WikiAlpha:Community portal

WikiAlpha's community portal archives

• Archive 1 (July 2011 – June 2021)

Please do not replace this content. The sandbox for practice and experimentation is at WikiAlpha:Sandbox

Basic rules, please follow

1. Make sure you capitalize names properly, use proper spacing, and use proper punctuation. Do not use ALL CAPS. Capitalize people's last names. Ali Khan should not be Ali khan or ALI KHAN.
2. Do not create duplicate pages. For example, create only one page for Ali Khan, not two pages for Ali khan and ALI KHAN. This does not help with SEO and creates unnecessary workload for volunteer editors working to maintain WikiAlpha.
3. Do not completely replace existing pages and templates with your own test content, whether they are Bangladeshi Instagram stars or Indian marketing companies. Experiment using your own user page or talk page.
4. Do not blank pages that others have created without explaining why.
5. Be respectful of server capacities. Do not make too many small edits to one page, or since they take up storage space and bandwidth when each unique historical version is saved. Do not upload too many large photos, and make sure they are your own work. This is because the bills are completely paid for by volunteers with no commercial interests, such as Richard.

Notability on WikiAlpha is not an issue, but please be neat and meticulous. Enjoy editing WikiAlpha.

WritingSnowman (talk) 16:23, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

User:WritingSnowman, you make several excellent points here. Thanks for taking the time to draft this section! Geo Swan (talk) 02:18, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

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Need help urgently

I created the page of Andre L. Henry the infobox is showing some vulgar language, I have checked the code, as well as the editing history. There seems to be no issue with them. Please help Menzi Holmes(talk) 21:43, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

As I have looked at other profiles, each and every infobox is having this issue. Menzi Holmes(talk) 21:59, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Attracting editors with non-commercial interests

As of now, it appears that the only users here on WikiAlpha who regularly create articles on non-commercial topics are User:Geo Swan, User:Mathewignash, and me.

Paid commercial topics are not a problem at all, since the founding principle of WikiAlpha is its universal inclusion policy. Many of the companies and entrepreneurs mentioned on here are quite interesting, but they would have been speedily deleted on Wikipedia. Curiously, more than half of them are Bangladeshi social media influencers.

However, to be more rounded, wiki encyclopedias should have both commercial and non-commercial interests to balance each other out, in order to maintain a certain level of diversity. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive.

What can we do to attract more editors who tend to have non-commercial interests? WritingSnowman (talk) 05:49, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

WritingSnowman, I too would like to encourage more contributions of independent articles. No ideas as to how to do so come to mind. Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 22:21, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

And don't forget about me too! GnosticScribe (talk) 08:34, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

WikiAlpha celebrates 10 years

Congratulations to WikiAlpha for successfully being online for 10 years! While Wikipedia celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, we are celebrating our 10th. In an online world where websites appear and disappear all within a few years, this is an impressive achievement. Kudos to Richard for consistently maintaining WikiAlpha, to Govind for helping it get started, MathewWignash and Geo Swan for continually and consistently updating and maintaining WikiAlpha, and all the editors on this wiki who have made us who we are today.

As a friendly, inclusive online space that radically departs from Wikipedia's environment, we will remain committed to being radically free, uncensored, and open. Keep on editing folks! WritingSnowman (talk) 16:33, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

P.S. WikiAlpha has recently had a lot of new articles on Bangladeshi entertainers. This trend started sometime in late 2019 or 2020. Wonder how this had happened! Sooner or later, we might have to rename ourselves WikiBangla. WritingSnowman (talk) 16:33, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Alexa Site Info shows that nearly 50% of WikiAlpha's site traffic comes from Bangladesh, and just over 80% is from South Asia. WritingSnowman (talk) 20:47, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

@User:WritingSnowman that is because some people started writing articles in exchange for money as a marketing businees. They are running paid advertisements for this on Facebook for that. Ref: [Facebook Ad post Link]. WyseMan (talk) 11:55, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

That's OK as long as they don't mess up the site by doing things like copying and pasting into Template:Recent pages and doing things that would cause bandwidth problems, like copying and pasting unnecessarily large chunks of text. And oftentimes, their writing is semi-legible at best. WritingSnowman (talk) 19:30, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

What's up with the active users list?

The Active Users list has no members, and says it's a cached version of the page from six years ago. Any reason why? Metroplex (talk) 07:40, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

There seemed to have been a problem with the creation of new articles...

There was an outage of about 10-20 hours, about ten days ago. When the system came back up there was something wrong with putting the name of an article that did not yet exist into the search box. Normally, once you clicked search, one of your option would be to edit the file.

Okay, it is working again. Yah!

During the time it was out I see a couple of contributors got around this by editing articles I wrote: Zaky Mallah and Barbara Foss, then rewriting them into brand new articles, on new topics, discarding the content I had worked hard on. They then gave those articles new names, reflecting the new content. Geo Swan (talk) 00:13, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

It might be because WikiAlpha is getting a lot more traffic. Please see my message on your talk page. WritingSnowman (talk) 09:47, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Recent outages

There was an outage, of approximately 20 hours, about a month ago. I don't know what caused it.

There was another outage, from March 10th to March 16th. I don't know what caused it, either.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 16:53, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Exceeding bandwidth or server failures? Please ask Richard about it. That's why I had voiced my concerns about the long-term future of this wiki; do we have enough resources to maintain a rapidly growing project? WritingSnowman (talk) 18:55, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Vandalism and disruptive editing from a particular user

Barkatofficial (talk • contribs) is consistently involved in disruptive editing. They're consistently blanking a biography page. I tried to create it under another name but they blanked that page too. Is there a policy on WikiAlpha to ban editors involved in this kind of edit warring/disruptive editing?

I would request to please look into this.

Thanks

Which article? I am assuming Tyler King? Also, please sign your name with four tildes (~~~~). WritingSnowman (talk) 20:24, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

There has been a lot of recent vandalism

There has been a lot of recent vandalism. I wonder why? Geo Swan (talk) 01:38, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Does the CSD copyright paragraph apply to articles ported from wikipedia, where the wikipedia contributors were not acknowledged...

I am {{ping}}ing User:Richard, User:Mathewignash and User:WritingSnowman, but others opinions are welcome too.

I used to rely on the Save Article button to take care of putting a list of wikipedia contributors on the talk pages of articles I ported. This feature doesn't work anymore, or, at least, it doesn't work, for me. So I manually copy that information when I port an article.

I am not a lawyer, but I think that, technically, it is a legal obligation on the person doing the copying, to acknowledge contributions made under GPL, Creative Commons, etc.

While working on cleaning up the recent vandal I have come across articles that had clearly been copied from the wikipedia, where no effort had been made to acknowledge the wikipedia contributors, and which were missing the {{wp-cca}} tag.

What, if anything, should we do about articles ported from the wikipedia, without proper attribution? Does CSD's paragraph on copyright violations apply to those articles?

I can see an argument being made that obligation to acknowledge the original wikipedia contributors lay on the person who ported the content, so I should "let sleeping dogs lie". Alternatively, it could be argued that recognition of missing acknowledgements should be seen as a serious concern, but not one requiring speedy deletion. Since the people who copied the material were newbies, who honestly didn't understand the licensing requirements, they should be given a longish grace period between when a note is left on their user talk page, and when the unacknowledged port is deleted. A month? Three months?

If I thought I could figure out why the bot that put the wikipedia contributors was no longer working, I'd volunteer to try to fix it. But, I don't know how to do that.

If the savearticlebot could be fixed, maybe it could be modified to work, retroactively? If it were handed the URLs of the wikipedia version of an article, and the wikialpha version, could it copy the revision history from the wikipedia - but stop at the date of creation of the wikialpha version?

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 01:38, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

I would personally err on the side of caution and apply the CC license to CSD articles. WritingSnowman (talk) 14:05, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

About 15 months of contributionss to this page, Wikialpha:Community portal, lost due to vandalism, and a bug

A vandal moved this page, Wikialpha:Community portal to a nonsense name. That left the new Wikialpha:Community portal as just a one revision redirect. I deleted it first. Then I moved the nonsense name, with the full revision history back to Wikialpha:Community portal. I wasn't sufficiently paranoid about bugs, and, when it said "a redirect already exists, delete it?" I told it to go ahead. What it seems to have done was do the deletion it thought I authorized, and the move, in the wrong order. The result of that ended in the unrecoverable deletion of all the good revisions.

Sorry everybody. Geo Swan (talk) 06:12, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

New language versions for WikiAlpha?

I think it would be a great idea to create new subdomains for different language versions of WikiAlpha. The most common languages I've seen on WikiAlpha are Bengali and Vietnamese. The interface can be in English unless we have someone who can help with localization, but the article contents can be in the target language.

We can try these subdomains:

• https://bn.wikialpha.org/ (Bengali)
• https://vi.wikialpha.org/ (Vietnamese)

WritingSnowman (talk) 22:24, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Sandbox

The sandbox for practice and experimentation is at WikiAlpha:Sandbox Thanks.PhilippMichelReichold (talk) 08:08, 17 April 2024 (UTC)