Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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encyclopedic v unencyclopedic Definition please

There are two words which seem central to most issues arising from entries, both new pages and individual edit/additions, these are

'notability' & 'encyclopedic'

I have spent many days searching for some guidance on these concepts within wikipedia. 'Notability' though a bit arcane at times is decipherable. But... "encyclopedic" is a real catch 22. a search for guidance gets redirected to "what wikipedia is not" where there is no mention of the subject. which sort of implies that if something survives long enough to be in wikipedia it is therefore encyclopedic.

I would dearly love to see some guidance on this matter as I'm sure im not alone in experiencing good, well written (by others) passages being deleted because they haven't appealed to somebodies sense of encyclopedic, more often meaning they dont think them important.

I realise that this is probably a very tiresome subject for a lot of old hands - but a policy, or even a single sentence statement would really help to establish a yardstick. rather than a pointer to a page of negatives

there is also a more subtle issue here - where all of the notes on 'notability' make absolute sense in relation to articles, they dont when it comes to a single point of information, say a sentence or even a paragraph. once a subject is clearly notable surely most additional info must be too, provided it is verifiable etc. The same goes for encyclopedic, surely once the main subject is assured of its credentials then it follows that any nested detail will become less major, to eventually end up minor bordering on trivia. Now it is easy to identify a page subject as trivial, but the most momentous subjects are comprised of individual facts that, taken individualy are highly likely to be trivial. For example. the school Albert Einstein went to. His grades, both perhaps trivial seperately, but relevant when you realise that he left school with no qualifications at all.

I hope that this hasn't come across as a rant, one thing wikipedia is teaching me, is to be more diplomatic - but I'm not quite there yet. this is a genuine call for guidance, or better still a pointer to a definition, I have no bones to pick or edit war to win.

and now someone is going to say, "it was there all the time" thanks DavidP 04:53, 5 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The short answer is that there is no consensus among Wikipedia editors on notability. -- SCZenz 05:58, 5 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's true, but I should think that WP:NOT gives a good idea of what most consider "unencyclopediac".--Sean|Bla ck 06:18, 5 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Quite some time ago there was a discussion about this at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not/Unencyclopedic. For the most part that ended the once common practice of nominating things for deletion simply because they were "not encyclopedic." However, in many cases it seems unencyclopedic was simply replaced by the equally vague "not notability". There is currently yet a debate over the notability issue at Wikipedia:Notability_proposal. That page can give an introduction to the long running debate over notability. - SimonP 23:15, 6 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Encyclopedic" is like "pornographic": very hard to define, but a lot of people think they know it when they see it. :) Basically, "unencyclopedic" can be considered shorthand for "I believe instinctively that this subject does not belong on Wikipedia: I can't be bothered to look for a specific way it fails WP:NOT, but I hope it does, and if it doesn't then it jolly well should."

Not the answer you're looking for, maybe, but that appears to be how the term is actually used. (It's certainly how I use it.) — Haeleth Talk 21:38, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is a fundamental lack of consensus on whether Wikipedia is an encyclopedia as the word is currently understood, or whether Wikipedia is something completely new that redefines the understanding of what an encyclopedia should be. There's a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work here.

If "encyclopedic" means "something which ought to be in Wikipedia," then everyone can agree that unencyclopedic articles should be deleted, but nobody can agree on what articles are encyclopedic.

If "encyclopedic" means "a topic which you would expect to find covered in the Britannica or the Americana or Encarta or things of that sort," then you could probably get a working consensus on what articles are encyclopedic—but you would no longer have agreement that unencyclopedic articles should be deleted. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:18, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It should be mentioned that the word "encylopedic" outside of Wikipedia generally does not mean "suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia." It means "having the characteristics of an encyclopedia," as in, "He has an encyclopedic memory." That said, I don't know what word would mean "suitable for inclusion," and the use of the word "encyclopedic" to mean that on Wikipedia has probably become too ingrained to stop the practice. -- Mwalcoff 23:52, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My frustrations

First, I would like to say that when I first started on Wikipedia I was very supportive of the current policy of allowing anonymous users to edit articles, but as I have become more active in improving articles I am frustrated by the constant vandalism I see. It is almost always anonymous users who do this. Please do NOT refer to me to Perennial proposals I have already given my thoughts on that page nobody looks at it anyway. I'm sick of anonymous users vandalism, and I think the benefits far outweigh the possible drawbacks. of course there are some good anonymous users in that mess of trolls & vandals, but most of the serious wikipedians have registered already. I'm feeling very angry, because I feel there is nothing I can do to change the policy. I am writing this here as a demand for a change in the policy to a policy where one must register to edit articles, nothing more, nothing less. --Revolución (talk) 02:54, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

New policies can be created and existing policies changed, please see Wikipedia:How to create policy. Pretty much any policy change is difficult to make happen, BIG changes (and this would be a big change) are extremely difficult to accomplish. You are welcome to try, but please realize this may be nearly a Herculean task. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:59, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The chance of this happening is pretty much slim to none. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(perennial_proposals)#Abolish_anonymous_users. And actually, I'd say at least half of the anon edits that pop up on my watchlist are good ones; maybe more, as I haven't checked. And some of them are *really* good. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 04:28, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Not only that, but a good chunk of vandals register an account.--Sean|Bla ck 04:36, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A lot usefull minor edits come from anons. From what I've seen on RC patrol only ~1/7 of anon edits are vandalism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geni (talk • contribs) 04:51, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is based on a common misunderstanding. More anon edits are vandalism than "registered" edits are (I think). However, this is not because "anonymous" (which they of course aren't; as you can usually track them down to the nearest city and ISP using their IP) editors are more inclined to vandalize because they're "anonymous". Rather, it is that vandals are more inclined to edit "anonymously" (because it's quicker). Therefore, if you block anonymous edits, that will only cause the vandals to make accounts; it won't remove a cause of vandalism. Nothing will be solved. Superm401 | Talk 06:49, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think requiring registration would have two consequences: fewer people would vandalize Wikipedia because of having to bother with registration, and those of us tracking vandalism would lose the valuable separation of IPs from usernames that easily allows us to focus on likely vandal edits. I've been tending to think the impact of the first consequence would be minimal compared to that of the second. Postdlf 07:02, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would be good to stop anonymous users from creating new articles, or at least having them go through moderation. Anonymous users are responsible for almost all of the non-image copyright violations on Wikipedia and they are usually on pages that the user has created. Also, anonymous users create almost all of the articles speedily deleted and a substantial number of the articles deleted at Articles for Deletion. It's relatively easy to revert a bad edit, but it's much more time consuming to have an article go through the deletion process on Copyright Problems or Articles for Deletion.

One of the difficulties with making these changes is that many editors have a doomsday prediction about what will happen if the rules are changed. We can make the change temporary and revert if it causes problems. -- Kjkolb 00:09, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Are there any statistics available on the contributions of logged-in vs. not-logged-in edits with respect to numbers in the several dimensions of a) sheer volume, b) edits per article, c) article creations, d) proportion of edits per article on those created by logged-in users, e) proportion of edits per article on those created by not-logged-in users? Looking at these numbers together might provide a better picture of the contributions of each editor group rather than relying on anecdotal evidence (though I believe in the anecdotal conclusion of their being largely positive and concur based on my own personal experience). Thanks for considering this .. perhaps someone who has experience in SQL access to the database could run a few queries, put the results in a page in the Wikipedia namespace in the Category:Wikipedia statistics. Courtland 00:42, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I share Revolución's frustration. In cases of page vandalism, I frequently check the contributions of non-registered users (IP address only). In most cases, if that IP address vandalized one page, all the rest of the contributions from that IP address are garbage, too. However, what if the user is sitting at a terminal in his/her public library? In one instance the input is garbage, in another it's great stuff, because a different person is using the terminal. For this reason it's making me rethink whether there's any point to posting warnings to the talk pages of non-registered users. The non-registered users may not even be familiar enough with Wikipedia to realize that they have a talk page, and may thus never see any warnings posted to the IP address they're using. Moreover, with dynamic IP address assignment, a vandal could be wandering around town with his notebook computer and logging in through WiFi hotspots, getting a different IP address each time. Since creating an account on Wikipedia is so easy, forcing users to log in before letting them edit is only a slight inconvenience to determined vandals, who'll gladly create any number of gibberish user names to do what they did with just an IP address the day before. I suspect the only thing that dissuades vandals from continuing is that they guess that something is afoot when they vandalize a page and revisit it a few days later to find their handiwork gone, and eventually just give up when it happens repeatedly. --Quicksilver^{T @} 19:36, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Being quite new to Wikipedia, I have yet to run into the problem Rick (as well as many others) has experienced with vandalism (although, I hardly look forward to the day when it'll occur to the articles I've contributed to). Perhaps some mechanisms could be put into place to specifically handle the vandalism problem. Articles could allow anonymous posting, and in the event vandalism occurs, the article could be locked so only registered users could make edits. I'm as idealistic as the next person with regards to anonymous editors, but as usual, the few bad apples ruin the bunch for everyone. --BrandonG 03:12, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Image deletion

We all know that Jimbo made some changes in our image deletion policy recently. I'm trying to stay updated with the changes, but perhaps this one eluded me: are we no longer allowed to upload images for use in our own user pages? I don't think this has been banned, and if it hasn't, I'd really like to know why someone tagged an image that was being used [solely] on my user page as an orphaned fair use image for deletion. It would seem, however, that it was a bot that did that, which shows that this, and perhaps other bots, might be malfunctioning. But what's worse is that an Admin deleted the image as a speedy. Maybe we need a general reminder that a speedy tag does not vacate the need to check thoroughly before deleting, especially images, because, well, tags may be misused. That was really regretable, something that really should not have happened — unless, as I said, we are now no longer allowed to upload images that will (or might) not be used in articles (that is, images for the purpose of use in a user's user page). Regards, Redux 15:49, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've just found out that the Admin who deleted the image was new to the job (has been an Admin for a couple of weeks). I've written him a direct message on his user talk page. I still can't phantom why the image was tagged as orphaned in the first place, though. Regards, Redux 16:02, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The bot was, I believe, working as planned - WP:CSD tells us that an image is speediable if it falls under:

Copyrighted images uploaded without permission of the copyright holder, or under a license which does not permit commercial use, which are not used in any article [...] (so-called "orphaned fair use images")

Basically, "orphaned" in this case means "orphaned from any articles", so the deleting admin was following existing policy. WP:FU tells us:

The material should only be used in the article namespace. They should never be used on templates (including stub templates and navigation boxes) or on user pages.

Hope that clarifies matters. Shimgray | talk | 16:27, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, it's got me a little more confused. There are many images that have been uploaded by users with the sole purpose of using them on their respective user pages. Apart from those that they took themselves (such as images of themselves), would that mean that all of those images should be deleted from the database, even if they are fair use, or usable under any other license?
Indeed, I got a message from another user explaining that the image had been deleted as orphaned because it was not being used in any article (as bolded by him). So that would seem to indicate that users, for all practical purposes, cannot upload images, even if usable, for illustrating their user pages, unless those images happen to be used on at least one article. Would that assessment be correct? Regards, Redux 21:00, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite. A copyrighted image that's being used under fair use can only be used in an "informative and educational context", that is to say, articles (specifically, articles that the image is relevant to, which is usually only a handful). Hope that helps.--Sean|Bla ck 21:14, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, but that seems to confirm what I had said: no [wouldbe] fair use images can be used on user pages if that's the only place where it is being used. That's a tough spot for many users out there. But I've started to review the US fair use laws (I've not completed my review yet, so this is a partial assessment), the use of the image that would be covered by fair use on my user page can very well be considered informative. The image evokes Brazil, and I'm using it to indicate to readers that I am Brazilian, which I do not say in the text. There's no profit to be derived from the situation, which indicates that the sole purpose of using the image was to inform of my condition as a Brazilian. So the question would be: what is informative? Does it relate to the importance of what's being informed? That is, my condition as a Brazilian is of no particular relevance to the reader per se (in that regard, it could be [very roughly!] compared to the contents of a gossip magazine: it's not really important, but people just might want to know about it), as opposed to the contents of an article, which is supposed (at least in theory) to contain relevant information. Now, the purpose of a user page on Wikipedia is to provide some information about the user in question, and informing my nationality, through that image, is perfectly within the boundaries of this purpose. Back when I uploaded it (I'd have to re-check this now), I found the image on multiple websites from Brazil (unrelated), which, thinking retrospectivelly, would indicate that the copyright holder (if the image was not free — hence the tag I had used on the image when I re-uploaded it, and which has already been removed) allowed it's free use throughout the web (noticing that no one was using it "with express permission"). Maybe my understanding of US copyrights provisions still needs some polishing, but it would seem (to me) that the image would be usable under the fair use provision on my user page. Or am I completely off? Regards, Redux 21:55, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Fair use under the law is always somewhat of a grey area. There are no strict rules that can be unambiguously applied to determine whether a particular use is defensible as fair use. However, I think there is some confusion about fair use under U.S. law and Wikimedia policies about fair use. Wikimedia policy may be more restrictive than U.S. law -- Wikimedia policy is not simply, "Anything that may be allowed by U.S. copyright law is allowed on Wikimedia projects."

About: "What is informative?". So far as I can tell, the phrase "informative and educational context" does not come from the law, so I would not rely too heavily on the word "informative". Without getting too deeply into the topic here, 17 USC §107 illustrates the types of uses that are meant with the wording "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research", and outlines a four part test of factors that are considered.

Also, the fact that an image is found on multiple, unrelated Web sites is not a reliable indicator for conditions of use. Copyright violations run rampant on the Internet. --Tabor 21:18, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That is precisely the point. I realized later on in the process that the bulk of this issue was about Wikipedia policy, not US law. The problem seems to be that a lot of people maybe think that it's more... impressive (?) to quote the law to justify things (in this case, why an image shouldn't be here). Why say this is not in accordance with US fair use laws when the real issue is this is not in accordance with Wikipedia image usage policy? Because the law was quoted, I was trying to find in it the provision that would prohibit the use of a fair use image (was not discussing whether or not it was indeed fair use) on a user page, theoretically because it was not "informative". There was nothing there that would seem to impede it — or at least it was open for some degree of interpretation. Then I started to realize that it was about our policy, not the law per se (because, as you said, out policy may be more restrictive than the law). Redux 14:49, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

major "Be Bold" guideline revision/reversal

The "Be Bold" guideline was recently revised, and virtually gutted, without notice or discussion. This shows the relevant change. [[1]] Wikipedia standards/practices call for prior notice, discussion, and consensus before a material revision in guidelines, and that wasn't done here. There is now an ongoing editing dispute -- the fourth or fifth this year, I believe -- involving the usual suspects, including myself. To complicate matters, there was admin intervention today, on the apparent basis that a perceived 2-1 division on involved editors was sufficient to justify the guideline change, even without the notice/discussion called for by guidelines and conducted in previous disputes. The guideline page is now inconsistent, with later sections pretty much contradicting the revised introduction. In previous disputes, editor sentiment as expressed in discussion was substantially against changes of this nature; most recently, in September, a semi-formal poll and extensive discussion rejected less restrictive language, applying only to Featured Articles, by a 2:1 margin. This dispute calls for involvement by a greater range of users, both in terms of the procedure for altering a longstanding guideline and the substance of the change. Monicasdude 20:32, 8 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

side comment "Be Bold" is more of a meme than a guideline in almost every circumstance I've seen it used in. Perhaps one problem is in trying to apply guideline rigor to something that defies such (I am thinking out loud here and don't advocate the kind of being bold that appears to have taken place at the guideline article itself). Courtland 19:23, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Cookie cutter response to vandalism

I have seen quite a few editors leave wikipedia because of the soft approach to vandalism. Why do serial and blatant vandals get such soft warnings such as the one below:

‹The template below is included via a redirect (Template:Test1) that is under discussion. See redirects for discussion to help reach a consensus.›

Hello, I'm [[User:{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}|{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}]]. An edit that you recently made seemed to be a test and has been reverted. If you want to practice editing, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on [[User talk:{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}|my talk page]]. Thanks!

The above template is currently the standard warning for examples of vandalism such as Amy is extremely ugly !!!!! and worse. This is obviously not a test, or a user experimenting with wikipedia. These are examples of malicious editing and I think it is silly to suggest such a user experiment in the sandbox. One strike and you're out should be standard policy for this type of vandalism not the five or so warning that seem to be the current norm. David D. (Talk) 16:50, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You have to balance that with not wanting to bite newcomers. I would say we need a few welcome/stop-your-vandalism templates with several degrees of nastiness based on the severity of the vandalism. there would be "thanks for your test" and "you should lay off the stuped edits." and "warning stop it immediately you will be blocked." MPS 17:20, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There's the concern that using an overly-nasty first warning message will convert someone who would have been a one-off vandal to a repeat offender. There are a lot of people out there who just can't believe that we will let anyone edit Wikipedia, and they can leave incredibly stupid and childish first messages just because they don't believe that it will work. We actually have quite a few editors who started off with test edits that were rather nasty, but have since reformed to become productive contributors.

Oftentimes the vandalism stops as soon as a message–any message–is left on User Talk. It conveys the idea that yes, someone is watching the store. The polite first warning also embarrasses some new editors into behaving themselves.

When I warn an editor, I usually keep their contributions log open in a browser tab and refresh it periodically for a while to check that they have straightened up. If not, I will escalate to the {{test2}}/{{test2a}}, {{test3}}, and/or final warning {{test4}} templates. (I don't tend to give four warnings, but I will pick and choose which templates are appropriate. Except in the most egregious cases I will give a {{test4}} warning before I block.)TenOfAllTrades(talk) 22:17, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

When vandalism is also an attack there is {{attack}}. But perhaps we should ahve a warning sereis parallel to test through test3 wherne is is obviously i8ntentional, but not yet serious enough to threaten an instant block? DES ^(talk) 22:49, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This sounds like a reasonable suggestion. I think TenOfAllTrades also makes a lot of good points, especially the one about embarrassing the vandal, I had not thought of it that way. Given these points I think a different 'polite' set of test series for malicious edits would be more sensible since the ones that are currently used do not seem to address the vandalism. In fact the current test templates may even give the impression that it is an automated response rather than being a response from a specific admin since they do not really address the maliciousness of the vandalism involved. Possibly a first response to a malicious edit could be along the lines of:

Please do not add gossip to wikipedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.

For me at least, this type of message recognises that the editor is being destructive. It is still friendly but slightly more blunt. David D. (Talk) 23:08, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest test mostly says that we saw that. Most vandels stop as soon as they relise they have been spoted.Geni 23:13, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have just created {{vw}} and {{vw-n}} with slightly firmer wording than {{test}} and {{test-n}}, but not quite as strong as {{test2}}. It would be considered a first-level warning, but for stuff that looks more like intentional vandalism than "tests". The higher-level warnings already refer to vandalism and I didn't think more strongly worded versions were needed. See what you think of these. DES ^(talk) 21:32, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Those look better. I agree the higher tests are fine. I'll try out the new ones next time I revert intentional vandalism. Thanks David D. (Talk) 18:03, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - I too once found the 'test' template odd for vandals. Then, I realized the beauty. Any vandal will either be expecting no message, or a stern rebuke. 'Test' sends the the signal that we can't even imagine your intentions weren't noble. People tend to live up to the expectations you set. If they don't, then a sterner message wasn't going to help anyways ... I don't the threat of a 24 hour block sounds like much of a threat to a vandal. Derex @ 06:24, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to check out Wikipedia:Wikiproject_user_warnings. Pathos seems to be doing some good work there. Wikibofh 14:27, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Fair use and GDFL

How is fair use of images compatible with the GDFL? We've been having discussions regarding fair use of images on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Comics#Image problems, because, with comics being a visual medium, a greater proportion of images tend to be used under the fair use banner. However, it has been brought to my attention that fair use may not be compatible with someone using Wikipedia content under the GDFL for commercial use. The thrust is that we are only allowed touse images under fair use such that any subsequent use is also fair use. If this reading is correct, it seems to me to follow that fair use is incompatible with the GDFL, since we do not know how our content is going to be used by any subsequent person or organisation, and there is no conceivable use of fair use that can not be invalidated if used incorrectly. I believe that if this argument is incorrect, that we are allowed to use fair use and that it behooves the subsequent users of Wiki-content to check their usage allows for the fair use of images, then GNU Free Documentation License#Materials for which commercial redistribution is prohibited should be tightened to make this clear, as I was advised that this does not clarify the situation.

It has also been argued, and again I feel wrongly, that Wikipedia can not claim critical usage under the fair use allowances. I believe that Wikipedia articles are a critical evaluation of a subject, and therefore we are allowed to make such fair use claims. Steve block talk 13:54, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The amount of discussion we include concerning fair use images is an important part of our justification for using them: the more, the better! Physchim62 (talk) 16:19, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Great, I'm happy to help that cause. However, that doesn't answer the question. Is Fair Use compatible with the GDFL? Anyone else? Steve block talk 16:49, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Just my personal understanding: Fair use ultimately is NOT compatible with the GFDL. Many other Wikipedia languages, notably German, do not allow them at all for precisely the reasons you describe. One important thing to remember is that we are offering our content to the world as "free", and outsiders are not likely to understand the subtleties of "it's all free for you to use EXCEPT for these pictures..." -- most are not even aware of the copyright/copyleft/source info on the image description page.

However, the English Wikipedia has decided by consensus that the value of illustrating some articles outweigh the drawbacks. We seem to have decided that certain classes of fair use images are acceptable, and that the our responsibility is fulfilled by tagging the items carefully. It is then the legal responsibility our downstream users to either filter out all fair use images, or to decide for themselves whether their own use is acceptable fair use under the law. (In practice, very few downstream users will do this, but then, not many of our mirrors copy our images at this point in time -- either because of the licensing issues, or because all they care about is search-engine-rich text content alongside their Google ads.)

I do believe that some classes of fair use images -- particularly album covers, book covers, screen shots (in limited numbers) and press release photos -- give us and, most likely, any downstream user a very strong fair use claim, as long as they're illustrating articles about the subject in question. Unfortunately, many editors don't really understand what "fair use" means and slap the tag onto any publicly available image they want to use -- after all, if it's on a website or in a magazine, it must be "fair" for us to use! Some people even believe that we must "exercise our fair use rights" lest they be "taken away" (I believe there's some confusion there with trademark law...).

In any case, aside from the few image types listed on the drop-down on the "Upload file" page, there's no strong consensus on how much fair use should be allowed, so different editors follow different agendas -- some aggressively tag & delete, others aggressively upload & insert.

Comics are a difficult case -- because it's a visual medium, it is very important to illustrate certain points, but it can be easy to go overboard. I agree with you that the "critical usage" applies for Wikipedia, in certain articles and in certain usages, but that doesn't address the problem that what's appropriate critical usage in Wikipedia (or any encyclopedia, or even any educational context) is not necessarily appropriate critical usage for all of our downstream re-users. And unfortunately, one "critical usage" image, used appropriately by a thoughtful editor, opens the gates for a thousand well-meaning fanboys to add inappropriate images to "their" articles as well, and it's sometimes difficult to explain the nuances.

The basic issues: 1) if more than one fair use image is used, the images should be discussed in the article -- they can't be merely decorative (see Kylie Minogue for fair-use-illustrated discussion of her changing image). 2) the image should be only of the quality necessary for illustration -- an album cover image should not be large enough to print a convincing bootleg CD cover, for example. 3) the number of images should not be excessive -- the two screenshots used to illustrate Natalie Portman are sufficient for Wikipedia's purposes (unless one is writing an in-depth article on Queen Amidala's walk-in closet...)

Anyway, that's more than I intended to write, but I hope it provides food for thought. — Catherine\^talk 02:30, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's a great help actually. What would help me more is if these three issues were expressed anywhere in policy. So far I have been unable to find them, and if this issue is as important as it seems to be I would argue that Wikipedia simply must have a clear, well thought out and enforced policy on this matter. If this is not the case I am happy to start drafting such a policy. Steve block talk 15:26, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Unnecessary images are killing performance, and should be banned

Can we please get a Guideline, if not a Policy, prohibiting the use of superfluous images? As I first noted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting#Images on stub templates starting to slow Wikipedia (again), the past few days it has started taking forever (often) to load images. Instead of throwing a bunch more money at upgrading hardware just to serve up tens of thousands of, at best, "nice to have" images, let's get of all superfluous images. The two main ones I think we should get rid of due to lack of utility are all images on Stub templates, and all images used in User Signatures. Other people may be able to think of other categories of images that we really don't need. Actually, all that are used somewhere other than the main Article Namespace should probably be carefully scrutinized as to whether they actually provide enough benefit to justify the (REAL $$$) cost. Niteowlneils 21:35, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with all of that. I'd also support subst'ing all stub tags, changing stub tags to simply add the article to a stub category, or placing stub tags on talk pages. Another idea is to remove the Wikimedia and Mediawiki banners from the bottom of pages. They are probably well cached and hence don't affect performance significantly, but they're pretty useless in any case. Fredrik | talk 21:43, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Whacking the stub template images would also have the benefit of removing the single greatest source of non-free images being used in inappropriate places. --Carnildo 21:45, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with getting rid of user sig images, which IMO are annoying as well as a resource issue. Stub images are soemtimes helpful, and I would like them to stay, but not if they unduly burden the servers. However, please do not subst stub tags. Loook at Wikipedia Talk:Subst where this issue was considered recently. Indeed look there for more on the gerenal issue of auto-substing and where it is and isn't appropriate. DES ^(talk) 21:50, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My position exactly. The stub images are cute, but are more iconic than informative. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 22:12, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As noted under the thumbnails thread, images are vanity items which means people will want them many and large. The advantage that images have from a vanity point of view is that there is usually only one primary author, usually only one author, so they retain the uploader's identity in a way that text does not. Incidentally, stub images ought to cache well. --David Woolley 22:18, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm, I think we need to actually see the numbers first, before deciding. Often site performance is somewhat counter-intuitive, especially with the wierd web of servers and proxies on multiple continents that wikipedia currently uses. Kim Bruning 23:43, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with User:Kim Bruning that we need to see the numbers. I don't doubt that image proliferation can have a significant negative impact on performance, but images also have a significant positive impact on both content understanding and user friendliness of the interface. To User:David Woolley who above made the blanket statement "images are vanity items", I don't think you could convince the editors of a print encyclopedia to do away with images just because they could then a) print only in black and white and b) reduce the weight of their tome by about 1/3 (to pull a fraction out of the air). Most images here are not vanity items in my opinion, and those that are tend to be either deleted quickly or moved out of their places in articles by editors (thereby dropping them from contributing to load problems). However, as with the impact issue, having some numbers as to what the load of "vanity images" are vs. "contributing images" is needed to put some meat on that supposition. Courtland 00:02, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

AFAIK no one is suggesting removing any images from the actual articles--just 'internal use' ones like stub messages and user sigs, etc. Niteowlneils 00:16, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

With respect to stub images and images on signatures, I would support a guideline and later a policy that sought to reduce or eliminate their use.

I'd characterize "user sig" images as personal use and a software modification might be enabled to block the addition of images to pages via the automagic four-tilde and three-tilde signatures. Manually inserted signatures are another matter but would ( I think ) account for a small number of sig-related images.
I'd characterize "stub" images not as 'internal use' really. A contingent within the stub sorting community (at one time) felt that such imagery would be useful for quick recognition of the article as in need of help in a particular topic area, not as some vanity thing to allow the creator to put his/her name up in lights. There is an argument to be made in favor of this, but I personally don't think the cost justifies the benefit in the case of stub templates.

Without having some breakdown of what image types are wreaking havoc on performance, opening the door to suggestions as to what types might be done away with invites the "I don't like this type so let's get rid of it" commentary. I could name a couple of types I dislike and would like to see disappear, but if those types a) do not damage Wikipedia performance or credibility and b) are useful to a group of people who use Wikipedia, who am I to disagree with the appropriateness of their presence.

Courtland 00:48, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

When I say that images are vanity items, I don't mean that there aren't many cases where they are valid. Some of those even justify an image that is larger than thumbnaail sized. However, Wikipedia differs from a printed encyclopedia in that you can link images, so it often makes sense to have a smaller (thumbnail) image on the page, and a much better than print full size version, off it. The vanity issue causes images to be made larger than needed and it means that in certain subject areas, where people tend to take snapshots, you will get lots of them. If you look at many of the Chinese tourist attractions, you will find that they actually have sections entitield Gallery with up to a dozen images. --David Woolley

Do you feel that using the image store at Wikimedia Commons would be OK for people adding their personal snapshots of Chinese touist locations so as not to increase the load on Wikipedia? My question is directed in part to explore the difference between non-vanity, vanity, and superfluous images and in part to touch on the technical matter of where to store the images. Courtland 13:13, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

When I consistently get all the text displayed, then spend a minute or two waiting for 'upload.wikipedia.org' to finish loading the images, I don't think it's very open to interpretation or 'server weirdness'. Also, can we try to remember WHO Wikipedia exists to serve? IMHO, it's the READERs, not the EDITORs. I am only suggesting removing images from the non-Article space. Also, whether it is a 2% performance hit, or a 20% performance hit, is making stub messages and user sigs "pretty" worth the foundation's donated funds to support? The last time we had to make a $$$ investment in the Image server was when the images were being added to the stub messages--seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Niteowlneils 00:14, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly! I've tried once to remind the editors of Russian Wikipedia that it's not about them and their convenience, but readers' ... to no avail, of course. As for removal of unnecessary images, it should probably exist as an option, at least: something like 'bare bone' interface—no images but those which illustrate the article (the "simple" skin works fine, but it does not eliminate 'em stub icons). —Barbatus 16:19, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is a toggle-able option (load or suppress images) in many modern web browsers (I've not found a reference for this in a Wikipedia article yet, but see [2] for a brief note on this). For instance, in FireFox 1.04 the setting is found via "Tools"→"Options"→"Web Features". Courtland 04:03, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If you use prefbar you can turn on/off a whole bunch of things without going into options i.e. java, javascript, flash, images + more advanced options. Arniep 12:27, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Have you tried contacting Brion or Jamesday re: this issue? You may well be right but they're the experts. R adiant _>|< 00:19, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent idea, Radiant. It seems like it might be the case if images are hosted on a separate server or servers that are being overloaded. Perhaps the internal images should have their own server. -- Kjkolb 01:00, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

All images are hosted on a separate server. --cesarb 15:08, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The images are accessed via upload.wikimedia.org, an alias for rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org, which may resolve to any of fourteen servers. rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org is also aliased by en.wikipedia.org and the other host names; all requests go through these servers. The main problem seems to be that some servers are not very reliable; sometimes a few of them become slow or go down entirely. If your browser resolves upload.wikimedia.org to a crashed server, images will not load (as happened a couple weeks ago). It's unfortunate Google's server offer didn't go anywhere. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 20:09, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

These fourteen servers (actually, they change depending on where you are in the world) point to the load-balancing squid servers (which are the ones who show the error messages). The overloaded servers sit behind them — and at that point there is a set of servers for the wikis and another set for upload.wikimedia.org. --cesarb 20:22, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see. Is there any way to prevent DNS lookups resolving to dead squids? ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 20:43, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that stub images are largely unnecessary and, if they're making a dent in server performance right now, should at least be suspended for a while. Maybe there's some technical way to smack "noinclude" tags around images contained in templates with "-stub" in the title until servers are upgraded, and then remove them after.

The slowness of "waiting for upload.wikipedia.org" is particularly frustrating when doing routine maintenance work (fixing 'what links here' on disambiguation pages or redirects for example), as some of the tools (like Lupin's popups) that help with this work won't function until the page is fully loaded. I believe some of my edits may have been lost as well when I clicked away from a page before it was fully loaded/saved/displayed because of images -- I can't say for sure, but it stopped happening after I was more careful to watch my status bar for the "Done" message. — Catherine\^talk 05:33, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is silly. Niteowlneils, you started the Images on stub templates starting to slow Wikipedia (again) section; are you a developer? Do you have the server logs? Consider which pages are accessed before looking for scapegoats.

Wikipedia is the 38th most popular site on the internet. Where do all the anonymous visitors who make it that popular go? I suspect the main page is the heaviest contributor to server load, followed by the hundred most popular pages. These are all in the main namespace, and accesses to these pages probably dwarf talk page accesses by orders of magnitude. There are no signatures in the main namespace (except for articles signed by newbies). The most popular pages are not stubs. If the servers really are overloaded by images, and the slowness is not simply caused by a combination of your browser and connection (I haven't seen problems with images loading), why not start by taking the sister project images off the main page? ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 20:09, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The anons don't provide much load. Anything other than active editing by an anon is handled by the Squid servers -- that's about 75% of the traffic, and the Squids can handle it without breaking a sweat. It's us logged-in users who are overloading the back-end servers and causing slowdowns. --Carnildo 05:35, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

i don't think images are really significant in terms of total server rescources. Afaict the reason there have been problems with images in the past is that the small ammount of rescources dedicated to them has been inadeqate (wikimedias rescource usage is on the up with no limit in sight due quite simply to increasing demand). The VAST majority of wikimedias hardware rescources goes on the pagebuilders. Plugwash 05:44, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

about logged in vs. not-logged in users impact on performance : User:Carnildo brings up a point I hadn't known about before. As an editor, the ratio of page calls I do for viewing vs. editing varies a great deal; sometimes while editing, I call up five pages for every page I edit. What I'm hearing is that if I were to view the pages that I do not intend to edit as a logged out user, then I would contribute 80% (1 in 5 page calls in this example) less to the server load than I do now. Is that an accurate way of looking at it? P.S. I'm thinking along the lines of viewing in IE and editing with FireFox or viewing with one computer and editing with another so the cookie instances differ between sessions. Courtland 13:20, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Would the load be significantly reduced if article content were displayed in a frame, so a logged-in user with default settings would pull everything from the cache except for the surrounding frames? (SEWilco 14:14, 15 November 2005 (UTC))[reply]

IMHO, frames have so many problems associated with them that it wouldn't be worth it even if it would have a significant effect (which I doubt). — David Remahl 15:29, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

To address some points, let's confine this discussion to IMAGES ON STUB MESSAGES.
All text is loading fine, so it IS NOT A GENERAL PROBLEM WITH THE SERVERS! It is SPECIFIC TO THE IMAGE SERVER(s) (have you tried loading List of flags in the last week or so?).
There are many hundreds, if not over 1,000 stub-related images called by tens of thousands, if not over 100,000 stubbed articles. There is absolutely no way that quantity can NOT have a significant impact on image serving.
Suggesting people turn off ALL images in their browsers just because STUB images slow things down seems completely unreasonable.
Image server slowness has repeatedly coincided with increased use of STUB images.
Why should we spend ANY donated funds on providing extra hardware and/or bandwidth on editor-based "nice-to-haves" like stub images, when our primary audience is (or at least should be, IMHO) the READERS.
We should tax the image servers only with requests for content related images, not useless 'backend' images. Images were coming up fine until recently--removing them from STUB messages should alleviate the problem, at least for a while.
Why try to over-think/over-complicate the issue? SERVING UMPTEEN MEGABYTES OF STUB IMAGES IS GOING TO HAVE A COST, PERIOD! Why incur that cost for something with NO TANGIBLE VALUE? Waterguy 20:21, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think it is also important to give readers a taste of the community on the back end, since we need more editors. While I have never taken part in the "stub" subculture of Wikipedia, I understand it engages quite a few people, who obviously feel that the images add some value and exposure to their efforts. Removing features in an attempt to optimize is never going to work in the long run. It is better to 1) optimize the infrastructure and software and 2) throw machines at the problem. — David Remahl 21:06, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I am glad to see some people calling for actual numbers before such a decision is made, but discouraged that noone has provided such numbers and even more discouraged that discussion proceeds without obtaining those numbers.

Waterguy, here're the problems with your last sentence: you don't have evidence that umpteen megabytes of stub images are being served. While you have correctly asserted that there is a non-negative, non-zero cost involved in serving these images, you still have no evidence about the exact value or order of magnitude of that cost. So let me pose a scenario:

If stub images are causing 50% of the load on the image server, then eliminating stub images will eliminate 50% of the load and give us a 100% speedup. That would be spectacular! I would very much push for that, at least on a temporary basis. Perhaps even permanent.

But suppose stub images are causing 1% of the load on the image server. In that case, completely eliminating them will provide us only a 1% speedup. We will have effectively accomplished next to nothing, and it make take somebody all day to go make the change, too.

Quite possibly stub images are only 0.01% of the load. Neither you nor I actually know, do we? Yes, eliminating the stub images will definitely cause a speedup, no matter what. But you haven't yet proved that that speedup will not be simply negligible, so adamantly calling for this change doesn't make any sense, yet.

Can someone get some numbers? Percentage of images served broken down by the namespace of the page they are on, broken down by whether or not they are in a template, expressed as number of images served/number of actual connection attempts versus number of bytes served, showing how many images are being found in the cache, etc.? Without numbers this discussion is a relatively pointless brainstorming exercise. With numbers, we might see all kinds of other much more effective solutions. It might be apparent that the real thing to do is limit the size of the images by having their quality automatically scaled down. Or that we simply need to add RAM to the cache and retune it. Jdavidb (talk • contribs) 21:02, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

(after edit conflict with Jdavidb) Woah, buddy, chill out. There's no need to shout. We're trying to have a reasoned debate here, okay? As already mentioned above, the developers have access to server logs, perfomance records, and so forth. I don't, and I'm going to assume you don't. I don't want to be rude, but you shoudn't make broad, definitive statements when you have absolutely no way to know what you're talking about. If you think images are a problem, you ought to post at the technical pump and see, what, if anything, the devolopers say, before getting so worked up over this.--Sean|Bla ck 21:08, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The technical discussion appears to be at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Images not displaying, and much of the discussion should be taken over to that section of the Villiage Pump, agreed. Courtland 23:34, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hard disk drives are the bottleneck. While stub images are small files, 1kB or less, they can have as much effect on server performance as large image files of several tens or hundreds of kilobytes. The reason is that the disk drives on which they are stored need to seek to the proper track, then wait for the disk to rotate to the proper sector (see latency). Head positioning takes orders of magnitude longer than reading the data and transmitting them to the requestor once the head is on track. Use of any images on Wikipedia should be done sparingly. Because there is such a tremendous variety of them, there is no practical way to cache all of them in solid-state memory. If using images everywhere is that important, the only practical way to solve the problem may be to move the most-requested ones to solid-state drives, which are very, very fast, but also very expensive. The system would also need to keep statistics on image file accesses in order to manage such caching. Unfortunately, mechanical hard disks have been leading solid-state memory down the price curve in cost-per-megabyte for decades, and there seems to be no end in sight yet. (Take it from someone who's worked in the hard disk drive industry since 1980.) -- Quicksilver^{T @} 19:00, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Spamlinks or not?

Looking for second (or third or whatever) opinion here regarding some external links I came across recently.

Someone (currently using IP User:4.240.213.29), has been adding external links from author pages to audiobooks of the author's works. The first attempts (by IP 4.240.213.43 (talk · contribs) simply added the same generic link to a dozen pages -- which I reverted -- while the newest batch has taken the time to actually make them to individual works. They still bother me, though:

Pros

They're Creative Commons-licensed, so they're non-commercial.
They (mostly) link to a relevant work.

Cons

It's a "*.com" domain, which is supposed to be commercial
The editor has created separate headers and subheaders within the "External links" section to make them stand out...
Placing them at the top of the list of links (only superceded by Project Gutenberg links), which had the side effect of rendering a note at Rudyard Kipling meaningless. As well, the editor ...
Readded the original generic main-page link he or she had added before...

...making clear to me that self-promotion is part of the purpose here.

(For an example, see this.)

Am I overreacting? Does anyone else think of these as borderline linkspam?

--Calton | Talk 06:42, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Potentially they're just:

overenthusiastic about this audio project
a WP newbie who doesn't know the ropes of "External links" sections.

Go ahead and revert, or cleanup, or whatever, but I don't see any evidence of self promotion here. I think you could extend the benefit of the doubt a while longer. The "cons" you mention are fixable without eliminating all the links. —Wahoofive (talk) 06:56, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Go ahead and revert, or cleanup, or whatever, but I don't see any evidence of self promotion here The generic links and high positions in the lists tells me that they're promoting themselves. In any case, if I knew what I wanted to do, I would have just done it instead of coming here for advice. What I HAVE done is delete the generic links and headers, and demote the individual links to more appropriate positions. I'm not 100% convinced, but maybe others can tell me if it'S sufficient. --Calton | Talk 07:20, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That approach seems sufficent to me, but it may be wise to contact them on their talk page.--Sean|Bla ck 07:34, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If only he or she HAD a talk page. I'll give it a shot, anyways. --Calton | Talk 07:50, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'd only use only this link as it has links to all the other recordings and put it with the other external links. -- Kjkolb 08:21, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's my note at Kipling, that is :-). For what it's worth, I personally would class these as linkspam and revert - the motivation was apparently to add their links to a number of pages rather than to "improve the encyclopedia", and as we note on Kipling they're not even reading the ext.links section... Commercial or not shouldn't figure into it; you can spam a free site perfectly well. (I also have a personal rule of thumb that external links to one work by an author shouldn't be on their page unless that work is unusual - imagine how many links we'd have if we linked to individual recordings of each poem by Kipling! - and should wait for an article on the original work, but this is simply a personal quirk) Shimgray | talk | 11:49, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Our friend is back - 4.240.198.66 (talk · contribs). I've reverted the most spammy of them, but most seem to be simply fiddling the URLs for links which were left in. Looking at some of those pages, though, various classic authors really need the external links clearing up... Shimgray | talk | 00:46, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Cleaning him up, I found 69.157.238.17 (talk · contribs), which is a pretty classic example of commercially-planned linkspam. Ugh. All gone now, but I've left our CC-linking friend in place. Shimgray | talk | 01:16, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I FOUND YOU! BECAUSE I TRY (a response from "the culprit") Thanks for the benefit of the doubt guys, in the last three days I've made tremendous effort (re-writing 100 pages) at LiteralSystems site to work better as a contributing source of knowlege and experience in literary works suitable for inclusion on sites such as wikipedia. On seeing my first (albeit newbyesque) attempts at adding relevant links to wikipedia author pages removed without explanation I emailed helpdesk-l@wikimedia.org to find out why (quoted here)

##begin##

Hi, I've added external links to about 15 authors biography pages but next day they were all removed. Perhaps, there is something I need to understand.

We at LiteralSystems.com make audiobooks released strictly under Creative Commons licensing. There is never a charge and we create quality human voiced readings from public domain literature. Is there any reason why we could not add relevant external links to the authors-bio pages?

let me know please, Warren Smith literalsystems.com

##end##

I never recieved a response. I re-added the links thinking somebody unathoritive removed them since I heard nothing from wikipedia. I used other external links as examples.

Through my own hard research I found this page featuring the subject of my adding links, I'll stay possitive about all this "sleuthing" of motivational design etc.. done by the page watchdogs at wikipedia but a simple return contact or establishing a query to me would have been better and more to the point. But here is quoted a response more in keeping with reality.

##start##

Potentially they're just:

1. overenthusiastic about this audio project

2. a WP newbie who doesn't know the ropes of "External links" sections.

Go ahead and revert, or cleanup, or whatever, but I don't see any evidence of self promotion here. I think you could extend the benefit of the doubt a while longer. The "cons" you mention are fixable without eliminating all the links. —Wahoofive (talk) 06:56, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

##end##

Sure, I classify as both. But here is an example of overenthusiasm on another editors part as well.

##start##

Our friend is back - 4.240.198.66 (talk • contribs). I've reverted the most spammy of them, but most seem to be simply fiddling the URLs for links which were left in. Looking at some of those pages, though, various classic authors really need the external links clearing up... Shimgray | talk | 00:46, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Cleaning him up, I found 69.157.238.17 (talk • contribs), which is a pretty classic example of commercially-planned linkspam. Ugh. All gone now, but I've left our CC-linking friend in place. Shimgray | talk | 01:16, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

##end##

If a person looked at my return visit changes they would see evidence of maintenance on my part to add a deeper level of relevancy to the links (besides fixing mistakes). At literalsystems.com we create new and valuable resources released strictly under Creative Commons, and we care about our work. We don't sell anything and don't carry advertisements. If there are any legitimate self promotion issues here regarding our adding links, then it would have to be the fact that we are proud of what we do and want to share it. Any group that claims an interest in creation of real and valued resources freely accessible on the net should recognize others with similar mind sets. That's what I thought I was doing by linking between us.

The problem with hardened mindsets is that their responses take on the simplicity of those who'd rather not know any more than what they already suspect. Moving on. Here is my email contact ([email removed - see page history]).

Hi 4.240.213.29 and/or 4.240.213.43 and/or 4.240.198.66 and/or 69.157.238.17 and/or 4.240.213.15,

First I'd like to do you a suggestion: could you perhaps take a user login? You can choose your own name, just click the upper right corner of the browser window, the procedure for acquiring a user login should normally not give any problems. Then, when you are logged in, and write something on a talk page, if you use four tildes (~~~~) for signing your contributions that will make communication with other Wikipedians probably a bit easier.

Secondly, I'd ask you to have a quick glance at the Wikipedia:Tutorial, or any similar short introduction to Wikipedia editing; Besides, if you take a login you won't have to wait too long before the welcoming committee puts a list of such wikipedia intro's on your talk page. I edited some of your talk above to make it more readable, you'll see it's not too difficult to acquire better lay-out yourself too.

Then, I think the "spoken literature" you're promoting might fit in well in Wikipedia, and the initial misunderstandings might maybe soon be solved. --Francis Schonken 16:59, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Just to add a couple of quick comments - the reason many were assumed to be spam is that they were often rather overlinked and that they seemed to have been added without paying much attention to the content of the page, which is often a hallmark of spam. For example, on the Rudyard Kipling page, we had two audiobooks of individual works, and a link to the overall site, added in the middle of a list without noting the "the two sites above" comment below.

We get a lot of people trying to add links to their sites everywhere, and it's a sad fact we have to be somewhat suspicious about an anonymous user doing nothing but adding a swathe of links to the same site. A site being free or commercial is not our primary motivation for removing the link; it's whether or not the editor considering removing it feels it adds anything to the page, since Wikipedia is not a collection of external links. We were unable to determine the motivation for making these additions; since you were using a dynamic IP, we couldn't contact you, and there was no way of telling if you were associated with the site or not to contact you via them.

Helpdesk-l is massively overloaded, so it's a pity you haven't yet recieved a response but not altogether surprising. Also note that the "commercial linkspam" comment you quote was about someone else entirely, who I ran across whilst checking your second wave of additions, and I mentioned since there was a brief "theoretical" discussion on linkspam. Your maintenance work on the second visit was not reverted, as I recall, though some readditions were.

For reference, Wikipedia:External links says:

Adding links to one's own page is strongly discouraged. The mass adding of links to any website is also strongly discouraged, and any such operation should be raised at the Village Pump or other such page and approved by the community before going ahead.

and Wikipedia:Spam gives some useful tips on "How not to be seen as a spammer"

I'd encourage you to create articles on individual works, where they don't already exist, and add the links for audiobooks to those; they're more appropriate there, don't clog up the author's page, and are much more useful to the reader. Please let me know if you want to discuss this further and work out a useful way to get these links in; you can leave a message at my talk page Shimgray | talk | 17:29, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've trimmed out the email address, to avoid harvesting, and replied by email as well. Shimgray | talk | 19:10, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the response (and especially trimming my email) from all. Okay you're not the hardened reactionaries I took you for at first. ;-) Anyway, I've responded to Mr. Gray's email and won't press the issue any further (or bumble around the site anymore) if it is agreed that my links didn't hold any relevance to the author articles at wikipedia. I did take the time to read the articles suggested here and added my logon identity. I feel I have a better conception now of the way things work here. Frankly it's too easy to just come in and make changes, but I am not saying a policy change is needed, no. --Literalsystems 22:18, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Frustration with make technical articles accessible policy

Recently there has been some discussion among mathematically-inclined editors on the make technical articles accessible policy. I would like to invite the broader Wikipedia community to help us sort this out. My position is that we must start to recognise that Wikipedia has moved beyond a general-audience encyclopaedia, and now serves specialist communities as well. The policy needs to change to reflect this.

For example, this morning I found a "too technical" tag placed on the article class field theory. Of course I agree that the article is too technical for most readers to understand. But sorry — that's just the way it is. I'm a PhD student studying algebraic number theory (the area of mathematics in which class field theory lives) and I myself have trouble really understanding what class field theory is all about. In fact, the current Wikipedia article on class field theory is far less technical than any other description I have seen before.

The difficulty is this: class field theory is about certain things called abelian field extensions. The author is not trying to be fancy or trying to impress anyone by using the technical terms "abelian" and "field extension". Unfortunately, it just isn't possible to simplify anything by using less technical terms. If you haven't ever done time studying Galois theory (which includes practically the entire "general audience"), then you simply can't make sense of these terms. It's not something you can just pick up in an idle afternoon.

The aims of make technical articles accessible are admirable. I certainly agree that articles should be made as accessible as possible. But a line has to be drawn somewhere. Dmharvey File:User dmharvey sig.png Talk 18:53, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't a policy. It says right at the top, "References or links to this page should not describe it as "policy"." It was put together by a small group of editors and there's never been a consensus on it; the previous decision to call it a guideline was out of process. Personally I'd look at the article, see if there's any small change that would make it a little more accessible, and then strip the template off. --Trovatore 18:59, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Access is important. It is also important, however, to be able to move highly technical material out of one article and into another. If that has happened, tagging it as 'too much for experts' is not so reasonable; it just induced defensiveness and makes it less likely that required segregation of material by difficulty will happen. Charles Matthews 19:02, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the comments that material should be made "as accessible as possible". For class field theory, it's possible that identifying the general field (abstract mathematics, or particle physics, etc.) is the most that can be done to explain it to non-mathematicians. I think the tag should be left on, however, as a warning to general readers that they won't be able to understand this article. If Wikipedia develops a difficulty rating system, then the tag would no longer be needed for this purpose. StuRat 19:20, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So you would indefinitely leave a tag encouraging others to provide a simple explanation on content you don't believe can be simply explained? Dragons flight 20:42, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think a brief, one line note at the top stating the article is highly technical would be better, preferably with links to material likely to be easier to understand. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 04:00, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt that a linearly ordered difficulty rating system would be particularly helpful. The reason that a reader can't follow a specialized article is not that he's not smart enough or not educated enough, it's because he doesn't have the necessary background from that particular field. So what does a rating of "difficulty 5", or whatever you want to call it, really tell me as a reader? Nothing particularly useful. I can still read it if I can read it, and I can't if I can't. The fastest way to find out which, is to try to read it. --Trovatore 01:20, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would generally support the notion that we should make technical topics accessible to those who are likely to read them. Class field theory would be of interest to number theorists, mathematicians, and maybe the occasional particle physicist, so it should use language that they can understand. You'll never make it accessible to my grandmother or even to someone with a typical college education, but it doesn't need to be that accessible because the typical college graduate will never travel so deep into number theory that they will need to care about the topic. In the specific case of class field theory, I might suggest adding something to the introduction to suggest why it might be interesting to someone who is not an algebraic number theorist (assuming of course that it is interesting to anyone else, even other mathematicians?). Dragons flight 20:42, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'd concur with this; even if the article can't be "made accessible", it'd be nice to have a short introduction for anyone who stumbles across it by accident to tell them a) this is an esoteric mathematical topic; b) it's interesting because x; c) an overview of the general subject of which this is part is at page y. Of course, sometimes even this can't be done - Feynman famously responded to a request to summarise QED by remarking that if he could explain it in five minutes for the news, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize. Shimgray | talk | 20:56, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

True, But Feynman also famously said "If you can't but together a freshman [College] legture on the subject you don't realy understand it." This is quoted in the into to the Feynman Lectures on Physics and seems to have been an long and strongly held view of his. i have found that even fairly esoteric topics in math and physics can usualy be explained so that people with a general college level education and some interst can follw them -- perhaps not well enbough to understand everything involved, nor to make original contributiosn to knowledge in teh field, but to have a fair idea of what is going on. I feel that I understand Group theory and have at least a nodding acquentaince with Galois theory, so if the Class field theory article is too technical for a reader such as myself to get anything at all out of it (I haven't checked it yet) then perhaps it needs a better intro at least. DES ^(talk) 00:01, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree strongly with this. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 04:00, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

One requests to people who put the {{technical}} template. Please take some time to explain either on the talk page or in the edit summary what exactly you think is a problem, and if possible suggestions for its improvement. It is not right for a person to just take a look at an article, say "Gosh, what is that?", put a technical template and walk away. First, the tag might not be justfified, and second, the article authors might sincerely believe that the article is already acessible enough, and your insight might be very valuable. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:50, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think in a lot of cases it should be fairly obvious that an article will not be understood by most readers. Recall Stephen Hawking's comment on including E=mc² in A Brief History of Time, for example. Equations must of course be included in our articles, but not before explaining what an article is about. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 04:00, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

One of the great possibilities of Wikipedia is for an editor to emerge who is able to make inexplicable topics understandable to the general public. I do not understand why we should berate an article's editors because either they themselves do not have this gift of translation or the topic has not found its way into the mind of someone with such a gift. This is not a call for a sea of abstruse articles to be unleashed but rather a call for a different way of looking at difficult to understand articles than to label them in a way that says "enter at your own risk - there be difficult brain benders ahead". Courtland 02:05, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding your edit summary - I wonder how many more Velikovskys we have to put up with before our Sagan comes along :-) Shimgray | talk | 02:29, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Billions and billions and billions and..." StuRat 04:20, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It is with some sadness that I watch a trend of anti-intellectualism grow with pages tagged with the {tl|technical}} template or with comments appended to talk pages describing the contents of academic pages as "gibberish" simply because they use the jargon of the subject area (even though extensively linked to explanatory pages). I might agree with the spirit of what Shimgray says, i.e. that there is sometimes a need for technical articles to be translated into lay language. It serves the purpose of making basic concepts more accessible to those without the academic background. I speculate that the success of the [Enter subject] for Dummies series of books profitably serves this need. However, when a specialist writes a page for other specialists, whether it be in science, mathematics, law, philosophy, or baseball, it is appropriate to use the jargon and expertise of that specialism (appropriately linked to explanatory pages for those who want to understand more). If this is arguing the case for a two-tier forking of pages into technical and introductory, then so be it. Those who wish to make sometimes abstruse material more comprehensible can provide a translation service where access to the content will serve a public good. But let us all have a little more respect for those editors with the drive to write pages on the Wikipedia, no matter what their intended market. So, to clarify my response to this topic as titled, it is the mere appending of non-constructive comments and general unwillingness to co-operate in the building of consensus material that is deeply frustrating. If those who object to pages had the humility to frankly admit what is not understood so that remedial action could be taken, accessibility could slowly evolve. But it seems that there is too much fear and insecurity in the world for this to happen. David91 05:10, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If they do make comments on the talk page, they risk being abused for "talking about a subject they know nothing about". The phrase "when a specialist writes a page for other specialists" also seems rather un-wiki to me. I rather think we should write for everyone, not just for people exactly like ourselves. StuRat 04:30, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that class field theory is probably never going to be accessible to an average non-mathematician, but I do think that there is a certain elitism involved in not even parenthetically explaining that "abelian" in this context means "commutative", a word known to all who study mathematics, and not just to algebraists. It should be possible to write this article so that an average third-year undergraduate in mathematics could read it. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:11, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree that the introduction could (and should) be made accessible to (say) an average third-year undergraduate in mathematics. Dmharvey File:User dmharvey sig.png Talk 15:58, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Any junior math major who hasn't encountered the word "abelian" is going to have a tough time graduating. —Wahoofive (talk) 05:08, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The technical template currently encourages people to add non-technical explanations without removing the technical material. I don't see why this is a problem. I recently put a technical tag on atenolol, a drug that I take. A few months ago, I understood everything in the article. Now, I only understand the things that I pulled out of the edit history after the non-technical explanation was erased. Wikipedia is for everyone — experts and non-experts alike. And so we should include information for both groups, not deleting one kind of information or the other. /soapbox Jacqui ^★ 05:05, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree completely ! StuRat 05:34, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia: Working the system

Wikipedia: Working the system was added by a user, User:NPOVenforcer who was recently blocked. I believe this new "policy" proposal does not add any helpful information and merely muddies the water about how things work here at Wikipedia. In particular, the first entry: stating wikipedia policy (typically NPOV, civility, or assume good faith) to a person that has not violated it, so as to falsely portray the party that is addressed as having violated the policy

suggests that even bringing up policy to a user and asking them to read it might violate Wikipedia policy. If you look at User talk:NPOVenforcer, you will see that the blocked user who wrote this document used this rationale to react with extreme hostility to even polite suggestions that he familiarize himself with WP:NPA, WP:Civility, etc. Given that we already merged Wikipedia:Gaming the system, I think this document should face a similar fate. Kit 20:34, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It has been nominated for deletion as inappropriate. Please see WP:MFD. R adiant _>|< 00:09, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright on Lists

Under US case law (e.g. CCC Information Services v. MacLean Hunter Market Reports, Kregos v. Associated Press, Eckes v. Card Prices Update, Key Publications, Inc. v. Chinatown Today Publishing Enters., Inc.), the courts have consistently held that a list of information whose selection or creation requires editorial creativity is subject to copyright protection. This includes such items as "What are the best places to eat in Denver" or "What are the best statistics to use in judging baseball". If someone creates a "Best of..." or "Most Important..." list based on subjective criteria then the list, when considered in its entirety, is a protected form of expression even if individual elements of that list are facts beyond the scope of copyright.

The effect here is that we should not be republishing such a list in its entirety, as doing so is an infringement on the owner's copyright. (Note that this only applies to lists involving creative judgments, lists based on facts or polling are not subject to copyright protection.)

What about fair use? There are four factors one must consider under the US fair use doctrine:

Purpose and character of the use: We fail this if the intention is merely to replace or duplicate a list. If we were critically discussing the merits of the list and the elements included we might pass, but almost all cases of such lists on Wikipedia are intended merely to duplicate the list. Also, merely adding wikilinks to a list is not a truly transformative use as envisioned by fair use doctrine.
Nature of the copied work: Hard to generalize, though the less publically available the original, the worse we tend to look by copying it.
Amount and substantiality: We fail this by copying the entire list. If the purpose is to discuss the list than only a few representative items are necessary, not hundreds. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters. found that the use of less than 400 words was infringement when they represented "the heart of the book". Even if the list is part of a much longer work discussing the items on the list, it is likely that the items selected cut to the heart of the work's value. For a related matter, it should be noted that copyright extends to the index of a book even if none of the book's other content is copied.
Effect upon work's value: If one copies the entire list, and in so doing decreases the market value or interest in obtaining that list from the original publisher, then you have tripped over criterion number 4. Lists already available on the internet have little market value so we aren't so bad, but copying lists that only exist in print is particularly bad.

Because of these issues, I propose that the lists in the articles below be deleted. In some cases, like The 100 there is critical discussion which should be kept, with a greatly abbreviated version of the list that could sustain a fair use claim. In many cases however, someone has merely copied the content of someone else's list onto Wikipedia, and these should probably be deleted in totality. I started to post several of these on WP:CP, and someone complained and asked for a broader discussion, so here it is. Dragons flight 06:14, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

To quote Dragons flight's own talk page: "No, as I said there, IANAL. I do however work in real life areas where I have to be familiar with and care about intellectual property law. Dragons flight" as such he is NOT A LAWYER and cannot state publically as such with authority... however BD Abramson AN ACTUAL IP LAWYER has stated: "See Feist v. Rural. The formula itself is merely an idea, and is not subject to copyright; only the expression of the idea can be protected, and the listing here does not duplicate the expression because it differs significantly from the layout of the Newsweek list. See Kregos v. Associated Press, 937 F.2d 700 (2d Cir. 1991). I've maintained such a list - indeed one more similar to Newsweek's own - in my user space for quite some time without fear of legal action, because I'm quite confident that this is no copyvio (and even if it was, it would easily qualify as fair use)."

Sorry DF but in this case I can only say mind your business and speak on a subject in which you are A RECOGNIZED AUTHORITY. ALKIVAR™ 08:02, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Alkivar, your comment would carry a lot greater weight if my arguments hadn't already convinced BDAbramson to remove that material from his user page. [3] Oh, and NPA, if you don't mind. Dragons flight 10:06, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Which are relevant: the jurisdiction the servers are, the jurisdiction of the contributor, or the jurisdiction of the reader? --Philip Baird Shearer 09:52, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I say we ignore the problem until one of the "rights"-holders actually contacts us and requests that they'd be removed. What do we have to lose? We should, however, make sure that we add a lot of value to the lists and not merely reproduce them. — David Remahl 10:47, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Haha, it would be nice if it worked that way. Except that we had this conversation and decided to wait for complaints means that it is now willfull infringement. Willful infringement provides penalties up to $150,000 per violation. See U.S.C. Title 17 § 504(c)(2). Probably best to consult a lawyer or remove the material. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 12:26, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Avoid copyright paranoia... We HAVE had a lawyer weigh in ... see BD Abramson's comment above. ALKIVAR™

15:18, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

First, I think we can leave all this to Jimbo Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation. They are not unsophisticated and they have access to lawyers and it's their problem anyway, and Wikipedia's been up for years and if jackbooted copyrighted thugs saw much of an opportunity I think we would have heard something about it before. Jimbo Wales has not been at all reticent to step in and, dare I say "lay down the law" where there was an indication of real danger (e.g "fair use" images), and I don't see any reason to distrust his instincts.

Second, now I will render my uninformed amateur opinion. I am not a lawyer. I simply cannot believe there's any serious risk involved in waiting for someone to complain. IP law is all about money. Nobody's going to want the expense of a lawsuit unless they think large sums of money are involved. I can't imagine Rolling Stone trying to demonstrate to a court the precise number of dollars they lost because Wikipedia copied their list. It's ever so much cheaper just to send a lawyer letter. This is particularly true of substantial commercial organizations. I can imagine some individual rich wacko taking a very questionable case to court to satisfy their own sense of justice, causing expense and nuisance to the defendant even if the suit fails, but I don't think Time Magazine would do that. They have better things to worry about than Wikipedia. Like, say, Newsweek. Just my $0.02. Did I say that I am not a lawyer? Dpbsmith (talk) 15:13, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If Wikipedia is to be a responsible public citizen then risk and money should not be the most important parts of the equation. The essence of avoiding copyright paranoia is not deleting things which are probably legally acceptable just because there is some small risk. On the other hand, the key to acting responsibly is not keeping things which are probably infringments just because we can get away with it. Just because someone lacks the time, resources, or inclination to sue us doesn't make it okay to blatantly steal their material. If we decide these lists are probably legally acceptable, then we should keep them (aside from questions of whether they are good for an encyclopedia), and if we decide these lists are probably not legally acceptable then we should ditch them. It really ought to be that simple. Dragons flight 20:36, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree 100% with User:Dragon's flight. Copyright laws clearly cover the creation of lists that have any creativity in them. What the laws do not cover are simply functional lists, such as phone books and so forth. These list articles, plus Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD which I ran across today and probably several others. clearly violate the law. Furthermore, let's get real here, the vast majority of these are not encyclopedic in the least. Why risk lawsuits over something that doesn't contribute anything of value to this project? DreamGuy 17:35, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Because that would open up a can of worms by effectively expanding the definition of "copyvio." Who knows what does and doesn't "risk a lawsuit?" Can I get any article I dislike deleted by finding some reason why something in it might not meet all the requirements of fair use and thus might be risking a lawsuit? Dpbsmith (talk) 18:20, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. By all means let's delete those lists, but not on the basis that there might be a copyright issue and that the IP owner might go straight to court without firing a lawyer letter across our bows first. Dpbsmith (talk) 18:22, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think this is redundant with what has been said above ... Jimbo Wales and the WikiMedia Foundation have weighed in on this in a limited way in the context of "list of articles found in Encyclopedia X that should be in Wikipedia" and the decision has been to remove those lists that can thoughtfully be considered copyright violations. I don't have the links to the discussion threads at my fingertips here but I'm sure that someone will be able to produce those links for general edification here in short order (I'll look for them later if I don't see them here when I have time to do so). Regards, Courtland 19:04, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Found it ... see archived Jimbo Wales User Talk, Encarta/2004 discussion thread. Courtland 03:21, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, after a quick check, Rolling Stone's lists are available on their website and the link is in the article, so this is fair use (it's advertising for them, really), those "1000 best scientists" are the result of a poll, so not copyrightable, and I guess most of the other lists are legitimate in some way too, so there shouldn't be any "let's remove them all" talk: it's a case by case thing, and only when there's a really likely copyvio should it be removed for that reason (then again, many of these lists are just plain unencyclopedic and have nothing to do here). Jules.LT 18:39, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You are right about the scientist list, as a poll it is not a problem. I selected my list of about 20 pages above to be limited to editorial judgements only, i.e. no polls. Please refer to the arguments at the start of this thread regarding fair use. I do not believe fair use should apply when one is copying someone's entire list. The argument that it is advertising for them is a red herring in most cases since we copied the entire list and there is no (or very minimal) additional information to learn on the topic by visiting their site. (If we provided only a small part of the list, I would buy that, but not for the entire list.) Besides, if you think it is good for them that we copied their content, then might as well ask them for permission and see what they think of what we are doing? Of course, I dare say most content providers would be unlikely to approve regardless of whether any fair use argument might apply. Dragons flight 19:00, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Jules, jst because a list is available on a website it DOESN'T make it free use. That has nothing to do with free use. They have a copyright on it, lots of people put their copyrighted material on the web, you can't just take it and claim "fair use" or even free advertsising. Come on, think about it here, by that tortured logic you could take anything nd everything found on the web and use it yourself. That's so completely against every concept of copyright laws there are. I mean, why are you even posted to a discussion about copyright if you know so little about it? Furthermore, I don't think that the results of polls are automatically not protected. Certainly the people polled used their creativity and knowledge to come up with their answers, and the publication used its resources to make it all happen. DreamGuy 15:51, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The result of a poll is considered in the US to be a fact which was discovered. Such facts, like scientific data, Napolean's birthdate, and the name of the person living at 348 Sycamore, are exempt from copyright protection. This applies even if the fact discovered was in actuality a summary of popular opinion. The Supreme Court, e.g. Feist v. Rural, explicitly rejected the notion that you can earn a copyright merely for working very hard to discover some set of facts. Dragons flight 16:17, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Article for each date

Is see user Pcb21 is making many new pages with titles like February 27, 2003. He is breaking up the February 2003 articles. Is this current policy? -- SGBailey 17:12, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The most recent month pages are getting far too long, and many now appear on Special:Longpages, so breaking them up seems reasonable. That said, some thought needs to go into how these pages are organized and linked to. - SimonP 19:34, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This came up on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/January 1, 2005, and there was no consensus. I agree with Simon that we could use a discussion about how best to do this before people start making radical changes. Christopher Parham (talk) 20:51, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Additional problems include the fact that mislinked dates, using February 27, 2003 instead of February 27, 2003 are indistinguishable or nearly so on the page, if it weren't for the fact that preferences don't work with the former.

Another problem is the fact that there is no redirect from 27 February 2003.

Some of the problems of overcrowded and overlinked to pages could be alleviated by removing the screwball connection between preferences and ordinary linking. Can't someone get the developers to come up with some independent scheme to make date preferences work? Gene Nygaard 12:03, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Drag it to RFC maybe? R adiant _>|< 17:17, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
And/or discuss at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) - I started Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) a few hours ago, as the result of a revived discussion on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles), thinking it would be better to treat the whole scope of dates and numbers in article names in a separate guideline (instead of the "years in titles" guideline proposal, that was IMHO not really coming out of the "proposal" stage); also separate from Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), that does not give many clues on article naming. Anyway, for the time being I copy this topic to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) - maybe also list the new guideline proposal on wikipedia:current surveys. --Francis Schonken 17:40, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

People inserting ethnicity instead of nationality in bio headers

I am currently in an edit war on Robert De Niro. Certain users keep trying to change American to Italian American. Personally I think it is wrong to include ethnic identifiers in the headers as this is not done in other good encyclopedias like Britannica, mainly because often is not entirely accurate. I am not against mentioning that De Niro identifies as an Italian American in an article, just not in the header. There was also a similar problem in the Leonard Nimoy and Alicia Silverstone article with people replacing American with Jewish American, probably with many other bios also. Is there any kind of guideline that would support my stance here or should I apply to create one? Arniep 20:07, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that nationality rather than ethnicity or religion is appropriate for the header. Many people though, think of someone's "nation" as the group that they belong to, not the state in which they live. We here in the United States of America don't usually make the distinction, but in Moscow for instance if you ask someone their nationality, the response might be Russian, or Jewish. My point is that the word "Nationality" really has more than one meaning. In most biographies, I would consider someone's religion, or ethnic background to be of secondary interest. I generally don't even mention someone's religion unless they are a religious leader or somesuch. Morris 20:57, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Roman Abramovich, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Boris Berezovsky are all Jewish Russian people but are not described as Jewish Russians in their headers, and, I think they would say are Russian if asked what nationality they were. Arniep 22:17, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I note that Khodorkovsky is described as a Jewish Russian businessman, but, I would say this is precisely an example of why ethnicity labels should not be allowed in headers. Khodorkovsky has been demonised + imprisoned by Vladimir Putin, and there is a notable anti-semitic atmosphere in Russia at the moment which Putin is stirring up. Arniep 22:27, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I also agree that ethnicity is inappropriate in the intro. I think the "people by ethnicity" subcategories encourage this kind of classification. I just discovered that there is a Category:African-Italian-Americans, to give you a hint of how useless these are. Postdlf 23:03, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This site states Khodorkovsky had mentioned privately to Jewish leaders on several occasions that he did not consider himself Jewish so there goes the Jewish Russian tag on his article. Arniep 23:32, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think this really varies. It would be very odd not to mention in the lead that Booker T. Washington was African American or that Abraham Goldfaden was Jewish. But country should be there, too. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:15, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not against saying someone is Jewish on the header if it is relevant to why they are notable. I am just against using ethnicity-nationality instead of nationality as no other reputable encyclopedia does this. Arniep 00:33, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think that in most cases, it's inappropriate to put someone's ethnicity in the header. This came up with Paul Wolfowitz, which originally had his Jewish ethnicity in the lead paragraph. I said that there's no reason to include that unless we call Jeff Halpern a Jewish-American hockey player, Adam Horovitz a Jewish-American musician, etc.

That said, there are some cases in which ethnicity might be relevant in the first paragraph. One instance would be if the ethnicity is essential to the person's notability. It probably makes sense to call Rosa Parks an African-American civil-rights activist. Another case might be when the relationship between ethnicity and nationality is unclear. For example, medeival traveler Ibrahim ibn Jakub was, as the Polish Wikipedia calls him, a Jew of Arab origin from Spain. Nowadays, we'd just call someone from Spain a Spaniard no matter what his religion or ethnicity, but to call ibn Jakub simply a Spaniard would be confusing. -- Mwalcoff 05:18, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User:Bluebot

This bot has been used by its owner Bluemoose (talk · contribs) to move this template under the References heading. I disagree with this action, for a number of reasons:

References are usually primary resources, and an encyclopaedia is a secondary resource
References are places you are directed to to check the veracity of the text in the article: in this case, the article is based on the 1911, so you would go elsewhere to check the validity of the 1911 itself.

Is there concensus for Bluebot's actions? (I have also raised this on the 1911 template talk page and on Wikipedia talk:Bots. Noisy | Talk 10:29, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please read the Wikipedia:Manual of style and Wikipedia:Cite sources, which say to put sources under a references heading. Also, the bot isn't really "moving" the template, it is adding the heading, because at present the 1911 tag often just floats around at the bottom somewhere, which is definately wrong. Plently of articles already use the 1911 tag under a references heading as well. Martin 10:33, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Interlanguage links order

While there have been an informal poll about the desired language order of multilingual lists, with the result of an alphabetical order based on two letter code, no policies have been set up. Why? There should be a consensus on that idea. CG 12:46, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Because that poll doesn't show a consensus to change the tens of thousands of articles which use the current system (alphabet based on local language). See also Wikipedia:How to create policy. Physchim62 (talk) 13:01, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'd think that alphabet based on two-letter code is more common--and that it should be. Gene Nygaard 13:15, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, the most common schemes currently used are neither of these, are not uniform, and appear to be mostly at the whim of the various operators of bots updating those links. This decision should not be left up to those bot operators, however. Gene Nygaard 13:38, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

How are the names under which these languages are displayed in the list determined? We don't have "nynorsk språk", "Deutsche Sprache", "English language", or "La langue française". So why in the world do we have "Bahasa Indonesia" and "Bahasa Melayu" using the local equivalent of "language" in those names? Gene Nygaard 13:49, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

For the order of links, I did a quick (and not very scientific) survey a few months ago which convinced me that alphabet by local language was the consensus ordering rule on English Wikipedia (other WPs have different rules): that may have changed with bot activity, I don't know. For the language question, I don't think we're in any position to tell the Malaysians or the Indonesians how they should refer to their language.And if anyone wants to change (or even make) policy on this, Wikipedia:Interlanguage links/Proposal is ready and waiting. Physchim62 (talk) 14:04, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the order is rather chaotic and random and depends on each user opinion. That's why we should create a policy that fixes all the problem stated above, including the "Bahasa" issue, and create a bot that makes the necessary changes to each page. CG 14:35, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt that it was Malaysians or Indonesians who made that decision. Like I said, we don't add "language" or "språk" or "lingua" to most of the languages, and somebody must have made that decision. Who?

The earlier straw poll should be considered by anyone making a proposal. Throw out all but the three or four choices receiving significant support. Explain how each word work for the problem languages, such as "zh:" and "fi:" and "nds:" and "gn:" and the like. Even "simple:"; should it be under "English"?

Of course, most of them aren't really based on the "local language" name of the languages now, except in the minds of a strange few. The "ja:" language in English isn't normally called Nipponese or Nihongo, it is Japanese, yet it is often indexed as if it came under the N. We often have "zh:" at the end, but "zh-min-nin:" at the beginning. Why?

The name displayed in the list doesn't work very well, because many of them are not in the Latin alphabet. Yet we often have "fi:" indexed under Suomi rather than under Finnish, the "local language" (i.e. English for en.wikipedia.org) name of the language. Gene Nygaard 14:57, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As many editors have noted elsewhere, sorting by two-letter code is easiest and least prone to both human and machine error. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:52, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes more than two, of course: simple:, nds:, zh-min-nin:, etc. Gene Nygaard 14:57, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The links are occasionally sorted by bots. Bots seem to use pywikipediabot wikipedia.py-file as the basis for their sorting, as User:Docu pointed out in the poll. Anyone who goes about and changes the order stands the risk of all their work being undone the next time a bot is run. Noisy | Talk 15:24, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The "by two-letter-code" school of thought seems mostly motivated by ease and obviousness for those entering the codes. Would it not be best to have them automatically ordered alphabetically by language name? If no-one disagrees, I'll file an enhancement request on BugZilla. [[Sam Korn]] 15:35, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Based on whose notion of those non-unique language names? Gene Nygaard 15:46, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia's. Be consistent. Some people seem to be able to dredge an NPOV problem out of nothing. It may not entirely make sense, but as long as it's consistent it should be OK. If you think Bahasa Meleyu should be referenced otherwise, that is a completely separate matter. (Of course, that may be inconsistent, but it is correct: we think of our language as English, the French theirs as "français", the Malays theirs as "Bahasa Meleyu". It isn't our place to dictate this.) How the languages are labelled is a side-matter, however. That can very easily be changed at a later date. The ordering is far more important, and consistency is most important of all. [[Sam Korn]] 21:34, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Days articles

Why is someone is creating articles like January 21, 2003? If it's to split the January 21 and the 2003 article, I don't think it is right. The years and and the months pages are after all articles that waits to be expanded. There's no need to create an encyclopedic article for every day in the year. I propose they all be deleted and merged back to their original article, regarading that this step hasn't been discussed before. CG 18:23, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There's relevant discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/January 1, 2005, which ended in a no consensus keep.--Sean|Bla ck 00:06, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is every need. If we are doing a decent job of a world chronology, each individual day article would be 10 - 20 KB - that's far too much information to load in to year, month or dayofyear articles. It must be time for a proper proposal. dramatic 17:33, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion Reform

I'm hoping to propose the pure wiki deletion system as a new deletion policy, but first want to get as much feedback as possible in order to consider any objections. The official discussion of deletion reform has been ongoing for three months, and pure-wiki deletion seems to have garnered the most support. Please check out the project page and post any comments on the talk page. —Jwanders^Talk 21:52, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

we tried an admin only version of this recently. I was not fun.Geni 04:06, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Of course. Anyone who opposes WP:PWDS is clearly not fun. ;-) So, where can we read about this thing that was tried? I'm not sure how something admin-only could be very close to PWDS, but I want to know more about it. Friday (talk) 22:59, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

RfC - layout of bibliographies, discographies, filmographies

i added an RfC asking for feedback/input on the proposed Guidelines for the layout of Bibliographies, Filmographies, and Discographies at this page: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (lists of works)#Basic information, and ordering thereof. The principle question: In what order should basic list item info be put (title, year, isbn, notes), and with or without brackets for years/isbns? Here are some examples (Only 1 response in a week, so duplicating the request here.) --Quiddity 03:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Forms of Address

In adition to the current policy on article naming for biographical articles, it would be very usefull if we had some good guidelines on how to handle the correct forms of address. A quick reference for people to know what honorifics and Post-nominal letters are, and how they should be handled within an article. And how to handle cases where claims to these are disputed or unclear, which often causes edit wars.

Debrett's provide a usefull online guide [4] that might be used as an external reference. --John R. Barberio ^{talk, contribs} 05:19, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

CCEL

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library exists as high quality resource for learning about many topics to do with Christianity. It describes itself as "Classic Christian books in electronic format". I am not affiliated with them, however I would like to ask whether we could add links to various authors found in the following list. Would anyone have any concerns? It would strictly go into either the "Further reading" section, or into the "External links" section. - Ta bu shi da yu 07:45, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see a big problem. However, after looking at the link for Albert the Great, I notice that it takes you to page which is itself litle more that a web directory with only three outbound links, one of which is back to the Wikipedia article. I also see that they have the text of a PD translation of one of his works, which I think would be a great link. Dsmdgold 08:47, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I'll start doing this soon, if no-one further objects! - Ta bu shi da yu 07:12, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Detecting Copyvios & Afd

I have found that Special:Deadendpages and Special:Lonelypages have several candidates ripe for deletion under WP:CV and WP:AFD, however these are not updated regularly. Also, the lists as they stand are arranged alphabetically but only the first 1000 entries are available as the report. It means that articles starting with alphabet D onwards would almost not find any mention. The associated talkpages for these 2 pages are largely inactive. --Gurubrahma 13:40, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Deadendpages, at least is fairly active, it has recently been updated about one a week. As long as these updates are regular we do make steady progress, and being up to the letter C is actually a fair bit of progress. - SimonP 18:17, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I understand and appreciate your point of view, but my concern is different. Let's say I want to work on Deadend pages to make them non-deadend. However, I'm more comfortable with working on India-related articles and articles available only upto letter C may mean that I hv few articles to look at or work on. Why not have the entire database of Deadend pages at one go? I do not know abt the technical feasibility for generating such a report and the load it cd place on the servers, yet I wd believe having the complete report would be a good option. --Gurubrahma 06:46, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In theory that would be possible, and from and editor's perspective it would be quite desirable. My understanding is, however, that generating the full lists would be too great a burden on the hardware. Feel free to pester the developers about this. Only a few months ago we got the first 2000 items rather than just the first 1000, even going back to that would be a major improvement. - SimonP 16:02, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It might be nice if the weekly generation started at different points in the alphabet different weeks, instead of always from the start of the alphabet. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:48, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Changes to the articles on major cities

Hello, I was having a debate at Talk:Moscow with some posters who want to glide over the problems or the unpleasant aspects of Moscow, when after arguing for inclusion I realised, on looking around, that most of the articles on cities try to present a sort of tourist agency view on everything. Sure, the best aspects of each city need emphasis, but I think it's extremely deceptive to talk about large cities without mentioning the problems they face. I just noticed for instance that London makes no mention of the squalor that is visible in many parts of the city and which has been one of its major attributes for ages - in the past two centuries alone these depressing parts of London, or the experiences from within, have given rise to many of the great works of sociology, literature and so on. I think there needs to be a change in the approach to writing such articles - apart from mentioning all the wonderful museums, galleries and other tourist spots, there needs to be some perspective offered to the curious reader, not just the kind of information that any tourist brochure or guidebook will give you; in fact, even some travel books are more honest about the areas to avoid, among other things, than Wikipedia is! Of course, every large city has more or less the same kinds of problems. But they all manifest themselves in different ways and to different degrees; corruption for instance is a problem in every part of the world, but it is much more widespread or common at lower levels in certain cities than others; squalor is also visible in every major American or English city, but to a much greater extent than in other industrialized nations like Canada and Australia; housing projects are extremely common now but they are much more numerous - in fact overwhelming and depressing - in, say, South American cities like Sao Paulo, than the ones outside Vienna or Frankfurt; public transport in London is shockingly overpriced and a lot less reliable compared to the equally extensive public transport in Moscow. Not everyone who lives in a big city is necessarily a middle-class, median income, lifelong resident, and the majority of those who aren't face a lot of difficulties, and so would an independent, budget traveller. These articles need to be more rounded out to reflect actual life in these cities, not just a listing of popular spots, and I'd like to see some guidelines to this end. -- Simonides 00:11, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I posted this at proposals but it probably belongs here
- I responded at proposals before I saw this here. Feel free to move my response over here & turn that into just a link to discussion in one place. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:52, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, I think we can stick to that page for now but I'd like to leave this here so that someone will consider drafting a policy. -- Simonides 06:53, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have no problem with this so long as you adhere to NPOV and don't turn the entire article into a city-bashing page. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:53, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know why you think 1) I'm going to write up every article and 2) if I do, that I'm out to do some city-bashing. On a side note, I don't know why people in general get so defensive when facts are discussed. It's like with domestic American politics - any presentation of real data about Republicans makes so many Americans go all shifty and woozy and complain about how everyone is "Anti-American", "Bush-Bashing" and their imperialism is oh-so-vicitimised. -- Simonides 06:53, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I concur with Simonides' position that most city pages need some balancing-out of bias. A year ago, I tried to balance out the boosterism on the Los Angeles page with some information about the city's serious violent crime problem (it has gangs where they initiate new members by handing them a gun and telling them to kill a man to prove their loyalty). This project has been a big tug-of-war, but I think we have all finally arrived at a consensus --- although one which I feel is still flawed as the COMPSTAT statistics fail to reflect the fact that L.A.'s crime rate is still much higher than most California cities. --Coolcaesar 05:46, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I too concur that cities are prone to gloss bordering on collective POV and find simonides' side note regarding the 'wooziness' of some people when, as he puts it, 'real data' is presented. These two issues meet in a most ugly way on the page about Cuba. where the prevailing U.S. policy/opinion is overbearing in removing even the slightest degree of balance. The page borders on McCarthyesque anti-comunist propaganda. Clearly that view is a valid one in the circumstances, but it should be tempered with some data that recognises the fact that Cuba has a national identity that is not perceived entirely through the filter of U.S. foreign policy.

I am at a loss regarding how to tame the excesses of the single contributor who seems to have taken upon himself the role of cuban information minister in exile, He is a fulltime wikipedian who declines to register, and has written almost all related/linked content on the country singlehandedly. Then I tell myself, wait a minute, wikipedia is american, its servers are based in florida, perhaps I should just see it as a public exploration of U.S. opinion rather than the International resource I mistook it for originaly.DavidP 17:11, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to modify WP:NOT an image gallery

The nomination of Gallery of Socialist Realism for deletion (AfD) has lead me to propose changing the policy that WP:NOT an image gallery as it relates to galleries of art and similar topics. Please comment on the proposal at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not#Proposal to modify WP:NOT an image gallery. Dsmdgold 05:46, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Use lowercase for template parameter names

I suggest adoption of a standard that all template parameter names be lowercase. See Wikipedia_talk:Template namespace#Standard for lowercase parameter_names. (SEWilco 16:30, 15 November 2005 (UTC))[reply]

How to split an article and preserve edit history

When I split text off from an article onto a separate page, how do I preserve the edit history in a way that meets GFDL requirements? The answer I was given on the Help Desk said to ignore the license requirements and just write "text copied from Foo article" on the edit summary. But that sounds dubious, and I wanted to check with people before I added that information to Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page or Wikipedia:How to break up a page. -- Creidieki 21:13, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There isn't really a way (AFAIK) to split specific edits off like that. Just add the notice saying you copied the text. -Greg Asche (talk) 21:37, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I believe part of the theory is that the edit History will still be available at the other article, so as long as you leave a link to it, it's probably technically enough. However, I have seen some people go further (perhaps in case the source article gets deleted for some reason), and paste the source article's history (upto that point) in the Talk page of the split-off article. On the otherhand, copyright stuff is NOT one of my specialties, so hopefully someone more versed in that can provide any further clarifications necessary. (And I also believe histories can be merged, but not split.) Waterguy 23:46, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Football (soccer)

I think we could use some guidance here. Soccer fans had been referring to their sport as "football" on Current sports events, despite the mentions of several other types of "football" games on the page. I was under the impression that the compromise term "football (soccer)" had been created to be used in potentially ambiguous or controversial situations. I changed all of the "football" references to "football (soccer)" and put a note on the talk page asking people to use the latter term in the future. A British user objected and changed all the references back. He said soccer is the world game, the true football, etc., etc. and could not be convinced to use the compromise term. So I put a note on Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts. After doing so, three more British people came to talk:Current sports events and, rather than lecturing the "football" guy for breaking what I thought was Wikipedia practice, supported him. Then an American came to the article page and changed all the "football" references to "soccer," screwing up all the wikilinks in the process.

How can we avoid revert wars and another tedious American English vs. British English argument? -- Mwalcoff 23:49, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would dispute your characterisation of the people who joined the discussion: Violetriga is British of course, as am I (though I have been regularly contributing to Current sports events for nearly three years now and can hardly be accused of "just coming to it"); however Sam Vimes is Norwegian and Andres C. is Ecuadorian, so plainly the preference for using "Football" to describe the World Game is not limited to British contributors. As I said in talk:Current sports events, my preference, which I have used for well over a year, is to use piped links so [[Football (soccer)|]] appears as "Football" but still points to the correct underlying article describing the game. I've been here long enough to remember the original tedious debate over the name, and as I recall the present solution was adopted specifically so that the "pipe trick" could be used; it's only later that gridiron fans came along and insisted on removing the pipe, which results in what I agree with Jooler is the damned ugly "Football (soccer)" actually appearing on the page. -- Arwel (talk) 01:32, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My apologies for mischaracterizing the users' nationality. I wasn't including Andres among the three people I mentioned and assumed Sam Vimes was British from his contributions list. Not that there's anything wrong with bring British, of course.

I thought the "pipe trick" was meant for situations in which the meaning was unambiguous. It doesn't seem to make sense to me to create the term "football (soccer)" and use it only for the title of the article on the sport. We might as well just call the article itself "football." -- Mwalcoff 03:25, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking as an American, and one who's usually pretty militant about spelling, I find football totally unobjectionable so long as it's wikilinked. Just plain "football" has too much potential for confusion, though. —Cryptic (talk) 02:31, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As another American, I also don't see any problems other then the extra typing with using football. It seems such a simple solution. Context should make it clear which type of football is being discussed in an article. Vegaswikian 03:34, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think there are two separate issues here: having the round-ball football content at the name "football (soccer)", and what should be displayed. I think having that content at "[[football (soccer)]]" is good, since there are also other things named football, so just "[[football]]" is best suited to be a disambiguation page.

That said, I don't think people should get uptight about leaving the full name unhidden as "football (soccer)". That is in line with other things that have different names in different countries; I think both terms should always be visible, such as "twin town (sister city)", "apartment (flat)", "lift (elevator)", "gasoline (petrol)", "maize (corn)" and so forth. The over-riding motive should be communicating with the reader regardless of which form of English they learned, NOT pushing some POV point about which term is more proper or accurate. Waterguy 23:39, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I personally believe the term football (soccer) to be a case of systemic bias, more specifically, USA-centric bias. Why? Well, it's pretty obvious that the two main sports that football can refer to would be American Football and the round-ball football - soccer. There are a few different games, but the rest are less popular. Now, in the USA, "football" refers to American Football. Elsewhere, it refers to the round-ball football, soccer or whatever you'd like to call it. This football is quite possibly the most popular sport worldwide. What's more, American Football is not popular except in America (and Canada), so no European or Asian reader would assume just the word "football" itself to refer to American football.

Thus, I would prefer to always refer to American Football as exactly that, American Football. It's completely non-ambigious, no European would imagine that to refer to round-ball football, and no American would be confused either. Solver 17:48, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would agree 100% on that rule, Solver (Full disclosure: I'm Swiss). Peter S. 18:55, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Just to confuse things a little more... in Australia (where I'm from), even though mostly the language is much closer to British than US english, the word "football" generally refers to one of Rugby League, Rugby Union or AFL, and we use "soccer" for the topic under discussion. People there are generally aware that most of the world means "soccer" when they say "football". The american game is known as either "American Football" or "grid-iron", but I've never heard the term "grid-iron" in my last two years living in the US, which I find very puzzling. Dmharvey 19:08, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Gridiron" (without a hyphen) is an occasionally-encountered colloquialism for (American) football in the USA, but not all that common these days. "Pigskin" (referring to the ball allegedly being made from the skin of pigs, even though it isn't actually) is another term that sometimes comes up in referring to this sport. However, just plain "football" is the most common way of referring to it. I would classify both "gridiron" and "pigskin" as slightly archaic-sounding words most often used by bored sportswriters making overly labored attempts to "pep up" their articles by using different words from the straightforward ones they have to use over and over. *Dan T.* 19:41, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Gridiron is a poetic word for the playing field itself. You might hear, "He was one of the greatest players to ever step on the gridiron," but you won't hear, "Let's go play some gridiron" in the US. -- Mwalcoff 01:19, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Calling Rugby "football" sure seems funny :). Dmharvey makes an important point about recognition of the term "football", too. As far as my experience goes, Americans are very well aware that, used by a non-American, "football" is most likely to refer to round-ball football, not the American variety. That's the whole most important thing about the issue, I think. In countries where "football" commonly means something else, people are aware of its meaning in the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, though, people aren't always aware that "football" can refer to American Football or other games, and many people don't even know the word soccer, which is only used where "football" typically means something else. Solver 21:51, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Rugby is sometimes called "Australian Rules Football" here in the United States. I also think that most American's know that American Football, is just that, American and that the word football usually refers to the other sport (soccer) inthe rest of the world. Morris 22:54, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Just to prevent even more confusion, I must point out that Australian Rules Football is another sport entirely from either form of Rugby, and is more akin to Irish (Gaelic football) - indeed teams playing the Irish and Australian codes play each other at International Rules Football, which is a sort of compromise betwen the two codes. -- Arwel (talk) 00:22, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Just to clarify the discussion -- the question is not what to call American football, which we all agree should be called "American football" in cases of potential ambiguity. The question is what to call soccer in the same circumstances: "soccer," "football," or "football (soccer)."

If the key is to avoid ambiguity and not to favor one brand of English over another, I think "soccer" or "football (soccer)" should be used. I had been under the impression that the latter term was coined just for these situations.

I would be very surprised to find very many English speakers who don't know the word "soccer." I've seen it in British newspapers, and even the monolingual Czech guy at my neighborhood convenience store knew the word, although he pronounced it "soatzer."

(Incidentally, I've been told that Czechs refer to soccer as "European football" or "classical football" when there's a potential ambiguity.) -- Mwalcoff 22:19, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really think this is an issue of US-English vs. Brit-English, it's more a cultural difference between the terms. By the way, many English speakers indeed don't know the word "soccer". Why? Well, I'm thinking here of those who don't speak English natively but learned it (which probably means the majority of non-North American and non-UK readers). I am European, and I know that English learners will learn the word football, referring to soccer-football, but not the word soccer.

I strongly oppose using "soccer". The term will confuse a good portion of non-native-English readers. I see two options. 1. Always use "football (soccer)". 2. Use "football (soccer)" in many places, but use "football" when it's obvious from the context that the soccer-football is meant. For example, articles on players could initially say that "X is a football (soccer) player", but then use simply "football" for the remainder of the article. This is what I believe to be better. By the way, yes, I've heard (in real life) people saying "European football" in ambigous cases, but not anything else. "American" and "European" are clearly opposite, whereas European languages don't even have a word like soccer. The word they have is also similar to "football" in most languages - fussball, futbols, futbol, etc. Solver 22:45, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I was starting from what you call option 2. The terms "American football" and "football (soccer)" need only be used in cases of potential ambiguity. In most articles, that will only be the first reference.

But that doesn't solve the question of what we do about Current sports events. If we say that "Football: Premier League" is unambiguous, than isn't "Football: Super Bowl" just as unambiguous? In my opinion, neither is unambiguous. Few Americans have heard of the Premier League, so they can't be expected to know it's soccer. Even if they figure it out, they'll still ask why British naming conventions are used over all others on the page. -- Mwalcoff 01:09, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Context is everthing! Your hypothetical American Football fan may not have heard of the Premier League, but presumably they will be aware that it's not American Football, ergo by process of elimination it must refer to "soccer". Similarly a round-ball fan will most likely know that there are no "Bowls" in his game of interest. Actually, you are correct that "Premier League" is not unambiguous as, according to soccerway.com it's the name of the principal division in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Libya, Russia, and Ukraine, not forgetting all the Spanish-speaking countries that have a Primera Divisiôn, but the English Premier League is unquestionably the widest-followed league of that name worldwide, and in an English-language context is normally the one referred to. -- Arwel (talk) 02:38, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Your hypothetical American Football fan may not have heard of the Premier League, but presumably they will be aware that it's not American Football, ergo by process of elimination it must refer to 'soccer'."

Not necessarily. My guess is the average high-school-educated person in, say, Dubuque, Iowa may not know that British people call soccer "football." In the U.S., the word "football" always refers to the American game. -- Mwalcoff 02:47, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thankfully this Encyclopaedia's intended audience reaches far wider than your average under-educated US high-school student. And presumably the purpose of this Encyclopaedia is to educate them, not leave them in ignorance. Jooler 07:56, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Another option is to go with "dribbling sport" as described by the RFU museum Year 1863 ;-)

Other rugby clubs follow this lead and do not join the Football Association. Without the participation of these clubs many of the Rugby School football influences are dropped from the FA’s laws and the brand new football game (soccer) will become an almost exclusively dribbling sport.

--Philip Baird Shearer 23:53, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This subject rugger soccer etc is described on the Football page and is done to death in the archives (Talk:Football). I think I have read all the points made here apart from the one about "European football". What does that make the Six Nations Championship? Perhapse Kiwi football :-( --Philip Baird Shearer 00:06, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As Arwel points out the compromise football (soccer) was made and accepted, after a huge amount of rancorous discussion, simply because it allowed the the pipe trick in running text. The use of "football (soccer)" was intended only for the article title, prior to the argument, the article at 'football' had been about Association football. When used without the pipe trick in running text it looks just damned ugly!. As an article title 'Soccer' alone was wholeheartedly rejected by Britons and many Europeans, 'Football' alone was rejected by Americans and a very loud Irishman. In the specific case that Mwalcoff is speaking of, the context usually clear. This should be an end of the matter. Jooler 01:31, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Here, here!! The soccer establishment does not have a mortgage on the word football, remembering that the laws of Australian Football were first codified in 1859. In terms of the history of all modern football codes - that is prehistoric. As has been agreed previously: Football (soccer) it is!!--pippudoz - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 05:51, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Cricket Articles

I was surprised to find a large number of cricket articles (results of various matches), such as Sussex_v_Middlesex_4_July_2005 and Durham_v_Leicestershire_1_July_2005. How does this fit into Policy? Is this material part of an Encyclopedia? LoopZilla 09:43, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

They are currently being merged into bigger articles. This debate has occupied the better part of three monthsm but it will be moot soon. There has recently been a mass AFD of all of them, which resulted in a consensus to merge. As did the one before that. As did the one before that. As did the one before that. As did the one before that. As did the one before that. Basically, it fits into policy by not violating policy. It's part of an encyclopaedia because we say it's part of our encyclopaedia. Possibly the best place for you to see is Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Sports results. The anti-cricket faction does, however, appear to be dying down now. The basic reason for keeping them is "why not?" Contrary to popular belief, this is a perfectly good argument. [[Sam Korn]] 10:29, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry I am late (into the discussion). It is clearly stated (as policy) that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information and it is this that leads to me ask, what is the granularity of the facts in our encyclopedia? This has been an issue for me personally, ever since I added some local history information from the area where I live. How much detail can I add? LoopZilla 09:28, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Shouldn't incoming Article links be removed before Images are deleted? (so articles aren't left with a bunch of red links)

I've been running across a lot of Image red links, and at least some of the time it is because the Image used to exist, but has been deleted for one reason or another (no source, incompatible license terms, etc.). I don't have a problem with them being deleted, but shouldn't the Article links to them get removed at the same time? For example, Charleston, South Carolina currently has a visible File:CharlestonSC.jpg, because the pic was deleted[5] but the link was left (List of flags also wasn't updated[6]). Why shouldn't incoming Article link removal be part of the standard Image deletion procedure? Waterguy 22:34, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Because there are so goddamn many images in need of deletion. There are approximately 4,000 unused images tagged as "fair use". There are approximately 9,000 images with no source information. There over 2,000 images with no copyright information. --Carnildo 23:03, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, couldn't this be solved with a cleanup-bot that does both the image-removing and the link-removing in the articles? Peter S. 23:11, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The odds of a bot with image deletion powers being aproved are so close to zero they can saftely be ignored.Geni 12:22, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, how about a program that a user can set in motion instead of deleting the image. It goes out, looks up where the image is used, and posts a summary as step 1. The user can then confirm that he wants to delete the image and all its references with a second click. Or the user can only delete the image, or the image and a selection of the references, all from available from the interface of this summary page. Result: As fast as before for the user, but no empty references anymore. Peter S. 12:49, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What I think is more likely is that images to be deleted are placed in a category by a human (Category:Images to be unlinked perhaps), a bot goes through and removes all links to pictures that are in that category (from pages in specified namespaces only?). When the bot has removed all links to a picture it has been tasked with removing, it moves them to a different category (perhaps Category:Images pending deletion). A human then goes through the second category, checking that nobody has linked to the picture since the bot finished and removes any links that have been created, and then deletes the image. This leaves the drudge work to the bot and leaves the deletion in the hands of a human. Thryduulf 13:13, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. You've got my vote on this process. Peter S. 01:15, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Links in articles should be removed as part of the image deletion process. Links to talk pages, user pages etc. might be best left: take the example of a talk page discussion as to whether to use an image—it makes little sense to remove all trace of the fact that an image was linked to the discussion. In defense of admins who forget to do this (I cannot guarantee 100% efficiency myself), the vast majority of images to be deleted are unlinked, it can be easy to forget to check the links section. I'm not sure that image redlinks are that much worse than article redlinks. Physchim62 (talk) 08:42, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Also, whenever I fix disambigs or avoid redirects, I don't edit User talk pages because I don't want to set off people's new message banner- it's strikingly annoying to see your orange box only to find it was a bot or something.--Sean|Bla ck 10:45, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Country naming convention

There is currently a new proposal for a naming convention for articles about countries: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (countries). --bainer (talk) 00:05, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I bet some people are not going to want to write Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for Libya or "Palestinian Territory, Occupied" for the West Bank and Gaza Strip. -- Mwalcoff 00:17, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Norse mythology naming convention vote notice

A new proposal on the representation of Norse mythology names is now up for a vote. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 00:51, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

And for those who wouldn't pay attention because Norse mythology isn't your thing, be aware that the "vote" they are proposing would force the English-language Wikipedia articles to be named following 13th century Icelandic words instead of their common English ones... It completely violates standard naming conventions here, and, looking at the names of the supporters, appears to be being pushed by members of foreign countries. Make sure you show up and vote against this really insane idea that English language words are inappropriate on English Wikipedia. DreamGuy 02:26, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That comment is enough to make me go and vote in favour of the proposal. A "member of a foreign country" 11:20, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the heads-up. I voted in favour :-) Your description here misrepresents the policy, which says to use English names if one exists and to use the Norse spelling if there is no common English equivalent.dramatic 17:36, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Audio hosting vs. linking

I know we've decided against hosting mp3s at Wikipedia. However, Let It Be... Naked has something a little different: hotlinks to WalMart mp3 samples. I'm guessing this is at least against policy. Deltabeignet 07:34, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's a classic example of bandwidth theft. It's probably also a copyvio. --Carnildo 08:31, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In France, it's called recel de contrefaçon en bande organisée, punishable by up to five years imprisonment and/or a 500,000€ fine... Physchim62 (talk) 11:32, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Royals & (other) nobility - two competing naming conventions guideline formats

The discussion whether it should be

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles)

OR

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Western nobility)

is still not concluded.

The first of these options equals the second, apart from: In the first option wikipedia:naming conventions (common names) is described as an exception to the names and titles NC guideline. The second option has the same content, only this option starts from the common names principle, providing solutions where that principle is not unambiguous. This way of putting it (that in practice does not lead to differences in page name all that often), is however better suited to link nobility naming conventions to the central ideas of wikipedia:naming conventions (people).

Someone thought it wise to hasten the discussion by listing the "Western nobility" NC guideline at MfD, see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Western nobility)

Anyway, both options are discussed at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (names and titles)#proposed tag, that's where I would group the discussion.

--Francis Schonken 10:00, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Can one use one photo in more than one article?

I wonder if someone could tell me if there is a policy about using one photograph in more than one article? I have posted a couple of photographs which I thought were pertinent to two entries - but it occurred to me that this may be a "no-no". Please let me know if this practice is discouraged, or whether it is O.K.

Many thanks,

John Hill John Hill 00:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly. Extra images in articles are encouraged, as long as they are relevant to the subject, illustrative, and not redundant. — Dan | Talk 01:00, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, re-using photographs is a practice that we very much encourage. Raul654 10:38, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Though please make sure that they're appropriately licensed - if they're fair-use images, we'd discourage using them in multiple articles. On the other hand, if you contributed them yourself, this shouldn't be an issue... Shimgray | talk | 13:14, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Elected officers of student societies

The Cambridge Union Society is obviously notable, because of its age and past members, but how are the current or recent officers of any interest to anyone outside the society itself? A recently added article on a student society is that on the Oxford Law Society, "famous within Oxford due to its reputation for hosting large free parties and quality balls" (is it famous for anything else?), which has a long list of current committee members, but nothing on history or anything else of more general interest.

We should have some guidelines on student societies in general (as current deletion policy seem to be very inconsistent), but also on what to include in such articles, when the notability of the society itself is not in question. Former active members who have gone on to do notable things should be included, as it helps establish the notability of the society. Current or very recent elected officers should definitely be left out, unless there are exceptional reasons to include any such individual. Tupsharru 10:19, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

We've been over this one, about a year ago. They are certainly worth mentioning within the article about the society; if it is their only claim to fame it is not sufficient notability to merit an article about an individual; on the other hand, if they are borderline notable, it would be a point in favor of an article. (Thus far, I believe, consensus from that discussion; hereafter, I put on my wings.) For example, if someone was both a former president of the Cambridge Union and was now the youngest counsellor in the history of Tunbridge Wells, and also fronted a rock band that had recorded only on a small label and never played outside of Kent, none of those alone would probably suffice for an article, but being former head of the Cambridge might raise her over the bar for notability. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:07, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You may have misunderstood my intention, but by "inclusion" I meant inclusion in the article, not as separate entries in Wikipedia. Under what conditions should people be mentioned in, for instance, the article on the Cambridge Union Society?

I agree that people who are notable for other reasons should be mentioned, and that is not really an issue. The problem is whether people who are not in any way notable should be mentioned in these articles. I can imagine a person being notable within the context of the society, for instance as part of a small circle of otherwise notable founders, but just never ended up doing anything significant later. But what about people who are not even that, but just mentioned because of the recentness of their association with the society?

Macaulay and Keynes should obviously be mentioned in the Cambridge Union Society article, but why do we, the general readership outside Cambridge, need to know that Luke Pearce and Alyson Thompson were among the elected officers for the Michaelmas term 2005?

In fact, I can easily accept the List of Cambridge Union Society Presidents, a list of presidents throughout the history of the society, as a reasonable proportion of these are likely to be notable. But with student societies, the most recent officers are almost certain to be the (so far) least notable ones, so why should those be highlighted in an article on a society that has existed for 190 years? It strikes me as either vanity or directory-type information that doesn't belong in Wikipedia, regardless of the obvious notability of the society and qualities of the rest of the article. I just doesn't want to get into an edit war by starting to delete these tables of recent officers where I find them, so I am asking for a policy on the issue. Tupsharru 05:03, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Licensing for community images

I have created a proposal which would allow the use of non-free images in special cases outside the encyclopedia. See Wikipedia:Licensing for community images; comments welcome. Thue | talk 17:04, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

April Fools

I propose the following policy for handling April Fools Day:

Allow the creation of April Fools Day subpages, i.e. X/AprilFools, but require the page to end with an {{AprilFools}}.
When April Fools Day begins, a script identifies any page X with a subpage of the form X/AprilFools, moves X to X/NotAprilFools, and moves X/AprilFools to X.
When April Fools Day end, a script identifies any page X with a subpage of the form X/NotAprilFools, moves X to X/AprilFools, and moves X/NotAprilFools to X.
On April Fools Day, {{AprilFools}} will generate a link to the /NotAprilFools subpage.
April Fools pranks which do not follow the policy of including a {{AprilFools}} and preserving the original page as /NotAprilFools will be considered vandalism.
After April Fools Day, votes will be collected for the best /AprilFools pages, which will be kept, all others will be deleted after one week. People are free to move the losers to user space during this week.

The intent of the policy is to (a) streamline the correction of April Fools pranks, (b) maintain core wikipedia functionality on April Fools Day, (c) redirect the efforts of April Fools pranksters to higher quality & more interesting pranks, (d) allow wikified preperation of pranks ahead of time, and (e) maintain goodwill between everyone. Actually, we don't even need the scripts really, we could just say that pranks will only be permitted if they follow the /NotAprilFools and {{AprilFools}} guidlines. I just thought the scripts kept it cleaner. Thoughts? - JeffBurdges 15:19, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But last year's utter chaos was so much more fun. — Dan | Talk 15:33, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But haven't you heard that having fun is now against policy and may result in an indefinite block if engaged in repeatedly? Filiocht | The kettle's on 15:40, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect very few April Fools pranksters would be aware of these rules. I think it might be better to add a disclaimer on April 1 like the current one about the image server suggesting that readers be particularly suspicious of articles whose last modified date is April 1 and understand recent edits may well be April Fools pranks. We could also add something on the edit page asking anyone making April Fools edits to please remember to undo their changes later (although many won't, and mentioning this might encourage more such edits - see WP:BEANS). -- Rick Block (talk) 17:31, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Many of the best pranks were executed by ordinary & serious wikipedians who were quite insulted to have their hard work destroyed as vandalism within a few minutes. If you want a more technical solution, one could imagine having an "April Fools Edit" check box, which would merge such changes into an alternative development tree, which could be used on April 1. At the other end of the spectrum, one can imagine reverting all April 1 edits. If pranksters really will not follow the rules, one could try to follow the above guidlines, but allow seriously messed up articles to be reverted to pre-fools state, with individual editors responsible for sorting out specific good edits from the f ools edits. At any rate, I think the above guidlines would be a good show of faith to the honest pranksters that wikipedia is not humorless. People may get ideas for April Fools Day a month or two in advance, being able to implement them in /AprilFools ahead would be a nice gesture. - JeffBurdges 21:47, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe we should consider implementing such rules by appeal to the better nature of wikipedian interested in general article? If Rick Block is right that few people would follow the policy, we could try the following:

Create the {{AprilFools}} template, which links to ./NotAprilFools and an page explaining the idea/policy.
Recrute a few people known to write good April Fools pages to follow the policy, and execute the movment rules suggested above.
Hope that humor prevails, i.e. ./AprilFools pages survive until April 1st and tolerance is shown on April 1st.

Thoughts? Does anyone have something they would like to see in an April Fools policy which this does not provide? - JeffBurdges 01:23, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But.. Doesn't that miss the whole point of April Fools Day? If I want to have fun, I will. Everybody knows that the Internet goes a little funny in April 1st, and Wikipedia is no exeption. This is just instruction creep.--Sean|Black 01:33, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, you may be right, feature creep is bad. :) But I feel this is more a problem with my first proposal. The second proposal has almost not policy element to it, just a "pseudo-policy" page asking everyone to be tolerant of April Fools edits which follow a good system for restoring the original page. As for fun, yes, I'm sure plenty of April Fools pranks will want to violate such a "policy". No worries, so long as it makes life easier on some people, either by allowing them to collaboratively develop the prank in ./AprilFools, or by preventing other authors from messing it up. - JeffBurdges 01:39, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think the fundamental problem is that on April Fools day there really isn't any way to tell garden variety vandalism from an intentional April Fools joke. So, do we let all vandalism stand for a day (probably not acceptable) or make some effort to identify and tolerate "good faith" pranks (which might encourage same)? Suggesting we'll tolerate pranks only from those already in the know (it's OK, wink, wink, if you've copied the article here and added this template) seems kind of anti-wiki to me. Perhaps rather than revert, we add an {{April Fools}} template (which we could decide to be visible or invisible) so the tagged articles can be fixed on April 2. BTW - lest you think I'm a humorless old goat, please see the following edit: [7]. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:17, 23

November 2005 (UTC)

To tell the truth, I'm in favor of having a notice somewhere (MediaWiki:Recentchanges, maybe) that says something about it. I don't think we should just let the encyclopedia get turned into sewage, but I don't want us to be a bunch of humourless snobs, either.--Sean|Black 03:27, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's a nice idea, but it sounds too complicated. April fools day is like carnival - for one day, all rules are broken. I think there should be only 1 rule (already said above): we should ask anyone making April Fools edits to please remember to undo their changes the next day. I think with making this "rule" official, more or less everything will be quite fine. Peter S. 03:36, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

One technical measure of which I would approve is a lock on the MediaWiki namespace for the day. Messing about with the site interface is, in my opinion, going a bit too far. — Dan | Talk 03:59, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What do we need special policy for? The normal rules apply.Geni 04:32, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

With the proviso that, on that day, the one about breaking all rules is paramount. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:02, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User talk pages

I'd like to propose a policy with regard to user-space talk pages (specifically User_talk:xxxx). It seems to me that a user should not be able to simply delete content from talk pages unless it is truly vandalism. Case in point, these edits by Pigsonthewing (this user is currently up for RFAr, and has also had an RFC filed against him, both of which he has ignored or is ignoring) : [8] [9] (user removed warnings from his talk page, warnings that lead to him being banned for 48 hours) [10] [11] [12]. I realize this user is probably an extreme case, but these edits of his smack of revisionst history: an attempt to cover-up peoples opinions of him. Sure you can browse the history to try and find every point which the user removed content (content removed with an invalid, IMO, edit summary). But most users tend to archive their talk pages, not remove content they disagree with outright.

My proposal is simple: users should not remove content from their talk page unless it is to a) archive that content on a sub-page or b) remove a very limited definition of vandalism (to be discussed if this topic leads anywhere). Users should absolutely, and under no circumstances, remove warnings given by other editors unless it is to archive them. I do believe there should be a process where an administrator can intervene and remove content that abusive (or wrong, in the case of warnings), but I think it's silly that the kind of edits above are, as far as I know, within the rules/guidelines/policies of Wikipedia.

Opinions/thoughts? —Locke Cole ^{(talk) (e-mail)} 00:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No, archival is not how all of us deal with our desk, and is not the only way to handle wiki content.. and conversations frequently just come to an end. The optimal solution is simply to make more special/procedural pages for users easier to access, via listings on Community Portal, allowing more people to see a users's troubles. - JeffBurdges 01:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Alright, fair point. =) But one gets the impression from the edits above that this user is pretty much giving themself the last word on their talk page (note that this user is deleting responses on his talk page, but still leaving parts of the prior discussion in place). That's the behavior I think needs to be addressed via a rule/policy/guideline. —Locke Cole ^{(talk) (e-mail)} 11:38, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

Policy archive

encyclopedic v unencyclopedic Definition please

My frustrations

Image deletion

major "Be Bold" guideline revision/reversal

Cookie cutter response to vandalism

Fair use and GDFL

Unnecessary images are killing performance, and should be banned

Spamlinks or not?

Frustration with make technical articles accessible policy

Wikipedia: Working the system

Copyright on Lists

Article for each date

People inserting ethnicity instead of nationality in bio headers

User:Bluebot

Interlanguage links order

Days articles

Deletion Reform

RfC - layout of bibliographies, discographies, filmographies

Forms of Address

CCEL

Detecting Copyvios & Afd

Changes to the articles on major cities

Proposal to modify WP:NOT an image gallery

Use lowercase for template parameter names

How to split an article and preserve edit history

Football (soccer)

Cricket Articles

Shouldn't incoming Article links be removed before Images are deleted? (so articles aren't left with a bunch of red links)

Country naming convention

Norse mythology naming convention vote notice

Audio hosting vs. linking

Royals & (other) nobility - two competing naming conventions guideline formats

Can one use one photo in more than one article?

Elected officers of student societies

Licensing for community images

April Fools

User talk pages

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