Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-19/Discussion report

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
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

 * With the conclusion of the 2011 Arbitration Committee elections, the election coordinators are now soliciting feedback about various aspects of the process.
 * A discussion has been started on the talk page of the Thanksgiving article, asking the community to decide between four potential lead sections. The Request for Comment emerged from a week-long argument on what extent religious aspects of the holiday should be covered in the lead section. The discussion has slowed to a near halt in recent days, with three of the four options attracting close to the same levels of support.
 * A Request for Comment was initiated on whether or not a particular image from the article Fisting, depicting action performed on a man, anally, should be removed. The discussion became heated after the nominator,, made a series of objectionable comments towards editors advocating the position opposite to his. The discussion has seen no activity since November 12, with two-thirds of participants commenting before then in favor of removing the image.