Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

(This general category is listed as a perennial, I must disclose first. But activity on this front seems to have stopped two years ago. See Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Removing warnings, and its talk page.)

My proposal is that users's right to remove warnings from their talk pages be limited to warnings older than a set age, such as 1 or 2 or 3 months. That way there should be no concern that warnings would stay permanently on user talk pages.

Simultaneously finding warning users as helpful to Wikipedia and its users, and on the other hand allowing warned users to remove warnings at will is self-defeating. Though it doesn't redound to a 'no warning' policy, it burdens the conscientious warners too much. That's because it requires that the latter scour users' talk pages for the history of warnings users have received in order to be sure what warning levels to use, without that exercise's revealing much about each previous warning: did the warned users even object to warnings which they removed, or did they remove warnings simply as attempts to cover their tracks?

Therefore, for the warnings that they shouldn't be allowed to remove, warned users should be encouraged to provide their retorts, if they have any, right there, below the warnings—which they're free to do now. Users who are about to issue warnings should in turn be instructed to read those rebuttals, if any, before issuing their warnings.

Is this a good middle ground? SamEV (talk) 22:27, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Strongest possible oppose due to the fact that this would require editors (even admins) to submit to dumb, troll-ish, WP:DTTR etc. drivel staying on their talkpages. ╟─TreasuryTag►constabulary─╢ 22:32, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  But your objection would logically apply to any such messages that are non-templated, doesn't it? SamEV (talk) 22:37, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  What does that even mean? All I'm saying is, if Troll553 comes along to my talkpage during a content-dispute and, solely for the larks of giving a false warning, posts {{uw-npov1}}. I'd have to keep it there for months (and what about archiving, anyway, by the way?). Ridiculous notion. ╟─TreasuryTag►quaestor─╢ 22:39, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was going to re-write my reply, but an edit conflict prevented me.

Your tone is very hostile. Would you dial it down, please?

I'll think about your objection before addressing it again. SamEV (talk) 22:45, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As I wrote, if you contest a warning, you can write so. Bad faith warnings would be just as removable and punishable as they currently are, and just as any message that anyone can write on a talk page: including those that are not templated. But warned users would be required to make the case why any warning that falls within the protected period is bad faith or misaddressed or whatever, and thus removable. I think of the editor who committed clear and obvious vandalism, but who currently has the right to remove a warning just as much as does the good faith editor who's falsely accused of something. I don't think they deserve equal benefit of the doubt. SamEV (talk) 22:59, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, I will not "dial down" my tone, which is not hostile, it merely reflects my feelings towards your absurd and unworkable proposal. ╟─TreasuryTag►secretariat─╢ 08:14, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. I lived through the era when we required people to retain warning messages. It led to some of the dumbest edit wars I can ever remember (e.g. edit wars about removing warnings about removing warnings). Requiring people to retain warnings they disagree with inflames too many tempers to offset the small gain of making it easier to keep track of vandals. No thanks, let's not try that again. Dragons flight (talk) 23:06, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm very surprised to learn that a 'no remove' rule existed before. Your answer is helpful. SamEV (talk) 23:24, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's interesting, Dragon's flight. I'll also mention, SamEV, that at least as far as anon IP editors (with whom I largely deal), that hiding warning messages doesn't work very well, because it's easy for an established editor to guess they're doing it, and simple to check whether they have. Also, when evaluating a new anon IP, this activity is an early hint that they aren't willing to play by the rules. Regards, Piano non troppo (talk) 19:07, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

But it would be far more useful if you could look at those (unexpired) warnings on the talk pages, along with whatever objections were expressed by the warned users. SamEV (talk) 09:52, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• no, no... The purpose of a warning is to warn a user of something. If the user removes the warning, that only means that they are sufficiently warned (whatever that means to them). Forcing them to keep the warning on their page is punitive rather than productive - might as well just create a set of Scarlet Letter templates so we can brand them as undesirables for all the world to see. Not a good idea. --Ludwigs2 23:08, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Ludwigs2. But the point is to make things easier for the editors who do the right thing by issuing warnings (and I'm not claiming that issuing warnings is mandatory). And why should we be so preoccupied with not 'punishing' misbehaving users a little? We shouldn't be blasé about it, but it should not be fatal to measures aiming at improving how Wikipedia works. SamEV (talk) 23:24, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Sam, and the road to Hell really is paved with good intentions. We punish people where people do harm to the encyclopedia (and usually that 'punishment' merely consists of preventing them from doing further harm, temporarily or permanently). removing material from a user talk page does not in any way harm the encyclopedia, therefore it's not a punishable offense. QED. --Ludwigs2 05:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The removal of warnings, especially when done by vandals, do harm the encyclopedia, because as a result too many vandals get weaker warnings than they would otherwise, especially from warners who are not very experienced; which means that too many vandals are free to roam around Wikipedia longer than they should. SamEV (talk) 09:52, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If a user repeatedly removes warnings in order to avoid receiving higher level warnings, it's unlikely that this would go unnoticed for very long. I check the talk page of users I've recently warned to see if they've gotten any further warnings, and I'm probably not the only one. If they've been repeatedly removing warnings in the hopes that no one would notice that they haven't stopped their disruptive behavior, someone watching their talk page would notice. Reach Out to the Truth 16:00, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's the truth (mild pun intended). But that's no help to any warner who's new to the talk page. SamEV (talk) 14:33, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• This isn't even worth thinking about, to me. Sorry.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 23:42, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK. Anyone can comment, just as anyone can put forth proposals (I think). SamEV (talk) 23:52, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What was the purpose of that message, and the tone behind it, SamEV? ╟─TreasuryTag►sundries─╢ 08:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Request for information: Is there presently any convenient way to check for a user's warning history other than his or her talk page and its history? If so, the proposal seems almost moot; if not, I can see why such an external data source would be desirable and might be preferable to immutable warnings on the talk page -- assuming a high level of transparency, right of appeal, etc. etc. - Regards, PhilipR (talk) 04:04, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Under the current understanding, standard warnings are supposed to expire and be forgotten after roughly a month. Editors who have talk pages which are active enough to make checking back a month difficult are unlikely to be getting standard template warnings. persistent vandals (who stay under the 4 warnings per month limit) are a minor annoyance who will eventually get bored if they don't get noticed and blocked. petty vandalism from months or years ago shouldn't count against an editor who is (maybe) trying to edit productively now. I don't even see a reason for an external resource. --Ludwigs2 05:22, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • If the persistent vandal keeps deleting warnings, then doesn't that put a burden on the person issuing the warning to reconstruct history to see if they've been issued 4 warnings per month? Isn't that the argument made in the paragraph beginning "Simultaneously finding warning users as helpful..." in the proposal above, or am I misunderstanding it? - PhilipR (talk) 05:46, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • The thing is, "warnings" themselves are effectively meaningless in reality. Their designed more as a courtesy/civility tool in order to prevent people from honestly being taken by surprise when it comes to administrative action. In the case of purposeful vandalism, they normally do more harm then good in that they provide the vandal with the attention and feedback that they crave by vandalizing, but in the end I think that we've (correctly) chosen to live with that drawback in order to prevent "damage" to the (optimistically) 1-2 out of 1000 editors who are mistakenly labled as vandals due to some mistake/misunderstanding (normally, in my experience, caused by language issues). It's generally better to err on the side of caution with things like this, after all. Personally, I'd think that some sort of proposal to "police the policeman", a process to review the use of warning templates and "vandal fighting", would receive more support and possibly even be worth doing, but then I'm somewhat predisposed to think that way....
        — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 06:36, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • When I patrol, my usual routine is to revert, then go to the Users talk page to leave a warning. When I get there, if the 'discussion' tab is redlinked I leave a level 1 warning and move on. if the 'discussion' tab is blue (meaning that the the page was created but is currently blank) I click the history tab and glance at recent activity, leaving a warning at a level that seems appropriate or sending the user straight to the admins if there's a lot of recently deleted templates. I leave any worrying about correctness to admins (vandal patrollers are traffic cops; admins are the judges). it really doesn't take much time or thought. --Ludwigs2 07:09, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what benefit there would be in this change, and I can see several new areas of contention that it would open up:

1. It would muck up a lot of people's archiving
2. Incorrect warnings would become a lot more contentious. For example I frequently move new articles to correct their capitalisation and as a result I sometimes get the "warning" when the article is tagged for speedy deletion.
3. Sometimes the boundary between warning someone and informing them that you don't think their article meets our notability criteria can get a tad grey. {{G3}} and {{G10}} will almost always result in warnings, but several of the other speedy criteria currently cover a range of good and bad faith articles, if we start differentiating between notifications that one can remove and warnings that we can't then New Page Patrol suddenly gets even more overcomplex.
4. We have a philosophy that anyone can start editing here without learning our ways, if we want to make warnings "sticky" then that is another thing that we have to communicate to newbies.
5. Some IPs are dynamic, others may be shared. The person who deletes a warning from a fortnight ago may be doing so because they have taken over that IP, and if so they might baulk at being told to reinstate a warning that they consider was given to someone else.
6. For the last four reasons I predict that were we to do this, the result would be a troll feeding frenzy.

PS For what its worth, when I block editors I don't just look at their current talkpage and I suspect most if not all admins have a similar MO. ϢereSpielChequers 18:05, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• • PhilipR, you understood well: I propose that we make warnings more effective and cease burdening warners so much. SamEV (talk) 09:52, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • ϢereSpielChequers, most of those seem like good arguments to me, for now at least. Not the first one, though. That potential problem can be avoided (i.e. other than by not adopting this proposal — and it might indeed be rejected...) by doing as WP:UWT recommends: "Warnings should be grouped by date under the heading "Warnings"." So my proposal would pose no trouble for archiving, either by humans or bots, as warnings would be found in one section, with the older warnings at the top of it. SamEV (talk) 09:52, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  Firstly, I haven't ever heard of that rule, and am a vastly experienced editor (Twinkle doesn't follow it either). Secondly, it's not a rule. It's not a policy. It's not even a guideline. I don't know where it came from, but it has no standing whatsoever! ╟─TreasuryTag►stannator─╢ 16:24, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  Heya TT, I'm not sure what the history is here with you, or between you and SamEV, or whatever. I just though that I should mention that your own tone in this discussion has been fairly strident right from the get-go. It'd be nice if you could back off a bit here, as I don't see how continuing with this open animosity here in front of everyone is really helpful. You could always take it to his talk page, if you think that it's really important.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 16:45, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks, Ohms law.

  I can't recall having ever interacted with user Treasury Tag, or to have even seen his name anywhere. SamEV (talk) 21:04, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • • That assumes warnings are issued in accordance with that guideline and I doubt they are - most are simply added to the end of a talkpage. But some active users have to archive on quite a frequent basis simply to keep their talkpages editable. Not all of them would be able to increase their archiving interval to the number of months that you want these warnings to stick for, and a bot that had different archiving intervals for warnings and other threads would be overly complex and risk hiding warnings away from other relevant contemporary threads. ϢereSpielChequers 16:21, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Warners should be made more aware of that guideline, despite the fate of this proposal. When I used to warn more, I did use that "Warnings" header. And btw, I don't see why bots that currently do cleanup or other tasks couldn't be programmed to create that heading and gather the warnings under it. For example, SineBot could be programmed to gather them when it leaves a message on a user page. (I name SineBot just as a blind example.)
        

I don't understand what you mean by "hiding warnings away", though. I take your word for it re: complexity, since I'm not versed in programming. :(

SamEV (talk) 21:04, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose most of the reasons are listed above. As to the concern about looking for removed warnings, this is one reason that warnings should include an edit summary. If the edit summary includes "Level 3", "Level 4" or "Final warning" it's easy to get an idea of what's gone on before with a quick scan of the talk history. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cube lurker (talk • contribs) 18:14, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Many, maybe most, warners don't leave those edit summaries. Besides, what do you learn just by looking at the edit summaries? What if the warnings were undeserved? You wouldn't know it just from the edit summaries. You'd have to look at diffs, one by one, to see what was said about each warning, if anything. Per my proposal, you'd get a much better idea of which warnings were merited and which not, and you'd know it faster, because warned users would explain themselves on their talk pages and those comments would remain visible as long as the warnings themselves. The reason warners would usually explain themselves is because simply removing the warnings would no longer be an option.
  • Maybe one day a technical way can be found to add warnings which cannot be removed by users, but by admins and/or automatically, once they've expired, by the software/bots. SamEV (talk) 09:52, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    If the warnings were undeserved, then they most certainly should not be forced to stay on the talk page. A lot of people uses automated tools like Twinkle for warning users, which indicates the warning level in the edit summary. Looking at the page history gives a pretty good indication of what sort of warnings the user has received in the past. Reach Out to the Truth 16:00, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose There are some wizards who are not good, Harry ... oops. Some folks have been known to give out toally unwarranted warnings. Frinstance, folks who give out 3RR warnings and final warnings after a single edit on a page. Absent a real need to alter current policy, let's keep what ain't broke. Collect (talk) 20:39, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reach Out to the Truth, and Collect: I concede on the autosummary point. But with respect to undeserved warnings: As I said above, bad faith warnings would continue to be punishable, and admins could remove them. In any case, I think it would be preferable for an undeserved warning to stay, with the warnee's objections, instead of a deserved warning's being removed with no justification even attempted. SamEV (talk) 14:33, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  "I think it would be preferable for an undeserved warning to stay" – *groan* ╟─TreasuryTag►secretariat─╢ 14:37, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Hand up* May I ask a question? When the proposer was a hall monitor in junior high a couple years ago, did he ask the principal to make those who had been admonished for not having a pass wear a piece of paper recording how many times the person had been previously admonished so the hall monitor could calibrate his degree of sternness when he caught them again? alteripse (talk) 14:57, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • All the time. SamEV (talk) 16:05, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Ha. I am disarmed by your charm (seriously), perhaps enough to support the keeping of block notices by administrators, but have been here enough years to have run into people whose "warnings" on my talk page didn't merit reading, let alone prolonged residence. alteripse (talk) 01:25, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • I'll take it! That's the closest to a "Support" vote I've got so far. :) SamEV (talk) 20:16, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak oppose. I'm as tired as the next guy of IPs getting away with murder by blanking their userpages month after month, but the cons of this proposal (trolls having one more policy to point to, people putting up with garbage, and the historical record pointed to above) simply outweighs the possible good. If no one is watching these IPs blank their pages now and keeping track of them, no one will notice if this goes through. --King Öomie 20:41, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose We've got better things to piss our time away on (such as an encyclopedia) than in trying to gauge whether a warning template can or cannot be removed. We don't need another level of bureaucracy. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:50, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The proposal: An admin who has undertaken admin procedures on a particular wikipedia article page (say, protecting the page, blocking a user, warning a user) should not be allowed to edit on the same article page for a pre-defined period (for example, 3 days/a week/ten days; that is, a pre-defined period decided by consensus here). The only editing allowed to such an administrator on the said article, would be to revert clear vandalism (and to get involved in talk page discussions). The administrators can continue to engage in other administrative action on the specific article and on the users involved. If the administrator really wishes to edit normally on the article, he/she should either wait for 3 days/a week (or any other pre-defined period decided here) or rather, should suggest the change to other administrators/editors who could undertake the action with a more neutral pov.

The whys of the current proposal:

• Reason 1 - An admin who might have, for example, locked a page for some time, blocked an editor or warned an editor about an impending block (due to the editor's tendentious editing/vandalism) has a possibility of becoming seemingly 'attached' with/to the article; in other words, apparently taking ownership of the article, leading to forceful (or probable non-NPOV) editing, that might not take into clear account the talk page discussions that would have taken place within the article over a length of time.
• Reason 2 - It'll create more transparency into the administrative actions, in general.
• Reason 3 - Other editors, after seeing an admin's administrative action on some particular user/or on the page, and noting that the admin is continuing editing on the page, might not be 'bold' in their editing actions and might accept changes without much discussion.

The benefits of this proposal:

• It clarifies one policy grey area of Administrative action.
• Administrators would feel less worried about getting caught in a misjudgement of action.
• It would allow administrators to justify their edits to other editors (who might be given to questioning the same).
• Clear cases of vandalism can still be reverted/edited by the administrator, so it does not shackle the administrators at all with respect to powers.

The drawbacks of this proposal:

• Admins might be forced to stop editing on pages that they might have been involved in over a long term; and that can take the sheen off the tempo.
• It'll give long term disruptive editors much more leeway to engage in tendentious editing during the time the involved administrator is absent.

Past similar proposals which have failed consensus:

• Wikipedia:Admin neutrality: This past proposal was completely focused on disallowing administrative action on users, with whom the administrators had been engaged in content disputes. The current new proposal does not talk about restricting administrative powers at all; but only focuses on editing powers of administrators.

▒ Wirεłεşş ▒ Fidεłitұ ▒ Ćłâşş ▒ Θnε ▒ _―Œ ^{♣Łεâvε Ξ мεşşâgε♣} 04:10, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Discussions could be held from here:

So if I revert and block some kid who scribbles "u poopface" in an article, I'd be prohibited from editing it? Seriously? Often it's when we revert vandalism on an article that we get caught up reading it, and then edit and improve. That's one of the fun things about Wikipedia. (Hey, that's the first time I ever got to write "u poopface"!)

Also, I often block vandals spray-painting graffiti on articles on my watchlist -- out-of-the-way topics for which typically I am the main, or only author. This new rule would prevent people like me from making further improvements to these articles. It would be a waste of time to try to find another administrator to make blocks or protects for me (in fact, if this were implemented, I'd just ignore it, and continue cleaning up the messes and improving the articles, and no one would ever notice). Maybe you are thinking of high-traffic articles on hundreds of watchlists? Antandrus (talk) 04:27, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We work it the other way around with WP:UNINVOLVED, which permits an admin to edit an article, but not take admin actions on it of a controversial nature. MBisanz ^talk 04:28, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There is no need whatsoever for such a policy. As noted by others, I will never avoid an article I have to protect over vandalism, while the community already reacts strongly to administrators who use the tools despite being involved. Frankly, I find this to be a solution in search of a problem. Resolute 04:34, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking something along the same lines: Is this a problem? I understand how it's possible for someone to come in as an uninvolved admin, issue a few blocks, and then become involved. But does it happen? And if so, does it happen in such a way that the person who issued the blocks (or whatever the action was) retains that "administrative" air, as a now-involved editor? Guettarda (talk) 04:39, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Warning a user is not an administrative action. Beyond that, administrative involvement is about content disputes, not all editing is a content dispute. An administrator must never use their tools to gain an advantage in a content dispute, that is where the line is drawn. Uncontroversial actions like blocking vandals are not an issue. Chillum ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 04:36, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This proposal does not seem needed and would just be another way to "get an admin in trouble." Now we would have to remember how long out "timer" is on every article we've preformed an admin action on or... what happens then? The admin gets blocked for making a constructive edit because they didn't wait long enough to make it? No thank you. Beeblebrox (talk) 04:44, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• It does seem as though we really need to do something about cleaning up the behavioral guidelines on content disputes. I don't at all think that this is limited to administrator behavior, but the simple fact is that our content dispute policies/guidelines and dispute resolution processes are simply piss poor at present.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 04:44, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• While I am certain the proposal was made in good faith, I do think that such a policy is actually contrary to the spirit of WP:AGF in that it presumes admins to be incapable of exercising appropriate judgment in the absence of explicit rules. Furthermore, it would most certainly have a negative impact on the project in because it would prevent admins - who are after all merely editors with extra responsibilities - from making many necessary and beneficial edits. (As with Antandrus, I end up watchlisting, following, and subsequently editing many of the articles where I've had to act in an administrative capacity.) --Ckatz^chat_spy 04:49, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• This policy is a good idea and necessary. It will prevent ill-feelings, and avoid the unnecessary appearance of impropriety. Once, while participating in a heated dispute about a page, I saw the page locked down by an administrator, who then continued to make edits to the page. The edits were minor and mostly uncontroversial, but they created bad feeling in the other group and a sense that they were preemptively sidelined. This was totally unnecesary. It was as if the administrator had said, I'm going to lock you out, and keep on working on my version, and you can't do anything about it. My version is the one that's right, its decided. The fact is, minor edits can wait until the dispute is over, admins should not have special exemption, especially if they were the ones that locked the page. In answer to Antandrus' argument about vandalism, first, this policy isn't meant to apply to non-controversial administrative actions like reverting obvious vandalism, also, if you revert a page and protect it, and/or block a user for vandalism, do you really need to edit that same page? I think doing so when the edit is not obviously vandalism will lead to unnecessary ill-feelings. LK (talk) 05:55, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lawrence, unless I'm mistaken, this proposal doesn't address the problem you've described. There are already strict measures in place to prevent admins from locking a page and then using their access to continue editing. This proposal would prevent an admin from editing even when all other editors were able to do so. I'm not sure if that affects your position regarding the proposal. --Ckatz^chat_spy 06:24, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• someone apparently reverted my edit to the absolutely ridiculous section title, which is fine, I'm certainly not going to try changing it again. It would be helpful if the author of this section or whoever it was who reverted back to the paragraph as a section title would come back and change it to something more reasonable. Thanks.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 06:47, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I would oppose this policy. The way it is worded would mean (as others have pointed out, and indeed as I pointed out to the submitter on their talk page a month ago) that admins couldn't edit articles on which they have done anti-vandal work (e.g. semi protection). And if it were re-worded to exclude such actions, then it wouldn't be necessary anyway. If an admin fully protects a page and continues to edit it, then they would be in breach of the page protection policy. Either way, this policy is not needed, and would hamper admins in their main work: beign editors. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 08:41, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• I agree with several other commenters that this is an unnecessary and counterproductive prohibition. The problematic case is not for an admin to take some administrative action related to a page and then start editing it (excepting page protection, which is already covered). If an admin has closed an AFD, blocked a vandal, etc., and notices in the process of doing so that the article could use some sprucing up, that's a good thing. The problematic case is when admins who are already active editors on a page use their admin tools to further an editorial agenda, which is already addressed in WP:ADMIN. --RL0919 (talk) 17:20, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Hate to pile on, but I have to agree with the general sentiment here. I thought admins were already trying to avoid using the tools in relation to vested editing, or content disputes. As long as they're blocking vandals, and not people who disagree with them over editorial matters, I don't mind any admins editing articles they've policed. --King Öomie 17:45, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - unnecessary creep. And for my own part, I rarely edit articles unless I land on them for some other reason. So I might show up to fulfill a semi-prot request for an article, read through it, and notice some slight copy-editing to be done. So I'd be prevented from doing that? No thanks... This policy will either be too broad and prevent good faith edits, or so specific as to be collapse under its own weight. –xeno^talk 17:49, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: it seems clear that this proposal isn't going to fly. If this section is to serve any further use, it might be for a wider discussion about the perceived problem. Rd232 ^talk 18:11, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose, I don't see how preventing a bunch of good faith edits by admins is going to improve the pedia. Like others above I'm easily distracted from admin stuff by the opportunity to do a gnomish edit, if you don't want me fixing typos and dab links can you explain why such edits are a problem? ϢereSpielChequers 18:18, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Although I am the one who proposed the suggested policy, I should say that I have to agree with many of the points that have been mentioned above by administrators/editors opposing the policy change. At this juncture, I therefore suggest that WP:UNINVOLVED be changed appropriately in due course to reflect a policy that leaves less grey area in defining when an Administrator will be considered uninvolved with respect to editing on an article where he/she has undertaken an administrative action. ▒ Wirεłεşş ▒ Fidεłitұ ▒ Ćłâşş ▒ Θnε ▒ _―Œ ^{♣Łεâvε Ξ мεşşâgε♣} 18:50, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

While you are welcome to propose a change on that policies talk page, I don't think it is a grey area at all. I think the criteria for involvement is well defined. Chillum ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 18:52, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You still seem to have it somewhat backward, as MBisanz mentioned above. Becoming "involved" with an article is a result of editing the article and prevents them from taking admin actions on it. Mr.Z-man 19:47, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thing is it depends on what is going on. There are areas where the amount of time taken to resolve in an admin's mind what the content situation is behind a problematic behaviour then makes them an "instant" expert on some tiny area - usually meaning they can see both sides and propose a neutral wording. Sometimes the admin is mediating, sometimes they just see an unfelicitous wording. Anyway, we could discuss changes to WP:UNINVOLVED but we should avoid WP:INSTRUCTION CREEP. Rich Farmbrough, 20:42, 19 January 2010 (UTC).[reply]

• Changes suggested > I've suggested the subsequent changes to WP:UNINVOLVED here. If you might wish, kindly put in your viewpoints there. Thanks ▒ Wirεłεşş ▒ Fidεłitұ ▒ Ćłâşş ▒ Θnε ▒ _―Œ ^{♣Łεâvε Ξ мεşşâgε♣} 04:50, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Bad idea, if I revert and block vandals, this shouldn't prevent me from improving the article. For example, just because I blocked User:Jdigitalbath, does this mean I should be limited in any way in editing the article on Tuberculosis? Tim Vickers (talk) 21:11, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. Many administrators first encounter articles as a result of administrative action, and become involved in editing after the encounter. The proposer has gotten it backwards. It is more sensible for an admin to refrain from using administrator powers after being regularly involved in editing it, except in certain egregious situations where admin involvment is required and obvious. Admins exercise such restraint already, so there is no need for the proposal. ~Amatulić (talk) 18:13, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So, as I understand it, the biggest issue people have with reliability of Wikipedia is vandalism. A lot of vandalism is never caught because a lot of pages haven't been watchlisted. IIR, the median time for vandalism to be caught is a few minutes, but the mean time is like two weeks. This is a result of vandalism on high traffic pages being caught immediately by bot or watchlister, as opposed to to low traffic pages being ignored for months. It seems to me that this issue could be addressed by having some way of counting the number of (active) editors watching pages and creating an "orphanage" to identify pages with few or no editors watching them. I don't think this would greatly increase the amount of work required to maintain a watchlist as the pages that would be getting watchlisted that aren't already are very infrequently editted, so the edits to check would be small in number. Is this a possibility? AzureFury (talk | contribs) 06:28, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Someone already beat you to that idea: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_51#Recent_unwatched_changes_straw_poll and Bug 18790. It just hasn't been implemented in the software yet. --Cybercobra (talk) 07:32, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Aw. Here I was thinkin I was being helpful. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 07:50, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The list of unwatched pages (that is, pages that are not on a user's "watchlist") is kept secret for obvious reasons. There is a tool that can be used to see how many people watchlist a page, but the toolserver admins restricted public visibility of how many watchers to 30 or greater. That is, if there's a dash in the "watchers" column, it means there are less than 30 users who have that on their watchlist. Only a small list of people outside of toolserver admins can see unrestricted data using this tool. Lately there's been much talk about using this data, but watchlist data isn't a godsend. Killiondude (talk) 08:41, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

95% of vandalism comes from anons... we could reveal that data only to autoconfirmed users? AzureFury (talk | contribs) 09:01, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cue "spy"/"wolf in sheep's clothing" user/vandal who edits properly enough to become autoconfirmed and then publicizes off-wiki every unwatched page they can find. --Cybercobra (talk) 09:56, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are there really people that determined to vandalize? It seems like you think there's a Guild of Vandals out there tapping their fingers while sitting on a throne made of malicious edits. When I tell people I edit the Wiki, they usually think it's pretty lame... Anyway, people can already write whatever they want on unwatched pages. If we knew which pages were unwatched, the number of unwatched pages would be less and the total number of vulnerable pages would decrease. The system would be more deterministic. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 10:06, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there are. And BTW autoconfirmed status requires only 4 days and 10 edits. Raw watchlist numbers are too dangerous for widespread use. Rd232 ^talk 11:04, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think any of this would make Wikipedia more vulernable to vandalism than it already is, but whatever, I'll let the experts debate about it. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 14:12, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if it could be added as a privilege like rollbacking? Which could very easily be taken away if the user starts to vandalize. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:54, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We can safely assume that any user who gets the privilege would not vandalize with the same account, or would vandalize having already saved (and possibly published) a large list of target pages. Pseudomonas_(talk) 15:21, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have never seen anyone so determined to grief or vandalize. Do you have any examples of someone working that hard to disrupt the encyclopedia? AzureFury (talk | contribs) 01:35, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, just peruse the pages at WP:Long term abuse. –xeno^talk 01:38, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like all those people are POV pushing specific topic articles. They aren't sniffing around for unwatched pages so they can vandalize them. These are not the people that would be targetting the list of unwatched pages for vandalism. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 01:43, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There aren't many examples of this specific M.O. because typically the data has not been available. If you don't think a vandal would seek a low-profile page to vandalize were the data available, you clearly underestimate the garden-variety vandal. –xeno^talk 01:47, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What I find hard to believe is that you would have someone SO determined to vandalize, that they would make X good edits over Y weeks to make an account capable of accessing the list of unwtached pages so that they could then find an unwatched page and then add "penis" to it. That's not how random vandalism works. The idea with the unwatched list is that you would cut down on the random vandalism. Sure you can beat the system. You can beat the system we currently have. I just don't think anyone would be willing to put in the effort to vandalize random pages. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 01:54, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Rollback isn't so hard to get and I worry more they would add sneaky vandalism (stuff than RCP and hugglers don't pick up on) than a simple penis or whale's vagina. –xeno^talk 01:57, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

They can already do that, though. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 02:01, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

But they lack a list of targets they are sure no interested parties (who would notice an edit that looked legitimate but wasn't) are watching. –xeno^talk 02:05, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So this vandal that you are worried about will make so many good edits, file a request for access to the unwatched list, and then make sneaky malicious edits that no one will really notice on extremely low traffic pages. It's probably safe to say that these people will be in the extreme minority, if any exist at all. I think the potential benefits of benevolent editors having access to the unwatched list well exceeds the potential (and IMO unbelievable) harms. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 02:16, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have to agree with AzureFury -- the likelihood of anyone doing this is so small as to be inconsequential. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 03:06, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• One (probably pie-in-the-sky) possibility is to somehow use the toolserver data to create a Special:RelatedChanges style link/list (for example, see the link I posted at WP:VPM#Easy tool to help). I guess that access to the underlying list itself would need to be restricted somehow, but something like that ought to be doable. We really should also push for some sort of implementation which causes users who have not logged in for X number of days to be considered "inactive", thereby having their watchlists ignored, as well.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 21:53, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • You're pretty much rehashing the existing bug comments. --Cybercobra (talk) 02:07, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Am I? Well, it never hurts to reiterate support, within reason of course. That, and I completely gave up on anything coming from bugzilla quite some time ago. This isn't the place for that sort of conversation, though.
      — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 02:59, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• as an admin I'd like to have such a list available-- like I think most admins I add sensitive pages I come across to my watchlist, and this way I could spot others that need it, and also avoid duplicate watching that is already being done by several others.--if 15 people are already doing it, they don;t need me; if only 2, they might. DGG ( talk ) 02:06, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Personally I have doubts even about allowing admins unlimited access to that raw data. It would only take one rogue admin (or compromised admin account) for a list of unwatched pages to get published somewhere: and that list would be too large, I think, for the problem to be easily dealt with after the event. Rd232 ^talk 14:44, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are so many problems with this scenario. A rogue admin or compromised account is already problematic so this would be no change. It's ironic that you should bring this up as there are currently a bunch of admins calling for sanctions against you for your use of the PROD tool. The unwatched list would hopefully be changing over time so if one person accessed and published it, after some amount of time, the pages that were published would no longer be unwatched. Further, let's suppose the unwatched list is published. Who will see it? How many people are going to visit a site to see the list of unwatched pages on Wikipedia? What fraction of those people are going to be vandals? Again, any system we can come up with is beatable if someone is determined enough. The system we currently have is beatable, and is beaten constantly. The idea with the unwatched list is to give benevolent editors the advantage and make it more difficult to vandalize. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 16:30, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"sanctions against you for your use of the PROD tool." - what? you're either talking about someone else or using the plural in a rather confusing way. Anyway, your rhetorical questions basically amount to "how bad can it be?" I'm telling you, it can be bad. There are some really determined vandals out there, and this would be a godsend to them - and trust me, if it was released, they would find it. The risks are too high. PS "A rogue admin or compromised account is already problematic" is of course true; except most of the problems can be handled by desysopping and undoing their actions; whereas a leak of unwatched data would be a lot harder to deal with. Rd232 ^talk 16:47, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You've got a similar username as a certain other, currently high profile, administrator, who just last night put himself into the limelight. So, yea, AzureFury was thinking of someone else.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 21:20, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, my bad. I was randomly browsing contributions and I viewed a huge discussion on deletion of unsourced BLP's. Anyway, I was discussing this earlier. It's true that there are determined vandals, but they're determined to vandalize specific pages. Do you believe that someone would put in the effort to vandalize random pages? Do we have any examples of this? AzureFury (talk | contribs) 01:50, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Long-term abuse (most famously willy on wheels) and Wikipedia:The motivation of a vandal. Rd232 ^talk 02:41, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Like I said, most of the long-term abusers are people vandalizing specific articles. Willy is an interesting example...did he ever have to make legitimate edits in order to make those changes, such as moving pages, etc? AzureFury (talk | contribs) 02:56, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, once "autoconfirmed" was implemented, Willy had to start creating "sleeper" accounts, ie. letting an account sit unused for a long time, do just enough edits to get autoconfirmed, then start vandalizing. I seem to recall one spot where he had several of these sleepers at once, and it took a while to get things under control again.

Also, if you don't think anyone would be that determined to vandalize, you've never visited 4chan or Something Awful. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 00:44, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Y Already exists - Seems you guys are talking about Special:UnwatchedPages. But since the list of unwatched pages is sensitive data that special page can only be viewed by admins. If you are an admin, then Special pages lists a whole bunch of extra pages that only admins can use. (Some of them would be very useful for a vandal...)

But currently many of the special pages aren't updated, and Special:UnwatchedPages is one of them. From what I have seen in discussions elsewhere the reason might be this: When some servers crash the rest of the servers get overloaded. As a quick fix the Wikimedia sys-admins (the people that manage the servers) then often disable such special pages to save some server cycles, since those special pages do pretty heavy database runs each time they are updated. Unfortunately the sys-admins tend to forget to enable the special pages again once all the servers are up and running again. Sometimes they also disable a special page since they have done some system change that breaks the special page, but they haven't gotten around to update the code for the special page.

Oh, and the idea to create Special:UnwatchedPages seems to be a perennial proposal here at the Village pumps. But as I said, it already exists. By the way, bugzilla: has a number of requests for adding more features to Special:UnwatchedPages.

--David Göthberg (talk) 03:02, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's a perennial proposal that is always accepted and never implemented, heh. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 10:45, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was aware of that page's existence, but I've never seen anything listed. From what I gather from the talk page, it seems to be down more than up over the last few years. Correct me if my deduction is incorrect. Killiondude (talk) 04:56, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have seen it working some months ago. But yeah, now that you mention it, it seems to mostly be down. I have seen several comments at some bugzilla requests that seem to say that Special:UnwatchedPages is disabled at the bigger Wikipedias for performance reasons, but that it is still up and running on the smaller Wikipedias.

Come to think of it, this kind of service usually is better handled by the people on the toolserver, so we should probably ask them to make a similar service. Of course, it would have to be limited so only admins and other trusted users can see it. I think that we need more than just the admins to take care of the unwatched pages and adding them to their watchlists.

This is exactly the kind of thing that could have good use of a "trusted" user group between autoconfirmed and admin. Such a group should only be assigned manually, say by two admins marking the user as "trusted". That group could include stuff like rollback etc.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:25, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There is a similar tool on the Toolserver - watcher.py. It doesn't provide a list, but it can provide the information for any page, so its somewhat more useful than a list that only covers a small fraction. Anyone can use it, but it won't give numbers for <30 watchers unless you're listed here and you have a TUSC account. Mr.Z-man 18:14, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Which is what I mentioned near the top of this thread (except my comment didn't instruct how to gain full access). :-) Killiondude (talk) 06:38, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Okay I propose the following:

• A bot runs and automatically semiprotects all BLPs created within the past seven days. It runs weekly. Thus the default state of any BLP is semiprotected. The first run the seven day prerequisite is turned off so all BLPs are captured.

• Any editor can request unprotection, and any admin can unprotect with a statement that it will then be on their watchlist. Thus we can liberally unprotect articles with editors vouching for and fixing content.

• Thus we have a functioning de facto flagged revisions, where admins can readily unlock articles for editing by anon IPs. Hopefully the emphasis at WP:RFPP will accommodate this, with more requests for unprotection and less for protection.

• This is a compromise and practical way forward, where we can protect unwatched BLPs in one go, and try to accommodate IPs.

• We are not creating yet more discussion boards and are attempting to work with what we've got.

1. Casliber (talk · contribs) 01:52, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
2. --Cyclopia^talk 02:16, 21 January 2010 (UTC) - This would be a true solution, really addressing libel and vandalism, without any unnecessary removal of content.[reply]
3. V = I * R (talk to Ohms law), as long as the "liberal unprotection" is actually liberal and not simply lip service.
4. Yes, this actually addresses the problem, instead of exploiting it as an excuse for mass deletion. Hence it will no doubt attract little interest from the usual crowd who claim to care about the "BLP problem"; however, it can have my support.--Kotniski (talk) 07:42, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
5. This looks like a sensible solution to a serious problem JoJan (talk) 08:53, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
6. This also establishes a "revert to" version if an article is severely vandalized. Rather than having to nuke an article entirely, we have a base entry to build from. Horologium (talk) 14:28, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. I refuse to support anything that has a class of articles semiprotected by default. No matter how "liberal" unprotection is. Protection should always be a last resort option, after blocking and after trying to solve the problem if possible. Never a default. -Royalguard11(T) 03:39, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Really? Anything? How about userpages? Nobody has any business editing your userpage except you; least of all an anonymous IP. I think all userpages should be semi-protected by default. While I'm neutral on this specific proposal, your blanket statement seems a little extreme. ~Amatulić (talk) 00:02, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. Protection without review is bordering on worthless. Mr.Z-man 03:52, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
2. Oppose It will make an individual admin responsible for the contents of a BLP, whether they have edited it or not. It could lead to issues of ownership for that admin over the article. I would like to see better protection of BLPs, but this is not the answer. Martin451 (talk) 05:59, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
3. Accepting default semi-protection in any form starts us down a dangerous path. Equazcion ^(talk) 15:01, 21 Jan 2010 (UTC)
4. I don't think we should start with the assumption that an article is violating policy and then eventually(perhaps never) get around to showing it does not. Given our premise as an encyclopedia anyone can edit then I don't think we should prevent IPs from editing until we have a good reason to in the specific case. Protection should not be used like that in my opinion and our best practices seem to agree. We should respond to BLP problems promptly, but we should not treat all BLPs like they are a problem. Chillum ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 16:05, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
5. It will not work. BLPs cannot be protected by half measures. Semiprotection raises the cost of doing vandalism so the insufficiently motivated will not do it, neither will a random passerby be able to undo it. What are left are the more dedicated folks out to get LPs, which are sophisticated, or at least motivated enough to break through semiprotection's very weak barriers. You'll need to full protect BLPs if you want to get anywhere. There are times when something is worth exactly the same as nothing. This is one of them. --Tznkai (talk) 16:49, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
6. Oppose This is not in any way de facto flagged revisions, because you need to go ask an administrator for permission before editing. How many non-autoconfirmed editors would even know how to do that? No, this is the same as permanent semi-protection of all BLPs, which is too harsh. Permanent flagged-protection of all BLPs, that would be a good idea that doesn't prevent IPs from editing, including fixing libel. --Apoc2400 (talk) 15:21, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. Sometimes IPs remove libel. Chick Bowen 02:24, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

   True, but anything is better then certain bad actors around here starting a deletionist/inclusionist civil war (although, it's probably too late now...).
   — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 02:37, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

2. Sounds good in theory, but slightly bureaucratic and it adds a lot of likely un-needed work. Instead the devs should get a good and loud nudging to get flagged revs up and running. NJA (t/c) 08:54, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
3. Potentially a good idea, but I suggest that we look at what any "unintended consequences" might be, first. I would suggest, instead, that all such articles, rather than be "semi-protected" be given a header stating "This article has not been reviewed for accuracy" which would accomplish much of what appears to be the goal (note that this also would apply to "unreferenced BLPs" and thus allow editors time to add references for notable people, and actually Prod or AfD the un-notable ones. Collect (talk) 15:22, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What does this plan to solve? It's obviously a well-intentioned and reasonable proposal, but I don't think it addresses our main concern: stale, unsourced biographies. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 02:19, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It is prospective so that large numbers of BLPs are given some form of protection from wandering IPs, and hopefully significantly reducing vandalism. By using it as above, it also acts as a flagged revision, with the RFPP board serving as a central place where articles can be unprotected and watched while they are edited. Julian it is not the unsourced that is the problem, but the damaging material. This helps with all BLPs. Everyone is focussing on unsourced BLPs, but there are stacks more with maybe one or two inline references for which a large chunk of article might be problematic. There are many angles we can approach this from, and this is just one to at least slow down future vandalism. Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:28, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Stale unsourced anything aren't a particular concern. Libel is the concern with BLPs; being unsourced is a correctible defect like with any other article (and staleness isn't a problem while we have no deadline).--Kotniski (talk) 07:45, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See my suggestion above regarding semi-protection. Also note that, as far as I can tell, WP has not had any libel suits under US or Florida law, which are the only applicable laws. In an earlier discussion regarding BLPs, Mike Godwin sent a missive telling us not to make policies which showed any implication of recognition of other laws (as a matter of WMF concern). Collect (talk) 15:25, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are IPs even the main source of BLP problems? I thought it was more about sloppy editing(ie repeating rumors, quoting unreliable source etc...) Chillum ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 16:09, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In lieu of the BLP deletions, I consider our current FlaggedRevs proposal outdated and passed by by reality. Instead I propose we immediately adopt the german model. Reasons

1. It requires no developer work to make the specifics from our original request possible. This is much kinder on Aaron who is doing a lot of work to make some rare situations possible in the FlaggedRevs extension, that will likely only be used for what was gonna be our test period. A wast of development effort if you ask me.
2. It is in the interest of our BLP articles
3. Why do we need a test if if it's already clear that BLP will trump everything ? Statements by arbcom members and Jimmy Wales clearly indicate a full endorsement of the BLP deletions. Some of those deletions might have been prevented if we had adopted the german model 2 years ago. To protect people against slander and to keep the Wikipedia growing, we clearly also need FlaggedRevs going into the future.
4. Why should we want to limit the test/usage of FlaggedRevs to biographies, if the rules and concerns of BLP are not limited to biographies ?
5. Why do we need metrics on the test phase of FlaggedRevs, if this is clearly the way we are going ? What are we gonna do? Reverse position on BLP issues if it affects our readership too much? Seems unlikely.
6. Why do we need to wait for interface improvements ? The usability team is always working in parallel, why should this part of the software be any different ?

I think that counters all of the reasons that have caused our earlier calls for immediate deployment of flagged revisions to be ignored does it not ? Focus on making sure it is stable enough for en.wp and let's just run that code. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:32, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. Oppose. This is impractical, because we have too many articles. Ruslik_Zero 19:30, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
2. Oppose for the same reason Ruslik0 does - between the number of articles we have and the level of editing, we would either have an enormous backlog of unapproved edits, draining our volunteer editors' time and in practice often denying anonymous users the right to edit, or else we would have an enormous number of edits approved without scrutiny, causing potential harm to the encyclopedia and (again) denying anonymous editors the right to actually fix the problems caused by approving harmful edits. Most likely we would have the worst case scenario - both at once. — Gavia immer (talk) 19:50, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
3. Strong oppose. First, political reasons: it took a lot of argument to reach the current plan, and I'd prefer to not have to repeat that. Second, the English Wikipedia is by far the largest wiki. Even if the rate of backlog is acceptable on dewiki or Wikinews, there's no guarantee it wouldn't be a problem here. Third, now that we've committed to the current plan, it makes little sense to abandon the development work that's been done to further it. I share the concern and frustration at the delay, but I'm sure that a more usable, more open version of FlaggedRevs is in the interest of long-term use and adoption. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 17:07, 26 January 2010 (UTC) (iPod edit)[reply]

   Thanks for the background. I take it this and this is what people are currently working towards, based on this March 2009 poll. Correct? --JN466 21:40, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

   Yes, that is the current general plan, and that poll is the one that confirmed the current plan. There was an earlier poll on using a more German-like implementation of FlaggedRevs, but at around 60% support it was deemed that there was insufficient consensus. The flagged protection and proposed revisions (FPPR) poll was closer to 80%, which is generally taken as enough of a supermajority to be a rough consensus. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 17:59, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. Support. I don't see what the number of articles has to do with it – while the Germans may have fewer articles, they also have far fewer editors.
   • Note that people who approve harmful edits would very quickly lose their user rights enabling them to approve such edits (it is not enough to have a registered user account, you need to be registered as a "trusted" user, and that privilege can quickly be withdrawn if it is undeserved).
   • Approving a new article version after edits by IPs or novice editors takes just as long as looking at the diff when the article pops up in your watchlist -- it just adds a mouse click to the process to confirm that you have seen it ("sighted" it). Really not a problem.
   • Articles that have had edits by IPs and novice users and need sighting show up with a red exclamation mark in Recent changes, and in your watchlist. You click on "Sight", get a diff, and click OK if it's okay, or on revert if it's vandalism. Having the red exclamation mark immediately helps you tell apart edits by recently registered accounts and trusted users.
   • The Wikis that have the system (Wikinews; German WP and 3 or 4 other WPs) do not experience backlogs. --JN466 11:26, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

First off, before anyone blows a gasket, this is a fairly tongue-in-cheek suggestion (I say "fairly" because I do sort of wish that something like this would happen). But, I'm quite aware of the perennial proposal which sort of addresses this.

Anyway, first I have a bit of an admission to make: I'm a horrible speller (realistically, if I'm not being self-deprecating, I'm probably slightly above average, mostly because I've become a decent typist over the years). It really makes little, if any, difference to me if the word describing "The spectral composition of visible light" is spelled "color" or "colour". To me, I personally learned "color", those who I have the most day-to-day exposure to use "color", and most importantly my (en-us) spellchecker doesn't flag "color"! Realistically, while it may bug me for a short period of time to start seeing "colour" all over the place, it would be easy enough to get used to if it weren't flagged as a damned misspelling.

So, with the above established, I'd like to humbly suggest that we develop a "en-wp" dictionary, distribute it to anyone and everyone who will take it, and use that here. The hell with ENGVAR, we'll write our own variation and stick to it! While we're at it, we may as well lobby for the banning of Webster's Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary as well. I think we've all had enough of their divisive shenanigans! Who's with me?
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 22:39, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea /in theory/, but of course, who will decide if it's color or colour, and how much bitching will there be that 'their' way is the better way? ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 23:03, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, there's an easy solution to that, we simply develop our own spelling convention, just like our buddy Noah Webster did! For example, instead of "color" or "colour", we spell it "colur"!

In all seriousness, something along these lines is likely to happen "in the real world" eventually you know, if it's not already underway. The web being a written medium, which brings those of us in various disparate parts of the world together, simply has to have a profound impact on the development of the language and writing in particular. Of course, thre's quite a bit of "dwell time" to things which are put online, and that put together with the fact that we as people are naturally somewhat averse to change means that there certainly won't be a change overnight, and there likely will never be too drastic a change (for example: old English to modern English). A change will surely develop though, and likely as not to Webster's more "Americanized" spellings. I don't say that out of any sort of national pride or anything like that, it's just that "our" words our shorter (nevermind the fact that the 'net and media are flooded with American writing...). I can hear people howling about that through my computer, putting down "txt spk" and the like, but the fact is that groups of people will always seek the path of least resistance, and fewer characters to type is that path. Anyway, I'm not sure what prompted this interest in the subject, but I figured that I may as well talk about it. *shrug*
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 07:01, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If the object is to create a dictionary which could be used in spellcheckers so that valid variants would not be flagged, the answer is simple, include both (or all valid) variants. Both "color" and "colour" would be included. Indeed, simply taking a good US English and a good UK English dictionary and merging them (and removing dupes) would be a good start. We might want to add Wikipedia-specific terms like "ArbCom" and "copyvio" that come up on talk pages a lot. DES ^(talk) 16:38, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For contemporary events in the news, there is often a tag at the head of the article, stating that the article covers a contemporary event and that information may change with the passage of time. In the same way,does any one think it may be worth having a similar tag at the start of articles on radio or television series about to begin a new series? In my home country of the United Kingdom, on BBC Radio Four, a new series of The Write Stuff is going to begin this week (i.e. the week beginning January 25 2010) and it would be nice if there were a tag at the head of the article stating something like: "This article is on a programme about to begin a new series. Information may change as the series progresses". ACEOREVIVED (talk) 00:02, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's a great idea. I also think that it's a great idea to add an optional link to Wikinews so that relevant stories could be linked to from the mbox as well. Both of those ideas seem to meet with resistance though, just so you're aware of it. I'd go ahead and create the template, just don't be surprised when someone sends it to TFD is all.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 07:05, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

{{future television}} used to do this, and it was deleted: Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion/Deprecating_"Future"_templates. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:33, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Theoretically, the current event templates are for use on articles where information is changing rapidly. I can't see a situation where the progression of a television show's season would necessitate this. What I could see though, is if there is a main article for the show, and a child article for the season, using something along the lines of {{Current sport-related}} to point to the child article for updated information. Resolute 15:54, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that any series that is still running is in that sense a current event. Mangoe (talk) 17:57, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not really sure why this would be necessary would be most programmes. The only purpose I can see for it is if the TV programme's plot summary is in lengthy prose as oppose to an episode by episode table. This would mean that the prose is subject to change, whereas an episode table means the information can be edited for each episode, meaning the template is unnecessary. TomBeasley (talk) 12:28, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The New York Times is one of the more widely cited sources on Wikipedia, partly because it's freely accessible. Recently it was announced that this will change from 2011, so efforts should be made to use WebCite to preserve access to key sources for ongoing content verification and expansion. This will be particularly necessary, perhaps, for old NYT sources (pre-1990, let's say), where there are less likely to be good alternatives online.

Is there (or should there be) some wikiproject or taskforce to take this on? Just spreading knowledge of WebCite would be a start, eg making a WP:Wikipedia Ad and spreading that around. Rd232 ^talk 16:14, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

see also User_talk:WebCiteBOT#URGENT:_NY_Times_and_WebCiteBOT. Rd232 ^talk 16:16, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Somebody ought to negotiate free link access to NYT from WP.--Jarhed (talk) 07:53, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There's a discussion that has started at Wikipedia talk:Requested moves#renaming a template regarding which process would be best to use for moving/renaming Templates. Participation there would be appreciated.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 16:30, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When a new user signs up and

1. edits their user page (unlike drive-by vandals), or
2. goes to their "my contributions" page

a set of links should be temporarily added to the bottom of that page. Those links would include simple, easy maintenance tasks and HowTos that can help them get up to speed as a contributing editor.

I've had a login here for years. It's been like pulling teeth to find anything worth editing - I don't go wandering through random stuff that I'm not interested in without someone saying "Hey, this needs spelling or grammar checking, source verification, bit rot checking," etc. So my login has sat unused.

It's not that I'm incapable, but I'm not going to drill down into a bunch of trivia to try and find a single page to edit. I have yet to find even a list of pages that need checking, if there is one! The only reason I found the "Village Pump" is that a friend told me that was what the suggestion board was called here. Otherwise I would have spent even more years not knowing it was even there!

The presence of simple yet neglected task lists for new editors to do, along with HowTo guides, would help people to feel useful and contribute more.

RavanAsteris (talk) 03:57, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite what you're asking for, but there is User:SuggestBot. --Cybercobra (talk) 06:01, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reply To Cybercobra - While User:SuggestBot may eventually be fairly useful to me, it presumes that I have already done enough edits to have a statistical pattern of past contributions. I guess I would consider that to be a good intermediate tool, for those with an already established passion who were looking to expand their horizons. Also, it is not easily available to the new editor.

Another general neo nitpick: I consider "users" to be people who come and look things up and read them - they "use" the encyclopedia. Editors are people who write or "edit" pages. I realize that the terms aren't used that way here, but it's screwy from a functional descriptive POV.

--RavanAsteris (talk) 21:49, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is a good idea, I think - to provide suggestions automatically to new users. It links with a suggestion I made to allow users to request random task suggestions: Wikipedia:WikiProject community rehabilitation/Idea/RandomTaskCompetition. It's perfectly doable, but someone has to do it... Rd232 ^talk 21:56, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, in the mean time, there's Wikipedia:Maintenance. Rd232 ^talk 21:57, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Community portal and {{opentasks}} are more appropriate. Fences&Windows 01:39, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm always partial to Wikipedia:Admin coaching/Other options. MBisanz ^talk 01:55, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You know what'd be easy for beginning editors? Reviewing pages created by non-native english speakers. I found a few on some obscure battles between Russia and Japan, or about Cuba that had many small errors throughout. Pages like that can greatly benefit from the ear of a native english speaker. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 03:26, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Now this sounds cool! It's low hanging fruit, and it doesn't require a lot of jargon to do. The drawback is what happens if the new editor is also not a native English speaker? --RavanAsteris (talk) 04:00, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

*shrug* Have other options? AzureFury (talk | contribs) 04:02, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, give the person several choices. Hence, a list. --RavanAsteris (talk) 08:03, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a good idea, but it does require tailoring to the individual. I believe that many editors come here because of a particular interest and putting them in touch with the most relevant project is a good start; Perhaps the list could have a tailored search box to make it easy to find projects that they are interested in? Other easy entry areas are Wikipedia:WikiProject Red Link Recovery, and one I'd like to see started - a project to add pictures to articles where the English language article lacks pictures but there is an article in another language version that has a picture. For some new editors who come with a more academic but less technical background perhaps reviewing articles at wp:FAC would be a good start. For others installing wp:Hotcat and starting at Category:Uncategorized pages might be possible - though I suspect that for most this would require quite a familiarity with our categorisation logic first. ϢereSpielChequers 13:58, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The editor above me is onto something with the search function. I know for a fact that I hardly ever edit any articles other than those related to comedy and comedians as that is what I have an interest in. If I happen to be browsing and find something in another category that needs editing, I will of course do it, but I don't really actively seek editing outside of my field. For this reason, I think it would be ideal to add a function into which a new contributor could add one of their interests and be directed to the appropriate category page or project. TomBeasley (talk) 12:25, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The ability to find tasks or a list of tasks suitable to interest and skill/comfort is part of the problem that I had. Wikipedia is a HUGE place, and just trying to pick an interest, much less what to do within it, is like looking for a particular shaped needle in a large haystack full of oddly shaped needles. Hence, a list of stuff like the suggestions above, and the cool search box concept. Maybe make it part of the welcome page thingy. --RavanAsteris (talk) 09:53, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Nearly 2 years ago it was agreed not to use place-holders (File:Replace this image female.svg and File:Replace this image male.svg). CON was split over how to proceed as some wanted to wait till a replacement could be devised this has not happened. These should be removed from wiki post haste Gnevin (talk) 09:13, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

From:Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Image placeholders

Use of placeholders in a nutshell: Use of these placeholders in neither encouraged nor deprecated. Although many editors object to their appearance they work for the intended purpose.

— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 17:45, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The text on the images themselves says different

There was significant opposition to the use of images such as Replace this image male and this one. 35 editors (66%) agreed with the question, "placeholder images should not be used at all on the main page of articles", however, only 14 editors (45%) agreed with any particular recommendation.

Gnevin (talk) 23:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, if you want to fight that fight, go ahead. If you're right then you shouldn't have any real issues with WP:FFD... I don't really care one way or another, personally. Although, thinking about it, the placeholders are not only nice to have, but their "ugliness" actually serves a purpose in that it ought to prompt some people to upload (appropriately licensed!) images to take their place.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 23:11, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have a major issue with a FFD. As the image is on commons and as far as I know the only legitimate reason for deletion from common is copyright issues. Gnevin (talk) 23:24, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So what can we do here? Add them to the blocked images list? --Golbez (talk) 02:00, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Humm... I hadn't realized that they're on Commons. We should probably have a discussion about that in particular; with a wider focus though (not limited to only those images). You're correct of course that they shouldn't be deleted from Commons simply because we may not like their use here. I'm not really sure how to accurately express this point, but while these particular images, and similar ones, can live on Commons because they have a compatible license, their content is distinct in that they're... more functional? They're not really content on their own, in the sense that an image which could potentially become a "Featured image" is "real content". As long as that sort of distinction is clearly made, somehow, then I wouldn't have any real issue with a policy stating that those images should be avoided in most articles here in en.wikipedia. (on the other hand, I'm somewhat hesitant to sanction the creation of yet another item of busywork for some editors to immerse themselves in...)
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 10:28, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also commons doesn't care about the likes of WP:OI. If its free its ok Gnevin (talk) 11:24, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Right, and they shouldn't either, which I touched on above. I think that my main point here is that, as far as I'm aware of, we don't have any formal policy on dealing with the use of Commons content here, and we probably should. We simply need to be cognizant of the widespread nature of such potential policy. We can't create policy stating that these specific images aren't allowed to be used any longer (well, we could of course, but that would be a mistake because it would be overly specific, and people will take that as a wider policy statement regardless of any intent).
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 11:32, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't FFD use to mean File for Discussion? Can't we modify FFD and block unsuitable commons images, basically extend the current FFD process rather than create an entire policy for commons images ? Gnevin (talk) 11:38, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The end effect that a new policy would cause would naturally be a change in the FFD process, I'm sure. From an organizational point of view, I'm personally leery of "backdooring" new policy by changing the manner in which certain processes operate. The manner in which a potential policy would affect Wikipedia is clearly demonstrated by this very discussion, which demonstrates to me that we're talking about new policy here rather then some relatively minor process wonkery.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 12:19, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How do you suggest we proceed? Gnevin (talk) 13:23, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I just posted a note on the talk page at WP:FFD. Hopefully someone there will come and comment. You're free to create Wikipedia:Use of Commons content if you'd like, of course (with the appropriate {{Proposed policy}} tag at the top, obviously).
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 14:13, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is blocking of commons images possible for a technicial point of view? Gnevin (talk) 14:58, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

From a technical standpoint, we could upload a 1x1 transparent pixel under the same name, but I don't think the elimination of these images is as cut-and-dry as the original post states. The consensus seemed to be to deprecate the use but not to eliminate them where they exist. See also: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive552#Massive AWB use to remove image placeholders. –xeno^talk 15:03, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lets put the original suggestion on the back-burner for now and pretend we've a commons image that we've 100% agreement to remove but it isn't copyvio how do we deal with it Gnevin (talk) 16:04, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't follow. We could bot remove it or as I said put in a single transparent pixel on the Wikipedia page with the same name as the commons image. –xeno^talk 18:38, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

←I'd say that it should simply be removed from any use in the article namespace (other namespaces shouldn't be a concern at all, here). I don't think that we should pick out specific images/files which shouldn't be used, although that's one possible approach, but we ought to develop a category with clear inclusion criteria. Adding a hidden maintenance cat to the File namespace page which holds the image would facilitate tracking. I think that the English Wikipedia page for a commons file can hold our own categories for the file, but if not I'm fairly certain that we could coordinate with Commons in order to create an appropriate category there.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 16:54, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Any category system would be open to massive abuse,unless the page was fully protected after and bot knew only to remove files from the category and the page was fully protected Gnevin (talk) 18:34, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

humm... this seems to be coming out of left field, can you explain better? Correct me if I'm mistaken, but it sounds like you're saying that if people were to disagree with you adding the category to an image and they removed it, you feel that it's your right to judge them as abusing the system somehow. Protection doesn't exist to resolve content issues, after all.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:12, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No I'm not saying I'd judge them . I though you where suggesting that after a FFD like discussion ,we'd place a Category:Barred commons image on the wiki image page. We would a bot which would maintain to ensure the image wasn't used after the FFB (File for Barring) discussion had been completed. Now for the system above to work we'd have to page protect the image page Gnevin (talk) 22:13, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is exactly right - if there's solid consensus to remove an image but the image itself isn't intrinsically bad, then just go around and remove all instances of it in article space. Deleting files (or templates, etc) in order to remove editorially disputed content is a bit inefficient, and not really what FFD is designed for. Shimgray | talk | 19:07, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Removing the back links is fine until the file starts to pop up again and again and again. Why have WP:OI and other policies and guidelines if we can't remove original images which by there very nature would be copyright free Gnevin (talk) 22:13, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A master summary template (which I don't particularly like) has been created to take up a huge piece of real estate on every page that covers a specific political election (e.g. New York City mayoral election, 2009 or United Kingdom general election, 2005). On many of these templates, there are one or more rather unattractive "No free image: do you know of one?" placeholders (see for example, Syracuse mayoral election, 2009). I didn't follow the original discussions referred to above, so I'm not completely clear on the issues involved, but would they have any bearing on placeholders for pictures that may not even yet be in Wikimedia Commons, as opposed to pictures that have been removed for copyright or usage reasons? —— Shakescene (talk) 07:13, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I assume that you're talking about {{Infobox Election}}? This started by essentially advocating for the removal of all instances where File:Replace this image female.svg or File:Replace this image male.svg are being used here on en.wikipedia. However, since those images are located on Commons, this discussion has morphed into a discussion on handling the use of images from Commons in general, which is a wider issue which I think is worth discussing regardless. So, in the case of Syracuse mayoral election, 2009, those placeholders would likely be removed from the infobox.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 12:33, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Would it make sense to convert the lowest level sections of the Wikipedia:Requested articles tree into included templates (much as the way the Peer Review section is now set up). That way those of us with a particular interest in certain subjects can just keep a watch on just those templates, rather than having to watch the entire page? Thanks.—RJH (talk) 20:27, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hello?—RJH (talk) 23:47, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The proposal: Allow trusted and established users who have a keen understanding of what are and what are not Reliable Sources (their past involvement would be evidence) an additional user right (akin to 'autoreviewer', or 'rollbacker'...) called rs-reviewer. RS-Reviewers would be responsible to involve themselves in discussions on issues raised on the reliable sources noticeboard. They would have the additional responsibility to ensure that RS issues on the noticeboard, in general, are resolved within a week, and at the maximum within a fortnight. They would also have the additional power to enforce the changes that are so discussed, on the specific article in question.

The genesis of the proposal: Currently, the reliable sources noticeboard - presumably the most important forum for discussing RS issues - sees issues being raised and previously involved editors debating in the same manner as they would have done on the specific article's page. Many a time, due to an overload of discussions from involved editors, independent commentators - who would have left their comments initially - veer off the discussions. As a result, discussions do not reach a conclusive end. And in some cases, discussions just keep languishing on the noticeboard with extensive commentary. RS-Reviewers would work towards ensuring discussions are undertaken in a concise manner and would be able to mediate the discussions towards the appropriate conclusion within a given time frame.

Benefits:

• The moment editors to an article - who would have brought an issue to the reliable sources noticeboard - note that there is an RS-Reviewer amongst them, their discussions would (in general) be more specific, logical and rationally civic.
• If the RS-Reviewer sees that discussions are not being allowed to reach a conclusive end - due to (perhaps) tendentious discussions - he/she would be able to report the situation to an administrator who, knowing that the report has been raised by an RS-Reviewer, would be in a better position to understand the stance to take.
• Administrators would be subsequently able to give more time for administrative tasks (similar to what happened after introducing the 'rollbacker' system).
• Edit warring on specific articles would also reduce, due to such a formal mediation by designated RS-Reviewers, on the noticeboard, and due to another reason given right below.
• Over time, RS-Reviewers will also involve themselves on talk pages of specific articles as neutral mediating entities working towards a consensus solution.
• Additionally, it would allow established users more involvement with the project (again, similar to what having the 'rollbacker' or 'autoreviewer' status gives) and further trust within the community.

How would RS-Reviewers be selected

• A centralised forum (similar to 'rollback' granting) would be set up, where established users would have to show administrators at least three instances of past involvement on the reliable sources noticeboard forum or on specific article's talk forums, where their comments worked towards consensus with respect to issues related to reliable sources. Once an RS-Reviewer power is granted, a tag would appear alongside the username in the link on user rights. RS-Reviewers thus selected would also be allowed to upload a standard template that announces they have RS-Reviewer rights.

Past similar perennial proposals: Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Hierarchical structures talked about creating different kinds of administrators. Although the suggestion here is not that, it might be seen as some to be that, therefore have listed the link. ▒ Wirεłεşş ▒ Fidεłitұ ▒ Ćłâşş ▒ Θnε ▒ _―Œ ^{♣Łεâvε Ξ мεşşâgε♣} 08:02, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds to me like basically you're saying, give certain people a "hey, this person is officially sanctioned as knowledgeable about RSes, so listen to them!" indication, which really rubs me the wrong way. Seems pretty against WP spirit to me. It also doesn't seem to grant any actual powers. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 15:11, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Solution in search of a problem. If discussion is veering off-topic then mention it and try to get discussion back on topic, you don't need a special title to do this. If dispute resolution is needed, we have a dispute resolution process already in place. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 18:13, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Don't see the point. We have admins as they use tools, not to make them special wise rulers. Why do we need to say that certain editors know everything on RSs? Fences&Windows 20:36, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So basically its a new user right with no actual technical tools or abilities attached to it, but with the power to essentially override a consensus and enforce their own view. And the proposal is to give this out for making 3 useful comments on a board that gets that many new threads every day? I'm not quite sure which part of the proposal I like least. Mr.Z-man 22:42, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This proposal strikes me as well-intentioned but misguided; it is contrary to the core values of Wikipedia to endow any user with "more say" than the next. Shereth 22:52, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It strikes me as, so to say, unconstitutional, in the sense: inconsistent with our core principles. Like the 'established editors' and so on. The lack of uninvolved editors to help in dispute resolution is indeed a real and persistent problem, but this is not a way to solve it. Cenarium (talk) 23:11, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This reminds of point two in the Wikipedia:Wikiness essay.. regarding "You're not smarter than everyone else".. Good reading.. the entire essay is.. -- œ^™ 23:40, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I guess the issue is not about giving another group of established editors any additional tools but with respect to giving them powers to (in?)formally mediate into the reliable sources noticeboard as many a time, discussions continue to be as obfuscated on the RS noticeboard as they generally are on the article's talk page. There is, however, a third-party opinion forum available that editors can use currently. This third-party opinion, I expect, is more or less used for the same purposes that I am mentioning. So is the reliable sources noticeboard. However, I have no issues with not giving the additional tag of an RS-Reviewer to the editor, in case it is seen as not adding to the solution. ▒ Wirεłεşş ▒ Fidεłitұ ▒ Ćłâşş ▒ Θnε ▒ _―Œ ^{♣Łεâvε Ξ мεşşâgε♣} 03:25, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Unnecessary community division; solution in search of a problem. We're not Citizendium and have never had a problem with not having official Experts, I don't see why we should start now. Vive liberté, égalité, fraternité! --Cybercobra (talk) 06:03, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lol :-) ▒ Wirεłεşş ▒ Fidεłitұ ▒ Ćłâşş ▒ Θnε ▒ _―Œ ^{♣Łεâvε Ξ мεşşâgε♣} 03:13, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Quite a few if not most articles use Rotten Tomatoes to show readers how well (or badly) a movie has done. The thing of it is, movie ratings often fluctuate so quite often someone has to edit the ratings (yesterday it was 25% now its 27%). My suggestion is this: instead of constantly editing the percentage number, why not link directly to the Rotten Tomatoes page for the movie and just use a term like 'poorly rated' or 'moderatly well rated' As an example: 28 Days Later:

Reception

The film was a considerable success at the box office and became highly profitable on a budget of about £5 million ($9.8 million). In the UK, it took in £6.1 million ($11.89 million), while in the U.S. it became a surprise hit, taking over $45 million despite a limited release at fewer than 1,500 screens across the country. The film garnered around $82.7 million worldwide. Critical views of the film were very positive; the review site Rotten Tomatoes rates it 88%. On Metacritic it received a 73 (out of 100) based on 39 reviews.

Doing it my way it would look like this:

---

Reception

The film was a considerable success at the box office and became highly profitable on a budget of about £5 million ($9.8 million). In the UK, it took in £6.1 million ($11.89 million), while in the U.S. it became a surprise hit, taking over $45 million despite a limited release at fewer than 1,500 screens across the country. The film garnered around $82.7 million worldwide. Critical views of the film were very positive; the review site Rotten Tomatoes rates it high. On Metacritic it also recieved a very positive view.

---

...or something like that. Then we wouldn't have to constantly 'fix' the numbers, in effect they'd be self-repairing. HalfShadow 01:21, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We don't include inline links to external sites in article text. The way to solve this problem is for movie editors to use "as of" dates when writing the text; the difference between 25% and 27% isn't worth changing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:43, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely not. Inline external links should be avoided at all costs regardless, but especially in this sort of usage pattern. This makes Wikipedia inappropriately reliant on external web sites, of which we have absolutely no control. I don't knock the underlying sentiment, but this is not the way to go.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 01:42, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Fluctuating success rates are an issue across many article types. A more pressing need for something like this would be stating how profitable a business is, for example, as that's a more frequent and wide-ranging fluctuation; and we don't throw up our hands in that case and say the information changes too frequently for us to keep up. Directing readers off to an external site for frequently-changing information seems like the beginning of turning Wikipedia into a link farm, rather than an information source in itself. Equazcion ^(talk) 06:38, 30 Jan 2010 (UTC)

I'm in consensus with what others have said here. I feel that using "as of" is an appropriate enough indication to either prompt someone to update it or to inform the reader to check for themselves whether this has changed. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not simply a portal by which to find information from elsewhere. TomBeasley (talk) 12:22, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As it currently stands, it is unclear as to where new additions to MediaWiki_talk:Spam-whitelist should be placed. At the bottom of the page the EDIT link gives you? Or above the next level 2 heading. I propose creating a standard template similar to that used on the page used for reporting vandals for admin attention, which will be something like the following:

{{{1}}}
*Page it will be used on: [[{{{2}}}]]
*Reason for request: {{{3}}} ~~~~

This will result in a format something like

Address to whitelist

• Page it will be used on Page to be used
• Reason for request: <reason here> Rich^(Contribs)_{(Talk to me!)} 21:18, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

It will create a standardized, easy to read format that will still allow admins to comment on it, by using second level bullets, etc, and will also avoid the problem of the additional level 3 headings. The actual talk page will need examples of usage, but this should be trivial, as it can be based on the previously mentioned vandalism reporting page. I'd go ahead and start implementing this myself, but I'm not sure how appropriate that is on a page intended mainly for admin use. Rich^(Contribs)_{(Talk to me!)} 21:18, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've created an example of what I mean at User:RoadieRich/whitelist request, and a testing page at User:RoadieRich/Test Whitelist. Other testers and comments are appreciated. Rich^(Contribs)_{(Talk to me!)} 21:34, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Most of the requests we get on the whitelist are from newbies and spammers who quickly screw up the page due to lack of knowledge on wiki markup. I guess this is a good idea as it may reduce the amount of screwing up that occurs (and hopefully reduce the number of bad faith requests as it forces the spammers to come up with a reason why we need the link). MER-C 02:37, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good, comments made on template talk page about formatting. DES ^(talk) 16:11, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Posted on the whitelist talk and WT:WPSPAM. MER-C 11:05, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I like this idea a lot. I often scan through the whitelist requests and it is often quite fiddly to see what the actual reason for whitelisting the page is. This uniform system would make it so much easier for the admins and for the people requesting. TomBeasley (talk) 12:19, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've reached what I consider to be a final prototype of the template at User:RoadieRich/whitelist request. I'm not sure if the {{error}} is appropriate for the missing argument, and also, whether it should test the two arguments (page and reason) or just the reason argument (as it does at the moment), and it's considerably less than perfect, but I'm now opening it up to the floor for improvement. Should I just go ahead and move it to the template space? Rich^(Contribs)/_{(Talk to me!)} 00:31, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• To be honest, I was looking at moving the whole thing out of MediaWiki talk namespace to Wikipedia:Blocked external links, but haven't had time to process it. Stifle (talk) 19:50, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Guys,

I wrote a bot to resize images in Category:Non-free Wikipedia file size reduction request. There has been some controversy on how the bot should opperate. Right now the bot works as such:

• If the image's longest side is greater then 400px and the aspect ratio is greater then 1/3:

• Resize image so that the longest side is 350px using the Mediawiki resize algorithm (I.E. [[File:Foo.jpt|350px]])

The bot is in trial, but I would like some more community consensus before I proceed. The discussion is at the bot's request for approval

Thanks, Tim1357 (talk) 06:21, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. What would you think to having a site notice up for Britain Loves Wikipedia? Something like:

Britain Loves Wikipedia - a free photography competition - is running in 20 museums across the UK throughout February. Join in, take photos, win prizes!

One concern, I guess, would be that this would only directly apply to 10% of the people that see it - but that's a fairly large percentage. It would of course be nice if it could be geolocated so that only British users could see it, but that isn't currently possible. I know that Wikipedia:Geonotice exists, but that appeals to a different audience than this (regular users cf. occasional visitors), and this is an event that would appeal to both really.

I know that this is a bit unusual, but I figure it's worth discussing. Mike Peel (talk) 12:35, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I say go ahead and do it, with one caveat: I'd ensure that the message was geolocated, somehow. While it's interesting to me that the Brits are doing this, as you essentially pointed out yourself there's no easy way for those outside of Western Europe to actually participate. I thought you guys used some sort of geolocation targeting for the fundraiser?
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 14:31, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, someone at the launch event today was from the US. ;-)

The fundraiser was a bit different - it was displayed to everyone, and when you clicked on it it was geolocated to determine the next page that would be visited. To do geolocation here would mean doing it on every single pageload, which would probably take the site down unless the WMF put some money into preparing it. I have filed a bug report requesting this, though.

So, the question here is: can we run a UK-specific sitenotice with no geolocation? Mike Peel (talk) 18:56, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, if it's really impossible to geolocate site notices, then that's that... I still think that it should be run, as long as the notice doesn't last for more then, say, a couple of weeks. Also, be sure to use the same CSS Class as the fundraiser ads did so that those of us who have bothered to disable those with the gadget still receive that benefit.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 19:07, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'll assume that no objections == consensus, and request this again later this evening... Mike Peel (talk) 21:34, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There's recently been an outburst (I'd say epidemic, but I'm trying to be neutral here) of "petitions" started in order to address a few controversial issues from one perspective or another. I think that we ought to... well, I don't want to say "outlaw" them, but I can't think of a better term. I imagine that if we could get some wide support for such a stance that we could develop a policy and then MFD the dozen or so existent petitions.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 14:41, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking along the same lines. I'm not a big fan of petitions (at least on Wikipedia). It doesn't seem constructive to me, to have a place where only support (or opposition) to a proposal can be stated. In fact it seems contrary to the general Wikipedia spirit. Proposals should be decided based on discussions where all sides can participate, rather than being open to influence by "political pressure", so to speak, of a bunch of one-sided petitions. Equazcion ^(talk) 15:20, 31 Jan 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia: Petition to Outlaw Petitions ? :) Tim1357 (talk) 15:25, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps all the "petitions" could be renamed "discussion" or "think tank" or similar, and a section for opposition added? Those who created the pages don't own them, and I agree with Equazcion that a list of only those supporting something is useful. ╟─TreasuryTag►Counsellor of State─╢ 15:39, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is when a page is created that does not allow for opposing views then it ceases to seek consensus and instead become a campaign to one point of view. I say if you want to do a petition print it out and go stand on the corner, Wikipedia is run by consensus not popular opinion. Any admin worth their salt will give zero credibility to any process that ignores consensus, so these petitions have meaningless results. Chillum ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 15:46, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Most of the petitions that I've seen here recently were not trying to create a new policy or do anything that required a consensus, so getting a consensus on the page would be rather pointless. I don't see how a petition where opposers need to create their own page is significantly different from the standard RFC view/endorse model where opposers need to create their own view. Mr.Z-man 17:42, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well then at least people looking at one page can see all the views. With a one-sided petition, you just see one side of the argument and one list of supporters. This is quite foreign to the wiki way of seeking consensus based on all the relevant views and considerations.--Kotniski (talk) 17:50, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So if a discussion isn't trying to get a consensus at all, should that discussion be banned as well for being confusing? A petition is not at all foreign to the wiki way of seeking consensus, because a petition is not seeking consensus. Mr.Z-man 17:56, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's basically the problem -- that a petition is not seeking consensus, yet it is an attempt at getting something to change anyway. Change happens through consensus, so if you try to do it another way, that's... bad? I think, anyway. Equazcion ^(talk) 18:03, 31 Jan 2010 (UTC)

It seems that the target of most petitions (so far) has been the WFM, so I guess that the first question is, "is it appropriate for us to be demanding things from the WMF?" I think that the answer there is "sometimes". So then, the follow up to that is "should those demands be made on a Wikipedia?", to which I would answer "No, their probably more appropriate at Meta, or completely off site". I've noticed at least one petition which is clearly targeted at fellow Wikipedia editors though, which is something that I've foreseen occurring for weeks, and is the main reason that I think allowing any of them to exist here on en.wikipedia ends up being inappropriate.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 19:14, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As far as requesting things from the WMF goes, the general rule of thumb is that global requests (something for all projects) go on meta and local requests (something for one site only) go on the site that's requesting it. Putting it on a 3rd-party site just seems odd. I don't see why it would be so much different if its more of a "demand" than a "request."

@Equazcion: "Official" changes, like changes to policies or articles happens through consensus, but that's not what these petitions (at least the ones that I've seen) are seeking. Wikipedia:Petition against IAR abuse is not asking for a physical change to policy, its making a statement. Putting that in the form of a threaded discussion would completely defeat the purpose. Wikipedia:Flagged revisions petition is not asking for a FR policy, we already have that, its asking the foundation to deliver on what they've already promised. Mr.Z-man 20:18, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'd agree that those examples seem fine. Let's confine this proposal, then, to those petitions that are attempting to influence a "physical" change. What sparked this proposal, I think, was this: Wikipedia:BLP semiprotection petition. Can we agree that this is the inappropriate use of a petition? Equazcion ^(talk) 20:29, 31 Jan 2010 (UTC)

←I like the three petitions mentioned so far as examples. The way that I see it, Wikipedia:Flagged revisions petition is a request/demand directed to the WMF, and Wikipedia:Petition against IAR abuse as well as Wikipedia:BLP semiprotection petition are directed more at en.wikipedia itself (and it's good to mention both here I think, because they sort of take opposite "ideological" sides of the issues surrounding BLP). I'll readily admit that the FR petition is specifically targeted towards en.wikipedia, but it is directed at the WMF. I understand the point made that Meta is normally about WMF projects as a whole, but I think that it would make sense to take discussion/requests/demands which directly addresses, or (as in this case) are only actionable by, the WMF and push them towards Meta; even if a specific proposal/demand may be confined to a single project at the time it is created. Making statements or demands of the WMF should inherently bring an awareness that the WMF is larger then any single project after all, and advocates should try to be aware that their proposals may have impact beyond their normal view. One thing that has bothered me for a long time is that distinctions between (mostly the English) Wikipedia and the Foundation have been "fuzzy" since Wikipedia's inception, and this seems like an opportune issue to try and correct that.

Petitions such as Wikipedia:Petition against IAR abuse as well as Wikipedia:BLP semiprotection petition are what really bother me, for the most part. Their existence is what several of us were worried about when the FR petition cropped up, but I think that we were shouted down for ideological reasons. For petitions such as this, there does seem to be quite a bit of general support that they are unwanted, which Chillum talked about above. I can see the need to handle this in two different ways, depending on whom is being addressed, which is why I wanted to make a distinction in the first place and offer a proposal to move some to Meta. I may be missing some problem because I'm the one making the proposal here, but this approach seems logical and helpful to me.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 21:13, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I just found this: Wikipedia:Petitions are harmful, which seems directly applicable here. I've added a link from the talk page there to this section, as well as adding a link from a few petition talk pages.
  — V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 22:23, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If they're not asking for a specific action, then they're not petitions, by definition. We could Rename this type to "Open letter", perhaps? People often add signatures to "open letters", and don't usually include "opposition" sections. This would seem to work for the IAR "petition"/"open letter", at least. -- Quiddity (talk) 23:52, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see how such distinctions matter that much. Classifying documents with essentially the same structure as either "Petitions" or "Open Letters" strikes me as being a bit pedantic in terms of this discussion (Incidentally, this is part of the reason why I avoided naming specific pages at first. I don't think we should allow ourselves to be bogged down in the issues around specific "petitions", here).
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 23:57, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So check this out, look what I did on this petition: I added my OWN "oppose" section. This is a wiki, after all. [1]. PeterbrownDancin (talk) 05:10, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've moved said section to the talk page; please see the resultant discussion here. --Ckatz^chat_spy 06:27, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Edit, "Moving "Oppose" section to talk page; this is a petition, not a vote"[2] Why wasn't a RFC opened about this yet? I am all for wp:equality myself. Everyone should have these support only petitions, (started by User:Scott MacDonald) or no one. Ikip 06:44, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And, now, we have the perfect illustration of why this proposal needs to be discussed.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 11:58, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell together signed one of the first petitions (open letters) to the world calling for nuclear arms treaty talks (the Russell-Einstein Manifesto), they were doing it in full knowledge that they were trying to use their own reputations as thinkers (10 of 11 signatories were Nobel prize winners) to advance their opinions over what they would obtain if they merely went to the polls and voted along with millions of other people who knew less about the issues. That is the nature of petitions. They are NOT “mini-polls” where one side is left out. They carry more information than numbers—they carry the weight of the reputations and social status of the people who sign them.

The importance of such petitions was so evident to the founding fathers of the US, that they included in the first amendment the right of the people “to petition the Government for redress of grievances.” Why was this important? Why couldn’t “the people” just vote the government out of office, if they didn’t like the way they were doing the job? The founders knew that there were times when a government could be deadlocked, but continue to move if small committees could decide on ideas put before them by virtue of their being supported by well-known and well-respected members of the community. Such things are a type of impromptu lobbying, but done by thinkers, not money interests, and not simply by weight of numbers on a plebiscite/referendum.

As I have commented on the TALK page of the BLP sprotection petition, I think that the governance structure of Wikipedia has long been broken. This is not surprising, as it is built on a model of decision making (small-group “consensus”) which never scales well. And no, it doesn’t scale well on WP, either. If we define “consensus” as a supermajority of 70%, it can sometimes be garnered on questions that essentially have only binary answers (an RfA, for example, with carefully self-chosen voters) but they don’t work well for complex problems in which there are as many ideas as voters, and the entire community is invited to vote. This is why all democratic countries are republics, also called representative democracies. None work either by direct democracy, or else by what WP calls “consensus.” Nor does WP make important decisions by this method—rather it runs on a vote of the Board of Directors of WMF, which is a very small group. And one which does not vote uniformly, either.

The US does not elect its leaders by consensus or yes/no supermajority (although Cuba supposedly does—a fact I recommend to those who think Wikipedia has stumbled upon the next advance in political theory). Even the second term victories of presidents Nixon and Reagan (49 states to 1 in both cases) had less than 61% of the popular vote. On more complex issues, such as health care for the last 20 years in the US (to take an example), the system can be effectively paralyzed by the numbers of people with ideas for solutions, none of which can garner consensus or even a supermajority. Thus, even with broad agreement that something must be done about the problem, nothing has been done about the problem (which continues to grow).

If the US republic system can be nearly busted for complex problems, WP is even more busted. The present BLP fiasco, in which 175 new BLPs on mostly-unknown people are created each day with nobody to read them, is an example. The public knows this is a problem, but WP cannot even begin to agree about what to do about the problem. This proves that the system does not work, for BLP is a very serious moral and ethical problem—perhaps the most pressing that WP faces.

The present petition to semi-protect BLPs so that only name users (4 days, 10 edits) can change them, is very modest. And yet, it has not been able to be acted upon by the WP community. The present petition aims to use the reputations of its signers to get this problem before the WMF board, which is small enough that it may be able to reach some type of consensus to take at least this much action (I hope some kind of opt-out clause can also be eventually added). So far, the petition has been signed by a steward, a former arbitrator, and one member of the WMF board. I hope to gather more influential signatures.

Does this bypass the “community”? Who is the community? I believe where BLP is concerned, the stakeholders extend far beyond WP’s active editors, to the entire population of people who stand to find themselves one-day subjects (or victims) of BLPs.

These people are bypassed already. Nothing WP editors can do will change that. The WMF board, however, can change it. And should.SBHarris 08:00, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You're basically saying you don't believe in Wikipedia's longstanding rule that discussion and consensus are the sole route to making changes. Debates about the practicality of consensus aside, it's nevertheless how we do things here. I don't see why your having become disillusioned with it should mean you get to do things your own way now, and in project space no less. Equazcion ^(talk) 08:38, 1 Feb 2010 (UTC)

Speak for yourself, please. Unlike you (so it appears from the above) I never had any illusions that “the sole route” to WP making changes was “consensus,” so I’ve never had any chance to be “disillusioned.” I have been here long enough to see what happens when discussion gets embarassing, as for example in the great pedophile userbox wheelwar. That lasted 4 days before Jimbo summarily desysopped 5 admins and closed it all down, effectively making the policy. The arbcom ended up voting Jimbo unquestioned “ultimate authority” on doing things on WP. Do you really believe that Jimbo’s decisions, forced on others at the point of a block, represent “community consensus?” No, I’m not interested in pedophilia, I’m only interested in the example, which I was around to see (you weren’t, not having arrived yet). Please don’t tell me how “we do things here.”

I know very well how things are done. The actual process, whether you choose to acknowlege it or not, is rather like a rope tug-of-war game over a mud-pit. When groups are small, sometimes one whole side loses. With larger groups, or when the rope has many directions to pull, usually the game goes on interminably without anything getting done. Or else Jimbo and rest of the WMF board decide to act, and do so.

BLP, by the way, is another example. Things are not happening by “consensus.” On Jan 21, MZMcBride opened an RfC about BLPs. The RfC tag for that appeared on every WP editor’s userpage. Who decided to do that? Who has the power to do that and who did that? Where was the discussion/consensus (d/c) to do that, please? A week later, the RfC was shut down, and now some single “uninvolved administrator” is going to digest it. Where was d/c for that? Somebody’s going to talk for me? To who? Who is this “Task Force” and who are they making recommendations TO? Did I miss the d/c in setting that up? If there’s anything worse than “no consensus,” it’s fake consensus. At the end of this, somebody will act on BLP policy, but you can be sure they’ll consult the WMF board and Jimbo for approval, since anything else would get them desysopped as quickly as the case above. So why pretend? Simply petition them directly. SBHarris 09:49, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So run the petition on their website (or in your userspace), and don't "pretend" that it represents the consensus of the English Wikipedia community (as a page in Project space should).--Kotniski (talk) 10:04, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• If you want to contend that the rest of us are only fooling ourselves, so be it. I'm not here to debate the effectiveness of discussion and consensus seeking on Wikipedia, or whether the effort is eventually thrown out in certain circumstances. To make an effort that doesn't even attempt discussion, just because you don't think it ever actually works, is not your prerogative here. If you want to start a discussion about how things work here and try to get Wikipedia to move away from the whole consensus "farce", as you seem to see it, you're welcome to try. You've already made the decision though, and have chosen to act on it. That can't be allowed. If users could simply act against any established practice they disagreed with, this place would work even worse than you claim it is now, I think. Equazcion ^(talk) 10:39, 1 Feb 2010 (UTC)

• The WMF has its own wiki site (as well as Meta, plus various special-purpose sites - I don't know why they like to spawn these things). It seems to me that any petitions addressed to the WMF board could be placed there, not here. If you want to do something here, then you play by our rules - namely that no-one owns a page (so it's not appropriate for a page to state only one side of an argument, unless the community has adopted that side of the argument through consensus), and we arrive at decisions through discussion (or at worst, polling between at least two options). --Kotniski (talk) 09:35, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm already on record at the petition page that opposers can voice their opposition on the main or talk page or anyplace they like, so long as it's orderly. Some moving of "opposes" to TALK was done there, but not by me, and nobody asked me. SBHarris 09:49, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Please consider joining the feedback request service. An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. Within 24 hours, this page will be added to the following list: Wikipedia policies and guidelines When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.

I propose that petitions (in view of their one-sided and un-wiki-like nature - see above discussions) not be allowed anywhere on Wikipedia except in user space. Any existing petitions to be moved to the user space of their originator. Please support/oppose/otherwise react.--Kotniski (talk) 09:43, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. OPPOSE. The purpose and function of petitions is given above and I'll not repeat it. Opposition on my own petition is allowed, so far as I'm concerned, and I've said that there on the TALK page. In that, it's little different from an RfC, while it's being constructed. At the point of delivery to WMF, the petition with supportive "signers" won't be in project space. A record of its supports and opposes will remain. Finally, petitions regarding en.wiki projects are appropriate to the en.wiki project space. The German Wikipedia, for example, long ago instituted flagged revisions for every article (including BLPs) which makes most of the discussion here pointless and irrelevant (and certainly make sprotection pointless). Why klutter up META with stuff that has no application to any non-English Wikipedia project? SBHarris 10:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

   Have you read the proposal? It says user space, not meta (though meta's another possibility). Since you refer to "my own" petition, doesn't that imply that it should be in your own space?--Kotniski (talk) 10:08, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

   No, it means only that I originally wrote it. If you mean to imply that I think I WP:OWN the thing by deciding unilaterally what goes on there and what doesn't, what remains and what doesn't, that's not the case (as you can see by the diffs). As I understand WP policy, I can't even do that for my own TALK pages or even sub/userpages. About the only thing we agree to give editors some degree of "control" over, is their own main userpage. Correct me if I'm wrong. [I've certainly seen enough complaints about people doing nasty and unwelcome things in their "own" subpages-- the argument was that they could do it on their own computer if they wanted total control; WP is NOT your notebook]. By the way, if you want to see any actual specimen of ownership of an article (although I cannot figure out by who) you should see the RfC page set up by the "Strategy Task Force" on BLPs. Apparently, the "Strategy Task Force" OWNs that entire discussion, and also how it's now to be digested and summarized for who-knows-who. Go figure. Perhaps that should be done in somebody's userspace also? SBHarris 10:22, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

2. Don't see the need. Deliberately misrepresenting or attempting to hide alternative points of view is already against policy. That applies to petitions, proposed policy, lists, the main page, The Moon etc. WFCforLife (talk) 10:35, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
3. Oppose Not only rule creep, it clearly fills no need at all. Collect (talk) 13:26, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
4. Oppose - Unnecessary new rules; I don't see a serious problem that needs solving here. I don't buy the argument they have got to stay out of the project space because they are one sided or don't revolve around the consensus model. Essays are also one sided and don't themselves either directly build a consensus and often don't reflect project wide consensus, but quite rightly many are in the project space. I also don't accept the rather simplistic argument that they are polls with the only option being support. Most of the time when editors object to an essay they simply write another with an alternative viewpoint, and that idea will likely be soon carried out with Wikipedia:Petitions considered harmful. Exactly the same process can occur in response to petitions. So at worse petitions are polls with the support and oppose sections on separate pages! As already pointed out however, many petitions are statements which aren't appropriate for a simple support/oppose polls. For example, with the anti-IAR abuse petition I doubt anyone is in favour of IAR abuse. A response petition could be something along the line of "Petition for liberal use of IAR to protect BLPs". Camaron · Christopher · talk 19:22, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
5. No real argument set forth for carrying out this proposal. What's the intention? Moving petitions to userspace won't make them go away. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 22:01, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. I can't support moving all "petitions" to userspace, because of Z-Man's point further up. Some pages that only state one point of view are rather harmless, IMO, like a page of "Wikipedians devoted to being polite to one another" (such things exist but I'm too lazy to find an actual example right now). In my mind the only problematic petitions are the ones that seek to apply pressure in a contentious debate. I'd support a proposal like that. Equazcion ^(talk) 10:44, 1 Feb 2010 (UTC)
2. Agreed with Equazcion.
   — V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 12:03, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. I wrote WP:Petitions considered harmful as a response to the recent spurt of petitions. In short, petitions (as they appear on WP) act like polls where you can only vote "yes". They are end up working against fundamental WP principles (WP:CONSENSUS, WP:DEMO, etc.). My proposed remedy is that petitions be discouraged, and any petition started be immediately converted into a poll or (preferably) discussion. Userification just moves the problem around; not helpful. —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 15:12, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would be very useful if maths and science articles listed their dependencies. e.g. Understanding of multiplication depends on understanding of addition. And in turn multiplication is a dependency of understanding exponentials.

If this system was applied to maths and science, it could be an invaluable aid to self-learning, curriculum design, knowledge management and analysis.

For example, if someone wanted to teach themselves trigonometry, the list of dependencies would tell them where to start. And the list of topics that depend on trigonometry would tell them where to go next.

And I reckoned, what better place to do this than Wikipedia?! Not only is it publicly accessible, and probably the most-used reference work in existence, but it is also possible for a machine to read it, and this hierarchy of knowledge could be used by third-party applications as an analysis tool.

--Norman (talk) 10:05, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• WP:SOFIXIT. If it's worthwhile your edits will remain.
  — V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 12:05, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  I doubt that such a deviation from standard practice would remain even if it were worthwhile. I think this proposal could even be considered a disclaimer. It's best to discuss it here first, IMO. Equazcion ^(talk) 12:09, 1 Feb 2010 (UTC)

  humm... I guess you might be right, depending on how exactly it's implemented. When I read this this morning I imagined a series of links simply being added as either hatnotes and/or in the See also section. If the planned implementation deviates significantly from that then yea, we should probably discuss it.
  — V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 23:49, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Surfing Youtube, I noticed this video celebrating the "Nate Kaeding Wikipedia hack." Two weeks ago, on January 17, in the 2010 NFL playoffs game between Kaeding's San Diego Chargers and the New York Jets, Mr. Kaeding missed three field goal attempts, and his team lost by 3 points. (Each field goal is worth 3 points.) During the game, two anonymous editors routinely noted this fact at 00:31 UTC on January 18. [3]. For the next 81 minutes and 200 edits, vandals raided this article with disgusting slurs and insults until NawlinWiki installed a 6-hour semiprotection [4] and shortly afterward Zzyx11 "[5] "Changed protection level of Nate Kaeding: Excessive vandalism: Increasing expiry time, since BLP vandalism due to fallout from an NFL playoff game has usually lasts longer than 6 hours" (emphasis added).

Probably thousands of readers visited the article during that hour and twenty minutes. They saw statements that make the Siegenthaler incident seem kind by comparison. For example (emphasis added):

• "like a fucking dumbass" [6]
• "Good Job Loser!!!!" [7]
• "ass faggot" [8]
• "farts and entertainment" [9]
• "Chokerville, Iowa native" [was "Coralville, Iowa") [10]
• "Nate Kaeding has been labled the biggest Pedophile, choke artist, catamite, penis licking pussy in the history of football." [11]
• "Is a damn fool" [12]
• "Nate Kaeding is a total fucking faggot bitch and I hope he dies in his sleep tonight."
• "Kaeding has also been known to wear womens lingerie before important games to help him focus on missing critical chip shots. Nate Kaeding is also Norv Turners lifemate." [13]
• '"Big cock choking Nate" and "Mr. choke"' (was '"Big Game Nate" and "Mr. Automatic"') [14]
• "ass raper" [15]
• Samantha Keading filed for divorce on January 17, 2010 on grounds that he is a LOOOOOSER [16]
• "He currently sucks penis in the back of the van." [17]
• "He was consequently fired after the game in the post game conference." (Actually not true; he is still on the team.) [18]
• "Battle against Shayne Graham" etc. [19]
• "After seeing that their fathers life was crumbling like buildings in Haiti, they [Mr. Kaeding's sons] filed for emancipation."
• "He sucked off his first guy at Iowa. And subsiquently became the gigantic faggot he is today." [20]
• "Currently Dog the Bounty Hunter and company have a bounty on his head by every Chargers fan in San Diego." [21]
• Mr. Kaeding's sons Jack and Wyatt are renamed "Choke" and "Gag" [22], "Suck" and "Choke" [23], "Epic" and "Fail" [24], "Jackchoker" and "Wyattchoker" [25]
• "In his free time he enjoys trying to have sex but missing his wife's vagina wide to the right and listening to gayass music like "Fireflies" by Owl City." [26]
• "Nate and his wife are already on a plane to Haiti to try and see if he can find a job there, since he just got fired for sucking more than a hooker on sunset strip!" [27]
• "He takes dildos up the ass" [28]
• "HE ALSO RAPES BABIEZ AND EATS THUM" [29]
• "After the Chargers' January 17th, 2010 postseason loss to the New York Jets, Kaeding attempted suicide in the locker room by hanging, but missed trying to kick the chair from under himself." [30]

To summarize: Within one hour after the game, our editors broadcast to the world that Mr. Kaeding was fired from his job, attempted suicide, relocated to Haiti, was a "pedophile"; and his wife filed for divorce, and his children filed for emancipation—all false and defamatory statements.

This must not happen again. This will not happen again. We will not allow it to happen again.

I make no apology for copying foul language onto the administrators' noticeboard, which thousands of family-friendly Wikipedia users read. I need to shock you to get you all to understand that thousands of family-friendly readers discover such disgusting words on our high-traffic articles. If you are not shocked, you will not be motivated to prevent a recurrence.

What shall we do?

Super Bowl XLIV ends exactly one week from the moment I write these words. I reasonably predict that one player or coach will do something unfortunate in this game. More than 100 Biographies of Living Persons are in grave danger of a concerted, unrelenting vandalism attack during and immediately after the game. To prevent vandalism from unregistered users, I request that all biographies listed on Template:Indianapolis Colts roster and Template:New Orleans Saints roster shall be semiprotected immediately for the next two weeks, i.e. one week before and one week after the Super Bowl. Mass semiprotection requests are typically declined, but this is just for two weeks, and the articles are indisputably high-risk during this period. Any significant new information may be added by a registered editor, or may be added to the Super Bowl XLIV article.

Note: it took me an hour to put this request together. In that time I could have done many other things to help Wikipedia (or myself IRL). I believe that enforcing high BLP standards is more important than adding individual articles. I ask the community of administrators to support and act on this request. Don't wait until the vandals have already hacked an article for more than one hour before you take action. Chutznik (talk) 03:33, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion was originally at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Semiprotection_of_BLP_articles_for_Super_Bowl_players.  Skomorokh  12:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose overuse of large bold text. Prodego ^talk 03:35, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Fine, I'll tone it down. Chutznik (talk) 03:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And I'm sure we can protect such pages if needed, how about we take a look at what is going on first though. Prodego ^talk 03:41, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think we already know what is likely to happen, we just don't know which player will get attacked. Best to protect all of them preemptively. Chutznik (talk) 03:48, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Support the gist of the proposal, to semiprotect the BLPs of these persons. Oh, and the overuse of bolding too. :) Note I was notified of this thread on my talk. Thanks C. ++Lar: t/c 03:51, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Support this proposal in principle. I saw this mentioned on Lar's talk page too. JBsupreme (talk) 03:56, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Support this idea, and believe we need to be prepared to do the same with other high profile athletes as we come up on the Winter Olympics. Our RC patrollers work hard, and edit filters are helpful, but articles that have both a high viewing rate and are at abnormally high risk for vandalism would benefit from situation-specific semi-protection. Risker (talk) 04:16, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose The policy is explicit: "Semi-protection should not be used as a pre-emptive measure against vandalism that has not yet occurred." We can easily and quickly apply semi-protection should vandalism occur. --ElKevbo (talk) 04:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ya, because that works so well, see the vandalisms listed above... how many nastyisms got through before semi-protection was "easily and quickly applied" in that player's case??? Do you plan to watch each and every player's articles on the roster, then? I plan to watch the game, not the articles. ++Lar: t/c 04:25, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• (ec) Commment: This should be discussed at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy at the very least and probably at the Village Pump as the policy reads "Semi-protection should not be used as a pre-emptive measure against vandalism that has not yet occurred, nor should it be used solely to prevent editing by anonymous and newly registered users." --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:25, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • why is this venue not a good one? ++Lar: t/c 04:26, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Because it's not solely up to admins to decide changes in policy. Discussions like these need a wider audience. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:28, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • This isn't a policy change. ++Lar: t/c 04:30, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • Oh yeah? You must have a novel interpretation of, ""Semi-protection should not be used as a pre-emptive measure against vandalism that has not yet occurred." --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:32, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
          • This is a fairly straightforward request to protect pages that are being vandalized. The only question for me really is will it be needed for those full 2 weeks, perhaps just the last few days, or maybe just during the game... Prodego ^talk 04:34, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
            • They're being vandalized right now? --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:35, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
          • NeilN: How much you want to bet I can't find at least one preexisting vandalism against each player on either roster? One prior vandalism is sufficient, under my interpretation of policy. Anyone willing to so certify (that vandalism was found by them for each player) at my talk, and I'll protect the whole lot. Also, as a note: [31] ++Lar: t/c 04:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
            • User space is not the same as article space as you very well know. If you protect the whole lot then I believe you will be misusing your tools to push your viewpoint that all BLPs should be semi-protected. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:44, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
              • If someone makes a good faith request to me at my talk I'll take it under consideration and act as I see fit. That's not pushing any viewpoints, it's using my judgment. You might not want to toss around "misuing your tools" so easily, were I you. However I agree, userspace isn't like articlespace. Users presumably know what they are getting into and if they don't want to have their userspace vandalised they can stop participating here and have the lot of it deleted. Users here can call on friendly admins to get their pages protected as soon as they start taking a bit of heat. BLP victims may not even know that they're being slandered or worse until they try to get on a plane, or get a job, or wonder why their reputation is sullied. And it's so EASY for them to do something about it too... if they take the natural first step of going in and fixing it, they likely get reverted and then blocked. OTRS is so easy to use too. Yep, you're right, userspace is nothing like articlespace. Why shouldn't we get all the advantages? ++Lar: t/c 04:55, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
                • Are you saying that two instances of vandalism would be enough for you to protect 40+ articles or each article must have a case of vandalism? Also, there's no reason why an IP should be editing my user page; there's plenty of reasons why an IP could be editing a BLP article. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 05:15, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Created a list of players this would affect at User:NuclearWarfare/Superbowl XLIV. Using Twinkle, it is possible to batch-protect all of these at once. You can also use this to see a recent changes feed for these particular articles. NW (Talk) 04:40, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • So far, it doesn't look like we need protection yet. Prodego ^talk 04:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I would agree. However, the moment that vandalism starts picking up on any of those articles, it is probably prudent to semi-protect them all. NW (Talk) 04:45, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I'm suprised anyone would favor Wikipedia policy over what will almost certainly be gross violations against living persons. RxS (talk) 04:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • So propose a change to the protection policy exempting high-profile BLPs - you'll get my support. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:54, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Like I said, I'm surprised anyone would value Wikipedia policy over easily foreseeable public slander. Why do we need to change policy before protecting a small group of BLP's that are at high risk? That is not a rhetorical question. RxS (talk) 04:58, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Policy at Wikipedia is descriptive, not prescriptive. If people consistently do the right thing, it becomes policy. Written policy often lags. If you think it's a good idea to do something, do it. If it sticks, it was. If it doesn't, don't do it again unless circumstances have changed significantly. ++Lar: t/c 05:03, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • First, because it's not easily foreseeable that that majority of articles will be vandalized - there's a reason why PP is not pre-emptive. Does anyone have any stats on what happened during last year's game? Second, there's talk about extending this to the Olympics and probably other high-profile events. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 05:07, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • Doesn't need to be the majority. All it takes is one edit identifying someone as a pedofile and real world damage can be done. Worst case, a Google spider comes along at the wrong time [32] and millions of people see it. There's no way that Wikipedia policy is more important than trying to prevent that. RxS (talk) 05:14, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: Policy states that pre-emptive protection should not be used. At no point does it state that it must not be used. The proposed timescale is reasonable. Mjroots (talk) 05:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, we have good evidence that there's likely to be plenty of vandalism. Whether or not this is a proper use of the policy, I don't know, but we can forget about the policy temporarily in the interests of preventing significant damage to the encyclopedia. Nyttend (talk) 05:16, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Anyways, I've posted a pointer to this discussion at the Village Pump which I should have probably done in the first place. For what it's worth, I support this proposal and think there should be an explicit exemption for high-profile BLPs in the protection policy. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 05:22, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: I made a slight change to the semi-protection policy [33] to reflect some of this discussion. RxS (talk) 05:34, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse (disclosure: I was alerted of this conversation on my talk). –Juliancolton | ^Talk 05:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. 1) Good idea, though probably not necessary to semi-protect until game day. Should protect the whole lot since we can't know prior to the game which players will be the most likely targets; 2) Risker makes a good point about the Winter Olympics, and we should probably apply some form of liberal semi-protection for those articles as needed; 3) The fact that this is being posted here is good as more admins will be attentive to these (possible) problems; 4) Approve of the change by RxS to the policy page on protection. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 06:34, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong support Great idea. As someone who watches a lot of sports bios, I know that the damage IPs do to them far outweighs the occasional good edits they make. We need to apply semi-protection more liberally to sports articles. It's not like the IPs are turning them into featured articles. When they're not vandalizing, they're fixating on things like scandals, embarrassing incidents, nicknames, relationship rumors, and video game ratings. Zagalejo^^^ 09:07, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • E - X - A - C - T - L - Y JBsupreme (talk) 14:31, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong oppose Sorry, this makes no sense whatsoever. We have thousands of underwatched BLPs which are not semi-protected and where sneaky and harmful libels can be inserted and no-one will notice. Those should be semi-protected in preference to these. The examples of vandalism cited are certainly embarrassing to wikipedia, but they are not libelous, as they are obviously abuse or lies and the reader will know that. That these articles will be highly-viewed during the competition is not an arguement to protect them, qhite the contrary - many views means that problematic material will be spotted and removed quickly. We urgently need to do something about low-notability and underwatched BLPs where bad stuff (believable falehoods) remains often for months. I'm in favour of wide semi-protection but these articles are not the place to start. Frankly, this just looks like the same "OMG they are American celebrities!" reaction which had us lock Sarah Palin and George Bush while Joe Soap was left open to all sorts. Semi-protect all BLPs, or start with the underwatched and vulnerable, don't start here.--Scott Mac (Doc) 15:17, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• If you'll allow me to make a comparison with which I'm sure you'll disagree (and perhaps take umbrage), your argument here strikes me as somewhat akin to the argument in the current BLP RfC (and elsewhere) that unsourced BLPs are not the real problem and therefore we should not bother doing anything with them. I disagree with both arguments. I do agree with you that "low-notability and underwatched BLPs" are the most problematic biographies of living persons and have said so repeatedly. But there are other problems, including people who suddenly make the news and are the target of smears for whatever reason, a problem because it comes at precisely the time when their bios are being most heavily read. Some times we can predict that (major sporting events are a good example), and it might be useful to alter protection practices and policy slightly to allow us to preemptively semi-protect in certain situations. Doing that does not preclude (or even remotely impinge upon) other efforts to deal with less high profile BLPs. Finally I don't think this has anything to do with Americans or non-Americans, or people who like (American) football or think it is not "special" (as one hockey fan suggests below!). I would support a similar approach for Olympic athletes as Risker suggested, or for players in the final rounds of the World Cup, and I'm sure for other events as well. It need not only apply to athletes either, it just so happens that the upcoming Superbowl is what led to the creation of this thread. -Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 21:16, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• I agree that other bios need semi-protection. I bet a lot of people supporting this proposal do. But it should only take a couple of minutes to protect the Super Bowl articles. It's not going to cause a huge drain on our resources. Zagalejo^^^ 22:06, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Overbroad, and will cause collateral damage as new editors see these articles and want to add content of value. If a single player fails so miserably and obviously as to cost his team the game, semi-protect that one article, and, while we're at it, where are flagged revisions? Hipocrite (talk) 15:31, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

PS - not from Lar's talk, though I have it watchlisted. Hipocrite (talk) 15:33, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Support The example above clearly shows that the vandalistic edits far, far outweigh any good faith edits by IPs, and these very edits put Wikipedia, BLP subjects, and editors at risk. We cannot take that risk just because a policy states that we shouldn't protect preemptively. I would say that common sense, and the need to protect high-profile BLP's overrules that part of the protection policy. The Thing // Talk // Contribs 15:34, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  WP:Petition against IAR abuse. Resolute 15:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  I also must note, as Mjroots has, that the policy states that preemptive protection should not be used. It does not say that it must not be used. The Thing // Talk // Contribs 16:57, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose 1. We don't pre-emptively protect articles. 2. Articles that do receive vandalism can be protected as needed. 3. Pre-emptive locking like this discourages new editors from participating. 4. To be perfectly blunt, football players playing in the Superbowl simply aren't that special. The current procedures will work fine. Resolute 15:36, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. Seems like a knee-jerk reaction to an unfortunate situation. It has been pointed out that pre-emptive protection is just not something we do. Shereth 15:53, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Reluctant support There's a whole load of vandalism that gets dumped on prominent sportspeople during and following big matches, predictably and reliably, of a level where if it had been going on beforehand we'd semiprotect, especially considering the increased visibility of the articles. An alternative would be to semiprotect reactively - to have an admin with the pages on watchlist who is prepared to keep an eye on them and take action rapidly if a wave of bad edits begins. Pseudomonas_(talk) 16:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as per Resolute. By the reasoning of this proposal we should also semi-protect all articels on major politicians during election season, and indeed on anyone currently involved in a high-profile event. IAR does not overrule policy. IAR simply stands for the proposition that consensus can overrule policy or can agree on exceptions. DES ^(talk) 16:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Support result: "This must not happen again. This will not happen again. We will not allow it to happen again." - Well, actually, it will happen again, and it will be allowed. Maybe not with super bowl players, but somewhere. Its petty vandalism. But I don't have a big problem with limiting BLPs to registered user edits. This proposal is more limited.--Milowent (talk) 16:51, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Support if generalized: This shouldn't be only about the big game. The proposal is a good idea, having a pre-emptive semi-protection guideline in general could be a good idea. In fact, let me start a little discussion on WT:PP (edit, oh wait, there already IS, nm that but still). ViperSnake151  Talk  20:56, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Narrow and Target The proposed timeframe seems overlong for all articles. I'm not sure we need to protect all articles for a full week before and after. Also it seems shortly after the game we could get a pretty good idea as to who would be prime vandal targets, both as "heroes" and "goats" and unprotect the rest. I think it's workable idea, but could use a little more scalpel as opposed to hatchet.--Cube lurker (talk) 21:05, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose one article was subjected to a spate of vandalism, which seems to have been reverted in minutes, and temporary semi-protection was applied not long after. This is not a sufficiently drastic state of affairs to overturn our long-standing prohibitions on pre-emptive protection, especially over such a large range of articles. As BLP issues go, "he is a loser" is actually very minor, because any reader can see that it's just childish vandalism. The real problems are articles which contain plausible-sounding negative statements about the subject. This is supposed to be the encyclopedia anyone can edit. Hut 8.5 22:10, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak support - The majority of this type of vandalism is not the real BLP problem and suggesting it is distracts from the real problems. I highly doubt that anyone is going to take seriously a statement that someone is a "total fucking faggot bitch." However, if it took more than an hour to notice and react to this level of vandalism, something is seriously wrong somewhere, and preemptively protecting likely targets until we can improve our detection and response for such incidents doesn't seem unreasonable. Mr.Z-man 22:29, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose doing anything special. The system worked perfectly here, so I don't see what the issue is. There was vandalism, it was reverted, the vandalism continued and so the article was protected. Proplem resolved, there's nothing left to see he, move along now, move along...
  — V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 23:19, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, we don't preemptively protect over 50 pages on the sole possibility that sometime, somebody will vandalize them. Change the protection policy first. Woogee (talk) 00:02, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Suspend replacing of ref by Template:r in citations

Please consider joining the feedback request service. An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. Within 24 hours, this page will be added to the following list: Wikipedia policies and guidelines When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.

The supporters of a newish template, {{r}}, have been replacing <ref> by {{r}} in citations of dozens articles - Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:R gives an up-to-date these articles. I object to the introduction of {{r}} without previous discussion in the relevant articles' Talk pages and in the guidelines about citations. I am also concerned that there is no proof that {{r}} will work with all of the many tools used for citation and editing, including bots. I include a statement explained these reservations at the bottom of this RFC, after the "Support", "Oppose" and "Neutral" sub-sections. You are welcome to add your own statement after this. --Philcha (talk) 17:00, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The proposition

The supporters of template {{r}} should not editing the use of {{r}} into any article until:

• all relevant policies and guidelines have approved the use of {{r}}.
• all tools / bots for maintaining citations had be proved to work as well with {{r}} as with <ref>.
• use of {{r}} in an article has gained active consensus, not just apathy.

Support (Suspend replacing of ref by Template:r)

1. (proposer of this RFC) --Philcha (talk) 17:00, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
2. I had never heard of the r template and did a little digging when I saw this. To me, that seems much more difficult to use and understand than the standard <ref ... /> formatting. As long as the MOS allows differing reference styles, no one should be unilaterally changing articles. Karanacs (talk) 18:01, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
3. Templates like these should be banned entirely. They introduce unnecessary complexity to an already complex system (wikitext) making it harder for new editors to learn and making it a constant learning process for experienced editors. They make it more difficult for bot and script writers to write programs that work consistently, and especially difficult to write scripts that work on other projects without lots of changes (fr:Template:R for example does something completely different). They also make it harder to import pages from one project to another (especially if there's a name conflict with the template). Adding another layer of templates on top of what's already one of the slowest parts of page generation (parsing citation templates) can only have the effect of making it slower. Mr.Z-man 18:04, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
4. We make it hard enough for new editors to grasp the html-ish ref and /ref bits -- this will be good for template folks, and a disaster for the rest of us folks. And I see no real gain with this over simply defining r and /r to be the same as ref and /ref in point of fact. We already can catenate in ref tags if we want. Collect (talk) 18:33, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
5. Per Mr.Z-man. I suggest a subst template instead. Sole Soul (talk) 22:52, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
6. There is nothing wrong with the current system. harej 01:48, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose (Suspend replacing of ref by Template:r)

1. First, I am assuming this is not a discussion about unilaterally changing articles. That is a done deal, and we have guidelines in place that say don't do it. How to approach the situation when it occurs is a different discussion (I prefer to try to explain to the offending editor why it's a bad thing and start a discussion, to avoid arguments like this one). Wikipedia evolves and markup changes. This is a good thing. I only recently discovered {{r}} templates, and I think they're very helpful. I've used them in two articles (Malvern, Worcestershire and Malvern Water). We (the group of editors working on those pages) have decided to try the {{r}} template on a those pages, to see how page maintenance goes. We will use the template on more pages if, after some unspecified time, we feel we've demonstrated that the template works without issue and that other editors can use them. The benefit is obvious to me, in that the page content markup becomes more readable (similar to the way that BibTeX and LaTeX are separated). As a secondary benefit, on both of the above pages we discovered reference duplicates, all with minor differences (ISBN 10 vs. 13, authors names or initials, etc). Finally, a proposal to suspend the use of a template in case it may do some harm, without any demonstration, seems bizarre and thoroughly un-Wikipedian. GyroMagician (talk) 19:19, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

   I've listed at least 4 concrete ways that it can cause negative issues in my comment above. As the author of one of the scripts in question and as someone who has worked with others on projects that try to read references, I can confirm that using multiple systems will cause a significant amount of extra work, and I would be rather surprised if any program that works with references currently supports the {{r}} system. Other than the fact that it requires manually going through all the references to implement it, how does the {{r}} system help you discover duplicates? Mr.Z-man 20:39, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

   Maybe this is the wrong place to discuss it (tell me if there is somewhere better), but why does this template break your script? The reference itself has the same syntax, but is in a different place in the article (I openly admit my naivety here, and clearly I don't use your tool - but I will have a look). I'm genuinely curious.

   The {{r}} template helps find duplicates because all the references are together at the end of the article, rather than peppered through it. If some sort of systematic naming is used, the same references end up in the same place (Malvern is not a particularly good example of this, but still enough that we found duplicates). I also found it helped in checking reference consistency (do they all use cite templates, books have ISBNs, etc). GyroMagician (talk) 22:56, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

   It doesn't actually break my script, it just won't work fully with it. The script will still output the traditional tag syntax even if the rest of the article uses {{r}}. It does break things like User:MZMcBride/climax as they only look for actual <ref> tags. This is also an issue with wikEd, which treats references and templates differently. For it to work properly, {{r}} would have to be special cased as a template that's actually a reference. I'm not familiar with the wikEd code, so I don't know how difficult that would be. Basically, any program that looks at refs will see a list at the end of the article, and nothing in the article body. Note that the main text of references can be put at the end of the article regardless of what format you use, its not something special to {{r}} - see WP:LDR. Mr.Z-man 00:22, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

2. Look, this is the sort of thing that I think we should be addressing, but there are many of you all who seem to think that the current system is perfectly fine (ie.: "let people do whatever the hell they want with citations, since it's not important anyway, it's all just formatting after all") If you want to standardize either using or not using these templates then get on board with Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Wikipedia Citation Style‎‎. Addressing citation issues piecemeal will simply create too much conflict and chaos, and personally I'd rather have the current situation where there is effectively no rules then to have some rules for some things and none for others.
   — V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 23:31, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
3. For the purpose of this discussion, I will take the "oppose" stance. The comment by V = I * R also makes sense to me, in that it's better to take such discussions to a forum where some across the board consistency can be generated, rather than too many ad-hoc decisions.

I should also note that I played a part in generating this kerfuffle by bringing the issues into the open for discussion in the first place. Of course I have wondered about the skeptics, and of course the skeptics have wondered about us 'converts'.

But I should note first that regardless of the way the debate to date has unfolded, all of the editors who have used the {{r}} template to date, including myself, those from whom I picked up the method, and those who picked it up from me, have used it in good faith. Looking at the discussion overall, I think it fair to say that those opposing the use of the {{r}} template, or at least demonstrating skepticism, are also acting in good faith, but from a different knowledge-base to those of us who have been using the {{r}} system. I for example, have no experience with bots and know very little about them at this time, other than that they exist, and can do some useful tasks, especially those of a repetitive nature.

I am pleased to see the style of discussion between GyroMagician and Mr.Z-man above. It is of the solution-focused kind that I have enjoyed with him and others, including Chienlit. From the discussion between GyroMagician and Mr.Z-man, I begin to see some of the concerns of Philcha, especially given Pilcha's reply to me pointing out that his opposition has not been to the concept of list-defined references, but to the use of the {{r}} template, and the technical issues arising therein.

• The same thing that attracted GyroMagician to the {{r}} template, was what attracted me and others, namely the ability to improve the editability of both the article and the references. This is evidenced in the descriptions, demonstrations, and links I've placed on my user page as the process evolved of working through the issues that we became aware of (e.g. what's a real issue, what's a percieved issue, etc). If you check the link to the Signpost of 21 September 2009, you see a link to the extensive discussion in July 2009 which preceded the successful straw-poll on implementing list-defined references. And in those discussions, you see many of the conclusions that GyroMagician, myself, and others later arrived at.

Regarding the grouping of references, I note Mr.Z-man's comment to GyroMagician above, that "the main text of references can be put at the end of the article regardless of what format you use". I have tried to demonstrate this on my user page, both in examples placed into the page, and with links to discussions, and to articles where different styles achieve the same outcome. But following Mr.Z-man's comment, prior to saving this discussion, I have placed the following reference (<ref name=Norbert1948></ref> ), into the section User:Wotnow#Examples of differing citation templates co-existing without issue. This is because while I have placed a range of templates in the page as a whole, which you can see for yourselves, it occurred to me that I haven't put an abbreviated 'ref' template there, despite having done so in articles I've edited. The reason for that omission is of course that prior to this discussion, the fact of the {{r}} template, and not the List-defined references technique being an issue, has not been something I or others were aware of. This discussion thus usefully brings those things to the fore. But it would be wrong to infer from enthusiastic, good-faith editing, some evangelistic desire of anyone to impose their will on others, and to react to them based on that assumption, which of course is not likely to be well received. It just seemed like a good idea, that's all. Wotnow (talk) 05:30, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral (Suspend replacing of ref by Template:r)

Statement by Philcha

The supporters of template {{r}} have tried to impose the use of {{r}} on Arthropod without prior discussion at Talk:Arthropod, have failed to follow WP:BRD and has insisted on restore every instance of {{r}}. In my opinion :

• Guidelines state that article layout should not changed until either there is clear consensus for the change or it is driven by a policy or guideline. I've seen no guidelines that govern change of a new type of markup for creating citations, because until recently there was one mechanism, <ref>. However, the general principle is supported by many other guidelines, including many parts of WP:MOS.
• If significant changes are introduced, WP:BRD should be followed - which means that the change(s) should be back downp until consensus is reached either way.
• Install {{r}} should be suspended until it has get the approval of all relevant guidelines and other documents (see followin paragraph), so that {{r}} should not become the default for many articles that are currently not maintained.

The introducing of {{r}} would also cause confusion:

• Inline citations by <ref> is currently the only method of approved for citing in WP:CITE and this is followed into documents such as the FA criteria. I suggest that supporters of template {{r}} should stop install {{r}} in articles until it has get the approval of all relevant guidelines and other documents that govern WP procedures, such as the FA criteria.
• <ref> is used routinely by experienced editors and taught to new editors. I see no need for editors to learn another method when <ref> has proved to work well in all situations.

I am also concerned on the impact of {{r}} on many tools:

• Citation formatters such as refTool generally produce citations with <ref> tags. These tools woould need be affected directly by {{r}}, but the article would then be have a mixture of <ref> and {{r}} citations, which could harder to see - and it is not known where relevant guidelines and other documents would approve such mixtures.
• Edit box tools such as User:Cacycle/wikEd use colour-coding and other typographic techniques to identify different types of type in the edit box - main text, comments, citations, etc. {{r}} is currently not supported by such edit box tools, so {{r}} citations will look like part f the main text, making it harder to read.
• Many bots help to maintain citations - AnomieBot has fixed many problems for me, and others can produced fully-formatted citiations from identifications like DOI. I've not seen a set of test pages to prove that all these useful bots work with {{r}} - and I think {{r}} should be suspended until it is shown that it is compatible with all these bots. --Philcha (talk) 17:00, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I think this is a non-issue, as all that changes is the location of the full reference - the format of the reference itself remains the same, inside <ref></ref> tags. GyroMagician (talk) 19:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I Want a Drama-Free Version of Wikipedia

I'm tired of all the pointless edit-warring, POV-pushing, personal attacks, etc. on Wikipedia. I know that I could just simply refrain from editing controversial articles, but I lack the self-discipline. Some articles are like a train wreck. I know I should look away, but just can't.

Therefore, I propose a system whereby editors can voluntarily opt-in and any article marked with a NPOV, OR, BLP, AfD, etc. tag would be blocked from view by said editors. This will allow editors to continue to contribute to Wikipedia in non-controversial articles and without getting inadvertently dragged into the mud. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 04:49, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure that would even be possible without a complete overhaul of the software. If you want a drama free encyclopedia, my recommendation is to get some paper and start your own private one. More than one person involved and there will to be drama--Jac16888^Talk 05:03, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

While this would be a lovely idea, to leave the drama queens to their own wasteland, in practice it soon would all be wasteland, because some cannot stand being denied an audience. IME, if you try to leave the drama queens behind, they pack up and follow you. If you keep finding that you can't look away, play the game of "predict the plot" for the soap opera. It makes it more laughable. Yes, I'm cynical - I've dealt with volunteer fishbowls for a long, long time. -- RavanAsteris (talk) 05:06, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oooh, Soap opera game sounds like fun, must remember to try that--Jac16888^Talk 05:08, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Avoid everything but the article pages, including article history. BOOM, drama-free. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 05:09, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Until you make an edit without knowing that "consensus" is against it. BOOM, drama comes to you. You can't escape it--Jac16888^Talk 05:12, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What! A drama free Wikipedia? I've a good mind to create a drama over that! Unfortunately, it wouldn't be practical. It's impossible not to encounter disagreement. And frustrating as it can be to all involved, a great deal of the knowledge that we now take for granted has a fascinatingly controversial history. It is true that some discussions can get heated. But sometimes, if you can get a bit of heat out of the arguments, some good progress comes. Some progress comes despite the heat. And some progress would ironically come because of the heat. It's probably a matter of trying to optimise one's entering and leaving of the kitchen, and which flavours we want to try when we do go in. Regards Wotnow (talk) 05:30, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can always try Citizendium. There's not enough people working there to create drama. ;p ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 05:42, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

NFCC Bot

Hey guys,

I just wanted to let you know that I have proposed a bot to remove nonfree images from namespaces other then the article namespace. See the discussion here: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DASHBot 5 Thanks, Tim1357 (talk) 05:21, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]