Polls, templates, and other December discussions

Coverage of discussions on the Stop Online Piracy Act can be found at this week's "News and notes" section.

A number of discussions emerged from the Harvard/Science Po poll advertised on a Wikipedia-wide top banner on December 8. As detailed in last week's "News and notes", anger was expressed over several issues: that an advertisement was run on Wikipedia for an organization other than the Wikimedia Foundation, that the discussion that led to the posting of the banner took place on Meta, not on the English Wikipedia, and that the study linked responses to the survey takers' usernames, edit counts, and user privileges. The discussions on Meta included criticism of the way that payments for completing the study were set up. Threads were also started at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents and Central Notices. Discussions on the poll also took place on the Administrators' noticeboard in March, when the authors sought permission to leave messages on the user talk pages of several thousand editors. The idea was tabled after significant opposition. Plans for proceeding with the poll, and what form it would take, are still uncertain.

Centralized

Discussions

• Discussion on what sort of action to take regarding SOPA
• RfC into the display of CentralNotices on Wikipedia
• Proposal to add a requirement at WP:CFD that category creators be notified
• RfC to rename the tab title from "discussion" to "talk"
• RfC about creating binding solutions to intractable content disputes through RfCs
• RfC about enabling multilingual search results for registered Wikipedians

Discussions detailed in the main body of the discussion report, or in previous reports, are not listed here.

A Templates for discussion (TfD) debate was opened on {{Foreign character}} on December 6, arguing that the template is unneeded because non-English characters can be searched for, and that the template is dangerous because it offers non-neutral and potentially misleading advice. The debate generated a large amount of discussion for a TfD, with more than two dozen editors commenting, three-quarters advocating for the deletion of the template. Two additional and very similar templates, {{Foreignchars}} and {{Foreignchars2}}, were also placed for deletion in the same nomination. {{Foreign character}} is used on just over 1,650 pages, and the other two combined are used on just over 100 pages.

• With the conclusion of the 2011 Arbitration Committee elections, the election coordinators are now soliciting feedback about various aspects of the process.
• A discussion has been started on the talk page of the Thanksgiving article, asking the community to decide between four potential lead sections. The Request for Comment emerged from a week-long argument on what extent religious aspects of the holiday should be covered in the lead section. The discussion has slowed to a near halt in recent days, with three of the four options attracting close to the same levels of support.
• A Request for Comment was initiated on whether or not a particular image from the article Fisting, depicting action performed on a man, anally, should be removed. The discussion became heated after the nominator, Camilo Sanchez, made a series of objectionable comments towards editors advocating the position opposite to his. The discussion has seen no activity since November 12, with two-thirds of participants commenting before then in favor of removing the image.

In this issue

19 December 2011 (all comments)

News and notes

In the news

Discussion report

WikiProject report

Featured content

Arbitration report

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Fallout from the Harvard/Science Po poll

Not raised at all was the use of LimeSurvey poll software that has recently been declared by various members of the WMF staff as having security issues, and should not be used for Wikipedia/Foundation surveys. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:24, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Foreign character put up for discussion

Not to nitpick or anything, but you could have noted that "foreign character" meant foreign alphabetical characters, not characters originated from non-English speaking parts of the world. I freaked out there for a minute since I assumed that we were discussing characters in film, tv, cartoons, anime, etc. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:39, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]