MediaWiki talk:Newarticletext

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MediaWiki:Newuserpagetext (talk), MediaWiki:Noarticletext (talk)

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[edit] Added deletion links

I added a couple links from another Mediawiki template to help bewildered people who find that an article that was previously present has disappeared. These links search the deletion log for the article and visit its AfD page, if it exists. I think this will help people whose pages are deleted to understand why so they can take appropriate action and refrain from recreating them. This is important for infrequent visitors or anonymous users without watchlists who may never even see the AfD warning. Deco 03:25, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I've fixed the deletion log link to use {{FULLPAGENAMEE}} so that it works outside the main namespace too. I made the same change to the AfD link too, effectively making it show a redlink outside the main namespace, although it really should be included in a namespace-specific section as discussed above. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:56, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. Unfortunately linking to the deletion votes for any page is impossible with how our deletion pages are structured, but I think anyone who writes non-article pages probably doesn't need this warning so much anyway. I made some additional changes in language after Dbenbenn's merge to deal with the situation where the page is deleted a long time after it's created. Deco 20:07, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

I changed the links for the four namespaces that get listed on MfD to also use {{FULLPAGENAME}}. This means that if there is a MfD subpage discussion, it should get linked to. --bainer (talk) 09:19, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Strong cut and paste warning

We still see a lot of people cutting and pasting content into new articles. I think it's usually an innocent mistake, but it leaves us with not only a legal issue but a messy unformatted article that's often quite long, POV, and otherwise needs massive cleanup (that rarely happens quickly if at all). So I think it would help if this message indicated that copy and pastes should almost always be avoided. I don't think this is really instruction creep, since this exact instruction already exists and is very important. Thoughts? --W.marsh 01:33, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Helping people out

This page, in my opinion, needs major changes to help newcomers out. Right now we're giving people a blank box and telling them good luck, it's no wonder that over 50% of new articles get deleted. Do we really expect people to fish through a bunch of murky guidelines and help pages to figure out what to do? That just isn't realistic.

In my experience, once you tell people that pages should be categorized and formatted, they are happy to do it, and do a good job of it even if they're new, since they're familiar with the subject. But there isn't always someone adding the appropriate tags to new articles... so often they just go neglected.

Anyway, other wikis with far less traffic and new articles than WP have Newarticletext messages that genuinely help new users avoid the common pitfalls of new articles... why shouldn't we? --W.marsh 21:08, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't think anyone in question is going to see warnings unless they're at the top of the page. It really helps if you actually deal with the new articles being created at about 200/hour every day... Wikipedia shouldn't be a city dump. --W.marsh 21:20, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Syntax error?

When I tried to create a new category talk page, I found out that the first line said something like: "Wikipedia does not have an article yet". This should probably be fixed. BTW, I'm not an admin so someone else should take care of this. --Eleassar my talk 22:11, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

All of the various types of talk pages (category talk, portal talk, user talk, talk) should say "Wikipedia does not have a talk page" where "talk pages" links to Help:Talk page. That would seem to be the correct behaviour. Can you confirm that this wording appears? --bainer (talk) 01:28, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

I think I've now fixed it. {{NAMESPACE}} returns "Category talk" rather than "Category_talk", which is why the old format wasn't working. It seems to now work for category talk and should work for all other talk namespaces, but let me toy around with it a bit and see if I got 'em all. AmiDaniel (talk) 01:45, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Okay, seems to be good. Let me know if there are any other namespaces where it does not display correctly. AmiDaniel (talk) 01:50, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This page is too verbose

When one try to edit a new page, one can't almost see the edit box because of half of more screenful of instruction creep. Particulary, I find the language

All articles written about yourself, your friends, your company, their business partners or products, or as part of a marketing or promotional campaign, may be deleted without further notice in accordance with our deletion policies. For more information, see Wikipedia:Spam.
The Wikimedia Foundation reserves the right to pursue legal avenues against persistent abusers. Wikipedia is not an advertising service.

highly agressive and unnecessary. I suggest that paragraph be radically trimmed to one or two sentences, and reduce the amount of bold. That note the way it is, is highly distracting, and it is not as if the more you rant the more people will listen. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:53, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

The number of new 'resume' articles has decreased measurably since the implementation of the message other types of promotional materials are somewhat harder to measure. --Gmaxwell 17:24, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
How do you know? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:12, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
Use Special:Newpages and count them. It's faster if you focus on pages created by redlinked people. I'd post numbers but I'd rather encourage people to look for themselves rather than take my mind for it. You can jump back as far as recent changes goes (a bit over a month). The amount of pure crud that is created is eye opening. --Gmaxwell 21:05, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I tend to agree with Oleg. This fills the entire page and then some on my browser. I think that people adding more speediable articles is a small price to pay for coming across as friendly to new users. JYolkowski // talk 00:48, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
So you'll be taking care of all of them and will be accountable when things are missed? :) If not then you're not really in a position to speak for everyone else. You can hide the text using local CSS, if you'd like help then let me know. --Gmaxwell 03:32, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

The message did have an aggressive and unsavory tone. I've modified it to focus on the one sentence that matters - that WP is not an advertising service - and to explain what may happen to promo material. It is still a bit too long, but now less likely to keep well-meaning readers from becoming contributors and sharing their knowledge. +sj + 15:45, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Request change

I think in the last paragraph, the link to Wikipedia:Deletion policy should span "deletion policies", and not just "deletion". -Ambuj Saxena (talk) 18:09, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for implementing the suggestion. One more suggestion. Wouldn't it be better if in the last paragraph, we link to WP:NOT from the bold text? -Ambuj Saxena (talk) 17:54, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BEANS

I don't know about the statistics of article creation, but adding a "don't advertise on Wikipedia!" clause seems to me likely to increase advertising in the medium term. WP:BEANS and all thatn. +sj + 15:47, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

WP beans only applies if the subject wouldn't have thought of it in the first place. If you're already at the new article page, thats probably not the case... although with your weaked and confusing new text (can we not have articles on companies at all?) perhaps I could see where it might cause problems. --Gmaxwell 15:51, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
I have to agree with Sj here. This could be counter-productive by having such a strong tone in the above-mentioned clause. --Siva1979Talk to me 20:28, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More tweaks required

Since this template is displayed even for sub-pages under a namespace, I think that the word "page" should be appended to the sentence as follows. Instead of:

Wikipedia does not have a portal with this exact name.

The page should say:

Wikipedia does not have a portal page with this exact name.

Similar changes are needed for other namespaces to make things clearer. — Ambuj Saxena (talk) 20:27, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I have to agree with you here. The latter sentence is more clearer. --Siva1979Talk to me 20:25, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Do you need another copyright warning?

Cut-and-paste copyvios still are submitted to Wikipedia at a rapid rate. Although there is a warning about doing this below the edit box, I doubt all new users read it. Perhaps we should also have a copyright warning here? -- Where 21:46, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

I tried this a while ago and it was shot down, people think prominent warnings are pointless (despite the fact that nearly all other Wikis have them). What we really need is a bot to actually do the Google test for copyvios, but that's never materialized. --W.marsh 22:19, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmmm. The bot possibility sounds interesting. I will have to look into it. Thanks! -- Where 23:31, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
Will there be any major problems if this bot was to be used? For example, there could also be a possibility of errors occuring here as well if the bot contains a bug. --Siva1979Talk to me 20:56, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
I do not think so, since the bot will only be editing one page in either userspace or Wikipedia-space. For more details, you can take a look at the discussion of the bot here. -- Where 21:23, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Slight change for Talk page text

A lot of people are getting confused by the Talk page new article text. New users have nothing on their talk pages so when they click the link to go there they see this message. However many people are used to just "having" a "message centre" whether it's empty or not, so lots of them are thinking that they don't have a message centre at all, i.e. they can't receive talk messages, because this page reads "There is no Talk page."

So I suggest clarifying this. --Alfakim-- talk 17:38, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Tis done. (I also updated Mediawiki:Noarticletext, which comes up when going to a URL of a redlinked page. Let me know if you like it. JesseW, the juggling janitor 19:40, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Please make a GOOD new article"

I mentioned this in discussion on wikien-l - we have lots of new articles. What we need to do is encourage good new articles. e.g. "Even if it's just a stub, make it useful to a reader, with a clear description and a good reference or two."

However, the text is already long enough for a complete newbie's eye to skim off it. So, per the wisdom of m:instruction creep, I don't want to add anything new without removing something else or at least severely tightening the present text. Assume we can't make people read it, so we have to make it as readable as possible. Any suggestions? - David Gerard 22:44, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree that there should be more emphasis on creating a "good" article in here. I would suggest that the paragraph about deleted pages could be spun off into a link somewhere, and the paragraph about advertising could be shrunk. Don't have the time right now to take a stab at it though. JYolkowski // talk 02:24, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
Well there's been talk of requiring (or at least suggesting) a screen to try to get people to categorize, format and create incoming links to new articles, if those areas are not addressed when the article is submitted. This was pretty much shot down... though there seems to be support for at least automatically adding tags so the creators might see what they need to do the improve their articles. See Wikipedia:Enforce inclusion of categories, I personally think that's the best easy to impliment bandaid for the perpetual flood of poor new articles... at least if people categorized/linked to them, it would be easier for dedicated editors to find them.
But in general, getting new users to create good new articles is going to take more than a few lines added to the instructions, though. We really need a revamped article creation process that gives people more than a blank box to work with. --W.marsh 02:53, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for creation has always given editors more than a blank box. It employs a preload template, Template:AFC preload, that automatically inserts a "Sources" section in any new submission. One idea to think about is altering the "Start the N article" link on MediaWiki:Noarticletext to employ a pre-load template, Template:Noarticletext preload, that automatically inserts a "References" section. Uncle G 17:16, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

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