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Village pump archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump. Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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How to move a page?

I want to move the Dark tranquillity page to Dark Tranquillity but there is a redirecting page there and it won't let me. How can I do this?

You cannot: a sysadmin has to delete the second page :-( Anárion 12:24, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Fixed. Was fairly awkward as the two pages had overlapping histories, so the usual (admin only) trick of delete target, move source to target and undelete old target would've screwed up the page history diffs. Instead I moved DT to Talk:Dark Tranquillity/Old duplicate version and then deleted DT, moved Dt to DT and wrote a note on the talk page explaining where the remaining history could be found, covering all our GFDL obligations, I hope. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:03, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

There's an equally elaborate workaround procedure to merge page histories which might have been used here, and could perhaps now be used to tidy the results. But it's to be used with extreme caution as it's irreversible, unlike most sysop actions, see the page for details. I'm not game, it's for experienced hands only IMO and I'm not completely sure it will work in this instance. Andrewa 17:19, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

That is not the right solution in this case, as you rightly suspected. That is the "usual (admin only) trick" I refered to. It wouldn't work in this case because both page histories overlapping dates, so although I could merge that way, I would be left two mixed page histories for which diffs are nearly useless. Thus I went to the fallback option described above. This is the boring stuff that adminship was intended for :-). Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 18:38, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

AHA! OK, understood. I didn't recognise the similarity between the procedures described before, I do now. Yes, that would make a very nasty mess! Andrewa 02:17, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Sort of related: How do you move an Image? I want to move this image to a new, more specific name, such as [[Image:DefenderOfTheCrown_AmigaBoxCover.jpg]], but the utility won't let me. Is there a special process for moving images? —Frecklefoot 17:40, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

You can't. You have to reupload it with the new name, and get someone to delete the old one. Dori | Talk 17:46, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

is it ok to have quiz pages ?

I believe that quiz pages would enhance the browsing experience of readers. By quiz pages, I mean a page with 10 or 20 questions related to an article. For example, a quiz in astronomy would include questions like these:

• Who walked first on the moon ? response
• Who found the first evidence that the universe is expanding ?response
• How old is the universe ? response

The difficulty of the quiz would depend on the corresponding article. Also, a list of quiz would allow quick access to all the quiz. There would not be any counting of good responses, and results would not be stored (i.e. this is not a competition).

I have not yet seen such pages on wikipedia. My concern is that this is not a typical content for a encyclopedia, so I would like to have feedback on whether this is accepted, and whether some guidelines should be followed (e.g. is the word 'quiz' ok ?). If OK, I would be happy to start ! Pcarbonn 05:15, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I wouldn't like the idea, as it doesn't seem "encyclopedic" to me, but that's just me. RickK 05:17, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Quiz pages as a means for instruction -- take it to Wikibooks. As a sort of rhetorical thing to introduce a subject, I still don't think it's that appropriate. There's a certain tone one tries to achieve in an encyclopedia article - such questions don't help it fit that tone. Dysprosia 05:26, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I agree that this would be more useful for Wikibooks. For Wikipedia, what we should strive for is making these same key facts easily accessible in the articles -- by using infoboxes, summarizing long sections and linking to important related articles.--Eloquence* 06:02, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

Yep, I agree that it's not something one should find in an encyclopedia. But a "general knowledge quiz" wikibook, graded by subject and difficulty, would be a great idea. Only last month someone asked me to set a pub quiz, and of course I set one that was too hard, and had no pop-music or sport questions (and so didn't go down very well). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:22, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

World Book, at least in their CD-ROM version, has like questions, but more than pure trivia, more higher-level in their scope. They place them at the bottom of the article. They're usually grade 3-5 average skill level. I agree that this would be best kept to Wikibooks; I'll create a Wikibook now, it will be a general book to be used as a teaching supplement for any Wikipedia article. -- user:zanimum

I'd like to announce the creation of the Wikibooks entitled, Teacher's Guide of Questions and Lesson Plans, to Wikipedia Encyclopedia. To contain all of the subpages with questions like that. Visit [[1]] for the new resource. -- user:zanimum

Just because one particular encyclopedia has accepted a particular type of material doesn't mean we should. As I've said before (but now buried deep in the archives or lost completely), one of my pleasures when under 10 years old was reading the Waverley Press Book of Knowledge, which was regarded as an encyclopedia and was written for adults (as well as for children). It contained several beautifully illustrated children's stories, original works I think written for the encyclopedia. I don't know exactly why they were there! They were imbedded in the text between more conventional encyclopedia articles, and I didn't even notice any particular correlation to the material adjacent to them. AFAIK other encyclopedias didn't adopt this practice, and we don't need to either (and I don't think there's any chance we will). Agree the Wikibook is a good idea. Andrewa 17:35, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback. I believe it is a great idea to provide ways to access Wikipedia from Wikibooks for the class room, and all your suggestions are good ways to do that. I'm also sympathetic to your concerns that articles should have an 'encyclopedic tone', and that quiz are not in line with that tone. I'm still convinced that there is also a need for the general public to access the encyclopedia in a more 'fun' way, i.e. via quiz, and wikibooks would not be a solution to that because wikibooks is for the classroom. Could I suggest the following as a possible solution agreeable to all ?

There would be 2 ways to browse wikipedia: article to article to article; or quiz to article to article. That is, the list of quiz would be accessible only from the left-hand menu of the (main) page. The policy would be that no quiz can be included in article (so no browsing from article to quiz to article). This way, the general public could choose the tone at the start of their browsing session, and the ones that want an encyclopedic tone are not embarrassed with quiz. Those that like quiz would choose it in the left menu. What do you think ?Pcarbonn 05:12, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

While your quizzes would likely be useful to someone, the important thing to keep in mind is that there are many useful page additions that could be made, and that the singular goal of Wikipedia is to provide a simple interface to a straight encyclopedia with no frills. This is already a very difficult goal, and what you propose would require not only software changes by our already overburdened developers but also a task force of contributors devoted to quizzes.

Also, such quiz questions are unlikely to apply to all topics; like general Wikipedia content, many quiz questions would be missing or of poor quality, or unevenly distributed in different areas.

In conclusion, I think this is a can of worms we don't want to open; create it, even correlate it with articles if you like, but keep it off the Wikipedia proper. I think anything else would contradict Jimbo's focused vision, which gives Wikipedia its edge over projects like E2.

Derrick Coetzee 07:02, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I understand your goal and constraints, and I agree with your view. Thanks for clarifying them.

I can also see a potential problem: there is no reference truth on the question "which item should be in a quiz ?", so that the dynamics of creating a quiz is quite different from the dynamics of creating an article. The quality of content could suffer from that, as you suggest. So let's drop the idea. Pcarbonn 11:01, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Number of Registered Users

There are now 62816 user accounts. The User List doesn't make it easy to find this out though. Maybe it's time for a revamp. -- Derek Ross 04:12, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

You shouldn't use the user list for that, instead try: Special:Statistics and [2]. Dori | Talk 04:15, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. In fact I would go further and state that the User List shouldn't be used for anything nowadays. The current alphabetical, searchless, minimal information layout is practically useless for the number of accounts which it has to deal with. -- Derek Ross

There are still a couple of uses for it. First two that come to my mind would be checking if a username already exists, and if a username has any special priviledges (i.e. sysop). Dori | Talk 04:51, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

Those are the obvious uses but have you actually tried to check whether there is a user Isis, what privileges that user has and whether the user is still active ? It's possible but it involves a lot of trial and error. Give it a go to see how much. -- Derek Ross 05:03, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I have actually tried it, and it is a real pain (not to mention much load on the servers for no good reason). Dori | Talk 05:06, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

Upgrading Special:Listusers has been on sourceforge feature requests since 2002. Feel free to fulfill it. -- Tim Starling 04:45, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I'll take a look. -- Derek Ross 04:48, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Random wierdness or user error?

Am I doing something wrong, or is there something funky going on? The Talk:John Kerry page was quite large so I archived old materials at Talk:John Kerry/Feb 2004 archive, Talk:John Kerry/Mar 2004 archive, and Talk:John Kerry/Family background and added links to them on the main Talk page. But the Family background page always appears in red and clicking on it opens the saved article in an edit window. I've tried refereshing several times and even resaved both articles to no effect. What's going on here? older ≠ wiser 20:13, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Should be fixed now, Bkonrad -- go back and try again. :-) I tried a couple of things which sometimes work, and one did -- editing Talk: John Kerry and saving. Usually if you make any change (even adding a period) to a page and save it, it will fix the persistent red link problem. Let me know if it doesn't work -- the problem has been solved for me, at least. Jwrosenzweig 20:29, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, it is fine now. older ≠ wiser 00:44, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Site performance

Anyone know why WP is suddenly so much slower/balkier? Yesterday I saw a bunch of 'all servers down' messages, and both then and now my browser is timing out trying to contact WP MUCH more than usual, and even when pages finally come up, even tho' they look complete, the status bar shows 'waiting for...' or 'transferring data from...' much longer than normal. Seems like some change in the past 36-48 hours severely hampered WP's performance. Niteowlneils 19:32, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

We're down to one squid since Browne went down. Dori | Talk 19:52, Apr 27, 2004 (UTC)

Bummer. Thanks for the quick answer. Niteowlneils 00:02, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Request for comments and arbitration

Just wanted to know where I should post a request for comment and arbitration on a specific article. Is it in the Cleanup page? More specifically, is anybody willing to give a third party opinion (or whatever party really...) on the NPOV of the last edits in Brussels article (cf. Brussels' talk page in section neutrality for more on the issue). cheers. -- Edcolins 19:16, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

You might try Wikipedia:Peer review. RickK 00:21, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Image fair use?

Would a smaller version of this picture on the article On Your Mark be fair use? --> Wikipedia talk:Fair use

The wiki will be locked starting in a few minutes?!?

Why, and for how long? Niteowlneils 17:41, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

NASA text, PD?

Although original content is nice, is text from NASA pages, like at http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/factsheet-text.html, considered fair use or public domain, for use on Wikipedia? -- useR:zanimum

Far as I know, all .gov content (unless it says otherwise) is public domain. RADICALBENDER★ 15:21, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)</nowiki>

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html

NASA images generally are not copyrighted. You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages. This general permission does not include the NASA insignia logo (the blue "meatball" insignia), the NASA logotype (the red "worm" logo) and the NASA seal...

NASA emblems should be reproduced only from original reproduction proofs, transparencies, or computer files available from NASA Headquarters. Please be advised that approval must be granted by the Public Services Division (see above information for address, numbers, etc.) before any reproduction materials can be obtained.

Any questions regarding application of any NASA image or emblem should be directed to: Bert Ulrich Public Services Division NASA Headquarters Code POS Washington, DC 20546

Tel: (202)358-1713 Fax: (202)358-4331 Internet: bert.ulrich@hq.nasa.gov

Hope that helps. →Raul654 23:34, Apr 28, 2004 (UTC)

Hear now the GodKing

Tangentially related to the facebook discussion above, it looks like you can now hear the voice of Jimbo Wales. This Newsweek interview has the link, unfortunately I can't check for sure it works where am I right now. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 13:43, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I listened to it yesterday. His interview is the second half of the clip. :) fabiform | talk 15:53, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

For those who do not like proprietary audio, or who have problems playing it, or who want a local copy of this interview, I have created an Ogg Vorbis rip which only includes the Jimbo segment: download this (4 mins, 2 megs). This is on my own server, and I consider it fair use.--Eloquence* 00:31, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Awesome, I was about to post a request here for someone to do that very thing. Andrewa 01:57, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It's very interesting to hear how he pronounces a name wikipedia. I mean that's certainly not the way I do. -- Taku 04:56, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

I guess talking phonetics is hard (unless we're International Phonetics Alphabet experts, which I'm certainly not) in text.. but I'll give it a go... they pronounce it wi-KA-pedia initially and then it drifts towards wi-key-pedia later on. I pronounce it the latter way. How does someone from Japan pronounce it? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:43, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

One thing sure about Japanese pronounciation is you don't make any accent whatsoever. In my understanding, accent is almost always used for gramatical purposes. So, if you say, wi-KA-pedia, you

may make you look trying to fool youself or something. In fact, I think mainly due to accents, many English-speakers think Japanese are not speaking English words when they think they are. Oh, complete off-topic but have you seen Kill Bill? Their Japanese is so bad that I needed to rely on English subtitles to decipher what they are talking. -- Taku 15:53, Apr 30, 2004 (UTC)

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(Answering my own question)

I was already familiar with this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dealing_with_vandalism

I have found two additional pages which are helpful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Dealing_with_vandalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism_in_progress

thanks, richard myers

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OK. Report it here? Or...?

GTA <-> Grand Theft Auto

Can an admin move GTA to Grand Theft Auto so that the former can be turned into a disambig page for Grand Theft Auto and Greater Toronto Area? I don't think it makes sense to have a spelled out title redirect to an acronym. -- Kimiko 19:40, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

it should be a move to Grand Theft Auto (game) or something. Grand Theft Auto is also a movie (I think a Roger Corman one) on which the original name is (nominally) based, and the name of the crime. So I'd argue both GTA and Grand Theft Auto should be disambigs. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:56, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Urgh. Not Roger Corman, but Ron Howard - IMDB. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:58, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Agree. I was planning on making Grand Theft Auto a disambig page too. It already has two only vaguely related parts (game and felony). -- Kimiko 19:59, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I'll make the moves, and I'll message here once I'm done. Consider both "in use"-- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:03, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Done. I think it's okay, but revisions (and redirect-skipping) welcome. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:25, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Oh, you did all the work already. I only asked for the switching of the two articles really.

Thanks. It looks good to me. I'll check for redirects. -- Kimiko 20:39, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Done. -- Kimiko 21:25, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Medals for Suez Canal Zone Veterans

It has been reported that there is significant delay in issuing these medals although I received mine without too much delay.

Why wait for applications? The M o D must have records of all those who served out there during the appropriate period. Army Navy RAF Records will also have such lists. Why not issue them based on these lists.? Many Veterans will have answered Roll Call elsewhere and their Descendants may not even be aware.

Maurice Scott ex 1 R Lincolns Mauricescott@Hotmail.com

are rubber/plastic bullets still in use in northern ireland?

This sentence was stranded in another section, so I turned it into a header. I think it's been moved to the Ref. Desk anyway, but I'm not sure. - IMSoP 17:04, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes it is there, and I have asked what the circumstances for this question were. Dieter Simon 23:53, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

centre steer

What's with the "mystery" here? -- user:zanimum

Add insult to injury

Not sure if this is the best place to address this, but this article still exists with a VfD tag from March--the Talk page seems to have a pretty clear consensus to delete. Niteowlneils 02:00, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

It's listed in the Ongoing discussions section, although this seems to have been a unilateral action by Pete/Pcb21 despite what looks like a clear consensus to delete. I've turned it into a stub for the album, but left the VfD tag. - Lee (talk) 10:57, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

As I said on vfd, the consensus was to delete the article about the phrase, but if the phrase is deleted, then we either have an article about the album, or redirect to the creators of the album. Either way, it is not a deletion issue but a content issue, I'll remove the vfd tags. I wasn't being unilateral, I was responding to the outcome of the discussion. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 20:17, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

User:Enforcer

...keeps making claims about Wikimedia needing to register with the state of Florida, or something. Any lawyers or anyone tell me what our status is? Meelar 05:32, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Where are these claims? Andrewa 05:52, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

See User:Enforcer, as well as User talk:172. Meelar 05:54, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Thank you! Andrewa 20:36, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Jimbo has written a comprehensive answer to this on the en.wikipedia mailing list (essentially: the claims are false, and he endeavours to go "above and beyond what is required of us"). The post also covers various clarifications of the status and roles of himself, Bomis, and the Wikimedia Foundation; and his vision of the future, including a well-run and transparent Foundation. Recommended reading for anyone interested in the wider picture of how Wikipedia and its sister sites are run. - IMSoP 17:04, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

"Wikispam"

I just thought the word wikispam might be a good catch-phrase to describe those dubious and sinister articles that are thinly-veiled commercial solicitations. See Eyeplaygames.com, an article that should be deleted precisely because it is "wikispam". Anyway, I'd be interested to know what wikians think of wikispam, how to make it std. jargon if enough like it (ie add it to some admin page somewhere), or if there's already a word for these types of articles. Alcarillo 06:47, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I like that word, I just added one article at WP:VfD of that kind and used the term for it. There are two kinds of wikispamming I came across so far - one is to create an advertisement article, the other is trying to sneak in external links to the spammer's website. The second one may also just be trying to get a better google ranking by having more incoming links. andy 07:52, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Glad you liked it! Hopefully it will gain further acceptance and be inshrined in wikipedia jargon with its own description. (BTW, this is an example of what's best about wikipedia, and it reminds me why I still come here.) Alcarillo 08:11, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Anyway, I took the lead and created a page describing Wikispam (since merged into wikipedia:spam). Alcarillo 08:28, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Note that the word WikiSpam has been used fairly widely for a few years now, I don't think Alcarillo can claim credit for coining it. -- Tim Starling 01:50, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

Andy Kaufman: Dead or Alive?

I have to leave for the weekend, therefore since I can't follow this up, please feel free to act as you feel appropriate:

Andy Kaufman died on May 16, 1984. He said that if he were to fake his own death, he'd re-emerge 20 years later (more info in the link). Maybe this can be featured as a brief event notice somewhere on the 'pedia. Some might want to know about it in advance, even if only to remember the character. I didn't know where to put this information, and whether it's appropriate, so here it is, in case anyone cares. --Gutza 13:14, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

One can only hope. Anyway, I mentioned it in the article. Alcarillo 15:37, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Admin removal

How do I nominate someone to have their admin status suspended or revoked?TDC 18:57, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

I suggest you work through the dispute resolution process first. You could start by discussing it with the admin concerned and if that doesn't help, seek other comments on requests for comment. If after this, you still feel their actions need to be reviewed, you can ask for that at Wikipedia:Requests for review of admin actions. There is no such thing as "nominating someone to have their admin status suspended" though. All you can do is ask that others review the situation. Angela. 19:07, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

This is not so much about one incident, but a repeated history by a specific admin abusing admin privileges. Perhaps the Admin Nomination page might work? TDC 19:13, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

No, that wouldn't be a suitable place for it. The links at the end of that page will just direct you to Wikipedia:Requests for review of admin actions. De-adminship is a very rare occurrence, so it would be best if you tried to work out your dispute with the admin concerned in an alternative way. Angela. 19:27, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Add insult to injury

-> Talk:Add insult to injury

User:Enforcer

-> User talk:Enforcer

Andy Kaufman: Dead or Alive?

-> Talk:Andy Kaufman

"Wikispam"

-> Wikipedia talk:Spam

Admin removal

-> User talk:TDC

Hear now the GodKing

-> Wikipedia talk:Press coverage

NASA text, PD?

-> User talk:Zanimum

Lindi and Malindi

Dear Ms/Sir

Is Lindi the new name of the ancient city of Malindi in Tazania?

Some one had said that Malindi is the name of three ancient cities located in Kenya, Tazania and South Africa. Is this true?

Malindi has been mentioned in Zhenghe's navigation chart as the last port of call in East africa.

kk Tan

Cut-and-paste move

Can a more knowledgeable/experienced admin fix the cut and paste move of Loch Ness monster to Loch Ness Monster, if possible? There's a page on how to fix cut and paste moves, but I'd rather not fool around with it. Thanks, Minesweeper 11:13, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

As the history of one starts more or less where the other one ends, one can delete one article, move the other there, and then restore the deleted one. It's a bit too messy when they have an overlapping history .. anyways it's merged now. -- User:Docu

Who were the romans and what were their effects on modern life? P.S. this won't be a huge rabling on commentary article, unlike the title! Please participate in this discussion!

So we all know who the ROmans were, but what is their relevancy to modern day technology and life? They certainly were interesting folk, letting the most part of their P.O.W.s actually become citizens of their empire, which lasted over 2000 years!!!! The aqueducs are another sign of their ingenuity and originality. So, what do YOU know about the Romans, who influenced our life today? Where would we be without them? Comments, please!

Shearwaters - wales - Lleyn Peninsula

Prestidigitation - thursday - Florida

Death by drowning - distrito federal - Jutland

And your question is...?

status of Saturday Night Live

Is proper Wikipedia procedure being followed in the Copyvio investigation going on for Saturday Night Live ? - Bevo 03:02, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

The main point is that the discussion should be at Wikipedia:Copyright problems#May 5. As it is an article with a long editing history - at what point the copyvio was introduced? We only delete articles completely if they were a copyvio from beginning, if someone adds a copyvio later we normally just revert to the last good version before. Whether a copyvio in the editing history is still a copyvio is a grey area. Our developers are working on a possibility to delete single versions in the editing history, yet IMHO we don't need to delete all those copyvios in the histories as soon as its possible. So for this article the standard way would be to revert to the last copyright free version, or if it's just a section of the article which is a copyvio just delete that section. andy 09:13, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Who was Karl Josef Weinmair(1906-1944)?

Who was Karl Josef Weinmair? I'm looking for detailed, in depth biographical information.

Marina

Where does marina Oswald Porter live now? Does she have a email?

Anyone a wiz with Wikimarkup tables?

Could you do a family tree based on

with the addition of children, see http://www.aboutdarwin.com/darwin/Children.html ; some were quite important in their own right.). That way we can also replace the image with links! It can be put into:

which is at MediaWiki:Darwin

and also add a photo to the blue box would be nice.

I don't think either wikimarkup or the underlying html table markup is powerfull enough to adequately capture the layout of the family tree graphic (well, it is, but in a horrible unportable scary way). We did have some work underway for family-tree markup, but I think that a) it isn't implemented yet, and b) it would only produce a graphic (now, at least) anyway. One day in the future (several years, I fear) we can replace stuff like this with a SVG graphic, which would allow nice things like stylesheets, searching, and hotlinks within the image. In the meantime, some poor person has to haul out a regular image editor (of one kind or another) and author another PNG. You could ask User:Cutler to produce another version of the graphic (and while you're at it, ask Cutler to upload a zip of the original image-editor file from which they made the PNG, so that others can change the graphic more easily). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:47, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

I like those box things with the links. Where would a newbie go to learn about those? Just knowing what the term for them is would be a start ;o) --bodnotbod 02:05, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

They're added by using a custom msg tag (edit the darwin page to see an example of use). More info, and list, at Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 02:11, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. I've got a subject area I'm keen on and there seems to be no overarching project or combined effort at work on it yet. But I'm waiting to make sure Wiki is something I continue with or whether it's something I have to give up as yet another destructive addiction to add to my list... --bodnotbod 01:18, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

Would it be possible then to do an image map? Duncharris 10:25, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

There's currently no support in wikimarkup for image maps. Image maps don't really work very well for a number of circumstances, particularly accessibility-browsers and the arrow-key based browsers one finds on cellphones and PDAs. In the absence of a decent stylesheet-aware graphics format (like the aforementioned SVG) I think we should stick with functional-if-dull tables, like the one above. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:09, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Great that you are aware of browser and impaired user limitations, but that should not be used to discourage a useful item like browser image mapping, provided the table or similar is retained for non-graphic browsers and the like. I'd say go ahead and add the image map data, just *don't* depend upon your reader being able to use that function.Daeron 07:47, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

You could do it as an ordinary table,(with small images for the lines) but it would be a monster. I'll have a go if anyone wants me too. theresa knott 18:59, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

You could do it with broken lines rather than graphics, | for vertical lines and — for horizontal. An example of a dramatically simpler table (lattice) using these lines may be found at Pitch space under "Riemann's Tonnetz" the second table. Hyacinth 23:52, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

As a self-test I started an example on my userpage. Hyacinth 00:10, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Why did Wikipedia call it the "so-called great train wreck of Nashville"

Why would you call it the "so-called" great train wreck in Nashville, Tn on July 9,1918. 101 people died . Many were soldiers returning from WWI and over have of the victims were African Americans going to work in the Dupont plant.This was very gruesome and tragic event. The newspaper says that wagon loads of body parts were taken to the morge. One witness said that the young mother sitting next to him was decapitaited and her arm was shoved "into her baby." I don't know what Wikipedia ment by the "so-called" great train wreck, but it sounds like a terrible wreck to me. The 1998 article reads "worst train wreck in US history." I am obviously offended by your statement . You should change that before a survivor or relative of someone who was killed reads it.i understand that ignorance was probaly the reason for this offensive blunder. So you are forgiven, but you need to change the statement.

You may want to edit the reference in the Nashville, Tennessee article and write a short article about the event. -- User:Docu

It sounds like you are right and the article needs to be improved. Sometimes people go overboard when striving hard to write from a neutral point of view. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 22:26, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

"Sometimes people go overboard when striving hard to write from a neutral point of view."

I agree with this, but i'd like to get some feedback about a specific instance. A memorial built in 1918 commemorates a massacre of women and children. One year ago the two statues that make up the monument were smashed. I wrote that they had been desecrated, but are being repaired. Someone changed desecrated to "damaged".

This "neutral" language fails to convey that the damage was human-inflicted, and obviously intentional.

My question is, how "neutral" do we want to be? --User:Richard Myers (talk)

I agree that goes a bit overboard, but have to admit that "desecrated" is a very emotive word, and has (for me at least) almost religious connotations (as in "desecrating a grave"). To convey "human-inflicted, and obviously intentional" damage, I'd probably go for "vandalised"; more neutral in the sense that it conveys the facts (assuming it has the same connotations to other readers as it does for me, of course...) - unlike "damaged" - but doesn't go further than the facts - as "desecrated" arguably does. Just an opinion, of course. - IMSoP 18:35, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

The Assault of the Machine Translators

Does anyone know what is going on with all the articles being added related to Machine Translation? E.g., Online Dictionaries and Translators, History of translation technology, Basic features and terminology, Ancient wisdom for the modern world, The great library of Alexandria, Translators throught history, History of machine translation by W.John Hutchins, History of translation and on and on.

Most appear to be copy and pasted from somewhere, quite likely a copyvio, and others are simply unencyclopedic substubs. The following users have contributed, though there may be others as well. User:212.8.80.248, User:Iratxe gonzalez, User:Irune Berdún. Some blithely recreate articles that have been speedily deleted and others overwrite the copyvio notices. If this is a class of some sort, is there any way to contact the instructor? older≠wiser 19:10, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

at least one (the "throught" one) links to a copyrighted article on http://www.completetranslation.com/ -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:19, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

It looks like there has been some discussion of this already at MediaWiki:VfD-Translation articles. older≠wiser 19:31, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

New York, New York

Theres a discussion and poll going on at Talk:New York, New York that needs a wider view of the wikipedia community. the discussion is about moving New York, New York to New York City, New York (city) or some other name. Come give your opinion and take part in the poll (near bottom of page). Theon 13:31, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

May 8's the last day to vote, according to Talk:New York, New York. –Hajor 23:08, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

New York, New York

Naming poll closed. Fallout on Talk:New York, New York and/or Talk:City of New York

Shifting to a new house

Dear Panditji

I have been visiting your site since last month everyday, I find it an extremely useful source of Vaastu which helps a lot of people in learning the real science behind vaastu which other sites dont even mention about. Your site is THE BEST SITE i have come across.

Panditji I have a question to ask you. We live in Dubai and planning to shift from a rented house to a rented villa, currently the villa work is going on, its a new villa its a north-east entrance, it would take another 20 days to complete atleast. My question to you is would it be wise to shift to the new house on May 24. Is it a good month as well as a good day? Is the Shukra weak at this point in time.

If 24th May isnt good month would it be advisable to stay on the 19th of may in the house for a night and cook a little and some back to the old house and then shift once the work is complete. if not 19th of may which other day would you advise.

We are in Jewellery business which involve sale of gold and diamonds. As diamonds relate to Shukra we donnot want to shift to the new house if it isnt good. Please advise, we would really appreciate if you can give us your advise.

Awaiting for your reply

Thank you very much. Regards Heemanshu Waya

Compliment Committee

We have a Welcome Committee to greet new users, but once they get greeted, they're rarely subject to much positive at the hands of other users, and many of them are subjected to a slew of insults from trolls, vandals, etc. Perhaps we should have a parallel committee, modeled after the WC, to compliment users when we see good edits, substantial work on pages, etc. Something less than a barnstar, but still a nice thing to do for the users. I suspect that, after a lengthy edit, it would be more than a little welcome to see a post on your talk page to let you know you did a good job, and that this would foster Wikilove Snowspinner 20:50, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Deleting Redirect pages

What's the policy on this? Someone has created the page Ohosaka to redirect to Osaka. This just seems like a complete waste of space to me. Can I just delete it? The same applies to several pages using the romanization Õsaka -- Japanese romanization systems do not use that O with the tilde thing over it. Exploding Boy 23:27, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

It should listed at Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion.--Jiang 23:28, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

If the redirect is meaningful, there is no problem as Wikipedia is not paper. Dori | Talk 23:30, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

Slow down, Exploding Boy! I like to search Wikipedia by typing in last names or alternate spellings into the search box, and it always frustrates the hell of me when I have to try several times to guess what particular name or spelling is actually used by Wikipedia. (Just today, I ended up writing a stub when Einsatzgruppe turned up nothing, even on the Google search, only to have it pointed out to me that it is under the plural, Einsatzgruppen, where Wikipedia catalogues particular horror. Users less familiar with Wikipedia than I might just assume that Wikipedia is far less comprehensive than it really is, and go away disappointed when "obvious" searches fail. More redirects make a better wikipedia. orthogonal 05:42, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

White buttons.

Has anyone noticed the changes to forms?

--Saint-Paddy 21:52, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Um, do you mean on the edit screen and so forth? In which case, they look the same as ever to me; what do they look like to you? - IMSoP 22:48, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

You probably tinkered with your own computer's Appearance lately. Maybe a change from XP Traditional them to Modern. --Menchi 09:51, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Could also be an Opera or Mozilla skin, or an IE-addin. Anárion 11:02, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

They look fine now. Hmmm. Are my eyes playing tricks on me? Am I paranoid or something? Nah. It's just browser I bet. I don't where it came from though weird. It just seems that Go and Search had white backgrounds instead of grey and the search and summary forms had a glossy white look to them, or kinda like something like Mac-form field. Never mind. It's too hard to explain.

Medals for Suez Canal Zone Veterans

moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk#Medals for Suez Canal Zone Veterans by IMSoP 18:41, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Case Sensitivity

This seems to apply when going for some articles but not on others. I don't know what the rules are but, more to the point, shouldn't case sensitivity be totally disabled for this search function?Dainamo 21:56, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Titles are case sensitive, and the first letter is automatically capitalised. See Wikipedia:How to edit a page#Links, URLs, images and Wikipedia:Canonicalization. -- Tim Starling 05:49, May 3, 2004 (UTC)

Encouraging A Global Perspective

I'd appreciate some thoughts on this please. My interest and, cough, expertise lies with comedy. And, since I'm British, British comedy.

I've been working on a couple of broad articles, notably sitcom and television comedy.

The thing is they are grotesquely skewed to UK/US information. And I, for one - though I would never have thought about it without Wikipedia - am now curious about sitcoms and TV comedy from around the globe. What the hell's it like? I ask myself. And Wikipedia's articles, currently, cannot help me.

So. How can I attract the non-English speaking globe to our English Language comedy pages?

I've added the articles to Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, but I have this nagging sense that all the best potential contributors are over on their own language versions.

Is there a separate page for this kind of request? Something like 'Pages Needing Global Perspective', perhaps?

--bodnotbod 21:17, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

I know of no such page, but it might be a useful idea. I remember coming upon bureaucracy and discovering that it was entirely a British perspective. Anyway, there is a page for coordinating translations (Wikipedia:Translation into English) that you can use if you know there's material in another language's Wikipedia that could be moved over. Isomorphic 22:08, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Unfortunately my foreign language skills are, for these purposes, zero. I stopped studying languages at 14. And I started age 12. My teachers told me I'd regret it if I didn't continue with a language. Damn them.

But it strikes me that this must have been debated before.

One solution that occurs to me is simply to add an invitation to articles that are more likely to attract foreign contributors, ie articles about individual countries or things that are iconic about them. I may try that, but any other thoughts, or tips, gratefully received.

--bodnotbod 22:15, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

Using pages on the English Wikipedia isn't an ideal way to attract the attention of editors of other language Wikipedias. Ideally meta should be used for this, but currently it is slightly overlooked, so you may find setting up a page there doesn't help any more than one here would. However, one of the aims of meta is to facilitate cross-project work like this and the recent call for help with the m:Articles on fr with no interwiki link to en seemed to work well, so it might be worth creating a "Pages Needing Global Perspective" page there to see if does work. Angela. 11:55, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

Hmmmm. OK. that sounds a bit intimidating at the moment. I've peeked at metawiki(?) but noticed I appear to need a separate log on. Unsurprisingly after working ten hour shifts for 4 days I am beginning to get a headache as it is ;o) I'll think about it again when I've got my wikiholism under control and have stepped outside, seen some daylight... --bodnotbod 20:35, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

The EPOV (English/Empire Point of View) is a huge can of worms. See Wikipedia:POV for the English community view of its own systemic bias. This is not as critical as it could be, which is normal, since no one who speaks English as a first language will really be fully aware of EPOV. Translators in particular would be much more aware of it. See also the history of Wikipedia:EPOV for good ideas about things to add.

Also, see major discussions on Meta-Wikipedia such as m:linguistic democracy in a multilingual project - and, see debates around economics, ethics, politics, philosophy, psychiatry as conducted in other languages. It is often remarkable how different they are. JRR Trollkien (see warning) 21:56, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the links, I read the POV ones and scanned the others (I hate statistics articles). Yes, that strikes me as a very significant problem. I'm going to try and make sure I put most of my stuff (I tend to add/edit comedy articles) under a British... subheader and hope that seeing a nationality as a subhead will inspire others to add their nation too. I think that would work well on most of the pages where this issue has caused me concern. Also, if the articles become lengthy it is then easier to give each nation it's own page. I will, from time to time, try and recruit people if I spot they're from somewhere useful. I've already sent out some invitations.

But on the larger, more thorny issues (political, historical, controversial)... all I can say is Yikes! And, you know, I never say Yikes!. It's beneath me. And unbecoming of a well educated Brit... --bodnotbod 22:17, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

<span> and language tagging

Wikipedia does not allow the HTML tag <span>. Why?

Very often we insert some non-English words in English texts. It is desirable to always mark them as belogning to a particular language.

The best way to do it is to write like this: <span lang="xx">some foreign text</span>.

But the <span> tag is not available. Of course, one may write instead like this: <font lang="xx">some foreign text</font>, but it is not so nice (because we do not want to change font, but only to change language).

So it is necessary eigther to allow the tag <span>, or to invent some Wikipedia-specific way of language tagging (which will translate into <span></span>). — Monedula 11:05, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

See the Wikipedia-l thread on the mailing list for last month's discussion on it. There were a couple of related posts on Wikitech-l as well [3][4]. Angela. 12:41, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps we should have some pseudo-tag for language marking? Something like

<lang xx>some foreign text</lang>, which will translate into <span lang="xx">some foreign text</span>?

I use <i lang="xx"> for this. Of course it's not so good if you don't want italics, but often when you insert text from one language into a running stream of another language italics are conventional anyway. Marnanel 22:19, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

New hardware

The thing is that this is not a discussion, but I have read above someone was setting up some new hardware and (as I feel it is faster I think it has been already set up) I wanted to say many thanks and a big cheers to whomever did it.

If the above is incorrect, please remove. Pfortuny 10:08, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, the servers were down yesterday and there was an OpenFacts screen that mentioned new servers were being put in. Is there a page where we can see details of what's changed? As a newbie I'm curious about the hardware set up and funding situation (healthy/unhealthy?). --bodnotbod 18:04, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

See meta:Wikimedia servers and meta:Wikimedia#Financial situation, repectively. - IMSoP 19:12, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Aha! Here's the dop on the new gear Wikipedia:Hardware status. --bodnotbod 20:53, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

are rubber/plastic bullets still in use in northern ireland?

Moved to (and answered at) Wikipedia:Reference desk#Plastic bullets in NI

Should we report vandalism that we fix?

I have reverted a case of minor vandalism. I mentioned revert in the editing explanation. Should i do anything further to report the vandal (an IP address), or does someone (or some process) examine reverts to track such incidents?

Richard Myers

Yes. It gives the rest of us a heads up to keep an eye on the vandal's other actions. RickK 04:40, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

OK. Report it here? Or...?

(Answering my own question)

I was already familiar with this page: Wikipedia:Dealing_with_vandalism

I have found two additional pages which are helpful: Wikipedia:Dealing_with_vandalism and Wikipedia:Vandalism_in_progress

thanks, richard myers

In response to the original question, I would urge caution - an isolated case of minor vandalism may not be true vandalism at all, merely a newbie test, and labelling the user a vandal is likely to be counter-productive (see also Wikipedia:Clueless newbies for an alternative label that may be more suitable). What's more, even if made in bad faith, the best reaction to such edits is simply to revert them. If, on further investigation, you find that the user has made many such "bad faith" edits, then it is worth adding a notice on Vandalism in progress; alerting the community to a user who has made one or two bad edits is a waste of both your time and those who follow it up. - IMSoP 19:25, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree. I was unable to find any other damage reported initiated from this IP address, so i have decided to let it pass, pending further information. --richard myers

Fundraising through Increased Book Linking

I'm very new to this so forgive me this is a yawn inducingly old idea.

I've noted the way books are to be cited, and the page which clicking an ISBN number takes you to.

I also note that this provides a source of funding as some click-thrus will give Wikipedia money for any sales made on referral.

For the uninitiated, you can see an example here.

What I was wondering is, would there be any value in having a Book Citation Drive to push up the number of book sales that Wikipedia earns commission on?

Of course, we would want to make sure additions are relevant - you can see the 3 I've added to the Dad's Army article at Further Reading

I figured if you had a splash on the front page and some other reminders strategically placed, it might cause an increase in citations and funds.

If you wanted to be gung-ho about it, Wikipedia could be a lot more aggressive in funneling click-thrus to those retailers Wikipedia can get money from - but I suspect that's against the spirit of Wikipedia. --bodnotbod 01:45, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

Well, shortly after the amazon partner link was added as an experiment Jimbo declared the experiment as being over as the income generated was quite small - and probably also because some wikipedians issued bad feelings about working together with amazon, as the patent policy of amazon is somewhat controversial. However that link wasn't removed even after the experiment was declared over, so maybe Jimbo should check again if it gained any significant income since.

But even if there were no affiliation programs used, adding books in a "resources" or "further reading" section makes perfect sense, as well as adding the ISBN for books which are listed already but lack that number. I myself do that regularily, but I limit myself to books I have read, so I can recommend that book to a topic. Searching through amazon to find a book related to the topic of an article just to add book title is not a good idea IMHO. andy 19:58, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

But Price Owl has a note saying it pays commission too. How about encouraging that? I agree books should be added on genuine merit (which means adding ones you've actually read, preferably). --bodnotbod 02:14, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Don't forget about pages that are actually legitimately about books, like Cerebus the Aardvark---there's only one edition of the phonebooks; I added links to all the ones I could find. It's not only good for Wikipedia, it's actually helpful to me to have those links there. Grendelkhan 15:02, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

How can I take this idea further? I think it's swamped here. I need the ear of someone who can take this up. It is FUNDING! we're talking about. Surely everybody should have an interest in that. --bodnotbod 23:46, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

If you have a newspaper from today..

.. head over to Talk:Abu Ghraib and let us know how coverage in your paper was of the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We'd like to add some empirical data to the article about a disparity (or not) between US and European media coverage.--Eloquence* 01:19, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

See talk:Abu Ghraib for a discussion of this project. Meelar 01:19, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Current events

April just disappeared a couple hours early of UTC, and the page seems way to empty! Where is the link to the previous month. It's been a few months since I have been at the wikipedia, but didn't we used to keep the last months news up there for at least a day before?! Also, the history is gone, did someone delete it and over write it? { MB | マイカル } 21:55, Apr 30, 2004 (UTC)

1. Don't panic!
2. The current events page is moved each month to become the historical page for that month - so the page recently known as Current events, history and all, is now at April 2004. The current Current events page is essentially a brand new one, which will eventually become May 2004.
3. Moving it ahead of 00:00 UTC was probably carelessness on the part of the user in question (Kaihsu by the looks) - although it is endlessly arguable which timezone should be followed, since some parts of the world will remain in April for several hours yet.
4. As for what to do around the time of transition, so that the page is not simply blank, there was some discussion (now archived) about this very issue a few weeks ago. There are various complications involved, and I don't think any real conclusion was reached.

Hope that clears things up! - IMSoP 22:51, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Awesome source for public-domain woodcuttings & line drawings

I just dug out an old book (The Clip Art Book, 1980; Amazon link. You have to scan in the illustrations, but there are over 5000 pictures of all kinds of things. There are line drawings of probably famous people (not labeled), tons of pages of old tools (many of which I cant' identify), lots of pictures of a wide variety of horse-drawn carriages & all other kinds of older transportation, people doing all knds of things, plants & food, anatomical sketches, architecture, sports, costume & clothing, weapons & hearldry & armour, animals... jeez I could be here for the rest of my life scanning them in. Get it and start scanning! See what I've uploaded for European dueling sword and Tonsure. Elf | Talk 18:06, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

There seem to be more than one book of public-domain images...it would be great if people could get them all online. See also, for example, the appropriately named Scan This Book by Mendenhall (2500 images). —Steven G. Johnson 19:59, Apr 30, 2004 (UTC)

It *would* be wonderful; two problems: This particular book is nearly 400 pages, and it'll be rare to find someone with that much time; also, the *page layout* is copyrighted, so in theory we cannot scan in an entire page but must do it an image at a time. ("The selection of illustrations and their layout is the copyright of the publishers, so that one page or more may not be photocopie or reproduced without first contacting the publishers." It's possible that someone could contact the publishers, explain wikipedia, & get permission. Elf | Talk 20:05, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Important distinction being made here. It seems that the images are not individually copyrighted, but the book is. Have a good think about this. It means we can't do what you suggest and scan the whole thing in. What we can do is to use scans of individual images, in appropriate articles. That's what it all means.

And this makes sense. While this particular book may now be out of print, the publishers and the artists they employ still need to eat, and producing whatever clip art books are currently in print is how they do this. To use their work to provide an online alternative is an attractive idea to us, but it's neither fair nor legal. Andrewa 20:59, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The wiki will be locked starting in a few minutes?!?

Why, and for how long? Niteowlneils 17:41, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I have no idea how long it will be for but they're setting up some new hardware (yay) today: Hardware status. fabiform | talk 17:48, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks for the link. It seems to imply any outage will be brief. That's good news. Niteowlneils 18:28, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hacker clans

I came across Hacker clans on RC patrol, but I don't know the material well enough to know if it is legit or vanity. I don't want to post it to VfD if it is legit. Anyone? SWAdair | Talk 08:50, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

the first part of the article looks legit, but I personally haven't heard of any of the "known clans" (though that' doesn't mean much) it is a little strange that the article fails to mention the "Legion Of Doom" or "cult of the dead cow" since these are the most famous. theresa knott 16:25, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

• It was added to VfD by another user on 07 MAY 04. SWAdair | Talk 06:36, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Welcome msg suggestion

This may sound weird, but I don't leave 'welcome' messages, and don't want to start now. But, doing some RC patrol I stumbled on a series of contribs from a new user, and I hope that someone from the Welcoming Committee will leave the user a welcome. It's User:Lynnea9. About a dozen new articles on valid topics within about 40 minutes indicates enthusiasm that should be encouraged. But the user could use the benefit of pointers to some of the Style, etc. pages, as the contribs tend to be unformated and barely stubs. I've been working on cleaning up the entries, but I would like her to get a welcome (from someone other than me). Niteowlneils 05:42, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes, it does sound weird. There's no reason you can't send a welcoming message, and it both helps the newbies feel like they belong and subtly tells the worrying ones that folks do notice what they do. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:44, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I got a welcome earlier and it made me smile. They're good. --bodnotbod 20:30, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

Special:blockip

I promise I'll learn how to report and look up bugs to the system after tonight, but this is one that requires fairly immediate attention and I don't know how to sort it. User:192.195.64.72 is on a personal crusade to blank various pages he doesn't like. I have tried blocking them following appropriate warning, went through the appropriate system, and they are carrying on using the same IP regardless. Is there a problem with the blockip tool? -- Graham  :) | Talk 01:25, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It's a known bug. Sometimes you need to do it twice before it works. I believe it's been fixed in 1.3. By the way, bugs can be reported at SourceForge or discussed on m:bugs. Angela. 04:00, Apr 30, 2004 (UTC)

What's the estimated roll-out date for 1.3? →Raul654 04:27, Apr 30, 2004 (UTC)

Sometime in May, probably; we're still finishing things up. However if there's a specific bug here I'd much rather fix it in 1.2 immediately! --Brion 10:33, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Latin name redirects

The first time I looked at the Deletion log, I noticed people deleting latin name articles that redirected to the organism's common English name article. Why would they do that? Does Wikipedia is not paper not apply to redirs? Also, wouldn't the latin names have more currency in non-Eng nations, so the redirs would be quite helpful? Also, some articles, like List of freshwater aquarium fish species specifically use the latin name redirs. Niteowlneils 19:20, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

In general, such redirects should not just be deleted without going through redirects for deletion, if at all. Perhaps you should ask the sysop who was deleting them if there was any reason for it, and if not list the pages on Wikipedia:votes for undeletion. Angela. 19:32, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Would you quote some samples, if you list them I can restore them (I can't see them in the log). I haven't seen any on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion lately. Maybe you want to create a special message to be added to these redirects, to better identify and trace them, e.g. MediaWiki:R_for_scientific_names (see msg in Wikipedia:Redirect#How_to_make_a_redirect ) -- User:Docu

I don't mind helping with the 'leg work' of restoring them, I mostly wanted to double-check whether there was some policy that said they were undesirable (I checked several naming convention pages, and project pages related to the animals in question, but found nothing pro or con RE redirs). I take it from your response that they are considered desirable. A couple are Hapalochlaena maculosa and Hapalochlaena lunulata. While researching this, I noticed one other category of redir deletions that I am curious about. Is there some policy that (assuming there is no other valid topic for the title) names of users can't be used as redirs to their user page? (EG Dgrant) Perhaps these questions should be addressed at Wikipedia:Redirect#What_do_we_use_redirects_for I'm not sure I understand what exactly you mean with your tracing page suggestion? Niteowlneils 20:21, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Both of those two were deleted by User:UtherSRG, and the comments suggest it's something to do with double redirects. I don't understand, but Uther generally is a level head, so if you ask him he might have a more enlightening explanation :) -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:25, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I undeleted Hapalochlaena maculosa. It's now a redirect to Blue-ringed Octopus, to add the new {{msg:R_from_scientific_name}} it would need to redirect to Greater Blue-ringed Octopus though. -- User:Docu

I've looked through the deletion log (which has around 10 days of stuff) and while I'm sure I could have missed a few, there certainly doesn't seem to be someone making a policy of doing it wholesale. Yes, the latin redirects should exist (even if they aren't currently referenced). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:19, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Since I just found this discussion (I don't frequent VP) and no one has asked, I'll comment anyway. Some of the time I spend on WP I troll RC for interesting things. At some point the two links in question came to my attention. I saw they needed some work, added a taxobox to the article, etc. When I ofund the article, it looked like this. The scientific name links were only used from the article itself to redir back to itself. Seeing this as needless, and removing the links from the article, I then deleted the redirs. Now that I've started Wikipedia:WikiProject Cephalopods, I actually prefer having the sci name links, so thanks for undeleting them! I like {{msg:R_from_scientific_name}} very much, and I'll keep it in mind. - UtherSRG 17:17, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Why did Wikipedia call it the "so-called great train wreck of Nashville"

-> Talk:Nashville, Tennessee]]

Reg. Privacy

Could anyone please tell me how Wikipedia handles privacy issues? For example, keeping passwords and keeping the watchlists. Is it readable by any others? TIA --Rrjanbiah 14:27, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Well, there is the draft privacy policy, but as far as passwords go, no other users can access your password. No other users can see your watchlist either. AAMOF, there was a discussion about implementing a feature that would allow users see others' watchlists not too long ago and it was overwhelmingly voted down. You can see all the edits that any user has made, however. As far as what guys working on the server-end can see, I don't know. They probably can see your watchlists, but your password is most likely encrypted. —Frecklefoot 16:42, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Developers have access to the hash of the passwords, but not the passwords themselves. They could also see your watchlist if they wanted, and details such as when you logged in etc. Sysops used to have the ability to read watchlists a while ago, but I believe this was removed, and is certainly not possible now that special:asksql has been disabled. Also, contrary to popular misconception, only developers can access your IP, not admins, stewards or anyone else. Angela. 17:42, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Oh, Thanks a lot for the explanation. BTW, it would have been much better if the IP itself is hashed and stored. --Rrjanbiah 05:13, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

(Speaking as a computer engineer) - no, that would actually be very bad. If the hash of your IP address were displayed, it would be trivial for someone to come along, hash the 4294967296 possible IP addresses, and figure out which one is yours. Poof, there goes the privacy of your IP address. →Raul654 05:22, Apr 30, 2004 (UTC)

If I understand right, Angela says developers can view the IP of the *registered* users. So, if the IP is *really* necessary for some login modules or country detection, it can be better md5/sha hashed and stored. But, YMMV --Rrjanbiah 09:20, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

There is no special recording of users' IP addresses. To check, one has to look up the web server logs (which are discarded periodically) to match up their actions with something they're known to have done (ie, editing a page, which records the user name, page name, and date in the wiki, where the timestamp and page name can be compared against the log, which contains only IP addresses and not user names). --Brion 10:31, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Oh...that is cool. Thanks a lot:-) --Rrjanbiah 12:12, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

image upload problems

I tried to upload some images but kept getting 'This image cannot be displayed because it has errors'. I think others may have the same problem. Is this a software/system bug? -- Kaihsu 12:53, 2004 Apr 29 (UTC)

Which images do you refer to? The last two you uploaded (Image:StopIqaluit Copyright1999KaihsuTai.jpg and Image:RichardHarries20040428 CopyrightKaihsuTai.jpg) display fine here. Maybe you should clear your cache? andy 12:59, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Seems to be working now. Image:BeachBarahona2001 CopyrightKaihsuTai.jpg -- Kaihsu 13:14, 2004 Apr 29 (UTC)

New feature

You can now paste an IP address into the search box and click "go", and it will take you to the contributions page. -- Tim Starling 03:26, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Cool.. but there's a bug :o) It doesn't take care of articles which have the name of an IP address. For e.g., 127.0.0.1 is the name of an article, but giving it in the "Go" button doesn't take it to the article. Jay 12:28, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Oh diddums. You won't be able to access the only two articles in the entire database which are named after IP addresses: 127.0.0.1 and 155.69.5.236 with the go button! I guess I'd better disable it, I wouldn't want you having to type the URL. -- Tim Starling 14:17, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Why not check if the page exists before going to the contri list? Just moving the if block down right before the "No match" should do the trick.--Eloquence* 15:34, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Make that one article. I orphaned 155.69.5.236 and deleted it. UninvitedCompany 16:05, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Zero: 127.0.0.1 is a redirect. - Woodrow XXIII^II, Emperor of the United States, Minister of Ministry 19:49, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The bug's still there. Will Eloquence's solution help ? Jay 12:36, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Does it matter now that it doesn't apply to any articles? Angela. 20:41, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, because it applies to a redirect, and possibly to future articles. anthony (see warning)

External links to nutritiondata.com on food articles?

I think that adding links to the corresponding page on http://nutritiondata.com to food-related articles might be a good idea. Do other Wikipedians agree, and does anyone know of a nutrition site which might be better? Eurleif 00:41, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, adding links looks useful, I started linking food and nutrition to the homepage.--Patrick 10:53, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Edit summary: Forcing the issue through blocking blank entries.

Don't know if this has been discussed before. A number of people seem to find it frustrating when people don't provide an edit summary. I do.

How about when someone clicks "save changes" and hasn't filled in a summary they get a "You have not provided an edit summary!" alert, and are left on the edit screen with the blank space staring at them expectantly?

--bodnotbod 09:39, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Then people will enter " " or "fhouash;piuh;iuh", just to get their edit in? Dysprosia 09:52, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

One prior discussion (at least) did not accept that proposed solution as it was too annoying for those occasions when it was appropiate to not put a summary (e.g. many minor edits) and too easy to circumvent e.g. write "xxx" instead of blanking when you can't be bothered to write one. Sorry. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:52, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

OK. The random letter thing did occur to me. If it's already been proposed and rejected, that's good enough for me. --bodnotbod 10:45, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

What about just giving the user a warning at the top of the resulting page ("You didn't fill in the edit summary field when you made your last edit. In the future, please fill the edit summary field with a description of the edit that you made.")? Paullusmagnus 13:50, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

A gentle reminder could at least some of those who are simply ignorant, but not THAT lazy. --Menchi 21:02, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Syntax highlighting mark up for programs?

I'm kinda newbie here. I'd thought that there will be some kind of mark up for syntax highlighting of programs like <program lang="PHP">..code here..</program> But, I couldn't find anything such. So, I have experimented few syntax highlighting with PHP's highlight_file() in few articles: PHP programming language#Code_Examples, Hello world program#Perl, and C programming language#Hello,_World!_in_C As Wiki is fast, I strongly believe this might be already discussed. Could someone please direct me to such thing? TIA. --Rrjanbiah 12:21, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

I've always thought syntax highlighting ugly. Others though may have good reasons to do so, though. It does make the code snippets difficult to edit, though... Dysprosia 13:16, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Wiki's own syntax highlighter something like <program lang="PHP">..code here..</program> may be helpful incase someone feels it is hard to edit the code. Is there any such projects going in Wiki anyway? --Rrjanbiah 13:21, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

An additional problem with manually colouring syntax, like you have, is that it won't take into account properties of skins, a user's preferences, possible future non-Web versions, etc, etc. Which brings me to suggest that somebody (you?) could write an extension, à la <math> et al to do exactly what you say. This could then include abilities to vary based on skin/preference/display modality (or whatever it's called) in the same way as the other extensions - there's probably a description of the new modular extension architecture somewhere on meta:, or will be soon.

Now, having said all that, I'm not sure whether I think highlighted code is better or worse, for such short bursts as we're likely to have here. It would probably be useful on wikibooks: though, where there are likely to be whole program listings... - IMSoP 16:02, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for your comments. I can contribute to that. My idea is something like <program lang="php" highlight="yes">..code..</program>. And also, skinning as in PHP's enhanced help manual (one with copy to clipboard JS stuffs, etc) But, I thought that similar discussions might have done in Wiki and that's why asked. And, I can't promise about my contribution at this moment as I'm busy now. --Rrjanbiah 10:35, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Please see Talk:Hello_world_program#Color-coding_of_hello_world_programs and allow people to discuss such drastic edits in the future by taking them up on the appropriate talk pages. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:32, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

Yes, I do care about Wiki. As stated in my edit summary, I was experimenting that and was planned to revert after few days (after getting some feedbacks). But, never thought that you would revert it immediately. --Rrjanbiah 10:35, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Annoying contributor

Amandag6 is a newbie, and on his talk page, I put this message User talk:Amandag6, welcoming him, and asking him to review other Wikipedia articles, to see the style we write encyclopedia articles in. However, he keeps creating orphan stubs by the dozen, in a definition format. What to do? -- user:zanimum

By the dozen, is misleading. There's about 5 stubs and a couple of those might make articles. I suggest waiting to see if he ignores you and carries on at the same rate, in which case maybe he needs some more advice. Too early to start getting heavy, surely? --bodnotbod 19:58, May 3, 2004 (UTC)

I agree entirely with bodnotbod, and have put a slightly fuller welcome message on her talk page (I'm willing to bet that's "Amanda G. #6"). Just to let you know, there is a page for listing "clueless newbies", so if it were more than half a dozen such edits, that's the place you could go for advice (theoretically, I don't know how well-watched that page is...)

Out of interest, why did you feel the need to create an (essentially) empty user page for the user in question? Seems to me it's up to them to do that, and it's quite a good way of spotting new users if their username comes up red (and if their talk page comes up red, you can be sure no-one's welcomed them yet...)

Oh, and please do not bite the newcomers; most everyone was new once! :-D - IMSoP 21:01, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Ah, you've inadvertently solved a mystery for me there: I wondered how red usernames could exist. I thought it was people who had created an account, done something (probably negative/harmful) and then closed the account. If that sounds like a baffling line of reasoning, you should note this is my first week, and I'm clueless ;o) But I suppose I thought a user page would exist automatically rather than requiring an initial click. --bodnotbod 02:11, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Locked wiki.

The locked wiki warning isn't appearing on all the pages, I'm currently surfing the the Tom Clancy article and I'm clicking on some of the links and the warning is appearing and on others it's not. I think there might be a problem, I don't know, but of course I don't I'm not a sysop or the server admin. --24.128.142.43 21:32, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

That message itself is out of date. The reason you're seeing it sometimes is that anonymous users see cached pages. If you create an account (pick a username and password) you will see the most up-to-date versions of pages automatically. The wiki was locked down for hardware upgrades, which are now completed.  :) fabiform | talk 21:49, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Hmmm. Yes, I was absent-minded a bit when I typed that, I thought I logged in when I wasn't. Hehe. Oops, oh well. Hopefully, its gone now. --Saint-Paddy 00:29, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

King of Wikipedia!

This is just a funny article I wrote when I saw the link on EntmootsOfTrolls user page. Don't ask me why I made it, I was bored and needed something to do and so I created that. Of course, It's just parody of the "real" articles of "REAL" monarchs. Anyways if you want to access it go to Wikipedia:King of Wikipedia, Also, I don't If it goes into votes for deletion, It's not THAT unless there are some people who acutally worship Jimbo and kiss the ground he walks on.

This is already listed on VfD, and so far there seems strong support for deletion. Andrewa 14:03, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Acutally, Angela wants me to move it to the MetaWiki. --Saint-Paddy 00:29, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Bah, let meta write its own jokes. There's a special "April fools' day" section in Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense , which seems to be the perfect place for this (well, I thought it was fairly funny). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:38, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Sock puppets

If a particular username is known to be a sock puppet and has been established as a sock puppet by Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration, is it acceptable to put some sort of message on the sock puppet's user page that links to the usual name of the user so that people know that the username is a known sock puppet?

For example, suppose someone normally edits under the name "AAA". And for the purposes of a dispute, that user created the sock puppets "BBB" and "CCC". The dispute was taken to arbitration, where the committee concluded that "BBB" and "CCC" were indeed sock puppets of "AAA". In that case, can someone, say, on the arbitration committee, edit those user pages, putting a message on "User:BBB" and "User:CCC" along the lines of:

:''This user is a [[Wikipedia:Sock puppet|sock puppet]] of [[User:AAA]], as established by [[Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/AAA]].''

The reason I'm asking for this is that otherwise when combing through the page histories of certain pages, it can be unclear who had been involved in editing it. --Lowellian 00:35, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

It's definitely helpful. Otherwise, except for those involved with insane passion in pursuing that case, us "outsiders" will never figure it out. It may be obvious to the committee, but not to most other people who's whose puppet. --Menchi 00:54, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

It might be better to just redirect one user page to the other one, unless the user themself has written that notice on the page. 1Angela 00:56, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

What if they're innocent? Will the redirected user be effectively locked out of their account/talk page? Love the term sock puppet BTW ;o) --bodnotbod 01:27, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

No, they can simply edit the page to remove the redirect. Angela. 02:02, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Presumably, if the arbitration committee found the page to be a sock puppet, then it probably is and they're not innocent. --Lowellian 01:22, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

Kosovo and Metohia

I have started an RfC and a vote on Talk:Kosovo and Metohia#Vote on the name on the naming issue. Please give your comments and vote there. Thanks, Dori | Talk 03:14, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Note: if you can't find the vote on the talk page, check the history and revert to the last edit with the votes if necessary. They have been removed from the vote list twice so far. -- Chris 73 | Talk 08:23, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I have removed the vote because there is no naming issue. The article is named in correspondence with Wikipedia:Naming conventions. Nikola 08:33, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Nikola, please do not remove other peoples comments from the Village pump. I just reinserted my comment above. -- Chris 73 | Talk 08:37, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought that your comment about me is no longer needed as I have just said the same thing as you myself. If you think that it is, no problem with me. Nikola 08:41, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikitravel

As a contributor to both Wikipedia and Wikitravel, what is involved in getting Wikitravel mapped in Wikipedia's Interwiki system? I link a lot of Wikitravel articles to the Wikipedia article. I would like to link in the reverse direction. Is there a policy for this? What would the format be? Something like wikitravel:article name ? --Nzpcmad 07:51, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Unless I'm mistaken, isn't wikitravel not a wikimedia project, and not GFDL (it's attribution-sharealike, if memory serves). So the issue of how/whether to implement interwikis between the two is a political, not technical, one. I don't know if there's a formal policy on this, but it's noteworthy that no such extra-org interwikis currently exist. The best venue for this discussion is the wikimedia mailing list. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 11:07, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Not true actually, e.g. [[meatball:UseRealNames]] works. A wikitravel shorthand seems reasonable, though there is nothing to stop editors using longhand links right now.

Indeed, we have a quite extensive set of InterWiki links - as mentioned on InterWiki, according to which page ours is based on that provided by UseMod (but I'm not sure that's up to date). I fairly often use links to MeatBall:, especially on meta: - I also note that Google:some search terms works, but the character escaping makes it fairly useless for anything other than single words - I fiddled, and the best I came up with was Google:some,search,terms,and-a-phrase which is about as ugly as copying and pasting the full URL :-( You can do Dictionary:word and Foldoc:foo as well.

But I'm wandering away from the point here - I'm not actually sure how and where the "InterMap" is defined on MediaWiki, so I guess we need to ask a developer to add WikiTravel: to it and/or tell us how. In fact, I don't even know of anywhere that lists the InterWiki prefixes currently available... - IMSoP 18:42, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Interwiki links are defined in a special table. It is very easy to add new ones (though it might be hard to add same ones on all Wikipedias). I guess that anyone with SQL access can see which interlinks exist. Nikola 23:02, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I was talking to Sunir about this recently. Our interwiki map was just copied from the interwiki map at meatball. That map is not intended to be a common interwiki map for all wikis, it's intended to be a shortcut to sites which are often mentioned on Meatball. So what we need to do is to make our own map. I've made a start, at meta:Interwiki map. -- Tim Starling 09:58, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

OK, I tried this. This link WikiTravel:Wanaka still points to Wikipedia not to Wikitravel? What did I do wrong? --Nzpcmad 22:06, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

You didn't do anything wrong - what Tim did wrong (no offense) was to simultaneously imply that that list was current and request edits to it. Since we don't have a MeatBall:FileReplacement-style system for automagically updating it, this is not the case. I added WikiTravel at the bottom of the list, but that doesn't mean anyone's put it into the actual database table.

I was thinking, though, that perhaps a Special: page could be made that presented this information, and allowed it to be edited (by sysops, or even just stewards). Similarly for the interlanguage links, which need updating every now and then. Not a priority, I know, but one of those things that shouldn't really require hacking the database directly every time. It's a bit more than could be done with a MediaWiki: page, I gather, but it could have a similar editing interface (can Special pages have attached discussion? I don't think they can). [And yes, I know: put it on SourceForge, and preferably do it yourself; once I've finished my degree, I may well do both :)] - IMSoP 23:42, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Front Page Observation

Today's main page has Did you know... links to Broadmoor Hospital and mental institution. The first is now peppered with redlinks (as a result of it's front page appearance, one imagines) - the nature of which will not be understood by a first time visitor ("Yikes! How have I hacked the site? I just pressed a link.").

The second, to my mind, is a pretty shoddy article in that it is riddled with implied and explicit criticism of the subject from start to finish: criticism, which, whilst valid, really needs to be explored as a discussion of the subject later in the article rather than entangled throughout.

Whilst I know something of the subject, it isn't really enough I'd feel happy tackling it. I've listed it on pages needing attention.

My point is: a little care in what is put on the front page may be called for? I would hate to think of people being made sour on such a fantastic project by ill chosen main page links. --bodnotbod 11:45, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

The reason this occurs is that it was decided that the "Did you know" content on any given day has to be new content. New content tends to appear on new pages, which tend to be more red than old ones. Your point seems to be valid though - see also MediaWiki_talk:Did you know and its archive. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 12:14, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Ive gotta disagree with you here Bod. Having "perfect" articles only on the main page leads a false impression of what wikipedia is all about. Having articles that need some work will encorage newbies to do that work. When I first pressed a red link and got to an edit box I didn't think "("Yikes! How have I hacked the site?" I thought "jesus I've never seen anything like this before, then set about creating my first article". I personally don't want newbies afraid to edit because they feel they cannot come up to the exacting standards of a perfect article.theresa knott 12:16, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I almost added something here about Cap Arcona, which is referenced from the front page and had (until I fixed it) some lousy and confusing English in it (I'm still not sure I've captured the author's intent). I disagree with Theresa here - while we want to encourage contributors, we also want to encourage readers. An encyclopedia which is only used by the people who write it is a pretty pathetic object. We want people to come here because they get solid, factual, useful information. If I had come here and found that most of the articles were confusing or badly written I would not have bothered to start contributing - it was the high quality ones that made me want to contribute.

Incidentally, no insult to whoever wrote Cap Arcona, you did a good job (especially if English is not your first language). DJ Clayworth 14:29, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

If you don't like the articles featured in DYK, then do this:

• Keep an eye on Special:Newpages
• When you see a potentially interesting article, edit it to meet your high standards
• Then add one interesting fact from that article to MediaWiki:Did you know.

This way, everyone benefits. This was my intent when I invented DYK -- getting people to keep an eye on newly created articles. Brushing the bad ones under the carpet won't do us any good.--Eloquence* 00:46, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

You guys aren't gonna like this, but the first time I clicked a red link, I thought "Yikes! How have I hacked the site?" than backed away from anything Wikipedia-related for a few months. --SMWhat 04:39, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Linked to from today's front page is User:Eloquence/Favorite Wikipedia quotes which has, as the first quote: ""ATTENTION WIKIPEDIA, THERE IS A MAJOR BUG ON YOUR SITE ALLOWING ME TO DO THIS (WRITE ON YOUR ARTICLES). I HAVE DONE NO DAMAGE BUT AM TRYING TO ALERT YOU BEFORE SOMEONE DOES"

Cant... stop... laughing! But really, who would actually think that Wiki is actually a bug? I'm gonna get the giggles out now. KirbyMeister 18:10, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Awards

Do we need a Wikipedia:Awards article, maybe linked from announcements like the one actually on the main page? -- till we *) 09:36, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article now a sections for awards. Angela. 18:35, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

Lindi and Malindi

Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk#Lindi and Malindi by IMSoP 10:21, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Interesting statistical analysis

There was some discussion over at Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship about the number of admins we have (initaited by yours truly, for better or for worse), so I did some statistical analysis. The final result is this excel document. I figured the results might be of interest to some people, so I thought I'd share them here. Comments are welcome. →Raul654 06:55, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

Interesting. However when I open it in OpenOffice only one of the charts has captions. What are the others? DJ Clayworth 16:36, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

So the number of admins in relation to the number of articles has increased. But in proportion to contributors has stayed about level. I use OpenOffice too: Um, what charts!? I can only see a table. --bodnotbod 20:02, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

WikiProject Cat breeds

WikiProject Cat breeds - New project; need participants

A project in the same style as Wikipedia:WikiProject Dog breeds but with the specifics for cat breeds. There needs to be a table template made and pictures located etc. Incentive: There are a bunch of requests for cat breed pages at Wikipedia:requested articles/Mathematical and Natural Sciences. Bensaccount 01:58, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm vaguely confused (not unusual); you didn't give a link for the project and I couldn't find it by searching. Did you mean that the whole project needs creation? If so, you can do it using the project template link at WikiProject. BTW--there's a juicy link there "Wikipedia:WikiProject/Guidelines" that says you can go there to learn how to create your own project, but there's actually no such destination! Anyone remember what happened to it? Or did it just never get born? Elf | Talk 03:49, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

- The whole project needs creation. I created the page @ Wikipedia:WikiProject cat breeds. It needs to be adapted to cats. Specifically, does anyone know what organizations define cat breeds and how? Bensaccount 17:02, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Only one I could find is http://www.cfainc.org/history.html Niteowlneils 19:52, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

table formatting

Can anyone help with the formatting problem being discussed at Talk:Panamanian election, 2004? Adam 01:10, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

This had already been fixed by the time I clicked through. (To force an empty cell to render properly, put a &nbsp; - non-breaking space - in it). fabiform | talk 01:29, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Community Punishment Order

Can I serve my Community Punishment Order by editing Wikipedia? Troll Silent, Troll Deep 22:38, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

What's that? Dysprosia 05:44, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Isn't there a type of punishment that a judge can give so that instead of prison, a convicted person can give community service to a registerest charity? Could he mean this? I can't find any articles on it, perhaps we need on... Mark Richards 18:43, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

In the US, it's typically just called "community service" or (if the context is unclear) "court-ordered community service." -- Jmabel 01:47, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps he's been ordered by Troll High Command to punish our community. -- Tim Starling 02:47, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

You'd need to ask the authorities who imposed or administer the order. It would be an excellent idea if they agree to it. But don't get your hopes up. Ask. Andrewa 19:59, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

MediaWiki:States

I'm concerned about people adding "Largest Cities" to the state MediaWiki boxes. I don't argue with adding the cities, but some are, I think, going overboard. For instance, for MediaWiki:Ohio I only added the very largest cities. However, MediaWiki:Maine has more cities listed than counties! We need to find some reasonable standardization on this. jaknouse 22:25, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I was going to say >500,000, but I see that doesn't work for some states. Maybe limit to top 10, at most? Even a state as big as CA only has 20 listed, and probably half don't really need to be listed. Niteowlneils 23:05, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Anyone a wiz with Wikimarkup tables?

Could you do a family tree based on

with the addition of children, see http://www.aboutdarwin.com/darwin/Children.html ; some were quite important in their own right.). That way we can also replace the image with links! It can be put into:

which is at MediaWiki:Darwin

and also add a photo to the blue box would be nice.

I don't think either wikimarkup or the underlying html table markup is powerfull enough to adequately capture the layout of the family tree graphic (well, it is, but in a horrible unportable scary way). We did have some work underway for family-tree markup, but I think that a) it isn't implemented yet, and b) it would only produce a graphic (now, at least) anyway. One day in the future (several years, I fear) we can replace stuff like this with a SVG graphic, which would allow nice things like stylesheets, searching, and hotlinks within the image. In the meantime, some poor person has to haul out a regular image editor (of one kind or another) and author another PNG. You could ask User:Cutler to produce another version of the graphic (and while you're at it, ask Cutler to upload a zip of the original image-editor file from which they made the PNG, so that others can change the graphic more easily). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:47, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

I like those box things with the links. Where would a newbie go to learn about those? Just knowing what the term for them is would be a start ;o) --bodnotbod 02:05, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

They're added by using a custom msg tag (edit the darwin page to see an example of use). More info, and list, at Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 02:11, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. I've got a subject area I'm keen on and there seems to be no overarching project or combined effort at work on it yet. But I'm waiting to make sure Wiki is something I continue with or whether it's something I have to give up as yet another destructive addiction to add to my list... --bodnotbod 01:18, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

Would it be possible then to do an image map? Duncharris 10:25, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

There's currently no support in wikimarkup for image maps. Image maps don't really work very well for a number of circumstances, particularly accessibility-browsers and the arrow-key based browsers one finds on cellphones and PDAs. In the absence of a decent stylesheet-aware graphics format (like the aforementioned SVG) I think we should stick with functional-if-dull tables, like the one above. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:09, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Great that you are aware of browser and impaired user limitations, but that should not be used to discourage a useful item like browser image mapping, provided the table or similar is retained for non-graphic browsers and the like. I'd say go ahead and add the image map data, just *don't* depend upon your reader being able to use that function.Daeron 07:47, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

You could do it as an ordinary table,(with small images for the lines) but it would be a monster. I'll have a go if anyone wants me too. theresa knott 18:59, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

You could do it with broken lines rather than graphics, | for vertical lines and — for horizontal. An example of a dramatically simpler table (lattice) using these lines may be found at Pitch space under "Riemann's Tonnetz" the second table. Hyacinth 23:52, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

As a self-test I started an example on my userpage. Hyacinth 00:10, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Einsatzgruppe

I think it's a major oversight that we don't have a page on Einsatzgruppe. I've added a stub. Please help me to fill out.

Thanks. orthogonal 19:33, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

The page is at Einsatzgruppen. Proteus (Talk) 19:42, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

My bad, but that page didn't cme up on Googling Wikipedia for Einsatzgruppe. Better cross-referncing is needed. orthogonal 19:46, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

On a somewhat arcane technicality, would Einsatzgruppe be the better location, since it's the singular, in keeping with general policy (even though it's not English)? But yes, this demonstrates the usefulness of creating redirects from obvious alternatives, doesn't it. - IMSoP 20:26, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I think it should definately be moved Dmn 23:25, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Is there a wiki travel guide?

A LonelyWiki guide perhaps? Where can I find it? If not, how do I start it? Thanks! Mark Richards 17:09, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Indeed there is - you need Wikitravel. It's newish, so a lot of material needed to be added. I'm sure they'd welcome your contributions. --ALargeElk 17:12, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! See you there! Mark Richards 18:05, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Its license does not look compatible with Wikipedia's GFDL. Since the GFDL is not identical to the "attribution-share alike" license (although their goals are similar), one cannot copy info from wikitravel to wikipedia. That's disappointing. - Kevin Saff 18:58, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Evan Prodromou, the instigator of Wikitravel and a major contributor to the MediaWiki code, thought a lot about this issue before going with the creative commons licence. The reasons are explained at http://wikitravel.org/en/article/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn%27t_GFDL. While incompatibilities remain between the two licences it is worth considering releasing your own contributions under both licences where possible... I am going to do that now. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 20:05, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. Dual-licensing seems like a good option for now. Kevin Saff 20:17, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

How about starting our own on wikibooks? someon want to take the leap? --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:47, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

Karl Koch (botanist)

Help! Or maybe it's just my browser. The Kentucky coffeetree article has a citation link to Karl Koch (botanist), but the link is stuck on "edit" even though the article exists. I've gone to the Karl Koch article and resaved it, but it hasn't helped (and, of course, I've reloaded the coffeetree article several times). Anybody know what's going on? jaknouse 14:59, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I just tried my usual fix for this and edited the Kentucky coffeetree article by adding an empty line. That seems to have fixed it. Lupo 15:06, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

New York, New York

Naming poll closed. Fallout on Talk:New York, New York and Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names)

Anyone from Brookline, Massachusetts?

Could you phone James Schwartz on (617) 566-4262 and ask him to email me at dunc_harriscoughhotmail.com (with cough replaced by 'at) re: George R. Price please? I don't fancy a trans-Atlantic phone call. If he doesn't know who Price is, you've got the wrong number! Duncharris 12:53, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Can this be wise? --bodnotbod 15:24, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Well my idea was that I was trying to contact George R. Price's family to see if I could get a photo of him, a bit of original research. James Schwartz has written the definitive biography of Price. Unfortunately, googling for George Price turns up no resources, [5], George R. Price George R. Price does little better, George Price ESS gets a few, George Price equation gets a few more conceptual topics. Read the article and Schwartz's biography; he was a fascinating gentleman. Duncharris 16:19, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Quick note: There is a link to a pdf version of the biography in the main article. Duncharris 16:25, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

No, I'm from Lynn. I do know a girl from there though. However, I not sure she knows him.

I'll probably send something snail mail then ;) Duncharris 10:27, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

Front Page Observation

Should articles on the Main Page include red links? -->Talk:Main Page

minus signs in math

When I use a single greek letter in math, as in "mit <math>\beta</math> multipliziert", I get a minus sign after it in the output:
"mit $\beta$ multipliziert"
Is this a known bug? Am I doing something wrong? Fpahl 09:42, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Use the HTML entity, regardless. & beta; (without the space) produces β Dysprosia 09:51, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

If you leave a space after the beta it shows no minus - <math>\beta </math>. andy 10:16, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Edit summary: Forcing the issue through blocking blank entries.

-->m:bugs

Wikitravel

-->Interwiki links to Wikitravel should be included in the interwiki map. See m:Talk:Interwiki map.

Kosovo and Metohia

Naming issue. Please vote at Talk:Kosovo and Metohia#Vote on the name if the vote is still there. (Check the history if it's not)

Sock puppets

• If a sock puppet is banned, you can explain this on their user page, or redirect their user page to their main one. This doesn't lock them out of the page as they can edit it to remove the redirect.

Locked wiki.

• Locked wiki message --> Log in and clear your cache and it will disappear.

Use of quoted passages, especially in entertainment bios.

Thought I'd sound people out on this. A number of my contributions are likely to be biographies of British entertainers. I'm pretty sure that in a paper encyclopedia there would be very little or no quoted passages from the artist themselves giving colour to biographical detail but, as we know, Wiki is not paper (see, in particular, ==no size limits==).

I am particularly interested in comedy performers and I feel that having something from them that contributes to the life story and indicates their sense of humour is a good thing and makes for more interesting reading. However, I can see that traditionalists might baulk at this.

The bio style guide isn't helpful on this point.

I would not be excessive in this regard but I'm trying to guage whether there is an almost complete intolerance to quoted passages (as very distinct from notable quotes, without surrounding context) used in bios.

Opinions?

--bodnotbod 20:19, May 3, 2004 (UTC)

• Personally, I think it would make the articles more interesting. But it's largely a matter of taste, and I'd have to judge based on how it was implemented. Just be bold, and the rest will work itself out. Yours, Meelar 20:36, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

• Well, that's what I want to hear ;o) I have a tendency to ask questions first and then be bold later... if that makes sense. I'm wary of upsetting people in my first week. --bodnotbod 01:45, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

centre steer

What's with the "mystery" here? -- user:zanimum

Whether one exists or not. Dysprosia 13:17, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

So this is a mechanical Nessie? Do they have blurry black and white photos of center steer walking at the edge of the forest? Do the Cree pass down legends of the mystical centre steer, and how it saved the first woman, who fell from the sky? -- user:zanimum

Seems perfectly self-explanatory to me: was such a vehicle ever made, or is it just an urban legend? (That link's probably better than myth; I think I'll change it) - IMSoP 16:09, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Mixing ltr and rtl

Recently I came across a strange problem with rtl (right to left) direction fonts. For example, please look at Google#Other_national_Googles and see the India (at 16 position). It is messed up with the rtl text. Is there any solution for this? TIA --Rrjanbiah 12:35, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Unfortunately that problem cannot easily be solved, as it is not a real list, but inline text with LTR and RTL. Since the Wiki blocks the <span> tag, none of the workarounds I know of work either. Anárion 12:42, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Span tags poll. Nohat 02:53, 2004 May 4 (UTC)

Syntax highlighting mark up for programs?

-->Feature suggestion moved to m:Syntax highlighting

which message do blocked users see?

I'm curious: when more than one sysop blocks a user, does the user see the message from the first blocking sysop or the last blocking sysop? To answer this question, I ask that a sysop block this account. I'll also block it, and then I'll check which message appears on the "You are blocked from editing" screen. Thanks, Cyan, a.k.a Socku Puppetto 21:05, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

done, for two hours, with message "known vandal "Cyan", back again. sigh" -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:34, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Heh heh. Turns out it's the first sysop's message which is seen. Later blocks do not override the message. -- Cyan 21:46, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

But what happens when the first (shorter) block expires? Whose message prevails then? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:51, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Also - I'm sure you have, but have you checked that this is not a browser cache issue? Mark Richards 21:53, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

The fact that duplicate blocks are allowed is a flaw. The behaviour is counter-intuitive. The block that is used is whichever one MySQL returns first -- probably the one which was inserted first. When a short block expires, longer blocks of the same user are deleted. I think it would be better if attempting to create a duplicate block gave an error. -- Tim Starling 01:07, May 7, 2004 (UTC)

It'd be more useful for changing bad blocked messages if they overwrote the older block. Martin 23:55, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Image copyright (again)

I'm a bit concerned at the contents of MediaWiki:Noncommercial, which reads at present

This image is not licenced under the GFDL. It is under a non-commercial-use only licence. Copyrights.

and is linked to by a number of image pages and also possibly used on others by means of the subst: syntax.

This seems to me to directly violate both Image_use_policy#Copyright_(images) and Wikipedia:Copyrights#Contributors'_rights_and_obligations. I'd suggest we either update the policy pages or add the following text to MediaWiki:Noncommercial:

Unless a GFDL compatible license is granted, the image will shortly be removed.

And, of course, do it. But that's a bit drastic. I'd like other comments. Have I missed something here? Andrewa 19:54, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Some things to think about:

non-commercial-only images are arguably (and argued by Jimbo) GFDL-compatible under the "aggregation" section.

non-commercial-only images are preferable to fair use images, as they are more free than fair use images, and we allow fair use images where absolutely necessary. Martin 21:26, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Definitely stuff to think about! Thank you.

Where does Jimbo argue this?

I wonder why the policy pages don't say this. Or do they and I've misread them? Or is it just a matter of updating them? Or is there still something I'm missing? Andrewa 01:24, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

No more comments? I was never going to move unilaterally on this, even before Martin's comments. If nobody else is interested, or if everyone else feels his comments have answered my concerns (I don't, obviously), then this will lapse. Andrewa 19:18, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

It's not that nobody else's interested in the contradictions of the "commercial only" pics. I suspect the real reason for not getting too worked up about it is that we have other image-related problems that are more serious, more pressing, but a lot more difficult to tackle: thousands and thousands of photos with no information at all on their provenance, and hundreds of others flagged as "fair use" without even saying where they've been stolen copied from. Compared to that mess, a couple of dozen commecial-use only images is a minor irregularity. –Hajor 00:46, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

The Assault of the Machine Translators

-> MediaWiki:VfD-Translation articles

tokipona language links

Thought I'd alert people to the fact that language links to tokipona.wikipedia.org's content don't work... In Wikipedia, [[tokipona:lipu sona Wikipesija]] was placed, and it doesn't work. Can someone change the software to allow for lanugage codes greater than two letters, or should the Tokipona language Wikipedia's address itself be changed to a non-occupied language code? -- user:zanimum

Links to Simple English pages work (http://simple.wikipedia.org/). Maybe someone needs to add an interwiki code. [ alerante | “” 20:34, 6 May 2004 (UTC) ]

Wikiquote

Is it my computer, or is wikiquote behaving very strangely? All I get is a wide variety of error messages and display problems. Tuf-Kat 07:42, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

Looks alright to me. -- Tim Starling 10:14, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

MediaWiki Msg - how to run in-line

Can anyone suggest how to get multiple small message boxes to display next to each other? For example I was looking at New Zealand and at the bottom it has two large messages, followed by one small 'mgs:New Zealand' ; I though it might be good to have the message 'msg:Australasia' next to it.

But the Wikipedia engine does not seem to allow it as far as I can see; can any assist with wisdom on this?Daeron 06:15, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

I would prefer a policy to limit ourself to a maximum of two such navigation boxes - the inflation of these boxes makes the articles look ugly. Do we really need a navigational box for the member states of every international organization? For countries IMHO the only navigational box which really makes sense is the geographical location one. New Zealand with three such boxes is barely acceptable, but did anyone look at Romania recently? At least the last two ones are really too much - and besides who ever heard of that Latin Union? andy 08:23, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Seems like someone agreed with me about the idiocy, now its back down to two :-) andy 16:28, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't agree with this idea of limiting ourselves to two MSG includes at the bottom of country pages. Some countries, such as Switzerland, are not involved in many international organisations, while others, such as Slovenia, are. It would be stupid and uninformative to remove these includes. And, I don't what you mean by the fact that they look ugly - they're at the end of the page and they actually look quite nice. "Seems like someone agreed with me about the idiocy" - what is idiotic in saying that, Romania, for example, is a member of NATO, what is idiotic in saying that Hungary is a member of the OECD? These are important international organisations, constantly mentioned in the media and in world affairs, which need to be highlighted. Of course, I don't agree on putting includes for two types of organisations: those that include more than, say, 50 countries (such as the UN, with nearly 200), and those which are totally unimportant (such as the Western European Union, etc.). But, the Francophonie is not unimportant, and neither is the Latin Union. Just because you haven't heard of it does not mean it's unimportant. And if you're going to pick on Romania and remove it's additional "redundant" includes, then please go along to every country and do the same. Some countries, like Mozambique have a message that links to the Community of Portuguese Language Countries. Others, like Slovenia, link to the Francophonie even though they are associate members. These should all stay, and so should Romania's includes to the Latin Union and Francophonie? Why? Because it highlights Romania's culture and this is important in encyclopedia. By simply looking at the includes, we can see that: Romania is politically part of the EU candidates, it is politically/militarily part of the NATO group, and culturally it is part of the Latin Union, sharing a similar culture, history and linguistic origin. Geographically, it is part of Europe, hense the Europe include. Therefore, we can see that all of these includes deal with a certain aspect of Romania and should be kept. Also, again, I'm not talking just about Romania, but also about the other countries which have these includes. Awaiting a response, Rronline 00:01, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

The point is not that I we should skip to mention the memberships in organzitations - a list of all international organizations (well, all the CIA thought important enough) is usually at the Politics of Country article, and that would be the natural place to make a more beautiful list. What I object is the inflation of navigational bars - how much likely anyone will use the Latin Union bar to go to any other article? If someone is interested in that organization, the article Latin Union contains the list of members, it only needs to be linked somewhere in the Romania article. Otherwise - how about a navigation list of countries crossed by the Danube. One with the countries bordering the Black Sea. Or the member states of Intelsat? And the same applies to other countries of course - we should limit ourself to the two most important navigational bars, onefor the geographic neighborhood, one maybe one for the most important international organization for that country. There are countries where the membership in the Commonwealth is relevant, while for other members of that one it isn't. andy 14:30, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Would love to hear what you think of {{msg:Indonesia}}, couldn't a person just go to the article Indonesia instead.

Looks to me like the information in {{msg:EU_countries_and_candidates}} could be combined into {{msg:Europe}}. The majority of articles where either is used have obvious reasons to use both; even for the European countries that are not EU members or candidates, the fact that they are not would constitute relevant information. -- Jmabel 18:55, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

You can use a table, but if anyone asks, it didn't come from me. -- Tim Starling 10:27, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

Doh! O.K. I know not your name, but you are a very clever masked person.;-)Daeron

status of Saturday Night Live

-> Wikipedia:Copyright problems

The New Pages Patrol is woefully understaffed...

...meanwhile, rogue pages are robbing old ladies and drinking cider on the street corners.

I found, and considered signing up to, Wikipedia:New pages patrol. I think the time slot idea is great - it might help me structure my day, instead of spending 14 hours on here ;o)

But I don't fancy signing up as member #2 much. How can I get admins to sit up and take a 15 minute slot? Or was this idea abandoned? Superceded? --bodnotbod 00:03, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

English vs American

Heya.

Just curious whether the 'English' language wikipedia is in fact in English or American. I find myself forever 'correcting' Americanisms, and I'm not sure if I'm just creating work for more knowledgable editors. So, clarification would be handy =)

--Si

Standing rule alas appears to be to allow Americanisms when they are already there, in essence to keep the language the article was started in. If an article is started using proper English keep using that, but if it is written in US English use that. Some people get annoyed if you correct their spelling :-/ Anárion 20:24, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

British or American English are equally welcome, we try to be consistant within each article though, so don't go around changing one to the other, there's no need. :) fabiform | talk 20:21, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Rejoice in Diversity. Fan ye not the flames of holy war. –Hajor 20:23, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

My personal policy:

1. Do not edit a page simply to "correct" the spelling in either direction.
2. If the subject is related to the US, US English is preferred (EG World Trade Center).
3. If the subject is related to part of the UK/Commonwealth, British English is preferred. Same with most European topics, as they probably mostly see British English (EG British_Labour_Party).
4. If the subject is neutral (EG science, etc.), the original contributor's usage should be followed.
5. The usage should be consistent throughout the article. Niteowlneils 21:55, 5 May 2004 (UTC) (writing from the US, FWIW)

Ahem. proper English, American British English, American English. Let's not use inflammatory terminology if we can avoid it, thanks. Nohat 20:34, 2004 May 5 (UTC)

Oh, hey, yeah, or we'll start talking about them thar Britishisms that alas keep a-creepin' in! ;-) (Hajor's "Rejoice in Diversity" links to the actual policy, if you didn't already look.) Elf | Talk 21:43, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Wise words above from User:Niteowlneils. I've occasionally wondered whether it'd be worth the effort to tag articles, by means of a remmed-out comment on the first line, indicating: "This article follows the canons of UK / US / Indian / Canadian / NZ / Belizean / etc. English" -- with links to Wikipedia:Canons of UK English, etc. UK subjects would get tagged UK, US subjects would get tagged US, etc., and all the others would get tagged according to whether the article history first records "color" or "colour" (or, indeed, Taoiseach, Billabong, or Lakh). It might save some squabbling, perhaps even an unfortunate 'alas' or two. –Hajor 22:13, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

But if the "tag" is commented out, then it's only visible when the page is in Edit mode or when viewing differences. Links wouldn't show then. Better to gently point newcomers to Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Usage and spelling, IMHO, and try to keep holy wars to a minimum. - jredmond 22:46, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Hajor, I preferred your response last time this came up (so much, that I saved it!):

The use of different styles of English here isn't really a problem, so long as everyone – on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the Irish Sea, on the soft underbelly of Asia, and right round down under – learns to rejoice in diversity and respect the different ways of saying, and punctuating, the same thing. [Hajor, 2004-03-29T19:22UTC]

- IMSoP 17:56, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Please note the upshot of all this. 'Correcting' American or British spellings is not welcome in either direction except under specific circumstances, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Usage and spelling. In fact have a read of the whole thing while you're there, and perhaps we need to update the Wikipedia:tutorial to make the policy a little more upfront. Andrewa 19:22, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

I've added the issue to the "Keep in mind" page of the tutorial. Since people seemed to second my summary, I have included it, along with a link to the longer version on the Manual of Style page mentioned above. Niteowlneils 19:06, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

User:Irune Berdún

Seems to be an enthusiastic and sincere, even if minimalistic, contributor, and could use a welcome and guidance (I have only been here a short time, and am not ready to do welcomes). Niteowlneils 19:46, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

I was delighted to discover a while back that there is a page of standard greetings that you can just copy and paste one from and thereby be helpful--and look knowledgeable without in fact being! Elf | Talk 21:39, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Idea: featured stub article

I just had an idea for the main page. It seems like the articles on the main page get a lot of attention. Why not have a 'featured stub article' of the day, like the regular featured article, and hope that it gets a little attention by being in the spotlight? That might help get more info into those stub articles.

This has probably been suggested before. Thank you guys for working so hard on this project! I use it all the time.

Sound like a cute idea to me. The only problem I can forsee would be how to choose the featured stub. It's hard enough judging articles by their content, even harder trying to pick good articles by their potential content... --Woggly 14:49, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Guess what, Wikipedia:Article of the week is just in the final steps before a first article is featured for expansion. And you still have one day time to vote for your favourite candidate for the first round. andy 15:48, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Awesome! I've been waiting for this for a while. Grendelkhan 13:59, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

Links to Wikipedia

Somewhere in Wikipedia is a page about sites that link to Wikipedia but it seems I cannot find it - Nilmerg 11:45, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Do you mean Wikipedia:Friends of Wikipedia? andy 13:21, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes. Thanks. -Nilmerg 13:30, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikiproject Evolutionary biology

Wikipedia:WikiProject_Evolutionary_biology

Announcement, we've set this up. Anyone interested? Duncharris 11:30, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

David Bates - A real can of worms

Picking the missing article David Bates from the most wanted articles list to write, I've found something a bit odd. There appear to be no fewer than 8 different notable David Bates's mentioned in other Wikipedia articles and one or two non-notables. And not a single page existed for any of them.

Would anyone care to help me unravel this please ? - TB

Good luck! I used Ask Jeeves "Who is David Bates" and found Sir David Bates, the physicist and peace activist, after whom an award was named. And David Bates the poet (1809-1870). David Bates the artist, exhibited in at least one museum of modern art. And a ton more David Bates, noteworthy & not. Elf | Talk 14:51, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

There are also 4 listed here at IMDB - note that page lists some people NOT called David Bates - you only need peek at the top 4 entries. --bodnotbod 20:11, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks guys. These David Bates's are worse than tribbles, I have now collected enough notable instances to form a football team. TB 20:59, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Ouch, and I thought I was doing it tough with the 4 people I had to unravel for my James Craig disambiguation! Well, I thought there were 5 at one time, but it turned out that 2 of them were the same person. --Stormie 00:17, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

Hey, I thought it would be easy to disambiguate John Taylor.... 27 separate individuals, and months later I'm still working on de-redding it all.  :) Catherine - talk 04:42, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

A noble goal! I have filled in a stub on the Welsh rugby player John Taylor to assist your efforts.. --Stormie 06:25, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

Writing about programming languages

I think that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way that we write about programming languages. Most articles on programming languages discuss the most popular compiler/interpreter for the language, but the language is a seperate topic to the language.

For example, C Sharp programming language talks about how "C# does not compile to binary code which can be executed directly by the target computer", but that's just how some implementations of the language work. It has nothing to do with the language itself. It would be possible to make implement a C# compiler that compiles to binary code. The article is about the language, not compilers.

Java programming language says that Java code can be compiled once and then run anywhere. But this is talking about Sun and IBM's Java compilers. It isn't true for gjc, for example, which compiles to native code.

QBasic programming language says "Microsoft stopped shipping QBasic with later versions of Windows". How does Microsoft ship a programming language (as the article is clearly about from the title), an abstract concept? Whoever wrote this is talking about a single implementation of the language.

What can we do about this?

CGS 23:58, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Bah, I just wrote a great long response to this, and then my browser crashed! It boiled down to:

• C# is a Microsoft language, so Microsoft's implementation deserves most attention - just mention that other implementations are feasible that break this rule.
• similarly, Java was designed with portable execution in mind, so it makes sense to discuss this mode of operation before any of the others - which can be seen as extensions to the original concept
• as for QBasic, the article has the wrong name, is all - there is no "QBasic programming language", it is an interpretter for the same dialect of BASIC as QuickBASIC (which could also compile it), which in turn is one of hundreds of mutually incompatible BASIC dialects that have sprung up over the years, but can't really be considered languages in their own right.
  • I suggest moving it (what's with this "foo programming language" convention anyway? Isn't it breaking a wider convention on obvious naming, except where necessary for disambiguation? What else is ever going to live at Smalltalk other than the content of Smalltalk programming language?)
  • It (QBasic) should be removed from MediaWiki:List of programming languages, too: you wouldn't put gcc in there, after all.

So, essentially, the necessary changes are kind of more minor than you make out, although I see your point about the mindset and whatever. Humph, now this is almost as long as my first version - this time I'd better not crash my browser while previewing it, cos I need to get to bed. Happy editing! - IMSoP 00:57, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree with CGS's observations, but also agree with IMSoP that priority should be given to the design intentions and popular implementations of a language. Some of it could be resolved by more precise language in the articles; instead of "C# does not compile to binary code...", use "Microsoft's C# compiler does not generate machine-level object code..." or something similar. Anyhow, it definitely needs some attention. I'll try to pitch in. -- Wapcaplet 04:27, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Maybe a visit to Wikipedia:WikiProject Programming Languages would be in order? --Phil | Talk 08:24, May 7, 2004 (UTC)

Fan sites in external links

Is there a policy about listing these? Someone edited The Carpenters by adding a second fan site to the list of external links. The Carpenters Webring includes 19 sites, and I'm sure plenty of bands, movie stars, etc. have many more than that. Listing all and listing none both seem like bad ideas. I suspect that, in many cases, the selection of sites to list is based on the site owners having shown up and added their own sites, which doesn't seem like much of a policy. JamesMLane 06:42, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

• Instead of a fan site itself, I'd link to their Links page and note it as a 'list of fan sites' (I would check a couple of such links pages for the best looking one first).Daeron 07:32, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

That's a very good idea. I'll keep it in mind if I'm creating an article or adding the first fan site (although even then I might sometimes get lazy and settle for linking to a good site that I happened to know about, even if further research might uncover another that was slightly better). But what would you do in editing an article that had one or more fan sites already listed? or if, as in the case that prompted my question, someone adds a fan site link to an existing article? Ruthlessly excising all such additions seems draconian. Allowing them all to remain will clutter the external links and reward the most assiduous self-promoters. In this instance, I did nothing except to add "fan site" after the link. JamesMLane 11:43, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

• It's a potential nightmare. For entertainers one solution might be to look the name up at BBC NEWS and see the right hand panel which will show you which external link they favour. I guess other fan sites that appear, if they seem weak, should be looked at for vanity as many article entries are on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. --bodnotbod 12:18, May 7, 2004 (UTC)

"$" in http address

One of the URLs at Gift economy#External links includes a "$" as a character. Looks like the wiki can't cope with this. Is there a workaround? If not, is there a preferred way to deal with this in the article? It looks to me like a very worthwhile link, and I don't want to lose it. -- Jmabel 23:15, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

I replaced the "$" with "%24" (the hexadecimal equivalent of it's ASCII representation). Seems to have worked. - Lee (talk) 23:42, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Nice. Is there somewhere I should have been able to find this workaround, since it is obviously specific to the wiki and not generic to HTML? -- Jmabel

Wikipedia:Tutorial (External links) ;). - Lee (talk) 00:02, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Interwiki

Whatever happened to the interwiki page-move system? --Smack 19:49, 8 May 2004 (UTC) 195.5/19

Are you thinking of meta:transwiki? As far as I know, no full solution to inter-wiki moves has yet been produced - or do you mean "wasn't there supposed to be one by now?"?. I believe the finishing touches are being put to a Special:Import to go with Special:Export, but I'm not sure of the details (GetWiki includes such a feature, but under an incompatible licence, so it has to be reimplemented from scratch in the original MediaWiki software). Does that help any, or have I just confused you further? - IMSoP 21:01, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

WikiProject Historical States

Come and help out at Wikipedia:WikiProject Historical States! We're still trying to get a template developed.--Jiang 00:46, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Considering Naming Conventions

How and by whom are the "Conventions under consideration" (Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Conventions under consideration) under consideration? When and how are they adopted or abandonded? --> Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions

Fan sites in external links

-->Wikipedia talk:External links

A very cool WP: namespace page.

Wikipedia:Categories of pages needing attention is lovely and concise. That is all. +sj+

Who were the romans and what were their effects on modern life?

->Wikipedia:Reference desk

Writing about programming languages

-->Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Programming Languages

Nexuscience — A new mirror?

There is a mirror of Wikipedia at www.nexuscience.com. It doesn't appear on Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks, and I'm not sure what the procedure is for dealing with these. At a first glance there seems to be some issues with compliance. For instance, there is no list of main authors, or link back to the Wikipedia article (just to the main page).

The existance of this site came to my attention on new pages patrol when an article about the site was created: Nexuscience.

-Rholton 01:07, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Isn't the article Nexuscience a classic example of WikiSpam. I don't see any encyclopedic value, it is just an advertisement on where to buy Wikipedia on CD. Of course they are free to do so, but they don't need to promote it here. ... [five minutes later] ... Seems like it is already listed on VfD, yet only the deletion warning boilerplate wasn't added into the article. andy 10:38, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Deleting that poxy little article should not be a priority. Instead I would like to see some contact between WP and nexuscience guaranteeing WP a proportion of the income (nexu have a moral but not legal duty to do this) generated. We currently have some leverage over them; they are way in breach of the GFDL - no link to original article, no history of authors, the usual stuff.

P.S. If anyone wants WP on CD, I think I can undercut $30! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 11:06, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Actually, there is a link back to the Wikipedia article - it's just rather unhelpfully disguised as the title of the page. It also uses somewhat bizarre (presumably v. outdated) links of the form http://www.wikipedia.org/?title=article_name - works, but weird. It also seems to be very inconsistent - they've indexed pages they haven't grabbed and some of the grabs are very out of date; they even have different forms of their own header and footer depending on the age of the grab (compare [6] [7] [8]) What's more every single article has a "contents" link which points at a non-existent page. I can't imagine anyone being foolish enough to pay $30, with no information whatsoever ("Questions? Email Us" - yeah, right, cos that's how all websites give out information :-/), for a CD copy of a hideously broken website; but then, this is the Internet, I suppose... - IMSoP 13:11, 9 May 2004 (UTC) [hmm, if you set up a broken mirror, do you get 7 years bad WikiLuck or something?]

"This is the webmaster and creator of Nexuscience.com. It was created in response to my admiration of the Wikipedia itself, and was not mirrored, but directly downloaded and then re-formatted from a wikipedia dump found on Wikipedia. I had seen a reference to the idea of somebody offering the Wikipedia on CD-ROM, and so endeavored to do so. I found that Wikipedia requested that webspiders not crawl the site, and so downloaded the most recent dump I could find on Wikipedia. I admit that selling the CD may have motivated me to play with the data, but it is the playing with of the data I find intriguing. I hope to cross-reference the articles in new ways with public domain information, possibly the guttenberg project. Any suggestions on compliance with Wikipedia copyright or the GNU/FDL will be considered heavily and adhering to such rules will be a priority of the project. I'm basically doing this for fun, and would be happy to lower the price of the CD-ROM, pledge a donation of the proceeds to Wikipedia, and accept Wikipedia's comments and input on the mirror. I may be a bit more commercial in mindset than the Wikipedia concept as a whole, however I do wish to create a compliant, up to date resource of the Wikipedia, along with other GNU/FDL and public domain resources. Contact information is available on the webpage, I am not sure if I am supposed to post such information here. Any assistance or suggestions on operating Nexuscience.com to the satisfaction of Wikipedia is greatly appreciated. www.nexuscience.com"

Well, I was going to say that that's evidence of someone a lot nicer and more well-meaning than I first gave credit for, but then I spotted something odd - Nexuscience had been unlisted from Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion. Turns out, it was the same user who created the article, and who inserted the above note [9]. Special:Contributions/68.203.192.35 also shows up that they had some fun experimenting with the article while removing the VfD message, too. [10]

Now, I know, AssumeGoodFaith and all that; so there are two positions here:

• If this person is as well-meaning as they say they are, and are just lacking in experience with wikis, website design (broken links and not even an FAQ are not good signs for a commercial project), etc - and have a tendency (like I do myself sometimes) to have grand ideas that they don't actually know how to implement - then somebody needs to take them under their wing and point them to some useful resources. Wikipedia:Database download for a start (why can I never seem to find that page?), and some relevant introductions to the running of Wikipedia. Then, if this ever gets off the ground, we can come to agreement about co-operation, and donations to the Wikimedia Foundation out of the profits, etc.
• If, on the other hand, they are in fact attempting to run some kind of scam - as pointed out on MediaWiki:VfD-Nexuscience, the site's parent company sells "envelope stuffing kits" [11]; and displaying an active PayPal link charging $30 for a product that doesn't exist yet doesn't seem entirely honest to me - then we need to disassociate ourselves from them to the greatest extent possible. Indeed, if we can prove it this way round, we should inform their ISP, PayPal, etc. of abuse of services.

To be honest, I'm not sure which route we should follow, and as Jamesday once said on IRC, "we" is an ambiguous concept. But I shouldn't even be doing this (procrastination is a powerful force!), so perhaps someone should take it from here via the contact e-mail address given on the site and try and clear this up... - IMSoP 21:40, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Nexuscience — A new mirror?

Various Nexuscience issues. WikiSpam and GFDL compliance. See Wikipedia talk:Mirrors and forks

Saving

What am I doing wrong. I have started, written and saved a page. I then log out, clear the computer of cookies, and do a google search for the page I have written. Google finds it, but always opens it in the edit mode, rather than as a completed document. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong? Ragussa 13:25, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

you're not doing anything wrong. Google just doesn't update it's links that frequently. Give it a little while, and it'll show up on Google just fine. theresa knott 13:38, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

The other part of this is that Google seems to index the edit pages for non-existent articles. Don't know why, there's a meta tag that says not to. -- Cyrius|&#9998 13:47, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

Anyone have any stats on how long it takes, on average, for a newpage to get indexed, and what variables affect the time taken. The Village Pump was indexed on the 8th May (two days ago as I write), but is a very frequently updated page. Clements Markham I started on April 7 and is now #1 google hit for the name. Ranulph Fiennes, on the other hand, I started on April 13, and it appears not to have been indexed yet. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 13:51, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I believe "more worthy" pages are indexed more frequently, where "worthy" is a combination of frequently-changing, well internally connected, and well-linked-to from outside the site. Of these the last probably carries the greatest weight. The Fiennes article's version on Nationmaster has been indexed: [12] -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 14:58, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

According to Google's_FAQ_page, depending on when the page was submitted and the timing of its web crawls, it may take 6 to 8 weeks for a new page to be added to Google's index. GUllman 21:37, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

---

Link back to parent page

I think there should be a link back to the parent page, in every page; Of course, we can use the back button in our explorers. But, after editing a page and saving it, if we click 'back' it goes to the editing page again. So 'The parent article link' feature would make life a lot easier. I havent scanned the whole page to see if such a feature already exists. So, even if such a feature already exists, please make it more eye-catching. :SudhirP 05:01, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you have in mind as a "parent page". Everything links back to the Main Page. Most articles don't have a particularly obvious "parent." -- Jmabel 05:15, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Dealing with offensive content on wikipedia

I have made some suggestions about how to handle offensive content on wikipedia, it needs some peer review. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:54, 2004 May 12 (UTC)

Shearwaters - wales - Lleyn Peninsula

Hello,

My name is Alan Gray and I live in Llanbedrog, which is in the Lleyn Peninsula area of North Wales. Myself, my wife and a number of friends, as part of our retirement lifestyle have invested in a luxury power catamaran charter boat to provide opportunities for visitors to our fantastically beautiful area to see the wildlife that lives here. Our reward is watching our vistors enthuse about what they see. Their contribution (administered by the local Tourist Board), go towards the running costs of our boat.

One of the most fantastic sights we see, is the thousands of Manx Shearwaters either rafting or wheeling around above our boat on our journey to Bardsey Island.You will of course know that Bardsey is the home to 20,000 breeding Manx Shearwaters.

In our efforts to promote our business (along with the well-being of Bottle-Nosed Dolphins, Grey Seals and Manx Shearwaters), we wondered if it would be possible to feature us on your magnificent website.

Our website is www.shearwater.info (which is the name of our boat), but our URL, which I understand is much more important is: http://www.llynmarinecharters.supanet.com

Anyway, even if you can't feature us, thanks for what you do and we wish you every success for the future.

Many thanks

Alan

Hi, Alan. I'm glad you like Wikipedia. I took a look at your website and it was just up my street as I am a mad keen dolphin and whale watcher. I've bookmarked your site as a possible the next time I go to Wales. As far as a permanent "advert" for your site here, I'm not sure we can help you I'm afraid. We only link to external websites if they provide in depth material on encyclopedia subjects that we don't have ourselves. Your website is more commercial and I don't think it would be a suitable external link for an article (except possibly Lleyn peninsula).

Note that our content is free for you copy if you wish to knock up a pamphlet or anything about the wildlife in your area to give to passengers. Hope that helps. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 22:39, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

History deletion.

Is it possible to delete the whole history of one page forever? How?

WikiProject Horse breeds

WikiProject Horse breeds is a new project that needs participants. Organizations that set the standards for horse breeds are needed for the table template. Bensaccount 02:24, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Another Random British Peerage Question

If someone is named, say, John Crypt, and he receives a life peerage, he'd be known as John Crypt, Baron Crypt of London. When I link to his name, should I link John Crypt, Baron Crypt of London or Lord London? I prefer the latter, but just making sure. cryptfiend64 01:36, May 14, 2004 (UTC)

Redirect warriors

From time to time here comes a guy and starts to "fix rediects". A recent example is massive change of Transsiberian Railroad into Transsiberian Railway.

It is one thing to fix redirects from, e.g., common misspellings. It is totally meaningless IMO thing to replace a perfectly valid and almost as common name, like in the example above. In some particular case I fixed some time ago, the article author intentionally used an archaic term, only to be "fixed" by some overzealous wikipeditor.

Guys, please be reasonable. Think about other useful things you can do, like Wikipedia:New pages patrol. Mikkalai 18:25, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Offensive pictures

Offensive pictures, human genitalia, human humiliation, torture and co, are not treated along the same standards on Wikipedia; In particular, female genitalia are hidden, while male genitalia are visible or pictures of torture are visible as well, such as on Iraq prison abuse scandal. In short, double standards exist, that indicate Wikipedia is somehow censoring a simple clitoris, while showing erected penis or pictures that make many people just feel sick in disgust. I am troubled by this. I would like some opinions about this, and to know how people feel like about censorship (ie, removing images), hidding images behind links (eg, the clitoris) or just plain display potentially offending images (eg, torture). SweetLittleFluffyThing

Concur with Ant. Wikipedia shouldn't require parental guidance. Or should we really have to ask the developers for a "child lock" feature???? Even on the anatomy pages schematic drawings are of more use than outright nudity of either sex. JFW | T@lk 11:22, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I have some ideas about a separate version of WP with particular consideration for kids that wouldn't impact on other's freedoms. Some scratchy thoughts at User:Pcb21/WP for kids. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 12:27, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I have no problems with nudity of either sex whatsoever. I don't like toture pics, but then I don't like torture. I think I should be informed of such things and as the saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words.So my opinion is that they should stay in the articles. However if people want links like in the clit picture I'll not object, but we shouldn't censor. theresa knott 11:33, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Sex is one thing. Tortue is another -- to me, tortue photos just very shocking to look at. You're bound to get to sexual images sooner or later, but if you get used to seeing people bleeding or scarring dying painfully --you're desensitized, in a bad way. --Menchi 12:00, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Menchi do you think we should have the offending pictures in a seperate gallary or do you think they should be deleted all together?theresa knott 12:08, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

A disclaimer would do. So long as the disclaimer is not hidden so it doesn't...disclaim as it should. And if the person is morbid enough to check it out AFTER seeing the disclaimer. Well, they have only themselves to blame. :-) --Menchi 06:22, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

On sensitive issues we have several times in the past done whatever the wider mainstream media has done (Kobe Bryant's accuser etc). The torture article now has a link to the decapitation video, which is more than other news outlets are doing it appears. The idea of watching that personally grosses me out and it is the first time I have thought "Yes people should have the personal freedom to make their own choices, but that doesn't mean I need to provide the means for them to do so." Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 12:27, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

There was a whole, lengthy, discussion of this, right here, less than a month ago. Unfortunately, I haven't time to find where it all got archived (and can't remember if it was particularly conclusive, either) but it's out there somewhere... - IMSoP 13:16, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Profanity contains (some of the) previous discussion, and the tentative policy is at Wikipedia:Profanity. Whatever the policy is, it looks like it is not consistently enforced given the difference between boys' bits and girls' bits articles that Anthere talks about above. When there are problems of consistency like that I guess it is hard to say "Ah, yes, we've done this discussion ten times before. Here is the policy and here is the talk that got us there. Now be quiet.". Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 13:43, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

First, let me preface this by saying that I was the one who re-added the pictures to penis. Stated simply, this is not the mormon wikipedia - it's not bowdlerized, and not censored. (This same issue has come up at, to mw knowledge, John F. Kennedy assassination, brain, penis, clitoris, etc etc)

We don't go out looking for potentially offensive pictures, but if one that is a useful addition to the article, being potentially offensive should not stop us from using it. If that means we need parental guidance, so be it. The kids can handle it - the pictures in question are (IMHO) relatively tame. You can look in almost any encyclopedia and see the same things - a picture of the brain, penis, clitoris, etc etc. →Raul654 13:52, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

I would prefer having links rather than embedded photos. I'm not morally offended, but rather I find photographs of male genitalia to be just plain unpleasant to view, for whatever irrational reasons. I would still like to be able to read the penis article. Of course, it could be said "well, that's just your problem", but I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of Wikipedia readers held the same viewpoint — in which case, I would argue that omitting the in-line photos would improve the article. — Matt 14:29, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Matt that graphic pictures generally shouldn't be inline, but should be optional viewing. I disagree with the statement that reference materials commonly have such pictures. They usually just have a diagram. I think the Iraq abuse photos are OK inline at present, as it is still breaking news, and news articles I've read indicate seeing them is necessary to understand how extreme the abuse is/was[13]. When the dust has settled, they should probably go optional as well. Niteowlneils 18:50, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

If I'm not in the mood for seeing a penis I don't type "penis" into the search bar. Same w torture or womens goodies or whatever. Does anyone seriously think a child who for whatever reason has a need for researching a penis shouldn't be allowed to see a nonsexual photo of one? Medical textbooks are allowed for kids, and I and my children have reviewed texts on anatomy w a minimum of thrills and chills. Cutting peoples heads off is far less disturbing than the graphic woodcuts and photos of torture equipment from the inquisition which I studied at length as a child. Encyclopedias and other reference texts are the last place that should be censoring. Check out the pic on this page *warning, shocking classical art* ----> Pan (mythology). I think some perspective is needed here. Sam Spade 15:01, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm rarely in the mood for viewing penis photos; that's just my nature, and I don't think I'm unique. Despite this, I might want to read an article on the penis without viewing a photograph of one. I'm not advocating censorship — I don't want to stop other people, including children, from looking at photos, hence I'd favour indirection (i.e. a link to a photo). If a large number of other readers share my aesthetic reaction, then this would improve the article for many people. If most readers are OK with the photos, then keep them inline — it's a benefit to the article. — Matt 15:20, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

My point is that if your wanting to learn about the penis (or torture, or whatever) seeing a pic is an important part of that process, and should be an expected cost of researching the subject. That being said, I think having a clickable link for the squimish to avoid isn't censorous, and while I feel it unnecessary, it would seem acceptable in some cases. Sam Spade 16:38, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Right, but aside from displaying or not displaying nude pictures, is that okay to you that pictures of male genitalia are displayed (hence, not enough offensive) while pictures of females genitalia are hidden (for being very offensive) ? Is there a pov there ? SweetLittleFluffyThing

Yes, that is a matter of taste, and/or POV. Many prefer the nude female form to the males, and the wiki is vaguely democratic. And so things happen this way. Consistancy would be nice in EVERY area of the wiki, but thus far, I have found it in none ;) What to do? Maybe some more democracy will help? And if the majority wants breast, but not penis? What then? lolol... Sam Spade 17:18, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Speaking as a younger Wikipedia user, I think there are many of us out here who feel the same way I do: optional viewing, please, via links. Anyone agree? Rissa of the saiya-jin 19:16, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

No, I disagree - first, it's a slippery slope as to what is 'objectionable' - someone was arguing earlier that the graphic pictures on human brain would be objectionable to vetrans. Second, putting it in link for essentially buries it, which is censorship in itself. Third, it takes away from the utility of the article. →Raul654 19:48, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

One: yes, there's a scale of "objectionableness", but it's not necessary to pander to every objection. We should, I believe, attempt to guage what might be unpleasant to large numbers of people, and act accordingly. The chief mechanism for this should be common sense. Two: Would you argue that a "Wikipedia contains spoilers" message is censorship? I do not believe that giving the reader a choice about whether to see a photograph is censorship. Three: Giving some readers a sense of distaste also takes away from the utility of the article. There's no loss of information for moving a picture to a link, just convenience. We should judge whether this loss of convenience is worth the aesthetic gain for a subset of readers. — Matt

Agree with Raul654, taking pictures about subject X out of any article deptives the article of something, also agree with Sam Spade that people who don't want to see a picture of a penis really shouldnt be looking for one in the search. I do not agree with the external linking of pictures, it takes something away from the rest of us because we can't print the article proprely without going through great trauble. Also an article is just more pretty with inline pictures than extenral, i think everyone agrees on this because we have inline pictures everywhere as opposed to external ones, it can be argued that it is nothing but a violation of NPOV ot be removing valid content from an article just because you are not comfortable with it. I have written down some thoughts on the issue at this page on meta and would appriciate some input. However until something like that proposed system is in place we should not gutting articles left and right at the loss of other readers just because we think it's a taboo subject, an encyclopedia should be timeless, not reflect the taboos of the time. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:11, 2004 May 12 (UTC)

People may want to read an article about a topic without seeing a picture of it. Other examples: menstruation, anal sex, Coprophagia... — Matt 09:15, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

My concern is that putting some of the more offensive images (Goatse, pictures of dead bodies, etc) up violates NPOV. That is to say, since there is usually a substantial controversy over the appropriateness of showing these images, it is POV for us to show them. We should offer links on a factual ground, but in the case of really controversial and debatable images, to display them is to say that it's OK to display them. We should remain neutral - those who feel it's right to view these things should be able to. Those who feel it should be hidden should not have to. This is the best NPOV compromise available. Snowspinner 00:15, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

I would draw a strong distinction between "shock" images of torture or execution, and clinical, non-shocking, non-sexual anatomical pictures. Absolutely, the article on "penis" should show a picture of a penis. Why shouldn't an eleven year old girl see a picture of a penis if she's curious about the human body? Are we really going to deny her access to that information because it offends some people's moral scruples?

The article on foot contains inline images. So does the one on Ear. There is no intellectually honest reason for excluding one from penis or clitoris, or the rest. Really, a penis or a clitoris is a lot like a foot or an ear, except that a lot more people are curious about the "sexual" organs because they don't happen to have them.

It's the job of an encyclopedia to "shine light into the darkness" on these issues and say, "look, there it is, a clitoris. Now what was the big deal?"

- Thparkth 20:07, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Do not forget to vote and give your opinion at Talk:Nick Berg, where on ongoing poll is going on, over the keep/remove/inlinelink severed head of Nick Berg. This is a poll to try to determine a new policy on the topic of potentially offending images. Thank you for all your comments :-) SweetLittleFluffyThing 05:33, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Fundamental inequalities between races in Wikipedia treatment

What follows is a discussion that was erroneously started on the wrong page - the issue was first raised by User:66.185.84.80. Please note that the IP 66.185.84.80 is a shared Canadian IP that is being used here by the banned user User:Paul Vogel. <- BCorr

• I am not Paul Vogel, I don't even know who he is. Before a week ago, I rarely ever visited Wikipedia beyond random reads on topics of interest during surfing. I think it shows bad judgement of you to ban me for unfounded suspicions of being another user, and right as I was in an debate too. I think you are trying to find an excuse to censor me. I demand an apology. - 66.185.84.80

66.185.84.80's issue: I wish to have this issue addressed by more people. For it is clear, when surfing the various race-related articles such as Jews, African-American, Blacks, Caucasian, Whites, and racism, that articles involving the issue of race does not at all give even approximately equal treatment to the various races and ethnicities. In fact, White people seem to consistantly get the deep end of this. Specifically, I bring up that,

• a) Articles about the White race/people discusses the existance and validity of race in disparaging terms, while articles about non-White races does the exact opposite: they contain a lot of encouragement, affirmation, and information about history, accomplishments, and inequalities faced. I submit to you that had this been the other way around, then comparisons to Nazi-Germany and allegations of the grossest of racism would not have been far away.
• b) All articles writing about racism utterly fail in also presenting racism against Whites as an phenomenon of significance, when many public figures and books make it clear that racism is a two-way thing, and that hatred against Whites is just as rampant, if not even more so, than hatred from Whites towards other races. Further, modern institutionalized racism against Whites is not discussed as racism like institutionalized racism against other races immediately is.

Thank you. Please reply with your opinion on this.

I am uncertain exactly what you're going for here. Whites does not appear to suggest that race does not exist, though it does bring up the opinion that some have that white is not a racial category. Caucasian race is a little more suggestive that race doesn't exist - I think that article is in need of a rewrite. That said, half of African-American is made up of criticism of that term, so I have trouble viewing this as systemic racial bias.

Furthermore, Affirmative action discusses many of the issues of racism against whites, as does Reverse discrimination.

I do not think that the problem you are describing exists. Snowspinner 22:21, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, the term African-American is under criticism, but that is because the term itself is thought of to be invalid in that it does not account for White Africans, or Black non-Africans. The Black race is not, and should not, be said to not exist, or be spoken of in disparaging terms. Further, there are a variety of pages under the Black issue, dealing with civil-rights leaders, problems they have faced, et cetera. Another point you bring up are the specific pages of "Reverse Discrimination" (a false term, racism is racism regardless of race) and "Affirmative Action." Giving note that "some say this or that" in "Reverse Discrimination" while ignoring to give racism against Whites equal treatment in racism is not fair at all. Why can't we just treat everybody the same, and allow both PC and non-PC truths under the main articles of a discussion? Thanks for the feedback. - 66.185.84.80

The problem is that "racism", as a word, is generally used in one sense, and if Wikipedia were to use it in a different sense, Wikipedia would become unintelligible. We are bound to the meanings of words, and to generlaly accepted usages and concepts. Racism against whites isn't talked about very much, and few consider it to be racism as such. I'm not sure what white civil rights leaders you'd want represented. There aren't that many. As for Black, the section of that on race suggests the term to be as broad and problematic as Whites does the term "white". Again, I can't find any real instances of what you're talking about. Perhaps you'd like to be more specific. Snowspinner 22:35, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I disagree with your statement about how we should avoid writing about a simple truth simply because current society generally suppresses its discussion. I am speaking of course about the fact that racism is racism, and that Whites are targeted just as much, if not even more, than other races when it comes to getting the shitty end of the stick because of their race (not to mention the "normal" racism like the common use of words such as "cracker," "whitebread" in negative applications). Also, racism have a definition, and it does not depend upon the race of the victim, so your assertion that racism should discuss only racism against non-Whites because that's how you think the word is understood at large, is problematic for me. Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, I submit that we should write about all that falls under the term and its definition without trying to promote any political agendas by hiding the "bad truth" under a different, whitewashed name, in some rarely linked page. What is currently going on is gravely offensive to me as a White person, and I would understand how it felt for people of other races if the situation was reversed. I think that being racist against a group which does not have strong political pressure groups advocating their rights and wellbeing is just as bad as being racist to any other race. - 66.185.84.80

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and ought reflect things as they are. It is not a force for social reform. It should not uncover hidden and suppressed truths. Racism is not used in the context you're describing it as in any general usage. This may be offensive to you, but Wikipedia is not the place for that reform to begin. Enlighten the world as to white racism, then Wikipedia will change to reflect that. But do not try to enlighten the world as to an unrealized evil through Wikipedia. Snowspinner 22:56, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I am not talking about dedicating an important page to some obscure issue noone cares about. I am talking about excerting some basic objectivity, and write of the truth as it is about a major issue, instead of looking to official western political dogma as the only truth that must be included in an encyclopedia entry for a term with a clear definition. But I am curious, are you wholeheartedly convinced that racism against Whites is not racism, while it is racism in situations where racial roles have been reversed? And do you think that if the government had an official and consistant policy of getting less-qualified Whites into positions of education and career ahead of non-Whites, that this should be part of racism? If so, why not for Whites as well? Why not excert equality and objectivity here? It's the same thing, and saying that racism isn't bad anymore when commited against Whites is utterly racist and meanspirited in itself. - 66.185.84.80

There are five paragraphs in Racism on reverse racism. I continue to be unsure what you're asking for that isn't already in Wikipedia. Snowspinner 23:15, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

User:Hyacinth/Full disclosure. First let me note that, 66.185.84.80, you almost seem to be advancing an anti-affirmative action agenda. At the very least, it seems that you disagree with affirmative action as it now stands (which is fine). It seems that, 66.185.84.80 and Snowspinner, you are both talking about different things. Snowspinner, Wikipedia should indeed reflect reality, which includes not only terms and their usage, but the reality/irreality described and not described by those terms. I do agree with you that racism is usually understood to mean racism against non-white peoples in America. Wikipedia, like many things, has a strong pervasive American bias, and this seems to be one incidence of that. I, at the moment, do not agree with 66.185.84.80 that racism is mostly against white peoples. The burden of proof is on you here, and if you have sources which argue this please cite your sources. Also, feel free to add a paragraph to reverse discrimination regarding objections to the term itself. This too would be greatly improved by citing sources, and I imagine that someone has been critical of the term itself. More importantly, I hope someone has directed you to Wikipedia's policy on neutrality: Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. Hyacinth 02:03, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

As a note, I do think that cases like Zimbabwe should be added to the racism article. Preferably by someone with more than a passing familiarity with the situation. However, I'm unconvinced that Wikipedia should try to take on the rather awesome task of uncovering the reality hidden by the limitations of language. Not that this isn't a concern of mine. I do critical theory. Just that I don't think Wikipedia is the place to launch those concerns - at least not on a level beyond acknowledging the degree to which they're already being discussed. I remind all involved of the policy against original research. Snowspinner 04:15, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Hyacinth, you say that I "almost seem" to be "advancing an anti-affirmative action agenda" when the truth of racism in "Affirmative Action" is merely another point to my above complaint. Per the mainstream definition of racism (different treatment based on race), "Affirmative Action" definitely is racism (and that's a hard fact, not bias), institutionalized at that, so I am of course against it. But, I am not trying to advance any agenda except that of taking a second look at pages that are purposely leaving out facts just because politically correct "thought-nazis" wouldn't be comfortable unless only what they are activists for is known. Some basic objectivity is all I ask for. I don't think you need to have a mind that can't rationalize itself for or against something in order to value and practice objectivity and justice in a cooperative work on what essentially is meant to be a book of fact.

Without accusing you of inserting your views on things that are meant to be neutral, may I remind you (since you reminded me) that you, according to your own writing on the "Full Disclosure" page, are highly biased? For example, you dispense with the scientifically correct term "homosexual" (this describes the phenomenon of being attracted to one's own gender in pure NPOV) in favor of the contemporary fad term "gay" (happy), and you also let it be known that you are an activist for a number of causes, including "Affirmative Action" (pro). I hope you see my point instead of taking it as an insult. I am trying to illustrate that all people have biases one way or the other, otherwise they wouldn't have a sane brain. And at the same time, we can all work together to maintain neutrality and non-spin in a factbook.

As for the levels or racism one way or the other, we can't possibly measure it, because you and Snowspinner have rather special definitions of racism that means that it is only racism when done against non-Whites. When done against Whites, you don't think of it as racism anymore, not unless it is *very* explicit like the ethnic-economical cleansing in Zimbabwe.

- 66.185.84.80

You misunderstand my point. I don't claim that anti-White sentiment isn't racism. I claim that it isn't existant. Snowspinner 06:19, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Indeed you do, because of your definition. That's exactly my point. You claim anti-White sentiment isn't existant even when Mugabe is on a mission to clean his land of White devils, the US government makes schools and places of work give you less points if you are White, and crime stats shows that White people are highly victimized in hate-crimes as well. And the best part is, you bravely admit to it. - 66.185.84.80

I have already indicated support for including Zimbabwe. I cannot help but notice that Affirmative Action has not spelled the end of whites getting better paying jobs, better standards of living, better education, and fewer arrests than other races, making me wonder how meaningful getting "fewer points" if you're white is. That said, articles on Affirmative Action are more than amply balanced to account for the opposing POV, so I'm not sure what your issue is. As for crime statistics, I'm going to go ahead and question that without some further evidence. Note that none of this has to do with a definition of racism, and all of it has to do with actually looking at the alleged instances of anti-White sentiment you're citing. Snowspinner 06:39, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Of course you will "question" the existence of anti-White hate crime. You are completely shut off to the idea that non-Whites are racists too, perhaps because you are one(?). To put it in your own words, "I don't claim that anti-White sentiment isn't racism. I claim that it isn't existant". You aren't particularly open-minded if that is the style you are going for.

But let's prove it for you then. Here is the second result on Google for the term "hate crime statistics": http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hatecm.htm

Well, the statement crime stats shows that White people are highly victimized in hate-crimes as well has been proven already, but I'd like to note that this is a 1995 edition, while some of the ones I have seen earlier from more recent years showed that Whites were in fact the #1 hate-crime victim. And I'm not even going to dwell into how many cases might be reported as standard crimes because of people with the same mindset as you, who refuse to file hate-crimes against Whites as anything other than a normal non-racially motivated crime.

Additionally, you defend yourself by saying that you don't see how "Affirmative Action" can be that bad for Whites. According to fact (and even the majority in society), it is still racism (mainstream definition="different treatment based on race"). Now, whether you see that racism as good, bad, progressive, cool, or evil, is a completely other thing. - 66.185.84.80

The mainstream definition of racism, going from dictionary.com, which can usually be trusted in its lousiness to totally fail to reflect any subtlties in the usage of the word, is discrimination based on race - not merely different treatment. As for your FBI numbers, come on - look at them. Think about the numbers per capita. Consider the number of whites there are to commit hate crimes against, compared to the number of blacks, and then tell me with a straight face that those numbers point to any sort of institutionalized or substantive anti-white trend in America. Look at the arrest rates, and compare them to regular arrest rates by race. Put the numbers in some context, and they immediately show a trivial amount of anti-white crime per capita. About .00067% of whites were victims of a hate crime, compared to .011% of blacks. In other words, blacks are six times more likely to be victims of hate crimes. Nationally, whites make up 37.3% of incarcerations, compared to 60.1% for blacks. In terms of hate crimes, whites make up 53.2% of those arrested, whereas blacks only make up 26.7%. So, no, the statistics don't give you any real support for a claim of institutionalized or substantive anti-white racism in the United States when you actually look at the numbers. As for Affirmative Action, I point out again that criticisms of Affirmative Action exist in the relevent articles. What are you really looking for here? Snowspinner 07:26, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Now you are straying way of course because you lost the argument, and you are displaying typical trolling behaviours. You claimed that there exists no anti-White sentiment whatsoever. I claimed that Whites are in fact also a targetted group in hate crime statistics. I proved my claim right and your claim wrong off-hand, and it took me two seconds. You saying that Whites being more populous than other races is the reason - a surplus of "targets" that is - doesn't change a thing about that. You don't even consider that a surplus of "targets" also is a surplus of "offenders," what a scientific method you use! ;) - 66.185.84.80

No, what I demonstrated is that, compared to their share of the population, anti-White hate crimes are completely negligible, and cannot be taken to be evidence of any sort of existing sentiment in the population at large. It's hardly a controversial scientific method to note that, when dealing with uneven populations (such as racial ones) raw numbers don't give you nearly as much data or information as rates and percentages do. As for the targets/offenders split, look again. When I move to talking about offenders, I switch to percentage makeup of prison populations. In other words, whites make up a disproportionately large number of perpetrators of hate crimes compared to the general criminal population.

But, however entertaining I find undermining bad use of statistics, you've yet to answer my main question, asked in most of my comments. Many of the articles in question already contain mentions of exactly what you want. Affirmative action and reverse discrimination are discussed in racism as well as in Affirmative action. Articles on blacks call into question the definition of that racial group just as much as Whites does. Hate crime doesn't mention race one way or another, except to list it as a category of hate crime. You have yet to offer any specific examples of the deficiencies you claim exist in Wikipedia. And, honestly, the more I look at articles, the more I think your view has already gotten itself more representation on Wikipedia than it does in most sources.

Please - what concrete things are you looking for here? Snowspinner 14:18, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia rules for External links?

Greetings.

After doing somewhat heavy contributing to the Wikipedia for some time now, I've started wondering if there are any generally agreed rules for what kinds of external links should be placed in articles. I notice what I consider to be junk links here and there, but although this is often a result of my personal opinion, I sometimes feel more objective in my complaint.

Besides having an obvious rule of relevance to the article, I would like to submit that there should be other ways to evaluate sites that are linked to.

On my web sites, I have what I call a "visitor-friendliness" policy (for lack of a better term). I don't link to sites that exhibit the following aspects:

• Displaying popup, pop-under, float-over, interstitial (intermediate page before continuing to requested link), content-obscuring or overly distracting advertisements; these kinds of ads are intrusive and take control away from the visitor.
• Requiring registration before being able to view content in its entirety.
• Using ActiveX controls, which are insecure, proprietary and effectively only work on Internet Explorer browsers.
• Using Java applets, which usually exhibit poor performance.
• Hosting by GeoCities or similar services that force in advertisements that effectively cheapen the site.
• Under construction.
• Frequently unavailable.
• Containing text that is difficult to read (e.g., fonts too small).
• Containing only a farm of links.
• Using background music or heavy graphics.
• Showing Flash or other video (with the exception of animated .gif's) on the main front page; showing it on an introductory page is OK if it's possible to bypass it and bookmark a main front page without video.

Now, I admit that my list may be overly restrictive for Wikipedia's purposes, but I offer the list as a starting point for discussion.

Any thoughts?

Stevietheman 18:24, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree 99%. I try to follow the same rules (I don't actively check for ActiveX, but since I mostly use Mozilla, I probably wouldn't link to such a site). I would only make an exception when such a site is the only relevant one available. Most, if not all, the external links I have added are either: the official site for the company/person, a government site, or a leading news media site (unfortunately, some news sites (EG cnn.com) occasionally include Flash ads). Niteowlneils 19:05, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Interestingly enough, this came up on Talk:Current events a while back, with respect to linking news articles that required registration to view. Some people really couldn't see what the fuss was about, but it was generally considered best to link to equivalents without such drawbacks where possible, but not to exclude links simply because they needed (free) registration, and not to go out of one's way to hunt down alternatives.

I think the same can apply to most of your other criteria: where there is an unnecessary but irritating "feature" of the target site, and an alternative is available, we should prefer the alternative. Where a piece of flash, Java, or even ActiveX content [does anyone actually use ActiveX? I've never spotted anything broken because of not having it...] is interesting in its own right, a note/warning next to the link might be helpful. But in general, we shouldn't go too far in ostracising sites just because their revenue model or design philosophy is different to ours.

One point where I'd disagree with you in your list of negative aspects, by the way, is "Containing only a farm of links". I think such pages serve a very valuable purpose in collecting together information (page locations) that you'd otherwise have to do yourself from scratch - indeed, since Wikipedia is not a link repository, these are actually sometimes the best sites to link to, since they can provide far more depth of information than one "dead-end" link. Broadly speaking, I think I agree with your points, though. - IMSoP 19:24, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

If indeed there is something notably "unusual" about a linked site, then notice should be given in text accompanying the link (examples: "requires Java", "100MB PDF file", "requires registration"). - Bevo 19:38, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I skimmed a couple of the CE talk archives, and didn't find the discussion, but from IMSoP's summary, and the conversation here, I decided there was enuf consensus to address the issue briefly at Wikipedia:External links (most of the articles it links to seem to just be "how to"s, with out much policy guidance). If I've been too bold, someone can delete it. If someone thinks of better wording, feel free--I'm feeling a bit rushed as I have to catch a plane in a few hours and still have things to do before I go (and yet, here I am on WP :) ). Niteowlneils 21:49, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I think it's a great start. I'm not sure at this point if more should go there. Part of me wants to see extensive guidelines, but I can also see how that could easily go too far. -- Stevietheman 22:42, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I was tempted to, also, but I've added a note about my paragraph (to which I have added pay sites) to Wikipedia_talk:External_links, which also talks about my reasoning to keep it fairly brief, and let the broad goal speak for itself. Niteowlneils 23:58, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I just discovered that some of my concerns are addressed in Wikipedia_talk:External_links. -- Stevietheman 22:42, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

gold sovereign

  What year did the Bank of England remove the gold sovereign as part of the every day currency needed to pay for articles, clothing, etc.

http://freescotlandparty.org

Free Scotland Party started on 01/01/2004. Independence from the UK, Independence from the EU.

acetone

how much activating energy's acetone?

Guidance?

I'm not clear on the custom for Wikipedians to give others critiques/guidance/corrections. User Olivier seems to be a valuable, prolific contributor generally, but seems to have moved the constellation content via cut and paste from Taurus to Taurus (constellation). Also, everything that pointed to just Taurus (including a msg) still points there (I've been working on updating the links this morning). Would it make sense for someone that can, rv taurus, del Taurus (constellation), then Move this page? Note, I have no problems with the end result, I just have concerns about how it was done. Niteowlneils 16:55, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

My approach starts the same as yours, I check the users contributions to see what they're like. So far, everyone has been a good solid contributor. So, what I've then done is to spell out my concerns about the change on their talk page and just say "I would approach it this way, I see you've done a,b & c. Can I ask why you've done that?" If I disagree with the reason I say, "hmmm... how can we resove this amicably?" So far it's worked well. And on one occasion, once it was explained to me, I could see they'd done the right thing. --bodnotbod 17:31, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

I deleted Taurus (constellation), which had 1 edit by Olivier. I then moved the Taurus page, including the talk page there. I replaced the new redirect from Taurus with the last disambiguity edit from Taurus (constellation), and then reverted the Taurus (constellation) to the last edit with the full text. I think the situation is fixed now, loosing only one edit when Taurus (constellation) was copied by Olivier, and another two edit histories of the disambig page are now under Taurus (constellation). I will drop Olivier a note soon. Happy editing -- Chris 73 | Talk 02:59, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Saving

New pages not showing up in Google: Wikipedia:External search engines

Upcoming Slashdot invasion (probably)

Someone's posted an article to Slashdot on our various articles on Quantuum physics:

There is a massive update on Strings Theory in Wikipedia : AdS/CFT, Andrew Strominger, Cumrun Vafa, Ashoke Sen, Juan Maldacena, Mirror symmetry, String field theory, Holonomy, Heterotic string, Closed string, Open string, F-theory, Background independence, Higgs mechanism, Conifold, Tachyon condensation, Einsteinian manifold, Second superstring revolution. Now you can easyly tell Open string from Closed string at last."

It might get a little busy here, assuming that the article goes through...
James F. (talk) 11:18, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Slashdot is past its prime (see e.g. Alexa), and the slashdot effect is overstated, particularly by slashdot readers, who believe everything they read on slashdot. The 200,000 articles slashdotting barely registered more than a blip here. So don't panic :) Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 11:30, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

It made it on to the Science section of Slashdot, but I doubt it will be put on the main page of Slashdot. So it probably isn't going to attract as many visitors. -- Popsracer 12:38, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Page moves logged?

Is there a log of which pages have been moved where, and who has moved them? -- ChrisO 10:21, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

There isn't a log, but the most recent page move is saved in the article's history. For example, if you move [[page 1]] to [[page 2]], the history of [[page 1]] would say "moved to page 2" and the previous history would reside at [[page 2]]. However, if you then move [[page 2]] back to [[page 1]], there is no record that page 1 was ever moved. It will look like the page was originally at [[page 2]] and then moved to [[page 1]]. Angela. 23:56, May 11, 2004 (UTC)

Safty Concern

Wow! I just read a short artical on the toxisity of Colchicine. My Doctor has just, prescribed an 0.6mg dose for an undiegnosed case of Gout, I have had for 8 weeks, now. I'm to take 1 tablet every 1 to 2 hrs., until I can no longer, tolerate the diarrhea or nausea. Is this common practice? Thanks! R.L. Sidowey PS Please forgive the fumbling, but I can't find a submition button.

Wikipedia does not give medical advice. If you are uncomfortable about the treatment your doctor has prescribed for you, arrange another consultation and/orseek a second medical opinion. --Robert Merkel 13:24, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

WikiProject Horse breeds

Wikipedia:WikiProject Horse breeds is a new project that needs participants. Organizations that set the standards for horse breeds are needed for the table template. Bensaccount 02:24, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Neutral point of view (NPOV)

Neutral point of view (NPOV) is the official, non-negotiable law established by Jimbo Wales. I think it is a crucial Wikipidia policy, but I don't see much attention being paid to it. Are my search skills poor? Are there reams and reams of discussion, but I haven't found them? I support the policy, I think it is an excellent policy, and I think it needs more exposure. I don't think it is a policy that is intuitive. One has to study and learn it. Have most Wikipidians done that? I think not. Worse, I am afraid people don't even agree on what it means, and many think it means to do exactly what it really is prohibiting. Therefore, to help generate some interest in wider publicity, as well as agreement on what the NPOV policy is, I have written a short story (moved the page and fixed the link --Jiang 23:03, 9 May 2004 (UTC)) that hopefully will generate some talk. I invite all people who edit on Wikipidea to read it. I hope you find it entertaining as well. ChessPlayer 22:33, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Many Wikipedians have heard of it, but many Wikipedians are humans and can fail to adhere to NPOV at times. It's up to you to either discuss what you feel is POV on the talk pages (where all the discussion usually goes), or you could try to change it yourself if the issues are not explosively controversial. Dysprosia 22:52, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Your story is in the article namespace. Can someone move it to the users subpages? I don't know how that's done, and I'm assuming that the user doesn't either. --bodnotbod 22:57, May 9, 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to move a page. --Jiang 23:03, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for moving it. I didn't understand what the colon did or that I had created the page in the wrong namespace. I thought it was in my user space.ChessPlayer 23:13, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

The story shows a grasp of the essentials of NPOV, but as your travails at Talk:FOX News and Talk:Jesus over the last few days have surely proved, it can get a lot more subtle and complex than that in the real world. Thank goodness only a tiny fraction of articles have these in depth problems. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 00:15, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Actual disputes can be more complex, there is no doubt; also, they can be mired in bias and partisanship based on specific issues. I think it best to not link to real world disputes here, as that may drag partisanship into the discussion on this page of NPOV. ChessPlayer 00:44, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I want to again repeat my observation: Wikipidians for the most part do not know the NPOV policy. ChessPlayer 05:44, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I think there is a distinction between a Neutral Point of View and a Point of View Which Nobody on Earth Disagrees With. Offhand, I can't think of a single fact that could possibly be posted which some one somewhere wouldn't dispute the truth of. And that one person will claim that everyone else is just advocating their own personal opinion. MK 05:35, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Unrelated contents

What should we do, if we see the contents of a page are unrelated to the subject? For example, in the farsi section, the page under "philosophy" is just christian propaganda. Should it be moved to "Christianity"? "Propaganda"? deleted?

You have a number of options, though you've made my task harder by not naming the article. I've been to farsi and there's no philosophy section so you must mean some other article.

Anyyway:

• Edit the article yourself.
• Mention your concerns on the articles Talk Page (click "discuss this topic" on the article page).
• List the article on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention.
• If you think the whole article stinks, list it on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion.

The first option is the most admired. --bodnotbod 22:45, May 9, 2004 (UTC)