The Signpost

Discussion report

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.

Fallout from the Harvard/Science Po poll

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.

Template:Foreign character put up for discussion

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.

In brief


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-19/Discussion_report