Suggestion to add to copyrightwarning:

You are also agreeing to abide by the (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Submission_Standards_(a)">Submission Standards</a>) and (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terms_of_use_(a)">Terms of Use</a>).

— Alex756 [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 00:29, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I disagree with this. First, both of those texts are drafts. Second, we don't want to force more terms on first-time or anonymous contributors than are absolutely necessary (i.e. legal junk and important warnings). Third, the Copyrightwarning is long enough already, almost too long. silsor 01:15, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

This addition is only 63 characters of screen real estate, as well the copyrightwarning could be shortened, "Please note that all" and "considered to be" and ", then" can all be removed. Replace "You are also promising us that" with "You promise" and "from a resource that nobody" with" from resources nobody" and even with the new text the warning will be shorter than it is now. — Alex756 [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 14:06, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

We need to still finalize the drafts and then have the board of trustees approve them. --mav

If we take out anything that is not clearly new material on these two pages and leave the terms and standards that already exist then those changes would not require the approval of the Board of Trustees. This would be useful as new users should be given the means to "easily" understand the rules around here, rather than having to search through many pages to learn these basics that most web sites post on their pages along with disclaimers. As the disclaimer change occurred without "Board" approval, other changes can also occur without board approval, no? — Alex756 [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 14:06, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

In theory yes. But then we have to decide what is new and what is not. That will take time. --mav

This is 394 characters long vs. 440 for the present version (a savings of 46 precious characters):

All contributions to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see $1 for details). If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it. By submitting your work you promise you wrote it yourself, or copied it from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain">public domain</a> resources — this does not include most web pages. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

— Alex756 [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 03:57, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Looks good to me. --mav

Here is my attempt at a non-controversial versions of these texts:

Wikipedia:Terms of use (a), and

Wikipedia:Submission Standards (a).

Comments? — Alex756 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756 talk] 07:38, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Look much better to me. Jamesday 02:32, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

=> Wikipedia talk:Webby Awards

At the bottom of the editing-an-article page, there's a link that says: "Vote for Wikipedia at the People's Choice Webby Awards". The Webby Awards actually call it the People's Voice (as can be verified by hitting the link, which points to [1]). Should be a fairly easy change for someone with the right powers. --Etaoin 01:12, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for pointing it out. :) Angela. 01:18, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

"By submitting your work you promise you wrote it yourself, or copied it from public domain resources ..."

"Promise?" Pinky promise, cross your heart, hope to die? At the very least, this sentence is missing a conjunction, but I think the wording ventures beyond "casual" into "poor." Verbs like "attest" or "affirm" preserve the informal character of this message without making us out to be a bunch of schoolyard pals.

Also, if one "copie[s] it from public domain resources," it's not exactly one's "work," is it? Thoughts?

Austin Hair 23:16, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)

I suggest:

By making a submission to Wikipedia, you guarantee [affirm] that you wrote it yourself, or that you copied it from public domain resources—these do not include a majority of web pages.

In addition, I find the phrase "bad edits" childish. What is a "bad" edit? I suggest using the phrase "poor edit" (indicating something "bad" with the quality of writing) or "vandalism" or some other such thing, but not "bad." Furthermore, we need to get rid of the blot that is anti-Commonwealth English, i.e. the use of "practice" instead of "practise." -- Emsworth 22:34, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps:

"By submitting content to Wikipedia, you affirm that your submission is your own work, or content copied from public domain resources. Be advised that the majority of Web pages do not qualify as public domain resources."

Short, concise, and I believe much clearer. The repetitive phrasing is intetional, and in my opinion appropriate to the emphasis we're trying to convey.

I'm open to replacements for the word "practice," but keep in mind that simply replacing it with "practise" is as anti-American as the alternative is anti-Commonwealth.

Austin Hair 23:32, Aug 14, 2004 (UTC)

I am not sure we should have them in the English Wikipedia. Most articles are not going to be using them, and they clutter up the page. Dori | Talk 18:17, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

I agree, they use too much screen space, divert too much attention and are simply too annoying to make up for the tiny amount of use they would receive. Heck, they don't even do anything in my browser. silsor 18:48, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

It's true that most articles won't include characters with diacritics; however, a significant number will (any page including substantial French, German, Spanish, etc.), and their utility in those cases might balance the small amount of screen real estate that they occupy. The Æ ligature will certainly be useful, since proper English typography can and does use it. I'm not sure how the eth, the thorn, the curly quotes, and the dashes will interact with various browsers—I know some browsers change those to gibberish upon submission. —No-One Jones ^(m) 18:54, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There is definitely a place for these characters in Wikipedia, I just don't feel that that place is on every edit page. silsor 19:10, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Special characters bar for people expressing support for the addition.

Personally I think there should be a way of customizing this for each individual user (perhaps under "Preferences"). Not everyone needs it, and people who do need to work with special characters are likely to have their own ideas on what characters they need. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 22:41, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, i for one would like alot of mathematical symbols but am not going to put it in the public bar because it would not be useful but to a small audiance, however having something might just get people used to and and push for an official sofware feature;) -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:38, 2004 Nov 9 (UTC)

Well, as I said on VP, I've added a few more that were requested (graves and circumflexes and so on). Some sort of "opt out" software thing would be an excellent idea, particularly if you could pick particular sub-sets of the characters. -- ALoan (Talk) 15:18, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

What about the superscript circle ° used in °C and °F? I think that one would be immensely helpful for a lot of writers. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 21:21, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

And what about a set of fractions more than the bare-bones 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4? Apwoolrich 18:49, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It seems that this page will simply bloat to infiniteness. :D Do you think we should allow this (you know, have a five-line-long box at the bottom of every page?) Personally I'm trying to imagine it and I don't think it's that bad of an idea — if you don't need it, then just ignore it; if you do need it then it's a lifesaver. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 19:16, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)

At the moment it is about one line, just under or just over depending on screen/window width. More than that would be a problem, I think, until you can switch it on or off, although having said that, the rest of the "Copyrightwarning" message is around 7 lines... Where will it stop? Cuneiform? Hieroglyphics? -- ALoan (Talk) 20:01, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The obvious problem with a very long special character bar is, it would obscure the more important part of this message: the copyright warning. We probably don't want that to happen. —No-One Jones ^(m) 20:21, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Then I guess we'll have to wait for the next software update... is there some way of bringing this up to the developers? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 20:38, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, file it at mediazilla. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:22, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

I think the characterline should go for reasons stated by User:Dori and User:Silsor and KISS, to make it a software preference would be even worse though.--Dittaeva 16:21, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Don't! In its short existence it has already proven itself invaluably useful to me. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 16:35, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

Hear, hear; I wholeheartedly agree with Ran! Like him, I have used the very practical char line feature for writing e.g. German names, whose special letters I don't have easy access to on my Norwegian keyboard. Along the same train of thought, I think other non-German-language-speakers and non-Scandinavians who writes on German or Nordic/Scand. people/places/history could profit from the feature, since I see far to much of names and places being misrepresented with 'ue's (for 'ü'), 'ae's (for 'æ') etc, etc.

Regarding the question of 'infinite' expansion of the line, with maths symbols, etc, I think the correct use of written human languages commands a special respect above academically developed symbol languages, so I feel that the restriction of the special char insertion feature to letters (of non-English languages) is a sound one. Thus, my conclusion is: keep! --Wernher 01:15, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

As this template is protected, can a sysop please fix Í so that it only inserts that character. --Zigger 15:40, 2004 Nov 23 (UTC)

Fixed, I think... ÍÍÍÍÍíí ... yep — Kate Turner | Talk 15:46, 2004 Nov 23 (UTC)

Argh. There's something strange going on with the char insertion feature right now. All the chars output 'Ã<some other special char, but not necessarily the intended one>'. Might it be my browser misbehaving? (however, it has worked nicely with this feature up to now). Anyone know anything about this? --Wernher 01:39, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'm having the exact same problem. This is what I get when I click on the first twelve characters: ÃáÃ&#137;éÃíÃ&#147;óÃ&#154;úÃý

-- ran (talk) 04:12, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)

On December 17, Dwheeler proposed adding this to the end:

Please cite your sources so others can check your work.

Dwheeler's rationale was that most other problems (not sufficiently NPOV, etc.) can be fixed by others, but it's often difficult for others to figure out where a contributor got their information. And as noted in how to edit a page: "Please cite your sources so others can check and extend your work. Most Wikipedia articles currently lack good references. This contributes to Wikipedia's single greatest criticism that it is not a reliable source. Please help by researching, preferably online and in print resources to find the best references available for the article you are working on. Then cite them in proper form, and consider inline citation for contentious facts. There is no consensus on the best way to do that, but anything is better than nothing. You can either use inline citation in academic form such as (Example, 2004, pp 22-23) or as a superscript to a footnote that you place at the end of an article." Dwheeler also noted that "Now that Wikipedia has grown into a remarkable encyclopedia, one of the major complaints by others is its lack of references. So, let's fix that; I think this minor template change could actually help."

After 4 days, absolutely nobody complained, so Dwheeler went ahead and made the change on 2004-12-21. He said, "after a little while, we should be able to see if its benefits outweigh the negatives of yet more text at the bottom."

After trying it out for a number of days, more people liked the citation reminder than didn't like it. As of 2004-12-30:

• For the citation reminder: Dwheeler, Soren9580, Whosyourjudas, Emerman
• Against the citation reminder: Chris 73.

This list of people for and against is listed here, not in Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), because the Village Pump stuff eventually disappears. Besides, documenting this in the discussion page of the text being changed should make it easier to find later, if anyone needs to.

Whosyourjudas liked the idea, but wanted the format prettied up. Others have prettied up the format since Whosyourjudas made his comments, and Whosyourjudas is now satisfied with the format.