A request for comment was started on November 28 seeking consensus to begin a three-month trial of the tool apprenticeship program, developed by Dcoetzee. The program would allow experienced users to apply for access to a specific tool or set of related tools currently accessible only to administrators, such as blocking or deleting pages. Successful applicants would receive that set of tools on a short term, probationary basis. Early support for the proposal was strong, with many of the initial opposers having struck their votes after their concerns were responded to by Dcoetzee, but later input was less supportive, leaving a significant yet tenuous plurality in favour of the idea.
Concern was raised on the talk page of WikiProject Articles for creation that the template used when project members rejected submissions was too negative, and had the potential to discourage future contributors. A good portion of the discussion dealt with the balance between a desire to give personalized responses to each submitter and the massive volume of submissions that AfC receives. As a result of the thread, the background color to the template in question was lightened, and WikiProject user warnings began exploring friendlier options for AfC templates.
Three proposals were recently put forth to modify the user watchlist feature. The first proposal, written on November 30 by Fred Gandt, would allow users to choose to watch a specific page, but not its corresponding discussion page, or vice versa. The idea was brought up before in both 2005 and 2008, on each occasion with minimal community feedback. Support and opposition for the current proposal are roughly split at the time of writing.
A second proposal was made later that same day by Czarkoff that would allow users to mark a specific item in their watchlist as "read". Under this proposal, after a change is marked as "read", the next time the watchlist was viewed, that change, and all changes made to the same page that took place before the edit marked as "read", would not show up in the watchlist. The idea received some discussion before branching off into a third proposal by Edokter that would add a "show changes since last visit" function to the watchlist. This function is already built into MediaWiki, as the $wgShowUpdatedMarker option, and is enabled on Commons and Meta already. The proposal has received strong support thus far.
The last issue of the Signpost for 2011 comes out on December 26, and we are planning on running a special issue of the discussion report that week detailing the most important discussions of the year. A thread was started at the village pump seeking suggestions, however it has thus far only received two comments (for which the Signpost thanks Jayron32 and Chzz). Further submissions are needed for this issue to be viable, so we ask readers to make suggestions either in the comments below or at the village pump, where details of what is being sought are available. The Signpost is grateful for any assistance, and we thank you in advance.
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- Well now I know where all the new people came from on Wikipedia talk:Tool apprenticeship. :-) Thanks to the Signpost staff for helping to get the attention of the community on this important matter. Your short summary appears to be quite accurate, and indeed is the best summary I've seen so far. Dcoetzee 12:01, 8 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Why thank you good sir. Sven Manguard Wha? 12:35, 8 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
==Suggestions for the special edition==