Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2023 March 10

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March 10

How do I remove a file from Wikipedia?

This image has been succeeded by this image as the previous one was uploaded by another user without the correct licence descriptions. How can I remove the previous image (which may violate fair use)? _MB190417_ (talk) 02:02, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@MB190417: The image is on commons so it will need to be deleted there. It looks like it is already tagged for having a licence problem. RudolfRed (talk) 02:30, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@MB190417: Although "remove" and "delete" are often used interchangeably by users, they are technically two different things. If all you want to do is remove the file from the article and replace it with another file, then just go to article, click "Edit" (either for the entire article or the relevant section) and replace the syntax the first file with the syntax of the second file. For more information on this, see Help:Files. If, on the other hand, you want the file to be deleted, then you can't do this yourself, You will need to request that the file be deleted by an administrator. Since File:Rosa Smester.png was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, you will need to make such a request on Commons per c:COM:DELETE. -- Marchjuly (talk) 03:00, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Is there a guideline on when to use secondary versus tertiary sources?

Is there any established rule for situations where using a tertiary source is inadvisable or if it's possible for too many of an article's sources to be tertiary? I'm asking here because I can't find any official guidance elsewhere, and advice I've seen appears to be contradictory. Some editors seem to consider tertiary sources equal to secondary sources, while others seem to consider them a last resort. This is an issue I've seen come up both writing content myself and reviewing the content of others. WP:PST talks about the difference between secondary and tertiary sources, but not when you should use one or the other. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:00, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Thebiguglyalien the question of weight applies for both of them. A controversial/bold claim in a secondary source with no attributable author beyond the reputation/name of the publication will hold less weight than a subject expert in a peer reviewed journal. For something like quoting the birth year of a dead person, a Brittanica Encyclopedia or generic Associated Press news blurb would suffice, but for a contentious claim on say Holocausts and Polish nationalism, it wouldn’t muster.

Certain tertiary sources like Wikipedia cannot be used because they’re self referential and also not “reliable” in that they regularly change. But that wasn’t directly what you were asking. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 07:02, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello, Thebiguglyalien. Are tertiary sources equal to secondary sources or should they be considered a last resort? You have staked out two extreme polar positions when the truth is somewhere in the middle. Secondary sources are always preferred, but tertiary sources are permitted when used cautiously and carefully. Consider a Wikipedia biography of a famous musician with a 50 year old career. A newspaper article briefly discussing one of their earliest public performances is a primary source of little value as a reference in a biography of that musician. A book length biography of that musician published decades into their career and written by a respected music critic and published by a respectable house would be a secondary source of the highest quality. A three or four paragraph description of that musician in an encyclopedia of contemporary music would be a tertiary source. It might have limited value in the Wikipedia biography, but well-reviewed book length biographies issued by respected publishing houses or university presses are far superior. It is not an "all or nothing" proposition. Sometimes tertiary sources (and primary sources) are OK until higher quality secondary sources can be found and analyzed. It takes more time and money, after all, to read and understand a book than a newspaper clipping. As editors, we should always be striving to improve the quality of article references, and how accurately we summarize them. Cullen328 (talk) 07:34, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

And in some cases high-quality tertiary sources are as valuable or more valuable than even secondary sources. If you want to summarise the academic consensus on some contentious issue, for instance, an academically minded specialist tertiary source (e.g. the Oxford Classical Dictionary or Brill's New Pauly in the field of classics) may well be more useful than the latest scholarly literature which can be more concerned with staking out a particular position than summarising the state of the field. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 15:42, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Question for a page I've been editing since last year.

The page I've been working on Draft:Veiled Experts

So, when I started editing this page last year, I had no idea on what to do since it was my first edit, and had to take time off to learn more about editing Wikipedia pages. (Plus there were no notable sources of information that I could find for the subject I was writing a page about).

However, with the recent updates in sources for the subject, I've started my work on the page once again and I would like to ask for some advice from other more experienced editors on Wikipedia.

If anyone could provide some additional feedback on how to make it a better page, please help a fellow newbie editor out! Hyccc20 (talk) 08:46, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

The main thing that this draft lacks is citations that establish notability. These should be in reliable secondary sources.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 08:51, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Nicknames

Good morning, I had already asked this question, but I had formulated it wrongly: should nicknames be written in italics or in quotation marks (or both)? For example, here:

"... The attacking trio of Sívori, Maschio, and Angelillo were nicknamed the "caras sucias" ...",

or "... The attacking trio of Sívori, Maschio, and Angelillo were nicknamed the caras sucias ...",

or "... The attacking trio of Sívori, Maschio, and Angelillo were nicknamed the "caras sucias"..."? JackkBrown (talk) 11:21, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Is that called a nickname? I understand nickname as an alternative name for something which already has a more official name but these people together (three of a large football team) don't have an existing name as a group. I would just treat it per Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Foreign terms with {{lang}} and a translation: The attacking trio of Sívori, Maschio, and Angelillo were called the caras sucias, meaning the dirty faces. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:45, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: thank you very much, I fixed it! JackkBrown (talk) 13:03, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Content hidden on page

Hello! I'm working on translating an article from German to English in a sandbox draft, and for some reason, all of a sudden, part of the text of the page has simply disappeared from the page altogether. It's all still there when I open an edit box to check, but when I close it again, a whole section just disappears, and two sentences are next to one another that should have a whole section between them. Has this happened to anyone else? Evansknight (talk) 14:26, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Evansknight: If you could point us to the page where this is happening we might be able to help. DuncanHill (talk) 14:35, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Evansknight - you had a incorrectly closed reftag - could you check and see if this has fixed it? Nosebagbear (talk) 14:38, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

(If not, can you give us the paragraph and exactly what text isn't appearing), too? Nosebagbear (talk) Nosebagbear (talk) 14:38, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Evansknight: I had a look at your contributions, I assume User:Evansknight/sandbox/Gunther Franz is the page. You had a malformed ref tag - you had <ref/> instead of </ref>. I fixed it with this edit. DuncanHill (talk) 14:39, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

thank you! I went to go grab the link to put here and saw that it had been fixed. Wow, I feel stupid. Thanks again! Evansknight (talk) 14:40, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

It's one of those little slips that is very easy to make and very hard to spot! DuncanHill (talk) 14:42, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Evansknight: I think this sort fo thing happens to most editors. A good general approach when this happens is to do a diff between the old working version and the new broken version. When working in a sandbox, save frequently so each diff is relatively small. You are of course welcome to come here for help, but sometimes all of us are asleep and the answer will be delayed, so self-help is quicker. -Arch dude (talk) 18:32, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Evansknight If you use the source editor you can toggle the syntax highlighter (the pen icon just to the left of the word "advanced" at the top of the edit window), which has the effect of colouring in the text and references in such a way that these sorts of errors become very obvious. Mike Turnbull (talk) 23:06, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

View counts per individual edit?

Hi, I've recently started editing as a volunteer, on behalf of a large academic body. We were wondering if there's something buried in page tools which allows users to see how many people have viewed an individual edit/addition to a page. This is of interest in terms of trying to gauge how useful our project is, going forward. I did look at general Pageview stats, but could not find the info I was looking for. Also had a look at the WikiProject edit counters page, and there were a couple of links which allowed greater analysis, but not in the specific area of interest here. Any input or suggestions would be very much appreciated! UtopiaCaled0nia (talk) 16:01, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@UtopiaCaled0nia, I can't think of any, but you can try asking at WP:TECHPUMP. If I see an edit on my watchlist I want to check, I may use the "diff" link there (or in the user history), or the "prev" link in the article history. It seems what you want would require collecting "views" from links like these. Also, sometimes an editor tell other editors "Hey, look at this diff [1], it's very odd!" And of course, such view-collecting will exclude those who see the addition by just looking at the article. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:35, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

@UtopiaCaled0nia I don't think that such a tool could be reliable, since there is no way to tell which parts of an article a reader has looked at, only that they retrieved it from the server. It is well known that many readers never get past the lead paragraphs, so edits lower down in an article are inherently less likely to have been read. In terms of impact, a much larger leap in pageviews always occurs if the article becomes a did-you-know on the Mainpage, so your project could aim to raise articles to a standard to generate candidates. Also, you could work to improve articles which are currently getting large number of pageviews but are currently assessed of low grade. That would involve looking at the Talk Page of articles which interested you to see which Projects are interested in them and looking at the statistics, for example for Projects such as WP:BIOG. Mike Turnbull (talk) 12:24, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

@UtopiaCaled0nia: It would be technically feasible for the Wikimedia tech folks to log page views for specific diff pages (such as this diff). I do not know whether they currently do it; even if they do, they probably keep them for legal or cybersecurity purposes, and I do not know if they would be inclined to share the info with external researchers. I am fairly sure no public-facing tool exists at the moment.

Of course, that is only valid for the diff page itself. For any given page, it is likely that the number of people who have looked at a given part of the page is much greater than the number of people who have looked at the edit that added that part. As Mike explained, the former number is impossible to know for technical reasons. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 12:05, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Derrivative Work

Is this file sufficient different from this file as to not be considered a derivative work and be okay for use in article epistrophe? User1042💬✒️ 16:01, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

That is . . . not a simple question. The one currently there was uploaded to commons in 2011, but is currently tagged for speedy deletion there as a copyvio (It seems you are the one who tagged it). The source of the image is unclear, but it does look like someone scanned an actual card they bought, which would indeed be a copyvio. The other one seems to be newer and uses images that are freely licensed, however the text and central concept of both are the same. This could come down to a question of intent; was the newer one made referencing the older one? ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 18:39, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@User1042: Copyright lies in the "creative elements" of a work, including "selection and arrangement" in addition to actual words and pictures. In my opinion the words are too close a paraphrase of the original and therefore infringe the copyright. Also in my opinion the "selection and arrangement" (i.e., the layout) also infringes. (I do like your new card, but I don't think we should use it.) But you are assuming the 2011 version is not in fact properly licensed. If it is then it's OK to create a derivative work as long as you attribute the original. -Arch dude (talk) 18:58, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@ONUnicorn:, @Arch dude: okay, thanks for the help. I have tagged it as a copyright violation. User1042💬✒️ 12:01, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Language

I can’t set Greek language Ells123go (talk) 17:53, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello, Ells123go. If you mean, How can you get to the Greek Wikipedia (with articles in the Greek language), you can find it at el:. If you mean, How can you use the English Wikipedia but with your user interface in Greek, you can set that in your user preferences (Special:Preferences). If you mean something else, you'll have to explain further. ColinFine (talk) 21:45, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Julian Assange update?

Would someone please update the first section about "Julian Assange" to bring the reader up to date on what has happened to his appeal since July 2022 and what his status is today? The article is lengthy with many twists and turns, and I cannot find anything that brings me up to date. Thank you!! 2600:1700:95B0:B620:807D:5264:1468:431E (talk) 18:10, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

You need to post this request at Talk:Julian Assange, rather than here. The lede does look a little out of date, certainly. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:14, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Creative Commons license

Hi! Can I upload some screenshots of these videos on Wiki Commons? [2] [3] [4] MJXVI (talk) 18:36, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

It looks to me as if the first one, anyway, has a suitable licence (see commons:commons:YouTube files). I haven't looked at the others. ColinFine (talk) 21:50, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Question

Good evening. In the following sentences, according to the rules of the style manual, should italics be added instead of quotation marks? "... with some parts of the media dubbing him "the Maradona of the Sixties"."; and "... In his final years he was often referred to as "l'Ingegnere" (the Engineer) or "il Grande Vecchio" (the Great Old Man)." JackkBrown (talk) 22:23, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

IMHO, quotation marks should be used, not italics. And it should be '"il Grande Vecchio" (the Grand Old Man)'. Maproom (talk) 10:25, 11 March 2023 (UTC)