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

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

Before posting your proposal:

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


Reducing barriers to entry

I've been talking to non-Wikipedians about their experiences with the project for a while, and have published some IM interviews in my user space. I intend to do more, and I highly recommend talking to your non-Wikipedian friends in the same way. Another way to observe is to read the questions people are asking about Wikipedia (and the awful answers they receive) in the Yahoo Answers! Wikipedia section.

I think we have some really major issues with outsider perception of the project. I'd guess that the majority of people visiting our site from a Google search have not a clue as to how the site works or that they can contribute to it. This is bad because it fuels the endless criticism we receive, and because it prevents these people from becoming contributors. Fixing these misperceptions and reducing barriers to entry should be one of our first priorities, and I don't think it's really even that difficult. Wikinews seems to be better at all of this than we are. Some ideas:

  1. On Article pages, you usually click "edit this page" to edit the entire page, or click the section edit links. But on Talk pages, you rarely edit the entire page at once. You're either adding a new section or editing a pre-existing section. For this reason, the new section link (currently identified with a completely inconspicuous "+" sign) should be made more prominent, by changing the button to "add comment" or "new section" or something along those lines, and the "edit this page" link should be made less prominent, maybe just saying "edit". I have tried to implement this in the past, and others have implemented it on other wikis, but some people are really resistant to any change to the interface. I don't understand why.
  1. In the corner of every article should be a short notice to the effect of "See a problem with the article? Fix it yourself or leave a comment". Obviously this could be worded better, but the idea is that clicking "fix it yourself" would be just like clicking "edit", except that there would be a "newcomer box" above the edit box explaining the basics of how the site works and how to edit and find more help. Clicking "leave a comment" would go directly to the "new section" screen for that article's talk page, again with a "newcomer box" above it. You would just be presented with a blank box to fill in with the text of your comment, press save, and go on your way. This way when someone sees an error, we can at least get notified about it, instead of them pressing "edit", being overwhelmed by wikicode, and giving up. I'd say we should even go as far as removing the need to enter four tildes if you're editing from this link. Your signature would just be added automatically after the comment (and would show up in the preview screen).
  2. Check out Talk:Elephant, and try to see it from a newcomer's perspective. That's a lot of yellow boxes, no? I think we should greatly reduce the prominence of most of the templates (especially the pointless WikiProject ones). I also wonder why the {{talkheader}} box is not at the top of every talk page. I predict some people will complain about it being annoying when you already know about editing. But this a situation where you make the default behavior cater to newcomers, and let the experienced editors hide it with javascript or css. At the least, we could always display it for unregistered users.
  3. I've tried to change the tagline to more clearly spell out the way the project works (linking "free" to free content, since you know everyone visiting thinks it just means "free of charge", and adding "that anyone can edit" at the end, for instance). We even had some support from Jimbo, but it ultimately went nowhere. There is apparently no shortage of Wikipedians willing to resist change. I'd like to renew this campaign again someday, but I haven't found the energy.
  4. Always endeavor to reduce complexity of code and interfaces, instead of adding more and more features without thinking about how it complicates the user experience. Ideally, the code would have very little special syntax in it, like the good old days, and all the boxes and categories and tables and interwikis and so on would be added, not withcode, but with real "Web 2.0" interactive tools like Flickr's tagger. This isn't something that can be implemented in a day like the others, but something to always keep in the back of your minds.

Please discuss. — Omegatron 06:08, 16 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support in principle. Just today, I ran into a newcomer who couldn't figure out how to add a new comment (as opposed to adding to an existing comment) to another user's talk page. Sbowers3 (talk) 15:17, 16 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Great ideas, all of them!
One little addition: when someone adds a comment via the "leave a comment" box, there could be some little symbol or quirk or "This message was added via leave a comment box" or something added to it so that established users will know that it's been added via that box. Some established users might want to regularly use that box, but it would help if such messages are marked so that people can be aware that it might be from a new user. (Not that new users should be treated any differently than established users, or vice versa ...) --Coppertwig (talk) 18:24, 16 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Good idea. Only for the link from the article, though, not from the regular new section link. — Omegatron 21:32, 16 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think that a modest learning curve on the mechanics is a nice barrier. If someone is not bright enough to figure out our simple processes or ask for help, I'd question the competence of the contributions. I think that our barriers are too low as it is. --Kevin Murray (talk) 21:17, 16 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • The mechanics of this place are so simple that the editor's index has more than 2500 entries. And I think you're confusing process learning with content learning - there are a lot of people who are very knowledgeable about a topic but don't want to have to spend their (limited) time learning yet another set of processes and procedures. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:42, 16 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's worth adding that the editors index largely consists of Wikipedia bureaucracy and policies with much of it being unavoidable on a project of this size. -Halo (talk) 02:12, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Eh? I use just 3 key best practices most of the time, and get by just fine. ^^;; --Kim Bruning (talk) 05:03, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure it helps that you've been around long enough to know what the real, unwritten, policies are. --Carnildo (talk) 07:31, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
A stinging indictment. :-( I've been trying to document what I know for some time now. --Kim Bruning (talk) 17:44, 19 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm personally against adding any more prominent static content on pages, so I think adding anything to the top right is a very bad idea - notices are already chronically misused, ugly and very annoying, and adding a permanent one in the top-right that's only useful to a small niche is just going to clutter the site. Helping new users really shouldn't be at the expense of annoying current users.
The "+" button was previously changed to "Leave a comment", but it was quickly reverted back after several prominent Wikipedians objected to the change at the time - the suggestion comes up repeatedly but no-one wishes to actually make the change. To be honest, I think "Leave a comment" is too long.
I fundamentally disagree with your final point that Wikipedia should be more "Web 2.0" when it comes to things like categories. "Web 2.0 interactive tools" are too often more annoying than useful, complex to develop and I honestly think Mediawiki's relatively simple "all content in one textbox" philosophy is a good idea - it's platform independent, relatively simple to use, extremely simple to implement (both in terms of client-side and server-side - the database schemas could get a lot more complex) and an easy concept to grasp. Separating content and markup is bad idea IMO.
Oh, and do you know about LiquidThreads? Based on your want to improve Wikipedia talk pages and want of 'Web 2.0' technology, it sounds like something you might be interested in. -Halo (talk) 02:12, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
To be honest, I think "Leave a comment" is too long - point well taken, but the better proposal - still not implemented - is to have something like "+comment". That's the way that the tab appears on discussion pages at Wikimedia Commons. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:46, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I was trying to be helpful since no-one else mentioned it. I'm not against the change - as I've previously stated many times (including on the persistent proposals page), I'm completely indifferent about it, especially considering it's not a feature I use (I find it's generally less hassle to start a heading by hand). -Halo (talk) 15:03, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]


adding a permanent one in the top-right that's only useful to a small niche

A small niche? Last I heard, more than 80% of page views are unregistered users. It would be good to get a better statistic on that. But they are by far the bulk of visitors to the site, and the whole point of the site is that they're supposed to be contributing to articles. They, collectively, know a lot more than we do. Wikipedia is not a clique.

"all content in one textbox" philosophy is a good idea - it's platform independent, relatively simple to use, extremely simple to implement

It's simple to implement, but it is not simple to use. Our code is way too complex for the average person to be comfortable with. Our editors are predominantly from technical fields for a reason. This is bad, because it skews the content and bias of the articles.
It would be much better if, for instance, you could type a potential category into a search box, and be shown a dynamic list of matching category names, with local tree structure, and pick one from the list to add by clicking on it. Similar with interwiki links. Then the article wouldn't be as cluttered up with code. Of course these would still show up in the history like any other edit.
And yes, we could definitely use a better talk page system. One that allows subscriptions, forked threads, full mediawiki syntax, localizable dates, never-ending threads that can be "bumped" by additional comments so that we don't have 100 separate conversations about the same subject, threads displayed on multiple talk pages for consolidated discussion (an issue that needs input from people on the village pump, article talk, and admin noticeboard all at the same time), etc. I've thought about this a lot, too, but it requires major software changes. The things I have proposed here can be done without software changes. We just need to convince certain people that they're a good idea.
(Also, in addition to recruiting passers-by to contribute article edits, we should be recruiting developers as much as possible, too, to implement the more complicated things our site needs. I get the impression our code is way too complex for most people to dive into, so we are stuck with a small number of developers who don't have time to do very much, which is why our site's functionality is so dependent on on user-written templates and user-written bots.) — Omegatron 00:12, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
In reply to Kevin Murray: I don't want that kind of barrier to entry. Someone may be quite capable of learning to use the syntax, yet it may still be a barrier because they don't have much of an incentive to spend effort learning it until they've discovered how rewarding it is to contribute. John Broughton also has a very good point about different types of knowledge. We need more contributions from people who actually know how to use (and have access to, and desire to spend time using) actual paper books and that sort of thing, not just people who feel comfortable using computer codes.
Reminds me of when I started using Generic Mapping Tools, years ago. I spent a whole day reading the manual and trying to run some of their examples before I got any results at all or enough information to make a decision as to whether it was worth spending any time learning it. I later emailed them and suggested that they make their first example something that you can just type in and it will work (e.g. produce a map of the world), which they could easily have done; instead, their first examples required downloading additional files, which for some reason took hours when I did it. I did learn to use their system and I still use it often, but I could easily have given up and never learned to use it. Whether someone has the ability to learn is not always the same thing as whether there is a barrier.
Reply to Omegatron: yes, that's what I meant: only the "comment on this article" link from the article page would produce messages with a special mark; though I'm actually not sure whether that's a good idea or not even though I suggested it. It might contribute to the whole "us versus them" mentality. Besides, the post would probably be signed with an IP username, so that would clue people in anyway that it's likely a new user.
Another option for the name of the tab at the top of the talk page is "New topic". This may be familiar to users of some other website fora. Just "comment" would be OK, I think. It might be worth asking some non-Wikipedians how they would react to a tab called "+comment". Possibly just "comment" might be less confusing to some less math-oriented users. Not that people don't know what a plus sign is; just that it looks like some unknown computer code.
Here's an idea, for all those Wikipedians resistant to change: the new "comment on this article" link could show up only for unregistered users (assuming that's technically feasible). --Coppertwig (talk) 02:07, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've actually been working on a "leave a comment" system with Javascript (though something built into the software would be better). Its not really done, mainly due to laziness by me. Mr.Z-man 02:44, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Even if 80% of page views are IP addresses, you're making the assumption that out of that 80% a large proportion are people who want to contribute but don't know how or that they can - which I certainly disagree with - and you're at risk of compromising the reading experience to make that happen. I stand by the fact that unnecessary static content is horrendously ugly and largely pointless, and I'm strongly opposed to it in general.
I disagree that MediaWiki is 'too complex' and even if it is that there are better practical solutions to that problem. Most editing on Wikipedia are already of the type "typing words into a box" which can't really be simplified, and you're always going to be left with some sort of markup language (even if I don't particularly like MediaWikis flavour of it). A web-based
I also don't think trying to proactively "recruit developers" to open source projects ever actually works. As far as I'm aware, the problem isn't MediaWiki's code itself as much as the fact that any project the size of MediaWiki has inherent complexity. I think bots exist simply because the projects lend themselves to bots more than anything else. -Halo (talk) 03:15, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
you're making the assumption that out of that 80% a large proportion are people who want to contribute but don't know how or that they can
That's absolutely correct. It's probably higher than 80%, in fact.
"typing words into a box" which can't really be simplified
It can be simplified by giving them an empty box to type into instead of requiring them to learn a computer programming language in order to contribute. — Omegatron 03:24, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Y'know, wikimarkup started out fairly simple. Having full WYSIWYG is not really simple either, and has huge disadvantages. WYSIWYM is more like it, but that requires teaching people new techniques yet again. But... hmmm, less bad that is, plausible too. --Kim Bruning (talk) 05:06, 18 March 2008 (UTC) yoda I now sound like[reply]
(WYSIWYM is plausible because: A: New users will still grasp it fairly quickly. B: It needn't interfere with existing wikimarkup, thus making it "easy" to code, in theory. ) --Kim Bruning (talk) 05:08, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Wasn't the original point of wiki markup supposed to be WYSIWYM? — Omegatron 20:21, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a mock-up of what I'm imagining for the notice that unregistered users will see:

User:Omegatron/Sandbox

Click the links to see the "newcomer boxes". — Omegatron 03:17, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hearty applause. As a person who has to refer to a manual to shut off the alarm on a digital watch, I'm all for enabling less technologically inclined editors to contribute. Some of us need extra guidance getting in but are capable of learning our way around once we've done so. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:48, 19 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, there's nothing stopping me from just implementing it right now, so the "only" things left to do are:
  1. Decide on the exact wording and formatting of the notice and screens
  2. Convince people it's a worthwhile change so it isn't insta-reverted.
There's some on my talk page discussing a WikiProject, which might be a good next step. — Omegatron 01:19, 21 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I support all of these ideas. The site really needs to be more accessible to unregistered users, and registered ones should be able to remove the unwanted features via css, js, or perhaps preferences. — Bob • (talk) • 19:29, April 6, 2008 (UTC)
I really like Omegatron's little invitation to contribute. It makes the point that Talk pages are about improving the quality of articles, not for airing opinions. Perhaps the first trial should only have the Talk page link, as inviting much larger numbers of people to edit articles could have downsides, e.g. edit conflicts, vandalism, mangled references, etc.
Speaking of references, for those who really want to edit articles the basic mark-up is very simple, about the level of phpBB. But the learning curve gets steeper after that:
  • References and citations are a real pain - I've raised and contributed to discussions about making this easier. As I pointed out in another discussion, web developers seldom hand-code that level of mark-up these days, they use tools.
  • There are so many templates that can be useful and I know I only discovered the handful I've used by accident. There should be an index by function / purpose, not by template name.
  • Edit pages should link to help pages about tables and other more complex mark-up.
  • Edit pages should carry one of the Wikipedia:Trifecta templates. Philcha (talk) 22:13, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, there is a lot of talk on this subject, but I'm not sure if the actual new user has been represented, which is where I come in. I'm a very new user. So far I've edited exactly one word in an article. Prior to that, I spent weeks reading various articles on editing, policies and the like. I'm still a bit confused about a number of topics, but I'm willing to work through them. To my point...

I agree that there are barriers to entry that prevent the casual user to Wikipedia from editing. I think it is good to have barriers; I suspect that people who are willing to overcome those barriers are more likely to take this project seriously. However, as far as the original suggestion is concerned, I have to agree with points 1 and 2. As to the rest, including much of the discussion that followed, I have to admit that I just don't know enough yet to comment.

If you want to really help us new people, create a link to the left in "toolbox" or "interaction" (I've probably violated the "Manual of Style" with my quotation marks; hey, I'm new) which would say something like "For beginners" or "Editor's tutorial". This link would send someone like me to an article that would say something to the effect of, "So you want to be an editor. Please read the following articles (in the order presented). When you are finished, you will be ready to edit your first article with confidence." I've read a bundle of articles already and I think I got the key ones, but I still run across links that let me know that there is more to know.

In other words, don't eliminate the barriers, but make it easier for us to find and navigate through the barriers. Lon of Oakdale (talk) 00:22, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support Great ideas, all of them. Wikipedia has a decent foundation, but it needs to improved. Lots of stuff (esp. those HUGE WikiProject banners on Talk pages) are just huge, annoying, and distracting. The same applies to many tags, and too many of these acronyms that everyone cites. It's a creeping spread which people aren't bold enough to cut. In addition, I wonder why Talk pages have to have old content at the top. That's counter-intuitive and annoying -- maybe the point is to make people read old stuff, but I don't think it works like that. In addition, I think the greatest problems are not for unregistered people, but for new users like myself. The amount of bureaucracy that people expect you to know is enormous, convoluted, and sometimes redundant.I think the bureaucracy can be streamlined, and I'm doing what I can to slowly reduce it. Incidentally, does RfA refer to both request for admin and request for arbitration. Also, I think technically we should add the ability to put links under the toolbox. I would want links to several other things there: Articles for Deletion page, Quick Directory, Requests for Comment, ect. Incidentally, Lon, the MoS doesn't apply to Talk pages as far as I know.

I still haven't learned half of the stuff I need to, and I haven't found a good, concise overview of how to simply contribute. The first concern a new contributor has is "how do I cite"? They don't need to know why things should be cited; that's common sense. Yet look at citing sources. It only gets into the mechanics halfway down the article when the mechanics should be at the top of the page! As a busy person, I found this general tendency in Wikipedia's intro documents -- avoiding the point -- to be incredibly frustrating. And now that I mention it, I'm going to attempt a re-organization of that page. In the future, I will probably write a concise article going over all of the major aspects of being a Wikipedian, beginning with policy (essentially just WP:TRI), next WP:CITE with a stern reminder to cite all sources, and then going into the ugly details of bureaucracy and the tools by which one manages them -- which I'm still not very up on. Incidentally, I'm looking for this Articles for Deletion, but I can't find it. The Articles for Deletion page is organized by date. It would be much easier to have (at least in addition) a massive list and use CTRL-F to find what you're looking for. OptimistBen (talk)

I agree about changing the tagline. When I first came across Wikipedia in early 2004, the tagline immediately put me off from even reading it, let alone editing. The reason is that, in my experience, things that are on the internet and claim to be "free" are very often scams, porn or other questionable sites. When I read "free" the first thing that came into my mind was "trashy". I assumed that it was some kind of promotion site thinly disguised as an encyclopedia. I though that a free encyclopedia was simply too good to be true. It never occured to me it was a wiki. I didn't even know what a wiki was ... Of course this doesn't matter as much as it used to because most people have heard of Wikipedia now.
I also agree about simplifying the editing interface. However, it should not rely too heavily on AJAX or Flash - sites like that are usually horrible to use. We should not introduce too much interactivity. I think the biggest problem at the moment is that the entire text of a citation must be placed inline. This makes the text horrible to navigate in the edit window. Citations should be done LaTeX-style, ie. they should all be placed at the bottom of the article with labels and only shortcuts should be placed inline. Cambrasa confab 23:54, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note bugzilla:12796. This would allow removing distracting footnote content from the inline article prose, though they would need to be placed at the beginning of the wikitext instead of at the end. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 00:34, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fancy JS leave-a-comment thing

Okay, I've got a working version of a "Leave a comment" system using Javascript and an HTML form. You can test it yourself by adding 

importScript('User:Mr.Z-man/feedbacktab.js');

to your monobook.js page and then bypass your browser cache. It still needs a bit of work - Something explaining what to put for each field, some might be replaceable with other input types (drop-down, radio buttons, check boxes) and some (or all) should probably use multi-line input. I'm open to suggestions about which parts may be unnecessary, what you'd like to see in it, improvements, or bugs (I've only tested it in Firefox). Mr.Z-man 02:44, 19 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I don't think implementing it as a tab is really a great idea. I don't think the people we're trying to reach even notice the tabs.  :) I also kind of think it's better to just give them a blank box and let them comment, as they would on a Youtube video or blog, but maybe giving them some structure to work in might be good? Not sure. If were implementing "quality voting" for everyone to leave, I think that would be better handled by a metadata extension than leaving comments on the talk page. — Omegatron 01:16, 21 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The location of the link can be put just about anywhere on the page, adding it as a tab is just the easiest way (remember that readers only see 4 tabs by default). Any suggestions as to where it might be better. It could be put in the article page itself, but then there's the risk of messing up content, especially if its on the top (infoboxes, maintenance templates). A lot of the current boxes are probably redundant, 1 main box might be the way to go. Maybe a couple minor options, using a dropdown or checkboxes, then one main comment box? Mr.Z-man 00:20, 22 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm fairly strongly against a "leave a comment" box at all. If you look at sites and blogs that have them, most users interpet the invitation as "leave an opinion" and you get a vast string of "Foo is great", or much longer appreciations of Foo, or of course "foo is crap" and elaborations of this too. For busy articles with thousands of viewers every day, this is the last sort of thing we want to encourage. In my experience most people are now well aware they can edit WP if they want to, as the point is stressed (usually negatively) in almost all media coverage. "edit" is hardly ambiguous. Johnbod (talk) 03:38, 24 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
So improve the wording. It doesn't just say "leave a comment". It says "leave a comment if you see an error or other problem". — Omegatron 16:14, 29 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Problem with your sandbox version: I use User:Ais523/watchlistnotifier.js, and the box covers up part of it. George D. Watson (Dendodge).TalkHelp 20:52, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiproject

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Reducing interface complexity — Omegatron 01:48, 9 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I just wrote an essay expressing my opinion on this proposal and on proposals with the intent of making the user interface more newcomer-oriented in general. It's a bit long to repost here in its entirety, so I'll just link to it: User:Pyrospirit/Design the interface for newcomers (WP:DIN). What do you think? Does it describe a good general principle from which we can consider potential changes to the interface? Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 04:12, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How to Recruit

The list of requested articles can be a useful tool for recruiting new contributors: when viewing an article, the side could contain "Do you know what <term> is?" where <term> is a phrase that an article has been requested for, randomly chosen from the requested articles listed in the category that the currently viewed article is a member in. This would give readers a concrete, obvious way to jump into contributing, "Geeze, I know that!" I believe this could be successful, and also be a way to get better coverage on vertical/narrow fields where knowledge on one thing while lacking on another is not uncommon. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fenglich (talk • contribs)

Use the Geotag Icon in association with coordinates

Wikipedia currently use a little globe icon to indicate GPS coordinates e.g. here:

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

The globe currently in use is indistinct and not location-specific, since globes are used in a variety of other contexts. The community-designed and free Geotag Icon has been created expressly for better illumination of geodata:

http://www.geotagicons.com

It is appropriate for geotagging using any format (meta data, microformats, EXIF-GPS, etc) and has been added to the microformats.org icons page:

http://microformats.org/wiki/icons

The information on the Project website is comprehensive and self-explanatory, but if I can answer any questions or be of other assistance please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Project Coordinator: Bruce McKenzie The Home of the Geotag Icon Project www.geotagicons.com

Pushpins are used in a variety of other contexts as well. And a globe strikes me as pretty descriptive. It is also the logo of the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates (see {{WPcoord}}), so it's use seems to be coherent here. --Dschwen 14:59, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Plus the main point of the globe is being the trigger button for the meta:WikiMiniAtlas. The RSS-icon-like pushpin icon would be counterproductive, because on no other site clicking it opens a draggable map! --Dschwen 15:05, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Rollback permission modification

Having admins use a separate requests page to handle rollback requests is time-consuming and inefficient. It wastes both editor time and admin time, when there are better alternatives that could be used. MediaWiki is capable of "autopromoting" a user automatically using set criteria.

Proposed: All users who have 300 edits and have had an account for over 30 days are automatically given the rollback right.

The only caveat is that using this method does not allow removing the right. If a user abuses their editing privileges using rollback, they will be blocked as most users who are disruptive are. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:59, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Data: - on 4 April, the most recent day, there were a total of four requests for rollback. During the roughly three months that rollback has been available, 1125 editors have been granted this right - around a dozen per day. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:42, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support

Conditional support

If this is automatically granted, it should be revokable.

Comment: I don't know if the software even supports auto granting with manual removal. (1 == 2)Until 13:36, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • MessedRocker (talk) 04:30, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Increase slightly the autopromote threshold and must be revokable. RxS (talk) 04:48, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Must be revokeable, but edit warring is perfectly possible (just fractionally slower) without rollback, so I don't understand the argument that it would significantly increase the risk of edit warring. Tim Vickers (talk) 01:20, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Agree with must be revokable (preferrably by bureaucrats - admins can block in egregious cases until a bureacrat can revoke/remove). I'd support this being given to even autoconfirmed users if (and only if) it prompted for an edit summary (like any edit) for non-admins. I personally wouldn't even mind if the tool always prompted for an edit summary , but I think other admins might complain, hence the difference. (One way around this might be to have a checkbox and an inputboxline in preferences for admins: "Rollback: prompt for edit summary (checkbox)" and "Default edit summary for Rollback: (inputboxline)" - Or something like that)- jc37 16:38, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fine with me as long as it is revokable and I think that admins can continue to do that. The dire predictions of wheel warring over rollback just haven't come to pass. --B (talk) 13:12, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

  • We need to be able to revoke this tool, there are already people who are refused this tool because they have abused it. We cannot expect a user to use the tool properly if they don't even know what it is, and I would hate for the only alternative to be blocking the user. (1 == 2)Until 04:11, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • POV trolls + rollback = disaster. Sceptre (talk) 04:25, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are just too many possibilities of issues arising. Perhaps the current system is a bit flawed, but this solution isn't the best one. Jmlk17 04:27, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Brb... going to create a few sleeper accounts and set them to edit their User: space and/or sandbox a lot. :P --slakr\ talk / 04:29, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I disagree with this idea, as there will be many users who could possibly violate the use of this tool so they can edit war per their POV, and there are many more issues that could possibly arise such as the one slakr mentioned above. It would put much more strain on administrators to have to continually block people, instead of just accepting or denying rollback requests. --ChetblongTalk/Sign 04:34, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yea, I'm not seeing the current system as so flawed to require this sort of solution. MBisanz talk 04:36, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do the admins involved think this is a waste of time? Any time spent is probably overweighed by the overall benefit. –Pomte 05:18, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Absolutely needs to be revokable. Majorly (talk) 14:10, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Absolutely nothing wrong with the current system - there have been few problems so far, and any problems have been easily sorted. Removal of the tool due to abuse is far better than a block and is more likely to educate otherwise productive users in the future. There have been a number of cases of abuse of the tool, and these have been dealt with swiftly, but it shows that not every established user is capable of using the tool constructively. Ryan Postlethwaite 17:43, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strongly oppose this: there are some people who clearly cannot be trusted with rollback, the same way there are people who can't be trusted with adminship. Giving rollback to everyone would be disruptive: while this proposal says that the current system is inefficient and time-consuming, imagine all the time that would be wasted from every single POV-pusher and revert warrior having rollback. The "easy give, easy take" process is excellent, and I would rather have admins spend a few minutes reviewing a user's contributions than have AN/I bloated with threads about all the disruptive users abusing rollback. Finally, "300 edits" isn't a measure of trustworthiness either: there are people with 3,000 or even 30,000 edits who would abuse rollback. Acalamari 18:39, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Very strong oppose for the exact same reasons as Acalamari. bibliomaniac15 Hey you! Stop lazing around and help fix this article instead! 19:10, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • It seems too risky to award a privilege like rollback automatically solely on the basis of number of edits and number of days of editing experience. Is there a longstanding problem of significant backlogs at rollback requests? If there is, couldn't it be solved by the involvement of a few more admins? - Neparis (talk) 19:15, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Acalamari. Soxred93 | talk bot 19:32, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - there is no evidence that the current system causes admins a lot of work (given the low volume, it's hard to believe that the current system is a problem). On the other hand, the proposal make make it far easier to set up sleeper accounts with rollback privileges. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:45, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Per others. It aint' broke, so don't let's fix it. Johnbod (talk) 19:52, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - this would have been great on any other wiki but on enwiki, it will spell disaster, such as POV pushing, rise in 3RR cases etc...--Cometstyles 20:20, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Oppose: Automatic rollback? Getting 300 edits is easy, and a month? After which rollback could be used for POV pushing, and reverting a large amount of user edits. I feel this would increase 3RR violations, edit wars, and could be misused by vandals. I'm sorry, this is something I cannot support with good confidence. It's too risky. Steve Crossin (talk) (anon talk) 20:27, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • No-way Oppose Bad idea per above. CWii(Talk|Contribs) 20:31, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Oppose Giving user's Rollback permission automatically is a very bad disaster when I'm patrolling the Recent Changes I sometimes see editor's reverting another editor's writing in an edit war, if the new proposal gets through it'll mean that new user's may or may not start reverting texts on articles which could damage the article itself and violate Wikipedia's 3RR policy. Terra 20:41, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. I see no reason for such a huge number of people to have this capability. it's too potentially disruptive to Wikipedia. --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 00:33, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose There needs to be some sort of control over this. Captain panda 00:58, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. There are quite a few cases where rollback can, and should be removed. I can think of several editors who meet the requirements whom I would not trust with rollback. Keilana|Parlez ici 01:15, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Makes it too easy to abuse. —Dark talk 01:53, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Majorly and Alcamari. -- Fullstop (talk) 02:03, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose I don't necessarily think it'll cause more edit wars, as it doesn't do any more encouraging of reverts than "undo", and both only produce a single edit that are equally revertable. But I think too many people simply aren't going to know what rollback means, what situations it's meant for, and what a "serious" action it is, and may perhaps use it improperly. It's better to just give it to people who explicitly request it, so someone can at least make sure they know what it is. No one is forced to use the request page anyway, as any admin can give permission upon request. The process is already as non-bureaucratic as possible without being irresponsible. Equazcion •✗/C • 00:07, 7 Apr 2008 (UTC)
  • STRONG OPPOSE This tool is too easily abused and the results of automatic granting would/will be horrific!!! Dustitalk to me 18:21, 8 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • oppose Kevin Baastalk 18:06, 12 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • We should not mindlessly give out this feature; that would increase our workload, not decrease. EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:16, 12 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Will never work perfectly. Malinaccier Public (talk) 16:58, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Comment - I think that although the rollback right is a good tool to give out widely and so forth, I'm initially cautious of the idea to give it to people automatically. Aside from the fact that it should be revokable, one of the current dividers that separates rollback and other bits from nasty use is self-selection. People who self-select to receive a tool will look at that tool differently from those who are given it innately as a right. From there, it's only a delay. For example, our semi-protection of articles is a ridiculously low barrier to overcome to vandalize an article - wait four days, and you have at least one account that can edit semi-protected articles at will. The difference is that users self-select to register and gain rights which allow them to accumulate trust. This, interestingly enough, deters most vandalism as it adds a level of self-selection to those who choose to vandalize, who must then apply even a minimal effort to achieve their mischief.
    By extension, there should probably be some level of self-selection for slightly more advanced abusable tools within the community; we already have a heavy form of this for adminship, where users are forced to undergo a gauntlet run, a review of those actions which they have taken and their dedication to the community. It, nevertheless, is game-able - people might remember Oldwindybear as an example. Self-selection is the best tool we have for finding people who are deserving of the community's trust; they come forward of their own because of their interest, with a willingness to follow community guidelines. I'm therefore concerned that removing the element of self-selection applicable to the right might cause issues with its use. As long as self-selection is applied and the right is revokable, I don't see how this could be a problem. Nihiltres{t.l} 06:29, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - what would this give me that Twinkle doesn't already give me? I've done a lot of edits and quite a few of those were because of vandlism, but Twinkle has worked fine for me.Doug Weller (talk) 09:28, 5 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

References on separate subpage

I just edited the article International reaction to the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence. It took ages to load and render on my old computer, in spite that I have a 2 Mbit/s ADSL connection. Users on old modems probably have serious problems to load that article. The article is not that big and can not really be split up into smaller articles. But it has 235 references and notes which makes the rendered code humongous.

So it seems for some articles there is a need for some kind of system where references can be put on a separate subpage. I don't know how that should be done, but I wanted to throw this idea out here to see what people think.

--David Göthberg (talk) 13:02, 13 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. I've been thinking a bit about longer articles lately and how they are relatively big for slower connections; I for a long time had a pitiful dialup connection where a megabyte in a minute was good, and it strikes me that pages which are bigger than, say, 100 or 200 KB might be a problem. Nevertheless, I'm not sure what we could do about it - perhaps we could offer plaintext downloads of pages (not equivalent to ?action=raw, which produces raw wikitext) to help? I'm also wondering about mere format issues - on the page you mention, it renders very fast for me (though granted, Safari is known to be very fast at rendering pages), and it strikes me that the issue might be solved by removing all those flag icons. Nihiltres{t.l} 14:24, 13 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that placing references on a subpage is a practical solution, since automatic numbering of citations would not be possible. However, after looking at the article, I think its size could be reduced substantially by removing redundant references. There also seems to be quite a bit of text that could be removed from the "States which do not recognise Kosovo or have yet to decide" by a combination of copy-editing and replacement of lengthy quotes with paraphrased summaries. Of course, most of this could be done only after full protection is lifted... Black Falcon (Talk) 16:29, 13 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There is a long discussion on WP:SIZE about making articles shorter. About a month ago "Article size" was changed to "Readable prose size" on the guidelines for article size, but it is likely that what it has meant all along was "Edit byte count" and that if articles were kept to 30-40 kB there would be less complaints about articles being too long. The United States article is a good example. With subarticles the article is actually many megabytes long, but is split up into over a hundred subarticles, except that the main article is horrendously long, because, in my opinion, of a false misunderstanding of the guidelines that articles be less than 60 KB that that refers to "readable prose". The proposal is to clarify that the guideline does indeed mean "Edit byte count". Articles either have no subarticles and grow to 40 KB Edit byte count before thinking about splitting them or they do have subarticles and there is no excuse for them being bigger than 30-60 KB Edit byte count. 199.125.109.64 (talk) 02:28, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
From a different pov: I do sympathize with slow connection speeds and renderers but any equivalent source of the content obtained from wp will have just as much content and be just as slow to load. Yes? No?
Alternatively, how 'bout an option to load just the lead paragraph[s] and toc?. Saintrain (talk) 17:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Most people aren't planning on reading all 10 Megabytes, or whatever, that is available about a given subject, they are just looking for some factoid. In the article about Kosovo, for example, someone from Italy might be interested only if Italy has recognized Kosovo, and by drilling down, they can get there by only downloading a small portion of the total information vs. if they have to download a humoungous file that has information about all 200 countries on the planet and whether each has recognized Kosovo. I see no reason to load just the lead paragraph and the toc. I do see a huge reason to knock off the nonsense of huge articles. 199.125.109.64 (talk) 01:29, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And how do you define what is "nonsense" in the article? -- Kesh (talk) 15:47, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Nihiltres: I tried loading the page International reaction to the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence with image loading turned off in my web browser, it still took ages to render. And I have downloaded the whole page with images and all and checked, the images are just a handful of kilobytes, while the references are a couple of hundred kilobytes.
Kesh: The references section is exactly the kind of "nonsense" that most readers probably never look at. (I think "external links" is used much more.)
Having the references just one click away on a subpage would get them out of the way for most users but still very accessible for the few that actually wants them. Another option would be to still have the references at the usual spot, but not render that section (at the Wikipedia server end of course) in the case it gets large, unless the user clicks an extra button or has his preferences set to "always show references".
--David Göthberg (talk) 07:03, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Propose a "reverting vandalism" marker

Hello all. I was looking over the history of an article, and I noticed that about a third of the edits were either vandalism, or someone reverting said vandalism, and I though to myself, wouldn't it be great if there was an optional to hide both of these types of edits from the history? The result would a much less cluttered, much more useful history documentation. I'm not sure if this would be totally possible, but I thought of a few ways that might work:

  • When editing, registered users should have the option to check a box below the edit window, which would then show their reverting edit in the history by marking it with rv. (i.e. in the style of how ticking "This is a minor edit" leaves an m mark)
  • When someone reverts vandalism, they restore the version that existed before the vandal struck. Thus, the article size has not changed. Perhaps MediaWiki could be taught to hide the edits in-between on request?
  • In a special example; when a user makes an test edit, and then reverts their own edit immediately, it should be relatively easy to teach the software to hide these edits in the history on request by another user.

Of course, within the history, this feature should just be a checkable box that affects only the skin of the user who checked it, and not a mandatory thing for all users. Thoughts? — Jack (talk) 19:47, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think that mames some sense. It might be problimatic to have the softwere automaticly giving edits this marker, but if it was applied to the roleback functon and reverts done with gadgets, it would let users ignore these edits when going over watchlists. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 19:56, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like a reasonable idea to me. GO-PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 02:27, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think the simplest, most straightforward, way to do it would be to have a checkbox, the way we have "minor edit". And (also like minor edit) have an option in preferences to "mark all my edits vandalism reversion". This would give great help for bots and others who do quite a bit of vandalism patrol. And at the same time, those who revert vandalism when they find it merely need just check the box. - jc37 01:00, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
What if someone vandalizes the page and marks it as reverted? --— Gadget850 (Ed) talk - 00:34, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
They already do that. I see vandalism quite often labeled as "Reverting Vandalism" GO-PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 01:46, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Why not combine the automatic and the manual? If an edit is recognised as a revert, then the checkbox for rv will be made available for the editor to use. All technical issues aside, this would remove the possibility of someone labelling a proper edit as revert, but would retain editorial discretion in the label's use. Waltham, The Duke of 08:25, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Safe Search" or "Adult Filter" function proposal

Many search engines and websites have something called a "Safe Search" or "Adult Filter" function. Wikipedia does not have such a thing. This causes many parental controls and corporate content filters to block Wikipedia. That sucks. Is there any way we could create such a feature so that Wikipedia would not get blocked? GO-PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 02:11, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is not censored. People who are searching for things like that are going to get what they want. We don't cater to any specific group or party in this regard; we portray these things in an objective, neutral manner that demands no censorship. Sephiroth BCR (Converse) 02:26, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
How do you define "adult content"? --Carnildo (talk) 04:32, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
While Wikipedia is not censored, there isn't anything stopping people from installing filtering software which should block most "undesirable" content, although I must stress the word most. But I don't think anything can be done at the Wikipedia level. x42bn6 Talk Mess 18:43, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
But the problem occurs when the filtering software ends up designed to block Wikipedia as a whole. I'm not saying we need to ban unsafe material, I'm just saying it might be a great idea to have some kind of special system to make it possible to have a "block adult content" feature which could be enabled by the viewers which could be done not only be registered users, but annon IPs as well. The idea would be to have a system similar to the one at http://www.aboutus.org. Another possible idea would be to have a system where Wikipedians could report pages as "adult content" and the word "explicit" would appear in the URL so that the designers of filtering software would block only those articles instead of Wikipedia as a whole. We could also make a policy where all articles containing mature material would have to have "(mature content)" in the title (so basically, if someone searched for "Naked woman" for instance, it would redirect that person to "Naked woman (mature content)"). I don't really see how mandating that all of such content have the text "(mature content)" in the title would be censoring Wikipedia, since the content would still be there and there would be little effect on anyone trying to post such content; the only people this would effect would be those on filtered computers. GO-PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 01:27, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Who gets to decide what is "safe" and what isn't? Admins? Consensus? The Wikimedia Foundation? Oppinions as to what is appropriate for minors differ vastly accross cultures and nations. For example, I know a lot of people who would have no problem whatsoever if their 5-year old child saw a (non-pornographic) image of a naked person. But I also know people who would have a huge problem with that. And they don't even belong to different ethnic groups. So which group do we cater for? How to we find a compromise that pleases both groups? We can't really. All we could do is cater for every conceivable group, and soon a large number of Wikipedia articles would be tagged as "unsafe". A much better idea is to let each cultural group censor itself. This is already possible, so why bother with a universal "unsafe" template that can be added and removed by any self-declared moral crusader, and that will achieve nothing but endless edit warring? Cambrasa 23:44, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There are no known cases of Wikipedia being completely blocked by parental or corporate content filters. If you know otherwise, speak up, otherwise I don't think you have much of a point. Kaldari (talk) 00:02, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Charlotte County Public Schools blocks Wikipedia for this reason; the only way a student or teacher can access this site from one of Charlotte County's schools is to sneak on through the secured site, which only a few dedicated editors (constructive and destructive) even know exists. As evidence, read this email I received when I emailed CCPS IT requesting that Wikipedia be unblocked:

"(removed for security) <(removed for security)@embarqmail.com> writes: >Why exactly is Wikipedia blocked anyway? > (removed for security),

I take it that you are a student? I could not find a teacher with that name.

The short story is that I have to follow district policy. wikipedia is a very interesting and sometimes useful site. I won't argue about whether or not its all guaranteed to be factual since it is created "by the people for the people". As with anything, consider the source.

You may have noticed that most of the search engines like Yahoo! and Google are forced to use "safe search" settings. wikipedia has no such functionality. It wants to be uncensored. That is all well and good, but because of this, the site includes a porn star database, "recipies" for doing bad or dangerous things (I'm intentionally being vague on that one), etc.

Wikipedia is like the Internet in it's own little world, it has a bit of everything. Because of the "bad stuff" one can find on wikipedia, it is blocked.

I hope that explanation helps. A school district is required by law to provide safeguards and you won't get the freedom you'd expect at home here."

See, there are content filters blocking Wikipedia. If you'd like, you can contact CCPS at web_security AT ccps DOT k12 DOT fl DOT us (but please don't say anything about the secured site, you'd make lunch time awfully boring as I go to the media center to fight vandals during lunch). GO-PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 00:52, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like this problem has more to do with backward US laws. I'm sure that Pakistani Madrassas censor wikipedia for similar reasons. Perhaps we can deal with this by categorizing wiki articles in such a way to take cultural sensitivities into account. Perhaps this might even allow the Taliban to be able to safely access wikipedia if we can categorize articles such that their browsers will be able to block pages depicting women who do not wear a burqa. :) Count Iblis (talk) 17:11, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
A school blocking all of Wikipedia because a few pages have "inappropriate content" is just stupid and a very poor reason to make the significant changes this will require. Either the school is too cheap or paranoid to use filtering software that can block based on page content, or they're just too lazy to configure their filter properly. Mr.Z-man 23:55, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
We're not talking about the school itself, we're talking about the district. The reason it's blocked is 'cause some idiot over at Charlotte High School in Punta Gorda, Florida got the urge to go on here and look up porn stars. If you want, you can email them, but I doubt much is going to change as long as we have one high school in the area (or possibly one more, Lemon Bay) that has malicious students, not much is going to be done to get the site unblocked unless something is changed on the Wikipedia side. Hey, it's not my schools fault that some SOBs from the other schools decided to act like a bunch of jack asses. GO-PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 18:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It's probably not the only issue, but I can pretty much come up with a more reasonable solution for the other issues. By the way, I'm using the secured URL right now, which allows me on here from school for now, but I don't know how long that's gonna last. You might bring your opinion up with web_security AT ccps DOT k12 DOT fl DOT us, but if you say anything nasty, don't point the finger at me, I just think it sucks that at any moment I could get kicked off of this site by filters. GO-PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 18:43, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Renaming the "move" tab to "rename"

I've never really understood why "move" was called "move." In reality, you're not moving anything, you're just changing the title of the page. None of the logs move, none of the deleted revisions move, nada, zilch, squat-diddily. The history moves over, but that's sort of an expected result of renaming something. In short, there is, so far as I can tell, no point whatsoever in calling that a "move." Because that's exactly what it isn't. I'm not the only one confused by this, either - the help desk gets asked on a regular basis "How do I edit the title?", "How do I rename this page?", or my personal favorite, the all-caps "WRONG TITLE". Here's one today, from Apr. 14, from Apr. 9, just after that last one, and so on. Mind, we do get a LOT of repeat questions, but renaming this tab would be really helpful in reducing those numbers, as well as reducing the number of confused newbies who don't bother asking. Of course, the log will still appear as a "Move log", but those who need to check those logs will probably know what it's referring to. For reference, the appropriate MediaWiki page is MediaWiki:Move. Hersfold (t/a/c) 23:37, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support the change (in fact, I've been thinking about it for a while). Soxred93 | talk bot 23:38, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For what it's worth, "move" makes perfect sense to me, as you're moving the entire article (with history) to a new name. *shrug* EVula // talk // ☯ // 23:50, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I support this. It makes a lot of sense. Majorly (talk) 23:51, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think [move] suffices just fine, honestly. seresin ( ¡? ) 23:56, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
@ EVula and Seresin: I will admit it does sort of make some sense, but look at it from the eyes of a newbie. If you're looking to change the title, would you click on "move", or would you be confused when there wasn't a "rename" tab? Hersfold (t/a/c) 00:24, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think rename makes more sense semantically, but I think it might cause more confusion to newbies due to the tree structure of pages. If someone wants to move a top-level page to a subpage, it's not as intuitive to call that a "rename". People might not understand that they are both the same function, and that in order to move a page within the "tree", you need only "rename" it. People here are used to computer file systems, where changing something so that it's in a "sub-folder" requires a "move", which is a separate function from "rename". In reality, you're not actually "moving" anything within a file system either, you're merely changing its name. But the illusion is important to the intuitiveness of the system. Equazcion •✗/C • 00:32, 17 Apr 2008 (UTC)
I'm probably a bad person to ask, because when I was a newbie, I put that together quite readily. But I'm also the sort of person that pokes at every little button up there to find out what they do... EVula // talk // ☯ // 00:34, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This has come up here before. While move doesn't really fit, rename just invites newbies to vandalize with it or test it even more than just move does. Reywas92Talk 01:28, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That was before only autoconfirmed users could move pages, though. Soxred93 | talk bot 01:53, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
"Rename" sounds better, for newbies, in theory, so I support it in principle. My personal preference for "move" can be easily achieved with some JavaScript; I already have "edit this page" fixed to "edit" and a few other changes. Nihiltres{t.l} 02:50, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't confused by the word "move", but I admit that "rename" is clearer, so I'll support. I don't think we would have a problem with people testing it any more than we do now; and any small increase in vandalism can be delt with by stern warnings and blocks. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 03:04, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, I'd support changing the "move" button to the "rename" button: many times I have encountered users who don't know how to rename a page because they can't find the "rename" button, and instead, they perform cut-and-paste renames, which are disruptive. Changing "move" to "rename" will be a very good idea. Acalamari 16:13, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I did this before and it got reverted...up for it again though. Voice-of-All 16:57, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • In my opinion, "rename" makes the action sound less computationally intensive than it actually is, in terms of the number of pages that need to be reparsed as a result. Unlike simply renaming a directory name in a file system (the tree structure Equazcion mentioned), or changing a file name in Windows (where all shortcuts to the file are changed to reflect the rename), moves can corrupt link structure. If one doesn't know what "move" means, how might one know what a "double redirect" is, and all of the problems that are caused by it? e.g. "I wonder what happens if I rename 'Kitten' to 'Kittie cat'. I'll just rename it back when I'm done". Users making constructive page moves when they need to is a great thing, but imho, calling a page move a rename simplifies what the action does and does not do. The term is more clear in terms of what the MediaWiki actually does with the database (see Title.php, "public function moveTo"), but not in terms of what the consequences of the action are. GracenotesT § 19:16, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree. "Move" is clearer. It gives the connotation that more is happening than the name of a page is being changed. If it was possible to edit the title of a page, then I could understand "rename", but that's not what happens, and we do a disservice to newbies by making it appear otherwise. - jc37 00:56, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I also prefer "move" for the same reason. —Remember the dot (talk) 00:38, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Likewise. Allow me to give you a metaphor... Titles are like lockers, ready to accept labelled containers (boxes etc.) of various types of content (representing information). An index also exists (representing the network of links and categories here), tracking all the containers and noting which lockers they are in. Moving pages is like moving the contents to different lockers inside their containers, orderly and with their names on top; the index is updated. Cutting and pasting is like emptying the containers and clumsily moving the contents by hand, unlabelled. On one hand, the index to the lockers will refer to the empty containers, so tracking the contents will be difficult. On the other hand, the contents will be outside any indexed and labelled containers, and thus unidentifiable (no history). As one can plainly see, there is a problem at both ends of the equation... And all this cannot be represented by Rename, which would imply a simple re-numbering of the lockers. Waltham, The Duke of 17:19, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Given the hierarchical way in which subpages work, "move" seems to a better descriptor than "rename". If something goes from User:Until(1 == 2)/Foobar draft to foobar, then that has been moved, not just renamed. (1 == 2)Until 17:40, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see the point. Move and rename are synonyms computer-wise - I don't think one is any clearer than the other -Halo (talk) 17:49, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Move requires users have a mental conceptual model that equates physical locations with different articles or web pages. I bet for novices that's more complex than the conceptual model that they can rename the article on a web page. They don't need to then understand how the hierarchy / name space works to make sense of the tab. - Owlmonkey (talk) 18:56, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Replace "+" with "add new comment"

This has always annoyed me. WHY, oh why, is the button to add a new section to talk pages labelled just "+"? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to instead have a short bit of text like "add new comment", "start new thread", "ask a question" or something of the like? Even Commons' idea "+comment" is more user friendly and intuitive. I imagine (and have once seen) scores of people wanting to ask a single quick question, but couldn't figure out the interface. What do people think? — — Jack (talk) 05:06, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Strong support (although with a different name) – That's always bugged me. There is absolutely no way that a new user would know how to start a new thread other than adding it manually to the bottom of the page until they got curious enough to click that little tab. Making it say something direct like "start thread" would encourage first time users to contribute to the discussions. If we change it, I would rather it say something using the word "start" or "new" rather than "add", because there are some new users on the other end of the spectrum who add all their comments using the + tab, even for existing threads. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 05:15, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Switching from one character to fifteen would dramatically lengthen the tab bar, especially for those will a few extra tabs than most users. In addition, a lot of instructions that have been written would become confusing / outdated. Not necessarily a bad idea overall, but it will require some work to be fully, correctly implemented. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:19, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I have a ton of tabs due to some javascript stuff in my monobook. If you keep the mouse over the plus sign, it'll say "Start a new section." bibliomaniac15 05:25, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • This was proposed and done back in June/July, but reverted back. –Pomte 06:35, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, so THAT's what it does! (I have an account, by the way.) 209.232.148.109 (talk) 15:28, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support – Back when I was a new user it took ages before I even noticed that little [+] tab. (Or perhaps it wasn't there when I started to edit Wikipedia?) But when I noticed it I first just thought it was a separator between the two kinds of tabs that came before and after it. And first time I clicked it I was kind of worried since I had no idea what would happen. Per Arctic Gnome above I suggest using say "new thread". (Not "start thread" since that is longer".) And I support in-spite that I now have so many buttons up there that if the [+] button gets wider they will overflow on my 800x600 screen resolution. (I got sensitive eyes.) But normal users will have room for it even at 800x600. I guess I can get a script that shortens it down to [+] again since I now know what it means. --David Göthberg (talk) 06:41, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support. I just wrote an essay, Design the Interface for Newcomers, that describes my position on the topic in more detail. Basically, if you're a new user, having the tab labeled "add new section" or something will be a great help. If you have so many tabs that a long tab name like that would be a problem, then you're clearly proficient enough with user JS to install a script to change the tab names. Thus, lengthening the tab bar is not a valid concern for experienced users. For the benefit of all the people above who had this concern, User:Voyagerfan5761/changelinks.js contains a script to change tab names. Pyrospirit (alt) (talk) 13:32, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - users who are annoyed by the change can use JavaScript to change the tab's text back to "+". I already have such a script working in my monobook.js to do this (I will not even notice this change if it is made!), and newbies would probably prefer explicit labelling. Nihiltres{t.l} 15:03, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose "+" implies "add" which implies "add a new comment". My tabs spread all the way to my watchlist link on a wide-screen screen resolution: when I reduce that to 1024x768 (which is standard on many screens), they're running an inch or more off the side. Changing this to something substantially larger is going to make accessibility problems for some users. Also, I've never seen anyone not be able to figure out how to add a new comment that way - if they don't see the button, they just do it manually. Hersfold (t/a/c) 16:57, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - Most people have commented that they didn't know what the + meant, and those who do only realize it well into their Wikipedia experience, as in, months. Also see here for a previous proposal which seemed to gain consensus, although nothing was ever actually done. PS I support changing the title, but not to something so long. "+comment" would be better, like they have at Commons. Equazcion •✗/C • 17:05, 17 Apr 2008 (UTC)
    • To stop the users who think that the + is for adding comments to an existing conversation, I would recomend "new thread". It's two characters longer than +comment, but I think it's worth it. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:58, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • I can agree there. I think we should just do it. There's no reason not to anymore. Just be sure to add the gadget also. Once the change is made, the gadget should probably be tested before it's added to the gadget list in preferences. Equazcion •✗/C • 18:00, 17 Apr 2008 (UTC)
        • Actually, "+comment" contains two m's which are fairly wide characters, so I took screen dumps from all three web browsers I have and measured. In Firefox and IE 5.5 "new thread" is one pixel wider. In Opera "+comment" is one pixel wider. So on average they take up exactly the same number of pixels. So I say go with "new thread". --David Göthberg (talk) 18:40, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Agree, using words instead of symbols is always a good idea. "Add..." of "[Add] new {comment|thread|section|topic}" are all good. -- Fullstop (talk) 18:50, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • By no means everyone is familiar with this sense of "thread", which I think will confuse as many as it helps. "New section" would use more typical WP vocabulary. Johnbod (talk) 18:52, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • The word "section" might also be misleading: a new section of what? I think that thread is a common enough term for most people, but if it is too unfamiliar to many people, we should use another word that relates to conversations, like "new topic" or "new subject". --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 20:10, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support the use of "new section" More intuitive for new users, and, as Johnbod said, is better suited to how discussion of Wikipedia functions. Harryboyles 19:41, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support "New section"; "thread" is more of a forum word. · AndonicO Engage. 20:36, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • 'New Comment or New Section instead of Add New Comment to reduce space. Reywas92Talk 22:06, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - I've been editing Wikipedia for over a year and only found out what that button did because of this discussion - feeling stupid. Guest9999 (talk) 22:51, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support: the current "+" is not self-explanatory. Thomprod (talk) 12:45, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support - I've been advocating for this for a while. See here and here for other related ideas. — Omegatron (talk) 16:31, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - There are zillions of user pages with a request to click the "+" tab to add a new comment, so this is going to be a problem for all those pages. I like the "+", it's very tidy and easy to find. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 17:33, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    The problem is that there hundreds of zillions of talk pages that do not tell users to click the + symbol, so users won't know about it until they get curious enough to test it. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 18:35, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, but I recommend it say "new topic" (see below). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:10, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

To what should we change the tab text?

While on the one hand I see a general consensus that the tab text should be more explicit, on the other I don't see to what we should change it (otherwise I would have already). Several versions have been proposed, including new thread, new section, +comment, add comment, and others of the form (regex) "(new|add|+)\s?(section|thread|comment|topic)". I express my general support for what I find to be the clearest, new section. What do you think? What are the relative advantages and disadvantages for particular phrasings? Nihiltres{t.l} 23:32, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • new section. Most descriptive to both newbies & oldies. Equazcion •✗/C • 02:05, 18 Apr 2008 (UTC)
  • new section. 'new thread' may suggest that sections work like threads on forums, when they don't really. 'new comment' is too close in function to 'edit this page'. –Pomte 03:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I suggest new topic. I don't think the length of the tab row is much of a drawback, since most users who need the "+" spelled out don't have any extra tabs anyway. Those who do probably know how to scroll to the right to access them or to change their text to shorter versions in order to fit all of their tabs on their screen. Some people seem to be overly-concerned with size. Ease of use is more important here. Thomprod (talk) 12:45, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • It's a rather minor distinction, but I think that new section is quite clear and presents no issues. On the other hand, new topic could potentially encourage off-topic or forum-like discussion of the article's topic rather than the article's content. I'd be fine with either, though. Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 22:13, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • new section per Pyrospirit. "Add" in place of "new" would do too. --WPholic(user)(talk) 02:18, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with new topic. "Comment" is extremely misleading (most posts are new comments), "thread" is too technical, and "section" is too vague. (Pages, chapters, and paragraphs are all widely understood, but "section" is often context-dependent.) "Topic" is easily understood (as in "change of discussion topic"). It's also the shortest, especially in sans-serif. I recognize the concern about off-topic discussions, but anything will be misunderstood by some, and a page heading like "Talk:Subject" pretty much defines expectations for those who pay minimal attention. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:10, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Changed to "new section"

Nihiltres made the change here. GracenotesT § 15:50, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That was quick; I figured that changing it to that, for now at least, would help encourage discussion. If a different version is preferable, I'm perfectly willing to change it again. :) Nihiltres{t.l} 15:52, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Nope, just mentioning for the record :) Hopefully people will find this discussion and we can reach a more complete consensus. GracenotesT § 15:57, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support the change (I think it's useful to separate those who supported the proposed change from those who now see it in place and like it) - much more understandable to the uninitiated. Happy‑melon 16:22, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is there a way for the user to override it, restoring it to a "+" for just themselves? I agree that "new section" is more newbie-friendly than "+", but I'd rather have the extra space. EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:05, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that the change is useful for new users, but I'd also like to be able to restore "+". It's not a big deal, but it'd be nice if this could be customised (I'm so used to the old position of the history tab that I now automatically click on "new section" whenever I want to view a page's history). Black Falcon (Talk) 19:23, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • In any case, change it to "add section" or "add comment". "New section" won't be exactly clear to the newbies, and it's only the newbies that need the change from "+" anyway. Zocky | picture popups 18:30, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • I agree with Zocky, let's change it to "new comment". Please readjust your newbie caps, folks, "new section" is just not intuitive enough.--Pharos (talk) 07:32, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • "New comment" makes it sound like people need to click it in order to add a comment to an existing section. I think "new section" is fine, and the most intuitive option for newbies. Equazcion •✗/C • 07:43, 23 Apr 2008 (UTC)
        • A "section" of what? Think like a newbie. They can always figure out the standard way to add comments later.--Pharos (talk) 07:51, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
          • A section of the page. I am thinking like a newbie. They don't see "headers". They see "sections". If they want to create their own discussion, they'll be looking for a way to create their own new section, not for a way to merely "add a comment", since they're not trying to merely comment on an issue already being discussed. Equazcion •✗/C • 08:00, 23 Apr 2008 (UTC)
            • You're assuming too much familiarity with the wiki. I don't think newbies see "sections" on a talk page, and want to add a "new section". A "new section" to them might mean a new section to the article itself, or even just some weird technical thing. I think they just look at the talk page, see a bunch of comments, and think, "I want to add a comment too". This is the wording that English Wikinews uses, and I think it would work best for English Wikipedia too.--Pharos (talk) 03:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Padding of the "new section" tab

The padding is smaller in that tab, so right now it looks odd. I am pretty sure that is in the CSS code, I think I know where to fix that. I'll investigate it and fix it if I can.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:34, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I found the source of the missing padding in the "new section" tab. It is code in monobook/main.css that does it. However I can not find where that CSS page can be edited and I have a vague memory that that page can not be edited by admins but only by devs or similar. This is the code that needs to be removed from monobook/main.css: 

#p-cactions #ca-addsection a {
    padding-left: .4em;
    padding-right: .4em;
}

If that code snippet is removed then that tab will get the default padding for such tabs. (Declared a bit higher up in the same file as "#p-cactions li a".)

Meanwhile I can add a temporary fix to MediaWiki:Common.css. It will look like this: 

#p-cactions #ca-addsection a {
    padding-left: .8em;
    padding-right: .8em;
}

Should I add the temporary fix? (I have tested it in my own monobook.css so I know it works.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 17:17, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

According to Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes, monobook/main.css is only for Monobook, so it would be wrong to add the code to MediaWiki:Common.css. The correct place would be MediaWiki:Monobook.css. --cesarb (talk) 17:50, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
CesarB: Oops, thanks for pointing that out. Seems you are right. (And that is why I discuss changes like this before I deploy them. :) I will add the fix to MediaWiki:Monobook.css. Anyone that thinks I should not add that fix?
--David Göthberg (talk) 18:57, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I have added the padding code above to MediaWiki:Monobook.css. So Ladies and Gentlemen, refresh your web browser caches to see the change. This is due to that MediaWiki:Monobook.css is set to be cached in web browsers for 30 days. Thus the correct padding will not be visible for some users until 20 May.
--David Göthberg (talk) 22:10, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
However, note that people who want the "+" back for their account will also probably want to change this for themselves. See MediaWiki talk:Gadget-addsection-plus.js. Superm401 - Talk 11:43, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
These discussions have shown that some people have problems to room all their extra page top tabs. Thus I have proposed a new gadget that will give you tighter tabs. (Gadgets are the ones you can turn on in your user preferences.) Have a look at my proposal over at Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals#Tighter page top tabs in MonoBook. And if you can't wait you can immediately use the code I show there.
--David Göthberg (talk) 14:14, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

More comments

  • Ugh, please change it back, the page is now far too wide and I have a horizontal scrollbar as the custom tabs in TWINKLE have been pushed off to the side of the page. -- Naerii 19:41, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There is a gadget to restore the + in your preferences. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 20:03, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Even more comments

Just quickly, nice going on this guys. The old way was really sucky for newbies. dihydrogen monoxide (H2O) 12:02, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How to transclude sections instead of whole pages

Many, including myself, have asked in the Talk:Transclusion page how to transclude only a section, not a whole page. This question was not answered. So I did some experimentation and found a solution: first, create a subpage of a relevant page, cut&paste into it the section you want transcluded, then transclude that subpage back in the original page and anywhere else you want. All future edits of that subpage will be shown in all.

For content that does not clearly belong to one page, I created the page Wikipedia:Transcluded content to act as a generic parent page for such subpages. The page itself contains detailed instructions.

Bye the way, what you are reading is transcluded from Wikipedia:Transcluded content/How to transclude sections only, which I inserted in various talk pages, including Wikipedia Talk:Transclusion, Wikipedia Talk:Transcluded content and Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). All comments you add here will be shown in all. Neat, uh? Emmanuelm (talk) 17:13, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The tip is appreciated, but I don't think this was actually news. There basically is no way to transclude only a section of a page -- you have to transclude an entire subpage, and if that subpage contains a header, it will be separately-editable on transcluded pages. There are many examples in which this is done, most notably WP:MfD. Also I'm sorry to have to do this but I've un-transcluded this discussion, because the code for the transclusion was showing up in and interfering with the discussion above. Equazcion •✗/C • 17:22, 17 Apr 2008 (UTC)
The only other workaround is to use <noinclude> to block the rest of the page from being transcluded. That works as long as it's always the same section that needs to be transcluded. There is no way to transclude a section by name or number, however. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:02, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I was just looking through User:David Gerard/1.0, and saw the line "In a lot of cases, the lead section is going to become the print article. We need stand-alone leads."
That fit nicely with the recent announcement that Bertelsmann will be publishing one volume worth of the German Wikipedia, "The first edition will contain 50,000 articles consisting of the introductory paragraphs taken from the corresponding Wikipedia articles."
Which made me remember this current thread.
Might this be a good solution for some Summary style articles? Transclude the lead section from the target, as the summary, under the {{main}} template?
Just thinking out loud... -- Quiddity (talk) 19:22, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We should allow original research (with certain constraints)

I propose adding an "analysis" tab to every mainspace article. The purpose of this Analysis page is to have a place where users can write original research about the article topic, however, with the following constraints:

  • wp:verifiability applied more strictly than on article page. All assumptions made in analysis essays must be verifiable, but conclusions can be original research. Unsourced assumptions should be removed, even if uncontroversial.
  • Any conclusions reached in the analysis page must be relevant to a specific statement in the article page.
  • Empirical data must come from reliable sources. Users are not allowed to include surveys they have conducted themselves, for instance.
  • WP:neutral still applies.

I feel that a lot of useful information has disappeared from wikipedia since it began its heavy-handed crackdown on original research. It's a shame, because three or four years ago the best part of many wikipedia articles was often the original research. It was often the reason I came to Wikipedia and not a traditional medium. So many articles have become so ... dry since then. Often users have made well-reasoned, well backed-up arguments. Why should wikipedia remove those arguments simply because a scholar hasn't bothered to publish them in a traditional medium yet? I know that technically this would go beyond an the scope of an encyclopedia, but wikipedia is not about emulating a paper encyclopedia, it is about spreading knowledge. Cambrasa 02:19, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that such a proposal can really go beyond larval stage, WP:OR has become one of the key policies in terms of content quality, I don't even want to imagine what effect this will have on some articles, particulary the fiction ones. - Caribbean~H.Q. 02:25, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Just to expand on the above comment, what I meant was that the introduction of a "analysis page" in some fictional topics will undoubtly just leave us with massive forums of endless fanboy theories and other fanfics, it would be a huge mess in those that cover extremely popular characters or shows. - Caribbean~H.Q. 02:30, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
if it meets an even stricter standard of WP:V, how is it original research? Johnbod (talk) 02:42, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The conclusions are original research, not the assumptions. For example, a study published in a reputable journal would be allowed to be used as a criticism of a statement in the article. There would be no more requirement that the connection has been made by a notable person. Cambrasa 11:35, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
WP:RSs are not required to be produced by the notable, but I suppose I see what you are getting at. Johnbod (talk) 16:26, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
to do this right would require editors of acknowledged competence capable of evaluating the quality and of the article. As our editors are not screened, this cannot be done. There are other projects where the editors are, and this way of working might be appropriate there. DGG (talk) 13:05, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I am opposed to this idea for two reasons. One, it would greatly complicate Wikipedia, adding extra bureaucracy and distracting from our goal. Two, it is beyond the scope of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the sum of all human knowledge, not the sum of all human opinions. This might work on another project, but not here. Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 22:10, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It seems a bizarre distinction to me, that opinions published in journals and newspapers are considered "knowledge" and allowed in Wikipedia, but opinions by Wikipedia users are not. What makes the journal editor so much more trustworthy than the Wikipedia editor? Sure, journals have peer review, but so does Wikipedia, and the majority of "opinions" published in journals are junk too. Cambrasa 15:12, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Again: The "analysis" page is not simply a collection of verifiable statements, it a page that allows conlusions to derived from those statements. Basically it is a place where WP:SYN should be legalised. Cambrasa 15:01, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
To respond to Cambrasa's comparison of wikipedia editors and journal editors: while it is true that the WP editor may be as knowledgeable, or even more so, than any given editor in a journal, WP is not set up to prove expertise or even to confirm real-life identities. A significant part of giving weight to, or ascribing merit to, conclusions is the reputation of the person drawing them. WP's "peer review", for example, is often merely a review by any passing editor who takes a shine to the title. "Peer review" in a journal is a review by acknowledged experts in the specific field. WP may have such experts, but has no real way of identifying them. ៛ Bielle (talk) 15:45, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And, to state the obvious, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia - of human knowledge -- not a journal. There's a big difference.Doug Weller (talk) 23:39, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You say that the analysis has to be neutral, however that's extremely difficult to achieve. Confirmation bias would be almost unavoidable, I expect. --Tango (talk) 23:45, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This is a recipe for disaster. We already have enough problems in fiction articles and articles which attract controversy like Global warming and Evolution or even something in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (let alone articles on psychics and stuff). Can you imagine the amount of problems that will occur if people are allowed to add what junk conclusions they want? At the current time, we just have to deal with the often silly conclusions drawn from various sources but these conclusions at least usually come from experts and undue is usually relatiely easy to establish there. Allowing every person in the street to add their own conclusion is just a recipe for disaster. Nil Einne (talk) 09:48, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Despite my initial sympathy for Cambrasa's proposal to accommodate what might be called "original deductions" (I'm interested in paleontology, where the fossil record is very stingy with evidence; occasionally the academic papers propose ideas that are based on the limited evidence but fly in the face of well-accepted wider biological principles), I oppose the proposal for exactly the reasons that Nil Einne has just stated. Philcha (talk) 10:16, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The analysis would not simply allow every conceivable conclusion. It would only allow sound, logically consistent, well articulated and well-backed up conclusions. Consensus would decide which conclusions are sound and which aren't. A balance of supporting and opposing conclusions should be presented for a contentious topic. This arleady works in article space, despite people adding junk all the time. Why should it not work in "analysis" space? Remember, 4-5 years ago Wikipedia did not have the clear policies for style, neutrality, verifiablity, etc. that it has now. Yet users still managed to reach an agreement organically, and the policies crystallised over the years. I believe that a similar set of policies would eventually emerge for the "analysis" pages, and those would prevent disaster. Cambrasa confab 08:51, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New essay

I wrote up a new essay, WP:GOLDENTICKET. Feel free to expand the page or comment to me, the talk page, or if relevant on here. Keegantalk 06:20, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Would be good to include a reference to Wikipedia:NBD#No_big_deal.Cambrasa 11:38, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Expanding information panel for cities

Any chance that a current local date/day time clock in the overview panel for each city and the local phone dialling codes. I am increasingly doing business with international businesses.

Its great to glance an overview of the city of the people I am contacting, the accurate current local time and to see how to construct a telephone number in an instant - rather than sourcing information from a minimum of three separate websites.

Kind regards

Karren

Hi Karren, pleased to make your acquaintance. I doubt that your idea would be implemented on a city-by-city basis (although it could have applications for major cities); however, it would certainly be a good idea for articles on nations. I don't have much experience in this area, however, and I don't know whether or not it is being or intended to be implemented. Cheers, and good luck! — Thomas H. Larsen 04:32, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
If current local time such as "15:40" or "3:40 pm" should be displayed then it should not be done in page code since that would ruin Wikipedia page caching. Or rather, as it works now the time when the page was rendered will be shown, and that might be several hours ago. Instead it could be done by adding to the Wikipedia javascripts and thus would run on the client side (in the web browser). I think our java gurus could code that up easily and give us some tag or template to put in pages in the spot where we want the local time of the country/city/whatever to be shown. Of course, if the clock or time zone information in your computer is set wrong then you are screwed. Ouch, come to think of it, that might cause people to complain on Wikipedia for showing "wrong" times. And some people might think that the time they see for their own country or city is accurate time since they trust Wikipedia.
--David Göthberg (talk) 15:41, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Some "work required on this article" templates should require details

I'll start with an example: Warm-blooded currently has an "Introrewrite" tag. If the tag was inserted after a thorough reading of the article, the person who inserted it could easily add a list of points in the article that should be in the intro and / or points in the intro that are not covered in the main text. OTOH if the person inserting the tag can't easily do this, use of the tag is merely vexatious. I think the same reasoning applies to the "needs clean-up to meet Wikipedia's quality standards" tag.

Since I'm not an expert on the range of tags, I'll leave it to more knowledgeable editors to identify other tags for which this approach might be appropriate. I'm sure there are other tags which do not need details, e.g. "citations needed" is almost always placed right after the offending content.

I suggest the list of details should not be visible in the "normal view" of the article but should be visible to people who wish to do something about it - perhaps a "show / hide" link, like those in many of the tags used in Talk pages. Philcha (talk) 10:26, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New ambox version

I have made a new version of {{ambox}} that I intend to deploy within some days. {{ambox}} is one of the most widely transcluded templates on Wikipedia and is visible on 342,000 pages pages, so this is a rather big update. For more about the new version and to discuss it see Wikipedia talk:Article message boxes#New ambox version.

--David Göthberg (talk) 13:08, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Editor review and RfC

It has been pointed out that editor review has devolved to some degree into a form of admin coaching. Since its purpose is intended to be soliciting comments from the broader community, I propose that editor review be merged into requests for comment. It would be simple enough to have a "user review" section, much like there is a "user conduct" section. It seems to be a bit of sprawl to have a separate (and somewhat obscure) page for editor reviews, when there is a well-developed (and much more visible/known) page and process for soliciting community feedback. Thoughts? Comments? Vassyana (talk) 22:50, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps it would be better to merge the other way to Wikipedia:Admin coaching? I don't know. It's always seemed like a cross between that and a personal request of "How'm I doing?" The difference (obviously) is that ER is usually requested by the user, and RFC is usually requested by others. - jc37 23:05, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Some RFCs on User conduct are very confrontational and nasty. If the Editor review is working reasonably well as it is, I suggest it would not be productive to tie it into a process as problematic as "RFC/User conduct." Wanderer57 (talk) 23:26, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

.


A call to allow main article subpages

Currently, subpages are allowed everywhere except for main article (main article namespace), where they are "disabled". This word is misleading: they work fine until an administrator deletes it. Therefore, the correct word is "forbidden". Apparently, this decision was based on fear of abuse with, e.g., the creation content forks via subpages.

Here, I call for the cancellation of the arbitrary interdiction of creating main article subpages. Noting the potential of abuse, I also bring as an example of legitimate use the transclusion of different portions of an article into several different other articles in order to reduce duplications. This currently requires the use of subpages. Another legitimate use would be storage of metadata to reduce the size of an overweight article. A well written guideline will suffice to prevent the abuse of this tool.

I suggest you add your comment to this discussion on the subject. Emmanuelm (talk) 13:33, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Subpages in the main namespace are indeed disabled. Try putting {{BASEPAGENAME}} at Wikipedia:Sandbox/Foo and Sandbox/foo to see the difference (use show preview, not save, obviously). This is as it should be. After all, AC/DC is not a subpage of AC. Zocky | picture popups 21:02, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There is no such thing as subpages. The "/" used to be used to indicate a subpage, but it no longer does. "/" is now just another character in the article's title. Corvus cornixtalk 22:36, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Allowing subpages of articles would be very confusing to many Wikipedia readers. It would create a concept of pages within pages. Some people do not have a problem understanding this concept, but many people find it hopelessly confusing. Wanderer57 (talk) 00:37, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Redirect

I noticed that WProj:Redirect seemed to have fallen inactive while I was cleaning up redirects. I have 'revived' the project, fixed up the pages and made a few changes. If you have an interest, please come along and join up [we need all the help we can get!]. ><RichardΩ612 13:48, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Adding an Acknowledgements section to the Talk pages

Proposal: allow a stable Acknowledgements section to stay on the Talk pages. If it gets large, it could be forked off into a Subpage. People who feel they've contributed significantly could then add their name and the edits they feel justify their addition to the list. I put a sort of example of how I see it done on a subpage of mine, and I'll copy it here.

Acknowledging major contributors to Sustainable agriculture

People might be required to put their edits next to their name to save space. They may want to put their largest edits first.

There are a number of advantages to this, mainly in two areas: 1) incentives to contribute heavily and 2) identification of experts on the topic. In addition, it could make it simpler to identify the changes over time. When I looked over the Sustainable agriculture article, I found that really only a few people had done all the work, and it had been a while since much substantive adding had been done. In addition, I've found on occasion that really substantive information has been deleted and never put back, although I can't find the article right now. OptimistBen | talk - contribs 04:48, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are several tools that can be used - see the "For counts and major contributors" subtopic in the HIstory (of a page) section of the Editor's index. Doing this manually means less time for actual editing. And it's not clear how the ranking would be done (who gets listed at the top of a list): number of edits? Number of "major" edits? Gross number of words added? Net number of words added? (We don't really need fights over how to list contributors.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:14, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Photograph attribution in image captions

I would like to propose that Wikipedia adopt the common practice of crediting the author of a photograph in the caption beneath an image for licenses requiring attribution, i.e. Photo by John Doe. Below are my reasons:

  1. After numerous requests from Flickr users for their name to appear "next to, or under" the photo when requesting relicensing from them, it is apparent that many photographers expect attribution to appear beneath the photo. It is often all they ask in return.
  2. This will strengthen our legal status regarding attribution, even if we are currently abiding by the terms of CC licenses. Since this has never been challenged in court, we don't really know if we are doing all we can to provide prominent attribution.
  3. The option to include credit in a caption should, at the very least, not be prohibited for "non-notable" photographers by guidelines for this very reason.
  4. It is in the spirit of many licenses we host, i.e. Creative Commons human readable licenses
  5. It is the morally right option, crediting the work to authors prominently
  6. It is common to see attribution given in this way in countless other forms of media
  7. Photographers are authors of original content, and most images are exempt from WP:OR prohibition. They are thus like the author of a book, who we credit in the reference section on the article page.
  8. It is courteous, giving a bit back to those photographers who were kind enough to relicense their work
  9. Some Wikipedia users do not know they must click an image, or that it is even clickable, to see source information.
  10. This proposal is not intended to apply to templates. Only images displayed in articles to provide illustration of a particular subject matter.

Support

  • I support and would like to add that the upfront citation should be considered a "required" practice for all fair-use and CC-by iamges while evaluating FA or GA. Arman (Talk) 10:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm a photographer who supported fotographs for Yusef Lateef, Solomon Burke, Wayne Shorter, Wadada Leo Smith, Trijntje Oosterhuis, Toni Lynn Washington, Till Brönner, Sean Bergin, Scott Colley, Russell Malone, Ron Westray, Philip Harper, Philip Catherine, Pat Martino, and many others, and in principle I'm prepared continuing sending photographs in the future. Mentioning the credits is important, since is the only reward that is obtained for work that normally is paid. Of course you can click the photo to obtain the information, but in practice nobody will do this regularly, if ever. Further, the credit may be important information to the reader, especially in the field of jazz wherein I'm active. Particularly, some photographs are as important and well known as musicians (William Claxton, William Gotlieb, Herman Leonard, Francis Wolff to mention a few). Maybe the present photograhers are not (yet) that famous, but without giving them the credits they will never become, and moreover those who are already well known will never contribute for free to Wikipedia. Tom Beetz (Jazzism, Jazzflits) User:Tbeetz April 21, 2008 (UTC)
    • Tom Beetz, your comment suggests that attribution is "only" a small courtesy in exchange for a big favour the photographer is doing to Wikipedia. But this is not always the case. Some articles, such as New York City get a huge amount of traffic. Having one's photograph and name published on the top of a page seen by tens of thousands of people every day can be of high value to a photographer's career, especially for less well-known professional photographers who aspire to break it as artists. If you had to pay for that kind of exposure (eg. through online advertising) it could cost you thousands of dollars a day. Now, I am not disputing that your work is of high quality and extremely valuable to Wikipedia, but I hope you can see that what you suggest potentially creates a confict of interest. Also, Wikipedia is an altruistic project, so nobody who works on it should expect any kind of "reward". Cambrasa confab 12:10, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Cambrasa, you barely acknowledge the "high value" photographs give to Wikipedia in your statement. Both sides benefit, which is how it should be. If Wikipedia had to pay for these photographs, we would be out of business. So while Wikipedia gets to host their image on the main article page, they can't do something as simple as give a photo credit to them underneath? Who wins in that scenario? If you want to talk about benefits and rewards, Wikipedia is the one winning out. Thanks again Tom for your contributions, they make Wikipedia what it is. I only wish Wikipedia would do a tiny bit more to give back in return, as well. Indeed it is enticing to have one's name under the photo, which is exactly the sort of thing that encourages more submissions! (Mind meal (talk) 16:16, 22 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  • Support - This is a no-brainer. Many photographers only ask for a photo credit, and without this very modest compromise we'd lose hundreds of excellent photographs, remaining in the land of the amateurish with hundreds of photograph-less articles for several more years, or forever. I support this proposal, only if the photographers specify that such a credit appear; otherwise, their credit can appear on the photo page itself, as normal. It's clear that most such photos are not taken by Wikipedians, so our partnership with volunteer photographers from Flickr must be highly valued and not treated with contempt, as I read in some comments just below. Badagnani (talk) 22:56, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Image description pages are not known to all readers, for example new readers or less web-savvy readers, so attribution-requiring licenses are currently being violated. Also, they are being violated in printed versions of Wikipedia articles. "Common courtesy" and similar reasons are nice, but the legal reasons are my only real concerns. -kotra (talk) 22:38, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I support the broad thrust of the proposal. Creative Commons "attribution" licenses imply that the use of a photograph will be accompanied by a reasonably prominent attribution, and I consider Wikipedia's present policy to be inconsistent with this type of license. Inhibiting prominent attribution discourages the licensing of photographs for free use by Wikipedia, and I feel that more and better photographs in an online encyclopedia are very important to the project. There is certainly wiggle-room on the details of implementation if the principle can be accepted. Easchiff(talk) 23:15, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, the direction is the (morally and legally) right one. Attribution doesn't have to be in-your-face, and kotra's suggestion for a compromise sounds great. -- Fullstop (talk) 01:47, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Strange debate. Here's my story: one editor asked me for some of my flickr photos. I was happy to help Wikipedia for the very first time. I finally understood that I was practically giving away some of my photos. That was still ok with me. I just asked to have my name mentioned as a photographer. Today some of you plan to delete it ... I'm sure it's legal. Like many other things. (Excuse me, I'm new) --Dubluzet (talk) 18:37, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Images are different than quotes and also slightly different than textual content. I say that conventionally. It's common practice in a variety of contexts to include photo attribution on images. Even without explicit copyright symbols on the images. Therefore, arguments below that images are the same as any other contribution is ignoring the conventional. I agree that self-promotion is potentially a problem, but there may be other ways to deal with that. But alternatives like that are only possible if we acknowledge that conventionally speaking images and even image thumbnails are not treated the same as other content with respect to attribution - in related media like magazines, newspapers, flyers, etc. In the very least, we should amend the policies to include an explicit mention that image attribution is conventionally done and may be ok for an article. In other words, we don't have to remove attribution if we don't feel self-promotion is occurring. - Owlmonkey (talk) 21:19, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Note: one idea/variation: instead of textual/link attribution we could eventually switch to another form of attribution like including a "cc" link under all cc licensed photos explicitly to license info for that photo. A technical change for that would be required. - Owlmonkey (talk) 21:19, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. As long as demands aren't unreasonable (i.e. someone saying that the photo can only be used with a profane or vulgar attribution which would be a very odd request) I think photographer should be free to ask for the kind of attribution they want. Without their work, there would be no photos, and I see no harm in crediting them in the way they would like if it's reasonable.►Chris NelsonHolla! 04:41, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have contributed a number of photos of jazz musicians. Attribution for photos should be required. If photographers are being asked to give up their photos then the minimum photo credit should be provided. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Crocon (talk • contribs) 11:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Conditional support

  • Only for photographs where the license explicitly requires attribution, and only if the photograph is exceptional - ie. a featured picture. Let's face it, 99% of photographs on Wikipedia aren't exactly works of art, and neither do they try to be. Most are purely documentational photographs that require 10 seconds of work operating a snapshot camera and another 30 seconds of work uploading the file to Wikipedia. By contrast, some editors spend days or even weeks researching a topic to promote an article to FA or GA status, and their work doesn't get attributed either. Once we start attributing photographers, then the question is, how come we are not attributing dedicated editors, illustrators, template designers etc? What makes photographers so special? Wikipedia should stick to its principles - it is an altruistic collaborative project and not a collection of individual works. Everyone who chooses to join this project should be prepared to "sacrifice" his/her work to the common good without expecting anything in return. Pictures are no exception to this; they should not be attributed by default. I am also worried that once the author name/pseudonym appears under every mediocre snapshot somebody has taken of his motorbike/pet/electronic gadget, users will start abusing Wikipedia's high traffic for shameless self-promotion. I would even go as far as saying that Wikipedia should strongly discourage picture licenses that require attribution, except for featured pictures. Still, we should give credit where credit is due, and if a photograph has been chosen to be among of Wikipedia's best work, then I don't see a problem with naming the author. Cambrasa confab 10:01, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Only for images that can be attributed to a high degree of certainty, attribution can be given to a name that is not unnecessarily offensive or ridiculous, and does not cause problems with the formatting of the article. I'm not sure how to define this, but also think it could be restricted to images that show some skill or effort. I don't think that a license must require attribution in order to have a credit in the image caption; it wouldn't hurt to say "Credit: NASA" in a few captions, even though those images are public domain. --Rat at WikiFur (talk) 05:06, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

  • Our editors don't sign the text content they add to the articles, so why should the photos be any different? We do cite quoted text when the quote needs to be verified or the person quoted is relevant, but we don't put the names of the Wikipedians that wrote the article into the article itself, it is one click away in the history. Articles should be limited to the content of the article. One click on an image and you get full attribution and license. (1 == 2)Until 15:33, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • As Until(1 == 2) put it; we separate content and credits. Besides, imagine the case when an image is repeatedly modified: can you imagine crediting each person who has touched up an image, as part of the article text? Or for compound images, should we list each author and reviser of each image, separately? I might support inclusion of author credit and license information as metadata, but article text should be relevant to the article with exceptions only for minor navigational and status additions such as hatnotes and template notices. Nihiltres{t.l} 15:57, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Agree with others. Attribution should be included only where it helps to understand the topic - if you're displaying an image because the person who created it has a notable involvement in the topic, and the image illustrates their involvement or position in some way, then putting their name there is important as it's informational. The same applies to quotes. Attribution for the sake of "crediting" alone is not practiced on Wikipedia. However, if I were compelled to compromise, I would sooner take textual captions then the abomination which is embedded watermarks. Dcoetzee 20:39, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with all that's said above. Mind meal's point above comparing authorship to photo credits is somewhat misleading. Print publications that include caption credits, like magazines, usually also have authorship included in the article. Publications that have separate authorship pages, like books, frequently place the photo credits in a footnote or bibliography section. We're more like a book than a magazine in that regard, so we're consistent with general publishing practice and offer the unparalleled benefit of a much more sophisticated and granular credit system that is also available for images (although not quite as robust, but still more informative than a single caption credit). As far as problems like not knowing to click on images and asking people to relicense stuff that's already licensed, this is common inexperienced-user/editor stuff that just requires climbing the learning curve that any endeavor includes. (And frankly, clickable images are practically de rigueur these days, so that's a fairly low curve.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:29, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with the Oppose views given above. We are most similar to a print publication that keeps the photo acknowledgments in a separate section. Clicking on the photo does not seem to be too high a barrier to seeing the credit. EdJohnston (talk) 21:37, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Oppose People may come to see the pretty pictures, but no one care who took it. Many times I have removed photo credits from articles. If it is needed to know who created an image, it is already required on the image description page. The only exception is if the photographer is famous. For example, it should be pointed out that it was taken by Ansel Adams. Also, there should never be any cross-namespace links to userpages, and often people prefer to be anonymous. Anyway, that would be way too much work for is already there. Reywas92Talk 21:41, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • A couple more reasons: 1) Readers don't care. They really don't. They don't want to see Photo by John Doe. It is not directly relevant to the topic, and it really is distracting. 2) We don't attribute article authors in the article; it's in the history. We shouldn't attribute article authors in the article, it's in the image description page. 3) This can be a major form of self-promotion. Reywas92Talk 16:38, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Attribution, whether for writing or images is separate for readability, accessibility and standardization across the site. When the photographer is notable or in some way important to explaining the photograph, its a different matter. Clickable thumbnails is a pretty standard sight on the interwebs, so we'll actually be helping people by educating them about it ;) Shell babelfish 21:47, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • We present content first and foremost. All attribution is connected to each article. Readers who don't know to click the thumbnail don't need to know who took the photograph or who collaborated on the article. For kotra's suggestion below, it is entirely unnecessary to have an icon link to the exact same target as the thumbnail. For the print version, do people print the edit history when they print an article? –Pomte 02:59, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per others above. Johnbod (talk) 03:06, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Full attribution, in accordance with BY-SA licensing, is already available by clicking on the thumbnail versions in article namespace. The legal concerns here are almost certainly misplaced (see below). Contrary to the hand-wringing above, BY-SA licensing contains no stipulation that a credit must always appear wherever the image does and Wikipedia already attributes authorship in accordance with the letter and spirit of the license. The proposal is concerned mainly with relicensed Flickr images; while they may well be valuable to the project, I don't agree that Flickr image use policy should dictate image use policy on Wikipedia. So anyone not prepared to accept WP policy won't upload their images – this has always been the case. A bigger reason by far for not uploading is the commercial use issue, which deters a great number of otherwise willing image contributors. Donating images here should be an altruistic act, not a means of getting your name into a popular online publication: the scope for abuse of this proposal is way bigger than the imagined absence of images it claims to want to address. Finally, giving special consideration due to photographs being primary source material and original research is also completely moot, as no other form of user contribution is credited in any way at all; photographers already enjoy more detailed attribution than authors of original texts on which the encyclopedia is based, for example. Let's stop conflating proper attribution with ugly, undesirable and unworkable caption credits. --mikaultalk 00:48, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Well said, mikaul. Not to be rude, but can we kill this idea now, Mind Meal? If you want image attribution, then why not list the article editors at the bottom? No, the photographer is credited in the image description page just as the authors are credited in the article history. As I said above, and did mikaul, this will cause undue self-promotion and a distraction from the encyclopedia. The fact that magazines, etc. credit the photographer next to the image is moot, as Wikipedia is WP:NOT a paper medium. This has been fine for years and is in no way a legal problem. I have and will actively remove the photo credits in articles. Sorry, but this is not going to happen. Reywas92Talk 01:05, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Not a chance this debate is being closed at this stage in the debate. Do you jest? "Sorry, but this is not going to happen." What arrogance. Watch and weep over the coming weeks. You say things have been fine for years. That suggests Wikipedia has reached a stage of impenetrable perfection in which improvement is not possible. (Mind meal (talk) 01:42, 23 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  • Attribution on the image description page is sufficient for cc-by and GFDL. I have been contacted several times regarding re-using images I have uploaded here. Many history books have a page of commercial photocredits at the back, and it doesn't seem to cause any problems. No objection to the credit being included in the metadata however. Megapixie (talk) 02:10, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Just about everyone else above me summed it up well. This will put needless clutter in article. I'm not big on copyright law, but wouldn't this bring problems with photos taken anonymously? "Photo taken by some guy who we don't know" doesn't look too good. Paragon12321 (talk) 03:24, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Geez, please, no! This proposal is a slap in the face of everyone who is doing serious article space work. Attribution on the image description page is sufficient. Full stop. Also if an image really is that great, people will click the thumbnail. Under no circumstances should credits be manually added to caption. If any such proposal should ever be accepted a software solution should be created which automatically displays image page credit in the caption. But I hope that day never comes. Pleas note that my main contributions are pictures and I'm still opposed. --Dschwen 14:53, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Attribution is already given on the image page, and adding it to the captions will just clutter up [especially image-heavy] pages. Editors are 'credited' through the history, they don't sign each individual edit, so why something different for pictures? ><RichardΩ612 15:01, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Quite obviously, most photographers are not Wikipedia editors. Their motives for allowing us to use their work often comes under a different' license than that which Wikipedia does. Not to mention photographers are authors of original content. We are editors of original content. (Mind meal (talk) 04:05, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  • Oppose - It's given on the image page. Looks a bit like a promotional thing in the article. A CC icon or small link seems fine, however. -Fnlayson (talk) 21:17, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose I disagree that the way we are currently doing it is inadequate. I'd rather not be attributed in the article page for my images. You run into even more problems with cases like images used in templates or very small images. I also happen to think that most of our readers, especially those who will be looking for source or copyright information, are web-savvy enough to think to click on the image. Mr.Z-man 23:52, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose until I get my name credited next to the text I contribute, since that would be the: "morally right option, crediting the work to authors prominently" Aboutmovies (talk) 01:40, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • What is with all the paper tiger and straw man arguments? Everyone keeps equating this to attribution of Wikipedia editors. Reality update: This discussion isn't about that! Lmao! (Mind meal (talk) 01:43, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
      • OK, how about this: Wikipedia is not about you, me, or Flickr photographers, its about making an encyclopedia. Pictures are decorations (i.e. optional as they only equal 1000 words, so we can always type more instead), and adding attribution does nothing for improving the content of the encyclopedia. I and plenty of others contribute lots of images to the project, many times not even asking for attribution. If you are "donating" your pictures to Wikipedia in the hopes of receiving attribution beyond the description page, then you are here for the wrong reason. Now, if we are talking about getting Flickr pictures, we should really avoid those as I'll bet quite a few pictures on Flickr and similar sites are copyright violations in their own right, and most pics on Flickr are not compatible with Wikipedia's copyright guidelines (that is most prohibit commercial use, and Wikipedia requires that there not be such a limitation unless its fair use). So, no real loss if we lose Flickr pics in my opinion. Aboutmovies (talk) 01:57, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • "If you are "donating" your pictures to Wikipedia in the hopes of receiving attribution beyond the description page, then you are here for the wrong reason." This kind of perception doesn't acknowledge reality: To encourage more contributions, we should prominently display credit. I'm surprised to see such little appreciation for photographs and photographers in the oppose section. Undoubtedly, few of you ever deal with Flickr users or know what considerations photographers make when deciding whether to relicense their work. "Now, if we are talking about getting Flickr pictures, we should really avoid those as I'll bet quite a few pictures on Flickr and similar sites are copyright violations in their own right." You need to prove this, and right now. "So, no real loss if we lose Flickr pics in my opinion." You obviously have no idea how many images we host come from Flickr. If you are going to make comments like this, educate yourself on the matter a bit before shooting so haphazardly from the hip. So many of these oppositions are way off topic. (Mind meal (talk) 03:18, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  • Oppose- First off, it looks disgusting, second, credits are not important at all since <0.01% of any reader on Wikipedia will take an image from us and publish it, and if they did, I'm overly confident that they will click on the image and unintentionally view the image summary (containing author info), or just cite Wikipedia, which is equally good. Why make a disgusting and cluttering link for all people when hardly any will ever copy-paste the image and publish it. Besides, most images are GDFL so attribution is not neccessary unless the uploader is so full of themselves that they would like everyone to know their name. -- penubag  (talk) 03:58, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • "First off, it looks disgusting"..."disgusting and cluttering link"..."Besides, most images are GDFL." Most images are GDFL? Where do you get such statistics? "Unless the uploader is so full of themselves that they would like everyone to know their name." This discussion is amazing. So many sentiments like this expressed. Why does it have to be narcissism for a photographer to want their work to have their name appear with it? Complete garbage. (Mind meal (talk) 04:09, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
      • "It looks disgusting" is a perfect argument. You tell me if this is pretty not to mention hard to read. What about an image with multiple authors who are all now suddenly wanting credit? And yes, most images are GDFL or Public domain, you can view WP:FU for our strict rules pertaining to images under any nonfree license. -- penubag  (talk) 04:28, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • This has become absolutely insane. Wikipedia hosts Creative Commons licenses. Also, you have provided absolutely no reference to where you get the info on the majority of images here being GDFL or public domain. Due to your inability to produce how you arrived at this, we can only assume you made it up. (Mind meal (talk) 04:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
          • Uh, that was explained, but maybe not well enough. The majority of images have to be free ones due to restrictions on fair-use of non-free images. -Fnlayson (talk) 04:38, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
            • And yes, CC says we need to give attribution, which we are doing in the image summary. What more could they ask for? Their names in the article itself? (disgusting) Soon the authors of individual paragraphs will want that. Besides, if they are that passionate, they should just watermark their images. -- penubag  (talk) 04:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
              • The GDFL is a specific license. Creative Commons licenses are separate. All they require of us is attribution. What more could they ask for? A photo credit beneath the actual photo, or at least a small link that says something about credits. A rectangle that says "enlarge" does not demonstrate that there are credits on that page. Users have no way of knowing where attribution is located. Obviously you haven't seen all the arguments and whining about watermarked images. Most who oppose here don't seem to care whether we host images at Wikipedia or not. They act like we are doing the photographer some giant favor by hiding their credit as author. The truth is, it is photographers who are doing Wikipedia the favor. Unfortunately, consensus thus far demonstrates Wikipedia doesn't appreciate it. (Mind meal (talk) 07:28, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  • Oppose - I have several problems here. One, the creative commons licenses require that attribution be made in at least as prominent of a way as for other content. If we follow through with the ill-conceived idea to port the entire site to CC licenses, that would require that text contributors be recognized in the article itself. In short, it would make it untenable. Even without the license port, it would make a painful job of making sure that all captions are equally prominent. It also opens us up far too much for advertising. Contribute a photo and you can get a mention of your company in a Wikipedia article. No, this is a really bad idea. --B (talk) 13:06, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - I am very tempted to think that we should employ our own guidelines (WP:MOS and related ilk) first, and if a photographer wants us to use images with a specific type of crediting on articles, we shouldn't use the image (and delete it?). We're an encyclopedia and I think that sometimes we have to say, "Thanks, but no thanks." A crediting system would encourage more people to upload more pictures - but will it be for the correct reason, to improve the encyclopedia, or the other version, to self-promote? x42bn6 Talk Mess 13:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The Audubon Ballroom. (Credits)
  • I propose that we modify the Images code so that there is an automatic link to the image description page, displayed as a link to "Credits". The advantage of this is that it makes attribution easy to find for newbies without encouraging narcissism among photographers, and a simple software change could implement this for all pictures.--Pharos (talk) 03:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support I support anything that strives to give more prominent attribution to photographers. (Mind meal (talk) 03:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  • Oppose. Not every image is formatted as a thumbnail. This also create 3 links to the image description page, all within a few millimeters of each other. If we want to make the little link in the corner more prominent, it should be done through a software change, not by adding another link next to it that will require users to manually add the link (I can't think of an easy way to do that with a template that would save much typing). Mr.Z-man 03:53, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It is so astounding to me how much objection there is to giving back to photographers. Absolutely stunning. Why don't we change the text from enlarge to credits when the mouse floats over the square and rectangle? (Mind meal (talk) 03:56, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Maybe a look at our policy Wikipedia:Ownership of articles-- penubag  (talk) 04:02, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Changing the hover text would be a far better idea than adding yet another link to the description page. Mr.Z-man 04:28, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This is a much better idea, having credits in the tooltip! :)-- penubag  (talk) 04:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Hover text?! Since when do newbies (or anyone else for that matter) read hover text? We should keep our goal in mind, which is making this information obvious to ordinary people.--Pharos (talk) 05:20, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Replies: (1) Almost every image in an article is formatted as a thumbnail. (2) Redundancy is useful in this case, because many newbies still can't find the link. (3) I would support adding a "Credits" link through a software change (that's actually part of this proposal), I believe this could be done very easily.--Pharos (talk) 04:00, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Ownership of articles is not Wikipedia:Ownership of photographs. Creative Commons licenses are not GNU licenses. Please, will anyone recognize this? (Mind meal (talk) 04:06, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Just because it is titled articles, doesn't mean it applies solely to articles, please have a skim of the first paragraph -- penubag  (talk) 04:08, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but it does apply to articles. I don't see images mentioned in there at all in any substantive way. You have introduced yet another off topic, irrelevant issue to this discussion. What a surprise! I need to write an essay on living inside of a WikiBubble. This entire discussion makes my skin crawl and hold my fellow editors with contempt. I'm sorry i started it. I will remind you that images in infoboxes 99% of the time have no enlarge link.(Mind meal (talk) 04:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]

Discussion

I'm pretty sure something like this has been suggested before. I've never seen the outcome but I would suggest links to previous discussions would be helpful Nil Einne (talk) 11:13, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

At Wikipedia talk:Captions: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive98#Images, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive302#Photography edit war on model Ana Beatriz Barros and WP:IUP#User-created images may be of interest. The second one is the one closest to the issue at hand, I think, and it is related to the third link. I don't know about legal issues but I think these are likely best raised with the Foundation lawyer, Mike Godwin, User:Mikegodwin. x42bn6 Talk Mess 16:04, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've emailed Mike. I'll let everyone know what he says. (Mind meal (talk) 16:05, 21 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Thanks for those links x42bn6. It seems that there is much previous consensus that captions do not go in the article. As to the idea below, it's just getting too rediculously complicated. The image description page just as easily has the author attribution. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Reywas92 (talk • contribs) 02:12, 22 April 2008
See also Commons:Watermarks#Signatures and photographer names. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:48, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
As a group of beggars, we sure are picky on here. (Mind meal (talk) 20:41, 21 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Or, on the other hand, I could say "We're builders, not beggars. We don't need our names all over that which we construct." Neither of these analogies of "builder" or "beggar" describes the situation completely. Let's avoid slanting the debate, please. Nihiltres{t.l} 21:07, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For those who don't want to see "Photo by John Doe." in image captions for appearance reasons, here's a compromise that might be acceptable: An Attribution icon in the caption, similar to the existing Enlarge icon, that would be conspicuous enough to notice at a glance, but not as obtrusive as the full "Photo by John Doe." text would be. It would link to the image description page, and for printed versions, it could be replaced with the full attribution via a print stylesheet. This would involve some creative coding on the back-end, but I believe it's possible. -kotra (talk) 23:03, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's an interesting idea, and I'd be fine with embedded metadata as long as it didn't visibly interfere with the content. Indeed, it would probably be quite useful if MediaWiki caused images to have data about their authorship and license embedded within the source code of an article, perhaps visible on print (ideally at the bottom of the page). It'd be a technical hurdle, but it's tantalizing. Nihiltres{t.l} 23:31, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
See, for example, www.eol.org/. The idea has been suggested many times. I believe the usual answer is: if you write the code, we'll collectively consider using it; otherwise, add it to the long wishlist at bugzilla for the devs to get around to when they can. Possibly there already is a bugzilla entry for it? Currently, the closest thing I can see is the enhancement request at bugzilla:13070, which asks about changing the "magnify" symbol used below thumbnails, and links to this example gallery at User:Thebainer/thumbtest. -- Quiddity (talk) 04:58, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The bugzilla entry and the example gallery you linked are exactly what I was thinking about. Thanks! I also thought there could be some extra functionality where the author information for attribution-requiring images could be displayed by default when the article is printed, but to me that's a less important feature and could be difficult to code (mostly because author information isn't completely standardized on image description pages). Perhaps that bugzilla thread can be revived (it seems to be stalled since February), though I don't know the proper etiquette there. -kotra (talk) 17:56, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think the best way to revive the thread, is just to "vote" for the bug (it's a bit complicated so, if you havent done it before:- create an account there. go to the correct bug's page, and at the very bottom of the page is a "related actions" box, click "Vote for this bug". Then at the voting page, select/click the radio button for the bug, then click "Change My Votes" to save.) I dont think they appreciate "yes please"/"ditto" comments at the bug, so only add a comment if you have additional information to provide, for fixing or diagnosing or clarifying the request. But voting freely is encouraged. (afaik) -- Quiddity (talk) 22:47, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! I've gone ahead and voted for it. As a graphic/web designer by trade, I may be able to help out there even. -kotra (talk) 23:48, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am concerned that many of the support votes include text that implies that the basic Wikimedia attribution system is fundamentally flawed; i.e., that credit on another page is no credit at all, and that Creative Commons licensing implicitly requires a credit that is part of the immediate presentation. If this is so, then any prose work done is also in violation, since all such work is credited only on a page that one must follow a link to get to. (In fact, many contributions require multiple clicks, especially for heavily edited articles.) This claim is either misleading or a serious problem with the Wikimedia system. Which is it? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:38, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As only one of the supporters, I can only speak for myself, but I do believe the attribution system for images is fundamentally flawed. I do not, however, believe that credit on another page is no credit at all, just that it's not good enough. The attribution Wikipedia gives to the authors of its text, however, is different. We voluntarily give up the ability to prominently attribute our contributions when we edit Wikipedia, and we know (or should know) we do so. However, images secured from other places like Flickr do not fall into this category, as they may not be voluntarily giving up prominent attribution for their works. Instead, other people (Wikipedia editors) are bringing their works into a context where they may not be attributed as they require. So, I think it's neither of the options you give. -kotra (talk) 03:39, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also speaking for myself, I don't think allowing attribution with the thumbnail means something is fundamentally broken. This is because conventionally - in journalism and other publication forms - image attribution is treated differently than attribution of text authorship. But even if conventional usage differs from our system, that doesn't mean our system is broken just that we're not meeting conventional standards or behavior. The legal standards and behavior are then another issue, yet they may intersect in that sometimes legal standards are based upon what's conventionally expected. Potentially then we also may need to pay attention to what's conventional done for legal reasons. - Owlmonkey (talk) 21:28, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just in case anyone is worried about legal issues of attribution, please read what the perennial proposals page says on the subject. Until Mike Godwin or someone else at the Wikimedia Office tells us that we must attribute images directly, we don't have to. The aura of paranoia is stifling. Nihiltres{t.l} 03:23, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that we should probably wait until Mike Godwin (or other legal counsel) responds before making a policy/guideline change, at least if it's based on legality issues, but I take slight offense to the view that I (and like-minded people) are being paranoid just because we are interpreting the licenses in a stricter way than you. As for Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Legal_issues, I don't see anything enlightening about this particular issue there. -kotra (talk) 03:47, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The only compelling argument for caption credits posted above is the suggestion that we may be in violation of the terms of CC-BY licenses by not permitting them. Nihiltres' point is that if such a massive legal timebomb really existed, the foundation's lawyers would have long since defused it. The perennial issue here is this assumption, based on a mis-reading of a legal text, that a qualified legal person has disregarded copyright law and allowed endemic license violation throughout the encyclopedia. Paranoia or nay, I know which horse my money's on... --mikaultalk 09:38, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
My opinion (yes, opinion only) is that we are violating the spirit and possibly the letter of the CC-BY licenses because we are frequently not attributing the images in the way the author intended. This is evidenced by the numerous complaints we receive from photographers not knowing where their credit is given.
I can see why one would assume that it's ok if Wikimedia's legal counsel didn't consider it a problem, but nobody (even a lawyer) is infallible, and Wikimedia/Wikipedia is a huge enough project that there are bound to be places where the legal footing can be strengthened. I don't see anything wrong with discussing how to make it more secure; even if we are not trained in intellectual property law, we still can offer legitimate concerns. -kotra (talk) 18:13, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm saddened to see those who oppose not acknowledge the wonderful donations photographers make here, many of whom never edit on the site. Another compelling argument should be that we do this because it is fair and gives authors of images they donate proper attribution that goes beyond the status quo we have for authors of text. The difference between authors of text and photographers is that we are citing sources (hopefully). The photographer, on the other hand, is making original content. It is their own work, as much as any author we "authors" cite and reference make their own work from which we make articles from. That is a difference, and it is stunning nobody seems to recognize it.
Also, mikaul mischaracterized the entire discussion by stating we say we are currently violating the CC license. I don't believe we are. I am saying that providing attribution beneath the photograph makes our position even stronger, and should a court case ever arise we will have done all we can to ensure Wikipedia is not held liable. I'm not sure why we wouldn't be doing everything we can to ensure we adhere to the licenses properly, even if it is what some characterize as "paranoia." What is that old saying? "better safe than sorry." (Mind meal (talk) 10:07, 22 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
I stated nothing of the sort, I pointed out that there was a suggestion on your part that our current image use policy may violate CC license terms, a point you just used your last paragraph reiterating. --mikaultalk 12:43, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, all I'm saying is: Why can't we do both? It both strengthens our legal standing and only requires a minimum amount of text. When one reads a newspaper, one doesn't say to himself, "I can't focus on this article. That photo credit is too distracting." It is an odd argument. You did mischaracterize things. You wrote "the suggestion that we may be in violation of the terms of CC-BY licenses by not permitting them" was the most compelling argument. In this current proposal, no such remarks were made. For me, to be clear, my foremost argument is that we should do this because it is the right thing to do. End of story. I just can't see the downside in providing a simple photo credit. Photo by John Doe. Did that distract you from my post? (Mind meal (talk) 16:01, 22 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Yes, that is distracting to me because I don't give a damn who took the photo, and because it doesn't contribute to the encyclopedia article. If I did, it's on the description page. If it's "the right thing to do", then I expect a list of all article contributors at the bottom of every article. Wikipedia is WP:NOT the newspaper, and it's usually small and on the side there. I'm sorry if you may find this rude, and it is in no way toward you personally, but I hate this idea and will not allow it. Reywas92Talk 01:12, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And so your not "giving a damn" means all people on the face of this earth do not give a damn. "I hate this idea and will not allow it." It is sad to see these and other such sentiments expressed when speaking of the wonderful contributions photographers make to this site. Yes, I do find it rude and no, I don't believe you are sorry for that. Your giving "a damn" about who took a photo is irrelevant to this discussion, as you are not "all people." Look at things from a perspective outside of only your own limited scope. "If it's "the right thing to do", then I expect a list of all article contributors at the bottom of every article." That is such a straw man argument. You would need consensus for that, just as we need consensus for this. Don't turn this issue into something it is not. Your telling me you can't read an article with a photo credit in it? Or, am I misreading your statement. You say it is distracting. Perhaps that is because you aren't just ignoring it. It isn't jumping out at you with bright flashy colors throbbing in and out. This issue is being blown way out of proportion, and frankly the opposition argument is extremely weak. (Mind meal (talk) 01:35, 23 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
I did not say that no one else gave a damn either, and I know that not everyone agrees with me, but some do, per here. You think that you're perfect and everyone agrees with you: "Watch and weep" in your edit summary? Yes, photographer have wonderful contributions, but the way that Wikipedia works is that it is collaborative and attribution does not need to be everywhere, though it is duly given. What the hell is a "straw man argument"? Whatever it is, you still haven't said why attribution should be in articles for photographers but not for writers. Yes, we do need consensus for that and this; I know that. Per the Support/Oppose section above, there evidently does not seem to be a strong consensus for this. Now you're telling me not to read the credit and just ignore it. I like to read what is in an image, so I'll read the caption. Them being so short, I find it hard to ignore another sentence, and it is in my nature to read everything there. This may not be the case for you and you can easily ignore it, but I and surely many others find it distracting. For something that affects hundreds of thousands of images on a couple million articles I'm not blowing this out of proportion. If this were to happen, it wouldn't happen easily or quickly. Personally, I find the proposition arguments rather weak. If your reasons at the very top were numbered, #1 and 2 are the same. The little something back is on the description page and the fact the image is used. Listing the name is self-promotion. #6 and 7 are the same as well, and that could be corrected in a different way. #3 is that the photographer is credited on the image description page. #4: Because we can is not a reason, and the should is elsewhere. #5 is for non-freely liscensed text that is quoted; images are often released. #8: Sure, that's true, but as an image contributor, I have donated my images to Wikimedia by freely liscensing them. I do not expect any attribution and I'm sure many others don't either. Reywas92Talk 02:20, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Straw man. "Whatever it is, you still haven't said why attribution should be in articles for photographers but not for writers." These are two separate issues. Please stay focused on the actual proposal at hand. "Now you're telling me not to read the credit and just ignore it. I like to read what is in an image, so I'll read the caption. Them being so short, I find it hard to ignore another sentence, and it is in my nature to read everything there. This may not be the case for you and you can easily ignore it, but I and surely many others find it distracting." This has entered the territory of absurd.(Mind meal (talk) 02:56, 23 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Please elaborate on my absurdity. I'm stating that we have different styles of reading and I cannot easily ignore it, so I find it distracting. Reywas92Talk 03:18, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I find absurd that anyone would claim three words beneath a photo "distracts them." Distracts you from what exactly? Do your eyes continuously get pulled back to the credit while reading the text? Does the credit have magnetic superpowers that speaks to you in a hypnotic tone? Do you find it "distracting" when you see an author's name on a book beneath the title? Can you not read a book that states who the author is for you? It is absurd! It doesn't make sense, that is the gist of it. You make it sound like seeing a credit is some traumatic experience one cannot recover from. (Mind meal (talk) 06:41, 23 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Okay, really, that's enough. I and others above find it distracting because it does not contribute to the article. It is irrelevant to a topic and I don't care to read it. If I want to know who took a picture, I can click on the link, not have it redily visible. I don't want it, okay? Reywas92Talk 10:56, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Respectfully, it matters little if the readers want this or not. Attribution is mostly for the benefit of the photographer/artist/licensor, not the reader. Abiding by the spirit and/or letter of the license overrides any minor distraction a credit in the caption might cause in readers. -kotra (talk) 23:17, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The CC-BY license states (Section 4b): "The credit required by this Section 4(b) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Derivative Work or Collective Work, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Derivative Work or Collective Work appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors." Clear attribution on image pages seems sufficient, and indeed even arguably more prominent than being part of the large list of contributions in the history tab. Some attention may be required to provide proper attribution on the image pages, and cross-license use may have other consequences, but those are distinct issues from this discussion. Vassyana (talk) 02:11, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Related but somewhat rhetorical question. Who determines "may be implemented in any reasonable manner" and is "any reasonable" related to what's done conventionally in similar contexts? Is the determiner the licensor / owner of the photo who may well be expecting attribution credit for thumbnails as well as the full image resolution? or is it considered "reasonable" in terms of conventional usage for images in print and other media? in either case I think it might be the case that our current usage might not 1) fulfill the expectations of some image owners who are used to seeing attribution in other contexts (not wikipedia) also on small image sizes not just large image sizes or 2) that conventionally images have attribution no matter the size in other contexts like magazines, flyers, newspapers. Wikipedia is a new kind of media so i'm not sure the courts have defined well what "any reasonable" really means for a usage like that. Our own familiarity with how wikipedia is now would not be the standard that we're measured against. For those reasons I don't think we should actively remove attribution in thumbnail captions for CC-BY images. Not sure if it's necessary to add them. But an active effort to remove those without a reason - like abuse of self-promotion - seems to me like we're just setting our own standard of what's "any reasonable manner" and not measuring against other media types or expectations. Have we made any effort at all to ask photo CC-BY owners what they think is reasonable, for example? - Owlmonkey (talk) 06:30, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You have to assume that the phrase "in any reasonable manner" is deliberately open to interpretation, in order to accommodate the wide variety of media and contexts an image may appear in. Usage conventions are as varied as usage license types multiplied by the range of available media. As any sociologist will tell you, convention is a complex, reflexive phenomenon. Wikipedia itself has conventions arrived at via very thorough debate and consensus and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find our conventions followed for other online media. If they weren't reasonable to the multitude of WP donors, we'd have no images at all.
Attribution appearing next to thumbnails is a convention on Flickr, which is reasonable given that images and their authors are the whole point of the site. Attribution on a linked sub-page is the convention on Wikipedia, which is reasonable as the thumbnails and every other non-plain-text element in our articles hyperlink to another part of the knowledge database, which is the whole point of this site. The fundamental difference in conventions between Flickr and Wikipedia is that one exists to share images and showcase authors, and the other exists to share knowledge and keep the authors anonymous.
What is clearly unreasonable is crediting some CC-licensed images in captions and not others. This is why the CC license wording is much more specific on this point: "at a minimum such credit will appear [...] in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors." Until such time as each and every thumbnail has an inline credit, we would be in breach of license for hundreds of thousands images, just by crediting one CC licensor in a thumbnail caption on the same site. That's why they should be removed wherever they are found. --mikaultalk 13:20, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well my point is not to say it is this or that, just to suggest that it might not be clear really what the legal requirement is exactly nor what the expectation is for photo authors. If we upload our own photos, then we're familiar sure. But what of flickr photo owners we ask to change their license? What's their expectation? The license is written vaguely. As you suggest probably because all the types of uses are too difficult to enumerate. But nonetheless I don't think that means one can take as liberal an interpretation as one likes. Further, as an interaction designer, my expectation is that an appreciable number of first time users would not know to click on one of our thumbnails and expect to see a larger version - even with the small icon in the corner implying they can enlarge it. That's a learned behavior experienced users may take for granted. Therefore, if I did a large scale user test I really doubt it would be reasonable that all users would find attribution for the photos even if asked to do so explicitly. If you put a small (cc) link in the corner or more likely (c) logo in the corner that was clickable I think you'd have a much higher user test success rate for people looking for attribution. If I'm right about that, then where does one draw the line for what is reasonable? when 70% of new users can find it? when 90% of new users can find it? My point is just that perhaps it's a gray area. Therefore, we might want to over correct slightly for our own bias blind spot in the favor of photo authors we license content from. - Owlmonkey (talk) 15:57, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I really appreciate everyone's thoughtful opinions on this. Let me re-summarize my point: we may not know for sure if we're fulfilling the requirements adequately, even with council review. It may not be black and white. Is textual attribution via a "history" tab sufficient? probably. is attribution via clicking on a thumbnail equivalent to a "history" tab? perhaps but i don't think it would user test as well; in my experience running consumer user tests. also, i believe photos are somewhat different than textual content, just conventionally speaking. We're more likely to be considered in the same realm as flickr than in our own realm, because our distinctions are more sophisticated than the general public but the general public probably decides what is reasonable. If you asked random people on the street if photo attribution was needed on small photos as well as large ones what would they say? - Owlmonkey (talk) 16:45, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's as may be, but if there's no such stipulation in the CC license text, the legal argument is moot. If this is to be a proposal to make attribution easier to find, then that's different; an icon, as pointed out earlier, is way less controversial than a byline which links nowhere and carries all sorts of burocratic baggage. It could replace the zoom icon and no-one would be inconvenienced apart from those who have to code for it. --mikaultalk 17:42, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see it as moot just untested in courts, who ultimately clarify the ambiguity. It's the ambiguity that is the center of my point though. If we aren't completely certain that our attribution scheme is sufficient, then we should endeavor to improve it until there is confidence. Currently we can only do that by adding textual linked attribution as per this proposal. But that approach has others issues. So yes I think a "cc" style link or similar would be better. But overall I think there probably should be more clear attribution for photos than for textual CC-BY included content, because the standard in other domains is different for images. I find arguments that we're just fine the way attribution is now as over confident basically, and any ambiguity as an argument for increasing attribution not reducing it... in my opinion... - Owlmonkey (talk) 18:47, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also I'd like to bring up that the human-readable version of the CC-BY licenses states that "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)." So, at least according to the human-readable version, it's up to the author/licensor to decide how they want their work to be attributed. And as evidenced by the large number of complaints we get from photographers at Flickr not understanding where they are attributed, we are not attributing them as they intend (at least initially, until (and if) they are convinced that we are actually attributing them properly). Crediting them more prominently somehow (either with "Photo by John Doe" or "Credit: John Doe" in the caption, or with an Information/Attribution icon instead of or additional to the Enlarge icon) would certainly prevent most of these complaints, and for those who still want more credit (via a watermark or something), we are free to not use their image. The legalese version doesn't seem to say who decides the proper attribution method, but the human-readable version is very clear. -kotra (talk) 23:17, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It may well be up to the author to specify how an image will be attributed, but the fact is that most authors don't specify anything, they just use the default CC-by license and as the default terms that license are honoured here, we don't have a problem. We only have a problem when Flickr photographers want to see their names appear the way they do at Flickr, ie next to thumbnails, in article namespace. As I noted earlier, this is a Flickr convention that we are not legally bound to follow, and if Flickr photographers insist on thumbnail credits, then we must decline their work. I really can't believe this is the serious barrier to migration of Flickr images here that you imply. I repeat, it's a question of convention, not legality, and simple unfamiliarity with our project. If this regularly amounts to angry rejection of it, I'd be very surprised, but so be it. We really could do without the help of any self-publicists who are militant enough to insist on non-standard terms, just as we've rightly declined a great many in the past. --mikaultalk 00:05, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at your contributions mikaul, I'm not sure how you would know that "the fact is that most authors don't specify anything." If you look at my contributions, maybe you'll see why this has been brought up. You have no idea the amount of photographers I speak with daily. Your statement is, to put it quite frankly, false. You say, "I repeat, it's a question of convention, not legality, and simple unfamiliarity with our project." That has not been demonstrated. (Mind meal (talk) 07:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
What do you mean, "not demonstrated"? Lack of user awareness is plainly the only point in this proposal with any validity, and the only issue on which there's anything approaching consensus here. I can prove that most photographers don't specify anything: just check almost any CC-licensed image on the encyclopedia. It would be much harder to find a CC-licensed image here which has been modified with specific requests for attribution. Do you seriously mean to say this fact needs to be demonstrated? All we hear from you is hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims about "numerous requests" for caption bylines. Where are these requests? I would love to know how many photographers you speak with daily. Why aren't they here, adding credibility (and much-needed support) to your proposal? Let's see some substance to your claims, instead of huffing and puffing about other people having "no idea". --mikaultalk 09:33, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Is that a request for me to canvass them to add their voice? I don't think you'll like the result, but okay. Why in the crap would I be lying about this? You haven't even looked at my contributions. If you did, it would be 100% clear to you I am dealing with Flickr users on a regular basis. Again, why in the gd hell would I be "lying" about this? Don't you ever call me a liar again, or even insinuate it. To the contrary, it is you who have made unsubstantiated claims. You have made them about my integrity through character assassination, and you have claimed "hardly any" photographers desire this. How would you know? I don't see any photograph additions in your contributions. You call yourself a professional photographer, though. If anything you might contribute a few you make here and there, and maybe you don't care about attribution. But here is a clue: case studies don't mean much. (Mind meal (talk) 09:55, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
It's a request to substantiate your claims. I wouldn't advise canvassing opinion. "Take my word for it" is worthless in this medium, as you well know. Please, enough with the groundless accusations, I might start to take offence. --mikaultalk 10:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
[1], [2], [3] (You think I save all of these emails? I don't have the time or room! I realize you have no or little faith in your fellow editors, assuming them to be liars instead of thinking, "Hey, you know what? This guy does deal with them much more often than I. Maybe he knows something I don't.") How can you ask for evidence, and then tell me not to provide it? If you really wanted to hear from these photographers, you would say, "By all means, contact them all." Perhaps I will. Also, I acquired almost all photographs in this category for Wikipedia, among many others: [4] (Mind meal (talk) 10:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Here is an email I received this morning about a Miles Davis photo: "Thank you for your interest, Adam. I'm not inclined to change settings on Flickr, but I could e-mail you the photo in question for the mentioned purpose. Credits should show right below the picture IMHO, as seen in the biography text (and not just when one clicks on the picture). Let me know!" (Mind meal (talk) 10:49, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
Another email from today: "Thanks for the info. Frankly, I'm reluctant to make other photos available without a visible credit since, as you point out, there's no guarantee anyone will actually click on the image. I've "lost" quite a few photos that have made their way around the Internet after I let one person (often a musician) use them for a website. Keep me posted, Ed." (Mind meal (talk) 18:07, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]

Number the issues, please

Mind meal, would you be so kind as to give us a numbered list of each reason that we should use captions in the way you suggest? I'm interested in this proposal and even though I currently oppose it, I'd like to evaluate each point individually so that it's easy to consider the benefits and drawbacks of the proposal objectively. Ideally, we can have a pro/con section for each reason you suggest. Nihiltres{t.l} 15:26, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Copied the newly numbered list here, added pros/cons. Each number starts with the original argument; either pro or con. Feel free to edit, add to, or re-sort the list. Nihiltres{t.l} 15:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  1. Pros
    After numerous requests from Flickr users for their name to appear "next to, or under" the photo when requesting relicensing from them, it is apparent that many photographers expect attribution to appear beneath the photo. It is often all they ask in return. Some authors may not be willing to license their work to us without more direct or noticeable attribution.
    Cons
    We can then educate them about our practice of attribution. It's merely a matter of asking them for the particular conditions we use as a part of the style Wikipedia articles follow. Our authors do not get direct credit, but indirect credit of a similar form - and some argue we are giving them even better representation than editors already, via the image description page, though others argue that it may be just as - or more - difficult for inexperienced visitors to find the image page than the history tab.
  2. Pros
    This will strengthen our legal status regarding attribution, even if we are currently abiding by the terms of CC-BY licenses (though some argue that we may not be, depending on interpretations of CC-BY licenses). Since this has never been challenged in court, we don't really know if we are doing all we can to provide prominent attribution.
    Cons
    Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Legal_issues. We need not restrict ourselves unnessessarily.
  3. Pros
    The option to include credit in a caption should, at the very least, not be prohibited for "non-notable" photographers by guidelines for this very reason.
    Cons
    According to current policy, credits in captions are only relevant in an article where a notable photographer took them. Otherwise, they are merely credits, which should then be discouraged in the same way that signing an article text is discouraged. This is based on the assumption that images with attribution-requiring licenses require the same level of attribution as article text contributed by editors (typically licensed under the GFDL).
  4. Pros
    It is in the spirit of many licenses we host, i.e. Creative Commons Attribution licenses, particularly the human-readable versions of these licenses.
    Cons
    We already give credit on the image description page, which some argue is fully within the spirit of these licenses, particularly the legalese versions of these licenses. The separation of credit and content justifies the separation while, some argue (see above), still providing image authors with better credit than text authors.
  5. Pros
    It is the morally right option, crediting the work to authors prominently.
    Cons
    By what morals? This argument is fallacious. We already attribute the images to their source.
  6. Pros
    It is common to see attribution given in this way in countless other forms of media, thereby giving an idea of what conventional standards are.
    Cons
    Wikipedia is not other forms of media.
  7. Pros
    Photographers are authors of original content, and most images are exempt from WP:OR prohibition. They are thus like the author of a book, who we credit in the reference section on the article page. Article text is different from images, in that it should not synthesize new ideas or concepts, and thereby deserves a lesser degree of attribution.
    Cons
    In contrast, some argue that our editors synthesize original content (if not original information) – "like the author of a book" – yet we do not directly credit our editors, including instead a history page. The "authors of original content" argument misses the point - if text on Wikipedia is not original content, it is generally a copyright violation and gets deleted. Book authors themselves often cite sources as well.
    Again, photographers make original content. They are the primary source of the image. They are the author of the work, not the author of work derived from another author. You have skewed the point. We credit the author of the book we use to reference, because that book is the primary source. An image produced by a photographer is most often the same. Only one individual made it. there are no "multiple" authors, and there is no synthesis. (Mind meal (talk) 17:19, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  8. Pros
    It is courteous, giving a bit back to those photographers who were kind enough to relicense their work
    Cons
    Yes, it's courteous, but courtesy need not override the style we use in articles.
  9. Pros
    Some Wikipedia users do not know they must click an image, or that it is even clickable, to see source information.
    Cons
    By analogy, this falls apart: "Some Wikipedia users do not know they must click [on the history tab], to see source information." If this argument is valid, people would be justified in signing every (non-talk; we already sign talk, obviously) contribution they made.
  10. Pros
    This proposal is not intended to apply to templates. Only images displayed in articles to provide illustration of a particular subject matter.
    Cons
    This isn't an issue if we don't need to use credits. Besides, this clause complicates issues of credit by contradicting the "expectation of direct credit" pro issue above.
    This was a response to a vote in opposition. I put it there because people are daydreaming about 1,000 what if scenarios in all this. At least you have taken the time to pro and con them all, however erroneous I may view it all to be. (Mind meal (talk) 17:26, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  11. Cons
    This proposal argues for the bundling of credit and content. Wikipedia articles should separate credit and content somewhat so that the article text itself does not contain references to its authors. This is currently the case for text. This proposal would disrupt that separation.
    Pros
    Were this truly something to shoot for, our reference section would be a square link with nothing to indicate what it is, which when clicked takes you to works cited.(Mind meal (talk) 17:28, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
  12. Cons
    If multiple revisions of an image exist, we should then credit each editor who has contributed to them via this proposal. Image captions might then contain large lists of authors, which would exacerbate the disruption to a given article involved in this proposal.
    Pros
General comment Since you have failed to identify one positive in all of this, one assumes there is a lack of unbiased assessment here. Even the most partisan politician concedes some points to the opposition. (Mind meal (talk) 17:34, 24 April 2008 (UTC))[reply]
I haven't identified any positives because I oppose the action. Of course I am biased, but I merely am presenting counterarguments to what is presented. I leave the interpretation of the relative merits of each pro/con to the reader. I don't want to compare this to politics; my job is not to convince, but to challenge. I don't think that this is an appropriate measure, so I present the reasons that we should not do it as a contrast. If it cannot hold its own against a "devil's advocate", it probably isn't a good proposal. Nihiltres{t.l} 18:31, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

UTC Clock for ALL talk pages

All wikipedians sign the talk page. If they don't, bots do on their behalf. Timestamp is left in the signature to let people know when the message was left. But it is in UTC. Layman like me hardly use UTC. We use local time zones like Eastern Standard time, Indian Standard Time, etc. Won't it be handy to have UTC time denoted at top right corner for ALL talk pages. An example exists - Talk:Main Page. Can we make this universal across all talkpages (article, WP talk, user talk, project talk pages.....etc)? I guess, this will be a very useful addition to Wikipedia. --gppande «talk» 09:33, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As a British layman, I use UTC for half the year. In any case, Special:Preferences has a gadget that adds a UTC clock to your personal toolbar. Algebraist 10:36, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Fine for people who access net from only 1 PC. But what for people who access it from Internet café or public libraries which have multiple PCs? --gppande «talk» 15:32, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I just tried it and it works from multiple PCs with your login. Thanks buddy. --gppande «talk» 15:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Governance reform

I've put together a (very inchoate) proposal for reforming the Wikipedia governance system; revisions, comments, flames, and so forth would be very welcome! Kirill 16:55, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Gadget discussion

In response to recent discussions on this page and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) several user preferences gadgets have been created. Some of them were deployed but were today removed by one editor.

The gadgets are:

  • "Addsection +" – Adds back the "+" instead of the "new section" in the middle talk page top tab.
  • "Diff underlining or borders" – Adds a red dotted border or red or yellow-green underlining to text that has changed in diffs. Makes it possible to see where spaces have been added or removed and makes it easier to find small changes like changes in punctuation.
  • "Tighter page top tabs in MonoBook" – Gives the page top tabs tighter margins and paddings so they take up less space. Good for users with many extra tabs and/or low screen resolution.

I would like to call attention to the discussion of these gadgets at Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals#Tighter page top tabs in MonoBook (and down from that point in that page). The main question is: Should these gadgets be added as options in the user preferences or not?

--David Göthberg (talk) 06:25, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

GA Symbols

FA symbols at them top of the page informs the community of Wikipedia's best work. I think a GA symbol at the top of the page (like the FA star) would be a good idea. It would infirm the community and readers of what our good work is, and provide a link to the GA page (like the FA star does for the FA page). Good idea? STORMTRACKER 94 Go Irish! 14:28, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Straw poll

Support

  1. Support Kevin Baastalk 19:08, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support: Considering the fact that we have ugly banners at the top of almost every article that has some reference issues - I guess a little positive info in the form of a small icon is more than appropriate - especially since we are spending so much effort in reviewing and promoting the GA articles. Arman (Talk) 04:14, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  3. I have wondered about this for a long time. Zginder 2008-04-24T14:30Z (UTC)


Oppose

  1. Oppose This would be completely useless. Then, we would need to put the Stub, Start, B, and A up there. The FA star signifies a highly-encyclopediac article, whereas GA is just "Good". Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 17:01, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Why would we need to put the Stub, Start, B, and A up there? I don't see why we would need to do this, or what good it would do. Kevin Baastalk 19:08, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    FA is supposed to be an example of the best work in Wikipedia. Why go around showing what our "Meh, I guess it's OK" work is? And because A is higher than GA, we would for sure need to add that. Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 19:19, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    "GA" isn't "Meh, I guess it's OK" work, it's "good" work, hence the "good" in "good article". And although I don't think the reader would be particularly interested in knowing what our "Meh, I guess it's OK" work was, I could see them being interested in what our "good" work was. And from the point of viewer of the editor, it provides a reward for good work - it provides an added incentive for improving article quality.
    If A is higher than GA, then every A article is also a GA article, thus "GA" would be sufficient; I don't see why we would need to be more precise than that for something like this. My point with the question was that it seemed to me that you were presenting a false dilemma. Kevin Baastalk 19:31, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I just don't think it is needed. You can have your opinion, and I don't feel that I have to explain every last reason for my opposing. This has been proposed plenty of times in the past, and every time it gets denied. Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 19:52, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  2. "Good" isn't good enough to let the readers know that it is merely "good". =) Malinaccier Public (talk) 16:57, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral

Voting is evil

  1. EVIL! --Carnildo (talk) 19:47, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  2. EVIL!! Nihiltres{t.l} 16:00, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Being able to edit your edit summaries

Ok, I've done this way too often. I make an edit, write the edit summary, and click "Save page", only to notice that I completely misspelled a word. At this point, there is nothing I can do about it other than hope nobody looks at my contributions. My proposal is being able to edit your own edit summaries. I brought up this discussion on one of the Wikipedia IRC channels, and there were plenty of ideas. The first is only letting admins edit summaries, and letting people make requests for them, because there is fear that other users would abbuse it, and possibly fabricate them. The other is only being able to make minor edits to fix typos, and prohibit completely rewriting the edit summary. I know this sounds odd, but some people (myself included) think this would be something that would make editing a little easier. Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 17:06, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I really don't see the need for this, nor a big problem that this would solve. If anything, a user script can be created that would require some sort of confirmation of your edit summary before saving it. - Rjd0060 (talk) 17:36, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think such a feature would be useful, as long as only admins could change them, and a history of the changes was logged. It should only be done for typos and minor mistakes. Fabrications of edit summaries would obviously not be allowed. Majorly (talk) 18:17, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I would say have it so you could only change it if it was the most recent edit to that article (and it was your edit, ofcourse). This would do away with the need for a history of changes, admin-only restriction, etc., while allowing for fixing of one's edit summary in the vast majority of cases where it would be useful and appropriate. Kevin Baastalk 18:21, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This would require a fundamental change to how Wikipedia's database is structured. (1 == 2)Until 18:40, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
How so? You wouldn't need to change any table names or column structures. As far as the database is concerned, it would just be one additional "update" query. Something like "update [table] set summary=? where article=? and revision=? and editor=? and revision=(select max(revision) from [table] where article=?)". That's not what i'd call a "fundamental change [in the] database [structure]". Kevin Baastalk
I'd much rather be able to change my log summaries (blocking, protecting, etc) which can sometimes look odd with typos. MBisanz talk 18:43, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Why waste time fixing a typo in an edit summary? Edit summaries are not part of article content, and so it doesn't matter that they have perfect grammar. If you really need to amend or retract an edit summary, then make a dummy edit or use the talk page. –Pomte 20:12, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Because that would be an even greater waste of time to leave a message on the talk page. And it wouldn't take that long. It could be like Rollback. You have to be granted the ability to edit your edit summaries, and then you just have to press a button or something. And really, how much time is it going to waste? Also, an edit summary is supposed to give an overview of what you've changed in the article. If you misspelled something or gave the wrong information, people might mistake what you've done. Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 20:27, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And it can get worse. I have sometimes pressed the wrong key while writing the edit summary (I still don't know exactly what I did) and that resulted in the edit being saved with just half the summary. This is obviously unhelpful. Waltham, The Duke of 21:02, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I would go with Kevin Baas on this one. One's most recent summary should be editable to fix typo. Any more than that, I and see RfA candidates going back to give themselves a leg up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Paragon12321 (talk • contribs) 22:29, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There is a simpler solution. Cultivate the habit of proofreading the edit summary as well as the actual edit when you show a preview. If you make a small error, it is really not a problem. If you really screw it up, make another edit to carry a correction.
Letting people alter either edit summaries or the substance of edits is allowing the rewriting of edit histories. It undermines the integrity of edit histories. The benefits are not anywhere close to being worth the cost. IMO. Wanderer57 (talk) 02:25, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Not if you only let them change their edit summary if it was the most recent edit to that article - as soon as another edit is made you can no longer change the edit summary, so a historical record is kept (and shown) that can't be rewritten. Kevin Baastalk 15:36, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Standardisation of punctuation for anniversaries

I have started a discussion at Talk:Main Page#Standardisation of punctuation for anniversaries about the relative lack of standardisation across the top lines of the various selected anniversaries' lists. Your input would be appreciated. Waltham, The Duke of 17:18, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Subscription site volunteers

Is there an existing centralized list of editors willing to access subscription-only sites to retrieve specified content? If not, would it be a good idea to create one?

For instance, I have subscription access to Nature journal and The Economist newspaper, I would be willing to provide article excerpts to others, as I believe this is permitted under my subscription terms (within reason, obviously). Would a list of volunteers willing to access these sites be a good thing? And would it be permissible under various copyright and license restrictions? Franamax (talk) 01:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yup. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange. Great minds think alike ;) -- Quiddity (talk) 02:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the link, I've listed myself. This is a fantastic idea, how many people don't know it exists? Should be well-publicized... Franamax (talk) 04:08, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ask the WP:Signpost to do a feature on it. --— Gadget850 (Ed) talk - 09:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Expand/collapsible watchlists

Don't you just hate it when you are watching a page but do not see the edit because another editor (or the same) made another edit to the same page therefore hiding the previous edit from your watchlist? Yes, there is a preference to expand your watchlist but that's just too much clutter. I'm proposing making watchlists like histcomb.js, where if there are more than one edit to a page, it displays a number next to it showing the amount of edits done since you've last visited the page. Clicking on it will reveal the edits. I've made an example to illustrate what would be ideal: -- penubag  (talk) 02:38, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]


there's a tool/script that will give you a preview of any wikilink you hover your mouse over - this includes diffs and histories - so it essentially implements this feature, except you don't have to click. i forgot what the tool's called. Kevin Baastalk 15:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's popups. But histcomb.js already does what you're suggesting, Peubag. Are you suggesting this way is better even for newbies? I'd have to disagree there. Equazcion •✗/C • 15:38, 24 Apr 2008 (UTC)
No, I'm proposing this for the watchlist, not the history page -- penubag  (talk) 16:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I see. You want the watchlist page to work like histcomb.js does for page histories. Perhaps a similar script could be devised for that. It would probably require the "expand" option to be enabled from preferences, but I don't see why the same script couldn't be tweaked to work for watchlists. Equazcion •✗/C • 17:50, 24 Apr 2008 (UTC)

Recoding of -self

When images are uploaded with {{GFDL-self}}, {{PD-self}} and moved or altered by a different user you run into complications of authorship. Even if the author is clearly stated to be a different person on the page it becomes unnecessarily complicated as the license would still state an ambiguous "I". {{self|author=uploadername|license}} would not run into that problem. This is a change proposal to the upload form. -- Cat chi? 08:17, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Bureacrat Coaching

They have admin coaching, but they don't a bureacrat coaching. I bet alot of more people would pass sucessful rfbs with Bureacrat Coaching. Nothing444 13:01, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

True. But there isn't a need for more crats, which is why you hardly ever see an RfB. SynergeticMaggot (talk) 13:38, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree entirely. The nature of RfB is quite unlike that of RfA (take a look at the round of RfB apps in February/March). "Need for more 'crats" is one concern addressed, but I'd suggest that far more important are the consistently nigh-unapproachable standards to which applicants were held. "Coaching" in no way addresses that, and I would expect that formalized coaching would be seen as a detriment to an applicant, a sign that s/he couldn't figure out the community's expectations and is thus unsuitable for a position of that level of trust. "No big deal" is not a standard that has ever been applied to the Bureaucrat position. — Lomn 15:18, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Edit conflicts

Bringing this up for the third time now. See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals#Edit conflicts for a description of the problem. User:AzaToth started a Bugzilla report on it -- in January -- of 2006 -- and so far, nothing. Long and rapidly-edited pages such as ANI are just about impossible to use. This is not a complicated problem to fix, and it needs to be taken off the back burner already. Please help get developer attention on this. Thank you. Equazcion •✗/C • 15:45, 24 Apr 2008 (UTC)

In the interim, my workaround is to use the back button -- once to copy my comment for reuse, again to the original page, then edit back into the relevant section. An automated fix would be nice, but there's no real need to try to merge into the entirety of ANI. — Lomn 16:00, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Requests for images

Imagine this situation: You create an article with no images. The topic is hard, and would be easier to understand with a illustration. But you can't upload one. You'll have to go to WP:Requests for images to post a request there. A request for images page would make things a lot easier. Nothing444 22:24, 24 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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