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Wikipedia:Village pump/Archive AI

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump.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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Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports infobox test

Hey All,

Thus of us at Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports have created an infobox for the various airport pages. Please head to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Airports/infobox for look and the various test pages it has been rolled out to. Then join the discussion about it. Don't be shy about how you feel about it. Burgundavia 10:26, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

Request

I would like to request page protection for Phil Gingrey, which has been involved in a multiple-day edit war, in order to force discussion at Talk:Phil Gingrey/proposed version. A rollback before protection would be nice, to remove POV, but I'll take what I can get. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 15:32, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

References/Books/Further reading/Bibliography

There seems not to be any standard regarding the terminology of what I would prefer to call "Further reading" at the foot of articles. At the moment, there is a wide variety of headings in use.

Secondly, there are many (especially history/biography related articles) incorporating 1911 Britannica text which have also incorporated wholesale the 1911 bibiography. With the exception of primary sources (which should be separately noticed and headed), I think these should be removed.

And thirdly, many contributors use headings conflatable with "Further reading" etc, usually headed "References" to note the publications from which they derive the information. These, I think, ought to be the province of numbered footnotes.

Whatever may be decided, I do think that a degree of standardisation is advisable. Djnjwd 22:58, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Djnjwd, I have been trying to get people interested in the Wikiprojects concept for several days now, so that a group of people working together on the same subject can 1) follow the same formatting, as you suggest - ie Bibliography instead of Further Readings where applicable, External Links vs Resources, etc etc... and also so that 2) Categories can be smoothed out, lists can be made complete, the linking between categories is more organized and rational, etc. So far I have gotten little attention and only noticed arguments over what kind of categorization system to use... so it might be a while yet until your suggestions are noticed. It seems very hard to bring people together here on a specific topic, and there are also members opposed to such organization. My only answer for now is to encourage people you know are working on the same subject, to follow a single format/ structure. -- Simonides 00:02, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
What I personally think is that there should be an automatic way to generate numbered footnote references. E.g.;
     X is Y <ref>Z - How X is Y (1996), ISBN 0123456789</ref>,
     P isn't Q <ref>W - How P isn't Q (1997), ISBN 9876543210</ref>
would display as:
X is Y [1], P isn't Q [2]
and at the end of the article there would be an auto-generated references section with a list:
  1. Z - How X is Y (1996), ISBN 0123456789
  2. W - How P isn't Q (1997), ISBN 9876543210
There's a billion ways formatting and syntax could be done, of course. Fredrik | talk 23:13, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
The whole auto-numbering question has been discussed ad nauseam on Wikipedia talk:Cite sources. One problem with your style of proposal is that you assume each reference will be cited in the text exactly once. A more typical case is for a reference to be listed at the end only. (Or a reference might be pointed to from the text more than once). In any case, the main problem is getting people to cite good references in the first place; the whole auto-formatting argument is a red herring. —Steven G. Johnson 01:24, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Cite sources seems to come down on the side of ==references== rather than any other header. Yes, an automatic way would be ideal. You'd certain get my vote. Dieter Simon 23:47, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I am quite opposed to the idea of using ISBNs, because they are misleading. An ISBN usually points to a single edition of a book, not to a title - the edition may be out of print, it may only be available in a certain country, it may be more expensive, it may be harder to find than other widely available editions, it may be out of date, it may not be in the original language, and so on. I think everyone should include only the title and authors, and the year of printing should refer either to 1) year of copyright on latest paperback copy or 2) year of copyright on first printing (perhaps both) and the language should be specified (ex. do not include original copyright year of German publication for a translated English title.) -- Simonides 00:02, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

References/Books/Further reading/Bibliography

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Cite sources.

Kim Sun-il, Korean hostage beheaded in Iraq

There's a specific article on the man now (Kim Sun-il)--shouldn't the main page and current events links go directly to the article now, instead of to a section of another article?

Someone else wrote it--I went in and cleaned it up a bit and wikified it a bit. It could use a lot more work, but that doesn't seem like a reason not to link there, since there's no more information in the Human rights situation in post-Saddam Iraq article.

Whoops, forgot to sign my name. Also, I just noticed that the Current Events template is non-protected, so I guess the original post wasn't entirely necessary! --Lukobe 19:09, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Umm...

A few burgers, and a donut. A coffee, a small coke. And yes I'd like fries with that... (sorry--Couldn't resist...this won't happen again [or for a long time]) Ilyanep 01:59, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

IDGI. If this was Y Caffi, or Le Bistro, then I could see where you were coming from - but who orders food at a pump!? - IMSoP 02:33, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Maybe someone brought some potluck or something. Ilyanep 14:29, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps it's a gas pump, and he's buying from the nearby 7-Eleven? [ alerante | “” 17:08, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC) ]

Cleanup Crisis

There's getting to be a slight Wikipedia:Cleanup crisis, not least because the many hundreds of wretched articles uncovered by User:Topbanana/Reports such as User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains no links are coming to the surface and being added to Wikipedia:Cleanup probably faster than they're being cleared up. All additional contributions to the cleanup and removal from Wikipedia:Cleanup of items which have been sorted, is most humbly sought. (It's okay - only handsfull are being added; most are sorted out without recourse to a cleanup listing.) --Tagishsimon

Perhaps it would help if you had an automatically maintained alphabeized list that has entries automatically added and removed when the cleanup notice is added and removed? If you'd like that, just get someone to add Category:Cleanup to Template:cleanup and it's there! I would have done that this morning, except that the template article seems to be stuck. --ssd 22:38, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
The cleanup message is though seldomly used, and I am among those who very seldomly put {cleanup} on the pages I list. There are several reasons for this, one is that it's often obvious that an article needs cleaup. ✏ Sverdrup 23:00, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia has an enormous amount of unwikified, truly poorly written articles, and they're being added with an increasing rate. I think we should have a monthly great cleanup day. On the great cleanup day, everybody should put petty talk page arguments and original article-writing to the side and instead work frenetically to get as many pages off cleanup as possible. Fredrik (talk) 23:30, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I second that. blankfaze | ?? 08:25, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I like the idea as well. Now that the template has Category:Cleanup in it, at the end of your month, we'll have a nice long list to work on. Assuming, that is, people don't wipe out the list before the month is over. 8-> --ssd 11:23, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
That's a good idea. Don't know how well it would work, but worth a shot. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 13:00, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I've been rather busy recently, but once I begin to have some more free time on my hands, I pledge to go through and clean up as many articles that are on Cleanup as I can :) Dysprosia 05:50, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I do a daily cleaning of Cleanup, checking each article after a week, two weeks, a month, and two months to see if it has been adequately dealt with. Before I started this in early March, Cleanup was over 90KB in size. After a throughout scouring it was brought down to less than 32KB and since March has been slowly growing and is now about 52KB. This is still much smaller than it was for the first months of this year, and I think we can wait for a while before another overhaul of the system is needed. Far worse is Pages Needing Attention, this page is massive and gets little attention. Much of what is on it has already been fixed, but the rest are pages in great need of aid, but very often people with specific expertise are needed. - SimonP 14:14, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)
SimonP, your link to "Pages Needing Attention" above goes to an article on "Peptide nucleic acid". The correct page (as of this writing) is Wikipedia:Pages needing attention. I didn't boldly change it myself because I don't know the history of these pages, but I thought you (and anyone reading this) should know. -- Jeff Q 16:38, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
My own practice agree with those of ✏ Sverdrup. Indeed I've never linked an article to Cleanup, though I could easily add a hundred or more that I know of in areas that I know well that contain gross inaccuracies or which contain information I think of dubious validity, are very POV, or just very poor. So I fix up what I can but most fixups lead to me discovering even more bad articles when I start checking links to the articles I fix up, far more than I can handle quickly. Some articles take a lot of time to clean up. Perhaps we should all start adding every such article to Cleanup and and declare a moritorium on all new articles until the Cleanup queue is empty? jallan 18:49, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Page histories

OK, what's going on? Every time I click on a [hist] link I get:

contents of history page deleted

RickK 05:36, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

From IRC - there's live patching going on. So things might be a little screwy. Dysprosia 05:40, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
+ It's for newbie contributions - edits and contributions from very new users. Dysprosia 05:46, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Programming wouldn't be fun without patching the live script of a website with thousands of online users ;) As Dysprosia rightly points out, [1] displays all edits by recently created accounts on one page. This is so that it's easier to detect and roll back Wik's edits. It can be slow to load, so it's probably better to use a shorter list if you're going to be hitting refresh often. The rollback links don't seem to work right now, I'll fix that in an hour or two. -- Tim Starling 06:00, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)
This page looks very useful. However it would make it easier to spot real newbies as opposed to on-the-spot vandal accounts if it showed the name of the account at some point. I realise that the layout is simply cloned from the standard single-account contributions page, but I would have thought that the Welcoming committee would find this page very useful indeed. --Phil | Talk 15:59, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)
And I've thought for a long time that contributions pages needed "diff" links. This is even more true for this page. But I understand, of course, that the developers have their hands full. moink 18:35, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Page move repairing

Currently I am running an update query to move the history from Mmmttt to here. Please do not delete this page or move Mmmttt to random locations like Village pump/Temp. If you are having trouble repairing page move vandalism due to a large history or a large number of incoming links, fix it using a cut-and-paste move and then report the problem. -- Tim Starling 02:55, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

Discussion of policies on dealing with conflict and building an open encyclopedia

I'd like to invite comment, ideas and discussion here Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines, thanks, Mark Richards 02:49, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

After the move to "Wikipedia:Village pump/Temp", then u -> h ???

Is it just my computer or what ? How come after the move to here (Wikipedia:Village pump/Temp) all the lowercase 'u's on this page have been converted to 'h's ???? -- PFHLai 23:10, 2004 Jun 16 (UTC)

I'm seeing it too. I'm using an old version of Mozilla (1.2.1? About Mozilla doesn't say) under Linux 2.2. Isidore 00:55, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Seems it's been fixed by someone just now. The background colour has changed from light yellow to white, and the u's have been restored. Isidore 00:59, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
  • The page was vandalized. I reverted the vandalism. Andris 00:47, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)
I think the "vandalism" was an adminstrator fixing the problem. The history has been wiped out, with your change being the first (bottom-most) shown. Isidore 01:04, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Vandalism was this edit [2]. in which User:216.167.144.187 replaced every u by h. I first reverted to the edit before it and then added back the text that was added after the vandal. Someone else moved the page while I was fixing it. Andris 02:16, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)
The move was vandalism as well (a vandalbot was responsible for both acts of vandalism). See User:Wik for details. -- ChrisO 11:50, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Criticism and Alternative views

Please comment on: NPOV#Criticism_and_Alternative_views: Should all articles include criticism sections? Should no articles contain criticism sections? Where is the line between "Criticism" and "Alternative views"?

For example, no example stays uncontested long enough to list here.

Criticism and alternative views should follow the introduction and main discussion of the article.

Wikipedia is not a place for conspiracy theories (as a certain ex-user was quite fond of). →Raul654 05:38, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
I'm not sure I get what you are asking us to do. There is no poll in progress at NPOV#Criticism_and_Alternative_views. It seems reasonably obvious that some articles -- on controversial topics -- need criticism sections, but one is unlikely ever to have a criticism section on, say, an article about a city.
(You clearly haven't seen the dump I live in...) --bodnotbod 19:49, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC) )
As for the specifics of your remark: I don't see a criticism section in Judaism's external links or Christianity's. Am I missing something?
Right now, the article on Christianity has a remark on the Ebionites poorly integrated into the article in a section entitled Alternative Views. The article Jew has a very extensive discussion of the Karaites much better integrated into the article. Yes, the material on the Ebionites seems oddly placed. I would integrate a mention of them into the article just like we have done for Arianism. Is that what you are asking? -- Jmabel 18:41, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
I think it is quite conceivable to have a criticism page for a city and this is an example that may be ridiculous. There seem to be two kinds of articles:
  1. Reviews: Reads like bulleted Pros and Cons
  2. Kids books: Always positive and not too substantial (as they must avoid controversy)

Where along this spectrum do you wish Wikipedia articles to lie? Hyacinth 19:18, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Problem with subscripts

Does H2O turn out correctly as water in your browser, or does it look more like H-squared O ?

My Mozilla 1.7 browser displays it as H-squared O !!

I can only suppose that others have noticed this too, but mention it here just in case... 

Humanist 14:39, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Testing

im new here and if you see this article please tell me

I need the sysops, how can one find them?

Recently, an ambitious and surely well-intending Helsinki-editor has made a couple of changes[3] to articles related to Finland's history. There are some examples of practices which I think is not quite optimal at Wikipedia, including cut-and-paste instead of using the move-feature, and some examples of changes that may be considered sensitive. However, Wikipedia does literally ask newcommers to be bold in their editing, and so this editor has been.

One of this editor's ambitions seems to be the purification of Finland's history from dishonourable traces of foreign supremacy through the exchange of Swedish spellings for Finnish spellings of phenomena from the times (before 1892 that is) when Swedish was the preeminent language. That question has parallells in the long strife over the use of the name Danzig in historical contexts. I do not expect such an issue to give reason to much of conflicts here, since the number of emotionally involved writers with Swedish and Finnish mothertongue at Wikipedia is far too limited, but I guess our ambition is some kind of consistency within Wikipedia.

I would wish that someone with more experience of Wikipedia editing, than I have, could take a look. Preferably someone with administrator privileges. Why that? For two reasons. First of all since one possible outcome would be a total roll-back of this contributor's edits, including some possible deletions. I do not say that this is the expected outcome, but that posibility will colour any exchange of thoughts with the editor in question, regardless of how much of wikiquette and wikilove is put in. The other reason is that newcomers most probably expect a more meassured behaviour from someone in responsible position.

Maybe a discussion with someone neither Finnish, nor Swedish or Russian, would give the contributor the right impression of the idea behind an English-language Wikipedia. As far as possible, one would wish not to import century-long strifes with nationalist undertones into Wikipedia.

So, now to my question: How do I come in contact with currently active and present administrators? /Tuomas 12:49, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Administrators are everywhere, but they have no more role in solving editorial disputes than any other user. A total rollback of all edits is unlikely in the extreme. You can request deletions on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. You just have to revert, discuss and compromise, in an attempt to form an article which both sides can agree with. It may be true that many administrators are experienced with these conflicts, but they don't have any more authority. -- Tim Starling 13:22, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I've forgotten

You know how sometimes you go into a room and then forget why you've gone there? Well, I've just done that coming to the Village Pump. I had a question to ask but I'm damned if I can remember what it was... It must be the psychological blow struck by England's %&*£ing defeat just now in Euro 2004. --bodnotbod 22:26, Jun 24, 2004 (UTC)

Heh...Ilyanep (Talk) 22:27, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Image tutorial

I just had the opportunity to refer someone to the lovely Wikipedia:Picture_tutorial. Couple of questions, though--

  • In my browser, at least, the example using div to put two images directly underneath each other has the text running underneath the uppermost image. Is it just me or is there something amiss with the markup?
  • Tutorial doesn't address having images without the thumb box around them but with having captions (as can be seen in Dog). Is the markup at Dog the approved markup for that sort of thing? And would it be nice to have such markup added to the tutorial?

Thanks! Elf | Talk 20:56, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Those thumbbox-less syntax are remnants of the old syntax, before this new one was in place. It's the same. I personally think we should change all old ones to the new syntax to avoid confusion. --Menchi 08:59, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I agree about changing the markup around images to conform to the new standards. It's just another case of Wikifying things.
Is it a good idea not to specify a width for images (unless there's a good reason for doing so in a particular case, of course). If no width is given the thumbnails default to 250 pixels wide which is the recommended size anyway. If that recommendation changes in future, the default could be altered and all unspecified images would change to the new standard without the need to edit each one. What do others think? - Chris Jefferies 17:33, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
If this is the case, I was not aware of it, and I'll go back to the images I've created and remove the width specifications. This is, as you say, a good idea, for the reason you mentioned. - RealGrouchy 13:00, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Slow access times

I wanted to know why the access times recently are sooooo slooooowwwww... It is almost impossible to normally use the Wikipedia. Maybe some kind of traffiking monitoring should be done - such as limiting the amount of users currently connecting (or ideally increase bandwidth dah...) (Ivenger)

Wikipedia is experiencing growing pains. We are being bottlenecked by our server power. It's already been said that from now on, we'll need to buy (at least) a new server every month. →Raul654 09:40, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)

THIS MEANS PLEASE DONATE, IF YOU CAN. -- blankfaze | ?? 12:24, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Spam filter

I spent most of this morning trying to post Doggystyle Records to Cleanup, but I kept getting an error page that was title "Spam protection filter" and kept telling me that I wasn't allowed to post Spam to Wikipedia. It WOULD NOT let me add it. So I came here to post my problem, and it wouldn't let me post it here! And now, the problem seems to have gone away. What's going on? RickK 05:13, Jun 19, 2004 (UTC)

I had something very similar happen. -- Jmabel 05:02, Jun 20, 2004 (UTC)

Can someone resize this for me?

Thank you in advance. ;) Neutrality 04:00, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)  

On the page that it's used, Abortion in the United States - I fixed your thumbnail tag - no need to resize the image. →Raul654 04:05, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)
If the image itself is resized any further, the #s will be unreadable. Leave resizing to syntax, ___px. --Menchi 11:01, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
the best place to resize a graph like this is in the Office suite program that generated it! If that is possible... 19:23, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

stdio.h

I started new page recently named stdio.h and it does not exist anymore. Why? Joakim 18:57, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It was speedily deleted by User:DJ Clayworth. Sorry about the lack of an explanation; however, articles like that aren't exactly what we're looking for. See Wikipedia:The perfect article and Wikipedia:Manual of style for more. Material like that might (or might not--ask) be more welcome on Wikisource and/or Wikibooks. Best wishes, [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 19:00, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Should it have been speedily deleted though? Maybe one for VfD instead? Secretlondon 19:19, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I've looked at the deleted content of stdio.h and I guess I agree that in that form, it's not a good article. However, stdio.h is certainly very important in the C world and there is something useful to say about it. For example, input/output is handled by library functions (and those functions are declared in stdio.h) -- this is different from, say, Basic, in which input/output is built into the language. Joakim, maybe you can try again, and focus on a general overview rather than just printing the declarations? Maybe the article can be called C language input-output system or something more general like that. Hope this helps, Wile E. Heresiarch 20:50, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
  • That would not be a correct title. Quite purposefully, the C language does not define an I/O capability: it's left to a separate standard. We already have an article at C standard library, and not a bad one. I'd suggest that any expansion should start from there. Maybe we should make stdio.h redirect there? -- Jmabel 22:03, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
    • I also notice that we have an article on Ctype.h. Maybe that should function as a model? BTW, I don't think this should have been speedy deleted, it should have gone to Vfd or cleanup. -- Jmabel 22:07, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
It seemed like a speedy deletion to me as well. I doubt as it was it would even be acceptible at sources. Dori | Talk 23:57, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)

Hi. On reflection I may have been a little over-zealous on speedy-deleting this article. At first glance it looked just like a copy of the include file. I meant to post something on Joakim's talk page, but I didn't get to it. If you try again I promise to give it a chance. DJ Clayworth 16:18, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Missing edits from History

I reverted vandalism on Free content after seeing an IP user go past on Special:RecentChanges to the last known good version, but now the History page doesn't include the version I was removing (a single line slogan about Greece) and it looks like I'm accusing a genuine user of vandalism. What gives? SkArcher 16:31, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Definitely a problem - it's only keeping the latest edit and some older ones on every article. -- ALargeElk | Talk 16:34, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Possibly a problem with server load-balancing and data distribution. They seem to have come back now. Certainly worth notifying those whom it may concern. SkArcher 16:40, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Still plenty missing from Caroline - the edits turn up in Recent Changes but not in the article history. In fact, I've just had a look and even the history to this page is screwed up... -- ALargeElk | Talk 16:47, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
And now they're back. How very odd. -- ALargeElk | Talk 16:53, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It's a weird caching problem that gets seen frequently, and confuses the hell out of people because they don't know what's going on. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:01, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
if the report is flakey maybe it needs a header to warn people... at least till its fixed? Erich 04:44, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I would strongly urge anyone seeing this to take a screen capture. If we can see exactly what it is that's being displayed, maybe we can figure out what's going on more clearly. --Brion 06:38, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
In the German WP we have the same probs, some sysops think of setting de:wp on "read only" 'till this has been fixed, but in fact "we" are as helpless as "You" here... (see: de:Wikipedia:Ich_brauche_Hilfe#Versionsgeschichten_bei_vielen_Artikeln_defekt) --Rdb 19:53, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

This sounds like the same problem that is reported on japanese wikipedia. It is always the edit(s) before the latest. And one person on IRC #wikimedia said this is perhaps because of the lag between the two databases. Suda, our main database server receives all the edits and record them. Ariel, secondary database server, sends data for browsing requests. And Ariel is not keeping up with Suda all the time up to the second. Even if you do not do anything, the appropriate history info will come eventually, and that is because those data are sent from Suda to Ariel, if I understand it correct. Tomos 21:06, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

See images Image:ScreenHistoryBeforeMyEdits.png, Image:ScreenHistoryAfterMyEdits.png, Image:ScreenHistoryCompare.png. Latter shows previous person's edits as mine (mine also show up, though, I'm pretty sure.) At the moment I still have the screen history available in my browser if someone wants me to try to look at anything. (sorry about filesizes; having some tool problems...) Elf | Talk 23:00, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Mysterious Wikipedia database error? Argh!

In my quest to correctly alphasort [[Category:Science fiction novels]], I found something very strange when editing The Time Ships. After doing my minor changes, when clicking "Show preview" I got to see the contents of the article about David Koresh (!) in the middle of the Time Ships article. This is also visible after I saved the article. Even stranger: when I press "edit this page" to sort out this hopefully-one-instance trouble, I only see the non-Koresh'ed article source. Anyone have a clue to what this is all about??? --Wernher 23:53, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Did you try checking out what was in Template:Spoilers? A look there would have answered your questions. It has since been fixed. For future reference, the standard spoiler warning is just {{spoiler}}. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:10, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Ah, some -eh- 'creative' individual had made that redirect, I take it (I never cease to appreciate the variability in sense of humor of the human race). Thanks for telling me, I'll try not falling in the same 'trap' again. :) --Wernher 00:25, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Caption style

I noticed the last few front page feature articles needed help with their captions, so I wrote Wikipedia:Captions. Please take a look and do that Wiki thing. -- ke4roh 23:50, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Good job! Elf | Talk 04:02, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Suffering from clinical depression, patient testimony

I had an idea I'd quite like to write up an article with people's stated experience of how they actually feel when suffering from clinical depression. Now, I envisage it being too long to go on the article page (I don't want to unbalance the article). So, I know the first answer in such cases is "stick it on the talk page". Well, yeah, but that's kind of unsatisfying (but, you know, if that's the consensus).

I could set it up as a separate article, but then I really don't think that people would agree to that (please tell me if I'm wrong) - but it feels very unencyclopaedic. (And think of the precedent I'm setting, next it will be "My gout hell" on VfD).

Another option would be to simply have a sub-category of external links pointing to the web articles that I'd be quoting from in any case - but I'm quite drawn to producing a single document rather than a bulleted list which might contain lots of info I'm not particularly drawn to - I like the idea of writing this up , so...

My preferred option would be to produce a personal user sub-page and then link to it from the article, but I have absolutely no idea of the etiquette involved there (anyone got a link?).

Thoughts, opinions, whatever...? --bodnotbod 20:03, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)

Is that "encyclopedic"? Would it survive a run through the VFD? →Raul654 20:06, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
Well, as I say above, my sense is, no, it isn't. So, what about my other options? --bodnotbod 20:14, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think it really is something I'd find appropriate for an encyclopedia. But it is a really good idea for a wiki in general, not just for clinical depression but for all medical conditions. I don't know if wikibooks would be happy with a "Patient Experiences of Disease" wikibook, or whether it would need to be a non WikiMedia wiki. I figure if I were suddenly diagnosed with AIDS or cancer I'd really want to know other patients' experiences, and I'd probably want to add my own stuff. Heck, I had my wisdom teeth out a few years ago, and I'd have welcomed some decent information about what to expect (note to pending extractees: do NOT rent The Bone Collector to watch during your recuperation). (Or read 1984. Mr. Jones 12:33, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)) This is, infact, such a good idea that I'm pretty convinced something like it must surely exist already. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:33, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It's suitable as a chapter or two on one of the pathology books on Wikibooks. Other patients' experiences are what cancer (or whatever else) suffers want to know, in addition to the scientific stuff doctors told them. That's what support groups are for. Sharing alcoholic experiences et al. Testimonials won't work here, but they (in my opinion) work on Wikibooks. --Menchi 22:11, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Fair enough. People seem to agree it's a worthy subject, but not workable "within these walls" as such. Although, nobody's ruled out putting it on the talk page (holds breath). --bodnotbod 04:02, Jun 26, 2004 (UTC)
Comments related to the topic but not to the article are often tolerated on talk pages. Having said that, I think we can do better for this excellent idea for two reasons 1) Eventually some busybody will go round removing them from talk pages because they don't directly involve the article. 2) Talk pages are not prominent enough.
I also think a chapter or two in a wikibook is not enough. The amount of material generated here could be substantial. Whilst I advocate using a Wikibook to get started (so long as people who are there a lot don't disapprove), I think a brand new wiki would be entirely appropriate. (WikiSupport?). Further I think if the wiki was open content then it is entirely with the Wikimedia Foundations aims ... useful, educational, free content. Thus I think the wiki should be hosted from Wikimedia servers. It might be good to take this to the appropriate mailing list. Again, I like this idea.
Pcb21| Pete 11:25, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Firstly it might be wise to double-check if such a patient's experience is shared by large groups of patients. Just documenting an individual experience would snowball immediately, as it is known that "disease experience" (properly called "illness") is a highly individual thing, depending completely on one's intellectial bagage, previous episodes, medicalisation (sic), and cultural factors. Documentation of a disease episode risks being unencyclopedic for this reason. JFW | T@lk 10:53, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It may be useful to collect experienced symptoms in a wikibook. Perhaps the personal insight gained by the sufferer could be used to expand the article. It might be useful to discuss the experiences on a sub page (e.g. Talk:depression/bodnotbod's experience) to reduce clutter on the talk page.

The text could then be reduced to a set of assertions and observations about depression. These could then be corroborated (using other noted testimonies and other kinds of suitable evidence) and incorporated into the article. Mr. Jones 12:33, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

RSS/Atom feed for watchlists?

Is wikipedia currently generating RSS or Atom feeds for watchlists? If so, what's the URL syntax for subscribing? If not, this would be a wonderful feature.

No. It's complicated by the need for authentication. Watchlists are meant to be private. We could put some sort of secret ID in the RSS URL, but no-one has coded that yet. -- Tim Starling 15:30, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
Why on earth are watchlists meant to be private? I'd always assumed that was a design oversight, not a feature. I'd much rather have them public (or with the option of public-ation), so that I could see what others are interested in and vice versa. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 10:41, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Someone suggested making them public a while back, with a "who's watching this page" feature, and it caused something of an uproar. To a number of people, the only acceptable solution would be to have watchlists private by default, and to allow users to opt in. In a possibly separate event (my memory is a bit hazy), someone complained that sysops could view other people's watchlists using Special:Asksql, and as a result the watchlist table was taken off the grant list for the sysop SQL user. -- Tim Starling 01:17, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
What exactly were people worried about? I mean, it's not as though anything else were private on Wikipedia, with the exception of passwords and, optionally, email, both of which have obvious reasons to be kept confidential. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 02:35, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
See m:Talk:Watchlist privacy, and [4] and associated replies. -- Tim Starling 02:52, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
Oh, thanks. Wow. That seems...huh. Okay. It would probably be rude and unjust of me to suggest that people are great big wusses, wouldn't it? -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 03:02, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Well, I can understand why some people wouldn't want their watchlist made public (if, say, they're tuned into a sensitive topic). I'm not aware of RSS readers that support HTTPS, although if they do, that would be one option. Another would be to give users the option to make their watchlists both public and feed-enabled. Not that I have the technical chops to do this, I admit. A third would be to encode, say, a hash of the username and password into the feed URL. This isn't airtight security (if someone could snoop that URL, they could tune into your watchlist), but probably adequate for the purpose at hand. adamrice

Criticism and Alternative views

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view. —Steven G. Johnson 22:11, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)

Gmail accounts

Want a gmail account, have nothing better to do? Try the contest. Quick in the draw 00:57, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I was inspired by the above to offer Gmail invites to people willing to clean up the Wikipedia:Copyright problems page. See Wikipedia talk:Copyright problems#Gmail.21. Angela. 01:36, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

In Advance....

I suppose I better explain my multiple creations, deletions, edits, changes, protections and manipulations of various subpages of mine and possible pollution of Recent Changes--- I was re-organizing my user page...so sorry if I caused any inconvinience. Ilyanep (Talk) 22:23, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

  • I noticed that for some people and themes there is an entry on Wikiqoute but not linked to in Wikipedia. What a shame and waste of work. I will try to help make the links but I can not do it alone. Andries 21:31, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Do we have a Wikiquote equivalent of en:/meta:/etc. yet, or do we still have to use whole urls? -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 23:38, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
E.g. Wikiquote:Truth --Patrick 09:30, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
There was a useful page at Wikiquote:Wikiquote:People articles in Wikipedia to be linked to Wikiquote, but it's currently very out of date. Perhaps reviving that page might encourage more linking. Angela. 21:44, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Can I create my own words ?

Is Wikipedia allowed to come up with new terms and assign meanings to it ? Or is an encylocpedia only supposed to reflect the world around it ? The word in context is Autagonist, a term that was created after a brainstorming discussion on Wikipedia:Reference desk#Literary Technique, to explain a literary technique that seems to have no name as yet. The word cannot be found in dictionaries (though Google says its a vague term used in Chemistry). Jay 10:12, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I don't wish to be anaspeptic, frasmotic or even compunctuous, nor cause you any pericumbobulation, but the answer's no. Wikipedians are having enough trouble documenting the existing state of the universe without adding to it. My heartiest contrafibularities on the neologism, though. -- Avaragado 10:21, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
How sad am I to know that that's from an episode of Black Adder and, indeed, that those lines are said by Atkinson to Robbie Coltrane's Johnson? --bodnotbod 00:38, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
As sad as a badger called "Colin". I confess I did have to look the quote up. -- Avaragado 09:37, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It's fine if you coin new words. But please first persuade the common public (or at least the experts in the field) to use it, then document its use on Wikipedia. Persuading only Wikipedians doesn't count, I'm afraid, sorry. Simon A. 19:48, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
No!!!! Wikitionary, not wikipedia! You must do a pennance of 10 articles for your callous disregard for policy. →Raul654 05:42, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
Except of course for Wikipedia related words, where we are the experts in the field or Judge, jury and executioner.--Samuel J. Howard 05:37, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
Really? Do we have articles on Wikipedia related words? Other than the meta articles. RickK 05:39, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)

I guess this comes under Wikipedia:No original research. I've added a bit about primary research in the Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not page. Jay 10:51, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Featured article policy

There is not currently a community consensus on what constitutes a featured article. The only relevant policy appears to be what is a featured article, which was written by one contributor and has not been reviewed or discussed to any significant extent. I have attempted to start such a discussion on Wikipedia talk:what is a featured article. Comments from the community would be appreciated. Isomorphic 04:27, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Monobook.css

Can someone direct me to a page on WP that can help me with editing the monobook.css file (User:Ilyanep/monobook.css)? I want to make all external links light green, and visited external dark green (the old revision of Red Link gave a good idea) but keep other links the same...I also want to see what other things I can customize. Thanks Ilyanep 22:10, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The best starting point is probably m:User styles (on meta, not WP). - 22:22, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC) Lee (talk)

What does "persistent" mean in vandalism?

I have posted a question at Wikipedia_talk:Protection_policy on this topic. Elf | Talk 19:07, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I assume whoever first used that adjective in that context probably meant ‘chronic’. quota
Change the wording to "repeated"' if you like. That's at least how I interpret it. I see no major semantic issue, though. &#151;Ed Cormany 23:39, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The new default skin has a problem

For my own personal use, I use the "Nostalgia" settings.

If you want to see a problem it has, go to Computer numbering formats. The Chinese version of that page looks, if anything, worse.

Why was this new skin invented, anyway? Was something wrong with the old skin? Does the new skin look more "professional"?

--Juuitchan

You mean the chinese characters are getting way too small. I am aware of a similar issue with Thai letters, which display fine on some systems but nearly unreadable small on others. This must be a font issue, as the systems it works fine have the MS Arial Unicode font, which contains almost all Unicode characters. That reminds me - I planned to put together a page with screenshots about that problem... andy 07:51, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
That is another problem. The problem I was talking about was with the text in the gray boxes. This text should not be in those gray boxes, and the alignment is not quite correct. --J
The gray boxes are the new way to set off text in monospace (i.e., <pre>). They're supposed to be there — the spacing is another issue. I think someone has to forcibly reset it. It's not just you; I've had nightmares with the gray boxes separating program code snippets on blank lines in one big one.
EDIT: Also, there is probably no monospace font configured for your system for "zh", so it turns into something sans-serif. [ alerante | “” 13:24, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC) ]
Just to point out an important distinction: <pre> is short for pre-formatted - basically, it preserves spaces; normally, it is rendered in a monospace font as well; the magic "space at line start" wikicode is a shortcut for <pre>. If you just want a monospace font, and don't mind about preserving spaces, you should use <tt> ("Typewriter Text", IIRC). I thought I'd point this out, because using the latter won't trigger any extra borders or anything like that. - IMSoP 11:31, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Kimberly Locke and Kimberley Locke

Need to be merged. Thanks. God bless! Antonio Irreverence Martin

I've posted this request for WikiMerging at Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. -- PFHLai 04:00, 2004 Jun 23 (UTC)

What's happened to Search?

A "redesign" seems to have happened since yesterday, the most frustrating element of which is that when the search is unsuccessful we now get:
"Try the Google or Yahoo! searches below"
... but the Google and Yahoo search options are no longer there! Surely some mistake? -- Picapica 21:16, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I noticed this as well, and I'm glad the search functionality is back up. However, I starting using Wikipedia after it had been removed, so it'll take a little getting used to. The way I understand it, "Go" is supposed to take you to that article, and "Search" is supposed to let you use the Google and Yahoo searches, but it doesn't seem to work that way.  – Jrdioko (Talk) 21:23, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
'Old-style' search results back again now. Ta muchly! -- Picapica 22:55, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
As I understand it (from some mailing list posts, excuse the Slashdot-style linking) the full-text search feature was re-enabled on a new server, but hadn't been in use for so long that there was no index for it to search - with the result that it was less useful than leaving the old Google and Yahoo! forms in place. A script is however working through creating indexes for all wikis; in other words, full internal search is Coming Soon to a Wiki Near You! Huzzah! - IMSoP 02:33, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Huzzah is right! Yay Woo-hoo HOOPLA! Yahoo! Ilyanep 02:54, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I must admit a preference for (at least an option for) the google/Yahoo search... especially googles sugestions when I have mispelled my search terms!
It seems that the "old style" full-text search has been disabled again, having been replaced by the Google/Yahoo duo. I've been keeping up with wikitech-l, but didn't hear of any plans to disable it. What's the word on this? --Diberri | Talk 18:27, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)

References/Books/Further reading/Bibliography

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Cite sources. —Steven G. Johnson 01:30, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)

High resolution wikipedia logo needed

has anybody the wikipedia logo in high res, or can tell me where to download it? At Computer Sciences Corporation we are working on a research report and want to include the logo. We already have the approval, but unfortunately not the logo :-)

Check out http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo - Fredrik | talk 15:06, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

A Question for Arabic speakers

I have a question in Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (places) for anyone who knows Arabic / is familiar with Arab countries. Thanks to all in advance. -- ran 09:07, Jun 21, 2004 (UTC)

Stickies for Editors?

Would it be possible to have some sort of Post-It/ Sticky feature that would allow all registered contributors to leave notes on the article page (such as "Bibliography Missing for Article, Please Add") that would only be visible to other contributors, instead of visiting readers? -- Simonides 03:35, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

<!-- Do it like this --> jimfbleak 05:03, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
(corrected HTML comment syntax) Dysprosia 05:47, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Or just use the attached discussion page - it's a good habit to get into, if you're glancing around pages with a view to editing them, to see what's being discussed. I think inline HTML comments are somewhat less helpful, since they require reading through the entire wiki-source (and who does that on a regular basis?). The only use I can think of for HTML comments is to really draw attention to a particular design / content decision which has already been discussed but might be inadvertently be "fixed" if someone forgot to check the discussion page. All just IMHO, of course, but that's my ?0.02 - IMSoP 18:57, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Inline comments are also useful to indicate (for example) that a particular foreign-language word could use a good English-language translation. -- Jmabel 19:03, Jun 21, 2004 (UTC)
I still think it's better to at least draw attention to the need on the talk: page - there's more chance of someone spotting it there than in the article's edit window, IMHO. - IMSoP 17:54, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Vandalism on Germany article

I am not sure if this is the place or method to report this, and I am sorry if I'm mistaken, but I'm afraid the article on Germany has been vandalized.

When I open the article on IE, the normal page appears. However, using Mozilla Firefox I see the vandalized version of the article in which the German flag has been replaced by the Nazi Swastika and the coat of arms by the Nazi Eagle insignia. Parts of the article's content have been vandalized as well.

I've taken screenshots of this:

Germany article as seen on Internet Explorer

Germany article as seen on Mozilla Firefox

However, a friend told she sees the vandalized article even using IE.

I do now know how to solve this, but I guess the code or something has been modified as I see the problematic page with Firefox but not with Internet Explorer.

Papa Lemming 03:08, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

  • Thanks for reporting vandalism on an important article. I fixed it. (For future, it can be fixed it by clicking "history", then finding the last non-vandalized version, clicking "edit" and saving. Or you can report it and somone else will fix it.) Regarding Mozilla/IE, my only explanation is that your IE was showing an earlier version from a cache. Andris 03:14, Jun 21, 2004 (UTC)

Linkage weirdness

On my draft Guide intro ([[5]]), when I Preview, Wikipedia correctly shows as a "visited" link. However, when I save and view the page, it shows as a "red-link", and links to the Edit page for the article. Any ideas? Is it just some obscure bug? Niteowlneils 20:38, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Arrrgh. I made some unrelated edits, and now it's behaving correctly. I guess I'll blame solar flares. Niteowlneils 21:12, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Found another page that still shows the problem WTEV--WJXX in the infobox shows as a red-link, even tho' the article exists. Niteowlneils 20:40, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This is due to the links table having bugs. It's known problem, and was caused in this case by the Wikipedia article being deleted and restored after vandalism. The links table is rebuilt every so often, which should fix the problem. Angela. 21:25, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Bogus interwiki

Someone, presumably with the intent of an Interwiki link, has added [[zh-cn:法国大革命]] to the article French Revolution. I believe "zh" is Chinese. "zh-cn" means nothing to me, but I hesitate to simply delete. Does anyone know what is going on here? -- Jmabel 00:51, Jun 19, 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Chinese interlanguage links. There are two versions of Chinese characters in use. It's good to specify which one. --Jiang 01:43, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
These links temporarily stopped working, and should be fixed shortly. -- Tim Starling 03:53, Jun 19, 2004 (UTC)
zh-cn is "simplified" Chinese, as used in the PRC, zh-tw is "traditional" Chinese as used in Taiwan and other overseas Chinese communities. I noticed these links have stopped working when I was on cy.wikipedia last night. -- Arwel 10:31, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Some issues

{I am posting this at Meelar's suggestion, to get a more responsive audience, though some of it's already appeared at the Help Desk.}

  • Some contributions never show up. I have created three new articles recently; while the first one showed up immediately after a search, the second two (created early yesterday) never show up on search results either on Wikipedia or on Google & Yahoo. Meelar says this might be because they haven't been crawled by search engines yet, but I am not sure that is the problem - I discovered some other pages, like the one on Viktor Shklovsky created last December, which also don't show up after a search on Wikipedia, Google or Yahoo.
  • I can't seem to move pages either. Though I did it for my first article, everytime I try to move a page now Wikipedia tells me I am not logged in, though I am and can still make edits. I have tried logging back in repeatedly, and also restarting my computer and clearing my cache, but nothing seems to change (so I doubt the problem is with my browser); I keep getting the same answer when I click on Move Page, ie that I need to log in first.
  • There is no coherent, rational structure or index for the distribution of articles, and no specified protocol which makes this structure/ index possible; because the current distribution is not rational, access routes to information are not reversible. Though each article has links that lead to other links, it is quite random; to illustrate with an example, a) User A creates article on Famous Scientist. Famous Scientist belongs to Specific Science, and is citizen of Certain Country; however, clicking on link to "Specific Science" does not lead to a COMPREHENSIVE list of famous scientists which will lead back to the Famous Scientist in question; in some cases it does not even lead to a list, or a history, or any such thing; similarly, clicking on "Certain Country" does not lead to a comprehensive list of famous scientists, or even "Contributions to Science" subdivision which will lead back to the Famous Scientist in question. User A may make an effort to rectifying said links and lists, but there are too many articles, lists, links and so on to ensure the changes have much impact. It would be much simpler to encourage a protocol among article creators and editors that would give rise to indexing, and will make these "information access routes" smoother and rational. (Additional note) b) I see there are " Wikiprojects" for some subject areas - would it be possible to direct newcomers to exisiting Wikiprojects, or ask them to create new Wikiprojects, so that groups of related articles can be effectively indexed and linked to each other, and category-wide changes can be requested and/or tracked?
  • I wasn't planning to complain about servers and slow downloads, but I finally had to edit this page and repaste this post, because I tried to "Start (a) Discussion" three times, and instead of submitting my discussion Wikipedia led me to some absurd "download" page that had a long list of numbers. What's with that?
  • Are there any simpler ways of catching the attention of the right people on a wide number of specific issues, instead of hunting all over Wikipedia looking for the right discussion on a Meta feature, which may have been abandoned a long time ago, and then the right discussion for a Bug report, which is not really a Bug report but needs to be submitted elsewhere, and so on and so forth ... this manner of electronic bureacracy is very time-consuming and discouraging to the newcomer.

Simonides 19:00, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Searching: google (etc.) do the searching, and we don't know what rules they use. Wikipedia's "own" search is just a pointer to google. They don't crawl all articles. The specific article you mention may not be indexed for the following reasons: 1) it's not very well linked-to (at the very least, fix the references via the redirect, and add one from your user page). 2) it's very short. The search engines may well have a threshhold that says "pages with < n characters are just intfrastructural junk (as, for example, redirects are)". moving pages: moving pages was disabled for new(ish) users a few days ago, because a vandalbot was using that technique to cause trouble. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:39, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for replying. I experimented on your suggestions by lengthening one of the articles, but it still didn't show up on Google. By the way, who should be notified of the fact Yahoo can't always search the Wikipedia domain and throws up something weird like "http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org could not be searched"? Moving: the first move I made was less than two nights ago. So it would be after moves were disabled. Or perhaps I did not come up as a new user right away. Please let me know if you find out more in any case. Simonides 03:43, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Google tends to only spider pages once a month or once a week, so it's likely that Google just hasn't/hadn't yet picked up on your expansion. Lucky Wizard 21:48, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Simonides, I'll add a little to Finlay's comments. The "What links here" button works in many cases for finding an article -- if Adolphe Theodore Brongniart is an authority on paleobotany, well, it's easy to go to paleobotany and see what links there. Sadly, of course, the list at physics is too long to manage sorting through. The category system is our attempt to resolve this problem....it's been active for just a few weeks now, though, so it's still incomplete. We'll need to work together to build the category system so that it's a good solution. The download page.....wow, got me. We've had trouble this week with access, largely because of a systematic vandal attack (really the first one we've ever had). Hopefully we can learn from this and avoid it in the future. And finally, it _is_ hard to know where to post things. This is a problem for even the experienced on a site with thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of pages (perhaps a million pages by now....can't say for sure). I usually post questions here or on one of the Wikipedia:Mailing lists, where I either get an answer or directions to the right place. If you have ideas for streamlining this process, especially if they can make it easier for new users to understand and be made aware of, please offer them! I'd be really interested in a solution. Discussion would probably take place here initially, but eventually be moved to a place where it could remain in the public eye longer (the pump needs cleaning pretty regularly)...perhaps a move to Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines, where we could set up some guidelines for how to approach problems? Just a few thoughts. Thanks for sharing your concerns! Jwrosenzweig 21:05, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for responding. I don't have any suggestions right now, but I was wondering if I could perhaps edit the Newcomer page to direct people straight away to the Help Desk or Village Pump after reading the bare essentials, if they have questions? And make it mandatory for at least one adminstrator to check the Desk daily, a different one every day, or something on those lines. I realise increasing protocol is cumbersome. But at least it keeps the newcomers (like me) interested in and confident about any tasks ahead, insteading of feeling shrugged off by the habitués and the jargon. (I don't feel that way - yet - but it's a possibility.) Simonides 03:43, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Simonides, categories aim to resolve some of the problems you've found with "list" articles; Wikiprojects are generally more about standardized formatting etc. And the "numbers" page you're hitting is the "tarpit", designed to slow the vandalbot down. (It isn't just affecting you, BTW; I had some replies for your questions earlier today, but the 'pit swallowed them whole.) - jredmond 01:03, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Thank you for the comments. The page I was getting was indeed the "tarpit." I have just been reading the Category page and they seem to be hosting a real Platonic dialogue over there! Categories that could be subcategories which are categories in themselves ... Never mind. I think there is a rationale for categories, where broad subject areas are concerned, and lists can be subjugated to categories, and vice versa, staggering on till we get to articles. I think Wikiprojects could be extended, to discuss some of the "context" behind categories, and to make peer review more productive and manageable. You know you are dealing with people interested in the topic, so for instance 1) you can discuss some overall topic-specific changes, and 2) any "formatting" corrections that are made are also unlikely to become errors of content. PS I find it a good idea to save your article in notepad first, or keep it open for copy-&-paste, in case you lose something.
Thank you all for the thoughts, please keep them coming. Simonides 03:43, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
PS Would anyone mind if I reposted some of these thoughts once I join the mailing list? I realise it's beginning to look like spam...

UTC TimeClock

Can someone put the UTC Timeclock to on side so when we see messages that the server will be down from this time to next time, We have a UTC clock ticking to show us the time? This would be a nice addition. How about the UTC time clock under the search box?WHEELER 14:00, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Coordinated Universal Time has a clock. You must be logged in to get the correct time. If you are not, you will get a cached copy. Paul Studier 00:12, 2004 Jun 19 (UTC)

I take it back. Even when logged in, this clock is not always updated, even if one does a ctrl-F5 in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Best is to use http://time.gov/timezone.cgi?UTC/s/0/java. Paul Studier 00:27, 2004 Jun 19 (UTC)

Personally, I just type 

 TZ=utc date

or (csh) 

 env TZ=utc date

but it's obvious what my bias is. 8-P --ssd 14:39, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Mysterious pic on Main page

The symbol of Wikisource on the Main Page (bottom right), a bluish image, has been disturbing my peace since a while. Anyone knows what it is or what it attempts to imply. Is it a photograph or painting ? Jay 13:21, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

 

The iceberg? - UtherSRG 13:25, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It's an iceberg, as the first name of WikiSource was "Project SourceBerg". andy 13:27, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Thanks. image:sourceberg.jpg didn't have any details but image:iceberg.jpg had. Hence I provided a link from the former to the latter. Jay 17:47, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
That logo was only a temporary thing put there when the wiki was created. It was never officially decided on as a logo, so, as far as I know, it's just waiting for someone to design something more appropriate. With the new name "Wikisource", the iceberg makes ever less sense than it used to. :) Angela. 23:27, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Playing with some ideas, and keeping the blue that seems to be consistent for other logos, how about...

File:Wikisource newlogo.png  --VampWillow 16:10, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

 
Idea for logo from Mr. Jones
It looks like a bread clip? Was that the idea? Dysprosia 21:44, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Here's a suggestion for a design. Mr. Jones 09:52, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Interesting ideas in there, but it needs to fit within 135px x 143px for the main page of wikisource version and about one-third smaller for the links from other wikiprojects. --VampWillow◊❝❞ 18:51, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I hadn't noticed the resemblance to a bread (or, indeed, paper) clip before but yes, it does seem to be able to hold things together, doesn't it! --VampWillow◊❝❞ 18:54, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)


Hey, mom?

Today's Calvin and Hobbes has Calvin running up to his mother and asking, "Can I have the car keys?" His mother answers, "No." Calvin sprints off and returns with a book and a disappointed expression, saying, "Can you believe the encyclopedia doesn't have an entry for hotwire?"

So, I thought to myself, I wonder if my encyclopedia actaully does. The answer was, "Yes, but not by enough." Hotwire is just a dictionary definition! Could someone who knows how to steal cars please take care of this? :) -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 20:33, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Tutorials belong at wikibooks ;) →Raul654 21:48, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)
MM, good point. But we can at least have an overview of the process, maybe a nice illustration. And the tutorial, over at Wikibooks. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 22:14, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It is encyclopedic to write about the history of hotwiring though - you know, first Roman to hotwire a Senator's chariot and so on. Pcb21| Pete 07:30, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I note that Wikipedia's editors came through once more -- there's now quite a substantial article there. —Morven 10:30, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)
The usual way of documenting criminal procedures is to ensure that important elements in the description of this procedure have been left out and to state that on the (as it's always been for me) television programme. Perhaps if we're going to encourage criminals to share their abilities we oght to institute a similar idea. After I've made my first £million of course... --bodnotbod 00:04, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
I totally 100% disagree. Hotwiring a car isn't criminal, so there is no need to leave steps out. Stealing a car is another matter. This is an encylopedia, we shouldn't leave out information because someone might use that information for criminal activity. theresa knott 14:40, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I agree with Theresa Knott — we shouldn't refrain from documenting bits of human knowledge simply out of a fear of what people might do with that knowledge, criminal or not. — Matt 14:55, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Summarised sections

This is a list of discussions that have been summarised and moved to an appropriate place. This list gets deleted occasionally to make room for newer entries. Please note that all comments relating to the new software have been moved to Wikipedia:Mediawiki 1.3 and all comments regarding categorisation to Wikipedia talk:Categorization.

Problem

A user calling himself User:I'm not User:Michael has appeared. Can he be blocked? Should his edits be reverted? [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 17:57, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'd say so. It's either Michael, or someone baiting us, in either case, it's fair game for blocking. Dori | Talk 18:01, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)
Yes and yes. :-) And someone already got him. Jwrosenzweig 18:06, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I've noticed on the block log that Guanaco is unblocking Michael's various aliases and others are re-blocking them. Crossed lines of communication here? SkArcher 18:14, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I keep trying to get Guanaco to explain why he's unblocking people and he won't discuss it. I wish he would discuss removing those before he just unilaterally unblocks, but he just does it without consideration as to WHY they were blocked in the first place. RickK 18:52, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)
I get the impression Guanaco believes there's little point in preserving blocks on old aliases. Some of the arguments for unblocking are that Michael is unlikely to reuse them, and that if he does reuse an identified alias instead of creating a new one, it just makes him that much easier to identify and re-block. Personally, I don't have much of an opinion about which is the better way to proceed. --Michael Snow 19:04, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Server-side "caching"?

Besides the frustration of my experiment with calling a parameterized template from inside a template, my day is burdened by the time wasted trying to get around my client-side caching to be sure about the current appearance of the affected pages. That was a waste, bcz it would seem that the server is caching the rendering of templating-using pages, until those pages are edited again. (Even tho the change to the template changes the proper rendering.) Is this acceptable, in light of reversal of bad edits becoming ineffective? Is anyone working on it? Am i being a jerk if i just stop trying to make changes to existing templates, lest a typo break all the pages concerned for i-dunno-how-long? --Jerzy(t) 15:42, 2004 Jun 29 (UTC)

This should not be an issue, as of MediaWiki 1.3 the caches _should_ be cleared for all pages including a template when it is edited; there seems to be some bugs in the caching though. ✏ Sverdrup 15:59, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
MediaWiki is a lean mean page viewing machine, everything is cached. That's why you're getting pages in 190ms right now rather than a second or two, and why the site seems to stay operational even in peak times. Now I just tried including the template from User:Tim Starling/Test3. I changed the template, and the test page was invalidated properly. Just hitting refresh in my browser was enough to show the updated page. Jerzy, can you please explain how exactly you managed to cause this problem? What pages were you editing? Can you find a way to repeat it? -- Tim Starling 04:19, Jun 30, 2004 (UTC)

Timeout when trying to modify Template:opentask

I receive timeout errors when I try to update both Template:opentask and Wikipedia:Community portal. Previewing works as expected. Can somebody look at this? [[User:Poccil|Poccil (Talk)]] 02:10, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)

That one was mentioned here earlier already, apparently noone who can actually check what's up with the database noticed it. And as you can see by the editing history that article is blocked from editing for quite some time already. andy 22:29, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
The problem wasn't with the database, it was with the squid purging. The database stuff would complete in a few seconds, and then the squid purging would continue for some minutes. Anyone trying to save the article in those few minutes would encounter a lock wait timeout, because the thread which is purging the squid still has its transaction open. I guess apache eventually kills the thread and the transaction is rolled back, leaving no edit. I added some code to limit squid purging to 400 pages. If a template is included in more pages than that, anons might not see changes to the template for a few days. -- Tim Starling 03:37, Jun 30, 2004 (UTC)

Community Portal Updates

How does community portal get updated? The same pages have been listed in e.g. the copy edit section for weeks, in spite of significant clean up. Tom 00:48, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Be bold - someone who thinks that enough copyediting has been done changes the page to add another worthy cqandidate. Probably best to read the Talk page for the given entry to see if a consensus has been reached before you take that step, and make sure you give it a good descriptive edit summary for those with the page on Watch - but it isn't like we can't undo the changes if they are disagreed with. SkArcher 01:18, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC) P.S. Please remember to use a level 2 header to define new sections to this page.

User:69.19.254.16 has made a series of edits to a number of pages (and is still editing as I type), in all cases adding links to www.paperlessarchives.com - a site that sells CD archived copies of papers from historical periods. There isn't any actual content there of relevance, but the content for sale is relevant - To delete or not to delete? List of contributions is [6] P.S. oops, forgot to sign entry SkArcher 23:35, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It's spamming. I'll take care of it. →Raul654 23:35, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)

Publishing Co. Out of business

How can I get permission to use a copyrighted material if the company is no longer in business? I wrote a company for permission to use material and they have not been there for 15 years and there is nothing on the web. I am looking for J. M. Dent & Sons of London. How do I go about getting permission or must I wait 90 years?WHEELER 22:13, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

  • Someone, somewhere, will still theoretically own the remnants of the Company. If they went bankrupt, then it will be their creditors, if they just closed up shop, then the original owners or shareholders will still own the company, and hence the rights. Good luck. SkArcher 23:33, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
    • I believe Dent was acquired by Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House), but I may be wrong. I know that the Everyman's Library series originated by Dent is now carried by Knopf. Jwrosenzweig 00:01, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
      • J.M. Dent & Son were taken over by the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson in January 1988, and the Weidenfeld and Nicolson address is at 91 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7TA. That's all I can give you I am afraid. Dieter Simon 00:10, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
        • I believe Weidenfeld and Nicolson was acquired at some point by the Orion Publishing Group, Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane, London WC2H 9EA tel: 020 7240 3444 email:info@orionbooks.co.uk http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/ older≠wiser 00:26, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
          • Now if you'd taken the Googling to the next level, you would've seen that in fact that W&N way predates Orion. Orion was effectively a management buyout of W&N in the early 90s. http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/recruit/hist/index.htm. Who's going to raise me and write the article about this lot :) ? Pcb21| Pete 00:35, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
      • To resolve a potential ambiguity: From what I can tell, Everyman is published by Random House in the US, and W&N in the UK. Pcb21| Pete 00:35, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
  • While this is getting a little offtopic, what you describe is a major problem with our copyright laws. Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, a book arguing for the reform of copyright law, discusses this at some length. His solutions look unlikely to be implemented in the short term, though :/--Robert Merkel 07:35, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
            • I want to say thanks for all your replies guys. Thank you. Thank You. And I will certainly contact these people.WHEELER 13:38, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'm having to do my editing in two windows

I edit in one window and monitor Recent Changes in the other, and when my change shows up in the Recent Changes, I know it's taken, because the window I'm editing in NEVER returns back a completed save. RickK 06:25, Jun 23, 2004 (UTC)

The same thing is happening to me. --Gary D 06:36, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC) And me. --Fritzlein 06:41, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I think Wiktionary should switch to case-sensitivity

Please vote. Thanks :)

Wiktionary is already case-sensitive, just like Wikipedia. -- Tim Starling 03:02, Jun 23, 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not case sensitive for the first character in an article title, I think. (Is it case-sensitive for þ (thorn) and such?) --Juuitchan

Problems editing

Just spent the last half an hour trying to fix the complete duplication of this page, was having major problems. I finally gave up just now.

'Show preview' worked fine, but on trying to hit 'Save page', the resultant edit did not go through. The link http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump&action=submit loads up as a blank page. Any hints as to what's causing it/what to do? I have submitted a SourceForge bug report, but wanted to check if anyone here knew what was happening. -- Michael Warren 19:15, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've been having the exact same problem on Cleanup, which is also currently doubled. - SimonP 19:19, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)
I finally got around it by deleting text bit by bit from the top of the page - it doesn't seem to like you deleting too much in one go. I suspect this of being a "feature" to discourage vandalism. Grr... - IMSoP 19:40, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I did the same thing at Cleanup, cutting section by section. - SimonP 19:53, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)
Apparently, it was supposed to be a newbie block, but somebody forgot a "not" - meaning that only newly created accounts could delete that much of a page! D'oh! - IMSoP 20:00, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Disambiguating 'Hispanic' in census data

Could anyone responsible for uploading U.S. Census data please see Talk:Hispanic at "Disambiguation in census data". m.e. 08:14, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

We really need someone to cleanup after User:Rambot, whose operator seems to have vanshed from the site. Asia is also one of the most linked pages. The link to the continent is inconsistent with the links to the American ethnic groups and should be [[Asian American|Asian]] and not [[Asia|Asian]]! I think User:Ram-Man resolved to change all of the links to Race (U.S. Census) but left without finishing the task. It's also illogical that there are no links for white. Any bot operators out there willing to help? --Jiang 08:24, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)
If you want, I can try to fix them with D6. As there are quite a few of them, it's likely to take days though. Which ones shall we change? Shall we change [[Asia|Asian]] to [[Asian American|Asian]] in all Census data? Which WikiProjects would we need to consult ?-- User:Docu

It'll be great if you can do something about this, Docu. There's Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Counties, but I'm not sure if this is part of their scopes. It was pretty much Ram-Man doing his thing...A note won't hurt though.

We have two options - change all the racial links to point to Race (U.S. Census), as Rambot was partly through doing, or change [[Asia|Asian]] to [[Asian American|Asian]] and [[Hispanic]] to [[Hispanic American|Hispanic]]. I personally think that the former may be slightly confusing. I think we should do the latter and make sure Race (U.S. Census) has a place in the individual Race articles. --Jiang 16:56, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It's probably preferable to link [[Asia|Asian]] to [[Asian American|Asian]] or to [[Asian (US census)|Asian]].
As there may be some 25000 references to change, the pywikipediabot I was planning on using might be a bit at its limits, but it should be feasible. If Rambot/Ram-Man is going to do some other changes, he could probably updated all references in the articles easier. -- User:Docu

Hey there. I don't know what, if anything, can be done about this problem, but I thought people might be interested. There seems to be an increasing case of people using data harvested from the WP, probably database dumps, to create link spamming pages.

For those who don't know about this, it is a way to trick Google and other search engines by creating hundreds or even thousands of junk pages at a time across multiple domains which link to each other. These pages then redirect to whatever advertising or affiliate programs the link spammer is involved with, and generate revenue for the spammer at the cost of damaging the search engines and wasting people's time.

My reason for writing this was that I discovered a site constructed entirely around link spamming using WP's database. It rated 3rd when I searched for my own nick on microsoft's new search engine demo earlier today [7]. The actual url of the site is www dot erdmond dot com, but I encourage people not to visit the site, since it will only redirect you to Amazon, and earn money for the spammer with the affiliation program.

The end result of this kind of behaviour will be for the spammers to damage Wikipedia's ratings and reputation with this behaviour. I doubt there is a lot we can do to stop this. I personally find it very annoying that parasites like this can use the WP community's hard work for their own reward in such a destructive fashion. My apologies if this has already been discussed somewhere else :) akaDruid 11:05, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spam#External_link_spamming - Bevo 13:11, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Google doesn't like link spamming. There's a chance they might remove these particular sites from their index if they get to know about them. Fredrik | talk 11:14, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
You might also tell amazon the affiliate ID of that google spammer, so this may drain the money source of this little bugger. Using wikipedia contents to show to the search engine robot, but then redirecting to other sites for regular browsers isn't a new idea, someone did the same with the german wikipedia about one month ago. andy 11:38, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Judging by the source of the page in question, it is probably of german origin, since it links to google.de. I have now reported it to msn search and to amazon. Hopefully they can squash the guy before he makes any money from it. [[User:Akadruid|akaDruid (Talk)]] 11:58, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Yes, it IS the same bugger - that URL first redirects to steine.de and then to amazon. In case you speak german, you can find something about him at de:Benutzer:Herbye, the user page of the now-banned spammer. andy 12:39, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
It would be good to write up somewhere the differences between unacceptable link farming using wp content, and acceptable linking farming. After all Wikipedia is a link farm itself. Is thefreedictionary.com, for example, good or bad? It mirrors wikipedia for commercial gain, but optimizes for Google in a much better way than we do, and as such always appears very high in the rankings. Affliate IDs are "worse" because they probably break the terms of use of the original site (here, amazon). Pcb21| Pete 12:10, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Yeah that is true. There are many legimate re-uses of the WP. Here, the problem here is misuse of WP's data for commercial gain. AFAIK there is no attempt to even use WP data as an encylopedia, the data is just garbled and used to promote the redirect pages for the affiliate. At the very least, from WP's point of view, the terms of the GFDL should be adhered to.
I don't know the details of thefreedictionary.com, but directly mirroring WP under the terms of the GFDL is perfectly OK - after all, that is the point of the GFDL, to allow any of us to read, re-sell or print on toilet rolls everything in WP. I suppose if the spammers were following the terms of the GFDL, then arguably there is nothing we could do about it. If we reach the situation where a mirror was eclipsing WP, then that weuld be sign that WP is doing something wrong. However, it would be simple to improve the WP in the same way, since GFDL forces the mirror to release everything. [[User:Akadruid|akaDruid (Talk)]] 14:09, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found...

I

  1. Deleted Bemidji State University (older article)
  2. Moved Bemdji State University (newer one) to Bemidji State University
  3. Undeleted "3 edits" on Bemidji State University

The merged history looks plausible (the new article's edit most recent and the old one's edits less recent) but the older versions are inaccessible, producing the messages

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "Bemidji State University,oldid=3377836".

and

...2784827

Yes, i know how stupid it is to believe what i did broke the system, but i do, especially since User:Jerzy/Editing Space, inspected soon after, has a Saddam courtroom stills that must be under 24 hours old, along with Sandbox stuff, and these can't be explained by the history of the page. Hmmm. I'm going to log off and see if that affects anything.

Oh, it says "ask an admin". Embarassing, since i asserted making me an admin should reduce the burden of my requests to other admins. But i couldn't have gotten into this trouble except as an admin. Hmmm.
--Jerzy(t) 05:32, 2004 Jul 2 (UTC)

All versions of the edit history link you provided above are accessible. It may have been just a temporary thing. Dysprosia 05:34, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
It's a known problem, although I haven't heard a peep out of the developers on the subject. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:06, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Thank you both. It was indeed temporary, tho clearing my cache, logging off, and rebooting did not fix it, and 8 hours later, i had to force another reload of the history page to see that the versions were good, and that the Bemdji State University versions now show up in the merged history. I would say that what happened is that i was served a version of the history that was out of date, from either before the deletion or between it and the undeletion, since the 7-digit ids that appear in the URL of the version diffs are different from the "oldid"s (and higher and consecutive, obviously reassigned at undelete time, but not reflected in the error msg).

I've now calmed down enough to whole-heartedly admit that "it's not about me" (i.e, abt my account or session), although i did experience this soon (a day?) after beginning to experience the fault of many pages' persistantly non-updated transclusions of {{Index only}}. (It occurred to me yesterday that there was an eventually useful edit that i could now apply to all the pages that call it, so the problem is now masked in that case.)

Now, about that picture of Saddam: No reason to connect it to the caching (?) anomalies. I remember the edit that supposedly justifies the surprising content. I had no occasion to edit at the head of the page, and can come up with no scenario that would have gotten

:{{Wikipedia:Sandbox|Junk}}
== ? ==

into my paste buffer. (Could a pointer intended for someone else's edit have gotten handed to a routine handling mine? How would i know!) So i am going to continue going around entertaining an indefensible idee fixe to the effect that the database is attributing to me two lines of editing that i did not commit. But i'm not interested in becoming the neighborhood tinfoil-hat-wearer, so i will probably never again mention it. [smile]
--Jerzy(t) 15:46, 2004 Jul 2 (UTC)

Front page featured article

What is the process to decide which article should be on the front page? any vote? How could Greek mythology end up there in its current form? Thanks. olivier 15:18, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)

  • articles are listed on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates and voted on theresa knott 16:02, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
  • What goes on the main page is decided by User:Raul654, selected from among the featured articles. If you think a page shouldn't be a featured article (and Greek mythology looks weak to me), you can note it at Wikipedia:Featured article removal candidates. — Matt 16:09, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
    • Just to continue that train of thought - if they "survive" the voting process, - IE, there's a consensus to promote them - then they are listed on Wikipedia:Featured Articles. After that, I choose what article to feature each night from the featured articles. →Raul654 16:08, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
      • Wow, amazing that I did not know about Raul! Congrats for your work! In fact, I still haven't found any discussion relative to the upgrading of Greek mythology to the Wikipedia:Featured articles page. Is it possible that it is one of the "legacy articles" from the old "outstanding prose" page, where anyone could simply post any article, without going through the now in place voting process? (or did I just not dig deep enough?) I remember that this case has happened at least once in the past. If this is the case, would it be possible to identify these vote-less articles and submit them to a "confirmation vote", which they did not go through in the first place? Thanks again! olivier 17:40, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
        • What you suggest has already been done - there was a confirmation vote about 7 months ago. Everything that appears there has been through either the confirmation vote or the FAC process. →Raul654 17:42, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)
          • Mea culpa then. olivier 09:16, Jun 26, 2004 (UTC)

I can't log in to meta

After I click on "Log in", all I get is a blank page. RickK 05:35, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)

Seems to be an intermittent problem affecting most of the wikis. Try again a few times; if not wait five minutes and try again; if not.. well, just keep trying ;) -- Grunt (talk) 17:45, 2004 Jun 25 (UTC)

New Search results page

Overall, it's great. However, I really miss the 'click this link if you want to start an article on this topic' link--it was such a convenient way to start new articles. Any chance of getting it back? (I also like that the monobook Search button no longer tries to "Go" first) Niteowlneils 03:34, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Yes, there needs to be a way to start new articles without editing the URL or making a link in another article. For example, if I want to create a redirect to a page that might be mispelt. — Matt 15:59, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
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