Wikipedia:Perennial proposals

This is a list of things that are frequently proposed on Wikipedia, and have been rejected by the community several times in the past. It is recommended that you address rebuttals raised in the past if you make a proposal along these lines.

Content

Content warnings

• Proposal: Images of a sexual, obscene, or disgusting nature should be labeled as such, hidden from users, or even deleted entirely.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of minors. In an encyclopedia, it is expected that articles on sexual subjects should be illustrated as such. In addition, standards about what is and is not acceptable for pictures vary wildly between cultures.
• See also: Wikipedia:No disclaimers in articles.

Legal issues

• Proposal: Because of such-and-such law, Wikipedia must do so-and-so (e.g. implement censorship as above, or require identification of editors, or defer certain rulings to the U.S. Supreme Court).
• Reasons for previous rejection: You are probably not a lawyer, and neither are most members of the community. The Wikimedia Foundation employs a lawyer who will inform us if and when such measures are necessary. The community need not use its incomplete comprehension of legality to impose restrictions upon itself.
• See also: Wikipedia:Office actions and Wikipedia:List of policies#Legal and copyright.

Advertising

• Proposal: To cover server costs, or for some other public good such as charity, Wikipedia should add advertisements to its pages. The ads could be highly-targeted, unobtrusive textual ads similar to those used by Google. Revenues would be very high based on Wikipedia's very high search engine ranking for many diverse keywords.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral, which advertising by definition is not. Even if well segregated from article content, advertising could create an impression that our content is commercially influenced and could be affected by advertisers threatening to withdraw their ads, whether or not this is actually the case. Advertising could discourage contributors, the lifeblood of Wikipedia, many of whom object strongly to advertising. Finally, there is no current lack of funding for server costs.
• See also: Wikipedia:Advertising; Spanish Wikipedia and Enciclopedia Libre.

Enforce American or British spelling

• Proposal: For consistency's sake, we should pick one style of spelling (British or American, generally), and enforce it throughout the encyclopedia.
• Reasons for previous rejection: It is wildly impractical and there is no agreement on which style should be chosen, which has in the past resulted in repeated, needless edit warring.
• See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English, Wikipedia:Standardize spellings/Archive.

Define reliable sources

• Proposal: Wikipedia should define the reliability of particular types of sources so that no exceptions are possible, and only sources defined as reliable may be used for the verification of Wikipedia's content. Examples include changing Wikipedia:Reliable sources from a guideline to an official policy, or merging it with Wikipedia:Verifiability and/or Wikipedia:No original research.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Assessing the reliability of sources requires sound editorial judgment, not strict adherence to a list of rules. Although it appears possible to define a minimum threshold below which sources are never acceptable as reference for Wikipedia content, it appears presumptuous to define all sources above that threshold as "reliable". For this reason, a universally applicable (or: policy-level) definition of reliable sources is impractical. Furthermore, strict rules about what type of source is permitted amount to instruction creep.
• See also: Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources (and/or many archives of that page); Wikipedia:Attribution/Poll, which dealt with an attempted merger of the verifiability, no original research and reliable sources pages into a single official policy. Also Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, which assesses the reliability of individual sources.

Protect featured articles

• Proposal: To maintain their high quality, featured articles should be permanently protected or semi-protected. Alternatively, featured articles could be split into two pages: a protected page showing the article as it appeared when originally promoted, and a separate "Draft" version for any future editing the articles may need.
• Reasons for previous rejection: (1) Featured articles often improve over time, rather than deteriorate. Although a featured article "exemplifies our very best work and features professional standards of writing and presentation", there is always room for further improvement. (2) Featured articles are not "finished" articles. Not only do they need further editing in response to changes in the topic itself, our standards for featured articles change over time. For example, in Wikipedia's early days most featured articles did not use in-text citations. Today, such an article would have no chance of surviving a featured article discussion. (3) While some featured articles deteriorate in quality, this is not a widespread problem. Since the featured article program began in 2004, 21% of promoted articles have been de-featured. (4) In regards to vandalism, our featured articles are not specifically targeted by vandals, and are among the most-watched pages on Wikipedia. Short-term semi-protection and blocks are more than adequate to deal with featured article vandalism. (5) A link to the "originally featured version" is already available on the talk page.

Indicate Good Articles to readers

• Proposal: Articles rated as "Good Articles" should have an indication of said status that is immediately visible to the reader, using {{GA-icon}} (similar to the standard {{FA-star}} for featured articles.)
• Reasons for previous rejection: Whether or not an article is a Good Article is decided by one reviewer, not by a consensus-based process like Wikipedia:Featured articles is. The presence of a GA icon may confuse or mislead readers with regards to the article's quality and accuracy.

Editing

Prohibit anonymous users from editing

• Proposal: Everybody should register an account before editing; IP addresses are insufficient.
• Reasons for previous rejection: A large portion of our good edits come from IP addresses; positive experiences with initial IP edits lead users to create accounts who otherwise would not do so; software features disabling IPs from creating new articles or editing semiprotected ones are sufficient. According to Jimbo Wales, "what is commonly called 'anonymous' editing is not particularly anonymous ... and there are good reasons to want vandals on ip numbers instead of accounts". While about 97% of vandalism comes from anonymous users, about 76% or 82% of anonymous edits are intended to improve the encyclopedia. (Prohibiting IP edits would not eliminate 97% of all vandalism, because those inclined to vandalism could easily take the 10 seconds to register.) The ability of anyone to edit articles without registering is a Foundation issue.
• See also: Wikipedia:Editors should be logged in users

Automatically prompt for missing edit summary

• Proposal: When an editor is about to post an edit without an edit summary, he or she should automatically be reminded that no summary has been provided and given another opportunity to include one. (At present, a user has the ability to configure Preferences to this option, but many users are not aware of this.)
• Reasons for previous rejection: It's already an option in the user preferences, and forcing users to enter edit summaries may annoy them enough they will not save their (possibly constructive) edits.
• See also: Help:Preferences#Editing

Talk pages and discussions

Prohibit removal of warnings

• Proposal: Editors should be prohibited from removing warning templates from their talk page.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Talk pages are not intended as a permanent record of a user's misbehavior. Warnings are frequently placed incorrectly or spuriously. Removal of warnings other than to archive them is strongly discouraged, but does constitute definitive proof that the warning was seen, and can lead to escalated warnings. Revert warring to keep a warning on a user's talk page is disruptive and constitutes "biting" newcomers.
• See also: Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Removing warnings

Use a bot to welcome new users

• Proposal: Some people get missed for weeks at a time, or never welcomed at all. Wouldn't it be better to have a bot drop one of the welcome templates on newcomers' pages instead of depending upon volunteers of the welcoming committee?
• Reasons for previous rejection: In general, this proposal comes up every few months at Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee, the village pump, or the bot requests page. There are multiple reasons behind rejection: (1) If a bot is used, it is cold and impersonal, and the bot is incapable of mentoring and assisting newcomers. (2) Many vandals are exposed when an edit made by them receives extra scrutiny, because one user page or another shows as a redlink. (3) The bot would make thousands of pointless edits welcoming vandals and accounts that never make an edit.

Disallow personalized signatures

• Proposal: Editors should use only plain signatures. Personalized signatures (colored text, HTML, special characters, etc.) are inherently disruptive, draw too much attention to the user, are often poorly designed, and/or take up too much space in the edit window.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Most custom signatures cause little or no trouble. In addition, they are widely popular throughout Wikipedia, and forcing users to give them up would create more trouble than it's worth. It's better to deal with unacceptable sigs on a case-by-case basis than to issue a blanket prohibition that would anger many users, with few or no benefits.
• See also: Wikipedia:Signatures#Customizing your signature.

Deletion

Numerical rules for deletion

• Proposal: Something like "people can only nominate three articles per day", "articles cannot be nominated more than once per year", etc.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Strict numerical limits fall under instruction creep. This is a solution in search of a problem.
• See also: Wikipedia:Revotes on Vfd, Wikipedia:Repeated AfD nomination limitation policy.

All authors must be notified of deletion

• Proposal: The first creator, or everybody who has contributed to an article, must be warned on their talk page of a deletion debate of that article.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Excessive bureaucracy; people are expected to keep pages important to them on their watchlist. The "first creator" is meaningless for many articles, as this person may have long since left or made few contributions; "everybody" can number several hundred people.

Deleted pages should be visible

• Proposal: Make deleted pages visible to everybody (or to all logged-in users), not just administrators.
• Reasons for previous rejection: That defies the whole point of deletion (which is to improve Wikipedia quality by getting rid of the worst parts); also, it would increase the workload of the Oversight body to ensure that copyvios and libelous statements are not visible to everybody.
• See also: Wikipedia:Pure wiki deletion system, Wikipedia:Viewing deleted articles, Wikipedia:Trash namespace, Wikipedia:Proposed blanking, Wikipedia:Soft deletion.

Administrative

Requests for Adminship is broken

• Proposal: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship is clearly too stern, too lenient, too arbitrary, too much of a vote count, and/or not enough of a vote count.
• Reasons for previous rejection: While RFA is our most debated process and nearly everybody seems to think there's something wrong with it, literally years of discussion have yielded no consensus on what exactly is wrong with it, nor on what should be done about that.
• See also: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Reform, Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia:Requests for adminship, Wikipedia:RfA Review.

Demote inactive admins

• Proposal: Inactive admins should have their admin status revoked automatically after a given time period. The general reasoning behind this is that the accounts might be compromised, or that an administrator who left a few years ago may not be suitable for today's Wikipedia without going through another RFA.
• Reasons for previous rejection: In general, this policy has been opposed both by administrators who themselves tend to go through periods of inactivity and do not wish to be forced to maintain token levels of activity to maintain adminship, and by people who believe that there is no substantive security concern. The developers have pointed out that an active account is in far greater danger of becoming compromised than an inactive account. A side effect is that this may raise a barrier for inactive admins to become active again.
• See also: Wikipedia:Inactive administrators, and an April 2008 discussion and poll, Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/desysop poll

Reconfirm administrators

• Proposal: Administrators should have their status reconfirmed through RFA or an RFA-like process, either (1) periodically or (2) on demand.
• Reasons for previous rejection: (1) There are already over 1,400 administrators. Periodically reconfirming them would be an onerous and time-consuming process. For example, with annual reconfirmation, there would be 25+ reviews per week. Endorsements of uncontroversial admins would consume much of the schedule, while the "wait time" to review admins who are controversial could be on the order of months. (2) Reconfirmation "on demand" has faced objections about potential abuse. Although no proposal for mandatory reconfirmation has achieved consensus, some administrators have voluntarily joined Category:Wikipedia administrators open to recall, agreeing to stand for reconfirmation if requested to do so by a sufficient number of editors in good standing.
• See also: Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship#Proposed processes.

Hierarchical structures

• Proposal: There should be some kind of "partial admin" that gets certain admin powers, but not all of them. Or, new admins should start with limited abilities, earning full powers as they gain more experience.
• Can't be done: It's confusing; if we can't trust people to use their tools sensibly, they don't become admins period. A "partial admin" process would at least double the already considerable frictional effort expended at WP:RFA, as users debate who gets full sysop powers versus who gets only partial abilities.
• Already been done: The rollback power is available to trustworthy non-admins upon request.
• See also: Wikipedia:Limited administrators.

Technical

Search should detect spelling errors

• Proposal: When someone enters a name in the search box and hits Go or Search, Wikipedia should automatically list articles that the search term is a possible misspelling of, like Google does with its "Did you mean..." feature.
• Reasons for previous rejection: MediaWiki already has this feature, but it is disabled for various technical reasons. See bug 974, bug 2486.

Create a counter of people watching a page

• Proposal: A feature request for a button or some other means to find out how many people are watching a certain page.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Such a button constitutes an unnecessary drain on the server and could also be abused by vandals, who can then find unwatched pages to vandalize. Note that admins have a page that lists unwatched pages.
• See also: Wikipedia talk:Special:Unwatchedpages, MW:Manual:$wgAllowPageInfo. This option does exist in the software, but it's switched off on the English Wikipedia.

Allow watchlisting individual sections of a page

• Proposal: Allow specific sections of pages to be watched, so people don't have to watch an entire page to monitor only a small portion of the sections on large discussion pages such as WP:ANI.
• Reasons for previous rejection: While most people agree this would be a good idea, the technical implementation would be very difficult. Currently wathclisting is done per-page and each page has a unique ID number in the database. Sections however, are very fluid. They are assigned a number on the page they are on, but adding or removing sections above it will change the number. The name of the section can also be changed easily and new sections can be created with the same name.
• See also: Section level watch, Sections can't be watched, Watch one section of a large article, and mw:Extension:LiquidThreads, a forum-like system for discussion pages that would allow watching individual threads, currently under development.