User:John Broughton/Initiatives

• /Wikipedia 2.0
• /A day in the life of Wikipedia
• /Individual articles

• Wikipedia:Interwiki map

• Why not a bot to take an AfD nomination and do the log and transcluding (suggested in early February 2007 by another editor, elsewhere)
• Editing toolbar: nice addition would be a couple of icons for templates for citations
• Why not be able to transclude specifically a named span (or a named div) of an article?
• It would be nice to have a page called Wikipedia:Navbar (or Wikipedia:NavBar or Wikipedia:Navigation bar), where a number of variants could be posted for editors to pick and chose from.

Just add {{conversebot}} immediately below a section heading, and the bot monitors the conversation for new postings, and posts to the other user's talk page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:24, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Removal of edits to articlespace pages where text comes from the edit toolbar === Section posted to WP:BOTREQ in mid-December; looks like no one is going to do this. 15:46, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

(1) If an article is between 24 and 48 hours old, has no CSD or prod template on it, has no external links, no "Note" or "References" or "Sources" section, then a bot should drop a "No source" template on the user talk page of the editor who created the article.

(2) Ditto for recent edits - an increase of more than 300 characters (60 words) to an article missing any indication of sources should lead to a note about citing sources when adding info to an article on the user talk page of the editor increasing the size of the article. (Note: check for revert by looking at last six versions of article - if byte count matches, assume that the edit was a revert).

If an editor adds an inline link (not to the EL section), where the URL contains the string "blog" or something else indicating a blog or other unreliable site (there would be a page of such strings), then the bot checks to see if the base URL is listed in a link in the EL section (as in, possibly a personal page of the subject of the article); if not, then the bot reverts and posts a note on the editor's talk page, with a link to the diff for easy reversion, and a note that if the link is reposted, WP:SPAM may result in a warning. (Could diff include a draft edit summary?)

Would be nice to emphasize that any significant addition to an articles judged non-vandalizing, where the addition lacked a source, should result in a (nice note) ("appreciate your expanding article X, but it looks like you did so without citing any source for the info you added. Policy. Apologies if this posting is in error; sure you share the desire of other editors to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles by adding sources and sourced information.")

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Links to disambiguating pages and Wikipedia talk:Special:Lonelypages. This is something a bot could do. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:54, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Needs to use one or more sortable tables (e.g., by continent) with multiple rows for location (country, state/province, city/town). Probably not at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedians/Photographers, but at other place(s) where requests are taken. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:16, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

I can preview my edits, but I can't preview any footnotes until I save my work. Often, I have found that a "simple" footnote has required a second clean-up edit because of a missing pipe or parameter. Can the <references /> be incorporated into the bottom of the preview? Yes, I know I can add <references /> myself to the section I am editing and then remove it before saving. However, this seems to be a work-around approach to add text that is not ultimately intended to be there. I am not sure if this requires some sort of hardcoding in the MediaWiki software, as I did not see anything at Special:Allmessages, but maybe there's a simple solution.—Twigboy 16:07, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

You can do so. You have two options. 1) Edit the whole page so the references section shows up in the preview, then you will see those. 2) Add {{reflist}} or <references /> to the end of the section you are editing temporarily (i.e. for the preview only) and remove it from your final save before you save it. Both work quite well. --Jayron32|talk|contribs 04:32, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I think Twigboy already mentioned that. It would be nice if the software could do it automatically. I guess in the mean time it could be done with javascript. -- DatRoot 14:39, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

User:John Broughton/Cite.php version 2

Wikipedia talk:Editor review - follow up on list of questions on separate pages

See this summer 2007 discussion and my comment of today at the Village Pump as to the discussion being ineffective. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:13, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

That's the way we do it on nlwiki where we patrol every anonymous edit. --Erwin85 22:48, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

There seems to be no organized way for a registered editor to write a potentially COI article in userspace and then ask for review, the way that unregistered editors to (in essence) at WP:AFC. But WP:COI doesn't actually forbid writing a COI article.

(Note posted at WPT:COI]. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:51, 5 December 2007 (UTC))

A lot of problems would go away if {{:ArticlePagename#Section}} were an option for transclusion. That inncludes much of the need for ConverseBot, since a reply on another page would be visible (and editing the section to reply would be much easier). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:24, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

This is already available - mw:Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion. Why hasn't it been implemented? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:22, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Renaming of guideline

Consider an ISBN namespace that used LOC information to flesh out user-created pages (for the sake of argument, via a very fast bot), with a subst:isbnpage template, where the pages were a matching service for people who (a) owned a book and (b) people looking for information from the book, for articles. Sort of a librarything.com group on steriods.

Could also be used to show links to all articles that cited a particular book; also a way to validate ISBN numbers in articles (name or author mismatch)

See also discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject Librarians) re ISBN. 17:44, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

It would be interesting to know what percentage of new category pages actually survive (say) a week? This seems an area where the number of (valid) pages shouldn't be expanding as fast as Wikipedia articles. Which argues, perhaps, for a systematic review, if not (heaven forbid) a review BEFORE a category page comes into existence. At least that would eliminate most of the pages at Special:Uncategorizedcategories. 22:36, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Initially discussed at the proposed change for WP:NPA (I think); also posted (hintingly) at Wikipedia talk:Talk page guidelines John Broughton | Talk 14:26, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Adding robots.txt in userspace to block search engines. November 2006 discussion here. Link provided by User talk:Opabinia regalis#Blocking search engines from user space. Discussion at VP (proposals), early January: [1].

ShakingBot is designed to do similar for bad external links. I've discussed the dab concept here. John Broughton | Talk 20:45, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

A bot could post a note to article talk pages where the amount of text in a section violates the summary style guideline. (Posting {{sync}} could also be done, though a bit trickier. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:47, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Disruptive editing (is there a "see also" for Wikipedia:Resolving disputes?

a new namespace, call it ArticleCandidate, for lack of a better name. Instead of 4000 articles a day added to Wikipedia mainspace and 2000 a day deleted, new articles would be reviewed in this new (holding) namespace, with the goal of (a) making them acceptable before promotion to mainspace or (b) killing them quickly because no one can find reliable sources and/or indications of notablility, with the ones inbetween (c) being userfied. (There would be a limit - say, 30 days - for an article to sit in this namespace.) (posted to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). -- John Broughton (☎☎) 01:33, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Note: copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), 8/31/07 When a lengthy article calls out the template {{main|subtopic}}, there are often well referenced citations in the called-out subtopic. In order to provide an inline synopsis, the lengthy article often winds up replicating the cites for a questionable improvement in verifiability. It seems to this humble puppy that we would be better off to have an identified synopsis in the subtopic article which can be automatically inserted by the call out, keeping all the similar refs in one place. For illustration of some of the issues consider First World War and its call outs under War crimes or the less controversial section Literature and movies. Am I missing a policy/guideline on this topic?LeadSongDog 20:55, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

What you say makes a lot of sense. I think the only problem would be making sure the summary is in line with the main article. It seems like there should be some way to do this with transclusion, but I don't think there is at this time. And no, I'm not aware of any policy or guideline that would let you do this. — The Storm Surfer 22:39, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm thinking along the lines of:

1. a comment field in the main article source text identifying which captures a permanent link to the historic version of the subarticle the abstract was taken from; or
2. a transcluded synopsis (perhaps in a DOI format?) that keeps current versions in sync; or
3. a policy that the refs go in one place or the other; or
4. a way to transclude named refs in synopses

But I have no clue at this time how to make it happen (or whether it should).LeadSongDog 01:58, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it's possible to transclude a chunk of text from within an (invisible) comment; if possible, I think this is attractive (this is #2, if I understand you correctly). That transclusion would pick up whatever footnotes are embedded in the text, of course, but

I don't think #4 is possible, though I'm not sure if you're talking about simply transcluding refs (which, I don't think, is really the point - keeping text synchronized is more important) or if you're talking about pulling in footnote details from outside the transcluded text (e.g., invisible text is in section 0, body of reference "ABC" is in section 3). I also think #1 is impossible (as much as anything is impossible with software - let's just say that I can't see the developers ever agreeing to this). But, who knows?

As for #3, it makes no sense that refs would go only in the main article; they either belong in just the subtopic (I personally favor that) or in both.

I think as Wikipedia articles continue to improve, this issue is just going to get more important - there are going to be more and more spinoffs/subtopics from main articles, and there will be a continual temptation (I've certainly given in to it) to simply update what should be a synopsis, and let someone else deal with incorporating the change within the subtopic article. Perhaps a note at Wikipedia talk:Summary style about this issue would be helpful? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 12:43, 30 August 2007 (UTC)