Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 January 10

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January 10

ultra sound said i had thick womb lining witch is moving

I have poly sistic overies, the other day i went for a scen which showed i had a thick lining of my womb which they said looked like i would have a period a of yet nothing has happened and i have had a very small light sot of blood. What is wrong? Is there any chance i could be pregnant in the very early stages? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stacey18 (talk • contribs) 00:03, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

We cannot give medical advice here. If you are worried, consult a doctor. Algebraist 00:05, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Created Articles

I Just wanted to know who has created maximum number of articles in english wikipedia. is there any tool available ? 59.92.128.134 (talk) 01:12, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't know. This tool shows article creations by a given editor (I have a whopping total of 3, not counting redirects), but I don't see a way to list editors by article creations (see for example the links under WP:EIW#NewA, which would be the logical place for someone to have listed such a tool). Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits only gives edit counts (I'm #3721 on that list, which means 3720 Wikipedia editors are running scared). Presumably the editor with the most article creations is somewhere on that list, probably toward the top. You might have to be more specific: do you mean maximum total article creations, or only of articles that survive? Do you only care about articles started by a human? I think some bots have mass-created articles. If nobody answers your question here, you could try asking on Wikipedia talk:List of Wikipedians by number of edits, where the discussion looks active. --Teratornis (talk) 05:12, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Why Are Edits Not Showing Up On the Page?

I edited copy on a page however they are not showing up on the main page. How can you edit the content so the changes show up on the public page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dedecker (talk • contribs)

The edits by you that I'm seeing are to The International Cat Association and to Rachel Hirschfeld (attorney). Your edit to the former still stands as the most recent edit to the article; your edits to the latter have been in part removed and in part revised by User:Orangemike (we don't, for example, include ^TM symbols in articles). You can see the edit history of an article by clicking on the "history" tab at the top of the page. Are there edits you've made other than these, which aren't showing up? Deor (talk) 02:27, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

It's also possible you have to bypass your cache to see the current version. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:02, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Someone deleted our link

Resolved

Someone deleted our link, www.vacreepertrail.us, from this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Creeper_Trail

How do we replace the link, and how do we find out who is doing this?

Thanks for any information. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Metayel (talk • contribs) 01:45, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Probably because it was considered linkspam. The best thing to do would be to discuss it on the article's talk page. – ukexpat (talk) 03:03, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

It was deleted by User:842U in this edit. See Wikipedia:External links. The talk page is Talk:Virginia Creeper Trail where a section can be started by clicking the "new section" tab. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:14, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your prompt response. We are new at this and your answer is very helpful. How do we award you a Barnstar? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Metayel (talk • contribs) 11:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Not many users who are new to Wikipedia know what a barnstar is - I'm impressed. See WP:EIW#Award. But why not be original? You could name your next two cats "Ukexpat" and "PrimeHunter", respectively. All seriousness aside, if your use of the plural "we" is not because you are Monarch, then see Wikipedia:Username policy#Company/group names. --Teratornis (talk) 19:13, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Citations

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 21:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

If I am using shortened notes with wikilinks for the citation format, how do I handle different papers written by the same person in the same year? Thanks, Reyk _YO! 03:23, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I have not used that citation style before, but in the example you linked to, the link format appears arbitrary, so you could probably just append letters a, b, c, etc., after the year. For example, in the example you linked to, an id like this:

*<cite id=refHaines2007>

could probably just as well be:

*<cite id=refHaines2007a>

and so on. You can probably use any alphanumeric string for the id, as long as it is distinct. The id is just creating an anchor you can link to. See Help:Anchors for more about how that works. If you are editing an article that is in a topic area with many similar articles, you might see how people have styled the other articles. You don't have to follow their style, but if you do it might remove a pretext for edit warring. If you can find a good article or featured article that uses this citation style, maybe this problem has come up before. But that might be tough, because I think citation templates are getting more popular. (Do you not like citation templates?) Also see the note on Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Example edits for different methods#Shortened notes with wikilinks vs. HTML 5. --Teratornis (talk) 05:33, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I think I've got it worked out now. Thanks. Reyk _YO! 06:01, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Creations

Am I able to create my own article on someone who i may feel from my community would possibly be searched one day? Or for anyone really as a cool gift? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Im.Krispy (talk • contribs) 05:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not the place for giving someone a "cool gift". There are a lot of articles like that being created everyday, and they are deleted within a few minutes. For Wikipedia to have an article on someone, they should meet the biography notability guidelines. Also, the facts must be verifiable and neutral. Chamal ^talk 05:29, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a great place for giving a person a cool pillar based gift. For instance, let's say that person is a big fan of Cincinatus... you could spend hundreds of hours making Cincinatus a Featured Article and then, on your talk page, dedicate the work to them. That would be a great gift! —Noah 05:46, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

That would be cool for a editor you really wanted to thank! Empire3131 (talk) 16:11, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree. Everyone should dedicate a page to the user in this signature: --Teratornis (talk) 17:44, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

For example, someone could dedicate this page. --Teratornis (talk) 17:46, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Logins Repeatedly Stop Working

I was using LittleHawk as a loging a few times, then could not login and was directed to create a new user account. I created BraveLittleHawk and that worked twice and then again I was directed to create a new account. My actual email has always been <email removed>. I am having the same problem with Facebook and Delicious. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.49.50.104 (talk) 08:39, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Check your computer for spyware. Or maybe you forget your password after creating new accounts?--Unpopular Opinion (talk) 08:46, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

For the record LittleHawk (talk · contribs) and BraveLittleHawk (talk · contribs) have not been registered as yet. --Unpopular Opinion (talk) 08:50, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

please, tell me

I want to write a page "umaglesi liga" in georgian and infobox in that georgian page, but I can not write the infobox. How can I write an infobox in Georgian? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Delibashvili (talk • contribs) 09:53, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

This is the English Wikipedia, therefore it is for English language articles only. If you want to create a page in Georgian, you should do so on the Georgian Wikipedia. haz (talk) 11:37, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Since not many Georgian speakers read this Help desk page on the English Wikipedia, we can only provide general advice on how a bilingual person would investigate the problem.

1. The first step is to be aware that the English Wikipedia is the largest and best-developed of all the Wikipedias. Several of the other large ones (German Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, etc.) are also well-developed. Once you get past the top ten or so, the remaining Wikipedias tend to fall off a cliff in terms of their level of development. That means many things which are easy on the big Wikipedias may be very difficult on the small ones. In particular, the big Wikipedias have a vast selection of templates written by highly skilled users, which the less-skilled users can use very simply. On the small Wikipedias, it is like going to a frontier colony, where the comforts of civilization may be absent, and the users must be more self-reliant.
2. See if the Georgian Wikipedia has a Help desk, and ask your question there. It seems a link to the Georgian Help desk appears in the "languages" box to the left of the top of this Help desk page (i.e., ka:ვიკიპედია:ცხელი ხაზი). See if you get an answer there.
3. If nobody on the Georgian Wikipedia can help you, then you are on your own. You will have to search the Template: namespace on the Georgian Wikipedia for a suitable infobox. If none exists, then you or a more skilled Georgian user will have to translate a template from the English Wikipedia (assuming the English Wikipedia has a suitable one).
   • The details of how to do this are far too complex to explain in the answer to a Help desk question. However, everything you need to know is in writing already, as part of the massive internal documentation of Wikipedia. See for example the links under WP:EIW#Translate. To survive on the frontier, you need a frontiersman's skills. Which means you need to read lots of friendly manuals.
4. Alternatively, you can simply wait a few years, by which time other users will presumably develop the Georgian Wikipedia into something more usable by people who don't want to read all the manuals.
   • Note that the English Wikipedia had no infoboxes at all when it started. I'm not sure when infoboxes first appeared or became widespread, but it seems the documentation about them only goes back to around 2006. Regardless of the exact timing, the English Wikipedia was able to grow rapidly for its first few years without any infoboxes at all. Infoboxes are nice to have, but I'm sure there are many other needs on the Georgian Wikipedia that you might address more easily. I.e., on the Wikipedias you should pick the low-hanging fruit first. Only do the difficult things when you have run out of the easy things. Maybe by then, the difficult things will have become easier, because other users will have improved the tools, and your knowledge will have increased.
     • As an example of some very low-hanging fruit: Wikimedia Commons has an enormous number of media files which all the Wikipedias can use. Not even the English Wikipedia is using all the existing media files that it could. All you have to do is browse around Commons, find some interesting photos, and then find articles on the Georgian Wikipedia to put them in. It's usually easier to start with the photos and then find the articles, rather than go the other way (start with an article and try to find a photo for it, which often becomes a Needle in a haystack problem - it's much easier to start with the needle, and put it in the haystack).

--Teratornis (talk) 18:25, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Inasmuch as Umaglesi Liga is a football league, you might be able to translate Template:Infobox football league to Georgian. It is built on top of Template:Infobox, which apparently has a Georgian version at ka:თარგი:ინფოდაფა; so you might be able to use that. Or you might be able to use ka:თარგი:ინფოდაფა directly. —teb728 t c 21:48, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

New Page

How do I start a new page, after 6,000++ edits I still dont know how to do this.--Woogie10w (talk) 11:24, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Wow, that's surprising! Anyway, you just have to search for the title using the searchbox, and if the article isn't already there, there will be red link right on top saying "you searched for....". Just click on that and you can start editing. Or just below it, there will be another redlink saying "Create the page". Click on that and start editing. I guess you would know about how the article subject should be notable and all that, so no need to give you all the prep talk :) Cheers. Chamal ^talk 11:32, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Have a look at Help:Starting a new page and Wikipedia:Your first article for help and guidance. Hope that helps! haz (talk) 11:37, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

• You can also make a subpage in your userpage like User:Woogie10w/NewArticle to work on your article in peace and move it to the article namespace when it's ready to face the crowd. - 87.211.75.45 (talk) 15:50, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

6000 edits and you haven't found the Editor's index yet? I hope that is a record. If not, then Wikipedia's user interface may be seriously broken. You should put a link to WP:EIW on your user page. The answer to almost every question about using Wikipedia is somewhere in there. For example see WP:EIW#NewA. Also, you should consider reading the Help desk more often, or try to answer questions here. You can learn a lot about Wikipedia by reading the Help desk, in much less time than by experiencing all the same problems yourself. --Teratornis (talk) 18:33, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I didn't find out about the EIW until I had around 7,000 edits and saw you answer a question and link to it - you're the only person I've ver seen mention it actually, despite how useful it is. Dendodge Talk^Contribs 20:39, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

30,000 edits in and that's the first I've heard of it. Looks like a very useful reference page. --Onorem♠Dil 21:54, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Now I'm wondering what useful things I haven't heard of yet. --Teratornis (talk) 05:32, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

First time I've heard of EIW too. Chamal ^talk 05:45, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

16,000+, an admin too, and I can't recall ever being pointed its way :-(- Do the 5 pillars mention EIW ? I've just tried the obvious shortcut of WP:INDEX, which is a pleasant surprise ! WP:CONTENT mentions it, but frankly I've probably run a mile away from that page as it talks about Portals. David Ruben ^Talk 19:17, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

18,000+ edits, 1000+ newly created articles, and I never came across EIW until just now. It seems very useful! Rosiestep (talk) 19:44, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Placing tags in wrong places

Why do people place Reference shortcuts and Citation Tags after sentence and before full stop? 92.25.199.151 (talk) 13:44, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:MOS#Punctuation_and_inline_citations, they shouldn't. I recall a style guideline stating that both could be used as long as each article is consistent but I can't seem to find it. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 13:50, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

You're thinking of WP:Footnotes#Ref tags and punctuation. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:22, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

That's it. Thanks. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 18:37, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

One would think a bot program could find reference tags that violate WP:REFPUNCT (does anyone know of one?). When you fix one of these, be sure to put something like: "fixed ref tag per [[WP:REFPUNCT]]" in your edit summary to help educate the other users, and to possibly guard against another user reverting you incorrectly. As hard as it may be to believe, not every Wikipedia editor has read and memorized every friendly manual page yet. And of course the manuals are continuously growing and changing despite the fantasy view in WP:CREEP that Wikipedia can somehow remain simple even as it becomes the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled. --Teratornis (talk) 18:42, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

And of course, one finds, as here, contradictory policies/guidelines. For what it's worth, I would delete the MOS as unreadable. DuncanHill (talk) 18:48, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

You might describe the contradictions on the talk pages of the contradictory guideline pages. Sometimes the talk pages are active, with a lot of users who take the documentation seriously and try to improve it. --Teratornis (talk) 19:22, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Image Dilemma

I wish to upload a set of scientific diagrams about a star system called Epsilon Aurigae, but I'm not sure of exactly how I can incorporate it. Are there any set copyright laws on diagrams from scientific papers? I do not know which license I should choose. The link that contains a two that I am eyeing can be found here. --Starstriker7^(Talk) 16:31, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

That website does not state that its contents are available under a GDFL license or something similar so we must assume they are copyrighted. The only way for them to be used on Wikipedia is for the copyright owner to release them following the process set out at WP:IOWN. – ukexpat (talk) 16:42, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

A strange stub template

I was taking a look at the article about Christian von Koenigsegg. At the bottom of the page I found a strange piece of text that looked like an ad (it can be seen here [1]). I tried to remove it but I just couldn't find this text when I hit the edit button. When I tried removing this stub template ({{automobile-bio-stub}}) and hitting the preview button this text disappeared. Could anybody here explain what this is? Should any action be taken? J-C V (talk) 17:01, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

See [2]. Someone mistakenly started an article inside a stub template. DuncanHill (talk) 17:09, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Reverted. You can add the template back. It seems that Alltwodogs figured out that wasn't the correct place to make his article (he created it as Matthew McGinn) but forgot to undo his edit. Xenon54 17:12, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Signature

I tried to change my signature to the default one, but it didn't work. Schuym1 20:33, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

In Special:Preferences, clear the textbox and untick the 'raw signature' box. Dendodge Talk^Contribs 20:37, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Paraphrasing terms definitions from published books

I am a new article contributor, and I have a series of articles I'd like to add, several of which were inspired by a book published in 1978, Managing for Responsive Research and Development, Stewart P. Blake, author.

Mr. Blake coined in his book several useful terms related to the meta-science of multidisciplinary research and problem-solving.

My first question is, can I enter articles that paraphrase his definitions (he wasn't particular formal at defining them) and use his book as a reference for those terms?

My second question is, I wrote (and published in the journal of the California non-profit corporation Synthesis Institute) an article that extended Mr, Blake's ideas. Is that article an appropriate source? (Note, full disclosure, I was at the time and still am Synthesis Institute's CEO.)

Thank you for your help! —Preceding unsigned comment added by BruceTow (talk • contribs) 23:28, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

This is not really an answer. But I have some concerns about what you propose to do. In the first place Wikpedia is an encyclopedia not a dictionary. Even if the scope of your proposed articles goes beyond definitions, the subjects of Wikipedia articles need to be notable. This means that to be included here a subject needs significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. —teb728 t c 00:36, 11 January 2009 (UTC)