Wikipedia talk:Quebec Wikipedians' notice board/Archive 1
Followup on the March Wikipedia Meetup in La Casa del PopoloPour faire suite à la rencontre du 14 mars, voici une copie wikifiée du brouillon des Montreal Propositions : Propositions to help in solving Wikipedia's most frequently reported weaknessesFirst, we want to stress the importance for the Wikipedian community of finding permanent solutions to the problems that are most often brought up by observers. You may or may not be already aware of some critical opinions that were recently published about Wikipedia. Here are the two that we are aware of:
If you know of other articles, you are invited to add them to this short list. A few weeks after the publishing of the two articles, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger submitted a personal "response" to these two articles in Kuro5hin. It can be read online at this address: In his opinion text, he suggests that two of the problems people have with Wikipedia, in fact, have a single problem at their root.
We will leave it up to people to form their opinion of Larry Sanger's conclusion. His comment is most certainly of interest; however, we cannot wholly agree with his conclusion because our observations and subsequent analysis lead us to a different conclusion. Therefore, we will move on to point out what we believe the root of the problem is, and we will also propose a solution of our own. On the accuracy of informationIn our opinion, the biggest problem we must recognize is this one: People wanting to simply use Wikipedia as an information source currently have no obvious way to be certain that the articles they find can safely be used as a reference. This means that, at present, Wikipedia is often simply discounted as a reliable source of information, which obviously it should not be (in our opinion as devoted Wikipedians). Why is this? A great many articles in Wikipedia are unfinished and in perpetual evolution. Can we say that for the majority of the articles? We do not know for sure. Some statistics on this would be useful. Please contribute statistics if you have any. Quantifying this would help us understand the phenomenon. What is for sure, however, is that when a visitor searches for and finds an article in Wikipedia, we know that it may
In other words, nothing truly prevents a simple user from landing on an article that simply doesn't live up to Wikipedia's own guidelines. This is the normal result of Wikipedia's functionning and must not come as a surprise. Why is it so? Although it would be better for the whole community if people first took the time to prepare their contribution outside Wikipedia and then, after some basic verifications (sources, grammar, spelling etc.), added it inside our beloved online encyclopedia, this is not what really happens. Nothing inside Wikipedia enforces this good practice; everyone can easily create/edit an article at any time using Wikipedia's own wiki editor, and there is in fact nothing to stop or even discourage people from drafting their text directly into the wiki editor we provide. (Admit it, you did it yourself at least once... ;-) Ideally, we all wish people would first read Wikipedia's documentation before they start modifying existing articles or creating new ones. In reality, new contributors may input quite a lot of content before they take the time to catch up on all this reading. The talk page is, as most of you would agree, not used enough by people. What really belongs in the talk page often ends up directly in the article and this produces what came to be known as "edit wars", a phenomenon which is downright immature and silly. (Yes, I include myself in the list of the immature ones. :-) The Montreal PropositionsWhat do formal printed encyclopedias have that Wikipedia doesn't? We think the answer to this question is simple: they have a review process which every article has to undergo before it gets printed. The review process exists to ensure that every article meets the quality standards set by the encyclopedia editor. What is the best solution we can devise to give visitors the assurance that the average quality of Wikipedia's articles is at least as good as that of formal encyclopedias? Our answer to this questions can be summed up in the two proposals below:
"Not yet reviewed" tagWe already have a tag mechanism as part of Wikipedia. Let us better use what is already there by automatically tagging every new article as Not yet reviewed. Example: "This article has not yet been reviewed. It may contain factual errors or spelling mistakes, and has not yet been through Wikipedia's article review process. If you have knowledge on the subject being treated by in article, you are invited to contribute." Sub-proposal: Add an option to Wikipedia's search engine to filter out these articles. This new option should be set to "on" by default in the internal search engine, but not at first, as this would mean people would find no article at all. A simple checkbox labeled include articles that have not yet been reviewed by Wikipedia could allow users to include everything back in the search. Obviously, we want all articles to appear in the watchlists, the community portal etc. What of the fact that Google will find and index these articles? Well, as User:EvanProdromou suggested it is possible to prevent Google from indexing certain pages in Wikipedia. (How do we do this?) Create a review processBy a review process, we mean a series of verifications made to an article which, assuming a successful review, will lead to the removal of the Not yet reviewed tag on this article. The reviewed articles would have a quality assurance tag. It could say something like: "This article has been reviewed by Wikipedia. It was found to be compliant with Wikipedia's 7 quality assurance criteria." The latest reviewed article could be made available by clicking on an additional tab (maybe named Reviewed Article?) right where we presently have the Article, Discussion, Edit this page, History, and Watch tabs. The Article tab would of course continue to contain the latest freely editable version of the article, but we would also have an "official" version 1.0 of the article. This is similar to the concept of having a development branch and a stable branch of a program's source code. The most important issue to solve if we go forward with a formal review process is "How do we create a review process that is 1) consensual, 2) effective, and 3) trusted by everyone?" SelectionHere is what we have in mind: Much like the "featured articles" process we currently have, we would first have a stage where people submit articles to the review process. We need to draft guidelines to help people bring up article from a simple draft to one that is worthy of being submitted to the review process. Maybe a qualified majority vote in the talk page? The second step after the initial submission would be to select an article for review. The method used by "featured articles" is not quite appropriate in this case. We would have to come up with something else this time. Essentially, all articles submitted to the review process should, in the end, all get reviewed, but passing them in order of submission might slow things down. We need to allow for multiple reviews at the same time.
The processThe actual review process could consist of 7 jobs (which can be done in parallel):
The time that will be required to do a full review will vary greatly from one article to the other. To take on the 7 jobs of the review process, we need 1) qualified volunteers 2) a set of criteria everyone agrees with. The reviewersA central question: How do we choose the reviewers? Obviously, we need to establish a few rules to avoid potential conflicts of interest. We think that we should, minimally, exclude the initial contributors to the article from the review process. That is, all users (and IP addresses) who edited an article being submitted for review cannot be accepted as content, neutrality, sources, or copyright reviewers of the said article. Sub-proposal: Create an evaluation program to produce "encyclopedist apprentices" out of Wikipedians. The community around the Wikiversity project might be interest in this. Here we are thinking of reusing and expanding the series of tutorials that we have (grammar, neutrality, copyright) to allow Wikipedians to educate themselves, and also of creating a set of complementary self-evaluations. A Wikipedia user successfully passing the Wikipedia grammar exam could receive some sort of "electronic diploma" allowing participation to the review process. This would work very well to turn normal wikipedians into neutrality, sources, copyright, spelling, language quality, and wikisyntax reviewers. Openened QuestionsEvaluations
Technicalities
Title of the notice boardThis page has been moved from "Wikipedia:Quebec wikipedians' notice board" to "Wikipedia:Quebec Wikipedians' notice board" on Apr 12, 2005 by User:Timwi (See edit history). What do they have, that you don't have?The Wizard of Oz asked this question to the scarecrow, tin man and lion. Here are his answers (in a handy table):
To what extent do Wikipedia contributors require diplomas, testimonials, or medals to be credible? Is this question itself elitist, and therefore to be discounted and ignored while we "move on" to better approaches? We want people to trust our work, and yet we know why they don't: factual errors, sloppy writng, bias (as listed way above). Some contributors don't even bother to correct their own typos! (writng should be writing, but who cares? Someone else will fix it.) Uncle Ed 13:30, 27 October 2005 (UTC) November Wikimeet?So, is it for tonight, or...? And where? DS 19:20, 7 November 2005 (UTC) Canadian city naming conventionTo try to get a good consensus, I am posting at all Canadian regional wikiprojects: Wikipedia talk:Canadian wikipedians' notice board#Canadian city naming convention. I just realized that Quebec might need its own naming convention. Thanks! -- Usgnus 21:50, 16 June 2006 (UTC) Provincial stubs and categoriesProvincial Stub Proposals - Should templates and stub categories be created for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland & Labrador? (See related SFD discussion regarding N.B., PEI, and Manitoba (plus the territories)). Agent 86 02:40, 6 July 2006 (UTC) Standard naming schemePlease see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Regional notice boards#A uniform naming scheme. Zocky | picture popups 00:52, 14 July 2006 (UTC) RequestHi ! Sorry to interfer. I'm a journalist for the daily La Presse, and I'm doing a paper about Wikipedians, especially wikipedians who are very active in the encyclopedia. I'm looking for people from Montreal, Francos or Anglos. Anybody interested in dropping me a mail ? You can write to me at niko@hysterie.qc.ca or User:Nikolai35 Proposed Move of Gatineau, Quebec
Proposed deletion of Action civique de QuébecThe discussion is at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Action civique de Québec. Skeezix1000 12:47, 6 October 2006 (UTC) DYKThe DYK section featured on the main page is always looking for interesting new and recently expanded stubs from different parts of the world. Please make a suggestion.--Peta 02:09, 10 October 2006 (UTC) "Sectors" isn't really the best word to use in English for what it's being used to mean on the Bécancour article — in English it actually has a military connotation, more like a post-war occupation zone (e.g. Allied Occupation Zones in Germany) than part of a town or city. It's been suggested that the word be changed to something more appropriate — but would they be better characterized as boroughs (arrondissements) or just plain old neighbourhoods with no particular political status of their own? Bearcat 03:03, 24 October 2006 (UTC) Notice Board updatesHi, I've been bold and done some fairly major updates to the QWNB. Please let me know what you think, and feel free to discuss here any issues that may arise from the changes I've made. --dragfyre 03:27, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Merge RequestCurrent this namespace is operating under pretenses of a notice board when in reality its more like a WikiProject. Many other provinces and cities have started WikiProjects and Quebec should do the same. The organization of this Notice Board is incredible, but WikiProjects have a fairly comprehensive standard and template set out specifically to organize group collaboration over a single or many subjects. The WikiProject Council is attempting to phase out the use of Notice Boards in a substancial way in place of the newer methods of using WikiProjects. I have laid out the template structure for your WikiProject and all that would be needed is moving content over in an organized fashion. Good luck. Mkdwtalk 05:09, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
Census divisionsI'd like to ask if someone more knowledgeable about Quebec demographics can clarify a question for me. What type of geographic divisions in Quebec are used for Statistics Canada purposes as the actual legal census divisions? Is it the administrative regions (Nord-du-Québec, Abitibi-Témiscamingue, etc.) or is it the Regional County Municipalities? As things currently stand, Wikipedia is a bit ambiguous about this: in some places we say it's one, and in other places we say it's the other. Bearcat 23:33, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Propsed new Nav BoxThe main problem with WP's coverage of New France is that there is little continuity between the different locales. Americans editors have made the Louisiana page very good, but much of it duplicates the main page. Meanwhile the main page concentrates way too much on Canada, and neglects Acadia, Louisiana, etc. There is a separate page for the colony of Canada but it is mostly unused. To help readers, and editors get a better understanding of how New France was organized. I am proposing creating this new Navbox template. The first section I am committed to and eventually I want to see it put on pages regardless. The rest is open to debate and change.
What do you think? Is it too broad, too narrow? Would a list of topics be better? Thanks for the imput. Kevlar67 21:37, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
QuestionI'd genuinely like to start an honest discussion here about something that I've noticed on Wikipedia. As many of you know, the words Montreal and Quebec (when referring to the cities or the province, although not necessarily in the names of institutions) are not generally spelled with accents in English. However, there's a constant tug of war in some articles between people who insist on adding the accents and those who insist on taking them back out afterward. From my perspective as a Franco-Ontarian, I'm obviously more attuned to matters Québécois than the average resident of Toronto, but at the same time there are obviously some nuances I may not fully grasp — thus, I ask the following: Is adding the é's to Montreal and Quebec in English writing seen as a political act, or is there just some kind of misconception that Wikipedia has an "always use the original language's spelling" rule? (For the record, it doesn't; the rule on here is quite explicitly "spelling most commonly seen in English usage", which is how we can have "Montreal" without an accent coexist with Trois-Rivières with one.) Bearcat 20:52, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
Montreal underground city hotelsMontreal underground city hotels has been WP:PRODed. 132.205.44.5 21:22, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
There is a request to rename Parliament Hill because a place called Parliament Hill, London is named after a girls school Parliament Hill School, and the nominator says the London hill is quite famous. 132.205.99.122 (talk) 19:54, 21 November 2007 (UTC) Category:Montreal commuter railCategory:Montreal commuter rail has been nominated for deletion. 132.205.99.122 22:51, 3 December 2007 (UTC) Notability questionCan somebody clarify for me whether Miranie Morissette is sufficiently notable within Quebec's music scene to merit an article? I haven't been able to find any verification for the article's claim that her debut album "climbed high in the charts". Did it, or is this just a vague publicity statement of the type that most emerging musicians engage in by describing their current single as a "hit" regardless of its actual performance on the charts? Bearcat (talk) 22:56, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Category:Island of Montreal municipalitiesCategory:Island of Montreal municipalities has been nominated for deletion. 70.51.10.91 (talk) 10:54, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Debra Arbec at AfDDebra Arbec has been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Debra Arbec. 132.205.44.5 (talk) 22:47, 8 January 2008 (UTC) Places in Montreal is at AfDPlaces in Montreal has been nominated for deletion. 70.55.85.225 (talk) 05:12, 16 April 2008 (UTC) An Invitation from the Philippine Wikipedia CommunityHello folks, The Philippine Wikipedia Community will be holding its 1st Meet-up in Cebu City (the fourth one in the Philippines) on June 23-24, 2008. This coincides with the first Philippine Open Source Summit, also to be held in Cebu. The Philippine Wikipedia Community is an Implementing Partner of the Open Source Summit. We invite you to join us in this event. If you are in the IT or IT-enabled services industry, this would be a great opportunity to meet people from the 4th best outsourcing city in the world. This is also a good excuse to visit our beautiful beaches :) If you're interested in joining the Wikipedia meet-up, please join our discussion. You can register for the Open Source Summit here. If you would like some assistance with local accomodations, you may email User:Bentong Isles. The Philippine Wikipedia Community bagelSt. Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel should have articles, particularly since the first bagels in space are from Fairmount, and that the National Post and Montreal Gazette have both run series of articles on the best bagels in Canada, and that NYC food critic has ranked NY bagels and Mtl bagels, using examples from these two bakeries. 70.51.11.207 (talk) 08:49, 2 June 2008 (UTC) Quebec's National HolidayThere is currently a discussion at Talk:Fête nationale du Québec (Saint Jean Baptiste Day) as to a probable change of name for the article. Please chime in.--Ramdrake (talk) 12:24, 3 July 2008 (UTC) Category:Food in MontrealCategory:Food in Montreal has been nominated for renaming. 70.55.85.116 (talk) 05:46, 12 July 2008 (UTC) Category:Quebec communities with important anglophone populationsCategory:Quebec communities with important anglophone populations has been sent to WP:CFD 70.55.84.212 (talk) 05:21, 21 July 2008 (UTC) La Belle at AfDLa Belle Province (restaurant) has been nominated for deletion. 70.51.11.210 (talk) 09:31, 19 August 2008 (UTC) Count of Mantane at AfDCount of Mantane has been nominated for deletion. I think it's autopromotion. JF Lepage (talk) 04:35, 21 August 2008 (UTC) Date format poll confirmationThere is ongoing discussion on the talk page for the Manual of Style (including a series of polls) aimed at achieving consensus on presenting dates in American (June 24, 2008) or International (24 June 2008) format on an article by article basis. The poll gives full instructions, but briefly the choices are:
If you wish to participate or review the progress of discussion, you may follow this link. --Pete (talk) 08:06, 20 September 2008 (UTC) La PresseI've initiated a move request to move La Presse (Canada) to La Presse, since it's the most prominent newspaper of that name. 70.51.10.188 (talk) 09:24, 15 October 2008 (UTC) VimontI've initiated a move request to move Vimont, Quebec to Vimont and Vimont to Vimont, France, since the one in Canada is more prominent. 70.51.10.188 (talk) 09:24, 15 October 2008 (UTC) Two MountainsI've requested a pagemove. Two Mountains → Two Mountains (electoral district), since English Montrealers refer to the lake, or the town, but not a long ago federal riding, by this name. 70.55.200.131 (talk) 11:52, 16 October 2008 (UTC) QuébécoisQuébécois has been proposed to be renamed Québécois (word) 76.66.195.159 (talk) 03:15, 20 December 2008 (UTC) Is the "Quebecois nation" a notable topic?Please comment at RfC posted at Quebecois article. --soulscanner (talk) 07:19, 31 December 2008 (UTC) Mount RoyalThe Mount Royal article was moved around via cut-and-paste moving, and then it was corrrected via histmerging, so now we've ended up with the original Mount Royal article situated at Mount Royal, Montreal, and the Mount Royal (disambiguation) article sitting at Mount Royal. 76.66.198.171 (talk) 20:45, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
Mount Royal was moved again, this time to Mount Royal Montreal, and then restored, per previous consensus on naming. 76.66.196.229 (talk) 08:02, 16 February 2009 (UTC) LNI -> Ligue nationale d'improvisationLNI has been nominated to be renamed Ligue nationale d'improvisation. 76.66.193.90 (talk) 07:05, 8 March 2009 (UTC) List of Quebec national parks → List of parks in QuebecList of Quebec national parks → List of parks in Quebec has been listed at WP:RM 76.66.193.90 (talk) 04:47, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
76.66.193.69 (talk) 01:23, 23 March 2009 (UTC) Joseph-Armand BombardierJoseph-Armand Bombardier was requested to be speedily deleted, then proposed for deletion. I have removed the PROD request. 76.66.193.69 (talk) 04:43, 3 April 2009 (UTC) Category:Quebecois cuisineCategory:Quebecois cuisine has been proposed to be renamed Category:Quebec cuisine 70.29.210.174 (talk) 04:38, 11 June 2009 (UTC) WikiProject Francophonie?Does anyone think there should be a WP:WikiProject Francophonie? It would be like WP:WikiProject Commonwealth that handles the British Commonwealth. See Talk:Organisation_internationale_de_la_Francophonie_(OlF)#WikiProject_Francophonie? for the discussion. 76.66.197.30 (talk) 07:54, 30 September 2009 (UTC) Concordia UniversitySomeone stealthily moved Concordia University again, without listing it at WP:RM, even though it has had a few WP:RM discussions in the past. It was previously noted that the one in Montreal is the most prominent, in past discussions. 70.29.210.242 (talk) 03:57, 20 February 2010 (UTC) highway naming conformityFYI, at WT:CANADA, there is currently a proposal to make all Canadian provincial highways named exactly the same way, following the way the US state highways are named. 76.66.194.32 (talk) 05:02, 26 March 2010 (UTC) CategoriesA bunch of Canadian categories came up at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy for renaming Especially: 70.29.208.247 (talk) 21:19, 27 April 2010 (UTC) QuebeckerSomeone went around and changed all the "Quebecer" articles to "Quebecker", violating WP:ENGVAR and not using Quebec English in the wording. 70.29.208.247 (talk) 21:36, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
FYI, {{Quebec English}} has been nominated for deletion. IT is an WP:ENGVAR template. 70.29.208.247 (talk) 04:28, 29 April 2010 (UTC) SovereigntistFYI, Sovereigntist has been proposed to be renamed, see Talk:Sovereigntist 76.66.195.196 (talk) 03:47, 3 July 2010 (UTC) FYI, Two Solitudes (Canadian society) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) has been nominated for deletion. 76.66.200.95 (talk) 05:46, 9 October 2010 (UTC) SN 1054Help is needed in cleaning up SN 1054. It was recently greatly expanded (by 80kB!) from the French version of the article. Checking the grammar and wording against the original to fix errors in translation would be good. As well as selecting English terms where French terms were used and untranslated as they were not originally French but some transcription into French would also be useful, as transcription systems in French and English are different for some languages. 65.93.12.101 (talk) 07:23, 30 March 2011 (UTC) Highest importance QC-related article failed GAQuebec has recently been nominated as a Good Article (Talk:Quebec) in the Places Subsection. Its candidature needs review : please do it yourself here if you did not contribute in the writing. -- Offiikart (Talk) 17:04, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Takes MontrealWikipedia:Wikipedia Takes Montreal is about, Sunday 28 August 2011. 65.93.15.213 (talk) 05:38, 10 July 2011 (UTC) proposed move: Official Language Act (Quebec) → Bill 22See Talk:Official Language_Act (Quebec)#Requested move (rationale and discussion). -- P.T. Aufrette (talk) 07:29, 27 January 2012 (UTC) new Template:QuebecMNAbio for biographies of current and past MNAsThe National Assembly website has biography pages for all current and former MNAs. I have created Template:QuebecMNAbio by analogy with Template:OntarioMPPbio and Template:CanParlbio, for standardized external links to these biography pages. -- P.T. Aufrette (talk) 07:23, 2 February 2012 (UTC) complete(?) online archives of Montreal Gazette, Le Devoir, and possibly othersFairly complete archives of the Montreal Gazette are available (all the way to the 1870s) at Google.com. This seems to be something new, these pages only started turning up in Google searches recently. For instance:
After clicking on the above link as an example, clicking on the "Browse this newspaper" link, and then switching between Day, Week, Month, Year, Decade in the "Show" selector lets you see any day's issue. "Browse all newspapers" gives many more, for instance Le Devoir is here. -- P.T. Aufrette (talk) 13:57, 22 February 2012 (UTC) Montreal Flood of 2012Is there a Montreal Flood of 2012 article? We have one for Montreal Flood of 1987, and the Tuesday 29 May 2012 rain event was an extreme rain event and flash flood, being only the second time the Metro's been shut down due to rain, major innundations, and many floodings. 70.24.251.208 (talk) 08:37, 2 June 2012 (UTC)
Concordia UniversityConcordia University was renamed without discussion again, reverted, and now a discussion is open at Talk:Concordia University -- 76.65.128.252 (talk) 12:48, 5 September 2012 (UTC) Quebec premiersFYI, there is a discussion on the formatting of Que premier bio articles at WT:CANADA -- 76.65.131.248 (talk) 04:01, 26 September 2012 (UTC) Montreal municipal partiesNOTE, there's a query at WT:CANADA about Montreal political parties. -- 70.24.247.127 (talk) 06:30, 17 December 2012 (UTC) Quebec CityStadacona and Habitation de Québec could really use improvement. -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 06:05, 25 March 2013 (UTC) Battle of Quebec (1775)Today's featured article, Battle of Quebec (1775) is having ENGVAR issues, particularly, it's using American English, not British or Canadian. See talk:Battle of Quebec (1775) -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 02:29, 4 July 2013 (UTC) |