Wikipedia:Perennial proposals
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a list of things that are frequently proposed on Wikipedia, and have been rejected by the community several times in the past. If you make a proposal along these lines, it is likely to be swiftly closed for the exact same reason. See Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals) for discussion on several of these.
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[edit] Content
[edit] Content warnings
- Proposal: images of sexual nature should be labeled as such, hidden from users, or even deleted entirely.
- Not a good idea because: Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of minors. In an encyclopedia, it is to be expected that articles on sexual subjects are illustrated as such. Suggestions of what is and is not acceptable for pictures vary wildly between cultures.
- See also: Wikipedia:No disclaimer templates
[edit] Legal issues
- Proposal because of such-and-such law, Wikipedia must do so-and-so (e.g. implement censorship as above, or require identification of editors, or defer certain rulings to the U.S. Supreme Court)
- Not a good idea because: You are probably not a lawyer, and neither is most of the community. Wikipedia employs a lawyer who will inform us if and when such measures are necessary. The community need not use its incomplete comprehension of legality to impose restrictions upon itself.
- See also: Wikipedia:Office Actions.
[edit] Advertising
- Proposal: To cover server costs, or for some other public good such as charity, Wikipedia should add advertisements on its pages. The ads could be highly-targeted, unobtrusive textual ads similar to those used by Google.
- Not a good idea because: Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral, which advertising by definition is not. Advertising would create an impression that our content is commercially influenced and could be affected by advertisers threatening to withdraw their ads, whether or not this is actually the case. Advertising would discourage contributors, the lifeblood of the Wikipedia, many of whom object strongly to advertising. Also, there is no current lack of funding for server costs.
- See also: Spanish Wikipedia and Enciclopedia Libre.
[edit] Enforce American (or British) spelling
- Proposal: for consistency's sake, we should pick one style of spelling (British or American, generally) and stick with it.
- Not a good idea because: It is widely impractical and there is no agreement on which style should be chosen, which has in the past resulted in repeated, needless edit warring.
- See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English, Wikipedia:Standardize spellings/Archive
[edit] Editing
[edit] Protecting the main page article
- Proposal: the daily article on the main page is often subject to vandalism, and therefore it should be protected.
- Not a good idea because: the main page showcases what Wikipedia is about, and one of the things we're about is free editing. Also, said article is frequently improved during its stay on the main page.
- See also: User:Raul654/protection
[edit] Prohibit anonymous users from editing
- Proposal: everybody should register an account from editing; IP addresses are insufficient.
- Not a good idea because: a significant part of our good edits come from IP addresses; positive experiences with initial IP edits lead users to create accounts who otherwise would not do so; recent changes disabling IP's from creating new or editing semiprotected articles are sufficient.
- See also: Wikipedia:Editors should be logged in users
[edit] Automatically prompt for missing edit summary
- Proposal: when an editor is about to post an edit without an edit summary, he or she should automatically be reminded that no summary has been provided and given another opportunity to include one. (At present a user has the ability to configure Preferences to this option, but many users are not aware of this.)
- Not a good idea because: it's already an option in the user preferences, and forcing users to enter edit summaries may annoy them enough to not save their (possibly constructive) edits.
- See also: Help:Preferences#Editing
[edit] Create a counter of people watching a page
- Proposal: a feature request for a button or some other means to find out how many people are watching a certain page.
- Not a good idea because: such a button could all too easily be abused by vandals, who can then find unwatched pages to vandalize. Note that admins have a page that lists unwatched pages.
- See also: Wikipedia talk:Special:Unwatchedpages, MW:Manual:$wgAllowPageInfo
[edit] Deletion
[edit] Numerical rules for WP:AFD
- Proposal: something like "people can only nominate three articles per day", "articles cannot be nominated more than once per year", etc.
- Not a good idea because: strict numerical limits fall under m:instruction creep. This is a solution in search of a problem.
- See also: Wikipedia:Revotes on Vfd, Wikipedia:Repeated AfD nomination limitation policy
[edit] Deleted pages should be visible
- Proposal: make deleted pages visible to everybody, not just admins.
- Not a good idea because: that defies the whole point of deletion (which is to improve Wikipedia quality by getting rid of the worst parts); also, it would require a new mechanism to ensure that copyvios and libelous statements are not visible to everybody.
- See also: Wikipedia:Pure wiki deletion system
[edit] Administrative
[edit] Demote inactive admins
- Proposal: inactive admins should have their admin status revoked automatically after a given time period. The reasoning behind this is generally that the accounts might be compromised.
- Not a good idea because: In general, this policy has been opposed both by administrators who themselves tend to go through periods of inactivity who do not wish to be forced to maintain token levels of activity to maintain adminship, and by people who believe that there is no substantive security concern.
- See also: Wikipedia:Inactive administrators
[edit] Reconfirm administrators
- Proposal: Once promoted, Administrators should periodically have to have their status reconfirmed through RFA or an RFA-like process.
- Not a good idea because: there are already over 1,000 administrators. Reconfirming them would be an onerous and time consuming process. Furthermore, good administrators aren't necessarily popular ones.
- See also: Wikipedia:Adminship renewal
[edit] Hierarchical structures
- Proposal: there should be some kind of "partial admin" that gets certain admin powers but not all of them.
- Not a good idea because: it's confusing; if we can't trust people to use their tools sensibly, they don't become admins period; it would at least double the already considerable frictional effort expended at WP:RFA.
- See also: Wikipedia:Limited administrators
