Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-05/Discussion report

Trial proposed for tool apprenticeship
A request for comment was started on November 28 seeking consensus to begin a three-month trial of the tool apprenticeship program, developed by. The program would allow experienced users to apply for access to a specific tool or set of related tools currently accessible only to administrators, such as blocking or deleting pages. Successful applicants would receive that set of tools on a short term, probationary basis. Early support for the proposal was strong, with many of the initial opposers having struck their votes after their concerns were responded to by Dcoetzee, but later input was less supportive, leaving a significant yet tenuous plurality in favour of the idea.

Discussion about a template used by WikiProject Articles for creation
Concern was raised on the talk page of WikiProject Articles for creation that the template used when project members rejected submissions was too negative, and had the potential to discourage future contributors. A good portion of the discussion dealt with the balance between a desire to give personalized responses to each submitter and the massive volume of submissions that AfC receives. As a result of the thread, the background color to the template in question was lightened, and WikiProject user warnings began exploring friendlier options for AfC templates.

Multiple proposals to tweak the watchlist
Three proposals were recently put forth to modify the user watchlist feature. The first proposal, written on November 30 by, would allow users to choose to watch a specific page, but not its corresponding discussion page, or vice versa. The idea was brought up before in both 2005 and 2008, on each occasion with minimal community feedback. Support and opposition for the current proposal are roughly split at the time of writing.

A second proposal was made later that same day by that would allow users to mark a specific item in their watchlist as "read". Under this proposal, after a change is marked as "read", the next time the watchlist was viewed, that change, and all changes made to the same page that took place before the edit marked as "read", would not show up in the watchlist. The idea received some discussion before branching off into a third proposal by that would add a "show changes since last visit" function to the watchlist. This function is already built into MediaWiki, as the $wgShowUpdatedMarker option, and is enabled on Commons and Meta already. The proposal has received strong support thus far.

In brief

 * A new noticeboard, the File namespace noticeboard has been created after being proposed at the village pump. The noticeboard is designed to assist editors that work in files in coordinating their activities.
 * A proposal was made to allow Checkusers to reveal the identity of accounts that are suspected of being, as phrased by proposer, "corporate propagandists". The idea met with overwhelming opposition before being closed with a statement that the proposal was invalid because it ran contrary to Wikipedia's privacy policy, and that only the Wikimedia Foundation has the power to alter the privacy policy.
 * Clarification from the community has been sought as to whether CSD G10, which allows for attack pages to be speedy deleted, applies to redirects; specifically redirects from disparaging nicknames of the subjects of the target articles. The prevailing view is that CSD G10 does apply, but that some disparaging nicknames are themselves notable, and should not be subject to speedy deletion.
 * The proposal to integrate a user status display into Wikipedia, covered in the last issue of the discussion report, was closed on November 28 with a consensus that the tool be developed as an opt-in feature.

Suggestions needed for end-of-year edition
The last issue of the Signpost for 2011 comes out on December 26, and we are planning on running a special issue of the discussion report that week detailing the most important discussions of the year. A thread was started at the village pump seeking suggestions, however it has thus far only received two comments (for which the Signpost thanks Jayron32 and Chzz). Further submissions are needed for this issue to be viable, so we ask readers to make suggestions either in the comments below or at the village pump, where details of what is being sought are available. The Signpost is grateful for any assistance, and we thank you in advance.