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Wikipedia:Village pump/Archive F

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump. Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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I wonder if before a disambiguation page is created, it might not be best to think it out in terms of true need and potential effects. Someone today created a disambiguation page for PGA. This puts a huge onus on my 50 years of work ALREADY done on "years in sport" where, now, in order for a user to click on my PGA listing, they are forced to go through a disambiguation page. Is not the computer terminology something better identified to avoid disambiguation? It is an obscure term for all but those who have a lot of computer knowledge. I hate to complain, but I have done a ton of work and I really do not want to go back and open 50 pages just to fix the PGA links in sports. Jacques Delson 17:20 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps you could try discussing this with Heron first at user talk:Heron or Talk:PGA, since Heron created the disambiguation page. Come back here if you and Heron can't decide on a satisfactory solution. Martin 17:32 24 May 2003 (UTC)
It's a really, really good idea to disambiguate TLAs beforehand. Few, if any, of them are not taken multiple times and many are better known for one thing in one field and another thing in another field. --Brion 17:52 24 May 2003 (UTC) (grammar fixed)
There, I've fixed all the links to go directly to Professional Golfers Association of America. It would have been polite for Heron to do that when creating the disamb page in the first place. --Brion 18:28 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Martin? Who are you? I put the question here to be resolved. If you have a answer please give it. Either leave things as is and I will stop my work because I have no intention of wasting vast amounts of my time discussing something with someone who created the page without a great deal of thought. It makes no difference to me. If making a contributors work harder is the goal then so be it but I'm not up to that kind of task. Whoever has the authority, please get rid of a disambiguation page without much real use or find a resolution 64.228.30.130 18:02 24 May 2003 (UTC)

I'm Martin. We talked earlier, about the DMCA, if you recall? Martin

proper nouns in disambiguation parenthesis

Do the proper nouns in disambiguation parenthesis have to be uncapitalized? (e.g. Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (chinese) Such ungrammaticality pokes people in the pupils until coconut-white stuff comes out. --Menchi 14:55 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, that should be capitalized. --Brion

I just want to say sorry for cluttering Recent changes page with a bunch of uploads. -- Taku 19:19 27 May 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, right. You were trying to DOS the server, weren't you? ;) -- John Owens 19:24 27 May 2003 (UTC)

Fortunately the server still seems working. Each file is actually really small, just a kilobyte. But unfortunately there is no way to hide uploads. -- Taku

I would like to create a bot that gets info from various U.S. Department of State websites, and makes articles. I have no experience making this type of program, could someone point me in the direction as to what I need to learn, or a where to start? MB 20:26 27 May 2003 (UTC)

If you have experience with Perl, it's easy. Even if you don't, it's easy as long as you're somewhat good with computer languages. For example, on page 708 of the first edition of the Perl Cookbook (Christiansen & Torkington) it shows how to grab a web page with two lines of code:
use LWP::Simple;
$content = get('http://www.wikipedia.org');
... at which point the variable '$content' contains the HTML of the requested page. More sophisticated robot work requires a little more code, but it's surprisingly easy. Jordan Langelier
If you have no experience writing bots please be careful that you don't unleash some kind of terminator onto the servers. Always test your work on a sandbox system (install an HTTP server locally with static copies of some example pages), and don't leave it going for hours and hours without checking what it's up to. CGS 22:40 27 May 2003 (UTC).

Automated content is generally disliked here: the value of Wikipedia comes from the fact that human beings interested in each subject have written and edited the articles. If you really feel that you must auto-create, you can test the bot on my server first; mail me and I'll give you all the info. LDC

Copyright on CIA World Factbook?

I was going to Bartleby.com. They have a ton of books online. While browsing their copy of the CIA World Factbook, they had this following info:

TITLE: The World Factbook.
PUBLISHED: Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002. ISBN: 1-58734-113-1.
CITATION: The World Factbook. Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002; Bartleby.com, 2002. www.bartleby.com/151/. [Date of Printout].
ONLINE ED.: Published April 2003 by Bartleby.com; © Copyright Bartleby.com, Inc. (Terms of Use).

As you see below, it appears that Bartleby.com is claiming a copyright on the Factbook! Does this overide the CIA's declaration that the World Factbook is public domain?

-- hoshie

IANAL, but that's basically a collection copyright claimed on their particular published edition. It may or may not have any validity if you, say, copy text from their pages without keeping their unique and creative page formatting. It certainly is irrelevant for material copied straight off of the CIA's web site. --Brion 18:18 27 May 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for the answer. I just wish Bartleby.com would be clear on what they claim rights to... -- hoshie

I'm writing articles for all of the major poems of John Keats (this way I can revise for my A levels, and wiki at the same time!) If a poem is short, and out of copyright, could I put the whole text into the article? Or should I leave that for an external link? CGS 10:16 29 May 2003 (UTC).

Quotes and small passages are good in order to serve as examples but since we are a wiki and are an encyclopedia it is not appropriate, in general, to have entire source texts. --mav

Deletion of talkpages

I am wondering if I should delete an article's talk page when I delete an article. Or should I rather delete just the article and keep the talk page intact? How things are handled in English wikipedia? (I'm an admin for Japanese wikipedia)Tomos 09:13 29 May 2003 (UTC)

You should delete the talk page, but make sure you record the reason for deleation (may be on the talk page) in the list of deleted pages. CGS 23:45 29 May 2003 (UTC).

Image use

I applied to the Turnbull Library for permission to use images from their collection and gave them details of wikipedia. This was the reply:

Requirements Please note that the Library has the following special requirements for the reproduction of its images on websites.

Required text As well as including the caption details (provided on Timeframes), you must use the following text alongside the image: "Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, must be obtained before any re-use of this image".

No Alteration of Images In order to maintain the integrity of the Library's images, no manipulation of the image is allowed, for example, outlining, clear cutting, overlapping, distortion (alteration of the proportions of an image), cropping, or, duatone washes and other colouring. Sepia toning may be allowed (specific permission must be requested). Other writing, such as titles or underlying text, should not intrude on the images.

Best wishes with your website and thank you for your interest in the Alexander Turnbull Library Collection

Are these requirements acceptable? Tiles 00:54 29 May 2003 (UTC)

Those terms are clearly at odds with the GNU Free Documentation License, which requires that people who receive a work be able to redistribute both unmodified and modified versions. Feel free to provide hyperlinks to the pages with the images if they are publicly visible on the web, though. (IANAL) --Brion 02:00 29 May 2003 (UTC)
I thought so but wanted confirmation. I will advise them and ask for a waiver. Tiles 02:24 29 May 2003 (UTC)

There's a very odd edit war raging on Alice in Chains. 152.163.252.167 puts in a line "On April 19, 2002, lead singer Layne Staley was found dead in his home.", and then User:Dante Alighieri takes it out again, repeated about a million times. Can anyone shed any light? Dante Alighieri is an upstanding Wikipedian, right? CGS 22:47 28 May 2003 (UTC).

See my response on my talk page. 152.163.xx.xx is Michael. See User talk:Michael/ban and User talk:Weezer/ban. --Dante Alighieri 22:49 28 May 2003 (UTC)
(extra link added by John Owens 23:24 28 May 2003 (UTC))

Yeah, but you should still know better than to get into a simple edit war loop. I cleaned up those articles and put the info in the right place (after verifying it). If a piece of text entered by a banned user seems appropriate, but you don't have the time or ability to verify it easily, then reverting is fine. But if it is easily verified and useful, the article comes first. If that means an idiot like like Michael gets to "win" an edit war, sobeit. LDC

Well I'm not sure how insulting him helps.... Martin 23:42 29 May 2003 (UTC)
Simple? You DO realize that John and I had to revert nearly 100 pages... I'm not about to check the facts on every single page. Any one of those facts, individually, might have been easily verifiable, but not the hundreds of things that were added. --Dante Alighieri 02:18 29 May 2003 (UTC)
See bans and blocks - in a "soft ban" situation, anyone can reinstate an edit if they can vouch for it, while in a "hard ban" situation, we all agree not to reinstate any edit, even if we know it's good. Unfortunately, it's unclear which of these two states Michael is in, which is probably why we keep having these discussions.
See also Talk:Right Back for a similar discussion. Martin 08:37 29 May 2003 (UTC)
I was not aware of any confusion. My understanding is that it is quite definitive that Michael has been hard banned, see User talk:No-Fx. Also, it may be worth noting that the most recent spate of vandalism from the following IP ranges: 205.188.xx.xx and 152.163.xx.xx come from the same individual, who just happens to freely admit/claim to be both Michael and No-Fx. --Dante Alighieri 20:20 29 May 2003 (UTC)
It is quite definitive that Jimbo has banned Michael. What is less clear is whether Jimbo is forbidding us to do what LDC has done with Alice in Chains.
Incidentally, I fully support people reverting Michael out of hand, deleting articles he creates, etc. Just please don't revert me if I see an edit I want to reinstate :) Martin
You mean breaking lines after 80 characters? Yeah, I hate that.
More seriously, I generally don't mind people putting info back in, as long as they aren't just taking Michael's word for it. Of course, lacking telepathy, I don't have much way of knowing that, so I'll generally be pretty tolerant there. -- John Owens 23:48 29 May 2003 (UTC)

What is the etiquette in adding to articles that are listed as originally published in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica ? Beans

Simple: rewrite them in modern English, and update the facts. No attribution or other mention of EB is necessary. Many, if not most, of the subjects are already covered here. LDC

Possible bug?

I have my preferences set to not underline links, but when looking at the following link media:Clitoris.jpg on the Clitoris page, it is underlined. Is this a bug or intentional? MB 14:03 27 May 2003

This is a bug which I have fixed a few days ago. Tell Brion to get us up to CVS status and it will be fixed on the live site as well. --Eloquence 14:15 27 May 2003 (UTC)

Apologies in advance if this has been asked and answered. I've had trouble creating an external link, and I think its due to the relatively new or uncommon practice of a dash included within the URL. See the lsat external link at the bottom of the Hamilton County, Ohio article. Any suggestions, or have I just done something stupid again? ;-). - Lou I 20:22 26 May 2003 (UTC)

It's because you've got to preface every URL with "http://" - so you have to type http://www.hamilton-co.org rather than just www.hamilton-co.org. I've fixed it, and it works now. Don't worry about it - takes everybody a bit of time to get used to how things work :-) --Camembert

I have noticed two very strange out-of-character edits from User:Andre Engels on the general lines of "I HATE THIS ... WORLD, and I hate myself too" -- either someone has cracked Andre's password, or he's having a really bad time... does anyone know how Andre is doing? The Anome 14:37 26 May 2003 (UTC)

Another possibility that crossed my mind... not actually cracking his password (or guessing it), he might have left himself logged in somewhere where someone else could use the computer later? He was editing (in a much calmer way) about half an hour before that. But no hard data as such, just speculation. -- John Owens 14:41 26 May 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, I did that. I suggested a girl friend had a look around the wiki on my computer - caos resulted. CGS 16:04 26 May 2003 (UTC).

Help! Please go to Panavia Tornado and click where it says "Click HERE for a picture of a Tornado GR-4". The picture comes up OK but there is then no way the reader can get to the copyright information except by noting its file name, going to the Image List and clicking on Descr. Clumsy! Should I therefore make the pic a proper Wikipedia page so that the pic can then be clicked on and the description will come up as normal? Thanks Adrian Pingstone 17:37 29 May 2003 (UTC)

Replace "foobar" in Image:foobar with image name, i.e., Image:Tornado.gr4.750pix.jpg.
  • SNIP*
Those terms are clearly at odds with the GNU Free Documentation License, which requires that people who receive a work be able to redistribute both unmodified and modified versions. Feel free to provide hyperlinks to the pages with the images if they are publicly visible on the web, though. (IANAL) --Brion 02:00 29 May 2003 (UTC)
  • SNIP*
So, why are we using this image at all? I request it be deleted. MB 20:49 29 May 2003 (UTC)
We allow fair use (see Wikipedia:Image use policy), and this is very similar. It does not impede distribution of Wikipedia or its forks substantially (fair use style laws exist in most countries), but deviates from the FDL. This is OK, but suboptimal. If a public domain or FDL image can be found, it should be used. What we cannot allow are conditions like "Permission granted to Wikipedia, any further use requires a separate request", because this would make forking impossible.
Brion may disagree with me here, but as long as we allow fair use at all, semi-restrictive licenses like that seem acceptable to me. See also the image in Carl Sagan. Given how hard it is to find free images, and how important they are, we have to make compromises. --Eloquence 21:31 29 May 2003 (UTC)
We very firmly disagree; I'm strongly of the opinion that so-called "fair use" images and even more so these explicit restrictions are inherently incompatible with our license and must be kept out if "Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia" is to be anything but a sham, a lie, and a fraud. But, that's just my opinion. :)
I very strongly recommend replacing "fair use" images with actual free ones whereever the opportunity arises, and I very strongly recommend not uploading non-free images to our server at all. Simply provide external links to the websites that show them if they are not explicitly GFDL-compatible, or go out and take some pictures yourself! Or make a nice artist's rendition if the subject is no longer available. Please don't take shortcuts that undercut the project's honesty and reputation and place additional burdens on the reusers and redistributors that a "free encyclopedia" is intended to provide material for, and which may or may not render our license void. (Lawyers, please...) --Brion 23:53 29 May 2003 (UTC)
My point stands -- if we allow fair use, which we do, it would be logically inconsistent not to allow equivalent licensing conditions. We all agree that non-free should be replaced with free whenever possible. --Eloquence 00:00 30 May 2003 (UTC)
While our license appears to forbid both releasing material with ambiguous or unknown additional license requirements (assumable to be "all rights reserved"), and taking material explicitly encumbered with additional license restrictions, I find that the second seems ethically much more reprehensible. It's a willful act, in which one deceives both the copyright holder (by the implication of intent to follow the license requirements they spelled out upon inquiry) and the receiver of the supposedly GFDL'd work one is incorporating it into (by the implication that the work is redistributable, reusable, and modifiable under the GFDL, which it is not unless the infringing portions are removed). IANAL, grains of salt, all that. --Brion 04:17 30 May 2003 (UTC)
We have never stated that all our images are under the FDL or in the PD, and they are clearly not. Not even on eo:, where I've seen many images simply taken from en: with no further copyright explanation. --Eloquence 13:19 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Yet we do claim that of our articles. Yet some of us insist on modifying our articles by embedding material that is not redistributable under the terms of the GFDL license, making our articles not redistributable under the terms of the GFDL license. (Please let me know which images on eo: are in question and I'll remove them.) --Brion 16:57 30 May 2003 (UTC)
OK, Ill revert the following articles I've illustrated, all from the BAe source talked about above. I'll leave doing so for a few days in case anyone decides I shouldn't. The articles affected are:
Eurofighter Typhoon
Saab Gripen
Hawker Siddeley Harrier
Panavia Tornado
HMS Ocean
Invincible class aircraft carrier
I sure won't make that mistake again!
Adrian Pingstone 08:19 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Except for Image:Euro.typhoon.250pix.jpg, where it is unclear what "permission" means, I see no reason to delete these images. ".. are made available for publishing and personal use" clearly implies that distribution, commercial and non-comercial, is acceptable, so they can be used here, more so than the images which we have uploaded as "fair use". --Eloquence 13:19 30 May 2003 (UTC)
>snip<Feel free to provide hyperlinks to the pages with the images if they are publicly visible on the web, though. (IANAL) --Brion 02:00 29 May 2003 (UTC) >snip< - Whereas I am a copyright lawyer - you guys know that there are copyright problems with hyperlinking too, right? For more info do a Google search on the Shetland News/Shetland Times fiasco. I'll do an article on legal problems with hyperlinking (if its not already addressed in the Wiki) - David Stewart 11:48 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Hyperlink copyright? So many forms of copyright lawas! Sounds interesting. Can't wait to read it. --Menchi 12:00 30 May 2003 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of uploading images that I can't edit how I see fit (Like I would be able to under the GPL). So I think linking to images we are legally allowed to use under the GPL is far better. Since these (and other non-GPL images) can't be edited, there is no real point in including them in the wiki. MB 17:53 30 May 2003 (UTC)

An investigation of the political beliefs of Wikipedia

For your information: Wikipedia is run by a bunch of Ayn Randite/US Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist loonies.

I find it is always helpful to know the ideologies of people when dealing with them. It can help you determine their motivations and what to watch out for.

In the case of "Wikipedia" (god I hate the term "wiki" .. almost as retarded as "blog"), they are creating an encyclopedia.

So I'm reading this thing, and some of the articles on it are okay, others are lousy, but at least none of them are as outright awful as "Everything 2"'s are. Then I stumble upon a synopsis of "Atlas Shrugged" .. ok.. but it's going on and on for pages upon pages of descriptions of each chapter, the setting, the characters, etc. and I'm thinking the author of this synopsis is going a bit overboard. Probably just another lone objectivist nutcase, right?

I kept investigating and following various other articles and visiting one of the editors home pages where I couldn't help but notice his big section of pictures of his gun shooting groceries (no joke).

Hey, I like shooting stuff too.. but you know when you see a home page that has pictures of the author's gun collection you are either dealing with a 1) Libertarian wacko or 2) Republican wacko (case in point:Eric Raymond)

I continued investigating, and find that these guys who are the editors of the encyclopedia all seem to work for a company called "Bomis" which also conveniently owns the encylcopedia as well.

Unfortunately, I was just following this investigative trail for my own curiosity... so I didn't bother to keep track of all the evidence I've found to determine the ideologies of the editors.... but trust me, !!!!Libertarian Wacko Alert!!!!

It's not that they are Libertarians that bothers me (for all you know, I could be one too), but that they are Randroid Libertarians Who Edit An Encyclopedia.

So what is my point? Any time idealogical extremists are in control of something, you better keep a close eye out for bias in the material. How can I rely on something for informational purposes when it is editted by people I wouldn't even trust to mow my lawn? Encyclopedia my ass.

Anyway, that wasn't my real point. It was "Why is the Linux community so full of political extremists?" aka "What about an obscure text-based operating system attracts the nutcases so well?"

Oh yeah, one last thing. What is it with the wild-eyed opposition of intellectual property by the Libertarian camp? It seems like something they should love?

Editors of the Wikipedia are not employed by Bomis - they're just people who happen to think that the idea of a free encyclopaedia is pretty neat. They have a wide range of political views, libertarian, authoritarian, socialist, capitalist, whatever. You can edit too, if you like. The reason there's so much stuff on Atlas Shrugged is that one or two editors who happen to be fans of the book decided to write a lot about it. That doesn't mean that every editor is a Rand-ite. I've written a fair bit on the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and hope to write more in the future, but that doesn't make everybody a rabid Mahlerian.
What you seem to have done is stumbled across some pictures by one bloke (Jimbo Wales, if I'm not mistaken, who is a founder of Wikipedia, pays for the hardware and bandwidth, but doesn't actually edit here), decided that these pictures prove the guy's a libertarian or republican loony, then extrapolated from that that everybody on the Wikipedia must be a libertarian or republican loony as well. You might enjoy our article on logical fallacies. You might also want to look at pages like Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers, Wikipedia:Overview FAQ and Wikipedia. --Camembert

An investigation of the political beliefs of Wikipedia

For your information: Wikipedia is run by a bunch of Ayn Randite/US Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist loonies.

I find it is always helpful to know the ideologies of people when dealing with them. It can help you determine their motivations and what to watch out for.

In the case of "Wikipedia" (god I hate the term "wiki" .. almost as retarded as "blog"), they are creating an encyclopedia.

So I'm reading this thing, and some of the articles on it are okay, others are lousy, but at least none of them are as outright awful as "Everything 2"'s are. Then I stumble upon a synopsis of "Atlas Shrugged" .. ok.. but it's going on and on for pages upon pages of descriptions of each chapter, the setting, the characters, etc. and I'm thinking the author of this synopsis is going a bit overboard. Probably just another lone objectivist nutcase, right?

I kept investigating and following various other articles and visiting one of the editors home pages where I couldn't help but notice his big section of pictures of his gun shooting groceries (no joke).

Hey, I like shooting stuff too.. but you know when you see a home page that has pictures of the author's gun collection you are either dealing with a 1) Libertarian wacko or 2) Republican wacko (case in point:Eric Raymond)

I continued investigating, and find that these guys who are the editors of the encyclopedia all seem to work for a company called "Bomis" which also conveniently owns the encylcopedia as well.

Unfortunately, I was just following this investigative trail for my own curiosity... so I didn't bother to keep track of all the evidence I've found to determine the ideologies of the editors.... but trust me, !!!!Libertarian Wacko Alert!!!!

It's not that they are Libertarians that bothers me (for all you know, I could be one too), but that they are Randroid Libertarians Who Edit An Encyclopedia.

So what is my point? Any time idealogical extremists are in control of something, you better keep a close eye out for bias in the material. How can I rely on something for informational purposes when it is editted by people I wouldn't even trust to mow my lawn? Encyclopedia my ass.

Anyway, that wasn't my real point. It was "Why is the Linux community so full of political extremists?" aka "What about an obscure text-based operating system attracts the nutcases so well?"

Oh yeah, one last thing. What is it with the wild-eyed opposition of intellectual property by the Libertarian camp? It seems like something they should love?

Editors of the Wikipedia are not employed by Bomis - they're just people who happen to think that the idea of a free encyclopaedia is pretty neat. They have a wide range of political views, libertarian, authoritarian, socialist, capitalist, whatever. You can edit too, if you like. The reason there's so much stuff on Atlas Shrugged is that one or two editors who happen to be fans of the book decided to write a lot about it. That doesn't mean that every editor is a Rand-ite. I've written a fair bit on the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and hope to write more in the future, but that doesn't make everybody a rabid Mahlerian.
What you seem to have done is stumbled across some pictures by one bloke (Jimbo Wales, if I'm not mistaken, who is a founder of Wikipedia, pays for the hardware and bandwidth, but doesn't actually edit here), decided that these pictures prove the guy's a libertarian or republican loony, then extrapolated from that that everybody on the Wikipedia must be a libertarian or republican loony as well. You might enjoy our article on logical fallacies. You might also want to look at pages like Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers, Wikipedia:Overview FAQ and Wikipedia. --Camembert

There are 17576 possible abbreviations for TLA. Is it really in wikipedia's interest to list all 17,576 possibilities with links? Many of these links amount to nothing but dictionary entries. Kingturtle 03:38 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Wiktionary is where most, if not all, of them belong.
The lists of TLA are of bad style. It uses Wiki<pre> and doesn't even fit on my 1024 screen. Not to mention the smaller computers. --Menchi 03:45 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I agree with that wiktionary should cover words stuff. I doubt the usefulness of the list in the first place because we already have a List of abbreviations in which we cover famous ones such as FBI. So I guess we can just get rid of list of any possible abbreviations for TLA. -- Taku 15:42 31 May 2003 (UTC)
That page definitely doesn't belong on wikipedia LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I vote for keeping it, as it could prove useful to someone looking for a TLA that's not in use yet or trying to determine whether a TLA he intends to use has existing meanings. Mkweise 17:38 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Google seems a better solution for this. -- Taku

The real value of TLA pages is as disambiguators; most TLAs these days have multiple meanings, more than most encyclopedists are aware of. If Wiktionary can disambiguate Wikipedia links, then great, but I don't think it can do that. Google is often useless for this sort of thing; if a TLA has 50,000 hits, then the less-common usage with "only" 5,000 pages will likely be invisible. Wikipedia disambiguator puts the common and less-common usages on an equal footing. The list of all possible TLAs is a useful index; Wikipedia is accumulating too many poorly-indexed articles because people aren't adding them to appropriate lists, luckily for this we can have a pregenerated list, and thereby save some work. Stan 18:28 31 May 2003 (UTC)

I admit that the tables are not pretty, but I think it's useful to have them in neat columns. My excuse for creating them was so that I could see at a glance which ones existed as articles, and to make it easier to create new ones just by clicking on the red links. I noticed a flurry of new TLA disambiguation pages after I uploaded these tables, so I feel that they catalysed quite a few new articles. That's why I think they are useful, despite their shortcomings. The style issue raised by Menchi wasn't my doing: I just put a space at the beginning of each line to invoke fixed formatting, which is standard Wikipedia practice. -- Heron

to whoever is responsible: Nice background color on Wiki pages. BF 02:53 31 May 2003 (UTC)

It seems that interlanguage redirects do work, but there is no "redirected from..." message at the top of the page when you access it through the redirect. That makes it a bit difficult to return to the redir page in order to edit it (the interlanguage redirect was really just a test, as I was curious to see whether it'd work.) Case in point: Bild. Perhaps it would be best to simply disable language prefixes in redirect statements, as that was probably never intended to work in the first place. Mkweise 21:12 30 May 2003 (UTC)

I've removed the interlanguage redirect by manually typing "redirect=no" in the URL. Now if you want to see an interlanguage redirect in action, see http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Bild&oldid=980225. Mkweise 21:22 30 May 2003 (UTC)
This was added some while back to support the (then frequently requested) ability to provide redirects for pages being moved to http://meta.wikipedia.org or http://sep11.wikipedia.org. It's just a quick hack and a little rough around the edges, but easily enough worked around & fixed if used inappropriately or mistakenly. --Brion 04:02 31 May 2003 (UTC)

I have set up voting for naming convention of Emperors of Japan. If you care, come to Talk:Emperor_of_Japan for voting. Cheers! -- Taku 18:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)


Temp Page Problem

What exactly are Temp pages? It just has a newer and more standardized outlook. It is confusing to have two pages on the same topic. And the notice on top of the page is often overlooked, as a result, many pages with temp pages have extensive history on both the Temp and the main pages. Unpleasant mergings are therefore necessary at some point in time. Why aren't the content of Temp simply on the main page? That'd eliminate all these problems. --Menchi 14:44 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Sometimes, for really long articles that need lots of work, it's easier to start over and do the article right, using a temporary page so as not to mess up the original article in the meantime. For example, right now I'm working on Bjork/Temp to replace the long and nearly incomprehensible Björk article. If someone overlooks the notice at the top of the original article, and edits it anyway, those changes can always be included in the new (temp) article. Most people will probably see the notice at the top and not edit the original, though, so mergings shouldn't be all that unpleasant :) -- Wapcaplet 15:39 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg. I've just had an absolute nightmare connecting all the Zygote articles together across en, nl, pl, da and es. Please could one of the devs implement this quick hack. It surely can't be more than a line of code or so, and it would be a GODSEND to people trying to further multilingual integration of articles. -- Tarquin 12:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Hi, could someone have a look at Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's basically a list of possible solutions and something of an analysis (from one user's opinions) of which are the best. They're currently adding links to it from lots of Israel/Palastine articles. In my opinion, this article will never cause anything but trouble, it's guaranteed to be hijacked at different times by people who are convinced that their particular 'solution' is best. I don't think we should be in the business of saying 'these ideas wouldn't work but these others would', it doesn't strike me as particularly encyclopaedic. I have to return to my much hated revision now but I couldn't bear to let this article slip by un-noticed. Happy editing -- Ams80 09:11 30 May 2003 (UTC)


The above-mentioned page looks as though it would make a great "Meta" article, but I agree that it is probably not for Wikipedia. Maybe one of the admins should consider moving it. -- Chris Q 10:20 30 May 2003 (UTC)
I think it is good for Wikipedia, because it clears up the several attempts to solve the problem and creates a good basis for discussions (outside the Wikipedia of course). To be a good basis for any debates is IMHO one major goal of Wikipedia. Therefore this article should remain. 212.137.33.208 11:28 30 May 2003 (UTC)
At the least, the title of this article needs to be changed! The title is misleading, sounds as though it is THE solution. We should add, proposed, or attempted to the title. In addition, it is not NPOV for anyone to mark which solutions are better. MB 12:48 30 May 2003 (UTC)
If the title is misleading - no problem, change it. But IMO it is still NPOV to point out which solutions are impossible or unwanted. -- 212.137.33.208 13:37 30 May 2003 (UTC)
"IMO it is still NPOV to point out which solutions are impossible or unwanted." Well, this is your opinion, and you are allowed to have one, but any attempt to determine which solutions are wanted or unwanted requires the use of opinion. Therefore, and such additions to articles would not be NPOV. It's alright though, b/c it has been moved to meta. MB 18:12 30 May 2003 (UTC)

I advice in the article when use the Chinese characters for specifying, use simplified Chinese characters instead of traditional Chinese, since the simplified Chinese has become the international standard. Samuel 04:31 30 May 2003 (UTC)

You probably want to discuss this also at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (chinese). -- Taku
We should better include Penkyamp transliteration for Cantonese as Hong Kong grows increasingly conscious about its differing identity from Beijing.

Maybe one day Taiwanese will also be included to give a genuine multicultural feel to the Han language and culture.

Why don't the ''emphasis quotes'' work in the LOOM article? CGS 20:14 29 May 2003 (UTC).

Because they are "double quotes" not two single quotes. Theresa knott 21:12 29 May 2003 (UTC)
No, that's not it. This is very odd: it's currently fine, but the emphasis quotes were not working in this revision, and if you do a diff against the current, working revision, you will see that the quotes used are exactly the same (and they are two single quotes). CGS 22:42 29 May 2003 (UTC).
Oh, that was because the quotes were on different lines back then, that doesn't work. -- John Owens 22:45 29 May 2003 (UTC)
Why can't the parsing software report errors like that, instead of just ignoring them? We don't want the Wiki markup to become soup like HTML. CGS 22:52 29 May 2003 (UTC).

New Topic - Accessing Wikipedia I'm a new user and new to programming. I want to access articles on a topic (e.g Battle of Hastings)in Wikipedia automatically (using a Java program)for study purposes. I want to transfer the first 100 or so words of each article to a file.
Is this ok ?
Its been suggested I should use a web crawler for this (but they seem to cause problems and I'm not sure I caould specify a particular topic either)
I thought of using database queries, any advice please? --User:Searcher7

Rainclouds: I see some pages are being linked to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Raincloud - but wouldn't it be better to have this in Wikipedia instead of meta? That way, you could look at "what links here" and see all the pages. Evercat 23:22 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Absolutely, that's one of those, "Why didn't I think of it!" ideas. --Dante Alighieri 23:23 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Michael is back, and he is getting smart!

Michael has made edits (I'm pretty sure) under the following ip addresses. He keeps changing his ip, so be on the look out for 152.163.25x.x and similar ip's. Here are some of the ip's I have seen him using, please help revert, delete, fix: 152.163.253.34, 152.163.252.33, 152.163.252.100, 152.163.252.133, 152.163.252.36. Could we temporarily ban this ip range? MB 18:37 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I fear we can't ban this range. Banning this is banning all of AOL. -- JeLuF
And your point is? Jordan Langelier ;)
I've been going through this ip range for a while, and I am finally deciding to give up on this for the day (Unfortunately Michael appears to have more time to create these articles then I have to check them). Here are 2 ip's which appear to have edit's of his but I don't feel like checking right now: 67.121.191.90, 24.130.213.242. Maybe someone can have a look at these edits. Thanks. MB 20:58 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Solution for Michael edits

Alright, there seems to be some disagreement as far as what should be done with pages that Michael has made/worked on, but others have worked on as well such as St. Anger. Zoe seems to think we should delete the articles all together, b/c Michael's name is in the history. Now, while I can understand why we don't want Michael's name anywhere on the wiki, it isn't fair to other users for us to delete articles they have contributed to. What should we do about these situations? Would it be acceptable to delete Michael from the history? Zoe seems set on making sure any record of his contributions are removed permanently. While I don't blame her, I don't think it is a solution for everything. MB 00:49 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

As I wrote on User talk:Camembert, those who wish to undelete articles should instead salvage the non-Michael parts of it that they want to keep, and re-create the article from scratch. That keeps Michael out Wikipedia's history. Say with me: Ignorance is strength.... --Eloquence 01:39 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

What is the policy of deleting blank entries such as this one created by Michael Candlebox (album)? I just want to make sure this is something acceptable to do, before I delete it. MB 20:13 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

As nobody else had edited this article, its arbitrary deletion was uncontroversial. However, deleting articles that someone else has edited (beyond blanking/reverts) is more controversial, with strong opinions on both sides. Martin 00:42 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

My response to Wikipedia:Wikipedians by religion can be found at Wikipedia:Wikipedians by race. MB 22:00 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

What's the consensus on User talk:Viking/ban? Should it be undeleted? --Dante Alighieri 20:40 31 May 2003 (UTC)

User:Viking has morphed to User:Vikings so the debate on banning viking is moot. User:Kils , who is associated with the group has stated that they will not be vandalising any more pages, but will try a different tactic. Never the less User:Vikings needs to be monitored and I think the ban page should be undeleted so that there is a history that can be checked Theresa knott 22:44 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Done. --Brion 00:35 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Neutrosophy looks coppied. Do you think it is? LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Yup, I put the opening sentence into google and found almost everything: Try this link for more http://arxiv.org/ftp/math/papers/0010/0010099.pdf Danny
BTW Florentin Smarandache is from the same IP-address and has some connection with the subject of Neutrosophy as well. I have no qualification to comment on the subject, but at the very least it could do with a bit of wikifying. It appears to have stood there without edits for quite a long time... -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 09:52 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I've been writing quite a bit (too much, in fact) on Middle-earth recently, and frankly, I'm getting tired of writing "Elendil is a character from J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world Middle-earth" at the start of each and every page. Furthermore, many, many of the Middle-earth pages are quite old, and do not have this blurb. I think that the best way to resolve this is to - yes, I am a newbie and I am suggesting that we bring back the subpages.
To use an analogy from Middle-earth, the resurrected subpages would be like Lúthien redivivus - they would sit quietly in their assigned corner, rather than running loose in the wiki and doing all sorts of crazy things. I think that subpages are appropriate for fictional people and places. I have looked at many of the arguments against subpages, and found that they simply do not apply. It would, of course, be good to replace the slash character (and the concomitant subdirectory backend structure) with something else, such as the proposed "--" character.
; So feel free to grab this idea by the tail and bash me over the head with it if you feel that it is appropriate, because I am afraid that I am being a stereotypical newbie and failing to see the gaping maw of some mistake or other. Smack 07:04 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I think you'd be better off using standard disambiguation format, e.g. Luthien (Middle Earth). And don't call them subpages, use a euphemism like "pages from the Middle Earth category", because some editors are very hostile when they hear the S-word. :) -- Tim Starling 07:11 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Sorry, subpages, no matter which separator is used, are dead and gone, end of discussion. Everything has already been said on Wikipedia:Do not use subpages and people are tired of going through this again. The proper way to organize these pages is to create longer articles:

--Eloquence 07:16 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

See what I mean, Smack? You can make subpages, just don't call them subpages :) I don't know if Eloquence looked at the pages in question, but they seem to me to be too long for merging. -- Tim Starling 07:42 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
With few exceptions, most of the articles in the Middle Earth section could be merged and redirected to longer articles. Exceptions would be stuff like Elvish language. Many of the Middle Earth articles are horrible stubs, e.g. Elrohir, Éomer. And adding a qualifier like "(Middle Earth)" will not help: Smack wants to do away with the introductions to save time. Sorry, but this is not how Wikipedia works.--Eloquence 07:53 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sorry Eloquence, you're quite right, doing away with the intros is completely unacceptable. The articles I saw, which I thought were too long for merging, were Lúthien, Thingol and Beren. -- Tim Starling 08:31 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I don't really think they're too long, especially since the characters' fates are interwoven, so some present redundancy could be eliminated. A good overview article can well be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. See also the Wikipedia-l thread Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia. --Eloquence 08:54 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I appreciate the nuisance factor of the leadins required to set context, which is why I prefer "In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, ", which is succinct and sufficient. Giant omnibus articles do not serve the reader well, because if I'm reading along and am confused whether it's Glorfindel or Galadriel that's the bigshot queen, I don't want to wade through a massive Lives of the Elves to find them. What I do see in Tolkien articles is that enthusiasts have wanted to retell the entire story in each article, and those should be pruned down, so that, Rashomon-like, each character's article only describes what is directly relevant to that character. If there's not much to say about Elrohir and the article is short, fine, that means I as a reader am done with it more quickly and can get back to my original activity. Stan 13:08 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please see the long thread on wikipedia-l referenced above for why this is a very, very bad idea. --Eloquence 13:15 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Indeed, I even contributed to that thread. Having experimented with both the "long form" and the "short form" articles, I've decided that shorter cross-linked articles serve the reader better. Consider HMS Ocean - nice long article, lots of content, but if the reader links to it from Royal Marines, it takes some work and reading of irrelevant material to find which of several ships was being referred to. That is unfriendly to the intended audience, and some day the Ocean article will be divided up according to the standard for ship articles. Stan 18:13 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
HMS Ocean is really a bad example. This is a bunch of articles thrown together simply because they are about ships with the same name. In a way, it's the expanded form of a disambiguation page. I agree that this should be divided. However, if there's not much to say about a ship, it may be more useful to have "XXX class ship" and then list and describe the ships of that class in the article. --Eloquence 18:19 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
" The proper way to organize these pages is to create longer articles: Characters of Middle Earth..."
Sorry, that's just not going to work. If you do that, you'll wind up with several mega-articles, each a retelling of Tolkien's entire oeuvre, with some degree of emphasis on whatever the article happens to be titled.
"What I do see in Tolkien articles is that enthusiasts have wanted to retell the entire story in each article"
I am a part of that problem. I am the one who wrote the structurally horrible Fëanor article and didn't have the heart or the energy to split it up. The problem is that Middle-earth is a history; a fictional history, to be sure, but a history nonetheless, and that makes it very complex and interconnected. Someone brought up Rashomon. I've seen that movie. The whole point of Rashomon is that if you tell only part of the story, you've told a half-truth at best. You cannot tell the story of one character and one character only without ripping it kicking and screaming from the context. It seems to me that the problem is even more acute here than with "real" history. Real history has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb by historians, and divided into more-or-less neat sections. Thus, you can acknowledge the causal connections of, say, the French Revolution to the American Revolution in a sentence or two. Middle-earth doesn't have this categorization, so you have to actually summarize what the prior event was.
The conclusion that I'd like to draw here is that we have a serious problem regarding fictional worlds of all kinds (Star Wars, The Hitchhiker's Guide, etc.) I don't know how to resolve it.
I want to move this discussion somewhere else, seeing as how it's getting very big, but I don't know where to. Smack 19:53 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
You might consider wikipedia talk:establish context, or wikipedia talk:do not use subpages. Martin 13:51 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Neutrosophy looks copied. Do you think it is? LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Yup, I put the opening sentence into google and found almost everything: Try this link for more http://arxiv.org/ftp/math/papers/0010/0010099.pdf Danny
BTW Florentin Smarandache is from the same IP-address and has some connection with the subject of Neutrosophy as well. I have no qualification to comment on the subject, but at the very least it could do with a bit of wikifying. It appears to have stood there without edits for quite a long time... -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 09:52 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Should Vulcanology just be a redirect to volcano? If so, change it. LittleDan

I don't think it should. I'm sure there are interesting things to say about vulcanology; if we leave the page, someone will probably flesh it out one day. Followup to Talk:Vulcanology. -- Merphant 02:31 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Can anyone translate Roman Odzierzynski into english? Kingturtle 23:19 31 May 2003 (UTC)

I can't seem to move power supply to power supply unit, even though the destination never had anything but a redirect in it. Weird, huh? What I think should be done is for power supply unit and electronic power supply - which essentially cover the same subject - to be merged, and I think the most logical place for this article to reside is at power supply unit. Comments, anyone? Mkweise 20:31 31 May 2003 (UTC)

It's because the redirect had a page history (albeit a history of different redirects). Anyway, I deleted it, then made it a redirect again, but now it has no history, so you can move a page there if you like. Evercat 21:12 31 May 2003 (UTC)

For some strange reason I got an error message trying to move Ess-tsett to ß, even though the target page didn't exist, but ß clearly is a valid page name as I was able to paste content there manually. Could a sysop please do the move? Having the page at Ess-tsett is inconsistent the way we handle other Latin-1 characters (e.g. Ä, Å.) Mkweise 17:34 31 May 2003 (UTC)


There was a weird little bug in the rename code that wouldn't let you rename a page to a one-character title. (!) Fixed now, page renamed. --Brion 20:22 31 May 2003 (UTC)


Thanks, I figured it had to be something weird since I was able to create an article by that name, just not move. Mkweise 20:31 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Here I am again with one of my great newbie ideas. This one concerns the short pages list, which I perceive is still down. I think there should be an option in the left-hand nav bar to add a page to the short pages list, interfacing to a little tiny program that edits said list. The list would be of a fixed length (the current 125 looks good), so that any time a new stub is listed, an old listing falls off the end of the list. -- Smack

Image Boilerplate

A few weeks ago, somebody discovered a set of HTML code that makes aligning works in most versions of most browser. But I can't find it. --Menchi 12:52 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You mean a floating frame? that's <div style="float:right;">{image}</div>. To make it work in all browsers, you can make an aligned table by doing <table align=right><tr><td>{image}</table> LittleDan 18:07 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Yes, thanks. --Menchi 04:48 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
See wikipedia:image use policy for markup suggestions.

A question (yet again!) on copyright. I've come across a site which would be a good source for pictures of all kinds but I can't decide if the pics are public domain. Any opinions, please?
Go to http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/~aminet/pix/vehic/ then click on HELP, then on SECTION 8 (Copyright Status and Disclaimer). Thanks Adrian Pingstone 09:03 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The collection copyright that Mueller claims does not concern us, since we do not intend to setup an AmiNet mirror. What does concern us, however, is the copyright status of the photos, which are described as "freely distributable". But that claim is without legal value if it is not made by the copyright holder, so you may want to contact umueller at aminet dot net and ask for the names and email addresses of the persons who created the photos you want to use. Just putting the stuff online and describing it as "freely distributable" would be fine with me, but Brion would probably disagree again .. --Eloquence 09:14 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

A Photograph Source

I have attempted to recruit contributors or photographers several times before, but have all failed until now. I just met a Mississippian photographer on a digital graphics DelphiForum, and convinced him to let Wikipedia to use, and modify if necessary, his photos on plants. For an example, see his Naked Lily (Lycoris radiata, L. squamigera).

Where do I announce this exciting (well, for me, anyway) information, so other contributors interested in gardening and botany can use them freely too? --Menchi 07:37 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Excellent news! Wikipedia:Announcements would be a good place, and you may want to create a page like Wikipedia:Merman flower collection to describe the copyright status of the pictures, so that it can be easily linked to from the image pages. I checked out the first page of the thread, and while he endorses sharing, I don't really see a comment referring specifically to the use on Wikipedia, or distribution under a specific license. So please do your best to describe when and where he made that declaration. --Eloquence 09:10 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'll make a page with his exact statements relevant to uses on Wikipedia. But another members on that forum has just gave us permission to use her photos as well, and I have not gotten the details on her conditions yet. After receiving them, I'll make a page. --Menchi 10:12 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Done. Wikipedia:Plant photo collection I. I'll add it to Wikipedia:Announcements now. --Menchi 15:37 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
There's a collection of GFDL image resources somewhere - it's linked from wikipedia:image use policy, I believe. Martin

The Middle-earth/subpages discussion has been moved to wikipedia talk:do not use subpages.

Next Query: Pictures. I've just uploaded two, 0201peoplelikeus2.JPG and 0201peoplelikeus.jpg, and the former is not showing up on the page People Like Us, while I can't find the latters Image Page... um... --ntnon 16:04 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Misspelling.
image:0201peoplelikeus2.JPG is the image description page. You didn't upload image:0201peoplelikeus.jpg. --Menchi 15:11 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

(No idea if I'm doing this right... oh well.....) I created a page for 'America's Best Comics', but due to an irritating Shift key, it's come up as America's best Comics... is it possible to change this at all..? --ntnon 15:00 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yep - from the article page in question, you should see a link to "Move this page" (it'll be one of the links down the side of the page and/or at the bottom). Click on that, follow the instructions, and there you go. More details are at Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page --Camembert

CD Tracklist

Some CDs have noticeable cultural and/or historically significance, so it may be of interest to list all the tracks on the CD. But, is the complete track listing of every CDs of every non-garage band to be included on Wikipedia?

For example, all CDs of Blink-182 have Wiki-pages, created mostly by one or two anons. But except to the band's zealous fans, none of them is significant. The only Wiki-pages that link to them are just back the Blink-182 page, the members of the band, and a one-phrase mentioning in an "n-year in music".

Are they really encyclopedic (again, except to the fans)? --Menchi 18:11 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I don't think so, you don't think so, 99.9 percent of humanity doesn't think so ... but without a central authority, who's going to decide which CDs deserve such treatment and which don't? If people want to take the time to create such (IMHO) pointless folderol, it would be un-wiki of us to stop them. -- DavidWBrooks 19:42 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Album Track List

(was CD Track List)

Some CDs have noticeable cultural and/or historically significance, so it may be of interest to list all the tracks on the CD. But, is the complete track listing of every CDs of every non-garage band to be included on Wikipedia?

For example, all CDs of Blink-182 have Wiki-pages, created mostly by one or two anons. But except to the band's zealous fans, none of them is significant. The only Wiki-pages that link to them are just back the Blink-182 page, the members of the band, and a one-phrase mentioning in an "n-year in music".

Are they really encyclopedic (again, except to the fans)? --Menchi 18:11 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I don't think so, you don't think so, 99.9 percent of humanity doesn't think so ... but without a central authority, who's going to decide which CDs deserve such treatment and which don't? If people want to take the time to create such (IMHO) pointless folderol, it would be un-wiki of us to stop them. -- DavidWBrooks 19:42 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I think if a page on a specific album has some important information about that album, and not just the track listing, it is appropriate for the wikipedia. If it is just a track listing, it is most likely not important enough to keep. For example, who among us would doubt the validity of the extensive article on the Beatle's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which of course includes a track listing (and which many of the songs themselves appropriately have their own articles). But many albums in the wikipedia only have the track listings and that is probablly innappropriate. If you are going to add an article about the album, take the time to research that album, tell us a little bit about what was going on with that band at the time, etc. Because writing an encyclopedia is writing *about* something first, so should the focus of any article be *about* the subject. But wikipedia is boundless in size, and should be bursting at the seams with facts, so as *secondary* material, don't hesitate to include the track listing. - 209.112.170.183

Disinfopedia has taken wikipedia articles and expanded them usually with a back reference. Is it worthwhile to forward reference from Wikipedia to Disinfopedia? Zardoz 17:57 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

no, why would you do that? LittleDan
Disinfopedia is highly POV. CGS 19:51 1 Jun 2003 (UTC).
Sometimes. Treat disinfopedia articles as you would any other external source. Martin 00:42 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

If anyone could take a neutral look at Limehouse, London, England, I would be very grateful. User:Harry Potter added things about spacejackers and sea monsters which I reverted assuming it was rubbish. However HP has reverted back again.. with a not totally pleasant Summary comment. I have had enough of HP and can't look at his contributions with a cool head any more... such has (IMO) the negative impact on Wikipedia by having him around. Can someone see what checks out. Thanks. Pcb21 22:13 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I have noticed (at least I think I have) this user User:Harry Potter appears to mischievously and deliberately introduce subtle inaccuracies into articles, which can often be quite difficult to spot. The latest, I think (I could be wrong, is on Jamestown Settlement "The first people reduced to slavery there were Polish, owned by Dr. Woodall, the surgeon of the East India Company."... I could be wrong but I don't think this is true. Polish glassblowers were employed by the English colonisers but slaves!? -anon
Hmm.... similar problems with Limehouse. Errant nonsense contributed by HP has had to be reverted. The only matches for his contribution found on a google search was at http://www.t0.or.at/karloff/darkterrors.html and http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/CcOpenNorthwestPassage Mintguy
Thanks anon and Mintguy, I was beginning to think that I was the one to notice/care what a pain this guy is. It is usually easy to spot problems in his new articles but the ones that are really annoying are the extra sentence or so he adds to previously existing articles. Unless they are clearly rubbish, they tend to be really difficult or impossible to verify. I guess we have to keep an eye and hope it dies down. He is either the same person as, or in very close cahoots with, User:Qqq. Pcb21 07:59 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
At first blush, they appear to be nonsense (especially the thing about a sea monster) but on closer inspection it really does appear that User:Harry Potter has the best of intentions in adding good, factual information. As he has pointed out, we can't assume that google is the ultimate reference for all things - there are plenty of strange facts about the world that would never turn up in a google search (and plenty of completely misleading nonsense that would). Aside from some minor difficulties in socializing with others, I think he's a good contributor. (but again, some of us have been flatly reverting any of his changes that are suspicious, rather than editing out the questionable content and taking it to talk--which hardly seems cooperative.) -- Wapcaplet 13:03 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Wap, as an example of HP's contributions please take a look at Anthony Hancock Paintings and Sculptures: A Retrospective Exhibition. The intention of HPs creation of this aritcle is to deliberatly cause confusion and useless debate about the existance of an artist called Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock. But this name is a fictional creation. In reality the British comedian Tony Hancock (full name Anthony John Hancock) created a character on film who was the artist in question. There can be no retrospective exhibition of his artwork because those pieces of art were infact created as nothing more than film props for the film the Rebel[1]. also look at three sided football. Mintguy
Also there have been copyright, POV or (more debatably) 'nonsense' problems with London Virginia Company, The Tube, Pataphysics, London Institute of Pataphysics, Humphrey Gilbert, New World Negationism. That's nine articles named on this page. Now if you review the talk for all the various artices, I hope you'll agree that there has been considerable attempt at dialogue on the part of those who disagree with Harry's contributions. In response, Harry has never said he wants to make an encyclopedia, never admitted the factual errors he has added, instead he has insulted me personally on several occasions. Thus when we are faced with the line "...killed by a sea monster" and find that other sources indicate that the truth is "..some sailors are reported to have seen a sea-monster. Some have suggestion what they may have seen a giant squid. Gilbert died during a storm later in the voyage.", I hope you can appreciate why some of us have come to the view that it is better to revert and figure out the wheat from the chaff later, rather than argue back and forth with someone who talks in riddles. Pcb21 14:28 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I hope that the "some of us" referred to in that last comment will aknowledge that the attempts at dialogue have not all been without a presumption of being on the self-designated cause of truth. On the insult front, I think the honors are even. This whole thing (concerning as it does a limited number of people on both sides) smacks of a personality clash, more than anything else. All the references exhort us to check out this and that article and its histories. Why not just express a singular allegation of an edit made conciously and maliciously to harm the wikipedia? Is that too much to ask? Or maybe should we have easier rules about how we go about banning people? Please express yourself. This matter will continue to be a matter of contention, and you yourself may one day find yourself on one or the other side of it some day. And if you wait long enough, you will have found yourself on both sides of it. This is not a trivial housekeeping matter. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 14:53 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Singular edit #1 - [2] - no attempt to state that this in fact a fantasy.
Singular edit #2 http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Football&diff=944250&oldid=944228 - inclusion of three sided football in mainstream description of the game.
Potentially unverifiable "factoids" -
From Edward Coke "In 2002, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain refused to make a public apology for the long history of slavery under the British Empire on the basis that it was legal"
Jamestown Settlement "The first people reduced to slavery there were Polish, owned by Dr. Woodall, the surgeon of the East India Company."
#3 http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=London_Institute_of_Pataphysics&oldid=961114
#4 http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Pataphysics&oldid=955981
#5 http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Pataphysical_situation&oldid=961154
#6 http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=The_Tube&diff=991375&oldid=991349
#7 http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=New_World_Negationism&oldid=987287
Well, Harry Potter; here is your chance. Refute the allegations. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 16:11 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'm not speaking on Harry Potter's behave, but could you specify what s/he did to articles #3 thru 7? Or at least link the the diff page, if you don't want to. --Menchi 16:26 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Whew, I am afraid I haven't followed the discussion enough to really comprehend what must be going on. Looking closely at the examples provided above (in particular the Singular Edits #1 and 2), I can see what you mean - it was rather absurd to introduce three-sided football as a genuine branch of what everyone else knows as football, and there's no good way to edit it out without just reverting. Seems like most of the topics that HP writes on belong in some article about absurdist philosophy or situationalism, not in articles on mainstream topics, where they will be interpreted as fact. He clearly has a fine command of the language - too bad he is squandering it on silliness like this. -- Wapcaplet 19:47 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I am sorry if I have been brusque upon occasion, however I cannot help feeling that I am being expected to adhere to a far tighter code than other people. E.g. Pcb21 has removed the London Virginia Company because they consider it Povie. However other very Povie artciles are available e.g.: the American Revolutionary War article which fails to deal with the very anti-democratic nature of slaveowners like George Washington or the role of the Dunsmore Declaration as the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America. However I refrain from simply removing a page which perhaps reflects deep seated institutional racism because I am not yet ready to put the time and energy into that because I am subject to so many unneccesaary attacks. If I have been less than cordial with Pcb21, it is because I feel that they have been less than fair with me.

As regards specific points: The problem with the football article was that it stated early on that having two teams playing was an essential characteristic of football - something which is untrue, not merely since Asger Jorn developed Three sided football, but indeed since the Haxey Hood Game, which I have just noticed has been edited out of the football entry! The problem existed more with the way the original text put forward such an erroneous view right at the start of the article, that it needed correcting there.

Singular edit #1 - [3] - no attempt to state that this in fact a fantasy.

The entry clearly refered to the Tony Hancock page. The exhibition certainly did take place, with real pictures and sculptures as represented in the film.

From Edward Coke "In 2002, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain refused to make a public apology for the long history of slavery under the British Empire on the basis that it was legal"

Well this is my understanding of the Queen's response to the Rastafarian request for an apology. What's your understanding of her response???

Jamestown Settlement "The first people reduced to slavery there were Polish, owned by Dr. Woodall, the surgeon of the East India Company."

If you check the Nicholas Ferrar page you will find the reference to this. So what level of ignorance am I meant to assume - and why have been singled out to supply verification for the facts I share with you whereas others are not/ (On a more practical level if there was a facility to build Bibliographies as an adjunct to wikipedia and the wictionary, then that would facilitate a place where references could be located - something I would fully support.

Perhaps Wapcaplet does not realise how demeaning their epithet of silliness is! Serious issues are being raised here. The English invasion of North America is a singular event in history, it changed the world. Yet when I start working on this, looking at the involvement of such luminaries as Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Martin Frobisher in alchemy it is because I feel that this is relevant. The fact that the dead hand of bureaucratic historification has so chosen to obfuscate the facts and created a climate when people both from North America and the British Isles find their minds easily befuddled. Yes I have apologised for making mistakes. Mea culpa, it was Martin Frobisher who brought the Black rock back from Greenland. Although Humphrey Gilbert invested in the enterprise, this was not one of his voyages. And I corrected it. But I am not the only person to have made a mistake. OK maybe the assertion about Gilbert's fate at the hands of the sea monster was POV, But the essence of the encounter has been demonstrated. Compared to the range errors in the mass loading of information on places in London, I wonder why I am being singled out for attack. As for the question about the tube, this is a serious point for people with disabilities. I have not had a chance to verify the issue, but as I recall there are restrictions to wheelcahirs and push chairs on the tube which do not exist on the underground, and that they were subject to political action by disabled groups at some time. Now this may not be important from an able-bodied point of view, but if we are to make something useful to people with disabilities, then the issue has to be addressed. As for the remark that I have never said that I am interested in making an encylopedia or dealing with facts: I aim to help wikipedia realise its potential as an encyclopedia, even if that potential overflows from the eighteenth century notion of what an encyclopedia could be. I am particularly interested in the heuristic questions which must arise from such a project. I see the goal of NPOV as laudable, even if it has its own problematic. However, if this is to succeed, then I see that it cannot be constrained by a neocartesian epistemology. Harry Potter

WikiContest #342L

Jiggy and Bonquisha are new users to the Wikipedia. Assuming that the number of articles remains constant at 130,000 - calculate the probability of Jiggy and Bonquisha editing the same page (over the course of a year), given that they each edit 100 articles per day. Pizza Puzzle

Well, that depends. Do they (like most Wikipedians) check Recent Changes often, engage in discussion on Talk pages, get interested in single articles and make lots of edits to them? Or do they just make singular edits to randomly chosen articles, whether the articles need editing or not? -- Wapcaplet 12:57 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Even if you assume they make random edits, we still need this question answering- On day two are they allowed to edit a page that they edited yesterday or do thay have to edit 100 new articles ?Theresa knott 13:03 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Jiggy and Bonquisha make 100 edits a day, to random articles. They can edit the same article more than once. Assume that if Jiggy and Bonquisha edit the same article at least 10 times each - then they will have "interacted"-For extra credit, calculate the liklihood of Jiggy and Bonquisha interacting. Pizza Puzzle

I'm new to wikipuzzles. Are we supposed to go away and work it out all by ourselves or are we allowed to put up partial solutions for others ot work on? Individual glory or collaboration? Theresa knott 13:26 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Collaboration is acceptable-thats the whole point of the wiki. Pizza Puzzle

If the edit the same article 10 times each (Jiggy edits Foo 10 or more times, and Bonquisha also edits Foo 10 or more times)? Or if, say, Jiggy edits Foo and Bonquisha edits Foo; Then Bonquisha edits Bar and later Jiggy edits Bar, and so on like this 10 times? -- Wapcaplet 13:50 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Either way, I'll go ahead and say that this looks a lot like the Birthday paradox - we should approach it as a question of, what are the chances that, on any given day, the articles that Jiggy and Bonquisha edit are different articles. From there, we can find the probability of them editing the same article on a given day, which can be used to determine the probability of editing the same article in a year. -- Wapcaplet 13:55 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
that was the lines I was thinking along Theresa knott 14:16 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

In order for there to be a proper interaction at Foo- both Jiggy and Bonquisha must have edited it at least ten times AND there must be overlapping edits: for example J J J J J J J J J J B B B B B B B B B B is not an interaction; however, J J J J J J J J J B B J B B B B B B B is an interaction. Editing 10 seperate articles one time each is not an interaction. Heh, now its even more complicated. Pizza Puzzle

Right let me think out loud. In the course of a year Jiggy will edit N number of articles where N< 36500 since he can edit one article more than one time.
if we now consider any one of those articles we can calculate the probability that Bonquisha will edit that article by calculating the probability that they will not hit it as 129999/130000 per edit. Since Bonquisha will make 36500 edits over the course of a year we raise the above fraction to the power of 36500.
(129999/130000)36500= 0.755 if I've done it ok

so probabilty that Bonquisha will edit that particular artilce is 0.245 Theresa knott 14:24 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)Bloody 'ell that's high have I made a mistake?

What I think you have done, is considered that J will edit any article. Then the question is, now that we have article X, what is the probablity of B hitting it after editing 36,500 articles. Since 36,500 is about 25% of the wikipedia, you can expect that any particular article would be edited about 25% of the time. I would hypothesize then that its very likely B and J would both edit the same article at some point. Pizza Puzzle

I think Jiggy and Bonquisha should move to Meta and stop hogging the pump. -- Tarquin 14:47 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Indeed, the probability approaches 100%. Over the course of a year, B has edited about 25% of the articles in the wiki. So, for each article J edits, there is a 25% chance it is one that B either has edited, or will later edit over the course of the year. So we have 1-(1-.25)36500 for the probability that they ultimately edit the same article, which is close enough to 100% to exceed the precision of my spreadsheet. For more rigor, we could figure out the distribution of probabilities for the various number of articles B might edit (could be anywhere from 1 article 36500 times or 36500 articles one time each with most of the probability clustered towards the top) and calculate the 1-(1-x)36500 seperately, mutiply, and sum. But, as a practical matter, the answer is the same. 209.150.193.201 19:29 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Could someone update Wikipedia:Recent Changes? It seems to be quite out of date (though that may just be a consequence of my having non-default settings that I don't remember setting), and it says nothing about blue arrows. Smack

What are blue arrows? Theresa knott 09:33 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The blue arrows are what you get when you click on "enable secret really cool options" in your preferences. And they are mentioned in Wikipedia:Recent Changes:
Enhanced Recent Changes - with this option enabled, multiple edits on the same day to a single article are grouped together on the Recent Changes screen. All the edits except for the most recent one are hidden, but can be revealed by clicking on the blue arrow next to the article. This option uses JavaScript, and won't work in every browser (see Wikipedia:Browser notes).
--Tim Starling 09:48 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Wow that is cool! I shall have to start looking into all the other options in my preferences to see what other good stuff I've been missing out on.Theresa knott 10:05 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
You're probably smart enough to work this out yourself, but Wikipedia:User preferences help has descriptions of what the options in your preferences do. — Paul A 01:34 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Several of us (Amillar, Stan and me) are engaged in a discussion at Talk:List of people regarding the possibility of adding some kind of meta-data to biographical articles, in order to (among other things) ease the maintenance process for exceptionally long (and high-maintenance) lists like List of people. Suggestions would be welcome, especially from any developers that have ideas about how such a thing could be implemented. Thanks! -- Wapcaplet 00:24 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedias Without Logins

How do we register accounts on underdeveloped Wikipedias, like Latin, Estonian, and Simple English? Or do our account names automatically carry over when we log into the English WP? --Menchi 11:30 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Afaik, all login accounts are different and individual on each wiki. Be they developed or underdeveloped. I might add that a pc and nicer expression would be in-development wikipedias :-)
So how do we get an account on in-development wikipedias? --Menchi 13:55 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ahah, Menchi, I see you are probably a quite recent user :-)))
The in-development (or waiting for someone to take care of developing them) wikis you are refering to, are still in phase I (the french wiki was still in phase I until the 31 of oct 2002). In phase I, there is only one space, where everything is mixed. Articles, meta pages, users pages...That is one of the fun things to fix once the wiki is updated to phase III. I recommand what we did : prefixing every meta article with a "wikipedia:xxx" so that makes easier to identify articles from meta pages. French wikipedians pages just had similar look that articles pages till we upgraded phase III (that is not until we where phase III that articles about Curry and Anther were created since User:Curry and me occupied the place of an article :-). You might identify yourself with a prefixed user:xxx, but honestly, when the wiki is small, it is of little interest.
I edited once or twice the simple english a good year ago, so I went back there, and created an account for test. Go check it. http://simple.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?RecentChanges
What you have to do to create an account, is to go to "preferences" (upper right). There, you enter your name, and a password. Confirm. And there you are. Your account is set. Next time you want to connect, you go back to preferences, enter your login and password, and that is it !!!
Oye, I feel "old" today. Memories...
If you need to delete pages or ban users (sigh!), you need to ask Jimbo for a password. There are no tech things to identify admin. Admin are virtual, their power relies in a password, the proper urls for deletion and banning, as well as the code to do so (note that deletions are permanent...*that* was scarry). If you need more info, drop a word on my talk page User:Anthere

So you have to register in Preferences! I didn't try that because it's very different in all the established Wikipedias, where we need to log in & register, not from Preferences though. I've registered on Simple English site. --Menchi 16:26 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm confused. I have just renamed an article called Thrust SSC to its correct name of ThrustSSC by using a Redirect done via the Move command. However, as a result there's a problem. The ThrustSSC article, correctly, shows the redirect from Thrust SSC but, when I do a search on Thrust SSC I get no results at all. Why not! It seems that the Redirect page is not indexed. Should it be? Adrian Pingstone 08:40 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Rainclouds: I see some pages are being linked to meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud - but wouldn't it be better to have this in Wikipedia instead of meta? That way, you could look at "what links here" and see all the pages. Evercat 23:22 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Absolutely, that's one of those, "Why didn't I think of it!" ideas. --Dante Alighieri 23:23 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Last I checked, meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud and meta:Raincloud were both out of service pages (IE, to-be-deleted)... Martin 14:34 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Alright, nothing points to rainclouds anymore, they point to Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute now. Now you can check here when you want to fix a page with disputed accuracy. MB 20:24 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

My response to meta:Wikipedians by religion can be found at meta:Wikipedians by race. MB 22:00 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

"The Monkey is one of the 12-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar. It is thought that each animal is associated with certain personality traits. "

This appears for a number of other animals in the 12-year cycle. I removed the reference under Cattle, thinking it irrelevant to the topic, while performing other edits there. Now I see it is elsewhere as well. Should all 12 entries be consistent in their inclusion of this prose? And, if so, should it be removed from those where it exists, or add to those articles that lack it?

I agree with your removal. It doesn't seem appropriate. What about adding See also: [[chinese zodiac| Chinese year of the monkey]] or something similar to each of the relavent pages.Theresa knott 16:21 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Some queries:

  1. Since it appears that subpages are unwelcome, can you link to halfway down a page..? Say, for example I wish to list the titles and plots of a series of books, but link to a specific title from a different page..?
  2. With the furore about pictures and whatnot, are we allowed to scan the covers of books/CDs/videos..? I presume we cannot just lift them from Amazon or wherever, but surely this would be OK?
  3. In providing book summaries or whatever, can you quote from the blurb..?
  4. ...Song lyrics?
    1. There has been talk in the news lately of record companies threatening to sue fan sites for posting song lyrics. So I would say that complete song lyrics are a no no. However a couple of lines would be fair use if some aspect of the song were being discussed. Theresa knott 13:35 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
  5. Am I correct in thinking that it is the case that you cannot post pictures with copyright details in full view unless they are owned by the person posting them..? --ntnon 13:56 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

2, 3 and 4 are all fair use... i think. CGS 18:05 2 Jun 2003 (UTC).


1. No. There is a half-implemented feature in the software to do this, called "fragments", but development has stalled in the face of opposition from editors. 2. Maybe. I'm against it, but I think I'm in the minority. 3 & 4. Yes, quoting is okay (except if you follow the "no fair use" doctrine -- see Wikipedia talk:Copyrights and Wikipedia talk:Image use policy). 5. That's correct. In most countries, it's an (often unenforceable) infringement of copyright to post a copyright image even if a notice is not displayed. The international nature of this project means that the penalties for infringing copyright are uncertain, however I think most of us consider the risk to contributors to be quite low. -- Tim Starling 08:10 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

2. Why not email the band in question, and ask them to grant permission under the GFDL? Use the wikipedia:boilerplate request for permission.
3. Why not email the author in question, and ask them to... (oh, and cover blurbs will need to be rewritten for neutrality)
4. Quoting full songs is generally not encyclopedically useful, except for short ones like Happy Birthday.
5. Why not email the photographer in question, and... Martin

New Topic - Accessing Wikipedia
I'm a new user and new to programming. I want to access articles on a topic (e.g Battle of Hastings)in Wikipedia automatically (using a Java program)for study purposes. I want to transfer the first 100 or so words of each article to a file.
Is this ok ?
Its been suggested I should use a web crawler for this (but they seem to cause problems and I'm not sure I caould specify a particular topic either)
I thought of using database queries, any advice please? --User:Searcher7

My advice would be to just download the articles using HTTP. You can't make database queries without special permission. You might be interested in Lee Daniel Crocker's Java test suite. It's a Wikipedia speed test which is not exactly what you want to do, but it has various handy functions to download articles from Wikipedia. -- Tim Starling 12:08 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please don't use a crawler to download large amounts of articles. You can download a database dump of the entire Wikipedia. Aggressive crawling of the server can cause a dramatic slow-down of Wikipedia. -- JeLuF
See Wikipedia:Database download.
I don't know how you would be able to limit it to only 100 words. Every java program I've ever seen that crawls grabs pages at a time.
Anyway, I'd grab from Google's cache. They have more bandwidth and money.

IMDB

I suggest that all articles about movies and tv shows be scrapped, and instead have the links point to the apropriate page on the Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com Their database is already amazingly thorough, and appears to be around to stay. No point in rewriting copious amounts of information which already exists in a well organized form elsewhere Vroman 23:12 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

  1. Descriptions at IMDB don't link back to other related articles on Wikipedia (such as interesting locations, years, film technologies, and people other than cast and crew)
  2. IMDB's license is restrictive
  3. IMDB data won't be directly available in an offline edition of Wikipedia
  4. IMDB is available in English only (and possibly partially in Italian and German, though the links don't work), so that wouldn't help the many other languages Wikipedia is available in.
It's certainly appropriate to link to IMDB for additional information, but it doesn't replace free, integrated descriptions. --Brion 23:37 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
There is never a good reason to delete perfectly good material from the Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't paper. We can create perfectly good NPOV articles, something IMDB doesn't even try to accomplish. -- Zoe
I agree with keeping those articles. If we have a britannica, why do we want a different one from scratch. -- Taku 00:10 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Agreed, no reason to delete any of them. Forever free, not tied to any commercial concern, etc. etc. One thing that could certainly be said about Wikipedia's articles on movies and TV shows, though, is that they would benefit from some standardization (especially in terms of the nice things that IMDB does, such as links on all cast and crew), but that'd be hard to implement in the Wikipedia format (since we prefer linking on commonly-used names; disambiguation would be a nightmare for larger collections). A wiki devoted just to movies and TV shows would not be a bad thing. We're probably not there yet, though. -- Wapcaplet 00:58 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ok, I see your point. Would it be possible to write a bot that would automatically translate IMDB pages into wiki articles, like the city pages from census data? Vroman 09:51 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
No, because IMDb is copyright, and they are unlikely to license their content under GFDL any time soon. -- Tim Starling 10:17 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
we could bot-ify their filmography lists, since they are plain data and not copyright as such. But please, anyone who does this: reverse the lists into forward chronological order when you do this, ie oldest first, newest at the foot of the list, so it reads in the same order as other chronologies on Wikipedia -- Tarquin 10:34 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'm afraid not - lists are copyright too. The moment you organise data into a list (for example, in alphabetical order) the list can be copyright. What we really need is a boilerplate layout for film pages. CGS 17:56 2 Jun 2003 (UTC).
I don't think that is correct. Lists are only under copyright if there is some creative process in either selecting or ordering them. Putting things into alphabetical order is just about the least creative way to order them, and as such does not fall under copyright. Alphabetical lists, chronological lists etcetera are not under copyright, unless either the items in the list are, or the collection is. Andre Engels 16:34 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Please see New England Patriots. Is it legal for us to include the logos of sports teams here? They're copyrighted. The NFL's website says "The team names, logos and uniform designs are registered trademarks of the teams indicated". -- Zoe

Well, just because NFL claims it doesn't make it so. I'm no attorney but I don't believe that copyright or trademark law could be construed to prohibit use of trademarks or logos for identification or news purposes, which is what we're doing.

Note: I am not a lawyer, and I might be wrong, but this is what I understand of it. Please someone correct me when/where I am wrong. You have to make a difference between copyright and trademark law here. Basically, something that falls under copyright law may not be used in an unchanged shape, unless there is permission from the owner (or some other exceptions like fair use). Trademark law is much less strict. Mostly, one gets into troubles if one is using a registered trademark in such a way that its use could create the false impression that what one is using it on would someway be connected with the trademark holder. Breaking the trademark would for example be to use the same symbol for another sports team. It would also not be allowed to sell fan stuff containing the trademark without permission. But as said above, using trademarks to identify specifically the organisation holding the trademark is certainly allowed. Most brand names are also trademarked, but that does not disallow us from using the name when we talk about "Coca Cola" or "Mercedes". Likewise we are allowed to use trademarked logos. Andre Engels 16:26 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

When, for example, a page on en: has been made a redirect to m:, and that with an afterthought on want to make a proper page on en, how can she modify the page for it not to be a redirection any more ? Same question on m: with a page redirected on en: ?

User:Anthere

For the moment you need to manually construct the url to it, such as http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=The_title&redirect=no (the &redirect=no is the key part, so it won't zip you over automatically). --Brion 21:41 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
yo ! Okay. that works. Thanks Brion.

Size of Wikipedia-L NNTP

I had been reading the online Wikipedia-L archives for info and for fun, but there seems to be something even easier to browse: the Wikipedia-L NNTP. But I tried it, and there are over 10,000 messages! How many bytes is it? I can't overload my Internet connection again. The last time I did, they phoned and threatened to disconnect me. :-} --Menchi 18:54 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

An anonymous user is adding a lot of links from computing articles to his favourite computing website. Actually, I don't find this annoying yet, as they seem quite reasonable links. But I thought it worth mentioning, in case it gets out of hand. Here are the contributions. Evercat 02:44 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Theme Songs

Opening

  1. #th opening: "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer

Ending

  1. #th ending: (ditto)

Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow what you're suggesting. Can you give an actual example? — Paul A 08:23 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sure, Love Hina, Inu-yasha, Martian Successor Nadesico and Trigun have examples Emperorbma 08:28 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, with that formatting, the number in the list will never be anything but "1." What's the point to it? Also, the standard is for song titles to be in double quotes, like "Official Song Name". Italics would be good for translations, when needed, I'd think. -- John Owens 08:33 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Love Hina is a special case because it has an OVA and a series... (Inuyasha was a better example.) — Emperorbma 08:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I see what you meant. Yeah, most won't go over 1 but some series have more than one end or opening (see Inuyasha). — Emperorbma
OK, I will revise the songs to use "" instead... I agree, but keep bold for readability. Emperorbma

Theme Songs

Opening

(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer

Ending

(#) (ditto)

OVA (Series Name)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

Movies 1. "Movie name" (Translation)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.

Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow what you're suggesting. Can you give an actual example? — Paul A 08:23 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sure, Love Hina, Inu-yasha, Martian Successor Nadesico and Trigun have examples Emperorbma 08:28 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, with that formatting, the number in the list will never be anything but "1." What's the point to it? Also, the standard is for song titles to be in double quotes, like "Official Song Name". Italics would be good for translations, when needed, I'd think. -- John Owens 08:33 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Love Hina is a special case because it has an OVA and a series... (Inuyasha was a better example.) — Emperorbma 08:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I see what you meant. Yeah, most won't go over 1 but some series have more than one end or opening (see Inuyasha). — Emperorbma
OK, I will revise the songs to use "" instead... I agree, but keep bold for readability. Emperorbma
OK how about revision 3.2? Any further ideas? Emperorbma 09:17 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I uploaded an audio file, why does Wikipedia think it's an image? I never told it that it was an image, and the extension clearly shows it's an audio file. CGS 11:54 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).

Theme Songs

Opening

(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)

Ending

(#) (ditto)

OVA (Series Name)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

Movies

1. "Movie name" (Translation)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.

(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.

Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow what you're suggesting. Can you give an actual example? — Paul A 08:23 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sure, Love Hina, Inu-yasha, Martian Successor Nadesico and Trigun have examples Emperorbma 08:28 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, with that formatting, the number in the list will never be anything but "1." What's the point to it? Also, the standard is for song titles to be in double quotes, like "Official Song Name". Italics would be good for translations, when needed, I'd think. -- John Owens 08:33 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Love Hina is a special case because it has an OVA and a series... (Inuyasha was a better example.) — Emperorbma 08:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I see what you meant. Yeah, most won't go over 1 but some series have more than one end or opening (see Inuyasha). — Emperorbma
OK, I will revise the songs to use "" instead... I agree, but keep bold for readability. Emperorbma
OK how about revision 3.3.1? Any further ideas? Emperorbma 09:17 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Suggestion: that a third Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page be created. The More bad jokes and other deleted nonsense is getting to be too long. Arno 11:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Better still, why don't you do it? *-- Tim Starling 16:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)

Opening

(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)

Ending

(#) (ditto)

OVA (Series Name)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

Movies

1. "Movie name" (Translation)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.

(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.

Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow what you're suggesting. Can you give an actual example? — Paul A 08:23 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sure, Love Hina, Inu-yasha, Martian Successor Nadesico and Trigun have examples Emperorbma 08:28 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, with that formatting, the number in the list will never be anything but "1." What's the point to it? Also, the standard is for song titles to be in double quotes, like "Official Song Name". Italics would be good for translations, when needed, I'd think. -- John Owens 08:33 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Love Hina is a special case because it has an OVA and a series... (Inuyasha was a better example.) — Emperorbma 08:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I see what you meant. Yeah, most won't go over 1 but some series have more than one end or opening (see Inuyasha). — Emperorbma
OK, I will revise the songs to use "" instead... I agree, but keep bold for readability. Emperorbma
OK how about revision 3.3.2? Any further ideas? Emperorbma 09:17 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Should I place this up as a style suggestion page? Emperorbma 01:07 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What about Japanese characters (As Unicode character entities)? Do we want a space to put them as well? -- Pipian
Sounds good to me. I didn't do that b/c crosslinking kanji to hiregana takes me a few minutes. ^_^ Emperorbma
Of course. Just need the optional space in the style suggestion page for them, that's all. -- Pipian

== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)

Opening

(#) "Bold Romanized Official Name"; Special charset (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)

Ending

(#) (ditto)

OVA "Romanized Series Name"; Special charset (Translation)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

Movies

1. "Romanized Movie name"; Special charset (Translation)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.

(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.

Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow what you're suggesting. Can you give an actual example? — Paul A 08:23 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sure, Love Hina, Inu-yasha, Martian Successor Nadesico and Trigun have examples Emperorbma 08:28 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, with that formatting, the number in the list will never be anything but "1." What's the point to it? Also, the standard is for song titles to be in double quotes, like "Official Song Name". Italics would be good for translations, when needed, I'd think. -- John Owens 08:33 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Love Hina is a special case because it has an OVA and a series... (Inuyasha was a better example.) — Emperorbma 08:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I see what you meant. Yeah, most won't go over 1 but some series have more than one end or opening (see Inuyasha). — Emperorbma
OK, I will revise the songs to use "" instead... I agree, but keep bold for readability. Emperorbma
OK how about revision 3.3.2? Any further ideas? Emperorbma 09:17 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Should I place this up as a style suggestion page? Emperorbma 01:07 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What about Japanese characters (As Unicode character entities)? Do we want a space to put them as well? -- Pipian
Sounds good to me. I didn't do that b/c crosslinking kanji to hiregana takes me a few minutes. ^_^ Emperorbma
Of course. Just need the optional space in the style suggestion page for them, that's all. -- Pipian
Sho 'nuff. Going for suggestion version 3.4! Emperorbma 06:02 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)

Opening

(#) "Bold Romanized Official Name"; «Special charset» (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)

Ending

(#) (ditto)

OVA "Romanized Series Name"; «Special charset» (Translation)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

Movies

1. "Romanized Movie name"; «Special charset» (Translation)

  • Opening: (ditto)
  • Ending: (ditto)

(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.

(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.

«» - Optional

Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow what you're suggesting. Can you give an actual example? — Paul A 08:23 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sure, Love Hina, Inu-yasha, Martian Successor Nadesico and Trigun have examples Emperorbma 08:28 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, with that formatting, the number in the list will never be anything but "1." What's the point to it? Also, the standard is for song titles to be in double quotes, like "Official Song Name". Italics would be good for translations, when needed, I'd think. -- John Owens 08:33 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Love Hina is a special case because it has an OVA and a series... (Inuyasha was a better example.) — Emperorbma 08:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I see what you meant. Yeah, most won't go over 1 but some series have more than one end or opening (see Inuyasha). — Emperorbma
OK, I will revise the songs to use "" instead... I agree, but keep bold for readability. Emperorbma
OK how about revision 3.3.2? Any further ideas? Emperorbma 09:17 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Should I place this up as a style suggestion page? Emperorbma 01:07 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What about Japanese characters (As Unicode character entities)? Do we want a space to put them as well? -- Pipian
Sounds good to me. I didn't do that b/c crosslinking kanji to hiregana takes me a few minutes. ^_^ Emperorbma
Of course. Just need the optional space in the style suggestion page for them, that's all. -- Pipian
Sho 'nuff. Going for suggestion version 3.4! Emperorbma 06:02 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)

  • Opening
    1. "Romanized Official"; «Special charset» (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
  • Ending
    1. (ditto)
  • OVA "Romanized Official"; «Special charset» (Translation)
    • Opening: (ditto)
    • Ending: (ditto)
  • Movies
    1. "Romanized Official name"; «Special charset» (Translation)
      • Opening: (ditto)
      • Ending: (ditto)

(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.

(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.

«» - Optional

Sections are optional based on whether they are used.

Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow what you're suggesting. Can you give an actual example? — Paul A 08:23 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sure, Love Hina, Inu-yasha, Martian Successor Nadesico and Trigun have examples Emperorbma 08:28 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, with that formatting, the number in the list will never be anything but "1." What's the point to it? Also, the standard is for song titles to be in double quotes, like "Official Song Name". Italics would be good for translations, when needed, I'd think. -- John Owens 08:33 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Love Hina is a special case because it has an OVA and a series... (Inuyasha was a better example.) — Emperorbma 08:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I see what you meant. Yeah, most won't go over 1 but some series have more than one end or opening (see Inuyasha). — Emperorbma
OK, I will revise the songs to use "" instead... I agree, but keep bold for readability. Emperorbma
OK how about revision 3.3.2? Any further ideas? Emperorbma 09:17 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Should I place this up as a style suggestion page? Emperorbma 01:07 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What about Japanese characters (As Unicode character entities)? Do we want a space to put them as well? -- Pipian
Sounds good to me. I didn't do that b/c crosslinking kanji to hiregana takes me a few minutes. ^_^ Emperorbma
Of course. Just need the optional space in the style suggestion page for them, that's all. -- Pipian
Sho 'nuff. Going for suggestion version 3.4! Emperorbma 06:02 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Also can we move this to a separate page? Emperorbma 06:16 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

New location proposed Wikipedia:Theme Song Format and the corresponding Wikipedia talk:Theme Song Format. Emperorbma

Does anyone think adding an Opening and Ending Songs section to series and movies sounds like a good idea?

I propose the following format (Revision 3.4.7):

Is there a discussion somewhere of the scope and topic suitabilitiy of the project?

Given no space limitations, what is the most appropriate approach to deep subjects? One could write volumes on many topics. How do we divide up articles that are lengthy and have logical subtopics? Even simple, noncontroversial topics, like cattle, have had volumes written about them. Must all pages be general interest? Where do we stop? Why?

Are articles on topics of narrow, professional interest encouraged? E.g. legal, accounting, medical, or other fields. If not where is the line drawn?

I observe that some of the most active editing has been on topics related to human sexuality. Is there a consensus (or a summary of the positions taken by whatever various schools of thought there may be on the subject) regarding the division between appropriate and inappropriate material for this topic?

I have seen some isolated stylistic recommendations, "the passive voice is to be avoided" (-: and "include all relevant content in one article rather than breaking it up". I can't find a summary of this information, and the style guide is no help. Is there one? Or shall my prose have to suffer such edits at the hands of others for me to understand the framework??

Kat

Hi Kat, welcome to Wikipedia! If you haven't already, I would suggest checking out Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines. Some of your questions may be answered there. As far as general versus narrow professional interest - there is a place for all of it here, provided it can be presented in a neutral, encyclopedic format.
As for writing "volumes" on some topic, it depends. Keep in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, first and foremost. A thorough treatment of any subject is desirable, but no article should really turn into anything too huge. Typically, if the article on a subject is getting that long, it can be broken up into several sub-topics. Use your best judgement. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not gives a pretty good overview of what is generally not desirable content for articles. -- Wapcaplet 18:48 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

What is the policy on linking? Apparently some user's cant tolerate a link to international community on a page about a leader in the "international community"; whereas, other user think such linking is part of the very core of wikipedia.

I wonder why, if someone doesn't like the links, they don't edit their preferences differently. Pizza Puzzle

Are there any biologists out there who can look at the page respiration. It looks wrong to me. What this page desrcibes is what I would call gas exchange. I would guess that most people querying a search engine on respiration would be looking for cellular respiration, not this. Theresa knott 13:29 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Advice on lists, please. There are lists of country musicians at List of country musicians, country music and Alternative country. There is a great deal of duplication. Is it better just to leave this and cross reference or would it be better to have a comprehensive list at one page with a link to that page? Tiles 00:22 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

It is better to put the list at List of country musicians. You may want to mention a very small number of the most-popular names on country music if there is something noteworthy to say about them. But don't duplicate all the names in both places. -- Amillar 02:16 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

When and why did the IP address disappear from the top right of each page when you aren't logged in? -- SGBailey 22:59 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Answer is right at the top of Wikipedia:New server madness. --Brion 23:13 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

OK & Thanks (I had done a search for <IP address> but hadn't found that reference. How do I find out what IP address I am / Others are? -- SGBailey 23:29 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm uneasy about a very wide picture of the Severn Bridge I've put on to Suspension bridge. Does anything strange happen on an 800 by 600 screen? I can't change my 1024 by 768 screen to check because all my icons pile up in a heap when I return my screen to 800 by 600 and it takes ages to return them all to their previous positions. I'm particularly concerned about what the screen looks like if a Skin has been set in Wikipedia preferences that has a menu list down the left side of the screen.
Thanks Adrian Pingstone 18:58 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Adrian - With an image that wide, you may want to consider posting a smaller version to the article itself, with a link to a larger version. On smaller screen sizes, this image will run off the right side of the page (though, some browsers, such as the newer versions of MSIE, tend to automatically re-size images that are too large for the screen). Check out the image use policy for suggestions about reasonable image sizes. Also, if you want to check what a page looks like in smaller screen sizes, why not just resize your browser window to 800x600 or smaller? -- Wapcaplet 19:22 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'd imagine it would get rather hairy for people with the floating navbar, like I have. I think the best solution is to replace it with another image with more tractable dimension (IIRC there's a good one in Golden Gate Bridge). I don't particularly like the Severn Bridge pic, because you can't even see the vertical suspension cables. -Smack 02:20 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for the two answers but has anyone actually seen a screw-up with Suspension bridge as opposed to thinking it might happen?
Adrian Pingstone 07:46 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
On my computer, the image does go off the edge of the screen at 800x600 if I have the quickbar turned on. An image width of 600 would be OK. --Zundark 08:47 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
On 800x600 with the floating sidebar, the image goes off the edge of the screen. On Internet Explorer, the text follows it, requiring horizontal scrolling in order to read the text. On Mozilla-type browsers the text stays within the visible window, but you need to scroll horizontally to see the right-hand end of the image. In either case, horizontal scrolling with the floating sidebar produces odd effects, but not until you scroll over to the right. Screenshots (with IE): media:Screenshot Suspension bridge IE left.jpg and media:Screenshot Suspension bridge IE right.jpg --rbrwr
Thanks for the screenshots Rbrwr, and thanks Zundark for your reply as well. I'll make the pic smaller when I have time.
Adrian Pingstone 11:49 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hey folks, what do you do when you find an external link is broken? Do you just delete it? Leave it there in hopes that it will fix itself? Put a note next to it on the page that it is broken? Post something on the talk page? --Nelson

Here's what I try to do:
  1. Try to fix it! Very often a broken link is broken just because someone restructured their site and forgot to leave redirects to handle old links. If you remove a layer or two of directories and poke around, very frequently you can find the page in its new location.
  2. Check google. Sometimes poking around isn't enough (say, if it moved from one domain to another), but the pages have been put up somewhere else. If you know enough about the page (like knowing it's called "Bob Frummel's Guide To Physics" or what have you) a web-wide search can turn it up.
  3. If you can't find the same resource, you might look for an alternate resource that provides similar information.
  4. Also check the Wayback Machine. These folks archive a fair chunk of the web, and if they've got the page you need you can link to the saved copy (it's more stable than linking to the google cache). Not all pages are archived, though.
  5. If you can't find anything and there's no sign that the site is coming back, consider moving the link to the talk page with a note. Someone else might know more about the situation and be able to track it down.
--Brion 18:29 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Question on Tables: I noticed that the figure of speech page, which (like many wikipedia pages) has a lengthy list, has had the list formatted as a table in order to make it into three columns (more attractive than one long list streaming down thep age).

This strikes me as fundamentally wrong, since what it is is not a table but a multi-column list. Is there a wikipedia policy to only use tables for actual tables, or do we translate the html practice of using tables for all formatting?

-- Tom

I've just had a look at figure of speech, but I must say I don't see the problem. Of course this is a list rather than a table. It seems you can/have to use the "table" formatting if you want to create columns, but you only see that when you edit the page. So again, waht exactly is it you're not happy with? --KF 16:04 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
HTML was designed to describe the structure of a page (information organized in paragraphs, lists, tables, etc.) rather than the precise formatting. The client/browser then decides what the page should look like. Unfortunately, this hasn't been the case with web design, and it's standard practice make layout that looks good on a given browser (or set of browsers) without regard to the structure of a document (e.g. using tables to create menus or columns). The problem this creates is in nonstandard situations -- an unusual browser, accessibility software (e.g. for the blind), etc. For a long term project like the wikipedia, I think we should focus on the structure of content in the pages and worry about appearance issues later (e.g. we could introduce standard column-creation for pages with very long lists based on some intelligent browser-aware method in the future). --Tom
Tom is exactly right. Every competent web authority strongly recommends against using tables for any kind of layout. If a bunch of stuff is supposed to appear in a list, then it should be in list markup. Some lists, if they are long enough, and contain enough different kinds of information, might be more appropriately formatted as a table (for example, if you have name/birthdate/comment for a list of people). Tables for things like placing an image on the right side of the article is (to me, anyway) totally unacceptable: DIV tags with style alignment works just fine (in modern browsers) for that kind of thing, and I replace it wherever I see it. Anyone who thinks layout can't be done without tables should check out W3C or Wired, just to name two. (stepping off soapbox) Obviously this isn't usually an issue on Wikipedia, since the majority of layout is done for us, but it's nice to keep in mind :) -- Wapcaplet 17:36 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
tables are a pain to edit, and there is no guarantee of the reader's screen width. I've removed it. -- Tarquin 16:12 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Thanks Tarquin for fixing that.

After doing the painstaking work of adding references to a number of articles, I'm thinking that maybe it doesn't get done enough because it's complicated, especially for books that have been around for a while and have long printing histories. So I was wondering what people think about a policy of routinely creating articles for references, especially for those that are useful for multiple articles? For instance, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships article makes DANFS easy to cite in all the articles about ships, and very often Bede is linked to from Anglo-Saxon articles because his Ecclesiastic History is the primary source for the article's info. In addition, the article can expand on the value and scope of the reference work, or mention a preferred edition. So many articles have nothing that enables readers to go beyond what they've just read... Stan 12:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You mean create articles for sources to which we commonly refer to? Excellent idea. -- Tarquin 16:16 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I suspect the controversial part is to "create articles first and ask questions later". :-) Many will likely be stubly and with only one or two links at first, so stub-haters will dislike, but they're still useful since their purpose is to encapsulate messy biblio bits. At some point it might also be useful to have a list of reference works as index. Stan 17:10 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

New Bad jokes/deleted nonsense page

Suggestion: that a third Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page be created. The More bad jokes and other deleted nonsense is getting to be too long. Arno 11:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Better still, why don't you do it? *-- Tim Starling 16:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Am I allowed to do it? I wasn't aware of that. You seem to have assumed that I was. Arno 05:49 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Yes, you can do it. It's not protected. -- Tim Starling 08:45 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Error: Fascism takes several screens of no text between mightiest and best-known. There is no reason why it should, having looked at the actual wiki. Is Mozilla at fault here, or is it Wikipedia? Emperorbma 03:49 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Looks fine here (Mozilla Firebird 0.6 on Linux). Force a reload (ctrl+shift+r) just to double-check that you don't have a broken copy in your local cache. --Brion 04:51 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Same problem. My version is 1.3.1 Windows version if that is relevant. Emperorbma 07:22 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hmm, I'm now looking at it in Mozilla 1.3 on Windows 2000. Looks okay still... I've made a trivial change to the page (linked an instance of World War II in the third paragraph), check the page again. If it doesn't show that link, you've got a stuck cache or something; if it does show the link, and it's got that weird display, I suspect other browser problems... --Brion 07:35 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Mozilla 1.4rc1 also displays this page OK. -- The Anome 07:39 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Still isn't working. I copied the 20 page blank spot and pasted it... it pasted a regular space. Emperorbma 07:54 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I made some (probably irrelevant) formatting changes. Does it always break in the same place? Try resizing the window to see if it breaks elsewhere (sometimes there's an extraneous table tag or something that causes weird formatting in some browsers. BTW, the page validates as correct HTML 4.01.) -- Wapcaplet 13:42 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Resizing moves the location of the break. Nevertheless, there is nothing in the HTML (view source) which would indicate a cause for this breaking... Emperorbma
Perhaps I have a broken installation, since no one else reports this. Emperorbma
Hmm, most curious. I just tried it in my Mozilla 1.3.1 for Windows, and it looks fine, until you get it down to around less than 600 pixels wide - at that point, the heading stuff (Wikipedia logo, search box, language links, etc.) all start to overlap and look really bad (due to table formatting issues, no doubt), but no big empty space such as you are getting. Tables do pretty nasty stuff when you mess with their intended size (which is why all the reasonable web authorities recommend against using them for formatting). I don't know if it's a table that's causing the problem on your browser, or something else. Do any other articles do it? I suppose the only solution I have for you is to upgrade your browser. Though, if Fascism is the only article that causes problems, it's probably not worth fussing over :) -- Wapcaplet 17:36 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Something's wrong with the database. The only place I can think of where I can reproduce it every single time is my very own talk page. Smack

Thanks to whoever did the update of Special:Wantedpages. One problem: After I created Eddie Cantor, I went to remove him from the list, only to find it couldn't be edited. And Eddie Cantor is still a red link there. -- Infrogmation 23:21 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

They used to immediately become Blue once you created them. That was better. --Menchi 23:47 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I found a bug. When moving Favorite pages of banned users to Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users and using the move talk page where aplicable option, it moved Talk:Favorite pages of banned users to [[Talk:Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users]], which is not the correct page.
P.S. I made Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users so that we could easily track when our favorite vadals have been making changes without cluttering out own watchlists with thier favorite pages (i.e. this works like a group watchlist).
MB 18:59 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

My !!! Just to say hi. I just look at the 50 last contributions. And I fear about 40 of them are about fight against vandalism. Horrible. My virtual support. Ant

I uploaded an audio file, why does Wikipedia think it's an image? I never told it that it was an image, and the extension clearly shows it's an audio file. CGS 11:54 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).

I dunno if this has anything to do with it, but as the Special:Upload page says, the preferred format for media files is Ogg Vorbis (no patent issues and whatnot). Check out Wikipedia:Sound help. -- Wapcaplet 13:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The Ogg version is the same. CGS 13:56 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
Curious... maybe there is no special facility for handling audio files? Are they always treated like images? I suppose it doesn't matter, as long as you can download/play it, but it is a bit confusing. -- Wapcaplet 14:27 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Just use media and colon-image links.
The only thing image-specific about the upload system is the word "image". Just ignore it. :) --Brion 16:55 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Can someone take a look at http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=62.60.78.153 ? -- Tarquin

Hmm... some of his stuff is fine, Richard Curtis for example, but what are they doing with Civilization et lingua universal? A whole page in French. CGS 08:44 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
No, it isn't French. I know Latin, and could certainly recognize French, Spanish, Italian, and probably Portuguese, and it isn't any of those. I've been wondering about these myself. Certainly a Romance language, of course. -- John Owens 08:53 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Given the title of the page. Perhaps it's some kind of universal language ?Theresa knott 09:15 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Esperanto is the only Universal language I've heard of... Emperorbma 09:21 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Read international auxiliary language. Become educated. Martin 09:28 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
It does mention Interlingua repeatedly. But then, it also mentions Esperanto and a few others, too. -- John Owens 09:25 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Heh. Call yourself a Wikipedian, eh? Wikipedia in Interlingua
Darn it, my link doesn't work. Smack
It's a language called Romanica
Adrian Pingstone 09:31 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, yeah, yeah... Whatever it is, what's it doing in the English Wikipedia, not being in English? CGS 11:42 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).

Ogg Format

Slashdot style morals aside, is it practical to upload an Ogg audio clip at the moment and expect the typical visitor to be able to play it? Can Windows Media Player decompress them? CGS 07:11 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).

I think this was discussed at wikipedia talk:sound help... Martin 09:33 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I know winamp supports it, and a lot of Windows users use it. Most Linux users can listen to ogg. All that is left is Mac users. MB 14:55 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Macs have OGG support available from a number of apps. I'm not sure if it's built into iTunes. -- Tarquin 16:36 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

If we follow a convention of writing 1.2E31 instead we can avoid the problem of having a break in the quanity...1.2 x

1031 Pizza Puzzle

Use &nbsp; if it bothers you so much. -- Tim Starling 04:23 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The E form is just a hack - use the proper standard form. CGS 04:25 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).

Many war-related pages have a banner attached:

History -- Military history -- War -- History of Russia -- World War II

I wonder where its best form and placement is discussed. Does anybody know?<br> -- Ruhrjung 21:03 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

best placed at the top Pizza Puzzle

It has occured to me the the photo on Mooning could be considers as offensive as the photo linked to on Clitoris. Therefore I move that we come to a concensus on photos exposing Intimate parts and follow it with all such articles. Please note, that IMHO to be totally NPOV, we should openly show any images. MB 20:25 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Please can an admin undo Michael's page move of Crass to Crass (band), many thanks. quercus robur 17:19 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Done, and talk page with it. -- John Owens 17:35 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Thanks quercus robur 18:08 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

For those who are interested, there has been some talk on the mailing list about putting a Content Advisory label on the Wikipedia. I have created Wikipedia:Content advisory so that the entire community can help develop the advisory. No decision has been made about whether we are actually going to put this up, so discussion should be had at Wikipedia_talk:Content advisory. MB 01:38 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Could a developer check to see if User:Eddie is loging in using User:Michael's ip range (i.e. 152.163.25x.xxx)? He has been reverting articles of User:Michael's back to user Michael's content in a sneaky way. I just want to make sure it is or isn't User:Michael. If it is him, please ban the account. Thanks. MB 17:38 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

My apologies if this suggestion is in the wrong place or has already been addressed, however I think it would be better if wiki links were not case sensitive. Its annoying having to either make a redirect page, or fix a bunch of links due to capitalization discrepancies.Vroman 22:06 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Is there a discussion somewhere of the scope and topic suitabilitiy of the project?

Given no space limitations, what is the most appropriate approach to deep subjects? One could write volumes on many topics. How do we divide up articles that are lengthy and have logical subtopics? Even simple, noncontroversial topics, like cattle, have had volumes written about them. Must all pages be general interest? Where do we stop? Why?

Are articles on topics of narrow, professional interest encouraged? E.g. legal, accounting, medical, or other fields. If not where is the line drawn?

I observe that some of the most active editing has been on topics related to human sexuality. Is there a consensus (or a summary of the positions taken by whatever various schools of thought there may be on the subject) regarding the division between appropriate and inappropriate material for this topic?

I have seen some isolated stylistic recommendations, "the passive voice is to be avoided" (-: and "include all relevant content in one article rather than breaking it up". I can't find a summary of this information, and the style guide is no help. Is there one? Or shall my prose have to suffer such edits at the hands of others for me to understand the framework??

Kat

Hi Kat, welcome to Wikipedia! If you haven't already, I would suggest checking out Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines. Some of your questions may be answered there. As far as general versus narrow professional interest - there is a place for all of it here, provided it can be presented in a neutral, encyclopedic format.
As for writing "volumes" on some topic, it depends. Keep in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, first and foremost. A thorough treatment of any subject is desirable, but no article should really turn into anything too huge. Typically, if the article on a subject is getting that long, it can be broken up into several sub-topics. Use your best judgement. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not gives a pretty good overview of what is generally not desirable content for articles. -- Wapcaplet 18:48 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I messed up. I need help. I was trying to make my profile on meta-wiki a redirect to my profile here, and it didn't work. However, it does work for editing; when I try to edit my meta profile, it takes me to the edit screen for my regular profile. I know there's a URL I can type in to get around that, involving the .phtml extension, but I don't know what exactly it is. -Smack 02:37 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=user%3ASmack&redirect=no
You can find the formula by going to a known redirect page, like Village pump. When it redirects you to the real page, click the "redirected from" link to get back. This doesn't work across Wikipedias, as you found out. -- Merphant 03:53 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I used to be able to view [diff] in my watchlist, now I can't. Also when I have the menu at the right-the edit box overlaps with it. Pizza Puzzle

Mailing lists operations

I've been reading and wanting to participate a bit (probably not very actively) in the WP Mailing lists for several months now. But I never actually did, because I never tried a newsgroup or a mailing list before. I finally forced myself into trying it yesterday, but things didn't go smooth, and I couldn't find help or FAQ on the Wikipedia:Mailing lists.

  1. NNTP: I can read all message of all lists on NNTP, but when I posted 2 messages there in two different lists, none showed up. Only a little pink square appeared beside the replied message's icon, indicating that a reply was sent, however...
    I also tried the newsgroup ab.test, and everything works, including replies. So my mail client works.
  2. E-mail: I know how to post new message using Hotmail, but how to reply to another person's old message? I can't even see old messages posted this morning just a few hours before my subscription succeeded.
  3. How do I send test messages? I really don't know how this mailing list thing work.

--Menchi 22:28 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Help! Help! Help! I'm drowning! :-S I thought it would be a good idea to direct all the precursors and descendants of Univac to that central article, since it seemed to provide a comprehensive overview of how all those companies merged... But now when I read closer, it seems that 'Sperry Corporation' separated from the pack, only to swerwe back into the fray very late in the game. It definitely isn't as clear cut as I Thought it would be. I Really hope I haven't gone overboard; It just seemed that many of those articles were just linking into each and every other of each other, when they really only covered the same historical ground. But I starting to get doubts, did I simplify things too much. Any comments wellcome. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 13:27 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Sorry if this problem has been known. Interlanguage links (at the top of the page) from English Wikipedia to Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia don't work. But the links from Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia work just fine. Some people on Chinese Wikipedia experience the same. --Lorenzarius 12:15 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hmm, they work fine in Mozilla 1.1 for Linux, Mozilla 1.3 for Windows, and Internet Explorer 4.0 for Windows. What browser are you using, and what happens when you try to link to one of them? -- Wapcaplet 12:23 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I am using IE6 and Mozilla 1.2.1 and the problem exists in both browser.
The problem is the links point to the wrong places. For example, when I click on the link to Japanese (Nihongo) village pump, it brings me here which is not the page I wanted. --Lorenzarius 12:55 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ah! Sorry, I do not read Chinese (and am very poor at Japanese) so I didn't notice that they went to the wrong place. Does it do this with all articles? Maybe the inter-language links at the top of the article(s) are incorrect (that is, the unicode stuff inserted into the article). I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you... -- Wapcaplet 13:36 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Seems to have been a side effect of banning chars 0x80-0x9f in titles; these are illegal in ISO 8859-1 charset used here on the English wiki, but it was also stripping them from interlanguage links, which need to be in UTF-8, which does use those bytes. I've temporarily disabled the check so the links should work again. --Brion 16:48 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'd like to propose some minor changes to the navbar at the top of every page. See this page for a mockup; it's a modified version of the Main Page. Comments? -- Merphant 06:58 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

a few weeks ago on the mailing list we had a GREAT redesign of the whole layout, using CSS. ANy news on it? -- Tarquin 07:44 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Can you give a link to the discussion? This small change should be much easier to implement than a complete redesign, so hopefully it has a higher probability of getting added. This post probably belongs on Wikitech-L, but I was wondering if anyone had an opinion on it. -- Merphant 05:03 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Multiple things with the same name. The Kings Highway article refers to one use of that term -- not the oldest or most frequently used. How do you handle other places with the same name? The existing Kings Highway article is about the British road up the East Coast. Another, older road by the same name ran from Florida to Mexico. And there is another one of interest in Jordan. How are these multiple meanings handled so that when someone goes to "Kings Highway" they can find the one they were looking for?

Wikipedia:Disambiguation goes into details on these kinds of situations. --Brion 02:30 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Surely "Orphaned articles" are those to which there are no links. I thought I'd try to link a few in and tried Berkhamstead (number 54 at the time I tried) and I find it is already linked from Hertfordshire. What is going on? -- SGBailey 21:54 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The "Orphaned articles" page isn't updated very frequently. -Menchi 22:01 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Thanks - I had just this second twigged that. -- SGBailey

Everytime I attempt to edit the page List of organic gardening and farming topics, which is currently a redirect page, I'm taken to the edit screen for Organic gardening, which is the page it currently redirects to. I want to change List of organic gardening and farming topics to a 'list' page, splitting it from the Organic gardening article, and also cross linking to Organic farming as it will be relevant to both pages. However at present I don't seem able to do this. Can anybody advise? Is it something to do with having moved the page a couple of times? quercus robur 11:51 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Does this link work for you? -- Notheruser 11:53 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hi Notheruser- the problem seemed to sort itself out by itself- thanks anyway quercus robur 15:20 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Japanese Name Conventions. Does Wikipedia have any? I've seen so many various articles with names listed either way:

  • Western-style (Hikaru Utada)
  • Japanese-style (Utada Hikaru)

It might be a good idea to set something down if there isn't one set in stone already. I personally suggest Western-style, if written in English/Romaji, but Japanese-style if written in Kanji (Unicode character entities).

-- Pipian 05:38 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Kanji names should be in Japanese style and Romaji names should be Western IMHO. (IOW I agree) Emperorbma 05:48 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Alright. I brought this issue up on the Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (biographies) page, as apparently the issue still hasn't been settled on. -- Pipian

Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Japanese) would be the right place.--Nanshu 22:45 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The moment everyone's been waiting for: Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians has been updated. Some highlights: Mav has overtaken Rambot and the conversion script, and now has almost 40,000 edits to his name. Zoe has moved up from #9 to #6, overtaking AxelBoldt and Koyaanis Qatsi. Lir, our most active troll, has moved from #30 to #10. Patrick jumped from #27 to #18 by clocking up another 3,700 edits. TakuyaMurata is a rising star, jumping from #54 to #23, now on 6,523 edits. Not that it's a competition or anything. :) -- Tim Starling 05:13 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yikes! I promise I'm not a bot nor have ever used one. :) --mav
174Michael1106
Ah, so that's his plan... -- Wapcaplet 11:59 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Please note that my contributes are also due to that I can rely on those who copyedit my misspellings or gramatical errors. -- Taku 03:57 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Naming conventions

I'm sure this has been talked to death, and I am sure most people don't really want to hear about it anymore, but it's still an issue. The longer I contribute to the wikipedia, the more I dislike the current naming conventions. The current conventions obviously have thier down fall. For instance in the case of inheritence. Currently, we have an article called Inheritance (object-oriented programming). There is a debate going on right now, b/c some people think people will get cunfused between Inheritance (computer science) and Inheritence (object-oriented programming). I think people are hesitent to suggest Inheritence (computer science) (object-oriented programming) becuase this just sounds bad. I have been thinking about a solution to this problem, of seprating single articles into seperate article (for space reasons). I have a possible solution. How about using a slash (to denote that it is a sub-article) like this: Inheritance (computer science)/object-oriented programming? Would this be acceptable? Is there already a rule regarding this type of thing? The problem seems to be that this is being treated as a disambiguation problem, but the standard rules of disabiguation can not be applied here. Could we come up with (if it doesn't already exist) a standard naming practice for sub-topics? If this standard doesn't already exist, can we agree on using /'s? MB 15:04 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Alright, Wikipedia:Do not use subpages has been brought to my attention. So the / is obviously not a solution. However, I think that we still need a naming solution for sub-topics. Using the disambiguation option of ()'s is not ideal for multiple disambiguation. MB 15:39 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please keep in mind that we actually want to link to these articles. Disambiguation identifiers should be kept concise. I really don't see what all the fuss is about. Either CS or OOP seem fine to me as an identifier. If you can't agree, why not have a vote? --Eloquence 20:25 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Can I get a few opinions on whether it's OK to remove any mention of neutrosophy and related stuff from serious articles? This stuff has been listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and the general concensus seems to be it's very obscure, but now MyRedDice opposes deletion, the articles may end up being kept. But nevertheless, I don't think serious pages should discuss it, until it becomes more widely accepted. Evercat 13:32 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps we should discuss this on Talk:Neutrosophy, and move the VfD discussion there as well. Village pump is already a very busy page. -- Tim Starling 13:39 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

What is the policy on linking? Apparently some user's (like User: Dan Keshet and User: Evercat) cant tolerate a link to international community on a page about a leader in the "international community" nor a link to governor-general about a man who was a governor-general; whereas, other user think such linking is part of the very core of wikipedia.

I wonder why, if someone doesn't like the links, they don't edit their preferences differently. Pizza Puzzle

Those particular links wouldn't make a lot of sense in context. Rather, link to international community and Governor-General. --Brion 20:52 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Thats really not the point Brion, this isnt a case of their improving my link, they are simply deleting it. A link to governor is better than no link at all, when the topic is a "military" governor. Pizza Puzzle

That's exactly the point. If you're going to pepper the text with links, they must be relevant. Sometimes linking individual words by themselves doesn't provide a link that is informative, but rather goes to an article on a different concept. Sometimes disambiguation on the titles is necessary, but often as not you can get away with linking to the right concept with a different word. For instance, dialogue is about literary forms; in the context of international politics, you probably want to link to something more like diplomacy. You can make the link 'transparent' to the existing text by using a 'pipe' character: [[diplomacy|dialogue]] -> dialogue, etc. --Brion 21:25 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Actually, I just reverted to the last version that didn't have silly links to pressure and absolute, for example. I'll re-instate the link to international community. (we're talking about Abu Mazen, btw.) Evercat 20:53 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Any why not link to pressure, pressure is just as much of a concept in politics as it is in physics. And why not link to dialogue, if we have an article on dialogue, and a world leader states that dialogue is so important that its the only quote we have from him, it doesnt seem "silly" to link to dialogue. Pizza Puzzle

Or how about the deletion of my link to Muslim, at the page on Jinnah. Not linking to Muslim there is sort of like not linking to Christianity when one has an article on Aquinas. I believe the most recent biography on Jinnah refers to him as one of the 3 most influential Muslims in history; yet, my link is "excessive". Pizza Puzzle

A link to Muslim still exists at that page (Muhammed Ali Jinnah). But some of your other links there were a bit excessive. I don't really think that when you say someone died, this actually requires a link to death, for example. Evercat 21:05 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

And why not? When else are we going to link to death? Many people like to browse the links. Pizza Puzzle
Wikipedia should probably not look like this. :-) Evercat 21:30 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Obviously, opinions vary about when linking is appropriate. Too many of them, and it gets hard to read an article. Too few, and it's hard to determine an article's context within wikipedia. I think of them as "key words"; I usually don't link on common words, especially when the meaning is relatively clear from the context. Uncommon words, I usually link on the first occurrence. I also treat them as a sort of "see also" within the article, like: Robert Fripp was one of the founding members of King Crimson. I dunno, seems like a matter of preference to me. -- Wapcaplet 21:07 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I just don't see how linking to laws, judges, and presidents, is an excessive notion when one is writing about laws, judges, presidents. Pizza Puzzle
Well, to use your example of dialogue in the Abu Mazen article... I think putting a link there is distracting and in a way takes the quote out of context. It makes it seem as if he is saying "There is no substitution for the Wikipedia article on dialogue." -- Wapcaplet 21:14 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

There is a Wikipedia:Make Links Relevant debate already. But the discussions there had been inconclusive, and eventually faded out several months ago. --Menchi 21:42 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Linking to death would be appropriate in an article about the existence of the soul, or life after death, since in that case you would want to know as much as possible about the terms being discussed. Linking to death when talking about somebody who just happened to die is not relevant. -- Nelson 15:00 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Is there a reason why Wikipedia is very slow today? Or is this something I have to get used to? It is a little frustrating when it takes so long to see the edit screen that I forget what I was going to edit :) Kingturtle 18:26 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The page cache has been cleared to accomodate recent updates to the software, so every page needs to get regenerated and stored at least once as it's first revisited. That may slow things down a bit for a day or two. --Brion 18:40 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Could a developer please check out the discussion at Wikipedia talk:How to edit a page? In particular, a couple of us are interested in having the default ALT text for images on Wikipedia to be changed to the empty string, "", rather than the filename, so that when contributors omit the ALT text, we aren't left with a filename which is potentially very confusing to users with speech readers, text-only browsers, etc. Refer also to the new article Wikipedia:Alternate text for images for some details on this issue. Thanks! -- Wapcaplet 16:30 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Type in great wall of china and click GO and you are taken to Talk:Great Wall of China. Type in baseball hall of fame and click GO and you are taken to Talk:Baseball Hall of Fame. This is bad. Obviously, users should be taken to Great Wall of China and Baseball Hall of Fame respectively. How can this be fixed? Kingturtle 23:21 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Curiously, if you type in "Great Wall of China" or "Baseball Hall of Fame", with all the capital letters, you get to the article. It just amused me, thought I'd mention it, don't mind me. --Camembert
Don't worry. I won't.
*joking* --Menchi 23:29 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I've installed Erik's fix for this; it now takes article pages at a higher priority than talk pages. --Brion 04:59 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

WP-L Address

So far I couldn't get any e-mails from Wikipedia:Mailing lists, even though NNTP shows that there are new ones. I think it's because of Hotmail's blocking system, which is ineffectively selective. Anyway, Hotmail has a solution, you enter the address or something:

Most often the 'To:' address is the mailing list's address. To insure you receive mailing list messages in your Inbox identify the 'To:' address for each of your mailing lists.

So what should I enter? I doesn't accept the domain @wikipedia.org.

--Menchi 00:38 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

My watch list is growing and growing (as is yours, probably ;-). I just thought, it could sometimes be of help, if the links on a page that are already on my watch list, would show up in a different color. Would this make sense / be helpful / did someone already think of something like that? Thanks, Fantasy 06:44 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Regarding musician entries: if there is a discography listed, should we make separate pages for each album comprised of a track listing? Mick 19:56 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

No, there are millions of album, 99% are insignificant, except to the fans, whose taste cannot represent Earthlings.
Similarly, not every person mentioned in this encyclopedia deserves an article. For some, a one- or two-sentence description will do, under appropriate section of relevent historical incident.
Yes, you'll find some counterexamples, but they're made by zealous, or possibly overzealous fans.
Note that there are historically and culturally consequential albums which should have an article.
--Menchi 22:16 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Mick - I'd say go for it, provided you have something significant to write about each album. Obviously, for famous and influential albums, such as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an article might just about write itself. Every full-length album by any musician probably has a good story behind it, so I see no reason why you shouldn't write about albums you know and love - provided it's good, encyclopedic information, and not just a review of the album, or a list of personnel who played on the album. (fans' taste cannot represent Earthlings? I won't pretend I understand what that means...) -- Wapcaplet 23:06 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)


It is the summary of what I said, nothing new. But in case you're wondering, it means "what a small group of fans of a particular band like to hear and consider very important in their lives in no way represents what most people on Earth consider to be an essential cultural, social, or historical assets".
If we write every religious affiliation with around or less than 5,000 followers, Wikipedia becomes Wiki-religio-pedia. Likewise, discography or minor CDs leads to Wiki-Amazon.com-pedia.
--Menchi 23:29 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Well, yeah, but then again, probably 99% of the entire contents of Wikipedia is of little interest to the Earth's population as a whole. Consider, for example, the stub geographical/census articles imported by Rambot. Discussion of what is or isn't appropriate on Wikipedia is neither here nor there; I just think that if someone wants to write about "minor" CDs, they should feel welcome to do so. Every album is a significant event in a recording artist's life, as well as in that artist's fans' lives, and may have an interesting story behind it. Why not have articles on them? -- Wapcaplet 23:38 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Geographical places will always be here, even after the inhabitants are replaced by some other group and names changed. Some CDs may not be so permanent.
But I agree that if there's something interesting and unusual about a CD that distinguish from the regular-Joe CDs, I for one would be interested in learning about it.
--Menchi 23:49 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Mailing lists operations

I've been reading and wanting to participate a bit (probably not very actively) in the WP Mailing lists for several months now. But I never actually did, because I never tried a newsgroup or a mailing list before. I finally forced myself into trying it yesterday, but things didn't go smooth, and I couldn't find help or FAQ on the Wikipedia:Mailing lists.

  1. NNTP: I can read all message of all lists on NNTP, but when I posted 2 messages there in two different lists, none showed up. Only a little pink square appeared beside the replied message's icon, indicating that a reply was sent, however...
    I also tried the newsgroup ab.test, and everything works, including replies. So my mail client works.
  2. E-mail: I know how to post new message using Hotmail, but how to reply to another person's old message? I can't even see old messages posted this morning just a few hours before my subscription succeeded.
  3. How do I send test messages? I really don't know how this mailing list thing work.

--Menchi 22:28 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

1. I've found posting messages via GMANE (i.e. NNTP) to be a bit dicey. The one thing you really have to know is that GMANE will send an "autoauthorizer" message to the "from" address, which you have to reply to before the post will be forwarded to the list. You also have to use a "from" address which is subscribed to the mailing list, otherwise it will be delayed for a spam-check.


2. To reply to a hotmail message, you click on the message and then the "reply" button. If there's too many messages and the one you want to reply to is off the page, there are "previous" and "next" links to click on, at the bottom of the list. I would strongly recommend setting up folders for each of the mailing lists, and creating filters to send the posts to the correct folder. Note that wikien-l + wikitech-l will fill up your 2 MB limit in less than a week, so you have to regularly clean up.

-- Tim Starling 01:35 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

2. So I can't reply to old messages that were posted before my registration?
Thanks for the tips and the warning. --Menchi 02:54 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
No, you can't. -- Tim Starling 03:05 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Well, you can of course write a response to an old post, but you'll have to paste in the title and quote text yourself and the message won't be threaded properly in some mail readers. But that's a minor annoyance; if it's the only way you can reply to something you want to reply to, by all means do so. --Brion 04:59 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hm. Rather than answering the above question, I'd like to add a new one. I just did a Google search on a lesser known contemporary British playwright called Winsome Pinnock. What I got among the first ten hits was http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Winsome_Pinnock&action=edit, which directly links to the edit page of a non-existing article. Could that sort of thing be avoided? Apparent vandalism in the form of "What the heck ..." etc. is probably due to people completely unfamiliar with wikis being suddenly faced with an edit page. --KF 18:34 12 Jun 2003 (UTC) Ähnliche Seiten

As near as we can tell the only way to keep those out of google is to not exclude edit pages and special pages with the robots.txt file. This would tell google to load up hundreds of thousands of dynamically generated pages and then ignore them. If we tell it not to load them, then it can't see the note in the page telling it not to index the pages. Pretty screwed up system... --Brion 18:44 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I had the impression that you could set the robot meta tag in the html to not index? From what you say you have to have a robots.txt saying that those pages should not be ignored by the robot, so that the "no index" robot meta tag can be read? Even if this is the case, it should be implemented. It will look bad when someone finds a blank page b/c it is listed on google. MB 19:36 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'm reluctant to let google load those pages since it would tend to increase server stress. Hypothetically we could recognize googlebot and let it through just enough to serve fake no-index-me pages, or drop the links entirely from google-served pages, but ugh. I hate dirty tricks like that, and it's reeeeal low on my list of priorities. If someone else wants to code up the special cases... --Brion 04:59 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Question: Who actually "runs" Wikipedia? Who provides the server space. Just curious... it seems a little odd to write/edit articles for an organization you know very little about.

-Alex S

Please see Wikipedia:Overview FAQ. --Brion

Some thoughts (I hope my questions are not academic):

  • will Wikipedia's collective editing paradigm be suitable for the ever-growing number of articles ? (we hear Wikipedia will hit 1,000,000 mid 2007)
  • is there a desirable ratio of articles to editors (mind not contributors) and where are we now ?
  • what is the probability that some newly created article is left unreviewed for months ?
  • will it be plausible/desirable to have lists of voluntary thematic editors (like Wikipedia:Wikipedians by fields of interest) who backed up by some software (like, for instance, "ancient changes") would take on editing more systematically articles we already have ?


Kpjas 15:19 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Those are some pretty deep questions! I don't think anyone has definitive answers to any of them. Since (to my knowledge) nobody has ever used the open-content paradigm on a project of this size (and certainly not one approaching a million articles), it remains to be seen whether it will continue to work as well as it has. I would speculate that as long as the percentage of well-meaning contributors/editors remains high, there is theoretically no limit to the number of articles we may someday have.
There is always a chance that a new article goes unreviewed for quite a while. If nobody notices it as it passes down the Special:Recentchanges list, it could very well sit around for months and not be seen. Though, again, if the percentage of good editors remains high, when someone finally does see it, it's likely to be cleaned up. But you may be right, we could use some kind of systematic way for dealing with this. (I try to skim through Special:Newpages whenever I visit Recentchanges, and catch a lot of nonsense articles that may otherwise go unnoticed, especially during peak editing traffic hours).
I'm sure some of this has been discussed on the various Wikipedia:Mailing lists. Our system has worked pretty well for more than two years, and I'm sure it will continue to do so, as long as we're able to improve and adapt as the situation calls for it. -- Wapcaplet 15:50 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

"Ancient pages" has only been added a few days ago and we'll have to see how it holds up for the purpose of reviewing past articles. An article will only disappear from that list if it has been edited -- but what if it needs no editing? The list may eventually show many very old, very good articles at which point it might stop being useful. Or we might work through past articles until we get to the User:Rambot imported US census data, and people would stop working through the list at that point because they have nothing to add to articles about 2000 people towns. --Eloquence 16:18 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I used to be able to view [diff] in my watchlist, now I can't because I selected "enhanced recent changes" Why cant I have both? Also when I have the menu at the right-the edit box overlaps with it. Pizza Puzzle

In some articles with chinese wikipedia link, this link work in preview mode, but don't in read mode. ex: Provinces of China, the link is the good one in edit mode too ... 62.212.110.113 11:54 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

When I look at "My Contributions" some are followed by the reference "(top)" What does this mean? Thanks! Mkrose

You've done the latest job: top, as in a roof. --Menchi 06:35 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Or, to put it another way: if you look at the edit history of the page in question, your contribution will be at the top of the list. — Paul A 07:07 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

This an S.O.S. to anybody who can help me, and especially to Paul A, who gave me the welcome. I have been smart enough to learn how to use Wikipedia's search engine, edit and create pages, enable links, create this account yesterday night, and successfully login "my" page and this one; but I WAS NOT clever enough to know how to login the rest. Despite my name, my "power" is limited, I'm just a warlock, not a magician... If you can lend me a hand, please write me a message; if I cannot login successfully having been registered I interfere with other users and with Wikipedia too. I'd like to stay, so I'll be grateful for any help.-- The Warlock June 12, 2003, 5:28 (GMT)

Yesterday's discussion of User:The Warlock's problem can be found at User talk:200.69.36.106, if anyone's interested in helping out but wants more information about what the problem is. — Paul A 06:59 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Do you have cookies blocked or disabled? Because if you do, the software will say "you are now logged in", but it will instantly forget who you are as soon as you go to another page. See HTTP cookie. -- Tim Starling 07:26 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Click here for a cookie test and tell us what it tells you. -- Tim Starling 11:03 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hey folks, sorry about dominating the Village Pump, but I don't know where to put this. There's a problem with numbering that I've noticed in many pages, most recently Paul_Simon_(album), where because the author has put spaces between paragraphs, the numbered list starts over again from one. There is no good way to fix this, because removing the space messes up the formatting, and if you were to manually input the numbers, this would make maintenance more annoying. This is one of those cases where I think HTML-like tags would serve us better, because within the <OL></OL> tags, you can put <br>'s without making the ordered list start over again. However, short of forcing Wikipedians to learn HTML, what can be done for pages like this? Change the code so that you must have two spaces in order to have #-numbered lists start over? That seems like the best solution to me, but I don't know how much work that would take, and how many current articles that would screw up. --Nelson 04:13 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

It looks like someone already fixed Paul Simon (album), so you can take a look at it to see how it was done. Numbering proceeds normally, even though some extra info is inserted in the middle. Yes, if you leave a blank line in editing, numbering seems to get restarted (since it opens a new <ol> element), but most things like this can be done using Wikipedia's regular formatting tags (#, :, *, etc.) Wikipedia:How to edit a page talks about this a little. (Actually, if you ask me, information this extensive shouldn't be inserted in the middle of lists in the first place - there's probably a better way to organize it to avoid the problem entirely.)
Don't worry too much about anything appearance-related. Semantic accuracy is probably more important than tweaking the spacing between bullet points. Most of that stuff can be tweaked with the global style sheets, I would assume. -- Wapcaplet 11:26 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Could a developer please update Special:Shortpages? The last update was made on May 13. --mav

Hey folks, two questions:

  1. I misspelled existence as "existance" when searching for its article, and I discovered that there are many pages with that misspelling in them. I then wondered about what should happen if somebody makes a link to existance. When I first did the search, there was no page for it. I made a redirect page to existence. Is this the right way to handle misspellings? Or is it better for there to be no page at all, so that the person linking to it is more likely to realize that it is spelled incorrectly?
  2. I've noticed that when I sign my articles with the four ~'s, Wikipedia somehow knows to sign my articles as Nelson instead of User:Skyfaller. That's really amazingly smart! How did it figure out to do that?

--Nelson 15:00 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

1. I don't know if that's the right way to handle misspellings... of course, the best way is to not have misspellings in the first place! Obviously, if you find misspellings, please correct them. But it's a good idea to have redirects from common misspellings. 2. That is probably because in your user preferences, you put "Nelson" as your nickname. There are some other cool things you can do with your prefs too - check 'em out! -- Wapcaplet 15:07 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I just realized that it might be possible that "existance" might be a British spelling of existence. Does anybody know if that is the case? Or is "existance" recognized as a misspelling on both sides of the Atlantic? --Nelson 16:18 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

No, "existance" is wrong everywhere. -- Tim Starling 02:12 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Oh dear, I seem to have created some weird server bug while playing around with the redirect page from "existance" to existence. I put an extra "#" before the #REDIRECT, in order to see whether a search would turn up any more instances of "existance", I thought the redirect page might be messing up my search. Now, if I search for "existance", I get that demented non-working redirect page, and no matter how many times I edit it back to a normal redirect page and save it, when I search for "existance" I get the demented page again. Interestingly enough, when I actually type in the URL for the existance page, it redirects properly, and when I follow the "redirected from" link at the top of existence, it shows a normal redirect page. Help? --Nelson 19:12 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Are you using "search" or "go"? --Brion 19:16 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ah, apparently I was hitting "Go", because I was simply hitting Enter instead of clicking the mouse, and it seems that defaults to "Go". Go is still bringing me to the demented page. --Nelson 21:17 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The old version is probably still in your browser cache, and because the "Go" URLs are different from standard retrieval URLs, there's a difference in caching behavior. Try clearing your disk/memory cache (completely or just for that page by hitting "Shift+Reload"). --Eloquence 04:39 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Pages retrieved via 'go' should not be cacheable, as the result could change to another page either newer or older than the page it first went to. However they may currently be, which would produce the above results. (IE users, note that I believe it's ctrl you need to make reload really reload, while shift for Mozilla/Netscape.) I'm also not sure whether redirects are handled properly. If someone would like to review that code, please do, my eyes water when I get near it now. :) (Look in Article.php for whatever calls checkLastMod() or something to that effect.) --Brion 07:17 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ah, thanks guys, I am using Mozilla, and shift+reload fixed the problem. --Nelson 20:31 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The periodic lag is annoying. What are the costs of running the wiki and how much would it cost to improve performance? Pizza Puzzle

There are two dedicated servers, a DB server and a page server, donated by Bomis, together with colo and bandwidth.

The DB server is running at a fairly smooth average 25% load on both CPUs, the page server is bouncing between < 10% load and almost saturating its single CPU. So it looks like the problems is either the page-server CPU, or disk IO fragmentation/contention on the DB (unlikely, it's got plenty of RAM).


Here are some possible routes to making things go faster:

  • tune the page-server to run more smoothly, using config options
  • optimise the page-server code to make hot-spots run faster
  • add an extra CPU and extra RAM to the existing page server
  • add an extra page server, and do round-robin DNS with a low TTL to balance the load (we can also do automatic cutover if one fails)

The wikitech-l mailing list is a good place to discuss these things.

The Anome 14:04 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

If 100 wiki users donated $10 im sure we could buy an extra CPU and RAM. Pizza Puzzle

Indeed. There are attempts going on to create a non-profit foundation that can raise funds, and do other things related to Wikipedia and other similar projects. See the wikipedia-l mailing list for more on this. The Anome 14:31 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

But is there any need to wait for a foundation to be formalized? Why not just create a PayPal account? 209.56.25.161

Heck yeah! I'd donate. -- Wapcaplet 15:07 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
User:Brion VIBBER, currently our most active developer/administrator, accepts donations; leave him a message on his talk page for details. --Eloquence 15:16 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Im using a computer which doesn't allow a large screen size. Can I either get a no-frames option or have the menu placed on the right of the screen? (or the top) Pizza Puzzle

Wikipedia does not use frames. If you're referring to the quickbar on the left, it can be placed elsewhere (or removed) by setting your preferences. -- Wapcaplet 13:57 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

What is NASA's copyright policy? Text on Bell X-1 is copied word for word from [4]. Is that okay with NASA? Kingturtle 11:17 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

NASA, like all US government agencies, can't claim copyright so the text would probably be in the public domain. --Robert Merkel 14:03 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Yep. Note that text from the US govt is often POV, and it's a good idea to crosscheck the material with other sources. Stan 15:37 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Where did all the articles on U.S. municipalities come from? Did a bunch of people just copy and paste a Census database into the 'pedia? -Smack

See User:Rambot for the lowdown. --rbrwr
Aha! It wasn't a someone, but a something. -Smack

User:Wrongbros, made a contribution to List of record labels and it was reverted. Is this Michael? If not, why was it reverted? MB 19:42 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Probably because it's doubtful whether we can get independent confirmation that the record label in question exists. See Talk:Messed Up Wreckords. --Camembert

Hello! I try to color the statement of math theorems or conjectures in order to improve readability. However, I have discovered that the image generated by <math>-tag is not transparent and so the effect turns out to be ugly: see Riemann hypothesis. Could anyone give me a helping hand? -- Wshun

colour does not improve readability. -- Tarquin 21:41 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)
but it does improve visibility. FearÉIREANN 03
09 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Then why are links shown in a different colour to other text in all web browsers? :) CGS 21:44 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)
yes, it does. It helps when we want to emphasis something but Bold and italics are already used heavily on a page; and it helps if someone just wants to get the theorem without really reading the article. -- Wshun

A friend of mine told me today that the Wikipedia "doesn't work" because he and a friend of his created a fake religion called Fieldism and it was still there. Needless to say, I deleted it, but this concerns me a bit. I think we should create a way for users to verify articles. To verify articles, you must have been around for a certain amount of time, or made at least x contributions, or something like that. And you shouldn't be able to verify articles you created. what do you guys think? Could someone post this to the mailing list? MB

Recently I have been thinking of how to ensure the quality of articles in wikipedia. I have no doubt about wikipedia will reach 1 million articles soon or later (aside from technical problems we might have), but the quality is questionable. It is true that as has the number grown, the quality of the majority of articles have improved too. Surely there are a lot of good articles (see Brilliant prose). Alas, there are significant number of articles that are written poorly, contain factual mistakes or even hoax mentioned above. We should not excuse them by saying we have far more good articles. People that are unfamiliar with wikipedia will reach such article, they might be disappointed or discard wikipedia as a pot of craps. However, we also should not get rid of articles that look fake, are written poorly now but can be expanded. That is the last thing we want. Fieldism might not show up in google but can turn out to be true. There are a lot of topics that never show up in google but trus thus should be covered by wikipedia thoroughtly. We need a better mechanism google-check.
Anyway, so what is the damn solution? Actually I am not sure about it yet. Nupedia has a good mechanism to ensure the quality of articles, however, it has been bogged out given its bureaucratic system. We don't want to bureaucratic approval system to wikipedia, which is why I have not had such yet despite debates and needs of some kind of peer-review. RecentChanges and My watchlist are our effective peer-review system, which is simple to handle but have worked most of the time thus far.
But we probably need more than them to improve the quality of articles further more. You can come up with other ideas, but what I am thinking now is to put a primary editor of an article to each article or somewhere else. This is not against the wiki-way which we believe in. Wikipedia is a collaborative documenting where anyone can edit any page. This is why any article has no author. We don't want that articles become territorirized by someone who cares about them, saying like this is my article, don't touch it, if you want to do something, go to your articles. This is written well already and your contribution only makes the article poor because your point view conflicts with that is now in the article.


My idea is not this but make explicit credits about who is responsible for articles. If you see a sentence like Dogs are considered a God during Edo Period in Japan, most of you probably wonder is it true and might go to remove that, doubting about accuracy. But if you see, the article with a credit of one who is specialized in Japanese history and culture, you can be sure. There is another problem with this that any article can be expanded later, not unlikely after the article is reviewed by professionals. This should be covered by a way like if some points are added after review, that portions should be noted as not reviewed yet in some ways, preferably by one who actually wrote them.
Reviews should be done by those who can claim their credibility in the similar way done in academic peer-review journals. They are like Ph.D or native people. If we don't want to clutter actual articles, we can use the space at the top of a talkpage. This is actually happening already in some ways. Many wikipedians already show their profession or degrees and put their primary articles to their user page, or sometimes people who doubt about ask those who probably know. This is a nice habit we already have. We do not have to discard this, but we can keep this kind of efforts in formal ways.

-- Taku 20:26 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Eh. I wouldn't worry about it too much. It seems to me that Wikipedia will always have a relatively high concentration of well-meaning and conscientious editors who generally will not let total nonsense articles stay around. The sorts of people who would post nonsense are probably quite likely to get bored and go away after a short time; the ones who stay are usually the ones most interested in improving Wikipedia.
As for determining what is nonsense, well, Google obviously can't answer all questions, but if some topic doesn't show up in a Google search at all (or is very poorly represented), that topic tends to be highly suspect. We've all seen the discussions (boy, that's the nice word for it) over articles like Neutrosophy. I would be very surprised if your friend's Fieldism article had remained for long; someone was bound to run across it sooner or later and find out it was garbage.
We probably could use a good system of at least getting reliable Wikipedians to look at all articles at least once. In practice, this seems to happen anyway, but a more systematic way of doing it wouldn't hurt. I don't think this will become much of a problem until the article-to-reliable-editor ratio gets much higher, though. The bigger Wikipedia gets, the more reliable editors we'll gain. I think if it's worked for this long, for 100K+ articles, it will continue to work for some time to come. -- Wapcaplet 22:49 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Yeah. "Fieldism" was spotted and thrown out. Vandals (who probably see themselves as "practical jokers" or "testing the system") are not really that useful as critics -- it is, in my opinion, like complaining that a city isn't clean after you have urinated in the street (as a test, you understand, as a test). Karada 23:02 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I've always been quite impressed with the security of Wikipedia. I was talking with someone last night about Wikipedia and he told me that the security was lapse, because he had been able to vandalise one of the pages, tea bag. I went to see what he had done, but it had already been reverted (less than 60 seconds). I told him that was our security. CGS 09:05 14 Jun 2003 (UTC).

Heh. What security? Did you tell him that's the whole point? It's very easy to paint graffiti on Wikipedia, but all the walls are made of teflon... -- Wapcaplet 15:43 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

One suggestion I have is simply to cite sources of information. Sometimes people just use sources in their own heads and that is fine, but in other situations they really should cite the source of the information. I've done a lot of work with geographical locations (cities, states, and counties) and citing them using Geographic references for one example. It helps critics of the articles to know that the information can be verified by checking the sources. Sometimes this requires someone to work slower and doing the boring part of adding citations even though it is not as fun as writing the article itself. -- Ram-Man

Thanks to all of you who helped me in solving my problem, it's fixed now. The Warlock.-- June 13, 2003, 6:37 (GMT)

Hey, I'm a newbie here. I just wanted to mention that there will probably a flood of newbies, as this site was just featured on the show The Screen Savers on Tech TV in the USA. I was really curious, and decided to check it out, and that's how I found out.  :) ManicGypsy

Three pages have been temporarily protected as a result of the influx: Martha Stewart, Monkeypox, and Gregory Peck. -- Notheruser 02:09 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Well, the Gregory Peck page was just too easy...
The pages are no longer protected. -- Notheruser 03:31 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
And as a result, they are once again under attack. -- Zoe

I have re-protected Martha Stewart for now. Evercat 17:46 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Seems to be unprotected again. Luckily everyone seems to be keeping a close eye on it to keep it from being vandalized. ManicGypsy 03:24 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Maybe it's just me, but the image on the Sylvia Saint page sure looks doctored. Can anyone confirm that the bomis.com logo really ought to be present in that image, or has it been Photoshopped in? --Dante Alighieri 00:25 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Doesn't look doctored to me, and this is Bomis' kind of thing. --Eloquence 00:30 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Not doctored, but probably copyrighted. -- Notheruser 00:32 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Can some kind soul show me how to put a sequence of four images down the right hand side of the page so that they form one unit and no text can sneak in between them. I'm referring to Sistine Chapel that I illustrated. I reckon the page would look nicer if I had all four pics together and there would be no problems with pics overlapping in different browsers. Thanks.
Adrian Pingstone 09:01 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

LittleDan told me something like this a few weeks ago:

<table align=right>
  <tr><td>
     <div style="float:right;">
         [[image:___Name___ | __Description_]] <br>
         <small>''More detailed explanation<br>
         [[media:___Name___ | Larger version]]''</small> 
         <br><br>
         [[image:___Name2___ | __Description_]] <br>
         <small>''More detailed explanation<br>
         [[media:___Name2___ | Larger version]]''</small>
         <br><br>
         [[image:___Name3___ | __Description_]] <br>
         <small>''More detailed explanation<br>
         [[media:___Name3___ | Larger version]]''</small> 
         <br><br>
         [[image:___Name4___ | __Description_]] <br>
         <small>''More detailed explanation<br>
         [[media:___Name4___ | Larger version]]''</small>  
     </div>
  </td></tr>
</table>

--Menchi 09:08 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

It's easier than that, no need for tables. I've done the first two -- Tarquin
Thanks, Menchi for your info. I'm sorry you had to do so much typing but I'll use Tarquins method (Tarquin, thanks).
Adrian Pingstone 09:46 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Not much typing, just copy-and-paste. If Tarquin's method is simpler, the better. :-) --Menchi 09:57 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Would someone please rescue the poor former Prime Minister of Canada. John George Diefenbaker.

Done. The Anome 00:14 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

Can someone who knows how make the map on Kurds smaller? thanks Kingturtle 06:02 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I've cropped the original image and done a bit of image clean-up (), and also uploaded a shrunk version of this (Media:Kurdish lands 92 cropped small.jpg). Further, I've updated Kurds. Is this OK?
James F. 07:41 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)
OK?! you rock! thanks! Kingturtle 18:35 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I have a query about searching for acronyms. Typing acronyms into the Find box with periods produces an error message even when the page title includes periods (e.g., James Bond's nemesis S.P.E.C.T.R.E.) - but typing them in without periods does not find the page. Am I doing something wrong? - DavidWBrooks 19:53 18 Jun 2003 (UTC)

From Talk:Anti-Zionism:

  • Dear ignoramus. Please stop lying about historical facts...the fact you are using anti-Semitic historical revisionism to hide this fact makes me question your motives. RK 13:03 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
This seems a bit much...Does anyone have any comments? Pizza Puzzle

Oh, lots of arguments get like this. I would let it drop. Evercat 13:30 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

heh...Pizza Puzzle

That is RK's normal style of discussion. If you continue to discuss with him, he will sooner or later call you a vandal and a troll. It is always the same, and he will never learn to change his behaviour. So, follow Evercat's advice, and stop discussing with RK. It is absolutely useless. -- Cordyph 13:37 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Congrats, Pizza the Hutt - you're now part of the club of folks that RK has called anti-Semitic. It's not a very exclusive club - create user:MyRedDice/Wikipedians insulted by RK if you like. Martin

There could be a strict policy of banning users for rudeness. One ad hominem remark and poof, you're gone. Would get rid of a lot of geeky young males in a hurry, plus make it a much more enjoyable place. I am serious about this BTW - it's acceptable to call an act of editing "stupid", but wrong to characterize the whole person as such. Witness the "ignoramus" comment by RK quoted just below, and the well-meaning but misguided tolerance of this by Evercat. Stan 14:27 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

*sigh* Because banning has proved so effective in the past?
I suggest that if you see an ad hominem attack that you find objectionable, you replace it with a link to no personal attacks, or delete it, or move it onto the user's talk page. They're rarely helpful in our goal of writing a collaborative encyclopedia. Martin 14:43 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I don't know, Stan, isn't your characterization of such posters as geeky in itself an ad hominem remark? The younger members have their contribution to make as well, and I don't see what gender has to do with it. Besides, they are more likely to learn forebearance by example than through an attempt by others to apply force. Kat 16:19 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Could someone update the snapshot of the lonely pages list - It is May 13, over a month old (and incomplete then). -- SGBailey 2003-06-19

HI! Does anybody know about copyrights in France? The question i easy: Can I post on Internet images printed in France in 1912? -User:Dixi

Aren't the copyrights international? Especially since France is one of the more "open" societies of Europe. Sigg3.net 09:19 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

They differ from USA to Europe, there may be some specifics... Since I want to publish images from 1912 Larousse, I need to know exactly, in order not to put Wikipedia on any risk...

I think I can help you: [5]. France is interesting in that copyright expiry was suspended for a few years during the world wars, so it can be up to life+84 years. I have a feeling that if the copyright is held by a corporation, or if there is no one single author, or something like that, then it's just 70 years from the date of publication, plus war time. I know this because we discussed it here and here. -- Tim Starling 10:21 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Thank you, Tim, for your help. Since my Larousse was published 1912, I assume what simple arithmetics tells me: 1912 + 14 + 70 = 1996 so I can publish those images without any risk for Wikipedia. (It already gives me 7-year safety margin.) Thank you again, I've gone through the addresses you gave me, and it seems 84 years after publication should be OK for French images. I will post your answer on my Talk page on Polish Wikipedia, for good of other users, Wikipedia and... owners of copyrights, I guess.
If you've not already been asked, please could you also put the date+place of publication, etc, on the image description page :) It's good to cite your visual sources... Martin 11:17 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Would using TechTVs logo be a copyright violation? Would it be covered by the fair use doctrine? ilyanep 00:10 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

We generally dislike the use of logos since they are covered both by copyright and trademarks, and their use may therefore be also interpreted as "trademark dilution". --Eloquence 00:39 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
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