Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 12

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals).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

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Coordinate and map information discussion

A discussion about including coordinate and map information in articles in in progress at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Geolinks-cityscale. -- SEWilco (talk) 15:33, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Make permanent articles

Some articles, once deemed to be entirely accurate, up-to-date, and of very good quality, should be saved in that state until new information regarding that topic is discovered. This applies best to scientific articles, as the general public often makes edits to perfectly accurate scientific articles because they believe wrongly that the article contains errors. Making an article semi-permanent would firstly assure that an article portrays correct information and secondly protect against vandalism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.84.10.3 (talk) 20:58, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

That goes against what Wikipedia is. This has been discussed several times before, and I'll try and find a link. - Rjd0060 (talk) 22:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

This should really be added to WP:PEREN. -- Kesh (talk) 23:25, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Articles are never done. Even when no new information on the subject is forthcoming, views concerning it are constantly shifting, and if nothing else organization and flow can always be improved. Besides that, it'd be a mess figuring out how to decide whether an article is "finished" or not. Dcoetzee 23:36, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Without disagreeing with the comment immediately above, you might want to take a look at Veropedia and WP:EIW#Stable. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:54, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

We already have "permanent articles", after a fashion; these are the versions of articles that have passed as Good Articles or Featured Articles, and are listed at the {{ArticleHistory}} box on the talk page. I would support a move to make such approved versions of articles more accessible to the non-wiki-savvy reader.--Pharos (talk) 03:42, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Automated webcite tool

It would be nice to develop automated webcite tools that would issue requests to archive pages linked from Wikipedia pages using webcite, and then link to those archived pages instead of the "active" pages. This would prevent linkrot problems, and relieve editors of the immense effort of archiving all the web references cited in an article and then link to those archived pages. Is this possible? Comments?--Filll (talk) 00:17, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Much - probably the majority - of pages that are cited are copyrighted, and the owners - newspapers particularly - would have strong objections to having the pages copied to an online archive. Making it easy for Wikipedia editors to do so is (in my opinion) to invite a lawsuit from (say) the Newspaper Association of America. I think it would be more fruitful to try to get editors to do full cites; that way, even if the link goes bad, the source can still be checked offline. Or via archive.org if there is no offline source. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:01, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Email

Description

[create an email server so people can have wikimail or email Such as [email protected] or [email protected]

Interested Wikipedians (please add your name)

1. [--Mgeheren 01:45, 23 August 2007 (UTC)]
2. Bernstein2291 23:33, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

• It would be a big project but may get a lot more hits to wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kintetsubuffalo (talk • contribs) 00:17, 29 December 2007
  • This isn't a WikiProject, it's a proposal. Not a particularly good one, in my opinion (see WP:NOT regarding what Wikipedia is not); regardless, please take it to the village pump page for proposals. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:09, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Agreed Last time I checked, wikipedia.org email addresses were reserved for Wikimedia Foundation personnel. This should go through the Village Pump. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 10:00, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
• What's the point? How does competing with gmail do anything but take up more server space? Mr.Z-man 04:22, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Not only that, but the reason stated as "getting a lot more hits" is really not one of Wikipedia's goals anymore. We've got all the hits we need. Equazcion •✗/C • 04:31, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

• The idea of "Wikimail, the free email that anyone can read and edit" is a bit disconcerting... EVula // talk // ☯ // 06:30, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

• what do you have to hide? (i read your email daily). the_undertow ^talk 07:38, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Image System Proposals

I'm relativly new here, but I've created a couple of proposals about our fair-use impage upload and management system here User:Mbisanz/ImageSystemProposal and am looking for comments or smarter users who would know how to code such things, if there was a conensus for them. Mbisanz (talk) 06:52, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Too many redundant stubs

There are approximately 300,000 species of plant and an estimated over 1,000,000 species of animal. It seems that some people want to have an article on every one of them. There are multiple bots whose job is to create these articles from other websites. All of these bot-generated articles are very short stubs at first, and very few make it anywhere beyond that. Take for example genus Aloeides. Of its eleven species articles, not a single one has any edits but its bot creation way back in July. I have seen countless others of these useless stubs while random paging and new article patrolling. I call them useless because they are; not a single word of unique information is in any one of them.

Another example from a main culprit, User:Polbot, is Keizaburō Saeki, one of many so-called renowned Japanese photographers, all generated from a single website list of 328 of them. I find it hard to believe that a one-sentence article is useful. A single list should be made with all of them.

My proposition is simple: An article about something should be created only if it has enough unique material to warrant its own page. If not, then a list is perfectly acceptable. If a stub could easily be merged into a parent article, then it should. In fact, this theory of individual notability could also be attributed to people, places and other topics.

Following the plants/animals example, all species should be included in the genus article until sufficient unique information is found. People and places can have fine lists until more things pertinent to that person/place is found.

Obviously, perhaps the best, most common, and strongest rebuttal is eventualism, that every one of these articles could, as legitimate topics, eventually be a featured article or whatnot. I fully agree with this. A species of butterfly is vital to the ecosystem and a Japanese photographer is important and notable in his own right. But until a topic has eventually been taken one step further and a second sentence has been written, I insist that the individual articles remain merged as one. While these topics may be notable, they rarely have good sources and are much too short for use.

As a model, the German Wikipedia, even if it were about the President, would not allow such a short article. I will admit, however, that we are not the German Wikipedia, and that some of their merging, such as for fictional characters, is a bit too intense.

The first step toward merging these unneeded articles is stopping the bots which automatically write them. Proponents of these bots claim that these immediate stubs are starting points for other users to add to them. However, I see absolutely no reason that, as the articles contain only a few lines anyway, a list is not a perfectly acceptable starting point. Besides, as I said before, this point is nullified as the butterfly species pages above haven't even been touched since July, and I could find many even older than that if I tried. Eventually? Maybe. Having no unique, useful content for the last six months? Definitely not. And no, I did not scour the site for the very shortest pages; there are many more rediculously short articles.

I do hope that you can see the unnecessarities of many redundant stubs. I'm sure that many will oppose this, but I hope I have made my points clear and that many will agree that redundant one-liners are not wanted here. Thank you, Reywas92^Talk 00:21, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

• While I agree with a lot of what you say, I don't think there is anywhere near enough support for the shift in practice that you suggest. What concerns me more is the idea of bots creating articles like this. I was not aware that this was going on, and it worries me. How can we allow bots to glean information from other websites and create articles for them on Wikipedia? Surely this is a blatant copyright violation. Also, bots are completely incapable of assessing the notability (or even the accuracy) of what they contribute. —gorgan_almighty (talk) 12:44, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
  • I run Polbot. Copyving information is never a copyright violation, since data itself can't be copyrighted. Only the presentation (e.g. full sentences) can be copyrighted. See Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 17:58, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

• I oppose bots being able to create articles. If no human can be bothered, we don't need it. Johnbod (talk) 02:20, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

• I agree. —gorgan_almighty (talk) 10:42, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Quadell uses Polbot as a tool to make article creation easier. The bot doesn't do it by itself. If you don't like these articles, why not take it up with the relevant taxonomy project? This hardly seems to place for such posts. The German wikipedia has banned the use of stub templates, but it still has its share of stub articles, even if it doesn't call them by this name (e.g. de:Erik Eriksen, de:Carl Theodor Zahle, de:Cornelius Alfred Moloney, de:Maguzawa, de:Wappen Kameruns). de:Wikipedia:Artikel#Umfang_(Stubs) names "Ludwig II was a king of Bavaria" as an example of an article that is too short, but "Ludwig II (25 August 1845 - 13 June 1886) was King of Bavaria (10 March 1864 – 13 June 1886)" as a valid (but short) article. All the Germans did was to remove their equivalent of the stub sorting project. Valentinian ^{T / C} 14:11, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

• If this is a helper program rather than a fully automated bot then that's not as bad. I wish we wouldn't refer to such programs as "bots", its very confusing. Incidently, whether bots can be used in this way or not is a matter of policy, so this is the right place to discuss it. —gorgan_almighty (talk) 10:15, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

A one sentence stub can tell you a lot about a plant. It is better to have a one-sentence stub than no article at all. Anyway, there are dozens of resources for every species of plants and what is one-sentence now, will grow over time (Wikipedia is organic, and not immediate, after all). Deleting useful content isn't productive and doesn't help Wikipedia. --Oldak Quill 05:33, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

• Merging a dozen one sentence stubs into a single article with a dozen sections accomplishes both goals - the information is kept (and is surrounded by other information which enhances its value), and the encyclopedia looks better for not having many one-sentence stub articles. The original titles will, of course, all redirect to the merged final product. Cheers! bd2412 T 00:06, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Merging has advantages and disadvantages. Disadvantages of merging include lack of consistency among taxonomy articles (where many species have articles but some are forced to merge), inability to differentially categorise species (while the merged article can be categorised, any categories that are different between species cannot be added) and merging as a disincentive to article development (I am more likely to add to a short species article than a hodge-podge merge article that originates from some AfD process). "the encyclopedia looks better for not having many one-sentence stub articles" - what do you base this assumption on? As a reader who both follows links and locates articles by search, I prefer dealing with one-sentence stubs than being redirected to an anchor point on a merged article. Discrete units have advantages! --Oldak Quill 02:03, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
• Umm.. How does a one-sentence stub tell you anthing other than its existence, as it is most of the time? A redirect to a merged list of one sentences is better. As I said before, they may theoretically grow over time theoretically, but they sure as hell haven't grown yet. Undelete the so-called useful single sentence when a few more can be added. Reywas92^Talk 00:38, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
  • A single sentence could be: "[Common plant name] (Latin binomial) is a [type of plant] that can be found throughout Europe and is well-known for its anti-inflammatory properties". That's about five facts in a single sentence and is certainly worth a read if you want to find out a little something about a topic. There is no deadline for Wikipedia and that an article hasn't developed beyond a one-sentence stub says nothing about where it will be in 12 months time. In terms of undeleting an article once someone wants to write more, how could they develop an article (or be inspired to develop it) if the stub were deleted. At best, they start the article from scratch and duplicate the efforts of others. --Oldak Quill 02:03, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

.: Perhaps there could be a group started that focuses on impriving stubs? Is there one already? I mean something to the effect that each person upgrades a stub to a paragraph through a little research on the article. Is there a list of stubs? There could also be a group to improve upgraded stubs. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy. I don't like the merging idea, though. Of course you could make a list seperate from the stubs without deleting the stubs.--Vapor One (talk) 01:20, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

The whole point about Wikipedia is that eventually there will be a decent article on every species. This is a young project, give it time to grow. Every species is by definition notable by itself and there's no policy which says a 'stub' should be deleted because it's a 'stub'. If you're worried that the articles aren't good enough then improve them yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it. Nick mallory (talk) 10:24, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I would improve it, Nick, but the fact is that I don't know anything about these obscure plants, nor do I even care. It seems that no one really cares either. Eventually it may expand, but how much? Even if someone were to work on the article, we probably don't even know enough about the plant to expand it beyond a slightly longer stub. A majority of these plant articles have never been edited by a human, only created by a bot half a year ago. Reywas92^Talk 17:29, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Let's just say Mzoli's Meats, enough said. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 19:18, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, because it was created by Jimbo Wales. That created controvery that brought many users to it at once, and there's actually something to write about it. Reywas92^Talk 20:35, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Automatic edit summary

When the summary is left blank, why can't an automatic summary be created to reflect whatever changes were made? I can't be bothered to write an explanation every time I wikify a link or correct someone's spelling or capitalization and I don't think I'm the only one. [Summaries] are nice but changing a P to p is enough of a drag (click on edit, wait for load, find P, place cursor, hit delete, hit p, scroll page, hit save) without having explain yourself. Having made an effort to use the summary for a few months, I've reverted to my previous form of just using it for potentially contentious edits. --Seans Potato Business 18:32, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Would a userscript which adds one-click-quick-summary-inserts be an adequate solution for you? (Just like MediaWiki:Edittools, but for the summary field) ∴ AlexSm 18:56, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

But this wouldn't do anything about all the thousands of other users that don't complete summaries. --Seans Potato Business 19:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, if the community suggest several most useful "summary parts" (like "wikify", "spelling", " iwiki", " category", " picture", etc.), this could be made a gadget and then a lot of users could simply enable it in preferences. Also, please look at it this way: you alone make the edit, and then usually several people get to look at it, so it's polite to provide a helpful summary and save their time a bit ∴ AlexSm 19:42, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Quote: you alone make the edit, and then usually several people get to look at it - that's exactly why it's a good idea to make automatic edit summaries automatic for everyone, whenever they don't specify an edit summary themselves. It's also why everyone should specify an edit summary themselves, as long as there are no automatic ones (or in cases where they are no good). - Actually, I think "Save page" with a blank edit summary (or just the /* section title */) should give a page with a preview and an automatic edit summary, requesting the user to press "Save" once more to commit the change.--Niels Ø (noe) (talk) 21:31, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

That idea has been rejected as a perennial proposal because it will deter people from making edits. As long as I'm not forced to enter a summary, I wont (I usually click the minor edit box before clicking save when applicable) and if I am forced, I'll stop correcting trivial mistakes. I don't see why a piece of computer code isn't already constructing edit summaries (it could do it retroactively based on the information saved about each edit and would like something like this "P > p or Parsnip > parsnip or whatever. It could even be smart and say capitalization change: Parsnip > parsnip). --Seans Potato Business 21:57, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

←You can set your preferences so this happens, but it's pretty annoying. I think something automatic has merit in that it would be useful, but probably very difficult to implement. It would need to function as a kind of AI, looking at the diff and trying to "figure out" how to classify what you did. It would be very buggy -- that's my prediction. I think the shortcut buttons for common minor edits are a very good solution though. Buttons for Wikify, spelling, -whitespace, etc would help tremendously, and you can bet people would use them.

Equazcion •✗/C • 22:59, 12/21/2007

If categorising the edits is too difficult (I would have thought case changes and adding [[ ]] around a word would be easy enough to recognise), it can also just show what was before and what was changed just like when we look at the difference in the history Seans Potato Business 23:41, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Ok lemme rephrase: in all but the simplest scenarios it would be difficult. A simple addition of double-brackets or a change of letter case would be easy to detect, I'm just not sure how often that's all that happens in an edit.

Equazcion •✗/C • 00:10, 12/22/2007

I'm betting that's most edits. People make a few big edits, and then many minor fixes. bd2412 T 00:14, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Ok then let's do it.

Equazcion •✗/C • 23:24, 12/23/2007

Is it just me or does there seem to be some kind of breakdown between the consensus to do something and the actual implementation? I mean really when's the last time a proposal actually ended up coming to fruition here? Everyone falls all over themselves to express their opinion one way or the other, but as soon as that's finished, everything seems to stop. What does this idea require? The involvement of a developer? Would this just be a monobook.js customization? Who do we contact to make this happen? C'mon people.

Equazcion •✗/C • 01:29, 12/24/2007

As far as I am aware, the most recent proposal to come to fruition here is this one where an option in the preferences to open external links in a new window was requested. It took just over 4 days to get implemented. However, with that one, the changes were low-visibility, the code had already been written and the interface already existed for adding it.

Regarding this proposal, we do already have automatic edit summaries such as 'blanked the page' or 'replaced page with ___' but they are for tracking vandal edits. To write algorithms for detecting useful edits as suggested above would require server-side code to be written and therefore would require developer involvement. There is a place for requesting this but it will probably still take quite a while to be implemented as developers have a lot of work to do. Tra (Talk) 02:11, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

←Thanks for the info. I'm not sure how things work at Bugzilla... will another discussion need to take place there to make sure there's consensus for the addition? I think I'll let someone else handle that... if anyone feels like it.

Equazcion •✗/C • 02:35, 12/24/2007

Once the request has been filed at Bugzilla, the main hurdle then is whether a developer has time to write the code necessary to do this. There is room for discussion at Bugzilla but that would mainly be related to actually writing the code. As long as there's consensus on the local wiki (i.e. here), the developers should implement it, once it's coded. Tra (Talk) 03:03, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I will suggest it to the developers if someone will confirm that the number of people involved in this discussion is sufficient to infer a consensus. --Seans Potato Business 13:56, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I count at least 5. I think that's a significant enough portion of the community. Let's git 'er rollin.

Equazcion •✗/C • 13:58, 12/24/2007

Five out of 60 000? Okey-dokey... --Seans Potato Business 14:14, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I thought it was over a million but okay.

Equazcion •✗/C • 14:16, 12/24/2007

Of course, unregistered users count too. Here is my proposed bugzilla entry:

"It is proposed that when a user submits an edit with a blank edit summary, a summary is automatically generated according to the change made. For example adding and around a word or phrase would be recognized as "wikify" and changing the case of letters could be recognized as a "capitalization change" etc. The type of change could then be followed by the change made (e.g. "Wikify: enzyme -> enzyme" or "Wikify: distributor -> distributor").

The suggestion was discussed and consensus was reached here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Automatic_edit_summary" --Seans Potato Business 15:29, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I meant I'm pretty sure we have over a million registered users. Anyway yeah your proposed entry looks good to me and I appreciate your willingness to take the reins. Once the proposal is in place please post the link so that I/we can follow it and provide support. Thanks again!

Equazcion •✗/C • 23:46, 12/24/2007

Just an FYI - there are over 6 million registered user: stats.

Equazcion •✗/C • 00:47, 12/25/2007

Gee-whiz! I wonder where my 60 000 came from... Anyway, here's the "bug"/enhancement entry. If you're registered, you and anyone else can go to that bug, scroll to the bottom and vote for it. --Seans Potato Business 09:21, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

You have a great idea, but I think you are to advanced! I would much prefer the bot to just copy a short bit from the "before", and then from the "after", in the section being changed. Or something. I think would be much more useful when you scan the edit sumaries for the article, the "wikify" don't really tell you a lot, but something actually explaining the change, might. Similarly would this be a great help on the RCP, telling you without having to look what the change was. Greswik (talk) 16:41, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd personally like "minor edit" to be split into multiple checkboxes, like wikify, corrected typo, copyedit, add picture, move things around, etc. And then those could expand into "minor edit" appending a sort of summary to the user's edit summary. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 19:35, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Create a new ref tag called <note>

Sometimes you use the <ref> tag for notes (ie a bit more information) instead of for a reference, and i have seen articles which use the old {{note}} template to create a separate list of notes as well as of references. It should be very easy for the mw:Extension:Cite/Cite.php extensions to add <note> and <notes /> as two new hooks which work in exactly the same way as <ref> and <references /> do.

This would enable an article to maintain two lists (one of notes and one of references) as now it is either lumped together in one list, or needs to use old templating systems. For example: International Whaling Commission uses just the ref tags but some of the tags are for notes (eg number 6), so could have two lists instead.

Also, would it not be possible (maybe with a bit more work) to be able to have multiple lists of each. Ie you could have <ref1>, <ref2>, <ref3> which corresponds to <references1 />, <references2 />, <references3> which would be handy for articles such as List of Governors of Alabama which has a list below a table, and then one at the end of the article; or United Kingdom (and like many of country articles) has some notes in the infobox as well as a References section at the end of the article.

(I also raised this question at the technical village pump.) Chris_huh^talk 15:01, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

This is often discussed at WT:FOOT. Incidentally, if there is a Bugzilla request for this feature perhaps it should be listed in the Related section of WP:FOOT. -- SEWilco (talk) 15:25, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I think those are both excellent ideas, the notes and the separated lists of refs (and maybe even separated lists of notes, like <notes1><notes2>). I hope it gets implemented. Equazcion •✗/C • 23:58, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Having a section attribute would be a good way to implement this. Example usage:

<ref section="notes">hello i am a note</ref> and <ref>i'm just a regular (default) ref</ref>

Problem with the Hindi editor

Hi, I noticed that the spellings on Hindi pages are in most cases quite atrocious. I tried to edit one of the pages to correct the mistakes when I realised that the Hindi based editor has inherent mistakes.

To explain further When you type out "Wikipedia" in the Hindi editor, the editor decides to put the "e" sound after the "W" sound and so on, which is how it would be in English, but in Hindi this results in the word "Wukipidayeeaa.

If you click on the Hindi language link on a page you can see this error by looking at the Wikipedia logo in Hindi (which reads correctly) and then looking at the title bar of the page, which shows the incorrect spelling.

I just realised this problem automatically expands itself to most other Indian languages, since they follow a similar style.

Jugular Bean (talk) 08:23, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Do you have complex script support installed? —Remember the dot ^(talk) 05:25, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Ah, everything's fine now :) Jugular Bean (talk) 08:15, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Fight songs

Please see Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Fight songs for a discussion about the inclusion of songs in university articles, particularly fight songs and especially the inclusion of their full lyrics. violet/riga (t) 10:56, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think this is the place to post a notice like this. You should post an RfC on that page instead. Equazcion •✗/C • 11:14, 30 Dec 2007 (UTC)

That would bring in further discussion, yeah. violet/riga (t) 11:30, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Not that it matters much but my point was that a notice like this does not belong here, and I was offering an alternative. That discussion is much more a content/policy dispute than it is a proposal. Equazcion •✗/C • 11:34, 30 Dec 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedians who ran for President

I'd really like to see a list like this. Including myself, Jonathon Sharkey (and all his socks), Ray McKinney, and countless others. I don't even know how many have edited wikipedia and ran for the highest office in other countries, but it sure would be interesting. Does anybody else think we should do this?--Uga Man (talk) UGA MAN FOR PRESIDENT 2008 22:53, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I think it would be a bad idea to bring that here, and borders on WP:SOAPBOX... you could create a User category of course, but I really don't see the point. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:53, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Non administrator rollback

We are now in a position where the developers have made it possible for administrators to grant and remove the rollback permission for non administrators. Over the last month, we have been discussing the ways in which it can be given, and we're now at the point to try and get a consensus for it's implementation. Please could I ask as many people as possible to review the proposal and come to a conclusion to support or oppose the proposal. Ryan Postlethwaite 23:06, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Did you mean?

I think if Wikipedia included “Did you mean?” tip-off along with (top of) all results, it would be fine. Google already had it when we mistakenly type something in the search box. The reason why I suggest this I started an article for Charles_Shobraj(see the history) and was keep on working hard. Before creating the article, I searched about it and did make sure that the article does not exist. After all finished my work, I was trying to get some additional references from google. This time I understood that the article is existing already under the title Charles Sobhraj‎ (see shobraj & sobhraj). If WP had the option “did you mean?” I should not have wasted my time. --Avinesh Jose (talk) 06:43, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree that Wikipedia's search algorithms could use some major improvement. We seem to be majorly behind the times for such a widely-used medium. On IMDb, I can totally misspell a movie title or actor name and the site can more often than not figure out exactly what I meant. On Wikipedia it seems that around 70% of the times you don't spell something exactly right, you get results that are completely off.

Equazcion •✗/C • 06:48, 12/24/2007

See Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Search should detect spelling errors. Use site:en.wikipedia.org on Google for enhanced searching. –Pomte 07:46, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Pardon me for saying, "If IMDb can afford to do it, we should also be able to." I can't imagine they've got that much more server resources than us. I have a feeling they've just got a more efficient script at work than the standard MediaWiki and PHP spelling correction scripts, since their software is written from the ground-up. This should be looked into again, as a priority, in my humble opinion. Search functionality is pretty important here.

Equazcion •✗/C • 07:55, 12/24/2007

IMDB has been owned by Amazon.com since 1998 according to our article, so I would guess that they do have more resources. Mr.Z-man 08:20, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Most importantly, they've got access to Amazon's search-engine technology. We don't. --Carnildo (talk) 08:44, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Then I stand corrected :)

Equazcion •✗/C • 08:47, 12/24/2007

I don't think saying they've got Amazon's search engine technology is anything to brag about.  :) Amazon's search engine is terrible. Corvus cornix_talk 20:55, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I would like to see this too. SharkD (talk) 23:57, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Of some interest may be mw:Extension:DidYouMean. This was approved by the community for use on the English Wiktionary, but has yet to be approved by the devs. -- Visviva (talk) 17:03, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Create 'red link' statistics or counters

Why not create a 'red link' counter that let people know how many pages has the same red link ? And then list the 'most red' links, the ones that appear in more pages, in a ranking page. Therefore contributors could find right away what are the most needed articles. It is better (or more democratic) than the 'requests' page.

Merry Xmas!

Lgtrapp (talk) 22:54, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

This is available at Wikipedia:Most wanted articles. One of the problems with this kind of ranking, however, is that if there is a nav box (that's put on several pages) that contains any red links, those red links would immediately have lots of backlinks and would clutter up that page. Tra (Talk) 23:06, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Hence we also have Wikipedia:Templates with red links, which should (in theory) nab those navboxes at the source. bd2412 T 23:35, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Is the Wikipedia:Most wanted articles available also in Portuguese ? Or is it difficult to implement there ? As I understood it has some kind of human intervention on the elaboration of this list. Lgtrapp (talk) 00:57, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I have no idea if a similar list exists in Portuguese, but it's unlikely. The list has most recently been generated by Sapphic so you could perhaps ask her if she could do the same for the Portuguese Wikipedia. It should be fairly straightforward to generate this list as Wikimedia wikis use the same format for database dumps etc. As long as you speak Portuguese, it should be easier to do the manual part of the process (such as organising into topics and finding causes such as navboxes) since there would presumably be less articles to deal with. Tra (Talk) 01:45, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

There is a version automatically prepared by the software (without the bells and whistles) at Special:Wantedpages. This is found on most Mediawiki installations, including the Portuguese Wikipedia. Unfortunately this page uses cached data due to database load, so it is seldom up to date. -- Visviva (talk) 16:54, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

A Support to Wikipedia Indian Editions

This is to bring into notice about a project developed to help Wikipedia in Indian Editions. Even before launching the project, considering the importance of the same DD NEWS (the official news channel of Government of India) did a story about the project and a recorded version is available at

http://mozhi.org/news

You can try some tools (for trying the coding) at

http://mozhi.org/hindi http://mozhi.org/punjabi http://mozhi.org/tamil

We can offer customized search boxes for Wikipedia pages for Indian readers to search in the respective languages and they enter words in the respective Indian language itself. The users can enter words directly in the respective languages and search.

Please let us know if you need any clarification or help in implementation. You can find the contact page in our site for the same.If interested we can launch it extensively and include all the pages.

Ready to archive. Pegasus «C¦T» 07:05, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Green Butterfly : rate products & companies on ecology, fair trade, human rights

Hello dear Wikipedians,

Please allow me to briefly present my project and feel free to post your suggestions. I was discussing ecology with a friend and I was supporting the argument : the consumer has the power. His daily choices direct industries towards ecology or not. Towards quality. Towards fair trade.

Then I thought : wouldn't it be great if a website enabled each user to rate companies and products. I imagined an ecology rate, a fair trade rate, a quality rate, a "workman's rights" or human rights rate. Each internet-user-consumer could share his knowledge and in a way, be the butterfly that changes this world (hopefully, stirring up less violent means than a hurricane).

I have programming skills in PHP, ASP.Net and am currently looking for advice (technical, GUI, ...) and suggestions about this idea. Any colloboration would be of course welcome. Why not a new wikipedia branch ?

Also, if you know anyone who could be interested in this project, feel free to forward this message.

Thanks in advance,

Peace ,

Michael.

(you may contact me on the wikimedia foundation mailing list '[email protected]')

Ready to archive. Pegasus «C¦T» 07:04, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Destroy bots - at least those that deal with copyright issues

I am having increasing problems with bots that are dedicated to tag images for "speedy deletion" on grounds of "lacking fair use rationale", "lacking source", etc.

In all cases they are wrong.

You can't discuss with a bot, obviously and they have an unfair advantage of being "machines" and therefore being active continuously more or less.

Case 1: Image:Euskadi escudo.png. BetacommandBot obviously wasn't able to see the self-evident fair use rationale of using the official schuteon of the Basque Autonomous Community in its own article. A human would have never comitted this error (nevertheless an administrator deleted it without a second thought).

Case 2: Image:Batasuna logo.jpg. OsamaKBOT (what a name!) claimed that it was to be speedily deleted due to lacking "source". It's a common logo reproduced a zillion times, I have no idea what the source was. Luckily in this case my protests were heeded and the image stays.

Please let's humans take care of these issues that require human-quality discernment. Otherwise we are going to go nuts.

Bots are ok to add links to other Wikis and things like that but otherwise, specially when they are in charge of nominating for SD on such hard to discern grounds, they are very disruptive. Let's kill them for the sake of a human Wikipedia! --Sugaar (talk) 07:36, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree, I've had my run-ins with these bots too, and that's just the times when I happened to come across their errors. Just because a fair-use template isn't employed doesn't mean the rationale isn't there, and the templates seem to be the only way these bots can see anything. I shudder to think how much has been deleted due to their errors when I'm not looking (judging by how much commented-out image code I come across constantly it's probably a lot). Equazcion •✗/C • 10:15, 12/26/2007

Remember the Dot and myself have worked up a proposal over at Wikipedia talk:Upload#Preload description and use rationale templates On this topic. ideally, users would be forced to fill out a template of use, especially for Fair Use, when loading an image.

As far as bots go, they shouldn't "just" look for a template. I know with BcB at least, its major focus is whether or not the article used in is defined in the image summary. Now its closed code, but I think BC has made some way so its not just looking for the Article=x variable in a template.

One idea I've had is for a semi-automated script that could copy the article name from the File Links to the Summary section and require a user to confirm its the right FU rational for that File Link to save the edit, but I'm an accounting major, not a programmer, so that would be for another user to tackle. Mbisanz (talk) 10:21, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but BetacommandBot's problematic edits are fairly infrequent compared with the correct edits it gives, and bearing in mind we are dealing with copyright law rather than petty vandalism means that it is possibly a still a good bot?

I for one understand problems why some bots cannot possibly deal with every single permutation thrown at it - but looking at various incidents being thrown at WP:ANI every now and then, I get the feeling some people think it's not just the bot's problem. x42bn6 Talk Mess 21:28, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually, whether or not an image has a "fair use rationale" is a poor indicator of whether it is fair use or a copyright violation. BetacommandBot mindlessly deletes valid fair use images and copyright violations alike. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 21:53, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually, BetacommandBot, nor its operator User:Betacommand, delete images. Neither of them have administrator privileges. If the bot inappropriately tags an image for deletion, then the deleting administrator should be making the decision to delete or not. Don't shoot the messenger. - Rjd0060 (talk) 23:51, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Is that an excuse for inappropriately tagging images for deletion in the first place? When confronted with a thousand-image backlog from BetacommandBot, how many administrators do you think will actually check if the images they're deleting meet the criteria? In my experience, almost all of the images are deleted just as mindlessly as they are tagged, even if the "problem" is merely lack of an explicit fair use rationale. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 00:01, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Trust me, I understand the frustration, and it is no excuse. However, it is the administrators' "job" to check before deleting it. If I were an admin, I would check. BCB may tag some images that shouldn't be deleted (if they are missing a fair use rationale), and I even have links to BCB's contributions on my user page and I frequently go through and add rationale's to some of the images it tags. However, our image policy is very clear and it says that a rationale must be supplied, and some people don't seem to understand that. Key word being "must". - Rjd0060 (talk) 00:05, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Why are explicitly written rationales so important that images are not worth keeping if they don't have them? —Remember the dot ^(talk) 00:19, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Because that is what the guideline says, and I am guessing it has something to do with GFDL. - Rjd0060 (talk) 00:21, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

No, actually, it has nothing to do with the GFDL, nor with copyright law. Explicitly written rationales are not a fair use requirement in any country I am aware of, and certainly not the United States where the servers are hosted. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 00:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Well then, I guess it is just a Wikipedia guideline, and that is really all that matters. - Rjd0060 (talk) 00:40, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Please, think about it a little deeper. This is Wikipedia, we don't just say "rules are rules". In fact, there is a policy which explicitly states to ignore all rules if necessary. The guidelines are not set in stone. You are invited to think for yourself: does this rule bring us closer to our goal of free knowledge for the world? —Remember the dot ^(talk) 00:47, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

(undent) Copyright violations are a fundamental threat to Wikipedia. Copyright owners can and do sue for violations. Image copyright violation is an open-and-shut situation, unlike most textual violations; further, when there are textual violations, it's generally something favorable to the copyright holder (e.g., PRish text on a website), while image owners are often third parties who make money from selling images. Wikipedia content isn't just about what's online - the goal of the project is to distribute information, by paper and DVDs and mirrors and however. Since images are (a) often not particularly critical to understanding a topic and (b) much more likely to result in lawsuits if copyright violations are widespread, it makes sense for the Foundation to be quite restrictive about what it allows, when sourcing and licensing are incomplete. And yes, bots aren't 100% correct, but where they make mistakes, and admins don't catch them, it's still possible to fix the problem. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:55, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't take issue with bots that find serious copyright problems. The problem is that BetacommandBot sees copyright violations everywhere, even when the problem is merely lack of an explicit use rationale, which has nothing to do with whether the image is a copyright violation or not. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 20:41, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Either way, BcB enforces policy. If you have a problem with the policy, address the policy, not the messenger. - Rjd0060 (talk) 00:57, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Rjd, I think Dot has addressed this reply already. Policies on Wikipedia are not supposed to be enforced as across-the-board steadfast rules. The point of WP:IAR is that while policy is generally the way to go, each case should be uniquely considered. A bot does not have the ability to do this -- it just dumbly checks for a specific pattern and rules one way or the other. There may be a policy issue as well, but even if policy should stand the way it is, having a robot enforce it doesn't keep with Wikipedia's definition of policy. Equazcion •✗/C • 01:05, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

The point of WP:IAR is to provide an escape hatch for unusual/unique cases, not to force editors to "uniquely consider" each case to decide whether or not to follow policy. Policy should be followed unless following it makes no sense.. If you want to argue that a high percentage of this bot's edits are wrong (violate an existing guideline or policy), or that it should follow another rule (which should probably be incorporated into a guideline), that's fine. But let's not argue that "bots are stupid, therefore bots shouldn't be used". That's a non-starter; bots are approved only when they have narrowly-defined functions that don't require discretion (in the view of the bots approval group). Sometimes they need tweaking; if so, you really should work on that. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:03, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Bots are stupid -- when they are tasked with the automated and permanent removal of content. The IAR issue is hardly settled-upon and is in fact highly debated. It's good that you've expressed your interpretation though. Equazcion •✗/C • 00:23, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Bots should not be in charge of policing such minor issues as sources or copyright. If an image is copyrighted and someone has an issue with that, it will arise by human initiative eventually and the image will then (and only then) be deleted. We do not need bots for that.

We may need bots for routinary improvements such as interwiki links but for copyright policy or otherwise deletion? No way. Bots can't understand such human subtleties and, while the template for uploading is no doubt useful, that doesn't mean that all older images must follow its requirements, right? Much less be subject of speedy deletion process for such minor inconvenience.

Btw, the relative lack of complaints does not mean that the bots are not comitting errors and abuses but rather that people feel powerless against them. If you complain in the robot page it's merely achived, if you complain to the bot-owner, he/she will surely not reply... That leaves people, Wikipdedia's editors helpless and raises the issue: do we really need bots for copyright policing or is this the invention of some mad copyright interests on payroll?

Let humans deal with human issues and use bots only for routinary improvements, not deletions, much less deletions that need nearly no human intervention - like SD. --Sugaar (talk) 13:15, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Bots are quite capable of policing some of the more obvious violations of image policy. For example, an image with no description clearly has no source, and one without a license tag clearly doesn't have a license tag. If we let bots deal with the easy cases, then the humans who are interested in image issues have more time to spend when thinking is required. --Carnildo (talk) 22:24, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Automatic edit summaries

Oftentimes when making an edit without an edit summary, an automatic edit summary (I'll call it AES) is made. For a new article, the AES is Created article with "ABC..." When redirecting a page and not giving a reson as a summary, the AES is Redirected page to XYZ. However, there are also two other common AESs: Blanked the page. and Replaced page with "Abc def". These two are very, very rarely used by experienced editors, but show up in watchlists, etc. as vandalism. ~98% of the time when these are used it is an edit by an IP or new user vandalising the page by blanking it or replacing the content with foul language. I propose that is should be impossible for an edit to make these AESs. The software knows when this type of vandalism edits occur, as it makes the summary. I see it as a simple change prohibiting vandals from vandalising in this way and saves others the time reverting them. I was a bit wordy, but I see no reason why this shouldn't be implemented, as non-vandals rarely blank pages. Reywas92^Talk 20:49, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps it should be restricted to anonymous editors and users who have not yet been autoconfirmed (account age < 4 days). That way, users and admins who legitimately blank pages (personal information, courtesy userpage blankings, etc.) wouldn't be suddenly prohibited from making those edits. Tuvok[^T@lk/_Improve] 21:33, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

The presumption behind the proposed change is that when the software generates an error message, that the vandal goes away, right? As opposed to the vandal trying something else that isn't as obvious, something that the software will allow? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:12, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

A tricky way of doing it would be so that the IP which made the edit sees it as completed, whereas all other IPs see the non-vandalised version. The IP is also silently tagged as a vandal so that the same thing happens to all edits from that IP in the following 24 or 48 hours. The vandal thinks they are vandalising, when in actual fact no-one sees anything. Of course, this would be (a) difficult to implement (b) resource hungry (c) not 100% accurate. -- Chuq (talk) 23:47, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

and (d) the false positives, although there would only be a few of them, would be enough to violate WP:BITE very badly and completely ruin Wikipedia's reputation. I've seen at least one false-positive blanking by another user, for instance (and once blanked Talk:Main Page by mistake due to using a really old browser that couldn't handle Monobook). --ais523 19:21, 2 January 2008 (UTC)