Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)

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Village pump perennial proposals   post
This page is an adjunct to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). It describes perennial proposals -- in other words, ideas that come up very often on the proposals page. If someone moves your proposal to this page, it does not mean that he or she thought it was a bad idea. It merely means that your proposal has been suggested multiple times and should be dealt with in an area that changes less quickly than the main proposals section, which has very high turnover.
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[edit] Proposals concerned with the main ("article") namespace

[edit] Always fill the summary field

Always fill the summary field. is Wikipedia policy.

My proposal is that something be done to help decrease the number of edits with a blank summary field. The obvious idea is to not accept a change with a blank summary field. I have my doubts about that, but I suggest that one letter summaries might be a clue that the edit itself is suspect, while a blank summary is now so common it is useless for that. Second idea is a plea to please please put something in the summary. A third idea is ten one word check boxes (revert, spelling, minor, etc) to make checking a box as easy as a one character entry into the sumary field. I'm sure others have equally good ideas. 4.250.132.28 04:56, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Would it be possible to automatically detect a blank summary field and add characters from the edit? Where there are multiple edits, it could prioritise the first human readable change. Just a thought. Bobblewik  (talk) 15:52, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
That would be a great idea. I am often too lazy to fill out summary fields. - Omegatron 23:11, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)
I oppose the "autofill" idea. I too thought, initially, that would be a great idea. However, I suspect that many lazy editors (including myself) would start relying on an auto-filled summary by default. You would then, paradoxically, end up getting a less informative Recent Changes page — it would be a lot harder to pick up vandals from the genuine edits (an empty summary is so much easier to pick out). For example, the more isidious vandal that falsifies a date would have the same edit summary as a lazy editor that before would have said "google says 1666 not 1676". Also, I think the suggestion "A better description" (sub-section below) would supersede this anyway.--A bit iffy 11:08, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
Adding code to the software to do this has been suggested several times before, but it was always rejected on the (quite reasonable) grounds that people who can't be bothered to leave a decent edit summary will just put random crap in if we force them to do something. In general, there aren't technical solutions to sociological misbehaviours. I suppose Omegatron's forgetfulness is one reasonable reason to implement this (there are technical solutions to honest mistakes), but don't expect a golden arcadia of well-written edit summaries. -- John Fader (talk | contribs) 23:23, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
We aren't forcing... people like me... to fill in the edit summaries with random crap. We are having the software fill in a bit of what they added to the article. This isn't a "use technology to force them to type something" thing, it's a "use technology to fill it in for them" thing.
Thus, if I change the phrase "often forget to" into "am often too lazy to", the edit summary will automatically be filled in for me: "often forget to" --> "am often too lazy to", or, less technically demanding, just "I am often too lazy to" as the edit summary. If you don't change the edit summary from the auto-generated section heading or blank, it automagically fills in a bit of your diff as the edit summary. - Omegatron 04:02, May 1, 2005 (UTC)
What if it came up with an "Are you sure" message, like when you send an email with no subject? That way if people didn't want to fill in the summary they could just say yes, but if they had just forgotten then they could go back and do it. MyNameIsClare 09:27, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
On a related note, I think I will create a Village pump (perennial proposals) section for things like this which come up often. (I suggested it a while back, too.) jdb ❋ (talk) 00:17, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
That is a great idea. - Omegatron 04:02, May 1, 2005 (UTC)
Writing an edit summary is a great curtsey to other people having that article on the watchlist. It is at least somewhat similar to writing a subject in an email.
One should make good conscious effort to write an appropriate edit summary. People should not be forced to write an edit summary, they should be aware that is good etiquette and follow it. You should not have the software write an edit summary anymore than you trust your email program to write the subject line for you. Oleg Alexandrov 04:15, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
Many applications provide default field contents that can be changed, rather than leaving it blank. Sometimes the default is simple like 'Doc1' and sometimes it is more sophisticated and reflects previous user input. However, the principle of field completion by default is certainly commonplace. The popularity of such design features is by no means a suggestion that people who buy the applications are lazy or discourteous. We even have such a feature right here on Wikipedia. For example, when you edit a section within a page, the summary field defaults to the section heading. Whether it is desirable or feasible is another matter. Bobblewik  (talk) 11:07, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

I would like to propose what to me seems would be reasonably simple to implement, and a genuine convenience: a short series of 'checkboxes' below the edit summary line, where one can make a quickie summary simply by making a selection. the 'minor edit' checkbox is nice - but why not expand on the idea with other 'minor' selections, to wit:

O Corrected Spelling   O Corrected Syntax   O Corrected Punctuation
O Cleaned Formatting   O Rephrased/Reworded O Reverted Vandalism

Thoughts? Anastrophe 00:17, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

  • All but the last item are copy editing. I'd rather just say that. Halcatalyst 21:14, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
    • But that requires one to type in "copy editing" which may be seen as redundant by people. Most of the times in which I haven't filled in the edit summary is when it's such a minor thing that it isn't worth my time to summarize. To have checkboxes like the above is a good idea in my opinion. "Rephrase/reworded" and "cleaned formatting" don't reall qualify as minor edits, however. 23skidoo 21:55, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
    • i would generally agree on the last sentence there. the reality is however, having only the two distinctions - minor or major - is impractical. i was thinking more along the lines of *eliminating* the 'minor edit' box and replacing with the six (or more) listed. a rephrase/reword can be significant, or only modifying the syntax simply for 'cleanliness'/elegance, e.g. changing "from the balcony leapt booth" to "booth leapt from the balcony" as a fictitious example. the meaning is identical, the wording is not. so it falls into the "medium range edit" area i think (!) Anastrophe 22:09, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

The Edit Summary Box would be better off being at the top of the edit page. The psychological reason for this is I think best explained as follows:

The desire and reason to edit is uppermost in ones mind when clicking on 'edit this page'. At this point it is easy to add an 'edit summery'. In practise one does not even see it -out of sight -and out of mind -at the bottom. Should one wait until the edit is complete and the mark-up characters are in place and the preview checked to ensure it looks pretty and professional... the original 'memory state' has expired and the original reason for the edit has passed to 'intermediate memory.' Also the desire has been by this point been satisfied and so the emotional linkage too, has been broken. This is why it can seem like too much bother to change gear mentally and start to ponder some suitable utterance. What is more, it is now more difficult, because one now has the distraction of how the new version actually looks and this may 'read' slightly different to ones original expectation. It becomes to feel almost like one is now being asked to justify ones actions.

Simply put the edit summary on the top of the page text field and all this is avoided. It is an easy oversight to make. I have often found forms with the fields still in the order that they were originally thought of -without any consideration for the ergonomics of the mind.

Also, if possible, have a reminder to add a summery if summery field is empty when 'preview' is selected and do not show the preview until something has been entered. This will help to 'condition' those with poor memories. I think this will only be an irritation to those who irritate others by not putting a summery. Aspro 17:22, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

I vote for leaving the summary field where it is: When I click 'edit' I want to start editing right away, not summarize something I haven't yet done... I might change my mind while editing or find another thing to fix as well. Better do the summary last and have the field close to the "Save" button.
I usually do reasonably good edit summaries when I can. However, I often make several unrelated changes in one edit, sometimes because I notice an additional problem with an article once I start editing for the initial change. If one wrote the edit summary at the beginning, that summary may not reflect further changes made to the article in that edit. Therefore, I would prefer to leave the edit summary at the end. Also, it seems to me that the edit summaries cannot be changed once the edit is finished. Occasionlly, I've found myself in a position where the edit summary is saved, but does not relect the edit content well and, it seems to me, there is no way to back and change the summary, so I just let it go the way it is. Maybe some guidelines or standard ways of briefly summarizing minor edits can help, like "sp" for a minor spelling edit, "p" for a punctuation edit, "f" for a format edit, "link" or "fx lnk" for edits that create or fix links, respectively. H Padleckas 02:07, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This idea may be new here. When I leave the summary box empty, it is always just an oversight. My mind is focused on what I'm writing, not on the infrastructure details like the summary box. So I would warmly welcome being reminded. If I press the key "Save Page" and my Summary Box is still blank, the software would remind me, "To Save Page without writing the Summary, click HERE." Then I would feel, what a great system Wikipedia is, it even reminds me of what I forgot. Others might feel, what a lousy system, trying to force me to write a summary and actually forcing me to make an extra click. But who would have a serious problem with making just one extra click?

To the administrators, this is a request, please implement it, to help forgetters like me -- regardless of other suggestions/solutions. I'd even be willing to code it for Wikipedia if I know the language. (In my opinion, it should be in low-level efficient code.) For7thGen 23:24, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

For a high-level, inefficient version, see #Javascript extension below. —Cryptic (talk) 02:43, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
How about making whether or not "Are you sure?" comes up a customizable option, so that those who are forgetful can turn it on, and those who dislike that kind of thing can turn it off? (By the way, are edit summaries recommended for talk pages?) Andjam 13:39, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
It can be a good idea to type "response to [[User:whoever]]". Steve block talk 13:43, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I think all three ideas would be very helpful, and are mutually compatibe: have several checkboxes, summarize small edits automatically, and ask "are you sure" if the edit is big and the summary is blank. You could even mandate that a big edit be summarized, or suggest "copy-edit" or "elaboration" etc as summaties. -Pgan002 05:03, 21 May 2006 (UTC)


[edit] A better description

This is not a proposal for forcing people to fill in summaries (everyone agrees this is a bad idea).

This is not a proposal to make filling summaries policy (it already is) and encouraging it more often (this already happens).

This is a policy to add some info about the edit when someone doesn't fill out the edit summary field, making patrolling easier on everyone. For instance, if I make a minor change to an article, changing "5KV" to "5 kV", I just press alt+s out of habit, without filling out the summary. What would be ideal is if the software just autogenerated a summary of:

16:15 Electricity (diff; hist) . . Omegatron (Talk) (→Voltage - "5KV" → "5 kV")

Likewise, vandalism would become SOO much easier to see, because it would autogenerate edit summaries like:

16:15 Politics (diff; hist) . . 192.1.2.123 (Talk) (→Political concerns - Added "poop")
16:15 Politics (diff; hist) . . 192.1.2.123 (Talk) (→Political concerns - "is a member of the" → "IS GAY!!!")

While reducing the need to look at diffs with summaries like:

16:15 Politics (diff; hist) . . 192.1.2.123 (Talk) (→Political concerns - "the the" → "the")

How could anyone not think this is a good idea??? It's just displaying the first few changes from the diff page, saving work for everyone and reducing server load by preventing the need to load a large proportion of the diff pages. - Omegatron 16:46, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and the auto-generated summaries should be in a different color so they can't be faked, which was my first (trivial) objection to my own idea. (Even more unlikely than vandalism with fake edit summaries done with the current software, which never happens.) I made them green in the above example, though maybe the same gray as the section name would be best:

16:15 Politics (diff; hist) . . 192.1.2.123 (Talk) (→Political concerns - "the the" → "the")

This saves server resources by processing a diff only once, preventing the need for many people to load that diff again in the future.

Details:

  • The basic generated summary would be of the "inital version" → "changed version" format. It should just use the first x words of each version. If only one word is actually changed, it should still use the surrounding words for context: "the first five words of" → "the original five words of"
  • If words are only added or removed, it should just say Added "word", although that would be better in context, too. Perhaps Added "word" → "The person's favorite word is". Maybe the added word could be in bold or something: "The person's favorite word is"
  • If merely adding a category or interwiki, it would say Added category Words and make the cat a link. Added interwiki de:Wort (Begriffsklärung). (It should not just say Added interwiki de, for example, as the summary could prevent erroneous interwikis. More info and more linkability is better.)

- Omegatron 21:28, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

A great idea. jdb ❋ (talk) 03:34, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
This is an absolutely great idea. The implementation may be a bit tricky though, if the database table row is a set size. Ideally, a new row should be created. I think that all edits should have this, not only the ones that don't get their description filled in. If the edit was large, you could put … → …, if old text was large and replaced by a reasonably small, … → "1337_GUY OWNS Y"… . The text inside the quotes should appear gray, or small, (different) while the quotes and symbols themselves should appear green, or blue. For things like spelling corrections, this would be great. Only problem is when they do multiple corrections. –MT 29 June 2005 18:51 (UTC)
If you like this idea, vote for it on Bugzilla (Bug 2437) - Omegatron 19:35, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

I think a better solution would be to use the diff function on edit submit to detect when certain things are done to the article, such as blanking (and section blanking), changing an image, removing/adding links, etc. And inserting these into the edit summary even if the user typed one already. Some examples:

  1. (cur) (last) 20:46, 14 September 2005 24.4.144.156 (Article text replaced with "idiot" - Fuck Bush And His Supporters)
  2. (cur) (last) 20:47, 14 September 2005 24.4.144.156 (Article blanked)

Detecting blanking - This would insert an autogenerated summary before the user's actual summary.

  1. (cur) (last) 20:48, 14 September 2005 24.4.144.156 (Image:George-W-Bush.jpeg replaced with Image:Flaccid_and_erect_human_penis.jpg)

Detecting image vandalism

  1. (cur) (last) 20:47, 14 September 2005 24.4.144.156 (External link added: http://uskatrinarelief.com)

Detecting link vandalism - !!NOTE: uskatrinarelief.com redirects to lemonparty.org - this is a troll link!!

Of course, large changes to the article would not fit in the edit summary. My point is, insert the auto-summary before the user's summary. --pile0nadestalk | contribs 02:28, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree, the auto-summary should not replace the user's summary. I also think the history should show information about the current word/line count of each revision, so that if somebody deletes 200 lines of an article, that change can be flagged for attention. Also there are cases where someone improperly reverts vandalism, causing some information to be lost; for example, in the Albert Einstein article, a vandal replaced a whole section with some silly text, and somebody deleted the silly text rather than revert the change. If the line count were in the history, it would be clear that this happened, and easier to find out when it happened. Pfalstad 15:33, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
A great idea! -Pgan002 05:10, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

One problem with the autofill method is that if someone made a large edit, it would create a large descripion, and what to do if two places are changed on the page. I think the best way to solve this is for longer entries to use a ... in the middle, and for edits with more than, say, three changes will just list the first three or whatever. Phantom784 21:49, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

If an auto-generated summary overflows its column, it could include a clickable symbol that will expand it for an interested reader. The generation of the summary line seems technically difficult in some cases though, since the diff function is very fallible. For example, two changes to the same section are often interpreted as one huge change, or many changes between words that happen to be repeated out of sync. I do think the auto-generated summaries are a good idea though, and for singles, they're very accurate and useful. --Loqi T. 17:32, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

I have been a major offender in leaving summaries blank. It's not because I can't be bothered, it's because I forget. I put a bunch of effort into carefully writing a contribution, maybe re-edit and press preview, and then when everything looks great, I press save. No malice, no laziness, just absent-mindedness. One problem is that the edit summary is an important part of an edit, yet it doesn't appear in the preview. But a good edit summary is written after all the prose is written. And what about the "minor edit" check box? That's important too. Maybe there should be a way to differentiate actual major edits from users who just forgot to check the "minor edit" box.

How about this: Generate a default summary line at the start of editing, say, the section heading. If the user asks for a preview or a save, auto-generate a summary along the lines of Omegatron's suggestion, above. A preview should include the entire history line, as it will be rendered, maybe between the submission text and the further-editing canvas. If the user saves without first changing the summary line, present a page saying that summaries are required by policy, and offer an editable auto-generated summary. If the user accepts this summary unchanged, give it a special marker (color) in the history listings; if the user insists on a blank summary, so be it. Also, either the "minor edit" checkbox can be deprecated, or a "major edit" box can be added to differentiate real blanks from fake blanks. This way, people like me won't forget their custom-written summaries, it'll take special effort to enter a non-meaningful summary, minor edits will get a standardized human-scannable format, and summaries that are generated by the machine can be marked as more trustworthy and accurate. --Loqi T. 17:32, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Javascript extension

Someone came up with a great extension you can put in your monobook.js file which does a quick & dirty check on your edit summary…if I can remember where I got it I'll post the reference here. --Phil | Talk 16:28, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

Take a look at this which I modified from here. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 16:33, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
What does it do? Could it be altered to do what we talked about above? - Omegatron 16:36, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
Basically it checks whether you have anything in your edit summary outside any "/*…*/" which might be put there…like I said, it's quick and dirty and catches me most times if i forget (although I think it might have problems with white-space, I'm not certain). HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 07:19, May 19, 2005 (UTC)

I made that script, and there shouldn't be any problem with ws. – ABCD✉ 20:27, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] another suggestion

In preferences, under the editing tab, there's a "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" option that people can choose.

The option is off by default.

Perhaps making it on by default would be helpful?

People will still be able to turn it off, but it just means new people will be prompted to use edit summaries by default.

It wouldn't do anything for anons not leaving summaries, but at least it will help encourage people to develope a good habit of using edit summaries when they register accounts.

I don't think new users even realize that using the edit summary is at all useful or helpful to other editors (and possibly to themselves). --Yaksha 04:58, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spell Checker at Edit Pages

   Agree or Disagree (to impliment s/b implement spell checker) + short note
Disagree - Cost too high. Spelling only matters when someone notices its wrong (then they can correct themselves) Fresheneesz 23:16, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

I believe that adding a spell checker to the Edit Pages can reduce the number of spelling mistakes in an article.Gaurav1146 19:29, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Nice idea...
Maybe it would. However, it is very difficult to implement from a coding point of view, would bring big debates like colour/color, specter/spectre, and aluminium/aluminum into play. Overall, it may well be more hassle than it is worth. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping you using a client-side word processor to spell check your end. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 19:45, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I dont agree with the arguments put up by you. As far as issues of American and Queen's English is concerned it can be sorted out after a discussion. One possible solution is that the word processor accepts both the American and the English version as correct. That is it takes both "colour" and "color" as correct but if somebody spells it as "calour" it should report it as an error. The solution that u pointed out of running a word processor at client side also does not seem logical to me. The reason is that not everybody editing wikipedia would take the pains to do that. As far as coding is concerned, I am not very sure abt the kind of expertise required. To conclude I would just say that if it is not technically impossible to add it, then it should definitely be added.Gaurav1146 20:15, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
While it would certainly save many typos, I think the necessary complexity outweighs the benefit. It's bad enough having to wait for the preview to reload, never mind having typos flagged somewhere along the line. Some browsers have spell checking built into them. (At least, the two I use do; Safari and OmniWeb. Not sure how the situation is on other platforms.) Problem solved. — PMcM 20:26, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This is not a panacea, but Wikipedia:Text editor support explains how to interface Mozilla with your favorite editor. Having this configured, one just needs to right click from a text area in a browser, click on the obtained menu, and have the wiki text pop up in the editor. After you edit/spellcheck and save the text, the brower reads it back. Oleg Alexandrov 20:34, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Besides, it's quite satisfying spotting and fixing typos. I guess you could look at all the other editors as being a built-in spell checker/fixer. — PMcM 20:52, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Just noticed there's a more comprehensive earlier discussion on this very page, just up a few days; Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Spell Check — PMcM 22:09, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

BTW: "Queen's English" does not simply mean "UK English", it's rather narrower than that. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:38, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

The only reason I started this discussion was that I observed that spelling errors were quite common in Wikipedia articles. Yesterday I picked two three articles at random, copied them to MS word and looked for spelling errors. There were one or the other spelling error in each of the article. Today I tried the same thing on two featured articles. Even these articles had some spelling errors.Gaurav1146 06:03, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Then fix them. Thryduulf 07:53, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Obviously I did fix them. As there are not many takers for the suggestion,so no point discussing it any further. Gaurav1146 20:19, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hi Gaurav, this is a good idea, and I think we should definitely implement it someday. The question is when, and how expensive (in terms of coding-time, server processing, etc) it would be. I think the big holdup is a) writing the code for an editor-plugin, and b) figuring out how to present the potential spelling corrections, so that it would be useful. Do you have specific suggestions? +sj + 06:07, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
copied them to MS word and looked for spelling errors ... hmmn. 'nuff said. --Vamp:Willow 17:15,?(null) 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Cor, but that takes an extra minute or so...
PJTraill 22:55, 23 October 2005 (UTC) Probably not enough said:
  1. Many spell-checker dictionaries are unreliable and/or polluted, so check anything you're not certain of.
  2. It is essential that you set yours to the national variant appropriate to the article.
  3. An author may have legitimate reasons for a certain spelling.

A reason not to do this that hasn't been mentioned yet is that it would consume massive amounts of server CPU. (Or so I've heard.) Nickptar 20:28, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hm. It would be easy, if much less complete, to add some client-side javascript (or even a server-side script) to highlight the 1000 most common misspellings on Preview pages. (We could find those by running a real spell-checker on the actual WP database, and picking (with some editing for proper nouns, etc) the most common misspellings. jdb ❋ (talk) 16:34, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
PJTraill 23:00, 23 October 2005 (UTC) I wonder if it would cost so much. Maybe people have seen Microsoft Word consuming almost all CPU with spell-checking during editting, but I think that was probably unnecessary.

Also see User:Omegatron#Spell checker for instructions on client-side checking with Firefox and the Spellbound extension. - Omegatron 16:26, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

One side effect of not having a spell checker is that poor spelling is still viewable. I've found poor spelling frequently accompanies poor content, so this is helpful to point out sections that need help. - Omegatron 16:16, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

About the issue of British vs. American English, it would be best for articles to be written in British English, since it is the most widely used dialect internationally (NATO, the UN, the EU, etc. all use it--see article "American and British English differences"). This would give the site more consistency and emphasize its cosmopolitan nature. Naturally, a user could have the option of ignoring the spell checker so that quotes from American English (or other) literature could be displayed as they were meant to be. If the technical issues are not absolutely atrocious, I fully support the spelling/grammer checker. Hipcat 16:53, 17 September 2005 (UTC)Hipcat

We're supposed to assume good faith, but it s very likely that "Hipcat" is trolling. In his only other two contributions, he advocates abolishing Serbian and Croatian wikipedias in favor of Serbo-Croatian, and switching to light letters on a dark background. -- Curps 18:43, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
I concur with Curps. Also, American English speakers form a supermajority of native English speakers at about 60%, so we would find a British English-only spell checker on Wikipedia to be quite offensive and not representative of the majority form of English. --Coolcaesar 06:58, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
Not that it has any real impact on the discussion or Wiki, but - due mainly to (British) English being the de jure language of India - there are rather more BE speakers than AE speakers... This certainly shouln't dictate language used by editors or spellcheckers etc., but it's something that often gets overlooked. - 86.130.183.32 07:39, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
PJTraill 22:55, 23 October 2005 (UTC) There is no need for a lot of controversy, as there is a Wikipedia policy (Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#National_varieties_of_English). Each article could have as a (modifiable) property a dictionary (or list), defaulting to that of the initial author.

I have been a regular contributor to Wikipedia for some time now but have never gotten involved in a technical or policy issue. So please excuse me if I'm bringing up a point that has probably been mentioned before.

The preferences menu allows me to choose how I want to see dates displayed; effectively customizing it to my preferred view. Is their any reason why this could not be so for different spellings? Someone could write or edit articles using the spelling of any English variant and Wikipedia would automatically change differently-spelled words to conform to your how your country spells them (presumably by the IP address) unless you choose otherwise in the preferences. I’m not experienced in computer programming so forgive me if I’m missing something obvious but could this be done? It seems to be a solution that would please everyone.

PJTraill 22:55, 23 October 2005 (UTC) If you are suggesting dynamically adapting the spelling to the person visiting the page, I fear that would probably cost to much server capacity (any idea, anyone?).

In addition, this talk page seems to be the best page for me to post this suggestion but if anyone else knows of a more appropriate location, I would appreciate it if someone could tell me where.

Thanks. Martin-C 03:14, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I hadn't considered server capacity as an issue but I suppose you're right. If Wikipedia's resources are already quite strained (I often get server failures) then anything placing more demand on the system would not be a good idea. Nonetheless if Wikipedia should acquire much more server capacity in the future, I am curious as to if writing a program such as I have described would be difficult? Martin-C 23:09, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Thinking on the AE/BE differences, I think the only way to solve this with a built in spell checker would be to set a flag on each article when it was created to say which variety of English it was written in. After that the spellchecker would use that type of English to check against. It wouldn't need to be changed very often, but the capability would need to be there (e.g. in case an article about a US Senator was started by a BE speaker, although if I were doing that I'd know it should be in AE and set that as the flag and get the spellchecker to convert my BE into AE. Not everyone would know this however), but probably restricted to administrator level to avoid waring over it. However as I personally don't think we need a spellchecker, this is kind of a moot point, but I thought I'd throw it into the discussion anyway. Thryduulf 09:22, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Cost of spell checking

In my opinion, the cost of adding spell checking would probably be prohibitive as long as Wikipedia relies upon donations. The most significant costs that come to mind are:

  • Processing power - the computational complexity of checking one word may be O(m²n), where m is the average word length and n is the dictionary size. For English, m is about 9, while our Spell checking article suggests 90,000 for n, giving a problem size of 7 million operations times whatever the overhead is, for every unknown word. Accuracy and completeness can be sacrificed for speed, but considering the number of editors, this still probably means we would need
  • Wordlists for every language - not a big problem; words can simply be extracted from database dumps. This would be much easier, though, if Special:Search used an inverted index.
  • Development - but spell checkers are at least easy to write. PHP even has levenshtein, soundex, and metaphone functions. However, only the levenshtein function is language-agnostic, so we might want
    • Custom phonetic algorithms for every language - which fortunately doesn't require much beyond understanding the orthography of each language.
    • In terms of development, would it be very hard to implement Aspell or Ispell as a server script, then at least highlight questionable entries, so it would be easier to spot spelling mistakes?

Spellchecking seems feasible except for the server problem. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 02:21, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

I know nothing about the costs, but agree as to the principle of a spell checker. It's not true that spelling doesn't matter until someone spots a mistake, nor is it true (be honest, folks!) that all of us when we spot a mistake, correct it. Bill 00:05, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Where does the O(m²n) come from? Using a Trie, I can't see how it would be any worse than O(m). --Dantheox 18:38, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
That's the cost of computing Levenshtein distances across the entire dictionary. Tries may be fast, but I don't think they can make spelling corrections beyond a very limited set of closely related words (what happens if the first letter is wrong?) ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 20:23, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
A Trie could be used to quickly determined whether a word was misspelled. The Levenstein distances would only be needed for words not in the dictionary, presumably a small subset of the total words in an article. --Dantheox 06:33, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Right; it at least isn't nearly so bad as checking every word would be, but it's still an obnoxious problem. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 06:46, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
The Google servers you mentioned are working much harder. They do fancy context-dependent magic like "untied states" -> "united states". [1] This algorithm could put in the Trie not only correctly-spelled words but common (or recently-seen) misspellings. I don't think enough's left over that O(m²n) is a problem. - Slamb 05:12, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
The other problem? There are a significant number of words that are spelled differently in EN-US and EN-GB. And there is a guideline (somewhere) telling us which to use in different cases - unless we can get a spellchecker to understand that guideline (stuff like 'articles specific to one country should use that country's spelling' and 'international articles should simply be consistent') it will cause a mess Cynical 21:44, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
See discussion in main part of spell-checking thread. -- PJTraill 01:22, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I recall seeing a list of commonly mispelt words on wikipedia before. perhaps we could have a spell check that only checks through a list of commonly mispelt words, instead of a full spell checker. This should be easier and less demanding technically, but should still be useful. So i'm thinking something that would generate a list of words in the article which are common spelling errors after an edit, and prompt the editor with the list. The editor can then choose to accept the changes or not. --Yaksha 05:05, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Firefox version 2.0 has a built-in spell checker it works very well for Wiki edits--Mutley 09:25, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Abolish anonymous users

This is probably one of the more frequent proposals. It has been proposed on Wikipedia and on meta

I'd like to suggest to editors that they read m:Foundation issues before commenting here. Soundguy99 16:01, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"We've always done it that way" is of course not a useful thing to read, other than as a gauge of the kind of opposition the move will meet. If a pillar in a building is found to be insufficient, defective or damaged, the survival of the building may require changing the pillar, obviously. Bill 11:58, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
This means that we can never win, right? That no matter how hard we clamour, anonymous editing will never be blocked? Because it seems to me that the overwhelming majority of the community want this measure to be taken. Mgekelly - Talk 00:39, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cookies to identify registered users

There are many cases where I forget to sign on, and since it doesn't ask for me to sign on, I don't have a record of everything i've done. Therefore I have suggested that the site use cookies to identify users who are registered and allow them to more easily sign on. Cookies could also identify serial vandals. Alternatively, when an unregistered user edits - there could just be an option "sign on: yes, no - your edits will be kept either way" - Fresheneesz 22:06, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Why is noone interested in this? Cookies would eliminate the problem of vandal anons using multiple IPs (as long as they have cookies enabled, don't tell them..). This would also help me, a non-vandal, because it would be a good guard against my laziness to sign in. The cookies idea is one i think would greatly benefit wikipedia. Common guys at least give one comment. Fresheneesz 19:43, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
This is already being done. isn't it? I haven't logged in with my password in 3 weeks because the site remembers me using a cookie, and on the few occasions where (due to malware attack) I've tried to access the site with a "no cookies accepted" setting, I get turned away. However (and this is a weakness with cookies) you need only do a cookie purge (which users are supposed to do every so often anyway) and everything starts from scratch, so I don't really see the worth ... if you're talking about more detailed cookies such as tracking cookies, that opens up a major privacy issue. 23skidoo 19:58, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
To clarify: once you sign in on your usual computer, it cookifies you and remembers you, so in fact you don't have to think about signing in again. The purge is every 30 days; granted that means that every 30 days or so it'll suddenly ask you to log in again (for the next 30 days) — but it's much better than being asked every time you access Wicked. Mind you, if you access Wicked from many different computers, especially other people's where you feel you need to log out each time, then it's as Fresh says: a fair waste of time. Bill 20:46, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Well actually, I have to resign in about every hour or less. I don't know if it changed recently or what, but in any case it doesn't work that way for me. Fresheneesz 22:22, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand how cookies work with Wiki and IE. Everytime I start a new IE instance, I have to sign in again or be an anonymous IP. It's great that the cookies remember me if I don't sign out but they don't seem to cross instances of IE.
Richard 00:25, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


How I avoid unintentionally making anonymous edits: I prefer the default skin, but use a different one just so I know whether or not I'm signed in. Is there anyway of customising the colours on the default skin, so that it's obvious whether or not you're signed in, but you still have the same layout?

TRiG 18:55, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Allowing IPs to edit

[edit] Benefits of allowing IPs

Please, someone let me know the overwhelming benefits of continuing to allow IP addresses to edit pages. Restricting editing to only registered accounts would decrease the vast amount of vandalism (especially of the "drive-by" variety) ... and does not force anyone to give up their anonymity. In fact, you have more anonymity in editing with a username than an ip address, at least someone can traceroute you with an IP address. --kizzle 23:42, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

  • Far too restrictive. There are some people who will register before they commit acts of vandalism... and while many IP edits do turn out to be vandalism, there are many IP edits which are not. Some articles have been started by and maintained by users who have not registered. I started out on Wikipedia editing as an IP before I registered an account. My feeling is that my barnstar for vandalism reverts was obtained 2-3 days after registering an account not just because of my actions during those 2-3 days, but also my actions as an IP editor.--Chanting Fox 23:48, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
It's the principle. This is a wiki, and it is supposed to be that way. How many of us, me included, just happend to stumble on to wikipedia from a google-search and and noticed the Edit this page-button? "No, it can't be that way.... It can't be that simple.... Well, there is a spelling error there, no harm in trying. Jesus Christ, it worked!" Yes, drive-by vandalism is common and irritating, but know that many (most probably) are newbies that don't really get how wikipedia works. Once they start to surf around they understand how it works, and starts to make useful, even great edits. As for the vandalism, most "serious" vandals get a user-name because, as you say, it get's you more anonymity, and you can create sockpuppets etc. Drive-by vandalism is much easier to fix in comparison. Personally, I think the openess of wikipedia is wonderful, truly it is what makes wikipedia the greatest site online, and we have to take the good with (the sometimes very) bad. Gkhan 23:57, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
  • I think it's important to remember that being unregistered makes a person's edits stand out from the edits of others, thus making it easier for the Recent Changes Patrol to spot vandalism. If it is true that 90% of all vandalism is performed by unregistered visitors then this is a good argument for allowing such edits! Wikipedia will always suffer from vandalism no matter whether you allow unregistered users to edit or not. Under the status quo we have a useful tool. reetep 19:22, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
Hey, I never heard that argument before... that's a good point! —Sean κ. + 20:42, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
I agree with that line of thought. Registring help us to flag good faithed edits. edit Summary , helps us flag good modifications. By that we end by helping to identify the bad guys: because the good ones are proud of what they do.
Good point, but I still want to submit the following for your consideration: How about, as a compromise, only allowing IP-only users to edit existing pages, and not start new ones? Thus they can still fix typos, but not start vanity pages. If they get a username to do so, there are other clues like lack of proper capitalisation and bios of people under the age of 20. --IByte 15:06, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, you got your wish, now anons cannot start pages. I think thats a good thing. Fresheneesz 19:19, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Expanding on Ibyte's point, how about allowing IP Users to only make a few edits a day before they need to register, this would allow them to relize that wikipedia works and that they can fix that spelling mistake, and I am sure then they would understand the need to register, to prevent vandalism. --Eliezer | £€åV€ m€ å m€§§åg€ 04:34, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
Excellent idea! This sounds like a great compromise. You could also have alternative or additional limits on the size of the edit. -Pgan002 05:35, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
I don't mind when static IPs edit, but I advocate an exception for AOL and other variable IP sources. Registration would allow administrators to block specific troublemakers without shutting out masses of legitimate users. Durova 06:19, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Helps to ease in to wikipedia
Contributing without registering helps people "ease in" to the wiki world. Many users (myself included) start by making a few edits, get comfortable with wiki structure, and then make the decision to register and be seriously involved. If you had to go through a registration process first, no matter how simple, I think a lot of people would never hit that "register" button. I might not have. Let's not do anything to discourage people from getting involved. Gary D Robson 20:16, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
I HATE visiting wikis that want you to register just so you can fix the spelling and a few links on one page that you happened to visit. Totally annoying. The good solutions to vandalism are social and technological. - Omegatron 17:39, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)
With one proposal above, you could still edit them - only large edits and/or repeated edits in the same time period would require logging in. -Pgan002 05:35, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Case in point: http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/GAIM Look at all those spelling errors! But I'm not going to take the time to register an account just to fix that if I am never going to visit again. - Omegatron 00:58, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism and IP blocking
Vandalism is a feature of mankind and should be let to take it's course here- hopefully it is found quickly and reverted back so that the whole project is a sum of it's parts, e.g most people want a useable resource. Most vandalism is recogniseable as such, like graffiti- one can accept it as long as it can be removed. If the vandalism is not recogniseable, then we come to the question; do we believe what we read anywhere in the world, virtually or in print? Anything can be vandalised -officially or not.

At least annonymous users should be make competely aware that they can be traced if need be. Perhaps smart software can recognise the form of vandalism that is taking place- I would suggest that new edits should appear in red in the main article until voted for by a determined number of subsequent users. after which further editing allowed. Slow, but it would prevent drastic vandalism.

I've been frequently attacked by one vandal who hides behind an IP address and not register, and who uses abusive language, and who does vast amount of damage on Wikipedia. He (I believe it's a he) makes it clear that we can't do anything to him, and takes perverse pleasure at that. He even taunts the admins who block him (eg. "you f---ing numskull you just block half a million users!"). What's worse, he attacks individual userpages, especially those who revert his vandalisms and/or chastise him, makes himself an enemy of all good editors. So if this "abolish anonymous user" policy isn't going to be cleared, something must be done to comprehend such vandals. Massive amount of money and time are wasted on such vandals each day. If you people can think of a solution then you'll help Jimbo save tons of money and fill up one of the massive loopholes on Wikipedia.
I had proposed a smartbot or smart software that automatically removes (ie. an autorevert system) all edits of an IP address once a vandal is established as hiding behind it. It will frustrate the vandal enough to deter he/she from making edits. If such a thing happens and a persistent vandal and a useful editor share the same IP address, then too bad, the useful editor will have to register. But once the vandal goes off after a certain period of time, then the antivandal bot or software can lifted. Mandel 22:26, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
Note that currently IP blocks affect even logged-in users who happen to share that IP. If this technique used the same process, the result would be chaos. See this inquiry for more on blocks. DES 23:13, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
I don't propose blocking. I propose smartbot auto-reverts for unlogged-in IP address with a history of vandalism. Mandel 23:43, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
I understand that. I was just saying that if the underlying technology used was the same, a problem would occur. If your proposed bot applied only to edits by users not logged in, that would reduce the problems with it -- althoguh the losses in the case of shared IPs might still be large. Since blocks against IPs apoply even to logged-in users, it seems reasonable to be concerned that this idea might work simialrly.DES 23:48, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
But you did suggest something that can differentiate them. So...is there a technology that does so? Mandel 00:02, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
Sure it is possible -- some distinctions between logged in and non-logged-in users are made now, so the software must be able to tell the difference. But the block code doesn't use the distinction, and other code based on it might not either. Possible and easy are not always the same thing.DES 00:11, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
I have the strong impression that much vandalism comes from shared IPs, and almost all vandalism from such IPs is perpetrated by users hiding behind anonymity. So why not modify the blocking code to allow for a form of IP blocking that only blocks anonymi? Then legit users can still get around the block by registering, which IMHO is just as anonymous as not registering if you choose not to divulge any identifying details. Lambiam 07:47, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

The major problem with anons is that they vandalize, correct? So why not talk about policies to fight vandalism instead? #Automatic edit summaries would help greatly in the fight against vandalism, for instance. I am sure there are other things we can do, too. A major reason vandalism gets missed is because the articles aren't on people's watchlists. - Omegatron 23:32, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

Automatic edit summaries will help spot vandalisms, but they won't deter them. Using a smartbot revert system will frustrate vandals because they will be fighting against a robot; their edits will be as quickly removed and trashed. Maybe some of them can be reviewed and permanently damped to retrieve bitspace. Of course both a smartbot revert system and auto-edit summary can be used concurrently to combat vandalism. Mandel 23:43, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
Automatic edit summaries will probably not help because blank summarries are what people look for when they look for vandalism. Fresheneesz 19:26, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Automatic summaries would be an addition to, not instead of, the user-entered ones.

I think people are trying to be too ideological about this whole thing. The IMDb requires users to register if they want to dot an I or cross a T and it hasn't seemed to hurt its popularity. The fact is there are simply too many jerks out there who want to cause trouble and are too chicken to do so under their own names. The only other logical option -- permabanning IPs -- would, as noted above, affect innocent bystanders. Another possibility is to have all anonymous edits be checked by someone before they go out live ... who wants to volunteer? 23skidoo 12:00, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

In terms of checking edits by anon users, judging by the 100 most recent changes as I write this 26 were made by anonymous editors, and this doesn't represent where one article has been edited multiple times. Thryduulf 12:32, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Permabanning anonymice (surely that must be the plural of anonymouse) would not affect innocent bystanders. As you say, the ground rules would be, to edit, register: free, uninvasive, no‑spam — why would anyone not do it? Answer, as you also say: to do stupid things from under a cowardly cloak. The innocent would register, the others would be prevented from editing. Bill 20:53, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Lots of people object to having to register things, particularly shy people or people who lack confidence. I know someone who just graduated from a degree in computer science, but still refuses to do anything that has signing up to a forum as a prequisite. Not to mention the hassle factor, I wouldn't have gotten an account on wikipedia if I hadn't been able to edit it a few times without a login to test the water. Instead I'd have dismissed wikipedia as being overly elitist, the same way I dismiss any forum that requires signup to read as being a useless resource due to elitism. Eldritchreality 20:09, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
My 2 cents ... Wiki vandalism, like crime in the physical world, can't ever be eradicated. And the more difficult you make it to commit, the more onerous you make life for the productive members. It's a social problem, and one that even technological solutions ultimately cannot address (witness the continual virus, spam and porn filter battles). To combat a human problem, you need other humans. And you have to find a balance between restrictiveness and openness, which I believe Wikipedia has found. Many of us (myself included) adopt articles near and dear to us to monitor for bad edits (I watch my hometown's article, for example, because I want it portrayed in a positive albeit NPOV light.) Some way should be found to encourage as many registered users as possible, and as many article adoptions as possible. Develop ways to recognize positive contribution, and minimize immaturity. How about these ideas:
  • adding a "Top Contributors" to the side-bar, and limit it to registered users (who fill in edit summaries)
  • upon log-in, displaying your watchlist
  • upon creating an article, it gets auto-added to your watch list (ie foster a certain level of pride, but hopefully without "ownership" mentality)
  • if Wiki can detect repeated viewings/edits of a page by a registered user, how about a prompt "Do you want to watch this page for vandalism?"
  • is there such a thing as a Wiki-award for recognizing outstanding contribution by registered users, as voted on by other registered users (a la the Academy Awards, etc)? (# of new articles created; # of vandalism reverts, etc) Addendum: I am aware of the barnstars. I guess I'm suggesting something more automated and formalized ... for those of us with a competitive streak. --N35w101 23:20, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

In other words, make it so that we do everything possible to overwhelm the bad element by fostering the good element. BTW ... I started out as an IP and quickly decided to register. Why? I wanted to watch certain articles, to know when useful information was added to them, so I could learn. I only became aware of the vandalism aspect after registering. --N35w101 14:59, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

I have just registered and want to express my whole-heartedly agreement with the suggestion of abolishing anonymous editors. It would put a virtual end to vandalism, and even more importantly, I want to know (or at least have an idea) of who it is I'm reading or working with. Why should anyone want to remain anonymous? It makes me distrustful and gives me the creeps, as those Muslim women do who peer at the world through just a slit in their headdress. It must be very off-putting for someone who knows his stuff and has gone to the trouble writing an article to have it mauled by some anonymous half-wit. Knowing who is making the contributions and doing the editing helps others to make judgements about its quality (--Roger Hicks 12 Aug 05).

You're wholy wrong. Vandals would REGISTER. What makes you think they wouldn't? Fresheneesz 19:26, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
My purely empirical experience over the last year-plus (as opposed to an idea from theoretical thinking) is that many would not. The proportion of vandalism to valid edits is, demonstrably, far higher among anons than among logged‑in users. If additionally an e‑mail were required to register, as is perfectly standard on the overwhelming majority of bulletin boards etc., vandalism would drop to a trickle: this too is an empirical observation based on my long-standign participation in some of those bulletin boards. Bill 20:59, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
As to knowing who is contributing, do recall that the vast majority of registered users have handles from which their legal names cannot be simply determined, and that anyone can create a new user name at any time, and it is not even a violation of policy to have and use multiple usernames, as long as you don't use them for vote fraud or to try to fake a consensus, or to evade the 3RR or otehr restrictions. So mostly you don't really know who you are dealing with even in the case of long term user names. And if you aren';t willing to ahve what you write mauled by half-wits from time to time, wiuth anme or without, wikipedia is the wrong place.
As to "putting a virtual end to vandalism" -- I doubt it. many vandals now log in, and more would if there was a requirement to do so. Now at least anon editors are obvious -- someone who just created a throw-away username is far less obvious on new-page or RC patrol. DES (talk) 12:28, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
I don't suppose that I have much choice but to acknowledge the validity of the points you make, but I will persist in my pursuit of a "nonymous community", DESiegel (--Roger Hicks 16 Aug 05).
Why, if anonymity has been found to cause problems? -Pgan002 05:35, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is it time to restrict editing to registered users?

Please note that the comment below was posted to another section of the Village Pump before I was referred to the Perennial Proposals section, and has been cut-and-pasted here by another editor, so there may be some duplication of comment from me and others. - 23skidoo 15:06, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism

I don't know about you but I'mn getting tired of continually reverting either clueless or vandalizing edits by anonymous IP users. These people don't check their talk pages and even if you do post warnings, etc. odds are you're probably hitting an innocent party since there are many who use the same IP numbers; I don't even know if unregistered users see the "You have new messgaes" notification. Has anyone seriously proposed a policy requiring registration and a username in order to edit pages? It would be so simple to do this, and while it would not eliminate vandalism of cource, at least it makes it easier to identify the culprits and block/ban accordingly. Case in point, the recent continued vandalism of Internet Movie Database by someone using a rotating IP. I'm sure there is some rationale behind allowing anons to edit, and it was probably a good one back in the day, but there have simply been too many violators for such an ideal to be maintained, not if Wikipedia is to remain viable as an accurate information source. I am thinking of proposing such a policy but I'm sure I'm not the first to do so, therefore I wanted to ask the question and get response before taking the next step. 23skidoo 04:48, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

I strongly second and support this proposal. If you think vandalism is bad now, wait till IPv6 becomes popular! Yuck! - Peter Bjørn Perlsø 14:29, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)#Abolish anonymous users. --cesarb 04:54, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I thought as much - much obliged! 23skidoo 11:55, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
  • Actually, having them edit anonymous makes them easier to track as it makes their IP visible to the common vandal hunters who can't otherwise check the IP of a user (even admins can't do that). - Mgm|(talk) 10:04, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
I think this is a very bad idea inimicable to the growth of the project. A high proportion of good edits are made by people who are not signed in. I have made thousands of edits. I made the first few hundred before I had an account and I'm not signed in now. 82.35.34.11 05:43, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
Ditto.--172.191.221.81 18:25, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

I have had my fair share of editing clueless Wikipedia edits or dealing with vandals, but no, Wikipedia is good because anyone can contribute. However, there could be other measures - perhaps it is time to consider technological measures in the next version of the software? For example, software that can detect newbie phrases like "testing" or perhaps "does this really work" or a continuous series of a single letter or sequence, or having administrators who can moderate the first few anonymous edits? --Mintchocicecream 00:08, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

See also m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles and m:Posting by newcomers should be limited, but not banned. We probably need something. We can't just pretend that vandalism and editing conditions will stay constant throughout the life of the project. What worked when there were 100 users won't necessarily work when there are 1,000,000. - Omegatron 00:18, August 15, 2005 (UTC)

No. The (hopefully coming soon) support of stable versions of articles should limit power of vandals. Anonymous edits will become more valuable since it will be easier to sort out useful contributions. Pavel Vozenilek 22:03, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

  • I am skeptical about this line of reasoning. I suspect that if edits to non-logged-in users were restricted, most would-be vandals would be discouraged and would not log in. Thus restrictions would be highly beneficial.
see Wikipedia:Requests for publication -- Zondor 20:24, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

The vandalism problem could be resolved by the following proposal for a published supplement to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#A_published_supplement_to_Wikipedia_-_a_policy_suggestion loxley 15:40, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

  • The suggestion above seems like a great compromise -- restict anonymous edits by frequency and size. Then casual and occasional contricutors can still contribute, but large-scale vandalism would require more effort and be easier to identify. -Pgan002 05:41, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion - in view of the length of this particular section, it should be hived off, given subsections and given a link from here.

I "regularly" correct typos and inelegances without signing in - too fiddly etc: this probably applies to others. Another suggestion: articles which are subject to vandalism/edit wars "above a certain level" (as distinct from "fingers in a twist" syndrome, puns and other attempts to get on BJAODN), require signing in for changes, while for others anonymous editing is limited to the equivalent of "this is a minor edit" levels - you have to sign in for significant changes. This would cover most of the problems likely to occur.

A major block on anonymous editing is likely to contribute to the growth of "secondary usernames/nom de plumes" (as distinct from sock puppets) - we can all think of reasons why we might not wish to be associated with specific questions, from curiosity to where there is a possibility of a flamewar Jackiespeel 17:44, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Encouraging anons to register, while disallowing edits

How about something like this: Have two levels of protection, a weaker form of article protection that only blocks anonymous edits to an article, registered users could still edit it, and anonymous users would be encouraged to register, and the stronger form (just as now). So anonymous users can edit most articles, and create new pages, but articles that were subject to excessive amounts of anon vandalism could be anon-protected or anon-unprotected by an editor. I think this would be favorable to blocking anonymous editors entirely, because many cases of repeat vandalism seem to be targeted at specific articles -- probably as a result of their visibility somewhere. --Mysidia (talk) 02:05, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

In short, no. Anyone who has followed recentchanges will tell you that anons contribute more valid material than vandalism. Besides, it's a core value of the project. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 02:27, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. I recently had to revert the robot page to a 15 day old version because there was significant vandalism which went unnoticed that whole time. (About half the page was deleted and the rest was un-wikified)! I decided to took a look at the past 100 edits (50 days worth) and determine how much vandalism there was. (This was just a quick eyeball count based mostly on the edit descriptions and is not 100% accurate).
* There were 17 reverts due to vandalism
* There were 34 vandalism edits (all by people with no account)
* There were 20 legitimate edits by people with no account
You can plainly see that there are more vandalism edits by anon users than legitimate edits. Note that over half of the changes made to the page were in relation to vandalism. -- BAxelrod 12:08, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

I would just like to add my $0.02 in that I support only allowing registered users to contribute. While some anon users don't vandalize, I've noticed on many articles that many of them do. Some are deliberate attempts to vandalize, some minor edits are done to "test" the system to see if indeed Wikipedia allows all users to edit/create. Registration with Wikipedia is easy and fast. IMO, registration is a psychological thing. It is a commitment to something. People who are serious will create an account and join the throngs of Wikipedians. I had done a few minor edits when I was an anon user but when I saw some articles that I could really add to, I created an account for I wanted to be a part of something. While you can't completely curb vandalism through registration, anything that makes it just a little harder to vandalize will help Wikipedians from having to continuously zealously police their favorite articles. Registration will not take away the community approach to Wikipedia. Registration of course isn't the only option as there have been other good ideas outlined on this page by other users. Whatever the solution, please just have one as it is so time consuming to continuously do battle with these rampant anon vandals. --speedoflight 09:06, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

  • Ability of anyone to edit articles without registering. This so-called ability of anyone to edit any article without registering does not exist in practice. Many users are blocked, and many articles are protected, some of them permanently: the best example is Main Page, probably, which is a very important article, that anonymous users happen to be unable to edit too. These may be exceptions to the rule, but the exceptions are numerous, and the exceptions are important cases.. (if the core principals don't even work for the main page, then what's up with that...?), it is not just in one or two cases, it is in a substantial number of cases. The notion of stable versions might help somewhat, but obviously... most contributions are from so-called anonymous users, because it is not made quite clear on Wikipedia that registering as a user is even done here, except by a tiny link: I believe many of these users would register if the advantages of doing could be explained up-front.. --Mysidia (talk) 01:55, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I disagree, for the most part, most users aren't blocked, and those users can edit almost any article. Fresheneesz 19:33, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

I strongly support allowing edits only by logged-in users. Why:

  • There is a lot of IP-address vandalism, mostly casual stuff (eg. "Stan is gay"), usually by kids in schools, who are just doing it to see if they really can. I firmly believe that most of these people wouldn't bother if they had to register.
  • When someone makes a change that is well-intentioned, but which I think is wrong, I want to talk to them about it before I hack all their hard-written text out. (Eg. when someone added a huge and good history blurb to Panama Canal, and I felt it belonged in History of the Panama Canal.) But if they do it from an IP, you can't talk to them, so you're faced with just taking a hatchet to their work.
  • Wikipedia has been in the news!!! But rather negatively, being accused of slander. We're getting a reputation for irresponsibility which is largely due to the totally open edit policy, and the high level of vandalism. Interestingly, the remedy in this case was to enable article creation only by IPs; but that wouldn't stop someone editing the JFK article to show that he was assassinated by Johan the Ghost. I think we could demonstrate greater responsibility by requiring logins for all edits.

I strongly support Wikipedia's core policy of openness. But people, think about it: Wikipedia's registration process is literally the simplest in the world, it literally couldn't be any simpler, and no-one who thinks about it rationally can possibly see it as a serious barrier to making contributions. If you're willing to volunteer a couple of sentences on a topic, you should be willing to type in a logname and password, for cripe's sakes.

In short, I'm for allowing anyone to make edits, but I'm for people taking responsibility for their edits, too — even by just tagging a made-up logname to every change. — Johantheghost (was that me on the grassy knoll?) 13:24, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

The amount of IP-address vandalism is really getting to me. Panama Canal seems to be a huge target, and I have to keep a close eye on it, which detracts from me doing real work on WP; and now that U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program is article du jour, it's getting bombarded too. It's making me wonder whether I can be bothered getting the whole Panama Canal series up to FA status; do I want to deal with the incessant vandalism?

I'd like to thank all those who are helping by reverting this trash; but wouldn't it be better if their energy was being directed into real improvements to the Wiki? What will it take to get IP editing banned? — Johantheghost 13:32, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Concept of registering

I think the concept of Wiki "registering" should be revisited before saying yes or no to this question. Indeed it would be better to say yes to this question, IMHO. But the real problem is that we have no way of validating people on the internet unless we use a 3rd party such as credit card verification or other identity verification. However, the mere whisper of such personal information being surrendered almost seems to the defeat the whole mind-set of Wiki and scream bloody murder. It appears that the Wiki creators already know this fact and have surrendered to it completley. The "registration" process to sign up for a Wiki is laughable in regard to security or user validation. They don't even bother making people put in their email address as a requirement. Because they know email addresses can be easily created for free all over the internet. But if you added at least that minimal layer of protection it would inconvenience vandals and also stop nearly 99% of automated anonymous garbage posting/spamming. If I may make a parable; a lock can be bypassed, but the fact that it represents an inconvenience or an obstacle to an ill-intended person is why it works. Your Wiki is free to view by all. Free to edit by all. But remember the price of freedom is eternal vigilance and you have to pay a price for that freedom. What I really find insane is that there are so many little safeguards you can do to prevent, finalize, and quickly stop vandalization that are simply not in place. Certainly a page should be declared final at some point. I've seen some talk about comparing this "Encyclopedia" to commercial ones. You can not compare them. Britannica does not have millions of raging vandals trying to thwart the enlightening of the masses every day during their publishing, editing, and review processes. BlackWolf 23:15, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

Also I must add that the more popular Wikipedia becomes the more responsible Wikipedia will be for producing a quality product--even if that product is free and fluid. What im saying is that the future of Wikipedia is in jeapordy due to the fact that as Wikipedia's popularity grows so too will its vanadals. But you'll argue that the "good" Wikipedians will protect its contents from the bad. Isn't the point of the Wikipedia to spread and open up free information to all? Our good Wikipedians are spending their time editing and hunting malicious content. It does not matter that the "good" Wikipedians can catch vandalism in as quick as 5 minutes or even faster. There is going to be the time where one person or more will be viewing misinformation. Misinformation that was either deliberately placed there or by accident. So Wikipedia may just earn the reptuation of a Misinformation Portal where advertisers, spam bots, and vandals tag and make their mark. People turn to Britannica and others because they know it has a reputation for solid facts and neutrality. Of course there are errors, people make mistakes. But Wikipedia, in order to compete, needs to learn fast that their reptuation diminishes each time a person (end users specifically, non Wiki types) visits and finds out their information is false! Imagine a student doing homework and fails because their information was false. Sure you provide a disclaimer... but why would I want to goto a self proclaimed "Encyclopedia" for what may or may not be the right information? So while it is great and I am quite the Wiki fan. Perhaps the Wikipedia itself needs more security and a whole new scheme on how to protect its crucial information; its reputation. I want nothing more than Wikipedia to succeed. Keep that in mind when you feel threatened that the Wiki way of life im proposing might be radically different than the way it was intended. BlackWolf 23:34, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

In response to the comment above suggesting that registering might require some sort of validation, I don't think that's necessary at all. The current system works fine. My thought is if we make people choose a username and register it, then that makes it easier for admins to ban vandals without having to resort to blanket bans of IP numbers, and IMO it would drastically reduce the amount of vandalism because it would remove that anonymity factor vandals crave -- even if there's no way to actually find out who a particular user is. And it would also eliminate so-called drive-by vandalism from anonymous posters that probably accounts for a good chunk of the nonsense. Of course registering won't be a 100% solution since there are known vandals and "wikiterrorists" who are registered. But it might help alleviate some of the frustration around here. 23skidoo 15:04, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
Strongly agree. I'm in favour of openness, as I said above, so keep registration simple — but require some form of registration, as at present, to facilitate intelligent tracking / banning, and to discourage experimental vandalism. Tracking IP addresses just doesn't work. I have no idea what my IP is right now, but I guarantee it will be different tomorrow. — Johantheghost 13:32, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
Any manual form of registration will deter new users from contributing. I have an idea for a sort of non-manual registration, though. Use cookies. Load cookies on visiters' computers, and using that cookie, they can be identified in subsequent visits. Anons would be able to track their contributions, and perhaps even have user pages. Likewise, vandals could be tracked, and the code associated with their cookie could be blocked. I believe this solves all the problems associated with IPs vs registering - but please correct me if i'm wrong. Fresheneesz 21:37, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
As I mentioned elsewhere, cookies are a privacy issue for a lot of people and a lot of folks have their browsers set to not accept cookies. IMO anyone who is serious about contributing to Wikipedia will be willing to register, just like anyone who wants to post to online forums, etc. have no problem jumping through a few registration hoops. Yes, I know it isn't a complete fix - browse Special:Newpages at any given time and you'll see nonsense articles being created by registered users - but I have noted a sharp drop in the amount of garbage articles being created since Jimbo banned anons from creating articles, and I'm confident we'll see a similar drop-off in anon vandalism if registration is required. I have 500 pages on my watchlist and I think in the last month only one piece of vandalism was actually done by a registered user; everything else was done by anon IPs. 23skidoo 13:45, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Maximum charcters IPs can edit

I know people that have edited a page and deleted all the information on the page and the made it in to a mesage to thier friends. So i cant see a problem with stopping unregistered users making large edits, can we put a cap on the amount of words their allowed to edit?? Labtech

Most vandalism edits (apart from blanking, of course) consist of no more than 10 words (I've frequently seen a single word changed to "penis", for example). --82.7.125.142 21:29, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
I've been editing as an IP for ages -- mostly fixing random vandalism, or making small corrections. I think the most pernicious form of vandalism I've seen is when people remove a couple of small function words (such as "which are", etc) from the middle of a sentence, making it confusing and ungrammatical. This is really bad, since it's a really tough pattern to scan for automatically. It's also incomprehensibly vicious -- I can see a random 13 year old thinking it's funny to put "joe is gay ha ha" in the middle of a serious article, but randomly rendering sentences ungrammatical is just plain evil. kraemer 15:57, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Flagging anonymous edits by style

There are two sides to the communications channel (supposing spoken communication for concreteness): the speaker and the listener. All proposals above seem predicated on the idea that only the speaker takes a role in communication (the IP editor, the spelling freak, or the vandal. No proposal takes the point of view that the listener also has an active role in communication: selecting to whom to listen, selecting to what to listen, selecting which portions should be ignored, et al... This is an important skill -- to determine which varieties of biased information will be deemed trustworthy by the listener.

I recognize that in the Wikipedia as is, the listener is not aided in this attempt. Anonymous edits look just like every other edit in the displayed article. Thus, a responsible "listener" does not have the cues necessary to exercise the listener's role in communication.

Proposal
Users have an additional configuration setting where they may choose to show anonymous edits in a different style (relative to non-anonymous edits).

Thus, the listener is able to exercise the listener's role and choose whether or not to weigh anonymous contributions as heavily as non-anonymous contributions.

Corollary
It might also be handy to have a third style (after "Normal" and "Anon") applied to any edit by an account on a list supplied by the user.

This could be a sort of "these guys are kooks" list (or a "these guys are geniuses" list) to allow the user to highlight such edits for the same purpose -- to engage the listener in the listener's role.

  • How would an article I'm reading show up, including edits from anons and edits from registered users? -Pgan002 06:07, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] But this still does not justify allowing editing from any anonymous source

I love Wikipedia and have made quite a few edit contributions that have stuck, so I like to think I am a positive asset to Wikipedia. But I am spending too much time reverting vandalism.

Why is it that Wikipedia allows anonymous (from mere IP addresses) editing of the articles? This is just dumb and we're literally begging for vandals to come and mess it up. I want to assume good faith of other contributors but if there is no discrimination at all at the gate, the barbarians just walk in. That makes it harder to do business inside the city walls (which we don't have time for) and, eventually, we will not be able to do business at all. This is what John C. Dvorak is predicting at Wikipedia:Criticisms#John_C._Dvorak. The standard Replies to common objections is not dealing with this modest restriction at all. Nor are the reasons above. There is no proof given that none of these "good edits" from anonymous users would have been made if these users would have been required to create an account and log it. People need to take responsibility for what they say in something that becomes a reference for others. Because Wikipedia does not require people to do that, the barbarians just come in and mess things up and those of us who are legitimate are running out of time cleaning up their droppings.

It is just not cutting it and too many person-hours have been spent editing Wiklipedia to allow this valuable web resource to be destroyed or become meaningless because of some zealous adherence to some notion of egalitarianism that is more than necessary to be egalitarian. Egalitarianism is not anarchy nor is it dependent on anonymity.

You should require every editor to Login and when they first create an identity, they should have to verify by responding to an email generated from Wikipedia (so we know their email address is real, and some domains can be nixed). They should have to identify themselves, at least to the administrators. And whenever they login, there should be a record of IP addresses that the logged in user comes from so that if vandalism is done from the same IP (but a different login name), we might have an idea of who to contact.

You guys have to fix this! It will not be long that sophisticated vandals will automate what they do and use multiple IP addresses to do it. And then Wikipedia will become useless. What a waste! r b-j 01:58, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

I strongly agree with your proposal. It would also help tremendously in curbing the abuse that afflicts many users who attempt to constructively author and edit articles for the Wikipedia. However, it seems evident that mainly for historical reasons it will be very difficult for the adminstrators of the Wikipedia to make this reform.--Pseudo Socrates 20:07, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
I see four possibilities here with respect to "multiple IP addresses":
  1. Someone in control of a range of addresses decides to use it against Wikipedia. This should be easy to detect (and ban - range blocks can be speicfied).
  2. Someone starts using lists of proxies. But Wikipeida admins routinely block proxies as they are found, and the popular ones don't move around all that much. I don't see an automated system doing anything other than causing these to be closed faster.
  3. Someone makes a program that abuses dynamic IP allocation on their ISPs network, getting new IPs when they detect a banning. A temporary ban against the range, and a note to the administrator of the ISP should be sufficient. Might be damaging if more people did it.
  4. Someone makes some spyware or virus that makes edits from whoever has it loaded. Has potential to cause real trouble. If this happened in a discrete time period the damage could be significant, but it would be fixable, and in a pinch we could always roll back to a previous backup. Probably "fragile" - not easily updatable to cope with changes in Wikipedia systems that could be used to break it.

[edit] Skillful Vandals
The thing is, the most worrying ones are the ones that take the most amount of time and skill. Automating things like grabbing a new proxy is not exactly trivial. Frankly, if I were that skilled, I'd spend my time doing something worthwhile. There are very few "sophisticated vandals", and I reckon of those that also have technical ability, most would get bored before even considering using it against Wikipedia. I wouldn't want to have the biography I'd have written for me when people found out who I was hanging over me for all eternity, either. :-) GreenReaper 06:16, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
I note that a logged-in user, although s/he can gain consistent reputation, can be and often is actually more anonymous than an IP user. It is often fairly easy to follow an IP address and get personal identifing information from it (not always, of course). While for a loged in-user, the IP address is not redily available, and the user ID often has no obvious connection with a real identity. Even if email addresses were required, it is often easier to get effectively anon email addresses than IPs. DES (talk) 16:42, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
This is in response to GreenReaper's comments above about sophisticated vandals not wanting to bother with wikipedia. That reminds me of a few friends of mine in high school who boasted that the "brought down AOL for X hours". I think it was one of those attacks where they just bombarded the server with multiple confusing requests from many computers. The point is that as Wikipedia becomes more popular and a larger force on the net, people will try to take it down just because it is there. In our case "bring down" probably means being bogged down with so much vandalism that the good content cannot get through. I predict that vandalism is increasing and there will be a point where something must be done. -- BAxelrod 12:49, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
Like rbj, I think I have proven my commitment to the ideal of a creating a free but high quality and up-to-date encyclopedia by my own edits here since I became a user some months ago. I have given considerable effort to writing long but highly readable and well documented articles on various topics in math and physics (areas in which I have a fair amount of technical expertise). Like rbj, I am dismayed by the amount of my available "WP time" which I have spending recently trying to deal with vandalism and hoaxes in comparison to writing new material.

[edit] Other
I am with the majority here: disallowing edits by unregistered users will cut down the time we spend reverting vandalism, at least in the short term. This goal is so important that, while I have seen useful edits (like minor spelling corrections) by unregistered editors, such considerations are simply irrelevant in view of the fact that (I believe) the future of Wikipedia is gravely threatened by vandalism. Indeed, I believe that damage caused by rampant vandalism is already far more serious than many Wikipedians may be willing to acknowledge. For example, one consequence of rampant vandalism of articles like Albert Einstein is what I call incoherence creep (see the talk page of that article for my explanation of this term and some modest proposals). This is so frustrating to someone like myself who has worked hard on various articles which are wholly unprotected against this kind of cumulative degradation that some kind of "forking" (e.g. Scholarwiki or something like that) is inevitable if collaborative encyclopedias are to survive at all as something which is more than a joke. Consequently, I believe that as a community, we need to try a variety of reasonable measures to make it much harder to vandalize or hoax the Wikipedia. Disallowing edits by unregistered users is a small but necessary and long overdue step in the right direction. However, further steps will be necessary, I believe, to allow Wikipedia to continue to flourish and attract high quality writing in the future. To mention just a few: we need some kind of iterative protection which will make it harder to damage high quality and high profile articles, and the admin system, which has not scaled gracefuly, needs to be completely overhauled.
Someone just told me that back in August, Jimbo Wales announced a forthcoming policy change which would indeed require editors of the Wikipedia to be registered users. More to the point, it seems he is considering some kind of iterative protection in which high quality articles are protected against casual poor quality edits, as well as vandalism. (See again my discussion of incoherence creep cited above. I am using Albert Einstein as an example in part because, while I think this has in the recent past been a high quality article, I have not myself contributed very much to it. I have however written other articles which I think are of high quality and I'd hate to see them suffer the miserable fate of Albert Einstein. You might need to have monitored this article for a month or so to see the kind of degradation I am talking about.)
Does anyone know more about these policy changes? How can I contribute to discussion of such policies and perhaps have a hand in shaping thoughtful and even wise policies which will strike the best possible compromise between encouraging small (and large!) improvements while discouraging incoherence creep, vandalism, and hoaxes.---CH (talk) 22:34, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
The new policy seems to be very limited, and went into effect a week or so ago, and has been presented as being in response to the Seigenthaler mess. It consists merely in requiring registration for the creation of articles. (That wouldn't have prevented the Seigenthaler libel, by the way, which occurred in an edit to an existing article.) But even this little is littler than it looks: within the last 48 hours or so I saw a Talk article created by an anon for the sole purpose of putting the usual "X is a fag" graffito onboard: so apparently the new policy only applies to the main namespace.
Jimbo's reluctance to go further is a witness to an open and idealistic mind, but (and by temperament I am among the very first to be sad about this) the world is not so built. For the time being we can coast by, leaning on the eagerness of new blood to correct endless vandalism; but we are still a pyramid scheme, although with signs of aging: and at some point, fairly soon I think, the number of graffiti will completely overwhelm the "undo" efforts of responsible editors. I'm a good example: I no longer usually make spelling corrections, revert vandals, etc.: leaving it to others. If I did, I'd be doing nothing but; we have lives to live. I say, use machines and automatic processes to do the donkey work: you and I, all of us, are worth more than that. Bill 21:10, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

My proposal - Simple, isn't it?

  1. Only registered users may edit articles on Wikipedia.
This is a proposal that is very controversial. Anonymous editing is what allowed wikipedia to become huge like it is. However, statically, anons are usually the vandalizers. BUT THINK ABOUT IT. If you wanted to vandalize, all you have to do is create a user name. Most vandalization would still happen if this proposal went through. MOST of anon editing is NOT vandalism, but are edits that would never happen if it weren't so easy to edit. Vandals are more determined than non-vandal anons, therefore they would GET an SN and still vandalize. Remember that people with user names are more anonymous than IP addresses Fresheneesz 19:16, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Re the statement "Anonymous editing is what allowed wikipedia to become huge like it is" — no, I disagree. Wikipedia became huge because anyone can edit an article. What some people don't seem to get is that with this proposal, it will still be true that anyone can edit an article — they will just have to log in first, and then if they vandalise, they can be blocked. Since no personal informaiton is required to log in, I don't see the problem with this.
  • Re the statement "MOST of anon editing is NOT vandalism" — see Some actual vandalism statistics below; I found that 75% of anon editing is vandalism.
  • Re the statement "MOST of anon editing is ... edits that would never happen if it weren't so easy to edit." Nonsense. If someone is willing to contribute a few hundred words to an article, they should be willing to type say 10 characters for a user name and 8 for a password, which is only required once.
  • Re the statement "If you wanted to vandalize, all you have to do is create a user name." Under this proposal, with email verification, that would be very hard — once blocked, they're off.
  • Re the statement "user names are more anonymous than IP addresses" — you're missing the point. No-one wants to know who these people are in real life, what sex they are, where they live, etc. The point is that a logged-in user can be blocked, or talked to on his/her talk page, etc. You can not do this with an IP address, because one address may be used by many people, or one person may have a different address every time they connect — like me. — Johantheghost 20:33, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
  • ...But not people like me. However, I will chat with you if you really need someone for that, Jtg. 203.198.237.30 12:09, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
  • You're either missing my point, or burning wacky candles. I have a different IP address every time 'cos I do most of my surfing wirelessly, at places like Starbucks, (I like the coffee. Sue me) not because I'm paranoid. My point is that if I have an ever-changing IP address without even wanting to, then using IPs to track vandals is never going to work. — Johan the Ghost seance 13:18, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Burning or at least grinding something else entirely brother. May be some of us stay in just to redress the balance, even a little. 203.198.237.30 03:31, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Brother, in an ideal world — a world not full of witless vandals — I would fight for your right to edit without logging in. To see why I'm not, look at the article history of U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program for 20 December. — Johan the Ghost seance 11:38, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I suppose we could do this indefinitely, seeing as how I signed up for a bit of a chat. Absolutely, NMMP was bad (perhaps not in the same league as butter), although by the by I seem to recall doing a bit of re-tooling there myself. Off the specific topic: has an automatic "integrity" color-coding scheme for the IP address or name of all editors come up before? The basic idea is that everyone starts with a certain hue to their name or IP address (in the same way that names with virgin user pages are red). As they edit (whether to contribute or vandalise), the color of their IP or name as displayed in edit history changes through a designated "spectrum of integrity" (perhaps without IR and UV), so that you can immediately determine whether the integrity of a user is positively established (eg. the color for those without any or only a few edits stays at the end of spectrum where integrity is simply not established). Such functionality is conceived as part of a more wholistic solution to vandalism than just outright IP address banning. Constructive feedback and moving the suggestion to a more appropriate location if anyone thinks it sufficiently meritable welcome. 203.198.237.30 06:17, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
  • But this brings me right back to my point. You are assuming that IP address == person. This is wrong! In reality, IP address == many people (eg. at a school), or many IP addresses == one person (eg. roaming user). So you can not use IP addresses to track or control peoples' behaviour. — Johan the Ghost seance 12:49, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
  • As I say, I signed up for a chat, recklessly in violation of that guideline about not disrupting to prove a point, but this has become a drag (if it's exclusively about whether or not people get your point). Regarding the specific concern you raise, I don't think this affects the efficacy of the proposed system. A given IP will either have not edited before (low integrity) or have some history of edits (if vandalism, also low integrity). Yes, valuable contributions and vandalism may be made through the same IP (but mostly they are one way or the other?), and those who provide the former may simply choose to sign up if they do not wish to retain low integrity indefinitely. Now, where is the best place to post my suggestion. Of course I will look around, but do you have a suggestion? 203.198.237.30 05:32, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vote

Proposal disallow editing by anons

Users who support this proposal:

  • User:Revolución
  • User:Unixer Obviously, anyone who wants to contribute seriously wouldn't mind registering. I don't have statistics but it seems 90% of vandals are anonymous, and 90% of good anonymous edits are just punctuation or minor changes.
  • User:Bill— Thayer (Why hasn't this been formally voted on if so many people are interested in the question?)
  • User:23skidoo (particularly in light of the JFK assassination article controversy)
  • User:Tomandlu (I only watch about a dozen articles, and at least 1 gets vandalised everyday - always by anons - and these are not even prominent articles)
  • User:Johantheghost Absolutely — given the amount of IP-address vandalism I got last time I got an article on the front page, I don't know whether I'll bother doing it again unless this happens.
  • User:Wuzzy I wonder how many people have already given up editing and reading Wiki because of its inability to control vandalism. Remember newsgroups? 02:59, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
  • User:Username132 I don't think there are any better ways to deal with this problem --Username132 05:25, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Response. IMDb requires membership in order to add information and, while that information may at times be dubious, they seem to have no trouble attracting people. Nor do the many BBSs and forums that require membership. Back when Wikipedia was in its infancy and looking to gain interest, that was different. Now it's up there with Google and IMDb - people who want to add to Wikipedia with serious intent will register. I for one have noted a sharp, sharp drop in the number of B.S. articles I've had to speedy since the ban on IP-created articles was put in place. 23skidoo 19:38, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
    • Actually, I think you'll find forums that require people to register tend to develop into small, cliquey affairs (as opposed to a massive community of a million people, developing into several hundred small cliques ...). Oh, and IMDb predates the Web. 19:32, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Neofelis Nebulosa (моє обговорення) 10:01, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Agree. It has to be done. The time has come to be pragmatic. Andy 16:57, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Agree. JohanTheGhost's link to the US Marine Mammal Program above is really a pretty good example of why this is needed. Bueller 007 18:27, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Agree. Registation is "no big deal" - let's put a username to each edit so we can cut down on the amount of time we are wasting dealing with vandalism. Johntex\talk 00:55, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Strongly agree, given the data in the thread, and for the reasons so well expressed by JohanTheGhost and others. The arguments that ligitemate anonymous contirbutions would significantly drop are not based on any statistics. But perhaps restricting frequency of anonymous edits is a good compromise. And automatically monitoring good and bad edits for each user also seems a good idea. -Pgan002 06:17, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Banaticus 04:30, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Strongly agree; however, we're wasting our keyboarding time. See Meta Foundation issues. I monitor controversial articles—gay porn stars, articles on gay porn stars, etc. Yesterday I spent 4 hours reverting vandalism on two articles. Two. Why? The vandalism was serial by three or four IP addresses; because they could have been used by anyone, each and every edit had to be reviewed for good faith edits. Other editors, God love 'em, tried to help, but due to lack of familiarity with the subject matter, reverted to other vandalised versions as well. Posting vandal tags on talk pages for IP addresses is a waste of time; it takes enough time to do with registered users. With different IP addresses assigned to users every time they log into their ISP, blocking the IP address doesn't work, either. I began drafting an article for posting on 15 August; I haven't had time to work on it since 20 August. I've also done the overwhelming majority of the work on the After Dark article. None of the arguments against registering balance against the benefits of having users register in terms of freeing up time to edit articles rather than revert vandalism. No e-mail address is required; make up a name and a password. Anonymity is generally used as a form of protection; what is being protected here? Idiocy? Spite? Destruction of others' hard work? All of the above. Surely new users would take Wikipedia more seriously if they had to at least create a name and password to participate. —Chidom talk 21:04, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Full Support This proposal looks kind of old, but I do think it is time for this. Take two minutes, register. I myself have registered on commons and wiktionary to make about two edits each (ironically, I registered on commons to revert vandalism!) I know that there are some ip's that have made some good faith edits, but all they would have to do is take 2 minutes and register. It's not that hard. -Royalguard11(Talk)(Desk) 23:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Strongly agree Perhaps this proposal is not exactly the right solution, but something has to be done. Apart from kids who just vanadalize at random, some topics seem to attract soreheads - in my case I live in a community that I enjoy, but that some others seem to resent! So far, I have spotted and reverted several snide comments on different pages - all using IP addresses only. Perhaps someone can come up with a way of discouraging this kind of thing! Jpaulm 14:35, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Agree Perhpas my limited time has turned me cynical, but I don't feel that Wikipedia can be taken that seriously if the first thing you see when you access a page is "You Suck!" because the grade 10 class at No Name High had nothing better to do. It's still anonymous, it's still "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit", but it's not the bathroom wall where it's much easier work for the vandals than the janitors. CMacMillan 15:02, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Users who oppose this proposal

  • User:fresheneesz - editing by anons is the most important way for this site to gain new contributors. There are better ways to deal with this problem.
  • Um, does my dissenting voice count? Off with my head then. 203.198.237.30 12:09, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
  • For one, it would mean people like me who have "renounced" their accounts due to the vast number of registered idiots on Wikipedia hounding them out have no opportunity to keep editing without people dragging their name through the mud. 19:32, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
  • User:Nabarry - Agree with fresheneesz. Many potential editors/authors may not have figured out whether or not they want to join - and something like creating an account may seem a hassle. Something like that could turn them off, and we would lose a valuable contributor. Sure, there are those who think it's fun to add a bit of vandalism to a page because they can. But there are those like myself who get enchanted by the idea that I can add to a page (even if it is something small like correcting spelling or grammar) without logging on. It was the element of trust that roped me into Wikipedia. I don't contribute to similar wiki sites (like the one in Davis, CA) that requires log-in. –Nabarry 06:40, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
  • False Prophet 02:45, 16 June 2006 (UTC) per slogan, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. If you need an account to edit, then not everyone can edit.
  • Consequencefree. Absolutely not! I will never support such a proposal. Perhaps to established users and wikiholics it would seem obvious that anyone willing to contribute would be willing to create an account and sign in, this is most definitely not true. A quick look at RC with logged users hidden will reveal that most of the edits are legitimate with exceptions for certain periods, and even so vandalism can be caught very easily there. This policy would pollute the unrivalled idealism that Wikipedia has managed to create and maintain, and as a matter of principle cannot be allowed to move forward. Ardent†alk∈ 16:29, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Terraxos 17:06, 6 September 2006 (UTC) I strongly disagree with this proposal, for reasons that have been mentioned too many times to repeat again. To be completely honest, I think it would be closer to the true spirit of Wikipedia to ban edits by registered users, and force all edits to be anonymous. But don't worry, I'm not seriously suggesting that here. :)

[edit] Some actual vandalism statistics

U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program has just had its 24 hours on the front page. While I was braced for some vandalism, I wasn't quite prepared for the storm of abuse that followed. In 24 hours on the Wikipedia front page:

  • we had 207 edits
    • 79 were vandalism
    • 86 were reverts / fixes
    • 26 (13%) were useful, constructive changes
    • 16 were non-vandalistic but detrimental changes

Of the vandalism edits:

  • 68 (86%) were from IP-address users
  • 11 were from logged-in users; these were 5 persistent vandals, who have mostly been blocked

Of the constructive edits:

  • 7 (27%) were from IP-address users

Of the non-vandalistic but detrimental edits:

  • 9 (56%) were from IP-address users

I calculate that the article was in a vandalised state for over 48 minutes, which means that 3.3% of people visiting Wikipedia for the first time and clicking on "Today's featured article" would have been presented with a giant picture of a penis, or something similar.

I'm grateful to the many people who helped to police the page and keep it clean — for most of the time. What a shame that all that effort couldn't have been directed into cleaning up articles, starting wanted articles, fixing POV issues, etc. — Johantheghost 14:37, 21 December 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Full semi-protection of Wikipedia

Fellow Wikipedians,

I would like to propose that the editing of Wikipedia be permanently restricted only to registered users.

I have been monitoring countless articles here on WP for most of the past year. Increasingly, I am seeing that anonymous, unregistered users are taking advantage of WP's unprotected state to cause random acts of vandalism. The Green Day article is a prime example - every other "edit" is a reversion of vendalism to the article; there are many others.

It has been argued that the unprotected status of WP allows "minor" users who might otherwise not register to make little factual and biographical corrections. This is an outright fallacy. Anyone who cares about maintaining the content of Wikipedia would surely take the 20 to 30 seconds it takes to register a free account, even for a handful of articles. More and more, the unregistered, anonymous "contributors" add nothing but vandalism, while registered users are taking increasingly large scraps out of their time to revert the damage. This is time that could be better spent helping better this website.

-- CJ Marsicano 02:08, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(perennial_proposals)#Abolish_anonymous_users. In my experience, somewhere between 10 and 20% of anon edits are vandalism or newbie tests. Try a little experiment for yourself: go to Recent changes by anons to articles, and look at the most recent ten edits. How many were positive, how many negative, and how many were you unable to tell because they were outside your field of expertise (e.g. changing the ranking of a music album you've never heard of)?-gadfium 04:16, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I just did that test myself. Nine of the ten edits were positive. The other one I couldn't tell: in John F. Kennedy International Airport an anon changed the number of gates in terminal 6 from 13 to 14. I could probably research it, but even the Kennedy airport website may not be up to date. I'll leave it and some New Yorker who goes through the airport a couple of times a week will fix it if it needs to be fixed. I feel my experience this time was more positive than usual; usually I come across one or two negative edits in such a test.-gadfium 04:24, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I checked the contributions of the anon who made the JFK airport edit. They've made lots of similar edits to airports, and have no warnings on their talk page. I can feel fairly confident they know their stuff.-gadfium 05:46, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Interesting test. I found one obvious vandal edit (to the day's FA), eight obviously good edits and one where I was unable to be sure, about Dramatic Hearts [2]; the phrasing was poor but not necessarily obvious silliness. That makes 8/9 good edits. It'd be a might shame to have lost them. -Splashtalk 04:30, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I just did it and found just 3 good edits (and lots of vandalism, unknowns and neutrals). Of course the results of any of our tests are not significant. Hmmm, how many uncaught vandals does it take to offset a few good edits? Is one bad edit sitting for several ours worth 5 minior improvements? I'm not saying that blocking anons is the best way to solve this though...Why do people oppose delayed editing? I'll never know. BrokenSegue 04:36, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Wasn't the first time you corrected an article and saw it actually appear on screen a "surely I can't...that comma...maybe I can...wow. I can! I am Power." moment? I do believe it may have been: [3]. -Splashtalk 04:38, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Why couldn't we make exceptions for certain pages (like the sandbox or when making new pages)? I'm sure there are other options we could use as well (an option to display the newest revision even if it hasn't elapsed its time or a version designed only for readers). If the only reason delayed editing isn't inplace is to serve as advertising (or to rope people in) then perhaps we can do without it. I don't want to have to be in a rush to review edits. Of course coding it would be hard. BrokenSegue 04:47, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Actually, just such a thing is being coded at present — articles puttable into a 'validated' state. Apparently, this was in addition to the article rating system. In December, Jimbo mooted its appearance in January. -Splashtalk 04:51, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
A perennial proposal. We're not doing it. The primary reason is not that anons make substantial important contributions to the Wikipedia, but that this is how new contributors first get drawn in and involved - we are successful only because we set the bar low, inviting anyone to participate with minimal effort. Moreover, it's uncertain right now what percentage of vandals would create throwaway accounts to perform the same vandalism they perform now with anonymous IPs. Deco 06:09, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
  • It is more difficult to create throwaway accounts than change IP addresses, and can be made even more difficult by captchas. What is your basis for believing that disallowing anonymous edits would decrease the number of new contributors? Do you have statistics? How about restricting the frequency of anonymous edits? -Pgan002 06:28, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong reject - I see lots and lots of very good edits made by anons every day. This ain't gonna happen. --Cyde Weys 06:10, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
    • The same people would still be drawn if they were allowed only occasional anonymous edits. The same good edits would happen, and in addition people would register earlier. -Pgan002


Of course, not long ago, if somebody suggested blocking new article creation to anons, it was rejected as a "perennially rejected" suggestion. Ultimately, despite great opposition, anon editing will be ended entirely. There will probably also be some more limits imposed on new registered users. This is all currently happening piece-by-piece. The use of semi-protection on articles will simply be used on ever-more articles, for ever longer. It seems better to plan how it will happen, then pretend its not going to happen. --Rob 13:11, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

If that happens, you can expect a fork (barring a sudden and drastic change in Wikipedian culture). Allowing anyone to edit is a basic part of the wiki philosophy. Johnleemk | Talk 16:55, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm hoping that Jimbo realises that pushing for even more limitations on anonymous users when the ones already instituted were highly unpopular, lacked consensus, and have shown no clear evidence of effectiveness could threaten the community. Deco 20:46, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Personally I'd like to see the open edit policy remain until the wikipedia is pretty well populated. At that point, when the majority of the work is actually spent in fine tuning the articles, maybe there will be more of a need for some sort of limitation on edits. *shrug* — RJH 21:36, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
    • You assume the Closed Wikipedia Hypothesis (that there will come a point where we can no longer significantly grow in breadth). Not all people believe this. Also, most changes made by anons are fine tuning. Deco 21:40, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Allowing anyone to edit is not incompatible with banning anons — unless you're assuming that there is a certain class of human being that is permanently "anon". Requiring people to give a username, password and email (with email verification) just one time is not a big deal by any normal Internet standard. And regardless of the ratio of "good:bad" anon edits, the fact is that there is tremendous vandalism by anons (see some actual statistics), and blocking doesn't work at present because an IP address is not a person. A huge amount of effort is expended by people fighting vandalism (see today's featured article's history page, on any day). Wouldn't that energy be better spent on improving Wikipedia? — Johan the Ghost seance 11:11, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
    It is a big deal by wiki standards; many of us (including myself) would not be here today if we had to register to edit. We started out dabbling and got hooked later on. And tremendous vandalism doesn't mean allowing anonymous contributions is bad, either (unless they really outweigh good edits by something like an outrageous 99 to 1 ratio). IIRC Jimbo told one media source that only 2000 of all anon contributions in December were vandalism (I find that figure a bit low, though). Vandalism is a necessary evil, and besides, if it's no big deal, it'll be easy for the vandals to register. Also, the biggest and baddest and most determined vandals tend to be those who wouldn't be stopped by registration. Johnleemk | Talk 16:46, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
Very strong oppose. I have made over 20,000 edits. If I had been required to register before editing for the first time I have little doubt I would never have edited at all. Most people are very reluctant to edit - tens of millions of people look at wikipedia every month and most of them could improve it, but very few edit at all and few of those become regulars. Barriers to involvement have to be kept to an absolute minimum. CalJW 18:46, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Nope, not happening. Sorry.--Sean Black (talk) 18:50, 6 February 2006 (UTC)


This is incomplete; how many of the constructive edits were from IP-address users? How many of the "rejected" changes? 82.12.106.84 14:46, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
Argh! A vandal! A vandal! Oh no, sorry — a bit twitchy there. ;-) I've completed the list as per your suggestion, for which thanks. — Johantheghost 15:07, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
Of all the people who are just jumping in to reject these proposals, how many spend a considerable amount of time on RC patrol, especially when the WikiDefCon is raised four or above? In total I've probably spent no more than two hours on RC patrol and I absolutely HATE it. I can't take the stress from seeing so many people desecrate other's hard work. Maybe a couple of hours at DefCon level 2/3 would change your mind?

I know my lecturers all hate wikipedia and I could never include it as a reference for a peice of written work. The open policy that leads to the poor reputation wikipedia has, is putting off people with detailed proffesional knowledge. Why can't we even trial a new system and see how it affects article expansion? You should at least propose an alternative solution. It's a bit unfair to just expect all the RC patroller's to do all the dirty work --Username132 05:39, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Username132, in many cases with educators, the problem is that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and you're expected to cite the primary literature on a paper. I won't let my students cite Wikipedia in a paper, but I won't let them cite a traditional encyclopedia either! I think either is a good place to start for learning the basics about a topic, but I expect my students to read far beyond any encyclopedia for a research paper. I don't think it's an issue with Wikipedia's reputation in many (not all) cases, but an issue with encyclopedias in general. -- Csari 21:52, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Stong support. Registation is "no big deal" - let's put a username to each edit so we can cut down on the amount of time we are wasting dealing with vandalism. Please note - there are a lot of oppose/support votes registered in the section above this one as well. Johntex\talk 00:58, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Require changes to be reviewed before going live

This is very frequently proposed, in one form or another. - Omegatron 00:10, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

See m:Posting by anonymous users should be limited, but not banned

(begin text copied from User talk:Omegatron#My editing philosophy and the Credibility of Wikipedia)

I base my editing philosophy on the basic premise that

Readers should not be misled when referring to what is supposed to be an accurate repositry of knowledge(Wikipedia)

To that end, I would rather see something that is inaccurate removed rather than remain on the article page to confuse the innocent. The inherent weakness/strength of a Wiki is, of course, that anyone can contribute and edit/revert. However if any one can contribute, and the editors do not know whether the contribution is right or wrong, the article can remain visible for a long time steering readers in completely the wrong direction. Since I have been editing Wikipedia, I have been truly horrified at the number of inaccuracies and sheer poor quality of writing on many subjects with which I am familiar. My purpose therfore is to try to correct those articles in the subject areas with which I am familiar so that readers like myself can have confidence in the accuracy of Wikipedia. I'm sure I read somewhere on 'pedia that CREDIBILITY is (rightly)one of the main concerns of the organisers. I have to tell you that, certainly in the field of electrical, electronic engineering, Wikpedia is certainly NOT credible to at the moment. I am prepared to, and already have started to, help correct that situation in the subject areas with which I am familiar.

I have a suggestion for minimising the amount of substandard/incorrect information appearing on the live pages. This is as follows:

Until a new user has proved his/her reliability over a period, he/she would only be able to edit the Talk pages relating to an article and not the article itself. New articles could be submitted in the same way but only go 'live' when the new user becomes 'registered as reliable'. The only disadvantage to this is that new users would be under the scrutiny of existing users and admins and may never get their 'wings'. But this is similar to the procedure at the moment in that existing users and admins try to moderate the excessive tendencies of new users and this must take up a great deal of their time. Under my scheme, at least the live pages would probably be more accurate and hopefully be more resistant to vandalism. I think also that in this scheme new users could be mentored and encouraged to edit responsibly and not have to learn the hard way (like me) by having their edits reverted and getting into timewasting arguments with admins etc.

I would be pleased to know your views on this idea and hope that the above explains my sometimes over-zealous attitude (which I am trying to moderate) when editing.:-)Light current 23:38, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

So you wouldn't be able to delete all this useful information until I approved your changes? Sounds good to me. ;-)
Variations have been proposed many, many times, especially by new users. You would have to get a lot of support to change something so fundamental to the wiki, though. I started a new section on Wikipedia:Village_pump_(perennial_proposals)#Require_changes_to_be_reviewed_before_going_live for you to post your idea in.
An alternative idea is just to warn newcomers about the way the wiki works and get them to approach articles the same way we do, with caution where caution is due. One small change that might help is to make the disclaimer or the source of our content (us) more visible to newcomers. See Wikipedia:Proposed update of MediaWiki:Tagline.
Also, I think the credibility problem is very much your own personal opinion. It has its problems, but it's not that bad, and covers a lot of things that aren't covered at all in other places. Read through Wikipedia:Replies to common objections, if you haven't. - Omegatron 00:21, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Sorry for intruding on the interesting philosophical discussion, but Light current's argument sounded a lot like a form of immediatism. It might be very interesting for him to take a look at that series of pages on meta. --cesarb 00:38, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

(end text copied from User talk:Omegatron#My editing philosophy and the Credibility of Wikipedia)

I think a good way to impliment this is to have only extensive and complete-ish articles be partially locked and force changes to be approved. For pages that are more or less complete, there could be the "article" page, the "discussion" page, and also a "proposed changes" page where anyone can edit. This way, anyone can still edit, but changes will be buffered. Perhaps only these "partially locked" pages would be rated and verified extensively. Fresheneesz 23:08, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
Constructive updates will be easier if "partially locked" means that the article can be edited as usual, but there is a lock on which version is displayed by default. Still discourages vandalism, what's the fun of vandalising a draft? But you still need to solve who gets to tag a new version as the default version, and how to decide which articles to lock down. HFuruseth 21:54, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I think there should be a way for individuals or groups to tag individual revisions. Then you could select for example the latest revisions approved by some group or individual you trust. Maybe some parenting groups would tag articles it thought were suitable for children. I would like to tag revisions free from vandalism. Maybe another group would like to tag revisions that have been fact checked. --Gbleem 15:29, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I believe radically open communication is one of Wikipedia's core competencies. Establishing a formal system by which contributions may be made will cause so many real experts not to bother. I wonder how many dedicated Wikipedians got involved initially just correcting some small error they wouldn't have bothered with if they'd had to register, prove their worth etc. The best people that Wikipedia needs to attract are probably the same people that are too busy to be bothered with the "getting involved" process. To entrenched Wikipedians, establishing an approval process is not a barrier; but it will be a serious hindrance to growing the Wikipedia community. Vandals are motivated to figure out a way to beat the system. Valuable contributors won't be so motivated, and they just won't get involved. The tagging idea is fabulous. If combined with some kind of editor rating system--universal or personal--that would be a great way to preserve both radical openness and excellent credibility.DaniU 17:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Agree: I'm almost totally in agreement with Wikipedia's policy of openness, and I think that the barrier to contributing should be very low. Any kind of approval process will be a major hindrance — for justification of this, see the story of Nupedia. But I think there should be a bar — just a very low one. In other words, as I argued above, disallow anonymous edits. WP's registration process is as easy as it could possibly be, but I think it would be enough to reduce casual drive-by vandalism to manageable levels, as well as giving as a mechanism to track and ban vandals — and, perhaps more importantly, talk to earnest but misguided contributors. — Johantheghost 19:17, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Non-logged-in users only see most recent logged-in-user edited version

This would make this idea automatic - no review process. The only review process is that a logged-in user has to edit the page before that version becomes seen by non-logged in users. It could be a fairly straight-forward software implementation, and IMO, a good compromise. Kevin Baastalk 21:35, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Require changes by anonymous and novice users to be reviewed

It seems the best way to balance the problems and objections here is to implement a system that is a hybrid of the "Require registration before editing" and "Require changes to be reviewed" ideas such as the proposal below. The key question here is, what's more important -- creating an encyclopedia, or conducting some kind of experiement in anarchistic collaboration? If the goal really is to create an encyclopedia (as valuable as the experiment has proven to be), then we should be willing to sacrifice a little bit of the openness we've grown up on in order to best achieve that goal. I truly believe that with just a slight increase in oversight, Wikipedia has the potential to be the most authoritative and unbiased source of information on almost everything. Respectfully:

[edit] Proposal: Require changes by anonymous and novice users to be reviewed

  1. Create a class of users called Editors. This does not represent a special status, but merely a verification that the user is not a vandal and is contributing in good faith.
  2. Editor status is attained by making one Verified edit to any article.
  3. Past or current revisions of an article can be declared Verified by any one Editor.
  4. The default version of an article that shows up to the general public is the last Verified revision. The most recent revision can be seen instead by a link at the top of the page, or set to the default in a user's preferences.
  5. Any revision must be Verified by an Editor to be considered a Verified revision.
  6. An Editor can Verify his/her own revisions. S/he can also choose to wait and let another Editor review and Verify them instead.

Considerations:

  • These rules would remove practically all incentives for vandalism, as 99% of vandals would not have the gratification of seeing their changes live.
  • Anonymous users would still be able to contribute fully; they would lose only the benefit of having their changes immediately viewable to the public. In fact, their changes would still be viewable to the public, just not as the default version.

Proposal submitted by Adam Konner, 11:39, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Comments:

Was this the wrong place to post this proposal? Could someone please guide me as to the proper way to do this? Thanks, Adam Konner 01:43, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism

Nearly all (all?) of the vandalism that I have observed is perpetrated by people without usernames. Is it possible to require the establishment of a username before being allowed to edit? I would be in favor of that. --Ssilvers 17:31, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

I strongly second this. The amount of vandalism continues to skyrocket, and it seems like every time I see some and check the talk page for the IP, I see many, many "final warnings". The warning system is a joke. Determined vandals can continue to damage Wikipedia almost without penalty, it seems. And they are, if not always, then certainly at least 90%, IPs with no username. From my experience, it looks like half or more of Wikipedia activity is protecting what we have, not adding new material. I personally have lost my appetite for creating in Wikipedia, and it is completely attributable to the level of vandalism. \ Fnarf999 \ talk \ contribs \ 18:19, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia seems to be slowly coming around to that consensus. A few months ago, without much argument, new article creation was restricted to logged-in accounts with a few days of existence behind them. Anons can't create new articles any more. Nobody seems to have objected to that change, or suggested going back.
But Wikipedia does have the tradition of being "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit". It's tough to give that up. Some tightening up is still possible, though.
The next step might be to require valid and unique e-mail addresses for new accounts, like almost every other web site. This would cut down the sockpuppet problem, and make blocking of vandals more effective.
How does requiring a log-in stop "anybody' from editing? Michael Dorosh 19:48, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
In addition to warding off casual editors who may have become larger contributors had they been given the chance to edit, there's another reason: Perhaps, for some reason, a user (who has an account) wants to edit anonymously. A subject considered embarrassing, maybe? I don't want to have any reason at all to discourage anyone from editing something; if it means putting up with some nonsense, then so be it. ~ Booya Bazooka 00:23, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
With that in place, the next step might be to allow any logged in user, not just admins, to turn on semi-protection for a page for 24 hours. That's controversial. But it's far less drastic than prohibiting all edits by anons, which is equivalent to turning on semi-protection for all of Wikipedia. --John Nagle 18:43, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I absolutely have to agree with this. As a current user of VandalProof, I have noticed that, as Fnarf999 says, at least 90% of the vandalism edits are from IPs. I understand that requiring user names would not stop people from vandalizing, but an intermediate step would hopefully curb some of it. I would rather spend my time adding encyclopedic content to Wikipedia than hunting for vandals. - Zepheus 18:45, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
90% of vandalisms may be from IPs; however, I would wager that 90% of IP edits are valid. That's the exchange we make. --Golbez 19:01, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps one day the law will provide for IP address holder accountability since no single IP address can be shared at the exact same moment in time. ...IMHO (Talk) 19:13, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand what you're saying. They aren't committing a crime by vandalizing. --Golbez 19:15, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
Not all laws are criminal. ...IMHO (Talk) 20:35, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
NAT. --Carnildo 07:48, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
"90% of vandalisms may be from IPs; however, I would wager that 90% of IP edits are valid". Not my experience at all, I'm afraid. Of all the anon edits to the many articles on my watchlist, I can safely say that about three quarters are either blatant vandalism, incorrect or so illiterate as to be useless, with the first category being by far the most common (and usually also falling into the third category!). From the way they're written it also appears that a majority of anon edits are made by bored teenagers showing us by their execrable English just how poor the education system is at the moment (which is not to say that there aren't plenty of good teenage editors on Wikipedia). -- Necrothesp 08:39, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Your impression is not, I think, representative. See some quick statistics I compiled here. If you would like to expand them, that would be useful, of course. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
One thing that would help significantly is being able to restrict shared IPs specifically and schools generally from editing without being signed in. Heck, just doing something about schools would eliminate at least half of the vandalism I revert each day. I'm not proposing this, mind you. I'm just stating that I am convinced it is necessary or at least will soon become necessary. We probably need to do something about AOL as well. --Yamla 19:30, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
The fact that "anyone can edit" is what makes Wikipedia what it is. If we suddenly restricted editing to usernames, then we would lose a very large userbase (even if many of them are vandals). Wikipedia benefits from allowing anyone to edit, because new users can easily jump into things. Once they become more situated with the area, they create an account. I know personally I wouldn't be here if anonymous edits weren't allowed because I would feel that I wasn't welcome. Cowman109Talk 19:37, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
So your position is that inexperienced editors are to be welcomed with open arms because to take 10 seconds to create a phony username would drive them and their "valuable contributions" screaming into the night? I suspect anonymous vandalism outnumbers the valid anonymous edits by a fair margin. Wikipedia does not "benefit" from allowing "anyone" to edit; it is self evident that if "anyone" is vandalizing, there is no benefit derived from that. Your personal comfort level is individual to you and would not be an impediment to others "required" to create an account.Michael Dorosh 19:46, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
Yes, inexperienced users should be welcomed with open arms. That is what the {{welcome}} template is for. See Jimbo's statement of principles at User:Jimbo. Numbers 1, 2, and 3, indirectly show that new users are always welcome to edit Wikipedia and that community is what makes Wikipedia so great. New users should be encouraged to make user accounts, but the founding principle of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit. Cowman109Talk 19:53, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
You keep parroting "that new users are always welcome to edit Wikipedia and that community is what makes Wikipedia so great" without seeming to understand why you are saying it. What is so great about 90 percent of a group's input being nonsense that has to be reverted? Just what is so great about that? And do you really believe wikipedia would be "less great" if anonymous editing was disabled? I have news for you - phony usernames are still anonymous. If you really feel wikipedia would be 'less great' - please demonstrate why. Because the opposite has already been demonstrated here by raw statistics. The burden of proof is now on you.Michael Dorosh 21:03, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
It's a tough nut. I agree that "anyone can edit" is a founding principle. But on many, many articles, including virtually all of the ones I actively watch, almost all of the edits are IP vandalism. And virtually ALL of the Wikiwork that I do is reverting vandalism and dealing (not very effectively) with vandals. I agree that we should be punishing the crime and not just the OPPORTUNITY for crime. But I also believe that vandalism is destroying Wikipedia, and that without SOME kind of improved control Wikipedia will be completely and utterly destroyed by vandals. I believe that a solid majority of the edits to Wikipedia now are vandalism. On some articles, especially ones on controversial topics (or topics that appeal to the "nyuk nyuk" mentality, you can see it in the history -- dozens of vandalisms a day. Go the vandal's IP talk page and there are dozens of "last warnings".
How about this: leave IP editing open, but clamp down tighter on offenders. One warning. Second offense is a 24 hour block. Third offense is a permanent block, and if a user tries to edit, they get redirected to an explanatory screen (this is for schools and so on). \ Fnarf999 \ talk \ contribs \ 20:31, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Forcing editors to log in will not decrease vandalism by all that much, but it will decrease the huge amount of copyediting that casual readers do on a daily basis. In any case, think back: How many people here calling for the end to logged-out editing started editing without an account? Think about that. We could be losing our best contributor simply because they didn't want to go through the hassle of registering an account to correct a typo. I oppose in the strongest possible terms any measue which limits people's ability to edit.--Sean Black 21:05, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

"Forcing editors to log in will not decrease vandalism by all that much, but it will decrease the huge amount of copyediting that casual readers do on a daily basis."
  • Firstly, how could you possibly know that? Especially after reading the stats on anonymous editing above.
  • Secondly, does an encyclopedia really need "casual" editing? Is wikipedia a reference that takes itself seriously, of just some fun toy for people bored at work?
  • If not the former, why then the emphasis on verifiability, sources, footnotes, references, etc?Michael Dorosh 21:26, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Statistics? There are no "statistics" above, just someone saying that "90% of vandalism comes from IPs" with seemingly no basis in anything at all. Do a study if you really want to find out, and I'm sure that you'll find that your numbers are very innacurate.--Sean Black 21:54, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
  • I have recently conducted a survey (albeit a rather unscientific one) in which I estimate that IP vandalism accounts for 82.2%-92.2% of all vandalism. Click Here to see my methods and results. Cool3 00:51, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
    Which is unrelated to the fact that perhaps 10% of IP edits are vandalism, and probably something like 30% (eyeballing RC, I wasn't systematic with that figure) of good edits are IP. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
I don't think the word casual is being used in its best sense here. A casual editor may be someone who simply edits when they see a grammar mistake on a page - their additions should be appreciated. If Wikipedia didn't encourage casual editors, then wouldn't it consist of people in cubicles writing articles and getting paid to do it? Wikipedia has been so successful largely because it is so easy for anyone to jump in and add content to pages. It would have grown much slower without the additions by IPs, and the amount of vandalism is being handled quite efficiently by recent changes patrollers and administrators. Cowman109Talk 21:34, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I also agree that the nearly all of the editing by ips I see is vandalism, minor fixes, or trivia, but largely vandalism. I am certain that the benefits of requiring logging in would outweigh the loss of these positive walk on by edits. After all if they really do want to help surely they wouldn't mind logging in. A lot of the excuses for not blocking ips is that they shared- if we require everyone to have accounts, we can say bye bye to vandalism only accounts without affecting anyone else (that's if the kids can bother to register every day to vandalise). Arniep 21:55, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I too strongly support logged in users being able to edit and unregistered users being to read. Other wiki sorts of sites require registration, it would probably viewed as entirely normal for us to follow the same procedures. Registration only requires an Email address. Easily 90% of vandalism is by anon users. It would also save administrators a good deal of trouble because ranges of IP addresses would no longer need to be blocked, that happens sometimes in cases of extreme vandalism. Terryeo 00:42, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
An e-mail address is not a requirement to create an account here. It's an option.—Chidom talk 18:36, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
This has been discussed about zillion times. Counter-argument exists that forcing everyone with username would reduce ability to spot vandalism quickly. More strict blocking policy would be, IMHO, more effective tool. Pavel Vozenilek 02:53, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
To the contrary, there are two things that can be done (under the current blocking system) against IP vandals that can't be done against logged-in users: IP ranges being used by, say, a botnet or persistent AOL user can be range-blocked briefly, and individual IP addresses can be blocked for varying periods of time (currently blocking a username autoblocks any IP addresses that it's used recently for exactly 24 hours, no more and no less, which is quite inflexible). The former case is frequently useful to stop people using dynamic dialups, and the latter is especially important for widely-shared IPs (some countries have all their Internet traffic routed through a single IP address, believe it or not, so such people are screwed for 24 hours straight rather than, say, 15 or 30 minutes at a time). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
Arniep, see my quick statistics here. Do you have contrary statistics? Please consider the difference between the statements "90% of anon edits are vandalism" and "90% of vandalisms are by anons". The latter is quite close to accurate; the former is completely wrong. A large majority of anon contributions are made in good faith, and probably a majority are useful. We just mentally skip over the typo-fixes and so forth.

As for "if they really do want to help surely they wouldn't mind logging in", you're assuming that the only important contributors are the dedicated ones. Many people just spend their time on semi-passive typo-fixing, with no real dedication. They'll likely be deterred by a signup; it's much more convenient to just edit.

And finally, "if we require everyone to have accounts, we can say bye bye to vandalism only accounts without affecting anyone else" is incorrect. If an account is blocked, any IPs that it's used recently are autoblocked for 24 hours, even if another user is using them. This inflexibility is being worked on, but do realize that it's pointless to block an account if the user can make another one in thirty seconds and just use that. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

If anyone's primary concern is truly stamping out vandalism, then propose fully-protecting all pages. With all pages fully protected, I believe vandalism would approcah zero. However, no one is willing to make that trade-off. Yes, requiring a log-in would probably decrease vandalism, but it would do so at great cost. Cool3 11:15, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

There are people always say "it would do so at great cost" whenever this discussion comes up. Where is the evidence for this? Arniep 17:22, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

It might not be a major point, but the high rate of vandalism will likely deter otherwise committed and valuable editors as well. I'm very new to Wikipedia and (like most people) I have quite limited time to spend on it. What time I do spend I want to be constructive, adding to the article, correcting minor errors, etc. If the day comes when my time is largely spent fixing vandalisms, I think my enthusiasm will wane pretty quickly. Blaise Joshua 14:04, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm really not sure whether the need to log in will have much effect here... many of the pages I watch are spammed as often as they are vandalized, and spammers usually create a username (presumably because they guess (correctly) that editors will be more likely to check on changes made by an IP). I perform a lot of rvs, but it's not something that gets my goat... sometimes it's rather clever actually, and a few yuks are worth the 30 seconds or so it takes me to get the job done). In some ways, the vandalism problem is part of wiki's charm, and maybe even what makes it work so well: when I see vandalism on a page, I often look over the page and see something else to fix too, etc.
The only thing about it that really bothers me is that it's a waste of server space. Maybe there could either be some "sub-admins" to delete vandal-versions, or at least a tag in the edit summary to notify admins that vandalism has been reverted. SB Johnny 17:59, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Preventing IPs from editing will just lead to an increase in accounts vandalizing. There are better ways to fight vandalism, i.e. Vandalproof and Tawkerbot. --tomf688 (talk - email) 04:51, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
I find it quite unlikely that new contributors will be deterred significantly by others' vandalism. Certainly no one has to revert a significant amount of vandalism; only in the event that someone vandalizes one of the small numbers of pages you watch do you have to revert anything. I almost never have to revert anything, since some people kill vandals so quickly. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Some Wikis do require you to be logged in to edit. I'd have no problem there, although it would possibly deter some people. Saying that you have to have a certain type of e-mail address to create an account is more problematic. It would debar many people from registering and mean abandoning the "anyone can edit" philosophy. Runcorn 19:41, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

The problem as I see it goes far beyond vandalism. Anons and brand new users simply do not know much of the policies around here, e.g. NPOV, linkspam, use of weasel words, etc. As a result even good faith edits run afoul of the many inclusion/exclusion criteria we have. I tend to spend a lot of time rv'ing cruft, linkspam and weaseling for example (others might have a different experience), simply due to the inexperience of contributors. How to solve the issue? My suggestions:

  • Firstly, by requiring registration before editting, but still permitting edits to talk pages so that hepful anons can make suggestions for changes or point out errors.
  • Secondly, by AUTOMATICALLY putting the welcome message on each new user's talk page which immediately gives them useful links to help them avoid the above pitfalls.
    • AND/OR by requiring that a newly registered account be "activated" somehow by an admin before being allowed to edit. In this way an admin can "look over the shoulder" of the user's first few edits to ensure they are not vandalising, or help them out if they are making unconstructive edits.
  • Thirdly, by requiring that ALL new articles go through an AfC process (spend some time on NP Patrol and you'll see that the vast majority of stuff is either unencyclopedic or VERY poorly written, to the point that it would have to be redone from scratch to make it encyclopedia worthy).
    • In this way unencyclopedic articles don't make the cut, rescuing poor ol' AfD from its current over-used state, and poorly written articles get cleaned up and wikified before being put into the main namespace.

Zunaid 14:16, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

  • I like some of these ideas, but with some modifications.
    • I'm not convinced about new users having to register (registering puts me off using websites and I'm not sure I would have started at Wikipedia if I had to register). I also think it would be harder to spot vandals (I sometimes fight vandalism during the UK day and most IP edits during school break times (12:00-13:30) seem to be vandalism).
    • Automatically displaying some sort of welcome message could be very useful. We could use the talk page or display something at the top of edit page for the user's first few edits.
    • I would prefer a system that made it easy to identify the first few edits for a new user (logged in or by IP address). Perhaps with a special page of some sort. This would enable more expereienced users to look over the shoulder of new users and help guide the user in the right direction or spot vandalism. I would prefer to approach it this way round rather than having users wait for their accounts to be activated until somebody is ready to watch them. --MarkS (talk) 18:24, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Everyone and their mother has suggested we abandon anonymous editing, the hallmark of the whole project. I mostly disagree, but it's an exceptionally common opinion. I wonder how common. Maybe we should make a "voting"/tally page, or Category:Wikipedians who want anon editing repealed, to get numbered lists of users who support various options. And don't forget Category:Wikipedians who would leave the project if anon editing was repealed.

We could also adopt "cultural" changes to make vandalism less attractive. Use some reverse psychology or something. It's mostly just high school kids trying to see how the site works. — Omegatron 18:38, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Incorrect. Everyone and their mother has suggested we abandon anonymous vandalism. Unfortunately, one seems to go in hand with the other.Michael Dorosh 18:40, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
This is true. As much as some people would love for anonymous users to continue to contribute, the fact is there has been so much trouble with vandalism and anons adding B.S. to the project that there is clearly a growing sentiment that in order to contribute you have to register. It won't eliminate all the nonsense out there, but I am convinced the amount of pure vandalism that people have to deal with on an almost hourly bases in some cases would be cut on the order of 90 to 95 percent. 23skidoo 18:44, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Can someone move my comment from above here please - I think I have proved my point about the Vandalism section being too long and complex. Jackiespeel 17:50, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I am incredibly angry about this. For those who are in favor of continuing to allow editing by unregistered users for fear of deterring contributions, how about how this deters contributions from registered users because they spend the majority of their time reverting vandalism? Some measure of accountability is not an unreasonable request. If non-registered users want to contribute, let them suggest their changes/edits on the article Talk page for a registered user to implement if appropriate. That is easily accomplished by semi-protecting every article page and leaving talk pages unprotected. Currently, I am on the verge of an edit war with an anonymous user with whom I cannot communicate effectively and if it comes to it, they cannot be blocked from continuing to edit. How is that constructive to the content of Wikipedia? It's an AOL account; are we to block all AOL accounts? I'd love to see some statistics on how much reverting takes place vs. actual constructive editing and/or creation of new articles. I would wager that creating vandalism and reverting it occupies the majority of time spent at Wikipedia. I didn't come here to constantly deal with vandals in an ineffective manner; I came to contribute by editing articles and creating new ones. If we lose the contributions of anonymous users, so be it. Wikipedia has an obligation to those who have shown some sort of commitment to this project. We're not asking for a pint of blood; a new user ID can be created at any time. It takes 30 seconds. Why is that unreasonable? It is unreasonable, however, to expect those of us who want to be here doing actual work to wind up doing constant cleanup instead. Should we start including some sort of warning in the welcome template about how much time you'll spend on vandalism? Additionally, how many editors who have made good contributions are leaving because they're tired of dealing with vandalism? Did anyone come here to do that? Argue your way out of that one, anonymous editor supporters.—Chidom talk 18:36, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

How about using Super Users:

1) Have a bunch of 'super users' generally accepted as 'fair'. To become a 'super-user', you must have posted a certain number of things, and had your content been found worthy by an administrator. 2) Have super user posts look different (different color for example) and only be editable/removable by other super-users. 3) Allow normal people to flag 'super user' content as untrue. Super users must examine at least one unexamined but flagged content from another user before they can add any other content. 4) Super-users that have their content changed by other super-users too often will acquire the notice of an administrator that may choose to revoke super-user status.

This method A) Continues to let anyone post anything they want. B) Lets people know what facts are more reliable and what is less reliable C) After start up work (identifing the first super-users), does not entail significant additional work for users or administrators. D) Retains the general idea and the 'feel' of wikipedia. Gurps npc 15:03, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Votes for Creation

[edit] From Village pump (proposals) archive

Wikipedia:Votes For Addition

My meek proposal is a constructive version of our existing VfDs. Instead of creating an article that you're not sure about, you could put it on VfA and get commentary (for a week or so) about whether or not the article topic is up to Wikipedia's standards. At the end of the week, the votes would be tallied and the result of the vote put on your user talk page. Almafeta 23:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

What would be improved by this system? It seems to me that it would result in a bootleneck of article creations, and not really provide anything new. People can talk about the merits of a potential article until they're blue in the face, but as they said in my computer programming classes, "the proof is in the pudding." Wouldn't it be better to create an article, and then, only if it's merits are questioned, it could be discussed at Requests for Comments or Votes for Deletion. In the end I think our be bold policy is a central one to wikipedia, especially when it comes to creating new articles. — Asbestos | Talk 16:03, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
It wouldn't stop anyone from being bold. It would just stop people from creating a full article only to have it deleted two weeks later because it's not up to Wikipedia's standards of notability. Almafeta 08:38, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
  • One: Reading "What Wikipedia Is Not" and "Bad article ideas" should be a must for newbies. If they are still wondering if the subject is article worthy, they can always ask here or on the Help desk, a WikiProject or someone personally. Two: A lot of articles get deleted for a serious lack of content instead of a non-notable subject. Those wouldn't be helped with this proposal. - 131.211.210.15 10:08, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
  • I suppose there could be an Articles for construction page with subpages slated for deletion in a short period unless someone decides to copy the content to a live page. It would give people a workspace for gathering stuff which they aren't sure will grow into an article, as well as yet another way for editors of stubs to find stuff to work on. Perhaps two lists: Public and Personal areas, with the latter labeled to discourage others from editing the articles during original author's initial assembly work. I don't know if there are people who would be interested in the concept, but at a minimum it would be a place to have sandboxes which a bot could automatically delete without adding to VfD load. (SEWilco 06:56, 15 July 2005 (UTC))

Eh, what the heck, nobody will notice this plug anyway. Wikipedia:Countdown deletion is nothing like this but is vaguely related. In spirit. Yeah, that's it. JRM · Talk 19:08, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] From Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

The following is a discussion from my usertalk page:

I don't know if this AFD comment was meant to be tongue-in-cheek or not, but I think it might not be that bad an idea, actually. Would certainly help reduce vanity article creation, I'd think, and certainly cut down on lists. --The Literate Engineer 06:35, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

  • Not really tongue in cheek at all. I've read some of Jimi Wales stuff on the future of WP and it seems that AFD is a major problem at the moment. I love it that WP is readily accessible to everyone with an internet hookup. I love it that its open-source. Still, it seems that placing some restriction (at least a restriction that new articles need be placed by people with an actual eusername and not just anonymously) could seriously curtail the spam and vanity and patent nonsense that I see taking up loads of time on AFD that would be better focused on improving the solid but less than ideal articles already in place.--Gaff talk 07:02, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
Wikicities already has the "mark as patrolled" system in place. It's not very functional over there and it's not used here at all yet, but at some point in time we could have articles by anons be in a queue, perhaps even rendered invisible to non-admins until verified by one; an admin would then check the article and either delete it outright, take it to AFD for opinions (for which purpose they would make it temporarily visible, much like VFU), or just click the link to confirm it as a good posting. I know this is fraught with problems and might even mean more admin workload, but it's an idea anyway. GarrettTalk 10:46, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure what Garrett is proposing, exactly. It doesn't help that I'm unfamiliar with Wikicities. However, I definitely don't think we should have every edit patrolled. I'm interested in the idea of AFC(Articles for Creation), though. Perhaps, there should be a two-day vote for the creation of any article. That seems overwhelming, but really there are only a relatively small number of daily creations, at least compared to edits to existing pages. It might be manageable. Still just brainstorming. Superm401 | Talk 19:43, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
As someone who has created about 600 articles, including about 100 in 2 days, "votes to create" is a very bad idea. It would likely be much worse than VFD is now, in terms of backlog. I would be alright with requiring users to register in order to create an article, but this might just result in more registered vandals, and thus more vandalisms that go unseen on RC patrol. Making it easy to edit means fewer users will bother to register, which means we'll more easily catch their vandalism. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-15 20:08
Do we have statistics on average number of daily creations? That would be helpful. Also, what were the 100 articles? Were they a batch of related stubs, or what? If we make AFC, we could allow batches to be voted on as a group. Superm401 | Talk 21:42, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
It seems about 1500 articles are created per day, a value that is steadily growing(Wikistats). Obviously, having an AFC for all articles would be unfeasible. However, it would probably be reasonable to have AFC votes for anons only, but this is probably a bad idea. Superm401 | Talk 21:53, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
It would just encourage vandals to register so their vandalisms are less noticeable. Don't break something that isn't completely broken. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-15 21:55
Those 100 were article text copied from the 1911 britannica. Many of them were stubs, but not all of them. I don't see the point of preventing admins from creating articles. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-15 21:54
I think that having to vote in order to create an article would be a disaster for the wiki. When I first read this, I though it would be voting to feature a new article for people to collaborate on, perhaps on the main page, which I think would be a nice idea. Lupin|talk|popups 03:40, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Pardon the ignorance of this relative newbie in starting this conversation in the first place. Having spent a fair bit of time working on WP over the past several days, I now see that votes for creation would not be a good thing at all. It does seem that some other method of cutting down on spam and fluff could be found. A lot of stuff popping up at WP:NP is just junk that people might not post if there was something as simple as a verification code that needed to be typed in by the person posting with a statement that they feel their material is worthy of an encyclopdia and free from copyvio. Maybe that is more naivety on my part. I'm sure that commercial sites, ad spammers and porn sites are trying to churn out as many articles as possible...--Gaff talk

[edit] From Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

Hello, this is my first policy propopsal (after an unsuccessful barnstar one - so please be gentle ;P)

As wikipedia expands, so more articles are created, and there being a finite number of possible articles, so the subjects of new articles become more and more specialised.

I recently created my first 'non stub' article at Bacon Grill, which I believe to be encyclopedic, especially given other canned meat articles - although I suspect that some would argue that it isn't. This has brought me a (frankly disproportionate) sense of real achievement, and I would like to create many more. But I have no intention of wasting my and other people's time by creating articles that are considered unencyclopedic due to their subject matter.

Which brings me onto my proposal. If one intends to create a killer article, but thinks that there is a relatively high chance of it being vfd'd, then I propose a pre-emptive votes for deletion - a votes for creation, as it were. Basically, you announce your intention to create an article, with subject, and, if it is helpful, a brief sub-stub summary of the article you intend to create. Then wait and see what the consensus is. It may even be the case that someone sees the discussion and is inspired to quickly create the article themselves, thus saving you a bit of work and perhaps giving you an article to add to.

What say you guys?

Cheers,

Spankthecrumpet 04:06, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Having to vote for something to be created would just gum up the works, so to speak. It also hinders the "be bold" and free information ideaology of Wikipedia. If someone doesn't like it, or views it as unencyclopedic, then it will be voted on whether to be removed or not. Until then, create what you like. Someone will let you know if they have an issue. Ereinion 04:11, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
Sorry if I didn't make this clear, but this would be optional - something to be used only if one is unsure if the article will be accepted. In practice it would save time - it takes a while for those who aren't gifted at communicating to write an article. I could write 10 000 words about my bedroom wall (sure, some of them would be the same words :P), but I wouldn't expect it to stay on Wikipedia for long (it's not notable, even for a wall). That would be a lot of wasted time. Some of the longest articles on wikipedia are on some of the most specialised subjects. Spankthecrumpet 04:25, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
You're talking a sort of peer-review then, which isn't a bad idea. A proper forum to discuss an article's admittance could be helpful. However, my concern is the bureaucracy involved. Unnecessary congestion in an already taxed system. The current process relies on common sense, which I consider a much more efficient stamp of approval than gathering a forum of approval together. And for those who need to ask if their bedroom walls are encyclopedic or not, they should be banned forever. ~^ Ereinion 05:19, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
You're trying to save yourself work, which is understandable, but imagine this scenario: you propose to create an article on something-or-other on your new WP:VFC. In order to buttress your proposal, you'll have to provide information for the reviewers about what the article will be about, what your sources will be, etc. What's the best format for such information? An article! Just boldly creating the article is the best way to approach this. Your WP:VFC really wouldn't save you significant work. —Wahoofive (talk) 05:39, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
That depends upon the nature of the article - what you say is right for some potential articles, paticularly the less complicated ones, but when someone can write ten thousand words of brilliant prose upon an article, but can also sum it up with ten hyperlinks I think it reasonable to do the latter to prove it worthy first, saving everyone time. I appreciate that for 95% of potential articles this process is unnecessary (in which case it isn't used, thus not wasting anyone's time), but for the few that are it could really be useful. Could also be handy for newbies, who are easily intimidated, to gauge the likely reaction of wikipedians to articles that they are thinking of creating - it must be very annoying if the first article that you create (I remeber seeing one recently called Girl Geeks or something) is deleted, and it's quite possible that you would take it personally. Cheers, Spankthecrumpet 14:19, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps a less bureaucratic alternative would be a Creation Nest - lay your idea for an article, and see if others want to see it hatch. :) If you can persuade one or two other people your article is worth having, that's probably enough to justify having a go. (To be clear, this approach wouldn't be about formal procedure in the way Articles for Deletion is - more like floating an idea with your friends to see what they think, to help you make up your mind.) Rd232 23:20, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

I like this idea - what happens next? Spankthecrumpet 08:46, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
Be bold and start one: Wikipedia:Creation Nest. Of course, someone might vfd that, but then just enjoy the irony (; Derex @ 07:51, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
I don't like the proposed name. Perhaps something like Wikipedia:Ideas for pages? You could also check Wikipedia:Requested articles and Wikipedia:Most wanted articles, and see if the page you wanted to suggest is listed at either of those... If it is, then of course go ahead and make it. Also, if a page like creation nest or ideas for pages is created and becomes generally accepted/used, a link to it could perhaps be included in the page creation template, which editors see when creating a new page... this would inform new users, who certainly could use such feedback, of its existence. --Aquillion 00:41, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
I have the answer to the original question: When I am not sure whether to start a new article, I usually go to a regularly edited page that is related to that topic and ask the editors there (who pay attention via their watchlists) if they think it would be a good subject for a new article. For instance, when I was interested in starting the The West End (Richmond, Virginia) article, I went to the Talk:Richmond, Virginia page and got the go ahead. Silence is assumed to mean yes MPS 21:43, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] I was wondering about changing wikipedia search engines?

I know this has been asked a million times before even w/o having been around for those times, but does anyone know? Is it even under consideration? I'd search if the topic was being discussed, but I probably wouldn't find it >D. Andrewdt85 11:02, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

I would recommend inquiring more specifically at Wikipedia:Searching ∴ here…♠ 05:43, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Locking articles

The current approach is to only lock "important" articles, in order to prevent vandalism. There are very limited user amount having rights to do this.

How about a some kind of karma system, that every user having published a good article or a couple, could have rights to lock/unlock a "finished" article? So, everybody could still do modifications and adding, but when the article would be good enought, the risk of undesirable editing would be smaller.

-- 195.148.50.152 17:03, 2 November 2005 (UTC) Antti Hahto, hahtoa(at)gmail.com

You have misunderstood the current system. Any article thst is a major vandalism target, whether "important" or not" may be protected (locked) temporarily, while soem other method is taken to stem the vandals. But there is a strong desire to unprotect as soon as the risk of vandalism is over. No articles are suppsoed to be protected permenantly. a few non-articel pages (templates and such) whjich are widely used, importsnt to the running of wikipedia, likley vandal targets, and not liklely to need legit edits often are protected indefinately. But no articles are. DES (talk) 00:51, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that some articles contain incorrect info. I think that we should ask everyone on the talk pages and see what final edits they want to make before lockingThe Scurvy Eye 00:30, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

We can actually combine quality control and locking of pages if new edits go through the person responsible for that page. It would work a little like writing in a moderated forum, the responsible person decides what to include and what to ignore. We need discussion forums to find out who the responsible persons are, but that is another problem. Roger4911 23:14, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Protecting the Featured article

This is a common suggestion. The usual reply is to give the proposer a link to user:Raul654/protection.-gadfium 06:20, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Proposals concerning Talk namespaces (and other discussions)

[edit] Wiki-discussion vs. Message Board

[edit] Discussion Pages - Bring Modern Interface

Hi,

I'm new to this community, and I intend to stick around as a regular contributor of articles. I've noticed a peculiar problem that I'm sure others have brought up - why does wikipedia use such a cumbersome discussion feature? Why not update the discussion section to look more like more modern and organized thread discussion board systems? The simple appearance can be maintained. Take a look at the software this board uses. [4] Very simple and maintains a tree format too. Currently I believe the peculiar all page edit system in place is unfamiliar to new users (like me), and for those who infrequently stop by will be discouraged from leaving a comment because it does not appear so simple. Also I believe a thread system will be more compact and well organized. What have been the objections to such a system?

Lotsofissues 09:28, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC) (<--- Take me some time to remember the tildas)

UPDATE: I did not intentionally make this message look so sloppy. I posted and it was published as one long line and this is what I got after attemption to correct it. Point proven. :-( :-|

Are you volunteering to write the sizable amount of code needed to integrate a web forum into MediaWiki? Development happens solely through volunteers, and none of the ones we have now see doing this as a priority. -- Cyrius|✎ 16:12, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Also, I suspect the reason it hasn't been a priority is that once people master MediaWiki markup and get used to the difference between editing sections and a whole page, they don't have much of a problem with using the same editing interface for discussion and article pages. --Coolcaesar 23:13, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Lot's suggestion. Wiki pages were just not designed for discussion; it's like trying to use a round peg for a square hole. A true forum interface with threading and editable posts would be vastly superior to the current setup. Also, Cyrius is mistaken; there would be no need to write vast amounts of code; open-source forum software already exists. It would be a matter of picking the most appropriate one, setting it up, and configuring the discussion tab to link to a forum thread instead of a talk page. (Current talk pages could be auto-incorporated into the new threads). - Pioneer-12 19:08, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As Cyrius points out, the developers are volunteers. When I propose we raise more money, I'm told we have more than enough. Time to start paying developers to sit in the rack room and glue the infrastructure together -- not to mention, to improve it. — Xiong熊talk 06:12, 2005 Apr 22 (UTC)

Even if it were easy to integrate a forum system like Slash (gasp!) or phpbb (shudder), I think it would be an bad idea because it contravenes WP philosophy. The current talk-page format is discussions in the wiki style -- anyone can edit anything. If the discussion is over, the thread can be deleted. If the discussion is splitting into two overlapping threads, an enterprising editor can split them up. If someone disagrees with that enterprising editor, they can revert the changes. Traditional web-boards have none of these features -- in fact, they are designed to make it impossible for non-mods to edit the general thread of discussion. Trying to hack those features into a traditional web-board would be silly -- you would end up with what we have already.

Lotsofissues, I'm curious what in particular you dislike about the current format. It may not be the same as what newbies would be used to, but it's not very hard to grasp, either. One feature that might make it easier for new people to post would be changing the "+" tab to one that says "Post new topic" -- the "+"'s meaning is terribly non-obvious. (BTW, what is a TTT? The discussion board you mentioned uses that TLA everywhere.) jdb ❋ (talk) 07:34, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

1. First the easiest question - TTT (Third Tier Toilet) is elitist applicant parlance for an all inclusive category of virtually all colleges in this country with the exception of schools determined elite by the elitist standard - those schools being Harvard, Yale, Princeton , Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, UPenn, Duke, Northwestern, JHU, Rice, Oxbridge, and the four premier liberal arts colleges Amherst, Williams, Swathmore, and Ponoma.
Indeed it isn't hard to be competent in this format - but even that skill level requires a bit of accumulated editing experience. I want a system for newbies (casual visitors) to comment as easily as many newspaper article feedback forums attached to the bottom of articles make it. MAKING FEEDBACK REGULAR - instead of occassional - sounds good right? A please comment on this article at the bottom leading to a familiar PHPBB style reply box would actively solicit critical/request info we need. 2. I think in many obvious ways Wikipedia has grown too large for this format. I do janitorial work which requires me to visit the VFD page - this is not fun - in fact, it's so tedious having to load the all of the page that it breaks my healthy editing rhythm. At no point does it become more like work than then. A reformed thread style format would be pleasant. 3. Despite contributor's mastery of this format by now, few would argue phpbb is not an easier format to post in. Contributors will begin to talk more amongst each other; perhaps then it won't take me a full year to become familiar with everyone. Lotsofissues 07:09, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There is plenty to dislike about the current format. First, "Anyone can edit anything" is just plain wrong for discussion. My comments are my own. Letting anyone edit them only causes problems and irritation. The forum method--that is, limiting editing access to only the poster and administrators--makes sense, saves time, and reduces irritation. Also forums have built in abilities for multipaging, standard formatting of user names, quoting previous statements, searching discussions by date--all abilities that wiki software has no real tools to assist for. Notice that no forums are clamoring to change over to wikis? It's ridiculous that I have to manually indent my posts, that I have to manually add my name to my posts, that there is no standard formatting separating one talk post from another, and that I have to manually add formatting for quotes. - Pioneer-12 09:39, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
People ought to write short posts, and if they don't, people split them up and reply to each point separately. I'm not convinced about quoting. People sometimes edit your posts to improve your spelling and grammar or to remove personal attacks. Any other editing would probably be spotted and considered vandalism. I do not think there is any major problem now, but you may be interested in the concept of m:LiquidThreads. r3m0t talk 11:09, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
I have to second (or third) Lotsofissues's point. Trying to construct properly-threaded discussions "by hand" is unnecessarily tedious. It may constrain the active userbase to only the most-dedicated people who can put up with it, but I bet it keeps a lot of otherwise-intelligent people from contributing as much as they could. I'm sensitive to the issue of how much can be reimplemented with the available volunteer coding base, but saying "it's good enough, we all use it, once you get used to it it's fine" is kind of elitist, don't you think? Steve Summit 17:54, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

I quite like what we've got already. Contributing to a discussion is the same as editing pages: you only need to learn one approach. I agree that the "+" is non-intuitive: in fact it's so non-intuitive I didn't know it worked.--Dave63 08:01, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There are considerable advantages to conducting discussion using a Wiki. The most obvious is that we can remove attacks and trolls, easily refactor long tedious discussions. and archive discussion threads whenever we want to. We can easily go back and retract things we should not have said. Also being lightweight and not obviously discussion-oriented it discourages long posts and point-by-point debate--which isn't what the talk pages are for. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 11:23, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Tony---Well put -- I think the last advantage is the most important. If anything, WP should discourage the talk pages from being used as grounds for long-running discussions. People who wish to carry on lengthy debates are likely to be unhappy with the WP philosophy of merciless editing, rearranging, and deletion with the aim of reaching consensus, rather than declaring a winner. jdb ❋ (talk) 05:13, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The need for organizing (archive) discussions becomes unnecessary in any modern interface. The need to remove attacks far dimnishes when every single user no longer has full admin power over a discussion page. Cockring.jpg blanketing needs to be removed; a FUCK YOU! thread - whatever. Lotsofissues 07:09, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
We absolutely should facilitate lengthy discussions. This format suppresses a long diagonal discussion - part of the process in supporting and defending the accuracy and fairness of a complex entry. More than casually critical ppl should not be grouped as unhelpful to the development of entries. Lotsofissues 07:09, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Sorry for being late to the party here, but my take on this is that Wiki discussions tend to be much more thoughtful and articulate than any I've witnessed in fora or bulletin boards of any kind. This quality of discourse is probably a direct result of the features of Wiki: anyone can edit anything and useless comments tend to get dumped very quickly. We rarely see "I agree" contributions and even flamewars tend to be more like debates than tennis matches. –DeweyQ 18:49, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Using talkpages, wikipages, for discussions doesn't work well at all, we should use tools appropriate for the task, like forums or mailing lists or newsgroups. Wikipedia could set up a discussion forum server, that is the simplest solution. That would also decrease the number of accesses to the wiki, which gives us more bandwidth for the wiki server(s).

In a forum we can talk every day with each other and that establishes a merit order. We can quickly find out who are the wise people and who are the less merited.

This results in a merit order based solely on each persons written messages, so reason and judgement can easily be seen, separate from the person's body language, his social pondus, his voice and ability to take people emotionally.

So we can find the really intelligent people through using the text medium. We can use the forums to learn to know each other, appoint by democratic votings some responsible and knowledgeable persons to have the final decision for a part of the wiki. We need authority to achieve a high standard, authority based on what we say and how we discuss with each other.

The forums can also be used by people who have been overruled by higher authority, to defend his views and maybe get support from higher authority on a certain issue.

Keep the discussions open and unmoderated like in usenet. Philosophy and knowledge in general really need freedom of speech. Roger4911 18:35, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I'd be happy to contribute code to integrate phpBB into talk pages. I've spent ages doing modifications of MediaWiki, and i'd be glad to do some nice hookup to phpBB (which is also free) within the talk pages, as i do agree - it can get confusing reading these things; it took me abouta minute to find the end of this discussion. the only problem is, is that all the handlers within phpbb are actions; eg action=edit, and so on.. So, the actual talk page itself would have to be modified slightly, unless a custom solution would suffice? Spum 21:21, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Image:PhpBB wiki.png

Sexy screenhot of my slap-dash coding to get phpBB into MediaWiki. (I am absoultely crap at HTML, CSS and design, so apologies for the wonky box layout. Spum 22:06, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't like the phpBB design. I prefer to be able to see the most recent discussion right when I pull up the Talk page. Ashibaka tock 19:21, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I have to add my support for putting some proper discussion boards on here instead of the "talk" wiki pages. At the very least, there ought to be a message board to post non-article discussions such as the one we're having right now! :) I could write pages and pages about why boards should replace wiki-based Talk pages, but to summarise: (1) It's very unclear how to use a talk board, whereas message boards are far easier for most internet users. Message boards are a mainstream discussion tool which people of all ages and backgrounds use on the internet, and they're much closer to a universal way of exchanging ideas than the current "talk" system allows. The "talk" pages have no reply button so it's unclear how to reply to someone's opinion, they have no "start new thread" button so it's unclear how to start a new topic, they don't even add your name automatically which has caught me out many times despite being having used the internet for 15 years. (2) The "spirit of wiki" is about articles being freely editable, not people's opinions about those articles. Surely the very reverse principle applies to opinions, that there should be no censorship or editing except by the authors of those opinions. (3) It wouldn't be impossible to do technically, there are dozens of open source Content Management Systems which allow simultaneous logins to both content and message boards. The Wikipedia would be the content, the Talk pages would be the message boards. Many community sites allow comments on each and every article they publish, using comments systems identical in format and functionality to popular message boards, some of them even allow threaded discussions. It's this kind of comments section software that needs to be added to Wikipedia articles. (4) Some people on here seem to deliberately want to use a hard-to-use interface to somehow exclude "noise", but I submit this elitist policy is also excluding far too much good and desperately needed discussion from people who aren't as familiar with the internet but are VERY familiar with the topic discussed in the article. The quality of discussions is high on soem pages, but often, especially with non-tech subjects, there is little or no discussion on the talk page and where there is most of it is by a small pool of people, probably the few folks who are knowledgeable in that topic AND who know how to conduct a discussion using a Wiki interface. I suspect a lot of non-techie visitors to Wikipedia who have desperately-needed non-technical knowledge to contribute would love to discuss an article but are completely baffled by the Talk page. We NEED non-techies contributing to Wikis, they form the vast majority of knowledgeable people in the world and in case anyone's forgotten the point of a n "encyclopedia" is to cover everything and everyone, not to exclude any topic of interest to a wider audience. Elitism will ruin Wikipedia and skew its contents and bias towards those of people who have greater technical knowledge than those who don't. In case you don't believe me, my father has a PhD, has been a university lecturer for 40 years and even in retirement gets regular work as an examiner, he's clearly got lots of knowledge in his specialist area (history), but he has great trouble with technical things such as using Microsoft Word because for most of his life home computers just didn't exist. He's constantly clicking on the wrong icon at the top (icons that are disturbingly similar to Wiki's) and messing up his texts, and I have to help him out. We need to make it easier for people like him, they are NOT noise, they're exactly the opposite of noise, they're knowledgeable people who have a lot to give to Wikipedia but who currently find it almost impossible to do so. People who think the Wiki interface is some kind of valuable intelligence test ought to try and see things from the point of view of someone who was born before valve computers existed. The Wiki interface just tests technical knowledge and experience, it doesn't test knowledge in any other field. (5) At the risk of repeating myself, the Talk page's interface is cumbersome to the extreme. If you'd never used a wiki, would YOU assume you can reply to something by clicking on "edit"? When I first encountered it I had no idea how to respond and certainly no idea how to add my signature to it (those icons at the top are VERY unintuitive and scary to non-techies). Even when you do manage to use a button correctly, the markup code is also unclear, for example why use colons when you could have descriptive words that give a clue as to what the code does? And how the heck does two of these "-" followed by four of these "~" tell you that a signature will appear there? --Krisse 18:08, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I would agree, especially with point 4 - editting using wiki markup is non trivial and will always exclude probably the vast majority of people that use the site, whether they would feel like contributing or not. Having the talk pages also work in wiki markup means they have no easy non technically minded way of contributing to the article. If it was opened up to anyone that could click on a 'Comment on this article' button and type in text without worrying about blanking, putting it in the wrong place, having it unattributed, and being able to reply to questions raised by their comments just by hitting reply then I imagine we might get a lot more contributions, particularly in the non technical fields that dominate the better articles here.
Every issue raised like vandals and flames are dealt with in various ways in existing forum software because all forums have exactly the same issues to contend with. Personally I see the lack of talk on most article talk pages as one of the biggest weaknesses of the project overall, I can't imagine with the number of page hits wikipedia is getting that there aren't many thousands of people that are viewing articles here every day and noticing mistakes, but even if they think to try and comment on it, even if they work out the talk page is the place to raise an inaccuracy, they then are pages of gibberish including lots of * [] : {{}} and decide they are out of their depth and leave without pointing out the problem the article has. Sfnhltb 06:55, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I totally agree with the idea of improving this cumbersome interface. I don't believe that the wiki software was designed with discussion in mind and maybe I'm just stupid, but I do find it confusing to navigate. Sometimes I'm reading down a "thread", decide to reply and have to carefully scroll up trying not to miss the appropriate "edit" and if I do miss it, I've got to start reading posts to find out if they're talking about the same thing or not. I would really appreciate a more modern interface, especially to take the place of these giant multi-thread pages. --Username132 04:43, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I support the idea of a modified forum interface: it is better for communication. Posts to a talk page should be auto-signed. It should be possible to reply to individual posts (currently impossible unless each post is in a separate section); this reduces the user's cognitive load and saves time (currently he/she has to search the source text of many posts for the one to reply to). Posts should be auto-indented and perhaps even boxed. To keep the benefits of wikis that others insisted on, it should be possible to edit any subthread. This can be done using an "edit subthread" link above each post to edit the thread rooted at that post. The edit would be signed as "Edited by XXX on YYY." (There would also be a "reply" link above each post.) It should be possible to explore threads top-down; perhaps the page should at first appear as first lines of each thread, and clicking on a "more" link next to each thread would reveal the top post and part of its subthreads. In my layman estimation, these would be small changes to MediaWiki, and should not be implemented using traditional forum software. I believe other projects using MediaWiki would also be excited about such talkpage improvements. -Pgan002 02:11, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with adopting a more universal messageboard system for discussions on Wikipedia. The current system is highly troubling for many reasons, some of them being:

  1. It is difficult to point out where a message has started and where it ended. Posts by different users are bunched together, and they can only be separated by spaces. A traditional messageboard separates posts. On Wikipedia, you have to press "Enter" a few times, and then you begin typing. For organizational purposes, this aspect of Wikiped is clearly annoying.
  2. The current system instructs members to add newer messages to the bottom of the talk-page. I am sorry, but does that make any sense? I suppose most people would prefer having their newer emails show up first, with the older ones going to the back. The same thing makes sense for Wikipedia. I can't understand why anyone would be more interested in a message that was posted several years ago, when there is one that has an urgent message that was posted recently. Again, it is a weird layout.
  3. Wikipedia's Talk-page style is alien to new members. Most people are already familiar with the thread-like structure of most messageboards as opposed to Wikipedia's system. It makes sense to adopt what has, for a long while, been successful, and what is considered industry standard. In this case, messageboards that use threads are industry standard on the Internet. Don't believe me? Check out Google, and ask yourself what you see 99% of the time. What is bothersome about this is that it takes time to learn the new way of doing things. It's a pain.
  4. It is too much to learn, for new or experienced users. Instead of requiring members go through a learning curve, why not go with something they've used many times before?
  5. Posts should be not be easily edited by just anyone. Posts on the talk-page should not edited as easily as it is now set up. You can easily remove someone else's message. That should not be the case on a talk-page. If a vandal does come along, an Administrator will have to deal with that vandal to remove his/her posts, just as an Admin would have to do with the article page. If a member is vandalising the talk-page, he or she should not be on the Wikipedia in the first place, and it is more likely that the vandal already had vandalised an article rather than a talk-page.

These are the words I offer. I can only hope the system will change, but that is only a hope. I also hope these words have not gone to waste. Stiles 03:26, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Response to Stiles That's a cogent summary of the reasons to change, but I disagree with most of it. A wiki is just a different way of doing things, not a worse one. A wiki gives useful flexibility for moving and rearranging discussions according to the structure of the information, e.g. if needed it can replicate a traditional Usenet 1:1 discussion (which I always find easier to read than a bulletin board because it is arranged conceptually rather than chronologically).
  1. So long as people remember to press the --~~~~ key and indent properly, finding the end of an article is no problem. It takes about a minute to grasp. Or use an appropriate heading.
  2. It makes much better sense to read from top to bottom to me, otherwise a new reader has to go to the bottom, scroll up, scroll down, scroll up, scroll down.... I also have my incoming email listed with the most recent at the bottom of the list, like a ledger. If you are following some discussions and want to keep checking if there's a response to a post, then the Wikipedia watchlist is arranged most-recent-first and is suitable for this. But most-recent-first is not a suitable way to present the actual bodies of messages.
  3. I wouldn't say 'most people' are more familiar with threaded messageboards (BTW I prefer W-Agora to phpBB, Phorum or vBulletin), and I find them irritating because it's hard to see who is responding to what abnd there is a lot of clicking between different threads and no 'long view' of the topic. However, anyone who is a Wikipedia editor, by definition, knows wiki markup and a systematic way of presenting information, regardless of whether they are coming from newsgroups, Google/Yahoo groups, paper correspondence, or a bulletin board. There is no 'standard', decided by RFC or any other way about the best way of debating a point on the net. (Hold, on yes, there is, it's the same one that advises writing responses under a selective quotes. In my experience that works much better than a bulletin board.)
  4. The greatest simplicity is in fact to use the same method of writing talk pages as articles, so that you don't need to switch between two skills, or indeed for complete newbies (some of whom may be respected academics), to learn to edit a wiki and to use a bulletin board. As software and equipment gets more complex, the mental space and attention shift required to use it productively increase. (For example, using a mouse makes certain functions more obvious to newcomers, but studies show it increases the amount of time taken to produce a word-processed document.)
  5. Certainly talk pages can be vandalised, or modified in some borderline way which requires a bit of thought to decide whether it is desirable. (I wouldn't mind someone correcting my typos, and there's no reason why a particular posting shouldn't be modified after the event by collaborators. With a wiki it's a matter of custom rather than software changes.) But talk pages also show up on watchlists and recent changes and the history is preserved, so vandalism is reverted in the same way as articles. I understand there is a problem if you feel someone may misrepresent you by altering words when you are not around, but the whole internet depends on a fair amount of trust.
So basically it comes down to an aesthetic decision. I actively prefer a wiki system because it is inherently integrated with Wikipedia itself. I cannot foresee a consensus to change. --Cedders 11:11, 27 April 2006 (UTC) (anyone sympathetic to the above points, feel free to add, retaining original numbering)
The most annoying thing about the current system is the amount of effort it takes to keep track of multiple discussions on several different pages, all spread out across each page. A better system would enable me to see a list of 'subscription' to which I had posted and to which there were new replies. When will this hurry up and go to a vote? --Username132 (talk) 14:47, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
Response to Cedders
  1. But the point is many (perhaps even most) in the community don't follow these simple guidelines (which is why the point was brought up). And that's beside the point. Threads require discussions to be ordered, with discrete topics and the ability to hit "respond", which immediately brings you to a text entry box where you have quoted what you're responding to. Remembering any series of keystrokes or conventions of indenting and headings can't be easier than that, no matter how simple they are. To argue it's easier, you have to beat "Click, type, post".
  2. Scrolling up and down to follow a discussion seems to be a problem with Wikipedia's Talk pages, not threaded bulletin discussions. This discussion is evidence of this (it's in the middle of a page of several other discussions). With threads, you get the last posted message at the bottom of the page and you're free to configure email notices of new posts as you wish.
  3. Whether or not they're familiar with bulletins, the argument still stands that to the average user (i.e. not familiar with Wikipedia's editing interface), a simple click-and-post interface would be easiest, allowing laypeople to contribute (one of the main tenets of Wikipedia).
  4. I think the point is that Bulletins are easier to use than Wikipedia Talk pages. Like I said, you see a topic you're interested in adding to, you click "reply", type, and post it. Not much more to learn for a Wikipedia contributor. And for a non-Wikipedia contributor or a new contributor, there's no need to learn about syntax, signing, or indentation conventions. And remember, these are conventions that are unique to Talk pages, not the main pages. In other words, you only have to remember to indent when replying to someone to edit a talk page, not a regular Wikipedia article page. Therefore these are unique "skills" themselves that would also limit productivity by your own argument.
  5. Yes, there are ways to fix vandalism to your post on Wikipedia if someone does so. But Bulletins don't even have that problem. This point doesn't seem to help your case.
I'd like to bring to your attention this very discussion. In a bulletin, I would have been able to easily quote Cedders and address his points directly, instead of the indirect "numbering system". Anyone reading this has to scroll up and down, reading his "point #1" and then my "response to point #1", and even the original "point #1" above his to follow the discussion. To all who find this cumbersome: I feel your pain.
Mhsia 21:10, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
By the way, wouldn't it be possible to use both? You could test a bulletin on pages that get a lot of traffic, while maintaining the regular discussion page. Then see which attracts more users.Mhsia 21:10, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion Pages - A Semi-Modern Interface

I quite like the wikinature of the discussion pages, but I agree that they don't scale well. How about this: as well as the [edit] link next to every section, there is an [archive] link which automatically moves the whole section to an archive subpage. When /Archive1 gets large, /Archive2 can be used, and so on. I think this would be considerably easier to add to the Mediawiki software than a full-fledged threading system, and would greatly ease the archiving of old discussions.

Of course, if someone prematurely archives a discussion, then there is a corresponding [unarchive] tag on the Archive pages, and the standard 3-reverts rule applies in the case of archiving wars. Comments? --Jmstylr 11:49, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Managed to get a working model of this idea

Well, i've been working on something liek this anyway, for a while (for my own project; wiki-cheats), and there's been some things that i've had to edit out of phpBB; firstly, the user cp - for avatars and signatures, i have simply linked signatures for posts to [[User:User_name/discuss_signature]] and avatars to [[Image:User_name_discuss_avatar.png]] (simply, to change avatar - re upload a new version of the file)

As for the other things, most are unfinished. For example, on the talk page, "Edit this page" and "+" both go to "create new topic" - however, what i plan to do, is have the forum topics available for moderation for all (or none) through the main chat page, or "edit this page", so useless topics can be removed. The storage is in phpBB's schemata (mySQL), because the wiki format is a bit out of-context for what phpBB parts i've usedso far .. but i have the mySQL tables listed, so it's no "biggie". I'll let you know how everything turns out! Spum 22:36, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Spum, this is great! I don't know why others who have advocated a switch to Bulletin-style discussion pages haven't given you encouragement, but I applaud your effort and I hope it's still going (since January). To you and the rest of the community, so now what do we do? Once we have a volunteer to write the app, who do we go to to get it implemented? Mhsia 03:34, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wiki-discussion as Vandal-Bait

[edit] Copied from "Wiki-discussion vs. Message Board" above

[Someone willing to extract, comment, & document the source & omissions properly could do the copying]]

[edit] Why aren't Discussion pages add-only?

[Whole section preceding 22:48, 23 February 2006 (UTC) copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)'s history's last version before archiving of the same section name; light re-formating -- mostly break tags just before sigs -- will be added in next edit.]

I'm finding it hard to phrase my idea, since so many of the reasons are similar to those who wish to permanently protect actual articles, but I'll give it a shot. Is there any reason for a discussion on an article's talk page to allow users to delete/modify the comments of others? Not only is it next to impossible to catch on high traffic pages, but I can see no benefit to simply changing it so that you can only append to to page.

Take the mohammed cartoons page. So much energy is being wasted reverting vandals on the *talk* page alone. And making this change has absolutely no drawbacks as far as I can tell
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 199.43.32.67 (talk • contribs) 16:08, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

The wiki philosophy allows anyone to edit anything. Vandals are a pain in the ass, but protection is typically a last resort, since vandalism is easily reverted. Some policies like NPA also require allowing editors to edit others' comments (i.e. to remove personal attacks).
Johnleemk | Talk 16:52, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
There are some advantages to it, albeit they are mostly introduced by the lack of discussion thread features. Fixing mixformatted threads, adding section titles to stray comments, and blanking old or misplaced discussions, etc. are all important aspects of maintaining talk pages, which would be impossible if the pages were locked somehow.
--W.marsh 17:06, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
We have strong conventions against editing of other's comments however. I would argue that a message board format, where a person can edit their own posts, would be a much better way of organizing talk pages. Wiki really just isn't suitable for this.
Deco 20:50, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Honestly I don't disagree with you. Wiki is brilliant for creating articles, not so much so much so for having discussions. It certainly works... but it is often a lot of needless hassle keeping things straight. I do not believe it would be easy to effect a change, though.
--W.marsh 20:53, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I strongly agree. The ability to change everything on talk pages is only a liability that sucks up valuable energy which should be reserved for editing articles. There should be real action on this. nadav 08:34, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)#Discussion Pages - Bring Modern Interface.
--cesarb 21:20, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
meta:LiquidThreads. The short treatment at perennial proposals really doesn't do it justice, so hammer out the details over at meta.
— Ambush Commander(Talk) 02:00, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Hm, there's been no real editing there in over a year. Are there actual plans to include LiquidThreads, or is it more of a wishlist thing? The suggestion looks okay, but I'd much prefer a more standard forum layout like the mockup on Perennial proposals. Any new system should have a subject-only view and keep different threads on separate pages. I don't see a use for the thread summary; all threads should be archived by their subject.
‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 02:38, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
I really don't know. Part of the problem implementing the feature is that no one really has thought it out yet... ^_^"
— Ambush Commander(Talk) 02:41, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
_ _ I'll go look at liquid threads, but as i just noted on perennial, IMO, the Add-only proposal is far too restrictive for the problem identified, and additions of talk-vandalism information specific to the discussion pages, in their histories, are a better medium-term response. I'll post specific suggestions if there is interest.
[The following 'graph (which i copied to VP (proposals) from what i wrote on this page's next section but later revised this page's copy of) is struck thru bcz the revised version below under "Should Creation, Refactoring, and PA-Removal of Discussion be made Forgery-proof?" is clearer.--Jerzy•t 22:48, 23 February 2006 (UTC)]
_ _ Elevator-speech version of my long-term proposal: Traditional Wiki-markup (TWMu) is optimized for collaborative editing of articles but not discussion. Supplement TWMU with extensions (minor enuf to conserve editors' investment in learning TWMu). Lightly process each contribution before saving: enforce sigs, suppress editor-specified color markup, and use trivial variations on existing facilities to assist detecting additions from re-ordering, from corrected, sanitized, or rethought replacements, and from refactoring. Use color coding and color-coded annotation to flag authentic sigs and the various sorts of replacement, including any endorsement by original editor of a replacement of their contrib.
--Jerzy•t 06:22, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
I would certainly like to see something like this, after all at the moment not only can vandals vandalise, they can also easily try to fake being another user, or more subtly alter a users comments to make it look as if they are attacking another good faith user. See [5] for example where my comments against a user were editted to make it look as if I was complaining about someone that had actually been helping fix the vandalism. Sfnhltb 18:50, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
This proposal would inhibit disambiguation within talk pages. Josh Parris#: 06:20, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Better Information for Vandalism Control

IMO, the Add-only proposal is far too restrictive for the problem identified, and additions of talk-vandalism information specific to the discussion pages, in their histories, are a better medium-term response. I'll post specific suggestions if there is interest.
--Jerzy•t 06:10, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

_ _ If i find that i made usable notes on this idea, i may add more, but off-hand i recall thinking that we could add a field, rendered in color, to each entry on history and diffs pages.
  1. It is quite mechanical to determine whether someone has simply added to the end of a page or section, and the code for Save page could label the new filed "append" (render in black on light green);
  2. It's not much harder (once the foundation is laid by comparing any sig and timestamp in the new text in each old edit with the actual user and save time, and adding that info to the page's record of edits in new system (i.e., not directly rendered) fields) to detect whether a contrib follows an existing sig, the original end of an unsigned contrib, or start of section, and ends with an authentically lked new sig of a registered user or an IP who did not pipe it; label "insert" (light green again); (for all i now, that "foundation" info may fall out naturally, "when shaken gently", from what is saved in support of "block compression".);
  3. If what rules out "append" or "insert" is lack of a sig, or editing the same user's earlier edit, label "anon" or "revise" (render in black on orange);
  4. If the edit changed someone else's previous edit, or forged a sig, label it "forgery" or "suspect"; it's worth an editor's attention to distinguish between personal attack removal, refactoring, reformatting (if the code isn't smart enough to disregard that safely), forgery, and removal or refactoring of constructive msgs (render in black on light red).
_ _ One would hope for registered editors to inspect diffs on red and orange edits, fix as necessary, add a note and summary saying "fixed" or "OK" with range they checked back to and (in paren) the start date of the full continuous run of unchallenged checks.
_ _ Even doing this with just #1 (requiring no change to how pages are stored) could make a big differenece in efficiency of vandalism detection of talk pages. Even doing all four requires no new modes of, nor restrictions on, editor input.
_ _ Note that this is appropriate for all discussion pages, not just talk ones. Unless Deletion discussions were to be moved to project-talk subpages, it would probably be worth having an admin-only mechanism for setting a per-page flag that designates a Wikipedia:-namespace page, or perhaps any non-talk page, as a discussion page.
--Jerzy•t 00:34, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Should Creation, Refactoring, and PA-Removal of Discussion be made Forgery-proof?

Should Creation, Refactoring, and Personal-Attack-Sanitization of Discussion be made Forgery-proof?
Elevator-speech version of my long-term proposal:

  • Traditional Wiki-markup (TWMu) is optimized for collaborative editing of articles but not for discussion.
  • Supplement TWMu with extensions (minor enuf to conserve editors' investment in learning TWMu).
  • Lightly process each contribution between user's "Save page" and actually saving:
    • enforce sigs,
    • suppress editor-specified color markup, and
    • use trivial variations on existing facilities to assist distinguishing additions from
      • re-ordering,
      • corrected, sanitized, or rethought replacements, and
      • refactoring.
  • Use color coding and color-coded annotation to flag
    • authentic sigs and
    • the various sorts of replacement, including any endorsement by original editor of a replacement of their contrib.
--Jerzy•t 06:10, 7 & 18:05, 23 February 2006 (UTC) (Non-formating additions from second edit bolded.)

[edit] Proposals about WP's relation to the world outside

[edit] Other Web sites

[edit] Wikimedia Affiliate at Amazon, BN, etc

Would it not make sense for Wikimedia to use an affiliate link under pages that deal with ISBN numbers and links to books/cds/etc. It doesn't impact the quality of Wikipedia at all and would bring in a few thousand dollars in revenue each quarter (a substantial amount to a non-profit). Nick Catalano (Talk) 00:28, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

We had something like this set up a while ago, but it was removed... +sj + 21:07, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
Is Wikimedia really in the business of supporting one particular vendor over another? Most of the work here is done by individuals, yet you picked two large corporations for your examples. I, for example, would be a lot less likely to add ISBN information to an article if I knew it would direct people to a direct competitor of the bookstore I own! How many other booksellers are here that would be ticked off by something like this? Gary D Robson 22:11, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Hear hear. Given an ISBN number, it is perfectly convenient to find a retailer offering the book.
I think this is a good idea. As long as you're using the standard ISBN link, you've already got links to "Find this book on Amazon", etc. Why not make that link an affiliate link and earn Wikimedia some money? It's not supporting a particular vendor-- that ISBN page lists a whole lot of possible vendors and no one seems to be complaining. Lord Bodak 13:02, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
I like this idea, as long as there are several choices. Voyager640 06:21, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
This is a fantastic idea for two reasons:
  • Becoming an Amazon Affiliate is a very efficient method of fundraising for Wikipedia. It is financially responsible for a non-profit to seek sources of income that flow naturally from its primary activities. By taking advantage of such opportunities, NPOs maximize funding without diverting significant resources to the acquisition of those funds. Maybe I'm naïve, but I think a well-funded Wikipedia would be widely regarded by Wikipedians as positive.
  • Amazon's book catalog would truly extend the information available on Wikipedia. It is a ready-made online bibliography back-end with consistent content and a highly accessible public interface.
    • Of lesser interest, in addition to the factual information provided for each book, the user reviews available provide equal-opportunity IPOV (individual point of view) commentary that might be of interest to Wikipedians in assessing sources. While not as scholarly as Wikipedia aspires to be, the reviews can offer insight.
DaniU 01:10, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Strongly dislike the idea, because of connotations of advertising, which is a waste of brain space/attention. The consensus I believe has been not to have advertising on Wikipedia, and I think it would seep into the content. If a link to a title doesn't provide any extra information about that title beyond a (note, very specific) way of obtaining it, then that means modification to the External links policy. I also don't see how it would technically be enforced (are you suggesting that editors creating or editing pages charitably find a link to an online store and add it in a special category, so as to support WIkipedia? We cannot assure the store it will remain there.). Of course it is good to use the catalogue in online stores (along with many library catalogues) for easy reference. --Cedders 11:25, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Filter or Site for Young Students

I know it's been said that wikipedia shouldn't be used by children without parental guidance, but it is quickly becoming a useful resource and I think an alternate site needs to be setup that helps me as a parent control what my children see online. My children are good to me and they surf the Internet only going to sites which I have bookmarked for them. I have also setup a way to remotely monitor their screens without them seeing me do this, and the results have shown so far that they are behaving. However, I cannot bookmark wikipedia for them until an alternative is setup.

I need something that filters out sexual or violent images, sketches, drawings, and topics; filter out sexual keywords; does not provide links to other sites; and includes current events (news items) that can be researched. Hopefully this might be considered something viable for their short student papers in the lower levels, as long as they use one other credible paper source from a regular library.

There have been several proposals for a content filtering/labelling system in the 5 months I've been here, but every one of them has failed. The reason for this is that the community has been unable to agree a system that is compatible with our Neutral Point of View policy, particularly with regard to a definition of terms like "sexual" and "violent". Wikipedia is international, and the cultural and community standards of what is acceptable for what age-group vary considerably from one place to the next (e.g. images of nudity are generally more acceptable in Europe than they are in the USA). See Wikipedia:Content labeling proposal for a recent example of a proposal.
If there were a system letting the user (parent) decide what's objectionable and what isn't, then it would be somewhat more NPOV - as opposed to a binary flag, there would be "sexual imagery", "sexual material", "strong profanity", "mild profanity", etc. flags. These would usually, but not always, be disputable. (For instance, how to flag Holocaust?) I just don't think this'll get implemented ever on WP, because the majority of people seem to hate the idea. Might I suggest that you use a content-based Internet filtering program? Nickptar 16:10, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Of course, no one will ever have a problem with someone setting up their own site to mirror and filter Wikipedia. —Sean κ. + 02:46, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
Something like a PICS system, where each article is tagged for levels and types of content that some might find objectionable, rather like a category system, which a user could then decide to use or not use as filtering criteria, might be feasible. Consider the self-ratings at ICRA for example. The ICRA vocabulary currently defines designators in the categories Nudity, Sexual material, Violence, Language, Potentially harmful activities, and User generated content. For each category, the site or page carries a designation indicationg which, if any of the defined types r levels are present from each category. The user can set filtering rules to block pages tagged in particualr ways. Wikipedia could adopt this scheme or devise its own scheme, if it chose to do so. (Of course, labels themselves would be editable, and thus might be vandalized or disputed). This would be a major project, of course, and might not be worth it. DES (talk) 12:43, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
This sounds like a good idea, but in practice I would bet on tons of edit wars and POV-pushing. ~~ N (t/c) 13:09, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
I believe that filtering would be a good idea, especially for images with nudity and other potentially offensive images. I sometimes stumble upon these types of images without meaning to, which would be especially bad if such an image were found in a public place such as a school or library. I think a good, simple method would be to have all such images linked to instead of embeded in pages, with a "potientially offensive" warning (or something like that). Profanity shouldn't be as much as a concern, but finding some of Wikipedia's images can be shocking. Such filtering wouldn't just be good for kids, it would be good for anyone who doesn't wish to or is in an environment where they can't view such images. Phantom784 19:07, August 25, 2005 (UTC)

People who want to filter the internet for their children must use a filter that covers all of the web, not only wikipedia, so it must be implemented in the user computer, and there are many free software solutions for that. This is not an issue for wikipedia, it is an issue for the individual user of internet to install a filter program in his own computer. Personally I think there are a lot of strange people out there, who let their children watch any amount of violence, but stop them from seeing nude bodies. Roger4911 11:12, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree, wikipedia is a repository for ALL human knowledge, if you want to censor that knowledge - do it at your own expense. As for the violence and nudity thing - my personal view is that violence is something that needs to *interpreted*, not censored. It should be the norm for kids to know about violence, what it is, and especially how to deal with it in a constructive way. As for "sexual" images - the human body is something that people should have a knowledge of, and noone should censor such basic knowledge as anatomy on a public site such as wikipedia. If you want to deny your children their right to public knowledge, do it with your own money and time. Fresheneesz 01:10, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

For this reason and other kinds of filtering it would be nice if there was a way for users or groups to apply their own tags to revisions. Then maybe some parenting groups would tag articles it thought were suitable for children. I would like to tag revisions free from vandalism. Maybe another group would like to tag revisions that have been fact checked. --Gbleem 15:24, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

That sounds like a pretty good idea actually, but a list of possible tags needs to be finite. And i think voting would be a better way of determining fact-checked pages - because then a consensus can develop. That might have been what you meant anyway. Fresheneesz 02:45, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

On the Talk:Penis page a suggestion was made for a way to handle 'filtering' images without impacting people who don't want to be 'protected' and without getting into differing community standards on what is or is not 'offensive'. It seemed to be well received there and is similar to some statements above, so I am posting it here for further comment. In brief, rather than tagging images as 'offensive' they could be tagged with a few direct descriptions of categories which some large segment of the world population finds offensive... 'Male nudity', 'Female nudity', 'Heterosexual sex acts', 'Homosexual sex acts', 'Bloodshed', et cetera. Then each user could simply check a box in their preferences to indicate whether they wished to have such images included on pages they view. People can certainly disagree over whether an image of a penis is offensive or not, but are less likely to disagree over whether it is a penis or not. Obviously we wouldn't include every taboo held by any person or small group on the planet, but there are some categories which many people would want to 'opt out' of. Shouldn't be difficult to implement, doesn't censor anyone from getting info if they want it, and makes Wikipedia more friendly for large groups of people who currently have a problem with it. Thoughts? --CBD ☎ ✉ 13:24, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Should this proposal be discussed elsewhere on this page?

_ _ I moved "Filter or Site for Young Students" into a section that presupposes it is unfeasible for WP to be changed in any way that will further what it proposes, which is a little stronger than i think the proposer hoped. This (the current sub-...-section) is a good place to argue that i made a mistake.
_ _ The section containing (and probably still immediately preceding) this is a good place to discuss how WP content could be used, at other sites or via client-side tools, to further the goals underlying the proposal -- especially discussion about how they might profit from assistance from people with WP experience.
--Jerzy•t 06:10, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nominees for Best Adaptation of WP to Another Medium

[edit] Will the spoken Wikipedia be available as podcast?

Loving the iPod and Wikipedia, I was wondering when the spoken Wikipedia files will be available as podcasts. Thanks, Hinke (Netherlands)

As a matter of fact, it already is. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/rss&action=raw

– Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 02:39, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] A printed (printable?) guide to hand to academics and the like

I'm a perennial student from a family of academics. I've just started trying my hand with Wikipedia, though I still have a long way to go to get the hang of what I'm doing. But it makes me think that I know many people who do nothing but research, routinely publish stuff for free, and would be pleased as punch to start helping out with Wikipedia.

The problem is that it's not that easy for someone who isn't particularly computer-savvy, and I'm thinking of many social sciences and humanities folks I know. It would be great if there were a manual -- a step by step, PDF-style document that they could print out, walk through, and begin using to help them lend their knowledge to the Wikipedia universe. (A seminar to accompany it would be even better. But now I'm dreaming in technicolour.)

Has this been tried before? Have there been, or are there, Wikipedia "experts" or veteran users who know enough to be able to do this sort of thing, and are willing to do it? I would be happy to pitch in with brute force, but haven't enough expertise to lend anything more useful. Thoughts? AnotherBDA 01:59, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

  • I am very happy that you have found WP. WP needs academics badly! What in particular might be difficult for new users? It seems you got the hang of editing talk pages, which is an accomplishment. You can get your questions answered at Wikipedia:Village_pump. You could also ask around the people you meet reguarly, like colleagues. After you get the hang of it, you could organise a seminar yourself. -Pgan002 07:00, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Miscellaneous within-WP improvements

[edit] Abolish personalized signatures

It is about time to abolish personalized signatures. Many signatures, if accidentally altered, would do evil things. Some signatures even contain images. -- Toytoy 15:28, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

Signatures work like anything else that can be added to a wiki page. There aren't any "evil things" that can be done with signatures that can't be done by simply typing or pasting. What specific dangers do you see here? --iMb~Meow 15:45, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Just minutes ago, a screweed-up signature made the text that follows it <small>. Some users even include pictures in their signatures, therefore, a discussion page could be flooded with dozens of such small icons. -- Toytoy 16:33, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
Again, how does an error in a signature differ from any other error in wiki markup? It doesn't. It's no big deal, someone will notice it and it will be fixed just like any other error. This has nothing whatever to do with the fact that it was in someone's signature settings, just as taking away the signature feature would do absolutely nothing to prevent people from adding many images to a page. --iMb~Meow 16:41, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Signature files do not carry needed information. If I want to know you, I visit your user page. It is not a good idea to make your signature file a miniature user page. I propose that we shall place some limitations on the use of signatures:
  • No HTML.
  • No more than 32 or 64 bytes.
  • No images.
  • No other external components.
I think Unicode characters are not a deadly sin, but some older browsers may not display them correctly. If we use Unicode characters or HTML tags in an article, usually it's mean to be informative (ideogram characters, math symbols, other symbols ...). Signature files are not supposed to be that informative. It is nothing but a road sign that points to your user page. You don't usually sign your name this way. When you sign your name, you do not write 100 advertising words. Bloating signature files are bad. -- Toytoy 17:12, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

It would be nice if we could customize the rendering of ~~~~. Then the server could enforce any restrictions automatically.

I don't think it would help, though. People leave behind all kinds of non-signature things which have potentially problematic HTML, inefficient table code, and images all over WP. At least we don't have 12-line ASCII art sigs (I bet I could do that in 32 bytes). —Michael Z. 2005-04-19 20:00 Z

I still don't see why this is an issue with signatures. How would the outcome be any different if we just said, "Don't use bad markup that ruins an article," which is probably policy anyway. —Sean κ. ⇔ 20:37, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
When you sign your name on a piece of paper, you do it the most effortless way. When you sign on the internet, either you don't sign it or you advertise it. This is why people abuse it. Leonardo da Vinci absolutely could draw. He did not draw a small Vitruvian man besides his name.
All I know is, I'm gonna start signing my name like this. - Pioneer-12 Image:Vader.jpg Image:Flag of Earth.svg
John Hancock, eat my shorts.
I know people can work out a way to beat the 32-byte restrictions, if there's such one. You can just copy and paste a 64 K gigantic signature loaded with dozens of animated GIFs each time you finish writing something. But the point is, if the cost to sign fancifully is not zero, much less people would do it. -- Toytoy 01:36, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)
Dear heavens. What now? Check your email inbox lately? Or, for the truly staunch, browse Usenet awhile. Sigs of doom, sigs spanning multiple servers, sigs towering not merely over all content, but over thought itself. Singing sigs, smiley sigs, dancing sigs. Oy.
We have it good here, too good to be true. The odd image in a sig, not good. (I did that myself, thoughtlessly, but you see it's Unicoded now, and functional.) The occasional malformed sig, turning all following text green. The very worst sig I've seen is painstakingly rainbow-colored; must weigh in at half a typewritten page worth of markup -- and I can't even read it. None of these are problems that cannot be fixed with a gentle word to the good member.
There are good and fine reasons to personalize sigs:
  • Users should take pride in their handles, and be reluctant to tarnish them with thoughtless comment. This is how users become community members.
  • Our community is already way too large, so that it is very hard to keep track of other members -- the sort of informal, subjective, in-the-head soft reputation management that is the true glue of any community. Distinctive sigs help more than do bizarre names.
  • The default sig sucks. At a minimum, the default should provide a link to the member's Talk page. On the other hand, maybe the default should suck. A nicely-customized sig is one way to tell the Old Heads from the noobies.
  • Messing with sigs infringes on personal choice. I don't refer to style, but to function. My sig -- for example -- provides links to my user page, my email, and my Talk. I do this because I choose to be thus available. Other members choose less availability, and some include links to cherished pages that define their personalities.
But the crowning argument is just that some members will pay no attention to any such restriction! You can fix the engine to abolish sig editing, but users will just create sig templates and drop them in -- and I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut, they will transclude, too -- at least the tildes substitute.
Please, be happy and content with the relative peace which now obtains. Lest we return someday to see Quotations from Chairman Foo and nudie ASCII fancruft art. — Xiong熊talk 05:16, 2005 Apr 20 (UTC)
I've been using this plain vanilla signature for over a year. I thought about using "~~~~" as my signature with "raw signatures" selected. Whenever I type "~~~" (without time stamp), the system outputs "~~~~". Four innocent bytes.
This is not the most evil part of my plan. The "~~~~" in the code would soon be replaced to the next contributor's signature and date. What a great plan. I am smart.
Anyway, you must be very happy now to see me use my plain vanilla signature. I am a pacifist. Or I'll be the worst vandal in all human history. Ha! -- Toytoy 05:55, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

I find over-elaborate sigs annoying, but the inclusion of a link to the person's talk page actively useful. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:48, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

To an old crow known and contacted by many people, it is a good idea to provide a speedy link to the personal talk page. Otherwise, you may want people visit your user page before talking to you. I don't find it very useful to provide your contributions, your Kate's Tools external URL or your golden retriver's CitiBank credit card number in a signature which is supposed to be very small. Most decorative signatures are providing too little clues to their functions. You may see a weird Unicode sign but you don't know what the sign means unless you see the link. There are supposed to be some signature etiquette or rules. -- Toytoy 06:04, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)
If you want to see where a user's sig links, mouseover it. Depending on your browser or your prefs, you'll get a hoverbox or the link URL in your status bar.
There is de facto sig etiquette: • Keep it short • No images • No templates • No markup that fouls up rendering • Link to your Talk • No blinking sigs •
I only worry that this discussion may prompt the feared action. — Xiong熊talk 06:31, 2005 Apr 20 (UTC)
God, I am a nice and creative mother. -- Toytoy 06:45, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)
What's that? --{{User:Carnildo/sandbox}}

The "broken" small-tag in the signature I have been using for some time is there intentionally. Nobody ever came to my talk page to tell me they're annoyed by it. If people complain, I will change it. Extremely distracting signatures are bad, but some Unicode and some html tags (font/colour) -- what's the harm in that? dab (ᛏ) 08:21, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Relying on obscure bugs in the parser to render your signatures is a great way to piss off developers. Please stop it. -- Tim Starling 16:26, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)
If that's the case, then why have some similar bug reports been closed? -- Netoholic @ 21:04, 2005 Apr 28 (UTC)
I am using a black background and amber foreground setting with my browser, I also disabled almost every fanciful things (CSS, <font >, colors ...) so I don't see any of your color tricks. My Mozilla is like a Lynx text-based browser (I was using Netscape 2.x last year). By the way, I only use one font. To make my browsing more vanilla-flavored, I installed Privoxy and customized its filter settings to remove almost every decorative elements in the <body > and elsewhere. I disabled Java, JavaScript, lots of sites' cookies and most plugs-in as well. Why? Based on my personal settings, most of your colored texts would become very difficult to read. I am the reader. I am supposed to be the one to exercise my rights to change fonts and colors. Many years ago when I was using Macintosh, I downloaded no images and filtered even more HTML tags (tables, italic, bold, ...)! I don't want to read anything unless it's like being displayed on an Apple ][ monochrome monitor. -- Toytoy 08:40, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)
Why are you telling us this? If you are going to such lengths to have control of browsing (I don't suppose you read print books or magazines, then), does it matter to you if people use different colors or fonts in their signatures? — Knowledge Seeker দ 16:44, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
In many ways we, as editors of *articles* leave very few traces on WP ... a little personalisation of handles where they are actually used (talk pages and the like) does little harm but a lot of good (self-esteem, handle recognition, direct link to talk page, etc.) I'm not overly happy of the more complex (I could do without photos and most graphics, thankyou) but each to their own, so long as they spend more time editing than creating wonderful sigs. --Vamp:Willow 17:12, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Customized signatures are really for self-esteem and a bit of fun for some users. If it helps attract people, so be it, in my view. JuntungWu 15:34, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • I strongly support customization of signatures. тəzєті 23:52, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

I don't object to custom sigs per se. But I do think that images in digs are distracting and can cause unneededs sever load. Moving images can be actually harmful to readers with seizure problems -- and if you think I'm joking, i invite you to stand next to someone whose seizure has been triggered in this way -- i have. DES 23:52, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Ok for cutomised signature. But no images. Pfv2 20:09, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Automated signing

You're logged in, wikipedia knows your signature, and it is expected that you always sign comments on talk pages. Also, automated signatures could be placed in a margin or something like that. Kevin Baastalk 21:42, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

  • I agree with you on this. Wikipedia should automatically sign posts for logged-in members. I don't see an objection so does this mean this will be implemented? Stiles 03:30, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
  • I agree! -Pgan002 07:24, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
  • I'm a little confused as to how you people believe this could be implemented. Would you have it automatically shove your signature at the end of wherever you stop typing on a talk page? What if you're just editing something you said? What if you want to remain anonymous? Would you have to go through the trouble of clicking a "don't sign" box? We'd have more of a problem with screwed markup with signatures halfway through a paragraph then than the problem we occasionally have now where someone forgets to sign something. And besides, is it really that hard to type a dash and then four of those wavy things (~)? -Monk of the highest order 04:22, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] individual sandboxes?

Is it my imagination, or is the current "global" sandbox useless? I was just about to compose some text there (amongst several other people doing the same thing), but then someone blanked the whole page (losing the 4-5 then-current experiments), and while I was figuring out how to revert it, someone else blanked it again. Clearly it gets trashed all the time, which it seems to me would make it uselessly frustrating for someone trying to actually use it to test out some text or markup that required more than one editing cycle.

I assumed that sandboxes were individual, not global (that's the way some other sites, e.g. everything2, work, I think.) How hard would it be to have individual, per-user sandboxes here?

Steve Summit 13:14, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

By creating a personal sandbox, I believe you have answered your own question... --IByte 16:50, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
Yes, that was gkhan's suggestion. Thanks. I still maintain that the global, public sandbox is pretty useless, and in particular, I can't imagine a new user (who probably needs it most) getting any good use out of it at all, when it disappears out from under them (along with whatever text they were playing with) at any moment. (Yes, the old text is all there in the history and can be reverted, but new users probably don't know how to find/do that.) So now my suggestion is: change the many prominent "you can test edits in the sandbox" links to somehow suggest using your user page in this way, instead. Steve Summit 17:42, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
I'd fallen onto this "perennial suggestions" page by accident. I've now re-pasted the suggestion onto the main VP "suggestions" page here, and will be deleting it here shortly. Steve Summit 18:18, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Yea this doesn't seem like a perennial suggestions type of idea. But I don't even see the problem with a global sandbox. What kind of edit would take more than one round? Even if it does - you can just copy paste your edit anywhere you want. Someone blanking the sandbox means nothing, because you can paste your edit in, and it won't be blank anymore. Not to mention, the sandbox is for testing out syntax - not for test writing an article - if you want to do that, just preview it on the article editing page. Fresheneesz 21:19, 18 November 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Category:Uncategorised Pages and Special:Uncategorizedpages

[edit] My Idea

A while ago, I (User:A.K.A.47) was feeling bored. Naturally, I decided to put a joke category on my user page - the category was "Uncategorised Pages". After a while, someone found this, deleted it and told me that my Russell's paradox joke was "appreciated". All very funny.

But that's not all - this little gimmick has given me an idea. Is there any way in which a page which has not been given a category (or been stubbed) can be placed in a special page called "List of Pages without categories"?

This would lead to fewer pages being essentially orphaned, and would allow all pages to be accessed by a category, which is one way for pages to have someone who wouldn't normally be interested in them to be given a bit of attention.¡¡Howzat!!

Ahkayah cuarenta y siete 11:29, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
Special:Uncategorizedpages. —Cryptic (talk) 12:00, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Thank you, but what I forgot to suggest was a wikiproject to encourage categorisation of pages - a push to get something to do be done about these pages, because, quite franky, I can't categorise every single one of these pages.

What you are interested in is Wikiproject Categories

[edit] "WikiMaps" A new kind of wiki ?

Hi, I am a contributor and supporter of wikipedia. I have an idea on expanding wikipedia's power. Maybe this is proposed before but I'll try to express my ideas. The idea is "wikimap" a diverse map which is drawn by wikipedia community. Since drawing and giving information on Maps is a verry different thing than just giving textual information, a special info entry screen should be developed. Here are some random thoughts on wikimaps

- Map should be on different levels, like "worldwide" "countrywide" "statewide" "citywide" "streetwide" - Maps can contain different layers and layers may contain different kinds of information like touristic information, road maps, geographic maps etc. - WikiMaps should be able to be displayed on browsers, a java like ekstra interface might be considered, but for most things, html and javascript should be enough - Other wikipedia content should supply geographical coordinates or special references to wikimaps and vice versa. - Other information like "how to reach this place" "cautions" etc should be seen or linked on map - Designing such an map entry interface and database backend is a very challenging job, but all is possible - This way wikipedia's information diversity can be greatly increased. and we can have a free, available for all countries and worlds greatest map driven by a great community.

Mehmet D. AKIN (mdakin@uludag.org.tr)

The idea of making a Wikimaps service has been repeatedly proposed. The problem is that it would require a very large up front software development project, and nobody has volunteered. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:38, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Besides,
Please see the notice at the top of the page - when you are proposing a new wiki-style project, go to m:Proposals for new projects and write about it there, not here. Note that this does not apply to WikiProjects. r3m0t talk 12:05, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
you may be interested in UPCT (French, map with layers, free edition)? Natmaka 18:45, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
You may want to look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates. Magnus Manske have written a bit of software, but the project is currently at a standstill. -- Egil 17:19, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

One thing that makes this idea less appealing is the amount of work that would go into it - and the amount of useful ness that would come out of it. The reason wikipedia exists is to allow people to access all human knowledge - however many companies have already develeoped an almost entirely complete set of maps - companies like google and yahoo have maps of almost any place you can think of. And their interface is decent to excellent. I would suggest the wikipedia community links to there for now - and draws their own maps when WW3 happens and we have to redraw all the maps ;-)

[edit] wiki travel guide

well... since i have started a long back-packing trip in south America, i found the main guide books (lonely planet and the south American handbook, ie footprint), not only over priced, but mainly unable to stand with the vast changes in this parts of the world... i was thinking of a wiki-like site, mainly consisting on travellers reports and advices edited by travellers as they go, updating and giving information on everything from trekking routs to hostels accommodations.. mainly, the main travelling sites, give you relativity a small amount of information, and mainly trying to sell you their books.... anyway.. i hope my idea would come true... i don't have enough programing skills to start this project alone, but i would be more then happy to help build a wiki-like structure, which i think is mainly more by country and city kinda thing... hope that you find this idea interesting, i am sure it would be pf great help to allot of backpackers all over the world, and mainly another step into free liberated information tools..

please response to my email: uassaf@gmail.com

see wikitravel.org. Here 22:40, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] User pages used as spam

Hi,

I am a user of French Wikipedia. We have to deal with a new problem and we'd like to know en.wikipedia policy about it. Some users' pages are just a long ad with a link to a commercial web site. On the one hand, some of us say it is a user's page and we can't say anything about how it is used. On the other hand, some think (as I do) that the user edits some articles and talks and then signs, just so people will see the ad--therefore we must delete it because it is a kind of spamming.

Please send me an answer on my french talk Thank you !Lisaël 10:32, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree with deleting spam on people's user pages. I really don't care whats on peoples pages, but if it takes up alot of resources on wikipedia's servers... then it shouldn't be there. If its just text, who cares - if its images uploaded on wikipedias servers, or like 500 pages of text - kill it. Fresheneesz 21:33, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
I think as long as the user themselves are making good edits on talk pages that contribute to the discussion it's alright however if someone is going around tagging nonsense with thier username for the purpose of directing people to various links on thier userlinks I think it should be considered spam. I actually am not aware of our policy on it so that's just my opinion but I think a lot of other users will agree. Deathawk 18:41, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Warning boxes for dangerous activities and products

I propose a set of warning boxes, with hard-to-miss red borders, that would alert readers that they were learning about dangerous products or practices and should not proceed haphazardly after reading part of the article. I have created Template:Danger, Template:Danger-adultsuper and Template:Danger-professional to serve these purposes, but they need some debugging. They would be placed at the very top of an article. The fill-ins would be, respectively, a link to a section, other article or external page; a conservative minimum age; and a trade or profession.

Articles that could use these templates include Human sexual behavior, LSD and Sword swallowing. Seahen 00:22, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Update: Also helpful could be a special box for things that are a danger to many people or the world at large (such as terrorism and suicide topics) and do not have legitimate arguments in their favour. We'd need a psychologist's advice on the wording, but I'd propose:

STOP! DON’T DO IT! If you are considering any of the actions described in this article, please consider the harm they would cause not only to yourself, but to Planet Earth and all of its inhabitants. Many people have been in situations like yours, and found other ways out of their desperation. Wikipedians around the world are asking you to read [link] thoroughly and consider less drastic measures before proceeding.

Seahen 01:10, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Please look at Wikipedia:No disclaimer templates. These kinds of templates were proposed countless times before, and were rejected every single time. --cesarb 01:58, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
I'd be fine with just using the Disclaimers link, except that right now the link is easily missed, even by those who reach the end of an article. If it were made prominent at the top of the framework, it would serve the purpose. (It could be a tiny one-line box, border=4 or so, with a small warning icon and the text "Disclaimers and warnings.")

I like it:-)The Scurvy Eye 00:26, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Better search feature

Wikipedia is a great website, but if there's one thing that I find slightly frustrating it's that the Search feature isn't very smart. I misspell things often, and if I don't know how to spell what I'm looking for on Wikipedia, sometimes it can be a dead end. So I guess I'm proposing a more advanced search feature?

You want to propose this as a software suggestion. See Wikipedia:Bug report. Deco 04:46, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
That's hardly appropriate. What is required is a major upgrade to include fuzzy searching. It has been mentioned often before, and I'm sure the developers are already aware that it's a major feature that it would be nice to have one day, but actually doing it is not easy and probably not likely to happen soon. Osomec 04:12, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
This is Mediazilla:974. The functionality exists, but is disabled for performance reasons. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:51, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Search Wikipedia with Google, add "site:[lang].wikipedia.org" to your search. You'll find the page you want, even if Google has cached an old version. --Stellis 08:44, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I just want to add to this complaint that I have recently resorted to searching wikipedia by going into my Google Search Bar and typing [whatever I'm looking for] wikipedia, much like the last comment discussed. Why doesn't Wikipedia strike up a deal with Google and become a "powered by google" website, or would this cost too much money/advertising?

[edit] About this page

[edit] Better visibility for ideas

It's so frustrating to write up an idea and post it on the village pump, only for it to disappear off everyone's radar when the pump is archived. We really need to provide highly-visible lists with short summaries of proposals and software changes and discussions about stuff like this, so people can check whether ideas they've had have been proposed in the past, contribute to discussions that would otherwise be forgotten, etc. - Omegatron 19:51, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

Nobody will ever check previous proposals before posting their own identical version. ;) Seriously, though, make Category:Proposals for Wikipedia or similar. r3m0t talk 16:36, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
But we can search for similar and merge them after the fact. I guess this intersects somewhat with mediazilla, but not with proposals for policy and stuff. A category is a good first step. I would want descriptive summaries next to each, though. - Omegatron 16:50, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Easing submission of a request for a new topic

Asking new topic submitters to suggest an area in a table of contents for the idea is great, but as the suggestion page recognizes, for a someone trying to submit a new topic, trying to go through the selection tree is difficult (I just ended up defeated in the attempt). It can be made easier. First, the search feature is a much easier way than the submission pages series of topical links to find a potentially appropriate area of existing topics for making the suggestion. If suggestions could be made from areas arrived at from search, making suggestions would be much easier. Technically, this may just be a matter of adding a "suggest a related article" link to each topic. Alternately, perhaps a view might be available to carry the would-be topic suggester from the search result to a table of contents with an organized hierarchical links to other articles in that section, or failing that, back to that article's place in the "submit articles" page's collection of links.

[edit] Is a hierarchical table of contents possible?

Beyond usefulness when trying to submit new articles or suggest new articles to the attention of an appropriate editor, a table of contents would be very helpful just while looking in Wikipedia for an overview of an area or to study related aspects of a topic. This would go beyond "What's related" to provide an outline (edited primarily by users) with major topics, subtopics, etc.

[edit] Easing making suggestions on making Wikipedia more user-friendly

[edit] Does this page need to be cleaned / archived?

It seems to me that some of these proposals are old and/or going nowhere. So if someone who is more involved agrees, I think lots of this discussion should be archived. Fresheneesz 23:10, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

The whole point of this page is to contain old proposals which are going nowhere but end up being repeatedly suggested. --cesarb 20:39, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
This page is for proposals that have been proposed before. They may be going nowhere or may be on their way to being implemented, or may be decided for eventually. See the introduction at the top of the page. -Pgan002 07:30, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Matters Surely Misposted or Mistitled Here

[edit] Begijnhof vs Béguinage

While attempting to expand the Begijnhof, Amsterdam article, I came across some general Dutch-language information not restricted to the Amsterdam situation. Looking for a page where to insert my translation, I found that two articles exist: Begijnhof (the Dutch term) and Béguinage (French). To my mind, these two notions are synonymous, yet the articles seem to lead lives happily independent of each other. Is this desirable?

Being Dutch and therefore afflicted with self-hate, I have added my translation, rather at random, to the French Béguinage.

Bessel Dekker 01:26, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Can Companies Be Encouraged To Write Their Own Articles?

I created a stub, PMal-C2 but I'm sure the company that owns the patent would be able to write a lot more about all their different products a lot more easily than I could. Is it a good idea to try and encourage such companies to write things about their own products? It would help biomedical students trying to understand journal articles if wikipedia included stuff on the products used in experiments. --Username132 04:45, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I can't see companies sticking to NPOV, they'll want to advertise their own product as being absolutely perfect and free from problems, and slag off their competitors as being worse than useless - MPF 11:03, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
Is PMal-C2 a notable plasmid, or is it just plasmidcruft? As for encouraging companies to write about their products here, I'm a bit hesitant about "encouraging" people or organisations to write here. It may be better to have people use wikipedia for a bit, and gradually start contributing if they feel like it. Many wikipedians also have a distrust of corporations, so suggesting this as policy would have a snowflake's chance. Andjam 11:16, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
It's just a random plasmid used in certain applications. It deserves an article so the future people in my position wont have to spend hours scouring the net for scraps of info regarding what it is. Once the company had sumitted articles, I'd be happy to alter them towards the NPOV. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Username132 (talk • contribs) 21:00, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
_ _ Companies who would use such a policy if it existed have an easy and superior option:
  1. Have an authorized employee (or several, preferably) register as a user, and state on the user page that they are authorized by the company, solely to make edits that add, to the user or user talk page, to article talk pages, or to article-creation-request pages, lks to pages on the company's site, and short explanations of them.
  2. Provide a page within the company's site with a lk to the user page and confirmation of such authorization.
  3. Lk from the employee's user page to the company-site page that has that lk, so we can confirm that authorization.
  4. Post material they think may belong in articles on the company site with explicit GFDL licensing by page (or, probably, by whole page less specified company logos and other boiler plate), either on the respective pages or on more centralized lists of covered pages, with lks to the pages covered, so WP's use of it raises no copyright issues.
  5. Add links to such material to the appropriate talk or article-creation-request pages (along with lks to any applicable centralized GFDL pages).
_ _ Obviously we should (and IMO can without a policy change) ban such users whose companies say they are no longer so authorized, and tolerate contrary edits by other such users that are authorized on the same page of the company website and not distinguished as representing different autonomous organizations within the company.
_ _ Nothing in this process requires any policy or policy change by WP. IMO, it is preferable to any such policy change bcz it lets us rely on their representations of GFDL coverage that are made on their own site, rather than by a single supposed employee on our site.
_ _ It is also preferable to companies, because they can enforce company policies that require memos in triplicate (or whatever), 3 signatures, and 3 passwords to modify the Web site. (They should be doing that, since it is reasonable for Web users to take company Web sites at face value as fully authorized, even if it eventually turns out that the employee making the change included, without authorization, GFDL execution, breaches of trade secrets and/or material that is libelous and/or covered by the company's works-written-for-hire copyright protection.)
_ _ BTW, at least one user has been banned for making a password public in the attempt to create an "open registered account", and if we don't already explicitly require a user to keep their password secret, i think we should. It seems to me that
  1. compliance with that on accounts used to make substantive assertions (as opposed to the lks described above) on behalf of the company would be unsound from the company's point of view, and
  2. we have no reason to create loopholes with well-intentioned companies in mind, which could be exploited by ill-intentioned companies, including spammer companies and shells set up just to help vandals and hackers exploit the loopholes.
_ _ It needs to be borne in mind that WP's mechanism for GFDL licensing contribs is designed for users working on their own behalf, and that by law the company rather than the employee often holds the copyright on employee contributions to works "written for hire". I participated in an AfD on the autobio of a California police chief, that was not questioned primarily on vanity grounds but as a copyvio from his dept's site. IIRC we accepted his statement that he was both the author and the dept's authorized agent for placing it under GFDL, but in the future i expect to insist on confirmation of authority via the Web site (tho i'm pretty satisfied that he was straight with us).
_ _ IMO, case closed, and you could point this out to the company involved in your case.
--Jerzy•t 20:56, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Analogies to understand subjects

An analogy can be used to understand a concept. For example, transistor be explained using the concept of handpump. Wikipedia contains a lot of terms belonging to different fields/disciplines of Science, Engg, Arts. And I am sure people who are not experts in the field/discipline can understand them using analogies. If we could contribute by adding analogies that really made sense, it would be really great. In this fashion we can help build our understanding across different fields/discipline in less time. [Unsigned by 129.110.93.243]

I think explanations of that description would be better suited to Simple English wikipedia > http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

--Username132 05:10, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Official Language - English or 'American' English

I'm sorry if this has been raised elsewhere, I couldn't find anything.

What is the official language of WIkipedia? The "English" used by all bar (as far as I know - America) or "American English"?

Maybe it's just me that sees this as an important question, but it would be good to be able to have a definate, consistent way of spelling words like "centre/center", "summarise/summarize" etc.

To state the situation in my own words, Wikipedia spelling results from linguistic colonization. Each article's creator sets the standard for that page. Spelling should remain consistent within the article. That's why Wikipedia has both armour and list of notable brain tumor patients. The exception is where the subject clearly has a specific national interest. It wouldn't be appropriate to use Commonwealth spelling for Abraham Lincoln. Durova 06:15, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
And by the same token, it would be inappopriate to use American English spelling for an article about London. Batmanand | Talk 19:24, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

See a much more comprehensive discussion of this subject below: Use of American v. British/Commonwealth English.

In which English is definite spelled "definate" and consistent "consistent"? Really Spooky 05:40, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Media Accompaniment (Podcast) for Wiki Entries

This may have come up, and if so, I apologize. I was thinking however, that one nice project would be to use some decent audio recording equipment to read wiki entries. I think it would make the most sense to record entries according to "most popular" in the search data.

Anyone who wanted, and had the equipment, could read through the entry and users could load them onto their mp3 players.

We already have spoken articles, usually in Ogg vorbis format. There is even an rss feed that could be used as a podcast. --Phantom784 22:09, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] AfD reform

Please take the time to review my (revised) proposal for AfD reform. Thank you for your consideration. El_C 12:47, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Use of American v. British/Commonwealth English

A vast majority of native English speakers speak American, not British (or Commonwealth) English. For this reason, to the extent that spelling is to be standardized or when a dispute arises, it makes sense to use American English.

I note American English is much more widely used on the Internet. A Google search for color gets 1,370 million hits, colour gets 231M. Standardize gets 26 million, standardise gets 2.3 million. Favorite gets 1.2B, favourite gets 275M. In general the American spelling is at least five times more used than the British spelling. It isn't even close!

I bring this up because in the dispute between using the American and British spellings for aluminum for the title of the entry, the British varient won out. I think this was a mistake.

I general, I think the best guide when it comes to a question of spelling is usage, and the American spelling of a word will virtually always be the most used. So I propose either a policy that explicitly defers to the dominant dialect of English (American English) or a policy based on usage. Kitteneatkitten 23:47, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Peace and harmony is best maintained, by deliberately avoiding a standard, and going by the "leave it be philosophy". Most articles apply entirely or mainly to one particular country, and that country's usage prevails. Elsewhere, whatever standard was used when the article was created, should be stuck with. --Rob 00:02, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
The general consensus on this is that either is acceptable so long as the style of writing remains consistent. However, aluminium is listed as the standardized form of the word with the American version as an acceptable variant. Using the first spelling is technically correct. – Someguy0830 (Talk | contribs) 00:05, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. Also, I don't buy the argument about the "vast majority". Did you figure in India? Numbers on the Internet are skewed towards richer countries, of course. --Stephan Schulz 00:10, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Uh… did you even read what he posted? If it's skewed to the "rich countries" then that should be enough. By the way, if all of the native English speakers in India used the internet, then it would STILL be skewed to American spellings. 67.6% (or so) native English speakers come from America. So, your point is incorrect. R'son-W 07:09, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
India does not use English as its official language, and its inhabitants are not considered native English speakers. If they were, however, you can take your sorry >300 million Americans and put them up against the billion Indians who'd be using BrE, throw in every other BrE-native country (the ones you've handily included to make up 1\3 of native English users in the world), and start recounting those percentages. Then we could start counting other countries in which English is a secondary language, and check out which form is preferred there. Suddenly, you'll see AmE is at a somewhat less imposing figure, 25% would propably still be a high estimate, but you get the point. --TVPR 17:47, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
And if I may ask, what exactly did you mean by "If it's skewed to the "rich countries" then that should be enough."?--TVPR 17:49, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
The general consensus is that articles about people/subjects that would be English use the English spelling, and people/subjects that would be American take the American spelling. Other articles stay with what they start as. We explicitly don't favor one over the other as this is an international project and it would be difficult and ethnocentric, to say the least, to enforce American spellings. Also, I don't think that a Google search can validate the greater usage of American English: certainly in Europe, Africa, and Asia, British English is more common. Snoutwood (tóg) 02:09, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Indians do not speak English as their native language, and only a small minority of Indians speak English at all (and they are generally rich enough to afford Internet access.) Yet American spellings still dominate the Internet by better than a five to one ratio. Also, in many countries those who learn ESL learn American English, such as Mexico and Vietnam.

English is "an official" language of India, one of several. It is very important in government and commerce. English is an official language in many former British Empire countries, which at one time accounted for 25% of the world's population, for what it is worth.--Michael Johnson 05:07, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Regarding aluminum, who exactly decided that the British spelling is the "standard?" IUPAC might be the best group to decide how to spell new elements, but I don't see how they can decide the standard form of an old word like aluminum. Once again, in searching the Internet we find the American spelling is far more common than the British. There is no standard spelling, but there is the more used one, and that is the American spelling. Kitteneatkitten 00:45, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Read the page. Aluminium was the original spelling. The use of aluminium is technically correct in this instance. I happen to think that spelling and general pronounciation is weird, but this is not my decision. Aluminium is the correct spelling to use. – Someguy0830 (Talk | contribs) 01:07, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Historical usages are irrelevant. The original spelling of color was color, honor honor, and so forth for that kind of word (o/ou); the original spelling of -ize was -ize (or actually -ιζειν -izein); and for that matter, the original spelling of wheat was hwæte. Currently, some people spell the name of the thirteenth element aluminum, some aluminium. And anyway, the actual original name was alumium, followed by aluminum, and only after that aluminium, according to our article, so your facts are off as well.

At any rate, in response to the proposal: pragmatically, we're going to piss a lot of contributors off by snubbing their spelling habits, and the fact that there are more Americans than Brits just means that more American spellings will be put into articles to start with, and due to the policy of not changing them we'll have your one-to-five ratio or whatever. So I don't view this as much of a problem. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:11, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Simetrical, you are wrong when you say that the original spelling of the word "color" was without the "u". In fact, it was the (American) Noah Webster who started spelling the word without the "u", in a bid to simplify the language's orthography. As for the debate, as someone who was born using AmEng, but spent a long time in countries that use BrEng, I am used to both, though I have standardized on AmEng. I say that as long as you are consistent in usage throughout the article, either British English ("the Queen's English") or American English is fine. Let's not make this an opportunity for casting aspersions at the colonials or the colonizers (or "colonisers", if you prefer), or of asserting some mistaken form of superiority (regarding whether or not Indians are native English speakers, for instance). -- Jalabi99 15:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
In actual fact, the word was frequently spelt "color" in Britain long before Webster. There was no standard spelling at this time and words were spelt in many different ways. As an archivist, I have seen many British documents dating from the 18th and 19th centuries spelling this and similar words without the u. -- Necrothesp 16:34, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
The word was originally spelled <COLOR> in Latin. It then shifted to colour in early French, with the long O becoming spelled <ou>. English adopted the French spelling, having received the word from the Normans. Then, a few centuries back, some people on both sides of the pond started spelling it without the u again (to the extent that there was standard spelling then at all), hearkening back to the old Latin form. By what amounts to dumb luck, one spelling became standard in America, another in Britain (as well as a number of its other colonies/former colonies and, to a large extent, the rest of the world). Essentially the same happened with -ise/-ize.

This is all from my recollection of the OED entry, by the way. I could look it up again if you really care. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:06, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

This is a perpetual battle, but Wikipedia uses aluminium because this is the IUPAC spelling, accepted for reference works in the English language. We use the spelling sulfur for the same reason: one apiece to each side of the Atlantic!, although editors should please create the necessary redirects... "redirects are cheap" Physchim62 (talk) 15:48, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Aluminium is a more consistent spelling; there are many elements ending in -ium, from helium to plutonium. - Runcorn 19:15, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
And? Using program all the time is more consistent than using program to refer to computer programs and programme to refer to other program(me)s; shall we purge programme from Wikipedia? For that matter, thru is more consistent with English spelling than through, so shall we purge the latter? While I sympathize with those promoting greater consistency in language, even to the point of being a cut spelling fan, Wikipedia is not a soapbox for linguistic prescriptivism.

Physchim does bring up a good point, though. If we agree, as a policy, to follow IUPAC spellings, I'd be all behind that. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:36, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Can't agree there. 'Program' may have derived etymologically from 'programme', but it's a distinct meaning and can be regarded as a different word. Runcorn 19:43, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
Sure, but they're pronounced the same, so surely better to spell them the same? That's if we want consistency in spelling. It's inconsistent to use different spellings for the same pronunciation. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 22:39, 7 May 2006 (UTC)


There's an amusing essay by Mark Twain about that... — Saxifrage ✎ 10:38, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Until those silly brits come to realize the futility of their efforts against the Gorilla US spelling campaign and adopt the clearly superior American english, Wikipedia will have to stick by our accepted practice of using both, but being consistent within a given article. Raul654 05:12, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Maybe there should be a policy to delete comments like this and replace them with links to a page that says "this has been fought about forever, and we've already made up our minds about it." — Omegatron 05:16, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Is calling British people "silly brits" permissible within Wikipedia rules? Don't forget that people in many other countries generally use British rather than American "english" (sic) Runcorn 14:55, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
Given that the "silly world" uses International English, which is based on British English, and Wikipedia is a worldwide encyclopaedia, not an American one, if any language was to become the dominant one on WP it would have to be IE/BE. But as Americans constantly change spelling and dating all over the place to their minority version, WP has had to allow variants based on two rules; language relevant to the article topic and consistency. I'm afraid Raul's conviction that American English is "clearly superior" is only shared by Americans. Much of the rest of the world, tongue-in-cheek, dismiss AE as "illiterate English" or "lazy English" where people can't be bothered to use all the letters! lol. FearÉIREANN\(caint) 15:05, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
The link that Raul provided was to a humour page on meta, and he's a Wikipedia Bureaucrat, who knows policy backwards. I think it'd be a good assumption to make that he was joking. WerdnaTc@bCmLt 15:38, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
I suspect you'll find that the majority of non-Americans here isn't quite so great as you'd think. While I do expect we are a minority, a) I would guess we're at least around a third of English-Wikipedians and b) I don't think anyone actually can say what the real number is with any useful degree of certainty, particularly if you count readers rather than just editors. And in any case, several prominent dialects of English (such as Canadian English, Australian English, and Philippine English) are somewhere in between American and British, so it's not reasonable to count them as completely on the Brit side. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:06, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

OMGSTFU Language. Changes. There are many many variants of the English language and none is superior to or "more correct" than the others. Get over it. We've been through this a million times and people keep bringing it up again. The whole topic is just an incivility magnet and waste of time. Here is our policy. People who suggest various standardizations or forks or complex technical workarounds should just be directed there and the discussion halted. It can certainly be tweaked and cleaned up, but is there any chance that the fundamental idea behind this policy will ever be changed? I don't see any... — Omegatron 16:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Amen. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:06, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
It would be difficult for me to agree more with Omegatron. Admittedly, I'm enough of a nitpicker that one some level it kind of bothers me to see "program" in one article and "programme" in another, but honestly, as long as it's spelled consistently one way within the same article, I really don't care. I don't think it's particularly important, especially when compared to the other, more important spelling problems Wikipedia faces on a daily basis. Generally, I think the current policy does the job pretty well. I'm sure it can be improved on, just like anything else, but in that case I'd like to see proposals for specific improvements instead of generic and draconian "everyone must spell everything in <one national strain of English>" pronouncements -- they only serve to annoy people and, in some of them, fires up feelings of national pride that make them more than willing to settle the difference between "color" and "colour" with sharp implements in some kind of a Thunderdomian "two spellings enter, one spelling leaves" battle to the death. Frankly, I think we can do without that crap, because it's tiresome and causes bad blood and, perhaps most importantly, doesn't actually improve Wikipedia at all. I mean, at least the endless arguing about whether notability should be a part of the criteria for inclusion has a huge potential impact on Wikipedia's content... -- Captain Disdain 13:38, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
American spelling is on the internet, because the internet is an American invention, and is still Americentric. Therefore American type spelling wil get more hits. As for articles, contributors should use English spelling for English articles, and American spelling for American articles. If you see incorrect spelling, say harbour, in an American article, then change it. Wallie 22:03, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
The main place that the British spellings seem to turn up in America is when people are trying to be pompous and pretentious; various academics insist on using such spellings to try to sound more "cultured", and real estate developers name their developments things like "Harbour Centre" when they probably are nowhere near any harbo(u)r and are far from the cent(er/re) of anything. *Dan T.* 13:04, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Wallie's hit it on the head. Quite right.--Runcorn 22:09, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

I think you meant Captain Disdain and Omegatron hit it. Having said that, I go with whoever first wrote the article. If its in American English I'll write like that, if its English² I'll write like that. - FrancisTyers 22:36, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

As a side point. I believe aluminium is also the most widely used form in other languages. (at the very least, Dutch, German and even FRENCH, come to mind). - The DJ 15:56, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Another side point: Punctuation is also different. In the States, commas and periods go inside the quotation marks -- "like this," or "like this." In GB, they go outside. Colons and semicolons go outside the quote marks in both systems. Schnaz 04:21, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Note though, that Wikipedia uses neither British nor American literary punctuation systems. Rather, WP uses a technical or logical system (I forget it's exact name): punctuation is within the quotes if it is part of the quote, otherwise it is outside. Thus, what is inside the quote is exactly what appears in the source. — Saxifrage ✎ 05:28, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
I have two thoughts on this. The first is that if any variant is used as a standard, it should be the original. The amercanisation of English was, if you read the Wikipedia articles about it, a deliberate move to create differences, with the deliberate intention of being divisive. Therefore the use of americanisms in what claims to be an English-language encyclopaedia is, in my view, following that same pattern of divisiveness. The second thing is that if one variant is agreed as a standard (say "American English"), then that will automatically exclude everyone else. I, for one, would leave the "American English" Wikipedia and wait for the "Commonwealth English" Wikipedia to come along. If the variants are so irreconcilably different, then we need to treat them as different languages, meaning no single "English language" Wikipedia. Personally, I think the status quo is fine, especially if MOS is obeyed. At present, it says to use neutral language wherever possible. I'm sure there are plenty of instances of "center", "flavour", "color" that can be amicably changed to "middle", "taste" and "hue". Waggers 22:34, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
If this helps at all, one aspect surely must determine whether to use American or British English, namely that of the subject matter. If the article is about an American/U.S. subject, then American English should be used, and on the other hand if it is about a British theme, British English should be used. That should clarify matters in respect of a great percentage of articles, surely? Dieter Simon 00:06, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
"Americanization" was not "a deliberate move to create differences, with the deliberate intention of being divisive". That is, quite simply, 100% wrong, and a common misconception among non-American speakers (as well as not being uncommon among Americans). Language always shifts, and different regions' languages shift in different directions. Until about the 1800s or 1900s, -ise and -ize (for instance) were both commonplace everywhere. Some preferred the traditional -ise, which followed the spelling directly inherited from the French in the shift to Middle English; some preferred -ize, which was both more phonetically accurate and more faithful to the original Greek and Latin. The same goes for, say, colo(u)r and hono(u)r: they come from Latin COLOR and HONOR, which shifted into French colour and honour, then got imported into English during and after the Norman invasion. By what amounted to sheer historical accident, Britain and its colonies ended up mainly adopting the historically newer but more traditional standards, while America mainly used the historically older but untraditional spellings.

If you know of any articles here that say anything to the contrary, please point them out to me. My source is primarily the Oxford English Dictionary; I could cite the precise edition and page if you like, or you can just check up what they have to say about -ise/-ize under those entries. Regardless, I agree that no specific preexisting dialect should be imposed. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 23:39, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Simetrical- Thanks for the history lesson, yet there's even more of relevance here. 1) If any dictionary was divisive, it was Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which came out in England before Webster's. England itself was very divided at the time. The Latin spellings of words like color had been common in both England and the Colonies, and scholars in England debated the question endlessly. (Shakespeare used the Latin spelling in the first folios. Some London snob then told him they weren't "fine" or "proper", so he changed to colour -- mais oui!; same with center; Shakespeare cared little about spelling.) Johnson, rather than accommodated both spellings, chose the Norman (upper-class) spellings, and didn't even list the "Shakespearean" variants. Now that's divisive! Webster did indeed want to codify the separate spellings that had evolved in the Colonies, and wanted to put an end to European cultural imperialism, but his main motivation was to make American English more suited to a melting pot. Creating a spelling system that would, for ex., enable one to tell a Dutchman that to get the noun form of humorous, you just remove the suffix, seemed a sensible system for a melting pot. If Wikipedia were to choose any one system, the American system would be better for that very reason. (Though there are a few American spellings I'd want to change to their British variants, and I'd want to use mostly British punctuation.) Fortunately, though, we have a policy in place that doesn't force any such choice upon us. (Of course, very few people actually follow the policy, but that's a different problem.) --Cultural Freedom talk 07:07, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

As this is the English Wikipedia, not the American English Wikipedia, the argument has already been won, by the English, obviously!. Markb 12:34, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

In response to the original posting (which irked me tremendously), there are also a (possibly even more) vast number of speakers who speak British English. I am of the strong opinion that the spellings should be used interchangeably (which they often are anyway). This would avoid a foolish dispute over whether to use "colour" or "color," or perhaps "program" versus "programme." Furthermore, in response to much other suggestion, a system of instances in which either one was appropriate would only complicate editing beyond a reasonable scope. Truly, the national pride of the United States, Great Britain, and Canada should really not factor into this; neither side has a greater claim to their language being used in any particular context. We should keep Wikipedia universal and not differentiate between national variants in spelling. Falcon 22:32, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

We don't speak English anymore anyway; it's American. Kill en. Fork it off into am and whatever the brits want to call theirs. Stop pretending that American and British are the same langugage; it's only a bit more reasonable than putting Portuguese with Spanish. John Reid 06:04, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
American English and British English are nearly 100% mutually intelligible, and therefore qualify as the same language one major standard that attempts to be apolitical. (If you would prefer the IMO rather silly point of view that convention should determine language boundaries, American/British English are still distinct. No major organization views them as separate languages.) Spanish and Portuguese have far more limited mutual intelligibility than American and British English, and are therefore closely related but distinct languages. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:06, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Citing the number of hits color gets compared to colour is a blatantly biassed. EG. most computer languages use the american spelling which ever language one is using, thus all those on-line computer manuals will appear as using american spelling, when infact they are using computer science jargon. Another good example of this is program which has become the standard British spelling for a computer program but not for a television programme or a programme of events. Again a hit on program/programme would drastically over estimate the amount of american spelling. A similarly misguided but converse argument is to note that pavement has more ogle hits than sidewalk, but then football is a different US englsh word but sidewalk is only an import in British English, and football has almost twice as many hits as soccer.--Timdownie 00:09, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

There are more Americans than there are British right now. Case closed. That's the reason there's more American English on the internet. No doubt about it. It's not chance, circumstance, the language built into programs, or anything else like that. American English is used more often on the internet because more people speak it. American wins the popular vote as for most widely usable, that's the truth; it would be best to stay with the obvious truths present in this argument, despite what we would like.
As for the more subtle decisions of opinion, I'd prefer we select one spelling system and stick with it, but liberally use redirects to accomodate the other system. I'd prefer American, more people know it, and that way the amount of people on wikipedia who 'know how to spell' is not an inclusive minority. -Monk of the highest order 00:13, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
No. More people speak American English as their native language. There are no reliable figures on where the divide falls among everybody who speaks English at all, which includes millions upon millions of people who learned it as a second or third language. And the number who speak it as a first language is the less relevant figure, since they will have a better command of it and be less likely to be confused by unfamiliar spellings, if you want to be picky. So you simply cannot say that "more people know American", because you have no evidence for that. In the absence of evidence, the present system is simply a brilliant solution.
I observe that it's only ever Americans who come along and seriously suggest rewriting the whole of Wikipedia in their dialect. You don't see many British, Irish, Canadian, South African, Australian, New Zealander, or Wikipedians from other English-speaking countries insisting that theirs is the "obvious" choice for the One True Language of Wikipedia. Because we've learned to compromise and to respect other people's choice to use a different spelling system. And the sooner Americans suck it up and accept that no, they do not own the Internet, and yes, they are expected to compromise too, the better.
By the way, while the Internet is an American invention, the World Wide Web - without which there would be no Wikipedia - was invented by a Brit working in Switzerland. So that's yet another reason why Americans should shut up and learn some humility. 85.210.13.95 15:08, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
I won't get into the nationalist attacks, but I will point out that I HAVE in fact seen more than one "everything should be changed to British English" argument. \ Fnarf999 \ talk \ contribs \ 15:23, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
As have I, I do believe. (Certainly in this very section there are two people saying British English is better and should be preferred if a single language is preferred, plus one person saying that Americans should make their own wiki since British English is the only real "English", and what we speak is "American".) You're probably right that more Americans suggest that their spelling be used than British do—does it occur to you that perhaps that's because they observe that the former is used much more often on the Internet? (If you weren't convinced by the colo(u)r example above, try hono(u)r, for instance, which gives similar results.)

I don't agree with them, but it stands to reason that the minority will insist on permitting diversity while the majority will suggest their view be the only one permitted. The minority has no chance of success on the latter point, so of course they won't advocate it as much. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:12, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

There must be many times more Americans than British people using the Internet; the population is higher, and a higher proportion use the Internet regularly. Thus of course American English is used more widely, and there are more Americans to point that out! --Runcorn 19:38, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
A higher proportion of Americans use the Internet regularly? Do they really? I'd be surprised. But I'm sure someone out there can provide figures. I wouldn't have thought the proportion of computer ownership and internet use would be much different. As far as usage of American spellings on the internet goes, you also have to add in the fact that many people can't spell and many British/Commonwealth people are easily influenced by American spellings, which tend to have fewer letters! It's laziness and ignorance of their own dialect rather than actual usage of someone else's. -- Necrothesp 22:02, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
A little bit of consitancy please - don't compare the use of the internet by a continent with that of a country! How many more Americans than Europeans use the Internet would be a valid question - though I really don't see what is has to do with the variances of English spelling. Markb 10:30, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

There are two points to consider here: #1 - 300 or 400 years ago, when Europeans discovered such lands as America and Australia, the British language is more similar to todays American and Australian language than the today's British language. If I can remember the spelling was similar to 'color'. However, all have evolved, with British language changing during the revolution and American changing less so as technologies were brought over from Britain. #2 - I personally believe that Americans think they basically own the world, ignoring other countries in their efforts to save the environment, etc. (Kyoto Agreement) I feel this is spilling over into such things as Wikipedia. TheTallOne 22:11, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

That, too, is a contentious point, £300 or 400 years ago, eh? Have you ever looked at the OED for words around those years? There was no unified spelling, in England or elsewhere. English spelling only began to become crystallised out into anything recognisable to present-day English spelling, whether in England or America. So forget color or colour, yes anyone would probably spell it either way until people like Samuel Johnson came along to start creating some kind of unity in English spelling. But, yes, you are right, English was in many ways somewhat more like present-day American English, although that doesn't help us today. Actually, there is an awful lot of chat either way here, when all we need to do is take a look at the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/National varieties of English where some wise Wikipedians have in fact given us some guidelines:

  • Articles should use the same dialect throughout.
  • If an article's subject has a strong tie to a specific region/dialect, it should use that dialect.
  • Where varieties of English differ over a certain word or phrase, try to find an alternative that is common to both.
  • If no such words can be agreed upon, and there is no strong tie to a specific dialect, the dialect of the first significant contributor (not a stub) should be used.

So, unless everyone wants to advocate changing those guidelines to what they consider more appropriate, where is the problem? Why not use the guidelines? Dieter Simon 23:46, 13 June 2006 (UTC)Dieter Simon 23:56, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Amen!! --Cultural Freedom talk 15:31, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wiki Toolbar

I recently started using Wiki alot for basic research and personal education. During a current writing project, I gave up searching Yahoo to get overall information about several topics, such as buddhism or evolution. Many pages contained idential information, were just using Wiki text, or were just incomplete/wrong. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 38.228.249.19 (talk • contribs).

I would recommend developing a Wiki toolbar for web browers, similar to the one Yahoo or Google has, so we can get right to the best information on the internet. Then I won't have to type "meditation wiki" into the Yahoo homepage!
Many already exist. See Wikipedia:Toolbars for a list. Cynical 23:20, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
There is no question that Wikipedia has lots of information, but it is not considered a reliable source (even by Jimbo Wales himself), and certainly not a stable one(!). Therefore, you could try a search that excludes Wikipedia. -- Fyslee 20:57, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More ideas on the speelchequer

A lot of work and an impractical amount of processing power required, but in theory a spellchecker that does the following would be possible:

  • Checks the spelling of non-capitalised words against Wikitionary.
  • Suggests changes when save page is pressed.
  • On the user's request, adds new words to Wikitionary.
  • Show which terms in an article can be wikified (Trillian already scans all chat and underlines words or phrases it finds in WP) and provide the option to automatically link all known terms.
  • Searches WP to see if red links can not be resolved.
  • Warns the user that the article being linked to is a disambiguation page.
  • Enforces American or British spelling consistency per page.
  • Checks grammar and suggest improvements.
  • Ensures that style the conforms to WP:MOS by automatically decapitalising words such as 'President' (based on rules) and ensuring that pictures do not break the format of the article.
  • Automatically links and formats partial dates.
  • Suggests categories and templates for new and existing articles
  • Can be integrated into the new search engine.

An idea that would require much less work and only a fraction of the server power would be to generate a list of articles containing words that are not in Wikitionary, sorted by the frequency of that particular letter combination occuring in Wikipedia.

- sYndicate talk 18:08, 19 June 2006 (UTC)


--Eaglesondouglas 17:36, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Over at my user paper I have an Nth Form Page. Eaglesondouglas

It is written not to bad for the first Try. Forms are fairly controversial and the religious aspect is stated in English for the first time here.

I have a hard time finding time to research the true scholar writings for adequate reference, but well, is such work allowed as first trial page?

A debate of predicate english appears and the useage of Greek style has already been accepted at Wiki. The Allegory of the Cave entry is written in third category. So the only thing is adequate review.


Somebody has to write the Nth Form.

[edit] Email notification of new message

I've been wondering about this for a while now - when a user recieves a new message on his/her talk page, they get that lovely and prominent "you have new messages" banner at the top of each page. Sometimes though, users want some down time away from wikipedia - to be honest I'd be suprised if that statement didn't account for the majority of users.

Given the purpose of talk pages (ie, for the community to get in touch with a user), would it not be to the benefit of both the community and the user if (just like almost every forum out there on the web), each registered user had an option in their preferences to recieve a simple email notification of a new message. Just like every forum out there of course, it would only send a notification for the first message, and not send one again until the user has visited the talk page.

Alternatively, A weekly email could be sent out with a summary of new talk page sections from over the last week, which would be perhaps useful in cases where a user is on an extended leave from wiki. I'm sorry if this has been brought up before, but I haven't seen anything about it. Any thoughts? Crimsone 19:10, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

YES! I went looking to suggest this aswell and ended up here. Wikimedia Commons has this feature and I think it would be very useful. I'm sure it would be useful for someone if say, they went on holiday, they are far more likely to check email on holiday than wikipedia, but might reply if they know there is a message for them. My ideas include:
  • A checkbox in preferences to say you want to receive emails (like on the Commons)
  • Containing a diff in the content of the email

Commments, suggestions? James086 Talk | Contribs 14:36, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 64kb extra-long article proposals

I would also like to recommend implementing the use of “long-page warning” banners unique to each category of long page, e.g. 32-63kb (extra-long), 64-96kb (super-long), etc. Presently, the only warning pages have is the following, which pops up for pages longer than 32kb when users click on the edit button:

Note: This page is XY kilobytes long. It may be appropriate to split this article into smaller, more specific articles. See Wikipedia:Article size.

Now, for articles in the range of 32-64kb, I will admit, there is room for some gray area as to article size. For articles more than 64kb, i.e. twice the recommended maximal size, however, I would recommend that we code a page such that “readers” (not editors), in a quick and easy manner, can cast their vote as to whether or not they feel an article is to long, such as:

Note: This page over 64 kilobytes long. It is strongly recommended that this article be split into smaller, more specific articles. See Wikipedia:Article size. If you feel that this article is too long click YES if not click NO.

In this manner we can collect data as to which articles readers feel are getting too long. Editors, conversely, usually have a thorough knowledge of the topics they edit and may never potentially feel that an article is too long. Please comment. Thanks: --Sadi Carnot 00:42, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

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