Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2007 July 29

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July 29

Technical glossary

I just posted the following question to WT:Glossary, but the page appears to be rather inactive, so I'm repeating it here, hoping for more eyeballs.

Is there any place where commonly used expressions and abbreviations like "em" (as in [[Image:Pictureitook.jpg|14em]]) and markup like <tt> etc. are listed and explained?

I believe a comprehensive glossary for interface related expressions and abbreviations would be very helpful for new users who yet have to learn about the interface. Since we should strive to counter the systemic bias, we should accordingly offer all the help to users who are not so tech-savvy. If such a page doesn't yet exist, I'd like to create it, and make the round at WP:VPR and the WikiEN-list. —AldeBaer 00:15, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

E.g., WP:G doesn't contain expressions like "mainspace". "Namespace" is there, but a new user may be completely unfamiliar with the latter term and the entire concept of namespaces, and so wouldn't know where to find a simple explanation. I'm not hellbent on the idea of a glossary, it's rather the idea to have one comprehensive goto page which features keywords rather than topically and hierarchically sorted information, so as to enable new users to more quickly find their own way around, without having to go through a lot of help and FAQ pages when they have only one very special question. (I remember more than one frustrating session, spending hours looking for rather simple bits of info — and I'm the kind of guy who installs Linux just to learn more about it...) —AldeBaer 00:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

You are raising several distinct issues:

• How you (personally) can look up technical details about Wikipedia more easily.
• How to help "users who are not so tech-savvy" (see: lusers) look up the technical minutiae of Wikipedia, so they can (presumably) counter Wikipedia's alleged systemic bias.

I address these individually:

• Searching Wikipedia yourself:
  • Everybody I know who installs Linux is pretty good at searching. Let's take the "mainspace" example. Here is a Google search on Wikipedia's Wikipedia: namespace for "mainspace", which finds a number of results. In contrast, Google Search on Wikipedia's Help: namespace for "mainspace" finds zero results (a search for namespace finds instances of "main namespace"). That suggests the word "mainspace" is not part of the official MediaWiki lexicon (if there is such a thing). Perhaps it is a neologism that is cropping up on Wikipedia, and nobody has defined it in a proper help page yet. You could be the first to do that, since the help pages are editable by users.
    • Searching is so fundamental to advanced editing that every editor should develop a search strategy he or she likes. For example, I saved some links to useful searches on my user page.
  • An alternative to searching is to organize information in topical hierarchies. For an extremely useful example, see: User:John Broughton/Editor's Index to Wikipedia. As a hobby, I like to try answering questions on the Help desk whose answers I do not initially know. Fairly often I can look up the answers on the Editor's index in a few minutes, with a few Ctrl-f searches in my Web browser.
• Countering systemic bias:
  • I find your implicit assumptions plausible, but far from conclusively proved, namely that Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias, and we can fix this problem by writing more manuals.
    • How much systemic bias is there? Nobody can read all of Wikipedia. Therefore nobody really knows how much systemic bias Wikipedia has. At best, various people might examine tiny subsets of articles and conclude Wikipedia's coverage on their favorite topics could be better. This is also true even for the most technical topics, the ones Wikipedia is supposedly systemically biased in favor of. The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone who sees a problem can fix it.
    • If systemic bias exists, is it even a "problem"? Systemic bias, according to WP:BIAS, manifests as the uneven coverage of topics in Wikipedia, such as having more articles about computing than we have about, say, macrame, basket weaving, or real estate. The technical demands of Wikipedia are obviously less of a barrier to computer programmers, system administrators, and other technical types. But is this a "problem"? The English Wikipedia has 6,912,227 articles, and that number increases by several thousand per day. Even if a disproportionate number of articles are about technical topics, by no means are all of them. The absolute number of articles on non-technical topics is enormous, and it is growing rapidly. Wikipedia is probably already the largest encyclopedia of non-technical topics in history. I don't see how the relative number of articles about technical topics matters. People who want to read about non-technical topics don't have to wade through the technical topics to find them. Wikipedia is not paper, so the content which a user finds irrelevant does not get in the way of content the user finds relevant (as would be the case with a paper encyclopedia massively bloated with irrelevancies).
    • Usefulness is not supposed to be a criterion for writing about something on Wikipedia, but let's be realistic. The people who use Wikipedia are naturally going to write about what they think is worth writing about. If Wikipedia has lots of articles about computing, that's because those articles matter to lots of people who read Wikipedia. Even though the proportion of readers to contributors may be 100:1, I think it is statistically likely for contributors to reflect the readers' interests, since it is so easy for readers to become contributors. Also consider, if Wikipedia's content did not appeal to its readers, Wikipedia would not be one of the top ten most popular Web sites. In other words, if Wikipedia has better coverage on some topics than on other topics, maybe that's what most people who read Wikipedia want.
    • There are only finitely many technical topics. Wikipedia may eventually have an article on every technical topic which belongs in an encyclopedia. At that point, the only technical stuff left to write about would be new inventions. If other topic areas on Wikipedia haven't kept pace, eventually they would catch up as more topic areas hit their maximum number of article "ceilings." On Wikipedia There is no deadline, so perhaps it doesn't matter how fast various topic areas are progressing, as long as their improvement rate is greater than zero.
  • On your implicit assumption that writing yet more manuals will help non-tech-savvy users become more tech-savvy:
    • People who are non-tech-savvy tend to be that way in part because they are unwilling or unable to read manuals. I suspect the "unwilling" part correlates with the "unable" part: few people enjoy struggling at things they find highly difficult. Reading and understanding technical manuals largely on one's own is an intellectually demanding task. People with high IQs tend to out-perform people with low IQs at this sort of thing. Having a specific IQ is not an absolute requirement for learning a skill such as editing on Wikipedia; rather, a person with a lower IQ needs more time and more repetitions to learn a given skill than a person with a higher IQ, on average. A high IQ is a relatively greater advantage in rapidly changing, unfamiliar environments, especially when there are no trained experts on hand to provide tutoring, and becomes less of an advantage in environments which have changed little in a long time (allowing slow learners plenty of time to catch up). Therefore, almost anyone who is smart enough to turn on a computer could eventually learn to edit on Wikipedia with sufficient time, repetition, motivation, and perhaps tutoring. Writing more manuals is probably not the most efficient way to help these people - it might be better, for example, to give them hands-on training in physical classrooms.
    • Wikipedia already has a huge number of manuals; in fact, Wikipedia may be one of the most comprehensively-documented complex systems ever created. That is not an argument against writing even more manuals, but if writing lots of manuals could rescue the chronically non-tech-savvy, I think we would already be seeing that.
  • On your implicit assumption that people must know a lot about Wikipedia's esoteric editing functions to contribute:
    • One of the great strengths of Wikipedia (and of wiki technology in general) is that users with all levels of skill may contribute. About all a person needs to know is the cheat sheet and how to click an edit link, and he or she can start making small corrections and additions to existing articles. The esoteric details of markup are mostly for doing fancy stuff like templates and so on. However, people who specialize in the fancy stuff can apply their skills to almost any article without having to know much about the actual content. Thus on Wikipedia we can have an efficient division of labor, as long as we have enough users who are willing to learn the technical details in depth (users like you, in other words).
    • I do, however, agree that Wikipedia could do more to help new users. In particular, the number of new articles getting deleted suggests we have an ergonomic design shortcoming: it seems that by making it so easy to create new articles, without requiring users to first demonstrate any knowledge of what belongs here, we encourage new users to assume they can write about whatever they like. At the very minimum, we need to somehow inform users who are creating their first new article that lots of new articles get deleted. It seems a number of new users only become aware of this when their own articles get deleted.

--Teratornis 16:24, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed reply.

The point I was trying to make wrt systemic bias and advanced editing is at least two-step.

I always found that the beauty of wikipedia is that there is no or only a soft border between audience and production spaces. Granted, I may never become a developer, but with the appropriate help, me and many others could do even more to help the project. The "many eyeballs principle" applies not only to articles, but also to policy related and technical aspects. Very good contributors may not be willing (or have the time) to become allround-tech-savvy and/or "wikipedia insiders". The problem is not so much with the number of articles, than rather their individual quality.

Wrt manuals: I do not believe that manuals should help not-so-tech-savvy users become more tech-savvy, but precisely to spare them that necessity. So I'm not implying to write more manuals, but rather to improve and optimise existing ones. If articles should be written for intelligent 12 year olds, why shouldn't manuals?

For example, the manual for {{Archive box}} used to say "[...]set the auto parameter to "long", all other parameter values will trigger the above format[...]". I removed the half-sentence regarding other parameter values, as this is utterly unnecessary and confusing at best for new and not-so-tech-savvy users. Anyone interested in learning more will sooner or later view the template code. — And then may (like I did) find it hard to learn more about special aspects of e.g. CSS syntax, without having to learn a lot more.

The personal aspect of it is that I am somewhat tech-savvy, but not a programmer, and I'm having a hard time sifting through the help pages at Meta for the info I need.

Btw: I know User:John Broughton/Editor's Index to Wikipedia, and I think it's a great thing that should be official. Improved manuals, and that proposed keyword page are things that could complement the Editor's Index.

A simple markup keyword page would enable anyone to simply search that page for a certain expression, where there is a link to the appropriate page or manual. The keyword page would contain nothing but a short howto and a multitude of piped keywords, linking to the proper explanation.

So what I'm proposing is basically this: (i) update and improve existing manuals (both those for "end users" and those related to meta-know-how) and maybe add a few, and (ii) enable interested users better access to those meta-manuals by creating a keyword page that links each keyword to the appropriate manual or other explanatory page.

—AldeBaer 18:27, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

One tip that I somehow forgot to mention in my far-too-verbose reply: Google Search has a "define:" option that does a pretty good job of looking up definitions for lots of terms. For example, you were asking about the em (typography) unit and the <tt> tag:

• Google:define: em - this works pretty well
• Google:define: tt - this fails rather spectacularly, as Google does not recognize this as an HTML tag (not even when we include the tag delimiters, or put quotes around it)

I basically agree with the rest of your viewpoints. While the technical aspects of Wikipedia may not be as transparently accessible to non-programmers as would be ideal, I can say that the technical aspects are more accessible than in any other system I can think of. Virtually everything a person could need to know to add value to Wikipedia and the underlying MediaWiki software, at almost any level, is there for the learning in manuals that are as complete as in any large open source project. Anybody who is smart, motivated, and has enough time can figure out how to monkey with whatever they want to monkey with - even an intelligent 12 year old could do it, although the order of presentation might need some work, and by the time the 12 year old plowed through all the necessary manuals, he or she wouldn't still be 12. For some of the complicated stuff, the time requirement could be severe, since a non-programmer would essentially have to gain the technical background that would normally occupy several years of university-level study. I'm not saying it is anything like easy, but the Wikipedia project contains enough documents to make it possible. I'm not sure how much more accessible the technical manuals can become. To make the technical stuff accessible to people who lack the technical background means introducing all the necessary technical background in the manuals, which basically means expanding them into enormous tutorials. Since Wikipedia is not paper we certainly have the room to do that, but this would require a lot of work. There are lots of introduction to programming type books like that, and someone (or a community of someones) could write a tutorial introduction to MediaWiki hacking aimed at people with no previous programming background, for example on WikiBooks.

A technical glossary for MediaWiki's wikitext is not a bad idea, but it would be hard to know where to stop, given that the wikitext syntax is extensible, and Wikipedia has a lot of extensions that add more magic words and so on. However, if you look at other markup languages such as DocBook, their manuals do a pretty comprehensive job of explaining just about everything in their languages (except that DocBook, like MediaWiki, can also involve some underlying stuff like CSS that is enormously complicated in its own right). From the user's point of view, it doesn't matter whether a particular confusing item is part of the base wikitext, or an extension, or javascript, or CSS, or HTML, or something else that can show up in an edit window - the user just wants to know what it is and how to monkey with it.

When computers get smart enough to pass the Turing test, it will be nice to get an answer in English when we ask computers to explain what they are doing, or how to make them do something that we want. Basically the computer should get smart enough to become self-documenting. Maybe by the year 2040. --Teratornis 02:04, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Images

Is it okay to upload a free image to only have it used in a template? → Hot Dog Wolf 02:54, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes. Peacent 14:52, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Godfrey Mwakikagile

Thank you very much for the assistance; I'm learning more and more.

Although an editor has looked at the article and approved it, there is still a notice on top saying: "Please help improve this article, especially its section layout, and relevant internal links."

I don't know what else to do because it seems to be done.

The reference and bibliographical sections, and the categories have been added and highlighted at the bottom. So I don't know what else needs to be done since the notice is still there concerning the need for improvement on section layout and relevant internal links.

Please help!

Thank you.

Dave 06:09, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Up the top, you will see two lines, which are the following:

{{Wikify|date=July 2007}}
{{Uncategorized|date=July 2007}}

Each of these is a "template", and they can both be found at Template:Wikify and Template:Uncategorized. To remove them, simply remove those lines. You can find more info on templates on this page. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 10:14, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Article needs to be written more like an encyclopedic article that conforms to how most Wikipedia articles are written. Most of content appears to not meet this criterion. Guroadrunner 10:49, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

little numbers after some sentences.

what do they mean? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.189.65.197 (talk • contribs)

They are citations. A link is generally embedded in the number. For example, I have embedded this section in this number [1].

Have a nice day,

The Rhymesmith 09:10, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

See also WP:CITE! Peacent 14:51, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Biblical inerrancy

This has to be asked since Wiki is suppost to be factual.

Biblical inerrancy is odviously a POV

Secondly if you ask 99.99% of people who dont have a vested interest (They are not christian) they will tell you the bible is not infalliable.

So why is this article not just an example of a mistake, contradition, etc etc etc then say the Biblical inerrancy is not true!--203.87.127.18 08:10, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Have you read the article? It says in the first sentance that it is a doctrinal position, not an indesputed fact. i ^{(said) (did)} 08:29, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Biblical inerrancy mentions several criticisms of the doctrine, and links to several more, for example Internal consistency of the Bible. Of course every religion article on Wikipedia faces a similar problem, because no religion limits itself to facts. A Wikipedia article about a religion must present what is factual (for example, the number of people who profess a certain religion in an opinion poll may be a demonstrable, testable fact) while presenting the unproven claims of a religion as just what they are: unproven claims. Obviously, it may be difficult for people who believe in a specific religion to write objectively about it, so all religion articles need ongoing review for neutrality. --Teratornis 17:12, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Fair use of text

I have been editing Internet_Governance_Forum. Someone added a large piece of text to Internet_Governance_Forum#History that quotes a UN report.

Could someone have a look and see if it is in the spirit of fair use? Also, if not, is this document quoted in the public domain?

Guroadrunner 10:46, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

It's only a three sentence quote, and it's clearly labeled as a quote, so you're okay. For a quote to be a copyright violation you'd have to quote much more extensively than this. --JayHenry 02:15, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

formatting

I wrote an article on "disjunctive cognition." When I pushed the save button, the text appeared in a strange format with very long lines. What did I do wrong?

Zeke8888 11:02, 29 July 2007 (UTC)zeke8888

It's now been fixed. You must use an empty line in order to start a new paragraph (see also Help:Wikitext examples). I hope this helps. Peacent 11:45, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks!

Delete an Account

what is the simplest way to delelte my account and images. Reason is I have a spine injury at the moment and relised after starting that I have not read the conditions correctly.

Reading is difficult with the injury sometimes near impossible due to concentration and I have decided for the moment I would rather just delete the entire account, images I was going to use and also that I am not happy with the name I registered as its without a space between the 2 names. I tried to register the one I wanted but it wont due to the first mistaek being too similar.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Scottcommins (talk • contribs)

You cannot delete your current account, but if the only problem is that you prefer a new name, please use the change username process. Peacent 11:47, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

i have a spine injury at the moment and it seems to effect lately more and more at times my concentratoin of reading effecting my reading. last evening I tried to register my name but it come up as scottcommins instead of scott commins. when i tried to re register it would not let me. I choose the new user name as mine was not registerable but then relised later I could not write about myself. I palced the delete account tag on one of the pages but am hoping both can be deleted adn I will re look at it at some time in the future if I recover from the injury enough to read all the content and get to understadn it but at this stage its a little too much to take on. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Scottcommins (talk • contribs)

clock skew?

Hi, I noticed a clock skew of one hour between my signature (and possibly those of other users) and the time stamp of edits on history pages. For example, the warning on User_talk:155.239.197.112 has a time stamp of an hour before the time stamp of the first edit Special:Contributions/155.239.197.112. What causes this, and is there a workaround to this problem? - Saibod 11:24, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, I looked at the page you linked, and it looks to me like the timestamps on all three messages match the time they were added in the history of the page. i ^{(said) (did)} 11:25, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

All timestamps on signatures use "Server time" which is UTC. The times on history pages and certain other places use a selected time zone. You can select the displayed time zone for your account at Special:Preferences. Click the "Date and time" tab and choose offset from server time. It's a matter of taste whether you prefer your local time zone to get your "true" time in history pages, or server time to get a match between signatures and history pages. PrimeHunter 11:38, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I see. This explains it since my Special:Preferences setting shows an offset of +1. Thanks, I appreciate it. - Saibod 12:16, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

IMAGE

Concerned Sir/ma'm I've inserted an image into the page Dhoom 2. When I've uploaded an image and saved it, I thougth that it would be placed on that page sidebye the matter. But astonishingly there is no change to the page and my image was not inserted. Can I know the reason please... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 124.7.112.12 (talk)

There are two parts to the process. First, you have to upload the image, either to the English Wikipedia or to Wikimedia Commons, depending on its copyright status. Once it's uploaded you can then edit the page to included it. The Wikipedia:Images page has the full info. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 15:30, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

One very angry contributor!

Twice now I have lost a complete page. The most recent (3:10 pm 29th July 2007)was a finished article entitled 'Hazards from Carbonated Drinks'. On examining the preview I wanted to change a word and that action led to a clean page displacing my article. Can you please confirm whether the article was automatically posted. If it wasn't then regretfully I really cannot justify spending any further time offering Wikipea a written contribution.

Dr Edward Willhoft--Edward Willhoft 14:21, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Edward, your contributions log shows only the two questions you've asked on this page. There's no such thing as articles being automatically posted. As noted above, when people are writing large chunks of new text, they frequently do so in a text editor link notepad; web browsers have poor to non-existent abilities to save temporary copies of contributions, and thus are a bad place to entrust your only copy of any work that took a lot of effort to generate. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 14:32, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Another option is to start the page in your userspace first, as User:Edward Willhoft/Hazards from Carbonated Drinks. That will mean you can save it frequently, and then move it to the main article space when you're ready. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 15:34, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

In any case, I think that it is a very bad idea for new Wikipedians to write new articles from scratch. The perpetual effort to improve the quality of existing articles offers plentiful important opportunities for you to use your expertise. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 17:15, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Meni: I'm pretty sure there's no wikipedia policy or guideline suggesting that. Wikipedia's policy is that new users, and anyone else, should be bold (but not reckless) - if you make an error, other editors can sort it out. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 09:25, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

How may Wikipedia be helpful to raise funds for our NGO ?

Registered name of the NGO  : Children Education & Welfare Society Abbreviated for future correspondence as : CEWS-Renaissance Of The Humanity Bhatta Chowk, St. # 2 (Front of Post Office), Bedian Road, Lahore Punjab, Pakistan Tel.#: 92-0425010535 Cell # : 0345-4688468

Dear Sir/Madam,

Sub. : Creating a Partnership to Serve Marginalized humanity

               of underdeveloped country’s areas, Pakistan

We are pleased to brief you that the CEWS is a registered, non profit and non governmental organization. Serving from last eight years of rural and neglected areas of Pakistan. CEWS progressed so far, from a community based to a provincial based organization. It was established on an ideological target oriented mission to care marginalized specifically WODA (widows, orphans, destitute & abandoned) of outreached rural areas. Ensured local community participation and women on decision making as well. Therefore, registration authority considered it one of the best due to its outstanding performance.

Marginalized humanity is absolutely helpless and deprived even of their basic rights specifically women led their life as pets. To care such marginalized and disadvantage humanity, CEWS introduced community based projects of health, vocational training, IT training and campaigning of prevention of HIV/AIDS/STIs through mapping, counseling and referring of the overseas employees. Ratio of poverty and HIV/AIDS patients is increasing alarmingly, due to lacking of follow up and non availability of donors.

This is one example of extreme poverty and helplessness of humanity of underdeveloped country’s areas of Pakistan.

Therefore, your kindness is expected to respond positively of as subject captioned above please !

Looking forward to receiving an early feedback & remain yours  ! Sincerely,

Malik Jamil (President)

Your efforts are commendable, but alas, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a charity organization. I doubt there is anything we can do to help you. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 14:36, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually the footer text on every article page says Wikipedia is the product of a charity organization, specifically a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, but WP:NOT#ADVOCATE indicates that Wikipedia does not promote other charities (although we have articles about lots of them). Malik Jamal might do well to study what has made Wikipedia successful at raising funds for its own work. --Teratornis 18:10, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, Wikipedia is maintained by Wikimedia, which itself is a charitable organization. But that does not contradict what I have said. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 18:14, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

More advice for Malik Jamil: Wikipedia is not the only wiki. See WikiIndex which may list one or more wikis which would promote your organization. --Teratornis 02:28, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

business

what are the basic words of business/economics one should know before reading something like business magazine (if one dosent know anything about it from before)?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.227.213.131 (talk • contribs) 16:22, 29 July 2007

This page is for questions about using Wikipedia. For factual and other kinds of questions: use the search box or the Reference desk. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 15:38, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I recommend that you read the business magazine and look up any terms you don't know on Wikipedia or Wiktionary. In general, you will be aware of when you don't know what a particular word means - if a word is unfamiliar to you, that should be obvious. There might be some danger that you could think you know what a word means, but you don't actually know how the business magazine uses that word, but it would be very difficult to eliminate all such possibilities by any course of study beforehand. Just read the magazine and look things up as you go. Someday, of course, all magazines will contain links on their jargon terms just as well-written Wikipedia articles do. --Teratornis 16:38, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

how do I display an (already uploaded) photo on a wikipedia page

Dear Wikipedia, I would like to have my uploaded image "MorningtonCrescent_roundel.jpg" displayed on/ linked to your Wikipedia pages "Mornington Crescent tube station" & "Mornington Crescent (game)".

Is this something I can do myself (if so, how?) or do I need to ask for permission to have my image displayed on a Wikipedia page (if so, where do I need to apply?).

Thank you, --Behpourdental 15:30, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

You don't need anyone's permission. Be bold and edit the article to include it. Wikipedia:Images has the instructions, but if you struggle with them, come back and ask for help. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 15:42, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

what are the proxies to access orkut when it is blocked?

what are the proxies to access orkut when it is blocked? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.227.213.131 (talk • contribs) 16:31, 29 July 2007

This page is for questions about using Wikipedia. For factual and other kinds of questions: use the search box or the Reference desk. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 15:51, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Biography info

Is it proper to include the name of a subject's spouse and the number of children, if any, on a bio page? ESass 16:01, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons is not very clear about this point, but I get the impression that while not strictly forbidden (depending on the notability of the person), it is better to err on the side of exclusion. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 17:23, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

That's about what we concluded the last time this question appeared on the Help desk:

• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2007 June 4#Spouses in Bios.

This search does not help much either. --Teratornis 17:32, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

{{SWE}}

There is something amiss with the Sweden template, which is causing to feed incorrectly into the 1991 row at Chicago Marathon.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 16:22, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't see a problem in the 1991 row. What do you see? PrimeHunter 17:45, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Maybe something is loading incorrectly because now {{SWE}} is working, but {{GBR}} is not in my FF browser. In place of the flag icon it says "Flag of United Kingdom" in linked text leading to Image:Flag of the United Kingdom.svg. The error is slightly different in MSIE with no text and just blank space in place of the icon. --TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 13:51, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Is there a wikiproject for event venues worldwide

Hi. I would like to ask if there is a wikiproject for stadiums, arenas and similar venues worldwide in general. I have checked Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports facilities but this wikiproject only covers aports venues which host professional American sports teams. I have also checked Wikipedia:WikiProject Music venues but they only cover music venues. Thanks in advanceTbo 157 17:06, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Generally if a given WikiProject is too specific, check the project page to see its parent project(s). For example, the two WikiProject pages you mention both have Parentage sections that link to Wikipedia:WikiProject Architecture, and the section: Wikipedia:WikiProject Architecture#Daughter projects does not list exactly the WikiProject you seek. (We cannot be sure the Daughter projects list is comprehensive, but I'd suspect it is.) Therefore, any event venue that doesn't fit into the two sub-projects would probably go into WikiProject Architecture for the time being (i.e., until such time as someone creates the project you have in mind). You might mention your concern on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Architecture and see if other participants think another daughter project is necessary. --Teratornis 17:23, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

How do I flag an article?

I would like to dispute the neutrality of an article (Dan Rather). It is incredibly biased and I would like to flag it. Fisksed 17:26, 29 July 2007 (UTC)fisksed

See: WP:TEMPLATE which leads to: WP:TM/DISP. --Teratornis 17:34, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

parserfunctions

Is there a way to make a template so as to optionally display text by passing according parameters, but without an #ifeq condition?

I wrote a template to optionally display one or more references. The best thing I could come up with is the #ifeq function, but there you have to pass e.g. parameter1=yes, instead of just parameter1. I'd like to make the template not display certain text if the according parameter is not passed, and display that text if that parameter is passed.

For the life of me, I couldn't get the #if function to do that (and I'm not even entirely sure it could be used for that). Any suggestions? —AldeBaer 18:41, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

How about:

{{#switch:{{{parameter1}}}

|yes=TEXT TO DISPLAY

|#default=

}}

—« ANIMUM » 18:52, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, but it does just what #ifeq does: You'd have to pass parameter1=yes. I'd prefer it if it worked with {{mytemplate|parameterX|parameterY}} instead of {{mytemplate|parameterX=yes|parameterY=yes}}. —AldeBaer 20:22, 29 July 2007 (UTC)