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. If you make a proposal along these lines, it is likely to be swiftly closed for the exact same reason. See Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals) for discussion on several of these.

Content

Content warnings

• Proposal: images of sexual nature should be labeled as such, hidden from users, or even deleted entirely.
• Reason for previous rejection: Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of minors. In an encyclopedia, it is to be expected that articles on sexual subjects are illustrated as such. Suggestions of what is and is not acceptable for pictures vary wildly between cultures.
• See also: Wikipedia:No disclaimer templates

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).
• Reason for previous rejection: You are probably not a lawyer, and neither is most of the community. 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.

Advertising

• Proposal: To cover server costs, or for some other public good such as charity, Wikipedia should add advertisements on its pages. The ads could be highly-targeted, unobtrusive textual ads similar to those used by Google.
• Reason for previous rejection: Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral, which advertising by definition is not. Advertising would 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 would discourage contributors, the lifeblood of the Wikipedia, many of whom object strongly to advertising. Also, there is no current lack of funding for server costs.
• See also: 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 stick with it.
• Reason 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

Editing

Prohibit anonymous users from editing

• Proposal: everybody should register an account before editing; IP addresses are insufficient.
• Reason for previous rejection: a significant part (~30%) of our good edits come from IP addresses[1]; positive experiences with initial IP edits lead users to create accounts who otherwise would not do so; recent changes disabling IPs from creating new or editing semiprotected articles are sufficient.
• note that some of the more exposed articles have long-term or de-facto permanent semi-protection, which amounts to a selective prohibition of anonymous editing in areas of Wikipedia where it is obvious that the damage done significantly outweighs the benefits.
• 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.)
• Reason for previous rejection: it's already an option in the user preferences, and forcing users to enter edit summaries may annoy them enough to not save their (possibly constructive) edits.
• See also: Help:Preferences#Editing

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.
• Reason for previous rejection: such a button could all too easily 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 enwiki.

Deletion

Numerical rules for WP:AFD

• Proposal: something like "people can only nominate three articles per day", "articles cannot be nominated more than once per year", etc.
• Reason for previous rejection: strict numerical limits fall under m: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: everybody who has contributed to an article (or, alternately, the first creator) must be warned on their talk page of a deletion debate of that article.
• Reason for previous rejection: excessive bureacracy; 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 little contributions; "everybody" can number several hundred people.
• See also:

Deleted pages should be visible

• Proposal: make deleted pages visible to everybody, not just admins.
• Reason 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 require a new mechanism to ensure that copyvios and libelous statements are not visible to everybody.
• See also: Wikipedia:Pure wiki deletion system

Administrative

Demote inactive admins

• Proposal: inactive admins should have their admin status revoked automatically after a given time period. The reasoning behind this is generally that the accounts might be compromised.
• Reason for previous rejection: In general, this policy has been opposed both by administrators who themselves tend to go through periods of inactivity who 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.
• See also: Wikipedia:Inactive administrators

Reconfirm administrators

• Proposal: Once promoted, Administrators should periodically have to have their status reconfirmed through RFA or an RFA-like process.
• Reason for previous rejection: there are already over 1,000 administrators. Reconfirming them would be an onerous and time consuming process. Furthermore, good administrators aren't necessarily popular ones.
• See also: Wikipedia:Adminship renewal

Hierarchical structures

• Proposal: there should be some kind of "partial admin" that gets certain admin powers but not all of them.
• Reason for previous rejection: it's confusing; if we can't trust people to use their tools sensibly, they don't become admins period; it would at least double the already considerable frictional effort expended at WP:RFA.
• See also: Wikipedia:Limited administrators