Wikiquote talk:Quote of the day/Archive 1

New System for scheduling Quotes of the Day

Yesterday Maveric149 (of Wikipedia fame) provided the means for developing far more advanced strategies of selecting Quotes of the day, and providing input upon them, than simply having me make the selections based on my own personal judgments, as has usually been the case for over a year now.

I am developing some ideas for a more extensive and open selection process with more input from more people in more ways, based on the new options available, but it might be a few days yet, before I complete them, and have the best of these ideas presented. In the interim, I strongly believe that the Quote of the Day selection for the Wikiquote project should not now, or ever, be left open to whoever comes along and happens to fill in the slot for a date first. I intend to continue making the final selections myself for at least the next week or so, and then perhaps a more open process of selection might be ready to be used.

I think there should be voting done for proposals for general quotations made by general users on the Wikiquote:Quote of the day/Quote proposals page as a means of ranking their popularity and acceptability, and also the option of posting proposals of particular quotes on the talk pages of particular days. After an initial setting up period, over the next few weeks, I believe that most of the scheduled choices eventually should be made at least a month or two in advance, but with the options always existing for admins to make changes relating to current events, and an admin or eventually perhaps a council of admins always responsible for any last minute changes, and final selections.

It will probably be a few days before I am ready to post some preliminary quote proposals to fill the upcoming month, and beyond this coming month, I intend to also initially post suggestions and ideas for specific days only on their talk pages, and not in the slots themselves, allowing at least a week for commentary to be made beforehand and alternatives to be suggested and perhaps sometimes voted upon, if there is no clear consensus on suggestions that can be reached.

One voting or ranking system that has occured to me is this:

4 : Excellent, should definitely be used.

3 : Very Good, strong desire to see it used

2 : Good, some desire to see it used.

1 : Acceptable, but no particular desire to see it used

0 : Not acceptable; not worth using.

These are just some preliminary ideas. ~ Kalki 22:45, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Is there any progress on that? MosheZadka 04:18, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

May 25th - Towel day

Hey all, I know this isn't the right place but I couldn't find the right one. May 25th is towel day, so I think the quote of that day should be by Douglas Adams, as a tribute. Probably from the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.

some progress...

A note by MosheZadka has served as a prompt for me to get going on this and a few other things that have been floating around near the top of my agenda lists (but never with such urgency as to actually get much done) for some time now. I drifted along for quite a while, considering various ideas, and though I initially had thought of using the individual talk pages for each date as a "voting" forum for various ideas, realised this could get a bit tedious and isolate a great deal of discussion and ideas into narrow windows that would quickly become obsolete, and might create a great deal of repetition of ideas and discussion. I soon decided that 12 pages for all the months in the Gregorian calendar with Section headings for each day of the month would be a better idea, where proposals tied to various days or periods could be reconsidered each year, and past proposals that have been used on the various dates could perhaps be noted as well.

As guidelines for the placing of quotations for any day of the month I would suggest that proposals ideally would be some highly notable statement and...

1. related to the anniversary of some famous person's birth, or occasionally their historical death date, or other date of celebration relating to them, if their birth dates were unknown, OR...
2. related to the anniversary celebrations of some historical event, or well known national, international, or cultural holidays; these could include reference to such natural "marking points" of the year as the solstices and equinoxes, as well as various cultural holidays that are often associated with them. These could also be quotes referring to a particular month or season, usually on the first day of such. OR...
3. related to prominent current events, especially where some famous person dies, or says something notable related to some prominent issue. These of course are the least anticipatable of the proposals, and they should probably be pretty notable to merit placement over the more regular historical ideas that may have been suggested.

Names of notable people whose birthdays are on a particular day, could also be added to specific dates, but of course final voting should be upon specific quotations to use, not specific people to quote without regard as to some specific statement. Also a limit of 4 quotes of any individual per user should be maintained, and their should be some statable rationale for adding them to any particular day. We certainly should not permit a flood of dozens of proposals quoting a single person upon any incidental days to become anyone's habit.

A voting or ranking system I initially considered which I still think appropriate would be one where registered users could rank proposals they wish to comment on as either:

4 : Excellent - should definitely be used. (Perhaps, at most, only one quote per day should be ranked thus by any user, as to avoid confusions)

3 : Very Good - strong desire to see it used

2 : Good - some desire to see it used.

1 : Acceptable - but with no particular desire to see it used

0 : Not acceptable - not appropriate for use as a quote of the day.

As is the case with other votes in the Wikimedia projects, votes by anonymous IPs should not be counted, and the use of "sock puppets" for voting should be rejected as absolutely unethical.

If there are definite preferences that clearly emerge, these can be placed in the "Quote of the day" slots 3-4 days ahead of time, but I continue to believe allowances should always be made for sudden changes for the sake of current events, though ideally any such changes that occur should be made at least a few hours before the new day begins at 00:00 UTC, to allow for comment.

I now intend to post such a proposal page for the month of June, and see how things progress. ~ Kalki 18:22, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

though ideally any such changes that occur should be made at least a few hours before the new day begins at 00:00 UTC, to allow for comment.

You have posted suggestions, one of which you picked, at 23:59 (one minute) before the next day. Can we maybe agree that suggestions must be posted at least one hour before choosing, so the community can comment on a vote's appropriateness? Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 04:56, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

QOTD RSS

Until there is something offcial, I created an RSS feed for the QOTDs. Before its linked on the main page, I want to make sure that its something that the community would find useful. You can access it here: http://theworldisgrey.com/wikiquote/qotd.xml.

Just a little bit about how its updated. It scrapes the QOTD page once per hour until its been updated for that day. Then it stores the quote do the database server and generates a new RSS. I could have it also purge the page cache to make sure it updates on time, but I'm not sure if its good to have an automated process hitting that URL.

I would like some feedback on this, is it useful? Should I make some changes? --Datasage 01:30, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

New "Tennyson Quote of the Day" section

What's with the Tennyson quotes? He's certainly quotable, but after three in a row, it's beginning to look like "Quote of the Day" should be renamed. ☺ — Jeff Q 11:28, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I had originally intended to put merely a couple of Tennyson's "ring out" and "ring in" stanzas as "bookend" quotes at the close and the start of the two years, but the tsunami tragedy prompted an alteration, and I closed out 2004 with a couple of Tennyson's verses that seemed more directly evocative of current events. Even two in a row by someone has been only a rare occurrence, and Thomas Jefferson is the only other person that has been used three times in a row, around July 4th of last year. Tennyson probably should not show up again for at least a few months now. ~ Kalki 17:46, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Quote of the Day email list inexistent?

I can't seem to subscribe to the Quote of the Day email list, as the link on the front page leads to the subscription page for the Wikipedia Article of the Day list instead. The list also is not shown in the list of Wikimedia mailing lists. Has the Quote list not yet been implemented? --64.81.67.109 01:52, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The quote of the day is delivered as part of the "Article of the Day" email; currently there are no plans to provide it alone as a separate service. ~ Kalki 02:23, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

RS/RDF-Feed or similar of the Quote of the day?

Is there any possibility to get an RSS feed or the QOTD or any other possibility to include the quote of the day into a website automatically without going through the email?

I am not acquainted with how this would be set up. It could probably be provided in the future, but I expect it would probably take one of the developers to arrange things for it. I don't know if any of them would be interested in working on it anytime soon. I know they have probably been a bit busy lately, working on some of the problems that still exist with the wiki software. ~ Kalki 16:50, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

QotD vote

Why not add a link to vote page on QoTD sections? --Aphaia 2 July 2005 10:51 (UTC)

Use Nabble to Allow Rating and Commenting on Quotes

I am new to WikiQuote so forgive me if what I say does not make any sense. WikiQuote is interesting but I can see why there might be problems when users disagree or even dispute. May I suggest a better way? Check out this forum site called Nabble. WikiQuote users can create a forum there. Each user can post his Quote-of-Day and his comment as a new thread. Other users can reply to this thread with their comments (it could be simple as "I love it" or with more elaborate reasoning). What's more, Nabble allows users to rate a post. So when somebody post a new thread of "Quote-of-Day", others can rate it, and of course, to people who strongly believe their ratings can also comment and explain their reasoning, to hopefully influence others. And of course, if I am the originator of this quote, I will defend myself in counter argument. This is a debate system that can hopefully produce better quotes of the day. Nabble prides itself as a truly public democratic type of forum without any censorship. I think it realy dovetails with the type of discussion that's needed here. At the end of the day, the Quote that received the highest rating becomes the Quote of the day. Nabble is pretty easy to use. I just created a Quote of The Day forum. And I just posted a quote. Feel free to jump in and rate me and my quote. --GeeVa 02:42, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm not clear on how this is supposed to be an easier system. Anybody, including anonymous users, can participate in WQ's QotD system, and they don't have to go to an external site to do so. So far for this month's quotes, exactly 7 users have taken the trouble to edit the QotD page. We hardly have so much discussion that it requires the complexity of threads. As far as I know, we've had no complaints about censorship in QotD, either. And if participation on QotD gets more involved and requires more infrastructure, it makes more sense to provide it on Wikiquote itself. It's hard for me to see how the suggestion to go to Nabble is anything more than a gratuitous website promotion, however well-intended. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:58, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I find no benefits to vote on another site, not here. Voting on Wikequote make a sense and currently I have no problem with the current voting system, though it could be improved. In my opinion we need no outside website, nor a complex system like you offered. --Aphaia 06:46, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Too much emphasis on dated quotes?

The new system seems useful, but is there not now too much emphasis on selecting quotes primarily because of some relationship to the date? I'm concerned that there are a world of good quotes, for which no one has researched any date relationship, that now have little chance of ever being used. Just a thought. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:18, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

I think we use a loose enough definition of "relationship to date" that any quote manages to find some relationship. Any quote about Love, anonymous or not, would probably be fair game on Valentine's Day. An (unselected) vote of mine was for Vizzini's "never get into a landwar in Asia" line to commemorate the Nazi invasion of Russia and a still-to-be-selected (hopefully) quote for 6 August (Hiroshima bomb) is a quote from "Dr. Strangelove". With such a loose relation, I doubt there is a quote which I could not find appropriate for some date. However, since nobody ever nominated a quote which has no date relevance (but is pithy, interesting and/or appropriate), I'm not sure how the "voting public" (which seems to consist of about 4-5 people) will react to it. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 13:34, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Au contraire, mon frère! I did post a non-dated quote after writing the above comment — the 5 August Gandhi quote you just voted on. ☺ Of course one can find a date for any specific quote, but the problem is really whether one can find excellent quotes for any specific date. We haven't created a year-long list to place potential QotDs in appropriate places; we're riding a wave of what-can-we-find-for-this-date efforts that necessarily preempt the overall pithiness of quotes for their date association. It seems absurd to cram thousands of Love quotes into a 14 February vote, just because it's an obvious date. With the current effort of the 4-5 contributors to this page to find quotes primarily based on dates, nobody is working the approach to include quotes first by pithiness, then finding appropriate year-round dates for them. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:36, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Of course, I said the above right before noticing your addition. I believe the problem you are working on can be fixed by completing the vote pages for year round — this way, when people stumble upon a nice quote, they can find a date, and add it to the vote there — even if it is a while away. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 16:16, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

D'accord. Cette une bonne idée! (Oops. "Good idea." I got a bit carried away with a français flashback.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

That's precisely how I got into the QOTD project: I had a quote I wanted to use, and a date (August 30), and then set out to create the infrastructure necessary to record it. 121a0012 03:51, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

It's worth considering that there will be dates on which the strongest or most obvious quotations will be exhausted relatively early (perhaps this year or next). By the same token, there are some sources which have only one worthy quotation, and others which are quotable far beyond their ordinary quota—so there will be plenty of material to spread around. (I have over 100 quotations on the Stephen Jay Gould page, with more to come, about a quarter of which are or could be boiled down to QOTD material; some will undoubtedly be used on non-Gould-specific dates.) 121a0012 03:51, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Cleaning the slate?

This is an entirely theoretical question at the moment, seeing as it will not matter for another ten months, but here goes anyway:

Should we clean the slate (i.e., remove or in some other way set aside) of old votes for quotations which are not selected? It seems to me that many if not most votes are made in consideration of a wider context: the other candidates, quotes used on other days, specific "round" anniversaries, and so on. If this is the case, then the old votes ought not to count when we get around to the same date in succeding years. (OTOH, for history's sake I do think it is important to preserve the votes and commentary which led to a quotation which was in fact used.)

This would also ensure that formerly active participant who are no longer with us do not leave behind a "dead hand" of votes which would tend to overbalance current voters. 121a0012 04:01, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Che Guevara quote

Moved from Talk:Main Page ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 06:47, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Wow - my first visit to Wikiquote and I'm smacked right in the face by a quote from Che Guevara. Help! - I'm surrounded by socialism! -- 129.33.49.251, 09:42, 14 Jun 2005

Don't worry — there's plenty of capitalism and most every other -ism represented in Wikiquote. Why don't you try using the Random Page link to explore just how varied Wikiquote is? And welcome! — Jeff Q (talk) 20:10, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

cross-wiki QOTD?

Is there any way to add the Quote of the Day template into a user page on another Wikimedia project, such as Wikipedia? (Anything to save the extra click per day to view it :P ) 81.79.39.92 22:01, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Archives

My apologies if this has already been discussed, but is there a reason that there are several hundred Quote of the Day archive pages with very little text on them? Could these safely be merged into monthly archives? I would be bold and just do it, but I didn't want to go to that trouble only to find that there was a reason for having them the way they are. -- Essjay · Talk 00:39, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

You must be referring to the individual date pages for each of the Quotes of the day. They are part of the system set up by Maveric149 last year as a way to provide for greater automation in the QotD posting process, and to permit QotD preparation for many days in advance. I have thus far rarely used them in that way, but recognized the potential convenience of having the option.
These date pages, and the month pages of a specific year which use them might be considered "residue" once the dates have passed, as they are no longer necessary. Only a few of them have had any comments posted to them — these few comments could be posted to the discussion pages for the archive of each year, and then the specific month sheets and date sheets of each year deleted, but I hadn't given much thought to the matter. If no one has any objections I might start deleting them within the next month or so. ~ Kalki 01:27, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

That makes good sense; I notice you are very busy here (I've been watching the recent changes feed in CDVF and the Counter Vandalism Unit's IRC channel and I see your name come across quite frequently). Perhaps if my RfA is successful I can take over this task for you, and give you the chance to take a well deserved breath! -- Essjay · Talk 03:07, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I've finally killed them all off; the only one left is todays (which I accidentally killed, but JeffQ saved). From here out, I'll subst: them all into the archive at the end of each month, then kill them a month at a time. Essjay ^{Talk • Contact} 09:31, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

A bit late, but I've cleared out the last three from March and cleared all of April; I'll try to be better about doing it on time next month (I've been busy over on WP and working with the toolserver lately). Essjay (Talk • Connect) 12:31, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Archive Links

Can someone fix the archive link, so that it links to Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/March_2006 instead of Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/February_2006?

This should be fixed now, and should remain fixed, through a slight formatting change I made. ~ Kalki 18:45, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I know you made the formatting change, and now you do not have to update the archive link monthly, but I think (now this is a person opinion) that the Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/June_2006 page is say, a much nicer overview of the quotes for June than say the Quote_of_the_Day_archive#June_2006

Now, I do not know how the Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/June_2006 page was created, because Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/March_2006 exists, so does June, but Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/February_2006 and Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/April_2006 seem to either not exist or they are blank. Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/May_2006 is there however

I know it is alot of work to re-do the old archieves, but if the way they are created changes, they can stay more user friendly from the begining

to me, Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/Complete_list just is not that nice either, especially because it does not give a date, and while the are in reverse, it just doesnt seem as easy to say, "hey, what was the quote for this day of this year?" liquidice5 20:10, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Many of the older "utility pages" get deleted as they have become obsolete. JeffQ is currently doing a great deal of work on updates that will make the proposal and record pages for dates and months much more accessible to users, as well as increasing the applicability of the customized options for the display of dates. The current complete list is formatted so as to make browsing over recent additions easy. I could eventually make an additional "Complete list" that provides a forward chronological sequence with dates, and perhaps "hidden" indications of who proposed them, and what the rankings of them were. There are several other things that have greater priority for me right now, but I could perhaps get this done within the next couple of weeks. ~ Kalki 12:02, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Now that I've finished the main job of month-date articles, I'm looking at some of these auxiliary issues. I didn't notice this discussion until after I'd started a spreadsheet that includes the date, quote/quotee, notes, and proposer/selector. (I think I've figured out how to get Excel to take in the raw data and output the wiki-formatted version for the month-date articles.) I did this to fill in the gaps in the "former quotes of the day" section of the date articles, but this would also be quite useful for a dated, annotated complete list. I like the idea of adding a cell for the vote and decision discussions, which we had agreed to leave out of the date articles, for possible inclusion on each article's talk page (the appropriate place to hold discussion of article content).

How far along on a dated complete list are you, Kalki? I've suddenly resolved a huge real-world problem and am looking forward to more time to do more tedious but useful maintenance work. (I think I can also revive the speedy-deletion revision effort, assuming I can get some other folks interested, too.) If you aren't actively pursuing this, perhaps I can work on it for a bit and see how far I can get before you can address it. Let me know. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:40, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I am glad to hear you have some problems solved. I was actually thinking of working on this list a couple hours ago when I updated the QOTD pages, but have not yet actually even started on it. I had intended a rather simple list after finishing a few other things. I usually have quite a few files of work on various things open at once, but for the last few days most of my (as yet un-posted) Wikiquote related work has been on editing, correcting and expanding the Einstein page, which I began working on a few days ago, expecting to do a few things in a few hours. I have intermittently spent much of several days on it, and there is much more I intend to eventually do, but I might post much of what I've done so far sometime within the next day. I've done a few "previews" of my work, but am still tweaking and arranging many things. I just counted my open windows, and I've kept things down to a relatively meager 20 windows lately (three of them on Einstein) but usually have at least 7, and often 30 or more open at once just in my primary word processor. ~ Kalki 00:43, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I usually go in at the end of each month and delete out all the previous month's QOTD pages, as they're no longer used. Since there is a new system, I wanted to ask: Should I go ahead and nuke all of these as I normally would, or will that affect what Jeff is doing? Essjay (Talk • Connect) 09:58, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, that's not where I'm getting my data from, but just to be sure, I've just copied all the June quotes to my spreadsheet. Nuke away. The new proposal/old-quote system has no direct connection to collecting a complete dated list, as far as I can see right now. We may get some insights from creating the new collection, but that's for later consideration. I don't want to interfere with ongoing processes that are working. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:28, 4 July 2006 (UTC)