The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on and about the English Wikipedia and major discussions on its sister projects. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition.
The Wikimedia Foundation has opened a survey among active English Wikipedia contributors regarding authorship credit. It is meant to inform discussions about potential clarifications of the terms of service and licensing model used by Wikimedia projects. The survey was advertised via a CentralNotice starting on 27 February. Questions are on topics regarding activities as a Wikipedia contributor; they range from I edit existing articles to I am involved in the organization, a chapter, or the Wikimedia movement. There is also a section asking which of a handful of models for giving credit to article authors are considered appropriate for Wikipedia text, asking that they be ranked in order from 1 to 6. The CentralNotice was disabled on 1 March 2009. A similar survey was opened for the German Wikipedia on 4 March.
There is currently a discussion ongoing regarding how Wikipedia:Build the web should be tagged. The proposition has five choices consisting of using: {{essay}}, {{historical}}, {{former guideline|Wikipedia:Manual of Style (links)}}, {{guideline}}, or no template. This most recent discussion regarding WP:BUILD is the result of a merge from 11 January.
It is important that to get as many views as possible on the format of a request for comment regarding date linking articles, we get individual views about the process.
Some questions he hopes contributors will address are: what issues the RfC should deal with, what format the RfC should take, and how each individual point should be put across. After the community has decided what form the RfC should take it will be listed in order to obtain a project-wide consensus.
A straw poll is currently taking place on a proposal to give bureaucrats the ability to remove the administrator status of user accounts, something that only stewards can do currently. The straw poll currently shows a clear lack of consensus, with 51 editors supporting the proposal and 26 opposing it. Nine editors also noted concern that the poll is premature, and that they believe that more discussion needs to take place.
A bot request for approval was initiated by Nn123645 on 26 February. The request states the bot would:
Fix the removal of the speedy deletion template by the creator of the page as specified in policy while remaining 1RR complient so as not to edit war. In the event that the article creator removes the template again notify both the article creator and the person who placed the tag on the article.
For users who repeatedly remove speedy deletion templates warn them with the {{uw-speedy#}} series (or a similar derivative template) and report them to WP:AIV where appropriate, being lax with this to target only users who are obviously abusing the system by repeadly removing templates.
For articles that are incorrectly tagged with the wrong speedy template, either due to the article changing since it was placed or the person who requested deletion making a mistake, either change the template to be accurate or notify the person that placed the speedy deletion template that the article may not meet the speedy deletion criterion.
Maintain a noticeboard similar to Suspected Copyright Violations of all articles that have had the speedy deletion template removed by the creator to allow administrators and other users to easily check up on which articles have had the speedy deletion tag removed by the creator.
There is overall support for points 1 and 2; while point 3 is currently under scrutiny.
There is currently a proposal to give Members of the Bot Approvals Group the ability to grant and remove the "bot" flag from accounts. The flag, which can currently only be removed and applied by bureaucrats, flags all edits made by the flagged account as "bot" edits. Bot edits are not shown in the recent changes feed by default, and can be removed from watch lists. Bots that edit more than a few times per minute require this flag to avoid clogging Special:RecentChanges. The proposal is almost unanimously opposed—many editors feel that the current system provides essential oversight of the bot approvals process.
There is a proposal to allow speedy deletion of the userspaces of non-contributing editors. In order to qualify for deletion, the user must have no non-deleted edits in a namespace other than User: , have not edited in the last year, and the page can not indicate that the user is a sock account or an alternate account. A new guideline, with shortcut WP:NONCON, would be created that would cite the aforementioned criteria. While there is currently no consensus for the change either way, it has been mentioned that this might work best if codified into CSD.
It has been proposed to tag and delete all 469 images which are currently tagged with {{GFDL-presumed}}. The proposal would use a bot to tag all of the images in the category with {{nld}}, with a specifically written message put on the User's talk page. The message would describe the issue and tell them to re-upload the image if they missed the grace period and their image was deleted. While there is general support, it was mentioned that between 19 September 2004 and 18 May 2005 MediaWiki:Uploadtext stated:
By uploading a file here to which you hold the copyright, you agree to licence it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
A proposal to hand-check certain entries based off of set criteria has met general support.
Following a post at the Administrators' noticeboard it has been proposed to modify the Criteria for speedy deletion to include a G13 criterion for the new books feature. The proposed amendment states it would include:
any book whose contents would be subject to speedy deletion as an article.
Currently the proposal has been met with minimal discussion. Following this proposal a second proposal was created to give Wikipedia:Books their own criteria section. A WikiProject Wikipedia Books has been proposed to the WikiProject Council which should help keep the amount of vandalism through books down.
Following a discussion at the Administrators' noticeboard it has been proposed to disable the ability to create books in the project space via Special:Book in an effort to reduce test pages and vandalism. Due to arguments against this move it was proposed to create a new namespace specifically for books. This proposition has been met with general support. It has also been proposed to modify {{saved book}} to allow the use of a |confirmed= parameter. This parameter would categorize books after they had been reviewed. This proposition has also been met with general approval.
Users at the Wikimedia Commons are currently discussing a proposal to enable the rollback feature. The current proposal states that the feature would be granted automatically if the user met certain specifications, and the right could also be granted under administrator discretion if the user did not meet the autopromotion criteria. Current discussion has revolved around automatically enabling rollback for users. Opponents specifically state that if the right is granted automatically that it cannot be removed, and that the right should be revocable.
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So this edition of Signpost is dated 2nd March and gives notice of a discusion to take place that "will be disabled on 1 March 2009" - bit late now isn't it ? David Ruben Talk 23:48, 2 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]