Wikipedia talk:Village pump/Archive 2

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

Contents

Summary of previous discussions

  • /Agora

This is a summary of this talk page between August 2003 and February 2004. The uncut version can be found here.

  • Village pump in the talk namespace

On August 8 2003, Eloquence moved the pump to the talk namespace to allow the "Post a comment" feature to be used. This broke interlanguage links. Brion moved it back. This broke the redirects. Eloquence pointed out that moving a large page is risky and that IL links should behave the same on talk pages as they do in the other namespaces. Lots of people got confused, and the pump remained in namespace 4. Some of the page history remains at this talk page though.

  • Moved discussions reminder

Paul A reminded people to update the list of moved discussions when they move a discussion off the page. Martin said he preferred keeping these links inline. Angela suggested adding the date they were removed. Paul A said that if the links were left inline, then the headers must be too or they get accidentally mixed in with other sections.

  • Moved discussion controversy

Alex756 sought advice on when to move discussions following a controversial move of an off-topic discussion to another talk page. Angela suggested that such items could be refactored to make them more applicable to the pump and suggested that moving things should not be an issue as long as a link is left to the new location.

  • Jump to end of page

In October 2003, Dori asked for a link to the end of the page. Adrian Pingstone recommended he press the end button on his keyboard. HappyDog added this instruction to the village pump in Janaury 2004, but was reverted by Martin. The discussion continued at MediaWiki talk:Villagepump.

  • Wikipedia performance

In December 2003, Mkmcconn was puzzled by the variety of performance from Wikipedia on different computers. Tim Starling suggested it was due to the time of day. Mkmcconn said it varied even at the same time of day. Gabriel Wicke wondered if it might have something to do with mru/mtu settings.

  • Ask Wikipedia

In January 2004, Bmills proposed an "Ask Wikipedia" page to move the "where can I buy a dog" type questions that appear on the pump. Pcb21 told him that the Wikipedia:Reference desk has this role, but said the "Ask Wikipedia" name might be more intuitive. Mav disagreed, suggesting that this would confuse people as asking questions about Wikipedia still needed to go here. Pcb21 asked what to do with off-topic questions. Mav said they should be moved, but that the Wikibooks:Study help desk might be a better place for them. Raul654 said it could all be solved with a better intro.

  • Village pump heading

In December 2003, Angela asked whether we still need the "The server is overloaded but it will usually respond eventually" message. Cimon avaro promised to reword it. Phil noted a rogue tr at the top of the page. In January 2004, Minesweeper said the size could be reduced by moving the header to the MediaWiki namespace, which Optim agreed with and Angela implemented. Brion disliked this as it makes it harder to get at and edit the stuff at the top. Sennheiser noted that this only decreases the size of the edit page, not the viewable page. Optim felt the current header was too long. Issues with Template:Villagepump heading and interlanguage links were discussed at MediaWiki talk:Villagepump.

  • Faculty rooms

Tarquin proposed "faculty rooms" to focus on different subject areas which would better coordinate work on clean-up, factual questions, discussions on new projects. Dori expressed doubts about this as people wouldn't follow that many separate pages. HappyDog said he liked the faculty idea (though with a less Americanised title such as Contributor Questions (science)). Optim suggested using "forum" instead of faculty. Angela was unsure about the faculty idea as there are already too many pages in the Wikipedia namespace to follow. She said most of the discussions could be moved to existing pages, rather than creating new faculty-related ones. mydogategodshat favoured having one central location to discuss all these issues but said that if the page needed to be split, it be split into policy issues, technical and pedagogical issues. He also like the faculty idea, but noted the problems of items which are cross-faculty. Angela noted that we already have a separate page for technical issues at m:MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion but this didn't stop people posting them to the pump.

  • Subpages

Sennheiser suggested moving discussion s to VP/sectionname subpages. Elde agreed with the need to move items, but suggested moving them to appropriate places such as Wikipedia talk:redirect. Angela said subpages should not be used, and that a proper title for moved items should be found. Optim liked the subpages idea but worried it might create confusion. HappyDog agreed with avoiding sub-pages but Sennheiser felt it might be unavoidable when there was no other place for a topic.

  • Archiving policy

HappyDog advocated a more stringent archiving policy where no topic be archived until at least 3 full days after the most recent addition to the discussion and any topic that belongs elsewhere be relocated immediately. This would need clear instructions on the page. Andrewa said we need to be more proactive in moving conversations to appropriate existing pages with a link from the pump. Sennheiser agreed.

Angela thought a 70kb limit would be more practical than a 32kb limit. Optim felt this was too big.

Dori said he liked the conversations being started on the pump, rather than on talk pages as these were harder to find and less visible. Elde said a pointer on the pump would solve this.

Angela thought that moving moved links to the top of the page was not useful. HappyDog thought most people would look on the page itself for the discussion. Optim agreed it was too much effort and said nobody cares about them.

HappyDog, Elde and Optim felt links should be left inline when items are moved. Angela thought these links should stay for a week. Optim thought they should stay for as long as the discussion is active if the page wa <32kb. HappyDog said it must be based on time, not page size. Optim said that if page size was still an issue, more pages must be created.

There were mixed views on whether the links to moved items needed to be archived. Angela didn't see the point. HappyDog thought they might be useful. Elde suggested moving them to the top for a while and Optim said there was no point in keeping them.

Angela said that pointless things do not need to be archived. If something has been fixed, it could just be deleted it. Optim agreed but HappyDog thought everything should be archived. Elde thought it should be noted somewhere for a brief time, but not forever.

Docu complained the pump looked like a list of headers. Angela said if it was going to stay <32kb, it would always look like that. Optim liked it like that.

Raul654 said he had lost an edit because Martin was archiving the item at the same time. Martin reminded him not to make feature requests on the pump and Andrewa recommended copying text to prevent loss during an edit conflict.

Optim proposed adding one-line summaries of moved discussions we move from VP to other pages. Many people agreed.

Sennheiser and RickK were annoyed with items being removed too soon. Dori said this wouldn't be an issue if links were left inline.

fabiform said the most recently moved discussions have their heading inline and that these are moved to the top when the page is archived.

end of summarised section

I've moved a section under the heading "Thumbnail size" to the Pump itself, which is the place to talk about this kind of thing. This is the page for talking about the Pump. (confusing, I know) - IMSoP 17:37, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Why are we making the pump redirect to itself? I am confused. -- Wapcaplet 19:54, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

IMSoP waits expectantly for a sysop/admin to come along and sort out the mess. Lord alone knows what's going on right now. - IMSoP 20:10, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Spots note now added to page. Starts waiting more patiently.
Join the IRC channel #wikipedia on irc.freenode.net to join in the fixing of the VP page. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 20:11, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It was a result of User:Zap (now banned) trying to move the page. Moving a page with such a large edit history takes a long time. The same happened with VfD, though with that the history was actually lost until Brion could run an update query on it. Angela. 12:54, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)
Given the difficulty in undoing this move (whatever the motivations were), it makes partially-protected pages (i.e. pages that can be edited but not moved) a priority feature request. I'll see if there is anything at sourceforge. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 13:14, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Request at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&atid=411195&aid=899556&group_id=34373. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 13:23, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Timestamp on moved discussions

Would it be possible for people to put a timestamp on notes of moved discussions, to make it easier to track when things happened. (In fact I'd be in favour of having more timestamps available all over the place, it can be very difficult to track a conversation when stuff is spatchcocked into the middle.) --Phil 09:08, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)

Spatchcocked - What a brilliant word! --HappyDog 12:41, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

dari and Farsi

Moved to Wikipedia:Village Pump#dari and Farsi

Comment from a Chinese reading friend who visited Wikipedia for the 1st time

Quoted from an e-mail:

"I visited the "Wikipedia" website, and I found something needs to be corrected.

From the many languages presented, I chose Chinese (the traditional one), I found out that it's not really traditional Chinese but a mix.

There are Simplified Chinese characters and Traditional Chinese characters from which you can choose.

And, when I went to traditional Chinese, I found out that it's not really traditional Chinese but a mix of traditional Chinese with simplified Chinese.

In this case, Wikipedia made a big mistake!

I want to protest about it but I don't know how to contact them and tell them to correct it.

If there are two Chinese languages (tranditional and simplified) on the website, then it should be very clear which one is which.

If I choose to read traditional Chinese, why are there many simplified Chinese characters in it?

And if there are simplified Chinese characters in the traditional Chinese languages, then it shouldn't be called traditional Chinese.

It's very confusing.

I grew up with traditional Chinese so it's very difficult for me to read the other one.

I don't like it at all."

Can anyone explain why Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese is getting mixed up? Is there a way to clarify the difference for contributors?

This is a knotty problem, but my guess is that the Wikipedia will be much more useful if this problem could be addressed.

Please respond if anyone has any thoughts.

-- Anon

"I don't know how to contact them"?! The Chinese Village Pump.... 互助客栈. Go yap in English there if you want (as I sometimes do), but in a nutshell:
A) that we discussed the Simplified-Traditional issue for monthssssss, but it's all talk and no deed. The deed, in a computer world, needs, intuitively, a computer guy.
B) Our consenus (including mine, a Traditional user) is the one Chinese WP site at zh.wikipedia.org will be the one site for the one language of Chinese. Schism will halving our effort. Not to mention more prone to depriving ourselves the fun of cross-straits conflicts in forms of wiki-arguments.
Unfortunately, no existing ZH Wikipedians are comp sci wiz. Crawl over the the ZH Pump and suggest better stuff there or volunteer or whatever. And...any non-Chinese computer programmers who want to give a hand or five, you're welcome to drop a note in English there too. --Menchi 10:50, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I found that problem too. One reason is the new format of the main page: there is only one Template:Dyk, Template:Itn etc. in Chinese WP, we have to decide which Chinese they go into. I also want to point out that, the differences between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese are less than 25%, and there is no need to separate them into two different websites. Stop protesting but give more practical solutions! That's not Simplified Chinese invading Traditional Chinese! I guess the Chinese community has asked for help many times in En WP and Meta WP without any responses! What we need is a computer programming genius who would like to help out how to solve this problem for Chinese WP, but not argument! This problem is quite urgent; i know how inconvenient it would be for traditional Chinese readers. but the majority contributors in Chinese WP is from simplified Chinese community. we are just expecting more traditional readers come here and make contributions. --Yacht 01:08, Mar 1, 2004 (UTC)
I would like to echo the frustration. I can read some simplified Chinese. Often, it's the one or two words/characters critical to the understanding of a sentence that was displayed in the wrong version of written Chinese and stumped me. (So I have been staying on the English side these days....) For a first-time user who doesn't know what Wikipedia is all about, the disappointment is understandable. On the bright side, we can label such "contaminated" wikipages as Pages needing attention, and invite newbies to do some copyeditting. Hopefully, as the number of users of tradition Chinese grows, things will get fixed along the way. Please don't feel offended when someone is not really protesting but lamenting the fact that something so good as Wikipedia is so accessible and inaccessible at the same time. How's that ? -- PFHLai 03:10, 2004 Jun 17 (UTC)

"remove 13kb of spam"

Possibly more text got removed than intended, that's why I rolled back the edit. -- User:Docu

I've no idea what happened there. I thought I was just removing one post that had been some strange advertising that took up 13kb and had no relevance to Wikipedia. But that doesn't seem to be in the page history at all, and it looks like I just removed random things from the page! Weird. Thanks for reverting it. Angela.
Could it have been that someone else started reverting the page before you and finished it earlier, so when you submitted your edit, it was compared to the new version, not the one you had edited? Ambush Commander 00:08, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Moving things to the reference desk

Following a question about the "Remote Possibilities" game...

Isn't it a bit odd that so many questions of this sort get asked. What is about our pages that causes people to think we can answer these sorts of things? And besides the Oscars were held on the 29th and All about Eve and Titanic still jointly have the most nominations (14), IIRC. Lord of the Rings equals Ben-Hur and Titanic in having the most wins (11). Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:28, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Not only is it odd, I'm now tempted to write a love letter to my ex and post it to the Pump. And she's not even a Wikipedian. --Charles A. L. 16:28, Mar 3, 2004 (UTC)
I think one reason that so many are posted is that most get answered. Wikipedians seem unable to resist helping someone outwith a bit of research. Not necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps we need a special page for it. Mark Richards 21:23, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
We have a special page for it. Wikipedia:Reference Desk. moink 21:25, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Er....not to be too elitist, but those of us who keep up with RD regularly really do hate to be seen as the people who handle any question. :) RD is designed to handle reference questions, not the questions of people who don't know what Wikipedia is. :-) Frankly, people like Nichole (no offense, Nichole) rarely seem to return to see if we answered their question....at least, we never see evidence that they did. I think explaining who we aren't and letting it sit here a few days is fine, personally. Redirecting them to RD where they will be told the same thing isn't a good idea--believe it or not, RD is about as crowded with posts as the VP is, usually. :-) That's my 2 cents, Jwrosenzweig 21:30, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Hey, I keep up with RD as well! No, Nichole's question would not be answered any better there. But Mark's point about helping someone out with research refers to the reference desk as the right place. moink 21:36, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Sorry, moink! I phrased that badly. I get tired of the Village Pump's tendency (in my experience) to dump just about any question on the Reference Desk, especially when it sometimes seems like there are only about 4 or 5 of us trying to answer questions at the RD. I didn't mean to imply that you didn't though -- my bad. You are right....helping out with research is definitely in the RD's purview. I was just looking at this particular question and thinking "this doesn't have anything to do with research or reference questions". Didn't mean to be grumpy -- I'll go make some productive edits as penance. :-) Jwrosenzweig 21:39, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Protected?

Could someone explain the {{msg:protected}} on this page? What page is protected? Apparently not this one... --Spikey 20:19, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

  • Last night, a vandal attacked a few pages, uncluding this one. the attack continued for over 3 hours, so some of the pages were protected. when the protection was removed from this page, the notice was not. Kingturtle 20:46, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)


What happened to leaving links to moved conversations?

I'm annoyed. From the summary above:

Optim proposed adding one-line summaries of moved discussions we move from VP to other pages. Many people agreed.

So why on earth do I now have to dig through archive sub-pages to find a link to a discussion which was on the pump just 2 days ago? Please, please, let's have a proper policy on this and stick to it. Moving discussion may be necessary to keep the pump usable, but visible pointers are equally necessary if it is to be useful! - IMSoP 18:20, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

People come up with these great archiving policies, everyone agrees that they're a good idea, but nobody is motivated enough to perform them on a regular basis. Instead everyone avoids archiving for fear of being attacked for doing it wrong, and the size of the pump reaches 100-150 KB. As someone who often uses a 56K modem with a download-dependent charging plan, I'm quite happy for links and recent discussions to be lost if it means I only have to download 50 KB rather than 150 KB every time I view, click edit, get an edit conflict or save the page. If you want a policy to be stuck to, do it yourself. -- Tim Starling 23:28, Mar 17, 2004 (UTC)
As the person whose been dealing with those articles that have reached 5/6 days on vfd for the last week, all I can say is that I heartily agree with you Tim. In some ways it is pretty amazing that with all the contributors to vfd and the pump, how few people we've been relying on to try and keep on top of things. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 23:44, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Just to throw out an idea, say the pump should be archived every two days (leaving recent discussions in place, of course). It's not much work to do it once, even with leaving the one line summary. We could work out a schedule for anyone that is willing to do it, so that one person is assigned to archiving for a particular day. With only fifteen volunteers, it would be only a few minutes of work a month (assuming every two days is a good rule, and I just made that up, so it probably isn't). Tuf-Kat 23:52, Mar 17, 2004 (UTC)
OK, then, I will do it myself. In fact, I'm going to be rather harsh with refactoring, because I think that's preferable to just having tons and tons of archives hidden away. Obviously the refactored version can then be archived later. Point is, I hope I don't offend anyone by cutting out their discussion. - IMSoP 00:03, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Gosh, archiving's hard work, isn't it? ("Yes," says everyone who has done it before). I'll have to stop soon, and get to bed: UTC==localtime for me. - IMSoP 00:54, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It sounds a nice idea to say "leave links to moved discussions", but leave them for how long? There was a complaint about one section I moved that was relating to a question a week old. This was on a day that the pump had exceeded 150kb. I removed 78 sections. Do you really want 78 headers left in place, in addition to the 40 that remained after the archiving? I used to do that, but it just isn't realistic anymore. The pump was only archived yesterday, and already it is 80kb again. Endless headers are not the solution, and this is not a question of motivation. It really is time for a more radical change to this page.

Ignoring my own objections at the end of January [1], I now re-propose mydogategodshat's idea of splitting the village pump into

  1. - policy issues (like the current discussions of page overpopulation and level of writing)
  2. - technical issues (like the recent problems with RC, image disappearance, and page blanking)
  3. - pedagogical issues (like people wanting to know how to use the new image markup)

I'm not sure these are the best category titles, but I do now think splitting the page is necessary. 150kb is not acceptable, and neither is having 100 section headers. It's useless. As these subpages get too large, we need to further specialise and have additional subpages, but I think for now between three and five would be a good start. Angela. 08:50, Mar 19, 2004 (UTC)

Personally, I'd prefer it if the pump became nothing but the headers - after all, if you split it up, and somebody left a note on the "wrong" sub-page, how would you let them (and anyone else who was waiting for an answer) know where you'd moved it to? You'd have to leave a pointer, wouldn't you?
Whereas, if we make it official policy to start a conversation somewhere else, and then draw attention to it with a link on the pump, "archiving" would become completely trivial, since it would just consist of moving the top-most headers & their links into the appropriate /archive subpage, and a header with a couple of sentences of summary and a link doesn't take up many kb, either...
OTOH, I reiterate my request of a few weeks ago that there be a page for leaving transitory notes to sysops/admins - requests for page merging and the like. Such a specific page could have a "once done, delete" policy. Or maybe there is a broader category of request for which this could be done?
- IMSoP 10:01, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)
There's no reason this page can't have a policy of requests being removed as soon as they are fulfilled. Why do you think it would be beneficial to have a separate sysop page to implement that? Maybe we need a poll to see if people would support the idea of moving all discussions elsewhere and leaving only links here. A similar thing is done at WP:RFC, which seems to be working ok. I think we would still need a page for miscellaneous discussions though. Not everything will fit neatly onto an existing page, and some things are better archived and forgotten about than scattered around in the Wikipedia talk namespace. :) I wonder if a subpage for proposals would be a good idea. Often these are sections that don't fit neatly elsewhere, so moving them is not an option, and creating new Wikipedia namespace pages for every proposal would not be a good idea. Having one page, where proposals that never took off could be archived, might be useful, and could prevent people suggesting the same things over and over again. Angela. 17:11, Mar 19, 2004 (UTC)
Re: page for proposals (and similar categories of discussion) - I think the point is that they needn't be Village pump subpages - just pages, generally in the Wikipedia_talk: namespace; sometimes Talk:; possibly occasionally on meta:, although I personally find the purpose of meta to be somewhat ill-defined (and the lack of unified logins & watchlists is off-putting for many). So yes, by all means have a page to discuss proposals, as a class, but why not call it e.g. Wikipedia:Proposals, rather than e.g. Wikipedia:Village pump/Proposals? - Wikipedia:Do not use subpages (the "rigid hierarchies are awkward" argument applies, IMHO)
Re: admin/sysop page and "remove on fulfilment". I guess there isn't any reason for this not to happen on the pump - but it doesn't. Maybe if the ethos of the page were changed to a sufficient extent, we could get into the habit of doing so (and saying "I've fulfilled your request" on the requester's User_talk: page, as I originally envisaged).
So, how about: "The village pump is a place to start discussions which you are not sure of a home for, or to draw attention to discussions which have found their home. Where possible, find a more permanent home for the full discussion as soon as possible, so that there is room for more summaries to be visible on this page."
Interestingly, it's actually far more useful to have archives organised by category than by date; an entire conversation stored in Village_pump/Month_year_archivenumber is unlikely to be found by all but the most determined digger. An archive of all discussions on a particular topic, however, is instantly more useful, and the archive for the pump itself would become a kind of log of what conversations were brought to the attention of the community when. - IMSoP 18:34, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I agree that titles like Wikipedia:Proposals would be a lot more useful than Wikipedia:Village pump/Proposals. If there is no existing page to start a discussion on, I don't think there is any harm in creating one. It can always be moved elsewhere or redirected later on if it is not going to be a useful page to keep. If an issue relates to more than just the English Wikipedia, there is an advantage in having it at Meta so that the other projects can input as well. I know it's difficult to find things at Meta, but I believe that is a sign it needs some more organisation, not a sign it should be avoided altogether.
It seems there are two options; either have a variety of village pump pages for different topics (bugs/ help/ policies etc), or have one village pump that has only links and no content. The second has the advantage of being self-maintaining as the discussions will already be in the right place, whereas the first will still require people motivated to archive it, and will eventually run into the same page-size issues as we have now. This already happened with VfD. It was split into a number of subpages (foreign, images, lists, copyvio and redirects), but a few months on, the page is too large again. Angela. 02:02, Mar 27, 2004 (UTC)
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