MediaWiki talk:Copyrightwarning/Archive

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents 1 1 2 Proposed shortened version 3 Non-controversial versions 4 Webby awards 5 Phraseology 6 Special characters 7 Ask people to cite sources when they edit 8 Expanded special characters list 9 Being bold 10 Proposal 11 Few essential Lithuanian characters missing 12 Hmmm 13 Vandal warning. 14 Proposed change 15 Yet Another Proposal 16 IPA symbols 17 Section symbol (§) 18 Proposed addition 19 Proposed removal 20 Insert special chars box to my own wiki

1

Suggestion to add to copyrightwarning:

You are also agreeing to abide by the (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Submission_Standards_(a)">Submission Standards</a>) and (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terms_of_use_(a)">Terms of Use</a>).

— Alex756 [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 00:29, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I disagree with this. First, both of those texts are drafts. Second, we don't want to force more terms on first-time or anonymous contributors than are absolutely necessary (i.e. legal junk and important warnings). Third, the Copyrightwarning is long enough already, almost too long. silsor 01:15, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

This addition is only 63 characters of screen real estate, as well the copyrightwarning could be shortened, "Please note that all" and "considered to be" and ", then" can all be removed. Replace "You are also promising us that" with "You promise" and "from a resource that nobody" with" from resources nobody" and even with the new text the warning will be shorter than it is now. — Alex756 [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 14:06, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

We need to still finalize the drafts and then have the board of trustees approve them. --mav

If we take out anything that is not clearly new material on these two pages and leave the terms and standards that already exist then those changes would not require the approval of the Board of Trustees. This would be useful as new users should be given the means to "easily" understand the rules around here, rather than having to search through many pages to learn these basics that most web sites post on their pages along with disclaimers. As the disclaimer change occurred without "Board" approval, other changes can also occur without board approval, no? — Alex756 [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 14:06, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

In theory yes. But then we have to decide what is new and what is not. That will take time. --mav

Proposed shortened version

This is 394 characters long vs. 440 for the present version (a savings of 46 precious characters):

All contributions to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see $1 for details). If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it. By submitting your work you promise you wrote it yourself, or copied it from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain">public domain</a> resources — this does not include most web pages. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

— Alex756 [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 03:57, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Looks good to me. --mav

Non-controversial versions

Here is my attempt at a non-controversial versions of these texts:

Wikipedia:Terms of use (a), and

Wikipedia:Submission Standards (a).

Comments? — Alex756 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 07:38, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Look much better to me. Jamesday 02:32, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Webby awards

=> Wikipedia talk:Webby Awards

At the bottom of the editing-an-article page, there's a link that says: "Vote for Wikipedia at the People's Choice Webby Awards". The Webby Awards actually call it the People's Voice (as can be verified by hitting the link, which points to [1]). Should be a fairly easy change for someone with the right powers. --Etaoin 01:12, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for pointing it out. :) Angela. 01:18, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

Phraseology

"By submitting your work you promise you wrote it yourself, or copied it from public domain resources ..."

"Promise?" Pinky promise, cross your heart, hope to die? At the very least, this sentence is missing a conjunction, but I think the wording ventures beyond "casual" into "poor." Verbs like "attest" or "affirm" preserve the informal character of this message without making us out to be a bunch of schoolyard pals.

Also, if one "copie[s] it from public domain resources," it's not exactly one's "work," is it? Thoughts?

Austin Hair 23:16, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)

---

I suggest:

By making a submission to Wikipedia, you guarantee [affirm] that you wrote it yourself, or that you copied it from public domain resources—these do not include a majority of web pages.

In addition, I find the phrase "bad edits" childish. What is a "bad" edit? I suggest using the phrase "poor edit" (indicating something "bad" with the quality of writing) or "vandalism" or some other such thing, but not "bad." Furthermore, we need to get rid of the blot that is anti-Commonwealth English, i.e. the use of "practice" instead of "practise." -- Emsworth 22:34, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

---

Perhaps:

"By submitting content to Wikipedia, you affirm that your submission is your own work, or content copied from public domain resources. Be advised that the majority of Web pages do not qualify as public domain resources."

Short, concise, and I believe much clearer. The repetitive phrasing is intetional, and in my opinion appropriate to the emphasis we're trying to convey.

I'm open to replacements for the word "practice," but keep in mind that simply replacing it with "practise" is as anti-American as the alternative is anti-Commonwealth.

Austin Hair 23:32, Aug 14, 2004 (UTC)

Also, this doesn't cover the cases of using other GFDL or CC licensed work that is permitted to be freely distributed including distribution of modified versions. -- WhiteDragon 18:48, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Special characters

I am not sure we should have them in the English Wikipedia. Most articles are not going to be using them, and they clutter up the page. Dori | Talk 18:17, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

I agree, they use too much screen space, divert too much attention and are simply too annoying to make up for the tiny amount of use they would receive. Heck, they don't even do anything in my browser. silsor 18:48, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

It's true that most articles won't include characters with diacritics; however, a significant number will (any page including substantial French, German, Spanish, etc.), and their utility in those cases might balance the small amount of screen real estate that they occupy. The Æ ligature will certainly be useful, since proper English typography can and does use it. I'm not sure how the eth, the thorn, the curly quotes, and the dashes will interact with various browsers—I know some browsers change those to gibberish upon submission. —No-One Jones ^(m) 18:54, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There is definitely a place for these characters in Wikipedia, I just don't feel that that place is on every edit page. silsor 19:10, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Special characters bar for people expressing support for the addition.

Personally I think there should be a way of customizing this for each individual user (perhaps under "Preferences"). Not everyone needs it, and people who do need to work with special characters are likely to have their own ideas on what characters they need. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 22:41, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, i for one would like alot of mathematical symbols but am not going to put it in the public bar because it would not be useful but to a small audiance, however having something might just get people used to and and push for an official sofware feature;) -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:38, 2004 Nov 9 (UTC)

Well, as I said on VP, I've added a few more that were requested (graves and circumflexes and so on). Some sort of "opt out" software thing would be an excellent idea, particularly if you could pick particular sub-sets of the characters. -- ALoan (Talk) 15:18, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

What about the superscript circle ° used in °C and °F? I think that one would be immensely helpful for a lot of writers. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 21:21, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

And what about a set of fractions more than the bare-bones 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4? Apwoolrich 18:49, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It seems that this page will simply bloat to infiniteness. :D Do you think we should allow this (you know, have a five-line-long box at the bottom of every page?) Personally I'm trying to imagine it and I don't think it's that bad of an idea — if you don't need it, then just ignore it; if you do need it then it's a lifesaver. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 19:16, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)

At the moment it is about one line, just under or just over depending on screen/window width. More than that would be a problem, I think, until you can switch it on or off, although having said that, the rest of the "Copyrightwarning" message is around 7 lines... Where will it stop? Cuneiform? Hieroglyphics? -- ALoan (Talk) 20:01, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The obvious problem with a very long special character bar is, it would obscure the more important part of this message: the copyright warning. We probably don't want that to happen. —No-One Jones ^(m) 20:21, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Then I guess we'll have to wait for the next software update... is there some way of bringing this up to the developers? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 20:38, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, file it at mediazilla. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:22, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

I think the characterline should go for reasons stated by User:Dori and User:Silsor and KISS, to make it a software preference would be even worse though.--Dittaeva 16:21, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Don't! In its short existence it has already proven itself invaluably useful to me. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 16:35, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

Hear, hear; I wholeheartedly agree with Ran! Like him, I have used the very practical char line feature for writing e.g. German names, whose special letters I don't have easy access to on my Norwegian keyboard. Along the same train of thought, I think other non-German-language-speakers and non-Scandinavians who writes on German or Nordic/Scand. people/places/history could profit from the feature, since I see far to much of names and places being misrepresented with 'ue's (for 'ü'), 'ae's (for 'æ') etc, etc.

Regarding the question of 'infinite' expansion of the line, with maths symbols, etc, I think the correct use of written human languages commands a special respect above academically developed symbol languages, so I feel that the restriction of the special char insertion feature to letters (of non-English languages) is a sound one. Thus, my conclusion is: keep! --Wernher 01:15, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

As this template is protected, can a sysop please fix Í so that it only inserts that character. --Zigger 15:40, 2004 Nov 23 (UTC)

Fixed, I think... ÍÍÍÍÍíí ... yep — Kate Turner | Talk 15:46, 2004 Nov 23 (UTC)

Argh. There's something strange going on with the char insertion feature right now. All the chars output 'Ã<some other special char, but not necessarily the intended one>'. Might it be my browser misbehaving? (however, it has worked nicely with this feature up to now). Anyone know anything about this? --Wernher 01:39, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'm having the exact same problem. This is what I get when I click on the first twelve characters: �áÉé�íÓóÚú�ý

-- ran (talk) 04:12, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)

I had this problem ( running IE6.0 ) with the Classic skin; it works when I switch to CologneBlue. Joestynes 04:57, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

---

I'd like to express my thanks to those who added the special characters bar. Editing was a chore before. To those who think it's useless: go and learn a language. Chamaeleon 03:41, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

---

I propose adding <charinsert>“+”</charinsert>, and maybe the same with ‘+’. It’s quite useful on the wiki that I run. —Fleminra 03:59, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

Ask people to cite sources when they edit

On December 17, Dwheeler proposed adding this to the end:

Please cite your sources so others can check your work.

Dwheeler's rationale was that most other problems (not sufficiently NPOV, etc.) can be fixed by others, but it's often difficult for others to figure out where a contributor got their information. And as noted in how to edit a page: "Please cite your sources so others can check and extend your work. Most Wikipedia articles currently lack good references. This contributes to Wikipedia's single greatest criticism that it is not a reliable source. Please help by researching, preferably online and in print resources to find the best references available for the article you are working on. Then cite them in proper form, and consider inline citation for contentious facts. There is no consensus on the best way to do that, but anything is better than nothing. You can either use inline citation in academic form such as (Example, 2004, pp 22-23) or as a superscript to a footnote that you place at the end of an article." Dwheeler also noted that "Now that Wikipedia has grown into a remarkable encyclopedia, one of the major complaints by others is its lack of references. So, let's fix that; I think this minor template change could actually help."

After 4 days, absolutely nobody complained, so Dwheeler went ahead and made the change on 2004-12-21. He said, "after a little while, we should be able to see if its benefits outweigh the negatives of yet more text at the bottom."

After trying it out for a number of days, more people liked the citation reminder than didn't like it. As of 2004-12-30:

• For the citation reminder: Dwheeler, Soren9580, Whosyourjudas, Emerman
• Against the citation reminder: Chris 73.

This list of people for and against is listed here, not in Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), because the Village Pump stuff eventually disappears. Besides, documenting this in the discussion page of the text being changed should make it easier to find later, if anyone needs to.

Whosyourjudas liked the idea, but wanted the format prettied up. Others have prettied up the format since Whosyourjudas made his comments, and Whosyourjudas is now satisfied with the format.

Expanded special characters list

This is what I have added:

It takes up 1 to 1 1/2 extra lines in most browsers. That's not nothing, but it's less space than the "Templates used on this page" feature uses if even one template is used on the page. Added: In any case, in most routine edits it is rarely necessary to scroll past the "Save page" button; the content below it does not change from one edit to the next.

This table supports all national languages of each country in Europe (including Turkey) that use the Latin alphabet, as well as Catalan, Esperanto and Welsh (which have significant Wikipedias) and pinyin, but not necessarily all minority languages in Europe or non-European languages or Greek or Cyrillic. The latter should go into a different table to avoid making this one take up too much screen space.

Note, most of these characters are in actual use in English Wikipedia, primarily to show the correct orthography of names in the original language: see for instance Lech Walesa.

Note, the ordering of the special characters is not random, but represents a compromise among the various languages that may use the same special characters.

First, we group by diacritics (acute, then grave, then circumflex, etc) rather than by letters (A, then E, then I, etc). This is because with small fonts, it can be quite hard to distinguish between, say, o-circumflex, o-tilde and o-double-acute if they are all next to each other, but much easier if all the circumflexes are in one group and all the tildes are in another. Second we try to cluster all the characters used by the same language as close together as possible: French, Spanish, Italian, German eszet next to umlauts, Portuguese tildes next to c-cedilla, Polish letters, Czech and Croatian and other Slavic-language letters close to each other. Where splitting is necessary, we try to split into only two separate clusters, as for pinyin, Turkish, Hungarian, Swedish. Finally we group vowel-diacritics and consonant-diacritics separately for the same diacritic, both for greater clarity and because the same languages often don't use both.

-- Curps 01:30, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I understand the theory, but I don't think it works well. It makes it very hard to find any one character because it means scanning through the entire list. I definitely vote for putting everything in pseudo-alphabetical order, A's first, then B's, etc. With punctuation at the end. I also think it should be not be in small tags. This will avoid the hard-to-see problem. Also, Maybe we should have more characters, particularly IPA characters for entering pronunciations. Of course, we can't fit the entire Unicode Plane 1 in a little box, but honestly there are probably just as many people entering IPA as are entering Turkish, or Esperanto, for that matter. Nohat 02:51, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Here's a quick mock-up in pseudo-alphabetical order including IPA symbols. Maybe we could make it hideable, like the TOC. Nohat 03:26, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

You have grouped some lowercase-L diacritics among the capital-I diacritics. -- Curps 09:38, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Letters used by various languages are:

-- Curps 02:03, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[Austin Hair removed Œ œ, &ndash, &mdash; and &hellip;, and removed Œ œ from the list of special characters used by French, and Š š Ž ž from the list of special characters used by Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian].

Regarding Œ œ, &ndash, &mdash;, they have been there for a while, and Š š Ž ž are used in several other languages in any case (and my sources, including Estonian alphabet, Latvian alphabet and Lithuanian alphabet do seem to indicate that they're used in those languages.] -- Curps 04:30, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

You're right about stripping certain characters; I regretably neglected to change my character set back to ISO-8859-1 after editing under the NeXT encoding. It was neither intentional nor a usual behavior of lynx. My apologies. A.D.H. (t&m) 05:19, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)

That's seven lines at the standard 80 columns, and as someone who uses lynx for his everyday editing, I find that excessive. Perhaps it's time to make this a special behavior, governed by the same user preference as the edit bar. ADH (t&m) 03:41, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)

But I think in most routine edits you would not need to scroll past the "Save page" button... anything below that is usually ignored, no? -- Curps 04:30, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I posted this on User talk:Austin Hair before I saw this discussion here: isn't it possible to add something like the following to the style sheet for your preferred skin (User:Austin Hair/standard.css or User:Austin Hair/monobook.css or whatever):

#siteNotice, #editpage-copywarn

{

display: none;

}

(I pinched this from User:Eequor/standard.css) This should disable the Copyrightwarning message in the relevant skin. HTH. -- ALoan (Talk) 14:06, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Being bold

I'm just going to be bold and make my version live. Lots of people see it so if it's unpopular I'm sure we'll hear soon enough. If you have a major problem with it, please feel free to change it back, I guess, or demand I do so if you can't. Nohat 08:37, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Curps, literally at the last possible moment, dissuaded me from this plan. Nohat 08:54, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

My argument was roughly as follows:

There are several problems... how to tell Croatian D-stroke apart from Icelandic Eth, for instance? Or perhaps some people might confuse β for ß also. Also, the letters needed by any one given language are much more scattered all over the place in your version... in particular, it's a much more disruptive change for common Western European languages like German or French, which were left undisturbed by my own recent change.

Also, you accidentally grouped some lowercase-L diacritics among the capital-I diacritics, but this is easily fixed.

Finally, the biggest problem encountered was that a number of people strongly objected to the special characters being normal size instead of small-font. And if small fonts must be used, then grouping characters alphabetically by letter instead of by diacritic results in illegibility and problems distinguishing characters, as already noted in the rationale for my own changes. -- Curps 09:03, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I saw that, but grouping them the way you did doesn't really make them more legible. It just groups them differently. Nohat 09:16, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

No, the way I did it is more legible and gives speakers of a particular language important information they need to distinguish special characters when a small font is used. If a Portuguese-speaker sees A-tilde near O-tilde, it's easier to tell that these are tildes than if O-tilde is next to Hungarian O-double-acute; similarly O-double-acute next to U-double-acute is an important cue for Hungarian-speakers. If we're forced to use a small font, a consecutive string of the same diacritics makes it a lot easier to tell what that diacritic is. -- Curps 09:25, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps the developers could give us #editpage-specialchars (and Mediawiki:Specialchars) separate from #editpage-copywarn and Mediawiki:Copyrightwarning, so that everyone could adjust their CSS preferences accordingly. -- Curps 09:03, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I also would like to add that we should probably force text-decoration: none !important, because the underlines are only going to make these harder to read, plus they're not really links, they're more like buttons. Comments on this idea? Curps also says that people will most likely only be working on one language at a time. This is probably true, but I don't think that the best logical result of that is to arange them the way he has. It makes it very hard to find a particular character if you don't already know where it is—it requires scanning the entire list. I recognize the idea of putting all the characters with the same diacritic together makes it easier to figure out what diacritic it is, but I don't think that it necessarily holds. The over-tilde and the over-macron are probably indistinguishible in the small size in most fonts. Grouping all the over-macron letters separately from the over-tilde letters doesn't really make it easier to see that two letters that appear the same actually are different. The only way to do that is to make the letters bigger.

Actually, it does make it easier. There's no "N-macron", so if you see A-tilde, N-tilde, O-tilde grouped together, it's a pretty big clue that these are tildes (after all, Portuguese speakers will be familiar with Spanish N-tilde). Similarly, there's no "E-tilde", so seeing AEIOU-macron grouped together is a pretty big clue that these are not tildes. You're right that it would be nice to make the special characters normal size, but I think if we do, that'll just get reverted. The current scheme is the only practical one as long as we're forced to stick to the small font. Which unfortunately I think we are. I have left a message at User talk:Brion VIBBER asking about the possibility of CSS-customizing the special characters section (maybe a future software release). -- Curps 09:35, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Suggestion perhaps what we need is a set of overlaying divs for each task—one for each language, one for IPA, one for math, maybe even one for cyrillic and one for greek (I don't think east asian character sets would be well-suited to this input format though (maybe Kana?). Then we could have a series of links that activate the different overlays. This would of course require a code change because we can't have javascript on this page (I think). If there is interest in this idea I could make a mock-up. Nohat 09:01, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Forcing text-decoration: none would be nice, but I think we need to ask a developer how to accomplish this... maybe User:Brion VIBBER could tell us.

If you want Greek and Cyrillic, here it is... but there's no space for them, a number of people object to the space already used for special characters.

-- Curps 09:08, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

---

Proposal

I've a modest proposal for amending the special characters list with the middle dot (&#183; or &middot;). It doesn't seem like such a big change, but I'm mentioning it here because millions of people see the list and most of them, I surmise, don't use it. Making it bigger might only serve to distract people from more important things, like the crucial caveat that one's writing will be edited mercilessly. Furthermore, we must recognize that, when we do trivial things like adding a couple-pixel midpoint to the special characters list, precedents sometimes get established that result in harm. Doing so could encourage others to add their own 'pet characters' to the list, leading to bloat and even less usability, which is why I'm unsure, now, how to proceed. Here's how the two versions, old and new, would look:

to

The second has &middot; added to the '&ndash; &mdash; &hellip;' subset; this subset was chosen because it seems to make sense there. The named character identity reference was chosen for consistency with the other items in the subset and for consistency with current usage in WP. I'm kind of surprised that the rest of the set is such a jumble of direct keyboard inputs and numeric and named references, but it's no big deal. :-)

So, if there are no unresolved objections, made anywhere, to my knowledge, in one month, I'll add the midpoint to the list, which is not to say that I would object to someone subsequently removing it for a good reason. BTW, I originally argued for midpoint use here; ALoan kindly pointed me to this page. Chris Roy 00:36, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

On second thought, my own comment on how adding the midpoint could establish a dangerous precedent does count as an 'unresolved objection'. Unless I or someone else convinces me otherwise, I will not add the midpoint to the special characters list. Chris Roy 03:54, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Few essential Lithuanian characters missing

There are already most of lithuanian specific characters in the page:

But few are missing and those are most essential as those are not correctly replaced by most browsers (it saves Š, but in Unicode lithuanian character Š should be replaced with &#352;, otherwise in interwiki links make incorrect URLs; it applies also for š, Ž and ž). So I suggest to extend the block (example was above) to make it:

After such change it would be much easier to add lithuanian interwiki links. Thanks. Knutux 08:57, 2005 Mar 31 (UTC)

Hmmm

Maybe you shoud add someting like http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning , they have [[Category:]] , <gallery>, and signature code. And ofcourse some Cyrilic letters like this Љ-Њ-Џ-Ш-Ђ-Ч-Ћ, we use this in Serbian wiki. Thanks --Sasa Stefanovic 17:44, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Vandal warning.

Considering how much vandalism occurs, I am surprised that there is not a clear warning against vandalism. Vandalism is a major problem, and having a better warning may make potential vandals to think twice. Instead, there is only the minor "bad edits to articles are watched for and will be quickly removed." message. I propose a message like this to make it clearer that vandalism is unwelcome.

DO NOT COMMIT VANDALISM. DOING SO COULD LEAD TO YOU BEING BLOCKED FROM EDITING.

NSR 12:45, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Proposed change

Based on discussions at WP talk:CP, feedback on wikipedia-l, and the note above, I propose the following version, which changes formatting and order, but changes content only by adding the note regarding vandalism as proposed above. The idea with the colored box is shamelessly stolen from the German WP. Rl 13:21, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yet Another Proposal

I would like to advocate for a proposal similar to user NSR's proposal above, except for dealing with copyvios:

PLEASE DO NOT COPY AND PASTE CONTENT WITHOUT RECEIVING PERMISSION.

I would like to suggest that this occur at the very top of edit pages, where new users can't help but see it. WP:CP is constantly being filled up by the contributions of well meaning anons who just don't understand about copyright and who don't bother to scroll down to the bottom of the page where the warning about the GFDL license occurs.

func(talk) 7 July 2005 21:01 (UTC)

Agreed. --Phroziac ^(talk) 15:03, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

IPA symbols

I would really like to see this "character palette," as I call it, include all of the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols. My interests, erratic as they are, are right now focusing on the IPA. Denelson83 06:18, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree, that would be nice. --Phroziac ^(talk) 15:03, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

Unfortunately, some people already object to its length as it is now. And others would like Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. etc. instead, and we can't fit everything. The solution would be to allow users to customize this. I think this would need an update to Mediawiki software, to allow specifying it in Special:Preferences... I don't think that CSS alone could do it (or perhaps it can? I'm discussing this idea with User:Plugwash).

If a Mediawiki change is needed, the person to talk to might be User:Brion VIBBER, who first implemented the idea. [2]

-- Curps 16:08, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

More recent news: for IPA, see User:Func/wpfunc/addipaextensions.js, which can be added to your [[User:YOU/monobook.js]] file. Similar ideas can be used for Greek, Cyrillic or any other set of symbols. -- Curps 00:37, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Why don't we use the Wiktionary approach, where different groups of characters can be accessed using a drop-down menu?  Denelson83  00:11, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Section symbol (§)

I have a small request: can the section symbol (§) be added to the character bar? It would be of immense convenience to those of us who write about statutes and other sources of law. -- BD2412 ^talk 22:07, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

OK, it's been added. -- Curps 00:34, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Many thanks!!! -- BD2412 ^talk 00:35, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Proposed addition

Until the MediaWiki software includes the capability of displaying the last diff on the article's Editing page (in order to allow users to check if the last edit was vandalism), I suggest that we add in a comment urging editors to check that the last edit was not vandalism. If everyone did this, it would definitely cut down significantly on the number of missed vandalisms (including sneaky vandalisms, since an article's editors are likely to know more about the subject than the RC patrol). In the future, I hope MediaWiki makes it automatic (displaying the last diff below the editing box, with red changes text clearly visible), and even provides a check box to administrators to "rollback the last edit" while still allowing them to edit the page. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-7 16:26

Unfortunately, I doubt anyone reads the boilerplate text under "Your changes will be visible immediately" text, except maybe newbies. It hardly ever changes in any meaningful way, so it gets ignored, and usually it's simply invisible because it's below the scroll window. So this will be pretty ineffective.

Your Mediawiki suggestion is interesting, you should post it at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). One drawback is that a large multicolor diff popping up automatically could be very confusing to casual or inexperienced editors, and if it's large enough it can cause long delays or timeouts. Vandals could deliberately create large diffs for this purpose. -- Curps 16:46, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, it could be an option that is turned on in the preferences, then. Anon vandals wouldn't know about it. Large vandalisms are always encountered anyways, so I don't see how this is any different in that respect. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-7 17:14

Proposed removal

Is there really a need for the text "Your changes will be visible immediately"? I'm for keeping these messages as short as possible, thus encouraging people to actually read them. Is anyone against removing this text? — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-7 16:33

Perhaps some newbies actually read it, once. After that, no one expects it to change... it's not a place to put news or messages. Even if few people read it, it doesn't do much harm, because it's usually below the bottom of the scroll window, so it doesn't really take up screen space.

For legal purposes I think we very definitely do need to keep the copyright and GFDL stuff. -- Curps 16:52, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

How about replacing the generally useless "Your changes will be visible immediately" with the arguably useful "Please check that the last edit wasn't vandalism". I really believe this will help cut down on vandalism, including sneaky vandalism. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-7 17:16

Insert special chars box to my own wiki

Hi, I was wondering how to add the "insert special chars" box to my wiki. When I add it to my page all I get is a bunch of "charinsert" tags... the javascript (or whatever) isn't converting it over. See: [3] Thanks. David Bergan 05:34, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Nevermind. I got it. The answer was found here. David Bergan 06:27, 30 October 2005 (UTC)