Wikipedia talk:Village pump (policy)

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Clarification of Policy vs. Other

This close in AfD was interesting: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of heraldic charges. There are many, including myself, who quote WP's without knowing which are policy and which are guidelines (or essays etc.). Why not have a different naming system to differentiate between then, such as WPP: (for policy), WPG: (for guidance), and WPE (for essays)? Aszx5000 (talk) 09:03, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

That would require creating new namespaces. In principle I'm not against it, but I don't think it will change anything; we'll just have a redirect from WP:V to WPP:V, and most would continue using WP:V because that is what they are used to. BilledMammal (talk) 09:21, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

I hear you, but it feels like not being able to separate a policy from other types of WP:'s should be a big deal? I'm not sure everybody knows the difference (myself included). Maybe we could do it by changing the colors? 13:50, 4 July 2023 (UTC) Aszx5000 (talk) 13:50, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure anyone really knows the difference; the best we have is WP:POLCON. The difference between the manual of style vs. guidelines is even worse defined.

What do you mean by changing the color? BilledMammal (talk) 14:12, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Eh, the MoS is a guideline; it's why it has a guideline template at the top of it. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:40, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

And I do think that knowing the difference is of value. By color, I mean that when some links to a policy (i.e. WP:V), that it would come up as say a green-link (instead of a blue link)? That might might be a quick improvement? Aszx5000 (talk) 16:44, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Changing the link colours is probably a bad idea. Changing the colour of the box a the top of the page ({{Policy}}, {{MoS guideline}}) might be worth considering. Mitch Ames (talk) 00:19, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Agreed on the first part; various user scripts and user CSS already do all kinds of link-coloration jobs (redirects in green, links to disambiguation pages in orange, etc.), and people are doing this stuff on a very individual basis. The only thing they've ever had to work around is blue for a link to an article, purple for same but already visited, and red for link to missing page. Introducing more would break all the existing customization stuff. On the latter point, I'm skeptical this is a good idea, because various things that had a guideline tag slapped on them by a wikiproject probably should instead have {{WikiProject advice}} (a subclass of essay), because they only reflect a "local consensus" of a small number of editors; meanwhile, there are various essays that have the overwhelming support of the community (WP:BRD, WP:ROPE, etc.), but remains essays because they are not written as guidelines but in essay style. For a system like this proposal to work, pretty much every WP:-namespace page would have to be carefully evaluated for whether it is classified correctly, and some would need to be completely rewritten to change classification categories to reflect their actual level of community consensus buy-in. I think it's just going to remain a fact of wikilife that our documentation structure is complex and not perfectly consistent, and has a learning curve. PS: Another issue is WP:IAR and similar concerns: there are plenty of times when the literal word of a particular policy is moderated in some particular, narrow way by principles laid out in a guideline or even an essay, but people would ignore such subtleties and just retreat to "my position wins because I cited a policy and you cited only a guideline and an essay" counterproductive thinking (not to mention that one's interpretation of the policy might be completely wrong). We already have too much of a habit of just citing a shortcut as if that explains everything, and we would not want to reinforce that bad habit with a new layer of imprimatur.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:49, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Why can't registered users edit using blocked IP addresses?

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

Article titles written in Chinese

According to Wikipedia:Article titles (policy), "article titles are written using the English language". Why, then, are there over 200 articles with the title written in Chinese characters? See Category:Disambiguation pages with Chinese character titles. WWGB (talk) 07:25, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

@WWGB, those are disambiguation pages and not articles per se. — Qwerfjkltalk 10:56, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

Just to expand slightly on that, it is entirely permissible for a Chinese title to redirect to an English title, but this raises the obvious question of what to do when there are multiple equally plausible redirect targets, and no English-language equivalent covering all of them. BD2412 T 15:19, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

We only create a dab when the Chinese translation is a likely search term for multiple topics, such as Chinese surnames and places in China. If the Chinese terms for "apple" and "baker" happened to be similar, we wouldn't create a dab, because Chinese is not particularly relevant to either topic. Certes (talk) 17:39, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

CP?

@Pecopteris when you wrote remove content that is illegal or discusses things that are illegal like CP, what were you referring to? I assume it wasn't WP:CP. RoySmith (talk) 19:24, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Child pr0n. What's the context, is this being discussed elsewhere? Pecopteris (talk) 19:46, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have linked to WP:VPP#Language at WP:UPNOT. RoySmith (talk) 19:52, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Ah. I see the conversation is over. I think the RFC was poorly worded, frankly. It was a general question about a specific situation - removing another person's userbox that said "this user likes What is a Woman?", on the basis that such a userbox is "extremely offensive". While there was consensus for "no change" to UPNOT, there was also a consensus that the specific action taken (and justified by citing UPNOT) was not appropriate. I think the closure should have made note of that. Pecopteris (talk) 20:38, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:VPP" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Wikipedia:VPP has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 September 9 § Wikipedia:VPP until a consensus is reached. —Matr1x-101 _{(Ping me when replying)} {_{user page} ^{(@ commons)} - _talk} 14:54, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Page size

Please see Wikipedia talk:Village pump (proposals)#Looking for some unofficial clerks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:05, 24 November 2023 (UTC)