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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump.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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note: new blueblox

There's a new bluebox at MediaWiki:US currency and coinage. It's my first one, so I'm probably missing a lot of style thing. If folks would like to fix it up and make it better, I'd appreciate it. Also, the pages it appears in---I didn't know whether to put it at the top or the bottom, so I generally picked the bottom. Is this policy? Grendelkhan 16:43, 2004 May 9 (UTC)

Looks nice. The bottom of the page is the normal location for blue boxes like this. -- Arwel 22:42, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

The names of diseases: policy?

There is a wide gap between lay terms and doctors' jargon when it comes to the naming of diseases and medical procedures. Several doctors on Wikipedia (see WikiProject Clinical medicine) feel that articles should be named by their scientific names, rather than the lay terminology (myocardial infarction instead of heart attack).

Arguments:

• Many of these terms appear to denote something that they're not (heartburn does not affect the heart, nor has it anything to do with burning);
• Some terms are imprecise: heart attack does not specify the nature of the attack (infarction) nor does it mention the fact that the heart muscle (myocardium) is affected;
• Some terms are bound by geographical constraints; diseases have different names in different communities and countries;
• People might actually learn something about medical terminology, especially if the redirects are in place and the page explains that myocardium is heart muscle and that infarction means dying tissue due to lack of blood.

See also Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions#Medicine, where I've raised this point and received a deafening silence.
JFW | T@lk 15:50, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Why not name it to the scientific name and have a redirect of the lay name? RickK 22:40, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, RickK seems to have the best solution there. The trouble with using medical terminology alone is that it will render the articles invisible to anyone but doctors. The person suffering from the condition who may come here for information won't find them. --bodnotbod 23:00, May 9, 2004 (UTC)

I suggest that you'll need to preemptively create redirects to the common names for diseases, otherwise well-intentioned users will inevitably come along and create new articles using the common names. No biggie and it happens all the time here, but just thought I'd mention it. You might even want to create some sort of cross-referencing index page to help keep track of things (also helpful to use the Related Changes function to see updates made to the articles on the list). older≠wiser 23:52, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

RickK: User:Ksheka tried moving heart attack to myocardial infarction but there was no consensus on the issue because "Wikipedia policy" was supposed to be that lay terminology is employed. My aim is to see if this should indeed be/remain policy, or that we can follow your suggestion and employ judicious redirecting. The Wikiproject Clinical medicine policy is to keep pages aimed at the general readership, only escalating the difficulty to address technical issues (e.g. what cellular molecules participate in the development of atherosclerosis in patients who smoke?)
JFW | T@lk 09:10, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

It should work to have --using heart attack as an example-- an article in layman's terms in that location, and one in medical terms filed under myocardial infarction, each with reference to the other at the top of the article. (Is this discussion redundant?) I don't think redirecting is the answer here. ;Bear 01:01, 2004 May 11 (UTC)

Loughall Martyrs

See Loughall Martyrs

1. The name of this article may be POV; but what is a better one? 2. Although this is a sensitive subject, I think the article generally is pretty NPOV. 3. Where do we go for advice on POV disputes? Duncharris 10:56, May 9, 2004 (UTC)

I have renamed the article to a hopefully less POV name. -- The Anome 13:23, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

Nexuscience — A new mirror?

Various Nexuscience issues: WikiSpam, GFDL compliance, and on-going issues over whether this project is in good faith or a scam. Please continue discussion at Wikipedia talk:Mirrors and forks#Nexuscience.

User:24.232.198.99

Maybe I'm just suffering a brain-freeze, but I can't figure out what to do with this IP[1] that's uploading a bunch of lyric articles to only moderately noted songs. I don't want to bite the newbie by simply listing them on VfD, but as far as I know, these articles aren't really appropriate. Niteowlneils 00:08, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

You delete them (put msg:delete on them) as lyrics are usually copyrighted, and they're not encyclopedic anyway in most cases. Dori | Talk 00:18, May 9, 2004 (UTC)

Actually, some people may argue that at least one of these should be listed on VFD to set a precedent. Dori | Talk 00:26, May 9, 2004 (UTC)

Protocol for Alternate Definitions

I am putting together a page for Marie-Louise von Franz and have found that some tangential topics do not exist. To this end, I would like to create them. As an example, there is an analytical psychology term amplification. There is an extant page for this term, however it is only a generalised definition. What is the protocol for adding a specific alternate definition?

2. Amplification: Expansion of dream content through personal associations and comparison of dream images with images from mythology, religion, and so on, which resemble the dream content. This concept can also be applied to myths and faerie tales.

Would something like this be appropriate?

this is discussed in more detail (on policy, technology, and practice) than you could ever want in Wikipedia:Disambiguation -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:36, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

It's one approach. Another might be for an article which defines terms used in analytical psychology (to avoid multiple small articles which have little chance of being expanded): you might include individuation, anima, animus, ego (in its use in analytical psychology as opposed to psychoanalysis), self, collective unconscious, complex, archetype, etc... though most of these seem to already have their own (short) articles - they might perhaps be constructively grouped together in one article, with redirects to it from each of the terms. - Nunh-huh 22:42, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

HTML to wikitext converter

There are a few out there, including Magnus Manske's C++ version and David Wheeler's version in C, but I decided to create my own HTML to wikitext converter anyway. It differs from others in that:

1. it's got a web-based interface (http://diberri.dyndns.org/html2wiki.html)
2. it's in object-oriented Perl, as HTML::WikiConverter
3. it shouldn't break on considerably broken HTML code (though I don't know the exact threshold for other converters)
4. it has some nice image-handling DWIMmery (read more at the URL above)

When I get a chance, I'll upload the Perl module to CPAN, but for now I figured I'd share the tool with the WP community. Please comment on my talk page. --Diberri | Talk

Combining one of these converters with Epoz could be a good start for WYSIWYG editing (See meta:WYSIWYG editor). -- Gabriel Wicke 01:01, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

FWIW, I've uploaded the module to CPAN. It's available at my CPAN author page. --Diberri | Talk 00:38, May 11, 2004 (UTC)

foo Day

I think for greater community spirit we should hold certain theme days, or days where people concentrate on certain subjects that need attention, for example we could have 'fix stub day' or a day where we would all fix stubs, ( of course participation would be voluntary. There could be a page where people would nominate what days to hold and what subjects to consentrate on, it could be anything, like gathering information about a tricky subject or cleaning up some pages.

Sorry in advance if this has been brought up before. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:02, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

I think it's a great idea. Perhaps have a signup page such as Wikipedia:Flying squad or Wikipedia:Gala days which would list supporters and keep a calender of such days, past and future. Those interested could then watch the page, and discuss ideas for new Gala Days on its talk page.

One severe caution, we would want to make sure that there were clear guidelines as to exactly what was to be done, and have plenty of review of these by some old hands. Done in this way, newbies participating would learn a lot. But without this preparation, there's the prospect of many hands all at once creating the same sorts of problems for admins and developers to sort out... Aaaargh!!!! It's enough to make you want to bang your head against your monitor to see which breaks first. Andrewa 20:26, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, there would have to be clear guidelines about what specifically would have to be done, --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:54, 2004 May 11 (UTC)

Probably worth mentioning Wikipedia:Article of the week here. --bodnotbod 12:05, May 7, 2004 (UTC)

This is almost at the top of village pump now which means it will be chopped off soon, any ideas where this discussion could be continued? Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:55, 2004 May 13 (UTC)

Copyvio clarification

When a site doesn't state copyright status explicitly, do we assume it's public domain, or do we assume it's copyrighted. Most of the articles created by this user [2] seem to be 90-100 percent copies from a couple web sites [www.healing-arts.org/tir/frank.htm][www.tir.org/metapsy/issues.htm] but neither seems to have any statement RE copyright status, so I don't know if they are a problem. (This posting is mostly for my education, and just happens to use these article I just found as examples.) Niteowlneils 21:57, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Unless the author explicitly state otherwise, any work like that is copyrighted, and not eligiblge for inclusion "off the bat" - we'd have to speak to the webpage author. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 22:13, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Read what Pete says carefully: It's not a matter of our assuming it is under copyright. In the US, it is under copyright in the absence of a specific act making it PD. --Jerzy(t) 14:40, 2004 May 14 (UTC)

Just to amplify this--this is true not only for the U.S. but for all countries that have directly or indirectly acceded to the Berne Convention (which for all practical purposes is most countries of the world). In general, you should assume that a work is copyrighted unless it is from a public domain source (such as the U.S. federal government) or the author has expressly transferred copyright to the public domain (or made it available under GFDL). older≠wiser 15:06, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

WikiProject : Gastropods

• WikiProject Gastropods is up and running. This huge project is an offshoot from the WikiProject : Tree of Life. Contributions from new collaborators and enthusiasts are most welcome. There is a great need for pictures of mollusks, marine snails and land snails. This is the occasion to give your photos a second life on Wikipedia. JoJan 09:19, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Page move to new destination without deleting existing page at destination?

Is it possible to move a page to a new location, even if there exists already a page there without deleting the target page first? I am asking because there is a controversy about the location of Kosovo, a.k.a. Kosovo and Metohia. Majority vote on the talk page (10 to zero) was for the location Kosovo, and it has been moved there three times in the last two days. It was always moved back unilaterally by user: Nikola Smolenski, most recently today at 15:02. I think this would require the deletion of the Kosovo and Metohia page first to make the move. However, there is no deletion log entry, and Nikola is not an administrator, so he could not delete it in the first place. What is going on? -- Chris 73 | Talk 06:36, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

I think I got it: the redirect page created at Kosovo and Metohia after the move to kosovo had only one history entry, so it can be overwritten by non-admins without deletion. So, after i moved the page to Kosovo again, i made a minor change on the Kosovo and Metohia redirect page, so now the page has a (tiny) history. Hope that stays there. -- Chris 73 | Talk 06:46, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Your edit won't actually prevent a non-admin moving the page back. As long as the redirect is still to Kosovo, Kosovo could be moved back to Kosovo and Metohia. I suggest you request protection if it becomes a problem. Angela. 00:47, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Wikipedia

Thanks Wikipedia. This is a letter I wrote to Brittanica:

When your online encyclopedia became a pay service, I was very disappointed. The internet and information should be free to everyone. There is now a new free encyclopedia called wikipedia that will lead to your eventual demise. May I be the first to say goodbye to you and your misplaced values.

If you didn't do it, I would have been forced to. Thanks.

Thanks for your comments. Do we have a Wikipedia:Testimonials or something similar? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 07:58, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Apparently so. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:25, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

While I think it's great that you have found Wikipedia and love it, just like everyone else here, I don't really look forward to the demise of Brittanica. I view Wikipedia just as another source of information. Not the one and only source. That said, Britannica may have to change their subscription model really soon, as Wikipedia just keeps growing and getting better, and more and more people are aware of how good it really is. --Vikingstad 11:53, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Shifting to a new house

Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk#Shifting to a new house

Compliment Committee

We have a Welcoming 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)

I think this could fit in well with the recent idea of Wikipedia:Great editing in progress; or, to be more accurate, I think some hybrid of the two ideas could be achieved that served this role well... IMSoP 21:45, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Hearing compliments from "Compliment Committee" is like you hearing "You look great!" from your grandma (as opposed to your girlfriend or partner). My point is that, the person who gets such a compliment won't feel particularly honoured, because those people saying so are comissioned ...to say such a "compliment"! Doesn't mean much. It sounds much better when coming from some random person. However, an Award Commission makes more sense. --Menchi 21:52, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

I think that last sentence made more sense when attached to the thoughts in your head (unless it's just that the thoughts in my head are rather detached right now :-/). What do you envisage an "Award Commission" as being/doing? - IMSoP 22:37, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Just an organization that gives out Barnstar and Wikipedian of the Year Award and stuff like once a month. --Menchi 12:00, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't think the compliment commttee would be as problematic. It's not as though every comment will get complimented. At least as I'm picturing it, the CCwould not simply compliment everyone blindly. It would be a more or less completely informal list of people who are committed to recognizing good work when they see it. We already have plenty of people dedicated to recognizing bad work, but very few beyond featured articles for good. Snowspinner 16:20, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea, and hearby appoint every single user to the Compliment Committee. Please remember to thank others when you see good things happening! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 07:59, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm new and I've already left a few comments on talk pages like "Great page - well done to all concerned." And when people have reverted vandalised pages that I'm particularly interested in I drop them a note to thank them - particularly when it's my User Page as was the case yesterday. Apparently I smell of cabbage. Some people who know me in real life might say that was NPOV. --bodnotbod 21:40, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

I also think it's a great idea, and would like to hereby second Pete's nominations of all users. Andrewa 07:03, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Screen width

Looking at a specific astrology page issue regarding appearance at 800x600 (I usually run higher), I discovered that Wikipedia comes close enuf to fitting that it seems to be the target resolution, but in reality, is just enuf wider to be a pain. Anyone know if TPTB are aware of this? Niteowlneils 17:36, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't know what TPTB means... but anyway I have a 800x600 resolution (pity me) and I have the left hand menu turned on.... wikipedia renders perfectly for me without horizontal scrolling. Unless, that is, there is an element on a specific page which is wider than my screen. Perhaps the problem is with the astrology page you were on, do you remember which it was? fabiform | talk 18:49, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

It was probably Taurus (constellation) (or possibly Gemini or Taurus (I've spent most of the day cleaning up move from Taurus--see above))--all are fine if I'm not editting them. Niteowlneils 19:55, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

(the powers that be). It may depend on which skin Niteowlneils is using. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:58, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

...and which browser (css not being quite as portable as one might hope). Niteowlneils - if you can tell us the page, skin, and browser combination, it may be possible to submit a bugfix request to have the stylesheet tweaked. It tries very hard to work everywhere, but suc transit... -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:01, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Initial report. Skin/left nav=default. browser=IE 5.5 and Mozilla 1.4. OS=Win2k. Page=at a minimum, edit pages. Niteowlneils 19:08, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

So far seems to be limited to Edit pages. Also occurs with Netscape6/7 and Opera 7. Niteowlneils 19:12, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Also happens currently on VP and VfD, but I believe it is due to the Darwin image and a long URL, respectively, so I don't think those need to be "fixed". Niteowlneils 19:19, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Screenshot of problem (using IE5.5--the severity is pretty consistent between all browsers tested) at Image:IEHorScroll75percent.jpg. Niteowlneils 19:35, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

FWIW (not too surprisingly) the Wiktionary Edit page has the same hor. scroll issue. I'm going to assume that A) the problem is limited to the Edit pages, and B) the issue has been sufficiently documented, so I am going to bump my resolution back up, unless someone has a specific request. Niteowlneils 19:42, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

This seems to happen only when the "Edit box has full width" is not checked (which I think it isn't when you're not logged in). This makes the edit box a fixed width, and one that does appear to be just a bit big for 800x600 (probably depending on your default font settings). You could file a bug on this, suggesting the default be a wee bit smaller. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:10, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

OK, I'll go do that. Since I have changed few, if any, of my Prefs, and I see the problem logged in, I have to assume the fixed width box is the default. Nice diagnosis--I went back to 800x600, checked the box, went to an Edit page, and confirmed that there was no hor. scroll. Niteowlneils 20:26, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Done. #951517. Niteowlneils 21:08, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

In the monobook skin the edit area has a % width by default, the pref is only there to work around some bugs in the old skin/ in ancient browsers afaik. Could be dropped maybe, and shouldn't default to a fixed width in any case. Try http://test.wikipedia.org in doubt. -- Gabriel Wicke 22:51, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Overzealous brand documentation?

Is it just me, or are we seeing a lot of overzealous documentation of the specifics of commercial products—the verbatim copying of ingredients lists, labels, the detailed listing of all the products in a specific product line, and so forth? My perception is that this material is not being contributed by people trying to promote the product, but just by people who, for whatever reason, just like to do it. Fans of the products, I think. I don't want to single out Sharpie other than as an example of the sort of thing I mean. Is it really valuable to note that it is available in Fine, Extra Fine, Ultra Fine, Super, Twin, Super Twin, Chisel, Metallic, Grip, Industrial, and Professional tips, and in Yellow, Black, Blue, Green, Orange, Red, Brown, Purple, Turquoise, Lime, Aqua, Berry, Olive, Marigold, Navy, Plum, Burgundy, and Silver ink? I won't remove valid information just because I personally happen to think it's silly, but... is this getting out of hand and, if so, do we need to draw a line, and if so, where? Dpbsmith 23:38, 9 May 2004 (UTC)

I think people do this not only because they like the product but because they want to contribute an article with "encyclopedia-like" details, but can't think of something to write about. And I have cut out most of this ridiculous Sharpie details. DavidWBrooks 00:39, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I think David's hit it on the head there. Someone likes a product, or - even - just has it on their desk, and they feel virtuous, conscientious including every detail from the labelling. I suppose it's interesting to consider how difficult it might be to find the ingredients of a soft drink that stopped being produced ten years earlier without such people ;o) --bodnotbod 16:49, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

If these were products discovered on a dig in of an 1872 heritage site in Virginia, we'd be glad to have this historical documentation; would we not be creating a cultural record of our modern society for future archeologists, sociologists, paleontologists, et al? It may be rather odd to create the historical documentation for those historians of the future, but they'll thank us for it. -- user:zanimum

That's [http://www.archive.org]'s mission, not Wikipedia's. Dpbsmith 17:16, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm not too sure about that, not to mention that, for a marker, tips are important. Furthermore, I do not entirely approve of DavidWBrook's edit, although this probably belongs in the article's discussion page. What I would have done is change the bulleted list (which takes up far too much space) into a comma-separated list, which would have fit nicely within a single paragraph, while preserving all information. -- Itai 02:54, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

emdashes

em dashes — dashes the width of an "m" character — are used in typesetting and "upscale" web page set off text, in a use similar to parentheses. where emdahses are unavailable, two "regular" dashes are often used: --

While em dashes look much nicer, on certain displays and devices -- such as my handheld -- they aren't in the character set at all, and are displayed using a placeholder character, often a question mark or unfilled square (a "box").

Should we use nice-looking em dashes, knowing they won't display properly on certain devices, or fall back on the less elegant but more portable double dash?

Thanks. orthogonal 04:22, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Is it that time already? Yeah, ok, we've had the mirror/fork question and the case sensitivity question, I guess we must be back around to dashes. May I suggest we keep it civil this time? More like the time before last than last time. -- Tim Starling 04:28, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

Tim Starling: while it's certainly fine to note that this discussion has come up here before -- and I understand the annoyance of an old-timer seeing questions arise again and again -- I do it would be more helpful for you to let us know what the previous consensus was.

Sorry. There was a short discussion last August, here. Then the civil discussion I referred to last December: Wikipedia talk:Special characters#Unicode. Then there was the discussion on wikitech-l in January: [3]. And finally there was the February discussion here. The current situation as far as I'm concerned is that either TeX-style conversion or -- to &mdash; conversion will be implemented as soon as someone works out how to do it without breaking various things such as the table syntax. -- Tim Starling 04:59, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

No problem, and thanks Tim, that's good to know. (however, this doesn't answer Othagonal's original question -- what should be done about the incompatibility of em dashes with certian devices? Personally, I think it's the device's own damn fault.) — Adam Conover † 16:47, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

In principle we could change the rendering according to user agent, although that may make caching difficult. Obviously we have to think of everyone, not just those trying to view Wikipedia from a mobile phone. -- Tim Starling 01:23, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Personally, though I use an emdash in my sig, I generally use double-dashes when writing, simply because that's what I'm used to doing -- most online communities don't support anything else, and '--' is the quickest way to write a dash in word -- and because they're must easier to type. I would guess that double-dashes will continue to be by far the most prevalent regardless of what we decide. — Adam Conover † 04:33, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I've been against them for some time now as they make editing difficult. Use "--" instead. RickK 04:43, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Offensive pictures

How should ofensive pictures be handled? Are there double standards? Should they be displayed inline or linked to? Are disclaimers needed?

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Content disclaimer

See also Wikipedia talk:Profanity, Talk:Nick Berg, m:offensive content

Family Feud

Hello, I been looking for family feud game and wonder if it's available in the market on disc to play it on PC or Play Station/? please let me know it is available and where can I find it.

thanx Riyadh

shawan_riyadh@yahoo.com

Amazon has it. or see here for more --bodnotbod 21:46, May 12, 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)

I agree with Jmabel, if you are suggesting what I think you mean. If by parent you mean the entry where you clicked on a link to get to the current page, there are a number of possible such entries in some cases. For example, Isaac Newton is be linked to from the articles on Analytic geometry, as well as the Bank of England article, aparently. There is a list of entries that link to any entry, you get them by clicking on the 'what links here' button on the list on the left. If this isn't what you mean, could you please explain further. Silverfish 14:09, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! I did not simulate all the possibilities! I think that a series of 'back' clicks is the only solution. Thanks 4 the response.

Newspaper story about Wikipedia: Thoughts welcome.

First things first: I learned of the village pump through Raul654. He said this would be a good place to find administrators and members who'd like to share details about the more interesting facets of Wikipedia. So here I am.

I write for The News Journal, a newspaper in Wilmington, Del. The story I'm writing is meant to inform readers about Wikipedia and how it works, but also to answer some of the questions they're most likely to have. What intrigues me about Wikipedia, beyond the vast collection of articles on obscure topics, is the culture that beats within the site. Here's where you come in.

Raul654 gave me a quick education on two of the more prolific Wiki-outlaws. That's what intrigues me most, and readers are likely to share that wonder. And through the sharing of such tales, readers will learn much about the evolution and self-policing of this unique site. (I'm loathe even to call it a mere "site.")

Please contact me at cyasiejko-at-delawareonline-dot-com. (Have I thwarted the spambots? I hope so.)

Take care, Christopher Yasiejko The News Journal

While of course I wouldn't dream of telling you what should intrigue you, I do think "wiki-outlaws" shouldn't. They are footnotes to parenthetical remarks, distractions from the purpose of Wikipedia, which is to build a useful and reliable reference work. On Wikipedia there is a "giant conspiracy attempting to have articles agree with reality". That some refuse to participate in this conspiracy is, in the end, irrelevant to its success, as it is irrelevant to the generally progressive nature of human knowledge. -- Nunh-huh 22:40, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree entirely. A useful analogy (and a deeper one that might first appear) is to compare wikipedia with the wild west. It's easy to think there's a lot of lawlessness, gunfights, tough-but-kindhearted sheriffs, and bitter feuds in blanco canyon (as The Simpsons would have it "now with 50% more rootin-tootin"). It is like the wild west, but not like that - like the unreported wild west, the unreported wikipedia is mostly a bunch of farmers - each plowing their personal furrow on an unthinkably vast land. Many never see a stranger for weeks on end, many have no-one to turn to when their crops fail. Here and there there's an odd little clan, the faithful in neglected commune, a two-horse wikiproject, someone's grand scheme gone to seed. It's a little more populated each day, each day a new stranger in town. Most of your cattle go unrustled, most of your banks unrobbed, and one day the railroad may come this way. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:08, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Just so you guys know (so you can be specific in your responses), the 2 users I told Chris about (he spent about an hour interviewing me) are Michael and Plautus Satire. →Raul654 05:07, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Does having a newspaper article about them count as feeding the trolls?! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:38, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

lol @ Pcb21 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:24, 2004 May 13 (UTC) ;)

Redirect to section

The Five Boroughs contains less information than City of New York#The Five Boroughs. Most of the info currently has to be maintained in both places. IMO, The Five Boroughs also tears the subject out of the valuable context of the City of New York article. But (as i learned by experimenting), overwriting The Five Boroughs with

#REDIRECT City of New York#The Five Boroughs

has the same effect as

#REDIRECT City of New York

Sounds like a useful SMOP to me, to have the Wiki engine use the section info instead of ignoring it. Has there ever been discussion of doing so? --Jerzy(t) 18:12, 2004 May 13 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:How to edit a page, "Note that redirects to sections do not work yet. #REDIRECT [[United States#History]] will redirect to the United States page, but not to any particular section on it. It is possible this feature will be implemented in future, so such redirects could be used now for future compatibility." So, I guess it has been discussed, but not yet done. --Stormie 00:43, May 14, 2004 (UTC)

Out of interest, the reason this isn't as simple as it might seem is that currently, a redirect essentially replaces the content of a page, whereas the information telling the browser to focus on a particular header (the "#anchor" notation) is stored in the address. So, if you go to, say, New York City, the page's address is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City (as you'd expect) - but the content is the same as that of City of New York (the target of the redirect) with an additional "redirected from" note. In order to redirect to a section, the browser would have to be told somehow to add "#section_name" to its own address - possible, but not trivial. With the current system, the browser is completely unaware that a redirect has been used, as it is all processed by the server.

Additionally, it could be argued that being taken to a the middle of a page when you thought you were going to view a whole article could be a bit confusing, although this is true to a certain amount with normal links to a section. - IMSoP 13:51, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

History deletion.

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

Not without a developer editing the database manually, which is seldom done for technical/licensing reasons, probably. When a page is deleted, the history and page becomes inaccessible and viewable only to administrators, but not obliterated. Dysprosia 13:31, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

The ver.1.3 of Mediawiki comes with XML import feature. The feature is available only to sysops (i.e. admins), but with that, one can delete a past version of an article. I have just experimented with it on Test wiki, where the ver.1.3 is currently tested, and took some notes on some details here. I am not sure when the ver.1.3 will be implemented, if the feature is turned on (to allow admins to really use it). Tomos 01:52, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Murray Haszard

I wrote this article (Murray Haszard) a few hours ago, and when I saved it, it took several minutes for Wikipedia to respond. I then saw in Recent Changes that two New copies had been saved.

I just check "What links here" and nothing does, yet there are references to this article from Ghost, B32 Business Basic and Binary Research. These links work. Why doesn't "What links here" work? --Gadfium 08:28, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

I had a similar problem with Battle of Mukden, with some but not all pages showing up in the "what links here". Two hours later it was fine. Right now on my computer, Murray Haszard & "what links here" gives me only the village pump, even though the other pages you mentioned also contain the link. Strange -- Chris 73 | Talk 14:09, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Huh. I got the same result. I just went into the Ghost, B32 Business Basic articles, did a couple of minor copy edits, and saved the articles. Immediately they showed up in What Links Here for Murray Haszard. I don't know what the deal is. Elf | Talk 16:23, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

reclaiming anonymous edits

somewhere once on a wikipedia FAQ i saw instructions for reassigning an anonymous edit you have made to your account. now i cannot find this FAQ. can someone give me instructions?Lethe

found it Wikipedia:Changing attribution for an edit

Fundamental inequalities between races in Wikipedia treatment

Are articles involving race given equal treatment? Answers to this and various discussions about the definiton of racism moved to talk:reacism.

Image for deletion

I have listed the image of the severed head of Nick Berg for deletion. Please vote at WP:IFD. Dori | Talk 21:00, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Copyright

Why is the English Wikipedia:Copyright locked? Please change the interwiki link to Swedish Wiki to "Wikipedia:Upphovsrätt". // Rogper 17:52, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I imagine it's protected so that no one can change such important policies while we're not looking (just like our general disclaimer is protected). I've updated the interwiki link for you. :) fabiform | talk 18:17, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. :-) // Rogper 18:39, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Subtle POV edits?

While Googling for "wikipedia and google", I came across a thread on the forum of an organisation called the "Stormfront White Nationalist Community" from the end of April, discussing Google and, tangentially, how to add (presumably) POV edits to Wikipedia: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=129083. Happily, it seems they quickly encountered "censorship" and IP bans, but the following post was a little worrying:

I have done a little "creative editing" on Wikipedia too. It is a waste of time to try it on any of the major articles, because the censors will pounce on you immediately. However, sometimes you can slip in a few words in the less popular articles, and they will last for some time.

What are the current Wikipedia mechanisms for defending against subtle POV or vandalism, and what confidence do we have that they work? — Matt 13:25, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Our defense mechanism is lots of eyes, and our confidence varies by individuals. I, for example, fear that wikipedia won't scale to massive size for social reasons such as this - but then, I'm a grump. - DavidWBrooks 14:16, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

That is precisely why I am not an inclusionist. The 'wp is not paper' argument focuses on physical resources. I don't remember where I saw it, but the comment totally resonated with me; the gist was, 'the number of articles should be limited to keep the ratio between articles and editors at a managable level'. Niteowlneils 18:55, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

And not get to worked up over it. I find it difficult to relate to the outright childishness of a person that gets his jollies by adding some small POV to an obscure Wikipedia article that might actually stay posted for a week or two! Or the ultimate (how do they contain themselves) a whole month! - Marshman 17:12, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Vandalism in Chinese Wikipedia

Hello,

the chinese Wiki is experincing massiv vandalism with a bot and a proxy again. Please help.--Philopp 18:13, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Please ban the IP addresses rang from 210.139.252.1 to 210.139.252.255. --Samuel 18:17, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Any sysop on zh can ban a range. See m:range blocks. Is the problem that you need more sysops temporarily? Angela. 19:48, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

References

This community seems very sensitive to the issues of copyright. But when it comes to credit and citation, we do quite poorly. I'm surprised at the number of articles that refer to authors' conclusions and interpretations without crediting the author or citing the source.

Some may disagree with me, but I think this is a serious weakness. It only takes discipline to cite source; hunting down original sources takes time, effort and uncommon selflessness — let's face it, unless you happen to know the source, you're unlikely to invest much effort in uncovering the implicit citations in somebody's articles.

Integrity, transparency, credibility, honesty: that's what's at stake here. What do you think?

Making references easier to add might lower the activation energy. If I'm not aware of a system that's already in place to simplify this, please let me know. — Johny 21:48, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

This is a serious problem, as not citing references is often part of a violation of the NPOV rule, by making it sound like the information cited is being made by the article itself, thus making the article the source of opinions. There seems to be no awareness of this issue, and even some who oppose citations, and who want Wikipedia to look like authoritive encyclopedias where the article writer simply pronounces the truth, whether it be about fact or opinion. These people want articles to be the products of consensus, whatever the editors can agree on as "proper" going into the article, instead of the NPOV way of stating only hard facts, and attributing all opinions to some source. ChessPlayer 22:09, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

It is official policy to include references, see Wikipedia:Cite your sources. Feel free to point it out to anybody who gives you a hard time about adding references, and of course set a good example by adding them to existing articles. The hardcore approach would be just to delete text and articles that are missing proper references, heh-heh. Stan 22:33, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree with you on all counts. Wikipedia does not include enough references, and Wiki markup does not make them easy to include. This is also a shortcoming of traditional encyclopedias, but not one that Wikipedia should emulate. Furthermore, when one does not have the chain of trust implicit in the traditional encyclopedia's choice of contributors, it's especially important that statements of fact be verifiable. Dpbsmith 00:27, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

The problem with citing sources is that we really are an encyclopaedia and not an original research project.

In research, you really do need to cite your sources, to prove you are enlarging on what others have created, you are developing what others have originated and not just copying what someone else has written.

In an encyclopaedia, you are referring often to what is in the public domain anyway. What is more, continuously citing others makes it so much more unreadable for the often casual reader. If you look at other encyclopaedias, how often do you come across: “(such and such) is the case, according to (author So-and-sos)?

It is different, of course, if you are actually writing about a particular concept, article, book or theory originated by another author. Of course, you must refer to every part of his work if you want to describe it.

However, take a geographical entity, when all you want to do is describe its settings, its famous buildings and scenery, it borders on the ludicrous to keep citing what other people have said about it unless their views throw a different light on what you might have seen yourself. All you need do is walk out the area concerned, clap eyes on what it is famous for and its sights and describe them.

Take an article by Tiscali Reference, an encyclopaedia, about ‘’Garcia Marquez, Gabriel (Gabo). You would look in vain for any source, where the information has come from. And why would you? It doesn’t matter whether the writer of the encyclopaedia article has read all the works of the author himself, and therefore knows them. He doesn’t have to quote himself as the source, or whether he has gleaned it from other sources. Surely, it is something that is more often than not commonly obtainable knowledge open to all of us?

After all, an encyclopaedia is a work of convenience for all of us, which if we try hard enough, we can search for laboriously ourselves, but that is what it does. It helps us find all the facts in one place and saves us time.

Dieter Simon 01:08, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Dieter writes, "In research, you really do need to cite your sources, to prove you are enlarging on what others have created, you are developing what others have originated and not just copying what someone else has written." In an encycopedia, you need to cite your sources, to prove you are not arbitrarily enlarging on what others have created. -- Jmabel 03:42, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, Jmabel, I see your point. If you are actually quoting the words someone else has used to describe a subject, of course, you must cite this source. I was however referring to the adoption into the encyclopedia of a generally known subject, such as bibliographical details of a writer, geographical locations (often you can find this in brochures), technical details of a car engine, etc. Yes, if you are citing a specific aspect of someone else's research and findings of a subject, and you find it apposite to it, or an aspect of an article which only another source has given, then that has to be cited in detail.Dieter Simon 11:19, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

External links epidemic

I've noticed that many editors have taken to including external links which are strongly POV towards one particular view or item of the article, often without any warning that this represents the views of one particular side. Often, these links escape the normal Wikipedia NPOV process, because someone needs to take the time to check them out (not always easy). Does anyone have views on this? Lately I've been killing links that are not properly described as being POV or fringe interest. JFW | T@lk 08:55, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Documenting the POV is much more helpful than killing the link, don't you think? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 10:11, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Sure, Pete. I personally only kill links when I feel they don't enhance the article content but just confirm that someone has a POV. Random assasinations of links will just provoke "link insertion wars" anywayz. JFW | T@lk 11:27, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Oops yes, should've added that before. Link to xyz's opinion only if it is an significant opinion. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:23, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

I've noticed this as a serious problem in science articles: Standard and established science knowledge is usually found in textbooks and not so much on the web. But fringe theories, non-standard ideas and other strongly POV stuff is easily found on the web, often in a way carefully tailored to be easily accesible and quick too read. Hence such links often overpower the standard science in the link list, especially if its a stub.

Not as serious, but related, are external links to papers or articles dealing with definitly minor details. Especially if these are the only links, this looks highly misleading. Stubs with such links are worst. I usually at least consider deleting such links but then don't as I feel obliged to replace it by a better link. But maybe one shouldn't be so hesistating. Sanders muc 18:44, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

One option is always to move links you're not sure of to the article's discussion page - particularly if the article is a stub, so that it's hard to determine whether the link will end up appropriate or not once it has been expanded (in the potentially distant future...). That way you can also justify your deletion, and people can respond and discuss it with you or one another. - IMSoP 20:40, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

IMSoP: This is what is probably the best thing, but many POV pushers simply reinsert the links without engaging in a discussion :-(
Sanders muc: This phenomenon (of fringe theories overwhelming main science articles) attracted my attention at cholesterol, where someone inserted a rant on the "dissidents of the lipid hypothesis", some noisy people who doubt the link between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Yet >99% of all doctors will subscribe to the "lipid hypothesis" (which is not a hypothesis anymore). Disconcerting. JFW | T@lk 22:46, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

URL trouble

I'm trying to add the following external link to a page:

[4]

As you can see, it is not parsed into an html link. If there is something wrong with the URL, I don't know what it is (the dollar sign?) but it works when copied into my browser's address bar. Is there any way to force the parsing, or will I be unable to link this page?

Radagast 22:54, May 15, 2004 (UTC)

Use the %-trick: replace the dodgy character with a percentage sign and its two-digit hex code (here, 24). Thus: [5]

Marnanel 00:00, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

Wonderful! Thak you most kindly. Radagast

From Wikipedia™

Should the text at the top of each page that says From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia include the trademark symbol? Please discuss at MediaWiki talk:Fromwikipedia. Angela. 00:31, May 15, 2004 (UTC)

Title casing

A user e-mailed me this afternoon, asking if I could correct the article IMac to the proper spelling iMac. Both spellings bring me to the same article as it is (and not even as a redirect), so I was wondering if someone could clarify for me how Wikipedia handles casing in titles -- am I correct in assuming that the Wiki software doesn't actually distinguish between IMac and iMac? Bearcat 18:25, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

yep - see :Wikipedia:List of pages whose correct title is not allowed by MediaWiki -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:30, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

That sucks, but people have now come to rely on this software bug, if it would be fixed something would have to be implemented which auto-redirected to the same title except with a capital first letter if it wasnt to break alot of links. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:35, 2004 May 15 (UTC)

Wikipedia rules for External links?

See Wikipedia talk:External links

I want to purchase the Xmen animation series

Since reading the Xmen storylines her on Wikipedia, I would like to purchase the Xmen anmiation series that aired on the Foxnetwork from 1992 to 1998. I would like all the five seasons, every episode please. Who do I call?

Michael Frye 1414 Wilcox Ave Portsmouth, Va 23704 1-757-391-0207

GHOSTBUSTERS!

Seriously, at least some appear to be available on DVD from Amazon. --Robert Merkel 03:34, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

On a completely unrelated note - I just found out that John Malkovich is playing Lord Voldemort in the next Harry Potter movie. Now, I've asked 5 people who they would prefer to play Lord Voldemort, and every single person said the same thing - Christopher Walken! Why, oh why, couldn't they get Walken to take the role? →Raul654 03:36, May 14, 2004 (UTC)

Not Malkovich. I read that the other day, then read a denial (can't remember where, now.) But Rowling has insisted all along that only British actors be cast. RickK 03:41, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

One more thing - is Warner Brothers the official owner of Daniel Radcliffe's soul yet, or are they just waiting for the paperwork to go through? →Raul654 03:51, May 14, 2004 (UTC)

Toki Pona link in Town article

There a link to Toki Pona language version of the town article but for some reason it does not display together with other languages but at the end of the article. The same seems to be the case on the Toki Pona language page itself. Why? Brona 20:48, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Seems to be a limitation in the software, list it on meta:MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:13, 2004 May 13 (UTC)

This is fairly easy to fix, I'll do it now. -- Tim Starling 00:54, May 14, 2004 (UTC)

Can I use these pics on WP?

This is the copyright notice for a site I want to use as a picture source, [6]:
"All the pictures on this site were taken by Jo Mitchell (unless otherwise stated) and may be used for legitimate and legal purposes provided credit is given. It would be appreciated if you email Jo to request permission for use of images. Most images are available as high-resolution scans (up to 4000dpi) for use in print and screen media - please do not hesitate to ask for further details. Copyright is retained at all times by Jo Mitchell. Thanks"
Can I use these pics (if I check with Jo Mitchell first) and what would be the copyright notice I should use on the Image Description Page? Thanks for any help,
Adrian Pingstone 18:51, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Goodness whether "legitimate and legal purposes" is, formally speaking, a restriction incompatible with the GFDL, but it does sounds like Jo would respond favourably if you explicitly asked for a GFDL licence (for the low-res versions) via email. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 19:17, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

There are a couple of pre-written permission-asking templates at Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission -- they cover most of the important points. Modify as needed for your purposes. Catherine - talk 01:56, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Dianic Wicca

Although most Dianics do worship the goddess unto herself, not all Dianics believe that there is no equal god form. In fact, I personally know two ordained McFarlane Dianic Priests. Although rare it does happen. Purley feminist Wicca is a reactionary belief system. It is a sociological backlash against male dominated religions. However, it has the same fault in that it rejects balance in favor of the domination of one form of Deity; hence, it is a psycholoigcal reaction rather than a true belief system. It has served its purpose in showing the fallacy of a amle dominant god from. But, to not understand the sacrifice of the god and the joy and pain the goddess experiences from his arrival and departure from this plane, is to not understand the majesty, beauty and compassion of the goddess herself. Unfortunately, many Dianic Wiccans fail to understadn the true nature of the goddess by ignoring or downplaying her equal and opposite self.

Suggestions from Kapil

Also, 1 more thing. I would just reccomend a link from an article to a contributions page, where you see the contributions for that article. I understand it is not all about 1 person doing the encyclopedia, and more about everyone creating it, but a contributions page would be awesome!

1 last thing. Are there any ranks in the Wikipedia? Like if you help out a lot, would you be recognized and be a VIP in the members room or something?

Whe you serach for your member name in the encyclopedia, you need to types in usr first. Why not ignore the fact whether the USR is there or not?

I promise this is my LAST suggestion. Why not a lounge chat area for members where you can talk about the articles, improve grammar, and other things?

Just a few suggestions by Kapil!

Google results: Mirrors vs Wikipedia

I'm sure this must have cropped up before, but I can't find it; can anyone point me to a relevant discussion? Anyway, I did a search on Google today for Lucifer cipher, and in the top 10 results were no less than 7 mirrored copies of the Lucifer (cipher) page, but not the Wikipedia article itself, which surfaces at position 70. This seems to happen a lot for various articles, and is somewhat annoying (especially since the mirrored pages are out of date and advert-laden). Anything Wikipedia can do? Feel free to point me to the previous discussions... — Matt 13:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Many people are PO'ed about this, and I have no idea how it could be fixed (short of someone at google taking some action). If those pages were respecting the GFDL to the letter, they would link to the exact Wikipedia article, which should raise the pagerank of the Wikipedia article, and eventually bring it to the top, but this does not seem to be happening. Dori | Talk 14:06, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

[From one of the PO'd peeps]. This is a relatively recent problem (roughly since thefreedictionary.com came along) but must be costing us traffic, and is a long term threat to the continued growth of the GFDL corpus. What is odd is that, despite at least some of the mirrors linking to WP and thus making it probably the most linked to version of the page, WP comes so low. Are the other sites so good at search exchange optimization/google-breaking? Has WP somehow fallen foul of a negative points score due to being seen as a link farm somehow? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

They have as many links as we do (as a mirror), but it's just that they were up when wikipedia wasn't and google spidered them first. Dori | Talk 16:22, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

Press release: Wikipedia wins 8th Annual Webby Award for Best Community

I think we should have a press release to announce our Webby Award success. I've started one at Wikipedia:Press releases/May 2004. Please add to it. Other sites such as Google and the BBC have made press releases when they have won in the past, so I feel it's important we do too. We haven't had one for over three months, and the last one received little attention in the outside world. Perhaps this one will have more of an effect. Angela. 17:03, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Good idea. I don't feel in the mood to write PR copy right now (I actually have in the past), but I left some things I could see adding on the talk page. Niteowlneils 01:46, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

This has been five days now. Should it be sent? Or is there not enough interest to bring it up to a sendable standard? Angela. 19:35, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

I look at it and find myself at a loss -- how to describe community practices? And I think all the work we went to last time sending out PRs only to get virtually zero response makes it harder to get pepped up. :-) What work needs to be done to get it in shape -- does it need all the expansion it currently indicates, or will it be fine with simply some quotes from Jimmy and a little expansion in key areas? Jwrosenzweig 19:42, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Part of this is that the idea is that the Webby should be a publicity boost to us in itself. With the weight that the award has.

I think the normal wikipedia editing practise is very poorly suited to editing a press release. We wan't to make it express a pointed crisp viewpoint; ours. And we want it to be a stylistically uniform polished text. Not a work in progress, nor NPOV.

Having a clear person whose responsibility it is to deal with public relations in general, would be a very good idea. I can envision the Board of Trustees appointing a Public Relations Officer pretty soon after they start their work.

Also, personally I think our press releases should be about us, not about what others think of us, but that is a personal leaning. -- Cimon 16:50, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

Speedy Deleting things on VfD

I've noticed in the past few days some things that were on Votes for Deletion simply getting speedily deleted. While I agree that many of these items should have been listed on speedy deletion instead of VfD, I feel that, once something is on VfD, it is poor form to terminate the debate. If it's truly a bad article, it'll go away within a week anyway - no need to hasten the process and leave a bad taste in people's mouths when a debate is effectively cut off. Snowspinner 19:09, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

This has come up before. See Deletion before all votes are complete. Angela. 19:38, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand what I'm taking issue with - my issue is that articles that were listed on VfD are getting deleted before five days of debate has elapsed - not the VfD discussions themselves. Once something is listed, the decision should wait five days. Snowspinner 20:14, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

No, it's the same issue. Just because someone wrongly lists something on VfD does not mean it has to stay there five days. Newcomers can not be expected to understand the full deletion policy or the CSD, so will often list things that have no chance of being deleted, or things that should have gone to wikipedia:speedy deletions. Removing them from VfD because they are candidates from speedy deletion is no more an issue than clearing up any other mistake a newcomer makes. Angela. 22:13, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

If the deletion were to be total, that would be one thing, but many of these are being left to hang around on VfD even after the page is deleted. (I wonder if people are using {{msg:delete}} on the pages instead of {{subst:vfd}} and admins who delete aren't realizing they're on VfD?) Snowspinner 00:45, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Are you saying I should have waited 5 days to delete the bad copy/paste move at The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences? What would that have accomplished? -- Cyrius|&#9998 20:26, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

It would have allowed the full five days of debate? That said, there's been a rash of this in the past few days, so don't take it as any comment on you - I'd just rather have doing this be against the rules so we don't start having cases that are questionable. Snowspinner 20:37, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

My $.02 -- if something qualifies for speedy deletion, then out it should go, no matter if it was mistakenly listed on VfD. older≠wiser 21:45, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

While I agree that many of the pages that get listed on VfD could be speedily deleted (And I never understand why people go through the lengthier process of listing on VfD when they could use the far faster speedy delete), I think that once the question is raised, cutting it off just leaves a... bad taste in my mouth. Snowspinner 00:45, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

I think that if a page meets one of the 13 criteria set out on Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion, it is fair game for speedy deletion. Even if it has been listed on VfD, and people are voting on it. Of course it should also be removed from the VfD page rather than leaving a pointless discussion and a broken link. But I don't see why a page that deserves speedy deletion should get a 5 day stay of execution just because someone listed it inappropriately on VfD. --Stormie 01:40, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

Let's not pretend that all of these cases would have generated meaningful discussions. That said, I won't argue against a simple, consistent, and easy to enforce rule against it, in order to avoid questionable cases. -- Cyrius|&#9998 21:59, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

I performed one of these. Ordinarily I wouldn't, but the article contained personal information on some kid. I would say that most times it should be against policy UNLESS it could potentially harm someone to have it up for 5 days. Meelar 23:05, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree that in the case of clear and present danger, speedy deletions should be enacted - that or we should have a more broad legal troubles page akin to the copyvio page where the article content could be deleted and a warning could be put in its place. But I can't see that coming into much use, so probably speedy deletion regardless of where it's listed is the best thing int hese limited cases. Snowspinner 00:18, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

"See also" vs "Related topics", and Category Project

The Wikipedia Guide to Layout recommends that "Related topics" be a heading for a collection of internal links to related topics. Custom and practice in the Wikipedia appears to be to use "See also". Should the recommendation be changed? Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style.

Looking for Wikipedia pages

I'm looking for the page that directs the "Did You Know?" section on the front page. Who decides what we see there?

I also want to know if there's a New pages patrol, just like the RC patrol.

Anyone with info please contact me hear or at my talk page. MGM 10:20, May 15, 2004 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Did you know is shown in the main page, and Wikipedia:Recent additions is the history thereof. The rules are in the corresponding talk page MediaWiki talk:Did you know. Wikipedia:New pages patrol is for the new pages patrol, but it's rather quiet over there. -- Chris 73 | Talk 02:01, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Appropriate URL

This is kind of amusing: the URL that Wikipedia generated for Image:Us-pa.gif (the Pennsylvanian flag) is "/upload/7/76/Us-pa.gif". Marnanel 04:07, May 15, 2004 (UTC)

-->Continued at Image talk:Us-pa.gif

Redirect warriors

From time to time here comes a guy and starts "fixing rediects". A recent example is massive change of Trans-Siberian 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)

There seems to be a 'redirects are evil' mindset among some people here. Not sure where exactly that came from ... possibly from the 'linking to disambiguation pages is evil' idea.

IMO, one should rarely change the linked-from text, that's what the pipe-link is for. But really, is there any reason why a pipe-link is BETTER than a redirect? It's just two ways of handling the same thing: linking from a string of text to a page whose title is not the same. One method keeps it all in the linked-from page, another uses a secondary redirect page, but I don't really see a reason why to change it.

It's possibly a squid/database load issue ... using the redirect takes two hits; piping the redirect at the point it is anchored takes a single hit. As others have said, though, there's never any reason to change the anchor text to deal with the reirect issue. --Tagishsimon

They are actually both one request (we don't use http redirects, instead the 'redirected' content is served at the requested url). But: Because we currently don't have a good way to find out which pages redirect to a certain page (for purging), so they aren't cached as a result. This will very likely change with 1.4 where the redirect will re-use the cached content of the 'real' page. -- Gabriel Wicke 08:13, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

As Mikkalai says, if the linked-from text is actually inaccurate and it's a context where that matters, then it should be changed ... —Morven 02:46, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

As the person who did the redirects to Trans-Siberian railway, let me explain my reasoning. It was based on what happens when you move a page, and you get the following warning: "Links to the old page title will not be changed; be sure to check for double-redirects (using "What links here") after the move. You are responsible for making sure that links continue to point where they are supposed to go." As far as I'm concerned, an article that points to "Trans-Siberian Railroad" when the actual article is at "Trans-Siberian railway" is not pointing where it is supposed to go. I understood that the point of redirects was to deal with people looking things up from outside Wikipedia, rather than badly-formatted wikilinks. However, I concede that in most if not all of those articles I should probably have piped the redirect rather than changing the text. Some articles are formatted in British English (railway); some are in American English (railroad); the important thing is consistency within the article. I will give myself a slap on the wrist and a task to check that all the pages linking to Trans-Siberian railway are still consistent. --ALargeElk 08:48, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

The discussion lets me undestand "the root of the evil". All this redirect/piping thing is simply a techie mindset: you are trying to "help" computer to do the job (of readdresing), whil it should be exactly vice versa: computers are here to help us write articles (and read articles). Using pipes and fixing redirects is IMO like writing pieces of code in assembly language where the compiler is dumb and cannot optimize. It ought to be done sometimes, but if you have to do it almost everywhere, this should be the hint that either the overall design is wrong or atavistic instincts come creeping. I know that "real programmers" write in FORTRAN, but... Mikkalai 15:46, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Offices Held by politicians

Do any guidelines exist for the content of tables showing the offices held by politicians? (See the bottom of the Tony Blair entry for an example.) It appears that periods spent as members of bodies such as Parliament aren't included, but I think it would be a good idea to do so. Betelgeuse 15:33, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

My first instinct was to agree with you, but after thinking about it, at least in the US, congressional districts change often enough that it's difficult to ascribe a real continuity to all of them. Similarly, Senate seats are arranged as junior and senior, but which seat is which will change periodically. So at least in US politics, I'm not sure how the linear nature of these boxes would work. I don't know, in Britain, how variable districts and their representation are, so I don't know if this problem exports to other countries. Snowspinner 16:29, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

It'd be awkward to include such tables on all politicians, even without reapportionment or redistricting - very few politicians stay in the same office for very long, and including a table for each office held would make their articles bulky. - jredmond 16:44, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Tricky. UK parliamentary boundaries are reviewed about every 10 years, and if the changes are too drastic a sitting MP may jump ship and look for a more winnable seat elsewhere (I'm reminded of one Conservative MP who looked for a better seat in 1997 and failed to win it, while what was left of his original seat remained Conservative...). Also MPs may lose their seat at one election, and be elected somewhere totally different at a later election (see Gwyneth Dunwoody or Tony Benn for example). -- Arwel 16:45, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Sir George Young is an example of an MP who moved constituencies because of boundary adjustments. For his entry I would add 'MP for Ealing Acton 1974 - 1997' and 'MP for North West Hampshire 1997 - present'. I don't think the two extra rows would add to much bulk to the article (most politicians entries are little more than stubs anyway), and I think it's the type of information a reference work like wikipedia should include. Betelgeuse 16:56, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't know about UK politicians, but it would be a huge mess trying to figure it out for U.S. representatives except for perhaps the last few decades. For early politicians, documentation is not always readily available about which district a representative was from (and even if available, may be misleading because the district boundaries change frequently). So even if we could figure it out, I'm not sure it would be that helpful since the actual districts change dramatically over time. For example, when Michigan first became a state, the entire state was one congressional district. Now the state is divided into 16 districts. I believe it had more districts in the past. Further, there are MANY U.S. politicians who have held multiple offices: representative, senator, governor, Presidential cabinet (sometimes different positions in the cabinet). In short, it *might* be feasible to do this for U.S. Senate seats, but I don't see any point to attempting it for House seats. older≠wiser 17:47, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

• Besides, many (perhaps, sadly, most) people in the U.S. don't even know who their representative is let alone what district they are in. older≠wiser 17:52, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Who killed Trip Hawkins?

I authored an article on Trip Hawkins a while back, but it's been deleted. I didn't see it listed on VfD, it's just gone! As the founder of Electronic Arts and 3DO, I think he is worthy of an article. Does anyone know what happened to it and why it was killed? —Frecklefoot 20:30, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

From the deletion log:-

05:38, 13 May 2004 Dysprosia deleted "Trip Hawkins" (just an external link - content was: '==External links==* [http://www.fuckedcompany.com/ Digital Chocolate website]{{msg:stub}}').

Lee (talk) 20:36, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

It was a full article at one point. You can see the cache of it here. However, it was ofen vandalized (apparently by a digruntled former employee of 3DO). I suspect the same person trimmed it down to the link and Dysprosia deleted it. The history would have shown the correct, full article. Is there some way to restore it? —Frecklefoot 20:42, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

can somebody do me a favour

and explain the ideas consensus and arrogant unilateralism to Jiang. Either that, or point out to me why I should pull my head in? any comments most welcome. best wishes Erich 23:09, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Disputes such as this are handled at Wikipedia:Requests for comment. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:42, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Bug or feature?

Check this extra semicolon http://sample.link/<hello> in the end. Why? // Rogper 19:04, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

References

Is Wikipedia poor at citing its sources? Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Cite your sources#References.

Note that, due to perennial confusion, I've moved this article to Wikipedia:Cite sources: while explaining how you came by information has some value, it is far more important to search for authoritative references that help the reader check veracity and learn more. ...even if you didn't (shame on you) consult any sources at all when initially writing an article. —Steven G. Johnson 03:13, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

gold sovereign

Question moved to Wikipedia:Reference Desk. Meelar 17:52, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

In praise of annotating lists of links—and anything else

In reference to the above problem of external links not being described (and consequently hiding POV), let me add that I feel that in general, Wikipedia has too many lists of links and anything else that just list items without any descriptions. Most of could be enormously improved by adding short notes to list items. (The note should be short enough so that the list remains on a single line without wrapping when the window is a normal size. This preserves the vertical compactness of the list and keeps the list items positioned for easy visual overview).

Editors seem to be reluctant to do this, I'm not sure why.

Perhaps what happens is that someone starts a list that contains no comments, and subsequent editors are reluctant to be the first to disturb the pristine columnnar appearance of the list by adding the first comment? Or is it a "foolish consistency" fear that it is somehow wrong to annotate one item unless you can annotate all of them?

When listing Moog synthesizer users, how much better to have

• Mike Farrell - Morrissey, Macy Gray
• Doug Fieger - The Knack
• Ginger Fish - Marilyn Manson
• John Fogerty
• John Frusciante - Red Hot Chili Peppers

(as is the case in the actual article) than

• Mike Farrell
• Doug Fieger
• Ginger Fish
• John Fogerty
• John Frusciante

Dpbsmith 11:13, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

That's better, certainly, but good old fashioned sentences would be better yet. Strawman:

• Mike Farrell, who played on earlier Morrissey albums, including With Your Tent Flaps Open and later as a session musician for Macy Gray
• Doug Fieger, for The Knack (particularly the solo on what does this knob do?)

I've taken to doing this on disambigs, e.g. Stirling (disambiguation) -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:41, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't know. There's a case to be made for conciseness as well. I think we should seek a happy medium. I agree that "Mike Farrell" or "Doug Fieger" is too little, but I think information about particular albums, songs, or collaborators should be found in the linked article not the link itself. MK 04:47, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

I maintain many lists - around 70. If there is twice as much to type, it takes twice as long (and I don't feel I've achieved more, in fact). I'm not past passive resistance if others get fancy about this. A list is mostly about making information about what is here or possibly is not here, in my view. Putting it another way, I think of a list as mostly about reducing the number of clicks pages are away from the Main Page. Charles Matthews 15:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

External links epidemic

What should be done about POV external links? Are these escaping the normal Wikipedia NPOV process? Should they be removed? Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:External links#External links epidemic.

emdashes

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dashes#emdashes

Verbs

I think there should be some naming conventions for verbs (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (verbs) - tentative).

There is a convention about using the most common words (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names)) which could apply to verbs in some cases; ie killing redirects to murder.

It seems to be common practice to use the present participle; ie. jumping rather than jump or jumped.

Any comments? Bensaccount 01:20, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

I advocate really useless and counter-intutive verb forms as the standard. i.e. Will have been jumping. Though if people insist on a reasonable standard, present participle. Snowspinner 04:30, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Demographics of US towns

I note that in the demographics of us towns like Hialeah, Florida, all ethnic groups except white are wikified. Does this strike folks as odd? What should this one link to? Thanks, Mark Richards 21:28, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

It should link to Race (US Census). User:Rambot didn't finish his job and vanished for some reason. The link to Asia is inapproprate. We need to know about the ethnic group, not the continent from which their ancestors originated. --Jiang 22:50, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

There is a WikiProject on ethnic groups. It's been a bit quiet lately. If anyone is interested in investing some effort into it, that would be great. This does come with one warning though: this is an area that ineveitably must be handled with some sensitivity, a matter that is discussed in that project page and its related pages. -- Jmabel 23:55, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia trophy room

Wikipedia recently won two awards (Webby Awards and Prix Ars Electronica), and I am sure there are more to come in the future :-) Do we have a place to list the awards, sort of a Wikipedia:Trophy room? I was thinking about making a page, but wasn?t sure if something similar already exists. -- Chris 73 | Talk 04:14, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

A formal one can be found at Wikipedia#Awards_and_nominations.

Perhaps the current silly awards for longest article title etc at m:awards could be overwritten with a page about our awards. See m:Talk:Awards Angela. 20:09, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Watchlist trauma

My watchlist now won't update, and instead says - 'this is a saved version of your watchlist'. Any ideas why? Thanks! Mark Richards 15:42, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, a developer has enabled cached watchlists to improve performance (which had crawled to a halt pretty much). Dori | Talk 16:27, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

So when do I get the real one, and when the caches one? Thanks, Mark Richards 17:56, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Normally when this is the case, you get one update per hour. -- Jao 18:15, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! Mark Richards 19:55, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

It would be much better simply to reduce the 12-hour default, which as I said on earlier occasions is a total waste. A one-hour default would probably be sufficient to improve performance and would be less "traumatic" than this almost entire disabling of watchlists. --Wik 20:25, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

An extra option "since I last checked my watchlist" alongside 1,2,6,12 hours could possibly maybe reduce more overhead than it creates... depending how things are implemented. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 21:26, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Google results: Mirrors vs Wikipedia

To be moved to Wikipedia:External search engines

I'm sure this must have cropped up before, but I can't find it; can anyone point me to a relevant discussion? Anyway, I did a search on Google today for Lucifer cipher, and in the top 10 results were no less than 7 mirrored copies of the Lucifer (cipher) page, but not the Wikipedia article itself, which surfaces at position 70. This seems to happen a lot for various articles, and is somewhat annoying (especially since the mirrored pages are out of date and advert-laden). Anything Wikipedia can do? Feel free to point me to the previous discussions... — Matt 13:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Many people are PO'ed about this, and I have no idea how it could be fixed (short of someone at google taking some action). If those pages were respecting the GFDL to the letter, they would link to the exact Wikipedia article, which should raise the pagerank of the Wikipedia article, and eventually bring it to the top, but this does not seem to be happening. Dori | Talk 14:06, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

[From one of the PO'd peeps]. This is a relatively recent problem (roughly since thefreedictionary.com came along) but must be costing us traffic, and is a long term threat to the continued growth of the GFDL corpus. What is odd is that, despite at least some of the mirrors linking to WP and thus making it probably the most linked to version of the page, WP comes so low. Are the other sites so good at search exchange optimization/google-breaking? Has WP somehow fallen foul of a negative points score due to being seen as a link farm somehow? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

They have as many links as we do (as a mirror), but it's just that they were up when wikipedia wasn't and google spidered them first. Dori | Talk 16:22, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

Interwiki

Currently interwiki links follow the principle "each language makes links to each language".  As the number of languages increases, this system becomes more and more difficult to manage.  Very soon we will have hundreds of interlanguage links on some pages.  Perhaps we should have a "central repository" of all interwiki links, with only one "other languages" link at normal pages?  Or perhaps it will be user-defined — either to have a lot of interlanguage links, or only one "other languages" link, or some chosen languages linked directly, and others via "other languages" link. — Monedula 14:08, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes that would be sensible as every time a new language (new_lang) adds an article, it has to go and find every other language (other_lang) that has that article, add the new_lang interwiki to each other_lang, and get all other_lang interwiki links and add them to new_lang.... There is a bot that does this, but it's not used everywhere, and it doesn't work unless there is an interwiki link in the articles to begin with. Dori | Talk 14:17, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

Is there actually a robot that updates interwiki links? If I add a link "latin:draco" to the English "dragon" article, will a robot come along and add a link "english:dragon" to the latin "draco", or should I do that myself?

I think it is preferable if this is done by a robot, because of the possibility of errors and omissions, especially when several languages are involved. Aleph4 15:17, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

I see two different solutions that both could be described as central repository. Which one are you speaking about? One would be an entry like <english>:<italian>,<german>,<hindi>,...; <italian>:<english>,<german>,<hindi>,..., ... in the central repositiory, just moving the long list of interwiki language links out of the article into something else. But still every article in every language needed some entry in the central repository. The other would be using what the Esperantist (I'm not one, but I know one ...) call the help of an intermediate language, i.e. articles on the same topic in every language inking to the same central repository article, which encompasses a list of links to all languages: <english>:<esperanto>, <italian>:<esperanto>, <german>:<esperanto>, <hindi>:<esperanto> and <esperanto>:<english>,<italian>,<german>,<hindi>,... This could help creating preferentiable interwiki links via software, transforming the need for k 1:n relations into n 1:1 relations + one 1:k relation. -- till we *) 21:59, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

The problem here, which I suspect is not obvious to some, is that this is not a "transitive" operation. For example, en:European_dragon links to ca:Drac, which links to en:Dragon, not en:European_dragon. Some languages may have more granularity, or articles just may not line up neatly, so situation this is not very rare, although it's probably under 5%. -- Jmabel 01:22, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm not very sure if this is really a problem. Take, for simplicity, only three languages and eo as intermediate language. Let's assume that eo for dragon is "dracxo". Then we get:

de:Drache -> eo:Dracxo

en:Dragon -> eo:Dracxo

en:European Dragon -> eo:Dracxo

ca:Drac -> eo:Dracxo

A automagically language link system could now turn these around and create, for ca:Drac, the following list of links:

ca:Drac -> eo:Dracxo -> de:Drache, en:Dragon, en:European Dragon

So the "only" probleme is that there would be two links for en. Depending on implementation, this could be a big probleme (now), or could be a very small probleme (if the central repositiory creates an extra webpage with possible translations, i.e. you have the article Drac in ca, click on "Other languages", and get a web page which lists all other links (with language and target language article name), listing English twice. Or you could get a language list at the top of the article, but with a slightly enlarged syntax: ca:Drac would then have links like "Deutsch", "English (1, 2)", "Esperanto" at the top of the article, linking to de:Drache, en:Dragon, en:European Dragon, eo:Dracxo ...

Where is my logical error? -- till we *) 15:31, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Making small links of long links

http://www.tinyurl.com Very handy. Andries 09:49, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

Any LDS members or persons knowledgeable about Mormonism...

I see there's a new article on Temple undergarment on which I am not qualified to comment... but anyone who is might want to check it for accuracy/NPOV. Dpbsmith 12:27, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

If you have a look at the talk pages of the various articles about LDS, you will get a good idea of who is knowledgeable about LDS. DJ Clayworth 18:28, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

There's a far more thorough article already at Temple garment, I've redirected it there. --Michael Snow 19:45, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

New Creative Commons migration plan

Orginal post

Okay, new Creative Commons migration plan. No horrendous programming involved. For a list of reasons why I think migrating toward dual liscensing under both the Creative Commons and the GFDL is a Good Thing, please visit my user page.

1. Proceed with the getting permission phase. For those just tuning in, this consists of:
   1. Changing the submission copyright notice so new, post-changeover material will be released under both Creative Commons and GFDL.
   2. Presenting registered users with a dialog box at their next login asking for permission to release pre-changeover submitted material under the Creative Commons (in addition to the GFDL).
   3. The Wikimedia Foundation agrees to release material contributed by it under the Creative Commons.
2. Mark in the page histories which versions were submitted by dual-licensers, and which were submitted GFDL-only. The CC and GFDL (or GNU) logos would be a good marker.
   1. Also mark all versions before the first GFDL-only version with a “This version is licensed in its entirety under both the Creative Commons and GFDL.” notice.
   2. Mark all versions after the first GFDL-only version and before the first “liberated” version with a “This version may contain material that is only available under the GFDL.” notice.
3. If an article has never had a GFDL-only submission, have a copyright notice in the article saying “This article is available under both the Creative Commons and the GFDL” or something to that effect.
4. Wait a month or so to give time for registered users to give their permission.

Then:

1. If an article has had a GFDL-only submission in its history, have a link in the article saying “Portions of this article maybe available under the Creative Commons. Click here for a Creative Commons compatible version.”
2. The Creative Commons compatible page will be “seeded” with the last version of the article that hasn't been tainted by a GFDL-only submission.
   1. If the first version of the article was GFDL-only, the page will start off blank.
   2. This will effectively fork the article.
   3. In addition to the usual submission copyright notice, add a line like this: “This submission contains no material that is licensed solely under the GFDL.”
   4. Users can then manually add CC-licensed material from later versions of the article.
3. When the Creative Commons compatible version is just as good as the original version, replace the original article with the CC version.
   1. Since the exact moment when the CC version is just as good as the original is a matter of opinion, I suggest that registered users should report candidates to the sysops, who will then do the actual replacing.
   2. Mark this version and all later versions in the page history with the “This version is licensed in its entirety...” note.
   3. Have a "This version is available under both the Creative..." notice in the now liberated article.

Does anybody see any problems with this plan?

Crazyeddie 00:58, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Cyrius

I may be reading this wrong, but doesn't it mean we have to start over from scratch? -- Cyrius|&#9998 01:16, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I'm now regretting not putting in a bit more of an introduction. I left off a lot of intro material in the interets of brevity. Anyway... Starting over from scratch is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. This plan would fork articles that might contain GFDL-only material into a regular (GFDL only) and Creative Commons + GFDL versions until they could be combined. Crazyeddie 01:49, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

You realize that "articles that might contain GFDL-only material" is nearly synonymous with "every article on the entire site", right? -- Cyrius|&#9998 02:23, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

Oh, brother, am I ever. The CC fork would be reverted back to the first version that would be CC compatiable. By what I mean by CC compatiable, read down. Crazyeddie 02:34, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Dori

It's not going to happen, many users have just plainly left. What about anons? What about permissions already obtained from other sites? Dori | Talk 01:19, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

Anons and registered users who haven't yet give permission, or users that have refused permission would be considered "GFDL-onlies" whose submissions would have to be worked around. I'm not sure what you mean by permissions already obtained from other sites. If it helps, a user who has submitted GFDL material that's copyrighted by someone else would have to refuse permission. In theory, they could give permission for each individual permission, but I think it would be better to just count them out entirely. Crazyeddie 01:58, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

RikK

Several objections:

• Presenting registered users with a dialog box at their next login asking for permission to release pre-changeover submitted material under the Creative Commons (in addition to the GFDL).

Some people, such as myself, don't ever log out, so would never see this unless their cookie was somehow damaged.

• The Wikimedia Foundation agrees to release material contributed by it under the Creative Commons.

Why would they do that?

• Mark in the page histories which versions were submitted by dual-licensers, and which were submitted GFDL-only. The CC and GFDL (or GNU) logos would be a good marker

How do you plan on doing that? Manually? And what if the "version" consists of a one-character minor change?

• Also mark all versions before the first GFDL-only version with a “This version is licensed in its entirety under both the Creative Commons and GFDL.” notice.

What is the first GFDL-only version? The current Wikipedia, as we speak, is GFDL. There is no first version.

• Mark all versions after the first GFDL-only version and before the first “liberated” version with a “This version may contain material that is only available under the GFDL.” notice.

What does "liberated" mean? And what if the article is GFDL only? Do you somehow make it unviewable? And why would you do that?

• If an article has had a GFDL-only submission in its history, have a link in the article saying “Portions of this article maybe available under the Creative Commons. Click here for a Creative Commons compatible version.”

I still don't see how you plan on splitting the different edits out.

• The Creative Commons compatible page will be “seeded” with the last version of the article that hasn't been tainted by a GFDL-only submission.

I find the use of the term "tainted" highly offensive, and suggest you re-think not only your terminology, but your entire idea as to why you think this entire, man-hours intensive project is a good idea.

• If the first version of the article was GFDL-only, the page will start off blank.

STRONGLY oppose. Wikipedia is Wikipedia, not the "Creative Commons Wikipedia."

• Since the exact moment when the CC version is just as good as the original is a matter of opinion, I suggest that registered users should report candidates to the sysops, who will then do the actual replacing.

Nice of you to volunteer the immense amount of work involved for us sysops to do.

As you may see from my above comments, I see no good coming of this project and must ask once again, just WHY do you think this is needed? RickK 01:24, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

Crazyeddie's Reply to RikK

Okay.... You bring up a number of good points, but I guess I better start out with a general declaration of principles. First off, I believe that the entire reason that the Wikipedia didn't start out under the Creative Commons from Day 1 is that it simply wasn't invented yet. The GFDL was simply the best available at the time. I have nothing against GFDL myself, but I'm told that if a outside agency wishes to use a Wikipedia article under the GFDL, they would have to attach 12 pages of legalese along with a 1-2 page article.

The new wikis that have been inspired by the Wikipedia have looked at the copyright choices, and by and large, have chosen Creative Commons, even though this means they have to work completely from scratch! For example, the LQwiki, which I contribute to, is having to write an article on Richard Stallman from scratch, even though there is a mature, multi-page Wikipedia article, whose creators, in all likely-hood, would love for us to use. (This initative is not sponsered by the LQwiki BTW, it's all my stupid idea.)

Essentially, I feel that the Creative Commons better reflects the spirit and intent of the average Wikipedian than the GFDL, and that the sole reason for the use of the GFDL is historical. Further, if the Wikipedia doesn't migrate toward Creative Commons, than the Wikipedia's work will have to be reduplicated from scratch. There is even the possibility that the Wikipedia may fork. Almost any thing will be less work than having to make the Wikipedia all over again. Crazyeddie 02:08, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Now on to your individual points:

• Presenting registered users with a dialog box at their next login asking for permission to release pre-changeover submitted material under the Creative Commons (in addition to the GFDL). Crazyeddie's orginal post

Some people, such as myself, don't ever log out, so would never see this unless their cookie was somehow damaged. RickK

This is a minor technical difficulty. Is there anyway to force users to logoff? (Sorry if this seems dismissive. It's just that I think that it's too early to worry much about questions like this while big ones like "Why are we doing this again?" Still need to be answered.) Crazyeddie

• The Wikimedia Foundation agrees to release material contributed by it under the Creative Commons. Crazyeddie's orginal post

Why would they do that? RickK

Maybe I should expand this a mite: "The Wikimedia Foundation agrees to release Wikipedia content that it created itself into the Creative Commons." By this I mean such things as the US city articles created by Rambot. (I'm assuming that Rambot was created by the Wikimedia people.) The main reason why the Wikipedia has not already migrated to Creative Commons is that the individual contributors, not the Wikimedia Foundation, holds copyright. All this means is that they agree to release whatever content that they hold copyright into the Creative Commons. If they don't wish to agree to a simple thing like that, then this whole plan is moot. As for why they would want to do this, see the "general declaration of principles". Crazyeddie

• Also mark all versions before the first GFDL-only version with a “This version is licensed in its entirety under both the Creative Commons and GFDL.” notice. Crazyeddie's orginal post

What is the first GFDL-only version? The current Wikipedia, as we speak, is GFDL. There is no first version. RickK

By first GFDL-only version, I mean "the first (by first, I mean by earliest date of submission) version of an article that was submitted by someone not in the CC-permission database and was submitted before the CC changeover date. Every version after that, until the remerging with the CC fork could contain material that is liscensed only under the GFDL. Crazyeddie

Cyrius

Which means we have to start over to achieve dual licensing. -- Cyrius|&#9998 02:50, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

No, I think this fork method will work. I'm just trying to iron out the bugs.Crazyeddie 02:57, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

If you have to "fork" all the way back to the first non-GFDL-only version, you're going back to a blank page for nearly all of the pages in Wikipedia. -- Cyrius|&#9998 03:01, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

This forking would start sometime after the inital phase of the changeover. (I said a month.) By this time, most registered users who are going to do so would have given permission for their previously submitted work to be released under the Creative Commons. So the only versions that are GFDL-only would have been submitted by anons, or users who have not given permission or have refused permission. I believe that a majority of versions by that point will be CC+GFDL. So most articles in the fork would have something in them, but it would be a very earlier version of the article.Crazyeddie 03:12, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

My experience looking at page histories says that we'd have to throw away an enormous amount of work to go all the way back to before anon edits. It just won't work. -- Cyrius|&#9998 03:16, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

From where I sit, either we fork the articles or we fork the project. Manually copy and pasting already existing, CC+GFDL material is less work then creating the same material from scratch. And this work would be done mainly by those who need the material under the CC. Unless the lawyers work out away for GFDL material to be released under CC, I'll keep trying to think of a way to make this as easy as possible. Crazyeddie 03:29, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Crazyeddie's reply continued

• Mark all versions after the first GFDL-only version and before the first “liberated” version with a “This version may contain material that is only available under the GFDL.” notice. Crazyeddie's orginal post

What does "liberated" mean? And what if the article is GFDL only? Do you somehow make it unviewable? And why would you do that? RickK

By liberated, I mean the first version where the CC+GFDL fork remerges with the orginal GFDL-only fork. The GFDL-only versions will still be visible, even after the remerging (through the page histories). All this messages means is that you can't use material from this particular version of the article under the Creative Commons. You can still use it under the GFDL. Crazyeddie

• If an article has had a GFDL-only submission in its history, have a link in the article saying “Portions of this article maybe available under the Creative Commons. Click here for a Creative Commons compatible version.” Crazyeddie's orginal post

I still don't see how you plan on splitting the different edits out. RickK

Hmmm, that should be "if a version of an article has had a previous GFDL-only submission,...." The link would go to a seperate wiki page- the CC+GFDL fork. I guess a good place to put it would be en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC_GFDL_fork/<page_name> This fork page, at first, would be the first version of the article before the GFDL-only material was submitted. Users then could add CC+GFDL material from later versions manually. I hope that explains it. Crazyeddie

• If the first version of the article was GFDL-only, the page will start off blank. Crazyeddie's orginal post

STRONGLY oppose. Wikipedia is Wikipedia, not the "Creative Commons Wikipedia." RickK

The only reason I can see for you to get this angry is if you think I mean that the main, regular, GFDL-only article would be blanked. I'm only talking about the forked CC+GFDL article which most people will never see. Crazyeddie

Cyrius

You mean the start-from-(almost-)scratch CC+GFDL article. This is looking like a worse and worse idea. Even if you got the majority of active logged-in users to retroactively agree, and even if you wrote software to handle chopping out the singly-licensed bits, you would still have to go through 90+% of articles manually to rewrite them back into a coherent state. It simply will not work. -- Cyrius|&#9998 03:45, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

The only thing I can say in defense, is that it's the only way I've come up with to get wikipedia content released into the Creative Commons besides waiting for the FSF and CC lawyers to solve it, which I'm not sure can be done. Crazyeddie 03:54, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

The only way that this idea would work would be if a version of the GFDL were to come out which explicitly cited the CC license as an equivalent license. (And what license would it be, anyway?) That would allow the cross-licensing to occur legally. Otherwise, it's a violation of the GFDL, and just too much trouble to manage the fork, with too much immediate chaos, for too little gain. And I'm unconvinced that the CC license is better suited to Wikipedia - the GFDL is really the revolutionary license. Others just followed along. Snowspinner 03:49, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

I've long wondered, if a version of the GFDL came out that was compatable with the CC, would older versions still be compatabile with the new GFDL? That's one reason I'm not willing to wait for the lawyers. Crazyeddie 03:54, 2004 May 24 (UTC)~

In defense of this incarnation of the forking idea, the ones who would be doing the grunt labor (manually readding CC+GFDL material) would be the ones who need the CC material. Of course, managing the damn thing would be a royal hairball in and of itself. My main purpose at this point is not to suggest any single solution, but to at least get people thinking about reliscensing. Crazyeddie 04:15, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

The difference between the two liscenses is really too subtle for me. The only reason I care is because the difference is just enough to seriously impact other wikis' work. I agree the GFDL, since it came first, was truly revolutionary. However, isn't it possible that later liscenses, following in the GFDL's path, might have done a better job? Crazyeddie 04:19, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Crazyeddie's Reply continued

• Since the exact moment when the CC version is just as good as the original is a matter of opinion, I suggest that registered users should report candidates to the sysops, who will then do the actual replacing. Crazyeddie's orginal post

Nice of you to volunteer the immense amount of work involved for us sysops to do. RickK

I do apologize for that. It does seem to be the nature of sysops for work to be dumped on them, doesn't it. This was only one alternative among several that occured to me. The problem is that remerging the two forks will not be a simple decision to be taken lightly. If it's done too soon, somebody will revert to a previous, GFDL-only version, or inject GFDL-only material. However, like the "some people don't logoff" problem though, the exact solution to this problem can wait until the bigger issues of this project are settled. Crazyeddie 03:54, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Well that's the best I can do for now. Crazyeddie 03:54, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

I've added sections and indicated who was talking where in my rather massive reply. I'm going to take one last look over, then go off to recover from this. Crazyeddie 04:09, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

User:Chameleon's changing '-' to "—"

I don't see why they should all be changed to "—". At large font sizes an "—" is *huge* and looks very ugly. A '-' works just as well and doesn't stand out as much.

Darrien 17:19, 2004 May 23 (UTC)

This perceived problem is a perceived font problem. Argue to have the Wikipedia font changed if you feel its m-dashes are too long. In the meanwhile, if a dash (—) is meant, a dash should be used; if a hyphen (-) is meant, a hyphen should be used. Read any book from a major publisher — you won't find them using hyphens for dashes, either single, as you like them (-), or double (--), as most wikipedians seem to. Bad punctuation is ugly to educated people Chameleon 17:35, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

It is not a font problem at all. I'm surprised an "educated" person would expect a hyphen to have the same boldness as a dash. Perhaps you should concentrate on changing the all the 'U's and 'J's to 'V's and 'I's.

Darrien 17:43, 2004 May 23 (UTC)

I think it'd be better, more wikilike, to have '--' render as '—'. (I agree that a distinction between hyphens and em-dashes should be made.) If there's no burning need to use HTML entities for something, they shouldn't be used. I vote for '--'. (Then again, we could go the TeX route and use '-' for the hyphen, '--' for the en-dash (used for ranges, like 10--25), and '---' for the em-dash (used for saparation---like this---of text). Higher-quality typesetting, fits well into the syntax ('----' is a horizontal rule, which is kinda sorta like the god-king of all dashes), and no more ugly HTML entities in the wikitext. Sounds like a win to me. grendelkhan|(blather) 18:45, 2004 May 23 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that there should be automatic conversion. That way, people could just type "--" or "---" and correct dashes would appear. That would be great. However, until this is implemented, we will have to use HTML, in the same way that we would have to use <i> </i> if we didn't have '' '' — Chameleon 19:12, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

Automated conversion is a good idea. But & m d a s h ; (rendered as —) isn't supported in all browsers, as far as I know. And "--" seems to me a usenet style for m-dashes, not for n-dashes. (A related probleme is, btw, the difference between "some text ? some extra text ? some text" and "some text?some extra text?some more text" in different languages.) -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 18:54, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

& mdash; displays correctly in all modern browsers these days. Let's work for forward, nor backward compatibility. Also bear in mind that "-", "--" or "---" for dashes do not display correctly (—) in any browser. — Chameleon 19:12, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

We did have automatic conversion up and running for a couple of months ago: really cool, except that it broke the wikitable formatting commands and was deactivated in a matter of minutes. It'd be nice to have it back, but I'm afraid I'm not a programmer.
Re the em-dashes and how they can look too long (a lot longer than a capital M here in Tahoma): the alternative is to use en-dashes (spaced), which is sanctioned by a fair number of schools of typography and punctuationalists. –Hajor 01:14, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

Ah, that's a pity. Surely it can be programmed not to break wikitables. I hope the programmers are reading this. I've just been looking at a few fonts. It seems a lot have over-long m-dashes. Verdana, Arial Narrow, Book Antiqua, Comic Sans MS, Lucida Sans, High Tower Text, Trebuchet MS and others are okay though. Having said that, although dashes should not theoretically be any longer than an em, that fact that professional font designers make them a little longer shows that they agree with me in saying that it is more elegant for them to be too long than too short.
In any case, I think it's clear that those who believe it's okay to put just a hyphen are in a typographically-challenged minority. Darrien, please put the pages back how you found them, and stop turning my dashes into hyphens. — Chameleon 09:44, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

-->Changing '-' to "—"

Translating articles

I would like to tran

New features

With the upcoming features I think we should keep in mind that "just because we can doesn't necessarily mean we should." What I mean by that is that the new parametrized templates and categories can make pages pretty hard to figure out. We should probably come up with a policy/guideline about how these two features should be used. As an example, keep a newbie mindset and try and figure out this page: [7] We should preserve the wiki principles of simple and easy editing as much as possible while making use of new features IMO. Dori | Talk 21:26, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

While I agree we could need a policy on new features (we still need one on the navigation bar inflation on the country pages, many now having four of them already), I think the templated version of the infobox is easier to grasp for a newbie, as content and display is separated. I consider the HTML table currently in Belgium much more scary than the template useage one on [test:Belgium]. And for shorter infoboxes, for example a taxobox, the difference will be much more striking. andy 21:37, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

To be honest I'll be glad if that example is as bad as it gets. Apart from writing the template parameters in thisstyle instead of this_style it looks quite readable. I think a newbie would be able to "get it", even if creating new templates would be an advanced user thing. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 21:54, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

I am sure it can get a lot worse than that. Perhaps we will need an obfuscation contest to see just how bad it can get. Dori | Talk 03:47, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

I added to Dori's example comments above & below the infobox of the style that we've been using in the dog breeds tables. Comments like this will help newbies a bunch. ... Oh, BTW, the little help box that pops up when the mouse hovers over that demo page's Save button says "Save you page". Is this a bug? Elf | Talk 05:03, 26 May 2004 (UTC)

RE the article on Margaret Trudeau

I was about to insert a book cover with her image but saw where one had been removed by User:Angela: (cur) (last) . . 23:06, 17 Nov 2003 . . Angela (remove photo - see Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements) - However, while doing the biography for Errol Flynn’s wife, Lili Damita, I see that the Image: ErrollFlynn.jpg "Cover of My Wicked, Wicked Ways, by Erroll Flynn" was inserted by a Wikipedia Administrator, User:Zoe -- Can someone clarify this? Should I delete Flynn or insert Trudeau? JillandJack 16:56, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

The removal of the Trudeau image isn't material to your case - it was removed on its own merits. Similarly, the Flynn one remains in its. Hopefully what you upload will be acceptable under the "fair use" doctrine - take a look at Wikipedia:Fair use for pointers as to what is and isn't fair use. Fair use is, however, problematic, so it would be better if you can find a public domain image of her, or can persuade the owner of some image to grant us licence to use it here - see Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission for sample letters/emails to send. Oh, and my compliments on checking this matter out so thoroughly. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:28, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Red Cross Logo on Main Page wrong

Can someone take a look at the logo for the ARC on the main page? The logo there is of the IFRC, of which the ARC is a member, but the ARC never uses this logo, and it is not the same thing. Can we swap it out for a plain red cross without the border, which is the logo of the ARC? Thanks, Mark Richards 16:40, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

I uploaded a simple red cross here but have no ideas how to change the main page. Thanks! Mark Richards 17:51, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Main Page doesn't have ARC or anything like that.... What? --Menchi 05:39, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

ARC was founded on May 21 1881; its founding was one of the Featured Anniversaries for May 21. We're now on May 22's Featured Anniversaries, so it's a moot point until next year. - jredmond 05:43, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

That red cross should be a PNG: . I've taken the liberty of uploading a PNG version of it. (One-tenth the size, and no yecchy JPEG artifacts!) grendelkhan|(blather) 05:37, 2004 May 23 (UTC)

MediaWiki 1.3

We're going to be phasing in a pre-release version of MediaWiki 1.3 over the next 24 hours or so. Expect minor service disruptions, and the sudden appearance of lots of new features. -- Tim Starling 14:08, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

I've created a new page to serve as a collection of comments and bugs about the new release: m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports. Please use only that page to focus the efforts. Dori | Talk 14:42, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

Sweet. I think everyone needs to give props to our very hard-working developers. →Raul654 15:20, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

this feature will only trigger an edit conflict if users attempt to edit the same few lines. Oh. My. God. Who do I buy a beer for??!! Fantastic! Mark Richards 16:03, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Dibs on the second round, for that and for Links in summaries allowed! - jredmond 16:11, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

*frown* Still no Wikisophia features like chessboards, music and chemistry diagrams, and they put in this timeline thingy, which seems to have just flown out of nowhere? Pfeh. It's a lot easier to write a text timeline than it is to write a text chemical diagram, or to make one with xfig or PPCHTeX Though I definitely appreciate the ability to include wikitext in image captions, and the ability to caption images without thumnailing them. This is the way image markup should be, definitely. Grendelkhan 20:28, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

If I understood previous responses correctly, that whole version of Wikitex was more-or-less a one-man project, and that one man has since disappeared, so I wouldn't hold your breath for it - it's all got to be rewritten from scratch if at all. (I may have the wrong end of the stick there, though). - IMSoP 20:46, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm putzing around with the developers now. Pain in the butt. Might be easier to track down the guy who wrote wikitex. grendelkhan|(blather) 07:35, 2004 May 23 (UTC)

I see that Wikiquote, Wikisource, Meta-Wiki, & Wikibooks have all switched to it. When will the rest be switched over?

Calendar bot

The calendar on the Japanese Wikipedia is changed each day apparently by hand. I think maybe we could use a calendar bot to automate such tasks.

Magie delle Ande: Portale Perù

Buenos dias. Deseo segnalar las mejores paginas web sobre el Perú en idioma italiano. Apartenecen a nuestra asociacion sociocultural Latinoamericana Magie delle Ande. Gracias por su disponibilidad. Gabriele Poli

http://www.peru.sudamerica.it http://www.magiedelleande.it

• Babelfish translation (FWIW): "Good day. Desire to segnalar the best paginas Web on Peru in Italian language. Apartenecen to our sociocultural association Latin American Magie delle Ande. Thanks for its availability."

• Mostly close enough; "segnalar" ==> "Señalar ==> "point to"; I believe "Apartenecen" is an un-word; the last sentence is basically "Thanks for helping (more literally "putting yourself at my disposal"). Anyway, he wants Italian-language pages about Peru, presumably either from Wikipedia or elsewhere. -- Jmabel 05:44, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

It seems to me like you've got the intent backwards. The poster has pages on Peru in Italian, and wants us to point at them. But then, I don't speak Italian. -- Cyrius|&#9998 17:21, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

You could be right. It's a little hard to decipher an Italian-speaker's slightly broken Spanish. (Wonder why he thought it was better to address English-speakers in Spanish than in Italian...) -- Jmabel 18:00, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

Which also shows how rusty my Spanish is. -- Cyrius|&#9998 19:18, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

A little OT, but... Does anybody know of a open-source translator project? There has got to be something better than babelfish. Crazyeddie 01:10, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Maybe actions from anonymous ones should be limited?

I recognize that the following ideas may be un-Wikipedian in their nature, but here goes.

There is at least the appearance that many articles are being vandalized by anonymous contributors, and also that many new junk articles are being created by the anonymous ones as well. Note the frequent vandal deletions of the United States article. I would like to submit that since the Wikipedia is very close to maturity (IMHO), it would be a good time to start restricting what anonymous contributors can do. I think it would be good if anonymous contributors should not be able to:

• Create a new article (to reduce the many new junk articles being created)
• Change more than a small percentage of an article text at one time (to all but prevent major vandalism, like full article text deletions)
• Make more than a certain number of edits in a particular time period; perhaps take the Slashdot/discussion board idea of maintaining a flood interval. For this purpose, track edits by IP.

Ultimately, the work of the registered contributors will become immensely difficult if we have to continue to battle the increasing wave of vandalism and junk articles coming from anonymous contributors. So, if we don't consider the ideas I present here, what honestly can be done? (Or, has this already been discussed before?)

Stevietheman 07:43, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

See m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles and m:Posting by anonymous users should be limited, but not banned. Angela. 08:08, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the links. From what I read, I think my proposal can be considered modest in its approach. It continues the ability for anonymous contributors to make edits (just not new articles). So, the typo and grammar fixing that anonymous contributors are famous for can continue, and vandalism and new junk articles should decrease. Besides, I would think that we would want the anonymous ones to have a major reason to upgrade to a registered account: so they can create their own articles.

However newly created nonsense article can be spotted rather quickly with the Special:Newpages - the don't get lost as fast as edits on Special:Recent Changes, and the byte length of an article also gives an idea what might be nonsense (something less 100 bytes is either nonsense or a very bad stub which needs attention as well). So if we don't allow anonymous users to create new articles, then the damage will be even greater than before. Speedy deletion of nonsense is easy and quickly done by the admins, while looking for a bad edit in an article takes more time. andy 08:52, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Stevie I don't like your idea at all. It's very unwiki. I don't think vandalism by anon IP's is a particluar problem. It's delt with quickly and easily by admins. As wikipedia grows we will get more of it, but then again we will get more admins too. I often sit and watch RC for vandalism edits, I know that loads of other admins do too. When I see an anon make an edit I check it, usually it's good, but every now and then it's vandalism. I hit roll back then I check that users other contribtutions, roll back all the vandal edits, warn the vandal, protect the page if necessary, temp block the ip if necessary. This can all be done very easily, with no stress on my part. Most vandals either become legit users or get bored and go away very quickly. I just don't see this type of vandalism at all difficult to deal with, and it's certainly not worth putting restrictions on the thousands of legit anon users in order to combat it. theresa knott 09:03, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

It is known that "RC watching" isn't going to scale in its current form forever though. It used to possible to examine all edits! Now that is hopeless. It looks like a software solution along the lines of being able to tick a box to say "I, Theresa Knott, have checked this edit, and it doesn't appear to be vandalism). Then those who trust Theresa Knott will see that edit greyed out in RC, and know it doesn't need to be checked. I think something along these lines will eventually be required, to avoid a massive amount of redundacy with RC watching. I agree that blocking anons would cause more problems (lack of new blood, more "hidden" vandals because they are have a blue username) than it would solve. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:58, 21 May 2004 (UTC)~

That seems a sensible suggestion. theresa knott 11:13, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

I think that's a great idea. Currently a lot of effort is wasted because each good anon edit to an article like Hitler is checked a hundred times while other articles go ignored. Such a system could also serve a second purpose of increasing the amount of positive feedback in Wikipedia, especially for new users. Instead of greying out the link just have a comment (e.g. Good Work - Username) appended to the edit in RC, watchlists, and page histories that clearly indicates the edit is thought to be a good one. The button to mark a good edit could be right next to rollback, sort of as its friendly opposite. - SimonP 22:15, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

That would be really nice. theresa knott 15:57, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

Based on your comments, since the review of new articles seems to be still somewhat manageable, I could lop off the first suggestion and leave the remaining two, which I have still seen no argument against. I'm not convinced that these are "unwiki". They are rather an automated control measure that limits vandal damage while permitting the vast majority of what's already done by good anonymous contributors. I want to reduce the work for admins, and reduce the problems, rather than just depending upon the scalability of lots of new admins as the community grows. -- Stevietheman 15:54, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea of having some limits; I also like being able to pop in and fix a typo without logging in (like if I'm at somebody else's house, showing them Wikipedia). As far as the idea of having things checked by a trusted checkerperson, that's much better than the mere anthill method we have now. It works OK for McDonald's but I have to wonder how well it would scale in the long run. ;Bear 23:20, 2004 May 21 (UTC)

I'd like to just have apparent vanity pages by anon users added to the list of what is eligible for speedy delete! The WP:VFD process eats a lot of time that could be better spent. -- Jmabel 05:31, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

On the contrary many people on VfD seem to positively delight in being rude about vanity pages. It would be a shame to deprive them of their daily cathartic moan. More seriously, I would oppose as this one type of article where you quite often find the usual crowd of deletionists saying "DELETE!!!" and then someone comes along and says "well actually, Xyz is a famous cba and I just wrote a decent stub." That needs the five days. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:29, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't think we should worry about restricting the rights of anons. When it gets to be too much of a hastle, don't allow annons to edit anymore. But that's just me. Crazyeddie 01:08, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

I support the restriction of rights, when admins decide that vandalism is eating a lot of time. I ask all the admins now to assess the time they spend checking versus the benefit of unrestricted anonymous edits. I think they are in the best position to make that judgement. Pgan002 04:45, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

Well in my experience causual vandalism doesn't eat a lot of admin timeat the moment. Vandalism sprees by logged in users, dealing with POVpushers, with people who delight in revert wars, with people who make personal attacks, with poeple who troll etc takes far more communuty time and effort than "George Bush has a huge dick" type vandals. I agree with PCB21 about vanity pages too. Vanity needs to be decided by the community, it's too much to expect an admin to make the decision themselves. Lord if I had to do that I'd be deleteing 3/4 of the "fasmous" people we have articles on since I don't know loads about lots of stuff.theresa knott 15:57, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

A few thoughts. First of all, vanity should not be a speedy-delete candidate--it's often hard to tell what is or isn't vanity (not always, but...). Second, I LOVE the idea of "This edit checked by". It would save a lot of my time on, say, George W. Bush, which gets edited nearly every day, often by anons, some of whom have good edits. I'm sure I'm not the only one checing these. Developers, take heed, please! Meelar 17:41, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

rambot-generated US town articles

Should the several myriad rambot-generated US town articles be moved to Wikibooks? --Juuitchan

No. Maximus Rex 05:00, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

No, encyclopedia material, not a book. -- Chris 73 | Talk 05:01, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Several?! No, I don't think so. Mark Richards 05:05, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

"Several myriad" is, I believe, correct. The number is four myriad something isn't it? --J

No. Absolutely not. RickK 15:02, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Hey, I wrote those 30,000 articles myself with the help of my master! Us bots are people too. -- rambot

Creative Commons petition (dual liscensing)

On my user page, I have a draft of a petition. This petition proposes that the Wikipedia community migrate toward releasing its collective work under both the GFDL and Creative Commons liscenses.

While this has been suggested previously (see here: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL_FAQ ), I believe that this proposal gets around the problems that have been mentioned. If it doesn't, I'm confident that the Wikipedia community, working in collaboration, can find a way around any problems.

Please go to my user page and edit this draft, especially if you disagree with this proposal. I'm planning to move the final petition to Wikipedia talk:Copyrights after July 1, 2004 (although I may hold off). Before I move it, I will make sure I personally approve the final draft. If you disagree with the final draft, you can link to a statment of your objections. At this time, I will also remove any signature from the draft, since I can't be sure that people who signed the draft will agree with the final form.

Thank you!

Crazyeddie 21:24, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

One problem is the massive amount of text already available. There is no way that can be converted. Another is convincing people to release material under two licenses. I doubt this will happen. Dori | Talk 23:44, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Dori. We've got tons of material released under the GFDL, if we had to go to everyone who has submitted material and re-ask if they want to also release their contributions under a new license, it would be a nightmare. RickK 23:46, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't propose that we ask each contributor to give permission. I do propose that we ask every registered user permission for content that was released underneath their username. Even I'm not crazy enough to think we should (or even could) track down every anyonomusly submitted piece of content. This would be a one time click on a dialouge box, so from the user's point of view, it would be relatively painless. I'm hoping that maybe 60% of the Wikipedia be made available for use by projects using Creative Commons. Ideally, the portions that we can't track down will be replaced over time by new dual-liscenced material, but this will take years. Crazyeddie 19:14, 2004 May 21 (UTC)

Indeed. I guess Crazyeddie's proposal is inspired by the relicencing effort of the Netscape browser. But in that case most (I guess > 90%) of the code was written by employees of a fairly small group of companies, so merely getting those companies to agree takes care of 90% of the relicencing effort. Secondly, they didn't allow anons to contribute, so tracking down almost everyone else was fairly straightforward. This left only a tiny percentage that couldn't (or wouldn't) relicence. I'd guess that maybe 50% of wikipedia's articles have been edited by an anon at some point, and absolutely 100% of the significant ones. So, without exaggeration, it would be less work just to delete the database and start again. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:24, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

No, this is the first I've heard of that effort. The Mozilla project I'm guessing? Actually, I'd guess the number of articles that have been edited by an anon would be closer to 90%. However, I'm not concerened with what article may have been edited in the past by a GFDL only contributor. I'm only concerned with what portions of the current version of the article were contributed by dual-licensors and what portions were contributed by GFDL-onlies. As for starting from scratch, that's pretty much what the smaller wikis are stuck with doing right now. I think this migration is going to be a big, hairy mess to accomplish (which is why I'm doing this as a petition to encourage debate and consensus) but it would still be better than starting over. Crazyeddie 19:14, 2004 May 21 (UTC)

A biiiig problem with your suggested solution is this part: "(With a link to a page containing just the CC portions.)". The MediaWiki software currently has no such thing as a "blame" feature (who contributed which parts of a page), and such a feature would be impractical with the way articles are edited (in any combination of expansion, reduction and refactoring you feel like; unlike a program maintained by CVS, which is most of the time edited line by line or even block by block). So it would be impossible to have a licensing status for anything more fine-grained than each article, and as Finlay says, that would rule out dual-licensing on most articles. It's a pain, but our only hope is for the FSF and CC to create versions of GFDL and by-sa that are compatible (and don't let's even start on the "should we abandon copyleft"; it's just plain too late!). - IMSoP 00:51, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

I really don't know too much about the inner workings of the Wikipedia. For the record, I based that CC only page idea on the page histories. I thought that maybe we could somehow do a diff between the different versions and figure out who contriubted what. I think if we can work out the legal angles, the technical side will be hairy but doable. Fortunately, I'm not the one who has to work out the Small Matter of Programming, since I can't code to save my life.

I do agree that for this plan to work, we will need a way of determining who wrote what. This shouldn't be impossible. Any programmers out there? Here's the problem:

1. We have a copy of each version of an article.

1. We know who submitted each version.

1. We have (or will have) a database of users who have agreed to the CC scheme.

1. Given this, write a program that determines which portions of the current version were created by CCers.

Incidently, I've been wondering: if the GFDL was modified enough for material to be released under the CC, would the old version of the GFDL still be compatible with the new version? Can CC material be released under the GFDL? If a wikipedia article includes material from another wikipedia article, does it have to give the changelog of the other article? (As well as not being a programmmer, I'm also not a lawyer. Just because I started the petition doesn't mean I know anything about what I'm talking about.)

Has somebody seriously suggested abandoning copyleft? Good lord, without copyleft, this place simply wouldn't work!Crazyeddie 19:14, 2004 May 21 (UTC)

I quite like that Wikipedia is under the GFDL, what do people have against it --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 13:43, 2004 May 21 (UTC)

My main objection to the GFDL is that it's keeping me from reusing Wikipedia in another project. I wouldn't get so worked up about this except I'm reasonably sure that the contributors would approve of this reuse if they could. As for why other wikis don't use GFDL, the short answer is that people reusing content from them would have to include about 12 pages of legalese along with a 1-2 page article. Crazyeddie 19:14, 2004 May 21 (UTC)

Who created this page?

I'm not sure what you mean. Also, could you login and sign your message? Crazyeddie 00:43, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

I've come up with a new plan to get around the problems you've all brought up. I'm submitting it as a new thread to avoid quadruple indentation. Crazyeddie 00:43, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Bug or feature?

Check this extra semicolon http://sample.link/<hello> in the end. Should I make a case of it on the bugtracker? // Rogper 19:04, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

It can't hurt, I say go for it as I don't see a need for inserting that ; Dori | Talk 19:34, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

Tech question

Every few minutes, I get a white screen saying "Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties" etc. Then, if I wait a few minutes, wikipedia works again. Wikipedia:Hardware status has nothing. What's up? Is this just me? Meelar 18:06, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

No, it's not just you. Been happenning to me a lot recently. older≠wiser 18:10, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, me too - although note that generally, I don't bother waiting a few minutes, just a few seconds. My guess is that the servers are running at pretty much their exact capacity a lot of the time, and occasionally get one too many requests per second or whatever. - IMSoP 21:23, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

Does that mean it's time for another fundraiser? Meelar 22:42, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

There's more hardware already on order. Arwel 23:27, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, it should arrive tomorrow [8] don't know how long that improvement will last though. Dori | Talk 23:59, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

Merging articles

The Community Portal devotes a couple of lines to listing articles that need to be merged. Wouldn't it be better to have whole page for this? --Smack 17:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

If I understand the question, most cases would go on Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. Niteowlneils 18:36, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

XML usage

My apologies if there's a better place to ask this, but I was curious if Wikipedia supports XML. I mainly ask for the possiblity of implementing a few databases. Oberiko 16:50, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

My understanding is that a forthcoming version of mediawiki supports exporting articles in an XML format. Is that what you had in mind? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 16:57, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by support, but try out Special:Export. In the upcoming version 1.3 there will be more features that involve XML (look for them in http://test.wikipedia.org ). Dori | Talk 17:00, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

Clarification

An example of what I mean by supporting XML would be to keep data, stored on Wikipedia, in an XML format for the purpose of table generation etc. I think it would make it easier to read, edit, use and upload/download by users. It would also allow data to be kept centrally for seperate articles that might rely on it (thus preventing redudancy). Oberiko 17:05, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

Optimally, of course, would be if Wikipedia had an actual database and allowed JSP. It would certainly help in terms of large articles, especially long lists so that we could dynamically generate sub-lists. Oberiko 17:43, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

To date, a trade-off has been made. We've favoured ease of editing, with wikimarkup accesible to almost anyone who can run a web browser, trading this against the increased amount of manual work this entails. You're quite right to identify this need - the next time there's a major election in a country for which we have good constituency coverage (particularly the US and UK) there will be a lot of work to get the wiki back to being correct, and a nontrivial period during which it will be wrong. Worse, when the next US census data comes along, thousands of articles will be outdated. We've used bots in the past, but they have limited use in making updates (as opposed to mere substitutions or additions). The addition of transclusion to mediawiki makes some tasks simpler (such as centralising some kinds of tables). The real problem is that very very few of wikipedia's contributors are web developers - so the software project is short of developers. Also, we need to keep our barrier-to-entry for new contributors very low (that's how we've grown so big) and making a database-inclusion mechanism that's accessible not just to sad technogeeks like you and I, but to our moms and dads, is durn hard. But your idea is good (although exposing the ordinary contributor to XML is about as welcome as exposing them to ebola)) and the need exists (it's not a major problem yet, but it will slowly increase as the wikipedia expands and the bot-authored data ages). The mediawiki article has links to the sourceforge page - perhaps you'd consider helping adding these features to mediawiki. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:58, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

Your comment re: US and UK elections and the next census, while quite correct, are nevertheless also quite depressing. →Raul654 18:08, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

As far as updating tables goes.. where a table appears in a page, a link saying "Edit Table of Australian States" (or whatever) appears in the edit page. Clicking this link goes to a grid of edit boxes where names, stats, figures, and other fields, can be updated. Layout can be varied as needed. You don't need to be a programmer to update databases, look at the number of office admin staff who perform data entry as part of their job. --Chuq 06:19, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

I saw some debate about using the As of 2004 etc feature to mitigate this - is there any concensus? Mark Richards 19:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I was about to mention that, too - the explanation lies at Wikipedia:As of, to which is attached much discussion. It doesn't remove the need for manual updating, of course, but it allows one to find where it is needed most. I rather like the idea, personally.

My main concerns with having some kind of database/XML "backend" built into the wiki are a)who would design the schema, and how (given that if you ever changed it, it would break everything using it); and b)how would the information be incorporated grammatically into free text (which I'd guess the majority of places this would be used would require). I guess you could have something like {{current president of the USA}}, but it would be hard work making sure it made sense properly.

I think SQL is simple enough that it could be incorporated (it's not like EVERY user would have to use it... just those who know), so long as it's limited to SELECT statements. Something like {{SQL: Field, Field, FROM Table WHERE...}}.

An example of census data it would just be {{SQL: US_Population FROM Census WHERE Current = 'True'}}. Still quite readable IMHO Oberiko 23:37, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

I think elections are fine - not all that much changes each time; most MPs stay in the same seat for years [how lazy! ;-)] - but the census data is going to be a pain. Will we run Rambot (and other similar bots for other countries) every time a new census comes out? But if we did it a more database-y way, how encouraging would it be for users to edit the page (one of the main arguments put forward for inclusion of Rambot-style data) if it was covered in some weird syntax they didn't understand? Hmm... - IMSoP 21:20, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

The election data is indeed an manageable change (it'd be worse of lots more countries' electoral constituencies were added). The census data is problematic - lots of Rambot's additions have now been manually changed to make the article as a whole read better (e.g. East Palo Alto). With hindsight (and more software) inclusion of such external info might better have been (or in future be) handled by transclusion (e.g. {{uscensus:East_Palo_Alto}}), which would make a discrete box on the page. Such a large, and rich, source of raw data would justify writing specific code to support. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:36, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

this isn’t the forum – but, m2cw, couldn’t conventional div or span tags address some of these problems more simply? ie giving the robots hints about what to target?

eg "Brisbane has a population of <div class=’population’ id=’Brisbane, Australia'>1.5 million</div>"

just a thought… Erich 00:28, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Eek! That's kind of a half-way house - much of the XML ugliness, but less of its power. Really, what we're collectively asking for is something with the expressive power of a query language and presentation layer, but the simplicity of free text - something I don't think can be done. Not to worry - wikipedia is a testament to the power of thousands of people botching stuff together. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:04, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Reference Desk Technical Difficulties

I'd like to post to or answer some of the discussions on the Reference Desk, but I don't see how to do that if the discussion in question is not the last one. Clicking Edit just makes part, but not all, of the massive Reference Desk bulk appear in the edit box.

Well, I'm guessing this is a page size limitation with your browser - the entire article should appear when you click "Edit this page", and it does for me. However, you can get around the problem by using section editing - basically, if you set your preferences correctly, you get a little link saying [edit] next to each header, which lets you work on just the section under that header (note that you have to be logged in for this, but it's ever so easy to create an account, if you haven't already). HTH - IMSoP 15:05, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

The problem is that the user is not logged in. Anon editors don't have the option of section editing. RickK 23:50, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

That was my guess, too (although I didn't go to the page history and check - a logged in user could easily just not have signed); hence my link to Wikipedia:Why create an account?. Wikipedia:How to create an account? would have been more to the point, but I don't know of such a page, since it's so trivial... - IMSoP 00:22, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Who killed Trip Hawkins?

Undeleted. Discussion moved to Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion. Angela. 20:45, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

Naming conventions

I've noticed some time ago, admittedly to my surprise, that even within Europe, nameing conventions vary considerably. For example, in German and English speaking countries, a wife adopts her husbands surname, while in France, this is not done. In Spain and Portugal, people even have two surnames, one from each parent.

Some people wrote articles about personal names in different countries, and a list of links to these articles can be found in the list of personal naming conventions. But this list is quite short.

I would like to ask the international Wikipedians to enlarge this list by explaining about the names in their home country. That might be interesting. TIA.

Sanders muc 17:51, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Along these lines, a few of us have recently done significant work on Spanish and Portuguese names, though I'm sure it could still use a lot more. It currently covers Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Catalan-language names. It should probably also cover at least Galego and Basque. -- Jmabel 17:58, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

plagarism?

who copied who?

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Utilitarianism.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

Links on both point to identical articles and even identical graphics!

They copy us (as they're entitled to) - their article says ...It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Utilitarianism" -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 15:49, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

How to make a two-part signature?

I've seen more and more of these around recently...the user sigs that link in one part to the User page and one part to the User Talk page. I know how to edit how my name is displayed in my sig via preferences, but whatever I put in that field is piped into a link of the form [[User:Ed Cormany|mysigtext]]. Therefore, when I try to put a link in the sigtext, it starts breaking things. What am I doing wrong? &#151;Ed Cormany 14:52, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

It takes two links, like [[User:Ed Cormany|sigtext]] [[User talk:Ed Cormany|talkpagetext]]. I had to fool around with mine for some time in my sandbox before it came out the way I liked. - Hephaestos|§ 14:59, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

User:Pcb21/Sig hacking

In the preferences i set my nickname to Chris 73]] | [[User talk:Chris 73|Talk, and got the following results: -- Chris 73 | Talk 15:37, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Brilliant workaround, although this means of course that I can't put the link to my talk page first, as I had hoped. Oh well, thanks anyhow! &#151; Ed Cormany 02:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

Never mind, i actually came up with it on my own! This takes it even one step further: start your sig with any whitespace followed by ]]. Now you have effectively closed off the link to your user page, but it is invisible because it is only whitespace! Now you can put whatever you please after that in your signature...you can even include plaintext, if you reverse the trick and tack it on the end ([[whitespace). OK, now go nuts! &#151; Ed Cormany 02:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

The only problem with doing it that way is that it makes the wikitext a lot longer, so diffs and edit boxes are not as readable. It appears as [[User:Ed Cormany| ]][[User talk:Ed Cormany|&#151;]] [[User:Ed Cormany|Ed Cormany]]. Angela

I'm aware of this. I'll keep tinkering. --Ed Cormany <--manual signature! ;-D

I had this signature for a while: Chris 73 | (New) Talk, but the code was just too long: [[User:Chris 73|Chris 73]] | ('''[http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Chris_73&action=edit&section=new New]''') [[User talk:Chris 73|Talk]], so i switched it back to this -- Chris 73 | Talk 02:55, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

How hard would it be to teach MediaWiki to support this? I'd much rather have the software do this than hack it manually. Okay, taking a look... damn, there's no Debian package ;-) --Jae 06:32, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

List of Colorado Senators

The title of this artitcle (I've seen List of New York Senators as well) seems confusing, to me. I would think that it would be a list of people who have represented Colorado in the US Senate. To make it less confusing, should it be moved to List of Colorado state Senators? RickK 14:50, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree with the proposed renaming. If not, there should at least be a "see also" to an article with the US Senators from these states. MK 17:57, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree that the title should say "state senators", though even "List of Colorado state Senators" could be understood as meaning a list of all past and present U.S. Senators from the state of Colorado. Perhaps it would be more specific to say List of members of the current Colorado State Senate or perhaps just Members of the Colorado State Senate (the word "list" implies an open-ended quality, and the current members of the senate are a finite group--presumably a member's name will not stay on this list after they leave office. older≠wiser 18:45, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I like older/wiser's proposal. RickK 19:01, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Is the word "Scandal" in an article's title POV?

Recently, the article Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal was renamed Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse reports because some users found the word "scandal" in the title to be pov. But wikipedia has dozens of articles with the word "scandal" in the title, including Watergate Scandal, Lewinsky scandal, Whitewater Scandal, Harken Energy Scandal, Quiz show scandals, Olympic Games scandals, Mutual fund scandal (2003), Accounting scandals of 2002, Teapot Dome Scandal, Black Sox Scandal, and many others. So should the word "scandal" be removed from article titles? Or is the word "scandal" inherantly pov? (For more details, see the article's talk page.) Quadell 13:55, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

The word is not necessarily POV. If an event is very widely described by others as a scandal then that may very well be the best article name. Sadly many people understand NPOV to mean "never call a spade a spade". Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:05, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I raised the issue and, after nearly a week of discussion, moved the page. My intention was not to whitewash or minimize the seriousness of what happened. Quite the opposite: my issue with the word "scandal" is that I believe it trivializes the seriousness of the matter, which is far beyond "scandalous." As noted on the talk page, the dictionary definition of "scandal" is

1. A publicized incident that brings about disgrace or offends the moral sensibilities of society: a drug scandal that forced the mayor's resignation. 2. A person, thing, or circumstance that causes or ought to cause disgrace or outrage: a politician whose dishonesty is a scandal; considered the housing shortage a scandal. 3. Damage to reputation or character caused by public disclosure of immoral or grossly improper behavior; disgrace. 4. Talk that is damaging to one's character; malicious gossip.

"Scandal" is typically used for crimes that are victimless, or for whom the victim is something vague like "the public treasury," and focusses, not on who was hurt by the scandalous acts themselves, but who was embarrassed by the public disclosure of those acts. We do not normally use the word "scandal" in reference to criminal behavior involving personal injury to victims.

The word "scandal" is typically used for incidents of sexual misconduct (Senator Wilbur Mills caught with a stripper in the Tidal Basin), bribery (Albert Fall giving Harding's cronies preferential treatment on Teapot Dome leases), etc. Quadell lists some examples above of how the word "scandal" is typically used. More can be found via links from the article Scandal. As I noted, we do not speak of the My Lai "scandal" or the Black Hole of Calcutta "scandal" or the Japanese-American internment camp "scandal," and Cecropia noted that Wikipedia speaks of the Iran-Contra Affair, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Oil for Food Allegations, the Dreyfus Affair, etc.

Further discussion welcome. I ask those who don't like the present title to propose specific suggestions. Dpbsmith 15:34, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Whilst I appreciate your point, it doesn't really answer mine, which was that we as editors of Wikipedia shouldn't abitrate on what an event is called - it is better to follow in the footsteps of others if we can. '"Abu Ghraib" scandal' currently gets 220,000 Google hits (not bad for an event so young!), suggesting that the dictionary definition doesn't quite capture how the word is being used in practice. I would prefer the original wording. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 16:46, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

My opinion is that, if anything, scandal is POV by virtue of being far to polite a term. I think Human Rights Violations or Geneva Violations - something of that sort would be more accurate. --bodnotbod 22:08, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

In general, maybe it's best not to used the word "scandal" in a current events article? Give history time to decide whether or not it's appropriate. Just my 2 cents. Crazyeddie 00:36, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Suggestion: tooltip first few words of article when mouse is over link

I would like to suggest a new feature for Wikipedia: display the start of the linked article as a tooltip when the mouse lingers over a link. Currently, only the title is displayed, using the TITLE property of the LINK tag.

Quite often I read an article about an unfamiliar subject that contains many unfamiliar terms. My main purpose is to understand the main article, but I need an idea of what those terms mean. For example, when reading the article Mycenae, it is helpful to know that Argos is a "city in Greece in Peloponnese", and that the Persian Wars "started about 500 BC and lasted until 448 BC".

It is inconvenient to have to follow each link to an article about each unfamiliar term, because the extra operations of clicking on the link and going back to the original page are required, and because of the delay of loading the pages. It interrupts the reading of the main article. It would be alleviated if the first 100 or so characters were shown as a tooltip.

For an implementation of this idea, see for example http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Mycenae. The page itself is a bit cluttered, but I'm just talking about the tooltips on the links. TheFreeDictionary has implemented them using Javascript, but a similar thing can be done using the LINK tag's TITLE property.

Pgan002 08:05, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Workaround: get a browser that deals with tabbed browsing, such as Mozilla Firebird, or if you're on a Mac, Safari. Dysprosia 08:12, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I second this suggestion, at least as a "wishlist" feature. Even with a tabbed browser (which I do use heavily for this purpose), this would be a great aid to reading; switching between tabs is still more awkward than a transient mouseover popup, and on a slow internet connection (or a slow wiki-day) auxillary pages can take a while to download. There'd presumably be a painful performance hit, though, for the server? — Matt 08:34, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Workaround, even in a non-tabbed browser: right click & open in new window. Spares you the reload time for "back" button. -- Jmabel 18:31, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Just to give a technical slant on this issue: Firstly, the tag in question isn't <link>, it's <a>; a slightly pedantic point, but <link> is for something else - it's how you link in stylesheets and favicons, for instance. Secondly, there is a major limitation with implementing this feature using title attributes: not all browsers have multiline tooltips; for instance Mozilla, and I guess any other XUL-based systems, will only show a limited amount of the caption, as much as it can fit in a medium-sized one-line box. So to make the feature useful, we would probably have to do something crazy with JavaScript, like TheFreeDictionary do.

Now, the reason I say "something crazy", is that I'm not quite sure how this would have to interact with the database. Our mirrors have an advantage over us here, in that they don't have to deal with the information constantly changing - they can be really aggressive with their caching, whereas we have to make sure changes get reflected ASAP. Looking at the source, it seems that TheFreeDictionary actually merges in the text for the tooltips as part of the page that gets sent - so before being sent, each article has to be generated from not only itself, but all those it links to (and you will generally end up downloading a load of text that you never see). An alternative would be to have the JavaScript fetch the data somehow when you point at the word - saving on server costs and initial download, but meaning you get almost as much delay as opening the link anyway (esp. if you use a new window/tab/whatever, as people have suggested).

I'm not saying this is a bad idea per se, just that implementation-wise, there are a few things that would have to be worked out. It would certainly be useful, but it wouldn't be easy. - IMSoP 14:54, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

can navratna disinvestment be reverted?

Understand it is a clause in disinvestment agrrement that decision of disinvestment made can be reverted within 2 yrs of takeover by the Government without assignning any reason. If it is so Congress Government may take initiative for the idisinvestment made for IPCL(Navratan Company) for reverting within 2 yrs.IPCL was disinvested on 4th June02 and hence now 16 days are left to government to revert the decision. This is mainly due to deal which was made at thraw away price by NDA Gov as against Worth of the company.

SUBJECT MATTER IS URGENTLY TO BE LOOKED INTO BEFORE EXPIRY OF PERIOD.

Subject to be forwarded to Congess Working Commotty at earliest. Regards.

Vandalbot page updated

Although many people might not have noticed, the Chinese (zh) Wikipedia suffered an astronomical scale vandalbot attack, spread over two days. Thousands of pages were created. The users there didn't quite know what to do about it. So as a result, I've updated m:Vandalbot. Everyone needs to read this so that they know what to do in the event of an attack. -- Tim Starling 04:02, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

No signatures/bylines policy?

I just left a note on a newbie's talk page explaining that Wikipedia articles don't have signatures or bylines, in order to emphasize the fact that nobody has ownership of an article. I'm really pretty sure I'm right about this, but... I wanted to cite a policy page, and I couldn't locate one. (And I tried googling on what I thought were all the obvious word combinations). Am I right, and, if so, what policy page should be referenced? Dpbsmith 22:26, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Ownership of articles is relevant, though doesn't mention signatures specifically. Angela. 01:07, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

Just for information, I've seen newbies who did not sign articles at first but started signing them after getting a welcome message. Some people misunderstand the part of welcome message that tells how to sign. Andris 14:28, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

I've added something to my standard welcome message to advise that signing is usually used on talk pages rather than on main articles. I might suggest that the rest of the welcoming committee consider doing the same. --ALargeElk 14:44, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I've added a quick & dirty discussion of the issue to Wikipedia:Ownership of articles--I'm sure it can be improved, but at least it's a start. Niteowlneils 18:34, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia for crosswords

Hey, I just found a new use for Wikipedia. I was wrestling with today's crossword puzzle. Usually the weekday ones are fine, but today--lots of facts that I just didn't know. I used it to find the following in just a couple of minutes:

• Adlai Stevenson's middle name
• Star of Camille (5 letters starting with G)
• Another phrase for motley fool (this was a search)
• Ingrid's role in Casablanca
• "A" wearer's name (I had to already know that this referred to The Scarlet Letter)
• AKA for Baby Face Nelson
• Star of Barnaby Jones
• Meaning of otological (also a search)
• 1936 presidential loser
• Van Eyck's first name

But--I couldn't find "dashboard of an English car"!?
Elf | Talk 18:56, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

How many letters? Marnanel 19:02, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

Five, am I right? Did you get the one about the flute? (spooky coincidence) As a thoroughbred Englishman, I can tell you that the dashboard of an English car is called... a "dashboard". So I'm not surprised you didn't find the answer here! [What crossword is this, anyway?] - IMSoP 19:18, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Tribune Media Services puzzle; I'm seeing it in the San Jose Mercury News. Elf | Talk 20:12, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

A five letter synonym for Dashboard in an English car would be "Dials"... But from what I read elsewhere, that doesn't fit. Peet42 19:47, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

How about fascia? That the best english-german dictionary http://dict.leo.org showed as one of the translations of the german Armaturenbrett. andy 20:08, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Huh. I am 95% certain about all of the crossing words. This leaves me with a 5-letter word for "dashboard of an English car" as _ACIA, and "high-pitched flutes" of _IBES (first letter is same for both words). I played flute for many years & don't know what they're talking about. I thought of Fascia, but that's 6 letters, so unless they spelled it wrong-- and that also left me with "fibes", which I couldn't find a reference to anywhere. Elf | Talk 20:11, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

According to Dictionary.com, "Facia" is an archaic form of "Fascia". I'd assume a problem with the "b", making the other answer "Fifes"... :) Peet42 20:35, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Maybe they think it's an Anglicism. (It isn't, to the best of my knowledge.) -- the English Marnanel 20:39, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

OK, fifes works. (For some reason the first time I looked at the B vs F for the first letter it didn't make any sense. Another case of brain needing cache cleared & reloaded.) 66.122.214.230 21:28, 18 May 2004 (UTC) (oops, that was me. Elf | Talk 16:13, 20 May 2004 (UTC))

Collins English Dictionary definitely gives fascia or facia as Brit.. a less common name for "dashboard". Dieter Simon 01:18, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (2000) says that facia (pl. facias) is 'the instrument panel of a motor vehicle' (among other things), and that fascia (pl. fasciae) is 'a long flat surface between mouldings on the architrave' etc. IME this dictionary is more conservative than those on the Web, and is of course Britannocentric. -- Heron 18:43, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

I love seeing Wikipedia being used for a wide variety of purposes like this. I found Wikipedia when I was running "online pub quizes" and in desperate need of trivia. Our list of lists was perfect for my purposes, and in a few weeks I'd got interested in the project and began contributing. Elf, perhaps soon the compilers of your crosswords will use Wikipedia as a source, just as you use it to crack the hard clues. ;) fabiform | talk 07:25, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I've used the Wikipedia for this myself. It helped about 75% of the time. Crazyeddie 00:30, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Intuition

Item: Intuition Discuss on: Talk:Intuition & User_talk:Heidimo#Intuition

Remark: I have a factual error dispute but the other person is unwilling to explain what she thinks is wrong with my way of reasoning. I guess what needs to be done is to sort out the philosophical meaning of the word from the informal meaning. I am studying this seemingly simple subject in another encyclopedia but it has not helped much until now. Thanks in advance Andries 18:31, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Peer review or Wikipedia:Requests for comment might be a better place for this. Angela. 06:39, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

Interwiki

Should we have a "central repository" of all interwiki links? Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Interlanguage links#Interwiki: central repository feature suggestion.

Google results: Mirrors vs Wikipedia

Our mirrors sometimes have higher Google rankings than Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:External search engines#Google results: Mirrors vs Wikipedia.

Name

I have trued to find out what the name Amanda or Mandy is in korean, i hope you can help me as this is to with the Martial art WTF Taetwondo that i study.

Thanks, Mandy.

Why not 아만다? — Monedula 17:18, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requested pictures...

...needs your help. We need photos of braided hair, felt, flyswatter, Palette knife, polyester, rayon, sickle, magnifying glass, Alquerque, Gomoku, Auditorium Building, Chicago, Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Chainsaw, roundabout, Baseball bat and glove, Blue Grotto, brassiere, panties, undergarment, all kinds of Cats, Hats, Instruments, and computers (VAIO), and much more. If you have any of the above pictures, or if you have the item, please take a photo and go to Wikipedia:Requested pictures! (all clothing requests are person-optional) -- Chris 73 | Talk 04:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

"all clothing requests are person-optional"

Is the converse also true? For people pics, is clothing optional? →Raul654 04:45, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

If so, I'd like to submit a list of requests. MK 07:25, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Suggestions from Kapil-Y

(Moved by Starx from MediaWiki:VfD-Kapil_Yedidi)

Also, 1 more thing. I would just reccomend a link from an article to a contributions page, where you see the contributions for that article. I understand it is not all about 1 person doing the encyclopedia, and more about everyone creating it, but a contributions page would be awesome!

• You can check the page history for any wikipedia article, the link is at the top of the page. --Starx 04:26, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

1 last thing. Are there any ranks in the Wikipedia? Like if you help out a lot, would you be recognized and be a VIP in the members room or something?

Whe you serach for your member name in the encyclopedia, you need to types in usr first. Why not ignore the fact whether the USR is there or not?

I promise this is my LAST suggestion. Why not a lounge chat area for members where you can talk about the articles, improve grammar, and other things?

• All pages have an asscociated 'talk' page for just that. Click the discuss this page link in the menu on the left. --Starx 04:26, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Chat and Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits. Dori | Talk 04:47, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

Just a few suggestions by Kapil-Y!

Banjo-Kazooie rhymes

I recently started adding to the Banjo-Kazooie article. I dont' have a copy of the game but thought it would be wise to ask here if anyone who does could fire it up and write down some of the funnier rhymes Grunthilda utters during gameplay. Also of course if anyone remembers something from the game which i forgot that would be great, thought it would be nice to ask this in village pump instead of pages needing attention since this is really a request very few are able to fill.. and the more eyes... --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:22, 2004 May 18 (UTC)

Well, I just opened my desk drawer and lo and behold there it was on top one of the piles of our N64 games. Hmmm. I might fire it up tomorrow becuase I'm busy right now. --Saint-Paddy 23:19, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

Cannes Festival!

Know someone who was, or still is, at Cannes? Are you surfing WP from an internet cafe in Cannes at this very moment? Help us get a good GFDL or public domain photo from the festival to use on Wikipedia! It would be nice to feature an image of this year's festival in the Cannes article, in the news on the main page, and on the Press Corps page. +sj+ 22:01, 2004 May 17 (UTC)

Kennt jemand jemanden, der in Cannes war oder immernoch ist? Surfst du die Wikipedia in diesem Moment aus einem Internet Café in Cannes an? Hilf uns bitte, indem du ein gutes GFDL oder Public Domain Foto vom Festival machst, damit wir es für die Wikipedia benutzen können! Es wäre schön, dieses Jahr ein Foto im Artikel Cannes, in den News / Nachrichten der Hauptseite und auf der Press Corps Seite zu haben. Fire 22:12, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Press release: Wikipedia wins 8th Annual Webby Award for Best Community

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Press releases/May 2004. More help still needed to write the press release before it is ready to be sent.

Speedy Deleting things on VfD

Should candidates for speedy deletion that have been mistakenly listed on VfD not be speedily deleted?

-->Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy