Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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The policy section of the village pump is used to discuss existing and proposed policies and guidelines.
If you want to propose something new that is not a policy or guideline, use the proposals section.

Please see this FAQ page for a list of frequent proposals and the responses to them.

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Photos of Executed Persons

There may be other cases besides nazis, but in the case of virtually every nazi executed by hanging we have included in the article a photo of the body, sometimes with the rope still around the victim's neck.

I personally find this shocking and unnecessary. Should this be allowed? Should there be warnings? A user-configurable preference that blocks or allows such images?--Jrm2007 (talk) 12:41, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not censored, does not use additional disclaimers and this help page will show you how to hide specific images you wish not to see. Cheers! Resolute 15:31, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Suggest you post at the relevant article talk pages for discussion there. Wikipedia is not censored and I see nothing wrong in these images being used. Jezhotwells (talk) 15:35, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) For the policy questions: It is and should remain allowed. There should not be warnings beyond the one covering the entire encyclopedia at Wikipedia:Content disclaimer. See Help:Options to not see an image for options on not seeing a particular image, and Wikipedia:Perennial proposals for more on this topic. You can also search the Village pump archives for old discussions, particularly on the related topics of sexually or religiously offensive images.

For the (unasked) content question: I have no opinion on whether the photos are encyclopedically necessary; it might be best to discuss that particular issue at WT:FASC, WT:MILHIST, and/or WT:MILBIO rather than here. At the very least you should post on all three of those pages to invite interested editors here, although I personally would suggest moving the content aspect of this discussion to WT:FASC and posting invitations at WT:MILHIST and WT:MILBIO to discuss it there. Anomie⚔ 15:36, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

• I think you will find that the vast majority of people, not just on Wikipedia but everywhere, feel that a nazi with a rope around his neck is the very best kind of nazi. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:21, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

  Speak for yourself. Nazis are people too. Generally bad people, but still people. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:43, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

  I'm with OD on this one. Taking pleasure at the suffering and death of others is incompatible with morality. The question, not necessarily censorship, is whether the pictures in the articles are purely there for shock value or to please the crowds. Not censored does not equal "as crass and disrespectful as possible." SDY (talk) 02:47, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

  The original question actually was censorship, specifically "Should this be allowed?" rather than "Is this necessary or desirable?". The latter is a good question and deserves asking, but it's a content rather than a policy question and IMO is better asked elsewhere. Anomie⚔ 04:00, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

• Gory, or scary stuff (like a distorted face) is one thing, but a small picture of someone hanging with a hood over their head doesn't have to be shocking. It is what it is. An execution is one of the biggest events in a persons life! If we've got a photo of that event, and it's not disgustingly gory, I think we ought to use it. Perfectly encyclopaedic. What OrangeDog, and SDY, said above makes sense to me, and I think Beeblebrox's comment is pretty close to the truth. I kinda think Nazis, and others despised by people today, get harsher treatment in their bios because of the lives they lived; and that kind of bias doesn't seem right to me, it seems like something editors should be on guard against.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 07:18, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

If you look at the photos in question, it is not a body with a hood over the victim's head. Hanging is a terrible thing to do to anyone, nazi or not (and some of those hanged were not even really guilty of capital crimes by today's standards) and I think the reason for showing such photos should be considered. Having said that, if the over-arching idea is that Wikipedia should not be censored, my question is answered and I will accept that terrible photos can occur anyplace within the site.--Jrm2007 (talk) 04:59, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

The article in question, I think, is Julius Streicher. This particular image is gruesome and adds little information to the article that isn't easily conveyed in text. If there was something highly unusual about the way the execution was carried out, that visual information would help with, that might be a good reason to include it. Including an image of their corpse because they were a bad person is a terrible reason. The Wordsmith^Communicate 06:00, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

What's so gruesome about it? If the knot weren't tied in traditional hangman's noose style, you wouldn't even know he was dead. Besides, if a person supports capital punishment for anyone, then Nazis should top the list; and if one opposes it, what better way to raise awareness and promote public disgust than to make gruesome images widely visible?

The merit to the article should be clear: it demonstrates the public nature of the execution (thus, indirectly, the attitude of the populace), and even more to the point, it shows that there is some proof (maybe not in this example) that the person is actually dead. Given the tendency of Nazi history to become subject to revisionism and conspiracy theory, there's merit to keeping the factual data plainly visible.

Now concentration camp photos are gruesome, and alas!, no less unusual for the time; still the merit of keeping them is clear. Wnt (talk) 13:55, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I am also shocked/saddened/made uncomfortable by photos of concentration camp victims or images that fall into several other categories. Perhaps what got me initially about the nazi hanging photos was the unexpectedness. Were it up to me, I would simply, like the "spoiler alerts" for movie plot descriptions, have similar alerts for photos that fall into certain categories -- I think the determination of such categories should not be too controversial since we are not censoring anything, just alerting.--Jrm2007 (talk) 17:33, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Note that we don't have "spoiler alerts" either. Anomie⚔ 17:46, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Early on Resolute said it very succinctly. There are policies in place and if you're offended, there are mechanisms to deal with it. No additional alerts are needed. AliveFreeHappy (talk) 17:57, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is also not a shock site. If an image shocks and doesn't add information to the article, it goes. We may not be censored, but we aren't offensive just for the sake of being offensive. This is a matter of editorial discretion, as was made clear during the Goatse deletion incident. The Wordsmith^Communicate 18:01, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

You lost me at "Hanging is a terrible thing to do to anyone, nazi or not. " Hanging is pretty mild compared to what the nazis did to their victims in the camps. It's important that we document the truth, and the truth is not always pretty, often it is in fact disturbing and it is a good thing if we have accurate historical images that make people uncomfortable. History is full of uncomfortable, ugly moments, if we had photographs of these battles where the Mongols used their prisoners as shields, or the Battle of Adrianople, where upwards of 20,000 Romans were hacked up by the Goths and the Romans had trouble escaping because they kept slipping and falling due to all the blood on the ground, then you would see some seriously disturbing imagery. Photography is now an important tool in documenting history, and we should not restrict what photographs we use just because history tends to be ugly. There is a reason that the Allies chose to record what they found when they reached the death camps, it's important that the reality of what happened there be known and not sugar coated, and it's also important that the reality of what happened to those who perpetrated atrocities and genocide be known as well. It's not pretty, and it shouldn't be, it was an exceptionally ugly time in the history of the human race. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:19, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

The logic of the comparative mildness of hanging vs what nazis did in camps making it okay to show a shocking image escapes me. And, btw, some of these nazis never murdered anyone. Documenting the truth is valuable -- repetitive gruesome photographs, perhaps less so. But if policies are in place already, fine.--Jrm2007 (talk) 18:31, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Words can barely express how offended I am at the Wordsmith's above suggestion that somehow accurate historical photographs of real events are somehow in the same category as a close up photo of some guys gaping distended butthole. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:37, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I envy people who live in a world where nothing ever makes them uncomfortable. Or maybe not. I suspect such people don't care about others. This world is filled with things that annoy me, make me uncomfortable, and shock me. Many of them are fiction coming out of Holywood. If I had my way, there'd never be another slasher/zombie/suspense film ever. But I just avoid going to see them and accept that there are strange people in this world who aren't satisfied with the existing non-fictional gruesomeness available in unexpurgated history books, and have to make up more of it. This issue here is a case of looking in real history books. And I agree that hanging was too good for Nasis, and I'd go further that "lethal injection" isn't nearly as nice as some would have it seem. - Denimadept (talk) 19:00, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

A micro question on claim of notability and a macro question on notability of religious figureheads

Resolved

 – ♪ ♫ Wifione ♫ ♪ _―Œ ^{♣Łeave Ξ мessage♣} 03:11, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Micro question Two days ago, I had speedied this article on the A7. Beeblebrox declined the speedy with the comment, "I would say that being a saint is a claim of notability...". The confusion that arose -- which I discussed consequently on Beebelbrox's talk page -- was that Beeblebrox was considering the claim of being a Hindu saint as (perhaps) being equivalent to the claim of being a Saint. I perceived that the claim of being a Hindu saint which the article made was not in any way a claim of notability (as opposed to the claim of being a Saint, which is a clear claim of notability). One reason for such a perception in me is because in my understanding of the Indian culture, India has a huge and significant majority of Swamis, Hindu saints and sadhus (all used synonymously) present who haven't undergone any formal test by fire, in the manner of speaking. Some references in context are provided:[1][2][3]. I might be comparing apples to oranges, but for me, the claim of being a Hindu saint is equivalent to being a claim of being a sports person. There're very many notable sports persons, in the same way as there're very many notable Hindu saints.

• Given all this, it'll be wonderful if editors here can clarify whether a claim of being a Hindu saint should be always considered a claim of notability (in the context of a csd A7 tag).

Macro question Given that we have notability criteria for many categories of individuals (from pornographic actors to academicians), is it a good time to re-propose that we have a separate section that defines the notability criteria for religious figureheads? Thanks and warm regards. ♪ ♫ Wifione ♫ ♪ _―Œ ^{♣Łeave Ξ мessage♣} 19:25, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

• I readily admit that my knowledge of Hinduism is limited at best,but I did not intend to suggest that any Hindu saint was "automatically notable™" and in fact I strongly dislike the idea that anything is automatically notable. The point here is that for purposes of speedy deletion, a claim of being a saint is an implied claim of notability, not that any article on a Hindu saint must be kept in the long term. All that is required to avoid WP:CSD#A7 is any reasonable claim of some notability. Of course actual proof is required to survive AFD and retain the article in the long term. (by the way if you are trying to clarify a CSD issue WT:CSD may be a better venue) Beeblebrox (talk) 19:21, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

• (commenting based on a note on my talk page) I agree with Beeblebrox entirely. This (being called a saint) isn't a case of notability, rather an assertion of importance as required by CSD#A7, a standard that is purposely lower than notability. As for notability criteria, I don't think there's a need for something different for religious people, WP:BIO and WP:GNG pretty much cover it. —SpacemanSpiff 19:49, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
• Figurehead is a rather insulting term to apply to who is being discussed here, namely, importance assigned to persons by religion or specifically religious communities. patsw (talk) 22:28, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Check your grammar, because that makes no sense, but I wish someone would insult me by calling me a figurehead.KD Tries Again (talk) 02:19, 7 September 2010 (UTC)KD Tries Again

• (Figurehead. It's not my intention to give a negative term. Apologies in case the term does that to you. Best regards. ♪ ♫ Wifione ♫ ♪ _―Œ ^{♣Łeave Ξ мessage♣} 03:20, 7 September 2010 (UTC))

Thanks for the comments. Even Xeno on his talk page communicated that Beeblebrox is right and that someone similarly unfamiliar with the subject would likely make the same decision coming across an article that where the claim was that of being a "Hindu saint". Thanks again and warm regards. ♪ ♫ Wifione ♫ ♪ _―Œ ^{♣Łeave Ξ мessage♣} 03:12, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Remember that A7 is meant to get rid of articles that don't say why their subjects are important. Being named a saint means that other people think that you've been important in some religious way, so whether or not you're notable, an article on you shouldn't be speedy deleted under that criterion. Nyttend (talk) 00:52, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Logo size concern

I have a concern that a proprietary product logo is being used on a page in such a way that it constitutes "an endorsement" of the product in question. The logo is the most striking object on the page, unnecessarily large for clear viewing, larger than the article title which has the same lettering, and draws immediate attention. I have twice reduced the size of the logo and a discussion at the project talk page is not being responded to since my last intervention. After my second intervention, the logo was replaced even larger than when I initially replaced it. The page is that for the IPad, an Apple Inc. Tablet computer. While I actually use Apple products, I feel this example has become a POV statement.

I've checked out several similar products, and other products by Apple, which have no such logo issues and this mis(?)use appears to be one other editor's. Other Apple Inc. products: iPod,iPhone,MacBook; comparable products: HP Slate PC,Samsung_Galaxy_Tab. Wider input to this matter? Thanks, Trev M  ~  12:50, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (infoboxes) seems to be about all we have on infobox design. It recomments such boxen should be 300px or 25em. The infobox in question is 22em, well within limits. The image is 250px wide - a standard image size. It is narrower than the HP Slate (albeit this is a landscape image) but wider than the Samsung, which like the iPad is a portrait image. Oh, and the image will be deleted on the 13th September anyway, as non-free and replacable. Given all of this, I'm not that concerned about the image size. We could survive with it smaller, but it's doing no great harm as it is. (Oh, and it's an image of the product, not a logo. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:46, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

I've removed the "logo" on iPad, which is just a standard rendering in Arial font, and replaced it with actual text. I've also replaced the non-free use image in the infobox with a free use image that was already available on Commons. That should take care of any issues with the WP:NFCC criterion #1, which both of the previous images failed. —Farix (t | c) 17:25, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Tagishsimon, I was talking specifically about the logo above the image, that TheFarix|c has since replaced with text. Best, Trev M  ~  17:40, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I see it now. Apologies. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:16, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

"Both", Farix? If you're trying to claim File:IPad wordmark.svg somehow failed WP:NFCC criterion #1, you should probably go review commons:Template:PD-textlogo which it is (correctly) tagged with.

As for logo versus plain text, I personally would prefer having the logo, but not enough to get involved. Anomie⚔ 20:18, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

It fails criterion #1 because it can be completely replicated by using text in an Arial font. Thus a free alternative is available. Let me also point out that there is an accessibility issue here. We shouldn't be using images to replace plain text. —Farix (t | c) 12:26, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

NFCC #1 is entirely irrelevant because the image is not non-free, it is in the public domain. There may be salient editorial and accessibility concerns, but NFCC ain't one of them. –xeno^talk 13:43, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

You're seriously arguing here about whether to include an image of the word "iPad" in the article about the iPad? If you don't solve this quickly and without resort to AN/I, I'm nominating it for Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars. Wnt (talk) 14:02, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Your indent level makes it unclear to whom your comments are addressed. See WP:INDENT. –xeno^talk 14:06, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Lamest edit war is by necessity a joint award. But apart from that I'll say that making a word in Arial font into an image is pointless... but taking it out as a "non-free image" tops that. Wnt (talk) 17:09, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I looked into it, and it's most likely Myriad, not Arial. Unlike Arial, Myriad seems to not be commonly available. Anomie⚔ 17:50, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

If there is no design and in the "public domain", then it is not a logo or a workmark and shouldn't be on the article in the first place. —Farix (t | c) 14:44, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

There are plenty of logos that are public domain but are still considered logos. Note also that your "replacement" with text won't render correctly if the visitor's browser isn't configured to use Myriad for generic sans-serif. For example, Arial and Verdana both have a square dot on the lowercase "i". Anomie⚔ 15:37, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Re Wnt and Lamest edit wars - on a simple information level, the issue is trivial and was dealt with before you posted: people realised that you don't need to have the name of the subject of the page as a heading 3 times within the top few cm of a page. So we quickly got rid of one. It's not, however, a lame edit war to challenge whether someone can come along and emblazon the commercial logo (or even the name in text) of the product the page is about, at whatever size they feel like, without getting called about it. If it were text, there'd be strict style guidlines imposed on it. So in a sense, the substitution of the image for the text raised the issue. The image was accepted as a compromise. The WP:Wikipedia page itself uses an image for the infobox name field but I've not checked to see whther this has been challenged. I, personally, who raised the issue, have little preference either way. That's why I came to Policy. Accessibility-wise, it can have an alt tag. Appearance-wise, it's a similar font to that used anyway on many renderings of the page: no concern. Size-wise, I'd just like it to be stylistically in-keeping with the page and not overtly or even covertly promotional. And I'm trying to get to a place of clarity about this so it can be cited next time this comes up. And deal with it according to WP behaviour guidlines, without reverting the image/text so fast the page flickers.... Trev M  ~  17:42, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

There is certainly a possible discussion to have over whether a logo that is a minimally stylized version of the "title" of the infobox should just replace the plain-text title, and what might be an appropriate guideline for the maximum height for a single-line-of-text logo like File:IPad wordmark.svg. But in my opinion your claims that including the logo is somehow "promotion" rather than "identification" are BS and continuing to use that argument just confuses the issue. I also disagree with you that the default font being "similar" is no concern, both because "similar" isn't good enough and because the default font is not globally shared and can be easily changed in the reader's browser. Anomie⚔ 20:46, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

The VP's title box: proposed changed view

In the Template:Village pump pages/sandbox is a proposed new view for this page's header box. There are demos before/after in Template:Village pump pages/testcases, and notes. Any support? -DePiep (talk) 17:14, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Looks to me like the most significant change is that the sub-heading that just repeats which section of the Pump we are looking at – with the additions of the word "discussion" and a link to post – has been moved to above the links bar that is immediately above it in the existing layout. Why do we need to repeat the title anyway? Apart from that, seems bit more logical flow. Keep those bars as shallow (top–bottom) as possible, get the "Lead" information into as compact a space as practical, stylistically. Difficult to evaluate this in the template without all the sub-templates rendered in full. Could we see that, or a lash-up? Trev M  ~  18:09, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

re the double title mentioning: Indeed, the second row repeats the "VP policy" from the title, also bolded when on that page. But the 2nd is in a list of similar VP pages. IMO, the box is (also) a page-navigation box. Navigation is: "1. Where am I" and "2. Where do I go from here". Only savvy users can skip 1. So a navigation box should also lead the irregular visitor to their destiny. That is why the sequence "Page title (you are here) -- related page titles -- places to go on this page" looks like a very useful guidance. Is where I would look when arriving first. Repeating the title here is a harmless small feature, which is compensated by being very usefull in navigation. Compare: almost every biography has the name of the person in the title, the intro and in tho of the infobox. Then, if we agree using the page title in the box at all, it should be in the top row, not row 4, first step in navigation. Which is what I changed.

re shallow subtitle lines (three currently, two in the proposal): indeed, shallow (=less, I read). The proposed two rows are two different groups: directly related VP pages, and places & actions on the current page. I think these are useful. Anyway, I did not want to remove any link. Just reordering.

re Demo of sub-templates: well, adding these to the demo is possible, but a bit complicated. Would this remark do: All changes are within the brown box. There is no behaviour change, and no outside change.. There should and will be no different placement, behavior or content outside of the box. All links work just the same. (Of course, the brown box takes one row less, but the other templates "don't know" that. They just move up one row). Also: if there were different behavior with the changed brown box, we must consider the proposed change as unfit, and it will be reverted. You know, these people from VP technical are using the same template. I can't fool them with bad stuff. -DePiep (talk) 07:40, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Changing a page from "proposed guideline" to "historical"?

Wikipedia:Notability (streets, roads, and highways) was last edited in June, and major edits were last performed in February; as well, there hasn't been much discussion since April. Is it appropriate to tag this as a historical page, or do we need to wait longer? Nyttend (talk) 00:54, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I concur, and have been bold. I'm strangely decisive tonight. SDY (talk) 02:26, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

As it was never adopted, it shouldn't be tagged 'historical', since that indicates that the community used it previously, but no longer does. Proposals that fail to gain consensus should be tagged as {{failed}}. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:39, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Notability of cities, towns, and neighborhoods

I'm looking at a couple of articles about neighborhoods within a good sized city. Some of them are no brainers as the areas are frequently referred to in reliable sources and some even have national historic status, others are more vague. Is there a guideline or policy (beyond WP:N) I can use to help determine which of these are notable and which need to be discussed deletion?--RadioFan (talk) 11:16, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

basically, if they meet WP:N they are obviously notable. Otherwise, if not much can't be found, but theer is evidence that they used to be a separate village (town, hamlet, whatever) before becoming a neighborhood of a larger community, then they shuold be treated like every other location-based article, i.e. inherently notable, and probably not deletable through AfD. However, merging them one level up may be the best solution in many cases (as here). Fram (talk) 11:33, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

All cities and towns are notable, period MBelgrano (talk) 11:37, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I was looking for a policy page on cities and towns, it sounds like one does not exist. I'm considering starting a deletion discussion on a neighborhood article. Which I dont think is automatically notable. Is there nothing beyond WP:N for these kinds of articles?--RadioFan (talk) 11:46, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I am not usre where MBelgrano gets his ideas from, but not from any policy or guideline that I know of. The inclusion criteria for all settlements is Wikipedia:Notability. It is a large guideline, so focus on WP:GNG for the key inclusion criteria. MBelgrano ideas fall foul of WP:ITSLOCAL. --Gavin Collins (talk|contribs) 15:32, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

As far as towns and cities are concerned, there were some 'bots that created a whole bunch of articles in the past on en.wikipedia and some of the other languages too, and much of the debate is old news in terms of the notability of these places. Much of this came from government databases and many of these locality based articles have been updated and refined to move them beyond stubs too, even if some of the more obscure towns still are largely just the raw census/government data and not much more. For most of North America, the UK, and some parts of Europe there were so many articles of this nature created that the driving need to even raise this issue hasn't even been an issue. The few additional town articles that didn't already exist were rare, or found in places that typically don't have native English speakers.

For myself, I don't see any special or unique guidelines for neighborhoods other than simply verifiability, at least a couple of 3rd party sources (aka no "original research"), and other standard notability guidelines that apply to all articles. Census defined places already have this with multiple sources, but neighborhoods not explicitly labeled or defined with government statistical reports are less likely to meet these standards. Articles about neighborhoods in New York City like SoHo and Greenwich Village certainly deserve Wikipedia articles and these are in fact quite well developed articles too. Generally I would think that smaller towns would be less likely to meet notability guidelines at least in terms of published articles, books or other sources that would confirm the existence of these kind of neighborhoods. If the neighborhood is commonly used in local news media, I think notability could be easily determined from references to it, and perhaps even a definition of the neighborhood from those sources. --Robert Horning (talk) 15:53, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

As someone who has made/expanded probably over three dozen town, village, city, hamlet, and neighborhood articles (all in NY so I am using those terms as legal definitions by NY standards) I would like to point out that- if you can actually write something more than a sentence or two stub about a place, then it is notable and you probably wont get enough !votes to delete the article. Anyone feeling up to the task is more than welcome to go to my user page and nominate for deletion any of the neighborhood articles I have listed there that I created, good luck! I really don't get why people get all bent out of shape about geographic places having articles... Kingdom City, Missouri has around 125 people and it has its own article, should it? Yes, it is a legally defined village incorporated under state law. Anything more required? No. For unincorporated places/city neighborhoods notability I say should go by the old rule of thumb- if you can actually write something meaningful then its notable. (Which is a better rule of thumb than I see most of the time- "I dont know what notability is, but I know it when I see it"). So in a nutshell- if its more than a stub and has a history section, demographics, geography, etc then leave it alone and dont bother to nominate it for deletion.Camelbinky (talk) 16:08, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

My ideas come from here: all cities and towns have a history, demographics, economy, political life, relations with all the rest of the cities of the country, etc; and all such things can be found very easily at typical sources. Therefore, they are all notable. I may turn the question backwards: is there any city or town that is not notable? And if there is, how did that happen? MBelgrano (talk) 18:02, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I would extend MBelgrano's question to inclued the so-called ghost towns which by definition wouldnt have demographics, economy, or political life would still have a history (if it can be found) and therefore would be notable for their distinction of being a ghost town, often notable for whatever event led to the depopulation. (Was a reservoir formed that flooded the town? A gold mine dried up? A nuclear reactor meltdown? Interstate bypassed it leading to the town just drying up on the old two lane highway?)Camelbinky (talk) 19:02, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Just stopping by to state that I agree with Camelbinky here. Killiondude (talk) 19:07, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

That makes little difference. Ghost towns do not have such stadistics now, but they had them in the past, and what is not known for sure is speculated by historians based on other evidence anyway (meaning, we still have something to write on the matter, still following WP:V and WP:NOR). If someone nominates Ur for deletion, the reactions would be surely fun to see MBelgrano (talk) 19:18, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Ha! A trick question. If a city or town was not notable we would not have heard of it. –xeno^talk 19:24, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

True for towns and cities, but not for neighborhoods. Every slightly largish new groups of houses gets a fancy name, but that doesn't mean that this "neighborhood" is notable. Obviously, things like the Bronx and so on are very notable, but this can't be generalized. Fram (talk) 19:46, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I would argue that, though I disagree these towns should have automatic notability based on past argues, that as long as WP is part gazetteer, and that we don't yet have WikiAtlas or comparable sister project, such pages on towns do meet the goals of Wikipedia, notable or not. That said, we really need to memorialize this common consensus somewhere. --MASEM (t) 19:33, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

There have been many attempts to put this in a guideline, but there was never consensus. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 12:08, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (geography) is one attempt to capture our practice and it looks quite reasonable; I don't think it was ever proposed as a guideline. Also see Wikipedia:Notability (Geographic locations) for previous debate. What we should be trying to do is document current practice, not imposing our own views (e.g. Gavin Collin's insistent on the GNG when the GNG is almost universally agreed to not be required to be met for populated places or geographic features). Fences&Windows 00:34, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

I had proposed to codify existing practice into a guideline for Wikipedia gazetteer content for WP:NOT (not WP:N) but it gets murky because of several long-approved bots which auto-create articles based on government-provided data. Very simply, existing practice is any geographic entity which can be cited from a government source can be created as a stub article.patsw (talk) 13:05, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

I think we have to absolutely clear that the creation of new articles is dependent on the topic's notability, not WP:ITSLOCAL. There are no polices or guidelines that suggest otherwise. What is practise is purely a matter of conjecture. What you are liable to hear from the babble ain't necessarily so. --Gavin Collins (talk|contribs) 15:13, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Our policy and guidelines are based on what practice is. It is practice these are kept even if they aren't "notable" per the GNG, thus we should codify that somehow, the best route seeming to be as part of the gazetteer function of wikipedia. --MASEM (t) 15:21, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Practice becomes policy, policy should never dictate and create new practice EVER. If you attempt to say that places must be notable, what is the criteria for notability?! Would Wyoming be notable? Would Tonga be notable? What is so notable about Cape Girardeau, Missouri or Berlin, New York? We would start having arguments with people saying one hand "I've never heard of it, it isnt notable worldwide" and others saying "its notable in our region of this state". This basically boils down to some people around Wikipedia who think if they havent heard of it then it isnt notable. Why does it matter to "you" whether these articles exist or not? NOTPAPER. We are a gazetteer. We probably always will be. Just give up and work on whatever articles you like and let others work on articles they like.Camelbinky (talk) 16:01, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Stating that only a notable topic should become a stand-alone article is a definition, not an illuminating statement. Significant coverage of the topic in a third-party reliable source is what we call WP:GNG, and that should not be conflated with notability. It should be obvious to editors by this point that passing WP:GNG is neither necessary nor sufficient to create an article, however common it is to be found in articles and AFD discussions. patsw (talk) 16:50, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Question is there a limit to how small something can be without further reason for notability? The Town I grew up in has an article - which is all fair and good because it's reasonably notable but the neighbourhood within that does not. At first I couldn't think of much notable about that neighbourhood Antonshill but an internet search returned [4] which defines it as a village, another hit defines details of the farm on which land the neighbourhood was built as well as a hit to Wikipedia itself A88_road - So there's enough material there to generate a stub but how useful is it, does it really deserve an article when there is so little of note? The other option is to include the information within Stenhousemuir but it doesn't really fit within the article there and as soon as you start to add lots of neighbourhoods because they're not notable enough to stand alone it looks untidy. Of course even smaller locations like Mojave_phone_booth exist with further reasons to justify their notability. Even a gazetteer has to draw a limit somewhere - My garden is not noteable but it is a sizeable geographic location. Stuart.Jamieson (talk) 17:10, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

On these location articles, it is generally that it is or was a national government-recognized settlement which was used to generate the stubs, which seems like a fairly good limit. The point is that we seem to be including these not that these are are necessary notable, but that they are needed to "complete" Wikipedia's aspect of being a gazetteer. I would argue that one can make a similar comparison between words and their definitions, and that that isn't a function of Wikipedia but is a function of Wikitionary. But while we can easily draw lines between a dictionary entry and a encyclopedia entry, it's a lot harder to draw the same lines for gazetteer and encyclopedia entries. --MASEM (t) 17:25, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

I completely agree with the need to "complete" Wikipedia's aspect of being a gazetteer (though I believe there is a significant amount of Data that may warrant a separate project as commons and wiktionary are) but it's the level of resolution I'm questioning. For the example I give above, various other gazetteers will either resolve down directly onto the neighbourhood (regarding it a village) or will only drill down onto the town there seems to be a 50/50 split of each type. The Government is not much better. Certain arms of the government (such as Surveyor general or Equivalent) may regard it as an identifiable settlement, yet another arm (such as the Census Bureau) may regard it's inhabitants as inhabiting the larger town or conurbation essentially regarding it as non-existent. Then again other arms like the Postmaster don't care either way whether or not it exists they just care what the street or house name is. Then again you have Unorganised Townships which arent government recognised but are large enough they should be covered in a Gazetteer. All in all it's a very thorny issue. Stuart.Jamieson (talk) 18:34, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Don't forget the rest of the world. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 20:14, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

There is no reason not to include an article on a populated place for which we have a verifiable location and statistics, no matter how small the place and even if we can't foresee a way to expand the article at present, no reason that is other than some kind of misguidedly dogmatic adherence to notability guidelines. But notability guidelines are a means to an end; they help us ensure that only topics are included in the encyclopedia for which there is a minimum of verifiable and NPOV information from reliable sources. We certainly don't have any such concerns with including articles on any populated place for which there is an official record, such as a census, government map, etc., so excluding such articles might satisfy the letter of notability guidelines without furthering any legitimate purpose or policy. Unless we pretend that reducing the number of articles and limiting our coverage of the real, verifiable world is somehow a legitimate goal.

Neighborhoods, however, may be more difficult to verify than populated places (i.e., standalone cities, towns, villages, however termed or sized). Neighborhoods may have some official recognition, as through designated historical districts or community boards, but not always. So we don't always have as clear a guide as we do with populated places to separate the substantive ones from what may simply be a real estate developer or a group of college kids trying to characterize a few blocks as a distinctive community. You could also have one guy claiming his house and general store in the middle of an open plain constitute a "town," but I think that's much less common than private individuals trying to generate a neighborhood out of nothing, and its absence from any official records would just shift the question to general notability criteria. postdlf (talk) 18:52, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

There is a reason not to include an article about a populated place for which we have a verifiable location and statistics: lack of notability. If a topic is not notable, then it lacks significant coverage, so there is no point in creating a stub that is just a set of co-ordinates. Such information is just not encyclopedic, because it provides the reader with even less information than a map. --Gavin Collins (talk|contribs) 09:17, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Notability guidelines are only a means to an end, and not the only means to that end. Requiring that articles on populated places satisfy GNG, even if they are verifiable, would not only eliminate the very short articles that you don't like, but also eliminate longer, substantial articles that have been compiled solely out of census data (unless we just call census data "significant coverage"), such as Blacklick Estates, Ohio, for example. All of this would undermine Wikipedia's function as a gazetteer, and for no benefit that I can see. I probably would not bother to create a stub that just has coordinates (note my comment above was supporting articles with verifiable locations and statistics, such as population), but I also would not delete it either because even a bare "X is a village in Y" statement still took time to write and post, has a kernel of verifiable information, and provides the start of article infrastructure that can be at least theoretically expanded eventually. At a bare minimum, we could hope that any named populated place could be expanded to give an explanation of the name and population figures, and this is a valuable part of a gazetteer even if we can never write a full history, culture, etc. for those places. postdlf (talk) 14:46, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

The basic reason for keeping all populated place articles is that they've almost all had enough coverage to justify it, but many aren't very good at showing it. Random example: this was a one-line stub of exactly the type that could easily have be deleted. But after a month's worth of improvements by two or three of us, it now looks like this, and had a DYK appearance. It's just an ordinary small village with 100 people and one road, but it has that much coverage available! The current system seems to work, so why change it? Alzarian16 (talk) 14:58, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

did you know ...

that Wikimédia France, Wikimedia Foundation's french chapter, was paying some random users, up to 150 euros ? Do you know of any other chapter having done such a thing in the past, or still doing it ? Freewol (talk) 13:32, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Any more details? Paying for what? Source? --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:37, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

For having contributed to articles probably. I don't know the details, as they have not been revealed today (maybe before, but no link was provided). Source is french Wikipedia's today's bistro. Freewol (talk) 13:43, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

This is a problem...... why? While I may think it to be a waste of money, I don't see any particular problem with any group or individual paying a Wikipedia contributor in some manner for contributions. If it can be a good incentive to allow some people to contribute more, good for them. --Robert Horning (talk) 15:24, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

The interwiki links down the side of the page at fr:Wikipédia:Wikiconcours will take you to the equivalents on other wikipedias. Here that is Wikipedia:Contest. Angus McLellan (Talk) 00:16, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Discussed at fr:Wikipédia:Le_Bistro/9_septembre_2010#Wikiconcours_septembre_2010_:_dernier_appel_et_communiqu.C3.A9. Fences&Windows 00:22, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia's racism

Resolved

 – Nothing to see here, move along. Fences&Windows 00:12, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

WP:RFCAUTO {{rfctag|category1|category2} Dr._Leigh-Davis RE: Dr. Leigh-Davis-White Professor O.K.; Black Professor: No Way! I just read the press release and I easily found numerous instances where people were blocked from presenting third-party links as references, on Dr. Leigh-Davis. How do I complain to Wikipedia's legal department about this racist attack? Where do I challenge the deletion decision? http://www.prlog.org/10920757-wikipedia-may-face-criminal-charges-for-its-racial-attacks.html 67.102.213.115 (talk) 21:53, 9 September 2010 (UTC)Kim

This would be a Wikipedia:Help desk question, I believe. Your answer: Wikipedia:Contact us. Please review Wikipedia:No legal threats. If you intend to take legal action, you will need to stay away from Wikipedia in the meantime. As for challenging deletion decisions, should you choose not to pursue legal action, see Wikipedia:Deletion. The policy contains an overview of our approach to deletions and your options for challening deletion of content. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 21:58, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Does anyone have any idea what this IP is talking about? Just curious, because the linked blog entry is none too clear. --Ludwigs2 22:14, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Dr._Leigh-Davis (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dr. Leigh-Davis

Apparently a hoax article? –xeno^talk 22:15, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Also Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2010 September 8#Dr. Leigh-Davis (closed), which I believe set the record for most socks in a DRV discussion. –xeno^talk 22:24, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Ah. so in other words, someone's pulling a Ken Starr (trump up a non-existent problem just to stir up the waters, and then bust our chops over whatever crapcruft they see floating in the wake). charming. --Ludwigs2 22:44, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

It looks like a real person (see their YouTube videos and Blogtalkradio program) trying to make a name for themselves, and running up against our notability and verifiability requirements. Not a hoax as such, but also not someone we're going to have an article about, no matter how many sockpuppets scream blue murder, threaten to sue, and accuse us all of being racist. Fences&Windows 00:12, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

I have a suggestion: For example, in the article on John Rhys Meyers (read "Jonathan Rhys Meyers (actor)") == it says

that he used the "n-word" - (what a namby pamby thing to say, by the way) - and as for the whole shebang, what is the suggestion, that it is acceptable to use such a word, - now come on, - I think aggressive action should be taken to correct these kinds of allegations on wikipedia, and remove from public scrutiny these kinds of yellow journalism.

D.s., Jed E. (no) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.190.234.183 (talk) 01:44, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Are background sources to be labeled "anonymous"?

When a newspaper or other reliable source writes:

• An administration official said X.

or

• A company spokesman said Y.

Is there a requirement in adding this to Wikipedia to change it to?

• An anonymous administration official said X.
• An anonymous company spokesman said Y.

This style is used because either the speaker is providing the statement with the provision that while the reporter knows his or her identity, it is agreed that the report will not use their name in the reporting, or that the reporter doesn't believe that it adds to the story to identify the speaker by name. The point is the speaker is not anonymous to the reliable secondary source we are incorporating into the article. Such reasons for naming a source are routine, and it is inaccurate to label each appearance of this as "anonymous". patsw (talk) 13:21, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't think there'd be a requirement to edit to this given that it's possibly wrong. There is a big difference between "An unspecified X" and "An anonymous X". — Coren ^(talk) 17:47, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Subtitles on Wikipedia

Would Wikipedia benefit from the introduction of (optional) subtitles for articles e.g. something like:

Henry IV
King of France

Georgetown
Guyana

Jade
(river)

This might take some of the heat out of the naming debates and also simplify titles. It could be used in various ways e.g. just as a disambiguator instead of brackets (as shown above). It could certainly tidy up a lot of titles. Views? --Bermicourt (talk) 21:13, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

• It would be a nice formatting option for all the disambiguated kind of titles like the ones listed into Scarface (random example coming to my mind). It would require some kind of Mediawiki extension, I guess -any comment on this? --Cyclopia^talk 23:02, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

I like it. Before we take it any further though, we need to find out if it is technically possible to do that with a page title. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:26, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

This is a good idea. This would require a MediaWiki schema change (devs don't particularly like this). One way it can be done is by having a title and subtitle field but the internal page name (for the purposes of looking up the contents of the page) would be a concatenation of the two and some separator string. MER-C 06:18, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

This is definitely a good idea and would help make it a more professional encyclopedia. At the moment article titles are being determined by conflicting criteria that cannot all be satisfied at the same time - we want them to reflect the common name of the subject, but need them to be unique, and also like them to be concise and consistent - we can't have all of these things. By introducing subtitles we could ensure that the main title is always what we consider to be the "common name" (no need to worry about uniqueness), while the subtitle performs the separate function of disambiguator. Of course you could say that we could do this already by using bracketed disambiguators, but these, being written in large type along with the actual title, offend against taste and clarity if they are made too long or used when unnecessary (causing conflicts between consistency, precision and conciseness, and sometimes leading to the rejection of most common names in order to avoid the ugliness of a bracketed disambiguator). Other encyclopedias don't subject themselves to these kind of constraints and mental exercises - neither need we. Of course, this would be quite a revolutionary change, but one worth pursuing.--Kotniski (talk) 09:12, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm skeptical. What would be the syntax for linking to these things? Pipes are already used in highly problematic ways (I consider them a last resort, like the goto statement); I wouldn't want to see further distance introduced between what a reader sees with and without links. --Trovatore (talk) 09:41, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean about pipes, but in principle, this wouldn't have to mean any change in the way we make links - however, editors would need to get used to not assuming that they could link to an article using its (large-type) title. Presumably there would need to be some kind of linking hints: e.g. a discreet line in the top right corner saying "To link to this page, use [[Georgetown, Guyana]]". Or even a drop-down list of all available redirects?? Anyway, as usual, we must give higher priority to what we present to readers than to minor convenience for editors.--Kotniski (talk) 09:54, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

This is just a guess, but if this does go anywhere it will probably be something like {{DISPLAYTITLE:Title|Subtitle}}, with no changes to the page title in the URL, the page title used in wikilinks, and so on. Although if we really wanted to, we could more or less do that right now without developer involvement. Anomie⚔ 14:27, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I totally agree with Anomie. Your example code looks very nice, maybe can it be developed into a template? (I would make font size 75% and colour black, however) --Cyclopia^talk 15:09, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that looks good (subject to possible graphical modifications). I still think there's going to have to be linking hints for editors at some point, though - the point of doing this would be largely to enable more verbose and redundant disambiguation (at least, according to the conception that's forming in my mind), and editors are going to want to know how they can link to the articles without doing that extra typing. --Kotniski (talk) 15:19, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I went ahead and put together a template at User:Anomie/Template:Subtitle; theoretically it and its subpages could be moved to the Template namespace without need for modification. Anomie⚔ 17:32, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

That's really good: but won't it clash with the current subtitles like "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" or "A B-class article from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" (if you have that gadget installed)? Fences&Windows 18:14, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

It doesn't do anything to "break out" of the title <h1>, so it shouldn't cause that sort of problem any more than does an article with an extremely long title. Anomie⚔ 21:30, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I like it a lot, but see it a bit differently. Speaking as something of a techie, I'd say that it is not only doable but easy to do. Syntax-wise (and this shows the difference in the way I see it), for e.g. Treaty of Paris (1898), instead of displaying the article title as

Treaty of Paris (1898)

it would instead be displayed as

Treaty of Paris

1898

That would be no big deal to implement.

However — and this is a big thing — this is not a Wikipedia issue. It is a Mediawiki issue. It should be addressed procedurally via WP:Bugzilla. I've tried that route myself on a few occasions and have to report that based on my experience I don't have much confidence in it, but that is the prescribed procedure. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 01:06, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, getting the devs to do anything useful is a frustrating and usually fruitless task (as even Jimbo has been known to find). If we want to do this and if we can do this without their involvement, then that's probably the way to go. I would say get rid of the "from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" anyway - what's the point, when we have the exact same slogan on the logo just to the left?--Kotniski (talk) 11:57, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't see the need to get devs involved. I think everything could be simply dealt with the beautiful Anomie template and a bot who takes care of putting the template parsing the parenthesis correctly. Seems a reasonably easy task. What do you think of putting up a proper RfC to get consensus on this and have it implemented? I'd like to do that. --Cyclopia^talk 13:17, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Note that a bot may initially be quite controversial, you may want to get consensus first for this to be manually applied by editors before trying to automate the process. Anomie⚔ 14:47, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

There's something in this idea for sure, but there's a couple thoughts here. First, I think we'd want to consider if the straight disambiguation resolution is the most we can do with this. For example, the "Jade (river)" example above, why not make the subtitle a tad more descriptive (eg Jade / German river). Similar logic could also suggest this could be a possible addition for nearly any article where it is not immediately obvious what the topic is about, a two-three word phase, of the type "<adjective> <noun>". Second, I'm sure that there are official names of people or something of the form "John Smith, X of Y" as opposed to a necessary disambig title "John Smith (X of Y)", so a question becomes if a split of the proper name is appropriate. Finally, we still want to make sure that editors can quickly copy and paste the proper title of an article for building interwiki disambi links (I do this all the time); I dunno where this can go but it can be small and the like to do that. --MASEM (t) 13:26, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Do note that, given the limitations of {{Help:DISPLAYTITLE}}, the article would have to be moved to "Jade (German river)" for the subtitle to be "German river". As for copying, this example copies correctly in Firefox here, while this one misses the closing paren (because there is nothing after for the browser to realize the hidden paren should be selected). Further testing would be needed. Anomie⚔ 14:47, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Huh? On my Firefox both subtitles render correctly (without parenthesis). 3.6.8, Ubuntu 10.04 here. --Cyclopia^talk 15:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

It renders fine here too. The comment is about selecting the whole title (both lines) and copy-pasting, in Firefox 3.5.12 here it misses copying the closing paren in the second example. Anomie⚔ 16:50, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

I think we could think about trying this out on a limited set of articles first, to see how it goes (say the European monarchs, where there are constant naming battles). Re the linking, I guess it's possible for the template (outside of the DISPLAYTITLE bit) to add a line somewhere up near where some articles have coordinates, saying (as I suggested before) "link here using [PAGENAME]" or something like that. This is the main technical issue with this proposal, I think.--Kotniski (talk) 17:06, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh no, it wouldn't necessarily always be pagename, I'm thinking of the possibility of using quite long subtitles to solve naming problems, like "George VI, King of Great Britain, Ireland and other dominions" - a pity this technique would require that to be the actual article title, though the link hint could at least be a redirect that's a shorter title.--Kotniski (talk) 17:11, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Seems a bit 19th century IMO. A book title was vague then, so they would give it a clearer "second" title underneath for people who needed clearer reasons to read the book! If we name a subsection poorly or obscurely, then yes, we might need a subtitle for our subtitle. To avoid this (looks peculiar BTW), we should be forced to name it clearly in the first place. If the article is "Henry XL," the subtitle should read "King of Navarre" and explain how he became King of Navarre. If that is too obscure, then it should read "War in France 988-999". A clear subtitle can avoid the need for multiple subtitles. Double subtitles is cute, a clever idea. But one other encyclopedias have managed to avoid.

If we do this, we will have "subtitle adjusters" who do nothing but alter or add subtitles throughout Wikipedia. Even when we don't need them! Or worse (IMO) when we are trying to get an article to GA/FA. A lot of second guessers. Student7 (talk) 13:17, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure you've understood - this isn't about sections - it's about the whole article (i.e. each article gets a maximum of one subtitle, at the top just below - or next to - the main title). The motivation is that article titles have to be unique, but making them unique sometimes means adding words and phrases that don't really belong in the title as such. Other encyclopedias avoid this by being printed on paper, with no software to impose uniqueness requirements. I believe online Britannica does use something like these proposed subtitles.--Kotniski (talk) 13:29, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Dr. Leigh-Davis - victim of racist attack on Wikipedia

WP:DENY

{{Delrevafd}} Dr. Leigh-Davis ”” RE: White Professor, O.K.; Black Professor: No Way! –Dr. Leigh-Davis - Why won’t you let anyone post any information about a black professor, but you have all of these white professors with no credentials on Wikipedia? I have been trying to post in support of Dr. Leigh-Davis: a notation in OK! Magazine, a quote in The Washington Post, and a report in the Wall Street Journal. As all the news is stating, I was completely barred from posting anything. I wish to initiate arbitration. Please direct me to the link to start arbitration. This proves racism: White - less credentialed professors- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Knight_%28professor%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Hurrell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_D._Peoples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Cooper_%28literary_scholar%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elomar_Figueira_de_Mello http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Weiner_%28professor%29 12.164.240.193 (talk) 23:14, 10 September 2010 (UTC) Brian W. I think you've pretty much exhausted the arbitration process in respect of this article. The article was deleted after discussion. A deletion review was held, which was packed by sock-puppets supporting the article, but nevertheless found against the article not for issues of race, but for lack of notability. In the meantime you've been crying racism from the rooftops ... not the most effective way of making friends and influencing people, but there we go. You may, of course, redo the article and provide the references which you claim show the notability of this person. However, waving a bunch of white profs at us is proof of little. I looked at just one, who by his honours was obviously of sufficient notability. I've helped to delete lots of, how to say, crap academics, from wikipedia. I have not a clue what colour any of them was, nor do I care. They were not notable and they had to go. You prove to the community that your academic is notable and he or she can stay. Fail to do so and he or she will get the chop. In closing: I find your approach most distasteful and ugly. Please make no mistake that you insult us all with your strident and repeated stupidity. I suggest, for the sake of expedition, that you provide the three references you have mentioned here and now so that we can give you an opinion on them. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:52, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists no longer marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 02:00, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

This appears to have been due to a attempted helpful change to the header that broke SAL as a guideline. I've fixed. --MASEM (t) 02:07, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

General Discussion Topic

Hello all,

I was just curious of your opinion on what makes an "active" user on Wikipedia. It seems like it's somewhere around 100 non-automated edits a month minimum, but I wanted to start a discussion about it. Doc Quintana (talk) 19:04, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't believe there is any "official" designation of Active User™, and I don't think there should be. Users who haven't edited at all in several months or who have posted {{retired}} on their talk pages are considered inactive, anyone else is an active user. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:17, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Drawing the line between "active" and "inactive" should depend on what the consequences would be of designating someone one or the other. I don't think the words have any utility in the abstract. What's the context for your question? postdlf (talk) 20:13, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

• For statistical purposes, an "active" user is counted as one who makes five edits in a calendar month (35-40k people on enwiki), and a "very active" user is one who made over a hundred in that time (~10% of the active users). I believe these thresholds are relatively arbitrary, and I don't believe we use them for anything specific to an individual user - just for general statistical purposes. Shimgray | talk | 01:17, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

I come to bury editors, not to praise them ...

It is believed that the deletion policy is not being properly followed. Whilst I am not experienced in patrolling pages and therefore do not have a broad overview of the issues, the small amount of evidence I do see gives me cause for concern. I believe part of the problem is that the ATD section of the deletion policy should be described in the lead as per LEAD. This would hightlight to editors that articles can, in many cases should, be improved by the main contributing editor, in this context, usually an inexperienced editor. The processes, CSD's, PROD's and AFD (have I missed one?) are being applied to articles by nominators that, in the cases I have seen, are not topic aware enough to make such judgements. In one case, a PROD occured within two minutes of the page creation. The net result is that new editors are being driven away by our over-prescriptive approach when common sense suggests a more gentle and sympathetic treatment of such editors is required.

I am a relatively new editor, who wishes to write articles of interest, with some limited success. I am however distracted by what I see as an unjust deletion process against new or inexperienced editors. I am frustrated because I do not feel I can express the issue properly, as I do not have the experience nor tools necessary, am too new to see the wider picture and the examples that I can give will unfairly single out a few patrollers and limited topic areas. What follows is a list of articles that have been rescued

I guess what I am trying to alert you to is that new editors are not being treated with respect. Each one I come across already has a bad experience via a csd, prod, or afd which are very aggressive processes to new people who do not understand the policy driven terminology we use. In all the articles above, a little gentle encouragement on the new editors concerned may have created a new editor; instead many of them have gone.

As a community, we should resolve to do the following

1. Patrol editors are not using AGF nor are they considering please do not bite the newcomers
2. aggressive posting on new editors talk pages should be punished, this includes writing wiki-speak which has no meaning to a new person - perhaps for every such post found, 5,000 edits are removed from the editors "edits since" count! That would stop them
3. Cease and desist posting negative sections (prods, afd, policy violations etc) on new editors talk pages without first considering if the new editor needs sympathetic help
4. be more proactive with the mentor programme. If necessary wikipedia should be prescriptive with established editors, such as every wikipedian must adopt one new editor a month or something similar

If you have read this far you deserve a little light relief. You have probably quite rightly ignored the subtle message embedded in the list above. In addition, you have probably interpreted the mis-quote from Julius Ceasar in one particular way. Which way? If you are one of the patrollers I have been describing, then cynically, the mis-quote is your mantra. My original meaning was not to praise the patrollers! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Senra (talk • contribs) 15:53, September 11, 2010

For what it is worth I have been involved in four or five deletions, one of which was the second article I ever wrote. In all but one case it was as you described... an editor who basically was deleting because "I never heard of this". Deleting based on technical aspects of an editor not knowing how to source correctly or not living up to our expectations is NEVER a reason to delete and anyone deleting on that reason should be banned from putting up an AfD ever again. We are a work in progress and if you see an article you think reflects poorly on the quality of Wikipedia then either clean it up or move along, do not delete. If you cant clean it up because you are too lazy, then please be too lazy to nominate it for deletion. Notability is the only issue that comes into play. That is my comment to these editors who are deleting what they consider to be "low quality" work. Do some freakin' work of your own.Camelbinky (talk) 00:46, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Some of us disagree. What both of you are advocating is View Two of WP:DEADLINE--that is, as long as an article might potentially be good/source-able/neutral, then it should be kept and improved. However, please note that some of us, myself included, take View One, which is that there is no hurry to create articles, and that an article should already fulfill basic policies prior to being put into mainspace. There are several ways to develop articles prior to adding them to the live encyclopedia, and if you can't bring it into compliance with policy prior to that point, then it shouldn't be in mainspace. I agree that we don't need to be too hasty in deletions, but I think that's only a problem with speedy deletions. By definition, both of the other deletion processes take at least a week, and that should be plenty of time for someone to fix the problems, if they are, in fact, fixable. Yes, we shouldn't prod a (non-BLP) article within minutes of creation, but that doesn't mean we need to let it lie around for a long time, hoping someone will improve the article. As for the claim that we're too "lazy," please see WP:BURDEN. If I believe an article is non-notable, I do a few searches in appropriate places, and I don't find anything, it's not up to me to go to the library, search through thousands of pages of false hits in an online search, etc. It's up to the person who wants to include the article. Perhaps the only thing I agree with is that people need to be careful with subjects outside of their realm of ability. I, for instance, have become far more cautious than I once was on articles relating to music, because I find the notability guidelines difficult to apply and in contradiction to WP:GNG; rather than try to deal with the conflict every time, I simply stay out of it, for the most part. But there are times where exactly what is needed is someone who does not have subject matter competence--that is the person who can evaluate a little more carefully things like WP:N and WP:OR. Qwyrxian (talk) 02:11, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

You are justifying actions that are in contrast to policy by quoting an essay. Not a great argument. Policy states that we are always under construction and that an editor's good faith contributions done incorrectly or incompletely do not invalidate their contributions. There may be two views, but one is codified in policy and one is codified in an essay. Who do you think we should follow? I see no reason to delete something. WP:PRESERVE is part of POLICY and precedence over that essay. Preserve instead of delete.Camelbinky (talk) 02:20, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure he will respond himself, but it seems to me that Qwyrxian is trying to explain a difference in philosophy, not mandate what any one person should be doing, so whether it's an essay or a policy or something written on a fortune cookie really makes no difference. There is no doubt that the approach Qwyrxian advocates leads to better-quality articles, but it also inevitably leads to fewer new articles and fewer new productive editors. Whether or not that's a reasonable trade-off is very much a matter of individual opinion. Regardless of one's feelings on that, there is a real issue with how new editors are welcomed and treated when they make their first edits. For a new user to put together a good-faith article and press the "Save page" button may represent hours of work, learning wiki markup and tweaking their wording. They desperately need to feel validated and encouraged, and to understand that their effort is appreciated. Having their article tagged for speedy deletion or similar within minutes of creation must be a terrible discouragement, and many promising wiki-careers probably end right there. Thparkth (talk) 02:36, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

So then what do we do if their article really is unsalvageable? Let it sit around for a few days or weeks, until we think they can handle it, then say "Oh, by the way, we need to delete that, we've just been lying to you all this time"? What about all the thousands of articles that clearly did not represent hours of work? The ones that are riddled with spelling errors and are totally unformatted? Mr.Z-man 04:04, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

(@ Mr.Z-man) - I regularly patrol the pages tagged for speedy deletion, and I can back up what you're saying about the "thousands of articles that clearly did not represent hours of work." The majority of pages tagged for speedy deletion absolutely need to be deleted, as speedily as possible. In my opinion, someone who comes here to write an article that is blatantly spam, or someone who writes an attack page, or someone who wants to impress Suzanne in the 8th grade by having a Wikipedia article about themselves... I'm not too concerned about hurting their feelings, because they are clearly not motivated to improve wikipedia anyway.

But there are other cases too. There are articles by retired carpenters about some technical detail of their craft, utterly unsourced and probably unsourcable, but almost certainly true, and almost certianly harmless. There are articles by systems adminstrators (like me) who know perfectly well that dig is an essential tool used by millions of people every day, and that the world economy would actually suffer a blip if it stopped working, so who don't comprehend why we might question it's notability. Or maybe they don't understand yet that the UNIX manual page for it is not a "reliable source" in wiki-speak, when in the real world it's THE reliable source, far more "reliable" than some crappy article by a know-nothing tech journalist, which for some reason we want them to reference instead ;)

I'm rambling here, but the point is that things that seem obvious to those of us who've been around this project for a while, that aren't obvious to a newbie - even a smart one. There are many articles being created in good faith, by people motivated to improve the encyclopedia, containing nothing but true information with absolutely no legal issues, which are nevertheless deleted within minutes of creation because some over-eager new page patroller and some lazy admin had never heard of it and didn't find it in the first page of a google search. This is losing us people - the specific people we want to keep. I'm not arguing that those articles shouldn't ever be deleted, but they certainly shouldn't be speedily-deleted, with the article creator having basically no chance to learn about the problem and fix it. There is no hurry to delete a harmless article IMHO. Why not work with the creator to see if it can be improved? If it's done right, it will either end up with a good article that can be kept forever, or with the article creator agreeing themselves that it probably should be deleted, because although interesting, it just doesn't fit the guidelines.

Of course, this will never happen, because the people with great content editing and mentoring skills are generally busy editing content and mentoring people, rather than doing new page patrols - different people have different skills. But what if there was a formal "new article resuscitation" team waiting to handle new articles identified by patrollers as being possibly hopeless, but made in good faith? I'd sign up for that. Thparkth (talk) 04:29, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

This isn't really a direct reply, as I mostly agree, at least in theory. Personally, I think we need to simply discourage people from creating new articles. They should be encouraged instead to add their information to existing ones. It kills 3 birds with one stone 1) Its easier to edit an existing article than create a new one so they're less likely to be reverted or discouraged simply by the process of editing. 2) It results in a net improvement in our huge corpus of stubs, rather than continuing to expand it. 3) It reduces the load on new page patrollers, so they potentially can devote more time to each page. Why can't the retired carpenter add his content to one of our other dozens of articles on the subject? If one is working within the context of existing articles, primary sources like man pages are often perfectly acceptable. The current idea that "new users create articles" stopped making sense about 2.5 million articles ago. We've been scraping the bottom of the notability barrel for a few years now. But of course, that too will never happen - old habits die hard. We have a discussion like this every couple of months. People complain that new users aren't being treated well and present some solutions that are either too vague to be workable or wholly impractical, while the underlying problem (Why the hell do so many people feel the need to create a new article as their first edit?) is not considered. Mr.Z-man 05:07, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

<ec>I'll admit to being guilty of this. I tend to be in favor of keeping and improving material rather than deleting it, but when I use tools to delete things I just post the generic templates that the Twinkle tool gives. As what I often do is remove an attempt to summarily remove material (WP:PROD) and replace it with an actual discussion (WP:AFD), I'm actually trying to give their work a chance. But what they get is a wall of notices. So we have two issues. #1 We do have inclusion guidelines such as WP:N which insists that "good" sourcing must exist on a given topic for us to have an article. I favor this pretty strongly. But at the same time we want to avoid WP:BITE because otherwise we'll lose potentially useful editors. Honestly I think the problem is that the standards we have for Wikipedia have gotten so high that it's really hard for a new user to contribute without doing a lot of reading and work first. And that's going to scare away people. But we also don't want so many bad articles that the encyclopedia is an unmaintainable disaster. And frankly the new page patrollers are already overworked, so writing nice notes to each person just isn't realistic. One thought I've had is to have articles fit into different layers of Wikipedia. Some articles are just bad and are part of the outer ring. Some are good, some are featured etc. It's pretty much what we do right now, with Good and Featured articles, but maybe we need a new layer, the "seems okay" layer and somehow only grant access to the layer below that when the user specifically asks for it. Given that people generally use search engines to get here, we'd need to work something out with them so that any such tag shows up in the search result. Probably not viable, but it's the best I've got. Thoughts? Hobit (talk) 02:41, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I see Senra has suggested that by default we move articles without BLP/copyright problems into the creator's userspace. I think doing that with a tag at the top which A) describes issues that need to be resolved B) states if it stays in userspace for more than (say) 6 months it will be deleted and C) makes it plain this isn't an article might be a great way to handle this. Thoughts? I think it would be a wonderful change to our standard procedures without causing any meaningful harm I can see. Hobit (talk) 02:53, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

This is such a huge change in the basic philosophy of Wikipedia that I'm beside myself to even see such a concept in print, much less advocated strongly. Assuming good faith is a fundamental principle behind Wikipedia that to give it up is to change the nature of this project entirely. While I don't mind user space articles if they are under development for some reason or another, I think that is something which should be strongly discouraged and that articles ought to be kept in the main development space even if they are stubs. An incomplete article, even a single sentence is just fine in terms of an article. Label it as a stub if you have to, but don't go deleting things just because you've never heard about it.

For myself, it ticks me off to no end to see somebody PROD an article a mere minutes after its creation and demand two or more reliable sources for it when clearly the article is under active development. I've had that happen to me on articles I've created... and I'm hardly even a newcomer to this project. A much more friendly tone can certainly be coming from the crew that is involved in recent changes patrol to distinguish between a good-faith article creation attempt and something that is pure drivel, spam, or trollish behavior. If you can't tell the difference, hold back and learn a bit before you start PROD'ing articles again and ask questions. I've been an admin before (I'm not on Wikipedia, but I don't want to involve myself in the politics here) and I do know some of the tricks and trash that happens when trying to stop the trolls. Unfortunately all edits start to look like trolls when in fact they aren't. Don't get hyper sensitive here and do encourage new contributors. A few bad admins can really spoil the environment for everybody here too.

If the complaint is about disc space on the servers, I should point out that deleting articles actually takes up more hard drive space than simply keeping the article in place. If something needs to be merged into another article, make the merger and add the redirect. Unfortunately that is often much harder to perform as it requires real editing as opposed to simply hitting the "delete" button. Nobody said that participation on Wikipedia was easy, and if you are using admin tools you should be cautious about using those extra tools that mere mortals don't have. My first instinct as an admin has always been to do what I can with the normal editor tools and use the admin stuff as a very last resort.

Importantly, remember the five pillars and don't create unnecessary bureaucracy and policies that start conflicting with those principles. I was involved with this project back in the Nupedia days, and remember how Wikipedia was set up as a sort of bastard child of the "serious" encyclopedia effort. I sure hope that we don't need to go back to that original model of Wikipedia on another site where we need to create a website where the "rest of us" can edit while the privileged and select few concentrate on refining the ever higher standards for inclusion into the main project. Just look at how successful Nupedia became and how widely used its content has been spread around the globe and then tell me which method works out better. Time and experience shows that a project of this nature works out best when you are as inclusive of all ideas as possible and the people you need to be stopping are those who somehow block new users from participating. Those are the real trolls here. --Robert Horning (talk) 03:33, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Adding a P.S. here. It was said above by Hobit

'And frankly the new page patrollers are already overworked, so writing nice notes to each person just isn't realistic."

I completely disagree. While perhaps the new page patrollers may feel overworked, try to be human here for a change. You can't get to everybody, but if you get to somebody and respond to their work with some real words of encouragement, it goes a long way. Whenever I do an introduction to a new user, I always include a personal note on top of and beyond the simple template. It is quality over quantity, even if you can't get to everybody or look at everything. A "nice note" to a person who has raised an eyebrow in terms of something questionable goes a long way to finding out what the real problem might be... or if that person is simply a troll. You might be surprised and get a real answer to a query you make too. From my own experience, far more new users respond to a genuine query than don't, unless they are sock puppets or troll accounts. Generally it is easy to tel the difference too. Just don't go assuming that everybody is a troll. --Robert Horning (talk) 03:43, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

"I certainly see where you are coming from. But A) I think userfying articles that we are currently deleting is more friendly, not less and B) the new page patrol folks are overworked. Either things don't get patrolled (which maybe okay) or templates are the best you're going to get. As far as the userficaiton thing goes, I would worry that by having such a policy we'd start "deleting" more articles and we'd move more toward a future where stubs of notable topics are userfied rather than left in mainspace. That would suck. Bah. So what is the next step forward? How can we make this place more friendly for new editors? Should we ask the new page patrol to patrol less and work with users more? Assuming that generates a backlog (which I strongly suspect it would) is that acceptable? What should we do with articles that have no hope of meeting WP:N? Deleting them 15 minutes after creation is a problem (per WP:BITE), but leaving them around is also a problem (do we really want to have a massive number of unsourced and unsourcable articles?) Thoughts? Hobit (talk) 04:03, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Is a backlog acceptable? All that shows is where some extra help is needed on Wikipedia, and if this project is more inviting to newcomers it will generate the support and help to take care of the problems from massive growth. If instead you are pushing new users away from this project, it indicates a dying project that will only require more effort with fewer people willing to do the work. No, I don't think having a massive number of unsourced and "unsourceable" articles. If it bugs you, clean it up. Demand that sources be found. At least give the person creating the article a chance to create the article.... which implies something on the order of months to develop the article instead of mere minutes or days. If an article goes unnoticed for a couple of years and then gets an AfD, it makes no difference if it is a bad article. I say give the new users the benefit of the doubt here, and cleanup can happen in other ways besides squishing the new users within the first few minutes of their contributions. There are articles that were created years ago that are in much worse shape than many of the articles that come up for AfD.

I also argue that if we let a "massive number of unsourced and unsourceable articles" into Wikipedia, there will also be a number of those articles that will eventually turn into quality articles. The question here is where should be draw the line on these articles? Articles that are stale are ones that ought to be more of a concern, such as WP:DUSTY. If the topic is something that nobody is paying attention to, generally you aren't hurting new users when you are deleting old content that hasn't had an update for years. I say let those article go stale and then delete them rather than "protecting" Wikipedia to keep them from getting created in the first place. Obvious trollish behavior is a exception. --Robert Horning (talk) 15:51, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

(e/c)I'm personally not a huge fan of userfication (in most cases it results in no improvement). If we not going to delete them, the Article incubator is nice, as it allows everyone to work on, and it means we're keeping track of what's there. The problem is that these articles are not "incomplete" like a stub, they don't meet basic standards of verifiability and NPOV. I agree that things shouldn't be tagged for deletion within minutes, but when does "active development" end? An hour without an edit? A day? A week? Wikipedia is long past the point where we can continue to treat it like was done in 2001. We're a top-5 website that millions of people turn to every day for information. That calls for higher standards. If we've learned anything from the history of the project, its that the "it doesn't matter if it sucks, someone will fix it" philosophy doesn't work. Unless someone comes up with a way to automate the fixing, the problems just keep piling up. About 3 years ago, there were 26,000 articles needing cleanup. Today there are more than 60,000 including nearly 200 that were tagged in 2006. The number of people creating substandard content is greater than the number of people improving it. And yes, the people doing new page patrol are overworked. 2 users have done 25% of the new article review work this month so far (each more than 1200 articles, or about 100 articles per day). Mr.Z-man 04:39, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is one of the top-5 websites because of the policies of openness, being friendly to new contributors, and a willingness to allow article creation that doesn't require a lengthly process for somebody willing to start a page on that topic. Where the complaints about Wikipedia come from are those who have been manhandled and disrespected... usually with a gross violation of established policies in terms of editor to editor or admin to editor conduct. There are detractors to Wikipedia, and not all of them are trolls that have been burned in the past. There are some very valid complaints that do need to be addressed.

My broad and general experience over years of participation is that "if it sucks, somebody will fix it" actually happens. You need to have the perspective of years of effort rather than merely hours or weeks. The statistics you are quoting here indicate a growth of this project rather than a lack of effort to clean up articles. That is a good thing and is indicating that the efforts to review articles is being successful. The problem facing new page patrollers is that those people who are patrolling new pages are not accepting new users nor are doing an effective job at recruitment. If the number of people involved with that activity is going down, the question should be raised in terms of what is driving folks away from that activity and how can new users be introduced into helping to support that work.... including training those new users on what is an acceptable practice and what isn't. If you are feeling overworked, that is a system problem that requires more openness and developing tools to help with the issue.

My issue is that new page patrollers are the front-line folks meeting new people coming to Wikipedia. It is a people to people issue more than being a bunch of security guards watching the front door. To me, I'd rather let a few articles slip by that may be of poor quality and instead concentrate on helping those who may be lost and need an extra little bit of help. A "kinder, gentler" new page patroller group that is focused on working with new users may be a much better paradigm than acting like security guards at a major airport. That, to me, is where the problem lies. --Robert Horning (talk) 16:07, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

No, we're a top-5 website because of the amount of information we have. On a normal day, 4-6 million people view the Main Page, only about 30,000 people edit the site, including vandals. Readers outnumber editors by about 150:1, many are totally clueless about where the content comes from. There really are people who don't know that anyone can edit Wikipedia. I've been here for years as well. I've seen how little the average quality of the site has improved. That is not just a "growth of the project" - hundreds of articles have been waiting nearly 4 years for cleanup. In 2007 around this time, we had about 2 million articles. We now have 3.4 million, a 170% increase. The cleanup category increased by 230% in the same time. We get about 2000 new articles every day; probably about 500 of them will be deleted. A few articles slipping by might be 10 or 20 every day. That adds up fast. The real problem, to me, is our nonsensical quantity over quality approach. It seems like most people on Wikipedia would rather have 20 stubs than one high quality, comprehensive article. People should be encouraged to add their knowledge to existing articles, creating a new one only as a last resort if no other article should reasonably contain that information. Mr.Z-man 18:41, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

If the new page patrolers are overworked, they can stop being new page patrolers. Everyone's a volunteer here, I don't understand why so many people seem to forget that. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 04:14, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Just because they're overworked doesn't mean they're miserable. But just because they're not miserable doesn't mean they have the time to do extra work. Mr.Z-man 04:39, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

I believe new page patrolling should be done in two waves, one shortly after say a few hours or a day, and another a week or so after. The first pass should be mainly speedy deletes of the obvious attack pages and suchlike obvious total rubbish, they could also tag the page for the probable type content if that is missing. The second pass could select by content type or missing type and check more carefully when there has been time for something that might eventually be reasonable. Having new pages tagged quickly could also alert people with an interest in a subject so the editor might get some support or be shown an existing page covering the topic. Dmcq (talk) 11:10, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

I believe Wikipedia:New pages patrol says all the right sorts of things. I believe though that a two stage process would take less overall effort and give a better result than having in effect a single check as it is at present. Dmcq (talk) 11:20, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Senra makes a good point. I'm not sure that this can be fixed by policy changes (I'm not saying it can't either). I try to follow the behavior he has described. It is time consuming. A couple of suggestions, beyond just being mindful of what he has said: 1) People, don't be shy about chiding an editor who has tagged or deleted an article that could have been salvaged, or tagged it too soon, or not engaged the editor beyond using a template (when warranted). You're doing them and everyone a favor, how else can they learn? 2) We need to change the template graphics, I think. The triangle-wow sign used to notify editors that there article is being considered for deletion is the same sign use for second warnings to vandals (I think). Herostratus (talk) 14:26, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps part of the reason I differed above is that maybe myself and Camelbinky (and, presumably others) are actually talking about a different kind of article. While WP:PRESERVE is policy, so is WP:V and WP:OR, and WP:N is a guideline (and policies do not trump guidelines). If an article is unsourced, at least 2 people (a nominator and an admin if speedy/PROD; more if AfD) need to make a judgment call as to whether or not the information can ever meet those criteria. If it appears to be the case (e.g., non-notable companies, actors who are "about" to make it, scientific principles of highly dubious quality and no reliable sources), we shouldn't PRESERVE that information, because that information is fundamentally inappropriate for an encyclopedia. Let me make bring up a set of examples, ones I see a lot because of the time zone I live in--articles about people, townships, and schools in India. If an article comes up about a living person, and it has no sources, it should either be marked for speedy deletion or with a BLP-prod, and I have no qualms doing that within an hour of the article's creation, because BLPs fall under far more stringent rules than anything else. If a school shows up without sources, I'm inclined to let it sit for quite a bit longer, because it's likely that (if it's HS or post-secondary), it counts as notable, and it's likely that sources can, eventually, be found. If an article about a village shows up (or is significantly expanded), it's really important (I think) to get in there and start editing right away, if you can. That's because I find that those articles, while fundamentally notable and valuable, are regularly filled with all sorts of non-encyclopedic information that should not be preserved (lists of people who live there, puffery about how great the village is, dubious unsourced claims of historical importance, etc.). Now, I certainly think that, along with all of these instances (save for outright vandalism or disruptive edits), it's nice to add some detailed, personal, non-templated information to the editor's talk page--if nothing else, that increases the likelihood that the info won't be re-added without any conversation.

Sorry, I know I'm going on and on, but I'm trying to get down to the idea that simply because one editor added something, or created a new article, that doesn't mean we are automatically compelled to keep it. WP:PRESERVE actually contains all of the explanation I listed above and more for why deletion is sometimes the best choice. I don't believe that I'm alone in thinking that a better encyclopedia is, well, better than a large one. Maybe that's even what people above meant, and I just misinterpreted their words; if so, I'm sorry. I agree that the retired carpenter should be encouraged to find a way to get what he knows (that can be "reliably sourced") into the encyclopedia. I think that if patrollers are just speedying these articles and not giving at least a one paragraph, personal discussion to the contributor, then they're doing something wrong. But I don't think the way to get that person to become a "good" contributor is to let their contributions float around in our encyclopedia indefinitely, hoping someone sometime improves it until it meets minimum standards. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:09, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I completely agree with you Qwyrxian.Camelbinky (talk) 00:52, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that speedies at least don't require that an article can't be improved. In some cases a lack of assertion of notability is enough. In other words it's about the state of the article and it can be improved. Perhaps speedy deletion notes like that should go to the creator and let them know userfication is an option... Hobit (talk) 13:20, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

• Conciseness would have helped get across many of the contributions above! I'm a novice to article creation and deletion, but two issues appear to be (1) civility and respect: I prefer to give and receive a personal message to a template. (2) Finality of deletion. Where poor or insufficient content have been the reasons for deletion, yes, page would be better "off-line". Off-line (eg. moved to user space) as a concept is an incentive to the creator to improve the article, get it into shape; deletion, the opposite. Feedback from non-contributing users amonst my friends indicates a poor-quality article is a worse reflection on WP than no article. Let articles be incubated before they're thrown up for instant gratification and then become throw-away! As per Qwyrxian, "..there is no hurry to create" –most– "articles.." (my qualification). Best, Trev M  ~  13:56, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

      A similar problem was mentioned a year ago at Bullypedia, A Wikipedian Who’s Tired of Getting Beat Up. This lead to a month long test of how newbies were treated at WP:CSD. The results of that test were recorded at Wikipedia:Newbie treatment at Criteria for speedy deletion. A lot of the same issues were brought up at that time. A series of proposed solutions was the result, so maybe reviewing them could be helpful. 64.40.61.22 (talk) 15:04, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Related article at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-09/New pages experiment 64.40.61.22 (talk) 15:15, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

an ambitious proposal

At one point I suggested that the conversion between metric and english measurement be automated in some fashion. Perhaps users could set preferences to show one system or the other -- the repetitive conversions present in some articles are sort of annoying inho.

Here is a much harder to implement idea but one that I think would be valuable: Often I see mention of currency in an article and I instantly wonder, what does this amount mean? It is obviously a very difficult issue that is beyond simply converting, say, lire to dollars since the value of the dollar has varied over time.

Would some sort of automated process that took into account time/place/currency be possible? I hope the value of such functionality is clear -- why mention monetary figures at all if the conversion is unknown?

I see these conversion functions as a powerful feature for Wikipedia (currency, measurement of various physical qualities and also date conversion and perhaps things I am overlooking) and a fascinating project. I would be willing to contribute if others would help--Jrm2007 (talk) 12:24, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

It would technically be possible to create a template similar to {{convert}} to convert monetary units. Since currency rates fluctuate, the conversion units would need to be variable stores in subtemplates that get updated on a regular basis. Then you have to deal with historical money, such as $10 (1910) is equivalent to $244 (2010).

Actually, this discussion seems familiar. I suggest you search the archive to see if someone started such a template. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 12:38, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

They did, and it's a real pain to deal with, sometimes. Comparing the value of money is hard; for something like the price of a cup of coffee or a day's wages, a simple "oh, six times as much since 19--" works fine, but it breaks down rapidly for very large figures. The cost of building a dam or running a war can't be converted by the same multiplier; there's a good essay here demonstrating why, with worked examples.

Unfortunately, the template (whose name I have temporarily forgotten) can't handle the nuance - it just takes an amount and a date and mangles something out of it, so we end up with articles that confidently state things like the Alaska purchase was the "equivalent" of $100m - half the cost of a modern fighter jet - which really doesn't help give anyone more of an idea of the cost than the bare 1870s figure would. Shimgray | talk | 13:00, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Probably {{inflation}}. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:24, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Currency conversion is a real minefield as rates between different currencies vary all the time. For other conversions we have the Convert template which is fine. I don't agree that all values should be automatically converted - it would make a real mess of a lot of articles. --Bermicourt (talk) 13:18, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

We do have {{INRConvert}}, which converts between rupees and dollars. Before using it as a model, the pros and cons need to be evaluated. It depends on a volunteer to update the values every week. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:24, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Linking to illegal contents in articles

What is the policy regarding this? What about linking to pages with entire sections with links to child porn, but with no actual child porn on the page linked to?

I removed some links like this from the Tor (anonymity network) article. Ismouton (talk) 12:29, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Why do you think that there was anything illegal on this hidden wiki? Ruslik_Zero 13:12, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

It is common knowledge. It links directly to hidden services hosting child pornography. Ismouton (talk) 06:05, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I know that we have a policy against linking to copyright violations, but otherwise I don't think so. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:01, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Item 3 under Wikipedia:External links#Links normally to be avoided would appear to address this issue (there should not be links to content illegal under Florida law). --Allen3 ^talk 13:13, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Leave redirects after renaming images?

Suppose I stumble across an image named something like File:2Oa8ifmKrCeIMO6Jpq3WXPy3bmT2Tx.png and rename it so that it has a more descriptive file name. By default this will make a redirect from the old file name to the new one. If I update all of the links to the image in articles that use it, is there any reason to keep the redirect from the old name? I've been deleting redirects like that (or just not creating them in the first place), but then I thought maybe I should ask about it in case there's something I haven't thought about. —Bkell (talk) 20:02, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

If the image is only used in articles, that is reasonable. If it's linked to talk pages, tracking lists, or olf I/FfD, I leave the redirect befind so that the image can still be found if those pages are reviewed. - J Greb (talk) 01:07, 13 September 2010 (UTC)