Proposals - Meta

List of propositions and proposals for proposed things

Adjunct wikis

Proposal for a new interwiki concept: wikis that aren't Wikimedia Projects, but which Wikimedia points to and says "We don't run it, but this content goes THERE, not here." Read more. 75th Trombone 06:00, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal: there's a nearly infinite number of term papers being submitted in college that get read only by the professor and the n thrown away. What if a system was created for having professors assign topics that are needed for wikipaedia, so after they are marked they could be integrated in the project? The professor could have every student select a username, and the article could be locked until the professor has marked it to make sure that no one modifies it. For example a botany professor could assign each student a couple of species to write the paper on, and that would mean 30 articles or so per class, per semester. This would help 'recycle' the tremendous amounts of time wasted on papers only one person ever reads. Obviously this could be organized in various ways depending on constraints. For example contributing to wikipedia could be an extra activity for bonus points. Sensitizing college professors to the issue could yeld tremendous benefits. redfax, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Changing domain name structure

en.wikipedia.org = wikipedia.org
fr.wikipedia.org = wikipedia.fr
de.wikipedia.org = wikipedia.de

etc....

Many (in fact most) languages do not have an obvious one-to-one mapping with a country. What do you propose to do with the isiXhosa, seSotho, isiZulu and Afrikaans wikipedias. You can't put them all at wikipedia.za. There is not Esperantio domain (Esperantio/Esperantujo is the fictional country where the real-life language Esperanto is spoken) Furthermore, with the current system Wikimedia only has to pay for one domain (wikipedia.org) whereas with your system they would have to buy domains in every country - and I'm not sure if domains are even available in some countries. I'm sure domain registration isn't the Sierra Leonese government's (what government?) top priority? --w:Taejo13:02, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

What do you think of buying those most wanted domains and putting a redirection ? Fore example, the french domain wikipedia.fr links to the standard one with a "location" header. I think they could improve it so that http://wikipedia.fr/wiki/Molière or even http://wikipedia.fr/Molière automatically redirect to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molière

--Caerbannog (see profile on french wikipedia), 8 january 2006

Agreed - TLDs have no correlation to language, and the whole thing would just create confusion, bureaucracy, and possibly infighting by people from different countries who are unhappy with the choice of any given country to represent a language. The existing system is simple, clean, and effective - no need to change it. -- Brian, 18 January 2006

For some national TLDs like .ir (for Iran), there's no relation between the concept of wiki and the country TLD. For example Persian Wikipedia is also used by Persian speakers from Afghanistan and Tajikestan (though rarely by now). And I guess current domain name structure is based on language and not nationlity. --Shervin Afshar 07:18, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In reply to Caerbannog, French is not the only language spoken in France. The best idea would be for http://www.wikipedia.fr/ to be like http://www.wikipedia.org/ in that it would provide a portal to different languages. The difference is that .fr would be a portal to those languages most spoken in France: French, German, Arabic, the languages Oc, Portuguese, the languages Oïl, Italian and Spanish (to name the top eight). --Oldak Quill 16:16, 5 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proposals for new projects

(Talk) - Entire new projects for WikiMedia, in accordance with the New project policy. Not to be confused with Requests for new languages for new languages versions of existing projects.

1. A new user specific wiki just for orientation, like Main Page Neutral, which is what meta-wikipedia used to do - before it become too focused on overly-expert users
2. Paper Wikipedia - many things need to be done to make this practical at all
3. Wikipedia client - offline reader suitable for CD-ROM distribution or no-net-access PCs
4. WikiCategory - global Category-Oriented Link-Directory
5. WikiTips - Hints and tips, howtos and other helpful notes for all areas of daily life (e.g. cooking, gardening, hints for specific appliances or computer applications,...), sorted by category
6. WikiRecipes - Catagorized recipes to replace the obscure wikibook and the unorganized wikipedia entries.
7. WikiOS - Open Source information on all major operating systems in which provides all latest and newest features, news, articles, downloads, etc.

Proposed software changes

please do not make ANY request here. Developers do not use meta: for feature requests. They should be posted to mediawiki-l for discussion or filed as a feature request on bugzilla.wikimedia.org

1. A roadmap for how wikitax will or must evolve, as per simple ideology of Wikitax which allows for chat, email and other influences on how things are marked up
2. person DTD, spacetime DTD, ecoregion DTD to neutrally establish who, when, where without relying on changing or multiple names, e.g. "Bohemia", "Czechoslovakia", "Slovakia", etc.
3. A proposal to create a separate Table: namespace (to treat them more like images) and an intuitive table editor (to avoid the downsides of raw table markup)
4. Allow users to create multiproject Watchlists and interproject ~~or e-mail~~ notifications. (E-mails must already be there in 1.5)
  1. Moreover, if that wouldn't overload the database servers, users could be provided with a way to create public automated watchlists that trace the recent changes in a certain set of pages: e.g. the frequently biased non-NPOV articles, etc.
5. Please consider introducing the visibility parameter for categories:
6. at the moment it would be quite convenient to introduce invisible categories like "Links to featured articles in XX" as we now have the Link FA template. I believe that would do a great job for translators. --ACrush ^?!/_© 11:24, 15 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
7. There should be a way to see which articles aren't on any watchlist.
Proposed system changes - to existing wikis
1. Prefix change proposal, e.g. interwiki link standard
2. p-cactions change proposal
OpenID first proposed in July, now reproposed for October, needs programming work Ashibaka 15:36, 2 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Requests

Wikimedia site feedback/request for an account - Request a mediawiki account
Requests for permissions - For those who want to run bots
PR/trans-request - help requested for translating PR releases

Search meta:"proposed", "proposals", "requested" "requests"

Home Page Wikiquote

Suggestion for who has authorization: the main page move http://wikiquote.org for a version near to http://wikipedia.org of way it withdraw the space in blank in the part of top, as well like the left lateral column, that occupies unnecessary space.

--Chico 15:36, 26 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Copy images

Why don't move every photos we can (i.e. we can't for "fair use" images) in wikicommons ? I think it's not too hard to make a script who will put every authorised picture in wikicommons in place of copy them x times in the different languages page (sometimes I've seen the same pictures 3 times). Jona

because not everything that claims to be authorised is.Geni 15:51, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User namespace dump

Dunno where to post or who to talk to, so I'll just post here. Can we not make a database dump of the user pages? While looking at Wikipedia's mirrors and forks section, many people found it annoying that the user pages were getting mirrored as well, and database dump would be the best way to prevent it. If they really need them, they can get it off each user pages. Most mirrors and forks copy only the articles, and I don't see any reason why we should be dumping user pages as well. (as well as user talk pages) Thanks. -- WB 09:50, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

limit small projects to useing media from commons only

AS we get bigger copyright is becomeing more of an issue. The bigger wikis are mostly about to handle this because they have teams who try to deal with this problem. The smaller wikis don't. Limiting the smaller wikis to commons only would reduce the opertunity for copyvios and at the same time increase the profile of commons.Geni 13:13, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Separate dumps of Help and Template namespaces (and associated images)

People WANT to use Mediawiki on their own personal (or company / organisation) wiki sites. One of the biggest limitations is the fact that they also need to install some Help for their users. At the moment they need to obtain a whole dump from Meta, and then extract the Help and Template namespaces in order to get a reasonable first-pass slab of data that can be imported back into their local wiki. The process is not so clear now that the dumps are XML - the old SQL ones were easy to filter via a couple of simple Perl scripts.

These Help and Template dumps should be ALWAYS available as separate downloads, not caught with the main project, user and talk pages. At the rate Wikipedia and friends are growing, pretty soon no-one will be able to get these namespaces into their new wiki without spending a lot of their network bandwidth downloading huge dumps

By the way, can someone explain why we now get XML dumps that are probably even larger than the SQL ones they replaced ?

Also, you really want a couple of images to go with these dumps - what I'd call a "minimal set" so that for example, the Help pages referring to images, e.g. Help:Images make some sense. With care, only a handful of non-copyrighted images would be required to "get the message across". Wikipedia:User:Armistej 11:12, 26 January 2006 (AEDT)