Wikipedia

Bayle Shanks

Joined 26 August 2005

Hi, I'm Bayle Shanks.

If you're curious about me, please see http://bayleshanks.com for my personal website.

Proposals for Wikipedia

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Proposal: Soapbox for living subjects

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Every articles about a living person should contain a soapbox for that person.

Occasionally I hear about someone who has a Wikipedia article written about them who thinks it is misrepresenting them.

My proposal is that, for any Wikipedia article about a living person (I don't mean any tangential mention of a person, I mean an article whose topic is one particular person), that person should be provided a soapbox, special space on the page to say whatever they wish without edits from others (aside from legally required edits).

Proposal: Redirects should define original term

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Every page which is the target of a redirect should define every term redirected to it. These definitions should contain the verbatim wording of the redirected page (so that a reader arriving at the page from the redirect can do a Find In Page in their web browser to quickly find the definition of the term).

Too often I find terms redirected to other pages which don't even mention the original term. The reader is left to guess what the relationship between the terms are. Are they synonymous? Distantly related?

Perhaps at the time that the redirect was created, the target page mentioned the term, but then that mention was later removed. When this occurs the redirect should be un-redirected.

Eventually, the wiki software could even catch these things; a redirect would be prohibited unless the target page's text contained an exact match of the term being redirected from, and an edit removing the last mention of any term being redirected to the page being edited would also delete the redirect.

Proposal: draft pages

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It's tremendously disheartening to have text that you spent time writing summarily deleted.

Also, a common complaint about Wikipedia from academics is that experts don't have time to argue with non-experts about things that everyone else actually working in the field accepts.

Yet, it does seem like a good idea for an open collaborative encyclopedia to require citations for facts in dispute.

A solution here is a division of labor. We allow people to write poorly sourced text and then for this text to be incrementally, collaboratively improved until it is ready to go on the main page.

In addition to a talk page for every article page, there should be draft pages. For each article page, any contributor can create a new 'draft', and a list of these pages should be accessible from a 'drafts' tab next to the Article and Talk tabs. The drafts are collaboratively edited (and collaboratively created and deleted) just like the main article page.

There should be a guideline that you don't delete large amounts of text newly written by others, even if it is poorly sourced, etc (although i guess text which is legally impermissible or offensive should still be summarily deleted). Rather, you move such text into a draft page.

Now other people can dig through the draft pages and find text that they want to improve, then they improve the text and post it to the main page.

The guideline about not summarily deleting other people's newly written text is key. Eventually this could be suggested by software; if a revert or edit meets certain conditions, the wiki software could by default create a new draft with deletions instead of just deleting it.

To prevent confusion by readers who don't know about draft pages and who think they represent a part of consensus Wikipedia, the draft pages could only be viewed by logged-in contributors who have checked a box to enable them.

List of overviews of knowledge on Wikipedia

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List of deleted pages that I am interested in

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