Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2010 December 31

Welcome to the Wikipedia Help Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current Help Desk pages.

December 31

Tab

Resolved

 – {{pad}} works perfectly. Thanks John. -JamesyWamesy (talk) 02:13, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Is there a way to place a large space in the middle of text like a tab key would in Word? Or would I just have to place several   to get that effect? -JamesyWamesy (talk) 00:42, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the most straight-forward way to do that would be several   characters. A tab usually creates a gap up to the next tab point in the horizontal rule, so tabs don't apply to html documents or to wikipedia. The only other way I know of to have a tab-like effect is to use tables or CSS positioning. GiftigerWunsch [TALK] 01:03, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

How would I use CSS positioning? -JamesyWamesy (talk) 01:16, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

This should be done almost never on Wikipedia. Why do you want to do it? Algebraist 02:30, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

There's also {{pad}}, which inserts a controlled amount of horizontal space. The contributor is trying to format a list of descendents in User:JamesyWamesy/sandbox1 -- John of Reading (talk) 09:47, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Australian football club logos and jumpers/guernseys

Resolved

 – At least at the Help Desk. – ukexpat (talk) 16:46, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

I'm finding it hard to understand with Australian rules football logos and logos on jumpers, how wikipedia allows some yet doesn't allow others despite the copyright allow/disallow criteria appearing identical between the images. There appears to be a inconsistent policy. For instance the St George jumper image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:St_George_Dragons_Jumper.svg has their logo on the front and is allowed on wikipedia yet the logo by itself was not and was deleted (without any explanation I might add). Another example is the jumper for another club http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holroyd-Parramatta_Blacktown_AFC_Goannas which has a goanna on the front and was deleted despite the image being my own replica creation of it. Then there's the example of the Western Suburb Magpies jumper whose WS logo is allowed by wikipedia on the jumper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Western_Suburbs_Magpies_Jumper.svg yet a small icon I created with the same WS logo was deleted.

It seems the only explanations I can gather is (i) the images accepted are on a en.wikipedia page whereas mine were uploaded to the commons (some still exist http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Australian_rules_football_jumper ) and (ii) certain images are allowed on wikipedia if you state "The entire logo is used to convey the meaning intended and avoid tarnishing or misrepresenting the intended image" and "The image is placed in the infobox at the top of the article discussing insert football club's name, a subject of public interest. The significance of the logo is to help the reader identify the organization, assure the readers that they have reached the right article containing critical commentary about the organization, and illustrate the organization's intended branding message in a way that words alone could not convey" and "Because it is a logo there is almost certainly no free equivalent. Any substitute that is not a derivative work would fail to convey the meaning intended, would tarnish or misrepresent its image, or would fail its purpose of identification or commentary." However as with the St George and Western Suburbs jumpers above this disclaimer was not included and there's no proof the uploader is the copyright holder as he/she has uploaded a whole set of different club jumpers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Saebhiar/Table.

May I have some clarification please on the first paragraph plus how do you upload images and include the above copyright disclaimers? The images of logos and jumpers that I uploaded but have been deleted would make each club's wikipedia page complete and are of public interest as some clubs have the same colours so just stating colours doesn't distinguish between all clubs.

Yours Sincerely,

User:Mtiges

Mtiges (talk) 11:56, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Media copyright questions is the best place to ask this, but my initial reaction is: first the easy ones - the jerseys that are just simple combinations of shapes and colours almost certainly lack the required amount of creativity to be copyrghtable, that would include many of the jerseys in that table; second, we upload and use copyrighted logos all the time pursuant to the non-free content criteria, but that may limit the number of articles in which the copyright image can be used - such images will not/should not be deleted provided that the {{logo fur}} template is properly completed for every use of the image. Hope this helps. – ukexpat (talk) 14:39, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Ta User:Ukexpat. That makes sense to me. One of my queries is some pre-existing images on wikipedia that I would believe on that criteria should have the {{logo fur}} such as the St George and western suburb jumpers don't have it but I'll put that question to the media copyright question section as you've suggested. Thanks for your help.Mtiges (talk) 14:53, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

meters

Alanna Kraus is an article about an Olympic athelete-a runner. References are made to race distances, ie: 1500 m. My question is should it be edited to read---1500m, with no space? Buster Seven Talk 13:53, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Unit symbols says:

• Values and unit symbols are separated by a non-breaking space. The {{nowrap}} template or the   character can be used for this purpose. For example, use 10 m or 29 kg, not 10m or 29kg.

PrimeHunter (talk) 13:58, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Requesting assistance

I've proposed a revision to Occidental_Petroleum#Chemical. The Occidental Petroleum talk page isn't very active, so I'm coming here for asking for assistance. Due to a potential COI, I'm seeking feedback from the community before making this addition.

• Proposed revision.

If you have any feedback, please leave it on the proposal talk page (my comments are there as well), or if you think it's good enough to add to the article, feel free to make these changes. Thanks, --CBuiltother (talk) 00:16, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

why do you need money(donations)?

Wikipedia is a website. it can be uploaded to a free domain. the people who are creating the articles are volunteres so they are not supposed to get money in exchange for thier time and effort.

so why are you asking for donations when you can run Wikipedia for free ?

I read a lot of "personal appeals" from Wikipedia's group, none of them spoke about this specific issue.

so can you please answer my specific question?

Thanks

Amir08 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.127.50.10 (talk) 15:17, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

While editors are volunteers, there has to be someone to provide the infrastructure and financial backing to allow the volunteers to do their work. For Wikipedia and its sister projects, this entity is the Wikimedia Foundation. They get the money from donations, and they mostly use it to support the projects it runs (Wikipedia included), along with maintaining a small paid staff.

You have several misconceptions about how websites are run. You cannot run one of the most popular websites in the world for free. Domain names are not free; they can cost anywhere from less than 1 to thousands and millions of dollars. I'd like to know where you think the files go once they are "uploaded to a domain". You have to run servers, and with a site with this many visitors you have to run a lot of servers. The Wikimedia Foundation spent $1,056,703 in the last fiscal year (1 July 2009 - 30 June 2010) for Internet hosting alone. In all, the Foundation spent $10.26 million last year, after recieving $17.98 million in income, $15.12 million of which was from a donation of some sort. Now, please, sit there and continue to tell us that hosting a website is free. It ain't. Xenon54 (talk) 15:56, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I can explain with a lot of details how to run a website for free, I did it with my friend, and the website is still online, full of articles and photos and we never paid anything to anyone in order to upload it or to keep it online. However, you don't seem interested to know, so I'll drop it.

there are millions of websites on the net and they never ask for donations, they just put some advertisements, and I cannot see why doesn't Wikipedia do that? is advertisemetns a bad thing? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.127.50.10 (talk) 20:39, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, you CAN "run a website for free"... However, Wikipedia is not a "site" in your apparent sense of the word "site"...

Your site has what, maybe 30-50 pages? Maybe a few hundred photos? How big was it? Less than a few hundred megabytes? Maybe a Gigabyte?

Consider this: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a small website with a few photos. The entire range of Wikimedia foundation projects are more of an archive of the entire world!

Now think back, to the days of real paper book encyclopedias. How many volumes did they take? One 2CM thick book per letter of the alphabet perhaps? More than 1? I have an old Encyclopedia Brittanica set that contains no less than 40 individual volumes. It takes up 2 full shelves in my bookcase. In the scope of physical comparison, your "free" website is perhaps a 5-10 page glossy printed booklet. It looks nice, has some info, but is not anywhere near the vast amount of information in an encyclopedia.

Furthermore, your site occupies a small fraction of the entire disk space available on -1- single server. You likely share this same server with perhaps 100 to 1000 other customers of this 'free' host. Each site on a 'free' host usually gets minimal traffic, otherwise the company hosting will take the site down, or limit the amount of views it can have for a certain period.

The server your site runs on is probably part of a handful (2-10 perhaps) servers run by your said 'free' hosting company. (All approximate, but I've seen a few of these operations before.) Between a few thousand "10 page booklet" free websites on this infrastructure, there's plenty of ads to keep the servers paid for, the company running, etc. I'd imagine your 'free' hosting company spends maybe 500 dollars per month for their server hosting fees. I would also bet your hosting company also provides pay services, which also contribute to the bottom line that allows them to essentially "give away" unused space on their servers even without the ad revenue.

Compare, Wikimedia Foundation, has HUNDREDS of servers all trying to serve up TEN MILLION articles with HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS if not MILLIONS of pictures. The ENTIRE SITE is server-end active scripting (the software Wikipedia runs on, MediaWiki, is a VERY intense PHP program that can bring a good server to its knees without meticulous tweaking, if the site is popular in any way). Maintaining this infrastructure *IS* a full-time day-job. You can't just ask some datacenter to give you 300 servers and run them all 'free'. Blood, sweat and tears are usually put into setting things of this magnitude up. (Blood, as computer case metal can be rather sharp)

There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that such a popular, worldwide mega-site, an information portal for all the planet, can be "free". Sorry bud, you've got an entire paradigm shift between your site and this mega-encyclopedia of knowledge that expands every single second.

Now, as for ads... This is a very bothersome technique to try and monetize a site (emphasis on 'try'). Seriously, would *you* want to see ads for random crap along side of an article about a terrible tragedy? A war? Religious history? No, I can't say ANYONE would *want* to see ads next to such important and emotionally moving information.

So, by asking for donations, Wikipedia is able to be 100% FREELY ACCESSED by the public. There are apparently plenty of people out there, better off than myself, who likely donate thousands of dollars a month, to make this treasure-trove of knowledge available with no restrictions to all people of the planet. Even the poorest countries that have internet access in maybe a public town hall can access the entire range of content. There is no "premium content" like many news sites will force you to pay for, to keep a revenue stream. There are no distracting ads that would litter up a pristine source of knowledge.

Please try and grasp the entire scope of what Wikipedia is and what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing, and realize, that nobody can do this much for "free".

Mystica555 (talk) 22:41, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanations, as for my site I ran it using my50gigabytes, which is a free domain. so I had a large space to use. but I'm assuming that if my site was as big as Wikipedia we would have trouble mainting it on free serves. But i'm still going o try it, as i'm working on a new site.

as for the ads, I think you know today's ads are much more useful than they used to be. you're making it sound like the ads will make the viewers feel uncomfortable. but ad companies will know to put the relevant and useful ads next to each article, because that would be good for them, and certainly it will be good for Wikipedia. for example: If there is an article about Wild animals, then why not put an ad about volunteering in south africa wild life projects? it would be relevant and certainly "useful" to Wikipedia and to the viewers and to the ad company. another example, if there is an article about a poet, why not have an ad of a library that offers books of this poet on a sale?

What i'm saying is, advertisements can be very useful, especially in the case of Wikipedia. it's a free encyclopedia that certaily requires money to be mintained (as you explained), so I expect the people in charge to be looking for ways to earn money without asking for donations, because once we donate, and pay from our own money, the encyclopedia will not be "free " anymore. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.127.50.10 (talk) 11:22, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

"Free" doe not mean it does not cost money to maintain, and it does not mean we don't ask for donations, it means that our readers are not required to pay for it. We don't and won't use advertising for the foreseeable future for a number of reasons but most significantly because our lifeblood is neutrality and advertising would give a perception we were beholden to sponsors, probably make us actually beholden to sponsors, make us seem hypocritical in our constant deletion of spam contributions and our policies that Wikipedia is not to be used for the same and so on. See Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Advertising. As for your comments about it being free to run a website like this, you can't have been serious. The English Wikipedia alone has 61,943,316 pages, and though the largest, is just one of a few hundred websites maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation which collectively get about seven billion pageviews per month. Your comparison of it to the cost of your personal website run on a free web hosting servcie (which itself made its money by piggybacking advertising onto the "free" hosting it was providing) is like saying "I don't know why Walmart has overhead. I had a lemonade stand and my mother supplied the lemons for free."--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:23, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Note: The word "free" in "Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia" primarily means free as in freedom, not free as in free beer; see Wikipedia:Five pillars. —Bkell (talk) 20:45, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

It WAS NOT a comparison, it was an idea, a theory, that required an example. I had to use such an example because it seemed to me that you think i'm inventing the whole thing about free websites, that's all.

now can you tell me what changed lately? I knew Wikipedia for years and only in 2010 I started seeing personal appeals for donations from Wikipedia's staff. So Wikimedia Foundation was able to maintain Wikipedia's site for years - without asking for donations from viewers - and now they can't do it anymore? Why? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.127.50.10 (talk) 19:02, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

There are fundraising drives each year. Maybe you didn't use Wikipedia during earlier periods with fundraising banners. The design of the banners vary. It hasn't always been formulated as personal appeals. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:20, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Cf. 2009, 2008, 2007. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 19:29, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Just as a data-point about the mind-bogglingly-large technological requirements of wikipedia vs a few pages on a free host (that consolidates a bunch of such sites into a still-small-requirements data pipe), consider the Main Page. Downloading of just that page consumes something like 60GB of bandwidth a day (calculated from today's browser-reported page-size and stats.grok's page-view count for 2010-12-31). That's not searching. That's not reading articles. That's not following links. That's not making edits. That's not including .css and other shared data files used site-wide. That's not any other languages or other sister projects. DMacks (talk) 19:40, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Personal appeals baners are bigger and they get much more attention and they look more serious. so I think there is probably be a reason to use this kind of banners, a reason that didn't exist before. is Wikipedia in danger of being sold or shut down? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.127.50.10 (talk) 22:01, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

The fundraising efforts this year, using the larger banners with Jimmy Wales' face, have proven much more effective than other banner designs in past years. There are always different designs, presumably so the Foundation can find the most effective one to maximize revenue. I don't know what they'll do with the extra revenue if they get more donations than they were expecting, but I'd assume it would go towards hosting costs in subsequent years. -Nick Klose (T/C) 22:30, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Kinuyo Yamashita

Hi, could I get this deleted article reinstated and placed into my user space? I'm writing bios on women composers and I have some primary sources that I could add. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'd like to use what was there already. Thanks. Pkeets (talk) 16:34, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Userfication. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:46, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Then can I get it reinstated? If you'll do it while I'm at the computer, I can add the info immediately. Pkeets (talk) 17:12, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

You say you have primary sources to add - let's make sure that we understand that: primary sources would be information written by the person themselves - or their management/agents. What Wikipedia needs is third-party sources, those written by other people, which are reliable and independent of the subject. Are your sources covered by that requirement? -- PhantomSteve.alt/talk\^{[alternative account of Phantomsteve]} 19:32, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Send article by email

How to send wiki article by email,from that page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.107.22.33 (talk) 17:13, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't think Wikipedia provides this function, but some browsers do. In Firefox I can right-click on any web page and choose "Send Link..." to begin an email message containing that page's web address. -- John of Reading (talk) 18:17, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Why not just email a copy of the article's URL? If your intended recipient can receive the email message, he or she should be able to browse to the article by clicking its URL in the message. --Teratornis (talk) 21:38, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I also recommend just emailing the URL. If you really want email— you can add links to the left toolbar for email and AddThis share by adding add this to Special:MyPage/skin.js:

importScript('User:TheDJ/sharebox.js'); //[[User:TheDJ/sharebox.js]]

--Gadget851 (talk) 23:15, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Rod Macqueen vs Rod MacQueen

I come from it.wiki, please have a look at this discussion -- SERGIO aka the Black Cat 17:32, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I have moved Rod MacQueen to Rod Macqueen as sources say. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:30, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Section Deleted

I had edited the Sports section in the "Lyndhurst, New Jersey" article. I added a section about cross country. I went to look back today and the section was deleted. Was there any particular reason that it was removed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.252.10.72 (talk) 21:03, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

You can check the history tab to see what changes were made, when and by whom. In this case the editor left an edit summary "move cross country details to Lyndhurst HS article, where it better fits (if at all)". RJFJR (talk) 21:07, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Easy way of finding articles I've created

Is there a tool or something that allows me to find all the articles I've created in the past? The hard way is to look through my contribution history but that'll take me forever.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 22:20, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Right at the bottom of your "My contributions" page you will see a link named "Articles created". -- John of Reading (talk) 22:29, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

...though it's either broken or very slow when I try to use it. Hmm. -- John of Reading (talk) 22:34, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

It's a bit slow but it came up for me. I normally just add a link to my user page whenever I created an article. Dismas|^(talk) 23:08, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

(belatedly) the time it takes seems to vary dramatically. I just keep a log on my userpage as well..Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:31, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

I suppose that it should be pointed out that that tool also counts redirects as "articles". I, for one, do not count the redirects that I create as an article. Dismas|^(talk) 18:28, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

If you use the article counter tool directly, you can choose whether to include redirects (and can choose a different namespace too). -- John of Reading (talk) 22:34, 2 January 2011 (UTC)