Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2016 September 20

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September 20

How correctly add emblem?

• Turkey (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Hi. I'm want add emblem for Turkey Eng version. Example - mhr:Турций etc. Thanks. If you don't understand a question, please say me. I will try to explain in another (I'm bad speak English, sorry) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gl dili (talk • contribs) 04:47, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

@Gl dili: If this question is for editing content on the Meadow Mari Wikipedia or the Turkish Wikipedia, you may be better asking on their equivalent of our help desk, which you should be able to find through their community portals at mhr:Википедий:Тӱшка and tr:Vikipedi:Topluluk portali, where you can hopefully get support in your native language. We officially only support the English Wikipedia here, and we do not know the policies and guidelines for other language Wikipedias (each Wikipedia sets its own policies and guidelines). We can give general advice, but it may not be correct for other Wikipedias. Beyond that, I'm not really sure exactly what you are asking. I assume by "emblem", you mean an image or logo. Which page do you wish to add this to, and where on the page? If your question is about a page on the English Wikipedia, this is the correct place for general support. Murph9000 (talk) 05:17, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. This emblem is in the most pages to other languages Wikipedia except the English version. Here is the page Turkey (last edits). I also discuss here Talk:Turkey § The emblem. Help please — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gl dili (talk • contribs) 05:26, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Gl dili: Ahh, ok, I just checked your editing history, and I see you have been discussing this at Talk:Turkey. Apparently the community consensus, here on English Wikipedia, is that the emblem should not be added to the page. I have not looked into the history behind that consensus, but the person who told you that (Anna Frodesiak) is an administrator, so I trust her answer to be correct. We, at the help desk, will absolutely not do anything against community consensus. Any discussion about changing the consensus should take place on the article's talk page. Murph9000 (talk) 05:33, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Bosham Sailing Club

I am a new user. An article that I worked on in my sandbox has been submitted but the title was my user name/sandbox. As this couldn't be edited, I submitted the article again with the same text (which I'm happy with) and the correct title (Bosham Sailing Club). Both are now sitting in my contributions box and I'd like to withdraw the earlier (wrong) one. How can I do this or will it automatically get rejected and the correct one (hopefully) accepted ? Credefarmer (talk) 11:40, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

The easy option is for you simply to blank User:Credefarmer/sandbox. You will then be able to use the page for anything else that you want to use it for subsequently. I see that you didn't submit Bosham Sailing Club as a draft for review through the AFC process, but you published it directly to mainspace. Some other editors have made further edits to tidy it up a little. I took the liberty of adding a section heading above your question, as it did not relate to the section in which it had been placed. --David Biddulph (talk) 11:52, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Size of printable version

When I print Wikipedia article by clicking "printable version", sometimes the article's font comes out tiny? Other times it comes out readable even though I don't change anything between doing the two. How can I make it always come out in readable font size? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dciree (talk • contribs) 13:00, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

@Dciree: This is a potentially tricky area, as there could be quite a few things which cause that. Can you please give us some examples of pages which exhibit the problem for you. It could be something problematic in the page's markup (i.e. some bad markup that we could improve), or it could be something like particular types of content (e.g. tables which are very wide, causing your browser to scale everything down to fit the table in). Please also let us know the browser and exact browser version that you are using. At the very least, we need some good examples to work with (and ideally a couple of examples which seem good to you as well), before we can give a good answer. Anything from more than one example that triggers the problem, up to about a dozen would be good (doesn't have to be that many, 3 or 4 would be fine, but more data is usually good), ideally with some variety in them. Murph9000 (talk) 13:12, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Side note: Generally, there is no reason to use the "Printable version" link, as all modern browsers apply the printable version automatically when you print from the browser. "Printable version" is mostly useful to show editors what a page looks like in print, without having to print. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:33, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Thomas Coke, 2nd Earl of Leicester

Please note that citation number 3 is not correctly done. Please repair - 115.70.161.50 (talk) 13:37, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Citation number 3 is a reference that you added, so the responsibility for correcting it is yours.

The parameters are described in {{cite web}}:

|publisher, if used, is for the publisher

page number goes in the |page parameter, not in the |publisher parameter

date goes in the |date parameter, not in the |publisher parameter

|accessdate is for the date you accessed the page to check it. If you accessed it today, it should be 2016, not 2014.

--David Biddulph (talk) 14:58, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Using Wikipedia to look at news

how to use Wilipedia to look news? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.52.97.10 (talk) 14:41, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Hello. While we do have some coverage of news and current events, Wikipedia is primarily an encyclopedia, and not a news service. We link to our limited coverage of notable current events on the main page and Portal:Current events. For more comprehensive news coverage, you will need to look elsewhere, such as one of the many online news services, e.g. BBC, CNN, Google News, many of the traditional quality newspapers that have an online presence, etc. Feel free to ask more questions about Wikipedia. Murph9000 (talk) 14:54, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Please see Wikinews. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:52, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Fix incomplete references after splitting article

• Bonsai (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
• Bonsai history (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

I'm in the process of splitting a long article. The contents of the new article contain about eighty references. Many are self-contained, with all needed information provided in the material copied from the original master article. These references show up correctly in the "References" section at the end of the article. But a number of the references in the new page are incomplete, referring to a preceding reference that exists in the master article but not in the new one.

A typical error message appearing in the WP-generated "References" section would be "Missing or empty |title=". It appears because the reference I have in the new article is only partial, depending on a preceding reference for some of its information (in this case, the title of the book referred to). That preceding reference has not been included in the text for the new article, so the reference I got by copying the master article's contents is visibly incomplete.

In some cases these prior references have unique titles or author names so are painful but easy to match up, and the reference can be repaired by copying the missing information from the reference in the main article. But some references are marked "autogenerated" - for example:

ref name=autogenerated5>Smith. pp. 124–125. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

These references in the new article do not seem (to my eyes) to indicate exactly which prior reference from the main article would contain the missing information. Again, if the author name is associated with only one prior reference, it's painful but obvious where to get the missing information. But it seems some authors have more than one work referenced, and I am not sure how to track from a reference name like "autogenerated6" back to the correct master reference that would contain the information I need to complete the incomplete reference properly in the new article.

I apologize in advance if I haven't communicated my problem clearly. I'm inventing jargon on the fly ("master article", "original reference", etc.) and I hope being at least consistent if not completely clear. I suspect I am at least the fifty-thousandth editor to run into this situation, though, and I hope that someone with practical knowledge can give me valuable hints to make this process simpler and error-free. Thanks!

Sahara110 (talk) 16:10, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

@Sahara110: For future reference, when asking for tech support, please link all relevant articles, ideally using {{la|Article name}}, as I have done at the top of this topic. It just helps us quickly see the full context and give you the best advice and answers. If you open the source for Bonsai, then use your browser's find function with "autogenerated5", you should find the reference you are looking for, and just need to copy that full reference across. Repeat for any other missing refs, replacing the first instance of any refs which are only a name (i.e. no actual reference) with the full version of it from the original article. These "autogenerated" names are evidently from some automated reference tool used by someone on the original article in the past. The wiki is not auto-generating anything for you here, they are just arbitrary labels. I hope that addresses it for you. If I missed something, or you need more help, please ask. Murph9000 (talk) 16:41, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Murph9000: Thanks very much for the quick response and useful information. I had thought - without evidence and, it now appears, without being correct - that "autogenerated" might be one of the many Wikipedia services I have not mastered. I certainly prefer the semantically meaningful appearance of a title actually derived from the referenced work in primary and subsequent references. But there seem to be a lot of different conventions and techniques used for references in different articles and by different editors. It appears that one of WPs many minions has already cleaned up the errored references in Bonsai history, so I will tuck your information away for future reference and proceed with the article splitting. Sahara110 (talk) 18:15, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

• Sahara110, while I have fixed all the errors left in the wake of your editing, I would strongly suggest you read Referencing for beginners "before" proceeding ahead with editing references and creating more such errors. Many of the references that I have fixed temporarily can be further improved in their structure. Do please feel free to ping me or any of the other editors for further assistance, if you get stuck. Lourdes 16:56, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Lourdes: I am sorry if I have missed anything, but after checking the change history to Bonsai I cannot spot your positive contribution to "errors left in the wake of my editing". Your fixes to Bonsai are much appreciated and definitely improve the article. Sadly I see no corrections to any errors I may have introduced into that article over the last seven or eight years. Those who made the errors to which you're referring, whose contributions are doubtless trackable through the edit history, may benefit more from your insights than I have. As to the problems in the new Bonsai history article, I had really requested and hoped to receive (as visible a couple of paragraphs above in my original request) information that would allow me to make necessary changes myself, as that seems to be a good way to learn. To my good fortune, User:Murph9000 seems to have met that request. Your quick work is otherwise much appreciated. Sahara110 (talk) 18:15, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

• Sahara110, my apologies if the statement "errors left in the wake of your editing" came out otherwise. If you refer to this edit of yours where you created the article Bonsai history, your edit contains all the referencing errors that have been corrected by me. As there is no editor preceding any edits made by you, and as you individually did not have an idea of how to correct the referencing errors in the article you created, I forwarded my encouragement (which still stands) that you should read Help:Referencing for beginners so that you can correct such future errors when you are creating valid forks out of large articles. I'll reiterate, please do ping me or any other editor for any assistance as such in the said articles. Thanks. Lourdes 18:34, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

• @Sahara110: I did some janitorial work for you on the talk pages of both articles, putting up a suitable copyright attribution template, {{Copied}}, and the standard WP:TALKLEAD stuff. I copied the WikiProject banners without modification, so feel free to adjust the class and importance parameters as needed, I was just doing a bit of technical help there, not actually assessing the article. If you are not sure about the ratings, drop a message on the talk pages of each WikiProject explaining your page split, and encourage them to adjust their banners as needed. Murph9000 (talk) 17:11, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Murph9000: Excellent! Thanks for moving this article forward. I will try to remember to keep open communications with the ratings teams. It was a failed GA (Good Article) assessment that led me to make a series of recommended changes to the Bonsai article, this split being the most recent task of several planned changes (see Talk:Bonsai#Pre_GA_comments and Talk:Bonsai#Tackling_some_of_the_GA_Good_Article_review_comments for relevant history). When I have addressed as many of the known concerns as I can, I will do as you suggest with selected ratings teams. Thanks for your constructive help. Sahara110 (talk) 18:15, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

ClueBot issue

• The Fox Lover (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Autobot destroys 1/2 of THE FOX LOVER plot; then my message that AUTOBOT removed half of plot was removed as well!

I wondered why someone only did half of the movie by the name of THE FOX LOVER and didn't do the rest.

After days of meticulously doing the plot of the last half of the movie, I got a message that the AUTOBOT 'edited' my submitted plot; upon examination, it deleted all except the part of the plot already on your site! ONly a few lines of my additions were left on the page.

I placed a message that the stupid autobot deleted the plot for the last half of the movie, and DemocraticLuntz‬ left me a message that I 'vandalized' the movie plot.

How can I 'vandalize' a movie plot when your stupid autobot did it already; all I placed at the bottom of the plot was deleted by your autobot?

This is not the only movie I have noticed that only has anywhere from 1/4 to 3/4ths of the plot intact!

Doesn't anyone check your autobot and see what it is up to occasionally?

I did make a copy of the full plot for THE FOX LOVER if you want it uploaded again.

DemocraticLuntx removed my message that half of the plot was removed by your autobot.

Any way of correcting this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Desade 4 (talk • contribs) 20:26, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

ClueBot NG generally does a good job at identifying vandalism, but it does make mistakes. You can report false positives at User:ClueBot NG/FalsePositives. However, you should also know that plot summaries should be kept fairly short, usually no more than 700 words. See MOS:PLOT. clpo13_(talk) 20:34, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

At almost 5000 words that plot was far in excess of what is recommended in MOS:PLOT. We don't need anything near that level of detail. And the complaint about the bot removing the edit did not belong in the article and was correctly removed. Meters (talk) 20:41, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Image placement dilemma

Hello. I am having trouble positioning a thumbnail on First Lord of the Treasury. My first edit to the article yesterday made the article look like this, which was unhelpful. I have since moved the image to just below the infoboxes on the right side of the page, but I would prefer if the text could flow around the image at the #Official residence section. I am unsure how to rectify this. Thanks.--Nevé–selbert 21:10, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

That's an odd one! I'll see if I can fix it for you and then I'll update here with how I did it, because yeah at first glance I would've thought you had the syntax right the first time. Innisfree987 (talk) 15:24, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Update for Neve-selbert: so I'm a bit out of my depth here but I'm pretty sure what's happening is layout defaults do not want you to place a picture to the left of that first infobox (to preserve layout in cross-browser viewing, I suspect)--no matter where I put the file in the code, it always takes it down to the line just below the end of the first infobox. I suspect that's an insurmountable problem but maybe someone who knows more than I will see your question and have a better answer here; or, you could ask at, say, Wikipedia_talk:Extended_image_syntax or another talk page about images, which tend to be frequented by people who've done a LOT of these. Sorry I couldn't help more! Innisfree987 (talk) 15:45, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

OK. Thanks anyway, Innisfree987.--Nevé–selbert 17:09, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Self-reverting 3rd revert

I have a question regarding 3RR. Say I revert a third time, but I self-revert that revert, is it still considered being on the border of 3RR? Thanks. Callmemirela 🍁 {Talk} ♑ 21:12, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Technically it's not, as undoing your third revert puts you at two. However, further reverts after that might be seen as WP:GAMING, unless they're obvious 3RR exemptions. clpo13_(talk) 22:43, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Callmemirela: WP:3RR has a specific exemption for self-reverting. Personally, I feel the spirit of it is that if you immediately self-revert a revert, that doesn't count towards the total, but if it's at the stage where you could have 3 non-exempt reverts you should be backing off for at least 24h (and constructively contributing to the talk page and other articles instead). Take a step back. If it comes a long time later, it could be more open to interpretation, especially if someone felt there was WP:GAMING involved. That's assuming a single self-revert to either correct an obvious mistake (e.g. reverting to the wrong version), or for a change of heart; I wouldn't expect a favourable interpretation of repeated self-reverts without an extremely compelling case.

To me, the spirit of the rule is that the edit history should not end up as pages of the article bouncing back and forth (with exceptions for 100% clear and obvious vandalism and the like, but there should be an AIV filed early on in that). If in any doubt about it, STOP! If you end up in a situation where an admin has to do complex analysis and maths to figure out if you crossed the line, they may not be terribly happy with you. Note the part of the policy which states that you don't actually have to cross the threshold to get a block for warring. Also, make certain that those edit summaries are good, whether claiming an exemption or not.

Murph9000 (talk) 23:02, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

@Clpo13:, @Murph9000: Thank you for your help! Callmemirela 🍁 {Talk} ♑ 23:06, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

How do I deal with references that could potentially get outdated in the future?

I'm new to editing Wikipedia articles. As far as references are concerned, wiki pages have websites cited as sources/references. However, news agencies or any particular website (cited as a reference) could potentially shut down in the future. If that happens, that can't possibly be a valid reference anymore. Right? How can I immortalize the references that I'm providing in my article on Wikipedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 110.235.7.46 (talk) 23:51, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

I don't think that you need to worry about that, because InternetArchiveBot will automatically replace the dead link with an archived copy. Pppery 01:18, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Pppery is right, but if you do want to manually archive your sources, check out WP:WEBCITE. clpo13_(talk) 01:56, 21 September 2016 (UTC)