Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Meta:Babel

This is an archived version of this page, as edited by Rotemliss (talk | contribs) at 07:45, 7 January 2008 (→Streamlined user rights management: Reply). It may differ significantly from the current version.

Latest comment: 17 years ago by Rotemliss in topic Streamlined user rights management

Note: If you seek language competence template, see Meta:Babel templates.


This is Meta's general and policy discussion page (post a comment); for discussions about multilingualism or translation, see the translator's noticeboard. If your comment relates to a matter relevant to a particular page, please post it there and only place a link with a brief description here.


Armãneashti: Cãndu comentarlu-a vostru easte ligat cu vãrã frãndzã spetsialã, Vã-plãcãrsim s-u publicats aclo shi sade s-bãgats ligãturã cu unã descriptsia shcurtã aoatse.
Беларуская: Калі гэта толькі магчыма, калі ласка, пакідайце свае каментарыі непасрэдна на старонцы «Talk» адпаведнага артыкулу Вікі, а на дадзенай старонцы пакідайце толькі спасылку туды.
Brezhoneg : E kement ha ma c'hallit en ober, laoskit ho kemennadennoù war bajenn gaozeal ar pennad zo e kaoz, ha na skrivit amañ nemet ur gerig displegañ gant ul liamm.
Català : En la mesura del possible, deixeu el vostre missatge a la plana de discussió de l'article corresponent, i aquí només poseu-hi un enllaç cap al mateix.
Čeština: Pokud je to možné, zanechte detailní zprávu na diskusní stránce příslušného článku a sem dejte jen jednoduché vysvětlení s odkazem.
Dansk: Prøv så vidt muligt at skrive dine beskeder på de relevante artiklers diskussionssider og blot sætte et link til den her.
Deutsch: Sofern möglich, hinterlasse Deine Nachrichten auf der Diskussionseite des betreffenden Artikels und plaziere hier lediglich einen Link dorthin.
English:
Esperanto: Laŭeble metu vian plenan mesaĝon en la diskuton de la koncerna artikolo kaj ĉi tien nur unu linion kun ligo tien!
Español : En tanto sea posible, coloca tu mensaje en la página de discusión del artículo concerniente, y deja aquí solamente una línea con un enlace hacia el mismo.
Euskara: Posible bada, utzi zure mezua nahi duzun artikuluak duen eztabaida orrian, eta hemen lotura azaltzen duen lerro bateko lotura utzi.
Français : Dans la mesure du possible, veuillez laisser vos messages dans la page discussion de l'article concerné et n'insérer ici qu'un lien vers ce message.
Galego: Na medida do posíbel, deixe as súas mensaxes na páxina de discusión do artigo relacionado e non insira aquí máis que unha ligazón cara a mensaxe.
Bahasa Indonesia: Ini adalah halaman untuk membicarakan mengenai hal-hal umum dan kebijakan untuk Meta (klik di sini untuk komentar baru); untuk membicarakan mengenai hal multibahasa atau penerjemahan, lihat di papan pengumuman penerjemahan. Jika Anda hendak mengomentari dengan suatu halaman artikel tertentu, tuliskan komentar Anda di halaman pembicaraan artikel tersebut, dan letakkan di sini pranala ke halaman pembicaraan tersebut dengan penjelasan singkat.
Italiano: Nei limiti del possibile, lasciate i vostri messaggi nella pagina di discussione dell'articolo e inserite in questa pagina solo il link alla discussione.
日本語： くわしい話はなるべく関連するページのノートに書いておき、ここにはそこへのリンクを添えた1行程度のメッセージだけを残すようにお願いします。
한국어: 만일 당신의 의견이 특정 문서의 내용과 관련있을 경우, 그 내용은 그 문서에 적어주시고, 이곳에는 그 문서로 가는 고리와 간단한 설명만 적어주세요.
Ripoarisch: Wann mööshlesh, schriiv Dinge Bëijdrach op däm Attikkel singe Klaaf_Sigk un donn hee nur ene koote Henwiiß unn_enne Lengk drop henn.
Nederlands: Laat je gedetailleerde berichten zo veel mogelijk achter op de discussiepagina van het betreffende artikel en hier een enkele regel met een verwijzing daarheen.
Norsk: Prøv å gjøre din beskjed her så kort som mulig, og lenk heller til relevante diskusjonssider.
Occitan : Dins la mesura del possible, daissar vòstres messatges dins la pagina discutida de l'article concernat e inserir aquí pas qu'un ligam vèrs aqueste messatge.
Português : Se possível, poste sua mensagem na página de discussão da página concernente e deixe aqui um pequeno lembrete com um link para a discussão.
Русский: По возможности, оставляйте ваши комментарии непосредственно на странице обсуждения соответствующей статьи Вики, а на данной странице помещайте только ссылку туда.
Slovenščina: Kolikor je le mogoče, pustite svoja sporočila z vsemi podrobnostmi na pogovorni strani ustreznega članka, tu pa naj ostane le vrstica s povezavo nanjo.
ไทย: การอภิปรายเกี่ยวกับหัวข้อเรื่องใดๆ กรุณาเขียนไว้ที่ หน้าพูดคุย ของเรื่องนั้นๆ และทำลิ้งก์จากหน้านี้ไปสู่หัวข้อเรื่องนั้น โดยเขียนไม่ควรเกินหนึ่งบรรทัด.
Türkçe: Eğer tartışma konunuz ile ilgili özel bir sayfa varsa, lütfen mesajınızı oraya bırakın ve buraya yalnızca bir bağlantı ile kısa bir açıklama ekleyin.
中文：​请尽量在讨论页发表你的详细意见，只在本页用一行写下你的意见摘要，然后做个链接连到即可。/請儘量在討論頁發表你的詳細意見，只在本頁用一行寫下你的意見摘要，然後做個鏈結連到即可。
Wikimedia Meta-Wiki
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Requests for bot status#Computer@metawiki

Latest comment: 17 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

I was told to post something here so here it is. -- Cat chi? 13:30, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Comment (from bot status page): Bot will work on double redirects and commons delinking tasks. Sounds OK. I'll flag if no one objects. Majorly (talk) 13:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

(OT) I added a note in Requests for bot status --.anaconda 14:04, 6 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

OK flagged, I can't imagine there being any problem with this, and it already has bot status elsewhere. Majorly (talk) 18:38, 7 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Note: The name is not standard (it does not contain "bot") but that has been waived elsewhere. ++Lar: t/c 14:25, 12 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Volapük Wikipedia

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Now Volapük Wikipedia is more than 100,000 articles. Please move it at http://www.wikipedia.org/ --Flrn 10:16, 8 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Bot policy

Latest comment: 17 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

Hello. There is currently no policy for bot access on Meta, so I propose enforcing the new crosswiki standard bot policy on Meta. If we do, a note will be added to the page explaining how to request bot access on Meta.

The page explains what is considered a bot as regards assigning bot flags, and lays out guidelines and rules for use, naming, authorization, edit speed, supervision, et cetera. It is primarily designed to streamline steward processing of such requests on other wikis, though it would also simplify the task for Meta bureaucrats. A further benefit is that the bot policy will be routinely updated to reflect the latest changes to MediaWiki, since it will be applicable on several wikis. —{admin} Pathoschild 07:23:49, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

  • Support this idea. I am behind on making a subpage for requests themselves, which I do think is a good idea but that there is such a page is not contradictory to adopting this policy, but rather complimentary. ++Lar: t/c 14:24, 12 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • Support. In addition requesting bot flags on mass number of wikis should be as simplified. -- Cat chi? 19:18, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
    This policy will simplify that for linterlanguage linking bots in particular. On many wikis, this will no longer require a new discussion if the bot is already proven. —{admin} Pathoschild 20:25:00, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
  • I also support this proposal, as it will simplify the bot process here which is currently a big mess. —O (说 • 喝) 03:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Call the question. I don't see anyone saying they have a big issue with this and it just seems like a good idea. Many many other wikis already use this. I suggest if there is no dissent in a few days (5?... 7?) we consider we have consensus and consider it adopted here. ++Lar: t/c 00:51, 25 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

'Tis policy now. —{admin} Pathoschild 18:03:34, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Promoting or removing proposals

Latest comment: 17 years ago15 comments4 people in discussion

Some of the new wiki project proposals are dating back to summer 2006, making it impossible to contact the proposer about the proposal because he/she isn't really watching the proposal anymore. Also, some of these proposals have 30+ users supporting it, while some others have none. Is there a set criteria for promoting and/or removing these proposals? I have yet to find any.

If not, I propose that we give any and all future proposals 3 months (1 month for projects nominated beyond 3 months ago at time of passage) to accumulate 20 or more users wishing to join the project. Also, that proposal must not violate any policy concerning project proposals here on meta.
  • If a project hits the 20 user threshold, then that project is given space on the Wikimedia Incubator (or some other "incubator") for 1 year (maybe more, discretion can even be used here) to grow and develop the new wiki.
If the wiki stalls while in incubation, the wiki may be removed by an administrator.
If, toward the end of the incubation period, the wiki fails to maintain a sustainable community, usually of about 100-150+ active users, then the wiki may be removed by the board.
Currently, incubator is only for new languages, not for new projects. Proposing a seed wiki for new projects is in some ways itself a new project. Angela 20:28, 13 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
Agreed. And if I recall correctly, Incubator made it their policy recently not to accept "new project" test wiki pages. From the reason Angela pointed, I think it making a sense. --Aphaia 09:20, 14 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
Ok, maybe not the Wikimedia Incubator, some other space on Wikimedia (like I said, some other "incubator") where it can grow and maintain a viable community. Seed wikis were deprecated when the incubator came along, and I don't know whether the community wants to resurrect them. Do you? Diez2 03:22, 19 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • Furthermore, you do have to admit that there needs to be a better system in place to move these proposals along the line. Right now, it seems that the current page is where proposals go to die. 50 people have shown support for the "Geneology Wiki," and though I'm not necessarily supporting the proposal, something needs to be done about it; it can't just sit there forever. Diez2 03:22, 19 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
    I would like to point out "so-and-so people support it" is not a good reason to assume that the Foundation says "go ahead". As for Geneology wikis, Wikimedia once rejected that idea in the late 2004 and let the other website pick the idea of geneology wiki. It is unlikely for the Foundation to host such a wiki again. There would be many random people bringing their idea and try to have the Foundation to fund their ideas, but it is not necessarily for us to do something for them. Serious proposals like Wikinews or Wikiversity have been considered and launched. And since I have seen no demand and community necessity to host those projects even as experiments, I am not sure if we should have such "seed-wikis", specially there are many kinds of free-hosted scratch pad wikis run by for-profit parties and after we saw some people shamelessly have tried to host advertisement on the Incubator. --Aphaia 04:20, 19 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
    Ok, I agree with you about the "so-and-so people support it" argument. Throw out the proposal. I also agree that if a proposal is against what the Foundation stands for, then it should be rejected. However, we cannot just say that this proposal cannot go through, and then do nothing about it. The Geneology Wiki proposal has been around since March 2006. We should set up a formal system that allows us to formally reject a proposal (or accept one). We can e-mail the proposer (or just leave a note on his/her talk page) saying that the proposal has been rejected and has been stored in an archive page. Also, the Foundation needs to step up here and start commenting on these proposals. The proposal page is so cluttered with proposals that it becomes impossible to read them all in one sitting. Furthermore, I don't see that any of these proposals have gone anywhere in the last 6 months. Like I've been saying, there has to be some way to move these proposals down the line, as in reject or accept them in a far more timely manner. Diez2 18:41, 19 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
    I don't oppose a new acceptance system in the community level, but as for the foundation level system, sorry I disagree. I don't want and don't think it necessary that the Foundation involved into the those things in this phase. It may increase their workload. Formal acceptance or rejection are unnecessary in my thought - most of proposals are self-abandoned and we need not to get involve the Foundation before that. I prefer to see them working on more crucial things - financial or technical infrastructure, good public relation or setting a system for quality control of existing things. --Aphaia 02:03, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
    So are we saying that "everything that can be invented has been invented?" The Proposals page exists so that new projects might have a chance, albeit extremely small, to become a Wikimedia project. If you do want to minimize the Foundation's workload, then you can also minimize their involvement. For example, only the proposals accepted by the community will be sent to the Foundation (as I see it here and here, the board of trustees only got involved in accepting the creation of Wikiversity after the community entered into an extremely extensive discussion), and for the most part, proposals are actually rejected, because not many people support the idea. As for the abandoned proposals, we can e-mail the proposer giving him/her 1 week to respond, or else the proposal will be removed. We can remove many upon many of proposals this way, and at the very least clean up the page. Diez2 02:52, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
Your proposal of removing abandoning proposals seems good. You could write it down and make it as policy of that page perhaps? --Aphaia 03:32, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
I would like to point out Wikiversity didn't come from the proposal page. It has come rather from Wikibooks, one of our existing projects. There had been a co-called sub-project since 2004 (or even before while I am not sure). In 2006 some of board members publicly spoke about the possible launching of Wikiversity and there was already a dedicated committee for launching the project. We just needed a right time and preparation to start it. So it is not the case of the proposals you are talking about, I suppose?
Honestly I don't know any project launched from the proposal page you are concerned. It hasn't been the official acceptance point of the Foundation, rather a community discussion page as well as other meta pages. That is why I think it an overreaction to ask the Foundation for intervention, saying no or yes directly. --Aphaia 03:27, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
In this case, should we move for deletion of this page? The whole point of this page is to suggest new projects the Foundation would take up. However, if what you are saying is correct, then no project since 2004 (when the page was created) has ever been taken from this page. Thus, lack of involvement from the Foundation defeats the purpose of having this. Diez2 19:37, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
It is still doing that. But the number of proposals is daunting. However, good vines need no bush. 85.211.128.219 20:01, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
Do you mean the Foundation is still looking at proposals on the page? Diez2 21:25, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
I haven't taken the page as a proposal for the Foundation, but rather for the community, while I don't know any project which appeared at first on that page. Realized projects seemed to come through other routes (mailing list or activity on an existing project), even the had their own page on meta at last. Also as far as I know, those realized projects were discussed elsewhere (like incubator, which we talked about for a long time, when we had some troubles about test-wikipedias on meta), but those "projects" were rarely interests of the community. Some of them were posted to foundation-l, but most of them are just unreplied. The foundation should take care of those ideas the Wikimedia community takes no action, even a gesture of denial?
So, it would be inappropriate and inefficient for us to expect them to watch the page regularly, while they are snowed with mails, phones and faxes. Rather we can think the proposal page just for brainstorming which may benefits also existing projects, I suppose, and as long as they are remaining healthy brainstorming, I see no need to alter the current situation and increasing our workload. In my observatin there is no serious problem we need to involve the Foundation. The community doesn't pay attention to those project proposals - that's all, isn't it? And I don't find any good reason the Foudation should be involved into this particular matter Wikimedia community has no interest. --Aphaia 09:31, 21 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Language

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Why is there not mor languages for this wiki? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Arceus fan (talk • contribs) 23:52, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Please clarify your question. Cheers! Siebrand 07:40, 25 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
I think he meant is that why are there relatively few languages available to Wikimedia and Meta-Wiki. Felipe Aira

Why was the search moved?

Latest comment: 17 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Why was the "search" moved way down below "beyond the web" and "community" can someone PLEASE move the search up higher. It is obvious that "beyond the web" and "community" will not be used as much as the search feature please move it. Odessaukrain 06:52, 29 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

It didn't move. Search box is placed just over the toolbox. It is impossible, at least for local admins, to place it in a higher row, unless remove two new boxes. --Aphaia 07:24, 29 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
For meta often functions as a foundation wiki where everybody can edit. I use hot key alt-F and I do not need to care where search bar is. Hillgentleman 07:44, 29 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
the two new boxes can go below the toolbox correct? Who added the two toolboxes, and where can I message them? I have my own wiki, and know this is possible, if you have the right permissions.
alt-F works thanks User:Hillgentleman. Odessaukrain 21:20, 1 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
It's impossible unless you edit the code or use an extension. – rotemliss – Talk 19:41, 4 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Pornography on cs:

Latest comment: 17 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

Is it normal to link pornography without a reason and without a warning like Czech arbitrator and sysop Che did?[1] —Zacheus Talk • Contributions • Edit counter 10:34, 30 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia isn't censored. Majorly (talk) 11:58, 30 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
Like any link on Wikipedia, it's appropriate if inserted in the right context. —Signed, your friendly neighborhood MessedRocker. 12:57, 30 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

I agree that when you write about pornography, you may include some graphic link, always noticed as such. But this is completely diffent thing. cs:Wikipedie:Hlasování o smazání/Jiří Macich was an AfD about a blogger, not a pornographer. There was discussion about his notability and Che without a warning put the link to pornography. What if somebody opened this link in a public place? —Zacheus Talk • Contributions • Edit counter 13:04, 30 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Have you bothered asking Che why the link was added? I don't speak Czech, so I can't really tell how relevant it was, but I don't think we should concern ourselves with every "what if..." scenario possible. EVula // talk // 04:24, 2 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

No, it would be useless. I wrote him several e-mails before, he never replied to me. I asked several Czech wikipedians to repair it, they ignored me as well. It is completely useless to try repair anything in cs: by Czech wikipedians.

It is totally irrelevant. Jiří Macich has nothing in common with pornography. He may be not notable, but why pornography site should be a comparative? Why pornography is not marked as such? What about if somebody would include Che's link into the article en:Russia? Or its discussion? —Zacheus Talk • Contributions • Edit counter 15:59, 2 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

sv-o

Latest comment: 17 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Can you add a sv-0 template to my page?--Arceus fan 15:50, 7 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

  Done The template didn't exist before, so I duplicated the text and all from the en.wp version. EVula // talk // 19:19, 15 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Translation combination boxes: Shortcuts for Serbian

Latest comment: 17 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Hello. I want to ask what is the criteria for these three-letter shortcuts? For instance, I see that German language is being represented with "deu" (first three letters of the original word "Deutsch"), while Serbian language had to be "ser", which are first three letters of "Serbian". Since the original word is "Srpski", following the same pattern as for German would result with the shortcut "srp".

ISO 639-3 standard defines three-letter shortcut for Serbian as "srp". What are your references?--freeman-sr taLk 16:54, 7 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Hm... since you reference (see this page) the same as I, I will take a small action of correcting this. There is only few pages to be moved / remade.--freeman-sr taLk 17:22, 7 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Done. Someone should delete the following categories, since they ain't supposed to be of use anymore:

--freeman-sr taLk 17:45, 7 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

I just tagged those categories for speedy deletion; should be gone soon. EVula // talk // 19:08, 15 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Special:Recentchanges

Latest comment: 17 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

Hello all. Since the header for the recent changes is very large people with small computer screens have to scroll a lot down before being able to see the actual rc. I would like to suggest a table similar to wikt:de:MediaWiki:Recentchangestext which is expanded per default for all users but it can be set in the users personal monobook.js to have it closed per default. If there are no objections I would like to add this to MediaWiki:Recentchangestext, thanks, greetings, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 00:16, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Why don't we just remove a good chunk of the code? While links to every edition of Wikisource are nice, it has very little relation to recent changes on Meta (though I'm aware of the "centralness" of Meta, I'm not convinced that this is a particularly relevant way of doing that). Basically the entire "Projects" section is irrelevant, and "Organization" isn't much better... EVula // talk // 01:54, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
...and apparently Pathoschild agreed with me.[2] :) EVula // talk // 05:13, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
Thanks that is much better. Best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 09:20, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
Indeed. Still seems like maybe more trimming might be possible? We can set up Bryan's bot to watch more things. ++Lar: t/c 11:09, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
The "live RC" bit could probably be removed (especially the "edit" link, since it is usable by only 0.15% of the editors here), and is redundant to the "Chat" link on the Discussions line. EVula // talk // 14:40, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
The edit bit could be, but live rc should stay - it isn't redundant as it's a direct link to the IRC feed. The chat link goes to a page all about every IRC channel. Majorly (talk) 16:08, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
@"live RC" removing that would not reduce the height of the header. I personally like the edit link, I find it practical :) but I would not object if You decide to remove it. Best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 17:14, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
Well it seems not everyone is in favor of removing those links. This was not what I proposed anyhow. It would be nice to have some opinions about this table which can be flapped in per click but is opened per default (the rc would look pretty much the same as they do now). Thanks --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 12:57, 18 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
imho Pathoschild did the right thing. removing superfluous links is a much better idea than trying to hide you have too many of them. btw, the table could be a bit wider. in my browser the "useful"-row is split in two lines. -- ∂ 16:46, 19 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

I've written JavaScript which adds the links to Special:Recentchanges (screenshot). If anyone else wants to use it, see the documentation page. —{admin} Pathoschild 20:36:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Incivility?

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Is there a procedure for dealing with a user who is showing incivility in discussions? User:Elephas's contributions to the discussion about the proposal for closing the Volapük Wikipedia are unusally belligerant and offensive (including words like 'vomit', 'fart' etc. to offend the language in question). His or her behavior in other discussions is also belligerant: he or she tends to belittle the language community and the language itself with very strong words (just click on some of his contribs). Yet his or her behavior in the Volapük discussion is worse than usual. Maybe a message could be sent to him or her to indicate that this behavior is frowned upon? --Smeira 00:39, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply


Special:Upload

Latest comment: 17 years ago51 comments14 people in discussion

Hi all, I noticed that we have lots of image uploads which are without licence and have nothing to do with meta. I have very good experiences with wikiprojects where we restricted the upload to sysops only, but if You find this too extreme, we could change the link on the left navigation sending people right to commons, while Special:Upload will continue to work (we have it like this on de.wiktionary). Please tell me what You think about this suggestion, if it was already suggested in the past and rejected, please let me know, thanks, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 17:14, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

I don't recall it being suggested, at least recently. There's very rarely any need for anyone to upload any images here, so that might be a good idea. Majorly (talk) 17:19, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
I disagree; there are many images more appropriate to Meta than commons, ranging from screenshots for user styles or scripts to user images and Wikimania bid images. I would favour a prominent notice on the upload page explaining what should be uploaded to Commons instead. Any image without copyright or source data can already be deleted (see the upload warning and inclusion policy). —{admin} Pathoschild 18:30:46, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Are there any differences in the media policies of Meta and Commons? If not, I think it is a good idea to mangage media as centralised as possible. Siebrand 20:43, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
Agreed, especially since we're not talking about removing Special:Upload from meta, just changing the link so that the bulk of the uploads go to Commons. For people uploading images that have an extremely limited usage (such as bid images that only need to be used here), they can still upload locally. EVula // talk // 21:16, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
This should be an all or nothing approach. A little bit of both is worse. As you may read in my previous comments, I am strongly in favour of closing any local upload on Wikimedia wikis. Siebrand 14:48, 18 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
I can think of instances where there's no actual benefit to having the images on Commons, such as pictures that are only useful for Wikimania bids (though the example that Pathoschild gave is an exceptionally poor example, as it is on Commons and is currently in use on eight different projects). Editors should be highly encouraged not to upload photos here, but if there's no benefit to any project other than Meta, why bother uploading them to Commons? EVula // talk // 15:28, 18 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
It is a matter of standards. Currently each wiki needs its image policy, new upload checkers, etc. Bsaically it is a waste of resources, as all required knowledge and infrastructure is available centrally. If the result would be that 0.25% of the media on Commons would be used only in one wiki, that is not a problem at all. I wouldn't be surpised if this is what is happening already - and that is not a problem. Cheers! Siebrand 07:43, 19 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hmm, that's an excellent point. I know some of the photos I've taken (that live on Commons) are only used on en.wp. Consider me swayed; down with Meta uploads! ;) EVula // talk // 14:49, 19 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
So how should we go about to implement this proposed policy of not allowing local uploads on meta? Should we have more discussion (where?), organise a vote (where?), or decree consensus ;)? Siebrand 21:08, 19 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
Add in a subsection below. People can vote on it. Majorly (talk) 21:20, 19 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  Done. The vote will start in 9 hours. Siebrand 13:03, 20 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

I do believe there are some policy differences but I'd have to actually read closely to be able to say exactly what... There have been deletions of things at Commons that Meta users uploaded for use here, and some hard feelings were engendered. I'd like to see, for example, Aphaia's comments on the idea of channeling uploads to Commons, as I think she has some perspective on that, before I'd support it. However, meanwhile I'd support a much more stringent warning about what is suitable, and a much firmer enforcement of existing deletion policy for stuff that's off the mark. ++Lar: t/c 21:42, 17 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Sad to hear that. However the warning actually looks like this MediaWiki:Uploadtext, I wonder how big the "Attention"-notice has to be so people actually do notice it :( (I personally think they don't care about those warnings).
Best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 14:44, 18 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
OK, you have two things you comment on:
  • Personal preferences/negative experiences: we cannot please anyone. I do not know when the experiences of the user you quote have been. Commons changes and everyone on Commons (except those that are blocked after a while) want the best for both Commons and the local projects.
  • Usability/repurposing of media: that is a POV statement. The power of Wikimedia projects can only fully thrive if we leave room for uses we have not thought of. I for sure would like to keep that room, even if I think that media are single purpose, I cannot be vcertain of that, because there are a potential 6,400,000,000 opinions. Siebrand 14:48, 18 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

It seems like a good idea making local uploads more difficult (or impossible) here. If a file is freely licensed, and of use at Meta, than it shouldn't be any problems with the Commons' regulations. If it's not freely licensed, than it shouldn't be allowed here either, since Meta doesn't have an EDP. --Boivie 15:08, 18 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Per the Board resolution, a media policy of the wiki cannot be more free than the one on Commons if it does not have an EDP. Hence, we should conclude that meta's media policy is equal to that of Commons, or more restricted, which would not make sense... Cheers! Siebrand 07:45, 19 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

It would be interesting to understand why many people are uploading off topic files here. I noticed that a large portion of these users thought they were on their (non-Wikimedia) wiki; they're not connected with Wikimedia, and probably came here while reading the MediaWiki help pages. It is a good idea to send them to Commons, but I would prefer if a customized upload page is displayed, rather than the default one intended for Wikimedians. Alternatively, another solution would to direct them to a new upload page here on Meta (like fr:Aide:Importer un fichier, for example). Korg + + 15:38, 20 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Well, my above comment was just about to change the upload link, but not to disable uploads on Meta. While in practice the files uploaded here could go to Commons, I'd say sometimes it's more convenient to upload (and then to handle) certain files locally. I could cite files used for test purposes ([3]), for the various pages under construction here ([4], [5]), or for other defensible reasons ([6], [7]). Incidentally, some images used to build the fundraiser pages, such as Image:Sostext.png, were deleted on Commons... [8] [9] (Ok, with good reason, but sometimes practical considerations should prevail).
So I would oppose the closing of local uploads. The goal of the initial suggestion was to curb the flood of uploads out of Meta's scope; changing the upload link should reach it, without even interfering with legitimate uploads. Korg + + 14:27, 22 October 2007 (UTC)Reply


Vote Discussion on closing local uploads for meta.wikimedia.org

In the above discussion, it appears that there may be consensus for closing local uploads on meta.wikimedia.org, as the media policy for meta is equal to that of Commons and it has no EDP(1). This vote will start on Sunday 21 October 2007, 0:00 UTC and will last for 14 days, until Saturday 3 November 2007, 23:59 UTC. A majority of 55% of confirmed voters[1] is needed before a request for closing local uploads is made on bugzilla:. The quorum for this vote is 20 irrelevent as it is not binding.

Participants in this vote are requested Errto choose from the following options:

  • I support the request to close local uploads for meta.wikimedia.org
  • I oppose the request to close local uploads for meta.wikimedia.org

You are allowed to add a statement to your vote. Please keep it short. Further discussion should be added below the vote. Neutral votes are not allowed. Siebrand 13:03, 20 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

  1. ↑ Votes confirmation is a measure developed by Irpen. He proposed that only votes from people who already had registered account in any of the Wikimedia projects by the time when the discussion started are taken into consideration. To verify or "confirm" the vote, according to his proposition each user should write his Meta account username on his talkpage in local project, take the diff link of this edit and place it on his userpage here in Meta. After that all votes by this user in discussions which started after this user's registration in local project are considered "confirmed".

    If votes confirmation was not used for some discussion all non-anonymous votes are considered confirmed. Note that there is no need to write two values ("total (confirmed)") into this table in such a case.
  • Siebrand, With which criteria did you set your percentages? This cannot come from bugzilla, can it? Have you any precedences? Hillgentleman 07:12, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
    • I have set the criteria to a majority. The 55% rule is used in all votes on the Dutch language Wikipedia and it works well. As for it being arbitrary: that is correct and it is exactly the point. Setting it at 99% would be rediculous, for example, setting it below 50% would also be awkward. I choose 55%. However, I fear that getting 20 users to vote may be harder than getting the 55%... Cheers! Siebrand 17:01, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • I take it that you cannot find any precendence in this on meta. Let us agree that this issue is more important than sysop confirmation. Yet even sysop confirmation requires 75% support. There is real danger in setting such a low threshold, in that the argument may spill over to bugzilla. That is why community consensus, and not majority, is necessary. --Hillgentleman 17:52, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • I shall not alter your signed comment, but I propose that your time limit, quorum, and 55% threshold be ignored, for it is a matter for reasoned discussions; and that there be no action until consensus is reached, for it is not an emergency. --Hillgentleman 18:13, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

I support the request to close local uploads for meta.wikimedia.org

I oppose the request to close local uploads for meta.wikimedia.org, but support limiting uploads

  1. Images that would be acceptable here would be compatible with Commons. EVula // talk // 14:59, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
    Addendum Because of Commons' additional level of scrutiny on public-___domain imagery, I can better understand uploading directly to Meta instead. I don't think it's quite as bad as the "purge" scenario seems, but it's a valid enough concern to at least strongly recommend that people upload to Commons instead. EVula // talk // 21:39, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  2. Per EVula. But we should not disable uploads completely, just limit them to admins. Majorly (talk) 15:20, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  3. The Commons copyright policy is not equivalent to Meta's policy. In particular, Commons requires that images be in the public ___domain in their country of origin and in the United States, while Meta policy only concerns itself with the United States where it is legally located. Commons policy is particularly problematic since other countries sometimes retroactively restore copyright (such as Russia effective 01 January 2008); this results in purges on Commons, while the images continue to be acceptable on Meta. Since many of our images are used on historical pages like Wikimania bids, any such images deleted would likely never be replaced, resulting in the gutting of Meta historical pages. —{admin} Pathoschild 17:13:13, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
    To be fair, I think there are plenty of Commons admins around here (such as myself) that would be more than willing to retrieve the imagery from Commons and upload it here, which would restore the Meta articles to their pre-Commons-purge state. "Gutting Meta" is a little overdramatic in my opinion, though I will concede that it would be an inconvenience. EVula // talk // 21:39, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  4. limit to admins or if Special:Upload stays active: replace the navigationbarlink on the left. --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 19:41, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  5. I would favour some tightening, such as more strongly worded warnings, non default text, even limiting to admins only, but per Pathoschild and others, I oppose completely disallowing image uploads at Meta. Like EVula, I stand ready to retrieve things from Commons if needed in any case, just ask. ++Lar: t/c 02:29, 22 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  6. --Thogo (talk) 21:09, 25 October 2007 (UTC) limiting to sysops would be ok, most active people on Meta are sysops (if not they can/should apply).Reply
  7. Slade ♠ 21:01, 18 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
  8. I think we should do more to encourage uploading to commons: though it should be a gradual process. The first step could be as easy as adding Upload file to commons: to the navbar. xaosflux Talk 17:02, 22 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

I oppose the request to close local uploads for meta.wikimedia.org

  1. Some images are not really commons-made. --OosWesThoesBes 08:59, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  2. I oppose this vote, with a threshold arbitrarily set, and almost obscenely low on an issue that has has site-wide consequences, and without a clear-cut statement (see, e.g. Majorly's comment of support). --Hillgentleman 16:08, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  3. Siebrand 12:27, 21 October 2007 (UTC) vote changed. With the vote new option, there is no gain in this. Siebrand 10:10, 22 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Discussion

  • @OosWesThoesBes: you state: "Some images are not really commons-made.". What exactly do you mean by that? Siebrand 12:28, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
    • I'm not perfect in English so I'll say what I thought in Dutch so you can translate it for other people: Sommige aafbeeldingen zijn niet echt gangbaar voor op Commons, ze zijn alleen maar voor gebruik op Meta. Looking to Wikipedias like Limburgish, many .ogg files are uploaded with the Limburgish pronouncation, they are only relevant for li.wikipedia than for another project. The same is on Meta. --OosWesThoesBes 17:30, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • Pathoschild: we're disabling uploads, not deleting every single local image. Majorly (talk) 17:17, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
    The point is that, if you put all you new images in commons today, there is a danger that external circumstances will cause them to disappear, without your knowing, next month. - Hillgentleman 18:01, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
    Yes, this would affect future historical pages, like Wikimania 2008/Bids. —{admin} Pathoschild 18:08:43, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
    FWIW that page is already historical ;) I agree that they would be affected, if the images are deleted from Commons. But why would they be? Majorly (talk) 18:14, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
    Their copyright status in their source country may change, and be deleted despite being in the public ___domain in the United States. This is not as uncommon as we might like to think; see, for example, a discussion about the status of Russian works on Wikisource after a change to Russian copyright law effective in January 2008 will retroactively restore copyrights. A similar problem even occurred in the United States with the ratification of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act effective 1996. While we can be reasonably sure that there will be few such restorations in the United States, it becomes very problematic when their inclusion also depends on their status in their source countries. See discussion below about why Commons' choice to require that images be in the public ___domain in their source country is neither required nor applicable on Meta. —{admin} Pathoschild 18:30:40, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
    Given the Board resolution, this is no longer relevant. Per March 2008, the policy *must* be equal to that of Commons, unless there is an EDP... Historical lack checking for correct licenses is not relevant, IMO. Siebrand 18:08, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
    No, Commons' copyright policy goes beyond the licensing policy resolution. Commons requires that works be in the public ___domain in the United States and in their source country to ensure that images can be used in as many jurisdictions as possible. This requirement is not part of the licensing policy resolution, and is not applicable to Meta since our goal is not to make our content available for redistribution in many international jurisdictions. —{admin} Pathoschild 18:30:40, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
    Please explain how the above complies with the complete contents of this wiki having a GFDL or more free license. It appears to me as you may be trying to invent a loophole/restriction here that is not relevant. Siebrand 19:34, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
    Consider:
    1. Works in the public ___domain are compatible with the GNU Free Documentation License. The public ___domain criteria for the United States do not match those in other countries, because these depend on national copyright laws. National copyright laws can change, and can retroactively restore copyrights.
    2. Commons copyright policy requires that an image be in the public ___domain in both the United States and the source country. Meta and the Foundation's copyright policy require that a work be in the public ___domain in the United States only. In both cases, the content is free.
    3. Therefore, Commons policy results in the deletion of images that are in the public ___domain in the United States if their copyright situation changes in their source country (but not the United States).
    Any mass deletion of images used on historical pages that are valid on Meta (but not on Commons) is not acceptable. I would favour limiting local uploads, but not disabling them. —{admin} Pathoschild 19:59:48, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh, for heavens' sakes. We don't do binding votes - here or anywhere else. Please don't abuse the wiki to suggest that we will. James F. (talk) 07:53, 27 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Oh yes we do. Steward/board elections are just two example I can think of. It certainly isn't abuse, that's just your opinion. Majorly (talk) 13:45, 27 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
These are foundation issues, not meta issues. Hillgentleman 14:10, 27 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
"Anywhere else" could easily mean those things. Majorly (talk) 15:44, 27 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Opening votes just some days ago the discussion had opened and changed the rules after the vote had opened? And at the moment the fundraising drive begans and most of meta regulars has no time to get involved to this domestic or Commons/Meta politics fight? This vote is too poorly organized to adopt any "result" to this wiki. How messy. I strongly oppose to have a vote on this issue in this manner. --Aphaia 13:09, 27 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Although I "voted", I've half a mind to strike it (although I thought it was a good compromise suggestion) because I agree with Aphaia, let's talk this through when there's more time (right now is not so great) and get to a consensus about what to do rather than voting. The wiki won't blow up if we do or don't allow uploads so there is time to get to the right answer. ++Lar: t/c 15:48, 28 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Favicon suggestion

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello, I'm afraid this might not be the right place to ask this since I'm pretty new to metawiki and you all seem to be discussing very important things (like, umm... porn?), but I was wondering about the favicons of wikipedia and wiktionary wich happen to be also the ones used in the search engine extensions (the ones that can be added to firefox and IE7). Both are the same, so, couldn't there be a little change (like, a colored border or something like that) to help differentiate them when bookmarked or added to the search engine list (some of us don't use text labels)? I know this is very trivial and, if this doesn't belong here, please tell me where should I make this suggestion.

There is a bug about it, Bug 6096. If a favicon is suggested and accepted by the Wiktionarians, it may be changed. (Wikibooks and Wikiversity already have their own favicon.) – rotemliss – Talk 09:17, 21 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Disabled HTML

Latest comment: 17 years ago4 comments1 person in discussion

In playing with a potential template layout, I thought I'd whip out two of my new favorite HTML tags, <fieldset> and <legend>, only to find out that they don't work at all. Any reason these HTML tags are disabled? EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:44, 26 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Yes, nearly all hypertext markup is disabled by default. A small subset of HTML elements is explicitly allowed; it's possible to enable HTML completely, but the security risk means it will likely never be enabled on the Foundation's public wikis. For an archived discussion on the reasons not to enable it, see w:Talk:HTML/Archive 1#Restricted_HTML.3F. —{admin} Pathoschild 02:07:53, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
I can completely understand disabling a good chunk of HTML, as there's no reason for, say, meta tags. But the above tags I would have found exceptionally useful (this question is closely tied to our discussion about the interlanguage template). *shrug* EVula // talk // ☯ // 06:36, 28 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
Those two can only be used inside <form> elements; how would they be useful to translation interlinking? If you want to add tags to the whitelist, poke the developers. :) —{admin} Pathoschild 07:18:40, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
I've used them before without <form> to format a page... though, granted, the page was a form, just without the form tag yet. I was thinking of using fieldset to do the overall border effect, with the legend tag being the "language" text (which we both agreed wasn't needed). It can be quite handy at the right place.
Since it's largely for cosmetic purposes, I won't bother bugging the devs about it; I really don't imagine it being handy for any other purpose (especially since we can get the same effect, more or less, with a regular div tag, and the legend tag isn't too important). EVula // talk // ☯ // 00:57, 29 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
Okay
Something like this? —{admin} Pathoschild 02:06:48, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
...and there's another reason not to bother the devs about turning it on. ;) EVula // talk // ☯ // 04:22, 29 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Hide Main page title

Latest comment: 17 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

I'm administrator in gl:wiki. Shouldn't be better to hide the "Main page" text to get better use of space. I'm trying to perform it in gl:wiki but I still don't know. It's not explained in Help:Page name or Help:Section. Do you know how? Sobreira 15:07, 28 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Hello. Add this code to gl:MediaWiki:Common.css:
.page-Portada .firstHeading { display:none; }
—{admin} Pathoschild 20:37:05, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks a lot :D --Sobreira 23:39, 28 October 2007 (UTC)Reply
You're welcome. :) —{admin} Pathoschild 02:24:42, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

IDN test Wikis

For those who haven't seen it yet, ICANN started 11+1 IDNwikis related to the 11 IDN (I18N Domain Names) test TLDs (Top Level Domains). ICANN uses MediaWiki, somebody who knows more about it than me should advise them if that could ruin their IRIs and/or invalidate their test pages in 2008.

Frank 17:08, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Issues: language and scope of a project?

Latest comment: 17 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

I incidentally discovered that there was a West Flemish wikipedia. At first sight I thought it was rather fun and sympathetic. West Flemish, for those who would not know, is a group of dialects spoken mainly in Belgium and Netherlands. But then I found this page, "Goal of the West Flemish Wikipedia", where it states that the mission of the group behind the West Flemish Wikipedia is to fix the West Flemish vocabulary and language. The West Flemish encyclopedia of Wikipedia is not the goal, it is just a tool to achieve the mission.

A bit further in the text, there is also the following that confirms that West Flemish is not a language but a group of dialects (as mentioned in the Wikipedia article): "we do not have any written reference point, be it for vocabulary, spelling or grammar, and there are important differences between regions"

This raised some questions for me, and I hope somebody can help me sorting them out:

The first question is: what are the languages in which a Wikipedia can be created? I guess an answer can be "any language for which there is a number of people who wish this wikipedia to be created". But is that the answer? Are dialects OK? I mean, when a language doesn't even have some source to determine what the correct form is, no vocabulary...I do not mean we should refuse local languages, but there seems to be ways to make the difference between a dialect and a local language, such as the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

I had a look at Meta:Language proposal policy, and it appears that the West Flemish WP would probably not have been created under that policy. Requests for new languages/Wikipedia West Flemish shows us that this project was created before the draft policy even existed (probably January 2006) based on a very small number of votes from flemish people.

Second, what can be the goal of a Wikipedia? In this case, the goal does not seem to be the encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia is defined as a tool to achieve the goal, which is to determine the vocabulary and the grammar of West Flemish. Honestly, I do not consider this being an acceptable goal for a wikipedia, and it is seems logical that a Wikipedia in a dialect would have this kind of actual goal. Bradipus 13:04, 4 November 2007 (UTC)Reply


Just to clarify: 1. Is the page vls:Wikipedia:Doel West-Vlaamse Wikipedia endorsed by an entire community? A group of wikipedians can hold whatever points of views; it doesn't mean they are not writing an encyclopaedia.
2. What do you mean by "no vocabulary"? In some minority languages, there are problems in the lack of standard writing. It doesn't mean that wikipedia should be stopped by such problems. Hillgentleman 15:36, 4 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
1. No idea. The page is there since more than a year and has not changed much. The community is probably small (2 207 article created in more than a year). If this kind of goal actually is an issue, maybe somebody should go and talk to these fellows.
2. I mean nothing, I just try to translate what they write as their goal. If their goal is to secure (vastleggen) vocabulary, it means that they have an issue in the determination of what the west flemish vocabulary is. I suspect part of the issue is the fact that west flemish is a flemish dialect that has no specific vocabulary for a lot of subjects. Bradipus 16:59, 4 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Plausibly related topic may be found at Talk:Proposals for closing projects. Your participation to the discussion will be welcome. --Aphaia 10:45, 7 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

An underlying agenda beneath many of the smaller Wikipedias is language preservation -- revival of extinct languages and preservation of endangered languages. In its weakest and mildest form, I think that's congruent with our broad educational mission of collecting and disseminating free information to the world -- these languages themselves are a form of human knowledge. Many of the endangered and extinct languages are old and projects here help retain their knowledge.
Then there are constructed languages such as Interlingua and Esperanto that have established communities and are important in field of linguistics. Finally, we have Simple English, which serves an important purpose in helping readers acquire English and information that's in English.
I get nervous when a language-advocacy agenda is pushed a bit stronger -- as with the failed European Portuguese proposal -- and I get downright alarmed when one of our projects turns into a downright POV, demagogic platform such as the now closed Siberian Wikipedia. In these cases, a few people wanted to create new forks of existing languages (Portuguese and Russian) from slight dialect differences. Globally, the most invasive and illogical of the big languages is English and both the world and our English language projects seem to get along OK (on the whole) with a mishmash of Britlish, Yanklish and even, occasionally, Europanto.
The wording cited above makes me nervous -- does that reflect West Flemish Wikipedia community consensus? It seems like POV-pushing and a deviation from Wikimedia's goals. Contrary to the writer's assertion, our Wikipedias are the goal from Wikimedia's standpoint and anything else is secondary at best. If they can't buy into that, I suggest we part ways amicably and they can port their work to date to another host (Flemopaedia?) running MediaWiki or other wiki software.
Beyond this, I defer to linguists and people familiar with that area and the West Flemish language/dialect. --A. B. (talk) 17:31, 7 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Is there a policy or discussion about consistency between same topic articles in different languages?

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

--> Discussion moved to metapub. Hillgentleman 23:32, 11 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Possible trademark violations

Latest comment: 17 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

To whom should we direct queries about external sites which might be abusing Wikimedia Foundation trademarks? Physchim62 16:46, 12 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

It's best to send them a friendly letter first telling that they're doing this in case they were unaware. If they don't respond to that, then you can escalate the situation via Wikimedia's General Counsel, Mike Godwin. Angela 02:16, 13 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Cheers Angela, the contentious item has now been removed from the external site so I think we can call the situation resolved. Physchim62 19:27, 13 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Some input please

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

There are some dark & dusty parts on Meta that could do with some more views please! I have two specific issues in mind. Firstly there is TV.com on the Interwiki map talk page. There seem arguments in both directions but little input.

Then there is gportal.hu on the Spam blacklist. There have been a series of request to block pages from this site & in the end a request to block the whole site which was done. However there are now arguments as to whether this was rather harsh to be balanced against the work of continually adding pages.

Hope to see some input on both - cheers --Herby talk thyme 09:20, 15 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Latest comment: 17 years ago3 comments1 person in discussion

Interwiki links are not working in Template:NowCommons. Does anyone know why? --Meno25 21:12, 16 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

There are no Meta-Wikis in other languages to link to. —{admin} Pathoschild 21:16:51, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Interwiki links on Meta should link to Wikipedia. See commons:Commons:GNU Free Documentation License where interwiki lniks are working properly. (In this case, there are no Commons-Wikis in other languages to link to.) --Meno25 21:57, 16 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Yes, interwiki links like en:foo work. Interlanguage links don't, because there's no other Meta-Wiki to link to. Meta and Wikipedia have very little in common; it would make more sense to have sidebar links to wikis like wikimediafoundation.org than to Wikipedia, and those are best left inline. Thus, interlanguage links are disabled entirely. —{admin} Pathoschild 22:13:49, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for explaining. --Meno25 22:33, 16 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Request for Bot Status

Latest comment: 17 years ago21 comments6 people in discussion

I'm requesting BOT status for User:Fluxbot. Task: Processing approved Category renames. Identical to en:user:Fluxbot. xaosflux Talk 05:34, 19 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Seems reasonable enough to me. No objections. I think our process for bot approvals is a bit muddy though. ++Lar: t/c 10:50, 19 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
PS please see Bot policy which applies to bot operations here, it's been adopted as the standard, per Meta:Babel#Bot policy... do you think you could do a small test run? ++Lar: t/c 15:16, 19 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Running trial now, will post results here when done. Muddy for sure, it appears that Meta:Requests_for_adminship#Request_for_bot_flags, Requests for bot status, and Bot policy need some merging. Will look in to soon. I'm assuming that we want to go with the newer Bot policy though. xaosflux Talk 03:01, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Requests for bot status if for other wikis (that stewards will give bot status to) and M:RFA#Requests for bot flags is for local bots that will operate on meta. Bot policy is just the policy, so I'm not sure how we'd merge all of them. ;-) Cbrown1023 talk 03:17, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
What I meant was that they all have directions regarding bots here on meta: Some are a little ambiguous, merge was the wrong word, clarify would be better! xaosflux Talk 03:27, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Note, bot trial ran see Contribs for log. Thought this would be a much longer run required to process a recent category rename but most of the pages got their cat's from templates. Still, should be useful for the future, let me know if any adjustments are requested. Thanks, xaosflux Talk 03:27, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
There are two different instructions for local requests: on Requests for bot status: "Local requests for the Meta-Wiki: start a discussion in Meta:Babel, then ask a flag in Meta:Requests for adminship#Request for bot flags."; on Bot policy: "To request bot access on Meta, hold a discussion at Meta:Babel for at least a week. If there is no significant opposition, post a request at Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat." Which instruction should be followed? Is it necessary to make a request at Meta:Requests for adminship#Requests for bot flags, if it is already discussed on Babel? Korg 15:39, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Uh really? :P I say move the whole discussion to Meta:Requests for adminship. I don't know why this page is involved, it seems pointless to discuss it here and then request somewhere else. May as well have it all together. Majorly (talk) 16:26, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
I don't have any problems with that, it's probably best that way. Cbrown1023 talk 16:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
That would be my preference as well. I'm not sure why it ended up being worded that way. I seem to recall discussing this above, and wondering then too after Majorly changed it around part way, I'd say let's change it the rest of the way and be more || with Commons for example, where bots are discussed entirely on the RfA page (although it's done there as a transclusion so the bot discussion can also be seen somewhere else). But this may be off topic for Xoloz's bot though :) Props to Majorly for all the reorging he's been doing lately, don't stop now! ++Lar: t/c 19:33, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
That would be Xaosflux not Xoloz I assume? ;) Majorly (talk) 19:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
eXactly. ++Lar: t/c 21:27, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Before, some of the few requests for bot flags were informally discussed here. But it makes sense to have all local requests on the same page. :) Thanks for your comments. Korg 23:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Following this discussion, the instructions in the pages mentioned above have been updated. Korg 17:53, 22 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
No objection from me. Korg 14:37, 20 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
I do a lot of bot work on en: and it's a big process, but we get a LOT of requests. If there is a chance that the discussion will get long, another good place to discuss it would be on the bot's talk page, with a link in the appropriate venues (maybe on here AND rfa?) xaosflux Talk 01:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Not the first time I've meen confused with Xoloz! xaosflux Talk 01:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Any on-topic :) feedback on my bot request? xaosflux Talk 01:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
You are SO no fun. Test run looks reasonable and I have no objections to this bot getting flagged. ++Lar: t/c 12:28, 21 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

I watched the run and as no one has raised objections the flag is   Done. Equally I do think further requests should be made as suggested above --Herby talk thyme 12:51, 21 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

AJAX transclusion table

Latest comment: 17 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

 
Screenshot

Hello, I suggest implementing the AJAX transclusion table script. This script adds a "[show]" or "[hide]" link to every row in tables with the "attable" class. Clicking the link will display the linked page below (see screenshots at right). No show/hide link will be shown in rows with no link to an existing local page (like heading rows).

This has several possible uses, such as Requests for new languages/table or User:Pathoschild/AJAX Welcome (translating templates without the need for the reader to download every version). If there's no objection, I'll add the following code to the site JavaScript, which will only call the full code if such a table is found on the page. 

/*************
*** AJAX transclusion table <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pathoschild/Scripts/AJAX_transclusion_table>
*** by [[m:user:Pathoschild]]
*************/
if(getElementsByClassName(document.getElementById('bodyContent'),'table','attable').length) {
	document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="'
	  + 'http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Pathoschild/Scripts/AJAX_transclusion_table.js' 
	  + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s"></script>');
}

—{admin} Pathoschild 18:09:22, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Could you please try explaining this again? The screenshot didn't help as much as I thought it would. How does this differ from normal show/hide behaviour done with divs? What are the disadvantages of doing this? ++Lar: t/c 12:56, 21 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
The scripts you're referring to (NavFrame and Language select) hide parts of the current page, by adding or removing the CSS "display:none" declaration; browsers download the full text of the page, then make some of it invisible with CSS. The AJAX transclusion table serves a different purpose, dynamically displaying the contents of other pages. It doesn't download anything until the user selects what they want to view, then it downloads only that. This is useful for heavy request pages like Requests for new languages or w:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, but the same technique can be applied for many other purposes like displaying translations (without downloading every translation available), making lists of templates expandable into examples and documentation, et cetera.
So you can't accurately compare them, since they serve different purposes. That said, the AJAX script has some advantages:
  • Much faster loading: a transclusion table doesn't download any hidden content at all, but instead downloads content on demand. For example, using NavFrame or Language select on Requests for new languages would result in a 230KB page (with perhaps 4% of that actually being read by the user), while the AJAX table results in a 7.3KB page (96% smaller). You can see the difference that makes by visiting Requests for new languages (imagine it has show/hide links), then visiting Requests for new languages/table (imagine same).
  • Flexibility: The AJAX table can display any page on Meta (not only what is on the current page or template). For example, you could have a template with a list of help pages on your user page, so you can click "[show]" beside any page to quickly read it. I've seen templates on enwiki with "quick-reference" links to various templates; the "[show]" links on those templates would display the template with its documentation.
  • Ease-of-use: To create an AJAX transclusion table, you just add class="attable" to any normal table; any rows with links will have a new "[show]" link that displays the content of the row's first link. In contrast, NavFrames are very complicated to use (see example code).
—{admin} Pathoschild 03:56:01, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
By the way, you can try it yourself by following the brief installation instructions and viewing Requests for new languages/table, which is an AJAX transclusion table. —{admin} Pathoschild 20:27:28, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
Can one transclude a section? Hillgentleman 04:05, 22 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
No, although that's a good idea to implement later. —{admin} Pathoschild 06:35:03, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Given that it can take weeks before most users see changes to the site JavaScript, I've implemented it now. We can remove it if serious objections appear in this discussion. :) —{admin} Pathoschild 20:02:33, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Umm...
  • script doesn't seem to work in IE6
  • script doesn't seem to work in Opera 9
  • script breaks for some old skins, e.g. Nostalgia
  • &dontcountme=s is really obsolete
  • notice on MediaWiki talk:Common.js would be nice (I don't watch this forum)
However, the idea itself is nice and I support it. I suggest we move e.g. to Editing User talk:Pathoschild/Scripts/AJAX transclusion table to dicsuss technical details ∴ Alex Smotrov 06:27, 24 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
I moved the discussion to my talk page; I prefer to keep discussions in few places, so they're easier to keep track of. :) —{admin} Pathoschild 06:53:22, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

List of Wikipedias

Latest comment: 17 years ago27 comments8 people in discussion

- from: Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Volapük Wikipedia -- Hillgentleman 15:43, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Relevant discussions at


Communication committee discussed this matter regarding to Public relation and concluded the current status was unacceptable. A project basically filled with bot-created stubs and without a real community, that is, Volapuk Wikipedia, shouldn't be listed on the list in the current rank. While everyone agreed the project itself shouldn't be closed in that condition.

During the discussion two solutions were proposed.

  1. The list will contain only projects whose size or speaker population, IIRC, is considerably bigger than a certain criteria. It means Volapuk Wikipedia will be removed from the list as a whole until its community reaches a certain size ... or if we use speaker population as criteria, it wouldn't be back to the list concerned.
  2. As Pfctdayelise suggested, Volapuk Wikipedia community can remove all those bot creations and stay in an appropriate place on the list.

It is up to the local community - but Volapuk Wikipedia community should realize they choose one of those proposals. --Aphaia 14:57, 22 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Can we see the minutes? Thanks. Hillgentleman 15:17, 22 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
No sorry, the list is confidential. So I am hesitate to show who said what ... However if necessary, I'll urge the people who proposed those ideas to post it to the foundation-l. --Aphaia 22:39, 22 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
How, then, is the communications committee authorised to decide on what to do with a page on meta, bypassing the community discussion? Hillgentleman 23:29, 22 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Do the Communication committee think the same about the other Wikipedias that are filled with bot-created stubs and don't have much of a community ? (lmo.wikipedia 100 060 articles - depth=0, te.wikipedia 37 687 articles - depth=1, new.wikipedia 37 561 articles - depth=2, ceb.wikipedia 33 530 articles - depth=0, bpy.wikipedia 22 092 articles - depth=1, to name the biggest).
The suggestion to remove all bot created articles in order to stay in the list seems utterly silly to me. If an article is useful it is an useful article, no matter who or what created it. To me it seems that the Communication committee are taking this list far to serious. It is just a silly list, not a proper measure of anything and certainly not the meaning of everything. --Jorunn 00:03, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
This has already been discussed. If you object to Volapuk (or any wiki) from ranking so highly by your chosen system of measurement, change your system of measurement. Don't try and artificially skew the results, or ban a wiki that has reached success by your (fairly meaningless) criteria. This has been discussed on this page already, and a good solution has been presented at List of Wikipedias by sample of articles. I think both of the proposals given here are unacceptable. I also think it is somewhat contradictory for a 'communications' committee to be 'dictating' what the community should do, rather than participating in the on-going discussion (i.e. communicating with the interested parties). --HappyDog 09:44, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hilgentleman - to answer your question, the page is an important publicity portal for the Foundation, rather than something "owned" by the Meta community (whatever that's defined as - the phrase seems to imply Meta as a separate project, which it simply isn't) - David Gerard 11:07, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
David Gerard, Nor does the communications committee. It is not right that the communications committtee can just simply look at any article, declare that "the page is an important publicity portal for the Foundation" and sieze its control, and does not even bother to ask the community for inputs or explain their discussions. It is analogous to a head of state declaring "State of Emergency", when there really is none, for political purposes. How is communications committee authorised to do such a thing? Hillgentleman 15:26, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Many have said it. Let me say it again. Long ago some wikimedians decided that they wanted a list of wikipedias. Then at some point people decided to order the list in terms of NUMBEROFARTICLES. Then somebody came in and thought, hey, this is not bad, let us use it for marketing purposes. As time changes, the list has changed, and the marketing folks come in, and say, You list is wrong. Your list is misleading. Please correct it.Hillgentleman 15:32, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
I suggest that marketing folks take heed of what we have said, above and below. The simplest solution that satisfies everybody is:
  LEAVE THE LIST AS IT IS, AND ADD A COLUMN OF MISCELLANEOUS COMMENTS.
--Hillgentleman 15:35, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Don't you think that we should reconsider the method of evaluating Wikipedias? For example – we can calculate the "real" number of a given Wikipedia's articles by:

  • not counting articles created by bots only – if they were not touched later by any human
  • not counting ultrastubs – articles with very little text even if they contain infoboxes and other templates automatically added by bots
  • not counting articles in "clean-it-up" categories
  • other criteria of excluding completely useless articles...

Polimerek 11:20, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

A few comments on some of the above topics:

  • (David Gerard): "The list is an important publicity portal for the Foundation". I note that one of the criticisms on the Volapük Wikipedia was "advertising" and "publicity". Are you saying that the whole List of Wikipedias is "publicity" rather than simply raw data? Isn't the foundation violating its own principles then -- just in order to be able to say, "we have 2,000,000 articles" (the overwhelming majority of which are still very, very far from FA -- or even real "encyclopedic" -- quality)?
  • The proposals of the communications community: I agree with Jorunn, Hillgentleman, and HappyDog, both solutions are silly, because:
    a. Keeping Volapük off the list takes away the lists usefulness as a purveyor of raw data; one would have to start a new page (say, List of all Wikipedias) to keep this information available; and
    b.     reducing its size to its "proper place" (without alternative criteria, isn't that a bit prejudiced?) only makes sense if you advocate deleting all stubs from all Wikipedias so that they all would be reduced to their "proper places".
  • Considerations about the minimum size of a community, or of a speaker population, don't seem to me to be of the competence of the communications committee -- isn't this in the area of the languages committee? Anyway, what are the arguments? What is the minimum size? What are the criteria? Shouldn't they be discussed, get perhaps their own page here at Meta, etc.?
  • If you want to see the projects occupying their "proper place" (by whatever criteria), you can always start a new page (like the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles, which corresponds better to your expectations -- though without the glamour of "millions and millions of articles"). Use new criteria, indicate them clearly, express your reasons for preferring them (+ criticism of the original List of Wikipedias), and then use this new page for publicity. I'm sure the intelligent people in the public will appreciate your sincerity.

--Smeira 17:03, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

If I remember correctly, List of Wikipedias used to be a purely alphabetical listing. That seemed like a reasonable way to comprehensively list the wikis: the front page links to the list, so people come to there looking for those really small languages that haven't made it onto the front page yet. It must be a pain to have to search through the entire list for such a language. Imagine a library where all the books were arranged by size. That's what we're doing. At least we divide the front page into four alphabetical lists, so you only have to look four places for the language. I have no problem with the by-size list's existence, but it should be at List of Wikipedias by size.

Anyhow, I'm not so much concerned about List of Wikipedias as I am the front page. It's pretty obvious that the list is raw data, but on the front page, appearing high up really matters. A wiki looks quite legitimate if it gets a spot in the very exclusive search box there, as Volapük and Lombard now do. (Users from the Russian Wikipedia wanted all 100,000+ wikis to be placed around the puzzle ball, but the search box was a compromise. Good thing, too.) Unfortunately, the by-size list and front page use the exact same criterion for arranging the wikis. It's a very simple, objective, easy-to-describe-without-words criterion, but it doesn't tell the whole story. I like List of Wikipedias by sample of articles very much, but how in the world do we use it at the front page, where we're not supposed to use any words because you'd have to provide upwards of 200 translations on the same page? Since lumping that many languages into one list would be annoying to use, how do you divide the top 118 (by sample of articles) into manageable lists?

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 10:12, 24 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

In other words the issue is, as far as I understand, if it is good and rational to give a "legitimate look" to stub-covered projects, like Volapuk. While we have a problem of feasibility, I agree with Polimerek generally - a mere count of articles shouldn't be the measure to choose the projects we highlight globally. I have no idea what is different from the things which has happened on Volapuk Wikipedia and what happened once on Wolof Wikipedia - an external organization tried to use it just for advertise themselves. As for "sample of articles" the sample is too much Westernalized and not a good way to evaluate projects. For example, Asian langauge projects which are some of our most accessed projects are underrepresented on that list. --Aphaia 10:25, 24 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Surely nobody has said Volapuek wikipedia is a mature wikipedia. And it is true that putting Volapuek wikipedia on the front page is not necessarily useful. But do not mix such matters with the list itself. If I read you correctly, Aphaia, when you say the list of wikipedia by number of articles 'give(s) a "legitimate look" ', you are reading too much into it, i.e. putting your own point of view into the list and your interpretation into the raw data. We have seen that many do not read the list in the same way the communications committee do. Hillgentleman 17:18, 24 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
And yes, alphabetical order makes sense. Hillgentleman 17:23, 24 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Good point. And I would like to offer an apology for my not well-described wording. It is better to separate 1) to have a list of Wikipedia by article number as genuine and raw statistic data and 2) to design portal pages (like http://www.wikipedia.org or each Wikipedia project Main Pages) based on that page. As long as the issue 1 affects the issue 2 directly, and I understand that is the current status, I think my first report from Comcom discussion valid and appropriate. But of course we needn't be bound to that list and can find any other appropriate way to choose projects we display on that page.
Regarding PR effects, and specially psychological ones, I don't think it the best strategy to list all projects in a same way - it should be properly grouped, and the ideal number of elements in each chunks are seven plus or minus two (so between 5 and 9). And as maturity of Volapuk Wikipedia, we all seem to agree that it doesn't reach to the quality which deserves to be featured as representatives of 200+ projects, as interim remedy, is there any problem to remove it from that page? --Aphaia 21:26, 25 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Despite being the main Volapük Wikipedia contributor, I don't in principle oppose this remotion. But I note one problem: in its current form, the front page does mention number of articles; if you remove Lombard and Volapük from it without explicitly changing the criteria, then you fall back into the same "insincerity" problem I mentioned above: the page talks about "the Wikipedias that have reached a certain number of articles" but then excludes some of these Wikipedias without further comments. In order to legitimally remove Volapük and Lombard (which, I agree, aren't as "mature" as the other large Wikipedias), the wording should be changed: the "100,000+", "10,000+" and "1,000+" labels should be replaced with something else, maybe a more neutral wording ("best", "good", "average"; or "A-quality", "B-quality", "C-quality"; or something like that. To me, this would be morally necessary before one could remove any Wikipedias from the front page on grounds other than article count. (Aphaia, could you give me a link to a page that describes the Wolof event you mentioned? I'd like to see how similar they are to what I was trying to do.)
On using the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles: I agree that the sample list (List of articles) is Western-biased; yet the results are better than the mere number of articles for purposes such as Wikimedia portals. If Asian Wikipedians (or any other underrepresented group) complement the list, it will be more representative. As for groupings: (a) the first 6, English to Russian (score > 3 000), (b) the following 12-13, Portuguese to Catalan (and perhaps Chinese; score between 3 000 and 2 000), (c) the following 24-25, Serbian to Norwegian (Nynorsk) (score between 1 000 and 2 000), and (d) all the others (score below 1 000). If finding words in 200 languages to name these categories seems too much, one could use iconic titles: five, four and three stars, or five, four and three exclamation marks (!), or something like that. --Smeira 01:44, 26 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
(A bit off topic) As for Wolof Wikipedia, I don't think there was a discussion on meta at that time (early 2005?). It may have been on IRC and e-mail exchanging but I don't remember which mailing list was used. Relevant discussions may be found on French Wikipedia, since the second language of Wolof speakers is French and those people were trained in French speaking community. But I don't think it was totally compatible with Volapuk Wikipedia - the Wolof project at that time put an advertisement of a certain external non-profit organization (promotion of Wolof language was their cause). They did on a good faith but it was never acceptable from our side. After it was found, they were trained on French Wikipedia to know how Wikipedia works. Anthere may remember where related materials are found ... I mentioned it as only an example "language promotion" became the main purpose of the project community and expect Volapuk project status is far better than that. --Aphaia 05:05, 26 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

(Re-dedenting) I like Smeira's idea of using stars to hint at relative quality. Besides, all the other Web 2.0 guys are doing it. :^) It would work well if we decide to use the "sample of articles" measurement, though we'd still have to come up with a way to divide the list into three or so levels behind the scenes. (Right now we can group by scores – 2 000+, 1 000+, 500+, and 250+ – but I don't know how stable those scores will be.) Coincidentally, removing the front page's numeric headings in favor of icons will solve a technical issue that has some IE users seeing a horizontal scrollbar. We can implement the icon heading as a background image, so that it centers correctly yet doesn't force the scrollbar. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 04:51, 26 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

I don't know how stable scores will be either -- they're still ad-hoc. There has been some discussion on the talk page of the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles about language "correcting weights" (since a text in Chinese or Japanese has much fewer characters than the corresponding text -- with the same level of information -- in English, it was felt that these languages were being placed below their actual level of Wikipedia achievement; and indeed that seems to be true). Hm... Is it the case that a decision for the front page has to be final? Should scores be changed in the future, and a few languages change category because of that, then couldn't the page simply be adapted to reflect that? Is it the case that the front page has to be very stable? --Smeira 21:44, 26 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
The decision doesn't have to be final, but we should avoid changing the criteria too often at the front page. Every time we bump a language up or down on the list, we force many of that wiki's users to hunt for the wiki again. The current system is quite stable because wikis' article counts generally go up, not down. Anyhow, I can wait to change up the front page until we come up with a good formula and whatnot. Just as long as Volapük doesn't dethrone English in the near future. :^) – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 07:35, 27 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Don't worry, that's a physical impossibility ;^)... Even if I wanted to do that, considering the growth rate of en.wp, my little laptop + python programs simply could not add stubs fast enough (even if I have a sufficiently large database -- say, the en:NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database... Maybe the Lombardians can do it (they're currently adding asteroids, after all...), in case they have more than one computer to use for this purpose. --Smeira 15:30, 6 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
On mixi.jp, the biggest Japanese social network website (imagine sort of Friendstar or Facebook) featured Volapuk Wikipedia in their column (membership required, so no link now). There are a bright side and a dark side. The language Volapuk is known thanks to that article, and originally the featuring on Wikipedia front page (perhaps Japanese in this context), it's the bright side. The dark side is, vowiki was commented "full of too short, less informative articles" "not deserved to be called an encyclopedia" "boosting with a bot and hence feature on the Wikipedia Main page may anger other Wikipedia version editors including esperanto" - shortly the article publicized the language itself but showed Volapuk Wikipedia something not serious. I don't think it is a good advertisement of the project itself and other Wikimedia projects. Also this article mentioned Lombard Wikipedia like "similar type boosted Wikipedia". I hope this trend is not spreading and think we need to remove them, at least Volapuk Wikipedia from the Wikipedia portal, just as Comcom recommended formerly. ---Aphaia 14:47, 4 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
The Brazilian Orkut has also opened a Volapük group, and there's also a Volapük group in Facebook; both are much less negative. Now Aphaia, what you mention is something I had been thinking about since before I started adding stubs to vo.wp: people won't like it (especially those who pay too much attention to article count), and it's not really a model encyclopedia. I've said many things on both topics in the proposal for closure; I'll summarize it here like this: a wiki project for a very small language with very few (effective or potential) collaborators cannot be a true encyclopedia. None of them will ever be like the English Wikipedia. The Volapük Wikipedia -- and about 150 other projects -- will simply never be like the English Wikipedia. Unless thousands of very active collaborators appear out of nowhere, this is simply impossible. Their goals must be different, and the criteria for judging them must be different; or else, if the criteria can't be different, why were they created at all? (Which should these criteria be? I made a few suggestions in the proposal for closure of vo.wp; I'd love to discuss this further with anyone who's interested.) If the Japanese people who condemn the Volapük Wikipedia don't realize that, then they're simply making a wrong judgement, in my opinion. Someone should mention this to them. I would if I could speak Japanese! ;-) --Smeira 15:30, 6 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
"Someone should mention this to them." And it should be someone who were persuaded with your argument. So It cannot be myself. Your argument seems to me pointless and only stick to the idea to place Volapuk Wikipedia on the Wikipedia portal to promote the language, even giving the disadvantage to the Wikimedia project at large. In my observation it is only you to support this idea (in twenty days no support has come from the community to your argument in this discussion), so if no objection is coming in a week, I'm going to remove it from the portal in accordance with the previous recommendation of Communication committee. --Aphaia 08:15, 24 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Coherency in policies -- consensus vs. voting

Latest comment: 17 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

We're having a bit of an argument on the Romanian Wikipedia regarding the implementation of consensus in practice, and we'd appreciate some input from outside. We are currently discussing a new policy proposal, wherein disputed changes to policies would be settled by voting. The current proposal would not affect other policies, such as Consensus, which would still stand. However, when a change to policies is disputed and consensus is not reached, it is proposed that voting would settle the issue one way or another (basically by asking "do you want to make this particular change to the policy or not?"). This proposal itself is disputed and is also subject to voting on whether it should become a policy or not. Should it pass, the final form of the policy will explicitly state that basic Wikipedia policies are not subject to voting (such as NPOV, copyright issues, etc).

The questions we have for you are:

  1. Is voting in this manner against the basic Wikipedia policies? If so, are other local Wikipedias free to implement it as a solution?
  2. If not, how is consensus reached in situations where discussions on the topic are leading nowhere?

If there is another more appropriate place to ask this, please let me know.

Thank you,
Gutza 10:31, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Some significant issues brought up when voting are: Thresholds for passing (majority, some super-majority?); along with how to handle more then 2 options on your issue; and what suffrage requirements to have. Some meta essays on voting are: Voting is a tool, Polls are evil, and Don't vote on everything. xaosflux Talk 13:38, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Comment: After a long discussion a community may converge to the opinion that any decision is better than no decision. (E.g. driving on the left or driving on the right.) In this case, deciding it with a poll does not contradict the spirit of consensus. Hillgentleman 16:58, 23 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Fundraising 2007/Why Give blog

Latest comment: 17 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Who exactly choses which blogs are posted and are featured in the donate tab? --Anonymous DissidentTalk 07:54, 28 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Read this for details. --Meno25 16:17, 28 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

RC messed

Latest comment: 17 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

RC is messed up, or is that just for me? the pages seem to be unclickable, and the white space below the page is huge. --Anonymous DissidentTalk 05:44, 29 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Hello, I don't have the same problem. Try to clear the cache, if this does not help, please make a screenshot for us. Please also click the following links:
rc|action=purge
rc|action=render
Thanks, best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 08:33, 29 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hi. Thanks a lot. That fixed it up perfectly. Regards, and thanks again. --Anonymous DissidentTalk 09:25, 29 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Status of a steward banned from a community

Latest comment: 17 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

Hi all. I have some questions:

1. Is a steward who is banned from a community still allowed to interfere, in any way, with the community that bans him/her?

2. Is a steward who is blocked in a community still allowed to interfere, in any way, with the community that blocks him/her?

Thanks. HOTUMA 14:06, 29 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

If a community is large enough to out-right ban someone, they probably have their own admins and bureaucrats, so the need for steward interaction is likely very, very low. Unless there's extenuating circumstances (such as the banned steward being the only steward that reads that particular language), I'd say that the steward should steer clear of the community that banned them; with more than 700 different WMF sites, I think there's plenty of work to be done that avoidance wouldn't be difficult. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 14:42, 29 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
My understanding is that a steward would not be permitted to take any actions relating to the community that they are banned on (and would be warned if they did so) --Herby talk thyme 16:13, 29 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for responding. I am eased now. She showed a minimum faith to our community. I rarely tell a future but now hope that she will not be banned. HOTUMA 11:37, 30 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Anyone banned on a project shouldn't interfere there. It would be highly inapropriate if a steward did so, and a blatant abuse of the steward rights. A community outranks a steward. --Jorunn 13:02, 30 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
Steward is not a rank. Hillgentleman 01:42, 3 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Nor is community. ;) —{admin} Pathoschild 10:09:12, 03 December 2007 (UTC)

Local Meta

Latest comment: 17 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Was there ever any proposal or discussion or something about creating own per language Meta-wikis? This wiki is for all Wikimedia projects in all languages and that's a good solution. But I wonder, whether it wouldn't be useful to have per language Meta-wikis too. For example a fr.meta.wikimedia.org for Meta-work regarding the French-language projects. For example, if the French Wikipedians want to give an introduction into the work of the Wikimedia Foundation, this page should not reside on fr.wikipedia, it would be useful for fr.wiktionary too. Of course such a page can be hosted on this wiki, but it would have many advantages, if such a page would be placed in fr.meta.wikimedia.org instead. A user speaking French only can easily get lost in this multilingual, but English-dominated wiki. A French-only environment would be a place where that user would feel much "safer". Or even think of a lesser-used language. Like Sami. A Sami-speaker only speaking Sami or only interested in Sami content will have a very hard time in this wiki. There are very few Sami pages (when there are any, I don't know) scattered in a big m(a|e)ss of English and other language content. If Sami had an own Meta-wiki, even if that wiki would be relatively tiny, that project would be much easier to access for the simple user. I don't want to detract the decision- and policy-making from this wiki, but more static meta content would be in better hands on such local Meta-wikis. So: was this ever proposed? --::Slomox:: >< 17:50, 7 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

I think this would be sensible, although it would take a lot of work to make it happen. Meta was, I believe, the second Wikimedia project ever, and was created in part to allow discussion of issues shared among Wikipedias in different languages. (I may be completely off-base on this; I wasn't around at the time.) The emergence of the second axis of diversity -- viz. Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikisource -- has made the exact role of Meta somewhat confused (and confusing). Also, in the past few years, much of the original Meta mandate has been hived off to the Foundation, Mediawiki.org, and others; IMO it is high time that Meta's role was rethought. Restructuring Meta as a set of language communities (perhaps with English remaining as the hub, or perhaps with English-Meta and meta-Meta separated) holds a lot of promise. There is already a considerable amount of content on Meta in various languages, but it remains an overwhelmingly English-driven project, which impairs our ability to serve non-English-speaking Wikimedians. -- Visviva 16:13, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Maps

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

i writed here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Translation_requests/WMF/Our_projects/source i have writed: hello. why not to make something like wikimapia.org but not with google because it is not gnu fdl or compatible but with nasa maps which are public ___domain, but they unfortunately dont have web api, i consider, do they?

Something like that exists. See OpenStreetMap. Angela 13:12, 8 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia

Latest comment: 17 years ago29 comments3 people in discussion

Hello. Would you please help us. I have several questions and Im getting frustrated coz I cant find help over at meta. I cant get any help from any steward of beureacrat. At metapub, I was asked to find a developer whom I can ask these questions.

I would like to know exactly when was the exact date Meta approved the creation of Chavacano Wikipedia http://cbk-zam.wikipedia.org. I have searched at the archives but I just really cannot determine what specific date it was approved for its creation.

When Chavacano wikipedia started last year, I didnt know how to go about translating the interface and the language file. I was just told by an admin of Spanish wikipedia to ask for admin permission and translate the messages here:

http://cbk-zam.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allmessages

I got the adminship and translated most of the messages. The interface was indeed translater, but was I on the right track? I noticed a newly created wikipedia http://bcl.wikipedia.org did not translate its

http://bcl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allmessages

but its interface is translated! So how did it happen?

Another question is, how come cbk-zam or Chavacano is not an option in the language preference of a user in another wikipedia? For example, at the English Wikipedia or here in Meta, if you go to your user preferences, Chavacano is not included as an option for the language interface. How do we make cbk-zam a part of a user language option? In cbk-zam.wikipedia.org, cbk-zam is there as an option, but not in other wikis.

Also, I would like to know where I can have the wikimedia configure the user preference in our Chavacano wikipedia. Whenever we configure the language option in our user preferences in http://cbk-zam.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences cbk-zam is listed as cbk-zam - cbk-zam which is wrong. It should be cbk-zam - Chavacano de Zamboanga. How do I do the correction? I am the sysop of cbk-zam.wikipedia.org. And finally, where will I do the necessary translation of the wikipedia donation to Chavacano that appears on every page? Thanks. I would really appreciate if anyone can help us. Thanks. --Weekeejames 13:32, 8 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Most languages have an own message file which is hardcoded in the MediaWiki installation. You can easily export your messages from Allmessages into a file. I guess you should best ask on Betawiki: for help with this, Betawiki is about translating the interface and they are experienced in exporting messages and committing them to the file repository.
If that message file exists, cbk-zam wil be an option in the preferences on all projects too. --::Slomox:: >< 15:13, 8 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hi, ah, now I understand that problem regarding cbk-zam cbk-zam, I just tried in cbk-zam.wiki. I am asking in #wikimedia-tech since I don't think that this can be changed at betawiki (there the interface itself can be translated and additionally namespacenames, magic words, skin names and specialpage-aliases). I think for this we need to open a bugreport on bugzilla:, best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 15:34, 8 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
I was just talking to Siebrand, a developer, who is one of the two devs running Betawiki. He told me that he could change this (since he is a developer), I will leave a message on betawiki:Process/tasks for him, and we do not need to open a bugreport :)
But before I would like to know if it should be "Zamboangueño" or "Chavacano de Zamboanga" because on other wikis it is "Zamboangueño" and in bugzilla:7581#c2 it was asked to change to Zamboangueño -> is it better?
Thanks, best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 16:02, 8 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the response. Spacebirdy, the formal name would be "Chavacano de Zamboanga", so it should be that way. When I requested the Chavacano de Zamboanga wikipedia here in Meta last year, it was requested by the proper formal name as "Chavacano de Zamboanga". I don't know why everywhere, even here at Meta, I see "Zamboangueño" (which is an informal name for the language and actually kind of ambiguous. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamboangueño ). I wish I could and be able to correct all references and interwiki links of cbk-zam as "Chavacano de Zamboanga" rather than Zamboangueño. But alas, I do not know where to start. BTW, I havent gone to betawiki for a full translation language file. I think the Special:Allmessages translations would be good enough for our wikipedia right now. But now at least I know where to go when the need for a full and complete translation arises. Regarding bugzilla:7581#c2, I don't know why Chris had to ask for a change. He is neither a native Chavacano speaker nor an admin or a regular user of the cbk-zam.wikipedia.org. He is only one of those people who supported its creation, but right up till now, he doesnt contribute anything to our wikipedia. I hope cbk-zam will be reverted back to its full proper and formal name, Chavacano de Zamboanga. Thanks and kind regards. --Weekeejames 04:16, 9 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hi Weekeejames, thanks for the response, I added Your request for Siebrand here, kind regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 08:13, 9 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Many thanks for helping out the Chavacano Wikipedia. We appreciate your extended help. I'm keeping myself in touch with the developments on this issue. Kind regards. --Weekeejames 13:20, 9 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hi Weekeejames, may I invite You to the discussion there, the reason for changing the interwikilink-name seems to have been a space problem, please feel free to suggest solutions there, thanks in advance, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 23:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
I tried to register but I cannot. It always gives me an error "Login error:Incorrect or missing confirmation code." I tried to register almost 20 times using IE and Firefox. Maybe Betawiki is Bugwiki. It's such a pain. :( please just relay my message:

"Hello Spacebirdy and Siebrand. If Chavacano de Zamboanga is too long, Chavacano will just be fine. Also, please change the interwiki links of cbk-zam from Zamboangueño to Chavacano (if Chavacano de Zamboanga is also too long). Indeed, bugzilla:7581#c2 is invalid. cbk-zam everywhere should be either Chavacano de Zamboanga or simply Chavacano. Muchas gracias. Weekeejames --Weekeejames 13:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Wow, I tried again and again to register an account at Betawiki, it still wont allow me in. The math is very simple for that thing against spam, it just wont let me register there. Why? :( --Weekeejames 13:22, 10 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
This should be a temporary problem, I am having problems loging in right now too, Siebrand is not in IRC right now and Nike seems afk, I am quite in a hurry now and can't be online before tonight, so I'll try to contact them then, sorry for the inconveniance, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=|
Hi, I could now post a comment there, can You please try again to create an account, it worked for me now link. Thanks, kind regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 18:45, 10 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
done. --Weekeejames 13:54, 11 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

You posted the same question on my talk page, and I answered before I noticed you had also posted it here. Please notify any others you've asked about this discussion, to avoid duplicating work. My answer is quoted below.

Hello Weekeejames. Interface translations should be done on the translatewiki, and they'll be added directly to MediaWiki's translation files. "Special:Allmessages" should no longer be used for translations (since at least 2005), only for customizing the messages for a specific wiki. This is the reason Chavacano is not available as an option in other wikis— the Chavacano Wikipedia is using an English interface customized with Chavacano.

You will need to import the Chavacano translations into the translatewiki, and generalize them (make them apply to any wiki, ie remove Wikipedia-specific content like links to Chavacano Wikipedia policies). Contact Nikerabbit if you're interested in doing that. If they're already generalized, Nikerabbit can export them directly to the MediaWiki files from the Chavacano Wikipedia. He can also correct the language name while exporting the translations.

To help translate the donation box, please see Fundraising 2007#Pages_to_be_translated.

Determining the date of creation of the Chavacano Wikipedia is difficult. I know it was created sometime between 17 June 2006 (the date of the last vote on Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Chavacano) and 07 January 2007 (when the subcommittee merged it into the new process). cbk-zam:Special:Statistics seems to say 02 October 2006, which would fit.

—{admin} Pathoschild 18:01:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Thank you Pathoschild. I guess, I was too impatient then, I was posting same questions on different areas of meta. I am waiting for Siebrand at Betawiki to help first correct the name of cbk-zam and then from there, I will start working with the translations at betawiki/translatewiki.

Spacebirdy has been giving a great deal of help. Thanks. --Weekeejames 23:07, 11 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Hi, have You seen Nike's response regarding the interwiki-names here? It seems the shortening is not needed.
Please can You redirect the other discussions here, if You have started same threads in other regions, I found 2 :) You know better if there are some left, thanks. Best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 23:11, 11 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hello Birdy. I have given my arguments there for Nike and all discussions related to this issue elsewhere here in Meta have been tagged as {{closed}} and have been redirected here. Thanks. --Weekeejames 12:06, 12 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
:) thanks, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 13:49, 15 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

cbk-zam - update

Thanks. I'm in touch with these issues at Betawiki and Bugzilla. I really appreciate your help. After all these minor corrections are done, I will start translating the interface of cbk-zam.wiki at Betawiki. Currently, cbk-zam is using the English interface with translations on its Special:Allmessages page. I will soon work at Betawiki for this, I just have to wait for the interwiki links corrections of cbk-zam as Zamboangueño to cbk-zam as Chavacano de Zamboanga. Gracias. --Weekeejames 09:32, 16 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Can you also update the donation translation of cbk-zam per http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2007/Text_for_sitenotice#cbk-zam thanks. --Weekeejames 17:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Done, thanks for the translations. Gracias, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 19:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Thank you. I did a minor correction on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Centralnotice-counter/cbk-zam Can you please update it? It should be $1 maga persona ya quien ya dona and not $1 personas ya que ya dona. Sorry for the little trouble. Also can you help me create the meter bar http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Centralnotice-meter/cbk-zam&action=edit with the text "maga persona ya quien ya dona" ? Thanks. --Weekeejames 05:44, 17 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Sorry, we can't create the meter, that has to be done by a dev. Best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 09:19, 17 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Ok, but can you please update http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Centralnotice-counter/cbk-zam ? Thanks. Do you know of any developer whom I can contact for the meter bar? --Weekeejames 10:59, 18 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Jup, I did update it already, or is there still an error? Just let me know then.
@meter: I don't think they will be added anymore. Please read this for understanding why some can't be created. About a month ago I suggested some possible solutions on foundation-I mailinglist but I don't expect anything is going to happen, I am really sorry. Brion Vibber created the existing bars afaik, so maybe You could ask him, best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 11:21, 18 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Thank you. The minor correction is now reflected at the Chavacano Wikipedia. Regarding the meter, never mind, if it's causing a lot of troubles. I am patiently waiting for the next software update on cbk-zam.wiki. On its langauge preference option, cbk-zam is still listed as cbk-zam. Also, I am patiently waiting for bugzilla action on the interwiki link of cbk-zam. On http://wikipedia.org cbk-zam is listed a Zamboangueño when it should be Chavacano de Zamboanga. As you see Birdy, that little mistake they did months ago reflected big mistakes everywhere. I hope it will be fixed soon. --Weekeejames 11:43, 18 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hi, the portal page I could update, I did not know it was incorrect there also, it takes a while until the changes are shown on the website. Kind regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 12:11, 18 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Thanks again. Kind regards, --Weekeejames 15:08, 18 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Why is it taking so much time for bugzilla to correct bugs? --Weekeejames 02:37, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply
Because there are a lot of bugs (a lot of work) and those people are also volungary workers, You could try to go to #wikimedia-techconnect and ask if someone can help You, best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 15:43, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

add Auto-Review

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

For the process of reviewing I found a very nice tool to discover typos and formal mistakes. Especially after you read the article 15 times already and 20 persons changed some little contents again, it is very comfortable to use that tool to find easy mistakes like the use of ... isntead of …. My request now is, is it possbile to intigrate that tool into wikiepdia for registered users. If a user is registered and enables the usage of it in his settings, than below every article he is browsing will be a line like this: This article is checked by Autoreview and its grad is 10.5. The aim could be to have all articles at least below 10. There are also "fillwords", I hope thats the correct word in English. The meaning is, that those words are always used without a special content. The toll also finds them and the author can check if they are really without meaning, or usefull at this time. In de.wiki I just found a lot of unuselfull words. Here the tool: Autoreview with "Republic China" example 快樂龍contentquestionconsequence 04:52, 12 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Transclusion

Latest comment: 17 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

I just realised this fairly important page hasn't been made. Should it be? It's likely to be fairly large, so any help/corrections to the page would be appreciated; info about templates will need to leak in, and PFs, etc. ----Anonymous DissidentTalk 21:27, 16 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Made it. Any improvements are very welcome. ----Anonymous DissidentTalk 06:32, 17 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Change in the central .css file

Latest comment: 17 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

Dear all, we discussed here about changing the page layout for the next steward election (whenever that will be), learning from this year's experiences. This would include a new TOC without the subheadlines, just containing the names of the candidates. To manage this, a change in the common.css file would be necessary (to allow hiding subheadlines from the TOC). Since this is a change in the general surface of Meta it can only be done by community consensus. Thus, please write arguments for or against this change here so that we can find a consensus. --Thogo (talk) 14:50, 23 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

  • Note that this change of allowing suppression of lower head levels in TOCs will be useful for more than just this particular usage. I plan to shortly carry this change out (unless someone beats/beat me to it), report on the results here and there, and prepare to revert it back if the community decides it's not a good idea. Support this change. ++Lar: t/c 03:57, 24 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • I Support..the last format was too "ugly" and did take a lot of space unnecessarily though we could have followed a similar format to the Board elections as well :) ...--Cometstyles 14:27, 26 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • I whole-heartedly support this plan. The way en.wp's RfA TOCs (enough acronyms for ya?) behave is ideal. This is decidedly non-controversial; can we go ahead and make the change? EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:13, 26 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Any admin here can make it. I'd said I would do it but I've slacked, so haven't gotten to it yet... no one should hold back just because I said I would :) ++Lar: t/c 21:20, 26 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Ok, I made it. The template to use is {{TOClimit}}. But it doesn't seem to work... Stewards/elections still shows 3 levels for me. Cache problem? --Thogo (talk) 20:38, 28 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Yes, was a cache problem. Works now. --Thogo (talk) 22:09, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Awesome, thanks for picking up my slack! SO... now we're good to go on the new page format? ++Lar: t/c 16:02, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hm, I don't know if we want to let everything else as it was last year. I mean the election modalities. I would think yes. Changing to 6 months (or even permanent election) will probably not get consensus among the stewards. ;o) --Thogo (talk) 16:18, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply
With respect consensus among the stewards being the criteria suggests a little too much detachment from the rather more overwhelming number of ordinary users? --Herby talk thyme 17:14, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Uncivilty

Latest comment: 17 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Could a Meta-Wiki admin asks to Arnomane stop with their uncivil behavior on Proposals for closing projects/Radical cleanup of Volapük Wikipedia? Asking to him on the mentioned page have produced no results. Thanks in advance. 555 16:07, 28 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

If you come across a personal attack (attacks against the articles of vo.wp ("crap", "junk" etc.) are not nice, but of course not personal attacks), you may call an admin at WM:RFH. --Thogo (talk) 20:27, 28 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Meta:Protected against recreation

Latest comment: 17 years ago12 comments4 people in discussion

There is no longer need to have this page, since deleted or non-existing pages can be protected directly now. --Thogo (talk) 09:49, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

I'd plan to post on this later. I agree that seems to be the case however I think it may still be worth using WM:SALT for some protections as it allows recording keeping? My thoughts (here too) is that spambot pages for example would be fine for the "new" protection. However I'm still inclined to the record/rationale allowed by SALT? Regards --Herby talk thyme 09:57, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hm, what exactly would be the advantages of WP:SALT in opposite to the log file protection? You can give reasons for the protection and you can specify a protection time there. What do you mean by "recording"? On dewiki we changed totally to the log file protection (I don't know if all pages are already done, but most are.) Grtx, --Thogo (talk) 13:21, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
I'm trying hard to put this in words! SALT gives someone a page with both the protected pages and a history of the activity of those pages and, via history, who put it there. Special:Protectedtitles only lists the page with no other info (sure the protection log is there but in another place)? I don't feel strongly but it might be worth not throwing away SALT for now (but I would certainly use the new way for bot pages). Regards --Herby talk thyme 14:10, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Imho Special:Protectedtitles lacks an "acitvity log" and the protection reason (maybe the devs can implement this) like we have it on Meta:Protected against recreation. The next thing that disturbs me is that sysops don't get a warning when creating a preprotected page try [11], I suggest we use both possibilities :) best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 14:14, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hm, but the reason and who protected when, is visible in the log file of every page, and in the general log file. Why do we need that on another page, too? *confused* --Thogo (talk) 17:12, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Because it would be handy to have it on Special:Protectedtitles, this list is imho not very useful without any further information, best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 17:30, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
With WM:SALT you can aslo do things like protecting a page periodically in selected time intervals. --82.133.109.205 17:42, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
I'm with Birdy - I shall probably use the new form on all & any spambot pages. It is simple, quicker and needs no explanation. However for other protections the grouping on the SALT page will tell people something as will the history available --Herby talk thyme 18:24, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Hm, ok. I'm not convinced, but I can live with that, of course. :o) --Thogo (talk) 22:11, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Maybe for the spambot thing MediaWiki:Titleblacklist is better (at least for the index.php thing), best regards, --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 14:49, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply
Please see now also bugzilla:12484, thanks --birdy geimfyglið (:> )=| 15:23, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Request for bot flag for MenoBot

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Moved to RFA#MenoBot. Cbrown1023 talk 02:45, 30 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Streamlined user rights management

Latest comment: 17 years ago11 comments4 people in discussion

I know I read about the change to have Special:Makesysop and Special:Makebot go away to be replaced with a more streamlined Special:Userrights page. Anyone remember where that was discussed? Reason I ask is that on Commons we have a very customised MediaWiki:Makesysoptext page (see it at commons:MediaWiki:Makesysoptext) which has instructions on what other housekeeping tasks need doing when someone is promoted. It is very handy, so I want to change the corresponding page for Userrights but I am not sure if it is MediaWiki:Userrightstext, or if it has some other name. I'm loath to just go in and start editing pages at random :) Any clues much appreciated! ... Thanks. ++Lar: t/c 16:09, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Try asking at wikitech-l? The relevant bug is bugzilla:11645. Cbrown1023 talk 16:23, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Special:Allmessages and Ctrl + F are your friend. I'm not entirely sure what you are asking. Is this what you're looking for? By the way, we need to update the same here. Majorly (talk) 16:52, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
I've added text at the bug itself. To reiterate, for this new rights manipulation interface, I would like to identify a page that stays visible from start to finish, where wiki specific things can be put, the same way that MediaWiki:Makesysoptext is visible from start to finish while using the Special:Makesysop interface. The page that you gave MediaWiki:Userrights-groupshelp isn't visible from start to finish I don't think... it's only visible during part of the process. The commons 'crats all feel that Commons:MediaWiki:Makesysoptext and its counterpart Commons:MediaWiki:Makebot-header have been very helpful at avoiding missing steps when making new sysops or when making bots (respectively), since the process is a bit complex due to local custom. ++Lar: t/c 18:09, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
As I noted in the bug, you want MediaWiki:Userrights-summary. – rotemliss – Talk 19:09, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
There may be a bit more to it than that, as editing that page to paste in what we had before results in a vast blob of text all in a very large font, as if it were all part of the heading, and it does not honor any html or wiki markup. If that is unclear I'll provide a screenshot ... (you'd have to be a commons 'crat to see what it did :) ) Is that perhaps the heading and there is another page that has the body? ++Lar: t/c 23:00, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
Silly me. MediaWiki:Userrights is the heading and MediaWiki:Userrights-summary is the body. All sorted on Commons. I propose to do something similar here on Meta now, moving the old texts for makesysop and makebot over. ++Lar: t/c 23:55, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Well color me confused, I went to make the same change on Meta and it didn't work. No text showed. So I checked on Commons, where last week it was showing the text of commons:MediaWiki:Userrights-summary at the top of commons:Special:Userrights, and then the rest of the page where you put the name in, etc... this week it is not. Did something change? ++Lar: t/c 22:59, 5 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yes. I have now fixed the software to display the message again. Please wait to the software update in Wikimedia sites. – rotemliss – Talk 16:56, 6 January 2008 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! Where can I read about what markup is and isn't supported on those sorts of pages? I'm thinking it might be nice to allow use of show/hide type functionality so that the preface material doesn't swamp the page unless you want to look at it. ++Lar: t/c 17:20, 6 January 2008 (UTC)Reply
Everything that is supported in the wiki articles, is supported in the "-summary" messages (but not in all MediaWiki messages! Some of them are HTML, and some of them are plain text). – rotemliss – Talk 07:45, 7 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Punjabi Wikipedia

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

the punjabi wikipidia is incompatible to Mozzila firefox, but works good on internet explorer. the text don't come out right on firefox. 216.15.104.172 17:42, 6 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

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