Wikipedia:Perennial proposals

This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:PEREN WP:FREQUENT

This is a list of things that are 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, but that it has been discussed before and never met consensus. Consensus can change, and some proposals which remained on this page for a long time have finally been proposed in a way which reached consensus, but you should address rebuttals raised in the past if you make a proposal along these lines. If you would like to help bring one of these proposals closer to resolution, please raise it as a community issue that needs facilitation.

• 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 pages contain a link to the Wikipedia:General disclaimer page, where you can access the content, legal, medical and risk disclaimers. See the "Disclaimers" link at the bottom of this page. 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. In addition, disclaimer templates are candidates for speedy deletion.

• 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: Again, 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 wildly between cultures.
• See also: Wikipedia:Options to not see an image for instructions on how to suppress images. m:2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content proposes user-configurable options.

• 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: You are probably not a lawyer, and neither are most members of the community. The 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. That said, certain laws are routinely enforced by common editors on Wikipedia, such as removal of copyrighted material.
• See also: Wikipedia:Office actions and Wikipedia:List of policies#Legal and copyright.

• 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 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:Advertisements; Spanish Wikipedia and Enciclopedia Libre.

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

• 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. Although it appears 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.
• See also: Wikipedia talk:Identifying 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. Also Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, which assesses the reliability of individual 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.^[1] Wikipedia has an unintentional systemic bias in favor of freely available online sources (called the FUTON bias) written in English that may distort its contents, and institutionalizing such a recommendation would only further exacerbate this bias.
• See also: Wikipedia:Verifiability#Access to sources and Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Cost

• 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:

1. 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",^[2] there is always room for further improvement.
2. 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 discussion.
3. While some featured articles deteriorate in quality, this is not a widespread problem. Since the featured article program began in 2004, 21% of promoted articles have been de-featured,^[3] and this is mainly due to increased requirements.
4. 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.
5. A link to the "originally featured version" is already available on the talk page.

• Proposal: Move maintenance tags such as {{cleanup}} and {{POV-check}} off the tops of articles where they are often seen as clutter and to the talk page where are they can still be seen by editors.
• Reasons for previous rejection:

1. Every reader is a potential editor and the maintenance tags give potential editors ideas of how to improve an article.
2. The tags also serve as warnings to readers about potentially problematic and low-quality content.
3. The {{ambox}} "meta-template" used by the templates means that they are not nearly as cluttered-looking as previously.
4. The implementation costs would be large: Hundreds of thousands of articles have maintenance tags, moving them all to talk pages would be a massive undertaking, even using a bot. 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.

• Previous discussions: Sept 2010, Jan 2009, Nov 2009, Oct 2008, December 2008, March 2008, October 2007

• 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".^[4] 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.^[5]
• See also: Many discussions in the archives of WT:Layout.

• 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: Mike Godwin (former General Counsel for Wikimedia) has stated that Wikipedia cannot legally host non-commercial content because it is incompatible with our other free licenses. (Fair use, on the other hand, is a type of unlicensed use, and thus does not present any license compatibility issues.)
• See also: Jimbo's original edict against NC media; Wikipedia:Non-free content

• Proposal: Today's Featured Article that is linked from the main page should be either fully protected or semi protected to prevent vandalism and ensure that all visitors get a good impression of Wikipedia.
• Reasons for previous rejection: Wikipedia claims to be an "Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit" so having the most viewed article everyday protected would be contrary to that purpose. Also Today's Features Article is always watched by many editors so any vandalism is quickly reverted.
• See also: Wikipedia:Main Page featured article protection and Wikipedia:For and Against TFA protection for lengthy discussions

• Proposal: There needs to be a formal way to request articles for Today's Featured Article on a particular day or for discussion of said selection.
• Reasons for previous rejection: There already is a page at WP:TFAR where requests for Today's Featured Article can be made. The whole process is managed by User:Raul654 who is the ratified Featured Article Director.
• See also: One of many Village Pump discussions

• 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;^[6] 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 anonymous users, about 76% or 82% of anonymous edits are intended to improve the encyclopedia. (Prohibiting IP edits would not eliminate 97% of all vandalism, because those inclined to vandalism could easily take the 10 seconds to register.) The ability of anyone to edit articles without registering is a Foundation issue.
• See also: Wikipedia:Editors should be logged in users, Wikipedia:IPs are human too.

• 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.)
• Reasons for previous rejection: It's already an option in the user preferences, and forcing users to enter edit summaries may annoy them enough they will not save their (possibly constructive) edits. Manually added edit summaries also suppress the automatic edit summaries.
• See also: Help:Preferences#Editing

• Proposal: All words and phrases in an article should be linked, so that anybody can click on any word and follow it to a Wikipedia or Wiktionary article.
• Reasons for previous rejection: This would create an unsightly sea of blue links, making articles unnecessarily difficult to read, as well as distracting readers from the links that might actually be of value to them. This was rejected in favor of Wikipedia:Only make links relevant to the context.
• See also: Wikipedia:Wikipedia doesn't use Allwiki

• Proposal: Paid editing is:

• harmful and should be banned.
• beneficial and should be encouraged.
• somewhere in between.

• For various viewpoints on this controversial matter, see the proposed Wikipedia:Paid editing (guideline), Wikipedia:Paid editing (policy), and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Paid editing. Editing services, in which editors solicit money for changes that benefit the customer, have been specifically condemned by Jimmy Wales, and users have been blocked and banned in the past for engaging in this activity.

• 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 lead to escalated warnings. Revert warring to keep a warning on a user's talk page is disruptive and constitutes "biting" newcomers.
• See also: Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Removing warnings

• Proposal: Some people get missed for weeks at a time, or never welcomed at all. Wouldn't it 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 behind 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 an edit made by them receives extra scrutiny, because one user page or another shows as a redlink.
3. The bot would make thousands of pointless edits welcoming vandals and accounts that never make an edit.

• Proposal: Editors should use only plain signatures. Personalized signatures (colored text, 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's worth. It's 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.

• 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 Google or another 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 none the less 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

• 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 also: Wikipedia:Revotes on Vfd, Wikipedia:Repeated AfD nomination limitation policy.

• 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 less requirements for a deletion proposal than for a Featured Article review, for which all main contributors must be notified.

• Proposal: Make deleted pages visible to everybody (or to all logged-in users), not just administrators.
• Reasons 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 increase the workload of the Oversight body to ensure that copyviolations and libelous statements are not visible to everybody. This proposal has been explicitly vetoed by the Wikimedia Foundation legal counsel ([1]).
• See also: Wikipedia:Viewing deleted articles, Wikipedia:Trash namespace, Wikipedia:Proposed blanking, Wikipedia:Soft deletion, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted.

• 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.)
• See also "sticky" proposed deletion for BLP articles

• 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).
• Note: This proposal was favorably received in 2009, but technical difficulties and inertia prevented the change; see Wikipedia talk:Articles for discussion/Proposal 1.

• Proposal: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship is clearly too stern, too lenient, too arbitrary, too much of a vote count, and/or not enough of a vote count.
• Reasons for previous rejection: While RFA is our most debated process and nearly everybody seems to think there's something wrong with it, literally years of discussion have yielded no consensus on what exactly is wrong with it, nor on what should be done about that.
• See also: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Reform, Wikipedia:RfA reform 2011Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia:Requests for adminship, Wikipedia:RfA Review, Jimmy Wales' comment.

• Proposal: Limit the number of questions asked at RfA, limit the number of questions a person can ask, 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.
• Note: While there has been no consensus to ban canned questions, they have routinely been criticized as not being effective or adding much value to the process.

• Proposal: Inactive admins should have their admin status revoked automatically after a given time period. The general assumption is that the accounts might be compromised, or that an administrator who has been inactive for years may not be suitable or aware of current policies and procedures.
• Reasons for previous rejection: In general, this proposal has been opposed both by administrators who tend to go through periods of inactivity and 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. According to the developers, an active account is in far greater danger of becoming compromised than an inactive account. Demotion may raise a barrier for inactive admins to become active again.
• See also: Wikipedia:Inactive administrators, and an April 2008 discussion and poll, Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/desysop poll

• 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 855 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), and Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 70#Time limits on adminship.

• Proposal: There should be some kind of "partial admin" that gets certain admin powers, but not all of them. Or, new admins should undergo a probationary period, which may include limited abilities or desysopping on demand.
• Can't be done: It's confusing; 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 sysop powers versus who gets only partial abilities.
• Already been done: The rollback power is available to trustworthy non-admins upon request.
• See also: Wikipedia:Limited administrators.

• 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 he or she has 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.
• This is one of the issues currently being discussed in depth at WP:RFA2011. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:03, 11 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Proposal: There should be a community-based process for removing adminship. Currently, the only way to involuntary remove adminship outside of emergencies is by Arbitration Committee action. This would make adminship really "No big deal".
• Reasons for previous rejection: Many admins object that a system like this would be too open to abuse by editors who have been disciplined by admins for violating policy. Also, nobody can agree on the requirements for filing a request for de-adminship. Many want very strict requirements for a desysop, while some want it no more difficult, or easier, than the requests for adminship process.
• See also: Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship, especially Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship#Proposed processes.

• 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. Possible security concerns. Gives the impression of user space ownership, which has been rejected by the developers and the Wikipedia community.

• 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.
• See also: Wikipedia:Ageism, Wikipedia:Age and adminship

• 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.
• See also: Section level watch, Sections can't be watched, Watch one section of a large article, and mw:Extension:LiquidThreads, a forum-like system for discussion pages that would allow watching individual threads, currently under development.

• Proposal: Use the reCAPTCHA CAPTCHA system in place of our own so that we aid in the digitization of text while deterring spammers.
• Reasons for previous rejection: The primary reasons for rejection are from Brion Vibber, our former CTO, who states that it is proprietary (Wikimedia prefers to use free and open source software), they won't let us run it on our own servers (it introduces a dependency on an external server by forcing MediaWiki to contact the server for CAPTCHA verification), the words are rarely readable, and it has a weak audio CAPTCHA.

• Proposal: Along the lines of the existing WP: → Wikipedia: namespace alias, create shortcuts such as T: → Template:, 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.
  • Some proposed shortcuts, such as T: → Template: and T: → Talk:, conflict.
  • Some proposed shortcuts, such as T: → Template:, conflict with existing articles. While those articles could be moved as was done for articles such as Ki:Theory that conflict with existing namespaces or prefixes, one must ask whether the advantages of a shortcut outweigh the disadvantages of present and future conflicts.
  • 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.
    • Templates are normally linked using {{tl}}, which cannot readily be improved upon as an abbreviation, and specification of the Template namespace prefix is not necessary for transclusion. Few templates are directly navigated to.
    • Shortcuts for Help pages are often created in the WP namespace.

• Wikipedia:Historic debates