that it only works for the first five times on a page--after the same template appears more than five times on a page, it does not get expanded properly. I understand that this is a setting in the Mediawiki software. older≠wiser 14:01, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

Not to mention that they are just damned annoying. Images like this draw attention. When I'm looking at a talk page, the fact that YOU have been there is not so bloody important as to deserve such visual prominence. -- Jmabel 18:25, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

Seconded! This Unicode characters/images/tables/etc in signatures crap needs to DIE DIE DIE. Garrett Albright 05:32, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Just for the record your signiture contains 16 unicode characters without the datestamp. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:24, 2004 Oct 24 (UTC)

Thirded. It's damn annoying, to tell the truth. I'd rather have everyone put a link to their Talk page instead. So much more convenient, and practical as well. Johnleemk | Talk 11:35, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I think i heard in #wikipedia that in MediaWiki 1.4 the 5 template limit won't be there (they have a differnt solution for infinite loops), then using templates in sigs will work fine (which I intend to do since my sig is very long :) —siro χ o 08:16, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

If your signature is very long, you probably shouldn't use it. --Spug 10:51, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Many thanks! This was an experiment. The template is not now in my signature.--[[User:Archenzo|Archenzo ( Talk)]] 13:16, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

From the heart, thank you A"shii"baka ✎ 20:45, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Flash policy?

What is the wiki policy about including Flash (.swf) animations in an article? 62.252.64.13 17:00, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any policy, but I'd call it unusual, but not discouraged. However, there should be some explanation of it for people without Flash, just as images have alt text. Derrick Coetzee 17:35, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I would hope to see it forbidden -- it can offer very little useful content, is very nonportable to other formats, is impossible to translate, and is further difficult to edit. Allowing such things on Wikipedia would be terrible for the project. --Improv 05:44, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The main problem I see is that editing Flash requires a proprietary tool. I strongly disagree with "can offer very little useful content." To the contrary, sites like Mathworld use a variety of Java applets where Flash would work just as well. Also, even images share the problems of difficulty in editing and translation, but at least image editors are free and ubiquitous. Derrick Coetzee 15:49, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

As previous posters have mentioned, Flash is too proprietary to be a good fit for Wikipedia. I doubt people would actually remove a Flash thingie from an article, but I think many people would work pretty hard to code a replacement, and put that in instead. So it's more like, please think really hard before doing it, and do it only if you really need to. (And expect it to be replaced, ASAP) JesseW 15:09, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'd say, keep the whole thing banned. Animations have no place in an encyclopedia. Gotalora 02:42, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with this statement. Superfluous animations are distracting, but animation is a valuable tool for informing people in many cases. Encarta contains animations, Mathworld contains animations, and there are animations demonstrating a variety of academic concepts all over the web in math, physics, computer science, chemistry, and just about everything else.

Unfortunately, every widely-supported format for animations on the web is encumbered with problems. GIFs have patent (and size/smoothness) problems, MNGs are unsupported, Flash is proprietary, Java is heavyweight, and Javascript/DHTML are nonportable. If there were a standard for animations I can think of a number of articles that would benefit from them. Derrick Coetzee 03:17, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The GIF patent has expired. Animated GIFs are fine from a patent perspective. A free equivalent for Macromedia Flash (whether it uses Flash format or SVG) would be wonderful, but I'm not holding my breath... --Robert Merkel 12:40, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Internal combustion engine is a perfect candidate for an animation, as is Lunar phase. The problem being, as others have said, an open format. I'm a little disappointed that neither page has any external links, animations or not! -- Chuq 03:11, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

HowStuffWorks.com uses Flash very well in explaining a variety of topics. Examples: Home Networking, Internal Combustion, and Earthquakes. I'm not sure if a propreitary format like Flash belongs in Wikipedia but there's no doubt in mind that it is possible to use it to improve articles, especially technical articles. Salasks 03:08, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

Messages in the article namespace

Now that there are so many sources of these messages (stub, various COTWs, Countering systemic bias, more I do no know?), I'd like to propose that all such messages (yes, including the stub message) should be posted on the article talk pages from now on. If we do not tell readers on the article page that we think an article is good (the feature message), why do we tell them when we think one is rubbish, or too short? They might even work out the short bit for themselves. Do we need a poll? Filiocht 08:21, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

Featured articles don't need a message because they are the most evolved of the artices, and therefore need less work. The stubs and CSB messages need to be on the article page because they highlight the the shortcomings of the article, and encourage others to improve them. And if they were on the talk page hardly anyone would see this.- Xed 10:01, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Totally disagree. Editors read talk pages and information for editors can quite happily go on talk pages. Pcb21| Pete 10:13, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Editors read talk pages, but often only if there is an indication on the article page that something is wrong. Xed 10:50, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Concur with Xed. --Improv 20:28, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Many templates by their addition on the main article page include the article in a category. We would need to have invisible templates to be added to the article page to add the category and alert editors to the status of the page. Actually, in general, I don't think it would be very workable to remove templates from the article pages - rather I would prefer to see the FA template being included on the page (and hey, that will suitably embarrass people enough to remove FA status if the page degrades). The NPOV dispute template or protected message are there to warn readers too for example. zoney ♣ talk 09:27, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Is there a problem with having the talk pages inside those categories, which are categorizing metadata, not article content, anyway.

On the latter point, it seems clear to me that all those messages are for the benefit of editors not readers. Pcb21| Pete 10:13, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

We have a guideline that says that tags that are for editors should go on the talk page and I would suggest that the stub and cotw tags fall into this category. The guideline implies that tags for readers should go in the article and I would suggest that the FA tag falls into this category. So I wonder, why ddo we post them the wrong way round? I agree with Pete re the categories. Filiocht 10:15, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

You're missing the point. The stub messages and so on are, effectively, apologies. Readers seeing a crappy incomplete article would tend to overgeneralize and think all Wikipedia articles are crappy and incomplete. The message tells them, 'This isn't our best article, we're still working on this one, don't consider it representative.' Derrick Coetzee 14:37, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Equally, the other messages might be read as sending messages to the readers. My point is, why are some messages accepted on article pages while other, equally valid, ones are not? Specifically why flaunt apologies and hide the FA message? Filiocht 14:42, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

Featured articles don't need a message because they are the most evolved of the artices, and therefore need less work. The stubs and CSB messages need to be on the article page because they highlight the the shortcomings of the article, and encourage others to improve them. And if they were on the talk page hardly anyone would see this.- Xed 14:48, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

You are saying that editors don't read talk pages. If this is true, and I don't think it is, it would be better to promote to use of talk pages again rather than pollute articles with non-article metadata. Pcb21| Pete 14:54, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

"This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by fixing it." Sounds like a message to editors to me. Pcb21| Pete 14:50, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

By definition. And often on articles that are actually quite complete. And if FAs do not need tags, why does {{FA}} exist? Article pages should represent the current state of the article, no more, no less. All the meta stuff belongs on the talk page. Filiocht 14:55, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

Note that {{FA}} *is* generally on talk pages. The battle of where to put the template has been won in that case, but the war about all the other templates is apparently still going strong. Pcb21| Pete 15:11, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

YM {{featured}} HTH. {{FAC}} and {{farc}} also go on the talk page, as does {{COTW}}.

I am persuaded of the rationale for a short message on an article's main page (rather than talk page) to explain to the reader that an article is shorter than may be hoped for (i.e. a stub message); similarly if there is a problem with POV or disputed facts then we (rightly) have messages that go on an article's main page to alert the reader, and these issues are generally dealt with quite quickly. However, stubbiness, POV, disputed facts can be tested reasonably objectively, whereas systematic bias is much more subjective. I don't think it helps the reader very much to know that a topic is (allegedly) subject to systematic bias. -- ALoan (Talk) 15:34, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Systemic not systematic. A description of the difference is on WP:Bias. -- Xed 15:44, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Can't see the difference, to be honest - if the system creates a bias, that is a systematic bias, whether it is deliberate or not. How does a systemic bias differ? -- ALoan (Talk) 18:30, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

PS - both are redirects to bias which was in cleanup, and I have subsequently edited it a bit - if you want to explain the difference between systemic bias and systematic bias, you could do it there and expand the article at the same time. -- ALoan (Talk) 19:29, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why are you persuaded of the rationale for putting stub messages? If an article is short, the reader can clearly see that for themselves.

As for the pov messages, they are always put there to placate editors who are at war, not to help readers out (in fact it may even hinder readers whomight then suppose articles without this message have been ticked off as neutral). Pcb21| Pete 17:40, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Because, as Derrick Coetzee points out above, stub messages are effectively apologies to readers so they know that the stub is not typical (actually, at the moment, quite typical, but there is some good content too...) and to encourage them to have a go at filling it out. -- ALoan (Talk) 18:30, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I have to agree with ALoan and Derrick Coetzee. The very first article I edited was one that was marked as a stub that I felt I could shed additional light on. If the stub message wasn't there, and thus wasn't inviting me to put in my two cents, I probably never would have started contributing. --HBK 05:12, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Filiocht that the policy on this subject needs some clarification, although I'm not sure I agree with his suggestion. As has already been pointed out in this discussion there are quite a lot of tags on article pages, and many seem to be intended mainly for editors. This probably explains why those of us involved in the CSB discussion on the templates and their use didn't really see any big problem with pasting them to article pages. For me, the main argument is that it would serve Wikipedia in the long run to encourage editors to expand on lacking articles, and that tags on article pages will be a more effective way of doing that than tags on talk pages.

I also think that the CSB Article tag (that says "This is an article targeted by the WikiProject Countering systemic bias as in need of expansion") fills a purpose as an excuse, and perhaps a hint at an explanation, to a reader discovering that important African profiles and huge labor organizations only have semi-stubs, when Wikipedia has half a novel on each and every obscure programming language and Middle Earth creature. The wording was chosen on the basis that it makes a non-POV statement, instead of a value judgement such as "this article is too short". Currently, there doesn't even seem to be any generally accepted way to alert the reader to the fact that an article is short in relation to the subject matter it's dealing with, if it isn't short enough to be called a stub.

The other CSB template, called Limited geographic scope, fills another important reader information function. It highlights the fact that although the article is about a seemingly general topic, "the general perspective and/or specific examples represent a limited number of countries". This is very common (for some examples, take a look at Lawyer, Gang or Student activism) and can potentially irritatate and alienate a large number of readers and potential contributors. The template could be seen as a sort of "internal stub tag", indicating that important parts on the subject is dealt with in a stubby way or not at all.

The above is an attempt to explain some of the reasoning behind the well-meaning initiative that some fellow Wikipedians have chosen to call SPAM in capital letters. This does not mean that I don't see the other side of the argument. Neither does it mean that I won't accept not being allowed to paste CSB templates wherever I see fit. I'd just like some constructive dialogue on better ways to handle the problems this initiative made a serious attempt at addressing. I would welcome any wording suggestions that might lead to templates filling the purposes outlined above being generally accepted. Alarm 18:59, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Part of the problem, I think, was the rather prominent nature of the templates used. The stub template is a short italicised sentence, no images, no box, no colour, and quite easy on the eye. I applaud your sentiments, but, for example, I was somewhat surprised to see that a prominent "CSB" notice had suddenly appeared at the top of the the current COTW, African Union, dwarfing the rather discreet "Current COTW" tag. (As an aside, if you doubt the efficacy of COTW, you only need to see how African Union and Congo Civil War have come on.) -- ALoan (Talk) 19:29, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

You should give the efficacy of CSB a chance. - Xed 20:03, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I think it is an excellent project. I just don't think it needs banner templates at the top of articles to achieve its objective. -- ALoan (Talk) 20:38, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why not give the templates a chance? What's the worse that could happen - Wikipedia gets better articles? - Xed 21:08, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Because (a) I think they are information for the editor, not the reader, and so should be on the talk page not in the article itself; and (b) I think they are too intrusive and detract from the content, which is, after all, the article, not the template. The worst that could happen is that readers see the banner and don't bother to read the article because it is marked as containing systemic/systematic/whatever bias. -- ALoan (Talk) 21:18, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

So is it just a design issue? It's too big? - Xed 22:15, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The worst that happens is that you spam articles, and effectively enclose them, withyour own POV judgement which remains there for all time. And then along come 101 other projects which do the same thing, until the wikipedia starts looking like a parade of worthy but misguided project adverts, beneath which, if you look hard enough, you'll find an article. It is not a design issue; in the case of CSB it is a POV issue. More generally it is a policy issue. --Tagishsimon

This should not degenerate into a spat over a particular template. The issue here is consistency. I contend that his is lacking in the current situation. Filiocht 07:34, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Again, my contention is that a reader will assume an article is representative of Wikipedia content unless we indicate otherwise. In the case of a featured article, this is a good thing — we don't want to ruin their good impression of the project as a whole by saying, 'You might like this one, but this article is better than all the others.' With incomplete, highly biased, or factually incorrect articles, it's just the opposite — a notice to editors on the page tells the reader that the page is still being worked on and shouldn't be considered reliable or representative. Also, since readers are often interested in topics they look up, it strongly encourages readers to become editors, just as red links do. Other messages do not share this property. Derrick Coetzee 07:48, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Similar cases could be made for other messages and personally I don't buy them. Also, there are repeated debates over what a stub is, with many articles potentially being incorrectly tagged. Once again I state: IMHO, we need consistency, a consistent and clearly stated policy. The steps towards this goal, as it see them, are: 1) define which messages are for readers (as opposed to for editors). 2) recast policy so that only these messages appear on the article page. 3) institute a mechanism whereby new messages can be caterorised as talk page or article page messages. Filiocht 08:03, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

I could easily mark hundreds of articles with a template that says that the article is crap, in my opinion, in one way or another. Or I could put them on cleanup. Most of us don't do that. We gradually try to improve articles in areas we know and create new ones. We don't stick ugly apology notices on them. And I am tired of the argument that stubs and poor articles and blank links are good because they encourage new editors. By that logic, what you need are more systemic biased articles not less. A difficulty with templates is that it they are easier to put on than remove. It isn't worth a possible fight to try to remove them. But every supposed new problem that comes up has someone proposing another ugly template to mark the supposed problem, to alert readers that this especially needs to be fixed. Stop all ugly tagging of articles by template warriors. Fix it yourself, or send it to cleanup and mark it with a template for that purpose, or leave it alone. If a project plans to work on a particular series of articles, list them on the project talk page. Stop SPAMMING me through templates that I have some duty to work on something just because there is a template on it. Or add a feature to turn off all editorial template display and make it the default. In the case of stub templates often placed by someone who obviously knows nothing about the subject. Templates that mark that an article is listed on a dispute page or on cleanup or on VfD or copyvio are a different matter. There is some way of knowing when they should be removed. But when does a systemic bias template get removed: when Xed, according to his POV, indiosyncratically says it should? Or are there going to countless editorial fights over template removals? Wikipedia supposedly doen't allow tailored messages to be written within a article to be visible in normal viewing. Why should less helpful untailored templates be allowed? Get rid of this junk POV advertising. Jallan 00:57, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Once again: my suggestion was not about one message, it was about all messages. I could mirror Jallan's rant substituting the stub message for the bias one, but that gets us nowhere. I'd now ask anyone posting here to read the original question first. Filiocht 08:32, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

Avenues for handling the ever-increasing size of VFD

For a good deal of time, we've been certain that there's a problem with how we handle deletions. The one that most people are sure about is that VFD is getting too big to handle. There are, of course, those who claim that VFD is an anachronism, useless, etc. (these people are often those residing in the extreme inclusionist camp), but their views don't carry wide support among the community.

Naturally, we've had proposals combatting the problem of an ever-expanding VFD, some of which can be viewed on Wikipedia talk:Candidates for speedy deletion, Wikipedia:Managed Deletion, Wikipedia:Categorized Deletion and Wikipedia:Preliminary Deletion. I originally wrote the following essay rebutting some common objections against Preliminary Deletion, but I found that the ideas outlined within would give a very good idea of where we could steer policy-writing in the future, regardless of Preliminary Deletion's outcome. Thusly, I have decided to share this with the community at large, since I believe that as our community grows, so will the size of VFD, and by extension our problem with maintaining such a behemoth.

[responding to the suggestion of expanding speedy deletion criteria]

Shall we rereview the results of Managed Deletion? I'd love to expand speedy deletion criteria, but that proposal would get shot down easily. There's a reason why nobody's drafted such a proposal — nobody but a few deletionists (or centrists leaning towards the deletionist side) want it.

The largest complaint about Managed Deletion was that it placed too much power in admins' hands. A good part of the community distrusts three admins to handle a deletion, so our alternative is to let one admin decide? That makes even less sense.

There's another compelling reason not to expand speedy deletion criteria. We might expand them, but the inclusionists always whine about the deletion of prose. It's one thing to delete "ioshgohgoaghoeg". It's another to delete a paragraph or two which some inclusionists might actually claim to be notable; these are borderline cases which some admins delete, but some admins don't. Expanding the speedy deletion criteria destroys the beautiful, if flawed, process of VFD.

Now, I'm going to discourse on why VFD is one of those genius-istic systems that some recognise and some don't, much like the U.S. Electoral College. VFD is not merely a place to delete articles. VFD is a place where borderline articles are placed when people don't know what to do with them.

For example, take a poorly written article on some rather obscure subject, say, a 1920s Bulgarian actor well known within his home country only, for pioneering filmmaking there. Google probably won't yield too many results on him. It may look like vanity. So following our current system, an editor places it on VFD, which basically advertises to Wikipedia: "Hello, I'm an article which is so confusing, nobody knows what I'm about or whether I should even be here. Can somebody help sort me out?" Anyone who knows the actor can easily describe how he is encyclopedic and should be kept.

Speedying full-fledged prose destroys this process, and as such, is probably not too feasible.

[responding to charges against Preliminary Deletion, such as "confusing bureaucracy", "instruction creep" or "too many problem resolution pages"] <snip>

Wikipedia is growing. We're getting more visitors. The population always contains a few baddies. At first we had one or two baddies, nothing our system couldn't handle. But as we grew bigger and bigger, we got more baddies, because we got more visitors. The percentage of baddies remains fixed, but not the total population. So naturally, we had to expand our systems for handling baddies as we grew larger.

Now, I'd say our current system is not scaling. Look at the debates on VFD. There are many contentious ones; however, there are always a few cases where practically everyone is for deleting the article; an obvious violation of policy, for example, such as irredeemably POV articles, or original research, or simply vanity pages. It's impractical to have them cluttering VFD, which is already damn bloody long to read, thank you.

So, our system simply isn't scaling. We will need to tackle this eventually, because people on dial-up simply cannot participate in VFD. Categorising VFD (another proposal) is an excellent start. But we will need to add extra pages. There is no doubt about this at all. We will need to expand our system for handling these, because there will be more people adding vanity pages, which will lead to more listings on VFD, which will lead to an extremely long page that only those on broadband can even read.

We have to cut down the size of VFD. The only way to cut down its size is to cut down the pages nominated, or move them elsewhere. The only way to cut down the amount of pages listed would be to loosen our policies, which surely a lot of people would oppose, or to develop other avenues for listing them, which leads back to "move them elsewhere". So it's your choice, folks. Either you centralise everything on one monolithic page, or you categorise deletions in some manner.

(this essay was originally posted on Wikipedia talk:Preliminary Deletion/Vote) Johnleemk | Talk 11:32, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I don't think the main objection to managed deletion was that it gave admins too much power, but that it privileged them by excluding non-admins from a voting process. Maybe a managed deletion path without this privileging of one grouping might be accepted? (Disclosure: I'm an admin, but not a member of any Cabal, as far as I know.) Filiocht 13:17, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

You know, Filiocht, I thought I was distinctly non-Cabalistic, if not unclubbable, until I wrote the Managed Deletion proposal and was called a Cabal member. The thing about the Cabal is that it's defined by the people who aren't in it. Anyway, the reason for admin-only was that I wanted it to be a form of expanding Speedy without the arbitrariness of "kill on sight" that ought to be really horking off inclusionists (if people only knew what they weren't seeing on VfD). I wanted a way for dangerous stuff and stuff that gamed us to go away, but with a consensus, and I structured the process so that any disagreement defaulted to VfD so that there couldn't be abuse. The reason I didn't make it open to all was that I thought the authors would vote "keep," and even a single keep vote punted to VfD. Also, I thought there were some people who might make it a point of pride or principle, because they don't think anything should be deleted, to go through and cast serial "keep" votes. That would have rendered the page nil. That's why I didn't have it open to all. There is another way, and that's to have a set of "Electors." I described this on the talk page to Johnleemk's proposal, but I gather he didn't like it, either, and it would definitely mean more beaurocracy. Geogre 01:57, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Electors are even more cabalistic, even if there is no cabal. We need to tailour proposals people can swallow. The thing is, as someone said elsewhere (can't remember where I read it), Wikipedia is so divergent now that it may be nigh-on-impossible passing any new policies in the near future, since there will always be a substantial amount of people you can't please (well, enough to prevent consensus at any rate). I find it close to hilarious people are calling Preliminary Deletion confusing or overly bureaucratic. I'm as fed up with red tape as the next person, but to me it seems people have taken advantage of this poll to vent their anger with the increasing bureaucratic procedures we have. I mean, you're able to boil down the policy itself to one sentence! And the additional "extras" are only one or two sentences more. How can this be complicated? I intentionally decided against using your suggestion, Geogre, not because I didn't like it, but because I know how afraid people are of bureaucracy. It's overly complicated, and people won't trust it. I'm extremely frustrated about how that despite the fact that we need to change our policies to keep up with an expanding Wikipedia, a substantial niche of people who have their own ideas (ideas ranging from the wildly inclusionist to deletionist that will get a lot of "no" votes if they're ever put to the vote) are holding up the majority who agree with a particular proposal. If 70% "yes" votes is the best a proposal as simple as this can muster, I wonder how "expanding speedy deletion" will go if it's ever polled for. Expanding speedy deletion gives one admin the vote. It doesn't just exclude non-admins; it excludes all admins but the one who stumbled upon the article. Johnleemk | Talk 08:47, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Now this is going to be hard for me to write, as I feel I'm going against my instincts, but maybe the answer is to just give up? I mean that maybe current VfD setup is the least possible evil? As someone who has tended to avoid the page for a long time now, I may be in no position to talk, but if an alternative solution is so hard to come up with, maybe that's because there is no alternative than to fight the good fight on an article by article basis? Or to accept that Wikipedia will never be an encyclopaedia in the conventional sense and that there will always be articles that I feel have no place here but that have a lot of support from others? In other words, if this place remains a process, thaen the presence of crap is less of a problem than it would be if it ever becomes a product. Of course, if it does ever become a product, I can imagine that a small group (2 or 3 people) will make some very hard-nosed decisions about what to keep and what to dump. Filiocht 09:03, Nov 2, 2004 (UTC)

Well, Filiocht, after the failure of Managed Deletion, I just wrote articles for a couple of weeks, ignoring all else. I was even tempted, when writing, to say what the inclusionists say, "Someone will fix it" and write whatever crap my memory dumped out. I didn't. I researched. I was careful, but it's just as discouraging to know that one's attempts to be precise, to think about one's prose, are of no more value than "Melissa Doll is an erotic model. She is very popular." Why work, when the work has no value? Why not just litter the site with the eager fever of self-fame? Do the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity? If they are, what can we do but step up?

So I have returned to VfD. Article by article. Checking in every :30 or every :60, because otherwise it's too long in new listings alone to manage. I have gone back to being Jack Ketch on the CsD page, though I don't do New Page patrol enough. I don't know what else there is to do, when Johnleemk is right: there are enough people of any point of view who are filled with zeal enough to kill all policy changes.

Johnleemk, I came to the conclusion that speedy expansion was impossible before I wrote the Managed Deletion. On the proposal page, you'll see a bunch of admins agreeing. People will suggest new criteria, and they'll have a civil discussion (see the talk page of my old Managed Deletion -- very constructive and sane), and then it gets to a vote. When it gets to a vote, a host of people are marshalled from the void to not just vote "no," but scream "no" (see -Sj-'s taunting on the subject of extending the vote period on Managed Deletion on the vote page).

My sad assumption is that there is going to be a point where only beaucrats, if not just admins, will have to make non-democratic (not unilateral) decisions. The reason is just that we have policies set up for the days when Wikipedia wanted to grow, when it was vital not to scare away contributors. It was well crafted, over time, for that. Well, we have contributors now. Now, we have a steady enough base and a large enough inventory that we need quality rather than quantity, but our rules are still set up so that no one can be scared off, where all is entirely democratic. I'm for democracy, of course.

As for the Elector thing, it's pretty democratic, but it adds paperwork, no doubt. I don't even think, btw, that anyone is really worried about that. I think that's an excuse. Geogre 13:56, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree with you (but I still can't stomach a full-time return to VFD) in general, but...I don't ever see the community adopting any of these measures. Like I said, if people think Preliminary Deletion is confusing, complicated and bureaucratic, wait till they vote on the elector system. It doesn't stand a chance as the situation is now. Johnleemk | Talk 16:43, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

typo/misspelling redirects

Is there a place where we collect redirects that should be removed? Redirecting misspelled variants can be outright harmful: it leads to wrongly spelled links on WP going undiscovered (because they will be blue, even though misspelled, this has happened to me several times), and also readers may be led to believe that the spelling is correct when it is not. Two examples off the top of my head:

Qu'ran (for Qur'an)
Battle of Khadesh (for Battle of Kadesh).

dab 16:42, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Try Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion. older≠wiser 16:45, Oct 31, 2004 (UTC)

I still believe that there is a strong argument for keeping common misspellings as redirects. It enables searching for the common misspelling. Ideally, we should develop a way to have these handled by some special approach that prevents them from creating blue links. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:39, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

well, instead of a simple redirect, we could put a note saying "did you mean", e.g. at Qu'ran: "Did you mean Qur'an". An automatic redirect is not even noted most of the time, and people will not realize it was a mispelling (rather than an accepted variant). dab 08:22, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It is possible to add a Category to a REDIRECT (you have to append it and make sure the whole thing is on one line. If we categorised REDIRECTs by their function, it would be possible for the Janitorial Squad to check that they are not being used for links where undesirable. --Phil | Talk 12:06, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

We have red links for missing articles and blue for those that exist. Is it not possible to get the system to make links to redirects green or something? Simply checking the first character of the article (a #) might be a simple way of doing this. If the green is of the same brightness level as the blue it would not be overly distracting but would allow us to spot them easily enough. violet/riga (t) 12:16, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

While having the redirect links display in a different color might be OK as a user preference, I just want to point out that it is perfectly acceptable to use redirects as links. I'd be cautious about anything that might give people the impression that using redirect links is somehow deprecated and should be avoided. older≠wiser 14:02, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

To be honest I think that people shouldn't link to redirects - piping them is much better. When editting an article I usually check for any links that are redirects and update them. violet/riga (t) 17:05, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It depends on the nature of the redirect. For example, if the title of a book currently redirects to the author it is still entirely correct to link to the book title: if that article ever gets written, it will now go the right place without further work. Similarly if the name of a building redirects to the city the building is in. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:32, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

If one adds Template:R_from_misspelling, "What links here" can be used to makes sure nothing links there. This makes spell checking easy.

The source is much easier to read if with [[Mayor of Chicago]] instead of [[List of mayors of Chicago|Mayor of Chicago]] (to link to the same page). Such redirects shouldn't be replaced with a direct link. -- User:Docu

Links to redirects can always be replaced automatically, if desireable, so there is no need to deprecate them. The "Misspellings" Category however is an excellent idea (as long as it doesn't spawn enthusiasm for the inclusion of as many misspellings as possible...), and it may also be used to automatically check for mispellings present in article texts. In fact, it would be great to have Categories for all redirects, allowing a classification of why the redirect is there (abbreviation, a.k.a/alias, misspelling, wrongtitle,...) dab 16:51, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC) I just found Wikipedia:Template messages/Redirect pages. nice. dab 18:12, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Proposed method for reconciliation of Deletionist and Inclusionist Attitudes

Inclusionists and Deletionists share what often seems like very little common ground (at least when discussing what to do with unsatisfactory articles), but both hope to make Wikipedia as good as it can be. I have a suggestion that I think would render most inclusionist/deletionist disputes moot; and be a positive wikipedia change as far as both camps are concerned. In the policy proposal I may speak extensively of school articles, though articles on schools are certainly not the only thing that would be impacted by this proposal.

Sometimes (at least when tempers are a bit hot due to a vehement dispute), there is the suggestion from one camp that proponants of the opposition view ought to start their own wiki. Suggestions of this sort are problematic not only in so far as they produce factionalism, but also because, if we were to take them up on that, we would essentially be forking wikipedia. And splitting the editor base into two different projects with large degrees of overlapping intent/content seems to be a bad plan.

So, is there a way to 1) allow people of these diametrically opposed opinions to coexist and 2) not require anyone to give up the fundamentals of their views on what wikipedia is/should be?

I think the answer is yes to both, and the way I would implement it is to have a deletionist wikipedia and an inclusionist wikipedia coexist.

To spell this out: Though there are varying views within either camp with respect to the scope of what wikipedia ought to cover, let us call the inclusionist position the following: All informative factual, verifiable NPOV information belongs in the wikipedia. Let us call the deletionist position the following: Only a certain subclass of informative, factual, verifiable NPOV information belongs in the wikipedia, and that subclass is determined by some factor like Notability or "encyclopedic" subject matter. I put encyclopedic in quotes because it seems as though something very particular is meant by that, and so it is being used in a particularized way.

The solution: Wikipedia ought to have two tiers of articles. Call the broader tier the wide tier, and call the narrower tier the slim tier. All articles start in the wide tier. People can nominate articles to be elevated from the wide tier to the slim tier. Then, there is a votes for promotion process (for those of you concerned that we need fewer voting processes rather than more voting processes, I think that a consequence of adopting this policy would be a drastic, drastic decrease in the number of candidates on VfD). If, by rough consensus, an article is deemed promotion worthy, then the article becomes part of the slim tier. The slim tier would reflect the deletionist ideal of wikipedia, not just the cream of the crop articles (like the one's featured on the front page), but basically all and only those articles that we, by consensus, think are on a suitable topic and well written. The union of the wide tier and the narrow tier would be the inclusionist ideal. Now, when a reader comes to wikipedia, they are presented with (by default) the narrow tier, but also with a clear announcement of the existence of the wider tier (and a notice reflecting the nature of the difference). People can set, via a cookie, whether they would like to use wikipedia slim/professional or the more robust (but also less refined) wikipedia. The result would be that 1) there is still only one wikipedia, and all wikipedians are working on the same articles (in the sense that no article has been forked to a different project, and thus, there is only one instance of each article for people to work on) and the wider tier would contain school articles, articles on hospitals, fire departments, obscure actors, so-called "fan-cruft." etc. Rather than fighting to remove information from the database, people would be proponants of the promotion of certain articles (and I'm sure we could include a process by which articles could be demoted, if that was favored).

In short, we would eliminate all of the notability arguments that occur on VfD, and VfD would basically be used to deal with issues like substubs with no potential for expansion, dictionary definitions, original research, etc. The school issue would be dealt with through 1) policy and 2) debates on votes for promotion. But, the inclusionists would be able to relax because failure to get an article promoted wouldn't mean the information is lost (in the same way an article's deletion results in a loss of information) and deletionists would be happy because there is a professional/"encyclopedic" face to wikipedia.

This compromise seems to be the best solution to accomodate everyone's preferences, alleviate the sheer number of articles on VfD, and allow us to focus on improving the articles themselves.

So, what does anyone think of this suggestion? posiduck 17:20, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea that seems to arise naturally when you think about the problem. However, what you are effectively suggesting is a peer review process. If the narrow tier were the default, most readers would not be able to see articles in the wide tier, and so these articles would, for all practical purposes, not be "accepted" until they are promoted. Those who argue against peer review say that the proportion of articles that are created that are not encyclopedic is relatively small, and wasting time and effort reviewing these is detrimental, and was partially responsible for the destruction of Nupedia.

On the other hand, a process which demoted articles from the narrow tier to the wide tier may be more helpful. In this way, articles could continue to be edited by people who care about them, even after effectively being erased from the public view, and perhaps one day promoted again. As for what the deletionists gain, the person whose content is currently deleted is bound to be more agreeable to a demotion (effectively meaning, go fix it, but take as long as you want) than a deletion. Derrick Coetzee 18:16, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I know that I would be a lot less concerned with demotion than deletion. I would be happy with either system. My questions are, 1) are there problems with this proposal and 2) is this a technical feasibility? However, if there aren't major problems, and we could manage it from a software standpoint, I think this solution is as near to ideal as we are going to get. Posiduck 22:56, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This is already technically feasible. All we'd need is to do is orphan the "demoted" articles and then move them to a namespace reserved for them. Put a suitable tag at the top indicating its status. We could call it the Graveyard. Articles in the Graveyard are considered as good as dead, and are not reachable through normal links or default search, but can be revived by a dedicated editor. Deco 00:56, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps a more accurate description of the inclusionist ideal is that "All, verifiable, presumed-to-be-factual, NPOV information, at the exception only of the lowest trivia, should be included, at the expense of quality." A more accurate description of the deletionist credo might be "Useful, verifiable, presumed-to-be-factual, NPOV information should be included, at the exception of information which is outside the remit of an encyclopaedia, thus at the expense of quantity and breadth." (and it has two As, not one) The hardcore inclusionist understandably wants quantity, regardless of quality, whereas the hardcore deletionist wants quality, regardless of quantity. The key here is to have guidelines which strike a balance between the two, and clearly define boundaries. Perhaps the solution is to table articles at a panel of admins. If it fails the "clear delete" benchmark, then it is deleted (though more slowly than a speedy). If it passes the "clear keep" benchmark, then it is kept. Then, anything which falls in-between goes up for discussion on VfD-under-a-more-suitable-name. Examples of "clear keep" boundaries might be:

For a book, Amazon sales rank above 1,000
For a website, Alexa traffic rank above 100
For a band, a listing on AMG
For a society, clear evidence that being a member makes one notable
For a school, several noteworthy achievements which set it apart from others
For any article, that the article is younger than a certain age (one week? one month? one day?)

"Clear delete" boundaries might be:

For a book, Amazon sales rank below 200,000
For a website, no Alexa rank, or a rank below 1,000,000
For a band, no commercial releases
For a society, no evidence that anyone famous has passed through their doors
For a school, no evidence that it is any different from your average school
For any article, no expansion beyond stub in a certain period (six months? one year? if it's not improved in this time, it likely never will)

These are just examples. We would also need clear, unambiguous definitions of "encyclopaedic" and yardsticks of notability. Then it is only the middle ground over which people will argue, rather than putting all of WP policy at stake. Leaving sensible argument is good, since it concentrates the efforts somewhere. Chris 00:51, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

But these things aren't clear, by definition - what is clear evidence that being a member makes one notable? What if the article is utter garbage, in such a way that it would be unanimously deleted on VFD now, even under a week after being created? On the opposite side, I think there's a strong case that a society can be notable, without anyone famous having passed through its doors. These things need to be judged on their merits. Furthermore, this policy is doomed to failure, as there is no way the inclusionists will agree to the school delete criteria. As to the broader idea - I vote no. Let's not create a whopping technical mess in order to give the inclusionists a Wikimedia-funded playpen. Ambi 01:14, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A playpen as well as a critical source of GFDLed material to be used in future articles. I think such a resource would be well worth the minimal hardware resources it consumes. Deco 01:43, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Actually, it depends. I wouldn't necessarily oppose such an inclusionist paradise version, IF it were not the default. If you could join and then select the preference, that would be fine, but I won't stand for new contributors being turned away by finding crap article after crap article. Ambi 05:22, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree with this. Such articles would not be linked or come up in searches by default. They would also be marked with a tag at the top indicating their status for unwary Googlers. Deco 23:17, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Coming to this fresh, so these comments are a response to the initial offering, and not to the comments that have followed -- forgive my going a bit long, please.

What Posiduck has proposed is a form of the "version system" that some people have advocated. I have no general problem with the version system. The idea that I heard from Angela was that all articles carry with them a rating. Any user might enter a rating value. Only articles that achieve a high average rating would pass over to the "Version 1.0" Wikipedia that would then be eligible for the print versions of the encyclopedia. Users of the Wikipedia could use the "peer reviewed" wikipedia (when researching and wanting more reliable information or not wanting to take a chance on the information) or the unrated Wikipedia.

In general, I think it's an ok way of establishing quality control. However, there are no teeth to the proposal (nor, really, to Posiduck's). What separates us from a playpen or from Everything2 or from Slashdot? We may not be paper, but we are not infinite. Without some disciplinary functions as well as some pruning facilities, we become the latest way-kewel board for people to play, albeit a very expensive one with an extremely high Alexa rank. Our Alexa rank makes us highly coveted for page rank boosting. Our Alexa rank makes us a fun target for vandals.

Therefore, I could abide a version system with the following changes: All new pages must win at least, let's say, 50 ratings before moving on. Let's assume a score of 1-10. Anything with an average of 8-10 goes to FAC. Anything with an average of 3-6 goes to Clean Up. Anything with an average of 2 or lower goes to VfD, simply for evaluation of whether it's worth keeping or not. Anything with an average of 1 or less goes to CSD. If something like that happened, then I could see it.

I look at Wikipedia as being an organism. It must get new food, and it must excrete waste. Growth for its own sake is the ideology of the cancer cell, Edward Abbey said. Geogre 01:44, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

That is a proposal I could agree with - and that quote is particularly of note. Ambi 05:22, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I like this proposal in principle, but see two problems with it. First, wikipedia's penchant for attracting vandals, which has already been pointed out above, could conceivably mess up this sytem entirely if the process is open to all users. It may be wise to restrict voting in some way, whether by experience or number of edits or whatever. My second problem with the system is that it encourages including what is popular as opposed to what is relevant. This is probably inevitable no matter what system of quality control is used since this is first and foremost a communal project, but implementing a system such as this gets us no closer to resolving the conflict between deletionism and inclusionism. I would say that some basic standards that are more strict than wikipedia's current standards would still need to be established apart from popular vote (though these standards should be sensitive to both sides of the debate and not reflect one side or the other's beliefs too strongly)and that popular vote would be used to decide where articles that conform to these basic standards would go according to the version scheme proposed above. Indrian 20:47, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)

What's interesting to me, Indrian, is that your objections are exactly the ones I made when I first heard the "Version" system proposed. I can see a dedicated POV warrior going through every article on HatedEnemy and giving it a 0 rating and every article on EsteemedHero a 10. I can also see the people who vote "keep" on every article on VfD giving every article a 10 score. Since demotion and deletion would depend upon average, it only takes a few curve-killing voters to keep a score out of the average that would lead to deletion or FAC. Further, highly academic topics, or highly esoteric ones, would not get many ratings. Currently, the very good John Dee article is on FAC. Hands up, all those who know who he was. If I tell you he was a 17th century mathematician, would you want to read it? I'm sure you see the dilemma. In fact, even though he was a mathematician, my literature background is better for reading the article than someone else's mathematics background. The biggest problem with all Version systems, though, is that they require what amounts to a major redesign. They take some software work, but they take a complete reorganization of how Wikipedians approach the site. We would all have to go to the Unrated Page every day, read and rate -- possibly having a queue of articles so that we could keep up with the ones we'd done -- and then go to whatever tasks we usually do. Still, as ideas go, it's one of the ones that is closest to something we can all agree upon, I guess. Geogre 04:32, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It's certainly a bold proposal, and on the face of it looks like it would solve a lot of problems. One thing I wonder, however, is if it really would. Specifically, not all Deletionists are the same, and not all Inclusionists are the same, and it is therefore unclear exactly which positions would be represented by each wiki 'slice'. We could, perhaps, do various clasifications for articles and allow cookie-based filtering of those (and then Rambot's work might be gone for those who decide not to use it, for example, while others might like Rambot's stuff but dislike pre-university schools). Another difficulty is the technical issues involved in this -- a lot of design work would go into implementing your proposal (and my improvement ideas make it even worse). Despite these two problems, it certainly is an interesting idea, and is not too much unlike other calls I've seen here that simply want reviewed, polished articles for professional purposes (e.g. printed form). Maybe that's in the future of the codebase if enough people decide it's important. --Improv 06:20, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I would be satisfied with just about any compromise that allows people who want to continue to work on the articles that would otherwise be deleted, without splitting ourselves into two different projects. That's my primary concern. Posiduck 16:21, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It seems to me that your proposal itself involves splitting Wikipedia into two projects, Wikipedia-narrow and Wikipedia-Wide. I don't think such a split is possible to avoid. And I judge from the fact that a significant number of people oppose merely allowing people to view deleted articles that there is no hope of reaching a consensus on this, which goes one step further and allows people to both view and edit deleted articles. anthony 警告 20:19, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Would I be a killjoy to say "If you missed it in the week on VfD, tough shit"? Chris 07:22, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I doubt that there is anyway to render this dispute moot as Posiduck claims at the beginning of his proposal. However, the proposal moves in the right direction towards compromise. The two tier system has promise, but I think if we are going to have two tiers of articles, then some guidelines need to be established other than popular vote for the top tier. These guidelines need not be overly stringent and should reflect the sensibilities of both sides of the arguement, but I think they are necessary. Establishing these guidelines would probably be a protracted and frustrating process, but the end result would probably make wikipedia all the better for it. Indrian 20:47, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)

I completely agree. We have far too much voting already. It's already quite possible to spend your entire time at Wikipedia just voting. As such, one problem which arises is that most issues do not receive a significant number of votes, so a small group of individuals (or a single individual with a few accounts) can easily manipulate things. Fortunately, Wikipedia has already solved this problem. In fact, it is the entire basis of having a wiki. If this proposal were to work, I would suggest that anyone be given the power to move a page to/from the main space. Then guidelines can be established for broad, general cases, and voting can be used for the really disputed cases. Fortunately we already have the general guidelines (What Wikipedia is not), and the forum for voting (VFD). It sounds like we don't have to make any changes, but the key difference is that people can view VFDed articles. I think this alone will take a lot of the heated arguments out of VFD. The threshold for VFD and VFU could be lowered to 50%, and I think a number of people including myself would stop caring so much. I'd stop voting on VFD and VFU completely. anthony 警告 20:30, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Revisited

Here is my proposal, in rough brief form, based on Posiduck's ideas:

There will be a new namespace called the Graveyard. Whenever a page Blah which does not meet the criteria for speedy deletion is voted to be deleted, it is not immediately deleted but is instead moved to Graveyard: Blah, and the redirect at Blah removed (effectively orphaning it). The default Wikipedia search does not search this namespace. A template, {{graveyard}}, is added to the top of the article, explaining to anyone who stumbles across it its status and asking for help in "reviving" it. All articles which are not significantly edited within a specific amount of time, say 6 months, are permanently deleted.

There will be a symmetric process, similar to Votes for undeletion, which can vote to "revive" a significantly improved article from the Graveyard.

What are the advantages of this approach?

Inclusionists win, because content which was formerly deleted is now kept and may be improved for a considerably longer period of time.
Deletionists win, because there will be considerably less opposition to demotion of articles than deletion, without sacrificing quality.
Graveyarding can be achieved by ordinary users using Move (followed by blanking the redirect); administrators can delete Graveyard articles at their leisure, or this could even be made automatic.
Articles which must be removed immediately, due to copyright violation, offensive content, or any speedy delete condition, can still be deleted instantly.

What are your thoughts? Deco 23:30, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Except for the part where you needlessly delete graveyard articles, I think this plan would work just fine. Posiduck 00:31, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I consider this a concession to deletionists who worry about resource usage. Graveyard articles which are continually edited would not become candidates for deletion. Deco 02:17, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Deleted articles are already kept in the database, and so they already use just as many resources as they would in this scenario. Furthermore, I'm sure you could get together enough inclusionists to donate a computer and hard drive to store everything. I myself pledge $100 to Wikimedia if this gets implemented. anthony 警告 20:33, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I have a serious problem with it. First, it essentially allows Wikipedia to be a web host for whatever junk anyone wants to put up. Let's say that the article blah is not "I am the kewelest!!!!! I rule!" but "Bush stole the election. We will have a revolution on January 21st?" What then? Conspirators edit it like mad. It stays edited and edited and edited. Or let's say it says "Bush deserted the military. He was supposed to report but didn't." Then let's say that someone at one of the bad lefty sites puts up a link saying, "Learn the truth about Bush. See Wikipedia's revealing article at" and gives the link. Edits? You bet! Tons of them. It's still trash, and we're now hosting. In the one case, Wikipedia is someone's Angelfire. In the other case, we're having our good name used for politics.

It's only a matter of degree between those and "My new way kewel game is at the following server" or "Chad is so gay" and "Lord Somersault is the cooooooolest character in console game Foobar" that we usually get. Add to that the vanity page where the person edits it a lot. Add to that the kind of junk that happens when illegal things like pedophilia find ways of passing information to one another, and you've got the real world.

We must delete things. There are damned good reasons for killing the junk, and they're not hatred of humanity. They're not attempts at spoiling fun. They're not academic elitism. There is crap out there that puts us all at risk. Geogre 04:22, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree completely with Geogre on this. This site advertises itself as an encyclopaedia and people really need to consider what that word means. The acceptance of crap is the greatest current danger to the future of this project. Filiocht 08:34, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)

I mostly agree with Filiocht -- I don't think it's the greatest danger (the greatest being some successful lawsuit imposing dangerous process on submission, or shutting us down), but feel that it is an important danger to pay attention to. The ability to delete is an important one, but, perhaps unlike a number of other deletionists, I usually vote to delete based on encyclopedicness of topic, not of article. Articles that I argue to delete, therefore, are articles that I think never, regardless of how good the article, will be appropriate for Wikipedia. Generally, if I think a topic is encyclopedic, and the article contents are even roughly aiming in the right direction, I will vote to keep the article, and sometimes work on improving it or rewrite (I've done it a few times -- if you're really interested, dig through my contribution history, noting that I was User:Pgunn before I renamed myself to follow my sig). This proposal seems aimed more at reconciling with a different type of deletionist -- someone who votes to delete articles that are poor but on encyclopedic topics. It may be interesting to attempt to determine how many of both types of deletionist there are. I should also note that, again, I wish people were more civil in these discussions on both sides. --Improv 15:26, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

When I say current danger, I mean one that is actually happening, not some (I agree much more serious) potential but not actual lawsuit. I agree with your approach to deletion, by the way. Unfortunately, it would appear that some contributors do not take the time to consider what an encyclopaedia is before creating an article while others, as you point out, want to delete articles because they are badly written or contain crap. If these articles went to cleanup and 50% of the effort that now goes into VfD went there instead, the problem might well reduce. That said, I do feel that the current voting setup on VfD is counterproductive and in need of reform. Filiocht 15:58, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)

What's being missed here is that Graveyard articles are effectively dead. The notice at the top would specifically indicate that we do not claim such articles have any credibility or significance. As for free hosting, well, yes, but they're also releasing all their content under the GFDL, and so it's available for morphing into actual article content. For example, an editor on the page about the console game Foobar might read your hypothetical Graveyard page on "Lord Somersault" and incorporate some of it after some fact-checking and copyediting. Also, just as real Angelfire pages are terribly unpopular and cost Angelfire little in bandwidth or space, so would these pages.

As for political speech, just because an article is in the Graveyard doesn't mean it's not subject to the same policies as the rest of the encyclopedia, such as NPOV. If the title itself is POV, it can be moved. The point of it being there is for it to be either eventually improved, or eventually deleted. If you could propose an amendment which better ensures this, I'd like to hear it. Deco 16:32, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Geogre, I'm not suggesting we eliminate deletion altogether. I think for copyvio, for random strings of characters, etc., it makes sense to delete those, and we'd still have a VfD for that. But, I am suggesting that for things like schools, hospitals, b-movie actors, as well as stubs on topics that people think should be included, it would be nice if instead of being deleted the articles could be preserved. If we delete a bunch of short but still informative schools now, and then later, policy changes, and the school articles are considered something we should include, it would be nice to just modify and promote the already existing articles rather than have to recreate all of them. It would cut down a ton on the debates of VfD, because most of the hotly debated VfD articles would be candidates for demotion rather than deletion. At the very least it would give inclusionists a chance to put our money where our mouths are, and take the time we aren't wasting on VfD anymore and put it to use improving stubs and whatnot. Posiduck 01:44, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I was under the impression that Graveyard articles would still be editable. Vandalism can still be removed, and vandals can still be blocked. We should still require that anything in the graveyard be verifiable and NPOV. Just not "famous" or "notable". As for the accusation of giving people free hosting, we could run it on a separate computer. In addition to marking the site as not representative of the views of Wikipedia (just as we do with the history pages which suffer from the same problem only worse), we could even put these pages on a separate ___domain name. Of course, now this is starting to sound more and more like McFly, which is already up and running. Just with better database connectivity (which I'd be willing to lease from Wikipedia at cost). anthony 警告 20:43, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I have two answers to make, I guess. Ok, first, unlike Improv, I do vote on the article, not the topic. This is because there are shades of quality in articles. I'll vote to keep even a poor article on a good subject and vote to delete even a good article on a topic that doesn't belong. I think we've got to know, though, that we're being used by more than authors. We're a reference, and there are many, many people using us as such. There are times, as I've argued on my user page, when nothing is better than an insulting something. If the article is "Ironweed is a book by Kennedy. It won the Pulitzer prize," then I'm going to vote to delete it. Why? Well, it's a great book, and it's being used in college classrooms. A new user comes to Wikipedia, searches for information on the book the class is doing, reads that misspelled and useless bit of junk, and never uses us again. It's not that it has to be a beautiful article, but it has to be an article. The authors of substubs are killing us to get their names in lights.

One of the things neither Deco nor Posiduck answered, though, is the very, very real worry that we will become a subcultural board. The worst case has already happened at our sister projects. The German Wikipedia almost got shut down because the pedophiles began writing coded articles that had external links that allowed them to keep in touch with each other. We've had the same things happen here, but nasty deletionists have stomped on them, sometimes with extreme passion. Trust me: that community knows about the possibilities of keeping in touch and posting information on free wiki's. Aside from the legal jeopardy of unwittingly allowing any of these people to propser on a graveyard or demoted space (and yes, ISP's and server corporations have been taken to court and suffered seizures in the US, where Wikipedia lives, for having this junk and not knowing it), think of the moral side of it.

Let's back up, though, from that edge, which is a real one. Let's look at what did, in fact, happen with the John Kerry article during the campaign. Someone went in and just said that Kerry's wounds were "minor." Well, that was POV. Bushcountry.com put up a page telling its readers to "learn the truth" about Kerry's fraudulent Purple Heart medal and gave a link to...guess what?... the edit warred John Kerry article on Wikipedia. Like I said: people do this because we are regarded as a reference.

Let's back up another step, though, from that also real edge, and let's just stick to the game of blah. What is the benefit of it? Cui bono? The primary benefit seems to be that people like it. Ok. They like it. Is that enough? People like pornography, too. We don't exist simply to be fun, or entertainment, or a communications medium, or the service of interests. What is the harm of losing it? People like it. Ok. What is the harm? You see what I mean? The fact that people do like the game means that they're eager to talk about it. It means that we get disproporationate activity on something about which we cannot be encyclopedic and need not cover. We become, in other words, a step closer to GameFAQs. These matters are already covered very well, and the primary benefit is that they entertain contributors, rather than inform the user.

Finally, schools. My objection, and I note that it's the objection mounted by most of the other "school deletionists," is not that the schools have information on them, but rather that they are treated as subjects. It is a question of granularity and taxonomy and of information retrieval and use. When the information on a given school is ___location, mascot, and principal, a table does the trick. By breaking out the information on every single school, and all of it trivial and out of date immediately, we lose that information. It can only be kept together if there are multiple pointer pages. My other problem with individual schools is that we're begging for edit wars and taunts when we have them. That's not a reason to delete, and I don't offer it as such, but "Mr. Smith's class realy sux0r" is going to show up more and more, and school rivals will taunt and repaint each other, once every school is known to exist here. It doesn't happen now because the kids don't find the schools here. If it ever gets to be the case that every HS and MS has an individual article, we're going to be awash in disputes and ugliness. We already get kids calling each other "fag" in articles that get deleted. Imagine when the schools are present.

At any rate, I don't have a problem with a Version system, if it has a digestive system attached to it, but "all things that are not completely false are kept" is not something I support. As for better ideas, Deco, I've offered them before, both above and elsewhere. I'm not one of the people you can accuse of cursing the darkness. Geogre 04:20, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The German Wikipedia almost got shut down because the pedophiles began writing coded articles that had external links that allowed them to keep in touch with each other. We've had the same things happen here, but nasty deletionists have stomped on them, sometimes with extreme passion. Trust me: that community knows about the possibilities of keeping in touch and posting information on free wiki's. Aside from the legal jeopardy of unwittingly allowing any of these people to propser on a graveyard or demoted space (and yes, ISP's and server corporations have been taken to court and suffered seizures in the US, where Wikipedia lives, for having this junk and not knowing it), think of the moral side of it. This could be done just as easily on Wikipedia already, by just putting the information in non-deleted articles, which would then be preserved in the history. Yes, the history can be purged by any developer, but a Graveyard article can be purged by any admin! anthony 警告 20:48, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

And that's why we need to delete articles, rather than having them get continually preserved by redirects. It's why the proposal made by Netoholic and you has met with such resistance from me. We don't need to preserve the histories of junk articles, or inappropriate articles. This is also why admins need to spend their time on RC Patrol with knives out and why people doing New Pages patrol are better off being overly eager to tag speedies than too lax. The danger of illegal junk is very real. Look at the history, some time, of one of the pedophilia-related pages. It's nothing but scar tissue. Geogre 01:59, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It means that we get disproporationate activity on something about which we cannot be encyclopedic and need not cover. But that's just your opinion. The point is not just that people like "blah", it's that people consider it encyclopedic. When the information on a given school is ___location, mascot, and principal, a table does the trick. By breaking out the information on every single school, and all of it trivial and out of date immediately, we lose that information. This is true, and it's why I think the best solution for schools would be to start a schoolopedia. But it's also true for cities, and numbers, and years, and species, and many of the other things in Wikipedia (I just wrote a script to extract the information from the year pages 1-1999 and put it in a database, 99.7% of it fit into the category "events", "births", "deaths", "links to specific year in pages", "nobel prizes", and "leaders", that's a real number, 99.7%, 34319/34425 lines, not an estimate). And this is even more true with year pages than it is with schools, because there is a whole lot that can be said about any school which doesn't easily fit into a table. One advantage of this system is it gives all the information a home in the mean time, and allows us to easily judge whether or not there is enough interest to start a subproject. In the case of schools, I think there would quickly be enough schools in the "graveyard" to justify a full project. Once this project was created, the information would be easily accessible, and there would be no need to start doing mass undeletions. Besides, people could work on the school articles before the new project gets created, without fear of being blocked for recreating deleted articles. anthony 警告 20:58, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

"My opinion?" Well, yes, Anthony. I would express my opinion. Whether my opinion is informed or not is up to community consensus. The problem is, indeed, that people consider the game encyclopedic, but the reason for the problem is the demographic of an online encyclopedia: Wikipedians are overwhelmingly young. The same folks, when they hit 30, will think Pokemon blather silly. So, what do we do? Do we say, "Hey, the Wikimedia Foundation and Jimbo Wales put up money so that everyone can have fun?" Do we say, "This was an effort to create a useful encyclopedia to be used as a reference?" If the latter, then we cut out things that only serve to stroke the happy button of the author in favor of things that satisfy the research needs of the reader. The reader will not seek and will not care about whether GameBlah has rad new supertwisterphasecannon fire pistols. Geogre 01:59, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If this proposal were limited to Pokemon cards, I might agree. But it isn't. Did any of the people who like Pokemon donate money? Probably. Will some of them one day hit 30 and still be contributors? I bet so. I am quite confident that putting this proposal into place will generate more in contributions than it costs. And I've even pledged $100 to the Foundation if this proposal gets implemented to put my own money where my mouth is. Putting this proposal into place will help create a useful encyclopedia, not hinder it. And by the way, the Wikimedia Foundation wasn't created merely for the purpose of making an encyclopedia, it was created for the purpose of developing and maintaining online, free, open content encyclopedias, collections of quotations, textbooks, and other collections of documents, information, and other informational databases. That certainly includes information on schools, and I'd say it even includes information on Pokemon. Maybe this proposal would be better suited for meta. anthony 警告 15:13, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I have to say, while I like the ideas that have been put forth to attempt to find ways to reconcile the different opinions, as well as the fact that people care about negotiating here, I find the idea of including articles to get money to be one which we should avoid at all costs. We are not advertising, nor should we make decisions on article content, for any reason, to seek funds. Our goal should, pretty firmly, be just to make the best encyclopedia we can. The other projects should do the same for their proper scopes. As a side note, as you know, we (along with plenty of others on both sides) disagree on (pre-university) schools, and also on Pokemon. --Improv 15:20, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I certainly like this idea. In fact, it's part of the intention of my Wikipedia fork, McFly. Call Wikipedia the narrow version, and call McFly the wide version, and we've already got this essentially in place. I'd much rather have Wikimedia adopt this solution itself, but until then there's always McFly (I've just added the ability to edit, and am working on parsing Wikipedia:Deletion log regularly, only allowing users to edit deleted articles, and sending the edit button to Wikipedia for everything else). anthony 警告 19:58, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Copied discussion

I think the two-tier idea has a lot merit. It could be especially good for schools. I copied the discussion to Wikipedia:Two-tier system. Maurreen 18:33, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

GFDL-friendly merge-and-delete of short, single-author material?

As some may know, there is continuing contention over the disposition of very short articles about non-notable high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. I am experimenting with the idea that such material should be merged into articles about the towns, on the premise that people interested in the town are better able to judge the appropriateness of this material than the general VfD population.

Here's the question. In the case of a short article that is exclusively, or almost exclusively the contribution of a single author, it seems to me that it ought to be possible to perform a "GDFL-friendly merge-and-delete" by placing a manually-written notice in the article's talk page, similar to the one below. (I've deliberately chosen one in which the article was created primarily, but not exclusively, by a single author). I'd like thoughtful comments on whether this is good enough. (I realize this isn't what you might call algorithmically perfect but GFDL is a human-interpreted license, not an algorithm).

This example concerns inserting the entire text of High Tech High into a section of San Diego, California.

The text is copied exactly from High Tech High to preserve GFDL traceability. Will clean up shortly. The text is that as of 17:25, 1 Nov 2004 Bboarder12. The text is entirely the product of a single author, Bboarder12, with the exception of the insertion and removal of various Wikipedia administrative notices by others. The history is: [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:14, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

(cur) (last) 17:25, 1 Nov 2004 Bboarder12
(cur) (last) 17:20, 1 Nov 2004 Bboarder12
(cur) (last) 17:05, 1 Nov 2004 Bboarder12
(cur) (last) 17:04, 1 Nov 2004 CBDroege m (reason)
(cur) (last) 17:04, 1 Nov 2004 CBDroege m (original author of page is not allowed to remove speedy deletion candidacy.)
(cur) (last) 17:02, 1 Nov 2004 RickK (vfd)
(cur) (last) 17:00, 1 Nov 2004 Bboarder12
(cur) (last) 16:56, 1 Nov 2004 Bboarder12
(cur) (last) 16:52, 1 Nov 2004 CBDroege m (candidate for speedy delete)
(cur) (last) 16:49, 1 Nov 2004 Bboarder12
(cur) (last) 16:47, 1 Nov 2004 Bboarder12

Placing a notice on the talk page does not satisfy the terms of the GFDL, which requires the list of authors to be in the section entitled history. If history information is lost accidently this isn't such a big deal, and we can wait until someone actually complains to remove the material, but we shouldn't be making this a regular practice. anthony 警告 21:18, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Accelerated VfD

I have just posted another proposal to try and deal with VfD overload. Since it a) is primarily a formalization of current practice, and b) requires unanimous consent of the entire community (admins and non-admins alike), I am hoping that it will be less controversial than some of the other proposed ways to deal with Wikipedia's seriously broken housekeeping processes. It currently is here. If someone wants to make it into a formal, separate voting page, fine. If people want to comment or suggest tweaking the numbers there, that's fine, too. Niteowlneils 19:09, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Whether to allow warnings about inaccurate information on the WWW?

When I was web searching for information about the APS Underwater Assault Rifle 5.56 mm, using Altavista's web searcher, I found a realistic-looking page about this rifle, which described this rifle in detail, and also mentioned a USA copy of this rifle and a recent undercover war called the Twilight War. The Russian APS is real and as described, but the USA copy and the Twilight War are fiction and occur in a videogame scenario. The page did not mention anything obviously fictional such as ray guns or spaceships. I do not play videogames and I had not heard of that videogame or its scenario. The web page did not mention any videogame and did not warn that any of its content was fictional.

That sort of mixture of fact and fiction (sometimes nicknamed "faction") can be a major pitfall and landmine for people looking for information. As a result, when I wrote the Wikipedia page APS Underwater Assault Rifle 5.56 mm (having checked the information by looking in reliable information at the APS's maker's web site), I included a pointer to a web page A warning about websites that describe guns which I wrote describing this risk of being misled. But someone deleted the page and the pointer to it.

However, the Wikipedia page Gestapo's section "Books" includes this warning:-

Suspected hoax works about the Gestapo include:
Gestapo Chief: The 1948 Interrogation of Heinrich Müller - Gregory Douglas. San Jose, CA 1995

which has been allowed to stand. Please, what is policy about warning the readers about inaccurate information on the WWW or in books or in films etc?

Readers should be told about possible inaccuracies in our own articles. We cannot be held accountable, however, for the rest of the web — anyone who isn't aware by now that the web isn't a totally reliable source of information probably shouldn't be reading Wikipedia. If it's a widespread phenomenon, it may at best deserve mention in the body of the article. If you're afraid an editor may use the faction page as a source, feel free to include an HTML comment mentioning it specifically. Deco 07:43, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Anthony Appleyard 08:03, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think A warning about websites that describe guns was correctly deleted. Charles Matthews 09:46, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

See also this talk area. Anthony Appleyard 17:03, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Reporting the POVs in dictionary definitions together with the POVs of opposing experts is always NPOV

Cited definitions from dictionaries such as the American Heritage Dictionary have been cut repeatedly from several Wikipedia pages. The reason given is that the "dictionary definition is POV." I cite you to the recent history of a disambiguation page and its TalkPage.

I suggest part of the solution to this problem is to insert a new paragraph into the NPOV page to state explicitly, "Dictionary definitions are always NPOV if the contrasting definitions of experts are also quoted and cited." The most appropriate position would be following the "Religion" paragraph of the NPOV page. ;)

Any suggestions? ---Rednblu | Talk 08:59, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure if we could assume that dictionary definitions from a real dictionary are always NPOV -- there may be some bad dictionaries out there, and dictionaries don't always reflect actual usage of a word. Personally, I don't think citing dictionaries ever adds anything to an encyclopedia, and imagine it might be a bad practice to get into. --Improv 14:47, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- Further note -- older dictionaries were often not even remotely POV -- I've looked at some older ones from the early 1900s, and they're hilariously POV. Even newer ones, for reason of historical conservativism or lack of agreement with us about what NPOV is about, are often not POV. I therefore don't think being part of a dictionary necessarily contributes at all to NPOV, and therefore think your proposal, while well-intentioned, is based on bad premises. --Improv 17:36, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
  - But wouldn't those older dictionaries validate for sure that those old hilarious POVs actually were part of history? :) ---Rednblu | Talk 17:44, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
    - It might be notable that some people thought that, but wouldn't necessarily be notable as to what other points of view were common at the time. We might expect, say, French dictionaries during colonial times to be very much for reporting the French government POV, and we might intuit a nationalist POV to oppose them, but that wouldn't necessarily tell us about the differing tribal POVs, the Communist POV, the early liberal POVs, the ... Basically I'm saying is that it can't be a very good rule of thumb. I don't see the utility in quoting dictionaries at all on Wikipedia. --Improv 20:09, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
      - I agree totally--no utility in quoting dictionaries. However, if a POV is expressed in a dictionary, then that POV is per se and necessarily a valid POV to document on Wikipedia, is it not? There would be no rational justification for cutting one dictionary definition among others from a Wikipedia page simply because of the POV in the dictionary definition that was cut, would you agree? ---Rednblu | Talk 21:23, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A dictionary definition is an opinion, though often an expert opinion. So it should be fine to quote it as long as you attribute it and as long as it's relevant to the article. In an article about a word you might quote the OED to show what scholars believe about the etymology or use of that word. But in a dispute about ownership of a word (e.g. "is America a democracy or a republic?" "is atheism a religion?" "is communism the same as totalitarianism?") quoting the dictionary doesn't help. Both sides of the dispute know that the word has more than one meaning. Gdr 15:56, 2004 Nov 6 (UTC)
- Those examples are helpful. I am folding your comment and everybody's else comments into the following "Digesting the suggestions" section. ---Rednblu | Talk 21:45, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- I agree with what you say, but I don't think we should have articles about words in the first place. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. For example, evolutionism should be about evolutionism, not about the word evolutionism. I think it's somewhat rare that an article benefits from quoting general dictionary definitions. If the meaning of a word is that non-obvious, we should probably be using a disambiguation page and pointing to other pages with more clearly defined terms. If the term is a specialty term, then we'd be better off using a specialty dictionary or other specialty source. anthony 警告 21:32, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
  - That many dictionaries state a POV should qualify that POV for representation in a NPOV Wikipedia page--no matter what POV the dictionaries state--whether the POV opposes my, your, or anybody's else POV. Is it not true that in Wikipedia, opinion is turned into fact by saying accurately who states the quoted opinion? Of course, summarizing any POV in a Wikipedia NPOV page does not settle the controversies among POVs. Our job in Wikipedia is to quote and cite the varying POVs and let the readers decide. Would you agree? ---Rednblu | Talk 21:59, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Digesting the suggestions: I plan to edit this section as we go along :)

Thanks for helping me clarify the "algebra" of NPOV. For example, I changed the heading on this section to clarify the idea here. After thinking about your comments, I find the following.

Likely the final page should not cite dictionaries. That is, artful editing generally would make the page flow better than just quoting dictionary definitions.
Many times a particular dictionary definition may not provide encyclopedic interest. In that case, editors would agree readily that the particular POV in that dictionary definition was non-interesting.
Dictionary definitions will not resolve which POV is right--merely validate that the POVs in the dictionary definitions are appropriate POVs to detail in Wikipedia somewhere. For example, dictionary definitions will not resolve whether "America is a republic or a democracy"--merely validate at most that there are two opposing POVs that are both appropriate POVs to detail in Wikipedia somewhere.
- Older dictionaries illustrate the point. Older dictionaries serve to validate that the hilariously old-fashioned ideas in them were actual POVs back in time. And hence, those POVs in older dictionaries serve to validate those old-fashioned ideas as appropriate for detailing in Wikipedia pages as part of the history of ideas. But neither the older or the newer dictionaries can settle which POV is right.
However, in constructing pages, including associated disambiguation pages, for a controversial area, dictionary definitions always would serve one important function, namely validating that the POVs in the dictionary would NPOV qualify for representation in some page. This would apply in any situation where there was disagreement among editors whether the POV in the dictionary definition was to be allowed "print space" on the page. (Typos are readily identified by the publisher.)
Hypothesis. Hence, NPOV could always be achieved by detailing the POVs in the dictionary definitions together with detailing the opposing POVs of experts.

It appears to me that the above states a falsifiable hypothesis on all dictionary definitions. That is, one counter-example that would falsify the above hypothesis would be from the following:

Find a word W in a dictionary D such that the D definitions for W together with opposing expert opinions would NOT make a NPOV page.

An example in support of the above hypothesis would be the word work for which the dictionary definitions state the following two POVs together with others.

POV 1. Work is the transfer of energy from one physical system to another, especially the transfer of energy to a body by the application of a force that moves the body in the direction of the force. (There would be several alternative statements of this POV.)
POV 2. Work is one's place of employment.

According to the hypothesis, an NPOV report on the concept of work could always be achieved by constructing a set of pages, together with appropriate disambiguation pages, of the POVs in the dictionary definitions of work surrounded by the POVs of the experts on work that differ from the POVs in the dictionary definitions of work.

In particular, NPOV would require that the non-scientific POV 2 on work would not get cut from a disambiguation page on work. ---Rednblu | Talk 17:27, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Reputable dictionaries are exactly as citable as any other reputable sources, no more, no less. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:10, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)
- I would have thought so a priori--before encountering a real situation. :( But then, when in an actual situation of having an exact quote from the American Heritage Dictionary cut by an editor as at this link, when I thought about it, there seems to be a lack of general understanding--including my own--about how citable a dictionary really should be. For example, I would have reverted the cut and argued much more strongly if the cited quotation had been from Darwin's Origin of Species--because I could say "Darwin said that." But who knows who wrote the dictionary definition? Thanks for helping me think this through--because I think a section in the NPOV documentation is required. ---Rednblu | Talk 20:04, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
  - To put it briefly: dictionary definitions are not special, nor is any particular source. Any text exhibiting a point of view is POV, without exception, although you could certainly contend whether a piece of text is POV or not. I can't help but see this whole argument as a way of drawing attention to and justifying a single tiny edit. I'd seriously consider just moving on. Deco 21:46, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
    - Thanks for the advice. :)) ---Rednblu | Talk 22:07, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

How to handle stale NPOV disputes

This is a question on the existing NPOV policy, regarding the detail how to handle articles which are listed as NPOV dispute but no activity is seen. The typical NPOV dispute article sees rather hectic activity, hopefully in the discussion, but sometimes escalating to edit wars in the article.

But there are some articles which are NPOV dispute listed, but no activity is seen. Except when trying to remove the NPOV dispute warning. So I wonder whether it is OK to use the dispute tag to stigmatize an article forever.

I've also asked at Wikipedia talk:NPOV dispute, but that page seems to have few watchers.

Pjacobi 21:29, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've previously gone through NPOV-disputed pages a few times to clean out old ones like that. What I usually did was ask on the talk page if the NPOV dispute was still ongoing, wait a week, and if there was no reply then either nobody's got it watchlisted any more or nobody cares about the old dispute. Of course I also check to see if there's any NPOV problem that's obvious to me as a total outsider, but if there isn't one and nobody seems to care I just remove the NPOV header. If there's still a problem someone will put it back someday. Bryan 21:44, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes, that would be the easy case. But I'm referring to the case, that when asked, or when trying to remove the dispute notice, there is opposition. But still no changes to the content. To make the case less abstract, my primary problem is Open Directory. --Pjacobi 22:42, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Heh. Yeah, I ran into one of those myself; Talk:Thealogy#NPOV still in dispute?. I tried using the threat of resolving the NPOV myself despite not knowing anything about the subject, through the "use a dull axe on any parts that seem POV and maybe also on the parts adjacent to those just to be sure" strategy, hoping it'd spark some effort to fix things before I got busy. It didn't work, so I used an axe on any chunks that seemed POV. Surprisingly, that did work. My axe was sharper than I thought. :) Anyway, you could try that; warn everyone that you're about to solve their dispute for them. One way or the other it'll shake things loose. Bryan 23:12, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You might also consider the tag {{controversial}}, which indicates that the topic is controversial without saying that there is necessarily a dispute in progress. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:43, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

Copyrights

See User:AaronSw/Song lyrics. What is the policy of having copyright violations in User pages? Rick K 08:41, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)

Same as for any other page. Everything published on Wikipedia is supposed to be under the GFDL; if these lyrics are copyrighted, a case might be made for fair use in a proper context (i.e. an article about the song) but I doubt that a user page qualifies. If they are copyrighted, AaronSw should tag the page for speedy deletion; if he refuses to do so it should be sent through Wikipedia:Copyright problems. —No-One Jones ^(m) 09:22, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've left a note about it on AaronSw's talk page. —No-One Jones ^(m) 09:25, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Transliteration

Discussion archived to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English)/diacritics.

See my proposal here: Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(use_English)#Proposal (should maybe be copied here?)

dab 15:17, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

As of CURRENTYEAR

See Talk:As of CURRENTYEAR. --Sgeo | Talk 23:40, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)

Countdown deletion

I'm a complete newbie when it comes to policies, so any help (in suggestions as well as merciless editing) is appreciated. I think Preliminary Deletion isn't going to work. I've blathered up a suggestion of my own (after all, we can never have too much deletion policies :-) tentatively called "countdown deletion". It's on a personal subpage; check it out, mull it over and tear it to pieces if necessary. Thanks in advance for giving a damn. JRM 00:55, 2004 Nov 8 (UTC)

Use of the word terrorism

It seems, from Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks, that people are in favour of trying to develop a sitewide set of guidelines for the use of the word terrorist. In view of its likely length, the discussion has been moved to a separate page: Wikipedia:Use of the word terrorism (policy development). Please go to that page if you wish to be involved in developing this policy, and publicise this page as appropriate to fellow Wikipedians who may be interested. jguk 22:35, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Johns Hopkins faculty

Quite a number of pages created recently have been copied directly from web page of Johns Hopkins University. While this may not be so serious as copyvio, I think the simple copying of CV-type material about faculty members and courses into WP is not a great precedent. See for example User:128.220.30.161. Charles Matthews 10:53, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This is actually strong copy violation, unless it's the author posting the content, and more than likely it's a student. However, I'm sure we could get permission from some appropriate authority to use the content. Deco 15:41, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I doubt we'd want the material, though, as one of the things "Wikipedia is not" is a place for resumes or CV's. N.b. someone just put up a silly joke article on a member of the comedy improv troupe at Hopkins, as well. Hopkins students are supposed to be clever, but apparently someone there isn't reading our policies. Geogre 18:41, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It's not just CVs, though — they're fairly good concise descriptions of the people's background and work in prose form, and that's about as much as we have in most researchers' articles. Here's an example (from Meredith Williams):

Meredith Williams, Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, received her B.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. She taught at Wesleyan University (Connecticut) and Northwestern University before joining the Hopkins Department in 2000. Her areas of research are [ . . . ]

They might be considered non-notable, but well, they are faculty at a well-known university, and I am an inclusionist. Deco 23:55, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Oh, great, now the copyvio is on this page, too. Rick K 22:12, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)

Suggestion on PROT, NPOV and edit/revert war articles

In most cases, disputed articles are resolved by means of the Talk page. But often they arent. In some cases the article is locked, and development stalls, in other cases there is a valid NPOV point but no progress is made until one or other contributor gives up and goes away, which is fair but not the best version of neutrality (see stale NPOV discussion above).

Ideally the handling of disputed articles should:

Where possible not freeze development of the article as a whole (edit wars imply an individual in breach wiki policy, and hence represent a problem with some individual(s), not the article)
Not encourage articles to become locked (except in cases of actual vandalism)
Not encourage articles to become described as disputed overall if the actual issue is in reality small scale (eg section or word use)
Minimise the time that articles are in dispute

A way that might work is to refine the use of tags so that heavy handed measures (NPOV or PROT on a whole article is quite heavy) are much less needed and mostly reserved for dealing with pollicy breach not article disagreement. Compare two articles:

In September 11, 2001 attacks the entire article was NPOV'd at one point with the main reason being a debate basically whether "terrorism" was right or not. But that tag arose not because the article as a whole was in dispute, just one term used in it.
In the Pursuit_of_Nazi_collaborators article an NPOV tag was added because the title was possibly NPOV, and there was debate what the scope of the article should be. But that labelled the entirety of the article and all facts as disputed, where they actually weren't.
In Paraphilia there was an argument that the entire article's approach was not neutral. In such a case a NPOV tag is more appropriate.

In fact, on Paraphilia, I chose {{POVCheck}} and not {{NPOV}}, meaning "This article may need to be reworded to conform to a neutral point of view; however, the neutrality of this article is not necessarily disputed", which was more accurate, so as not to mislead readers of the present article that there was more doubt than was the case. Because I didnt want visitors to be faced with an article that was 70% right and yet be told at the top, "this is all disputed".

What comes across clearly to me is,

There need to be some more appropriate tags which are more applicable to smaller scale dispute
In case of dispute, use of minimal tags where reasonable are so preferable this should be wiki policy
- (A minimal tag can be left longer as it doesn't lock or cast doubt on the whole article)
The tags applicable to disputed words/sections/articles need to be made much easier to find (maybe a link on the edit page?)
Once a disputed aspect of an article is tagged, revert and edit wars on that point are not permitted. Sysops may select what they feel is a fairly balanced wording for the time being, and provided it's tagged as "disputed", the rest is kept to the talk page until agreed.
Major tags such as NPOV which affect entire articles should by policy only be appropriate if the entire article or major parts of it are disputed
Tages such as PROT should only be needed to prevent vandalism and/or revert/edits against wiki policy, by users who do not respect sysop decision.
- (But any article content dispute can be resolved as above so PROT shouldn't be as necessary)
PROT especially should be used slightly differently. If an article needs protecting from one user, then that user is the person who must be blocked or asked to stick to the talk page, not the article. Only if the article is subject to anarchic major editing from multiple sources should PROT be needed.

Examples of new small scale tags I'd suggest (ok they arent perfect but its an idea someone else could develop upon):

"This section is being developed or reviewed. Some statements may not be neutral or may be disputed at present. Please see Talk page before editing"

"There is dispute over the usage of the following words, which may not be neutral or may be disputed. Please see the talk page. This article retains the existing words until consensus is reached"

"This is a fast changing article and many areas are being developed at a time. Lesser disputes such as posisble individual NPOV words have been left to a side while the article as a whole is developed. These should be discused on the Talk page rather than allowed to override the development of the article as a whole."

"This article is subject to regular edit and revert wars, and the administrators of Wikipedia have agreed a wording which they feel comfortable is not unreasonable for the time being. The article is left open for development, but these aspects should not be changed until a better consensus is reached and the matters on the Talk page are resolved."

"The following words are not considered neutral by some, and are actively being discussed on the Talk page"

In summary, the changes would be:

Specifying that users should wherever possible use the most appropriate tag (not just "NPOV")
Encouraging lesser levers of dispute,
Requiring proper tagging, not just NPOV for everything, possibly by a "tags help" next to the "editing help" on the edit page
Allowing sysops to specify a relatively neutral wording until a better consensus is reached

wiki can keep more articles open and reduce the number where the whole article is marked as disputed, without in any way reducing people's power to contribute individually.

Its a raw suggestion with many holes in right now, but the heart of it - better use of tags disputing a word or section without casting the whole article into doubt, ways to say "yes we disagree on X but lets come back to it" and ways for a sysop to say "use that wording until you get a better consensus", could help free up many locked and stalled articles, allow faster ways to resolve edit wars, and that would benefit everybody.

FT2 21:21, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

VfD follow-up?

I have always assumed that there was some process to ensure articles that have spent 5 days on VfD are acted upon based on the voting. I had also assumed that the specific process is that they only get removed from VfD if they have been acted upon. Apparently that may not the case, as the 10/26 entries were removed en masse 11/1, and put on /old, even tho' Black Templars, at least, hadn't been acted on, and still hasn't weeks later. Was I correct and this article just unintentionally slipped thru the cracks? Or are they just moved to old and it is just hoped that someone will do something with them some day? If so, how can one tell if there are articles that still need to be acted on on /old--Black Templars' 'What links here'doesn't reveal any sort of tracking page. Niteowlneils 03:53, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Maybe they get removed from /old when acted on one way or another? Are we really that far behind (10/24)? Niteowlneils 04:02, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

OK. After several red herrings, I finally found Wikipedia:Deletion process, and we are that far behind. I guess I'll start trying to help. Niteowlneils 04:48, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Dude, if you can figure out the prose of the deletion procedures, you move to the head of the class. It was about as thick as a whale omlette, which is why I haven't been lending a spade to the effort. I'd like to, though, and I don't even mind going after the "controversial" debates. (I don't count nonce accounts.) Geogre 02:08, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Upcoming Arbitration Committee election

Based on some preliminary discussions, a proposal has been formulated for the next Arbitration Committee election, to be held in December. --Michael Snow 04:46, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Contributions from the associate director of ACSH on the ACSH article

For several years now there's been a very low-intensity edit war over on the DDT article over how much funding the American Council on Science and Health gets from industry sources and whether that has an impact on their impartiality. An anonymous user - it seems to have been the same one throughout, the wording he's used is consistent - has kept trying to play down industry connections, and other users have found sources showing they're more significant than he lets on. I finally split out that material into the article American Council on Science and Health so that DDT could remain more stable from now on and the anonymous user came in and made his changes again over there, but this time he announced that he was Jeff Stier (the Associate Director of ACSH, in charge of external affairs among other things). Assuming this is true, how do we handle contributions from "involved" people like this? On the one hand he's got access to a great deal of information, but on the other hand it just gives weight to my perception that he's been rather partisan. Bryan 16:45, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC) (small update: I emailed Jeff Stier to confirm that it is him, and he responded that it was.)

He should be encouraged to provide any and all information that he is willing to(maybe on the Talk page), but should be gently reminded that it is Wikipedia policy for involved people not to directly edit articles on subjects they are involved in. Basically, he should post on the Talk page, not the article. JesseW 01:05, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Splitting the VfD page won't help one of the current problems with it (big processing backlog)

There is currently a week-long backlog of VfD processing (IE there's been no action at all on most of the nominations whose 5-day voting period expired in the past 7 days), because not enough people are spending enough time doing it. Splitting the VfD page does nothing to help with this. The problem also seems to be increasing, I checked a random recent 5-day period, and 132 nominations were added to VfD, and a bit less than half (59) were processed and removed from the VfD "old" page (where the processing happens). VfDs "old" page is huge and growing, and usually takes a minute or two (literally) to save, further slowing down VfD processing. I just discovered this; it makes me all the more convinced we need alternatives to VfD.
I don't know if most people are aware of this, but you do NOT have to be an admin to help with VfD processing--I did about 80 this morning, and didn't have to delete a single article (I did cheat a bit by focusing on the easiest ones, but that was to shrink the page as fast as possible--I got the number of listings down by about 20%, although the handful of VERY long debates means that doesn't truly reflect page size reduction). (re-posted from prelim. del. vote page) Niteowlneils 00:43, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Well, I would help if I don't have to judge consensus; i.e. if a decision has been reached. I understand the reasons for having a somewhat vague standard for judging consensus, but at least in my case, and I think in many other's, that's what keeps us from helping out at VfD. JesseW 01:09, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Well -- as someone who has originated his share of VfD's, I hereby commit to to try to clear at least two old VfD's each time I add a new one. Anyone else wanna take the pledge? --jpgordon{gab} 01:31, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Also -- I'd like to propose that VfD/Old be modified so that instead of {{Votes for deletion/article name}}, it read [[Votes for deletion/article name]] so that the silly thing loads more quickly. --jpgordon{gab} 07:16, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

For a few months I was clearing VfD/Old each day, but on October 23 I was asked to stop. Due to a recent uptick in deletionism I no longer agree with all VfD decisions, and I thus do not have much interest in renewing my involvement. - SimonP 07:23, Nov 12, 2004 (UTC)

Just as a matter of interest, who asked you to stop and why? -- ALoan (Talk) 12:12, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Vfd processing backlog is back down to 2 days--great work people (mostly Francs2000)! Niteowlneils 02:56, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm a little confused... I'd like to help with the VfD "backlog", but I looked for some explicit backlog and read some instructions and so on and can't figure it out. Does this just mean deleting articles with a consensus to delete that are older than 5 days? Deco 05:31, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Never mind, I found it (Wikipedia: Deletion process). Deco 05:31, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

After 15 minutes of doing this, it seems like a 7 step process with 5 windows open per article is a bit tedious. Perhaps there should be a script for this. Deco 06:00, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Can we get a similar catch-up effort on the trans-wiki backlog on 'old', dating back to April! Niteowlneils 20:13, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Keeping In The News neutral and relevant

I've proposed a new criterion for the Template:In the news guidelines with the aim of keeping ITN focused on widely reported stories covered by multiple major news outlets, and ensuring that NPOV is maintained. Please take a look at the proposal and add feedback at Wikipedia talk:In the news section on the Main Page. -- ChrisO 18:59, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Moveable Feasts on the Main Page

I have just found out that today is Eid ul-Fitr and have added it to today's current events. Like Easter and many other days - some non-religious - it's a moveable feast. What is the policy about puting these moveable feasts on the main page?

I know they don't really fit into the In the news or Today's Featured article boxes, but I am of the opinion that the main page should relect that we are aware that certain days are observed. I'm suggesting a box that would say (for example) Today is Diwali/Easter/Martin Luther King Day/Eid ul-Fitr/Mardi Gras etc. -- Martin TB 20:26, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

also astronomical events, solstice, equinox, eclipses, etc.; mabe even a permanent little box giveng the moon phase (although that may be a bit too much clutter) dab 20:40, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

On a sidenote, I have no idea that the word "movable" contained two Es. ;-) Agree that they should be mentioned somewhere on the day. Chris 07:32, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

See American and British English differences#Common_suffixes. In fact, even most American dictionaries consider "moveable" an acceptable variant of "movable" [1]. And, of course, movable feast is a redirect. Deco 07:51, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think the current solution of having these days under "Selected Anniversaries" is ideal, even though it's technically not an anniversary in some sense (well, it's an anniversary according to a different calendar...) Mpolo 08:50, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)

I removed the item from the Current Events page because I didn't feel that it was a 'Current Event'. To me the page is where news items are posted. If something had happened because of Eid ul-Fitr then yes it would go there along with the reference to the news site it was found on. Also the person who posted it had put it on the wrong day anyway.--enceladus 00:07, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

Actually I hadn't posted it on th wrong day. It was celebrated in the UK on Saturday, in the US and the Middle east on Sunday and in Morocco and some other territories today. It's a moveable feast! Martin TB 07:45, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I assume what is happening is that each group of Muslims require an actual sighting of the cresent moon by their group. --enceladus 21:41, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

Two articles on the same man - what's the policy?

Is there a policy on when it's ok to have two articles on the same man (but under different names)? Some people seem to say are ok to be merged, others stay for ages. jguk 20:47, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Almost always should be merged (assuming that one person is actually the subject of both articles: for example, we could have both a biographical article about an author and any number of articles about his or her books). -- Jmabel | Talk 20:56, Nov 13, 2004 (UTC)

I've just seen Jesus and Isa. Should these be merged then? jguk 21:09, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Probably not. Isa specifically discusses the concept of Jesus when used by that name and differences from other Jesuses. There isn't significant duplication of content. As long as the articles don't cover or aim to cover about the same material, merging isn't usually warranted. Deco 21:20, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Don't forget Yeshu... but no, probably these articles should not be merged. Gady 22:49, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Those do all interlink, and Isa is even explicitly in the "Jesus" template, while Yeshu is linked several times. They're not merged because Jesus is far too long as it is! Mpolo 08:47, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)

Well that's a different point Mpolo. The Jesus article needs shortening, but that doesn't mean the others shouldn't be merged with it. I'm still puzzled as to why we want 3 biographies of the same man. Wouldn't one merged one be better? jguk 15:20, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

To be honest I don't think it would, it is better to treat the three articles as different entities. If the three are merged religously important details could be accidentlily cut, and precedent will almost certainly be given to a particular image of Jesus/Yeshu/Isa. I think merging them just isn't worth the inevitable arguaments. Rje 06:47, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Arbitration policy amendment vote

I proposed a streamlining of the Arbitration Committee's policy in August, and, given that it is now 3 months on, I have just opened a ratification vote about it. James F. (talk) 03:28, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Proposal to enforce the Three Revert Rule

There is a vote and discussion on whether and how to enforce the Wikipedia:Three revert rule on Wikipedia:Three revert rule enforcement and Wikipedia talk:Three revert rule enforcement. Please come and contribute your comments/votes. jguk 14:16, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Stub sorting

I think the evaluation of stub sorting needs some kind of restriction or review... There are some creation of categories and stub templates which are completely useless... --[[User:AllyUnion|AllyUnion (talk)]] 09:29, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Right Floating TOC

I have been advised to post here to draw peoples attention to a discussion about WP:MOS and the TOC. I am suggesting that it is more aesthetically appealing to have the TOC floating on the right. My suggestion can be found at Wikipedia talk:TOC#Right floating TOC Please comment -- Martin TB 19:39, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

the cost of vandalism

I blocked an annoying vandal, last night, for the duration of 24h. (User:24.71.223.141). I shouldn't have done so, as it's a proxy, and a few minutes later, a legitimate user complained about the block. Technically, wouldn't it be easy to allow unblocked, logged-in users (with an account creation predating the block) to edit even when on a blocked IP? This would solve the annoying problem of 'unblockable' proxy IPs (we would just have to kindly ask editors on vandal-prone IPs to get an account).

A more general thought I had recently was that, the larger WP will grow, the greater the percentage of time spent reverting worthless edits will become. The singularly low threshold to contributing is a major feature of WP, and clearly a big advantage on an encyclopedia that consists mainly of stubs. The more accomplished an article, however, the less likely an anonymous edit is to be useful. I would therefore propose:

the introduction of a 'protected from anon edits' status as a measure less drastic than 'protection' for frequently vandalised articles
automatic 'protection from anon edits' for featured articles
at some point in the future maybe even a 'good faith' tag for users known to have made good faith edits, and protection of featured articles from edits by all but these

such a course would provide the more vulnerable articles some protection from the main brunt of casual vandals (while of course the determined ones will not be deterred), while it would not raise the threshold for quick creation of new articles, and edits to stubs. dab 12:58, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

"...would not raise the threshold much", I'd say. It does raise the threshold somewhat. It's not completely hassle-free, or something. (If it were, there obviously wouldn't be any point.)

the introduction of a 'protected from anon edits' status as a measure less drastic than 'protection' for frequently vandalised articles
Sounds good in theory, but I'm pretty sure there will be a heap of vandals who have no qualms about registering bogus accounts when it comes to frequently vandalised articles, just to have the opportunity for ranting on controversial ones. It might indeed keep "undetermined" vandals out, but those are easy to revert.
automatic 'protection from anon edits' for featured articles
That sounds topsy-turvy. "We consider this article to be the best example of what collaboration in zero-threshold editing can achieve. Now, buzz off or get an account. This article is ours".
at some point in the future maybe even a 'good faith' tag for users known to have made good faith edits, and protection of featured articles from edits by all but these
Whereas I consider your other ideas just a bit extreme, but possibly justified for the future, this one would make me get up and leave. If that's an open encyclopedia, then kindly fork the whole Wiki to where the edits still roam free, and I'll gladly serve the RC patrol there. Are you then going to trade in vandal patrolling for good faith stamping? Any reason to assume branding someone a non-vandal is easier than identifying a vandal? Any reason to assume this won't just be an enormous incentive for trolls to try their hand at "coming in under the radar"?

That's not to say your idea is bad! Maybe an encyclopedia (maybe a future Wikipedia) under that regime might do even better than vanilla Wikipedia. Maybe. Just not my cup of tea.

Summarized: the price of Wikipedia is eternal vigilance. A community that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. Give me anonymous edits, or give me death! Ask not what Wikipedia can do for you... OK, I'll stop now. I'm starting to sound ranty. :-) Just my $0.02, no bad feelings or mere semblance of knowledgeable authority intended. JRM 15:54, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)

I thought the reply might sound something like this. And you are right, I think. Of course, at some point one could fork "WP 1.0" into a more sheltered environment, but this will not be feasible for quite a few years. Eternal vigilance it is, then :) but, any comments on the "logged-in users may edit from blocked IPs" proposal? dab 16:15, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The "logged-in users may edit from blocked IPs" proposal sounds right to me. I guess the question is one of "practicality," is it not? How easy would be the system implementation? Is it not true that the only reason the "logged-in users" get blocked is because the TCP/IP module is "ignorant" of logged-in users? So it is a "cost of development" question, yes? ---Rednblu | Talk 16:34, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This has come up on the Pump on multiple occasions in the past. We all believe that the current privilege levels are too rough-grained, and as Wikipedia evolves they might need to change, but I think they do alright in most cases, for now. Don't forget that complexity is also itself a barrier to participation. Deco 00:24, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This has probably been proposed before, but since I've been spending some time on Recent Changes lately, it's become overwhelmingly apparent to me that the vast majority of vandalism is done by unregistered users. I suggest that we allow a maximum of 5 article edits (but unlimited talk page edits would be ok) for unregistered accounts, after which users must register for a user name before they can edit further. It's far easier to track changes and vandalism by accounts with unique user names than for accounts that are strings of numbers. Exploding Boy 21:52, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

Don't forget about the push-pull effect though. Anons can create and throw away accounts even more quickly than IPs — they don't do so because they can edit without doing so. Vandals will do just as much as they need to in order to vandalize, no matter what technical hurdles we place for them, and Nupedia demonstrated that pushing too far in the direction of content control is bad. Not that I necessarily disagree. Deco 00:48, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Edit flag for large changes?

Would it be possible to have an edit flag for large changes (i.e. more than 10% of article size changed, or more than 10% of text altered) for Recent Changes and the Watchlist? Perhaps just a ! which would let us easily know that vandalism has most likely taken place? And perhaps a filter mode for Recent Changes to only show articles that have been massively changed? --Golbez 17:23, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

See: Proposal to extend Recent Changes flags Paul August 04:46, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Sandbox threat

Do we really need a threat as ... threatening as

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES EDIT THIS LINE or ABOVE. YOU COULD BE BLOCKED

in the sandbox, where people are encouraged to experiment, and likely make their first edit on WP? Wouldn't it be just as easy to have a script that replaces the {{sandbox}} template every 10 minutes or so, if it is removed? Just a consideration of not barking at the wrong people. dab 17:35, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Totally agreed. This isn't just biting the newbies, it's chomping their heads off. No one will miss the template too much if it's missing for a few hours. I for one wouldn't ban an anon even for repeated removal of the template.Deco 00:19, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Is it possible to create some sort of daemon that will just check the sandbox periodically and restore the notice? If I were programming wiki*, I might allow for registering certain pages as permanently having certain headers (or perhaps allow for a certain number of inviolate lines.) --jpgordon{gab} 01:36, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Another way to do it that would prevent them from editing the header altogether is to protect the main sandbox page and place nothing but two templates on it, {{sandboxheader}} and {{sandbox}}. The first would contain the header message and a link (an external link I guess) to the edit URL for the sandbox template. The idea is similar to the process of the Main Page. Again, though, I think the sandbox header message probably isn't important enough to justify this. Deco 21:58, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

reactions to the notice [2]. :-D — Of course, anyone can replace the notice, so it is almost impossible to tell if the notice is 'official' or has been placed there by a random visitor. At the moment, there is an official-looking notice that the sandbox is colsed, but it was placed there by an anon editor. I am replacing the note with a simple 'please do not edit', since the threat, if it has any effect at all, only dares people to mess with the notice. I like the {{sandboxheader}} proposal, though. this could be the solution. dab 09:07, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

breaking news articles with unsafe information

(Motivation: Since Yasser Arafat's death, many things have been said or written in the media, blogs, etc. about the causes of his death. On Death of Yasser Arafat, there was some kind of policy (somewhat controversial) that probable speculations were not to be detailed in length: that is, the article would not give in detail what some presumably rather uninformed media would comment about the possible causes of his death. On the other hand, we have to draw a line somewhere; since we will very probably never get some authoritative source for his medical case, and the question attracts considerable attention, then I suggested we may add some bits from some investigative magazine who very probably had insider sources.)

I think we have a policy problem here. When we have authoritative, safe sources, we can probably just report them and ignore the non-authoritative ones. But what should we do in cases where the real information is hidden? Can we report somewhat detailed news from reputable newspapers who claim they got it from "insider sources"? David.Monniaux 08:40, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think it would be a mistake to try to push WP toward providing "Breaking News". I would say reporting what other news orgs decide to publish is borderline okay, but we should not do this just for the sake of being "up-to-date" or "satisfy the curious." Quality over quantity is the rule WP should follow. Just my two cents... Awolf002 14:34, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

we have very many articles where the truth is unknown. In these, we simply list the competing opinions of experts. Who is an expert in a given matter is of course a question of individual judgement, but a line between serious opinions and crackpot conspiracies needs to be drawn in all these cases. Let others do the research, and report what the major news sources came up with. If there is ever a PhD-thesis on the subject, draw on that ;) dab 15:03, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

In cases where the source is in doubt, follow this handy 3-step process:

Talk about what the source says, but attributed to that source, and not as fact.
Cite the source specifically.
Briefly say that the source is in doubt and mention why.

In short, if you don't think you can definitively choose what is true, give the reader the information they need to make the decision for themselves. Deco 18:46, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Still, if the reporting about the unverified source is widespread, we should discuss that reporting, even if the information itself can't be verified. Rick K 07:07, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

Standard GFDL licensing form for Non-Wikipedians

I proposed this idea over at Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission, which provides form letters to send to non-Wikipedians who have images, text, or data collections that might be useful for Wikipedia, and might potentially be willing to license them under the GFDL. Although I get many polite "no thank you" responses to this request, I've been somewhat at a loss when people say "sure, how do I do that?"

Most of these people do not edit Wikipedia themselves, nor are likely to jump through the hoops to upload and tag their own contributions.

Would it make sense to provide a simple licensing form/template at the bottom of requests for permission, for people to use to respond -- something that could then be pasted into the Talk page or Image Description page as evidence that the creator wishes to license their work? Something along the lines of this (please edit mercilessly):

IMAGES
As the creator and copyright holder of the image currently named <TITLE.EXT>
(found at <URL> as of this date), I hereby licence said image under the GFDL,
as a contribution to Wikimedia and its downstream users."
<NAME>, <DATE>
 
TEXT
As the creator and copyright holder of the text found at <URL> as of this date,
I hereby licence said text under the GFDL, as a contribution to Wikimedia and
its downstream users."
<NAME>, <DATE>
 
As the creator and copyright holder of the text found at <URL> as of this date,
I hereby licence that portion of the text included in this email (below) under the
 GFDL, as a contribution to Wikimedia and its downstream users."
<NAME>, <DATE>, <TEXT>

Most of my requests have been aimed at webmasters, not dead-tree authors, so these samples are geared toward that end -- other variants welcome. I don't know much about the Creative Commons licensing process either, so if there's a simple way to describe those options to potential contributors as well, I'm all ears.

Please comment -- this ought to be legal and bulletproof, and I'm no copyright expert. [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 08:26, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I am no copyright expert, but let me try.. I do similar things for Japanese Wikipedia. My comments are mainly based on that, not necessarily based on ongoing understanding/practice of these issues on english wikipedia.

I think it is better to offer links to Wikipedia:Copyright, warranty disclaimer, terms of use, etc. along with the license clearly, so that there is a better chance of the author clearly understands what GFDL is, and how Wikipedia interprets it.
In case of images, it is safer to show examples of how an image is shown/used in wikipedia. From the text of the GFDL, a photographer may expect "so my name will clearly be shown in any work which contain my photo," which is not really the case. English Wikipedia follows the spirit of the GFDL, but not necessarily the letters. And showing typical exampes would prevent some unfortunate misunderstandings and potential troubles. Examples I think of are: how commons images are used in articles, how images in english wikipedia is used in articles, how the image information page looks like. An example of how you would record/report the authors name when you upload a picture is also good.
If you are not confident, ask if all rights are cleared, or if the author knows any rightholder involved in the image or text.

Tomos 14:14, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

GFDL Thoughts

The more I read about the GFDL license the more I think that Wikipedia should be duel licensed with a creative commons license.

After deciding which Creative Commons license to use (probably CC by atribution ) all the new materials added would be CC/GFDL but the old materials would still be GFDL unless people authorized their work to also be CC.

Overtime most of the GFDL only stuff would be replaced by CC/GFDL material. Mozilla Firefox is doing a similiar procedure converting their code from MPL to MPL/GPL/LGPL code 'trilicense'.

Update: I got some interesting information on a couple of project pages that have this same idea. Guide_to_the_CC_dual-license and Wikipedia:Multi-licensing are projects in which users can duel license their own content themselves.

Please sign your posts. We have no idea who you are. The problem is, that there have been thousands of editors who have released their material to the GFDL, who may object to re-releasing them to any other license. It is also impossible to recontact all of those editors to even see IF they agree to that release. That means the dual licensing would have to refer only to items released AFTER a particular point in time, and meaning dual versions of articles and of Wikipedia itself. Rick K 07:04, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, this is a problem, but over time a large proportion of the GFDL only material could be relicensed or replaced, having, say, half of the 'pedia under a sensible license is better than none! Mark Richards 15:55, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Article about the problems of the GFDL released by Nathanael Nerode into the public ___domain

This article is a link in the GFDL article, and a lot of its ideas were incorporated into the GFDL article. Here is the article:

Why You Shouldn't Use the GNU FDL

[copy of the above article removed - please see the external link if you want to read it]

Why did you vote against Preliminary Deletion?

Preliminary Deletion has been rewritten, and now includes a section at the end answering some common questions/objections. I urge those who voted against this policy or had their doubts to please read the section in question and voice their concerns on the proposal's talk page. Thanks in advance. Johnleemk | Talk 11:36, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Plagiarism by any other name

A question and a comment:

Question: do we have a concise Wikipedia essay on what plagiarism is and isn't and is there a way to provide an internal link to it? If I deleted a plagiarized passage or entry and wanted to place a helpful note at a User's Talkpage like "please see Wikipedia policy here" or "for a definition of plagiarism, please click here" or some such. Can someone please advise?

Comment: plagiarism is rife in articles about entertainers; for some reason people think it's fine to copy from e.g. the IMDB. I think this is aided by well-meaning responses on the HelpDesk that say things like, "if you retype in your own words, it's fine". Well, no, I don't think it is; we were taught that paraphrasing is still plagiarism.

Quill 23:42, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Paraphrasing sometimes violates copyright, but if a court could reasonably rule that the facts and ideas were duplicated but the selection and arrangement of those facts was not, then it's not plagiarism. The rule should not be to paraphrase but to summarize: talk about what they said in less words and give the source. The line between a copyright workaround and a new work is admittedly fuzzy sometimes, but I think as long as a source is given the two can be compared and our version updated if necessary. As for a project page on plagiarism, that's a great idea; I'm not aware of any such page, but there is plagiarism and Wikipedia: Cite your sources. Deco 00:02, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Ah, yes, but I mean to speak to an ethical rather than a legal issue. Copyvio (legal) and plagiarism (ethical) are not always the same thing. Often go hand in hand, but not always the same.

I would volunteer to help with a plagiarism page.

Quill 00:19, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Ethics are quite a matter of debate, though; I would argue any properly credited statements are ethical, as well as any widely-known ones. Keep in mind that the role of an encyclopedia is quite different from that of a typical paper — there is no implication that any of our text is our own original idea. Also, to establish ethical standards for Wikipedia articles in general would be setting a very flammable sort of policy that I'd be surprised to see adopted, never mind maintained. All that said, I do frown on copying large bodies of text from public ___domain (or not-so-public ___domain) sources without any credit, especially since the result is often an obvious contast with other articles. I've only seen this done once, though. Deco 00:41, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

We snag stuff from the 1911 Britannica all the time. And while there is no legal requirement to credit it, there is certainly an ethical requirement, IMO. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:50, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

At some point, hopefully when enough of the article has been rewritten, perhaps every single paragraph, and maybe the layout changed, we can remove such notices from the article itself (which can remain in the history, or perhaps the talk page. Actually, maybe they should always be just on the talk page). --Improv 04:38, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree, and we do with the {{1911}} template. I should do a hunt sometime for EB pages without it (they're surprisingly easy to find with a few searches for archaic language). Re Improv, I think we should definitely keep the 1911 EB listed eternally as a reference, even if the tag is removed. Deco 06:36, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Absolutely. No matter how far we have evolved the article, it remains a reference we used. Also, when people are using the {{1911}} tag, it should always be in the "References" section of the article, not just hanging there in the body of the text.

Thanks for the responses, folks. Okay, that sorts things through WRT the 1911 EB, but how about the other stuff? Deco, I see it all the time because I spend a lot of time on actors and singers and the like. Pages lifted from IMDB, liner notes, websites--sometimes this is listed as a 'reference', sometimes not.

I'll have to do some more thinking about it; can't quite reconcile this "Keep in mind that the role of an encyclopedia is quite different from that of a typical paper — there is no implication that any of our text is our own original idea." with this "By submitting your work you promise you wrote it yourself, or copied it from public ___domain resources — this does not include most web pages."

I like your idea about a guideline page. Can something be done about this?

Quill 20:09, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Internet trolls

Hi all,
I am an administrator from he_Wiki. In a recent months we have been attacked by 2 internet trolls. The last one started to vandilise he_wiki during this week. I want to ask if you have any policy regarding internet trolls in en_wiki. If you do have, what are your suggestions dealing with this phenomena. Gilgamesh he 09:29, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It's not something which we deal with well. If the person is actually vandalising, that's easier to deal with and they will usually be blocked eventually. However, you need to be clear whether they are a vandal or a troll (see What is a troll). Various people have tried to set up policies about trolling, but they have never reached consensus. See Wikipedia:Dealing with trolls and Wikipedia:Dealing with disruptive or antisocial editors. We have a formal dispute resolution process that can be used for trolls or other problem users, which basically starts with asking the community to comment on the problem, and ends with the Arbitration Committee making a decision, but I don't know if he: is yet large enough to go for something so complicated. If you know any other languages, asking at one of the smaller Wikipedias might get you more useful advice. Angela . 10:01, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with Angela - it depends on what behavior you are talking about - a lot of people use the word troll to mean vandalism, if that is the case, then its easy to deal with. Personal attacks are likewise easy. If you mean someone editing from a point of view that you don't agree with, then that is more difficult - you will have to find some way to choose which point of view you will accept. Mark Richards 15:58, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Personal details

I've put up Wikipedia:Divulging personal details for discussion on when it is appropriate to include personal details in articles. In my particular case, I've identified a person who has been working under a pseudonym even though the legal name was not widely known (though verifiable). I've posted this at WP:RFC, but as this is urgent (possibly the harm has already been done, if mirrors have scraped us since) I also want to bring it up on the pump. — David Remahl 13:13, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

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