Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 December 3

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December 3

Mobile browser

Which browser works best for editing from an android mobile phone? The ones I've tried don't work at all, they bunch up the text area or when I click somewhere, it goes like 6 lines above. CTJF83 00:43, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I haven't tried it but have you seen Help:Mobile access#Android applications? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:49, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

While I have done limited editing, Opera (Opera Mini in this case) is the most competent browser I have used. Яehevkor ✉ 00:54, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try those. CTJF83 01:18, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

You are not citable!!!

I am a student of Mira Costa College, Oceanside Ca, and I have a bit of a problem. I thoroughly enjoy reading the entirety of your websites thorough descriptions of many of my queries in regards to papers I write. However, sadly enough, your website is not regarded as a citable source in the college community. Please fwd this message to Jimmy Wales and let him know that I, and the ENTIRE college community repect and appreciate his, and his colleagues, thorough definitions and historical descriptions involved in Wikipedia, yet cannot EVER cite them as a credible source in any of our papers/answers/ANYTHING. If Wikipedia would become a credible source in the college atmosphere, it would be the most utilized source in the world, I guarantee it. I have cross-referenced the majority of your Wiki-inputs and have found them to be more than credible and would greatly appreciate your finding a way to become a completely credible source. Please, and thankyou.

Coridally,

Dane A. Rodriguez — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dano.rodrigo (talk • contribs) 05:43, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

The problem from that point of view is that a Wikipedia article can be edited by anyone at any time, so the inclusion of an item of information in Wikipedia is not necessarily a guarantee of its truth. Normally vandalism or unsourced claims will be removed relatively quickly, at least on well-watched pages, but you might see it before it is corrected. Information in a Wikipedia article ought to be verifiable by reference to reliable sources, so what you ought to do for your college work is follow the references, judge their reliability, and where appropriate cite those separate sources, rather than citing Wikipedia itself. - David Biddulph (talk) 07:25, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

To put it more simply, do not use Wikipedia for primary research, instead use it simply as a guide to research. Like you've done with cross-referencing, references cited by each Wikipedia article are the ones you should be reading further and citing.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 10:47, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia#A caution before citing Wikipedia. Unfortunately we don't have the editor resources to at the same time make millions of articles and make them reliable enough to be citable in college papers. We only have this much information because we allow everybody to edit. Citizendium chose another approach: Restrict editing to become more reliable. But they have less than 1% of our articles, and less than 1% of those are "expert-approved".[1] PrimeHunter (talk) 13:19, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Using general encyclopedias (of any variety) as a source in a college level research paper is not a great call to begin with. Like others have said, Wikipedia can be a great jumping off point for research, but it and other encyclopedias aren't really meant to be cited as research material. --Daniel 19:20, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

How to generate a list of all en-wp's article titles?

Hello, anyone knows how to list up all en-wikipedia's article titles?
I know this may be a big job because there are over 3.8 million articles up to now, so I am seeking some technical supports.--Capim Dourado (talk) 06:42, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

From Wikipedia:Database download I found my way to http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/ and downloaded "enwiki-latest-all-titles-in-ns0.gz". I uncompressed this and found I had a 179Mb file containing the article titles one per line. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:14, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

This is great! Thanks for your big help! --Capim Dourado (talk) 00:51, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

New Article

I have posted a new article on the Women's History Museum and Educational Center and I can't seem to locate it without looking at my contributions. How can this information be available for everyone to see? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Swilkinson (talk • contribs) 08:10, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Women’s History Museum and Educational Center is there and accessible; note that Women's History Museum and Educational Center does not exist, as the punctuation is different. If you are talking about Wikipedia search, see Wikipedia:Search#Delay in updating the search index. - David Biddulph (talk) 08:26, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Re the punctuation, you may wish to look at Wikipedia:Article titles#Special characters. - David Biddulph (talk) 08:30, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I moved the article to the preferred title. —teb728 t c 09:59, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Sixties TV series

for many,many years i am looking for the titel of a british black and white tv-serie from the sixties. It was a detective-serie that also was braodcasted in The Netherlands were i live. The Story; a group of young boys ans girls become detectives and a main caracter is an old Nazi-officer who haunts them. The old-Nazi plays in several episodes WAGNER music,mostly the theme from the opera TANNHAUSER. This music still gives me the creeps and takes me back to this tv-serie but i cant find the name. Again; it was also braodcasted in The Netherlands in the sixties. Thanks for any help! mail; [redacted] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.28.164.64 (talk) 15:29, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Have a look at Category:1960s British television series. — Edokter (talk) — 16:02, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Citing a multiple-author book

How would I use the Harvard format to cite a multiple-author book (not a co-authored book)? HurricaneFan25 15:55, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

This?--♫GoP♫_T^C_N 17:54, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Help needed in determining the amount of detail that is useful for a reader

I am working on the article Wieferich prime and want to further improve it. A number of searches for these specific primes have been performed to discover new instances of such primes. For most of these searches, there exist scientific papers reporting about the results of the search (which in most cases means reporting that no new Wieferich prime has been found in a specific interval). Is there a guideline from which I can draw a conclusion on how detailed a record of these searches the article should give? For example, simply reproducing the table from page 3 of this paper might not be a good idea. Is there a guideline applicable to this case from which I could determine, how much detail would be useful? I don't seem to be able to read an answer to this question out of MOS:MATH, so perhaps it might in the end have to be decided via a consensus decision. If there is no specific guideline for this, I can bring it up at the articles talk page or WT:MATH. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 16:08, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I once read a guidline (can't remember where, sorry) that "general" articles should be written to be comprehensible to readers with only a high school education while more technical/complex topics should be covered at an undergraduate college level. Roger (talk) 18:07, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, but this is not exactly what I wanted to know. I think the article already is quite accessible, given that for example it mostly avoids using congruences in many places, such as in the introduction. But still, my question remains: In order to achieve comprehensive coverage of the subject, should the listing of these searches be more detailed than it is now or not? I think increasing the amount of detail regarding the coverage of searches for these primes has no influence on the general accessibility of the article. I just want to have a guideline on how detailed the coverage of these searches should be, for example, should the article list all searches for prime numbers of this type from say 1913 to present in order to increase the articles comprehensiveness or would such a list be regarded as excessive, given that the paper I linked to above contains a relatively detailed record of these searches? So should the article refer the reader to that source, or should this information be listed directly in the article? Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 18:48, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd say that an infodump of all those search details fails, under WP:UNDUE, as undue emphasis on a particular aspect of the subject matter. The information is readily available from the article to which you provide a link, and need not be repeated here in Wikipedia. --Orange Mike | Talk 22:55, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Identifying edit removing section from article

Hi, I disagree with the removal of the section 'Alleged relation to crimes' from the Child's Play article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child%27s_Play_(film_series) but am struggling to identify where this was removed from the edit history, as the person who removed the section does not seem to have flagged this in an edit summary. If I can identify the editor, I can ask him/her to justify the removal - I assume this is better etiquette than unilaterally reinstating the section. Would be grateful for help with this, many thanks --Clivemacd (talk) 17:53, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Using WikiBlame, this query shows that the deletion was done anonymously in this edit. -- John of Reading (talk) 18:01, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

T:AH invalid time at Talk:The Litigators

Resolved

I am unable to determine why I am getting an invalid time error at Talk:The Litigators.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:47, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Adding (UTC) breaks the template, for one. Retyping the time for the other one (16:33 not 16:23) seemed to fix it, although maybe there was a stray space somewhere or something... Bencherlite^Talk 18:53, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

The problem was that you had an invisible left-to-right mark after the year in both cases ("2011<LRM> (UTC)") Without the LRM the template seems to tolerate (UTC). —teb728 t c 23:42, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia button for blogs and web pages

I can't find the place with the assortment of Wikipedia logo to add to my blog and/or web page. I've looked several places and found zipola. As I recall, last year when I donated the code offer was easy to find. Help

Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by Linenwash (talk • contribs) 19:11, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

If you mean encouraging others to support Wikipedia then see wmf:2011/Support/en. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:16, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Feedback for Rise to It page

The Wikipedia:Requests for feedback page says I should ask for feedback here. So, I've created a page for a Kiss song called Rise to It and I need someone to view it. Thanks :) Zrinschchuck (talk) 21:00, December 3, 2011 (GMT +1)

left comment at Talk:Rise to It Tigerboy1966 (talk) 11:09, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

How to delete a redirect

How can I delete a redirect? There is a redirect from breech-loading rifle to rifled breech loader. But a breech-loading rifle is a type of rifle, a hand-held fiream, while a rifled breech loader is a type of cannon, an artillery piece. Maproom (talk) 21:23, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

When you hit a redirect, you see the redirect page title under the big title. Click on that and you go to the redirect page (without redirecting). Then, you can edit it. I changed it to point to breech-loading weapon which has a section on firearms. -- kainaw™ 21:36, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

The Josh Pate article needs a review.

Can anybody review it and get that awful template away? AnonymousAnimus (talk) 21:51, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Splitting out discography into new article

Resolved

I want to move out the discography from Skream to a new page, Skream discography to stop it dominating the rest of the article, only keeping the albums on the Skream page and linking to the discography with Template:Main. Is there something I would have to do in terms of history attribution or anything like that? Thanks, doomgaze (talk) 21:55, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Splitting#Procedure CTJF83 21:59, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. doomgaze (talk) 23:02, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

How do you cite a US state law?

I'm unsure which template to use (or if I should even be using a template). If you need to know, the law is in California. Thanks. - Purplewowies (talk) 22:12, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

The Bluebook is the most widely used system in the US. {{Cite court}} complies with Bluebook style, but not with Citation Style 1. Which is probably confusing, but the best answer I have. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:47, 3 December 2011 (UTC)