Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2020 July 18

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July 18

Samantha Kshathriyas are not Nayars, someone wrongly updating this page, please don't allow it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Kshatriya Samantha Kshathriyas are not Nayars, someone wrongly updating this page, please don't allow it to add nayar claim there. They are from Ayya community and lineage to Chola chera dynasty. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:87:300:4130:5D7F:6FD6:40C9:E6E4 (talk) 02:20, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

O.K they are not Ezhavas in no way. Ezhavas were Outcastes not even included in the caste system. Do not vandalize articles by removing citations. Point out a difference in Samanthans (Nair Samanthan) and Samantha kshatriyas with a reliable source first. The article and the sources itself says Samantha Kshatriyas are not pure Kshatriyas. They are treated as a supereminent class of Nayars. Saw your comment somewhere on the same article stating Nair women were concubines. For your information, Sambandham custom was followed not only by Nairs but also by Ambalavasis and Samanthas. In Travancore Ammachi panampillai amma consort of Maharaja was from Nayar community. Same with Cochin kingdom 'Neythyar Amma'. The Princess from Travancore and Cochin Kingdoms had sambandham partners (Nambudiri Brahmins). Wikipedia depends on reliable sources, not on Point of views. Refer to some books before getting into a debate.Outlander^07@talk 03:26, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

How to avoid an edit war

Hi. I'd like help. Please advise. Someone (User:TFBCT1) is accusing me of edit warring. Which I don't believe I have done. And which I want to avoid. You can see the very bottom of my Talk Page. And this Talk Page: Talk:Oldest people#Oldest man. I'd like help. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:16, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Can I get some help, please? I am making some very reasonable requests / questions at that Talk Page. And some editor is giving me all sorts of push-back. Can a neutral person please look at the matter? That editor has an "itchy finger" to block me. I am just trying to improve the poorly written article. And he/she will have none of it. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 21:56, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for all of the "help", from this Help Desk (i.e., no replies at all). (Sarcasm.) Thanks! Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 01:28, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Redirects

Hello! I am in the process of copy editing an article for the GOCE. How do I redirect a link to a specific section in another article (e.g. clicking a word of an article should redirect to the "History" section of another article)? Fellowtorontonian (talk) 04:44, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Use [[Article name#History]], see WP:ANCHOR. --David Biddulph (talk) 04:50, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Sayuki Geisha Page

No one has been able to add any new information to this page for many years. Every time any attempt is made the writer is branded a sock puppet and their account banned and now the page is protected even when the content added is sourced from valid newspapers. Please look at the page history to see that any new content is immediately removed. There are many newspaper articles and television programs about Sayuki's current activities in the Fukagawa Geisha District in Tokyo. Please help to update the page with current information! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2400:4050:B1A0:2D00:65ED:7FE0:2DE3:BCBF (talk) 04:48, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi IP 2400:4050:B1A0:2D00:65ED:7FE0:2DE3:BCBF. the article Fiona Graham is currently protected which means that accounts need to be WP:EXTENDEDCONFIRMED to edit it. If you would like to make some suggestions on how to improve the article or propose corrections, you should make an edit request on the article's talk page. Another edit who is able to edit the page will review your request and assess in terms of relevant Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Your request should be as specific as possible (e.g. Change A to B) and be supported by links to reliable sources which verify what you're proposing. If, on the other hand, you think that there's no longer any need for the article to be protected, you can discuss this at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. If an administrator agrees with your assessment, they will unprotect the page; if not, they won't. Please understand that neither Ms. Graham nor anyone connected to her or trying to edit the article on her behalf has any sort of final editorial control over the article's content as explained in Wikipedia:Ownership of content. The article is not her article, but rather an article written about her; so, if she wants something in which she can regularly update and have total control over, perhaps she should take a look at Wikipedia:Alternative outlets. -- Marchjuly (talk) 05:29, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

For those not aware, the 2400.4050* editor IS Fiona Graham who's been trying for years to whitewash the article and use it to promote herself. Ravensfire (talk) 14:38, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Ravensfire, you may be right, but are you also WP:OUTING? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:23, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Gråbergs Gråa Sång, Self-declared (checked very carefully before I posted the above) - [1], [2]. Ravensfire (talk) 13:15, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Ravensfire Ok, I'm not deep into the mysteries of IP:s, I only checked the 2400:4050:B1A0:2D00:65ED:7FE0:2DE3:BCBF edits. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:48, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Gråbergs Gråa Sång, No worries, and appreciate the caution about outing. That's not something I want to ever cross. Should have included those links in the initial post. Ravensfire (talk) 15:49, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

How to create biography page for an actor

I want to create a biography page for an actor. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gayathri paradox (talk • contribs) 05:53, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. You may want first to ensure that the subject meets WP:NACTOR or the more general WP:GNG. Then you can go on to WP:YFA which should help you to create it. Victor Schmidt (talk) 09:22, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Jonn Lewis page

WHY IS "WHITE" at the top?? If % is descending order, Black should be first! Jesus Christ already! Get your act together, or I'll start a movement to highlight Wikipedia's racial "subtle" prejudices toward NON-F'n-WHITES!

Ethnicity	
31.95% white
57.7% black
4.61% Asian
6.39% Hispanic
0.52% Native American

Cook PVI D+34[4] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.207.162.8 (talk) 07:24, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

You have as much right as anyone to make the edits you speak of. Rather than making a point make an edit Fiddle Faddle 07:35, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

There's no "Jonn Lewis" page on Wikipedia, but if you're unable to edit the page yourself, leave an edit request on the article's talk page. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 10:32, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

And John Lewis is a disambiguation page with dozens of people. Why do rude people nearly always make inept posts which don't even identify what they are about? John Lewis (civil rights leader) got attention after dying yesterday but if it's about him then I still don't know what the post refers to. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:40, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Bizarrely, this appears to be about Georgia's 5th congressional district. How we were supposed to know that is anyone's guess.  Velella  ^{Velella Talk}   11:03, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

You would expect the percentages to be in size order but it is preset at Template:Infobox U.S. congressional district as far as I can see. MilborneOne (talk) 11:08, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

MilborneOne, Are you either able to edit that so that it pre-sorts in descending order of percentages, or, if not, are you able to frame a request to achieve that outcome, do you think? Fiddle Faddle 11:22, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Not really my area but I have left a comment on the template talk page. MilborneOne (talk) 11:34, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

So it wasn't about a "Jonn", it was about an unidentified John Lewis among dozens, and "Jonn Lewis page" wasn't actually a page about any of them but about a district where one of them was elected for office. Good find, but what a waste of time to have to do such detective work for a poster who is unable to say what their post is about. It would require an absurd amount of infobox code to sort them by size when the generic {{Infobox}} is called with various numbered label and data fields which would all have to depend on the sorting. I have never seen an infobox which sorts any input. Our template language just isn't suited for it. The preceding infobox field references the official site of the United States Census [3] where whites are also listed first. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:40, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

How nice, starting a movement about Wikipedia's supposed racial prejudice when the real cause is that the template's code does not support sorting ethnicities by size. I imagine if the original poster had seen an infobox that had white as the largest ethnicity he wouldn't have even seen any supposed racial prejudice. JIP | Talk 12:51, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

At a time when many of us are discovering unwitting racism baked into our institutions and organisations, it seems a very pertinent comment to me. There may be good reasons for the order, or there may be reasons that are weak but would take a lot of effort to change, or it may be unpredictable. But to reply to the OP's comment with snide dismissal is racism at work. --ColinFine (talk) 14:56, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

It would be possible to create a sortable table inside the infobox, the code for the sorting is already inside the sortable table class, and would not need to be done for the infobox. I am not sure this would look well, but it should be technically possible. It would be possible to put such a sortable table, possibly created via a template, in the body of the article instead of in an infobox, which might be an improvement anyway, I think we often try to cram too much into infoboxes. Such a sortable table could be sorted by default on the percentage figures. DES ^(talk)_{DESiegel Contribs} 15:38, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Sortable tables always start out in the order of the wikitext. They can only sort differently after a column is clicked. Few readers probably do that. I took another look at {{Infobox U.S. congressional district}}. I was wrong before. The ethnicity data is distributed in many parameters in the calling article but is collected in a single parameter data6 when {{Infobox}} is called. That means sorting would be possible with a suitable Lua-based sort template. {{Sort list}} nearly works but it sorts alphabetically with "6.39% Hispanic" larger than "57.7% black", since the initial character "6" is larger than "5". It also makes bullets which would be ugly here. I don't know Lua. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:21, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

(ec) To the original IP editor: The problem is that we use a template for the infobox in all the congressional district articles, they have fixed parameters for each of those (census-defined) racial categories, and they appear in the order that is I believe most likely to be sorted correctly by default (i.e., in most districts, isn't the white % is greater than the black %?) As was said, it would be impractical and slow to auto-sort the list in each article to show the highest % item first using standard wiki/HTML table code. @DESiegel: or do I have this wrong? Have you seen a way to cause a table to auto-sort on a particular column by default? I'll note Help:Sorting#Initial sort order of rows.

I've run across other situations where it would be nice if a table were initially displayed sorted by something other than the physical order of the rows in the code. I can imagine some javascript that would simulate the click on a particular column, or a LUA-based solution that would render the rows in the sorted order regardless of the order in which the parameters were given (if that were decided to be desirable at the expense of consistency among articles). —[AlanM1 (talk)]— 16:32, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

"At a time when many of us are discovering unwitting racism baked into our institutions and organisations, it seems a very pertinent comment to me. There may be good reasons for the order, or there may be reasons that are weak but would take a lot of effort to change, or it may be unpredictable. But to reply to the OP's comment with snide dismissal is racism at work. "

Excuse me? The fact that white is listed first is because of technical reasons, the template simply does not support sorting at the moment. It has nothing to do with racism. JIP | Talk 17:52, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

"Whites come first because that's how we do it, and anyway it would take too much effort to do otherwise". Perhaps we could add that to the front page. DuncanHill (talk) 18:15, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

So all this is about is that the template lists whites first? We could simply edit the template so that it lists blacks first. JIP | Talk 18:41, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@JIP: In case that wasn't sarcasm: the original complaint is that the majority should be listed first. Editing the template to list black first would make it wrong on a much higher number of articles. —[AlanM1 (talk)]— 21:26, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

But it has already become apparent that the majority can't be always listed first, the template doesn't support that. The order is fixed. Some skin colour will always be listed first. JIP | Talk 21:34, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Not if we start on "Hispanic". InedibleHulk (talk) 21:52, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

One possible solution described at Template talk:Infobox U.S. congressional district § Ethencity order gives this result:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:14, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Infobox hospital

As part of the WP:HOS wikiprojct, we have been adding Infobox hospital to all hospital articles. Is there a way to use the parameter data in the Infobox hospital to show summary statistics on parameters such as the number of beds, opened date, coordinates, etc. in the articles containing Infobox hospital? This would be useful information to include in the article History of hospitals. -- Talk to G Moore 13:01, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

You mean, G. Moore, that you want to show in History of hospitals a total of or collection of info from all articles using {{Infobox hospital}}? No, that could not be done with that template or another template somehow connected to that template. It would be possible to have a bot regularly read all such pages and collect info from them and create some sort of report, much as the various wiki-projects get and display reports on the number of articles displaying their project banner, separated by class and importance level. Whether anyone would be willing to write such a bot I couldn't say. But using such a report in an article, such as History of hospitals, would be, in effect, using a number of Wikipedia articles as sources for that article. This is not allowed, because individual articles are not considered to be reliable sources, and doing it in this sort of indirect, non-transparent, way would, in my view, only make that worse. Such a report could be displayed in project space, but I doubt it would be worth creating a bot just for that purpose. I advise against pursuing this idea. DES ^(talk)_{DESiegel Contribs} 15:03, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

DESiegel Thanks for the quick feedback. Could this be done for and on the Category:WikiProject Hospitals articles and used in the WP:HOS project. It would help identify where work needs to be done on finding coordinates for hospitals. That would be more closely related to the project and a category. Would this also require a bot to do this? If this cold be done with a bot, how do we go about getting someone to write a bot to do this? There are other parameters within the Infobox hospital that we are trying to cleanup, such as missing country, missing opened date, missing location, missing beds, etc. -- Talk to G Moore 15:18, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

G. Moore, I think that would also require a bot, although perhaps it might be done via an SQL query on the WP database. Wikipedia:Bot requests is the most usual place for requesting that someone else create a bot. Note that any bot must be approved by the bot approvals group, see Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group. See Wikipedia:Request a query to request an SQL query. Good luck. DES ^(talk)_{DESiegel Contribs} 15:29, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Generally, if you want to use the same information in different articles, it either has to be in a template (i.e. in the definition of the template), or pulled from Wikidata. I'm pretty sure that the technically best way to do what you're asking for, G. Moore, is to hold all the data in Wikidata, and pull it into one template (presumably {{infobox hospital}}) for each article, and into a different template in the History article. But the problem DESiegel raised about verifiability makes that problematic. Until Wikidata requires reliable sources for information like that, and Wikipedia provides a way for the citation to be readily available to the reader, I don't think this is desirable. --ColinFine (talk) 15:56, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

wrong photo

Who is that person in the photo of the Andree Viger Biography? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.62.237.70 (talk) 14:17, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

the picture in the André Viger was extracted from here, Where the City of Boston archives claims it is Viger. -Arch dude (talk) 14:42, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Download problem

My wikipedia downloading pdf is not working — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2409:4061:2E8E:CE44:0:0:CB:4114 (talk) 14:31, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Could you please provide more details of the steps you're attempting to do, and the results that you see when it doesn't work? GoingBatty (talk) 16:42, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Would Ancestry constitute as a source?

I would like to use an Ancestry link to cite an article and expand it. Would this work as a source? Lettler^hello 19:05, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Much of the content of ancestry.com is user-generated and often original research; so that's a strong No. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:17, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Here's our perennial sources entry on it. Ian.thomson (talk) 19:18, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@Orangemike:: Would this apply to a military service record? Lettler^hello 21:15, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@Lettler: An Ancestry.com's user's assertion that a particular gov't record is the correct one is not a reliable source. If you have other evidence that that gov't record is the correct one, try finding that record from somewhere besides Ancestry. Note, however, that gov't records are primary sources which are open to editor misinterpretation, which is why we generally avoid that sort of thing. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:20, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Franz Fanon entryHelp:Cite errors/Cite error ref no input

In the entry on Franz Fanon, I'm the person who corrected chapter 9 to chapter 6 in the discussion of "Black Skin, White Masks." I'm reading the Richard Philcox translation now of the book (New York, Grove Press, 2008) and the chapter titled "The Black Man and Psychopathology" is the 6th chapter not the nineth chapter as was previously indicated. In fact, there is no chapter 9. I don't know how to make the change without the unnecessary notice asking for a reference. Thank you. Mary McLeod Professor of Architecture Columbia University — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.167.61.55 (talk) 19:19, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi Mary! I suggest you discuss this on the article talk page: Talk:Frantz Fanon. It's possible that the 1952 edition references in the article has different chapters than the 2008 translation you're reading, or it's possible that you simply just fixed a typo. Happy editing! GoingBatty (talk) 20:09, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi. Adding that the cite errors you received was because you added a set of empty ref tags. Those are used to place a reference in between them. See Wikipedia:Citing sources and Help:Footnotes. --DB1729 (talk) 20:26, 18 July 2020 (UTC)