Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-09-07/Discussion report

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The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition.

Do you have the right to edit policy?

Full disclosure: Your writer has participated in some of these discussions

Currently, across Wikipedia there are a number of discussions regarding the ability of editors to make bold edits to policy. At Wikipedia talk:Consensus User:M and User:Blueboar debated whether mistakes in policy should be corrected immediately or whether a discussion over the nature of the mistake was more appropriate first. User:Ohms law disagreed with what they depicted as an "extra hoop for people to go through in order to edit any project pages that happen to be policies", to which User:Xandar countered "that a change to POLICY and some major guidelines can often cause widespread troubles that the few people making the change don't consider or foresee." While Blueboar argued that '[t]he point of "discuss first" is that you can often avoid rigidity in the first place' M stated the opposite, that '"discuss first" does not avoid rigidity, it condones and offers support for it'. Over at Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines a similar debate is playing out, as a rewrite of the page has foundered over whether to remove guidance that editors can edit policy directly.

Historically, Wikipedia's rules to follow, as they were then known, were proposed at Rules to consider, with editors endorsing or rejecting them by adding their signature. Popular rules would be written up on separate pages, with anyone free to amend and suggest simply by editing the text. These rules were drafted in order to ensure the project could meet its stated goal of creating "a free encyclopedia--indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms of depth. We also want Wikipedia to become a reliable resource." Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines noted that our policies are ever evolving and changing from its start on 1 November 2001 by User:Larry Sanger until an edit on 6 May 2006 by User:Wereareyou, one of only two edits this account has made, the other being to their talk page.

Why do we have naming conventions?

There is much debate over the purpose of our policy on Naming Conventions, largely initiated by attempts to revise the wording. User:M suggested that the main principle was that "Wikipedia articles are given the name that the greatest number of English-speaking readers would expect in a reliable source. Naming is for the benefit of readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists." User:Hesperian felt "[t]he name of an article should be optimised to be as acceptable as possible to as much of its audience as possible." User:GTBacchus offered a view on the fundamental objective, based on experience, that:

Where a particular WikiProject reaches a consensus on some particular naming convention, is is de facto the case that their naming convention supersedes the general principle of WP:COMMONNAME.

Debate now continues as to whether there is a logical loop in the relationship between the Naming Convention policy and separate Naming Convention guidelines. This loop is caused by text at Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines.

Defense is not the best form of defense

At Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion, editor and administrator User:GTBacchus opened a discussion about the best way to "save" an article listed for deletion, noting that "[s]ome editors claim that they would be better able to improve articles if they didn't have to defend them against deletion." User:Ikip suggested adding "a statement at the top of all AFDs: All articles which are deleted can be userfied by request by admin." User:Jclemens suggested "some sort of an 'AFD reset' button if someone has changed a certain percentage of an article".

The discussion also took in administrator behaviour, with User:A Nobody offering anecdotal evidence that "at least one admin ... does not look at the articles under discussion when he closes AfDs, but only the discussion." GTBacchus responded strongly, stating

Admins who close AfDs by nose-count need to be stopped. I will help you stop them, if you bring it to my attention. It's unacceptable; someone doing that should not have the mop.

Polling

A round up of polls spotted by your writer in the last seven days or so, bearing in mind of course that voting is evil. You can suggest a poll for inclusion, preferably including details as to how the poll will be closed and implemented, either on the tip line or by directly editing the next issue.

Talk:Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China/FG poll is a poll on whether Reports of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China should be merged into Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China. The poll runs from 13:50, 3 September 2009 (UTC) and concludes 13:50, 14 September 2009 (UTC).

Deletion round-up

Your writer has trawled the deletion debates opened and closed in the last week and presents these debates for your edification. Either they generated larger than average response, centred on policy in an illuminating way, or otherwise just jumped out as of interest. Feel free to suggest interesting deletion debates for future editions here.

It's just not cricket!

A number of articles, amongst them Featured Articles have been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sam Loxton with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948. In nominating, User:Hammersoft seemed most concerned with "the precedent being set here", noting that "the level of detail here is excruciating and absolutely astonishing" and would therefore seem to contradict Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. In response, User:NuclearWarfare pointed out that

we aren't creating an article for every season for every player in every sport. These are 15 articles on the most important season for the most important players for one sport. Entire books have been published on this one team.

Debating the fact that some of the articles nominated are amongst Wikipedia's Featured Content, User:Nick-D noted that "their creator, User:YellowMonkey is trying to develop a featured topic on the 1948 'Invincibles' cricket team". WikiProject Cricket is also listing The Invincibles as its Featured Topic drive at Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket, having done so since the 19 May 2008.[1] However, User:Calathan, who has argued for a merger of the articles, felt that "[b]eing a featured article doesn't necessarily mean that something is an appropriate article to keep in the encylopedia."

User:Juliancolton, expressing the view that the articles should be kept as they are, said "[t]hese are as I understand it the most notable players of the most notable team of the most notable year in cricket" with User:Bridgeplayer pointing out in an impassioned argument to keep that "[a]t the same time as one group of editors is effusing over these articles and awarding them coveted featured article status, another group of editors is 'policy wonking' i.e. trying to get the pages deleted on fine nuances of guidelines. Bizarre! What we have here is a unique set of pages; informative, accurate, well sourced, objective, and tolerably well written. If all the time spent on this discussion was spent on writing new material how much better would the project be?" Attempting to remain neutral, User:Resolute commented

On the one hand, this is a horrendous precedent, but on the other, enough sources exist that four of the articles are featured.

Articles

Categories

Files, templates, redirects and stubs

Deletion review and miscellaneous

Briefly

At Wikipedia:Village pump (all)#Making our editing interface more clear and helpful, a proposed change to the editing interface was put forward by User:Anxietycello. Anxietycello described their proposal as "simpler, clearer and prettier than the current situation". User:Noisalt like the proposal, adding that Anxietycello was "absolutely right about the hodgepodge of the current interface. It needs developing but it's a good start." Further revisions based on suggestions at the village pump were made to the draft before it was posted to the Wikipedia Usability initiative.

There is a debate at T(t)he Manual of Style over when to capitalise the definite article. User:Boson proposes we make it clear that it "is conventionally not capitalized, even when it is (or could be regarded as) part of a proper name: the United Kingdom, the Hebrides, the President of the United States." While there is consensus on some sort of standard, there is no consensus as to appropriate wording as yet, and there is some discussion over possible exceptions such as band names.

At Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion User:MZMcBride questioned how the right to vanish affected requests for user talk pages to be deleted. MZMcBride felt there "some sort of consistency. Currently it seems to depend entirely on who the admin going through the category is." User:Rd232 regarded the general consensus to be that "user talk pages shouldn't be speedied; where deletion is required, they should be referred to Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion" and edited Wikipedia:Right to vanish accordingly.

After discussion, Wikipedia:Edit war was moved to Wikipedia:Edit warring. The page was initially created on 26 April 2003 as a redirect to what is now Wikipedia:Requests for comment, before User:Ed Poor wrote a brief description on 4 October 2003. On 29 October 2005 User:Radiant! proposed a merge with Wikipedia:Three revert rule, a merge User:Kim Bruning rejected after finding no discussion. In the same edit Kim Bruning marked the page a policy, 6 November 2005. A merge with Wikipedia:Three revert rule was finally achieved on 21 June 2009 after discussion.

At Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy a change to the wording of the Indefinite block section has been suggested by User:Atomic blunder. Consensus among administrators who rely on the section is that the change does not detail current practises.

Requests for comment

Twenty-four Requests for comment have been made in the week of 31 August – 6 September:

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Just like to say that I find this column incredibly useful in keeping me informed of all the stuff going on around WP without having to spend hours a day reading them all. It has to be a lot of working writing this section, so thank you! --PresN 05:10, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think there should be some sort of mention that the Naming Convention debate is almost completely centered on a debate growing vitriolic by a few users who have taken some deep-seated issues (of unclear origins, to be honest) against the naming convention adopted by WP:PLANTS. Circeus (talk) 15:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I hadn't noticed that, apologies. Which section of the page should I look to for this portion of the debate? Hiding T 20:25, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]


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