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Don't Bother Posting Educational Videos
If you desire to link to an outside video -- even an educational video -- don't even bother.
After editing a couple of articles to include links to educational videos online (with no commercials), then I got an urgent message from one of the users commanding me to stop "spamming the website with self-promotional links." Afterwards, I noticed he had removed all of my link updates. Oh well! I guess doctors don't need to know about emergency medical procedures from other emergency room doctors!
- Well if you don't even create a user account, and then solely start adding the same link to a LOT of articles, you look like someone spamming. Wyllium 06:50, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
- Hang on a moment. The first thing is that is very bad form to bite people who contribute without creating an account. We encourage people to contribute anonymously in order to get them hooked, we shouldn't complain when they go ahead and do it!
- Second thing: The IP who posted here is 69.38.37.161. Checking his contributions, he had only added four links when you wrote your comment, hardly a "LOT". Also it wasn't the same link, each link was tailored to a particular article... e.g. a link to video about drowning was added to the drowning article. A video about the Wright brothers was added to the Wright brothers article.
- So unless I've missed something (e.g. that isn't the only IP involved), please remember to Assume Good Faith and to not bite the newcomers. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 12:15, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
- I'm not justifying removing his links (which don't look that suspicious to me), I'm merely explaining why people might have reverted him. When anonymous users add the same link to a lot of articles, 9 times out of ten, it's a linkspammer. Wyllium 01:08, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- 69.38.37.161: Your stuff looks fine. Your links look fine. They should not have been deleted. Your edits to the Charles Kuralt article look fine. Sorry you got nipped, glad you mentioned it here, and hope you don't go away mad. It's really true that Wikipedia does get a lot of Wikispam, and it's true that some of it takes the form of unregistered users adding self-promotional external links to many articles, so what happened, though wrong, is, regrettably, understandable. It would have been less likely to happen if you were a registered user, and I don't know of any reason not to register--you needn't disclose anything, not even an email address. If you had registered I'd be replying on your own page, instead of here. There's absolutely no requirement to register, you can just keep contributing as an unregistered user. What happened would also have been less likely if you had included an edit summary--a short phrase or line that can be typed into a box whenever you edit a page. Dpbsmith 13:54, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
As I was the one who reverted the links, I feel I should comment (though I question the value of defending myself, given the comments above).
I see a lot of spam while monitoring RC, and what this user was doing is a classic example. It does not matter that the material itself was free (and "free of commercials"): the fact is, the links were added in an effort to drive traffic to this person's website. While all the links were "tailored" to the topic of the articles, they were all to the same site. This site is (apparently, please correct me if I'm wrong) a commercial enterprise and makes its money by selling ad space. Did anyone actually look at the site linked to? A good chunk of their programming seems to be entirely about patronizing their sponsors.
If I had not warned this user (politely, I may add; I did not "bite" him/her. See User talk:69.38.37.161 for my horrible warning.), s/he would very likely have continued to add links to this one website to a large number of articles. I've seen this many times before; you are free to disagree, but I believe I did what was in the best interests of the project. I might also point those interested to m:when should I link externally, which includes the helpful guideline "In short one shouldn't link externally to anything that we would like internally." If these vidoes were truly educational, we would want them internally. I don't know about you, but I don't find a travel video about Mississippi steamship cruises to be particularly "educational". (Interesting to some, sure.)
I may not be the most prolific editor, but up until recently I've happily volunteered my time in maintaining and (IMO) defending Wikipedia. But after witnessing the flak dedicated users like RickK have to put up with and seeing valuable users such as Tannin leave us, I have reason to reconsider my commitments here. If the consensus is that I've done something wrong, I sincerely apologise. I was acting, as always, for what I thought was the betterment of Wikipedia. Time will tell me if that betterment is really worth fighting for. -- Hadal 02:41, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Easy there. You do good work. Thank you for monitoring RC. As a long term wikipedian you know that people disagree about pretty much everything. Just because some of us feel that one revert was not needed doesn't mean that your reverts were wrong, and in fact - looking at your recent edits - I think your RC patrol work is quite good. I would like to apoligize if my comment and my reverting of your reverts came across as curt, and I certainly do not want you to stop acting for the betterment of Wikipedia! Best wishes, -- Chris 73 | Talk 03:00, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- No hard feelings here, and thanks for the kind words (and awesome work on pufferfish, by the way). I'm not often reverted, but what I actually found offensive was the characterization of my actions; I feel I've been made out to be the bad guy here (I don't think there is one on either side), when I honestly meant no harm nor offense to anyone. Perhaps next time I'll wait until a user has added, oh, I don't know, 20 links to the same website before I even dare use the word "spamming". Otherwise something like this might happen again. So, right or wrong, I'm sorry for any negativity I've created and hope this user (I don't know his username?) settles in well. Cheers, -- Hadal 06:40, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I do not understand the abhorrence of linking to commercial entities. The argument should be solely about the quality of the linked-to material, not how it is funded (although a site with lots of flashing ads, popups or whatever would probably count as "poor quality"). I checked the drowning link and it looked reasonable. I didn't see about the steamboat.
- '"In short one shouldn't link externally to anything that we would like internally." If these vidoes were truly educational, we would want them internally.' By that logic, we would barely want any external links at all, we would want everything internally. There are obvious problems with this.
- You say your warning was polite ... but you managed to use the words "spamming" and "will result in a block" in a warning that fits on to one line on my screen. This would be absolutely fine except that they are the very first words that a new user, apparently acting in good faith, has had directed at them since joining the project.
- Apologies for continuing to debate these points after you've offered to sincerely apologise, but these "threaten to leave if I can't do things my way" posts (you and Rick are far the first) really get on my wick. I make compromises every day on Wikipedia... perhaps I am not so battle-hardened by the fighting the legions of trolls and vandals so much. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:45, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- First, see my reply to Chris above. Why is it that someone can be "spamming" without knowing it, which I believe is what happened here (and therefore he/she was "acting in good faith"), but I can't be "acting in good faith" by pointing out (what I thought was) his/her error? You again bring up my warning, which is why I ask. It may have appeared curt, but I did say please. Its brevity was purely an attempt at efficiency; I hand out many warnings in a single day, and as far as I know there's no template: suitable for spamming (whether you agree with that verdict or not). Emotions can't be conveyed very well in a text-based medium. Perhaps I should have included a smiley?
- The fact that the site was commercial isn't the point, exactly. The point is that the user was adding links to the same site to a number of articles; while it is true that only four links were added at the time of my warning, judging by the scope of the site this user could have conceivably gone on to add many, many more. While I know it's only my testimony, I have seen this happen more than a few times. I was trying to nip the problem (not the user) in the bud rather than have him/her waste his/her time and the time of those maintaining Wikipedia. Perhaps someone could advise me as to exactly how many links qualifies as spam so that I may reserve my apparently rude accusations of "spamming" to cases everyone can agree upon.
- And yes, I do apologise for any wrongdoing. I also apologise for getting on your wick with my "threaten to leave if I can't do things my way" post; I don't see that I've made such a post, of course. I didn't say I was going to leave (perhaps stop dedicating huge chunks of my evening, but not leave), and I didn't say I wanted things my way; I just don't like being villanized, and I don't imagine you do either. I welcome disagreement, however. Perhaps there should be a "don't bite the well-intentioned admin" policy, eh? -- Hadal 06:40, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
As the person who posted this comment in the first place, I feel I should address some of the other comments. First of all, I am very glad to see such a great tool on the web such as WikiPedia. Secondly, as a newcomer just learning about it in a magazine article, I was not aware of the differences in attitude towards registered and non-registered folks. As a newcomer, I have to say I was somewhat shocked that someone would call me a "spammer" and accused of posting "self-promotional" links -- it was kind of weird to have a "new message" link pop-up and see that message being new to the site. I feel that some sort of protocol to actually CHECK OUT the links before making those accusations would be helpful. Also, I think there are lots of opinions about what is "educational" or even beneficial to a reader on a certain WikiPedia topic. However, just arbitrarily removing edits without checking them out first is not exactly fair. Legitimate edits and constructive debate about what is best for each article is certainly the reason that WikiPedia is exciting since everyone has input. Lastly, I am sure that Hadal has done good work for Wikipedia and that spammers are a big problem. But please don't automatically lump people who are new to the site and not aware of your policies in the same category as spammers. Thanks for the chance to have some input. PS: I have now created a User Account -- thanks for the tip. Also, one more thing -- thank you to everyone who took time to post to my original post including Hadal. It seems like a great way to overcome differences.
How Dry Should Wikipedia Be?
Have come across this a few times before, but having a particularly hard time with samovar - an overly colorful, and occasionaly totally POV article, but so charmingly written I almost cant stand to delete paragraphs like "Ground-breaking technologies provided mankind with wondrous inventions: space travel, nuclear powerplants, supersonic jets, and the nickel-plated electric samovar. " and "Will the twenty-first century bring Internet-enabled computer-controlled samovars that guide us through the tea-brewing process in the language of our choice?" and " During the above outlined process of evolution, the samovar achieved technical perfection: nothing to add, nothing to take away" and thats from about three paragraphs of a very long article. And article is full of computer language analogies (huh?) and more besides. Datepalm17 20:16, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- The bizarre idioms and analogies are due to the bulk of the article being lifted from a Unix Howto, which are generally written from the POV of some sort of hacker. They're a little weird. --Eequor 14:19, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Obviously not an encylopedic article, but it seems a shame to remove all of the colorful language - how much of this sort of colorful commentary can be kept in articles? Basically, do articles have to be completely dry, if they're understandable and free of POV and bizzare idioms and things. (and what to with totally inappropriate, but correct, analogies?). Datepalm17 20:16, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- I like colourful language. It will be a sad day when it is eliminated entirely from here, and I don't think it is necessary to do so. However, some users do not agree with this and will edit anything remotely colourful to death if you draw their attention to it. So as a rule I do not. --Nevilley 21:02, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- It's just me, but I try to apply the "alien archeologist test". Suppose sometime in the distant future an alien archeologist finds a tiny fragment of wikipedia in the ashes of the lost "McDonaldsPlaystation" layer. All that's readable is the Samovar article. Obviously she's going to get a tiny, jaundiced slice of "our" knowledge, but does the article give her an unnecessarily wrong picture? In-jokes are funny only to those who fully understand the domain, and I think our alien archeologist could me misled as to the comparative importance of a samovar, or its supposed perfection. Now obviously extra-terrestrials and distant-future civilisations aren't a "core target market" of wikipedia, but the future civilisation of our children is, and however entertaining the sections you cite are, they're both wrong, or at least significantly misleading. Style is good, but where there is conflict, truth must always win. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:32, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- I noticed too that some article are unencyclopedic for the sake of the dramatic effect. Esp. WWII articles. I have to admit that I made some of those edits myself too. I don't think those edits belong here. It is all right if an article is boring here. Andries 21:39, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- Encyclopedia articles should not be dry. This is a recent and unpleasant development. The 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is full of life, full of personality and (for topics which interest one) fun to read. And, IMHO, it more authoritative than recent encyclopedias written in dry style, because many of the articles were written by top people in their field (Lord Rayleigh, Ernest Rutherford, etc.) Articles in U.S. 1930s textbook articles were lively, too. During the 1950s, during the McCarthy scare, schools and textbook publishers became deathly afraid of including anything "controversial." Meanwhile, encyclopedias, originally written by educated people for educated people, became instead highly commercialized enterprises marketed to parents who hoped to give their children an unfair advantage in school. Encyclopedia articles followed the lead of textbooks and became dumbed down and dried up.
- I agree. Wikipedia is in the game of INFORMATION, not PROSE. When people come here, they should get the correct information, without a point of view, and that's it. Personally, I find dry writing to have a certain charm of itself. Wyllium 06:55, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
- There is nothing about NPOV that requires writing to be distant or dry. John McPhee and Bill Bryson are recent examples of nonfiction authors who are both highly accurate and wonderful prose stylists. Dry prose is sometimes a lazy way of avoiding NPOV issues by avoiding the expression of any point of view at all.
- 'So you would carpet your room ... with representations of flowers, would you?' said the gentleman. 'Why would you?' 'If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,' returned the girl. 'And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?' 'It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy - '
- 'Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy,' cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. 'That's it! You are never to fancy.' .... 'Fact, fact, fact!' said the gentleman. And 'Fact, fact, fact!' repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
- —Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Note: for any Gradgrinds reading this... Dickens was being ironic). Dpbsmith 21:53, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- Dryness depends somewhat on the subject matter. Holocaust should be very dry. Infinite Improbability Drive should not be (and isn't). -- Cyrius|✎ 07:20, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Zonealarm
I use zonealarm, I have enabled the cookie and ad block to high. However all the images in Wikipedia are then treated as ads and blocked, except for the top left logo. Anyone in mediawiki, is it possible to eliminate this glitch so that inspite of the settings, we get to see the pictures? Nichalp 19:56, May 30, 2004 (UTC)
- I had the same problem. Zonealarm is a law unto itself as to whatever it considers an ad to be (I think it goes on geometry, but who knows). I made a special entry in Zonealarm's "privacy" setting for en.wikipedia.org to stop it from blocking images - unfortunately one needs to do this for each wikipedia (de.wikipedia, es.wikipedia, etc). It's just one more reason I wish there were a decent Open-Source alternative to Zonealarm. Grrr. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:10, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- You could try the AdBlock plugin for firefox (see http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/). -- Gabriel Wicke 00:19, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- In case others run into this problem, let me say that I had similar problems with ZoneAlarm Pro 4.5, even after creating a separate en.wikipedia.org entry and completely freeing it from constraints. It would continue to ignore this and follow the overall settings on occasion, with no pattern I detected. I finally reinstalled ZAPro after mercilessly deleting every trace of it from my system and then recreated the separate entry for Wikipedia. It's worked well for weeks now. Go figure. -- Jeff Q 07:11, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Table caption formatting?
Hi, I'm using Mozilla 1.6 on Debian Linux (testing), and the formatting of table captions doesn't seem right any more on with the new MediaWiki (which I otherwise think is beautiful).
See, for example, this table — even though the caption is specified as align=bottom, it appears at the top. Moreover, the caption is has the same margins as the rest of the text, so it is indistinguishable from an ordinary paragraph (whereas previously it was narrower, to match the table). Is this a problem with that particular table's code, or is it a bug in MediaWiki? —Steven G. Johnson 19:07, May 30, 2004 (UTC)
Press Release
The May 2004 press release, about the Webby Award given the Wikipedia, at Wikipedia:Press_releases/May_2004 looks to be about finished and, as it is nearing the end of May, should be finalized. Aside from quotes which may be added, it looks to be production quality. Anyone who has edits or comments should make them soon.
As for the proposed quotes, the first would be from Jimmy Wales the founder, which we don't have yet. The second is the five word acceptance speech that was delivered or will be delivered at the awards ceremony, which of course is dependant on a fact or decision about that. Also, it would be nice to be able to include the date and location of the ceremony, so anyone who has that information should step up to the plate. - Centrx 19:05, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
something wierd is going on... Dunc Harris | Talk 16:50, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Formatting
At the bottom of the article French Revolution, the following
- ''This article makes use of the out-of-copyright'' [http://www.outfo.org/literature/pg/etext06/8hfrr10.txt History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814]'', by François Mignet ([[1824]]), as made available by [[Project Gutenberg]].''
...shows up as...
- This article makes use of the out-of-copyright History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814, by François Mignet (1824), as made available by Project Gutenberg.
On my system, at least, there is an undesired space between the external link and the following comma. I believe this is new with the new software upgrade, and I presume it is not specific to my configuration.
- Does anyone understand what is going on?
- Is there either a fix on the way or a good, generalizable workaround? (Obviously in this case I could move the restart of the italics to after the comma, but I'm interested in a general solution)
-- Jmabel 04:35, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- Are you seeing an icon following the external link? (Looks like two intersecting boxes). If not, there could be some browser/compatibility issue: there's meant to be an icon there, and it's present for me. - Nunh-huh 05:32, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- I am not seeing a space. →Raul654 05:28, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- Try refreshing the page (Mozilla: click Reload (or Ctrl-R), IE / Opera: Ctrl-F5, Safari: Cmd-R, Konqueror Ctrl-R). There should be an image after the link. Can you see other images on Wikipedia ok? Angela. 08:15, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- I'm seeing the same problem. Screenshot:
- This seems to only occur when the external link wraps around because it reaches the edge of the screen. (Note that the icon on the second external link, which doesn't wrap around, shows up fine while the first link wraps around and has the problem.) That's the way it's been happening whenever I've seen this. Also note that a slice of the icon does show up after the "to", when the link wraps around.
- Perhaps the reason others aren't having the problem is because they're using a different screen resolution from Jmabel, so the text wraps at different places? I'm using 800x600, and I would guess Jmabel is too. LuckyWizard 06:20, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
- Yup. And 800 x 600 should be supported, no? -- Jmabel 20:20, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
- I'm running at 1024 x 768, and I've seen the same problem, though on other pages. I'd say the issue is just one of wrapping within a link. Anyone could reproduce it by adjusting their browser width to cause a wrap in a multi-word link. -Rholton 14:38, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Policy change on VfD?
Why the policy change on VfD? I'm referring to the new idea of just putting the debate under the heading, instead of using MediaWiki messages... just curious. blankfaze | ♫ 04:24, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- In the new version, when two people work on two different sections, it will not cause an edit conflict. The MediaWiki messages were a temporary solution for all the edit conflicts, so that's not needed anymore. Wyllium 05:27, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
I have no desire to get involved in an edit war, but my attempts to give the article Star's Edge a more neutral POV have been reverted by user:216.53.175.46 who appears to be a devotee of the, um, philosophy. In particular, I was interested to see what the criticisms of Avatar were, so I followed the external link described as "Critics" only to find that it was an official page from Star's Edge calling all the critics liars. This is deceptive linking and does not offer any balance. Instead, I retained that link but retitled it "Rebuttal of Critics" and googled for what seemed a typical criticism link, adding that.
Would I be justified in re-reverting? How long before moderation or mediation is needed? dramatic 01:40, 30 May 2004 (UTC) (Just an old-fashioned skeptic)
I have just removed price information from this article which seems to read more and more like a commercial advertisement. Under its present classification and content I'm not sure it can be given a NPOV. The link mentioned above has again been changed and, although I too see no benefit in an edit war, to permit this to stand, commercially-driven and without someone identifying themselves as responsible for the non-NPOV content seems very non-WP. I second the query above. --VampWillow 23:04, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
dKosopedia: Copying articles from Wikipedia
(summarised)
dKosopedia wiki are copying our articles.
Yes, they're allowed to. See Wikipedia:Copyrights and Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks.
Hey, guess what?
Even though I don't have caching enabled in my preferences, I cleaned it all out anyway and my problems went away. RickK 21:54, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
- It wasn't your browser cache, or media wiki's "cache articles" setting that was at fault - the squid will still keep a copy of the stylesheet(s) regardless, until you (well, someone) does a shift-reload, which makes the browser send special "no-cache" lines in the HTTP request (and thus making any intermediate caches get up off their ass and go fetch everything fresh). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:58, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
- Can someone guide me through this process? I use IE6 and am, therefore, unworthy of assistance - I realise that. But have pity. --bodnotbod 15:09, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
error
Every time I go to a new page, I get a pop-up message saying "A runtime error has occurred. Do you wish to debug? Line [16, 17, or 18] Error: addcss is undefined". Meelar 21:15, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
- Which browser are you using? That's a javascript DHTML call (I'm surprised any of that stuff is portable). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:34, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
- Try clearing your cache. If it still happens, please report it at sourceforge. Angela. 21:43, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Vilna Gaon/ Elijah son of Solomon
Their seems to be an article that repeats itself under two different names one of them should be destroyed
- Which articles do you mean? There is a Vilna Gaon article, but no Elijah son of Solomon article. You could list them at Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. Angela. 19:11, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
Copyright problems duplication
The Copyright problems page has just duplicated the JulyJune 3 section and wiped out the JulyJune 2 section. I could fix it from history, but someone might want to take a look at what went wrong. --gadfium 01:38, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Customizing en stylesheet
(Repeating this post as it's important to leave on the pump for more than a few minutes) Since many people have complained about the style, and since now we have the option of fixing it at least for the entire english wikipedia, I think we need to have a discussion and possible some votes, and fix the major problems.
Discussion at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css Dori | Talk 23:31, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Yay for CSS customisation
I love the new customisability, right? I was glad to be able to switch the personal toolbar from the top (ugly) to the side. But ONE THING nagged the hell out of me. For that specific menu, the links wouldn't underline when you hovered over them (coz they weren't supposed to when they were on top). It just annoyed me. So I went digging and found the little codebit that's responsible and now my links underline when I hover over them. Hooray! blankfaze | ••
- p-personal li a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }
New skin
Hi. My name is Eddie. I am a junior in high school. I use this website often for research and personal education. I really hate this new system. I find the lettering really difficult to read. I hate having to saerch around for buttons that aren't where they used to be. Can ypu please switch back to the old way? Thanks alot. Eddie.
- If you like the old style, sign in, go to your "Preferences" page, and set your "Skin" to "Standard". - Nunh-huh 22:30, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Replied (the same) on his talk page. →Raul654 22:31, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Tempelate Sandbox
How is someone supposed to test a temp elate if template:Sandbox is protected and template:Test is already in use? --Ankur
Frances Shand Kydd
Why does Frances Shand Kydd appear as Frances Ruth Burke-Roche? Is there a Wikipedia rule that married women must appear under their maiden names? I though we used the most commonly used version of a person's name, which in this case is certainly Shand Kydd. We don't have articles on Margaret Roberts or Golda Mabovitz. In any case Burke Roche doesn't have a hyphen. Adam 11:03, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Someone created the page Golden Age of Freethought by Moving the Wikipedia:Sandbox to it.
Thus there is an obscure page with no incoming links, yet with a History of thousands of modifications.
This must take up an enormous amount of storage space. Can some admin person go ahead and truncate the history? Any way to prevent such a situation from recurring? Curps 20:16, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- The history has now been truncated, thanks. Curps 17:29, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Nupedia attribution
Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Nupedia_and_Wikipedia . In reviewing Nupedia sourced articles from the list kept there, I don't see any uniformity of attribution style for this requirement. I also see that the links to the original Nupedia articles are now deadends. Is there a simple phrase that would suffice to meet the requirement? - Bevo 19:54, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
RSS/Atom feed?
I could have sworn I saw a link to an RSS or Atom feed in the "toolbox" while on some page earlier today. Though it could have been on meta.wikipedia.org. Either way, I can't find again what page I saw that on, and so haven't had the chance to see what it was an RSS feed of! -- protactin 19:50, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Special:Recentchanges -- Cyrius|✎ 20:05, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Any chance we could RSS-ify or Atomize other pages? It may be interesting to have a newsfeed for Template:Did you know, or the day's featured article, or Special:Randompage. - jredmond 00:54, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Disambiguation Problem
Currently, the Abercrombie page is an article about a horse named Abercrombie, with a link to Abercrombie (disambiguation). Shouldn't the disambig page be the main one? Can a moderator please move the Abercrombie article to Abercrombie (horse), and move the disambig page to Abercrombie? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 14:30, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
- The horse is the only item actually called "Abercrombie", the others are just have that word in that name. It's probably best as is. Pcb21| Pete 14:52, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- There are two locations on that page named "Abercrombie", so each one could be referred to as Abercrombie. Also, the popular clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch is commonly referred to in vernacular as just Abercrombie, and I'm sure that the Google test* search for Abercrombie would show that the most common usage is for the clothing brand. - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 15:00, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
- - yes... i know the google test is not wiki-god, but it's still significant
- There are two locations on that page named "Abercrombie", so each one could be referred to as Abercrombie. Also, the popular clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch is commonly referred to in vernacular as just Abercrombie, and I'm sure that the Google test* search for Abercrombie would show that the most common usage is for the clothing brand. - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 15:00, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
- Ummm... So how should I go about this? Is there a place I can get a vote on this? It's not really a vfd issue, is it? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 16:17, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
- I'm afraid I agree with Pcb21/Pete. Leave things as they are; let horsey enjoy the limelight. –Hajor 16:49, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Heck, don't worry about it too much. In any sensible layout, such as the one you suggested, (or indeed the one I would've kept, I inhumbly submit) people will find what they are looking for. No vfd required here thank goodness! 217.159.40.49 22:44, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Why is it gone? I want it back. --Jiang 05:04, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- It's at the top, I agree that the my contribs and it should be in the toolbox instead (/me waits for someone to mention the custom stylesheet). Dori | Talk 05:07, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
- You can do it with a custom style sheet ;-). You are told how at m:User styles. I am loving the new flexibility. Pcb21| Pete 07:20, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Ditto. Plus these hotkeys are a godsend. I'm at least 53% more efficient. --Chopchopwhitey 07:23, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- A godsend, yes... but slightly annoying, since some conflict with IE's menus. In particular, Alt-E (Edit in WP, Edit Menu in IE) and Alt-A (View Article in WP, Favorites Menu in IE). Also, while they automatically perform their function in Firefox (For Linux, at least), IE just moves the focus to the proper button; i.e. I have to hit Alt-L and then enter to view the Watchlist. Also, one more issue - hitting Alt-E to do something in the Edit menu has destroyed some of my edits in Firefox, thanks to the site automatically reloading the Edit page. Perhaps some alt-links like Alt-E should be disabled on the edit page? --Golbez 20:00, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Range block
Range blocking ability appears to be disabled. Does anyone know why and how long for? DJ Clayworth 17:56, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- This is the same for Korean, Latin, Simple and Meta. I expect it may have been accidentally turned off when the software was upgraded because I haven't heard anything about it being officially switched off for any reason. I'll leave a message for Tim Starling about it as he was the one who implemented it in the first place, so might know what's going on. Angela. 18:42, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- This should be fixed now. -- Tim Starling 02:52, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
- Thank you. On an entirely related note, our anonymous bot (?) is back making bizarre changes to Star Trek characters. I'm going to give him an unlimited ban, since 90 days didn't stop him. DJ Clayworth 14:53, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Minor link edit for anon users missing
I tried to fix a typo on a page without logging in, but could not find the "Minor edit" option. Wasn't it supposed to be there ? Jay 07:19, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- No, minor edit is for looged-in users only. It's to prevent vandalism. Wyllium 08:39, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Some people choose to hide minor edits from recent changes, so preventing anons (who are the most likely vandals) marking edits as minor means their vandalism is less likely to go unnoticed. Angela. 18:45, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- This looks like a very weak logic for blocking vandalism. A lot many edits (the majority I would say) of anon users are minor. Also a lot many users do not have the "hide minor edits" option set, which means vandalism will continue to be reverted. If anon users are being equated with vandalism, stop the facility to anon users. Jay 17:18, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- It's not blocking (or even directly preventing) vandalism, it's just making it harder to hide, so that the wonderful contributors who keep an eye on unregistered user contributions can more quickly see the bad stuff and jump on it. Jay, you can probably save time (and do it quite safely if you have full control of your computer) by checking the box below the login button so that in future you are always logged in as soon as you come along. (A copy of that last sentence is going to your Talk page.) Robin Patterson 03:29, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Some points to mull about.
- Minor edits are minor edits. Period. Don't mix it up with fighting vandalism.
- A vandal who uses minor edits to vandalize is an intelligent vandal who knows the workings of Wikipedia. Such vandals are few and no amount of tactics will help fight such a user except patience.
- An anon user who uses the Minor edit is an intelligent user who knows the workings of Wikipedia. He has most probably made a useful edit.
- A lot many people do not have the "hide minor edits" option set, so I don't buy the "minor edit-anon user-vandalism" connection logic.
- Thanks Robin for the logging in tip. Jay 04:57, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Some points to mull about.
See Wikipedia:Minor edit, and the links at the top of that page such as Anons can no longer make minor edits, Minor edits and anonymous log-in. It's been discussed before, but the consensus was always to keep anons from using the minor edit checkbox. Angela. 00:28, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Thanks for the references, I've copied the discussion to over there. Jay 07:52, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Pictures, Categories, and so forth
I am crossposting this comment to Wikipedia:Village Pump and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style.
I have been advised that the manual of style says unambiguously that articles with single pictures must have the picture at the very top of the article, aligned to the right. I have no particular problem with this as a general guideline. At the moment, however, when this is done to article with categories, it results in an extremely ugly article. I have been advised that this will probably be corrected at some point in the near future (although have seen no evidence that this is the case, aside from Raul654's assertion that Mr. Starling will "doubtless" do this.) In many cases, it is perfectly easy to move the picture down so that it is even with the second paragraph of the article. In most of these cases, this looks perfectly fine. It also means that we don't have absolutely hideous articles until whenever it is that the problem with categories gets fixed. For moving the pictures in several articles down a few lines, I have been accused of doing "serious damage" to wikipedia, because now people will have to "fix" all these articles so that they don't contain the ultimate indignity of having pictures slightly lower in the article than the manual of style says they should be. My feeling is that this is insane pedantry, but what is the general feeling on this? john k 06:06, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I am quite sure this problem is solved soon - it's not only the pictures which create that problem, but also the very popular Infoboxes. Instead of temporarily moving down the pic/infobox or move the pic to the left we can also abstain from adding the category temporarily until the glitches of the new software version are fixed - this also gives some time to think about what categories we want to add. andy 08:01, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
terms for administrative assembly
Does it make sense to make a list or a category various terms that denote gatherings for council, management, etc., both nation-specific and international ones: kurultai, ting, Loya jirga, veche, parliament, Congress of Soviets, etc.? Or are these belong to a list of forms of government (absent from it now)? Mikkalai 05:57, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I'd suggest that they would be a great addition to forms of government but that they are more of a 'related group' than something you would work through as a list. imho, anyway. --VampWillow 11:41, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia now imposes its will on its readers?
Why has Wikipedia overridden readers’ default font and highlighting selections? Do you really think ‘you’ know better than all your readers? I used to enjoy reading Wikipedia articles; they are now in a font that is painful to read—and every linked term now has a forced, ugly, and distracting underline.
(And please do not suggest that readers should edit their .css file on every Wiki they use; that is impractical. A separate profile for every web site is not sustainable!) quota
- Yes, Wikipedia is a malicious entity, run by some kind of secretive organization of web designers who aim to make things difficult on everyone.
- Seriously, though, any good browser will let you override site-specified fonts, and for that matter, practically every other visual attribute of site presentation. That's the nice thing about CSS! You may want to join in the discussion of MediaWiki comments and bug reports, layout design, the monobook skin, and skins in general, among others; participating in the existing discussion on these issues is more likely to bring about change than simply complaining about it. -- Wapcaplet 19:39, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- You can use one stylesheet across all wikis by dropping @import url(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:You/Monobook.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css); in the secondary wiki's Monobook.css. Then you only have to edit the en version. -- Gabriel Wicke 11:48, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I think the fans of the new cutesy-but-less-readable font are missing the point. The experts can change CSS stuff any time they want. It's the ordinary folks who don't invest major portions of their lives to learn all the intracacies of the latest browser styling fads that are left to squint at this unannounced, unvoted-upon, fait-accompli change. (I won't even dignify the idea that one should change one's default browser fonts just to make Wikipedia look nice with an indignant response. Or have I just?) ☺ -- Jeff Q 04:33, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Edits from before the crash are there... but not shown?
I made a few edits on things like James Bond and Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing that don't show up on the main page. Then if I look at history, my changes are there. I compare the current (mine) to the one before, and it shows mine. If I hit 'edit' trying to put the changes back, they are already there! Ideas? I've cleared my browser caches and Squid caches. Not only my stuff - example, I went to add a new link to the end of Google for GoogleWhack.com and somebody already did, but it doesn't show up on the main article page. --Revragnarok 11:11, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I just had this happen at Talk:Luckenbach, Texas (history). --Smack 23:27, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Seems to work now...?--Revragnarok 00:32, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Questions about categories
My main question is about changing a category. What I've noticed is that if you edit an article and rename the category ie if the category was incorrect or too general, it will create a link in the new category page, but the link remains also in the previous category page, even though that link does not show on the subject article page. For example Jack Nicholson was originally categorised as Category:Actors. I'd read on the categorisation talk page that Paul McCartney should be British musician, but not musician, because British musician would be a subcategory of musician, so I applied the same logic and changed Jack to Category:U.S. actors and actresses where he now appears. But in the Category:Actors page he still appears even though there should be nothing to link him there, and in the Jack Nicholson article page, the only category now visible is Category:U.S. actors and actresses. Does anyone know why that would be? Am I doing something wrong or is there a problem with the database or what?
Also another question which is less important but I'm trying to get my head around categories and subcategories. So .. Category:Vocalists and Category:Pop singers. To me, all pop singers are by definition vocalists, so along that line of thinking every person categorised as a pop singer should also be categorised as a vocalist. But is that the intention? Should vocalist just be for a band's vocalist? ie Robert Plant vocalist, but not pop singer. Along the same line I would categorise Belinda Carlisle vocalist (Go Gos) and pop singers, (solo). Britney Spears pop singer, but not vocalist? Would be interested to hear how anyone would interpret this. Thanks
And now I've just discovered that the category pages can't be linked from here. Which is why I've italicised them instead. As if I wasn't confused enough! :-) Rossrs 10:20, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Delete problem
A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was: DELETE FROM cur WHERE cur_namespace={$ns} AND cur_title='Baron_Rutherford' from within function "Article::doDeleteArticle". MySQL returned error "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '} AND cur_title='Baron_Rutherford at line 1". Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Rutherford"
- UtherSRG 12:42, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Invitation Letter
Last weekend, I went to a number of places where there were guided tours, and that got me thinking...it would be nice if this person could contribute their knowledge of this place to Wikipedia...
I think there should be a standard letter to invite people to share their knowledge with Wikipedia, for when you come across someone who knows a lot about something.
Or does a simlar thing already exist? What do you think? RealGrouchy 00:03, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I think it's a great idea. There's some sample solicitation letters linked from Wikipedia:Building Wikipedia membership. — Matt 02:02, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Name change for Wikipedia?
I think we should call a vote regarding changing the name of Wikipedia to something different. The word 'Wiki' just doesn't have a ring to it. I say we vote to change it, and if Management doesn't like it then we can think about taking legal actions. We all contribute, so why shouldn't we have a say in the name. I already have had the legal paperwork drawn up for this, so all we need is votes now. - Jiang 02:17, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Help Wanted - mis-spelled links needing fixed
Howdy. I've been running some analyses of links to non-existant articles and have hit a problem - too many things for me to fix!
There's a (I believe very high quality) list of over 1000 mis-spelled links available here - each entry also lists what the link should probably be. If anyone has an hour or two to spare, grab yourself a hundred items from the list to check and fix please.
- TB 15:10, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
- Well, I just did all the H's. It quite relaxing, really, I might grab another letter this afternoon. :-) —Stormie 00:25, Jun 4, 2004 (UTC)
Japanese word "haron"
Why was "furlong" katakanized as "haron" rather than as "faaron" or something like that? Juuitchan 07:27, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Well, in most circumstances, katakana doesn't have the option of using the "fa" syllable - "f" exists only before "u". If you take a look at the chart in the katakana article, you'll note that there's only "fu", and no "fa", "fi", "fo", or "fe". It's technically possible in modern katakana to create "fa", but use of these modern extensions is (I think) fairly rare. But I'm not an expert. -- Vardion 09:25, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- The modern norm is to katakanise as 'fa' ('fu' followed by a little 'a'), as in 'fan' or 'fashon' (fashion). Which page are you referring to? --Auximines 10:31, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- The Japanese Wikipedia page titled "haron" (in katakana) is what I was talking about. Also, the Japanese word for "foot" (the unit of length) is "fiito".
- I suspect furlong is katakanised the "old" way (ハロン - haron) because it's a somewhat antiquated word - as the article says, it's only really used in horse racing - so it hasn't been modernised. Compare, for example, the word "fork". It used to be katakanized "hook" (ホーク), but nowadays is always written "fook" (フォーク). --Auximines 11:56, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Respect and Decency
I am appalled at the material that has been submitted to this encyclopedia by users. I have attempted to remove material, specifically from articles about Jennifer Love Hewitt, Cary Grant, Drew Barrymore, Kylie Minogue and Angelina Jolie. Having read many thousands of legitimate articles in such publications as Encyclopedia Brittanica, I am quite familiar with the standards that they apply to their work, and these are in no way consistent with what is being allowed in Wikipedia.
In an additional ironic twist, the articles that I have written about Negro League Baseball players were materially altered by various fellow users, one in such a way that I consider to be racist. If anyone at anytime may alter another contributor's articles, even in offensive ways, then it seems to me that my "censorship" of the articles of others amounts to no more than the editing done by every other user of Wikipedia.
To state my reasons for editing the above articles, I will say that stating that a private area of the body of a serious actress are her best-known feature and providing a link to a crazed website that focuses on the woman's anatomy is extremely sexist, vulgar and classless. I also think that making reference to a certain supposed incident in Cary Grant's adolescence is highly unneccessary and unprofessional. Furthermore, listing an actresses's "measurements" is demeaning and an invasion of privacy, as well as being completely unnecessary to the content of the article. When the same writer adds his tabloid-based opinion about her sexual orientation, the debasement is complete. I think, too, that most would agree with editing an article with three paragraphs focusing primarily on a private area of a female singer's body and accompanied by a photograph that brings to mind the worst sexist images in rap and hard rock music videos. I also made an innocent change to an article on an actress that implied that her looks are more responsible for her success than her talent, something that I know to be entirely false.
I assumed that I was perfectly free to make such changes as I wished, since my articles had been terribly butchered and since the disclaimer below what I am typing right now says that articles may be "mercilessly" edited. Yet a certain overbearing webmaster (and he knows who he is) has said that I am committing "vandalism" and orders me to stop what I am doing or lose my membership with this site. Okay, then would he please tell others to stop vandalizing the social message of my articles?
I would like to request that a higher standard of respect, particularly for women and their privacy, be upheld on this site. I do not believe that anyone reading this would want such things said or shown of their sister. I am not asking to remove legitimate biological and psychological discussions of human sexuality, merely to prevent a pornographic mindset from seeping into what should be a serious educational tool. I encourage feedback so long as it is not of a threatening or accusative nature. Thank you. (Felix F. Bruyns)
- The page diffs in questions are:
- Cary Grant
- Angelina Jolie
- [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Jennifer_Love_Hewitt&diff=0&oldid=3849452
Jennifer Love Hewitt]
- It appears to me that you were removing legitimate information from the articles because it is politically incorrect, which (in my book) is not a valid reason. →Raul654 00:24, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
- Raul, Felix F. Bruyns is a troll who appeared here a couple of days ago as User:168.103.232.64. When asked about copyvio regarding his baseball player entries, he did not reply but changed his name. Unfortunately, his copyvio entries remain. Moriori 00:40, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Felix, I had a look at those. Some I agree with - the paragraph you removed from Jennifer Love Hewitt shouldn't really have been there. Others I don't - the swathe of material you removed from Kylie Minogue was a perfectly fair summary of a part of her career. Angelina Jolie and Drew Barrymore I have edited in an attempt to find a compromise that might be acceptable to both you and the people who have been reverting you. Cary Grant I'm leaving alone since I have no idea whether the incident in question is idle gossip or well-known fact. --Stormie 00:44, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Well I disagree with Stormie. None of the material should be culled. Just because other encyclopedias are too worried about appearing prurient doesn't mean Wikipedia has to be. I have restored all the censored material including the Cary Grant story for which I found a reference. Paul Beardsell 01:15, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Paul, the only thing I thought should be culled was the line "References to her breasts cropped up in almost all of her print interviews, and even inspired the creation of a website devoted solely to them [2]" in Jennifer Love Hewitt. Reason being: the website linked to is 404, so obviously that half of the sentence needs to be lopped out, leaving only "References to her breasts cropped up in almost all of her print interviews" which is a terrible, vague, meaningless, unverified (and probably unverifiable) mess of a sentence. I have no problem with someone writing something about the fame of her breasts - but that sentence is terrible. The other articles, my "compromise" edits all involved adding material for clarity or balance, not culling anything. Oh, and the reference you found for the Cary Grant story is fantastic, keep up the good work! --Stormie 01:23, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
- Sorry, I meant to say I disagreed with you in that respect only. I did not follow the link. It has also been pointed out I have used the word prurient incorrectly. Now fixed, kind of. Paul Beardsell 01:29, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- While "Felix F. Bruyns"'s deletions were excessive, I agree with a couple of them. Specifically, an external link that gives a 404 error should not be in WP, and an actress' measurements should not be included. Why? 1) it is POV to list female measurements, but not male. 2) inherently unverifiable--unless you have a tape measure, and access to the person. 3) variable--just because the measurements might be true today, who knows about tomorrow.
- I would not have removed the 'bisexual' reference from Ms. Barrymore's article, but I would argue that it is also POV to cite bisexual people, unless sexual orientation is referenced in all biographical articles. Niteowlneils 16:04, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- It isn't POV if the person in question self-identifies as such, and its POV to try to hide the information. I don't have a problem with the edit Felix made to the Jennifer Love Hewitt article, it was silly, but I'm very worried about censorship, and will revert if Felix gets carried away with this "decency" fixation. Moriori, have you listed the supposed Copyvios on WIkipedia:Copyright problems? RickK 19:06, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Thoughts on new-page-creation notice text
I'd like to see the new-page-creation notice—the one that begins "You are at a page that does not exist yet"—include something short and pithy along the lines of "Please do not create an article about yourself, or an article whose main purpose is to promote a product or business." If interested, please discuss this at Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion#Thoughts_on_new-page-creation_notice_text (not here). Dpbsmith 23:36, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Official Wikipedia song (redux)
Since the original discussion (currently archived in Wikipedia:Village pump/May 2004 archive 2), I've been tossing and turning all night just *knowing* that the right song was only a moment away. It finally struck me in a dream last night--and the lyrics were right here all the time. They just needed a wee bit of updating and correction--OK, a whole bunch of changes--for our particular situation. Using the specifications in that original discussion, I present for your comments The Web Encyclopedia Song. Elf | Talk 22:58, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- No, no, it should be based on Ko-Ko's song in The Mikado, "I've Got a Little List" :-) Seriously, very apropos. Nice! The funny thing is that it was just the other day that I was noting, in the article on Caratacus, that it can also be spelled Caractacus and that it's a version of the name Caradoc. (A Caradoc, a Caradoc, a most ingenious Caradoc...) And, of course, in VfD we were just discussing making Quadranomial expansion a redirect to Multinomial formula... Dpbsmith 19:13, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Caractacus gets around. (ingenious Caradoc... boo... (a play on "A paradox..." from another G&S operetta)) I now remember a song from childhood about "The ladies of the harem of the court of King Caractacus..." but I always thought it was a made-up name. Wikipedia enlightens me again! Glad we've got multiple Gilbert and Sullivan fans here, although I'm afraid that it won't translate well into other Wikis--has G&S ever been successfully translated into other languages? There's so much word play. Elf | Talk 19:37, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedians with reference works
I may start a page called Wikipedia:Wikipedians with reference works for anybody who wants to to list the reference works they own in case there is a question. I have quite a few books on subjects I'm not very interested in, but I'd be glad to look something up if there is an issue. Since these aren't topics I care about, no relevant pages are on my watchlist and I'd never notice a debate. So, if I created such a page, would anybody else be willing to add their own reference works to it? Tuf-Kat 20:27, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
- There already is such a page: Wikipedia:Research resources.--Eloquence*
Spammer at work
can an admin pls put the breaks on this dude: 68.7.15.227 thanks! Erich 23:39, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Missing edit history
What's up with the edit history for Cardiopulmonary resuscitation? I made loads of edits a few days ago (June 4th) and they show up in my contributions but not in the edit history for that page. (The edits are present in the page though). It still says "the database is read only..." but I can't see that message anywhere else now and the database obviously is not read only or I wouldn't be able to write this...? Tjwood 16:26, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- It seems to be back to rights now; I'm not sure if it was a forced page reload I did that solved it. Tjwood 17:26, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Ethnic Groups Infobox
I have been attempting to add the following here, but I keep getting a DB error. I'm no-wiki-ing it to try to get it in. If anyone can work out what is wrong, please feel free to clobber this preamble and the nowiki tags.
There is a proposal to change the ethnic group infobox at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template. Proposed alternatives can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template#Color scheme. Some people may want to propose more drastic changes: see Talk:Jew#Ethnicity box. If you have an opinion, please chime in soon at [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template#Color scheme]]. -- Jmabel 21:24, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)
Goodbye
It was fun while it lasted. But I've interest in working here as long as people just delete what they don't like without discussing it on the appropriate talk pages. There are more mature places on the internet to work. abigail@abigail.nl. Abigail
Kingdom of Israel is largely myth.
The main page of Wikipedia displays an article about Zionism with a link to an article about Kingdom of Israel. The article about the Kingdom of Israel is based too much on Old Testament lore taken at face-value. For one thing, archaeology has shown that Jerusalem did not exist as a city in the period circa 1000 B.C. when Solomon was suppsoed to have ruled there, so the reference to Solomon as a king of Israel is pure fantasy. The story of Solomon is actually based on a king Sulayman who ruled in Arabia Felix.
I am especially sensitive to the inclusion of this kind of myth because I just read an argument about whether the dubious information about the Merovingians from Holy Blood, Holy Grail should even be mentioned in the article about them. Clearly, the myth about the ancient Kingdom of Israel has to be mentioned, because the myth is a powerful influence in Zionism, but at the same time the dubiousness of the Biblical account of the Kingdom of Israel should be discussed as well. Indeed, if fact is to be emphasized more than myth here as in the case of the Merovingians, the entry on the Kingdom of Israel should contain a high proportion of debunking.
ISO 8601 date format
ISO 8601 date format "2004-06-14T05:43Z" is better than "05:43, 2004 Jun 14 (UTC)".
Please require HEIGHT and WIDTH tags for images
Please have the server insert HEIGHT and WIDTH tags for images so the page doesn't jump around when it is loading. --Juuitchan
- This is an excellent suggestion: copying to bugs list.
The image below does not look OK (Monobook skin or Standard skin, Mozilla FireFox 0.8): (but does look OK with either skin using IE6)
===Painter's algorithm===
Illustration for painter's algorithm. Early crappy attempt at vector drawing from me, but I'm giving this nomination a shot anyway. Fredrik 15:21, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- Interesting that Mozilla FireBird 0.7 (the previous version of FireFox) renders both images correctly. So, maybe there is a bug in FireFox 0.8 ? - Bevo 14:22, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- The images seem ok to me, running FireBird 0.8. What are they supposed to look like?--Fangz 23:06, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Three boxed images of the same size, enclosed in a box. And, it's FireFox 0.8 (not FireBird), right? - Bevo 14:40, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Oopsy, I did mean Firefox 0.8. That's what I see. It looks right to me. I'm using the monobook skin, a screen resolution of 800x600, Win 98, with the style sheet mods that give rounded corners and bottom tabs. What about everybody else?--Fangz 00:29, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Looks ok for me after removing the table. This also has the advantage to work better for really small screens (pdas etc). You can use the same techique with the <br style="clear:left"/> at the end for photo galleries as well, the images will wrap to the available screen width then. -- Gabriel Wicke 22:02, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
===Painter's algorithm===
Illustration for painter's algorithm. Early crappy attempt at vector drawing from me, but I'm giving this nomination a shot anyway. Fredrik 15:21, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
- Interesting that Mozilla FireBird 0.7 (the previous version of FireFox) renders both images correctly. So, maybe there is a bug in FireFox 0.8 ? - Bevo 14:22, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- The images seem ok to me, running FireBird 0.8. What are they supposed to look like?--Fangz 23:06, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Three boxed images of the same size, enclosed in a box. And, it's FireFox 0.8 (not FireBird), right? - Bevo 14:40, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Oopsy, I did mean Firefox 0.8. That's what I see. It looks right to me. I'm using the monobook skin, a screen resolution of 800x600, Win 98, with the style sheet mods that give rounded corners and bottom tabs. What about everybody else?--Fangz 00:29, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Looks ok for me after removing the table. This also has the advantage to work better for really small screens (pdas etc). You can use the same techique with the <br style="clear:left"/> at the end for photo galleries as well, the images will wrap to the available screen width then. -- Gabriel Wicke 22:02, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
The image below looks OK (Monobook skin or Standard skin, Mozilla FireFox 0.8): (also looks OK with either skin using IE 6)
===Painter's algorithm===
| | |||||||
Illustration for painter's algorithm. Early crappy attempt at vector drawing from me, but I'm giving this nomination a shot anyway. Fredrik 15:21, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Current Sports EventsOn the eve of the French Open and Stanley Cup happenings, I was wondering if we could make a Current Sports News page, different from the 2004 in sports page that we already have, to cover major events that otherwise might not be covered by Sports in 2004. I watch Sportscenter a lot, I could manage the page well. We could put it on Main Page beat where Current Events and Recenth deaths are at. Antonio Long One Martin
I have no problems with a link as suggested by Hajor. But I think an extra box on the front page is too much, and I am personally not interested at all in sport news. -- Chris 73 | Talk 22:50, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I have Wiki'd for x days now, and my shame is automatically displayed
Article with missing historyDunno if this is a software bug or what, but imagine my surprise on seeing my watchlist report that Ships of the Royal Netherlands Navy has been changed by an anon, then clicking on the diff only to find that it's a new article! Of course, without history, there's only my word that it's not new, but then how did it get on my watchlist? Stan 16:21, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Amazon linksIs anyone familiar enuf with the Amazon "affiliate" program to know if the external links being created here[3] are 'for-profit'? If I find the albums from the amazon.com home page, the links are QUITE different. I am assuming using WP for profit is frowned upon, but I don't remember ever coming across an article that explicitly states that as a policy or guideline. Niteowlneils 19:27, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Help! I screwed up this page [4] somehow (edit conflict or bad section edit or something) and am not sure exactly how to fix it. anthony (see warning) 01:42, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Hiding bot edits on watchlist?Since my watchlist has been flooded by Template namespace initialisation script edits [5], is there any way to disable bots from being visible on this page, similar to how they can be blocked on recent changes? I've tried &hidebots=1 (or &showbots=0, whatever it was), but no luck. Chuq 03:01, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Login timeoutsAbout the automatic log-off:
Since I edit wikipedia as a background activity to other tasks (it beats playing mahjongg!), I often get logged out while editing an article -- which means my edit is either rejected or stamped as anonymous. Now, I am the only user of this machine, so security is not a problem; and I can't see how an inactive logged-in user could have a significant cost for Wikipedia....
New serversAre we still waiting for new servers? Wikipedia speed seems to be getting worse instead of better. RickK 07:01, Jun 4, 2004 (UTC)
the speed of the servers are good but can get better. --Jew 10:00, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC) Possible database corruptionI was adding section headers to the page "Talk:List of sets of unrelated songs with identical titles". After doing a "Show preview", I attempted a "Save page". I got the following error:
After trying it several times, I also tried "Cancel" and got the same error. Same thing if I entered the page title directly just to read it. Checking "My watchlist", I found the page was listed as updated by me. Clicking on the link, I again got the error. I logged out and anonymously fetched the page successfully. The current page, however, is NOT updated, even though its Page history says otherwise. Looks like database corruption to me. How does one address this problem? I want to make some more updates, but I'm afraid to do anything to it now. -- Jeff Q 11:36, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Underlined links in Monobook?Is it possible to switch off underlined links in the Monobook style? I can't, the radio box on my prefs doesn't seem to do anything, on other styles it works. Thanks, Mark Richards 18:36, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
regardless of the bug in the userprefs, you can fix it without learning css coz I'll tell you how. Just insert the code below at this page: User:Mark Richards/monobook.css. /* remove the ugly, recently-reinstated link underlines */
a { text-decoration: none; }
a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }
PiWhat's up at article π ? When did the title start displaying as π ? - Bevo 20:27, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
In the same vein, the Polish 'L' Ł as in Lucasiewicz of Polish Notation fame is not rendering. Ancheta Wis 02:20, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC) New article text, and draft of guideI've just changed the new article text—the text that appears when you edit a page that doesn't yet exist. It now reads:
I've also create a rough draft of a simpler guide to use instead of What Wikipedia is not—one which concentrates on the most common reasons why things end up on VfD. Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Discussion of new article text and proposed guide, not here. Dpbsmith 23:58, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)) Weird thing with categoriesI'm not sure whether this is a bug or a user error, so I'm asking here first. (I've cleared my cache and restarted Netscape, to forestall those questions!) From Category:Dogs, click Category:Dog types. The category exists, has content, has an article assigned to it. Click Sheepdog. It is assigned to the category Dog types, but the link shows as if it doesn't exist and, sure enough, when I click it, I get an edit page rather than a display of the category page--but it doesn't say it doesn't exist, it actually shows the content of the page! Why does it think it doesn't exist at the same time that it knows that it does? Elf | Talk 00:32, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
There seem to be wild cache issues with wikipedia right now, and especially with categories. Anyone know what the deal is? john k 02:13, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC) Template SandboxHow is someone supposed to test a template if template:Sandbox is protected and template:Test is already in use? --Ankur Oops, just noticed actually template:Sandbox too is in use and protected. Well, I guess then I'll try the "Be Bold" idea now. But it would help to have a template sandbox too that would work with the wikipedia:Sandbox.
Oh, Thanks booth of you. I never knew about test.wikipedia.org its a cool place sort of like google labs. --Ankur Wikipedia talk:Vandalism in progressPlease see Wikipedia talk:Vandalism in progress. I'm going to wait until Sunday evening and if there are no objections, I will delete all Vandalism in progress alerts more than one month old. RickK 05:09, Jun 5, 2004 (UTC) Moving Category pagesI am being told I am unable to move Category:Australian MHRs to the correct form, Category: Australian federal MPs. Is there a rule against moving Category pages? If so, what is one supposed to do with a wrongly-titled page? If not, what is the problem? Adam 13:45, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
"The following pages link to this image:" failure for an image?Why is Queenstown, New Zealand not listed under "The following pages link to this image:" on image Media:Queenstown - Remarkables 1.jpg ? - Bevo 18:55, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Editing of main page by anonsI fixed some things in an article from Template:Feature and noticed that is was edited by anon users. Since it shows on the main page, is it a good idea to allow anons to edit it? (BTW, bye to all unitil July 27)Mikkalai 23:21, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Math bug?In the page Barycentric subdivision, several formulas are replaced by the message
Is this my fault, or a software bug?
An edit I made...seems to have vanished (here's the dif[6]--it's to George Bush presidential library. What causes this? I'm fairly sure it's not a cache thing--I did cntrl-F5, and cleared out my cookies and history. Meelar 05:25, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Renaming imagesDoes anyone know whether it's possible to rename an image, eg. by renaming its description page. I can't find anything on the subject, though I would expect a solution other than uploading the image anew just to change the name. Aliter 11:41, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)
StrewthI am not a wikiholic... I am not a wikiholic... urrggg... wow I'm glad that's over. Is there any summary of what happened anywhere?
new message messageI can't get rid of the "you have new message" message, even though I have edited and unedited my Talk page. RickK 05:51, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
thumbnails not right-alignedWhy are the thumbnails on River Weaver and Buttermere not right-aligned? Am I using the wrong markup? Lupin 08:08, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Current Sports Events--> Moved to Talk:Current sports events Sharing with other sitesOn another topic, I wondered if I could ask the sites I have written about to spread the word about us. Ive tried hard to get my doctor, my pharmacist, my pastor, a cop, a boxing trainer, a former Marine and a pastor to be to help us. The only one who has been hired by me out of those is the former Marine my dad. By asking some sites I visit and have written about, we might increase traffic, although two of these sites, Projectvoyeur.com and PurePanties.com are of dubious material. Put your opinions down here, hehe: Antonio Porn Addict Martin
Uh...I don't know. Are the people from "Project Voyeur" the spam-type?? --Menchi 11:44, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Fix Upload pageThe Special:Upload page still says {{msg:PD}}, even though the "msg" part is no longer required. Can someone please fix the page (apparently the script can't do it)?
Template problemI wanted to make a little Template for the Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress page, replacing the not so nice looking *([[User:a.b.c.d]] | [[User talk:a.b.c.d|talk]] | [[Special:contributions/a.b.c.d|contributions]]) part with {{Vip|user:a.b.c.d}}, but somehow the outcome isn't what I expected. What did I do wrong? --Conti 12:12, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC) Hrm.... I was going to say you did nothing wrong, but it does look like template have a problem linking into the User namespace: - UtherSRG 12:43, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I'm not sure why it thinks the pages don't exist, but it works ok if you use the full URL in the template instead.
([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=user:{{{user}}} User:{{{user}}}] | [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=user_talk:{{{user}}} talk] | [[Special:contributions/{{{user}}}|contributions]])
<br/>
New pages?Under the cologne blue skin, there was a taskbar link directly to new pages, now the book skin doesn't have it. Why? -- user:zanimum
REDIRECTs now disallow any extra text?I was trying to add a Category to a REDIRECT page (don't ask rude questions and I won't tell you where to stick them :-). However when I tried to save the change, not only did the Category not get saved, the Edit History wasn't even updated! I have just tested it in my Sandbox and it seems that whereas it used to be possible to append text to a REDIRECT, to explain why it was there, for example, such as "Common mis-spelling", this would seem now to have been forbidden. The edit seems to be simply ignored, but there is no message saying that this has occurred. Was this a planned feature of the MediaWiki 1.3 upgrade? --Phil | Talk 14:57, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
I know that now! (wishing I could recall from whence that is a quote). Well actually I had figured it all along but I wanted to see if it were possible or whether MediaWiki would tell me I was doing something unwise. When the edit was just silently rejected I dug a bit more. It turns out that something which is reasonable and was allowed before—i.e. adding extra explanatory text after a REDIRECT—has now been forbidden for no apparent reason and without any message to explain why MediaWiki is throwing the edit away. --Phil | Talk 15:50, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
You used a template message and appended it to the end of the REDIRECT: if you put your extra text on a new line it gets wiped! A little testing in my Sandbox proves it, and also that the history totally fails to register even the attempt at editing. --Phil | Talk 17:25, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC) ... and just to add a little spice to the mix, putting the Category directive on the same line does allow you to specify a category for a REDIRECT (see Category:Test which has members if no actual text). Which has to make some kind of twisted sense if I can just twist my mind enough ... --Phil | Talk 17:34, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC) MonoBookUhh, my mono book skin just stopped working, I was seeing the pages raw. I switched to Cologne and everything is fine. Is someone working on the monobook css right now? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 17:54, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
What is the policy for dealing with PageRank vandalism?What should be the policy for dealing with articles like Protocol Analyzer (see history)? Right now, we list them as copy vios, and link to the site that they plagiarize. However, due to Wikipedia's high page rank and the many number of sites that clone wikipedia data, this will still allow these vandals of achieving their goal of increasing page rank. It would be more effective to make these speedy deletion candidates. What do you guys think? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 18:06, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
Press kitsWhile browsing the official web site of the Cassini space probe (that will arrive at Saturn in three weeks), I downloaded the press kit, which is a 400 kb PDF file. In my opinion, this sort of thing is a goldmine for Wikipedia articles: it lists each and every detail about the probe, the planet and its moons in a plain language, designed for journalists who aren't experts on the subject. It includes lots of pretty pictures that are also very informative (in this case, the orbit layout, the planet interior, the ring structure, the probe schematic, and so on). The press kit has no copyright statement on it. Coming from the JPL, I suspect it's public domain. So wouldn't be a good idea to harvest press kits from the various gov. organization that are trying to show off? What's the actual copyright status on them? What could be a proper WikiProject procedure? This press kit is so well done that it could be splitted into two articles: Saturn and the Cassini probe, that could be almost wikified and left that way. Would others be the same? Alfio 18:51, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC) The JPL is a division of Nasa - NASA images generally are not copyrighted. You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages. - http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html →Raul654 18:59, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
Trouble editing template namespaceFor some reason, trying to save a change to Template:Album gets an error message, but saving anything else works fine. Can anybody else edit the template namespace? Tuf-Kat 23:05, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC) Sorry- we have a problem... The wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request. To get information on what's going on you can visit #wikipedia. An "offsite" status page is hosted on OpenFacts. Generated Tue, 08 Jun 2004 23:03:51 GMT by wikipedia.org (squid/2.5.STABLE4-20040219)
Also Known AsIs it possible for Wikipedia to have some kind of AKA tag akin to categories? Alot of the articles I work on have many names and instead of putting in the article "Also called x,y, and z" I'd rather if there were simply a {{AKA: x,y,z}} feature. Oberiko 00:51, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
sorting on category pageI cant figure out the sorting of articles on category pages. On category:North American rivers the Yadkin rivers was sorted to C and I changed the link to Yadkin river. So now it is sorted to Y. OK. (Ok, now its a north carolina river) Then I looked at Pecos River, which is already sorted to P. But there the category is also only category:North American rivers. How does it work? --141.53.194.251 07:54, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Missing imagesI notice that some articles (at least Maui and Haleakala) are missing images. The server seems to be trying to download them; my browser says from this "file": en.wikipedia.org/style/monobook/headbg.jpg No idea what "headbg.jpg" is (not one of the four missing images) or why the download is not working or where the images went. Anybody notice similar problems? - Marshman 08:12, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
How to get images permission?I could see many people easily get permission to use photos. I want to know if there is any letter templates for that. Why I'm asking is my English is poor and I wanted to use [8] in the article Sari but couldn't even get response. I think, it needs bit diplomacy. Experienced people can share. TIA. --Rrjanbiah 08:46, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for all the people who helped me in this thread. Thanks for Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission and Wikipedia:Requested pictures--that is what I was looking for. BTW, recently the webmaster of [9] replied me stating that the photo is from agency and so he can't help. Unfortunately I couldn't understand this jargon ("agency"). Is there anyway to find the agency of the photo? Also, is there any place in Wikipedia where I can confirm if the image is in PD or conforms to the license? Say for example, I could find the photo in many places [10] --Rrjanbiah 05:37, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
New layout kudosThe new page layout is just wonderful: clean, logical, functional and uncluttered. To whoever is responsible for the new design: Thanks for the great work! AxelBoldt 10:26, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I love the new layout. As I experience it (Mac OS X 10.3.4, Safari) it looks prettier and the text is more legible and the pages are just as information-dense or maybe denser than before. There are very minor glitches—for example, the article creation text tells you to click "edit this page" but the tab, of course, just reads "edit." Dpbsmith 00:06, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC) I like the new layout too - especially how each user can customize it for themselves. Perhaps we should create a page for Monobook fans? - jredmond 00:17, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC) In general, I like the new layout, but I still can't agree with overriding the user's default font choices, and forcing a sans-serif font in particular. See also Wikipedia_talk:Serif or sans-serif and MediaWiki_talk:Monobook.css#Font typeface —Steven G. Johnson 06:04, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)
When I first saw MonoBook, I actually went to IRC to ask who made this amazing-looking artistic theme. People who like the standard skin don't value aesthetics! --Menchi 16:40, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Man pagesTwo questions: (1) under what license are Unix man pages released? (I guess that those used by GNU Linux, use, well, GFDL, but want to ascertain this.) (2) Is there a policy regarding inclusion of whole or part of man pages on Wikipedia? In the rlogin entry, for instance, it is awfully tempting to include sections of the man page, but I do not know whether there's a relevant policy. -- Itai 11:58, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Delete problemGot this trying to delete Baron Rutherford: A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
from within function "Article::doDeleteArticle". MySQL returned error "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '} AND cur_title='Baron_Rutherford'' at line 1". - UtherSRG 12:45, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
pref system/ access key update
Translators: Many translated accesskey-XY and tooltip-XY messages need to be moved to the Monobook.js array, they are now deprecated. The remaining ones might follow soon. I also changed the wording and key of the 'clear your cache' message as it's now also displayed above the prefs as well. A new string is qbsettingsnote. To get the new files, a reload might be necessary (the usual reload in moz, ctrl-f5 in IE/Opera, cmd-r in safari). -- Gabriel Wicke 15:02, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC) How does Google index Wikipedia?Wikipedia would seem to be part of the "deep Web" and hence inaccessible to Google. That is, there isn't any static page that links to all the other pages (or a static tree of such links). So how does Google's spider find articles? Does it watch special:newpages, or does it have a Wikipedia-specific search procedure (perhaps based on special:allpages), or what? The speed with which new Wikipedia articles get indexed is astonishing.... Dpbsmith 16:11, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Changing some link namesWhat does everybody think of changing:
in the bar at the top (in MonoBook) as they seem redundant to me and they are taking too much space (plus I hate this MS trend). Discussion at WT:MNT. Dori | Talk 19:09, Jun 9, 2004 (UTC)
Deletion logCan someone please add Wikipedia:Deletion log to Category:Wikipedia:Deletion? It's a difficult article to find normally. - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 19:18, Jun 9, 2004 (UTC)
Category rendering in historyIf you look at the history for Wikipedia:Categories for deletion, you will see that think link for Category:Jewish mythology appears red and links to the "edit" page, as if it didn't exist. However, even when you click on that link, there is data there. Is this a mediawiki bug? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 20:05, Jun 9, 2004 (UTC)
Another reason why wikipedia rocks the worldEven if an article isn't exactly POV, the debate and discussion regarding how the article should be written is completely public, and anyone can chime in. What other so-called source of information lays all that on the table? Can you imagine if Fox News or the New York Times or Encarta published their internal debates? Wikipedia rocks. Kingturtle 23:43, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC) Hmmm I bet seem as they will be in the history forever, future historians will be fastinated by it when the WP has taken over the world. There are historians who study the history of the Oxford dictionary and the Encyclopedia Brittanica apparently so I'm sure wikipedia will be a source of study at some point G-Man 23:51, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
True, the turbulences under a seemingly calm surface can actually be more interesting to some readers. There probaly are WP readers who browse our encyclopedia mainly for the discussions at the Talk pages, instead of the articles proper themselves. And I do wonder from time-to-time how exactly do Britannica people reach their final form on their controversial articles. For an encyclopedia as old as EB, the behind-the-scene debates themeselves must be a delight to read. Indeed, writing an article is just half the fun. The other half is to participate in Talk discussions, engaing or not. --Menchi 06:23, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC) I almost always go through the talk page when looking something up - they often have all sorts of extra information and colorful bits and pieces that didn't make it into the main article. I actually found myself wondering a while a go whether years and years from now Wikipedia Talk and History pages might contitute major historical sources, for seeing how grasp of an event or issue has changed over time or how popular culture has shifted (by the number of sorts of articles bieng staryted at a given date for example). Hmm, I may have been putting too much thought to this...Datepalm17 22:12, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC) What an interesting thought. I bet someday a historian will read this very discussion were having now, and thin "gosh, didn't these wikipedians have foresight" so just in case....Hello Historian... G-Man 22:51, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC) What's going on with imagesI've noticed all of a sudden that thumbnailed images seem to have gone to the far left of the article space and overlap with the taskbar. I dont know if anyone else has experienced this or whether it's only me. But it wasn't doing it a few days ago. G-Man 23:48, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Coventry is an example, although it only seems to be doing it on one computer I use. I was using another computer earlier and it was fine. G-Man 19:52, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC) Example of image rendering concernsBorrowing from Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates two image rendering examples follow.........- Bevo 18:48, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
{|
{|
[[Image:Painter's algorithm.png|thumb|left|400px|Painter's algorithm]] Illustration for painter's algorithm. Early crappy attempt at vector drawing from me, but I'm giving this nomination a shot anyway. Fredrik 15:21, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Interesting that Mozilla FireBird 0.7 (the previous version of FireFox) renders both images correctly. So, maybe there is a bug in FireFox 0.8 ? - Bevo 14:22, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I'm having this problem too. FireFox 0.8 here. Fredrik (talk) 09:14, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC) Looks ok for me after removing the table (Case 3). This also has the advantage to work better for really small screens (pdas etc). You can use the same techique with the <br style="clear:left"/> at the end for photo galleries as well, the images will wrap to the available screen width then. -- Gabriel Wicke 22:02, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC) Suddenly, this afternoon the image in Case 2 above is rendering OK using Mozilla FireFox 0.8. - Bevo 19:15, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Please add a "create new section" link for articlesWe have links to edit individual sections, so why not a link to add a new section? It would be especially useful on this page. --Juuitchan
What happened to this simple lightning article edit?I edited the page on Lightning to remove a line about unsubstantiated speculation on the shuttle columbia crash being caused by lightning (a single sentance removal) and it made all these [[12]] other changes I didn't make!!? Did I do something wrong? Is this a bug?? Deglr6328 03:23, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)
Wikidictionary or Pedia?I have in mind a series of concepts related to each other, and while some of them are pretty short, they have the potential to become much longer. So my question is whether to just go ahead and make stub articles (which are easier to look for), put them in the Wikidictionary or just use one main Pedia article to summarize. One example is: Principle I: Long vowels rise. Principle II: Short nuclei fall. Principle III: Back vowels move to the front. These principles are defined by William Labov for chain shifting, something found in language change. For this example, I would like to make 4 pages (William Labov already has a page). Is that making an excess of short articles? TIA bab
Template namespace initialisation scriptWhat on earth is Template namespace initialisation script? In the article on Something Might Happen it changed {{msg:spoiler}} to {{spoiler}}, with no apparent difference on the surface -- you can still read the same old spoiler warning. What is sthis all about? <KF> 12:43, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Book blurbOriginally posted on Wikipedia talk:Fair use but garnered no response yet ... Is the blurb on the back of a paperback, or on the flyleaf of a hardback, fair game for inclusion in a Wikipedia article? It would seem intuitively obvious, since the purpose of the blurb is to garner publicity for the book, but is there any hard policy? I would of course assume that any such text would be clearly annotated as such. --Phil | Talk 13:05, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)
Category weirdnessI can't work out why some categories don't appear to be displaying properly. Take a look at the foot of Avignon and the category Category:Cities, towns and villages of France. Even though it's a populated category, it's displaying as if it was an empty article. Can anyone explain what's going on here? -- ChrisO 15:38, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
About the new skinThis might be rather late but, why exactly was it decided to change the skin. and why was no-one told about it before it happened?. Personally I find the new skin quite hideous, it hurts my eyes reading it, I've had to go back to using the old one. I think this might be quite off-putting for readers. What does anyone else think? G-Man 19:58, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Page duplicationRecently, I've noticed a lot of accidental duplications of pages, VfD especially. What are these, precisely, and is there anything we can do to get rid of them? Thanks, Meelar 20:22, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Bulleted listsWhy is it no longer possible to have a gap (one empty line) in a bulleted list? (Or am I again wrong?) <KF> 20:46, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Linked ImagesNoticed this at Template talk:Wikipediasister. I think this is important and is missing attention. --Ankur 21:04, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC) Is there any way the images can be made clickable? (ie act as links?) Otherwise it would be annoying to click on the image, expecting to go to the site, when one goes to the Image: page instead. Dysprosia 01:12, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Absolutely. I mean, a lot of people coming to wikipedia are newcomers. They've spent there lifetime clicking on images that either enlarge or take them to another article. To a newcomer it obviously is a strange behaviour for an image to take the user to the attribution page even if the image does enlarge. On the main page it is expected that clicking on the image will take you to the article rather the Image:Xyz.png page. So definitely image on main page should take you to the article. This reminds me of the wikipedia logo - which takes you to the homepage of wikipedia instead of Image:WikipediaLogo.png or something of the sort. Now if there were a solution to the problem of wikipedians who will want to modify the image. --Ankur 02:29, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
m:Main Page wikiquote:Main Page wikisource:Main Page wiktionary:Main Page wikibooks:Main Page --Patrick 15:57, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC) Case sensitivity in "Go"I can't even begin to express what a profoundly bad idea it is to have case sensitivity for the "Go" 'search' (for instance, "gnu project") without providing a page of case-insensitive alternatives should the 'search' fail to find any results. If this isn't remedied, it seems necessary to provide redirect pages for these case variations, despite it being a tremendous waste of time. - Centrx 21:27, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Completely disagree. Case sensitivity is important in Wikipedia because articles are differentiated by case. Ab is different from AB. RickK 23:52, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)
For what it's worth, the programmers have included searches for several possible capitalizations of articles when using Go: I don't remember the order, but after trying "as entered", they try all lowercase, all uppercase, and all lower case except with the first letter of each word uppercase (probably others--I can't find the article). There are two I feel should be added:
I think all "go" searches should be case-insensitive. Articles with differentiated case are really only of interest to editors (and then mostly for editing purposes), and to people who know precisely (down to the capitalization) what they are looking for; even those who know precisely what they are looking for may not correctly guess what capitalization scheme is in use for an article. Articles that might inadvertently turn up in a case-insensitive search (for example, Ab when one is looking for AB) could just have the disambiguation notice ("This article is about... for other meanings, see...") at the top. -- Wapcaplet 00:37, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Commas in article titlesI've noticed a sudden rash (well, a few pages I have on my watchlist) suddenly being moved from their current page name to the same name with an added comma. Example: European Parliament election 2004 has been moved to European Parliament election, 2004. I'm not sure this helps (actually, I'm sure of the reverse) as if someone enters an address directly they are more likely to enter it without the comma. Comments anyone? --VampWillow 23:33, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It was just the arbitrary way that [[User:RobLa|] named all the U.S. presidential election articles when he created them from public domain text. TC was the first to complain [14] and I agree that the format is not at all natural to link to. For example, 2000 U.S. presidential election is more natural and thus more likely to be directly linked to without using the pipe trick than U.S. presidential election, 2000. If you want to have this changed, then goto Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions and argue your case. If a change is approved I volunteer to move all U.S. presidential election articles and fix any broken redirects. --05:04, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Have re-opened disussion on this at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles) Please continue disussion there. Thanks. --VampWillow Can't edit Template:OpentaskI've tried at least a dozen times today to edit Template:Opentask. Everytime, the page won't load after I his "save page" and after a few minutes has passed, I get Database error: A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software...from within function "Article::updateArticle". MySQL returned error "1205: Lock wait timeout exceeded; Try restarting transaction". I want to chage the "wikify" line to: <li>'''[[Wikipedia:Glossary|Wikify]]:''' [[Antioch, Pisidia]], [[Euthymia]], [[Candaba, Pampanga]], [[Lector]], [[Leroy_Chiao]], '''[[Wikipedia:deadend pages|Deadend Pages]]''' Anyone else getting this problem? --Jiang 23:57, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
After almost a week, Template:Opentask is still frozen. Sigh .... Is it possible to start a new Template, delete the old template, then rename/move the new template to take up the void ? Will this solve our problem ? I ain't an Admin. I can't try it out it myself. I don't even know if this is a good idea or not, so I shouldn't try it, I suppose ..... -- PFHLai 05:22, 2004 Jun 16 (UTC) Aligning an image without a table?I'm sure this is recorded in some FAQ, but I can't find it. I want to float an image to the right with text filling in whatever space remains to the left. Is using a table the best (only?) way to do this? Thanks. --Fritzlein 05:23, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Can't make my mind up ...Article on nerd has had an edit by an IP address user. To the list of Examples of the stereotype in the media they have added
I can't quite decide whether this is misplaced within the article, an example of minor vandalism, or totally accurate, so I have brought it to a wider audience for amusement and response ;-) --VampWillow 11:49, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Ethnic Groups InfoboxThere is a proposal to change the ethnic group infobox at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template. Proposed alternatives can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template#Color scheme. Some people may want to propose more drastic changes: see Talk:Jew#Ethnicity box. If you have an opinion, please chime in soon at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template#Color scheme. -- Jmabel 21:24, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC) Suggestion: Rendering of "wurble (thing)"(William M. Connolley 22:32, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)) There are quite a few articles of the form, e.g., "Joe Brown (climber)". To refer to these, its necessary (I think) to write: Joe Brown (climber)|Joe Brown. But since the ()'s is (always?) inteded to be hidden, couldn't the wiki software do this automatically?
Help with accents in article nameI just attempted to move the article Bogoljub Karic to Bogoljub Karić. What I got was something that the link Bogoljub Karić certainly goes to - but it displays at the top of the article as Bogoljub Karić (the URL has Bogoljub_Kari%C4%87). What have I done wrong?! Can it be fixed!? —Stormie 22:39, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)
Problem doing a DiffI tried doing a Diff on the most recent change to Atlanta, Georgia from the Recent Changes page, and I got a database error: A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was: SELECT old_namespace,old_title,old_timestamp,old_text,old_flags,old_user_text,old_comment FROM "old" WHERE old_id=4043094 from within function "DifferenceEngine::loadText". MySQL returned error "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '"old" WHERE old_id=4043094' at line 1". Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta%2C_Georgia" I tried going to the article, looking at the History, and doing the Diff that way, and got the same error. But when I opened a new window and tried it, it worked fine. RickK 23:28, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)
I miss the colored diffsYesterday, I could recognize which words were changed in an edit-diff. Today I can not. Is there some preference I ought to change to get this feature back again?
.diffchange {color: red;}
Holy, somebody just changed the diff to a ginormous fontsize! How can I change it back? ".diffchange {size: NOT-OVERSIZED"? ;-) --Menchi 03:48, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
<font color="red">diff text goes here</font>
<span class="diffchange">diff text goes here</span>
Was the recent drop in the font size in the two parallel diff text columns (using Standard skin) part of this change? It suddenly became smaller and now I have to lean forward in my chair to peer at the screen and see what changed. Was that discussed anywhere? Can I change it back on my own? –Hajor 13:36, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC) Huge imagesHow firm is the 100K guideline? There's a bunch of HUGE photos going in, such as Image:Charmed Rose McGowan.jpg , which is over 1.3 Megabytes. Niteowlneils 04:57, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
1.3 is ridiculous. But it's quite bad when you click on a thumbnail size, and you get a image that's basically one fingernail larger than the thumbnail. (What's the point?) ^_* --Menchi 22:22, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC) I agree that it is annoying when you click on a picture, the "larger" version is basically the same size, and that 100K might be a little low, but jeez, this one[16] is 1858933 bytes, 3783x2543 pixels, or (according to Photoshop) 12.61x8.477 inches, but that's gotta be print size or something, because using 1024x768 monitor resolution, I can only see a small fraction of the picture at a time in a maximized browser window. I mean, we're talking a headshot several times bigger than life-size. Wikipedia is not paper, but at some point there's gotta be bandwidth issues, and what about dial-up users? Other than the 100K request on the upload page, and the 2M hard file limit, nobody says/does anything when people are uploading pics that are basically useless when not thumbnailed? (Actually, I may crop some, as some have quite a bit of wasted space, but I'm reluctant to do anything more drastic that might open me to "lowered image quality" complaints. There's no way to put the cropped image at the same name, and still have the original version available thru the history, right?) Niteowlneils 02:39, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
A problemEvery time I go to a different page, a message flashes up, saying "A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug? Line 363 Error: 'ta' is undefined". What's causing this, and how can I fix it? It only happens when I use the "standard" skin. Meelar 05:43, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
IE 6.0. Meelar 05:56, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Reloading didn't help for me, I had to Delete my cache (ALT+T ALT+O ALT+F <ENTER>) to make it go away, even tho' I have IE set to load the page "every time", instead of the default "automatically". Niteowlneils 02:47, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Working barefoot in the Wiki VillageArbitration and de-adminshipProof of blatant double standardsRequest here was removed. There is ABSOLUTELY NO place in public Wiki space where this can be put without it being immedately removed or redirected by wikipolice to some 'quarantaine quarters. On the contrary, if admin complainants care to carry active editors in ludicrous "arbitrations" without trying to resolve dispute first, such complainants are heard and pampered viz. titillated. So they feel encouraged to "admin" even more in such masturbatory styles. Alas, they are also, by this very action, de facto, and automatically requesting review of their own administrative actions, AND desysoping. As I ALREADY stated, redirecting or CUTTING my request is NOT, repeat NOT a REVIEW of admin actions - but Wikipolice "maintanance" as usual. I therefore LEAVE WIKI having made my final point. - Good bye, and good riddance :O) irismeister 14:27, 2004 Jun 11 (UTC)
Proposed practical measures
I have no idea what Wikicreative indices are and why you think they're necessary. Can you elaborate? RickK 23:10, Jun 12, 2004 (UTC) EditingWhen attempting to edit Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, one comes across a "database error." One is instructed to restart the transaction. What would cause such a problem? -- Emsworth 14:45, Jun 12, 2004 (UTC)
Identical articles on Wikipedia and encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.comSnap! http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/History%20of%20Scotland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Scotland I'm not a wikipedian but found one of your articles useful reading today. Then found the identical one. Just letting anyone concerned know, in case it's a problem.
That's ok then, wish more of the 'net was more open. I've often found wikipedia useful but virtual home is the erratic but sometimes breath taking h2g2 (and I spend too much time on the internet already). "What links here" broken for images?I've noticed recently that clicking on "What links here" for an Image: page lists nothing, even though pages do link to the image. For example, click on the image from Bose-Einstein condensate, and then click on the image's "What links here" — it says that nothing links to it. Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug? Thanks. —Steven G. Johnson 20:56, Jun 12, 2004 (UTC)
Math symbolsIs it just me, or are some math symbols appearing as squares in the Monobook skin? For example, the right arrow (→) appears as a square, which renders some articles, such as domain, codomain, and range, difficult to read (although note in these articles I changed the inline math expressions that involved a right arrow into LaTeX---revert to earlier versions to see the squares). I think the sans-serif font is to blame. I don't believe sans-serif font supports a right arrow symbol. I think we should change the default font back to a Roman font or at least a font which supports all the math symbols the articles use. What does everyone think? –Matt 22:37, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC) On the other hand, I see the right arrow appears correctly on this page, so perhaps it is just my computer... –Matt 22:38, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone know of any ways to solve this problem? Preferably without changing skins, so as to simulate what someone from the outside (i.e., look up an article without an account) would see. I have tried flushing my cache and history, to no avail. Currently, for me, the ·, →, and − have appeared as squares. –Matt 11:00, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
On Providing Sources For FictionHello. I wanted to disuss to you about loosening your concrete rule of providing a source. I do not believe providing a source is necessary for all articles, especially when it's about fiction. I believe that all that is needed to solve issues about fiction is logical reasoning. Please be aware of your policy and try to change it for the satisfaction of many people such as me. --Marcus2
She said they were real, so he tried
About Mario being a radical Trotskyite insurgent, the logical reasoning you gave is ridiculous and has no comparison to mine on a different matter. Besides, this is POVish. Please change your policy, or at least let me edit the articles. --Marcus2
Please watch the language. Not all laborers are Trotskyites, not everybody who wears red are communists, and Mario in no way fights against "entrenched capitalist interests." Eat your hat! --Marcus2 Nobody's stopping you from editing the articles, but you haven't really convinced people that we should change our policy of requiring sources on fictional material. As such, I have to ask that you continue to follow them. Best, Meelar 23:42, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC) GoodbyeIt was fun while it lasted. But I've no interest in working here as long as people just delete what they don't like without discussing it on the appropriate talk pages. There are more mature places on the internet to work. abigail@abigail.nl. Abigail
I did not threaten to behead you. Were you talking about me? --Marcus2
For background, please see the pre-blanking version of User_talk:Abigail-II (see [17]). I would urge her to un-blank her talk page and respond. You demand a discussion, and you've got one, so please participate in it. -- Curps 00:39, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Co-WritingWould anyone be interested in writing an article with me? I like to write articles in Computer Science and Science and Political stuff (maybe some other stuff too)...but two+ heads are better than one! Please reply here or on my talk page. Ilyanep 01:07, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Some Pages too longThere should be a mass cleanup of the Village Pump and Vfd pages...they take at least 15-20 seconds to load on my DSL! Ilyanep 01:07, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC) Admin enforcement requested by AC page set-upI just set up a page that will be used by the Arbitration Committee to inform Admins of arbitration rulings that we would like to see enforced. Please see Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Admin enforcement requested for current requests. --mav 02:08, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Election results"Elections are over. Congratulations to ..." To whom? I don't see any results. What am I missing? RickK 03:03, Jun 13, 2004 (UTC) Confused categorisation of "Kelvin"Kelvin is tagged as belonging to the category SI base units but SI base units does not list Kelvin. Any ideas on what's going on here? -- Grunt 03:16, 2004 Jun 13 (UTC) I went to Kelvin and did an "Edit" and "Save". Since I didn't modify anything, nothing shows up in History. But lo and behold, Kelvin now appears in Category:SI base units. -- Curps 15:52, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC) A related issue is some items bizarrely sorted under "C". For instance Atom was listed under "C" in Category:Chemistry. Doing the no-modification Edit+Save trick on Atom fixed this too. An actual modification will also fix it. -- Curps 16:02, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC) Kingdom of Israel is largely myth.Moved to: Talk:Zionism Sandbox for TemplatesShouldn't there be a [[Template:____]] page for testing out templates just like Wikipedia:Sandbox? One could use the string "{{{inuse}}}" in the page when working on it, so that when someone views the template he/she/they know(s) that the page is in use, but the "inuse" message won't appear in the page when the template is transcluded. -- Paddu 10:28, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
worldhistory.comMoved from Wikipedia:Reference desk. I was wandering on some google results when I found this site. It seems to be using ALL Wikipedia content on it. The page just downloads the Wikipedia page and then prints it on their site, along with ads and sponsor links all around it (and their "on the news" is just a google link, as well as their other "features" are just "sucked out" from other sites). I googled wikipedia about this site name and didn't found anything, so I suppose nobody's aware of this yet. But, anyway, there ARE texts over there saying the article is from Wikipedia, but, is this alright or legal or what? I know Wikipedia is free and etc, but can they do that? Even with all those ads? Aren't they USING Wikipedia and it's content for dragging users to their page so they get hits on their ads? That's what it seems to me! Compare: http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/N/Nikola-Tesla.htm with Nikola Tesla http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/D/Dilbert.htm with Dilbert http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/W/Wikipedia.htm with Wikipedia Just change that letter after "/wiki/" and try it with ANYTHING! Hope I'm being helpful warning about this, and sorry if the reference desk isn't the right place for it
"Page does not exist" warningThis may sound silly, but I've just noticed that the notice one gets on pages that do not exist is: "(Wikipedia does not have an article on this topic yet. To start the article, click Edit this page.)" Thing is, under the current default skin, there is no "Edit this page" link - there is simply an "edit" tab at the top of the page. Could someone modify this message? I gather it's somewhere in the MediaWiki: namespace - in which case, by the way, feel free to move this request into that article's Talk page and continue the discussion there, if this is more appropriate. (I've never really dealt with interface before.) Ideally, the "Edit this page" part should be a link to the relevant edit page. -- Itai 12:27, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Automatically fixing category sorting under "C" ?It seems that there was a bug at one time, causing any article added to a category to be sorted under "C". Articles sorted this way remain there until the next time they are modified. For instance, Category:Programming languages, as of this moment, has "Ada programming language" listed under "C", as well as "JavaScript", "Fortran", "Lisp programming language". Fixing this is very simple for any individual article: just Edit it and Save. This can be done even without making any changes during the edit, in which case the "modification" won't even show up in the article History. But the category will now show the article under its correct alphabetical letter. The problem is, there are many such bogus "C" listings, scattered over all the various categories and sub-categories. It may be months before some of the articles in question get edited and modified in the normal course of Wikipedia editing. Is there any way to run a script to fix this globally, or must we wait for the problem to fix itself over the coming weeks and months? -- Curps 16:37, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Section editingWhen editing only a single section, where you click on the edit link next to the section name and cannot edit other parts of the page, the software should not prompt an editing conflict if other sections of the page are changed. This would be quite beneficial, especially for active pages like the Village Pump or VfD and, if section editing is only a user interface thing and still posts the entire article, then changing that would be of great benefit to conserving Wikipedia bandwidth, etc. - Centrx 20:18, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC) I thought this was changed with the latest change of the software. RickK 21:00, Jun 13, 2004 (UTC) HELP!!!Hi! I started the Current Sports Events page yesterday, by copying the Current Events page model, but something went wrong, and the letters look extremely small....I need help, can someone correct this? Antonio World Matrix Martin 20:something 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Skin changingRecently, I've noticed a few changes. For example, instead of nonexistent pages appearing in red, they've only got a red question mark next to them. Also, links are no longer underlined. At the same time, section editing stopped working. Why is this happening, and how can I change it back? Meelar 22:49, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
80x15 link buttonIn case it's useful to anyone, tonight I made this:
It's the vaguely-standard link button size of 80x15. Feel free to use it to link to Wikipedia. Marnanel 01:04, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Hijacked browser keysAlong with the new layout, Wikipedia seems to now hijack browser keys. For example, when I hit "alt-f", which normally brings me to the "file" menu of my browser, Wikipedia instead moves my cursor to the "search" box on the right hand side. When I hit "alt-e", which normally brings me to the "edit" menu of my browser, Wikipedia instead seemingly does nothing - until I happen to hit the "enter" key, at which time it magically brings me to the "edit" page for the article I happen to be on, even if I hit a bunch of other keys in between "alt-e" and "enter". I'm sure that the heart of whoever made this feature was in the right place. But please. Please. Turn it off. There's nothing worse, from a UI point of view, than taking something that the user knows so well that he doesn't even think about it, and replace it with something else entirely. It stops me in my tracks, confuses me, and forces me to think about things on a conscious level that otherwise are entirely subconscious. Moreover, it can be viewed, in a way, as rude. I know how to use my browser. I know how to edit Wikipedia articles. Please don't presume that you know better than me how I should use my browser and how I should edit Wikipedia articles. Thank you. -Rwv37 03:29, Jun 14, 2004 (UTC)
I believe it is only a feature with the Monobook skin. It doesn't look like there's a way to turn it off inf Prefs (probably should be), so you'll probably have to switch back to Standard if you want to use the ALT keys. Niteowlneils 05:50, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Seeing as accesskeys are a W3C standard, it's not really fair to say that a site (the Wikipedia) using them is hijacking keys. It's the browsers that needlessly cede control over their shortcut keys. Apparently IE on PC, and Firefox on several platforms, stupidly assign conflicting accesskeys and don't do anything about the conflicts. I'm lucky, because Firefox on Mac assigns accesskeys to ctrl which don't conflict with anything — I'm having a blast using them. Nathan 19:52, Jun 15, 2004 (UTC)
ISO 8601 date formatISO 8601 date format "2004-06-14T05:43Z" is better than "05:43, 2004 Jun 14 (UTC)" for signatures, etc. Rajasekaran Deepak 06:20, 2004 Jun 14 (UTC) The ISO-8601 formats are lovely for creating computer-readable text, but are not too readable for humans. I believe this argument has been done to death before but sadly cannot recall just where. HTH HAND--Phil | Talk 13:51, Jun 14, 2004 (UTC) My own preference would be writing all dates in ISO 8601 format and having the software optionally display them differently... but that probably won't happen. Fredrik (talk) 14:47, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Relevance is niceWhat or who determines the daily featured article? I wish they would select ones with a bit more relevance to todays problems/issues and entertainment.
China blocks WikipediaI think we could all see this one coming - sad but probably inevitable...
-- ChrisO 07:54, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I'm typing this from Beijing. It looks to me that the block has been lifted? (The Chinese Wikipedia is still blocked though.) -- ran 11:34, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)
Results for the Elections to the Board of TrusteesCongratulations to Angela and Anthere, who have been elected on the m:Board of Trustees as Voluteer User Representative and Contributing Active Member representative, respectively! But — where are the election results? In any election I know, the final results (which candidate got how many votes) are published together with the announcement of the winner(s). Lupo 08:43, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I think most candidates agreed to results being published, except for those who are not often on the mailing list, and did not see people requests. Danny is busy getting these last agreements. Hopefully, results will be visible in a few hours.
Imran let some of the results for top vote-getters out on IRC, having gotten permission from the candidates involved. As they were stated:
I apologize if I'm stepping on anyone's toes by posting this, but it was stated publically, and people are getting antsy for actual numerical results. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:41, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
The EconomistI'm not sure if this has already been raised, but Wikipedia has got a mention in a leader in this week's The Economist as a "surprisingly good open-source encyclopedia" in an article on the economics of open-source generally. Looks like wikipedia's star is still very much on the rise. Kudos to all. 217.159.81.197 18:43, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Stub msg weirdnessAnyone else having {{stub}} behaving erratically? It can have the normal old message, like at Panchathan Record Inn, or be "Template:Stub", like at Xanthosoma. Sure look the same to me. Niteowlneils 03:34, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This weirdness has to do with some changes we've been discussing over at Template talk:Stub. This probably warrants a post to wikitech-l. --Diberri | Talk 04:22, Jun 15, 2004 (UTC) Adding Category:Disambiguation to Template:disambigWould adding [[Category:Disambiguation]] (or perhaps [[Category:Disambiguation pages]]) to Template:disambig be a good idea? I know that disambiguation articles would not instantly show up in Category:Disambiguation, but as they are edited, they would be slowly added to it, and this would be better than adding them all by hand even more slowly (and unreliably)... It would also eventually replace the need to maintain Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages which currently takes forever and a day to even load. --ssd 05:10, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Stamps and bank notes as image sources?A lot of stamps and bank notes display well-made portraits of important persons, and we might want to use this source to fill up missing portraits for Wikipedia biographic articles, cf. e.g. http://www.th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de/~jr/physstamps.html . On the one hand, these images are of course copyrighted by the respective national banks and postal authorties that have issued them, but on the other hand, a bank note or a stamp is such a hugely distributed and often displayed object, that it could be considered fair use if we used them for our purposes, too. Opinions? Simon A. 12:29, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Morse code article space rendering problemIn the Morse code article, the american (railroad) morse characters need to render with internal spaces. The code in place is currently ·& nbsp ;& nbsp ;& nbsp ;· · & dagger ; (note - spaces added to prevent interpretation( which is rendering as · · · † which has no internal spaces. Why is the & nbsp ; being ignored? How do I fix it? Rick Boatright 14:27, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
· ··†
Um, this is a bit off topic, but the HTML "tidying" seems to have broken <small> usage in tables--previously you could make the whole table small with one command, now you'd have to add it to every tr. Compare an old version of Seattle with the one right after 1.3, with now. Or, as of this moment, the table of companies at Houston, which I believe used to be all small, but now only the first row is. Anyway, my actual question is, can you point me to info about this 'tidy' feature, and/or places to comment about what it has done to existing articles? Niteowlneils 19:20, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Half-million article poolThere's still a day left to get your vote in on the Wikipedia:Half-million pool. Based on the current bets, the English Wikipedia is expected to pass 500,000 articles sometime in early 2005. There's no prizes other than the opportunity to gloat over your peers. And isn't that good enough? The contest will be closed to new entries at 03:07 Jun 17, 2004 (UTC). -- Cyrius|✎ 18:44, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC) Bullet lists and imagesAt least on the in the news template, if the image is at all to the right of an item in a bullet, even just a half line, the alighnment of the entire item will leave space for the image, even though the remainder of the margin is just empty space. I see this all the time with the in the news template and it unnecessarily lengthens it and doesn't look good. ? - Centrx 20:01, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
DashesOpinions are being sought regarding a proposal on this thorny issue for inclusion in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style. Please see the bottom of Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dashes. Thanks. –Hajor 20:15, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
What's going on with imagesI've noticed all of a sudden that thumbnailed images seem to have gone to the far left of the article space and overlap with the taskbar. I dont know if anyone else has experienced this or whether it's only me. But it wasn't doing it a few days ago. G-Man 23:48, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Coventry is an example, although it only seems to be doing it on one computer I use. I was using another computer earlier and it was fine. G-Man 19:52, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC) Self-linking?Is it just me, or are all new articles claiming to link to themselves (ie the article appears in the "what links here" list)? Worse, if you move the page, the article continues to claim to link to the old location, now a redirect page. See Fulbert Youlou, and its "What links here" page. Niteowlneils 05:43, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
VandalbotThe vandalbot's changes aren't showing up when I view Recent Changes. How do I view bot changes? Yes, I know Wik has started listing his changes as minor, but even before that, they weren't showing up. RickK 06:13, Jun 16, 2004 (UTC)
Tarpit???Weird..... When I tried to save the page with the comment above, I was redirected to http://download.wikimedia.org/tarpit.php..... What on earth is that? (twice now...) \Mikez 08:49, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
On Providing Sources For Fiction (renewal)If you would like to know my proposal see the original entry on the topic "On Providing Sources For Fiction. And I must say, I must complain about this policy when applies to all Wikipedia articles. My proposal still stands to change your policy slightly. The developers and and service people should at least be aware of this. --User:Marcus2
If you are looking for the previous discussion, check "79" in the table of contents. And what do you mean by showing links and using Google? --Marcus2
Sorry about that, I didn't mean to barge in on you like that if that's what you think. The contoversy is of the articles Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island and Bowser (Nintendo character). Fredrik and Meelar argue the doctrine that Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, and Bowser met as babies and revert my edits that delete the mention. Meelar in particular said that I needed to back up the deletion with a source, after I had already explained what really happened in the history of the Mario Bros, which refutes the text I deleted. Since it's based on fiction, it isn't a big deal, so I was thinking that there should be an exception made in Wikipedia's policy. --Marcus
Actually, I do not want to add my own fiction. I may discuss it, but I won't add it to the encyclopedia articles. --Marcus2
I'm not adding anyone else's fiction either. --Marcus2
I'm not proposing to add info. I'm proposing to delete what I think is a little false to me. --Marcus2
What justification are you talking about? Have I not already discussed it with you? --Marcus2
Okay, what is it that you have trouble understanding? --Marcus2
In what way am I being evasive?! Anyway, my proposal is that Mario and Luigi were reared in Brooklyn, and therefore not orientated with the Mushroom and Koopa Kingdoms and Dinosaur Land (Yoshi's residence) prior to working as plumbers. And another thing, Baby Bowser likes to ride Yoshi. --Marcus2
Certainly, the proposal was based on numerous material from Nintendo. --Marcus2
TechTV/Comcast MergerWhat should we do about the TechTV, G4, and G4TechTV articles? (Please discuss at This Talk Page, I just wanted a public place to post this) Ilyanep 17:32, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC) and Ilyanep 17:57, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC) I'm seeing this too. I'm using an old version of Mozilla (1.2.1? About Mozilla doesn't say) under Linux 2.2. Isidore 00:45, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC) |
![[16]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GabrielleMiller2.jpg){kind=link}