Wikipedia:Village pump/Archive C

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Hi, this is my first post on the Village Pump. Three questions: firstly, I can't see how to get that vertical bar character on my PC keyboard (the one used to put images onto a page). It's on the key OK but lower case gives a comma thingy and upper case a horizontal bar.

Not sure about this. UK keyboard?

Secondly, I have uploaded a 600 pixel wide pic to my Tillandsia entry (it's a houseplant that needs no soil, very weird!). I don't know if such a large pic is acceptable. If not, I have a 250 pixel wide thumbnail ready but how do I link the thumbnail to the 600 pixel pic so that the reader can have a larger pic if he/she wishes.

:You can make a direct (text) link to an image by using 'Media' instead of 'Image'. So if you put something like [[Media:Big version of image.jpg|Click for larger version]] next to the smaller image, that should do it.

Thirdly, why does everyone else have their username at the bottom of their entry (here in the Village Pump) underlined in blue, and the date and time, but I don't? Do I have to type it in myself? Thanks, Adrian Pingstone (username arpingstone)Arpingstone 22:59 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

Type four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your comment, it'll be automatically turned into a link to your user page and the time. If you don't want the date and time, just type three tildes. --Brion 22:57 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

Ah, so that's how it's done. I've been wondering about that myself, and came here to ask that question. I'm glad I looked first. Arno 06:06 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

okay ... the pipe character | not sure. What computer & OS do you have? Try fiddling around with the key to the left of Z and those to the right of L. (using SHIFT too)

600 wide is indeed big ... not sure about thumbnails. I'm sure someone else will come and give the solution. In the meantime, try a search for the words "larger image" and ruthlessly copy however it's been done elsewhere ;-)

3rd... sign your name with 3 tildes ~ in a row. 4 ~s gives you the date as well. You can see if you have new notes on your personal talk page by the asterisk that appears in the top right of any page next to your login name -- Tarquin 23:01 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

We need a policy on how to name those members of royal families who are not monarchs. We have such a policy for monarchs' names, but see Talk:Anne Windsor -- Zoe 21:15 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

Instead of having to contact any administrator and hoping that he/she reads the request, how about creating a page Wikipedia:Sysop requests which all admins are required to watch? This could be used to request the editing of protected pages, banning of IPs, what have you. Is there such a page already? Alternatively, sysop usernames could be flagged in some fashion, but this would smack of elitism. ---Eloquence 21:25 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

but w3 *IS* teh l33t! (kidding) -- t

... and detrimental to npov. Sysops already have a disproprtionately high

credibility with the credulous. See Milgram experiment. It is bad

enough that the Hubris of some Sysops, prevents them from recognizing the ::failure of logic, that is known as an appeal to Authority. Who else but ::Two16

I am new to this, and heard about it on NPR. I was interested in looking up the Mars Pathfinder project, as I did some of the calibrations of load cells for testing the lander at Plumbrook Station in Ohio. I have some video tape of the testing, and a short discussion of the problems they were working on for the mission but your site is not as easy to navigate as I expected so I'm asking for contact information on writing/posting some of the stuff I know about but don't see here. Thanks harry_gentry@ameritech.net

I'll reply by e-mail. --Eloquence 01:24 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

A wikiparable

Once upon a time a grad student in sociology or psychology or philosophy (let's call him "Larry") wanted to do his dissertation on how people on the Internet would respond to certain situations. There was also a computer wiz with his own hardware (let's call him "Jim") who was willing to sell researchers the time for their experiments on Internet behavior. The subjects in these experiments didn't seem to notice the "project" they were working on was impossible, by definition. Should the picture above be lab rats instead of sheep? -- isis 04:07 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Oh the sheep are bad enough. If there were lab rats... I'd never stop thinking

about The Milgrim Experiment. This project is about freedom. If the goal is

static residue: by definition you are right. The project was never meant to ::end. It is meant to process information and to process the process. That proces ::is NPOV.

I say we wouldn't have all these problems if people had voted for Strom Thurmond .. uh, I mean, if we would use voting for policy matters. --Eloquence

Ever read Asimov's Foundation, Isis? A bunch of people who thought they were writing an encyclopedia find out that they're doing something quite different ... ;-) -- Tarquin 23:08 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Should we expect on Wikipedia's 100th anniversary that Larry Seldom's (or was it Jimbo's?) holographic image will

appear from a hidden wiki page and tell us what are we really doing?--AN 20:47 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

I just discovered enhanced recent changes in my preferences, real nice addition. Vera Cruz

Actually....why is there no longer a diff button??Vera Cruz

The lines showing individual entries show a 'cur' and/or 'last' diff button just like in the history (but, inexplicably, on the right side of the title). The multi-change header entries (the ones with the arrows) have a 'diff' link that covers all the changes they list. Send ideas for improvement to Magnus, the mastermind behind its implementation. --Brion 19:31 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

I think the paragraph tags in the cologne blue theme are way to tight, surely, a simple touch of the css should fix this.. anyone agree? --spiff

What is the proper response to duplicate articles? Three different articles, all with lots of decent text, cover the topic of Deerwood, Minnesota (Crow Wing County). What to do? Is this covered in help pages anywhere? Which of the three titles is in the best format? - "Newbie"

What are the three articles in question? All I can find is Deerwood, Minnesota, Deerwood Township, Kittson County, Minnesota and Deerwood Township, Crow Wing County, Minnesota, which would appear to be about three different, but nearby and similarly named, places (at least it seems the US census bureau counts them separately, as the data on those three pages is completely different). On the more general question of how to handle duplicate articles - you can either merge all the duplicates into one article yourself (the best name for the article can often be determined by the Wikipedia:Naming conventions) or you can add them to Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. Welcome to the wikipedia, by the way :) --Camembert

As of right now 1730 GMT, Jan 17 2003, Wikipedia changes are showing up as Jan 18 -- Hotlorp

Not here - check the UTC offset in your user preferences. What's it set to? --Eloquence 17:37 Jan 17, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks!

If you click "email this user" or whatever, the next page says inter alia:

"If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in is user preferences".

Whilst I applaud the cheery cockney informality, surely it should be made non-sexist and properly punctuated thus:

"If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in 'is or 'er user preferences"

Unless of course something else was meant? :) Nevilley 13:09 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

_________

Thanks for all the sage advice. Its procesing now. Long silence on a busy talk site. Couldn't decode the silence.No need to get an email now. Something very peculiar is happening; but, the talk is processing again. I wish that we could pov like SUV. Two16

_____________________________

Can we use the text of http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10092a.htm in Wikipedia? The copyright notice says: The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume X. Copyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton Company. Online Edition Copyright © 2002 by Kevin Knight. olivier 03:25 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

This has come up before. If I remember right we chose to accept the 2002 copyright at face value since the quality of their text isn't worth a fight. But there is no harm at all in asking. See Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission. --mav 08:23 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

The Catholic Encyclopedia is highly biased. Please do not dump their material in Wikipedia. --Eloquence 08:36 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

For random page, why not use mersenne twister? I hear it works fast, and when there is little traffic, you could reseed the generator just to keep us from predicting what will come next.

How random is the random page feature? I mean over the past few days I seems to be getting some pages more than once, and it isn't just one page. Is it just me, or is it not really that random? Just wonderimg... Smelialichu 19:43 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

There are so many different methods that could be used. True randomness is hard; but, pseudo randomness is indistinguishable to a casual observerer. It could be that you are only seeing a pattern in the flux. When I was a child I saw my brother roll 7's with two die an amazing 17 times in a row. Then chance moved back to equilibrium. Someboy told me that the casino record for a consecutive run of one colour is in the high twenties. If you never got a duplicate or a quick revisit to an article, that would that be weirder. Two16

After having tried the random page feature myself, and having some practical experience with computer pseudorandom number generators, I believe that either it's a very poor PRNG or there is some other problem causing less randomness than what one might expect. --Robert Merkel

It seems that way to me too. I guess I'd need to actually do a proper scientific test to be sure, but I seems to get repeat articles very often. Cuold any devs comment on this?

The random page function (see the source) keeps a queue of 1000 randomly selected pages (no duplicates), which queue is regenerated at semirandom intervals (avg time between refills should be about every 450 loads). On each load, one of those 1000 pages is selected randomly. This can produce duplicates on subsequent or relatively close loads, and with a field of only 1000 is fairly likely to if you push the button frequently. Possibly better would be to remove each one from the queue as it is loaded, then refill the queue when it's found to be empty. (Which would have the additional benefit of semiautomatically replenishing the random queue of a very small wiki.) --Brion 02:02 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

I had a feeling it may work something like that. I guess that's the reason for the duplicates. Thankyou for clearing that up, it's much appreciated. Smelialichu 09:16 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps we could flag and pipe minimalist American geography articles. They are hardly interesting to anyone and they certainly discourage the random pages use as an editing tool. It's not just a substitute for opening a Volume at random by the reader: for the editor it churns articles to the top of the to do list. if tagging were made available, random change junkies would have the rambot stubs filtered out in no time. Anytime it was filled out to the point of interst of a random user, the flag could be lowered. If someone forgot, or didn't know about it, there is no problem 'cause the next time a Wikipedian accessed that page they could lower the flag. Two16

I've made the above-mentioned changes to the random page selection; that is, preventing short-term duplicate selections. I don't quite understand the obsession some people have with hiding one particular category of articles that could desperately use some research and human addition. --Brion 06:43 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Brion, you are ignoring some very important things:

Many of us are not American. There is a world outside of the USA, you know. And if someone from, say, Australia, sees a so-called "article" (with almost no non-numeric content) about some obscure township somewhere in the middle of the USA, what's he supposed to do about it? You're just wasting his time! Even if he's not looking to edit articles, but is only interested in browsing... my gosh! it's like reading the telephone directory!
Same goes for most of the Americans here. Let's say there are forty thousand towns in the USA. That is just a guess. And let us say that each of us Americans is familiar with forty of those towns, which is probably greater than the truth (but what do I know?). So even an American would have only a 1 in 1000 chance of being able to edit an article about a town. And after a while, seeing all those town articles is a total BORE. Don't you just want to turn them the heck OFF?
I am not sure whether or not I correctly understand the difference between "information" and "data", but it seems to me that these articles are pure data with little or no information. If data is what you want, I hope somebody uploads a star catalog! \(`o')/
I think I get your point, Brion. What you are trying to say is that you want "random page" to show the town articles just to remind people that they are there. If that's you want, then have "random page" use this procedure: Choose a random number from 0 to 7. If it is 0, show a town article. If it is 1 through 7, choose another article. You could, if you wanted, be sly and try to bias the distribution of town articles towards the user's home state (if you can tell where they're accessing the Internet from, what their time zone setting is, etc.) But really, once you've edited articles for your town and the surrounding towns, and possibly other towns you're familiar with, what more is there to do, other than crib information from books, the Internet, etc.?

If you ask for a "Random page", by gum you'll get a random page. If you don't like it, push the freaking button again and see if the next one interests you. This goes equally for American towns, Canadian towns, Russian towns, African towns, Australian towns, South American towns, Chinese towns, Antarctic towns, tiny islands in the Pacific, craters on the moon, characters in the Simpsons, obscure politications and writers, films that won some award a hundred years ago, and the number of pimples on a long-dead feudal ruler's butt. I hope this sums up my opinion on the matter. --Brion 20:31 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Seems that the banned 142.177.97.215 had a partner in crime. Maybe 24.42.43.3 rings a bell. He wrote through my userpage. I'm going to go through every contribution in their histories to rectify every single thing they mukked with. Two16 will then get back to writing encyclopedias.

Please only remove vandalism and nonsense. --mav

Watch list for 'last 1 day' does not seem to work (works as 'all'). - Patrick 13:50 Jan 12, 2003 (UTC)

Is it my imagination, or are page deletions and file uploads not showing up on recent changes any more? Is this deliberate, or some bug/oversight? --Camembert

It is all part of my evil plot to delete all pages dealing with Christianity and upload p0rn. No, I've noticed this too and would like to know why. --mav

Looks like Magnus introduced a bug to the logging code when he added the caching for MostWanted. Fixed now. (I blame PHP's crazy syntax for accessing member variables. $this->varname? WTF??!) --Brion 06:34 Jan 12, 2003 (UTC)

At emir, sheikh is listed as not having an article. There is an article at sheikh and selecting takes one to the edit page, isntead of the actual page. Vera Cruz

How long does copyright last? At what point can I quote large chunks from a book first published in 1934? -- SGBailey 19:30 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

It depends on the law of the country to which the author had the closest connection.

The general international rule is Life + 50 years and it would apply of the author was Canadian or Australian.
If the author was an EU citizen the rule is life + 70
If the author was American it would go into the public domain on Jan. 1, 2030. If, however, the author failed to renew his copyright in 1952, it is already in the public domain.

There are some variations. Eclecticology 21:19 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I just edited this page to correct an omission in it. Please check. - Patrick 16:26 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

what's happened to the rollback links on IP user contribution pages? -- Tarquin 21:57 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

SEARCH BOX QUESTION
Hi!
I'm puzzled by the search box at the bottom of each page. There are two words (to the right of the box) SEARCH and GO. But they seem to do the same thing. I've never seen two words to choose from on any other web site.Please explain! Arpingstone 10:32 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

If you type the exact title of an article in the search box and hit the go button, you will be taken directly to the article. Whereas if you hit the search button you will be shown a list of pages containg the text. Mintguy

What the heck is this?????:

You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. If you'd like to create a new page under this title, delete this message and get typing! Click the 'Help' link up top if you haven't used a Wiki before and aren't sure how to go about it.

If you didn't mean to create a new page, just click the 'back' button in your browser, or use the search box at the top of the screen to find existing articles.

Isn't that a tad excessive? -- Zoe

It's an experiment; a longer, more informative message has been frequently suggested, and I say it's about time we tried it. Over the next couple of days, count the number of pages that are created that are empty or contain only "test" or "what's this" or the new-page message. Compare with the count of pages deleted as "newbie experiments" from the previous few days. See if it's gone down. --Brion 05:42 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

I've changed the code so that the text is autoselected via JavaScript. It's in CVS, bug Brion if you want it on the live server. --Eloquence 10:02 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

At the same time let's start counting the number of 400 byte pages that are created with only that text or a slightly modified version. The text also has a comma so it counts as an article! It would be nice to have javascript delete this text as soon so a cursor touches it. Of course, not everybody has Javascript enabled but I'm pretty sure that over 90% of people visiting us do. The other 10% should be presented with what we have now except for the fact that the software does not create pages with only the intro text (as it was with the old "Describe the new page here". --mav

That was a bug caused by the linebreaks in the longer text. It's fixed in CVS. Also, see my comment above re: JavaScript. --Eloquence 11:42 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Hi, it is a very nice project. Hope you add Hebrew support for it soon. I tested in the sandbox: mose things do come out well in Hebrew, but there are some problems, such as alignment to left, not recognizing the "Enter" when it is between 2 Hebrew lines and combination of Hebrew and English. There is a relative of this project, another clone of Wiki, that supports Hebrew (and has many other very nice features - you can copy) in http://sourceforge.net/projects/chiqchaq it is the technology behind of a very big content site in Israel, http://www.beofen-tv.co.il/cgi-bin/chiq.pl ("beofen tivi" is "Naturally" in Hebrew") when you enable Hebrew - plese let me know, and I will both contribute myself and spread the word in Israel. Thanks, Oded, dedel@netvision.net.il

Copyright question

I have an obscure copyright question: If I embroider a commercial kit, and then take a photo of my finished product, does publishing the photo infringe copyright? Thanks for any help - Sannse 10:56 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

I'm no expert, but I think that if you published the picture it would. Judging from cross-stitch magazines etc. most kit manufacturers actually like having photos of their kits displayed. If you give details of the kit you are giving them a free advert, so I doubt that they would object. If in doubt write to them and ask for permission, they will probably be delighted. -- Chris Q 12:06 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

I believe that your photo does not infringe on the copyright. The company would have rights to the pattern, but I don't think you can apply copyright to a finished embroidery product. I'll ask isis for her informal opinion... -- Stephen Gilbert 14:26 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks both. As you suggested Chris, I've mailed DMC (an embroidery company) to get their view, but the more info I can get the better so isis's opinion would be a help too - Sannse 18:10 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Hi, it is a very nice project. Hope you add Hebrew support for it soon. I tested in the sandbox: mose things do come out well in Hebrew, but there are some problems, such as alignment to left, not recognizing the "Enter" when it is between 2 Hebrew lines and combination of Hebrew and English. There is a relative of this project, another clone of Wiki, that supports Hebrew (and has many other very nice features - you can copy) in http://sourceforge.net/projects/chiqchaq it is the technology behind of a very big content site in Israel, http://www.beofen-tv.co.il/cgi-bin/chiq.pl ("beofen tivi" is "Naturally" in Hebrew") when you enable Hebrew - plese let me know, and I will both contribute myself and spread the word in Israel. Thanks, Oded, dedel@netvision.net.il

It seems there is in fact an entry for the Latin phrase ad hoc. You can get to it by typing it in the window and pressing Go. Any attempt to link to it with the brackets fails, it disappears, like this: ad hoc <-- it's in there. It may work with a link like this: Ad hoc What gives? --Ihcoyc

I can see "ad hoc" in all of the articles you've had a problem with. -- Zoe

I am using Mozilla 1.2.1. Let me try Internet Explorer. . . --Ihcoyc

Nope, it disappears with Internet Explorer just as surely as it disappears with Mozilla. Let me see if it's a WebWasher thing. --Ihcoyc

Just for reference, I'm using IE 6.0 -- Zoe

I've never seen such a problem with Mozilla 1.2.1 or 1.3a. If I may hazard a guess; your overzealous spam-blocker may be triggering on the "ad" part... Does this direct URL vanish the same as the wiki link? --Brion

That's apparently it. For some reason, the WebWasher standard filter (v 3.2) is removing the text link with ad hoc in it. I have no notion why. --Ihcoyc

How about ad hominem or ad libitum? AdLib? Ada? Adam Ant? --Brion

A-ha. It deletes anything with the accursed string ad in it standing as a single word. It forbids ad hominem (<--ad_hominem) and ad libitum(<--ad_libitum), but allows AdLib and so forth. I think I am grasping why now. I tried to add the words ad hoc as a link and they kept vanishing on me and I never thought to blame WebWasher. --Ihcoyc

BUG!!!

problem saving chuink of TeX. See Talk:Ellipse for details.

Recently I have seen some pages being created with special characters in their title (eg. Istiklâl Marsi, François Paul Jules Grévy, Émile Saisset, etc.). I'd like to know if this is accepted policy. If so, should the special character be typed in straight from the keyboard (eg. "é"), by its HTML entity name (eg. "é") or by some other means? After all, and strictly speaking, the guy's name is not Francois but François. D.D. 11:26 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)

Some people only want to allow 7 bit ASCII for page titles while a growing majority want to allow full 8 bit extended ASCII which allows for accented and other Latin-1-based characters. Some older browsers (esp. on Mac OS 9x) destroy keyboard-generated é characters. But this is becoming less and less of a problem for at least Latin-1 characters (the situation for UTF is a HUGE mess with MANY browsers breaking characters). However many English-speaking users don't know how to create these extended Latin-1 characters at all so the only way they can link directly to François Paul Jules Grévy is to copy the characters. This is bad and very unwiki. It would therefore be very nice if the software treated Francois Paul Jules Grevy as a synonym of the accented name. That way users who don't know how to create the special characters can easily still link to article titles which have them. Of course, if and when there is widely accepted Anglicization you really should use that instead. --mav

We could freely add redirects with unaccented titles to article with accented titles, like I just did for François P.J. Grévy, and suggest people to do so. (BTW, is putting all a person's first names in the title really useful and recommended ? I'd answer "no" to the first question, it's a bit of a nuisance for me. I'm afraid the current informal policy answers "yes" to the second question.) --FvdP 20:32 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)

But this only solves part of the problem (people may want to link to articles for which the redirect is not done yet). I would agree with automatic redirects, when no article exists under the unaccented title. --FvdP 20:38 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the answers. I think those redirects are a sensible solution to the problem. I'll stick with that for the time being. D.D. 09:07 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)

Can we have the same auto-redirects for mis-capitalisation? If there's no article under the uncapitalised title, of course.

How will these "auto" redirects work? It is easy enough to strip the cedilla off of François, but in Norwegian, sometimes the Å (a separate letter in the Norsk alphabet) is rendered as Å and sometimes as Aa. The Aa is probably what Norwegians would expect to see in English, but maybe not. See Talk:Åfjord for a brief, slightly informed discussion. By the time you went through all these cases in all languages you'd have a pretty big table and likely some conflicts. Aren't handmade redirects like Aafjord safer? Ortolan88

Why not make it as simple as possible, and if there are more difficult cases, just ignore them. Surely that way we get a system better than our current one which is simple, easy ot maintain and unlikely to run into problems. Maybe when you click on an edit link for something like united states of america, in the explanation on how to edit the page it could give suggestions as what this page may be trying to link to? i.e. United States of America Smelialichu 16:19 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

Not sure if this is the right place to mention this, but: There seems to be something wrong with the search engine. Not a major functional problem - it's finding things all right - just with the way it's displaying the results. It used to be that each item on the search results list would have the article title followed by an extract from the article with the search term/s highlighted; what I'm getting now is the article title followed by 50 characters from each of the first five lines of the article, which isn't often very helpful. Does anybody know what's going on? -- Paul A, 4 Feb 2003 8:30 UTC

Side effect of a quick performance hack I added. I'll try to fix it. --Brion 08:34 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

It also seems to be displaying things in a different order. In fact, I can't work out the logic of the order it's displaying things at all. For example, I just searched for Lou Harrison, and the first fourteen article text results had "Lou" and "Harrison" in them, but not the whole phrase "Lou Harrison". As a result, a lot of irrelevant stuff is given prominence. Sorry if this has been brought up somewhere else, I've not spotted it. --Camembert

Actually, now I check again, many (maybe even all) of those first 14 results don't have "Lou" in them at all, just "Harrison". --Camembert 20:21 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

A Boards of Canada and Madonna fan all rolled up in one? holy crap.

MarcusAurelius

I'm not sure where to mention this, but I just posted a draft at Wikipedia:Talk page layout. Ortolan88

Look at what I did to Quitman, Missouri. Should I be able to do this? And would it be a good idea if there was a script that did more of exactly this? (I can't do scripts myself. Sorry.)

I am guessing that if you can do scripts, you can input numbers as words.

Perhaps I've missed it, but there's nothing about donating to Wikipedia on the front page, or anywhere in the FAQ. The site does often seem slow, and so the question arises naturally. Of course, donations may be impossible because of the corporate origins of Wikipedia, etc, or they might be possible in the future. Could the answer be added to the FAQ?

Pde 08:42 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)

Great question! I am not a developer but I do read and contribute to the developer's mailing list. First, outside of the occasional Slashdotting or other media exposure, the slowness is not the result of our server not able to handle the load or our bandwidth pipe not being large enough. The slowness is from table locking in My-SQL and other programming inefficiencies (which are being worked-on and improved all the time - albeit slowly). So even if we were to buy a new server that is four times faster there would probably be little if any noticeable improvement in performance. What we really need is somebody with a great deal of experience optimizing databases for heavy loads. Our developers are doing a great job but they are largely learning how to do this type of optimizing as they go.

Right now Jimbo Wales is our sole benefactor. He pays for our bandwidth and for the Wikipedia domain names (which are all cheap for him since he owns an ISP) and last year he bought us a new $US 3,000 server. There are serious plans, however, about forming a non-profit organization to manage Wikipedia's and Wiktionary's finances. Such an organization would be able to accept donations but Jimbo has stated that he doesn't need any help right now supporting Wikipedia. He has also stated that he would continue to at least provide bandwidth for Wikipedia and Wiktionary even after the non-profit is set-up. So financially we are doing just fine - we just need a developer who is an expert in database optimization. --mav

Sequential searches are ineffecient at searching vast text databases. They should not be used as a primary. File Includes are a much better way to go.

I've got meetings next week with people who I might persuade to fund qualified experts ( proof is in the pudding! ) for this open source programming initiative. Rate determining steps to are unknown at this point: I don't know how long it may take to secure funding. But I have started so there will be funds made available either through an existing NGO, Canadain Government Bodies, or Venture Communists. I don't care to get an e-mail or a phone so any message should be placed on my talk page. Two16

A Question of Stumps

Like a Virgin

Despite being well-known and, IMHO, a pretty good song, it would seem to me that this article will never really go anywhere, and might just be better off having its guts moved over to Madonna (singer). Like a Virgin, to the best of my knowledge as a Madonna fan, doesn't really have enough of a back-story to warrant it's own article. Sure, I could crank out some articles like ROYGBIV (Boards of Canada song) or My Fair Lady ('Boogiepop Phantom' TV Episode #4), but at what point does this stop being appropriate ? - Tzaquiel 17:06 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

I agree. If nobody can see how an entry will ever grow into a serious article, as opposed to a stump, its content should be merged into an appropriate parent article. That said, there seems no harm in leaving such stubs for a week or so to see if they do get expanded. Like a Virgin was only created today, so why not give it a chance? If anyone thinks it can become more than a stub, let hir prove it by doing so... Martin

Well you could point out the Reservoir Dogs reference, and there are probably a few other things that this track has had a cultural influence on. I doubt whether before this song came out any child under 10 was ever heard to sing the word 'virgin'; with the possible exception of some refence to Queen Elizabeth I. Mintguy

I am no fan of Madonna, but I see some value to it, as it is now. This kind of basic info. is not bad to have. Of course, it would be better if one can add how the song was/has been received, any influence on the piece, influence of the piece on others, etc. I am no plan to familiarize myself to Madonna, but if I were, I would possibly come back to the article and find it worth reading. Tomos 04:44 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

Been out of the loop. Please fill me in. Seems that somebody was banned for advocating illegal drug use. I don't know what drugs it may have been; however, I've read the apology and wish to know more about the cicumstances. My thoughts read like this:

illegal in what jurisdiction?
even if we were to accept present day american legislative sensibilities, who is to say the legislative branches won't come to their senses and repeal vast amounts off their drug legisation? Or that their system of checks and balances might effect change? Who knows what could happen in the wink of an eye. The jurisdiction I live in presently (Ontario, Canada) has no law about the possession of less than 30 grams of marijuanna. It is not an illegal drug in that amount here. All those front page newspapers photos of people puffing cones in front of city hall are giving the lie to Reefer Madness and make it less likely that a new repressive marijuanna law will withstand a constitional challange. Canadain laws can be overturned level if it can be shown that the law is not "reasonable in a free and democratic society."
more (or better) reason (persuassion) needs to be used before resorting to banning in situations like this.

Two16 : Lockdown Sv Rule.

I've not even read the apology... :-/ Link? As someone who thinks the UK laws against cannabis and possibly ecstacy could do with a review, I'd be interested in the details. Martin

Nobody has been banned for advocating illegal drug use - User:Vera Cruz (who I guess this is referring to) was banned because 1) User:Vera Cruz was getting on a lot of people's nerves and was generally felt to be doing more harm than good; and 2) because there were very strong suspicions that User:Vera Cruz was the same person as User:Lir who was already banned. For the record, I doubt that anybody would be banned for advocating illegal drug use on their talk page or on article talk pages (within limits of course - I shouldn't think overt drug dealing would be tolerated), though doing so in a POV manner in articles would be a different matter, of course. --Camembert

Thanx for the info. Wasn't Lir returned to good standing about 2 weeks ago?

Not as far as I know. If so, it happened while I wasn't looking (which is possible, but probably unlikely). --Camembert

Please see question about Conventicle Act on its Talk:Conventicle Act page. -- SGBailey 23:33 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

I saw that http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?xyz can be abbreviated to [[Wiki:xyz]]. For which other wiki's are such InterWiki links possible, and what code (like wiki here) to use? - Patrick 22:23 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

I have expanded the InterWiki article, it should now answer your question. --Eloquence 23:31 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

I may have missed out on essential information, but whatever happened to the "his page has been accessed ... times" feature? Okay, first it was disabled. Has it gone for good now? I've always considered it relevant (if only quantitative rather than qualitative) feedback. --KF 18:58 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)

It's gone for good for performance reasons. There will be a replacement though, based on log analysis. --Eloquence 19:14 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)

At the least, it's gone for now, as the counting part of the counter is disabled for performance reasons (and in any case not very accurate, as it shows repeat views by the same persons; hits by web search index spiders; doesn't indicate how long the page has been around to accumulate those hits; etc.) --Brion 19:18 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)

I've just noticed in the history of computer program that there is a revision from 2001 between two revisions from 2002. Is this a bug? Can the revisions be put back in the correct order?

(cur) (last) . . M 17:38 Sep 6, 2002 . . Andre Engels (nl:)

(cur) (last) . . 18:39 Jun 27, 2001 . . Larry_Sanger

(cur) (last) . . M 15:20 Aug 6, 2002 . . Aldie (hmmm)

Oliver P. 17:11 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

I saw a similar problem after I merged the histories of two different articles. A bug report on this has already been filed. --mav 20:34 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

---

I found this attached to the watcfhlist for my own user page: "Oklah (FAT PIG CHECK YOUR HOLESTEROL)". I find this offensive.

This is coming from our vandal of the day. Check Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress for more. olivier 13:49 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

There seems to be a bug where if i create a link to a page which does not exist and then later create the page, the earlier link is still directed to the edit page. Vera Cruz

Most likely a browser caching "problem" - your browser is showing you an old version of the article saved on your hard drive rather than the most recent version on the server. Hitting reload should fix it. --Camembert

It's not. Vera Cruz

I think that some browsers require you to hold down control or shift while you click "reload" in order for it to really reload. You might try that. If that still doesn't fix it, then I can't help you, but in any case, it isn't a server bug, because new pages I'm creating aren't resulting in this. --Camembert

I noticed that the access counter were not working for some pages. Instances I found: Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Pennsylvania German language, Hutterite German. Is it just me?

Tomos 20:17 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Whatever happened to the feature at the bottom of each article stating how many 'hits' it has had? Just curious (and concerned) Arno

Look about halfway up the page. --Brion 08:18 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

At emir, shaikh is listed as not having an article. There is an article at sheikh and selecting takes one to the edit page, isntead of the actual page. Vera Cruz

People create articles for dates like 1500 BC or links to non-existant articles like 7326 BC. This seems undesirable to me, since dates so far in the past are uncertain and subject to revision. Most of the articles will be useless because they will contain at most a few events. I think some kind of massive redirection of these dates (and their BCE equivalents) may be helpful, but what to redirect to? Articles like 16th century BC are perhaps not helpful when dates are often approximated to a round number like 1500. -(

IMO specific years before 6000 BC are completely useless since that is before recorded history. Decades are probably better suited for anything from 6000 BC to about 4000 BC due to very inaccurate data. So yes the edit links you talk about should be de-linked and any pages created on those dates should be redirected to probably corresponding century page. --mav

A heads up: I've noticed that some Wikipedia users seem to have started threatening libel suits against each other. Does anybody have anything to say about this? Btw, I don't seem to see any "minor edit" button, I used to, I wonder what happened to it :)

You only get the minor edit option when logged in. -- SGBailey 12:58 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

In answer to your first question - one user who has a recent history of communicating with users in manner best described as touchy threatened another member with a libel suit for suggesting that she was mistaken over a copyright issue. See the Juliette Binoche discussion page and Jimbo Wales'es discussion page for further details.

Since this started on Jan 26, she (who by the way, says that she is a lawyer) has had her pages deleted and he has been talking of quitting.

In answer to the second question - only users with IDs can now use minor edits. In other words, anonymous users no longer have this facility.

Arno

Add option G (grammatical change) to the recent changes and edit modification choices. Vera Cruz

Yep, and let's also have S for spelling changes and P for punctuation changes and... Ahem, no, sorry, only joking. :) I'm not sure it's really necessary to distinguish between all the different types of minor change. It would just get annoying having to choose between the different tick boxes each time, I think. -- Oliver P. 22:17 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

The point is, Im using minor to refer to an edit of several sentences or the like, this being because people complained that I made too many major edits which weren't major enough. G should be used for truly minor edits, this way we can differentiate between a minor (but non-grammatical) change and an actual major change.

It might also be useful for someone who has made a string of edits on a page, to delete all interim pages, so it reads as if they made only one edit-this would be useful for eliminating complaints about "death by a thousand edits" as well as for making it easier to use the edit comparison features. Not to mention the space it would free up. Vera Cruz

Erm, I'm not really sure I follow you. If you're only correcting grammar, spelling, formatting, etc., then you should probably mark the edits as minor, regardless of how many corrections you make - as long as you're sure that the corrections will be uncontentious, that is. If you're changing the content - i.e. what the article is actually saying - then you should probably call that a major edit, regardless of how small in size it is. I think. Oh, and if you examine the "Preview" page more carefully, and make lots of changes in one go before clicking on "Save page", that would eliminate the "death by a thousand edits" thing. :) Hope this helps... Hmm, not sure it will, though. Jimbo's just e-mailed wikien-l, saying that you're still supposed to be banned, so you'll probably be off again shortly... Quick, send an e-mail to Jimbo, and promise to take on board those suggestions, and everyone else's about not getting into fights and so on, and he might let you stay! -- Oliver P. 14:02 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

Isn't that what the "enhanced recent changes" option in preferences does? Martin

I'm running MSIE 5.5 on Win98SE. Becasue of the slowness of the wikiserver (or the SQL data base table or whatever) I'm often running several edits on related subjects at the same time. I find that when a page is updated it pops on top of whatever I'm doing at the time. Is there a way to stop this "pop on top" behaviour? -- SGBailey 22:57 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

We have a little JavaScript that puts the cursor in the edit box when creating new pages (the same thing Google does for the search field). We also have the floating quickbar, which also does some JavaScripty stuff I haven't looked into. Are you referring to newly created pages? If so, the JavaScript may cause the "popping" on some operating systems. Or are you perhaps using the floating sidebar? Does anyone else have this problem? --Eloquence 23:12 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

In Mozilla 1.3a on Linux (Red Hat 8, Gnome desktop), I get:

open an edit link in a new tab (appears under the current tab, not focused) -- when the edit page finishes loading, the keyboard focus moves to the still-lowered tab, and keystrokes go into the edit box
open an edit link in a new window (comes up focused, but I then click-focus back to the first window while it loads) -- when the edit page finishes loading, the edit window is brought to top unbidden, and focus goes to the edit box

This is new behavior; I don't recall it happening until recently. --Brion 23:20 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

The particular scenario that is frustrating me is hte list of Swedish municipalities. I am working my way down the list, using "open in new window" on three successive towns at a time. If they display properly, I close them, If the wikification is wrong, I tick minor edit and save page which fices whatever the bug was. Whilst all this is going on, the page I think I am working on gets hidden by whatever has newly loaded, be it edit page or finished article. -- SGBailey 23:26 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

I have similar behaviour to that described by Brion on Opera 6.05 on WinXP (spit), but turning off JavaScript fixes it. --Camembert

I don't fully understand what you are doing and how (are you editing or loading pages?), but I don't see a relation to the JavaScript if it happens during both edits and newly created pages. It may be an IE thing, but try turning off JavaScript and see if it still happens.

But Brion, the behavior you report is caused by the script. The same thing happens when you tab-load http://www.google.com. --Eloquence 23:44 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

I err. The pop-on-top behaviour only applies to edit pages. I had been clicking so furiously I was confused about what had happened. -- SGBailey 23:43 Feb 6, 2003 (UTC)

When editing an article and creating new links, how do you link a word which may not be exactly the same as the title of a relevant page to that relevant page (e.g. if you write the word 'Epicureans' and want to link it to a page called 'Epicureanism', how do you do it?) Sorry, that's very badly explained; I hope someone knows what I mean!Olivia Curtis

adslhadlhasjhdsakhdakjshdasjkjash click edit and see how this was done

You could write [[Epicureanism|Epicureans]], that will display what is after the | and link to wwhat is before the |. BTW, use 3 tildes (~) to sign, that will create a link to your user page -- Tarquin 22:00 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry? I'm afraid I'm more than a bit technologically backward. How do you get that vertical line symbol? I've found it on my keyboard, but there are two other symbols on that key and I only get one or the other of them when I try pressing shift and alt and things. And what's all that <nowiki business for? Thank you Olivia Curtis

you on mac or PC? on a PC it's to the left of Z. on my mac it's to the left of ENTER. The nowiki thing was a mistake, fixed, see above -- Tarquin 22:12 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

Aha! Or should I say Eureka (quite literally - you already know I'm a bit of a pretentious classicist). It was to the left of Z - I was looking at the wrong one. Thanks a lot (and sorry if you've just come rushing back to answer a query, only to find it's just a thank you note)|||||Olivia CurtisOlivia Curtis

that's cool. being a pretentious classicist is a Good Thing as far sa I'm concerned :-) -- Tarquin 22:23 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

at worse you can cut and paste the | ; is an html flag which allows one to write wikisoftcode which wont be processed such as <nowiki>==No headline== Vera Cruz

You could also do it another way, which is a bit more effort, but which would allow you to link directly to Epicurean in future, if you wanted to. You could create a redirect at Epicurean - i.e. a page which just contains the line "#REDIRECT [[Epicureanism]]". Then going to Epicurean will automatically redirect you to Epicureanism. Then you can just write "[[Epicurean]]s" in articles in future. (The "s" automatically gets put into the link.) Hope this helps! -- Oliver P. 22:17 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

Okay, stupid question time. If one wants some text to appear next to a picture, and then some more text to appear below the same picture, is there any easy way of doing this without just inserting lots of s? By the way, sorry if I've messed up the STS-107 article by trying to sort that out... -- Unsigned (due to shame)

Put in a single , that will force following text down until the margins are free of floating images. --Brion

Thank you. :) -- Oliver P. 04:16 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

pop-up ad?

It seems that I keep getting pop-up ads when I download this page. I want to know if this is only me. Any advise is appreciated. Thanks.

Tomos 20:46 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Access Counter

I noticed that the access counter were not working for some pages. (They all give 0 as the # accessed.) Instances I found: Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Pennsylvania German language, Hutterite German. Is it just me?

Tomos 20:17 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

No, it's not just you. Actually, I think it's good that it's there again. Doesn't seem to be working 100 per cent yet: Some pages do not have one at all. Am I right in assuming that this is something to do with whether a particular page has been accessed recently by someone other than one of the users/authors listed in the history of the page? KF 21:23 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Your objection based on the inadequecy on the wikipedia's entry is noted: many of the samples are simply a diferent cute name for the same general fallacy. every single one I examined was . There are several accept nomeclatures of logical fallacy (one extremely popular example classifies logical fallacy into 14 different categories. Most university run courses in basic logic and reason which use tests and assignments to ensure that the people with the intellect of a small childern do not become philosophers ( or have an other profesion which requires rationality or reason). The culture of reason is still a sub-culture in the 'pedia. Cultures not based on reason are fundamentalist. I would be more than happy to provide examples from edit wars that I have sat through as a bystander and earlier examples where a neo-sprite ( me) was appling logic to people who simply couldn't use logic. Period.

Starting an article whose statement is impeachable on the grounds of some incorect thinking has the point of view of the ignorant.

At the heart of every edit war the is a logical fallacy on 1 or more sides. If you haven't seen logical fallacy in wikipedia (basically including any article without NPOV logical reason has fallen below the threshold of counsciousness. A very quick person will retrieve all this learning in single sitting.

Hard core examples from the science is found in the talk:scientific method and talk:EPR paradox. Any point of view which is based on logical positivism, or is a varient of it, is a logical fallacy.

Boolean logic doesn't change through time. It is a concretization of Indo-european modes of reason embedded in a symbolic language of language pure and applied reason.

with loveTwo16

the belief in the validity of logic and logical means of reasoning is a point of view. When wikipedia talks about positions that are universally acknowledged to be illogical it should say "position X is illogical". When wikipedia talks about positions that are believed by some to be illogical it should say "some people consider position X to be illogical". We should not say "position X is ignorant because it is illogical", because the link from illogicality to ignorance has not been proven and is itself disputed. In this way, we can satisfy both people who worship logic and people who blaspheme logic. Martin

Martin the wikipedia has a very specific meaning for POV and NPOV. Please read them so that you are informed about the nature of this dialogue. An example of a common logical fallacy still common in the scientific community is logical positivism which is refuted by the meta-mathematical doctoral thesis of Kurt Godel which refuted the ideas of the Vienna circle about science before they were even published in 1935. Many scientists are completely mistaken about the limits of their own field because they hold unreasoned positions that are equivilant to logical positivism. Any article which is writtten by someone who holds this logical fallacy will have the point of view of the ignorant. I have framed my arguement for logic, in the Sciences, because that field is considered by those who have never examined the subject to be Objective. I guess in this regard a should mention the philosophically indefensible philosophy Objectivism developed by Ayn Rand. No appologies will be given to anyone foolish enough to be a dogmatic Objectivist. Respect what she has to say of value, there is much, but don't be so stupid as to think it is not filled with logical fallacy.

Two16 - I consider your incorrect assumption that I have not read NPOV (et al) to be impolite, as is your incorrect implication that I am not "informed about the nature of this dialogue". Anyway, I'll see you at Goedels Incompleteness Theorem, if you want to pursue the point... Martin ---No desire to be impolite to you. I think you wear a white hat: Hanlon's Law Would you consider doing a close reading of NPOV because it can only be defended by those who know it cold..

I think this is a good idea. There are many situations where logic cannot be applied because of lack of knowledge, mainly disputed premises etc. I think, however it is perfectly valid to point out flaws in what are presented as logical arguments. -- Chris Q 15:34 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Disputed pemises are adequetly dealt with by correct use of talk pages and Wikipedian refactoring technique. Logic is a tool of Epistemic communities. Not

Do you reckon using stills from a DVD counts as fair use? There's probably plenty of images that I could take from my DVDs that could be used for the relevant movie and even in other contexts. Mintguy

IANAL but I do know that stills from a movie are fair use when used to illustrate an article about the movie. --mav

There's been a small DVD capture on The Matrix article for some time now. I haven't seen any fuss over that one, so perhaps it's OK. Minesweeper 09:40 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=world&cat=china

"[China] invoked an accusation that resonates loudly in today's world: terrorism. Wang Bingzhang, a Chinese citizen with permanent residency status in the United States, was convicted Monday of spying for Taiwan..." GustoMacphisto

So today I switched to Mac OS 10.2 (from 9.2) and upgraded my Mozilla to 1.2.1. I checked the advanced recent changes block in my preferences, and I like it... but why can't I find my watchlist? Tokerboy 02:27 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

Um, where are you looking? Is there not a "My watchlist" link in the sidebar? Is there not a "Watchlist" item in the special pages dropdown at the top of the screen (or if using Cologne Blue skin, via the "Special pages" link at top of screen)? If not, under exactly what circumstances does it or does it not appear? --Brion 12:18 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps, just forgotten to login ? -- Youssefsan 12:27 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

Aaah, I forgot I switched to Cologne Blue to see what it was like, and I never knew there was a link in the drop-down menu. Everything is under control. Tokerboy 19:13 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

I've just completed some minor edits to an article (Franz Josef of Austria). On linking to that article from some other page via a redirect (Franz Josef I of Austria) I found out that that way I'm faced with the older version. Is this the rule, an exception, or is my browser again playing tricks on me? KF 21:56 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)

Try shift-F5 to reload. Pages are now cached (see above). - Patrick 23:00 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. KF 01:03 Feb 6, 2003 (UTC)

Capitalization Rule

Why are some redirect pages for proper nouns, like JapaN, it's not just the beginning of the word capitalized, but the end as well? I've never seen a word's last letter capitalized. --Menchi 22:45 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

A relic of CamelCase, an old Wiki technique for creating links used in the early days of Wikipedia. I suppose such redirects might still be usefull just in case someone made a link to JapaN. -- Infrogmation 00:30 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)

Whenever I click on the "Recent changes" page I'm successfully logged out. What's wrong? KF 12:24 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

Immediately after posting this question I tried it again, and of course it's working now. Thanks anyway. KF 12:27 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

If you're using Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6+, the software now allows some pages to be cached by the browser (this cuts down on gazillions of unintentional reloads by people using the 'back' and 'forward' buttons, which under our previous 'never cache anything' setup causes those browsers to decide to reload every page when you push 'back' and 'forward'). Recentchanges will cache until a new edit has been committed; this is usually only a few seconds, though. ;) If you didn't do a full shift+reload, then during the time between edits merely clicking on Recentchanges again would continue to give you the copy of the page from prior to your login. --Brion 19:09 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

Not only Recent Changes, also other pages, I think. - Patrick 23:00 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)

HOW DO I CHANGE AN ARTICLE TITLE?
Hi!! For accuracy, the Disneyland Paris article should be renamed to the new title Disneyland Resort Paris but, when I go into Edit for an article, there is no option to change the title. How do I do this?
Thanks Arpingstone 15:34 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page. - Patrick 15:49 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry Patrick, the instructions on the page you gave me (How to rename (move) a page) don't make sense. I quote - "When you've got your article up, click on the "Move page" link in the sidebar. You'll be asked for a new name for the article, and given the option to also move the article's talk page.". The problem is I can't find anything called "Move Page", not on the article page nor the Edit page. Help, again! - Arpingstone 16:20 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I just edited this page to correct an omission in it. Please check. - Patrick 16:26 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, Patrick, all is well now.
I was on Nostalgic, now I've reset my prefs to give me a sidebar. Arpingstone 20:04 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

pop-up ad?

It seems that I keep getting pop-up ads when I download this page. I want to know if this is only me. Any advise is appreciated. Thanks.

Tomos 20:46 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

I guess it's just you. What does this ad look like, and are you sure it's not related to another site you're looking at? Or if your browser has been compromised by spyware? --Brion 21:57 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Logic and Wikipedia

Two16 would like responses to this:

Any article based on a logical fallacy has a point of view: its the point of view of the stupid.

But what if people cannot agree what is or is not a logical fallacy? --Eloquence 09:47 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Just to be pedantic it could be a perfectly sensible point of view but not correctly explained or justified in the article. -- Chris Q 15:06 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

That's what I would call a fully defensible position (free of logical fallacy). Compare with: Extraodinary claims require clear proof. Positions which require for their defense, the defense of a logical fallacey, are not really defensible at all. Marxism is not fully defensible bacause of logical fallacies contain in its premise. No ideology is fully defensible.

Well in principle the basics of logic are well accepted and there are several canonical books on the topic. Subtle logics such as Quine are not too far beyond the skills of a first year philosophy student. (though far beyond many university graduates.) In principle there is no difference between the processes in Epistemic communities in the flesh and on-line in this matter. What do you do in the other Epistemic communities that you inhabit? Two16

The (very long) list of logical fallacies goes far beyond the basic principles of logic and is hardly uncontroversial. Moreover, these concepts change over time. In addition to that, many views which are arguably not based on logic, such as religious beliefs, are represented on Wikipedia. It is not clear to me what you mean with "based on" a logical fallacy. Is an article that says "X believe Y" based on fallacy Y? I would not agree with what. Do you have any practical examples in mind? --Eloquence 11:03 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Your objection based on the inadequecy on the wikipedia's entry is noted: many of the samples are simply a diferent cute name for the same general fallacy. every single one I examined was . There are several accept nomeclatures of logical fallacy (one extremely popular example classifies logical fallacy into 14 different categories. Most university run courses in basic logic and reason which use tests and assignments to ensure that the people with the intellect of a small childern do not become philosophers ( or have an other profesion which requires rationality or reason)). The culture of reason is still a sub-culture in the 'pedia. Cultures not based on reason are fundamentalist. I would be more than happy to provide examples from edit wars that I have sat through as a bystander and earlier examples where a neo-sprite (me) was appling logic to people who simply couldn't use logic. Period.

Starting an article whose statement is impeachable on the grounds of some incorect thinking has the point of view of the ignorant.

At the heart of every edit war the is a logical fallacy on 1 or more sides. If you haven't seen logical fallacy in wikipedia (basically including any article without NPOV then you are in need of remediation. Most people over-estimate their capacity to use logic. They have never examined themselves in this regard, with a gentle philosophy inquiry. The goal for writers and editors should be to have logical reasoning fall as far below the threshold of counsciousness, as the rules of grammar fall in a skilled corrospondant. A very quick person will retrieve all this learning in single sitting.

Two hard core examples from the history and philosophy of science is found in the talk:scientific method and talk:EPR paradox. Any point of view which is based on logical positivism, or is a varient of it, is a logical fallacy.

Boolean logic doesn't change through time. It is a concretization of Indo-european modes of reason embedded in a symbolic language of language pure and applied reason. I guess the sapir-whorf article needs to be re written too.

with loveTwo16

the belief in the validity of logic and logical means of reasoning is a point of view. When wikipedia talks about positions that are universally acknowledged to be illogical it should say "position X is illogical". When wikipedia talks about positions that are believed by some to be illogical it should say "some people consider position X to be illogical". We should not say "position X is ignorant because it is illogical", because the link from illogicality to ignorance has not been proven and is itself disputed. In this way, we can satisfy both people who worship logic and people who blaspheme logic. Martin

The Wikipedians al too rarely recognize logic, nor does their estimation of its worth or value.

Martin the wikipedia has a very specific meaning for POV and NPOV. Please read them so that you are informed about the nature of this dialogue. An example of a common logical fallacy still common in the scientific community is logical positivism which is refuted by the meta-mathematical doctoral thesis of Kurt Godel which refuted the ideas of the Vienna circle about science before they were even published in 1935. Many scientists are completely mistaken about the limits of their own field because they hold unreasoned positions that are equivilant to logical positivism. Any article which is writtten by someone who holds this logical fallacy will have the point of view of the ignorant. I have framed my arguement for logic, in the Sciences, because that field is considered by those who have never examined the subject to be Objective. I guess in this regard a should mention the philosophically indefensible philosophy Objectivism developed by Ayn Rand. No appologies will be given to anyone foolish enough to be a dogmatic Objectivist. Respect what she has to say of value, there is much, but don't be so stupid as to think it is not filled with logical fallacy.

Two16 - I consider your incorrect assumption that I have not read NPOV (et al) to be impolite, as is your incorrect implication that I am not "informed about the nature of this dialogue". Anyway, I'll see you at Goedels Incompleteness Theorem, if you want to pursue the point... Martin ---No desire to be impolite to you. I think you wear a white hat: Hanlon's Law Would you consider doing a close reading of NPOV because it can only be defended by those who know it cold..

I think this is a good idea. There are many situations where logic cannot be applied because of lack of knowledge, mainly disputed premises etc. I think, however it is perfectly valid to point out flaws in what are presented as logical arguments. -- Chris Q 15:34 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Disputed pemises are adequetly dealt with by correct use of talk pages and Wikipedian refactoring technique. Logic is a tool of Epistemic communities.

How do you get straight to someone's talk page, other than clicking on the (Talk) beside the person's username on the recent changes page? (That's what I've been doing so far, but what if the person hasn't changed anything recently?Olivia Curtis

As on every page there is a 'Discuss this page' link on your sidebar and at

Was that an answer to my question, mav? Sorry, I'm not being sarcastic: I don't understand how the 'Discuss this page' helps you to get to an individual's page.Olivia Curtis

Currently, except on Recentchanges there's not a direct way to jump to some user's talk page. Click the name, which takes you to their user page, then hit "Discuss this page" to get to the talk page. Two click minimum. Or if you're feeling adventurous, type the URL directly into your browser. :) --Brion 19:47 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

Two more questions: 1) Do you have to log in again each time you visit a page in another language? Or do you have to create a new account within the section of wikipedia in that language? 2) If you e-mail another user through wiki, does s/he then see your e-mail address, or is replying also done through wiki? Olivia Curtis

1) Each language version has a separate set of user accounts. So if I go to the Japanese 'pedia (where I've not yet created a user account), I can use the same username, but will have to make a new account and log in again (so the second thing you said is right). 2) Yes, the person you mail through the 'pedia will see the email address you registered with, and can then reply by email to you if they want to. --Camembert

Access Counter

I noticed that the access counter were not working for some pages. (They all give 0 as the # accessed.) Instances I found: Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Pennsylvania German language, Hutterite German. Is it just me?

Tomos 20:17 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Access counters are still disabled. The non-changing counters were being displayed briefly because someone overwrote the page-skin code without changing it. --Brion 21:57 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Well, I do hope that they come back soon. I do miss them. Arno 05:40 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

As do I. --Menchi 05:50 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

If you link to am external site, do you have to be reasonably sure that the site doesn't infringe copyright, or does it just not matter. What are the implications if you

accidentally link to a site that infringes copyright.
link to a site that you have doubts about the copyright status.
link to a site that you know full well infringes copyright.

The reason I ask is that on the Shorthand page I have added a link to the free handywrite shorthand page on http://personal.riverusers.com/~busybee/handy/handywrite.htm.

I am certain that the author of this page (and the handywrite shorthand system) intended to release it into the public domain, but a number of the consonant forms are copied from Gregg Shorthand. Now this may not be enough to infringe copyright, and Gregg shorthand may even be out of copyright, but I have slight doubts about the site I have linket do. -- Chris Q 10:36 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

You don't have to worry about it at all. The content of a page is the responsiblity of that page's maintainer(s). Linking to it doesn't imply that we have to be somehow responsible for the content. -- Stephen Gilbert 15:03 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Is there a way I can change the settings for "User contributions" in my preferences. Now it shows the last 50 articles in the last 5 days. I'd like it to show something like the last 100 articles in the last 7 days (after clicking on "user contributions" I have to click two more times to have that result.) D.D. 11:54 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

The number of articles you can set, not the number of days (I think). However, you can bookmark http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges&days=7&limit=100 , either in your browser or on your user page. - Patrick 12:19 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, but the answer you gave me is for "Recent changes". I'm wondering about "User contributions". Any idea? D.D. 14:11 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Dhum_Dhum&days=7&limit=100 -- sannse 14:27 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

wikipedia is a great reource and I came to it as I was researching how best to build a bibliography of books and content on material related to the Vedas, upanishads etc.

Examples of some of the material would be pages on

Hindu Gods & Godesses - There are numerous Gods and Vishnu has a 1000 names and for each name commentaries have been written.
Books and their reviews on Hinduism
Various noted eastern philosophers and historians.
Different philosophical doctrines and their relevant
Temples - their histories and other related information.
Mythological characters etc..

As you can see this list is both voluminous and eastern although the language would be largely english However, there would of neccessity be a lot of Sanskrit words and words from other Indian languages like Tamil.

Is this something that wikipedia could be used for and if not would a "sister" pedia be the appropriate vehicle. ajiva_rts 23:59 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

Hey, we have a list of fictional cats -- we allow almost all material that is encyclopedically written. This sounds perfectly appropriate, as long as you write from the NPOV. Compare Yoruba mythology as an example for mythology pages on Wikipedia (not all of these may be brilliant prose). --Eloquence 00:06 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)

Has there been a change in the markup parsing code? five ' used to mean bold and italics but now it's coming out at italics only Mintguy

The text above is bold/italics in my browser; the HTML is correct: italics only. Have you, by any chance, switched browsers or changed your font settings recently? --Eloquence 20:59 Feb 10, 2003 (UTC)

Hmm.. I was using my laptop when I noticed it. I'm now back on my main machine and it's coming out correctly. I'll have to fiddle with the laptop tomorrow and see why it's not coming out correctly. Thanks Eloquence Mintguy

When you get back to it, try bumping the font size up and down. I seem to recall that bold-italic on some fonts at smaller sizes displayed as plain italic on my old Windows boxen. --Brion 01:29 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

What's happening with the orphaned/most wanted pages? I used to be able to access these on a weekend, before 3pm British time. Now I find I can't access them at all, although there's supposed to be a 12-hour window. Is there some problem? Anyone know? Deb 12:09 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

The slower special pages have been put on full-time blackout temporarily. This should be lifted shortly as performance problems are being resolved. --Brion 12:14 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

When you move a page, the comment attached to the move appears to be "Moved to new_article_name", which is obvious from the name of the article. Wou;dn't it be better to have the comment as "Moved from old_article_name"? -- SGBailey 00:04 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

It appears on the line of the old article name, and in the history of that, "moved to" makes therefore more sense than "moved from". It would be better though, if the name change were also in the history of the article with the new name (here of course "moved from"). - Patrick 12:09 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

Also, the "N" for "new article" appears on the line of the old article name. I think it's far more logical to have this "N" appearing together with the new article name. D.D. 11:54 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

But the article at the now article name isn't a new article: it's the old article, just in a new place. It's the old location that has the new content.

--Paul A 07:59 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

An example (open quote...

(diff) (hist) . .N Dependent areas; 09:57 . . Dhum Dhum (Talk) (moved to "Non-independent_areas")
(diff) (hist) . . Non-independent areas; 09:56 . . Dhum Dhum (Talk) (dependent areas / other non-independent areas)

... close quote) There was an article in Dependent areas(DA), there was no article called Non-independent areas (NIA). There is now an article called NIA which is new (it didn't exist before) so it needs an N whilst the old article (DA) doesbn't need an N since it was just an edit to replace the entire content by a redirect. It doesn't matter that that isn't how it is handled within the database, what matters is how it is perceived by the general punter. This should have read (open quote...

(diff) (hist) . . Dependent areas; 09:57 . . Dhum Dhum (Talk) (moved to "Non-independent_areas", now #REDIRECT)
(diff) (hist) . .N Non-independent areas; 09:56 . . Dhum Dhum (Talk) (moved from Dependent areas) (dependent areas / other non-independent areas)

... close quote). IMO anyway -- SGBailey 10:18 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Argh! My user contributions are appearing all out of order! -- Oliver P. 18:19 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

So it is. I'll take a look at that... --Brion 19:02 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

I've found the problem; image uploads create a description page which doesn't have the timestamp-sort field set properly, and that screws up the sorting sync between old and current revisions in the contribs list. I've reset the timestamps for existing pages, and am now off to fix the bug... --Brion 19:32 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Thank you! I think that was the first time I'd uploaded an image. -- Oliver P. 21:47 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Odd "what links here" error?

When I look at the list of links to David Bailey I see only List of mathematical topics (not sure why it's linked from there, but there it is). However the pages Terence Donovan and List of famous photographers also have links there. Am I having some weird browser cache problem that I can't seem to fix, or is it a bug? --Camembert

OK, this seems to have fixed itself now - maybe adding the link here gave the system a push or something (or maybe somebody quietly fixed it). --Camembert

How can I make a REDIRECT to an other wikipedia? #REDIRECT [[ps:Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel]] doesn't work. -- JeLuF

It works just fine, but please don't dump English-language source texts into the Pashtun-langauge Wikipedia, even if nobody's using it yet. --Brion 11:21 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Are you saying we shouldn't use Project Sourceberg, or just not make redirects to there using [[ps:...? If the latter, is there any way to do an interwiki redirect to there, or not? The main page of Sourceberg, and other pages, are unclear. --Camembert

No, I'm saying that [[ps:... is an interlanguage link to the Pashto-language section of Wikipedia. There is no wiki for the proposed, never implemented, Project Sourceberg. --Brion 19:02 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Project Sourceberg is at http://ps.wikipedia.com - I mean, it does exist. And if you put #REDIRECT [[ps:Pi To 1,000 Places]] in an article, then it redirects you to Sourceberg - see my user page at present --Camembert

All such pages are offtopic and will be removed. If you want Project Sourceberg, it needs its own location. --Brion 19:12 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

I wouldn't be happy with the idea of redirecting people out of the Wikipedia when they haven't asked to be. That's what "external links" are for, isn't it? If you want to refer someone to a Project Sourceberg page, you can put an external link to it at the bottom of the page. -- Oliver P. 18:19 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

I agree in general, but sometimes someone makes a page at the 'pedia, then it gets shifted off to Sourceberg, and then one has to decide what to do with the original page - delete or redirect? When there's a lot of links pointing there, or when the page has been in place for a long time (meaning somebody may have linked from an external website), interwiki redirects are very attractive. --Camembert

I don't personally care whether Sourceberg lives or not, but both me and, I seem to recall, mav, have told people they can and should move stuff there. It's even linked from the Main Page, which was what led me to believe it had some sort of official status. --Camembert 19:25 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Best untell them, then. The Pashtuns will be livid! :) -- Oliver P. 21:51 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

If so, mav is in error. I have removed the incorrect link from the main page. --Brion 10:57 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

OK - thanks for clearing that up. --Camembert

Invasion of essays

...by a variety of writers, it seems. WikiWeeders be alert please, and rewrite / move to meta / etc -- Tarquin 14:38 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Including the following files uploaded with the image upload function:

Users engaged in this behaviour seem to be (probably among others): User:Gr1136, User:Oleclef, User:Kvanorme User:Xdeghell User:Krenard, 130.104.225.102

--snoyes 16:28 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

There's a whole flood of these! Is it OK just to move them to the Discuss this article pages? cferrero

For sure. There is no indication that anyone is making them encyclopaedic. (Did I miss some? I thought I got them all.) --snoyes 16:51 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

I wouldn't even copy them to talk pages. Wikipedia isn't an open publishing space for anyone with an essay. I used to move all such essays to the meta, but I'm not in favour of that any more. -- Stephen Gilbert 17:05 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

They are not even good essays. Rambling, full of typos, badly written. Delete away with confidence. Tannin 17:12 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Hi, I'm new to Wikipedia. What an amazing idea! This is my first post, so bear with me. The first thing I noticed was that the vertical black line on each page that separates the left column from the heading and body sections goes through the links "Main Page", "Printable version", "Other languages", etc. Not very pretty. I am using Safari as my browser and when I use Chimera pages are formated correctly. How can I suggest to the webmaster (if there is such a thing) to fix the formating so that it works for Safari? --Feb 21, 2003

Hmm, strange to believe but it must be a quirk with Safari, as Konqueror (on which Safari is based) renders it just fine - as do most other browsers. Just checked the wikipedia browser notes, could it be that it has something to do with a sidebar function? (It notes under Konqueror: "Problems with tables on pages when sidebar is activated. Left-aligned tables get overwritten by the sidebar". Is there even a sidebar in safari? --snoyes 06:44 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

No, there is no sidebar in Safari. Safari (because it is in beta form) allows you to send in bug reports. So I just did that. So, there is nothing on this end that can be done? --06:56 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

A screen shot should help with figuring out just which part is going wrong. (I do use a mac at work, but only OS 9 so I can't test it in Safari myself.) --Brion 07:17 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Is it appropriate to post a screen shot here? What did you have in mind? Is there a place I could send it? --mahongue

Just a screen shot of the main page (and/or other pages on the wiki) would be fine. Just to keep things separate, upload on http://meta.wikipedia.org/ . (You'll have to login separately.) --Brion 07:58 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry, maybe I'm a little dense here, but are you telling me to go to that website and modify the page by adding my screenshot to it? Or go to the "discuss this page" and put it on there? Then, how do you "upload" the file from my computer to the page? Also, how do you add your signature and time automatically (if this is what you are doing)? -- mahongue

Meta-Wikipedia is the wiki for general discussion about Wikipedia and its mysterious workings. Once you're logged in there, there should be a link "Upload file" in the sidebar (if you can't get at the sidebar, follow this link: m:Special:Upload). Just follow the directions there, and once the file is uploaded I can take a look at it. (You don't need to link it anywhere, I'll see it from m:Recentchanges.) --Brion 08:27 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

The upload was successful. I hope you got it. mahongue

Got it, thanks. Looks like the spacer cell in the table is coming out too small. I'll try something, gimme a sec... --Brion 09:03 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

By the way, the "nostalgia" and "cologne blue" settings render just fine. And how do you add the time and signature automatically (I assume you are not typing in the time like that every time)? --mahongue

Just do four tildes in a row like this --~~~~. It gives your username and the UTC time. (UTC effectively means GMT). --Arpingstone 09:19 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC).

Yes, those skins deal with the sidebar and topbar a little differently. Could you also take a shot of http://test.wikipedia.org/ ? I've modified it to show the borders of the layout table. (A link to your user page is inserted as a signature if you type three tildes - ~~~. A fourth adds the time & date. This is probably buried somewhere in Wikipedia:How to edit a page, which I think was layed out for maximal intimidation factor. ;) --Brion 09:23 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

There you go. The second screen shot should be there. --Mahongue 10:05 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

It looks like you moved the top portion over. The M of the word "Main" is right on the line so the table could move over 1/2cm more to the right.Mahongue 10:59 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Okay, I've found a copy of Safari on a demo machine at the uni computer store. :) The prob seems to be that the almost-empty table cell is getting its width (should be fixed at 152 pixels) reduced preferentially to avoid wrapping the text in the rest of the header bits. If you zoom the text in/out or resize the window, you'll see it pop around from the right size to too small and back. I've reported a slightly more detailed bug, we'll see if they fix it... --Brion

Exactly! When I resize the window the table moves around. I have to make it Biiiiiiig to make it look right. Thanks for looking into it. --Mahongue 00:10 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Linking Chinese Article to the English Article

When linking a Chinese article to its corresponding English one (adding the interlanguage link [[zh:___]] after "Other languages: " at the top of the Edit Page), do I link the traditional Chinese version or do I have to link to the simplified version? I just linked the traditional version to overseas Chinese because that's the original version I wrote. --Menchi 00:48 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Copyright: Translation

I wish to translate materials from the English 'pedia and use them on the Chinese 'pedia. Do I need to acknowledge it? If so, how? --Menchi 23:45 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

If the Chinese wikipedia is under the same license (which I assume), then there is absolutely no problem. --snoyes 00:42 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Yup, you can reuse material in the Chinese Wikipedia without restrictions or limitations. That's the great thing about open content. If you want to be 100% on the safe side, you may want to add a "Based on the English article foo" notice, because the FDL requires attribution, but I don't think anyone will go after you if you don't do that. --Eloquence 01:55 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Goodbye to a debate: a promise

I just wanted to say this. You don't know who I am, I hope, and I am not - even when not working under a different pseudonym or logged out - someone you would have heard of or think is important or interesting. I've decided to never again work on the Richard Wagner article, or on anything that Clutch touches, ever again. This is not a promise to anyone else but myself as I find that trying to understand and be involved with what is going on there is actually making me ill. No kidding. So, I'm stopping. Clutch will have one less person to revert his strange changes, and one less person to make claims against: he will maybe feel that he is "winning" in some sense. I hope that others will have the strength to keep going and to try and understand what he is doing and why - I don't think it's difficult to understand: Clutch does it in a subtle way but it's not a very subtle thing really. You just have to look really closely and carefully at what he does. I wish you luck in dealing with him but I never ever will again, under any name or from any IP address. I feel, speaking purely personally, that Clutch has wrecked Wikipedia for me and if I go on using it at all I will cross the road whenever I see him. I am sure he is a great guy and has high principles but I cannot work on a project with him. I am too depressed by it. Someone some time ago in the course of one of these arguments said that it's not Jewpedia - well, sure, good and right. But if people don't start looking closely at what he's doing, it will be Clutchpedia before too long. Good luck. I'm out of this mess and back to doing stuff I enjoy. Clutch has beaten me. Goodbye. 62.30.150.99 22:49 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Clutch has been banned by Jimbo Wales for his repeated violations of Wikipedia policy. I hope you will consider working on the articles in question again. --Eloquence 07:12 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

php.wikipedia.com

When I was Googling, I came across a URL that starts with http://php.wikipedia.com/, but it's unaccessable. What's php.wikipedia.com about? --Menchi 21:38 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Long ago it housed a test installation of the PHP-based Wikipedia code when it was new. It has been since walled up in the basement where we hoped no one would find the body. ;) --Brion 22:08 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

How come I get

Sorry! This feature has been temporarily disabled during peak access hours for performance reasons; come back between 02:00 and 14:00 UTC and try again.

when it is after 2:00 UTC? Mkweise 03:06 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

The last I heard, those features were disabled permanently until rewritten because they tax the server to the point all traffic slows to a crawl. The programmers decided--rightly, I think--that being able to read and edit articles quickly was more important than letting a few people surf randomly (and if I've understood right, it would only be a few people at a time able to use the special features). Talk to a developer about changing the message, maybe? Koyaanis Qatsi

I thought I'd already changed that! I must have forgot to commit the file... Okay, changed again. --Brion 03:27 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Umm, why don't you just cron generating the CPU-intensive special pages (even just once a day) and serve them statically? Mkweise 03:44 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Chinese 'Pedia Log In Problem & Minor Edit

Dear administrator, the Chinese 'pedia's login isn't working. After registering and logging in, it still says "登录" ("Login in") and not "Log out" or "Login Succeeded". And after one chose "我的設定" ("My preferences") or any other options listed on that get-form, the new page that shows up is still the main page.

Also, the minor edit (细微修改) check box has disappeared.

--Menchi 02:33 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Looks okay to me. Two things: first, make sure the login cookie's getting set (occasionally it happens to me that I accidentally rejected a cookie, and our system doesn't handle that case with, say, a useful warning message, but just silently un-logs you out the next page you visit). Second, if you're using Internet Explorer, force the page to reload: Ctrl+F5. Also try visiting pages on the site that you haven't been to before, to be absolutely sure they're not being loaded from the browser cache. I've got some workarounds planned that should allow caching to keep working while avoiding the problems of unchanged articles not forcing reloads of a differently formatted page due to login/logout/creation or deletion of linked pages. Hopefully those should be in place in the next couple days... I may never get that conversion script for the other languages finished at this rate. :P --Brion 03:38 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

How about the minor edit (细微修改) check box? Where did it go? --Menchi 21:00 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

It's only available if you edit while logged in. --Brion 21:24 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

But I did log in. And I ctrl+F5 many times. Problems described above still persists, i.e., I still can't access My Preferences. --Menchi 21:40 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

I just tried it with Mozilla and it works. It turned out that I wasn't registered! But I did, several times actually, in the IE. So it seems the problem is only IE-specific. --Menchi 21:57 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Caching is only done for IE, because refreshing is even buggier on Mozilla. Did you check that your login name appears in the upper-right corner of the edit page? If not, force a reload (see above). --Brion 22:08 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the information! I've been hindered by this problem for a very long time. Now I switched to Mozilla and I can create an account now on zh.wikipedia. --Lorenzarius 14:20 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Can we please bring back the asterisk in the top right corner telling you you've got a new message? I know you get a message at the top of the page saying you've got a new message etc.., but the * was a nice little reminder so that you could just look up at, out of the corner of your eye every now and again. Im asking if this can run alongside having the current reminder. Cheers. Mintguy

Way(s) to Convert CJK Characters to HTML Unicode

How to you convert a relatively large portion (one sentence or two) of Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters into HTML Unicode? I've been using Google to convert, but it only supports less than ten characters at once. Thx for answering. -Menchi 22:31 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

If you use Mozilla as your browser, you can simply paste the CJK text into the text edit box on the wiki; on submitting the form, the chars not available in Latin-1 will be automatically converted to numeric references, which is exactly what you want. --Brion 22:48 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

Is that different in the esperanto wikipedia? http://eo.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Ami%C5%9Dismo&action=edit&oldid=19473 contains CJK characters, not numeric references, in the edit box. (I changed that to allow copying to other wikipedias, which did not work). - Patrick 23:09 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

The Esperanto, Polish, Czech, Bosnian, Serb, Croat, Malayalam, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean wikis use UTF-8, so they can store the CJK characters directly. The browser has no need to convert to references which may or may not be (but in our case are) an acceptable alternative. --Brion 03:27 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

I use Internet Explorer 5.0. Is there a conversion method for the IE other than Googling? --Menchi 23:31 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

Some tips in Wikipedia talk:Wikipedians/South Korea might help you. --Brion 03:27 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Here's the method I use, which is similar to what is proposed in Wikipedia talk:Wikipedians/South Korea --kt2

For anybody interested in how the day and year pages are formatted please visit Talk:Historical anniversaries/Example because there is a question about a change in formatting. --mav

I would like to draw some diagrams on a graphics package and use them to illustrate an article. How do I do this, do I merely cut & paste them or what. User:G-Man

Please see Special:Upload and Wikipedia:Image use policy. --Brion

Something funny's happened to my article on Caroline Lennox. If you go to it from Recent Changes, you get the article in its current state. But if you go to it from Charles James Fox, you get the edit page. Help!!! Deb 20:52 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

go to Mr. Fox and click Ctrl+F5 - that forces the server to recalculate the page and turn the red link into a blue link. Martin

Anybody thought about open source textbooks? That are freely editable? What about www.wikibooks.org? User:Extro

Somebody brought this up once, but I don't remember if anything ever came of it. You might search around on meta. Tuf-Kat

I love Internet textbooks, and there are now many around, especially for mathematics. I suppose it would be easy to take related Wikipedia articles and to package them as books to start with. Then they could be edited further. Maybe also create the PDF's. And reserve the URL www.wikibooks.org. How would one start such a wiki project? User:Extro

Hi!! from a cold England (-2C at breakfast). Just two questions from a newcomer. What does Wikified mean and what does Meta (in the context of this encyclopedia) mean? Thanks!
Arpingstone 12:24 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

wikified = changed to use wiki markup, as described in wikipedia:how to edit a page

meta = to do with Meta-Wikipedia (see also wikipedia:meta-Wikipedia)

Martin

Meta is also short for meta data which is a techy term for documentation. So since all pages in the wikipedia:namespace are supposed to be about or relating to Wikipedia then they contain "meta data" about the project. Thus the use of the word "meta". Meta-Wikipedia contains even higher level "meta data" about the project that is more general and of interest to more than just the English Wikipedia. --mav 21:17 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

An interesting question has been raised by mav concerning NPOV. I'm posting this here before someone actually deletes the page ("Losers in literature"):

How in the world can this entry ever be NPOV? This page needs to be deleted. --mav 10:28 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

Delete it then -- it's in your power, not mine. However, I urge you to reconsider what you have just said. Including even fictional (!!!) people in that NPOV craze is really carrying things to extremes. Has it ever crossed your mind that creating winners as well as losers is exactly what fiction writers are doing all the time? And before you delete this talk page as well, I'll have to copy it and paste it over to the Village pump. --KF 10:54 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

See Talk:Losers in literature for the reply. --mav

after adding the image, I'm getting the following error when I display the page for the Bab.

Warning: error_log: Unable to write to /usr/local/apache/htdocs/upload/logfile in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/OutputPage.php on line 436

I rotated the logs to compress the old one and save disk space. You must have loaded the page during the split second between the old file being renamed and the new one being created. Congratulations! :) Reload the page (you may need to hold down "control" to force a reload) and it should be fine. --Brion 08:18 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

Searching

I'm trying to do a search and exclude redirects, but it's not working. Ideas? Martin

Random page function

Is there any way the random page function can be changed so that it doesn't throw up these Nowheresville, Ohio census statistic pages? (Or, alternatively, offer some options in the user preferences page). Whilst I'll admit that a purely random page choice should throw them up occasionally, there's so many of them that they occur very frequently and are of, I would imagine, little interest to people who aren't looking for them directly but just looking for something interesting to read. cferrero

This should really be in the Wikipedia:FAQ. The answer is no, just push the button again if you want to see something different. :) On the other hand, if you'd like to spend a few moments researching the town to add local history, that'd be even better! Many communities have at least some web presence, and you could send an e-mail letting them know Wikipedia exists and has an article on their town which they can expand. Might get some bites! --Brion 10:51 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps the random page feature could be weighted by size, so that you're more likely to go to a page with more content, rather than a stub. Martin

Since one of the things people use it for is to find stubs that need to be expanded, that may not be the best idea. The problem is that different people want 'random page' to do different things -- some want interesting fully-formed content to read; others want stubs to expand, still others want anything that may need fixing up, wikification, proofreading. Weights appropriate for one are wildly inappropriate for the others. --Brion 11:20 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

The effort might outweigh the benefit, but you could have a user-preference option to weight random pages towards "short articles", "long articles" or "no weighting". -- Chris Q 12:05 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

Surely short pages are best found using the special page for short pages? Or most wanted stubs or find or fix a stub... Martin

Those city articles are rather longer than most articles in the 'pedia. -- Zoe

Wikipedia Logo

Why are the logos of some non-English language 'pedias, such as the Afrikaanse, have two enormous vertical strikes over it, like this? What do they symbolize? --Menchi 22:39 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

I believe that's the old Nupedia logo; it's a giant "N" squished into the circle. --Brion

I've just put a request for guidance on the structure of the America's Cup article at Talk:America's Cup. Dramatic 21:12 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

It did it again. This is now the third time in a few days that I properly entered revisions to an article, but the next day it is gone! This is pretty discouraging, especially since I do not usually take local backups of what I do (it is too cumbersome)! I think it may be connected to the (far too short IMHO) login timeout. Perhaps when you're submitting the article and the article times out, the article seems to be all right when you look at it, but it is not really properly entered into the database after all? (I know there is a bug report thing somewhere - it just seems much more suitable to discuss bugs at the pump first) -- Egil 10:06 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Can you tell us what the articles were? Any chance your changes are in the Older versions? -- Zoe

Just to double check: hit ctrl+F5 to reload and override local cache. (You must hold down control.) Does the new version show up now? And yes, for the love of all that is wiki, when you report a problem PLEASE say EXACTLY what pages the problem is occuring on, as well as exactly which web browser, which version of it, and under what operating system you are using it. We simply cannot effectively figure out what the problem is without that information. --Brion 10:20 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

OK, the latest incident seems to be perhaps me jumping to conclusions based on two previous incidents - the artciel in question had disappeared from my watch list. The previous incident was the Nile, were I lost something on February 12, or thereabouts. The one incident before that I did not record - I will try to keep my eyes open. Browser is Galeon 1.2.7, on Linux RedHat 8.0. And no, It never seems to cache thinhs it shouldn't. And yes, it would greatly help me restore my sanity if the auto logoff period could be extended. -- Egil 15:03 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

Is there any way to get to an anonymous user's talkpage except on recent changes? Like in the list of contributions page... If not, can there be? Tokerboy

Be a man: type in the URL manually! --Brion 10:57 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

Wide Screen problem. I have seen some oblique references to this, but only really noticed it this past couple of days. It seems to happen when I edit an article containing an image. What causes it and can I prevent it happening? Deb 21:41 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

It is not always clear to me either, but some info you can find in page widening. Which article edit gives this? = Patrick 14:40 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

Is the Wikipedia guideline of only linking to the first reference of something in an article, written down in the style guide or elsewhere? I can't find a reference to it. Mintguy

The Wikipedia:Manual of Style says "Do not link every occurrance of a word; simply linking the first time the word appears will usually be enough" (in the section headed Free Link Style). --Camembert

Thanks for that. I skimmed through that bit, and moved my eyes on swiftly after reading George W. Bush. Mintguy

I've noticed two or three instances where some contributor has inserted comments about the safety of certain types of aircraft. Some of these are certainly justified. For example, the DC-10 had a major problem with the cargo door seal and some hundreds of people were killed. This is relevant, factual information and should be included in the Wikipedia entry on the type. However, the great majority of passenger aircraft types are widely known to have a good record.

Someone with a particular weirdo POV inserted comments in some of the Airbus entries, suggesting that they were unsafe (an assertion that is clearly without evidence or merit). That's fine: I removed the POV comments some time ago and there is no controversy about that.

But now I get to the curly one. Look at the links from Airbus A300. The last two links contrive to suggest that it is an unsafe aircraft (which it is not) without the contributor actually having to say anything. Now the first link (to a CNN page) is easy: it's an ill-informed tabloid article and the link should be deleted. (I'll leave it for a day or two longer so interested people can have a look first. If you don't understand why it's BS, sing out and I'll provide appropriate details.) But the second link is (a) perfectly valid information from a respectable source, and (b) highly misleading, insofar as the link is made from Airbus A300, but similar links are not made from (for example) Boeing 747, or Lockheed L-1011 (two other aircraft types which also have perfectly respectable safety records). I don't like to delete good information, but the placing of this particular link in this particular context without similar links in all the other entries is highly POV and possibly slanderous.

Thoughts? Tannin 15:03 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

Tannin, I do not see why the first link should be deleted. Any airplane article should have links to relevant press coverage of past accidents. As for the second link, the answer is simple: Add similar links to other airplane articles. --Eloquence 15:07 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

That's what I'm afraid someone would say! Three reasons: (a) lots of work to do that, (b) we end up with a whole stack of redundant links to different pages of the same site, (c) we make the aircraft pages look like a roadmap to a graveyard (when in fact the modern passenger aircraft is one of the safest transport technologies ever invented). The first link though is - forgive my technical term here - crap. It's disinformation, not "relevant press coverage". Tannin

Sure, it's not the best solution, that would be to have a detailed article about aircraft safety, with a discussion of different types of aircraft and their safety record, and so on, linked from every aircraft page. But as a temporary solution, it's completely acceptable. Regarding the CNN link, if it's crap, point to a publication that shows why, or explain that in the article. Just removing the link without explanation is not OK. In generally, make statements (and links are a form of statement) NPOV by providing balancing statements, not by removing them. --Eloquence 15:32 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

Wikidates

Is there as a rule as when to wikify dates and years? For example, on the pages "Parti Québécois" and "Bloc Québécois", only some dates were wikified, while others aren't. To me, the choice seems to be arbitrary. Are only the relatively more important dates wikified? --Menchi 05:23 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

It's a matter of taste as much as anything else: some people will wikify all dates, some will only wikify important dates, some will wikify very few. Birth and death dates in biographical articles should be wikified (as per the Wikipedia:Manual of Style), but beyond that there's no policy on date wikification, nor any consensus on it, as far as I know. --Camembert

I tend to favor wikifying all dates (and all possible words, for that matter) because a heavily cross-linked encyclopedia is more useful than a bunch of text blobs, it doesn't hurt readability, and it will facilitate various kinds of automated consistency analysis in the future. For instance, imagine being able to check Foo Bar's participation in some meeting against the dates in his biographical info. (Recently I was working over data on early Spanish kings, and found an interesting monograph where one of them was tracked by the grants and charters to monasteries and such - when the dates and locations were plotted, it became clear that he had to have spent most of his life on the road. The names of the witnesses to each charter also showed who traveled with him. Basic date info can be very useful material!) Stan Shebs 14:57 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

I have a question about headers and subheaders in articles. Obviously, the first word should be capitalized, but should the subsequent words be capitalized? Obviously if the words are part of an official title, it should be capitalized, but what about in general? I've seen it both ways, and I didn't see this issue addressed anywhere. I know article titles are not supposed to be capitalized, but what about headers in those articles? Which should it be:

==External links==

or

==External Links== -- 136.152.197.237 06:28 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

My impression is that the general convention is not to capitalize subsequent words in section headers (unless they're proper names, of course). I suppose it doesn't really matter, but "External links" etc fit in better with the house style. --Brion 06:32 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be nice to have piped wiki links displayed in a different color (e.g. a darker shade of blue)? Mkweise 05:21 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Well, it would be confusing. With luck, that'll scare a few of the less savory types away. ;) --Brion 05:23 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

The list of words not used in searches seems reasonable for words IN articles. Is there anyway that the search of article TITLES could use ALL words? -- 217.24.129.50

When we upgrade MySQL to version 4 (which has much better fulltext search capabilities, including exact phrase searching), we'll try to reduce or remove the stopword list. This'll have to wait a bit, as the last couple of revisions have had bugs which specifically affect types of queries that we use. --Brion 17:34 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Asterisks in Revision History

In revision history, some people put * in front of their summary. What does the asterisk signify? --Menchi 22:03 Feb 12, 2003

Most likely, nothing at all. An older version of the wiki software put an asterisk in the summary field in the edit form by default, and some people forgot to delete it when typing in their own text. --Brion

I've uploaded an image and forgot to rename it. How can Wikipedia get rid of this (too simple) filename? BTW, it was Image:Leo.png --Torsten Bronger 02:47 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Can someone look into the issue I raised at Talk:History of Singapore, regarding copyright problems with the History of Singapore article? I don't have the time to handle it right now. -- CYD

Is is just me, or are the pages starting with a 'V' not showing the 'v' try Secret_Intelligence_Service and click on the vauxhall stuff at the bottom... -Stevert

p.s. : never mind - wierd browser glitch.-SV

At Talk:List of songwriters/temp a link has automatically appeared to Talk:List of songwriters. Is this a relic of the subpage system? Tokerboy

Partial support for subpages has been restored for user pages and talk pages in recognition of the facts that A) sub-pages have continued to be in de-facto use in these domains and there's no clear suggestion for replacing them, and B) the complaints against sub-pages were primarily in regards to their distortion of article title conventions, which doesn't really apply to the above usages. --Brion 03:51 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

I think a rating system similar to amazon would work well on a site like this. That way if i want to use this for my kids school i can guage if it is a good article. This generally needed for subjects that the reason i am coming to the site is that i know little or nothing about the subject i am searching for.

Rating systems of various kinds have been discussed many times. The general opinion around here seems to be that the base Wikipedia should remain as it is, with any rating or moderation systems built as separate projects. Larry Sanger was working on one such system, but there hasn't been much said about it in the past few months. -- Stephen Gilbert 15:12 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

The article School sanitation seems a little odd and its related link about IRC reads like a business plan without saying much. Should either exist? If so in what form?

external book sources

I'm working on the Japanese Wikipedia, and some pointed out that "external book sources" option in the Special: name space can direct users only to English-based sites such as Amazon.com which have, quite predictably, few books in Japanese.

Would there be any way to change the list so that Japanese users can have the same benefit of locating the books of their interests conveniently? Tomos 23:13 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

I am planning to put hunderes of stubs for Japanes authors using bots. Any objection? The format should be like Hozumi Shigeto -- Taku 04:47 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Nice format. I like the way you have the Japanese characters in the same parenthesis as the birth/death dates. One minor issue: a space needs to go after the comma in the dates. --mav

I don't like the way the Japanese characters are in the same parenthesis as the dates. They are different things altogether, so it seems strange to link them in that way. And it doesn't follow the standard "(date - date)" pattern that seems to have been agreed for biographical articles. I prefer the format used at, e.g. Kokichi Mikimoto. -- Oliver P. 16:04 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

The article contains little more than List of Japanese authors, only the Japanese characters. These could be added in the list. It seems better that a separate article about an author is made at the moment that there is more info on him/her. Except when it is probable that soon more info will be added to a large percentage of the stubs. - Patrick 10:33 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

I agree that it makes more sense to do a list, and when someone decides to flesh out a particular author they can create a new page. --snoyes 16:34 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

What is the benefit of adding all these authors using a bot? Is it truly contributing to the content of wikipedia, or just cluttering the database? If people feel that they need to add content about a particular topic, then surely to benefit readers, it should have at least a little content. Kabads

I don't think they're just "clutter", since these people are presumably all going to get articles, so pages on them are going to be in the database eventually anyway. These bot contributions are just providing slots into which people can put stuff. We all want more encyclopaedic content to be added, of course, so I think the most important question is: are people more likely to add encyclopaedic content on an author who (a) has no entry at all, or (b) has a very brief entry with almost no content? I suspect that the latter is more likely to spur people on to add information, but it's debatable, of course. (I still don't like the format, though!) -- Oliver P. 16:51 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

First of all, stub articles have inadequate information but the purpose of them is to provide a good starting point to write an article. Finding out the birth date and death date is a tedious job and particularly putting Japanese characters are difficult to job for those who can't type Japanese. Secondly, we already have the List of Japanese authors. It means soon or later we will have articles for all of them. There is no reason to postpone making articles unless we are unsure we need such a article. Yeah, we need a little more at least, where he/she was born and died. I think I can put such information because I have it.

Yeah, maybe bots are a little too overwhelming. I will put stubs by hand if we can agree with having stub articles for Japanese authors.

Taku, Have you read Wikipedia:Bots? It's a useful page on this issue. -- sannse 16:41 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Yes. I believe my bot is useful, harmless and not server hog.

I guess another benefit of using a bot is to guarantee consistent format for the articles. --Tomos 20:30 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Also, someone mentioned I could not express opinions on Wikipedia (e.g., looking for feedback on my dream file/web browser concept), even on the "Discuss this page" item. Is this true? It seems to me Wikipedia would otherwise (if it did allow opinions at least on the DiscussThisPage pages) to be a potentially incredible way to store discussions in that it would not get in the way of the "facts" which would be limited to the main documents (though obviously "facts" can be opinions too, it's largely about the tone in which they're worded), but they would have the advantage of being automatically categorized and allow people familiar and interested in a certain subject to know exactly where to look (like Usenet groups, but more accessible to anyone and even more hierarchically specifiable).

Are previous versions of Wikipedia pages eventually deleted? Could someone theoretically choose to link to a previous version (in case newer versions insistently omitted the data)?

I notice that 10 January is available as a redirect to January 10, which is really really convenient for articles on military topics, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Is there any reason not to create all the others? Stan Shebs 04:32 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

The only problem I can see is it would be likely to decrease the conformity of dates across Wikipedia, which might be a problem in, for example, biographies. Anyone using 13 February at the moment gets an empty link and can see immediately that that's not the standard way of formatting the date. But this is a small thing, and conformity in date formats might not be important enough to negate the convenience of having the redirects. -- sannse 07:29 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

My vote? I'd prefer all the dates to be uniform throughout the Wikipedia. -- Anon.

I don't understand -- why do military topics need the "10 January" format? --Eloquence

Accounts of military doings tend to have lots of dates, and they standardized on "10 January 1952" long ago; it looks pretty old-fashioned to read "January 10, 1952". Thinking to find an explanation for the difference, I consulted my Bible, 13th edition, and it says (8.36) "The University of Chicago press prefers that in all text, including notes and bibliographies, exact dates be written in the sequence day-month-year, without internal punctuation", which goes a long way towards explaining why most (though not all) of my recently-published history books have been using the "military" style for all their dates. :-) Stan Shebs 11:44 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

Fowler also says "10 January". I had assumed "January 10" was the US style, but if Fowler & Chicago agree I think we have to consider changing our own Manual of Style policy -- Tarquin 12:23 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

While not requiring dates in the "10 January" form The Elements of Style (Strunk & White) states:

The form is an excellent way to write a date; the figures are separated by a word and are, for that reason, quickly grasped.

If we were to change it, there are thousands and thousands of dates in the other form, every biographical article, for instance. Of course, our own software uses the other form, as shown in the signatures here. Ortolan88 15:52 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

We don't standardise on US spelling, why should we standardise on US dates? Martin

Yes, I think it should suffice to allow both forms, add the redirects, and perhaps express a preference. If all dates are habitually wikified, it becomes trivial to convert to a single standard later. (Chicago just expresses a preference, not a rule; my guess is that day-month is today more of an academic/professional thing, and month-day is more "normal". Imagine it in an article about a grunge band, seems positively stuffy.) Stan Shebs 13:05 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

Hm, no, I don't think so - from my perspective here in the UK "month day comma" seems a strange way to express dates. I have a feeling that it might have been used 40 years ago, but nowadays day-month-year seems normal. Arwel 19:10 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

On a grunge band's CD sleeve maybe, but an encyclopedia article about a grunge band should be just as serious as any other. It would take a VERY long time to convert all mentions of dates; so even with a change of standard there'd be a certain amount of cohabitation -- Tarquin 15:00 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

The other advantage of day-month-year is that it becomes easier to link 20 February 2002 and make use of the per-month entries for recent years. Does anyone know what's standard outside of the US? I know the UK only uses day-month-year, but what about other countries? Martin

Wouldn't it be easy for a programmer to create a bot to search all Wikipedia articles for [[month day]], formatted links and convert them to [[day month]]? I've already suggested that we should standardize on the international format. This string should be moved to Talk:List of historical anniversaries. --mav

move to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) be better :) -- Tarquin 19:41 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

What is the proper bibliographical citation for Wikipedia? There's no real "author," so would it be a combination of work without author, encyclopedia, and Internet resource? I'm guessing:

"Old English", "Middle English", "English Language", and linked articles. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (2003). Available online: < http://www.wikipedia.org/ >.

I'm doing a project on the evolution of English; I used some linked pages for more information. And would it be better to give it as three separate sources, or with three URLs? -Geoffrey

Particulars depend on the style specified (by a school or publishing enterprise), but for a reference so changable as Wikipedia it is important to include the date and time accessed and the complete URL. In most instances, each page used will require a separate URL entry in the bibliography. -- Someone else 23:24 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks. My teacher says use "proper" citation style - that is, pick one standard. I'm using Author. Title. City: Publisher (Year). OK, I'll use the full date and time. Also, her source requirements won't accept multiple pages from one web site as separate sources towards the requirement of five, hence the reason for my including all pages in one citation. But if I separate them into tree, there'd be no place for articles like Indo-European language or Satem that I may have picked up a few facts from; therefore, I thought this might work better. For the date and time, should I try using the &oldid= attribute to /w/wiki.phtml to ensure others will get the same revision I got?

There's a page on applying the Chicago Manual of Style to internet sources at <http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite7.html > (though it doesn't sound like your teacher is going to be too picky.) Your idea for using the oldid attribute is good, but you should include date/time outside the address just to be complete. -- Someone else 01:23 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

I have a copyright question at Talk:List_of_miscellaneous_poker_variants. --GGano

An RSS feed?

Could someone code a simple script that would convert Special:Newpages (maybe some parametrisation e.g. exclude new articles under 100 bytes) into an RSS feed. I think that this would interest lots of people, and wouldn't consume very much bandwith. -Tzuhou 19:57 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

See m:RDF spool. --Brion 20:02 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Am I right that we shouldn't have sub-pages for articles? I'm looking at Godsmack/Self-Titled, Godsmack/Awake and similar. Should they be moved to Godsmack (album), Awake (album) and so on? sannse 19:43 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

You're right. I didn't make the pages, but I do know that every subpage I've worked on has been moved. If you want to move them I have no objections. -- Goatasaur

OK, thanks - job done -- sannse 20:03 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Why can't newbies understand the concept of the 'Show Preview' button? It's getting really annoying seeing 10 edits of (for instance) Shawn Mullins in a two-minute span. -- Goatasaur 19:03 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Be kind to us newbies, we will learn the ropes (I have been at this only two days, for example). Is there a way you could contact him (is this what the Talk link is for?)? If it were me, I would appreciate an old hand showing me a tip I hadn't known before. I think I too must be guilty of what you were talking about. I wasn't aware of the concept of the 'Show Preview' button. Now I know. One more newbie on the road to becoming an oldie. --Mahongue 05:27 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

searching for worcester

I'd like an easy way to search for articles containing the text "worcester" that do not link to Worcester, England, Worcester, Worcestershire, etc, so that I can link them properly (if relevant, of course). Is there any way to do this? Martin 18:45 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

What I do in such a case is change my preferences for "Lines to show per hit:" (under "Search result settings:") from the default 5 (I think it is) to something like 150. This means it will return every hit in the first 150 lines of the article, instead of the first 5 lines. Unfortunately this preference has a rather unintuitive name. You'd think that if there were 5 hits in an article, then it would display all of them in the default setting, but rather it only returns the ones in the first 5 lines. It is then easy to read whether the text "worcester" is part of a link or not. I don't know whether this taxes the server too much, but maybe someone in the know would like to comment. --snoyes 22:33 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

snoyes, you are a star. Thanks! Martin

Hi, Please help if you can... How can get Wikipedia to work offline? Have downloaded the database cur_table.sql and the database program cygwin-1.3.9-1 but cannot get it to work. I'm using Windows 98. Would like to use Wiki offline because my cost per hour online is high.

If can get this to work others might find it useful. Maybe we could set up a link (that I have been unable to find)...

Peter - Bangkok

See (if you have not already) Wikipedia:Readers' FAQ, question "Can I get Wikipedia on CD, or download it for offline use?"

Going back to an earlier comment regarding the USA census results, I have in fact added some colour to a few towns. Unfortunately, as a Brit who has spent a total of 10 days in the USA in Florida, I am probably the least qualified person to do this. I haven't seen anyone else adding anything, so it would be reassuring to know if any American contributors were building o the bare statistical facts as well.jimfbleak 12:07 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Sure, see Topeka, Kansas amoung others. Many people do their home towns, and as I get tired of working on the Baha'i subjects, I'm doing eastern Kansas. It will be a while, there are a lot of towns in eastern KS and not a lot of wikipeidans. Did you do YOUR hometown? Not many Brit towns are in the database. Rick Boatright 17:16 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)~

I've added info to dozens of towns, and I know others have been doing the same. --Infrogmation

How do I delete "Older Version" entries in my Profile? Because my computer has a fault and crashes regularly I have to save my typing very frequently so my "Older Version" list is much too long. Go to User:Arpingstone and then to "Older Version" to see what I mean. I only need the latest entry.Can I do it or can an Admin? Thanks Arpingstone 09:53 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

I can do it for you - just say when. --mav

Please clear out my profiles Older Versions (except the very latest, of course!) whenever it suits you. Thanks -- Arpingstone 10:36 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Will do. --mav

I would like to add the abreviation DEC to the database. It stands for the drug diethylcarbamazine. There is already a DEC, which redirects to Digital Equipment Corporation. What do you do when there is one name for two different entries. Can someone help me with this? --Mahongue 09:37 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Actually this kind of thing happens a lot at Wikipedia, see Disambiguation. In your case, I suggest you use the full name of the drug as the title of the article and turn DEC into an disambiguation page. --Lorenzarius 10:07 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

"DEC" is the abreviation for many things. Ideally a disambiguation page would be created at DEC but in this case DEC probably means Digital Equipment Corporation almost all the time when it is linked. So your article should be at drug diethylcarbamazine. --mav

Surely you mean it should be at diethylcarbamazine (which is where it is already). --Zundark 10:17 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Opps! You are right. --mav

I think this would be an easy disambiguation page to write as DEC is currently just a redirect itself. As Zundark mentioned, I have created a diethylcarbamazine entry already. Does anyone have a problem with me creating a disambiguation page for DEC? --Mahongue 10:28 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Just make sure to fix all the misdirected links to DEC and then list it on the disambiguation links page. --mav

Maveric, what does it mean to "fix all the misdirected links to DEC"? Does that mean to find the links and have them point directly to Digital Equipment Corporation (instead of to the newly created disambiguation entry)? --Mahongue 11:05 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, you need to change every [[DEC]] to [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]]. You should do this before creating the disambiguation page, so that nothing is broken, even temporarily. --Zundark 11:18 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Or is it better to put the disambiguation page at DEC (disambiguation)? There're a lot of article linking to DEC and all of them are referring to the Corporation. --Lorenzarius 10:42 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Ok, its done. And what is great is that if anyone is unhappy, it is very easy to reverse what I did. I (1) changed every DEC link to point to Digital Equipment Corporation (I think someone was helping me, thank you!) and (2) created a very simple disambiguation entry (please check it out and change it if you would like). --66.47.86.47 11:47 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Bot discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Bots

If I find a page that says "Not Wikified." what does that mean? --Mahongue 00:34 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Wikify = Make cross-reference, by linking, to other Wikipedia pages, as described in wikipedia:how to edit a page --Menchi 00:52 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:Glossary explains many Wikipedia terms. -- Stephen Gilbert 17:14 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

If you edit a page, I don't see the changes because my broswer doesn't refresh and get the new version. How can I change that? Im using IE6 Susan Mason

Ctrl + F5. --Menchi 00:54 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

I see how you can edit a page (like this one). But how do you create a new entry in the encyclopedia? I see that if you click on a link that does not have an entry this creates an new page. Is there another way? --66.47.86.47 20:39 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, type the new article name directly in the address bar, like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/____. Replace "____" with the desired new article name. --Menchi 20:43 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

It isn't simple to make an article that is not linked to in another, to discourage "orphans" that aren't linked to. It is best to find a related article and make a link, perhaps in a see also format. Orphans are bad, though, so try not to make them often except redirects and such. Tuf-Kat

That does make the creation of redirects difficult though: it'd be nice to have a quick way to create one or more redirecs to a page. Martin

Edit a page, any page. Add links to your new redirects. Don't save, click SHOW PREVIEW. Take those links. When finished, throw away your previewed page. Tannin

The split between Spanish 'pedia and la Enciclopedia Libre

What exactly caused the split between Spanish 'pedia and its daughter project that came to be la Enciclopedia Libre? Unresolvably different objectives? If so, what are the differences? It seems rather illogical to divert manpower into two separate projects that could've been one combinedly better one. --Menchi 20:04 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

See m:User:Maveric49/The Wikipedia Family and also the history section of Wikipedia. --mav

These logo's are owned by Drexel University. Image:Drexel.png, Image:Dxl-logo.png. Is it copyright infringement to have them on the wiki? If so, they should be deleted. If not, I will put the back on the Drexel University page. MB 05:12 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

These logo's are owned by Drexel University. Drexel.png, Dxl-logo.png. Is it copyright infringement to have them on the wiki? If so, they should be deleted. If not, I will put the back on the Drexel University page. MB 05:12 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Do we have a policy on users who merely spend their time adding weblinks to one company, presumably in an attempt at promotion? For example, user:203.35.82.3 has added lots of e-text external links to the same company - how to handle this? Martin

In this case, I think the links should be replaced with links to a non-commercial source (e.g. Gutenberg) ASAP, but they're OK for the time being. What would be a reason for banning is if he replaced links to non-commercial sources with commercial ones. --Eloquence 19:00 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)

Since Wikipedia is open to contributions from all comers, what is to prevent its being taken over by commercial interests wishing to promote their products?

Primarily, it's against the rules of contribution - wikipedia is not a place for advertising, and most advertising is not wikipedia:neutral point of view. The various checks and balances against vandalism have always worked to date (see Our responses to our critics). If companies want to contribute to writing factual, balanced, informative articles, so much the better. Martin

So I'm working in USS Bennington, find that Bennington, Vermont is completely missing, but then go to http://www.bennington.com and find that it's the "5th-largest community in Vermont". How is it that Bray Township, Minnesota, pop. 73, got created from census data but not Bennington? Stan Shebs 13:13 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

hth, Martin

Going by the Bennington home page, there is an actual town that is different from "Old Bennington" and "North Bennington". (Now that I've done the study, guess I should record all this in an article, eh? :-) ) Stan Shebs 19:03 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

When I search for Panzer VI, I don't directly find it. Susan Mason

Double and triple redirects seem to have been confusing the software. I've fixed them, and Panzer VI is appearing on searches now. --Camembert

OPINIONS ON WIKIPEDIA 2/24/03 Also, someone mentioned I could not express opinions on Wikipedia (e.g., looking for feedback on my dream file/web browser concept), even on the "Discuss this page" item. Is this true? It seems to me Wikipedia would otherwise (if it did allow opinions at least on the DiscussThisPage pages) to be a potentially incredible way to store discussions in that it would not get in the way of the "facts" which would be limited to the main documents (though obviously "facts" can be opinions too, it's largely about the tone in which they're worded), but they would have the advantage of being automatically categorized and allow people familiar and interested in a certain subject to know exactly where to look (like Usenet groups, but more accessible to anyone and even more hierarchically specifiable).

Feel free to express opinions on talk pages and on your user page - there is no rule against that. But articles must be NPOV. ---mav

Thanks, the npov article was helpful...By talk pages I assume you mean the pages under "DiscussThisPage"?

Is there a place to navigate only the discussion pages?

No. Should there be?

So are user pages are totally unrestricted then as to content?

No. You should still consider wikipetiquette, make no personal attacks, and avoid breaching copyright or the law. But they are less restrictive.

Also, I was just wondering, can people post advertisements in the talk pages? (e.g., under the computer OS page, could Microsoft theoretically be allowed to point out under "DiscussThisPage" that they can purchase the newest Windows software at their website)

Personally, I would remove such adverts on sight.

Could someone who has privillege put 最近更新したページ (Japanese for RecentChanges) to RecentChanges? -- Taku 01:04 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Done. --Brion 01:28 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. Can you do it for chinese 最近更改 (Chinese for RecentChnages) -- Taku 01:49 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Done. --Brion 01:59 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Thank you. Sorry but can do me a favor again? Put this to main page. [[af:HomePage]][[ar:HomePage]][[da:Forside]][[de:Hauptseite]][[en:Main Page]][[eo:%C4%88efpa%C4%9Do]][[es:Portada]][[fr:Accueil]][[it:HomePage]][[ko:대문]][[nl:Hoofdpagina]][[pl:Strona główna]][[ru:Main_Page]][[su:HomePage]][[zh:首页]] I found this list in ja wikipedia, which seems more comprehensive than current one. -- Taku 03:43 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

There already is a comprehensive list on the Main Page under the In Other Languages area. Some of the links you've listed are to wikis that don't even have a Main Page. --mav

Aside from Sudan, all of them have homepage I think. And it is quite convinient and normal to have language links. -- Taku 05:24 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

If we include some of the smaller wikis as interlanguage links on the Main Page then it would only be fair to include all of them. That would mean that people at 800 x 600 screen resolutions will be greeted not by content on the Main Page but by a screen full of language links. --mav

I have had some trouble logging in. This is probably a browser problem for Safari users (Safari has problems with this site!). Too bad for us Safari users. --66.47.86.47 13:52 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

Safari is based on the Konqueror HTML rendering engine, I don't know whethter that encompases such things as login/cookie management, but everything works fine under Konqueror - maybe you could describe your problems more acurately. --snoyes 15:04 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

Here's a more indepth description: When I go to the login page and type in my user name and password and click "login", red lettered words inform me that my user name does not exist. At other times I can login with no problem. --66.47.86.47 15:59 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

see Wikipedia:Browser notes & leave a note there -- Tarquin 15:06 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

When I write an "a" with an acute accent is it best to use the code (ie. "á") or just the letter itself ("á")? Or is there no difference? -- sannse 13:40 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

The letter itself, see Wikipedia:Special characters. - Patrick 14:28 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

I beg to differ. Quoting from the above mentioned Wikipedia:Special characters page

Use an HTML named character entity reference like "á" . This is the most reliable method, and is unambiguous even when the server does not announce the use of any special character set, and even when the character does not display properly on some browsers.

which seems to imply, and it would be my experiance that the HTML named character entity reference like &aacute is FAR better than inserting an #0160 directly. Rick Boatright 14:55 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

But Wikipedia:Special characters also says "For the purpose of searching, a word with a special character can best be written using the first method." (c&p etc.) "If the second method is used a word like Odiliënberg can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg" So now I'm confused again. -- sannse 15:42 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

bear in mind that many pages including that one were written when the Wikipedia software couldn't handle accents at all. I'm sure one of the devs (eg Brion :-) will be along to tell us ... - Tarquin 17:20 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

That page is obsolete, pay it no mind. ;) Seriously though, let me lay it out:

á or the uglier, but just as correct   will work in darn near any browser, for both viewing and editing.
- but under our current system, it won't turn up correctly in searches
inserting à should work correctly in darn near any browser, for both viewing and editing.
- A small number of oddly-configured browsers might munge it on editing. However this is fairly rare for the latin-1 wikis. (There is more trouble with UTF-8 and older browsers, see m:Meta.wikipedia.org technical issues, but the English Wikipedia wiki is currently latin-1)
- Search works!

Note also that titles are another matter. We do allow, and some of us encourage, accented chars in titles. There is a very small portion of the browser world that chokes on these (namely, Konqueror prior to 3.1, I'm told it's now fixed). Named characters references in the text of a link should be automatically be converted to the appropriate character for linking purposes (but there are some funnies when using numeric references; currently these go to UTF-8 as their primary use in linking is the interlanguage links... someday this'll all be smoothed out. :) --Brion 17:39 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Okay, so let me see... Both work in almost any browser, but both have problems in some cases. So, erm, which should we prefer? I think I missed the actual answer there, but I'm probably just being dim... :) -- Oliver P. 17:48 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Àààààààààààààààààààààààààààààà! --Brion 17:53 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Heh! thanks, I was just trying to figure out the best way of asking again myself :) I think I've got it - I should use the characters themselves in the text to facilitate searching. (I also find it a lot easier to see what I've written that way).

As for titles: I've seen a few pages where the unaccented characters are used in a redirect page. So if someone searches for the unaccented word they don't miss a page that uses accents in the title or text. This seems useful, or is it not? sannse 17:58 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

That's mainly to catch links by people who can't/won't/don't think to use the accented character. But yeah, it catches searches too. --Brion 18:53 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Maybe we should update the somewhat off topic note in Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) "Use Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) for the title of an article. Note not UTF-8 nor 7 bit ascii. While Western European accents are acceptable, non-Western European accents need to be dropped. (for German umlauts -> letter+e; for French, dropped accents). (Based on the post from Brion)" Docu 07:12 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

Linking Chinese Article to the English Article

I've already asked the following Q once, but it apparently seems to be deleted! I visited the Archives and didn't find it. Why is it delete?

When linking a Chinese article to its corresponding English one (adding the interlanguage link [[zh:___]] after "Other languages: " at the top of the Edit Page), do I link the traditional Chinese version or do I have to link to the simplified version? I just linked the traditional version to overseas Chinese because that's the original version I wrote. --Menchi 00:48 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

As a test I linked to both. That works, but you can not see which is which, except that the numerical code that pops up is different. One solution is to have two Chinese wikipedias, another is to have the two links in fixed order for all articles, a third solution would be some software change, for example showing the Chinese characters in the popup, or just an indication for traditional/simplified. - Patrick 10:35 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

Could anyone rename ECMAScript to JavaScript? I can't use rename by move this page because there is already artcile named JavaScript. Thanks -- Taku 01:10 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Done. For future reference: just click edit on both entries and cut-and-paste the content. Mkweise 01:16 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

No, you should not rename by that way because you will lose edit history of the article. -- Taku 01:24 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

If it's the same article that has been at some point in its past cut-and-pasted from one title to the other, the preferred method to recombine the histories is to delete the original, rename the later version to the original's title, and undelete the original. The recombined article can then be renamed to your heart's content. If these are two separate articles, that's another matter. In this case, JavaScript had contained an ancient stublet followed by a couple variants of redirects as the page got moved around, then the recent rape-and-paste history-breaking move from ECMAScript. I've deleted the old JavaScript title and renamed ECMAScript in its place. --Brion 02:32 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

To be precise, by delete you mean permanent deletion or simply submit empty text? The term like rename, delete are quite ambigous here (or only to me?) -- Taku 02:42 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

"Rename" is (or should be) never ambiguous: it means to use the 'move this page' function to change the name of a page. "Delete" is sometimes used to mean "save over with an empty text area", however I try to avoid this usage because it's confusing. Here, it means to remove a page entirely from the wiki. (Deleted pages are retained in an archive, and can be viewed and restored by other sysops, so "permanent" is a misnomer.) --Brion 02:48 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

By the way, should ordinary wikipedia ask rename for sysops or ask delete to make a room to rename? I want to put more concrete yet preferrable procedure (It seems there is some confusion about renaming) -- Taku 02:58 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

I endeavour to use Delete meaning administrators zaping the complete article and its history and Empty for something anyone can do to an article. Rename is obvious. What isn't obvious is that the old name becomes a new redirect article to the new name with move. -- SGBailey 22:41 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

In this case I believe "consider" can be interpreted as want, and edit can be interpreted as impirialism.

There has been some lively discussion on Talk:List of United States people and related pages on usage of "America", "American", "United States", "USA", etc. Perhaps the most extreme position in one direction has been taken by an unlogged in user from 128.193.88.195 and 128.193.88.55, who insists that "American" is the only proper term for a USA national, and calls phrases like "People from the USA" an attempt "to reengineer the english language". I'm towards the other side, arguing that "American" without context can be ambiguous, and prefer other constructions. Suggestions like "American (USA)", "People from the USA", "United States people" etc are all fine by me, but not for some others. Check it out. -- Infrogmation 16:29 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

I consider your position (of denying that "American" is the proper name for the nationality of United States citizens) to be the "extreme" one. You would prefer to rewrite the definitions of words for the sake of your perceived "clarity". Fortunately, you found essentially no support for any of the neologisms you proposed.

I also find quite peculiar the other reversions of my edits you have been doing. For example, you appear to deny that "swiss" is the plural noun used to describe natives of Switzerland, and you appear to insist that Quebec is a nation. Were it not that your actions appear to be well intentioned, I would say you are bordering on an ill-tempered vandalism of my edits.

Hey everyone... is there some blindingly obvious way to link to wikionary articles that I'm missing? I tried the obvious... Wiktionary:Beer parlour archive, but that doesn't seem to do it.

Try wiktionary:dog wiktionary:Rain cats and dogs or wiktionary:Wiktionary:Beer parlour --mav

Well it works, but a more direct linkage would certainly be nice.

I'm not sure what could be more direct than an InterWiki link? --Brion 02:32 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Anyone speak Greek? I need to know for a wiki article if 'αρπαστον' would equate to 'pheninda' ? Mintguy

I think I've found that it equates to 'episkyros', but could 'pheninda' be a Romanisation of this?

Any possibilities of linking to the By Alphabetical Order page? It is slow and may be a drain on the server to run these queries, but it is more efficient having such a page than going manually through all pages starting from the beginning of the AllPages search. - Brettz9 18:22 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

If I check what links here on my user page, I discover that Talk:Richard Wagner archive apparently links to my user page. Which is fine, except it doesn't... Martin

Sure it does:

[1] [2] Not that I believe either source: sounds like standard journalistic hyperbole to me. -Martin

About 3/4 of the way down the page. HTH, Merphant

Let me clarify this: Talk:Richard Wagner archive redirects to Talk:Richard Wagner/Archive 1. Now, Talk:Richard Wagner/Archive 1 links to Martin, so therefore Talk:Richard Wagner/Archive 1 should show up on my "what links here" page (and, AFAIK, it does). However, Talk:Richard Wagner archive is showing up on my "what links here" page, and it definately should not. Is that clearer?

Why are certain people insisting that it is proper to list names alphabetically by first name. How is this acceptable? Susan Mason

I agree this is a bad idea, and goes against all conventions. Apart from anything else, almost anyone looking up "Newton" would look under N, not I for Isaac. I don't even know the first names of Aristotle, Voltaire or Goethe! -- Chris Q 07:31 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Propose change:

"WARNING: This page is X kilobytes long; Ideal length for articles is between 30-50K. Should this page grow longer, please consider breaking the page into smaller sections" -&#35918&#30505 p.s. will post to mailist..

"Ideal length" would not be in the 30 - 50 KB range. Anything above 20KB of readable text tries the patience of readers and anything above 28KB has technical limitations for users on slow computers and/or use certain browsers. --mav 00:32 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

The policy of putting new text at the bottom tries the patience of anyone with a slow computer. Susan Mason

Brion? on the Wikipedia-l said that 30-50 was the range... I thought it suspect at first, but Im not sure where the range really is... this was an issue on 911.wik where Martin and Elo? fought over how whether the 911 list should be broken up - I suggested why not both? If you cant deal with... you have options still, and that list can be broken up by category... this begs the question of course... lists are better dealt with by software... Either way, it seems like the warning needs some clarifying and consensus... i just signed to wiki-en - ill repost this there... -&#35918&#30505

30-50k is way too long. First of all, it's a technical problem in that many users cannot edit pages of such length. Second, I think it's simply uncomfortably long for an article. Can you provide links to some pages that are that long that you think are comfortable to read, easy to edit, and simple to cite? --Brion 03:31 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Grammy Hall of Fame Award is about 62 kbs. I'm not done wikifying the list, so I haven't thought about moving it yet (one thing at a time...) but I'm not sure if it should be. I'd rather have it all on one page. It'll only need to be edited every year, when they induct new members, and I guess for disambigging as needed, though if I do a good enough job wikifying, that should be rare. If the consensus is to break up any page too long for anyone to edit, I'll go ahead and move it, but I don't see the point. Tuf-Kat

That's a list, which is a rather different animal than a textual article. It is not subject to the same reading pressures, nor to the same editing pressures. --Brion

I've been doing some work on the British railway system, mainly involving creating new articles on historic railway companies of the 1830s-1940s. In editing the article on Midland Railway I notice that Pullman redirects to sleeping car; most of the text in the article clearly refers to practice in the US, but the Pullman company also provided dining cars for the Midland Rly from the 1870s. Should the redirect be cancelled and the article hacked about (the sleeping car article doesn't really describe modern sleeping cars anyway!). Arwel 03:02 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

As is fairly common in the wikipedia, Pullman redirects to sleeping car because there was no article about Pullman and I thought it ought to point to something since there were links to it. The sleeping car article does talk about both about Pullman and the Wagon-Lits company. Obviously, there is a lot to be said about Pullman, not only their international operations, but also the "model town" Pullman, Illinois and the Pullman Strike. There's also a lot about Pullman porters in the sleeping car article that could be in a separate article as well, and an article about George Pullman. I think this discussion about reorganization should probably move to Talk:Sleeping car. It would be good to have someone else involved. Ortolan88

I'll have a think about what should happen over the next few days, and maybe put a few thoughts in Talk:sleeping car. In any case the sleeping car article shouldn't just be about Pullman and Wagons-Lits. Arwel 20:41 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)

Thank you. Sorry but can do me a favor again? Put this to main page. [[af:HomePage]][[ar:HomePage]][[da:Forside]][[de:Hauptseite]][[en:Main Page]][[eo:%C4%88efpa%C4%9Do]][[es:Portada]][[fr:Accueil]][[it:HomePage]][[ko:대문]][[nl:Hoofdpagina]][[pl:Strona główna]][[ru:Main_Page]][[su:HomePage]][[zh:首页]] I found this list in ja wikipedia, which seems more comprehensive than current one. -- Taku 03:43 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

There already is a comprehensive list on the Main Page under the In Other Languages area. Some of the links you've listed are to wikis that don't even have a Main Page. --mav

Aside from Sudan, all of them have homepage I think. And it is quite convinient and normal to have language links. -- Taku 05:24 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

If we include some of the smaller wikis as interlanguage links on the Main Page then it would only be fair to include all of them. That would mean that people at 800 x 600 screen resolutions will be greeted not by content on the Main Page but by a screen full of language links. --mav

These logo's are owned by Drexel University. Image:Drexel.png, Image:Dxl-logo.png. Is it copyright infringement to have them on the wiki? If so, they should be deleted. If not, I will put them back on the Drexel University page. MB 05:12 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Wouldn't that be a matter of trademark law, not copyright? --Brion 06:42 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

The only restriction on the use of others' trademarks is that they must be properly attributed. This can be accomplised by a footnote anywhere on the page, such as:

The Drexel Logo is a registered trademark of Drexel University

or

The Drexel Dragons Logo is a trademark of Drexel university

Of course, you need to check whether the trademark is in fact registered (often signified by the "Circle R" character) or not (not specifically marked or marked "^TM). Mkweise 16:09 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Can someone update: [3], so that there is more to choose from? Many gaps have been filled since last update. -user:Zanimum

Memorial Wiki

Problems with the memorial wiki. If someone can give me relevant powers and/or advice on how to solve these myself, that'd be great. Otherwise, I throw myself at the mercy of the technical folks.

One cannot search or use the go button, as MySQL returned error "1191: Can't find FULLTEXT index matching the column list".
The side links include a "main page" and "current events" and "bug reports" pages. These need to be replaced with "in memoriam", perhaps some other pages.
The Help and About link on each page is bust. We probably just need one of these links for now.
sep11:Special:Upload has dead links
Link as GNU Free Documentation License on each page is broken
Discuss this page is unnecessary on a memorial wiki
minor edit is currently unnecessary
Each page says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" - it should say something more appropriate ("From the memorial wiki", etc)
the logo says Wikipedia... again, it should say something more appropriate

I've fixed the search problem. As far as broken links, fill them in! Where appropriate, copy or link the pages off of this wiki. --Brion 00:04 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

Ok, I can certainly fill in some info for some of the links I mentioned, but for others the links themselves should be removed. I guess I can add temporary redirects, though, for the time being. Thanks for fixing the search problem :) Martin

Cross-wiki redirects

A simple question. There are certain people, such as Stephen Huczko, who used to have an article on wikipedia, and that article has been moved to the sep11.wiki. I believe that such articles should redirect to the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Casualties page. The Cunctator thinks they should redirect to the relevant sep11.wiki page. I dislike cross-wiki redirects, and wondered what the general opinion was on their use. Of course, if there's an appropriate FAQ on the subject, please direct me to it. Thanks! :) Martin

IIRC cross wiki redirects were made for exactly this reason. If the wikipedia tribute pages are made into orphan redirects to the sep11 wiki there should not be a problem. --mav

The problem is that if a page does an inter-wiki redirect then you don't get the "redirected from" link that allows you to remove the redirect, and "What links here" doesn't work across wikis. It can be done, but you need to hack the URL, which is a rather cludgy solution, IMO. Is there a tool/utility page for finding links to pages that redirect off wikipedia? Martin

Is it policy to forbid users from editing other users signed comments? I thought it was, but I don't seem to be getting ANY support in my fight against an anon user who is constantly deleting my signed messages. Please help, --snoyes 20:39 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

it IS policy, but give a noob a break! That IP's contribs show they've only been around since TODAY. It takes some time to digest our growing mountain of guidelines. assume good faith. only hit the flamethrowers later ;-) -- Tarquin 20:42 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry tarquin, please see http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Annoying_users&action=history the edit history of Wikipedia:annoying users. This user (being 128.193.88.55) before has deleted my posts 9 times now, even after explicit warnings written in bold. I hate having to spend the better part of my day dealing with this. --snoyes 20:50 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Tarq, I'm not a noob here, but that is an understandable mistake. My POV on the issue is that Snoyes tried to stick me in the "Annoying users" bin, and then in the "Vandal" bin, before she had even TRIED to discuss the edit conflict we were having. And then, she rejected my attempts to discuss the issue and my attempts to resolve the conflict.

I had (and have) reason for sticking you there. Infact the reasons are listed on the page itself, but you do not respond to them, rather you just delete my posts. --snoyes 21:12 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Please don't say that I wouldn't respond. I've been trying to discuss things with you in Talk:Current_events and User talk:Snoyes for the good part of the day. --the anonymous user in question

Daniel MacKay writes: I get the feeling that there is an enormous and interesting discussion and lots of info about contributing going on in the Wikipedia: "hierarchy". Is this true, and is there a guide to it? Or are there only a few articles?

Wikipedia:Utilities is a good start - the Related Changes button will give a reasonable impression of Recent Changes for the wikipedia hierarchy Martin

Edit Disappeared

I discovered that my edit to the article "Three People's Principles" on Feb 16, 2003 is gone. It took me some research and wasn't a really minor edit (it contains 4 or 5 new sentences, if I remember correctly), so the disappearance is quite disappointing. The edit was more info on "San min chu i", the Taiwanese national anthem. I also remember that another edit of the same article in December 2002 also disappeared and I had to redo it again, but at the time I thought it was just me forgetting to save the work.

What's going on? Can the disappearance be restored? --Menchi 03:24 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

Server logs show your IP opening the page for editing at 06:59 on Feb 17 (10:59pm on Feb 16 in PST), but have no record of it being saved (or previewd) that I can find... Hmm, around that time I was running a backup of the server; the wiki would have been in read-only mode for a few minutes. If you saved it at that time though, you should have received a message telling you that the wiki was in read-only mode... --Brion 05:31 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

WIKIPEDIA DELETION AND LINKING TO OLD VERSIONS 2/24/03 Are previous versions of Wikipedia pages eventually deleted? Could someone theoretically choose to link to a previous version (in case newer versions insistently omitted the data)?

Before February of 2001 the software we had did delete older versions and only kept newer versions. But all versions since have been stored so nothing since then can be permanently lost. --mav

I think it was 2002, not 2001. --Zundark 11:06 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Under our current software, old revisions of pages are not deleted (unless the page itself is deleted). They should remain forever for future data archaeologists to examine. :) However, there is not yet a reliable way of linking to a particular revision; this is currently under discussion on the wikitech-l developers' mailing list. --Brion 19:43 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I already know the answer, since I've already looked at the UNICODE and HTML pages, but I'm asking. Is there any consistant way to indicate dot-under characters in the wiki and in html in general? I know, dot-under's are not part of ISO-Latin-1, but they're an important part of transliterating Persian. It's not uncommon to ignore them, and that's what I have done, but I've tried _hard_ to get the orthography correct on the various Bahá'í stuff I've done, and the lack of the dot-under's is annoying to me. -- thanks in advance (and yes, I know that sometimes the answer is "no". Rick Boatright 05:05 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

The dot under characters are mostly in the "Latin Extended Additional" area of Unicode. Using number codes should do the trick. They fall in the hex range, 1E00-1EFF. Thus Hex 1EA1 = Decimal 7841 gives "&#7841", Hex 1E05 = 7685 gives "&#7685", etc. Eclecticology 07:49 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Two questions: How do you add the comments that appear in black on the "recent changes" page? Second, I don't see a link to the village pump on the main page. Is there one I am not seeing? If there is not, can we consider adding one? --Mahongue 05:30 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

For the comments, just fill in the Summary box. Have fun! Danny 05:36 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

So obvious, I never saw it. Thanks, Danny. --Mahongue 05:38 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

I see someone just added the "village pump" link to the main page (or I just now see it). Thank you. --66.47.86.47 12:36 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

Why are certain people (JtDirl-Zoe) insisting that it is proper to list names alphabetically by first name. How is this acceptable? Why should I look for Hitler after Adolf? Why should I look for Chamberlain after Neville? Why should I look for Bogart after Humphery? Hmmm, let me now look for Rommel after Erwin. After that I shall look for Clinton after Bill. Perhaps later I shall look for Eisenhower after Dwight. After tea I plan to look for Gary Gygax after Gary. Around dinnertime Ill be looking for Dickens after Charles. Before bed Ill hunt up Copperfield after David. Overnight Ill have my computer try and find Gates after Bill. When I wake up maybe it will have found Truman after Harry. For breakfast Ill look up Peet after Bill. For brunch Ill be examing a list in search of Wayne after John. I think by lunch I will have found Ford after Harrsion (and Henry!). Susan Mason

I agree this is a bad idea, and goes against all conventions. Apart from anything else, almost anyone looking up "Newton" would look under N, not I for Isaac. I don't even know the first names of Aristotle, Voltaire or Goethe! -- Chris Q 07:31 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

There is one convention it doesnt go against, thats the "wikiway" where if I suggest it, its wrong. Did you know that Im just like DW, Lir, ,172, Vera, 142, and basically all the other bad users because all I do is harass poor innocent users and try to vandalize and subterfuge their articles by changing them without getting permission from the high cabal. Last week I was crusading for my NPOV POV, now Im crusading for my own bias towards last-name alphabetization, where will it end? If RK is right, by next week Ill probably be insisting that it's ok for Chinese people to use their Chinese names on the ENGLISH wikipedia. I'd like to complain more but hold on cuz Im trying to find Vonnegut, I think its listed after Kurt somewhere... Susan Mason

Susan, I agree this this first names nusiness is unconventional, but it seems too firmly entrenched to try to change now. One advantage that it does have is that it makes links easier to set up.

For instance, in a sentence like "Charles Babbage, Clark Gable and Winston Churchill were seen at the Exchange Hotel in Kalgoorlie together last night", it's easier to create links by placing ]] and [['s around the names of Charles Babbage, Clark Gable and Winston Churchill. Under the surname first system, you'll need to add a |Babbage, Charles, |Gable, Clark and |Churchill, Winston as well for the links to work. Arno

Arno, I don't think Susan Mason's talking about article titles. I think she's saying that in, for instance, List of English people, the people should be listed in alphabetical order by surname, not by first name. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but with a certain amount of puzzlement: I know of no list in the Wikipedia that is listed by first name. Perhaps Susan Mason could supply some examples? --Paul A

Well, perhaps those particular pages could be redone. Just add |'s at the end of the links concerned - eg a link that reads Gomez Addams becomes Gomez Addams|Addams, Gomez. Arno 08:21 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Right thats the unacceptable course of action upon which I embarked. Susan Mason

When somebody is scanning down a list looking for names, their eye needs to focus on a vertical column. That vertical column needs to be alphabetized which is why the last name has to be listed first. Look at a phone book, there is a reason they did it that way. Susan Mason

Couple points here:

1:We dont need to change article titles to be last name first, we are not a paper encyclopedia.
2:We dont need to change all lists all at once. The way Ive been changing them is that everytime I add a name to a list, I change the 5 times on either side. Overtime they will all be changed.
3:We don't need to use last name first when writing text within the article itself.

Also:

Bush, King George W.

or

Bush II, King George W.

or

Bush Jr; King George W.

Susan Mason

Lists should be in second-name order but titles should not. If this means having complex links in lists then I think that is the best option. An alternative would be to (slowly) add redirects for all names, making both titles accessible.

Susan, could you direct me to the discussion you have been having on this? Thanks.

I understood that the arrangement on, for example, List of Swiss people is the usual. Names are listed as "first name, second name" but in alphabetical order of last name. This doesn't lead to a problem in finding a name (search alphabetically by last name) but makes the list easier to read and easier to link. -- sannse 08:10 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

The list is harder to read if you are actually trying to find a specific name, because u don't have a nice neat vertical column of alphabetized letters which u can scan. If you go that list and search for Keller, chances are you are scanning the last names; which is why the last name should be listed first. Susan Mason

OK, I can see your point on that. With "first name, last name" it's easier to read the individual names but less easy to read the list as a whole. I think you missed my first question, could you give me a link to wherever you have been discussing this? -- sannse 08:27 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump

Perhaps I can clarify my question. Your first comment on this subject on this page was "Why are certain people (JtDirl-Zoe) insisting that it is proper to list names alphabetically by first name." I would be grateful for a link to the page where JtDirl-Zoe and you had the conversation that led to you posting this comment on this page. Thanks -- sannse 08:35 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the links Susan. I think you may have misunderstood Zoe and JtdIrL's position. I think it is clear that all agree names should be listed in alphabetical order of last name. The only question is whether, within that arrangement, they should be written as (last-name, first-name) or (first-name last-name). I can see benefits to both arrangements. -- sannse 15:19 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

I can't. Susan Mason

Itd be neat if there was a way to see how many times a page had been viewed. Susan Mason

We used to have this feature, but it was turned off because it was slowing things down too much. Enchanter

Why do only sysop have the opportunity to "see" the contents of deleted articles ? Why not a read only option for regular users ?

Well, then they wouldn't be deleted now would they? ;) I am open to changing this if there is demand for it, but it opens other problems. For articles deleted because we cannot distribute them due to copyright, "deletion" that allows anyone walking in off the street to continue to be able to view (=copy) the material would be insufficient to comply with the law; if the copyright owner complains, we must remove it from public access. Thus, we would need to make it easier to remove deleted pages from the deleted page archive -- at which point you've invented another hierarchy and more cabalish ways and paths to abuse. ("Oh yeah, I deleted that because it was copyright infringement. No, you can't look at it -- I had to flush the archive so it wouldn't be available anymore.") --Brion 20:39 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

How about making it a two-step process to do what is currently done. One user can "delink" a page, essentially decoupling it from the main body of the wikipedia but still allowing users to view it, and a second user has to endorse the decision to fully make it unviewable. Susan Mason

Is it ok to translate an article from another language Wikipedia to another one? For instance, I was working on translating something from the Spanish Wikipedia to the English one when it occurred to me that I should at least ask about it ... mgmei

Yes, of course it is! Be sure to include an interlanguage link, and it's good form to note the source in the edit summary. --Brion 06:46 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

Just an idea to keep the developers busy -- can we have a diff function on user contribution pages? Most of the time I use them it's to see if someone's other edits are as questionable as the one that led me there, so I end up having to go to the article, then the history, then find out what he changed specifically. Tuf-Kat

Oh I like. Also good would be a cur link so we can see if someone else has already fixed them. Martin

I've got a book of copyright free animal illustrations. Would these be of interest, even though they aren't photos? They are pretty correct looking and well drawn. Zanimum

Yes please! Photos would be nice, but good illustrations are a lot better than a page of uninviting text. --Brion 17:09 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

ers

How do you go about translating a page into another language? Do you have to go into the French/German/Italian wikipedia and create the page again there, or what? Olivia Curtis 18:35 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

yup. -- Tarquin 19:04 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for your succinct answer. What do you do next? I've created a new page to match the one in the English wiki, but there still isn't a thing at the top saying 'other languages:' - how do you do that? Olivia Curtis 21:07 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

Did you copy in the interlanguage links? (BTW, it's always best if you can give a link to the page you're working with as an example.) --Brion 21:12 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks - I didn't know about those but have got there now. Olivia Curtis 21:24 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

You have to log in in the other wikipedia separately, then create an article similar to doing that in the English wikipedia. - Patrick 21:35 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

When I click 'show preview', nothing happens - it just looks exactly the same as when I'm editing. Why is this? Olivia Curtis 22:37 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC).

If you scroll down, you should see a preview of how the page will look underneath the edit box. Enchanter

I'd like to see the warning ("Note: Remember that this is only a preview, and has not yet been saved!") at the bottom of the page, as well as at the top. (I seem to remember that it used to be at the bottom, in fact.) If you're looking at the top of the page, it's obvious that it's a preview, because you can see the word "Preview", and possibly even the edit box itself. If you're looking at the bottom, there is no obvious indication, so you (well, I) might forget. -- Oliver P. 02:57 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)

Yes... an easy mistake to make. As a further suggestion, the whole preview could have a distinctive background colour (light green, say), to remind you that it is a preview. Enchanter

And it might be helpful to move the "Save page" and "Show preview" buttons a little apart. With the current setup you could accidentally hit the save button instead of preview, stuffing the database unnecessarily.Kosebamse 11:05 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)

If you prefer you can choose to have the preview appear above the edit box (a better arrangement I think). The tick box is in "preferences". The "not saved" warning was moved when this option became available, but really needs to be at the top and bottom to suit people with both arrangements. Personally, I think the preview above the edit box would be better as the default as well - Olivia is certainly not the first to have missed the preview below the edit box :) -- sannse 14:22 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks everyone! Olivia Curtis 00:09 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

RK reverted work I had done on Idolatry and left this message

Reverting Susan Mason's gross abuse of this article. Stephan, I am willing to work with you, but Susan is making huge amounts of edits screwing this up. She is writing things that just are not true

Implying that he is not even willing to work with me. What am I supposed to do? He refuses to even discuss such things! Susan Mason

Um, Is there a reason timelines and such pages are being formatted to have most recent events at the top? I'm thinking of the Afghanistan 2003 timeline and Timeline of trends in music (1951-present). Isn't this backwards? Just wondering, Atorpen 18:32 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

yup. it's the wrong way round. there's a list-reversing script linked fgrom somewhere on my user page -- Tarquin 19:07 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

I do not understand how the editing process works here. I have been trying to contribute to the article on Idolatry however my changes are constantly reverted without comment. What can be done to improve the situation? I have tried communication with other users on the talk page, however there are only a handful of users there and most of them have been quite hostile and unwilling to discuss things with me. Susan Mason

This is a good start, Sue.. your admitting not knowing exatly how things are done.. (which is haphazard in most cases) Second, youre admitting that there is a revert war going on (Nice to be aware of if your in one). Third is your acknowleging that communication outside of short wisenheimer comments is required to proceed. And fourth, is your honest appeal to the community. Let silence follow... go do something else... and perhaps even take it to the EN mailinglist... but MOST IMPORTANTLY - allow some time for things to settle! I dislike getting my shit reverted constantly by "some people" but what can you do? Keep your head on! -&#35918&#30505sv

In addition, I tried to remove the POV assertation that Ira Hayes is a "hero", something which he himself denied. I have not been able to engage in significant dialogue with any other user, instead, my change was reverted with the "fact" that Hayes was a hero being submitted as proof that the assertation is somehow NPOV. Susan Mason

Isnt it Drunken Ira Hayes? - Bad joke. SV

lol Susan Mason

Why are the H1 and == headlines showing up with a 1 in front? -&#35918&#30505sv

There's an option in preferences for 'auto number headings'. By default this is turned off, but if you have it turned on you will see the numbers. Enchanter 01:51 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

Ah. So-o desu. -&#35918&#30505sv

Incomplete sentence

The last sentence of the second paragraph on the page "Wikipedia:Complete list of language wikis available" is incomplete. --Menchi 08:13 Mar 8, 2003 (UTC)

Folks, when is that hit counter (the item that counts the number of hits that a particular web page gets) coming back? It's been ages. Arno

Though this does not answer your question, I thought that there is one potential disadvantage to the hit counter in that those wishing to "subscribe" to the page (e.g., through Internet Explorer) will be notified that the page has been updated even if the only change to the page has been that the site has been visited again (even including Exploer's own visit!). I wonder if there's some way to resolve that if it is to be brought back. - Brettz9 07:56 Mar 8, 2003 (UTC)

It's unlikely to be coming back. Recording the number of hits to every article in Wikipedia requires a lot of database access, which slows down the site. While the hit counters are nice, keeping the site running smoothly is certainly more important. Enchanter

Good to see that other sites are linking to us as a reference. Spot the Wikipedia link on the Abacci books site -- Derek Ross

See also top of User talk:Jimbo Wales and user:MyRedDice/Abacci Letter - they do need to say that the content is released under the GFDL... Martin

I'm using Mozilla 1.3b on Mac OS 10.2 with advanced recent changes on. Sometimes when I click on the arrow to make multiple edits list separately, the arrow disappears and a small space is inserted, but the edits are not listed. I have to click reload and click the arrow again. Is it my browser? Tuf-Kat

I'm using Mozilla 1.3b on Windows 2000; I see the same thing if I click the arrow before the page has completely finished loading, but haven't noticed any problems when clicking after it's done. --Brion

Aah... I'm just impatient I guess. Tuf-Kat

Something that's confusing me -- on the Battle of Coronel article I have a link to HMS Canopus which works fine; however, on the Battle of the Falkland Islands article I have another link to HMS Canopus (since she survived the first one!) but it only appears as a red "edit" link. Anybody got any ideas why? Arwel 02:27 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Both are blue when I go to look at them. If HMS Canopus was only created recently, you may have been getting a cached page or somesuch from a time before the HMS Canopus article existed. Happens to me all the time.

--Paul A 03:04 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

No, the Canopus article is several days old now, and I'm still getting the "edit" link from the Falkland Islands battle! Weird... Arwel 13:41 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Seems to have fixed itself through clearing out all my "temporary Internet files"... Arwel

On the Eurovision Song Contest page, one entry shows up as text rather than a wikipedia link. In the table (1978), Izhar Cohen has two brackets around it, but fails to render as a link. I tried looking for a cause, but I couldn't find one. Is this a bug with links and tables (or have I overlooked something obvious)?? -- Notheruser 23:10 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

I think it was because there was a line break in the middle of the link. I've fixed it. -- Merphant 23:41 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

Well, I guess it was something obvious :). -- Notheruser 00:03 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

'What links here' weirdness

If I check what links here on my user page, I discover that Talk:Richard Wagner archive apparently links to my user page. Which is fine, except it doesn't... Martin

Sure it does:

[4] [5] Not that I believe either source: sounds like standard journalistic hyperbole to me. -Martin

About 3/4 of the way down the page. HTH, Merphant

Let me clarify this: Talk:Richard Wagner archive redirects to Talk:Richard Wagner/Archive 1. Now, Talk:Richard Wagner/Archive 1 links to Martin, so therefore Talk:Richard Wagner/Archive 1 should show up on my "what links here" page (and, AFAIK, it does). However, Talk:Richard Wagner archive is showing up on my "what links here" page, and it definately should not. Is that clearer?

Aha, yes, that's clearer; I didn't notice it was a redirect. Interestingly, Talk:Richard Wagner/Archive 1 does not show up on 'what links here' from your user page, but Talk:Richard Wagner archive does, and is correctly labelled as a redirect page. I don't know why, sorry. -- Merphant 23:41 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

Should I leave a disambiguation link on list of astronomical topics? Cassini is linked, but it is in reference to the Cassini probe; should I change the link and leave the disambiguation link or just change the link? Thanks. - Notheruser 19:45 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

Since that link is immediately followed by links to the people of the same name, it doesn't make a lot of sense to link the disambiguation page which provides those same links. Link the probe directly. --Brion 21:53 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

That's what I was leaning towards...thanks for the clarification. -- Notheruser 22:06 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

One more question...Is it conceivable that Wikipedia could be programmed to accept anchors to links internal or external to the given page (whether going somewhere else on Wikipedia or not) (or does it somehow already)? - Brettz9 19:09 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

For internal links, this is a controversial feature. (See recent discussion on the wikipedia-l mailing list.) For external links, should work fine: http://foobar.bizbax/somepage.html#ananchor --Brion

Thanks, but is there any way you could direct me to a recent archived thread or something? There seems to be a vast amount of discussions to sort through (with no way to search) and I didn't seem to find it during the time I tried searching.

By the way, many thanks for all the helpful suggestions. - Brettz9 06:53 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

See this post and immediate followups for the current discussion. --Brion

I have not been able to find any Wiki sites dedicated to people starting up their own (non-neutral) projects on any and every topic (preferably with by topic lists and the option to hide projects from searches). Is it just too memory-intensive to house such a service? - Brettz9 18:22 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

Have you looked at SeedWiki? --Brion 19:36 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

That helped my find what I was looking for, but SeedWiki specifically seemed too specialized. <http://www.swiki.net/> seems like what I was looking for (though there were complaints about it not being accessible.

Are there any plans (or is it already somehow possible) to add customizably-viewed databases (e.g., sorts by different columns on a database within a page), collapsable/expandable outline elements, automatic cross-referencing of data at other pages, etc.? I'm not a programmer, but if there are pages existing on how to do the html code for this (if it can be done in html), I might like to try it out. - Brettz9 18:22 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

Not at this time; this seems to be a wide range of proposed things though! ;) If you'd like to make some more concrete proposals about how to go about doing such things, you're welcome to set up some pages on http://meta.wikipedia.org/ and get some feedback. --Brion

great, thanks for the starting point.

Any possibilities of linking directly from the main page to the By Alphabetical Order page? It is slow and may be a drain on the server to run these queries, but it is more efficient having such a page than going manually through all pages starting from the beginning of the AllPages search. - Brettz9 18:22 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

An improved alphabetical index version of Allpages is partially implemented, but waiting for installation on improvements. --Brion 19:36 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

You mean one different than the By Alphabetical Order page we have started? If so, do you mean it has not been installed/is not accessible at all now or that the improvements have not been installed?

Yes. It seems rather silly to maintain a page of arbitrary and ever-shifting index numbers when the machine can do this itself! See mailing list post. --Brion 17:52 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

Any possibilities for Wikipedia housing almanac data? Granted it may be better for Nupedia since we probably don't want just anyone fudging statistical data, but it seems to me there is a great need for this data to be publicly accessible and actually searchable such as on the internet. I do not find there are many resources already existing on-line, or they do not necessarily have the full amount of data as the print versions. - Brettz9 18:22 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure just what kind of data you're looking for here, but it sounds like this might be a case for a related side project... You might compare discussion at m:Wikiteer et al. --Brion 19:36 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

Well, it seems at another page I was directed to List of reference tables which seems to have the kind of information I had in mind, but I also suggested the main page reflect an entry such as Atlas to ensure those of us searching for that term would find the data we were seeking. - Brettz9 07:07 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

Lee Harvey Oswald used the ailas "Alek J. Hidell" during his lifetime. I am torn on creating a new article, a redirect from the Hidell ailas to the Oswald article, or talking about it in the Oswald article. Which is best?

- --Hoshie

Write about it in the article. To also create the redirect is not a bad idea, but I don't think it is in any way necessary either - it's not like someone is likely to ever create the Alek J. Hidell link (except for my creation here and now). Andre Engels 23:46 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)

Add an option so one can filter out of the watchlist those pages in which one was the last editor. Susan Mason

That is an excellent idea. I second it if it isn't too hard to implement. --snoyes 23:51 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC)