Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2009/August

2009 ArbCom elections
I'v estarted a page for this year's ArbCom elections. People are yugently needed to help organise it. Please see Arbitration Committee/2009 elections. Computerjoe 's talk 13:11, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

We are now accepting nominations for ArbCom
Nominations are now being accepted for the Arbitration Committee.

The deadline for nominations is Sunday, August 9, 2009 at 23:59 UTC. Elections will commence on Monday, August 10, 2009 and close on Monday, August 17, 2009 at 23:59 UTC. The new Committee will be appointed on Tuesday, August 18, 2009.

Please see Arbitration Committee/2009 elections

Please circulate this notice.

Thanks Computerjoe 's talk 12:41, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Categories &c - reasonable divisions
I'll pull up Portal:Federally Administered Tribal Areas as an example of some of the stuff that's problematic. Tribal areas of where? Yes, it's Pakistan, but it could be bloody anywhere. How small an area should we cover? Should we cover cities? How do we decide if a city is appropriate to do? For example, we have London - obvious as the capital of England, but we don't have Edinburgh - the capital of Scotland. We have individual US states, and that seems reasonable as many of them are much larger than some European countries. Within the US we don't have Dallas, but we're getting inundated with odd categories that pretty much mean nothing to people outside the countries they're in.

The repeated concern with these is that they'll never be reliably maintained, and long-time users will have seen the headaches with DPLs when categories are added to older articles.

Does someone want to put forward their ideas on how geographic categories are managed? Do we kill stuff like FATA because it is just a notional area defined by a government. We zapped attempts to create Latin America as it is linguistic instead of geographic. --Brian McNeil / talk 10:41, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm of the opinion that divisions should be maintained if there are articles for it (say at utter minimum 3 articles), and that such divisions should be clearly named. I think all cities should be named City, State/province (ex category:Montreal, Quebec) or City, Country if the country doesn't have internal divisions and secondary territorial divisions should be named just its name - category:Alberta, unless its ambiguous than its name should be clarified (ex Category:Georgia (U.S. state), but perhaps should be Category:Georgia, United States instead). Non-unique names - the aforementioned Portal:Federally Administered Tribal Areas should have clear names, like Portal:Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan, with the unclear name redirecting. (IMHO)  I don't really see the issue with adding categories late (other than  the effort required to do a repetitive task) as DPL's that are properly set up should order by the date that publish was added to the article, not the specific geographic cat. Bawolff ☺☻ 22:28, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * A bit of an aside but ugly as it is Georgia (U.S. state) and others like it is phrased that way to harmonise with the tautology at en wiki, which influences the naming of categories at Commons. Humans can tell that Category:Georgia (U.S. state) and Category:Georgia, United States are the same thing, but in my experience the bots which do a lot of the interwiki maintenance are a pretty stupid lot, and it helps if we can keep the naming schemes cross wiki as close to each other as possible.KTo288 (talk) 22:43, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Bawolff pretty much sums up what I was thinking. Even if some cats are for small geographical areas, but have at least a few articles for them (I'd give five a minimum), then it's worth keeping and maintaining them. There also should be some standardised way to name such categories, like City or other area, Province or State, Country. And also, as Bawolff says, correctly set DPLs shouldn't cause any headaches. Tempodivalse [talk]  23:24, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I as well agree with the sound assessment given above by . Cirt (talk) 02:36, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Proposed addendum to MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning‎
There was recently a request to make an addendum to the message at MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning‎. I decided to decline the request for now as it's a pretty significant change, and probably shouldn't be made without some prior discussion. Please see MediaWiki_talk:Copyrightwarning for the discussion and give your input. Tempodivalse [talk]  20:48, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * IANAL, but doesn't Wikipedia's Wikipedia:Licensing update directly address this issue? I think it makes the suggested change unnecessary. But that's just my interpretation. Cheers, --SVTCobra 00:48, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Umm, not really. The Wikipedia license update does not affect us in any way. (we're still incompatible if thats what you mean). Bawolff ☺☻ 02:33, 25 August 2009 (UTC)