Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2016 February 8

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February 8

What to do with dead external links.

Annsville, New York, had some dead links in the External References section. These links seem to be ancillary to the article probably mentioning info not included in the article. Since they don't work anymore, what is the best thing to do? Just delete them or flag them as dead? MB (talk) 00:16, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Finding replacements is the best thing. Otherwise, tag them as dead and a bot will come along and try to fix them. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 00:18, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

About 15 minutes after I put this here, someone came along and just deleted them (a 10yr+ editor). I was going to look into finding replacements; even adding information to the article... MB (talk) 01:12, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

See also WP:EL for more information on permissable and prohibited external links. Policy-compliant links should be preserved as far as technically possible (sites like the Internet Archive often have a backup archive), but prohibited or redundant external links should usually be deleted. GermanJoe (talk) 06:40, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Cited references are the basis for information in the body of the article: assuming that all was fine when they were added, they should be retained, because they were valid citations at the time they were added. Of course, it's best if you can replace them with working citations to the same source (e.g. the Internet Archive, or a different place hosting the same online book) or to other sources that have the same information, or if you have a way of knowing that they didn't provide the information claimed (e.g. you used the Internet Archive), that's a hoax, and they should be removed along with the text. However, removing a reference and its text, just because the link is dead, is always unhelpful. It's completely different in the external links section: this section's links are meant merely for someone who's trying to find additional information, and a non-working link is absolutely useless, so unless you have an alternate link right now, you should remove one that you find to be dead. Nyttend (talk) 14:11, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Christians' True Spirit

Respected Sir/Madam,

My Christians True Spirit is been deleted?? I am new to Wikipedia and it's getting very difficult for me how to contact deleting Administrator GBAWDEN that why he have delete my page?

I have all the right from Christians' True Spirit to use there LOGO and other information for Wikipedia, can you please explain me in simple words that what kind of verification is required by Wikipedia so the article of Christians' True Spirit is not deleted in future by Administrator of Wikipedia.

Kindly solve this issue on urgent basis and please restore the article of Christians' True Spirit.

Thanking You In Advance

A tag has been placed on Christians' True Spirit requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about an organization or company, but it does not credibly indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please read more about what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator. Gbawden (talk) 11:35, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Regards

Asif Khan — Preceding unsigned comment added by Asif.khan1979 (talk • contribs) 06:00, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Gbawden is not an administrator. You can find the username of the administrator who deleted your article in the deletion log at Christians' True Spirit. If you read the messages on your user talk page they explain the reason why your article was deleted (... it does not credibly indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia) and also about copyright. In those messages the words in blue are wikilinks to further information. If you need to contact another user you can do so on their user talk page, linked from their signature and log entries, but before that, please read the links in the messages on your user talk page. - David Biddulph (talk) 06:27, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Dear David, Sir I really don't know were to put message in talk page, Secondly if Gbawden is not a Administrator then how can he delete my article? Please restore my article. following is the message which I got.

A tag has been placed on Christians' True Spirit requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about an organization or company, but it does not credibly indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please read more about what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator. Gbawden (talk) 11:35, 5 February 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Asif.khan1979 (talk • contribs) --Asif.khan1979 (talk) 07:25, 8 February 2016 (UTC)Asif.khan1979

It was administrator User:DGG who deleted your article following the recommendation by Gbawden. I can't see the deleted article, but I assume that it lacked references to indicate that the charity is notable in the Wikipedia sense. Google finds only one reliable source for me: the Pakistan Christian Post. The organisation's own website and facebook page cannot establish notability. The mention by the Barnabas Fund might help slightly, but it's only a mention. If your article contained text copied from the organisation's website, then Wikipedia policy is to delete immediately to avoid copyright issues. Dbfirs 10:15, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Here is the URL of my article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christians'_True_Spirit and website is http://christiantruespirit.com/ copy text from the website was already removed from the article and it was all okay then why did user:Gbawden removed my article. Please restore my article--Asif.khan1979 (talk) 11:09, 8 February 2016 (UTC)Asif.khan1979

As other people have already said, the article did not have references to indicate why it is important. Although it was a very serious issue that the initial version of the article plagiarized the website, that was not the only reason why it was deleted. You need to cite multiple, unaffiliated, non-primary, professionally published academic our journalistic sources to demonstrate that anyone outside of an organization cares about said organization.

Our site has standards for what topics will get articles and what topics will not. You can read them by clicking here. Ian.thomson (talk) 11:37, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

The best way for you to proceed will be first, to look for and find references providing substantial coverage from third-party independent reliable sources, not press releases or mere announcements. If you do, start a new article in Draft space as [[Draft:Christians' True Spirit]]. Butunless you have the references there's no point in it. DGG ( talk ) 01:23, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Removal of speedy deletion tag by an IP

"The creator of a page may not remove a speedy deletion tag from it" Is it OK if they log out and then remove the tag? - See Oasis Academy School (revision history): Noyster (talk), 10:23, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

No, that's illegitimate sockpuppetry. Ian.thomson (talk) 11:20, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

In general, you can't assume IPs are definitely sockpuppets, and IPs are human too. In this particular case, however, that seems unlikely, and I've accordingly opened a sockpuppet investigations case. —me_and 11:42, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Formatting of Related Articles

This looks like a technical issue with the newish feature RELATED ARTICLES; they are displayed across the whole width of the page, after the article, but on a short page this leads to the sidebar being obscured and inaccessible. For example, 1996–97 Southern Hemisphere tropical cyclone season. Longer articles don't have the problem because the sidebar is shorter than the article. Colonies Chris (talk) 11:28, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

It's an optional beta feature "Read more" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. It looks OK to me in Firefox. What is your browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:47, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

I have tried other skins and see the problem in MonoBook and Cologne Blue. If you have rendering issues then please always state your browser, and your skin if it isn't the default Vector. At Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures the feature has a "discussion" link to mw:Talk:Reading/Web/Projects/Related pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:54, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm using monobook, and it's the same problem in (at least) Opera, Firefox and Chrome. Colonies Chris (talk) 14:32, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

For the time being I've switched off this feature (which seemed pretty useless anyway) and all is well now. Colonies Chris (talk) 14:35, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Templated links with specified deletion rationale

Following a note at WP:AN, I've checked several hundred entries at User:Anomie/Neelix list/frogs. Most of them were good, but several small batches needed to be deleted, so I opened each bad page, clicked "Redirected from X", clicked "delete", picked G6, and deleted. A lot of work when we're talking a few dozen pages, so I preview-added {{la}} to them all; this made it just one click to reach the delete screen, although I still had to specify G6 in the dropdown. And unfortunately, the {{la}} documentation page doesn't mention any way to tweak the template so that it prefills the deletion rationale.

Is there a way to use {{la}}, or any other template, so that I immediately get a link to the delete page with a prefilled rationale? It has to be something that can be used simply; right now, each entry on that page is #[[:Page title]], and I'd like to do a find-replace command to get #{{la|Page title|G6}} if that were the option. It can't be something that would require tweaking of each entry, because that gets rid of the time-saving that I'm trying to accomplish. Nyttend (talk) 14:16, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Can you not use WP:NUKE to get rid of a whole bunch of them at once? I have never used it myself, but I understand you can select a whole pile of pages and kill them all at once. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:09, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

The problem is that WP:NUKE gets rid of everything, doesn't it? As I noted, most of these redirects were good; they have to be addressed individually. Nyttend (talk) 21:14, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: created {{Delete page}} (yes, there may be a better title). Use it as {{Delete page|Page title|G7}}. But it may be better to include in the main {{la}} template. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:06, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Fancy quotations

I've seen some fancy quotations in Wikipedia, but I don't know how to make them happen. What I'm referring to is a way of presenting quotations that indents them, starts them off with a very large quotation mark, and possibly puts them inside a box.

How can I format quotations in this style? (If I could find one now, I could figure out how to do it.) Lou Sander (talk) 15:32, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

You may be looking for <blockquote>the actual quote</blockquote>Naraht (talk) 15:50, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

There are also templates like Template:Quote (written using {{ notation.) RJFJR (talk) 15:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

I suspect you're thinking of {{Pull quote}}, which produces output like the below:

“ Here is some quoted text. Isn't it pretty? ” — me_and

I produced the above with the following text: {{Pull quote|Here is some quotation text. Isn't it pretty?|author=me_and}}. Just do the same thing in an article to get the same effect. Alternatively, use {{Reduced pull quote}} instead of {{Pull quote}} to have the quote over to the side of the article rather than centred.

—me_and 16:12, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Got it! Thanks to all of you. I searched various "WP:Quote..." articles and found several that I needed. The Helpdesk strikes again! Lou Sander (talk) 17:07, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

I think it's great that Naraht and me_and helped Lou form a nice fancy box quote to lay out the ideology of a white supremacist website on Wikipedia. After all, presentation is everything, and if we can make the words of a racist like Jared Taylor look more formal, perhaps people will stop thinking about the fact that he's a racist. Good work all around! Rockypedia (talk) 17:54, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

I think the article in question is more than clear enough that groups like the SPLC consider it to be a magazine of a White Supremacist organization.Naraht (talk) 18:51, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Editing changes didn't stick

I'm new to editing a Wikipedia page. I created an account and made some editing changes and additions to a page about Benjaman Kyle. When I tried to save the changes I got a window that asked me to describe the changes, which I did. It also asked me to fill in a Captcha, which I did. However, when I clicked on Save it kept returning to the Captcha box, and the changes would not stick. Did I do something wrong? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rbmike1986 (talk • contribs) 16:15, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Rbmike1986: If you are logged in, it shouldn't be asking you for a captcha. Looking at the history of Benjaman Kyle, I can see no edits by you in recent history. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:06, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Referencing errors on Evaristo Márquez Contreras

Reference help requested. How do I fix an archival URL error? Thanks, Chitowngal12345 (talk) 16:37, 8 February 2016 (UTC)chitowngal12345

@Chitowngal12345: It looks like you removed the error but I don't see the template parameters being used correctly. The "archive URL" is for pointing to an archive like The Wayback Machine. What you want is simply the "url" parameter. See Template:Cite web for more. Dismas|^(talk) 16:42, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Citing sources: source within a source

In Wikipedia, when a source explicitly cites another source, what is the usual practice for deciding whether to cite the newer source, or the source within the source? --Tsavage (talk) 17:02, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Tsavage: Use the original one (source "b") unless the other one (source "a") has other information that is being referenced. In that case, feel free to cite both. One more source reference is not a bad thing in an article. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:05, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. What if it is relevant to the content that the newer source, by citing the older source, indicates that the older source is still valid? For example, Source A (2013) cites Source B (1996), demonstrating that B remains current—in this case, citing both sources separately wouldn't indicate that A validates B. --Tsavage (talk) 17:23, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

You can add a note that indicates that, if that's what you're trying to do. Just be as clear as possible when citing the source, and include an explanatory note if needed. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 18:38, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Tsavage: The policy here is WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT – if you've only looked at one source, reference the source you checked regardless of what sources it references in turn. If you've checked both sources, there's (normally) no harm in citing both. —me_and 17:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

OK, that's clear, thanks! --Tsavage (talk) 18:33, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Entry partially trashed--please help

Eugene V. Debs (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

It looks like someone has partially trashed this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs# could someone please remove the spurious photos, etc.? Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:197:100:8707:31D7:68F:5058:1858 (talk) 18:55, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Just some stupid vandalism. I have reverted it. -- GB fan 19:02, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

There may have been vandalism by two different vandals, an unregistered editor, and a registered editor with one edit, but they may have been the same editor. OP: You may have the vandalism policy for advice on how to deal with vandalism in the future. Basically, if it hasn't been reverted, one should revert it. The editor can be warned. If the editor has been warned and continues to vandalize, they may be reported at the vandalism noticeboard and may be blocked. Thank you for mentioning it here. While this Help Desk is not listed as one of the places to report vandalism, vandalism that is mentioned here is usually corrected quickly. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:50, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Welcoming committee directing people to wrong page(s)?

I am not sure why the "Welcoming committee" talk pages keep getting request from all over...can someone look into this...as to why they keep posting in the wrong place...is it a welcome template that has the wrong links? e.g Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia/Finding your way around -- Moxy (talk) 21:16, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

It is odd that they found their way to that talk page. None of the three editors that have made requests on that page even have a welcome on their talk page. One of the three has an invite to the Teahouse, but the other two do not. -- GB fan 21:21, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Its got to be a link they see...we redirected Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia to the teahouse... but people still posting there as if no redirect. -- Moxy (talk) 21:27, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

My guess is that it is something to do with the "welcome" notification, but I haven't been able to work out where that notification's link target is configured. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:39, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

• Got 5 more in the past 24h even on odd pages like Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia/Intro....need to solve this.--Moxy (talk) 07:27, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

@Moxy: The link is in MediaWiki:Notification-welcome-link. It was enabled in phab:T117509. (Briefly: The notification didn't have a link-target previously. Now it has a locally-configurable link.) Perhaps GB fan could change that to a link to Wikipedia:Teahouse? Or discuss further. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

O I see...ideally we should be directing "new editors" to Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia (parent "how to" article) and for questions to Wikipedia:Teahouse. -- Moxy (talk) 20:40, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Stefan Roloff

The article has a box above since 2012, stating it needs additional verification sources. The article contains all necessary references, please remove that box. — Preceding unsigned comment added by When6is9 (talk • contribs) 22:43, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Hello, When6is9. Any editor may remove that tag if they think it is no longer applicable: just edit the article, and find and remove {{refimprove}} from the top. Make sure you explain in the edit summary what you are doing, so nobody will mistake your removal for vandalism. --ColinFine (talk) 23:43, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

The article Stefan Roloff has 11 references. One of these is to YouTube, which is not a reliable source. One (no. 9) has one sentence about him. Another (no. 8) has one sentence about him and another about his father. The others merely mention him. All this does not add up to the "significant discussion" which is required to establish notability, so the tag should remain. Maproom (talk) 23:59, 8 February 2016 (UTC)