User:Cedders/Proposals

Directing new submissions to more appropriate projects

Sorry if this has been suggested/asked before. I've tried a bit of janitorial work, and one obvious problem is the tendency of new users to create pages for self-promotion of something that isn't otherwise notable. These then need to have their notability checked, and be cleaned up or taken to AfD or speedily deleted, and this and ensuing conversations with the user can be tedious. The contributor may be acting in good faith, but have misconceptions about what Wikipedia is, even after they are pointed to the relevant WP:CORP, WP:AUTO, WP:BAND, WP:OR or WP:NFT policy. For example, there seems to be an idea that because there is lots of information about popular beat combos on Wikipedia, that they can become popular by being listed here; word gets around about Wikipedia in certain circles, as maybe "a great website you can add your own stuff to" without fully understanding the explicit limits of what is covered or that bit about "Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia". (I also worry somewhat about PR things being posted here in the form of encyclopaedia articles and POV being inadequately removed because we don't know better.)

So my proposal is to make these contributors feel less excluded and so less argumentative, and perhaps give them more of what they want and might benefit from. This might also change outside perceptions of Wikipedia and stop attracting more of the same type of unsuitable submissions. In addition to pointing them to policy and leaving templates on their talk pages, they should be directed to other more appropriate projects. This is already done with Wiktionary: and Wikisource: to an extent.

As far as I have been able to find them, these are the options we have at the moment:

Bands below the threshold of notability	Indiepedia? [Skwik.com]
Corporate plugs/info/reviews	Some business directory on Wikia?
Original research, especially idiosyncratic theories	Not Wikimedia; maybe Wikia again
Creative writing	Writely VirtualSoil?? Webquill
Jokes etc.	Uncyclopedia?
Stuff made up in school personal pages etc.	Wikipedia fork for kids?

Obviously one would need to check with the relevant site that they are actually prepared to take such submissions. Where an appropriate project doesn't exist, I think maybe Wikipedians should support its creation. There seem to have been suggestions of bowdlerised/filtered forks for kids before; I would suggest a Wiki as one huge fork as a sandbox that can be edited by people who don't really understand the difference between an encyclopaedia and a book of jokes, and then useful contributions moved to Wikipedia if needed. It's getting to the point where Wikipedia is an institution and collection of work which people want to defend; some are looking for an alternative free space, and it may not yet exist. Perhaps there's a call for a very lightly-edited Wild West Wiki. --Cedders^tk 15:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

• Original research, especially idiosyncratic theories --> Wikinfo(that may not be exactly what it is for, but who will care?)
• Stuff made up in school/personal pages --> myspace.com

Bhoeble 23:14, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

• neologisms → Urban Dictionary

Grutness...wha? 23:52, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Ways of highlighting backlinks

Somewhere here an editor was complaining that another editor persisted in trying to introduce material about Asperger syndrome into the Albert Einstein article. A major article that has to cover a lot of ground cannot often include links to all auxilliary or tangential subjects. without breaking the flow.

It might therefore be useful to have a convention for linking to the What links here page for the article. Something like:

Space does not permit all aspects of this subject to be referred to here. For other articles that may contain further information relating to "Article name", please see What links here or press [alt-j].

This could of course be done as a Template ({{backlinks}}). It would benefit from certain improvements to the MediaWiki software, in particular ability to restrict to the main namespace [1] and to sort according to some kind of relevance or popularity. It would also need consensus to adopt this convention and document it on relevant Wikipedia pages. --Cedders^tk 15:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

If there is justification for the link, why not fork off a separate article, such as Albert Einstein and Asperger's syndrome (properly linked from the main Einstein page, of course), and put the link there? If there is no justification for the link, then it shouldn't be there at all. User:Zoe|^(talk) 16:39, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

To clarify, in this particular case (which I can't find now and I wasn't involved in, but it raised some other issues) it was not thought appropriate to have any link or mention in the Einstein article to Asperger, and it's not hard to see why. If every topic that mentioned Einstein was linked to from the main article, there would me scores of unrelated or diversionary sentences at the end of the article. Maybe you could get around this with forks on Einstein's personality, say. Backlinks are available already. To accommodate possible complaints that a particular connection isn't made in cases like this, why not point to them in the text? --Cedders^tk 17:50, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

If there's no mention of it in the text, then clearly, there shouldn't be a link to an external site. User:Zoe|^(talk) 18:05, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

There are no external links involved. These are all within Wikipedia. Imagine a page with a limited number of outgoing links, but a far larger number of incoming links. You can find the incoming links from possible related articles using What links here already. I'm just suggesting highlighting this in some way to tell the reader that there are likely to be several backlinks that cover obscure aspects of the topic (that is, not making direct links to any page that is not referenced, only highlighting a feature that is already partially present). --Cedders^tk 18:47, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, now I'm very confused. If you're talking about Wikipedia links, why is there a link from Asperger's syndrome to Albert Einstein if there is no mention in the Einstein article about Asperger's? They have to verify each other, or there's something wrong. User:Zoe|^(talk) 22:31, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I am talking about Wikipedia links. There is a link from Asperger to Einstein; there is no link in the opposite direction. What exactly is wrong with that? --Cedders^tk 12:53, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that Whatlinkshere has boatloads of totally tangential stuff for pretty much any topic, even if you only count the article space. Pages that are of only the most tangential relationship to the topic at hand are probably of interest to very few readers; if they weren't, they would after all be in the article itself. And there are often pages outside the article space linking to articles, as well as many pages duplicating info already in the linked-to article. So really, I don't think that this is a useful thing to give our readers. It would probably confuse more people than it would help, particularly since you'd have to teach a lot of people how to use "Find" on their browsers to get to the one sentence that mentions Einstein (or whatever). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:07, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm afraid you are correct. Maybe this proposal is premature and should wait until such time as Whatlinkshere is more useful to readers, allowing parametric restriction to main namespace and sorting by, e.g. page views divided by article size. I have however created template:backlinks in case it should be useful. I do think that sometimes people will be scouring for any information on a particular subject or wondering why the article doesn't mention something that the editors didn't deem sufficiently relevant to include.

On your final point, I guess Whatlinkshere could be improved so the links table included an anchor within the target page, but I expect it would be a lot of programming. Thanks for comments. --Cedders^tk 14:31, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Cedders, I think you may be on to something really worthwhile here. I'd like to spin an idea out of this concept of inter-article relevance for a second. Obviously one of the great innovations of Wikipedia is the ability to quickly follow 'trees' of knowledge both vertically and horizontally, allowing for users to develop a sense of both the breadth and depth of a subject by examining its context and history. As the project grows, it should be possible to become, literally, an expert on a given area of study simply by following enough of the appropriate links. But which links to follow, and in what order, is not always obvious, especially if you want to study efficiently.

In that sense, it could be very useful to have a tool that showed users, for a given article, which articles other users arrived from, and which they departed to. Zooming out, this would allow for a kind of conceptual roadmap -- a set of beaten paths, if you will -- that would not only help users usefully navigate families of concepts, but also provide a set of invaluable data about inter-article usage patterns, and maybe, eventually, the nature of the conceptual relationships themselves. It's the Wikipedia equivalent of "Users who Bought this Book Also Bought" -- except that instead of being a marketing tool, it would be one that streamlined learning.

It takes your garden-variety linking to the next level. The way it is now, all links are created equal, a state that results in lots of irrelevant connections, and does little to reveal the nuanced webs of relevance that bind all concepts. Knowing the best routes between ideas could solve the irrelevant links problem by just showing users what other users have done. Better even than the 'tree' or 'beaten path' or Amazon.com analogy is this: imagine a library where books were connected by glowing threads. The stronger the connection between two books, the brighter the thread would be. Everything is connected, of course, but you'd be able to make out patterns within the web that would indicate which shelf you ought to go to next. Who decides what's relevant to what? Well, everyone, of course. -- HarpooneerX 08:03, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely! Please don't let this idea drown a quiet death in the village pump - this sounds like a groundbreaking idea that would make Wikipedia even more powerful a tool than it currently is. Where can this idea be taken forward? TheGrappler 21:36, 9 May 2006 (UTC)