Wikipedia:Perennial proposals

This is a list of things that have been frequently proposed on Wikipedia, and have been rejected by the community several times in the past. It should be noted that merely listing something on this page does not mean it will never happen or is to be rejected on sight, but that it has been discussed before and never met consensus. Consensus can change, and some proposals that remained on this page for a long time have finally been proposed in a way that reached consensus, but you should address rebuttals raised in the past if you make a proposal along these lines. If you feel you would still like to do one of these proposals, then raise it at the village pump.

Content

Content warnings

Censor offensive images

Advertising

Only allow the truth in articles

Define reliable sources

Require free, online sources

Require inline citations for everything

Move maintenance tags to talk pages

Upgrade GNG to policy status

Use Wikidata in infoboxes

Editing

Prohibit unregistered users from editing

Automatically prompt for missing edit summary

Allow editing of edit summaries

Manual of style

Remove state from US placenames

Enforce American or British spelling

Changes to standard appendices

Establish a house citation style

"It" for ships

Appearance

Redesign the Main Page

Allow non-commercial licensed content

Add in-article credit for images

Talk pages and discussions

Prohibit removal of warnings

Use a bot to welcome new users

  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 one of their edits receives extra scrutiny because their user or talk page shows as a redlink.
  3. The bot would make thousands of pointless edits welcoming vandals and non-editing accounts.
  1. they created their account within the past 36 hours and had since made at least 10 edits.
  2. the user had not already received an invitation to visit the Teahouse
  3. the user had not been blocked from editing at any point since joining
  4. the user had not received a level 4 user warning

Disallow personalized signatures

Usernames should contain only Latin characters

Allow discussion about the topic of the article

Deletion

Rename Articles for deletion or expand its scope

Cap on nominations for deletion

Notify all authors of deletion

Deleted pages should be visible

Delete no-consensus AfDs for biographies of living persons

Deletion of user accounts

Delete unreferenced articles

Grace period for deletion

Merge speedy deletion criterion F9 into G12

Adminship

Too many questions at RfA

Reconfirm administrators

Hierarchical structures

Prerequisites for adminship

Grant non-admins admin functions within their user space

Administrators should be of the age of majority

Automatically grant adminship to users with a certain number of edits or time editing

Suffrage requirements for RfA

Technical

Watchlist changes

Note that extensive styling of nearly every aspect of one's watchlist is possible through CSS; see Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists.

Multiple watchlists

  • Proposal: Users should be able to have multiple watchlists so that they can group the pages they watch and not have to see all watched pages in one huge list.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Technologically unfeasible without further development. See T7875 and T3492.
  • This issue is currently evolving: Watchlist labels, a way to group together sets of watched pages are currently being implemented. See T404391.
  • See also: archive 68, archive 3, archive 92, Help

Public watchlists

  • Proposal: Watchlists are currently private for each logged-in user. Watchlist functionality should be public so that a given watchlist could be managed by all members of a wikiproject.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Technologically unfeasible without further development. See T9467.
  • Partly done: The "related changes" feature displays changes on pages linked from a page.
  • See also: Help:Public watchlist, Wikipedia:Article alerts

Allow watchlisting individual sections of a page

  • Proposal: Allow specific sections of pages to be watchlisted, so editors can monitor small portions of large pages, such as WP:ANI, instead of the whole page.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: While many users support the use of such a feature, the technical implementation of this feature is difficult, if not impossible with the current version of MediaWiki. At the moment, watchlisting is done on a page-by-page basis, as each page is assigned a unique ID number in the database. Page sections, being fluid, are assigned numbers on the page they are situated 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. This does not apply to pages which are transcluded within other pages, but this setup is not commonly used.
  • Partly done: The discussion tools feature allows editors to subscribe to specific level 2 talk page sections. This is enabled by default and can be toggled at Special:Preferences.
  • See also: User:Enterprisey/section-watchlist, T2738 ("Ability to watch section levels of pages") and T275943 ("Add support for subsection subscriptions")

Use reCAPTCHA

  • reCAPTCHA is proprietary, whereas Wikimedia prefers to use free and open-source software.
  • Google will not let Wikimedia run it on their own servers, so it would introduce a dependency on an external server by forcing MediaWiki to contact the server for CAPTCHA verification. Using third-party servers is a privacy risk.

Create shortcut namespace aliases for various namespaces

Move the Main Page out of the main namespace

Share pages on Facebook, Twitter/X etc.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ In desktop view, a link to the disclaimers appears on the bottom of all pages. In mobile web view, the disclaimers can be accessed from any page via the three-bar settings menu in the upper left-hand corner. The official English Wikipedia app has no interface link to the disclaimers, but they can be found through the search function or via the links above.
  2. ↑ For example, the Oxford English Dictionary is free to (most) readers in the UK, but not elsewhere.
  3. ↑ From Wikipedia:Featured article criteria, as of April 2, 2008. (permalink)
  4. ↑ As of May 2023, there are 6,275 featured articles and 1,541 former featured articles (1,611 that have lost featured status minus 70 that have regained it). If you divide the 1541 former featured articles by the 6275 articles that have ever been featured, 24% of FAs have been de-featured.
  5. ↑ Wikipedia Statistics - Tables - English, accessed April 2, 2008; Who Writes Wikipedia?. Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought; accessed July 13, 2010.
  6. ↑ See Policies and guidelines: "Sources of Wikipedia policy"
  7. ↑ A majority of articles follow the APA style (psychology) and Council of Science Editors style guide (all physical sciences) in naming the primary list of citations "References"; this proposal usually comes from someone who is familiar with the conventions used in history or the humanities.
  8. ↑ Statement from Legal