Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2022 August 27

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August 27

Donald Machholz Death Location

I've tried a couple times to ask for assistance without resolution. My husband Donald Machholz, astronomer, death location is incorrect. He died in Wikieup, AZ not Park Valley, AZ over 300 miles away. Thank you. About Description Donald Edward Machholz was an American amateur astronomer who was the leading visual comet discoverer, credited with the visual discovery of 12 comets that bear his name. Machholz spent more than 9,000 hours comet-hunting in a career spanning over 50 years. Wikipedia Born: October 7, 1952, Portsmouth, VA Died: August 9, 2022, Park Valley, AZ Discovered: Comet Machholz, 96P/Machholz, 141P/Machholz, MORE MicheleMachholz (talk) 01:20, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

@MicheleMachholz: I'm sorry for your loss, which is also a loss to amateur astronomy: he will be missed. Wikipedia is strange: we are all amateurs and volunteers, and we have no way and no desire to verify that you are who you say you are. Therefore, to make this change we need a reference to what we call a reliable source. In this case an obituary published in a newspaper will suffice. It does not even need to be online, although it helps: just the name of the paper and the date of publication will suffice. We don't need a paper copy: we will take your word that it says what you say it does, so long as someone could in theory find it in the future. -Arch dude (talk)

@MicheleMachholz: I did a bit more research. Our article is Donald Machholz, with two good references, so we can handle this with no need for you to dig around in your local newspaper. It had the correct place of death. However, our sister project Wikidata had the incorrect date place of death. I corrected it in Wikidata. I suspect that you saw the incorrect information on another web site, possibly Google, that got it from Wikidata. It may take some time for my fix to propagate to that other site. On a personal note, I had never heard of Donald before this, and I found his article quite interesting. It seems that he had a good life and he made a real contribution. -Arch dude (talk) 05:44, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Edits using IP; forgot to sign in

Is there a way to remove the IP address and insert my user name in the edit? Didn't realize I wasn't logged in. Appreciate any help. Thanks. Bodding (talk) 03:51, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

@Bodding:IP edits cannot be reattributed to accounts, though you can ask the Oversight team to remove the IP address from public view. Victor Schmidt mobil (talk) 07:42, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. I guess they'll have to remain. Appreciate you taking the time. Bodding (talk) 18:11, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Is there something wrong with this table?

The table is or was at Compound subject. It's a table of examples for a subject in grammar. User:Izno has deleted it twice now. Here's the diff.  Card Zero  (talk) 06:21, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

I see you have started a discussion of the table on the article's talk page. That's the right place for it. I expect izno will reply there. Maproom (talk) 07:32, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

I wondered if there's some rule about use of tables with respect to people browsing in "mobile view". I didn't see anything about it at wp:Table dos and don'ts. In "mobile view" mode the table sits on top of the rest of the article, I think that's Izno's complaint. (I've moved it slightly further down now.)  Card Zero  (talk) 07:40, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Template or User Error?

Why do these three cite book templates generate an invalid character warning?

• Fitchett, F. W. (2007). Naval Battles of the Napoleonic Wars: Cape St. Vincent, the Nile, Cadiz, Copenhagen, Trafalgar & Others. Leonaur Publishing. ISBN 9781846773143.
• Pappalardo, Bruno (2019). How to Survive in the Georgian Navy: A Sailor's Guide. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 978-1472830876.
• McGowan, Alan (2003). HMS Victory: Her Construction, Career and Restoration. London: Caxton Editions. ISBN 1 84067 532 2.

I have checked the isbn in all 3 books and they agree with the numbers in the template. They are also the ones listed at World Cat [[1]] [[2]][[3]] and searching by isbn numbers on Google Books [[4]] [[5]][[6]]] and Amazon [[7]][[8]][[9]] brings up the appropriate books. --Ykraps (talk) 08:30, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Each had an invisible character at the beginning of the ISBN, namely Left-to-right mark (hex 200E). That can happen when copying text when the invisibile character is inadvertenly included in the copy. If you check the diff of me adding this comment, you will see that I also deleted the three unwanted characters which removed the errors messages. Johnuniq (talk) 08:54, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Johnuniq, that was driving me nuts.--Ykraps (talk) 08:11, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Recover content from my deleted User Page

How can I ... find the text from that page? It was speed-deleted, and it's not in the revision history...nor anywhere I can see. I surfed a little bit to try.

On my talk page, there is a pointer that suggests recovery of the text is possible. I do not intend to re-post it on Wikipedia. Thanks!

Pistophicus (talk) 12:05, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

The message on your talk page says to contact the administrator who deleted it, in this case Explicit. |Madeline. 12:24, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Hello, Pistophicus. Your user page was deleted as misuse of Wikipedia as a web host. As an adminstrator, I can read the deleted text. It started out OK describing your plans as a Wikipedia editor but then it strayed far afield. Would you like me to email it to you? Cullen328 (talk) 17:58, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

This is now at RfU - WP:Requests for undeletion#User:Pistophicus. Jay 💬 08:36, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Indeed I recall doing that, Cullen.... Thank you for the candid response! Will adjust writing habits going forward. Pistophicus (talk) 13:25, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Wikitable party colours

I made a Wikitable (gosh I have no clue how to use those) on the 2021 German federal election page to bring it in line with other election pages. However, for some reason, it would not accept the "party color|x"" definition even though the same format is used for basically all other German politics infoboxes/electionsboxes/tables etc. Maxwhollymoralground (talk) 15:28, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Use style="background-color: {{party color|Social Democratic Party of Germany}}" instead of {{party color|Social Democratic Party of Germany}}.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:54, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Maxwhollymoralground (talk) 15:56, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Request to patrol new article

Hi! I created a new Wikipedia article (Nizar Hassan) and after receiving feedback here, I worked on it for a few weeks to improve it and tackle all the suggestions. Now I would like to request it to be formally patrolled, to hopefully receive a more formal ok, and eventually appear in Google searches. Would that be possible? Thanks! -- Samer.hc (talk) 17:16, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Samer.hc It will be patrolled in due course. Requests to "jump the line" don't usually work. Do you have a particular need for it to appear in search engine results? 331dot (talk) 17:24, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Oh I'm sorry, I didn't mean to "jump the line", since I'm not familiar with the patrolling process. I guess I was just excited with the idea :) Is there an approximate estimate for how long does it take for a new article to be patrolled nowadays? I assume there will be multiple factors, I mean if it's more like a month or more like 6m or 12m? To calibrate expectations. Thanks! Samer.hc (talk) 20:12, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Like everything else on Wikipedia, the New Page Patrol is done by volunteers who work on what they choose to work on, so there is no order, and no useful estimate. Articles which are obviously adequate or obviously inadequate tend to be picked up quickly; those that will take more work to patrol may wait for longer. ColinFine (talk) 20:20, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Hello, Samer.hc. If the article hasn't been patrolled by a human editor within 90 days, it will automatically be marked as OK for search engines to index. See WP:NOINDEX for details. Cullen328 (talk) 20:26, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

That's really helpful, thank you @Cullen328! Samer.hc (talk) 09:01, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

The latest version of a thumbnail used from Wikimedia Commons not showing up for me in the article I updated it in.

Hello, I recently added the newest and updated map of the football tournament UEFA Europa Conference League with the newest participating countries in its Wikimedia Commons page (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UEFA_CL_teams.png) and then went to the UEFA Europa Conference League Wikipedia article (UEFA Europa Conference League) and made an edit so the old image would refresh, and it did, but the new image only shows me the latest version of the map as a thumbnail and when I click on the image it enlarges but it shows me the old outdated version of the image, I tested this problem on other browsers from the one I used for the edit, and there it worked perfectly (the new version of the map showed up both as the thumbnail and as the enlarged image when clicked upon).

I read that one way I could solve this was by clearing my cache which for the browser I use (Chrome) was by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R, which I did but it still remained as before, the old version of the map also shows up on my phone's Wikipedia app, for which I don't know how to fix it.

So I guess I need help with two things:

1. How to see the newest version of the map when clicking on it, since the "cleaning your cache" method didn't work?
2. And how to do the same on my phone's Wikipedia app, do I need to clear the app's cache on my phone for it to be updated and work, or is there some other method?

Thank you for your understanding, and I would really appreciate the help.

Nori2001 (talk) 20:42, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

It's not your browser cache that you need to clear, it's Wikipedia's cache. See Purging. ColinFine (talk) 21:36, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Multiple errors in Lifespan timeline of presidents of the Senate of Romania article

The article Lifespan timeline of presidents of the Senate of Romania reports several errors in red, apparently pertaining to the automatic generation of a timeline. Has something changed with respect to the #tag:timeline? This article's history goes back to March 2016 and it seems unreasonable that this error would have existed for so many years. All of the past history articles I checked report similar errors. Can someone who knows more about timeline than I please check this. Thanks. Truthanado (talk) 22:49, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

@Truthanado: Thanks for reporting this. I am not familiar with how Timeline works, but the error was complaining that 2022 was outside the range of the timeline. I changed the "end" of the timeline from 2020 to current year, and that made the error go away, but I am not sure if that is the correct fix. RudolfRed (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

@RudolfRed: Thanks for your fix. It looks much better now. Truthanado (talk) 00:42, 28 August 2022 (UTC)