Wikipedia:Perennial proposals

"WP:PERENNIAL" redirects here. Not to be confused with Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources (WP:RSP), Wikipedia:External links/Perennial websites (WP:ELP), or Wikipedia:Deletion review/Perennial requests (WP:DRPR).

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

• Proposal: Certain Wikipedia pages should display content warnings or disclaimers, such as "This article contains sexually explicit images" or "This article is not suitable for children".
• Reasons for previous rejection: All Wikipedia web pages contain a link to the Wikipedia:General disclaimer page, where you can access the content, legal, medical, risk and survey disclaimers. In addition, Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of minors. Our mission is to document human knowledge, no matter how unpleasant or offensive it may be to some people. It is impossible to draw a line between "offensive" and "non-offensive" content that satisfies all cultural, religious and political norms. Any page could conceivably be offensive to somebody. Furthermore, once a page has loaded, the disclaimer is often too late.
• See also: Wikipedia:No disclaimers in articles.

Censor offensive images

• Proposal: Images of a sexual, obscene, emotionally disturbing, religiously offensive or disgusting nature should be hidden from all users or even deleted entirely.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not § Wikipedia is not censored. 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 widely between cultures.
• See also: Help:Options to hide an image for instructions on how to suppress images. m:2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content proposes user-configurable options. In August 2011, a referendum on how to permit users to suppress types of images they personally deem unwanted was begun at m:Image filter referendum/en.

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: The Wikimedia Foundation employs legal counsel to advise on whether and when such measures are necessary, and editors may rest assured that appropriate Wikipedia policies will inform them of any such needed measures, such as removal of copyrighted material. Please do not make legal threats.
• See also: Wikipedia:Office actions and CAT:LEGAL.

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 that our content 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. Placing ads would also likely decrease the amount of money raised by community fundraising. Also, since we don't allow spam or advertising by users, doing it ourselves would be, at the very least, hypocritical. Finally, the financial situation of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the website, is stable—there is no pressing need to make such a change.
• See also: Wikipedia:Funding Wikipedia through advertisements; Spanish Wikipedia and Enciclopedia Libre.

Enforce American or British spelling

• Proposal: For consistency's sake, we should pick one style of spelling (American or British, generally), and enforce it throughout the site.
• 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.

Only allow the truth in articles

• Proposal: For a long time, the first sentence of Wikipedia:Verifiability stated, "The threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth". This meant that the absolute minimum standard for including material in Wikipedia is that it be possible to verify it; the minimum standard for including material is not merely being true in the opinion of an editor. The most common proposal is to require not only that all material be verifiable, but that all material also be true in the opinion of editors. The second most common proposal is to require that material be either verifiable or true according to any editor. It is usually motivated by a desire to reduce errors in Wikipedia or increase Wikipedia's scholarly reputation.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Wikipedia is supposed to be based on published reliable sources, not on the opinions or beliefs of editors. The community refuses to let editors delete well-sourced material if they believe the sources are wrong or to include material merely because they personally believe the unpublished, unsourceable material to be true. Adding unsourced material or deleting well-sourced material on the basis of editors' personal beliefs can result in biased, unbalanced articles and frequently does result in edit wars between editors with opposing personal beliefs.
• See also: Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth, Wikipedia:Editorial discretion, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view

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. Whether a source is reliable depends on how the source relates to the material: a very weak source may be reliable for a very small claim, such as "this source was published", while a very strong source will be deemed unreliable if the claim is unrelated to the source's contents (e.g., a source about electricity being cited for information about a celebrity). Although it may be 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.
• Partly done: Editors can assess the reliability of sources at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, and frequently discussed sources are indexed at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. Strong community consensus results in a source being classified as "generally reliable" or "generally unreliable", but exceptions are possible depending on context and consensus can change.
• 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.

Require free, online sources

• Proposal: Editors should use sources that anyone can read immediately, without cost.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Editors should use the best sources available to them, regardless of cost or format. The content policies require that it be possible for someone to verify a given statement—not that it be quick, easy, and free for you to verify it. A "replacement" source that is available online and/or without cost is not identical to the first source, and therefore is never truly equal in all particulars. Many academic journals eventually release papers, and more books are being digitized, so "unavailable" sources may become freely available later. What appears to be free in your country or computer network may not be free everywhere. Wikipedia already has a systemic bias in favor of freely available online sources (called the FUTON bias) that are written in English; this bias may distort its contents, and institutionalizing such a recommendation would only further exacerbate this bias.
• See also: Wikipedia:Verifiability § Access to sources, Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Cost, and WP:NOTONLYFREE

Require inline citations for everything

• Proposal: Every sentence (or paragraph) should be followed by an inline citation that supports it. Any material added without a reliable source should be promptly removed. All articles without references should be deleted, regardless of whether Wikipedia should have an article on that subject. All use of general references should be banned.
• Reasons for previous rejection: The policy is that material must be verifiable, that is, that it must be possible for someone to name a reliable source that supports it. Sourcing policies require inline citations only for four types of material, and there is no deadline for supplying these citations. Inline citations are not required for material everyone agrees is obvious. The editing policy requires editors to preserve appropriate, encyclopedic information, which often means adding citations to reliable sources for editors who did not name sources at the time the material was added. Increasing the requirements discourages new editors, and would destroy most of Wikipedia's content.
• See also: § Delete unreferenced articles, below

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:
  • 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, and always will be, room for further improvement.
  • 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 inline citations. Today, a proposal to promote such an article to "featured" status would have no chance of surviving a featured article candidacy.
  • While some featured articles deteriorate in quality, this is not a widespread problem. Since the featured article program began in 2004, 24% of promoted articles have been de-featured as of 2023, and this is mainly due to increased requirements.
  • 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.
  • A link to the "originally featured version" is already available on the talk page.
• Partly done in August 2023 there was consensus to semi-protect today's featured article for the day before to the day after.

Move maintenance tags to talk pages

• Proposal: Move maintenance tags such as {{cleanup}} and {{POV}} from the head of article pages to the article talk pages. Some proposals recommend all tags be moved, and others only propose moving some tags. Moving templates would reduce self-references to Wikipedia, reduce clutter, and reserve article space for information about the subject.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Every reader is a potential editor and the maintenance tags give potential editors ideas of how to improve an article. Some tags also serve as warnings to readers about potentially problematic and low-quality content. The {{ambox}} "meta-template" used by the templates means that they are not nearly as cluttered-looking as they were before 2007. The implementation costs would be large: About a million articles have maintenance tags, and moving them all to talk pages would be a massive undertaking, even using a bot or spreading the work out over many months. The documentation on all the templates, several editing help pages, and any bot or script that edits or reads maintenance tags would have to be updated manually.
• Previous discussions: September 2010, November 2009, January 2009, December 2008, October 2008, March 2008, October 2007

Changes to standard appendices

• Proposal: The standard appendices at the end of an article (e.g., See also, Notes, References, Further reading, and External links) should be changed to the system preferred by the editor/a particular professional field/the editor's school. These proposals may involve changing the names of the sections (e.g., changing References to Sources or Bibliography), changing the order of the sections (e.g., putting External links first, or References last), or changing the formatting (e.g., long lists of references should be hidden in a scrolling box).
• Reasons for previous rejection: Policies and guidelines document "actual good practices". Most proposals fail to demonstrate that their proposed practice is an emerging, sustainable alternative to the current de facto method. These guidelines only seek to document the status quo and not to change it. The See also precedes the References, Further reading, and External links; the reason for the existing order follows a logical progression from on-wiki to off-wiki information. About the names of the section headings, different academic fields use different terms, and Wikipedia editors do not want to impose the convention preferred by one academic discipline on articles in another discipline.
• See also: WP:ORDER. Many discussions in the archives of Wikipedia talk:Layout.

Allow non-commercial licensed content

• Proposal: Allow uploading and use of media which is licensed under a non-commercial license (such as Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial).
• Reasons for previous rejection: It could cause confusion. Many editors may not realize that they cannot use images under this license for any purpose, and hence inadvertently violate the licensing policy for these kinds of images by doing so.
• See also: Jimbo's original edict against NC media; Wikipedia:Non-free content

Establish a house citation style

• Proposal: Wikipedia should establish a house citation style applicable to all articles. This would improve consistency between articles and/or make citing sources easier for new users. Past suggestions include an outside style guide/prescribed format (such as MLA or Harvard referencing), a system preferred by the user's school or teacher(s), and/or a unique style that would meet the specific needs of Wikipedia.
• Reasons for previous rejection: If academics can't find a single system suitable for all fields, why would one system work for Wikipedia? An extreme amount of time and effort would be necessary to (1) develop, or even agree on, a comprehensive house style that covers most or all situations, and (2) implement it on all 6,916,589 articles with sources, even with the help of one or more bots. Any benefits of a single encyclopedia-wide house style pale in comparison to the massive scope of such an undertaking.
• Partly done: Inline parenthetical referencing has been deprecated. One could consider citation templates to be a de-facto 'house style', however, the use of these is neither encouraged nor discouraged (see WP:CITEVAR and WP:CITECONSENSUS).
• See also: Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Citation discussion, Wikipedia:Citing sources § Variation in citation methods (shortcut: WP:CITEVAR)

Add in-article credit for images

• Proposal: Wikipedia should include bylines or some other sort of in-article credit for images used in articles. It is sometimes also claimed this is required by CC BY licenses.
• Reasons for previous rejection:
  • There is no need to clutter articles with this information. Credit is already provided for the majority of images by linking them to the file description page, which includes authorship, licensing, and more. (The exceptions to this are CC0 and public domain images used as icons, where the file description page still exists but is sometimes not linked.)
  • Maintaining these in-article credits would be a significant maintenance burden on our editors, so there should be a similarly significant advantage to doing it. Such advantage has not been evident.
  • The existing model of attribution has so far proven to be widely successful, despite resistance by a small number of copyright holders to allowing use of their images without in-article credit.
  • Mistaken credit of images taken from Wikipedia (e.g. crediting them to "Wikipedia" rather than the actual authors) is an issue, but it is not evident that this would be significantly affected by this proposal.
  • Including in-article credits would increase the incentive for people to "spam" their images into articles in an attempt to use Wikipedia for free advertising.
  • Prominently crediting some images without crediting all, including the various icons used in maintenance templates, could itself prove problematic by seemingly valuing some people's contributions over others'. The same applies to prominently crediting image contributions without doing so for text contributions.
  • And, specific to the CC BY licenses:
    • While the CC license deed (a summary, not legally binding) says attribution is to be provided "in the manner specified by the author or licensor", this does not mean that the author/licensor can require specific fonts, colors, wording, or placement of the credit. Looking at the actual license (the "legal code"), this seems to be referring to the author/licensor's ability to choose the name to be attributed, the title of the work, and the canonical URL for the work.
    • The actual location and formatting of the attribution is merely required to be "reasonable to the medium" and "at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors". The assertion that linking to a file description page is not "reasonable to the medium" of a hypertext encyclopedia has not received any significant level of support.
    • Providing in-article credit for some but not all images might possibly fall afoul of the CC BY license's "at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors" clause.
• See also: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Captions/Archive 2 § RfC: Requiring photo credits in footnotes for copyrighted images, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 76 § Attribution of images, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 25 § Photograph attribution in image captions, Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 17 § Requiring photo credits, Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive AZ § Image attribution under CC-Attrib license

Remove state from US placenames

• Proposal: Remove the state from the titles of articles about unambiguously-named US places. Example: Missoula, Montana → Missoula.
• Reasons for previous rejection:
  • Reliable sources commonly append the state to placenames.
  • Appending the state is common usage and sufficiently natural that it may be considered part of American English.
  • Repeated or otherwise ambiguous placenames are very common in the US (e.g. Springfield); a majority would require disambiguation regardless of USPLACE. Always appending the state produces a consistent and predictable set of titles.
  • Including the state makes it clear that the article is about a US municipality, which can be helpful with lesser known places.
• Partly done: Twenty-nine significant US cities are exempted from the convention per AP style.

Redesign the Main Page

• Proposal: Revamp the look of the Main Page. The current design was implemented in March 2006 following several months of discussion by the community organized by the Usability WikiProject.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Although some consensus exists that certain changes are in order, no particular change or specific redesign has had consensus.
  • No consensus on what Main Page sections to add or remove.
  • No consensus on particular changes to the general layout.
• Partly done: Today's Featured List was added to the Main Page every Monday and Friday in 2011, and minor tweaks have been done since 2006. Another major change is the removal of portal links in April 2022.
• See also: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Main Page features, Wikipedia:Main Page design

Change the color of red links

• Proposal: Use any color except red to identify links to non-existent articles. The usual reasons are that red is an aggressive color or that it is too easy to see.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Red has been used for so many years that its meaning is established among editors. There is no evidence that red links are abused to make certain names or words stand out in an article.
• See also: Help:Link color or User:Anomie/linkclassifier on how to change the color for your own account.

Upgrade GNG to policy status

• Proposal: The general notability guideline should become project-wide policy, requiring all articles to meet it or be deleted. Some versions of this proposal continue to allow subject notability guidelines, while others attempt to do away with those and have GNG be the only governing policy.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Having GNG be a policy would be overly-restrictive on articles that could be included on Wikipedia and preclude the use of common sense. More discretion in deletion discussions is preferred to a clear policy.

Use Wikidata in infoboxes

• Proposal: Implement infoboxes that pull data from Wikidata.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Concerns over the verifiability of Wikidata and subtle vandalism.
• Partly done: Template:Infobox software pulls in the latest stable and preview release versions from Wikidata.

Proposals related to suicide and self-harm

• Proposal: A wide variety of proposals have been made to change how Wikipedia handles content about suicide and other forms of self-harm. One common proposal is to display information about crisis hotlines outside of article content. Other proposals involve temporarily displaying public service messages about suicide at the bottom of articles about recent suicide deaths, adding an anti-suicide editorial message to articles such as Suicide, adding a note to Special:Search when people search on suicide-related keywords, writing a script that geolocates the reader and displays a message about the local crisis number, providing encyclopedic information about how to access treatment in articles, including crisis hotlines in an ==External links== section, creating our own guideline on how to write about suicide, following the guidelines used by news media in English-speaking countries, discouraging certain phrases ("died by suicide"), and more.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Proposals along these lines generally start from a position of advocacy or righting great wrongs, calling on us to override Wikipedia:No disclaimers because suicide, mental health, domestic violence, and so on are important social issues, and pointing out that many other sites have given in to this advocacy. Proposals also frequently advocate one nation's resources, while if we were going to do this we'd need an in-house geotargeted service.
  In recent RFCs, the most strongly supported argument against has been that independent research has found that these warnings have little benefit in actually preventing suicides and such, and Wikipedia:No disclaimers should not be overridden for such questionable benefit. There has also been concern over our ability to accurately maintain such a list, and concerns over a possible slippery slope (e.g. should we have a Surgeon General's Warning on cigarette and smoking?).
  Also of note is that the World Health Organization's guidance suggests resources at the end of an article, not at the top; we generally already have prevention information inline, links to articles about prevention (where they exist) inline and in "See also" sections, and relevant external links in "External links" sections.
• Partly done:
  • Many articles directly about suicide and self-harm contain appropriate text, links, or images related to suicide prevention. They also have links to articles such as Suicide prevention in the article body and in ==See also== sections, as well as relevant external links in ==External links== sections. Editors are encouraged to improve these articles.
  • In a 2019 RFC, editors decided to add a hatnote on the Suicide article stating "For information on prevention, see Suicide prevention". Similar editorial decisions have been made at other articles, including the Suicide methods.
  • In 2021, editors created MOS:SUICIDE to describe appropriate content for articles.
  • In 2022, editors created the {{Self-harm}} template to link to the WMF's global list of crisis lines (for use on talk pages).
• See also: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 161#Proposal to add suicidal disclaimer at Suicide, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 192#Suicides, Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 164#RFC: "Committed suicide" language, Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 43#Topic related help resources, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 212#Suicide hotlines, Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 59#Resources on severe mental illness pages, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles/Archive 16#Suicide Language, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles/Archive 16#New section on suicide and self-harm, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles/Archive 17#"Omit information about suicide notes", Talk:Suicide/crisis hotline link, and many more.

Editing

Prohibit unregistered 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 unregistered users (less than 8% are vandals), about 76% or 82% of IP edits are intended to improve the encyclopedia. (Prohibiting IP edits would not eliminate 97% of all vandalism, where all vandalism is about 8% of all users, because those inclined to vandalize could easily take the 10 seconds to register.) The ability of anyone to edit articles without registering is a Foundation issue.
• Partly done: IP addresses have been unable to create pages in the main namespace since 2005, and are subject to other restrictions such as not being able to vote in RfAs.
• This issue is currently evolving: For privacy reasons, the Foundation has stated that the public display of IP addresses will be terminated at an unspecified date, probably in 2024. They intend to deploy a temporary account system. The general public will see "User:~2024 1234" in logs and history pages, but experienced editors will be able to reveal the IP addresses. The Portuguese Wikipedia does not allow unregistered editors to edit articles (but allows them to edit talk pages and other namespaces) and a report has been published on the results. The Persian Wikipedia similarly experimented with ending IP editing, but decided that an anti-vandal bot fit their needs better.
• See also: Wikipedia:Editors should be logged-in users, Wikipedia:IPs are human too, Wikipedia:Not every IP is a vandal, Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed article creation trial (new accounts shouldn't be allowed to create pages), and Prosecutor's fallacy.

Automatically prompt for missing edit summary

• Proposal: When any editor is about to post an edit without an edit summary, they should automatically be reminded that no summary has been provided and given another opportunity to include one. (Registered users can set their accounts' Preferences to do this, but many users are not aware of this.)
• Reasons for previous rejection: It's already an option in the user preferences, and forcing (or reminding) users to enter edit summaries may annoy them enough they will not save their (possibly constructive) edits. Forcing users to type something in the edit summary box does not mean that they will provide accurate, honest, or useful edit summaries. Manually added edit summaries also suppress the automatic edit summaries. Blank edit summaries are a good way to spot possible vandalism.
• Partly done: As said above, this is an option for account Preferences.
• See also: Help:Preferences § Editing

Usernames should contain only Latin characters

• Proposal: Proposals have included banning usernames that include symbols, Unicode characters, non-English alphabets, and/or any characters that are not easy to type on "standard" computer keyboards.
• Reasons for previous rejection: The notion of acceptable characters was broadened to accommodate single user login rules. Very few active users choose names that are difficult to type, so the problem is quite small. Being able to type a name is not necessary, as names can be copied or ignored. Furthermore, banning non-Latin usernames would cause difficulty on Wikipedias in languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, as speakers of those languages may not be able to enter Latin characters with their keyboards and would have a difficult time in choosing a username.
• Partly done: Since 6 November 2017 no usernames are permitted to contain Unicode characters unrelated to writing, although usernames registered before that time were grandfathered in.
• See also: Wikipedia:Signatures § Non-Latin usernames on providing transliterations. WP:UUN for the list of active accounts using Unicode characters.

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 still lead to escalated warnings. All warnings continue to be available in the page history regardless of whether or not they have been removed from the page's current revision. Revert warring to keep a warning on a user's talk page is disruptive and constitutes "biting" newcomers.
• Partly done: Users may not remove declined unblock requests regarding a currently active block, miscellany for deletion tags while the discussion is in progress, speedy deletion tags and requests for uninvolved administrator help, and templates and notes on anonymous IP user talk pages that indicate other users share the same IP address.
• See also: Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Removing warnings, WP:BLANKING

Use a bot to welcome new users

• Proposal: Some people get missed for weeks at a time, or never welcomed at all. Would it not 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 for 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 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.

• Partly done: HostBot automatically delivers Teahouse invites to new users if:

1. they created their account within the past 36 hours and have since made at least 10 edits.
2. the user has not already received an invitation to visit the Teahouse
3. the user has not been blocked from editing at any point since joining
4. the user has not received a level 4 user warning

• See also: Wikipedia:Bot requests/Frequently denied bots

Disallow personalized signatures

• Proposal: Editors should use only plain signatures. Personalized signatures (colored text, CSS, 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 popular throughout Wikipedia, and forcing users to give them up would create more trouble than it would be worth. It is better to deal with unacceptable signatures on a case-by-case basis than to issue a blanket prohibition that would anger many users, with few or no benefits. Furthermore, a user whose username uses non-Latin characters could use a custom signature to display an alternate name that English speakers could understand.
• See also: Wikipedia:Signatures § Customizing your signature, User:Kephir/gadgets/unclutter.

Allow discussion about the topic of the article

• Proposal: People should be allowed to discuss the topic of the article on talk pages, instead of limiting discussion to improvement of the article. Or forums of some sort should be created to allow this, either on Wikipedia or elsewhere and linked from all articles.
• Reasons for previous rejection: This conflicts with our mission at a fundamental level: our purpose is to create an encyclopedia, not to provide a place for people to hold random discussions on various topics. Similarly, we are not here to endorse any particular external sites for such discussion; people interested in finding such places should use a search engine. Additionally, hosting such discussions would require volunteers or staff to monitor and/or moderate these discussions, delete WP:BLP violations, block or ban disruptive users, and so on, which would reduce the time these people (likely Admins) have to spend on activities that do improve the encyclopedia. Occasionally it is claimed that these forums could provide a place for original research to be "peer reviewed"; this would nonetheless conflict with our policy WP:No original research, even if the "peer review" turned out to be much more rigorous than can be reasonably expected.
• See also: Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not § FORUM

Deletion

Further information: Wikipedia:Deletion reform

Cap on nominations 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 Wikipedia:Don't stuff beans up your nose).
• Partly done: On occasion the community has imposed specific limitations on specific editors, demonstrating that issue can be handled on a case-by-case basis without a general rule.
• See also: Wikipedia:Revotes on Vfd, Wikipedia:Repeated AfD nomination limitation policy, and List of articles that have been nominated for deletion more than once.

Notify all authors 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, including those who have made trivial edits to the article and aren't concerned whether or not it's deleted. Regardless, editors are encouraged to notify the original author or the main contributors of an article when their article is nominated for deletion, as it is considered courteous; this is strictly optional. This puts fewer requirements for a deletion proposal than for a Featured Article review, for which all main contributors must be notified.

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: This defeats the purpose 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 copyright violations and libelous statements are not visible to everybody. The proposal to allow access to all deleted content has been explicitly vetoed by the Wikimedia Foundation legal counsel. If you have a plausible reason for seeing a particular page, then you can request a WP:REFUND. Wikipedia is written by its readers.
• Note: Some articles that are unsuitable in their present state but have potential are often turned into drafts for later improvement. Also, several long-standing deleted hoax articles are preserved (see Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia).
• Note: Deleted articles may be archived in the Wayback Machine or archive.today.
• See also: Wikipedia:Viewing deleted articles
  • Failed proposals: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted

Delete no-consensus AfDs for biographies of living persons

• Proposal: Deletion discussions for biographies of living persons (BLPs) where there is no consensus for keeping the article should result in deletion.
• Reasons for previous rejection: In articles that meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, most BLP-related problems do not require deletion of the article. Policy on consensus requires consensus for deletion as well as for edits. (One exception: Biographies that are entirely negative in tone and unsourced are considered attack pages, which makes them eligible for speedy deletion under criterion G10.) There is also a "sticky" proposed deletion for BLP articles.
• Partly done: A policy already exists to permit (not require) deletion of biographies of relatively unknown subjects when there is no consensus for keeping the article and the subject has requested deletion.

Rename AFD

• Proposal: Change the name of WP:AFD from "Articles for deletion" to "Articles for discussion" in order to seem less confrontational and/or to match some other forums such as Redirects for discussion. This usually assumes that Wikipedia:Proposed mergers and Wikipedia:Requested moves would be merged into AFD, as the equivalent processes are at the XFD "for discussion" pages.
• Reasons for previous rejection: The purpose of AfD is in fact to decide whether or not to delete an article. Lesser issues such as mergers or renaming should be discussed on the talk page or at the separate merge and article title forums. Users should be made aware of the very real possibility that the article will in fact be deleted at the end of the discussion (the result for perhaps three-quarters of nominated articles). AFD is already very large and would become even larger.
• Note: This proposal was favorably received in 2009, but technical difficulties and inertia prevented the change; see Wikipedia talk:Articles for discussion/Proposal 1.

Deletion of user accounts

• Proposal: Allow users to have their own accounts deleted upon their request.
• Reasons for previous rejection: This is currently a technical impossibility for both Wikipedia system operators and bureaucrats. Even if it was not technically impossible, there would still be legal limitations on the implementations of this idea, particularly violations of our CC BY-SA 4.0 License and GFDL. Alternatively, users can delete their user page by adding {{db-userreq}} and can mark the talk page as inactive by adding {{retired}} to the top of the page. Users wishing to permanently leave can have their accounts renamed to a generic username under the courtesy vanishing process.
• See also: Wikipedia:Username policy § Deleting and merging accounts, mw:Extension:User Merge and Delete

Delete unreferenced articles

• Proposal: Wikipedia should automatically delete articles that do not cite at least one source, via speedy or proposed deletion. This may apply to all articles, newly created articles, or certain types of articles (BLPs, for example).
• Reasons for previous rejection: Such a practice would "bite" new users and discourage them from becoming members of the community, as even good-faith contributions are immediately deleted or proposed for deletion. Keep in mind that not all users fully understand our policies and guidelines the minute they start editing. When a brand-new article is started without references, the creator, or another user, is often gathering sources to add later. Many users—both new and experienced—create stubs as a starting point, with the intention of developing them into full-fledged, well-sourced articles. Of course you are free to tag such pages, and to help clear the backlog of unsourced and poorly sourced articles, and articles with unsourced statements.
• Partly done: A deletion process for unreferenced BLPs has been approved, see WP:BLPPROD.

Grace period for deletion

• Proposal: Pages should be immune to deletion for a certain amount of time after their creation and/or XFD/PROD/speedy nomination. This would give editors time to improve the page or convince editors of its subject's importance, and would help make Wikipedia more friendly and inviting for new users. There may be exceptions for copyright violations, attack pages, etc.
• Reasons for previous rejection: PROD and XFD already have "grace periods" built in, so editors should have ample time to find sources or otherwise improve problematic articles, if possible. As for speedy deletion, our criteria are carefully written so that articles can be speedily deleted only if no Wikipedia-compliant article is possible at this time or the content is so dangerous to the encyclopedia it must be removed immediately. A mandatory grace period would also be excessively bureaucratic, and would make it more difficult to delete copyright violations and attack pages, even if there are exceptions for such cases. You can already request undeletion in your userspace in certain limited cases. If you believe a page was deleted mistakenly or out of process, you are free to request a deletion review.

Merge speedy deletion criterion F9 into G12

• Proposal: F9 (deletion of files that are obviously copyright infringement) should be merged into G12 (deletion of text that is obviously copyright infringement). Both authorize speedy deletion of obvious copyright violations. Merging into a single criterion would decrease rule creep.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Text and files copyright violations are dealt with in different ways. It is possible to revert to a previous version to remove text copyright violations, but it is not possible to do so for files. A valid fair use rationale may be added to non-free files that would otherwise qualify for F9, which is not possible for text. When they were a single criterion, it contained numerous caveats that applied solely to files.
• See also: The 2007 discussion that resulted in the relevant split, a 2016 RfC, a 2019 discussion, a 2019 RfC, and a 2022 RfC.

Adminship

Too many questions at RfA

• Proposal: Limit the number of questions asked at RfA, limit the types of questions asked, not allow additional questions to be asked, or ban "canned" questions.
• Reason for previous rejection: RfA is a discussion and people may need to be able to ask questions they find pertinent towards making a decision. People should be able to ask the questions they want/need to ask to make an assessment based upon their individual criteria.
• Partly done: In 2015, the community set a limit of two questions per editor.
• Note: While there has been no consensus to ban "canned" questions, they have routinely been criticized as being ineffective and adding little value to the process.

Reconfirm administrators

• Proposal: Administrators should have their status reconfirmed through RFA or an RFA-like process, either periodically or on demand.
• Reasons for previous rejection:
  1. There are 851 administrators. Periodically reconfirming them would be an onerous and time-consuming process. For example, with annual reconfirmation, there would be 15+ 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.
  3. The Arbitration process can address problems that arise from accusations of administrator misconduct.
• See also: Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship § Proposed processes, User:SamuelTheGhost/Re-electing admins (a proposal), Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 70 § Time limits on adminship, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 97 § Admin tenure, and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Adminship term length. Reconfirmation is done at some very small Wikipedias, such as the Norwegian Wikipedia, which had just 63 admins in 2013.

Hierarchical structures

• Proposal: There should be some kind of "partial admin" that gets certain admin powers, but not all of them, such as only being allowed to block IP users or only being able to delete pages. Or, new admins should undergo a probationary period, which may include limited abilities or desysopping on demand.
• Reasons for previous rejection: The proposal doesn't solve any of the problems.
  • 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 administrator powers versus who gets only partial abilities.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation may require an RFA-style process to access some specific permissions anyway, such as viewing deleted revisions. Therefore, it does not make sense to have people go through one RFA to just get a subset of these tools and then later go through a second RFA if they want the full set of admin permissions.
  • Many common problems require access to multiple tools (e.g., RevDel, blocking, and page protection for BLP vandalism). Having only a small subset also results in non-optimal responses due to the Law of the instrument. This means that a protection-only semi-admin, for example, would sometimes deploy page protection when a user block would be far more appropriate, because page protection is the only tool available to them.
  • It would also increase wasteful overhead, because even admins with the "wrong" powers would have to find, explain the situation to, and request help from someone with the correct power, instead of stopping the problem instantly themselves.
  • It's confusing. People won't know who can deal with a problem, especially inexperienced users.
• Partly done: Several permissions are available to trustworthy non-admins upon request, such as rollback, page mover or protected template editing. See Wikipedia:Requests for permissions for a list and the application process.
• See also: Discussions listed at Wikipedia:Unbundling administrators' powers.

Prerequisites for adminship

• Proposal: To reduce the number of failed RFAs, all candidates should meet certain requirements, such as a minimum edit count, contributions to featured content, or participation in internal Wikipedia processes like articles for deletion.
• Reasons for previous rejection: While candidates with few edits and/or a lack of project-space contributions often fail per WP:SNOW or WP:NOTNOW, there are always exceptions. The encyclopedia should not lose out on a good candidate just because they have not achieved an arbitrary number of edits or does not frequent a particular area of the encyclopedia. Having a set minimum edit count may not lower the number of failed RfAs substantially, because an otherwise poor candidate could edit just for the sake of meeting the requirements. In addition, edit counts are not a reliable indicator of an editor's experience or competence. It is better to evaluate candidates on the quality of their contributions, not the quantity of their edits. Finally, no one agrees on what the prerequisites should be.
• See also: This is one of the issues that was discussed in depth at WP:RFA2011.
• Done: In proposal 25 of the 2024 RfA review, the community decided that candidates must be extended confirmed (30 days/500 edits) to run for adminship. Earlier, a discussion in 2017 determined that editors must be at least extended confirmed to nominate/self-nominate someone for adminship without the request being reviewed by someone else first. Both proposals were enacted to prevent futile RfAs of very new editors who didn't know better.

Grant non-admins admin functions within their user space

• Proposal: Allow non-administrators to administer their user space, with the tools technically limited to that space only. This has been proposed in a number of different ways, ranging from individual abilities (such as deletion), to full admin abilities.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Lack of need; admin workload is not high enough to justify this. There are also possible security concerns; if users could delete pages in their userspace, they would be able to move pages to their user space and delete them. This ability also gives the impression of user space ownership, and has been rejected by the developers and the Wikipedia community.

Administrators should be of the age of majority

• Proposal: Administrators should either indicate or prove at their request for adminship that they have reached the age of majority in the country in which they reside. This would provide legal protection for the editor and possibly also for the Wikimedia Foundation.
• Reasons for previous rejection: No consensus to implement this; editors are free to use age as a personal rationale for opposing adminship on RfA.
• Partly done: Certain user rights typically occupied by administrators, specifically checkuser and oversight, can only be occupied by those who sign the access to nonpublic information non-disclosure agreement, which requires those to be 18 and older. See also wmf:Policy:Access to nonpublic personal data policy
• See also: Wikipedia:Ageism, Wikipedia:Age and adminship

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

• Proposal: An editor who has edited for a certain period of time and made a certain number of edits would be automatically granted admin rights
• Reasons for previous rejection: This would create major problems for the Wikimedia Foundation's legal department. The legal department requires that admin rights only be granted to users who have undergone community review.
• See also: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 116 § RFA reform Proposal: Automatic admintools to users with 1 year of registration and 3000 mainspace edits

Suffrage requirements for RfA

• Proposal: New editors lack the knowledge and experience to appropriately evaluate an RfA candidate. This also would eliminate vandalism and trolls.
• Reason for previous rejection: There is already a prohibition on IPs from 'voting' on RfA. New and/or single purpose accounts are generally disregarded anyway. Bureaucrats are empowered and able to discern such activity on an RfA and factor it in appropriately. Vandalism and troll behavior at RfA is low and handled already by current methods.
• See also: various proposals such as from 2015 administrator election reform, another proposal from 2015, a 2016 proposal, and a 2017 RfC.
• Done: In proposal 14 of the 2024 RfA review, the community decided that editors must be extended confirmed to vote in requests for adminship.

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.
• 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 mw:Beta Feature allows editors to subscribe to specific talk page sections. This can be enabled by navigating to Special:Preferences § mw-prefsection-betafeatures.
• See also: User:Enterprisey/section-watchlist, T2738 ("Ability to watch section levels of pages")

Use reCAPTCHA

• Proposal: Use the reCAPTCHA CAPTCHA system in place of our own.
• Reasons for previous rejection: The primary reasons for rejection were given by Brooke Vibber, our former CTO, who stated that reCAPTCHA is proprietary (Wikimedia prefers to use free and open-source software) and Google will not let us run it on our 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.
• See also: Wikicaptcha: a ReCAPTCHA-like solution for Wikisource, phab:T34695

Create shortcut namespace aliases for various namespaces

• Proposal: Along the lines of the existing WP: → Wikipedia: and WT: → Wikipedia talk: namespace aliases, TT: → Template talk:, U: → User:, UT: → User talk:, P: → Portal:, CAT: → Category:, and so on.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Adding shortcuts comes with an increase in complexity that the community in general does not feel is justified by the added convenience. Contributing factors include:
  • Some namespaces, such as User:, Help:, and Talk:, are already so short that further abbreviation is not really necessary.
  • Some proposed shortcuts, such as TT: → Template talk:, conflict with existing interlanguage, interWikimedia, or interwiki prefixes, or codes from ISO 639 that may be used for future interlanguage prefixes.
  • Few pages in most of these namespaces are linked or navigated to directly (using browser search boxes or direct URL manipulation) often enough that the savings of a few characters for a few users is worth the hassle for the rest of the community. Those few pages that are can be handled with WP-namespace or pseudo-namespace shortcuts, or shortcuts with the full namespace prefix.
    • Shortcuts for Help pages are often created in the WP namespace.
• Partly done in the form of "pseudo-namespaces" such as "CAT:". Additionally, TM: → Template: was created in May 2024.
• See also: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 68 § Proposal for an alias to templatespace, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 127 § Prefix suggestion: TP: for Template:

Move the Main Page out of the main namespace

• Proposal Since the Main Page isn't an article, it should go in another namespace such as "Wikipedia:" or "Portal:" rather than stay in the main namespace.
• Reasons for previous rejection There is little if any reason for such a move and we would still need to keep a cross-namespace redirect at the current title to avoid breaking probably millions of incoming links. The Main Page in its modern form dates to 2002, before the modern namespace system fully crystallized, and was placed by default in the main namespace. It has remained there since largely due to inertia and lack of a solid reason to move it to another namespace. Being sui generis, the Main Page doesn't particularly belong in any of the other namespaces either (with the possible exception of Portals).
• See also: The discussions listed in Wikipedia:FAQ/Main Page § Why is the Main Page in the main (article) namespace?

Share pages on Facebook, Twitter/X etc.

• Proposal: Wikipedia pages should have a "Like" button or "Share" widget to enable users to tag their favourite articles and to share article content on Facebook, Twitter/X and other social media sites.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Consensus and policy both establish that Wikipedia is not a social networking service. Having to decide which sites to include and which not would potentially cause issues in the community where Wikipedia would rather remain neutral. The copy-and-paste facility in most computer operating systems already allows people to copy links and paste them into a much wider range of websites than any share or like implementation ever could. In addition, there are potential privacy issues with many "like"/"share" implementations. Most network-sites provide bookmarklets that work on every webpage.
• Partly done: The official mobile apps have a "share" button accessible through the options menu.
• See also: Village pump 1, Village pump 2, Village pump 3, Village pump 4, Help desk 1, Help desk 2, Help desk 3, Help desk 4, Help desk 5, Help desk 6, Help desk 7, Help desk 8, Help desk 9, Village pump 5, Help desk 10

See also

• Wikipedia:Bot requests/Frequently denied bots
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/FAQ, listing some perennial disputes regarding the Manual of Style
• Wikipedia:Historic debates
• Wikipedia:FAQ/Main Page § Why doesn't the cursor appear in the search box, like with Google?