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Wikipedia:Village pump/Archive E

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump.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

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The pseudorandom number generator which backs the Special:Randompage link appears to be not so good. I just hit it about two dozen times and had several links come up multiple times. -º¡º

Emphasis on pseudo. I got RNA transcription four times in about a dozen clicks - twice in succession. Also, Thats how a nigger goes came up - but redirected to Johnny Rebel. I thought redirects were excluded. Geoffrey

Here's what I found out with a few SQL queries. The cur_random field values are strongly clustered up around the high end. In fact, there are no articles at all between about 0.18 and 0.4, and only few below 0.18. A few minutes of browsing through the old versions of SpecialRandompage.php shows why. A previous version of the software selected the lowest-numbered cur_random value, and set it to a random value. So here's why we now see poor results: Most of the pages are clustered up above 0.9 or so, so when you click Special:Randompage, there's a high chance of picking one of the few low-numbered articles. The cur_random value is then reset, and there's still a high chance of the new value being below 0.9. Hence, the few priveleged low-numbered articles get selected far more often, and unless someone re-randomizes cur_random column, it will take a long time for the high-numbered articles to diffuse back down. -- Tim Starling 04:25 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

Okay, I've re-randomized the whole bunch. --Brion 15:16 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

While we're discussing random pages, would it be acceptable do uninclude all pages with a comma and a state name in the title? I'd like to see real articles, not bot-written city data (which accounts for a considerable percentage of Wikipedia articles). --Geoffrey

I find them to be a useful reminder of the pros and cons of attempts to automate the generation of articles, heh-heh (yes, you get more material, but the quality is lower). It's also a fun game to try to find something interesting to say about a random town. Could be organized even - each month have a contest for the smallest town to get a new factoid connecting it to some other Wikipedia article. Legit articles only, no list of towns with Artichoke Queens! :-) Stan 23:13 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

Long, long ago, someone suggested removing the Ram-Man/Rambot articles from Special:Randompage, but Ram-Man argued that those articles need just as much editorial attention as all the other articles. As I remember it, no-one else made any comments. I agree with Geoffrey -- I would like to see them excluded. With the current version of Special:Randompage software, it would be fairly easy to set cur_random for all Rambot articles to -1, thereby ensuring they never get selected. But understand that it's controversial, and therefore unlikely to be implemented. -- Tim Starling 06:00 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

I wonder if perhaps a sysop could lock the Frumpysnarf page? Hephaestos 20:25 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

Done. For the record, this was done to prevent an anonymous user continuously posting rubbish there -- the page has been deleted many times before. -- Tim Starling 07:22 Apr 30, 2003 (UTC)

Trouble is, now the demonstration on Wikipedia:How to start a page won't work properly. (The demonstration is the reason for Frumpysnarf's long history of bizarre new-user experimentation, of course.) Mind you, I'm not sure the demonstration is giving the right message anyway: twice now, I've seen new users create their articles at Frumpysnarf and then rename them, instead of creating the new article outright. -- Paul A 07:33 Apr 30, 2003 (UTC)

Trouble with some Holy Roman Emperors I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but there's a serious problem with the current nomenclature for Holy Roman Emperors named Henry. I mentioned this in the "German Kings and Emperors" talk page, but I suspect that nobody reads that, so I thought I'd bring it up here. Essentially, they're all numbered wrong. The traditional numbering is as follows: Henry I the Fowler 919-936 (who was only German King, and not Emperor, and thus the problem) Henry II 1002-1024 Henry III 1039-1056 Henry IV 1056-1106 Henry V 1106-1125 Henry VI 1190-1197 Henry VII 1308-1313

Currently, the Wikipedia articles are set at one number too low, due to Henry the Fowler's not being an actual emperor. Thus, the article on Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor refers to the man who is always called Henry IV. And so forth. This is completely wrong. I'm new here, so I'm not sure how to go about fixing this, as it would seem to involve switching around the texts of numerous articles. Any help would be appreciated john 08:22 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

On further investigation, I discover that these changes to the Henry's were all the work in the last few months of User:Eclecticology, and seem to have been part of a devoted program to "correct" information which was already right. Sigh. Could still use some help. john 08:31 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

Is there an index of "most read" or "most indexed" articles? I'd like to read what others are reading. (Recent changes aren't exactly the same thing.) Thanks. Samw 02:30 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

There's a "most read" page: Popular pages. It is updated every now and then, but I don't think there's much change in a short term. Wikipedia:List of articles frequently visited through Google is helpful too. --Menchi 06:04 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

A couple of times in the past, using Internet Explorer 5.2 for the Mac on wiki I have been hit by bugs whereby letters on the keyboard would mean different things to what they should. I ended up closing IE completely and re-opening and usually though not always this went away. Tonight, the same phenomenon has struck this time on the safari browser in wiki. (And true to form, as I write about it here, it has cleared up, but only after I had left wiki and opened up other pages using safari, where no such problem existed. Then, back in wiki, everything was fine. [[[[][][][]][ Yippee!!! I can type square brackets again. And yes, 'y' produces y and not 'z' ( and 'z' produces z not y.) This is not the first time this has happened on safari, and I experienced it on IE. And never ever outside wiki. It is making using wiki almost impossible. I just did an archive on the talk page of Communist state and I had to cut and page colons, square brackets, round brackets, etc. I could not even sign a contribution as the ~~~~ could not be typed, and my É in my name had had the fada (that thing on the top) on the bottom. I presume that there is a browser problem, but as it only ever seems to happen on wiki, there must be a wiki side to it. ÉÍREman 00:32 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

It happened again, when I tried to type in the talk page of Wilhelm II of Germany. I left, went onto a different screen, when into hotmail, typed there. Everything came out correctly and when I went back into wiki on another screen, hey presto, everything is working again. What is going on? ÉÍREman 01:24 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

One of the usual German keyboard layouts is pretty similar to the English/American layouts (QWERTY), except the 'Y' and 'Z' are switched around (thus it's sometimes called 'QWERTZ'), and of course there are some keys usurped to add the umlaut and eszets needed. If you're getting the 'Y' and 'Z' switched, it sounds like you might be inadvertantly switching to a German keyboard. I don't know about Macs in particular, but usually there's an option or setting to have some certain key combination switch among the keyboard choices; e.g., in GNOME, I use left ALT + SHIFT to switch, and it's configurable. You're probably hitting the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) key combination at some point and getting switched to the German keyboard. Check your internationalization settings, and see if it lists the key combo there, or just remove the German one from the list to avoid getting that one in particular. -- John Owens 07:22 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)
Try Command-Space or Command-Shift-Space, if I remember. Also, ensure the little flag in the menubar (if you have one) is an American (or your country's) flag, not a German one; click on it like a menu to change. You may also want to check the International control panel (assuming Mac OS X). Geoffrey

Anthere listed a bunch of pages on my talk page. These are a great many former redirects which she blanked because they were not equivalent to the thing being redirected to. e.g. Agroecology had redirected to Ecology. She wanted me to delete them, but I don't want to make a false step. Should I:

  1. not delete them and hope someone will turn them into a stub;
  2. not delete them and restore the redirects, or
  3. delete them? - Montréalais
From a quick look at them, I would favour deleting most (though not all) of them, but in any case, the right thing for Anthere to do is put them on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and take it from there (you shouldn't feel obliged to do anything if you don't want to). --Camembert

I mostly asked you because you deleted on sight my comment on disagreement. I see not well which difference there is between deleting disagreement and deleting industrial waste. None have any article on them. But, of course, I will have to blank them everyday till they are deleted, and maybe budda will recreate them all after deletion .... best would be stub, yes anthere

I often have trouble with the wikipedia responding slowly and would like to have an offline version, I would rather download a simple package just install run then the wiki code which looks a bit complicated, so I though the tomberaider database would be the simples but I can not download it! Is it still supporeted? I try to download from http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_as_TomeRaider_database_-_download_instructions but get "The page cannot be found" error. Have anypne made a one download offline version of wikipedia? I think that would be a very interesting project. Prefereably running on windows, but a standalone bootable linux CD would be interesting also.

Stefan 01:15 Apr 26, 2003 (UTC)

See the Wikipedia:Readers' FAQ. The TomeRaider database is the only thing currently available. However, the links seem to be broken. Anyone know what the problem is? -- Stephen Gilbert 14:34 Apr 26, 2003 (UTC)
I fixed the links (I think). -- Notheruser 14:43 Apr 26, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! Stefan 03:58 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia clock inaccuracy

Err... maybe I'm being stupid, but the Wikipedia clock seems to be out by about 8 minutes. I'm writing this at 11:16 BST (10:16 UTC) -- Mintguy 10:09 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)

It's been getting worse for months, but I never got around to saying something... -- Tim Starling 12:00 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)
Clock is now out by about 9 minutes (Written at 10:58 UTC) Mintguy 10:50 Apr 27, 2003 (UTC)
That is probably because computers maintain the time in software when they're turned on... This means it can go offtime over a long period of usage, especially in a computer which has a CPU under constant heavy load as the extra cycles further the disruption of time emulation. I had a computer lose 5 hours in 18 once. The solution is to have the server automatically connect to a timehost over the network such as at sntp://ns.arc.nasa.gov , this will sync the server's time to within a few miliseconds of an atomic clock.
The proper way to handle all of this is to run an RFC-1305 NTP daemon (i.e. xntp) on the server. On all current Unices, it handles the issue of clock synchronization in an elegant manner. [1] -- Egil 07:55 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)
Could someone with access just ssh to the server and set the clock by their watch!? Simpler than NTP (though I know NTP is simple and would be better). --Geoffrey 21:20 Apr 30, 2003 (UTC)

What's the recommendation for using InterWiki links? Most links to other wikis are written out in URLs - should these be changed to the appropriate InterWiki links? Should the articles about other wikis themselves use URLs, InterWiki links, or both? Geoffrey 03:31 Apr 23, 2003 (UTC)

Wanted pages update

Could the Wanted pages be updated please ?

Option Request: "Move Page" in Nostalgia

Could we have the "Move this page" option available in Nostalgia skin? Maybe somewhere on the lower bar, among "Discuss this page", "Watch this page", etc. --Menchi 12:32 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Re: "Client-side scripting" Tim Starling above; Somehow I don't feel phased with what you said, reminded by "if it aint broke don't fix it". I'm conditioned by Prolog with its 2 instructions, Cut and Fail, and where the System-Typing is implicit in the predicate DB design. I'm trying to figure out just what (technical within Wikipedia) resources are available for building some sort of Propadeutic such as in Britannica where the Atoms of knowledge are in the Micropaedia and the Articles are topicalised in the Macropaedia. Am I right in thinking that the "icy reception" is simply the prefernce to err on the side of caution? Is it going too far to suggest that Wikipedia is merely a good Data Capture device? By the way is this the place to talk about such things? user:Jus

I split the article Head of Government as I found it be about Prime Ministers and Parliamentarism to 90%, neglecting Presidents and the Presidental system. Now, I didn't dare to make too drastical changes, so I limited myself to creating a new page: Parliamentarism, history. This motivates a few reflections:

  1. I tried to figure out how such a history page ought to be named, according to Wikipedia:Naming conventions, but failed.
  2. It's something of a mess with the articles mentioned above (and some of the related articles). There is a certain lack of clarity and hierarchy when it comes to which type of notices ought to be put in which article.

Comments? Suggestions? Advices? Critic? Please! :-) -- Ruhrjung 07:44 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

try for natural names that can be easily linked. Eg History of parliamentarism. I'll leave you to move the page :-) As for the mess of articles -- if this is a subject area in which you are knowledgeable, then go ahead and be bold! -- Tarquin 07:57 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Knowing nothing about PHP and little about Wiki, I would like to hear from one of your online experts whether it might be possible to embed a Smalltalk VM, select and run (doIT) a method (script) from within the Wiki. -- Jus

Well, I don't know much about Smalltalk, but I can tell you that the current version of Wikipedia software doesn't allow anything vaguely resembling scripting. It basically has an "allowed tags" list, and an "allowed attributes" list. Both lists are pretty short. You can try to convince everyone to change the software, but note that previous suggestions to allow client-side scripting have met with an icy reception. -- Tim Starling 05:51 May 3, 2003 (UTC)
On that note, I'd like to see the <span> tag added to the list of allowed tags. -- John Owens 21:26 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Re: "Client-side scripting" Tim Starling above; Somehow I don't feel phased with what you said, reminded by "if it aint broke don't fix it". I'm conditioned by Prolog with its 2 instructions, Cut and Fail, and where the System-Typing is implicit in the predicate DB design. I'm trying to figure out just what (technical within Wikipedia) resources are available for building some sort of Propadeutic such as in Britannica where the Atoms of knowledge are in the Micropaedia and the Articles are topicalised in the Macropaedia. Am I right in thinking that the "icy reception" is simply the prefernce to err on the side of caution? Is it going too far to suggest that Wikipedia is merely a good Data Capture device? By the way is this the place to talk about such things? user:Jus

Wikipedia makes decision by consensus-finding, which makes seems to make it conservative. If you're just making suggestions and not offering to write code, you have to get one of the developers on your side, or your suggestion will just be ignored and forgotten about. As for choice of forum, here is fine for short disscussions (i.e. not much longer than this is now) and newbie stuff. Then there's the mailing list wikipedia-l for policy discussion (which this is), wikitech-l for technical implentation (which this probably won't become but it's there just in case) and meta for longer proposals and essays. -- Tim Starling 03:34 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

I recently ran across the Timeline of U.S. economic indicators and noticed it needs a lot of work. I've listed it on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, but it seems to have been ignored. I'm hesitant to list it on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion because this page could have some useful information, but it would require a lot of time and research. If it seems no one is willing to bring it up to date (it hasn't been touched in seven months) it seems that it should just be deleted. Any thoughts? -- Minesweeper 09:45 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

Not sure where this ought to go, but I often think when carrying on a discussion through User_talk: pages, it would be rather nice if the ~~~ sig went to the User_talk: page instead of the User: page. An even better solution might be a different combination, either more tildes, or three or four of some other character (@@@? %%%?), which would give a link to your talk page instead. Feasable? I would think so. Worthwhile? You decide, I don't do PHP. -- John Owens 07:10 May 2, 2003 (UTC) | John Owens 07:09 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

That sounds like an interesting idea, but is there really that much effort saved versus clicking on your username and then clicking the "Talk" link on the bottom? To me, at least, it seems to be perfectly fine with the setup as it is currently.
Perhaps, instead of having it be two different commands, just add the User_talk: page as a part of the ~~~~ signature, like it is listed on the Recent Changes page? So like TimmyD (Talk), as I feel that would be a better representation of what it's actually attempting to convey.
--TimmyD 06:06 May 3, 2003 (UTC)
Perhaps we should consider why we need seperate user and user talk pages? Martin

OK, this may seem kinda strange, but since I go to the school, I figure I have a right to talk about it. :) And since I have no idea how to go about fixing this, I've decided to bring it up here.

Anyway, on the Minnesota page, the "College of Saint Benedict" and "Saint John's University" are listed as two separate institutions, and link to two separate Wikipedia articles (both empty), when actually they are a joint academic institution (see http://www.csbsju.edu ) ... also, on the List of colleges and universities starting with S page, the institution is erroneously referred to as "St. John's University, College of Saint Benedict" when in actuality they are always listed in alphabetical order and spelled out in full.

HOWEVER (and here's the kicker), I'm not sure what the proper naming for the correct entry should be. The institution is normally referred to as College of Saint Benedict | Saint John's University in "official" terms (ie, the full names with a pipe character as separation), or as CSB/SJU in shorthand (ie, the abbreviations with a slash as separation). Should there be new #redirects for CSB and SJU (listed in full) that redirect to a joint page? What would the naming for the joint page be? Should the institution still be listed separately (ie, CSB on "C" and SJU on "S") with both links being the same, or should it be listed just once as a doubly-named institution (the latter of which is slightly more correct)? As you can see, I'm really confused by this ....

If someone can help me out in this, I'll be glad to start filling out the entry for this school! Thanks a bunch! -- TimmyD 07:52 May 1, 2003 (UTC)~

Many good questions on the organization (yep, the 'pedia is all about org), here's what I think:
  1. Yes, it'd be useful to have redirect pages for both colleges that go to a joint page.
  2. The joint page's title should be the full, official name: if College of Saint Benedict | Saint John's University is what it is. (How rare that the punctuation mark of a pipe is used in the official name!)
  3. The institution is better listed as College of Saint Benedict | Saint John's University on the C page and as Saint John's University (College of Saint Benedict | Saint John's University) on the S page, for the ease of browsing
These aren't the "official" answers, however. I'm just speaking from my understanding and experience as a Wikipedian. If for some reason, those pages or their titles should be changed, they can be, with ease. The 'pedia is flexible and changeable. It isn't like an academic paper that once you submitted it, you can't change it anymore. --Menchi 09:30 May 1, 2003 (UTC)
Using a pipe in an article title might confuse the software a touch - using a slash might be safer... Martin 10:15 May 1, 2003 (UTC)
Pipe doesn't work in titles, obviously. Use the slash. --Brion 15:16 May 1, 2003 (UTC)
OK, so College of Saint Benedict / Saint John's University has been created, I double-check to make sure nothing was still left linking to St._John's_University,_College_of_St._Benedict (the old link from the S page), and this page should be the only one that does. With regards to redirects, however, should there be three or what? CSB/SJU, College of Saint Benedict, and Saint John's University (Minnesota) -- note that there is also a Saint John's University in New York, hence the parentheses -- perhaps the other SJU link on the S page should reflect Saint John's University (New York)? This seems really over my head for only my fourth day or so here, but it's great to learn and go through this stuff! Thanks for the help so far! -- TimmyD 05:30 May 2, 2003 (UTC)
You've gone a great job on the CSB/SJU page. Very informative. Now, onto your Qs:
  1. Yes, having the three redirects (CSB/SJU, College of Saint Benedict, and Saint John's University (Minnesota)) is a good idea. You can even make redirects CSB and CSB if you find it helpful, but that's not necessary.
  2. You're correct that SJU New York's link should be Saint John's University (New York), since not one SJU is particularly more famous than the other. (Well, at least not up here in Canada....)
I've given you a little feedback on the CSB/SJU Talk page. --Menchi 08:12 May 2, 2003 (UTC)
I've decided to let St. John's University still refer to the one in New York, since as far as I can tell, the offical name is not spelled out like the college I'm at (ie, Saint vs St.) thus there shouldn't be confusion between the two? Perhaps instead I'll go through and just add "(New York)" to the four articles that mention St. John's University so as to help distinguish, or is it enough of a similarity that there should be St. John's University (New York)? --TimmyD 06:06 May 3, 2003 (UTC)
Page Title of St. John's University New York
You made a good point. Since there is difference in the official spelling, it is redundant to title St. John's University (New York), since there is only one institution truely and properly called "St. John's University". However, in a non-official ad, it refers to itself as "St. John's University NY". [2] So, I think we can have St. John's University (New York) as a redirect page and St. John's University as the main page. --Menchi 07:03 May 3, 2003 (UTC)
Mentionings of SJU NY
Maybe instead of adding "(New York)" to the four pages that mentions SJU NY, it can be written like "St. John's University in New York" or "St. John's University, New York", so that it's more grammatical. --Menchi 07:03 May 3, 2003 (UTC)
Disambiguation
Since the difference between SJU NY and your SJU would confuse most people (including me, had I not have this discussion), it'd help to include a disambiguation block on top of each of the SJU pages. For examples, see Asia and China.
An equal disambiguation page is impossible in this case, since not one or the other SJU can be the title of the disambiguation page. --Menchi 07:09 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

Has someone changed the page layout. I am now getting the underlines in the left hand menu going right accross the screen, and am unable to access the top fields. I think this was working yesterday. (using Mozilla 1.4a) -- Chris Q 07:02 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

I get that often when the server is really suffering, and I'm guessing the CSS doesn't get properly transferred, so those go clear across like you see. (I'm using Galeon-1.2.10/Mozilla-1.3.) Usually, once the server's recovered a bit, a shift-reload will clear it up. At the moment, they're working fine for me, but the server seemed pretty bogged down a few minutes ago. -- John Owens 07:09 May 1, 2003 (UTC)
Yes, that's exactly the problem. --Brion 15:16 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

I spent several hours uploading and inserting photographs into many, many, many articles on Saturday evening and virtually every one of them got modified. I would appreciate some explanation as to why they were modified, instead of just being slapped across the face with the back of the hand. Why should I bother trying to contribute? I'm starting to feel that this is personal. -- Zoe

Hmm, I only noticed the pictures being compressed (the few that I looked at). Are these the changes you're referring to? -- Notheruser 01:52 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
No, I have no problem with your compressing them. It's Egil and his ilk running around behind me and modifying almost everything I did without an explanation. -- Zoe
I've done some editing on the U.S. presidential election images (e.g. U.S. presidential election, 1800) to right align rather than center them. I certainly didn't mean offense; it was intended as explained on Talk:U.S. presidential election. Incidently, your uploads inspired me to go find the source, which I did, and now there's instructions on Talk:U.S. presidential election for how to get the latest digital versions from nationalatlas.gov (I did U.S. presidential election, 1988 - U.S. presidential election, 2000, and I'm taking a break, hoping someone beats me to the rest of the job) ;-) -- RobLa 03:17 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
Zoe, are you really DW? Has someone altered your precious prose? ;) Seriously, what is the problem here? Is there anything in particular that you object to? All I've seen doing spotchecks over your recent contributions is recompression and formatting tweaks, and there's nothing objectionable in that. Hell, I'm worried when people don't follow up on the articles that I've been working on. --Brion 03:39 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
As I said, I have no problem with the actions that Notheruser made, and I don't have any problems with RobLa's actions. It's mainly Egil, who felt it necessary to change almost every single caption and picture position that I made last night. It has nothing to do with "deathless prose", I have no problem when people change things for reasonable reasons. But when every one of my contributions is modified for what looks like just the sake of modification, then I start to object. -- Zoe
Just to clarify, I didn't actually compress any of the pictures. I was trying to ascertain the changes referenced. -- Notheruser 03:58 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
So in other words, Zoe, you are not complaining about any particular actions that were done, just the fact that someone made formatting changes to a bunch of pages shortly after you edited them? Why is there something wrong with this? This is a wiki for goodness' sake! We're supposed to clean up after one another. Pages don't suddenly become off-limits after you've touched them, and if you leave a large, very visible swath of work across Special:Recentchanges you should not be surprised if people look at those pages and make their own edits to a lot of them. (Particularly mass edits where you make a similar change to dozens of articles; if someone else finds the need to make additional tweaks on top of one or two of them, the same will likely be needed for the rest.) And yes, that includes formatting and wikification. It's all part of the process. That's how wiki works. --Brion 06:57 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
I compressed a bunch of those images because many of the USDA images were 100-200K when they only really needed to be 25-50K. Living on dialup makes me particularly sensitive to image size. I tried not to alter the appearance of the images in any way; I just used Photoshop to compress the images down. I've started compressing other unnecessarily images down as well. I hope no personal offense was taken. -- Minesweeper 04:04 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

Sometimes I make some edits and everyone reverts them or changes them again right away. But this is OK: I know it's only because you all hate me and are out to get me. Other times, I make some edits and no-one touches them or even reads them for months. But this is OK too, it just means that everyone is ignoring me because I am an incredibly boring and worthless person and you all hate me. And sometimes I make a bunch of edits and a few of them get changed and a few of them don't, and some people even post notes to say what nice edits they were. But this is OK, because I know that it is all just a plot by my enemies to confuse me with insincere fake praise because you all hate me. tAnNIn

(OK, now that I've had my fun, I'll make a serious comment: we all feel like that sometimes. It's part of the deal, you have to take the rough with the smooth. Just the same, I always think it is discourteous to sit on someone's hammer and follow their edits around. (Unless they are out-and-out vandals, of course.) Usually, if I find myself editing the same person's work for the third time in a row, I try to find something else to work on for a while so as not to be rude. As for yesterday's edits, I saw Zoe's name on all those uploads and edits and didn't look at them, because I figured that, whatever it was that she was doing, it would be good, positive work and I could leave those pages in her capable hands. (That's a compliment, Zoe.) Tannin 07:39 May 5, 2003 (UTC))

Thanks, Tannin. -- Zoe

Can anyone help me with a redirect problem? I'm trying to create a page for the Turk, a 19th century chess playing machine (which was actually a fraud).

Anyway, as you can see from the link above, it redirects you to info on Turkey. It would be nice to have the choice to go to either info on the turk chess playing machine or Turkey when clicking on a "Turk" link. Is this possible in a redirect?

Or does anyone think that the "Turk" page should be info only on the chess machine?

Tommertron May 4, 2003.

What is possible here is Wikipedia:disambiguation. There are two options in this case:
  1. Equal disambiguation: Convert the Turk page to something like Jupiter. With two wikilinks, one called Turk (machine) and another Turk (nationality). You can think up a more descriptive modifier within the parenthesis.
  2. Primary topic disambiguation: On the Turk page, write about the machine, but on top of the page, place an ambiguation block in italics, noticing the reader of the use of "Turk" as a nationality. For examples, see Asia and China.
To me, both options have their merits. Turk the machine isn't what people usually think of upon reading the word (favour option #1). On the other hand, Turk the nationality is probably not going to get a page of its own with words on it anytime soon, if ever (favour option #2). I say this because it's the way it is with all major and minor nationality words. The exception is Chinese. What's your opinion?
It seems clear to me that primary topic disambiguation is a bad choice here. In my opinion, primary topic disambiguation is only a good idea if almost all links to the page are about that topic. Here, Turk the (fake) chess machine has fewer links (if any?) than Turk the nationality. That there is no own page for Turk the nationality does not seem like an objection to me - just have Turk be an equal disambiguation page with (as I now see it) the following disambiguations: Turk (machine), Turkey and Turkic people. I don't see why the fact that those last too are not of the form [[Turk (blabla)]] would be a reason to choose primary subject disambiguation. Andre Engels 15:59 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
By the way, you can sign your name by typing ~~~, and sign your name and date and time by typing ~~~~. If you have any further doubts or questions, ask away. --Menchi 05:32 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Vkem has been creating strange articles, see Aimo Cajander, Lauri Ingman, Väinö Tanner and Haltiatunturi. These seem to be machine-translations of some sort. For example, I compared Aimo Cajander and this Finnish website [3] (the fourth page that came up when searching on google for "Aimo Cajander"). The article looks like a word for word translation of this website. Are these copyright infringements? In any case the articles have to be rewritten to be human-understadable. -- Jniemenmaa 13:18 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

I just got a reply from Vkem on my talk page "Aimo Kajander is translated with Syntax 8.0 translator." -- Jniemenmaa 08:54 May 4, 2003 (UTC)
Not having any experience of this Wikipedia project, I think I at least can contribute with a fresh opinion not tainted by Wikipedia culture. :->> I question the value of bad translations (which this is an example of) much more than the value of relatively mediocre English by writers of other mother tongues, as myself. (Not to mention the copyright problem.)
This issue is probably related to the in-extenso quotes from Encyclopedia Britannica in the edition of year 1911. In both cases it's duplication of information which already is available for any user of Wikipedia. In my eyes it might devaluate the value of Wikipedia. Careful consideration is called for.
When a writer needs support against his unsecure and un-idiomatic handling of English printed works in English are better than www-available, as they don't invite to paste-and-quote. :) -- Ruhrjung 11:39 May 4, 2003 (UTC)
We do indeed recommend against machine translation, for just this reason. Martin

List of artists posted today by User:141.219.44.74 makes no sense.MammaBear

It's being discussed on Votes for Deletion. -- Infrogmation 22:54 May 6, 2003 (UTC)


I'm attempting to format "years in sport". If anyone wants to look at 2003 in sports to see what I have done and suggest changes and improvements, please do. I'll wait a few days until there is an acceptable Template, then I'll start copying the format and setting up each of the past 100 years or so. Jacques Delson

Perhaps Wikify the sport names? --Menchi 03:22 May 4, 2003 (UTC)
I'd say leaving out the sports names that have no events under them. My reasoning is this: There are dozens and dozens of different sports. So they should only be in the article if they are pertinent. Otherwise, you need to add Road cycling, Gymnastics, Weightlifting, Tennis, Figure skating, Alpine skiing, Cricket, Diving, etc. etc. There are just too many to list. So, consider only listing the ones that have an event to list. Kingturtle 03:51 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Can't believe I forgot tennis! Will add it, but the smaller sports like weightlifing etc can be in the General category. I'll set up a sample on the 2003 in sports page. Jacques Delson

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

Ammunition and some linked pages contain mostly (if not entirely) info from Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911, and most is hopelessly outdated. It is very well written, though, and would possibly be better placed on a history page. I don't feel too comfortable just replacing hundreds of lines of text with what would be a stub in comparison... Comments? europrobe 10:15 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Weigh it up: what's best for the reader who comes looking for information - a few paras of up-to-date or lots of old? I'd say the first. You can leave the EB text below your stub, or move it to talk pending a rewrite to place it in historical context. good luck! and be bold! -- Tarquin 10:24 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

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RE: September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack....shouldn't the article title be "September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks"? The attacks may have been orchestrated and planned together, but there were distinctively separate attacks made. Kingturtle 01:36 Apr 30, 2003 (UTC)

Apparently so! Googling reveals that 20,000 "September 11 Attack" pages and 200,000 "September 11 Attacks" pages. 14,000 "9 11 Attack" and 60,000 "9 11 Attacks." Time to move page? --Menchi 06:46 May 4, 2003 (UTC)
I'd suggest being conservative here - there are quite a few pages, and they're linked from all over the place, so a change of name will actually entail a fair bit of work. But if you do move, consider whether "terrorist" and "attack" need capitals... Martin

In a well-meaning attempt to improve things, I've done something terrible to the title of the Tomaz Pisanski article. Help!! -- Paul A 05:32 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

Wow, cool. Reading it makes me feel like I am in a surreal dyslexia. Kingturtle 05:37 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

I moved it back to Tomaz Pisanski. Further discussion on Talk:Tomaz Pisanski -- Tim Starling 06:04 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

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How come my hearts and diamonds on Most wanted Iraqi playing cards are green instead of red? Kingturtle 22:39 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

You used funny quotes. In HTML tags, just use " or '. --Eloquence 22:47 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
Ah. See, what happened was, I copied the article into Microsoft Word, did a "Replace All" and then copied back to wikipedia. In the process, those little quotation marks got funny. Kingturtle 22:48 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
To prevent this from happening, you want to go to Tools/AutoCorrect/AutoFormat as you type and uncheck the options there. AxelBoldt 23:50 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

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Is there no end to the ability of I Explorer to screw up images on wiki? Because it found the images on the pages too big (which other browsers didn't), I cropped a series of images on Dublin. In safari, the new page with the cropped image shows up. Ditto with Netscape. Ditto with opera. And with camino. But as usual IE does things differently and still shows the upcropped images extra large on the page. Why isn't IE 5.2 for a Mac able to instantly update the page like everyone else? Is it just images or does it not update text too? Will it eventually update? Why the hell does anyone else that damned browser? I gave up in frustration months ago but thought it necessary to check the page using it just to make sure it was not screwing it up. And surprise, surprise, it was and is still doing it.

JT, I find that I have problems with modifying images in IE. I have to do a Refresh, and then the latest version of the image usually (but not always) shows up okay. Sometimes an F4 works. -- Zoe
Thanks, Zoe. I really am amazed how both Netscape and IE seem to have so many bugs! Normally as the two most used browsers I would have expected them to be the best, but of all the browsers I have used since August when I came on line with a new computer they are by far the worst, with safari the best, which is why I generally use it. ÉÍREman
Yup. 'Refresh' did it. How utterly bizarre IE is!!!!! Thanks, Zoe!

BTW - Netscape doesn't recognise the <small></small> command, which means captions written in small lettering and laid out as such goes haywire in netscape because it treats all lettering as the same size. Is there anyway to counteract this? ÉÍREman 21:56 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

2. An alternative code is <font size=-1></font> .
In Netscape 4.79, it works though. Which version are you using? --Menchi 23:14 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks Menchi. I have just checked and apparently it is 7.02 on an eMac. As I mentioned to Zoe above, I am amazed to find of the 6 browsers I have used since I got the new eMac, IE and Netscape are by far the worst, safari easily the best. But aware of Netscape and IE's tendency to muck up wiki images, I occasionally go on to check how a page I laid out looks. (And invariably groan at what one or other has done to the page!) ÉÍREman 00:45 May 6, 2003 (UTC)
Netsape 6.x was based on an alpha version of Mozilla, so yes it was very buggy. Netscape 7 was based I think on Mozilla 1.0. I'm using Mozilla 1.2.1 now and the <small> tag displays fine. I'm not sure how Netscape 7 is so bad as I've not used it, but it is a rebranded rehash of Mozilla, and Mozilla works just fine apart from having a very computer-programmerish gui.
Netscape 6.1 (not that I ever use it!) also doesn't do <small>, either. -- Arwel 01:06 May 6, 2003 (UTC)
How odd that a browser would reduce its capacity in its new versions. Or is it a operating system thing? I use Windows 98. --Menchi 01:14 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

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I've just edited closed source, replacing "he" with "they". This got me thinking. Does wiki have a policy on gender? "He" is old fahsioned and I think should be avoided in original writing. Some strange feminists think we should write "she" (I've seen this in some weird software manuals) - I think this is equally stupid. I changed to "they", which is common usage for a neutral gender case in the UK, but I understand that this is not universal? Thoughts? CGS

An option is s/he and his/her, both are dictionary entries. --Menchi 20:45 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
I think that makes one's writing look like a multiple choice test though. CGS
If you really want to go nuts (and drive other people in with you), then use sie and hir. --mav
See/edit also: gender-specific pronoun, gender-neutral pronoun, singular they, non-sexist language, and Spivak pronoun. Martin

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

I switched to the 2002 in sports page to do the setup for a template. This page could get very large unless discretion and good judgment is used but at the same time I did not want to leave any country or major event out but I'm sure I have. Please check it out before I start setting up the last 100 years. Once done, there will be much work needed to get each year up to snuff. Big job, just doing 2002 was exhausting. Volunteers? Jacques Delson

Just one note: "Football (American)" should probably point to American football rather than the NFL just to be more general. -- Minesweeper 06:31 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
Very impression and comprehensive work, Jacques! Nice job. I'm certain that after you've created a few pages, WP will attract more vivid sports fan and sportsmen and the chronicle process will be faster. But now, you're a pioneer!
Are the individual events under each sport section listed in order of importance? If not, try list the feats of the same person together. Like under Golf, the three feats of Tiger Woods could be next to each other. --Menchi 18:04 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, I didn't put Tiger Woods all together because that becomes really hard work. I'm lazy, want a master template to copy and paste then beside each annual event type the winner's name. This is such a huge job I really don't think I can handle more than that. If someone else has some ideas, that would be helpful. I'll leave it a few more days so people can make changes before I start. Jacques Delson

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

Automated conversion

What are "Automated conversion"? See 'em all around, but dunno what they're. --Menchi 11:56 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

They date from when we switch from UseModWiki script to our "Phase II Wikipedia" script, around Feb 2002. -- Tarquin 15:51 May 7, 2003 (UTC) (this might want FAQing)
What do they do? --Menchi 18:15 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
Back in the dawn of time, Wikipedia was run using the UseModWiki wiki software. When we got to ten or twenty thousand pages this got to be a bit much for usemod to handle, and various new and exciting features were demanded that UseMod didn't support. Magnus Manske wrote a custom wiki program for Wikipedia (that version is now called "phase II", our current software is a rewrite of that, hence "phase III"). The pages had to be extracted from UseMod's files and imported into the database for the new software. The conversion script that did that marked the page creations as being done by "Automated conversion", as the conversion process was, well, automated. ;) Some time later I tweaked up the script to import prior saved revisions from the last archive of the UseMod-based wikipedia, so some older articles will also show revisions by real humans prior to the automated conversion. --Brion 18:26 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

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Why is wikipedia so unbearably slow right now? Kingturtle 09:36 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

It is always slow because we are so damn popular. I sure hope the new server is set-up soon. --mav

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Question: Why the distinction between (say) "[[as of 2003]]" and "as of [[2003]]"? They both link to the same page.

...no, hang on a second, I think I've got it. Pages that link to "[[as of 2003]]" are grouped together on 2003's WhatLinksHere page, so they're easier to locate and update. Is that it?

--Paul A 01:26 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

Exactly. See Talk:As of 2003 (formerly talk:as of 2002) --Brion 01:30 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

The below note was left on User Talk:Infrogmation:

I have also been blocked, apparently because I'm on the same IP address as "Michael/Weezer." He probably used AOL, as I am right now, so blocking his IP might block a lot of other people as well. RL Barrett 22:38 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

Are we having a problem with blocking vandals on AOL without blocking other users? What is the proper procedure here? -- Infrogmation 22:54 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

We don't have an official policy on meta:bans and blocks yet. However, I'd say that if a hard-banned user edits from a range of IPs then any IP block should be temporary (IE, a number of hours) and we should chiefly rely on detection and reverting to keep Wikipedia accurate, unbiased, and otherwise healthy. Martin
If you unblock an IP, consider addding it to Wikipedia:IP probation watchlist, so there's a record of your actions. Martin

A user called Daniel C. Boyer has created a page for himself on the french wikipedia. I saw he also has a page here, and saw mentionned the pump about this article, but did not find it. I would like to know exactly how much well known is that man, for he is absolutely unknown from french people, and I think his article will likely be deleted. Any advice please ? user:anthere

I have nothing against Daniel, but I agree with ant. Googling reveals only 2 pages on Daniel in French. --Menchi 18:58 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
I am getting four. --141.219.44.46
Well...I made his personal user page myself, before the article page be deleted (but after it was blanked nevertheless). We frequently suffer free advertisment on the paint topic (pages about very new and unknown artists are created, with links towards their personal sites, or gallery). It has become quite burdensome recently. So, new artists are currently not very welcome. I think Daniel will be welcome, provided he proves one or two of his books have not been published at his account, plus one or two articles in serious and famous books or other publications. Articles on his grand father will not be welcome I guess. ant
I can't remember where but I have heard of Daniel C. Boyer a few times before I edited Wikipedia. He seems to be a minor celeb and therefore deserves his own article and maybe a few articles on his best work. --mav

The current version of Daniel C. Boyer is written by me. I did this because I think if he's important enough to have several articles about his works included in Wikipedia, he should have a proper article about him in the main namespace. I made my case for this on User talk:Daniel C. Boyer. And I would say that just because he doesn't have a large French following doesn't mean he should be excluded from French Wikipedia -- although I guess that's not for me to decide. -- Tim Starling 02:56 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

I restored the page for now. But if others disagree, it will go. I will add the link to User talk:Daniel C. Boyer. I hope though you would understand if tomorrow a person called Françoise Legrand made herself an account on this wikipedia, wrote *no* article whatsoever, except one dealing about her unknown artistic works, you would perhaps be a little bit surprised. I don't give more than 5 mn for the article to be deleted for self-promotion of an unknown (for english people) artist. There is a point it is very tough to judge of the fame of a person. User:anthere

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Hi

I'm trying to reduce the size of an uploaded image, anyone got experience of that. I tied to crop it in Graphic Converter offline, then up load it , but the new upload was bigger, although still a croped version of the old... help! TonyClarke 11:40 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

Do you mean Image:Hobies.jpg and Image:Trimhobies.jpg? Because the trimmed image is definitely smaller than the original image. Egil uploaded a scaled version of Image:Hobies.jpg which was much smaller (pixel-wise and byte-wise) than the original. How about I rescale the trimmed one for you? -- Tim Starling 12:13 May 6, 2003 (UTC)
Okay, that's done now. I adjusted the levels a bit too. Just revert it if you don't like it.
Image compression is a bit of a dark art. If you're recompressing a jpg image, there will be far more loss of quality than it is worth.
Yes, I know. I was going to ask you for a higher quality image (if you have one), but it was getting late here in UTC+10 land, and I was only using a modem so multi-megabyte image files are a bit annoying. -- Tim Starling 00:15 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
Wikipedia:How to keep image file sizes as small as possible might help. --Menchi 15:20 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

KanjiReference ok?

Is this appropriate encylopedia content: KanjiReference:Index? If so, can someone explain why to easy my confusion? Is wikipedia also a foreign language textbook? -- mib 23:53 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

It seems something more suitable for Wiktionary. --Menchi 00:28 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

But so are alphabets, greek letters and so on. Anyway, There were some debates in the past. Please use Wikipedia:WikiProject Chinese characters. Thanks -- Taku 01:27 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

We don't seem to be able to Protect Image pages. Can this be done? -- Zoe

You can protect image pages, but this only protects the page from edits, it does not protect the associated image from re-uploads, reversions, or deletions of old file versions. That's probably a bug; I'll add it to my list of little fixes to do. (Additionally many older images don't actually have description pages, which can lead to weirdness in behavior.) --Brion 06:12 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

Logo Protection

Having our logo Image:Wiki.png vandalized is a great insult to Wikipedia and all of us. Why isn't that image protected? The vandal must be banned. --Menchi 20:36 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

should B.E.A.M be BEAM? Kingturtle 07:21 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Extremely Profane User Name

Lorenzarius, kt2, and I have discovered an extremely offensive user name: user:Dewlaylomo, which explicitly means "(go) fuck your aging mother" in Cantonese, a curse equivalent to "motherfucker". Mandarin has a similarly pronounced phrase as well. So it isn't just offensive to the Cantonese-speaking, it is offensive to all Chinese, unless s/he has a particularly unfeeling numb mind. This isn't just offensive to selective sensitive people.

As Scipius discovered, this user is at least a partial vandal. S/he replaced the American national flag with a skull and bones picture. (See User talk:Dewlaylomo)

This is unacceptable, period. We have a Wikipedia:No offensive usernames policy. If this username is discovered by more Chinese, Wikipedia will be viewed as anti-Chinese. The only option is deletion of the account name. --Menchi 22:03 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

The user hasn't made any edits since January. If he comes back and does anything stupid, he will be promptly banned. If it bothers you much, you may want to edit the comments containing the offensive name. --Eloquence 22:06 May 14, 2003 (UTC)
So you are saying that Wikipedia is tolerant of people defaming the Chinese, so long as they do not presently do "something stupid" to a degree that will cause their banning, like Lir? As long as they be a nice little sheep, they can use any offensive name, to any degree, for as long as they like? Even when it "needlessly discouraging other contributors, and distracting from the core purpose"? --Menchi 22:13 May 14, 2003 (UTC)
I'm saying that the account appears to be dead, so what's the rumpus? Don't feed the trolls. They want attention. --Eloquence
172.134.228.13 just posted on my Talk page saying that Lir was banned because s/he accused Wikipedia of racism. Is this implying that because user Dew did nothing major of that sort, s/he will be tolerated? That is exactly my point. Does one only get the attention of administrators when s/he is defamatory in action? How about a defamatory name, deliberately? The policy page explicitly stated "If enough people complain about your user name..., the administrators will change it." --Menchi 22:27 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

user:Dewlaylomo, has inserted a link to uglychinese.org. IMO his name is offensive on purpose. Ericd 22:53 14 May 2003 (UTC)

I too think that this name should in some way be removed. I'd be quite surprised if I was looking through a page's history and happened upon user:(go) fuck your aging mother. I agree that it's not urgent but I think if it's possible to rename it to Dew so that Dew appears in the edit histories then this task should be added to the bottom of a developers to-do list. -- Ams80 23:19 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Extremely Profane User Name

Extremely Profane User Name

This user showed up for a week in January, didn't really contribute anything useful, and left (as most vandals do). I removed his name, and I don't expect him back. LDC

I was messing around with color on my user page, and I wanted to see if I could change the color of one of the links on my page. You see, it is a link to an internal page, but wikipedia gives it the color of an external link. I found out that it is really easy to do this in a bit of a funky way with the <font> flag.
Here is an example: hEx MiXeR
and here is the code: [http://home.i1.net/~dwolfe/hexmixer/ <font color="FF6633">hEx MiXeR</font>]
MB 19:02 15 May 2003 (UTC)

Looks like it's not just the color flag that you can mess with. I changed the font on my userpage too. I will be messing around and seeing what types of neat stuff I can put in the wiki. Check out my page to see what I am up to :). MB 19:13 15 May 2003 (UTC)
Do you really have to modify the standard font choices? Changing the colour might be ok, but why have you made your user page appear in Courier? We should sternly discourage the use of different fonts. It's not neat - it's vulgar and does not add anything. Cgs
What is wrong with personal style when it comes to personal pages? MB 19:22 15 May 2003 (UTC)
Personal pages are fine - I just have nightmares of Wikipedia becoming like the internet in the mid 90's - all flashing text and scrolling banners and shit. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Cgs
Well then we need to decide what is acceptable, and what is not, and then decide how to enforce it. 1) Change the wiki source to disallow resricted formating changes, or 2) Just make policies. MB 19:33 15 May 2003 (UTC)

How do I find articles with the word nickname in them? When I do a search I am taken to the nickname article. I don't want that. I want to see a list of all the articles with the word nickname in them. I used to be able to do a search for word-appearances. Is the merging of the Search and Go buttons the reason why I can't do this anymore?

Being able to find word-appearances is important for editing. For example, when I made the No-Fly Zone page, I then went to each article that had the words no-fly zone, and I bracketed them to link to my new article. Kingturtle 05:49 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

I disabled title search again to get the machine running smoothly again this morning. If 'go' doesn't do what you want, for the meantime use an external search engine like google. --Brion 05:54 May 12, 2003 (UTC)
I used google to reduce use of the Americanism "sophomore" to mean "second", and it seemed sufficiently effective - more so than the wikipedia search, in fact. Try it! :) Martin 16:23 May 12, 2003 (UTC)
How do I get to the Wikipedia-google search page? Kingturtle 17:21 May 12, 2003 (UTC)
Like this. --Menchi 17:37 May 12, 2003 (UTC)
Visit it directly here (or just add "site:www.wikipedia.org" into your google queries). Or, put some junk into the search box and just hit 'search', then scroll down to the form. --Brion 17:34 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

Hi all, I'm sure that a while ago I came across a page somewhere (possibly on meta) which listed landmarks for all the wikipedias, so for example when the Danish wiki reached 5000 articles it would be announced on that page. I can't find it anymore (which in some ways makes me question whether it existed in the first place...), if anyone knows where it is could they let me know? I started looking for it today because I noticed that the German wiki had passed 15,000 articles. Anyway, if it does exist I'd appreciate having my mind put at rest! Thanks in advance -- Ams80 22:59 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Is this -- m:Wikipedia News -- what you're looking for? --Menchi 23:09 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
Yes, thankyou. It's a very sensible name for it, I searched for lots of things like 'events', 'landmarks' and 'timeline' but missed the obvious 'news'! Thanks again, Ams80
Perhaps this is where redirects come in. --Menchi 23:30 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

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Repeated wikification

What's the current concensus regarding links from (and over-linking of) years and dates in articles? Where should I look? A Style guide?

To what degree is it adviceable to link from all occurances of a certain year, or to limit it to when deemed relevant, or the first occurence in an article, or the first occurence under a headline or a line... :-) -- Ruhrjung 05:29 May 11, 2003 (UTC)


Usually one link per article is sufficient, generally first occurence, unless there's some reason that it would look or function better at a later occurance. -- Infrogmation 05:39 May 11, 2003 (UTC)



In tables, we may want a link repeated several times, because readers do not always start at the top and read through the table, as they more likely would with prose. --Ellmist Sunday, May 11th, 02003]

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

Are there any statistics on how often Special:Randompage gets accessed? I'm trying to figure out how often each page in the 'pedia gets viewed (on average). -- Crenner 03:06 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

According to Special:Statistics, we have 53.89 views per edit. --Menchi 03:18 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
That doesn't answer my question. I'm trying to figure out how often we can count on each page being viewed, and at the same time, being peer re-viewed. So, the only way to reliably get people to the very rarely-viewed pages is via Special:Randompage, hence my interest in the number of access per day/hour/whatever. -- Crenner 03:32 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
Average of about 1300 hits per day over the last week. --Brion 06:49 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
So, if the Random Page was really random, and 1300 hits per day was standard... And assuming there are 120,000 pages...
After 64 days, any article has a 50% chance of being shown. -- Tristan
However, when I do my daily random page searches, I am usually taken to the same pages as the day before, sometimes even in the same order. Kingturtle 22:16 16 May 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, i've noticed that too (and not just coz all the smalltownUSA's look the same :) ). It also seems to pick recently edited articles preferentially.--Tristanb 22:30 16 May 2003 (UTC)

I think there may be a conflict when uploading a picture. I mean when someone creates a new article, and upload a picture, nothing tells him that the picture already exists and the web site doesn't ask him to confirm. I guess a confirmation should be required. Thomas 21:23 May 10, 2003 (UTC)


There is deliberately the ability to upload new versions of images. If you make a mistake, the old version can be reverted back with one click. A warning/confirmation might be nice, but doesn't seem like a big deal. --Brion 02:58 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Ryder cup -- Clue me in, please. Why is the "c" in cup not capitalized? The Ryder Cup is the legally incorporated name of the tournament, it is not a descriptive word like say, coffee. The reason I ask, is that this type of label appears in several places at Wikipedia and it is affecting links. Thanks. Jacques Delson

So, move it to Ryder Cup... I just did. -- Infrogmation 07:11 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.


Quick note: could a developer look through the history of communist state - this edit by Tannin seems to be in a weird state... Martin

Nonresponsive Anon

142.59.27.250 has made some unreasonable changes. S/he separated a Chinese word arbitarily into two parts in the middle against the official convention that all characters of a word is to be written without a space in between (that represents a pause), on Kung Fu and Wushu. S/he also deleted mention of Cantonese terms, on Wushu. I have asked him/her why on the Kung Fu Talk page, but s/he did not respond. Ten minutes later, I posted a message on his Talk page. It's been over half an hour now, he still is ignoring. Although s/he has add the phrase "two word" before 功夫, seems as a response to my question. But it's wrong. 功夫 are two characters, they are collectively one word. What do we do? --Menchi 07:29 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

Why is it when I do a search for Novel I get a "Badly formed search query" result? Kingturtle 04:09 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

"Novel" is a "stop word" on Wikipedia search - it cannot be searched for. See Wikipedia:Common words, searching for which is not possible and Wikipedia:Searching. --rbrwr


Nearly all of the stop words are not essential article titles, but novel most certainly is. How do I go about creating a movement to remove the word novel from the stop word list? Kingturtle 03:02 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
It'd be useful for the reader to receive a link to Wikipedia:Common words, searching for which is not possible on the searched page, instead of the not very informative: "Badly formed search query. We could not process your query...." --Menchi 03:11 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Is there anything in the works to make the "@" symbol work in article titles? I ask because Genome@Home and Folding@Home don't show up correct as links on distributed computing. -- Minesweeper 22:33 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

I still don't see a way to put it in the actual title (other than workarounds like SETI(at)Home), but did you already work out that you can at least do things like [[SETI|SETI@Home]] (SETI@Home), or [[SETI(at)home|SETI@Home]] (SETI@Home)? It's a step, at least. -- John Owens 22:44 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
I suppose I'm a little more curious as to why it doesn't work in the first place. I don't have any plans to work on those pages for now, but in the long run, it seems this is something that should be resolved. Is there any reason we shouldn't allow "@" in wiki? Is it to prevent email links from being posted? -- Minesweeper 09:38 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

Hi, this could cause a little bit of debate... do we have a policy on images of the clitoris? The Wikipedia has just gained itself a picture of one and if you're easily offended I'd reccomend not clicking this. Have fun -- Ams80 21:29 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

If someone would like to make a cold, clinical, well-labeled drawing of the human female genitalia, that might be less controversial and just as educational. --Brion 21:36 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
I think that the image should be removed. I wouldn't mind a drawing or something, but this is clearly a porn image that has just been labeled to make it look like a medical image. I think we are being trolled here. I'm removing the link from clitoris. Cgs
OK - I'll draw a diagram. However I don't have a scanner and I'm not sure how good a digital photo of the drawing will look.... --mav 03:39 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
I remember seeing that "clitoris" was the a popular artcle immediately ranked after your user page. So, it seems like "the logical thing to do." --Menchi 03:52 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
I forgot about that - I guess subconsciously I'm trying to even things up. ;-) Alas, my blasted memory stick card reader doesn't want to mount for some reason so I can't upload my drawing yet. It didn't take long - I'm sure somebody else can whip up an even better one before I get my card reader to work. --mav 05:08 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
talk at image talk:Clitoris.jpg, talk:clitoris

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

a minor problem with redirect

I noticed that when I'm redirected to another page, the usual statement "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." doesn't show up. Instead, it says "redirected from _____." Not that it's a big problem, but should I bring it to sourceforge? Tomos 21:07 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

As a user, I'd prefer that this "redirected from..." statement appear in those cases. I like to know when I'm being sent somewhere other than where I thought I was going. As a contributor, I may find the redirect either unnecessary or inappropriate, and then decide to start an article for the page I was trying to pull up in the first place. RL Barrett 03:43 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
There's another problem with this, which should become irrelevant within the near future: the (old server) and (new server) indicators, for www/pliny and larousse, respectively, disappear when the redirect notice appears. Can we have both "from Wikipedia" and "redirected from" on a redirected page? --Geoffrey 00:11 15 May 2003 (UTC)
What, the huge logo "WIKIPEDIA The Free Encyclopedia" isn't enough of a clue for you? ;) --Brion 00:15 15 May 2003 (UTC)

So, I've had this problem occasionally sprout up when creating redirect pages. Basically, the redirect doesn't work, and when I try to edit to correct it, it gives me the edit page for the page that I'm trying to redirect to. How can this be created? john 03:28 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

If you mean the edit conflict bug, I submitted it to the SourceForge bug tracker some time during the last ice age. Read this and tell us if it sounds familiar. -- Tim Starling 03:38 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
I don't think that's what it is, but I'm not sure. With the current problem edits Lord Beaconsfield and Earl of Beaconsfield, which are supposed to redirect to Benjamin Disraeli, they apparently work fine on IE, and just don't work for my stupid Netscape. john 03:41 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
Have you tried clearing your cache or doing a shift+reload? -- Minesweeper 22:33 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Technical: IPA

Why is it that on IE 5, while this web site can display every single IPA letters and diacritics correctly, none of the Wikipedias can display any, except the standard 26 English letters? Something looks wrong. We should better WP. --Menchi 07:13 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

It's the difference between <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> and <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">, I suspect.
--Paul A 08:10 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
That reminds me, are there plans afoot for following LiveJournal and using UTF-8? (LJ did so, and arranged for server-side on-the-fly translation of "legacy" entries to UTF-8 - and LJ is a good example because that's mostly user-contributed content too. Most users were unware of the change to UTF-8, but those that maintained journals in non-english charsets were overjoyed.) Tenbaset 23:21 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
We already run in UTF-8 on all phase 3 wikis except for English, Danish, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish. The reason the western European languages haven't been moved over yet is that when you edit a page on a wiki, your browser has a chance to screw up not just your contributions but the entire contents of the page. It happens fairly regularly on meta and wiktionary that someone (usually our dear Anthere :) destroys every non-ASCII character in a page by making an edit with a browser that has broken UTF-8 support, and someone else has to go in and fix them. Until we either banish all such browsers ;) or make tweaks to make safe round-trip edits in those browsers without inconveniencing the rest of us with too much armor, the western european languages will stay in Latin-1.
Note that you can use all the Unicode characters you want, including IPA, with &#12345; etc. See Wikipedia:Special characters. --Brion 00:15 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

Suggestion: keep using SAMPA in markup, but provide an option to have this "translated" into IPA characters if the user chooses. -- Tarquin 08:23 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

Can we add to the developer's list adapting a similar code from that page to Wikipedia, so IPA displays properly? --Menchi 09:40 16 May 2003 (UTC)

Function Request: "Move Page" in Nostalgia

Could we have the "Move this page" option available in Nostalgia skin? Maybe somewhere on the lower bar, among "Discuss this page", "Watch this page", etc. --Menchi 12:32 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Why do nobody like Nostalgia skin? It's so big and wide! Surely it's lacking in this one function, but that can be fixed, can't it? --Menchi 06:36 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

I suggest create a wiki tag for translation without the need of create a new article in the destination language. For example, if I am in new-article and see no translation to my natural language, I could use this translation tag (i.e. [[t:languageaISObbreviation:translationA]]<nowiki>) to indicate that there is no correspondant article in the another language, but the translation of the article to the another langue is ''translationA''.

I can't get <math> to work right. Pizza Puzzle

Example? --Menchi 23:04 15 May 2003 (UTC)
  •  
  •  
  •  
If you want a fraction you would use "2 + 3 + \frac{3}{7} = 3". See Wikipedia:TeX markup and associated external links. -- Tim Starling 03:41 16 May 2003 (UTC)
 

I don't want a fraction, I want to display the above equations as <math> is supposed to display stuff; rather than as normal text. Pizza Puzzle

You mean something like (with a correct answer)
 
? {2+3 \over 7+4}={5 \over 11}, then, if that's what you mean. If not, could you be a bit clearer what you want? If, on the gripping hand, you mean it displaying as an image instead of text, that's set in your Special:Preferences page. -- John Owens 05:29 16 May 2003 (UTC)
PP, please see the first paragraph of Wikipedia:TeX markup for an explanation. --Brion 06:14 16 May 2003 (UTC)

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

Why isn't the default set to render png? Pizza Puzzle

Because the purpose is not to render pngs. It's to layout math. The rasterization is an ugly ugly hack which is necessary to render many relatively complex equations in a satisfactory manner until MathML support is widespread enough that we can produce that as output (which will scale with your font size, print nice, can be selected and copied, etc). --Brion 11:32 16 May 2003 (UTC)
Why do you think the default should be to render pngs? Cgs

What do we do when an article is so poorly written it might as well not be there? I'm refering to BEAM written by Workisfun. No capital letters, little punctuation, crap spelling, sentences that are all inside out and upside down. English may not be his first language, but honestly - I send mobile phone text messages that are better thought out and more formal than this. Some examples: "aestetics-obviously it has to look like something. like an ant", "anyways another way to approach this is that by using random patterns that use motor feedback", "Biology-meaning inspired by particularly bugs which uses their gates". It's too bad to just apply a few copy edits. What should we do? Cgs

Assuming you don't already know everything about the subject, copyedit it and learn something new. You benefit from knowledge, Wikipedia benefits from a better article. Failing that, list it on pages needing attention and offer some WikiMoney to fix it. :) Martin 19:40 May 15, 2003 (UTC)

I believe the Image Upload page has been disabled on the old and the new servers for about 36 hours now. Can anyone tell me when it might come back?
Thanks Adrian Pingstone 14:59 May 15, 2003 (UTC)

support for info on this, and for updating Wikipedia:Most_active_Wikipedians jimfbleak 15:27 May 15, 2003 (UTC)
Uploads are now enabled on the new server. (But note that newly uploaded files won't appear on the old server.) Jason's just made the DNS change, so at some point in the near future it should be taking over; in the meantime you can visit it directly at http://larousse.wikipedia.org/ --Brion 17:39 May 15, 2003 (UTC)
What is up with the new server? What is better? Will we still be using the old server for some things? I want deatails! :) MB 18:03 15 May 2003 (UTC)
Load sharing of web and database on two servers; will increase performance, and the second server will act as a backup in case one goes down. --Eloquence 18:05 15 May 2003 (UTC)
Very cool! Maybe we will be able to get some features back up and running here soon! MB 18:34 15 May 2003 (UTC)

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Just an announcement, I've added a Wikipedia:Standard user greeting for those who are interested. I assume this is the appropriate place for this? Are there any pages that should link to this? MB 18:50 14 May 2003 (UTC)

Does anyone know of any pages that talk about greating new users? MB 18:51 14 May 2003 (UTC)
link it from the Boilerplate text page -- Tarquin

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WOW! SALT II is terrible! It appears to be nothing but the text of the treaty. I think a brief description of the treaty, and maybe some history would be more approriate with an extern link to the actual treaty. MB 15:12 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

try wikipedia:pages needing attention - but be bold in making terrible entries into brilliant prose.

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

What do you do when you find entries like "kdd is french rap very good the first singer of this crew is Dadoo or dadppda and he made a new album solo very good" (KDD) ? This is POV, and stubbish but it gives information (ok... at least now I know it's french rap). Muriel Gottrop

That's a matter of opinion, but I would say rewrite it and add the stub warning from Wikipedia:Boilerplate text. Some contributors may argue for deletion. -- Tim Starling 15:10 14 May 2003 (UTC)
For slightly larger POV entries, slap on a NPOV dispute header, and come back to fix it at your leisure. Martin


Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

I believe that Ativan is a trademark used for the drug lorazepam...but i may be wrong. If so...shouldn't the article be called Lorazepam rather than Ativan...with Ativan redirecting to Lorazepam? Kingturtle 07:32 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

That might be a good idea, but please don't forget that also the generic names of drugs often exist in a bunch of similar versions. When doing a search for Lorazepam in any online directory I would believe it would be good to search for Lorazepame and N05B A06 at the same time. (The latter being the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System-code (i.e. the ATC-code). -- Ruhrjung 07:44 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

should B.E.A.M be BEAM? Kingturtle 07:21 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Yes. It should be whatever is most commonly used, and judging by the external link, that means BEAM. -- Tim Starling 15:10 14 May 2003 (UTC)
Changed it. Kingturtle 22:59 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Is it maybe time to update Wikipedia:Most_active_Wikipedians again? jaknouse 07:04 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Color me naive, but what does Bytesexual mean? Kingturtle 06:08 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Maybe you want to RAM your hard drive into your
software . . . until it's a floppy? (Sorry, I couldn't resist such a straight line). jaknouse 07:01 May 14, 2003 (UTC)
The sexuality of a byte (or any word) is if it is low endian or high endian (where the most significant bit is). bytesexuality == endianess.

Announcing a naming conventions vote

Since it's topical... There's a vote on in Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles) to decide how to put years in titles. We don't have a particular standard at the moment - different articles use different options. Voting closes in one month's time: June 13 (aka 13 June). If you don't vote, you forfeit the right to bitch if you don't like the outcome! *grin* Martin

Surely that should be "If you vote, you forfeit the right to bitch if you don't like the outcome!" ? Derek Ross

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

You've heard of pages so big they can't be edited? I've found one so big it can't even be displayed, as far as I can tell. List of rock and roll albums, 156K. I don't know what's to be done with this... but paradoxically, I can edit it - I assume the HTML markup that the page generates is really big though, causing my problems viewing it. Evercat 21:49 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

I can view it. It is awful big, though; the obvious thing to do would be to try breaking it into sections by decade, since it's chronological to begin with. --Brion 22:39 May 13, 2003 (UTC)
What format's good for the names? How does List of rock and roll albums (1960s) etc sound? Hmm, that runs into the problem of what the page starting at 2000 is called... suggestions? Evercat
or List of rock and roll albums, 1960s; 1960s list of rock and roll albums; list of rock and roll albums of the 1960s - see the vote below... :) The decade starting at 2000 would be the 2000s - in Wikipedia that should always refer to the decade rather than the century or the millenium... Martin
But that doesn't sound right. I mean, how do I actually speak the word "2000s"? Evercat
/'tu"θaUzndz/ --Brion


A little typo: þ -> θ --Menchi 06:44 May 14, 2003 (UTC)
Oops! Thanks. --Brion

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

Is there any reason why you can't put a comment on a move page as you can on an edit page to explain briefly why you are doing it, or apologising for a move to a mispelt page title? jimfbleak 15:29 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Good idea. You can always put something on the talk page, but I quite often want to add a comment when moving pages. Depend on how hard it is to implememt, I guess. Tannin
I think the big problem with that would be, you can only have one summary per edit, and it's crucial that it include the actual name of the page it was moved to, so it can be tracked down if it needs to be moved back. There might be an adequate solution involving some character which oughtn't appear in any article titles to separate an automated move summary and a user comment, and glomming them together, but no good punctuation to fit the need comes to mind offhand; the only things coming to mind that can't be in titles are the double quote '"', and at symbol '@'. -- John Owens 16:33 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Talking of comments, it would also be nice to be able to embed a comment within an article page so that it showed up while editing but not while viewing. This would be useful for marking pieces of text or facts which are in fact correct even though they appear to be wrong to a casual reader. -- Derek Ross

I would argue that in this case you should add text to explain to the casual reader why the fact is right even though it appears wrong. If you don't, then casual readers are less likely to trust the article, because they wil believe that it is "clearly inaccurate". Martin
That isn't always practical. The case that made me think of this form of commenting was the capitalisation of E. E. Cummings. That is explained in the article but not everywhere that a link appears, and it would be inappropriate to add a visible explanation to every article which contained a link to his article. In principle, you could use the talk page but in practice, people don't check the talk page before fixing what they think are typoes. Check the 1894 article for a demonstration of appropriate use of this type of comment. It's intended for an editor, not a reader and thus it makes sense that it will only be visible to an editor. -- Derek Ross


I thought you could do that with HTML comments? Tannin

Excellent! Can you give an example ? -- Derek Ross

Let me test a bit with previews... <!-- comment here --> OK, that works, that's how it's done (but without the <nowiki>, if you're looking at the page source here). -- John Owens 16:33 May 13, 2003 (UTC)
Is this documented somewhere obvious? If not, it should be. MB 17:41 May 13, 2003 (UTC)
Now it is, just added to Wikipedia:How to edit a page. -- John Owens 17:47 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, guys. That's a neat feature. -- Derek Ross

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

FA Premier league, season review

Would it be worthwhile to have an article about a particular season in the English football Premier league. I'm planning to add the end of season league table, as well as a few miscellaneous highlights. For example, Arsenal F.C. losing their xx point lead, Sunderland A.F.C. having the worst season ever. etc.

Which naming format should this article use? I want to name it as a subpage of the main FA Premier league page: FA Premier league/2002-03.

Erzengel 13:09 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

you may wish to read Wikipedia:Naming conventions (years in titles) and participate in the related discussion. No convention has been set yet, though FA Premier league, 2002-3 and 2002-3 FA Premier league would probably both have some support. Try one of those? Martin 13:23 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

The page was helpful, but there are no mentions of events spanning years yet. Usually, soccer seasons are called 2002/03 or 2002-03 (two digits). I feel inclined to follow the convention set by the Football World Cup pages, so I'm tempted to go for FA Premier league 2002-03. Erzengel 13:50 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

  • At NBA.COM, on player pages, they write 00-01 to represent seasons (See: [4])
  • At NHL,COM, on player pages, they write 2000-2001 to represent seasons (see: [5])
  • At Yahoo.com, for both the NBA and NHL, 2001 is written to represent the 2000-2001 season (see [6] and [7])
  • for what its worth, Kingturtle 22:16 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

There is a table somewhere of the people with most edits on Wiki, so presumably there is some software counting this for each user.

Whilst I would not aspire to such heights as that table, I would be interested to know my own figures, either for total edits, new articles or both. Is there any way of finding this data, or is it information restricted to administrators? (I don't want to count all the way back through My Contributions, even if it keeps all edits. jimfbleak 12:06 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians. It's about due for an update, by the way. Tannin
Thanks for the pointer, I knew I could depend on you for help. Unfortunately, since I don't make the top 200 list, I'm still no wiser about my own figures. jimfbleak


If, after your recent efforts, you don't make the top 200 next time one of the software gurus runs the counting script, I'll eat my cat. Tannin (PS: ~1000 to 1500 edits would be my guess. Does the Wikidollar concept extent to making small wagers? I'll put W$10 on it.)

Logo/Image Protection

Having our logo Image:Wiki.png vandalized is a great insult to Wikipedia and all of us. Why isn't that image protected? The vandal must be banned. --Menchi 20:36 May 11, 2003 (UTC)


Brion's changes this so uploading a new wiki.png doesn't change the logo
The vandal has been blocked, but note that such blocks only have limited effectiveness in enforcing bans. Martin 16:21 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

We don't seem to be able to Protect Image pages. Can this be done? -- Zoe

You can protect image pages, but this only protects the page from edits, it does not protect the associated image from re-uploads, reversions, or deletions of old file versions. That's probably a bug; I'll add it to my list of little fixes to do. (Additionally many older images don't actually have description pages, which can lead to weirdness in behavior.) --Brion 06:12 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

Please block ip 203.108.4.70 for repeated vandelism. See User contributions for changes. Almost all have been vandelism.

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

I get a 404 on the TeX images in Wilson's theorem. In all other pages it seems to work fine. This is on the new server. -- Arvindn 07:12 16 May 2003 (UTC)


I've gone ahead and cleared the tex cache table, so it'll regenerate those that were on the old server but not the new one. Should be fine now. --Brion 07:17 16 May 2003 (UTC)

Discussion has concluded. Ready to be moved.

I hadn't realised until I saw an item above that it is possible to see other user's contribution list. This has obvious benefits for keeping track in an area of shared interest, and I can understand how to do it for a not-logged-in contributor. How can I see the list for a logged-in contributor, when I don't know the relevant number? jimfbleak 10:12 16 May 2003 (UTC)

Bring up their user page, cick "User contributions" in the sidebar or bottom links bar. --Brion
  1. It's on the lower bar if you use Nostalgia skin.
  2. Also, you can copy the URL: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=XX , where XX is the user name. --Menchi 10:19 16 May 2003 (UTC)
Duh! Sometimes I wonder at my failure to see the obvious-thanks Brion, menchi. jimfbleak

This is really stupid, but... I posted in a talk: page regarding profanity, and now I can't find it. I know it's not the regular discussion page for profanity.
Smack 23:57 19 May 2003 (UTC)

There's currently a (very minor) edit-war going on in the London Congestion Charge page about whether the caption on the final picture, which shows a one of the signs that indication one is leaving the charge scheme area, should read "'London Congestion Charge Zone Ends' sign", which is just a re-reading of the content of the picture, after all, or "You are now leaving the London Congestion Charge article", or some an otherwise similar wording of either. There's a vote going on on the talk page over whether it should be changed to the former from the latter after remaining as it was for many months; the primary charge against keeping the wording is that wikipedia should remain bereft of humour and human touches, as they smack of improfessionalism. Of course, the wording I've just used is somewhat POV, but we're getting tired of people editing it back and forth. Would anybody else like to weigh-in with their vote? James F. 16:49 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Professionalism is a *bad* thing, but even if it weren't, the British convention is to put humourous captions on all photos even in The Economist, newspapers, etc. While the issue is a wonderful one to help dolts self-identify, it should be resolved in your favour, especially for such a UK article. "You are now leaving..." is the reader's POV, one for which there is little enough respect around here as it is.

Does anybody know what is going on with inherently funny word? I consider myself to have decent sense of humour (I'm British after all), but this page just seems to be a list of words which someone is saying are funny. Is this just the POV of someone (someone who laughs each time he reads "sock"), or am I missing the big joke? CGS 12:27 18 May 2003 (UTC)

I agree Mintguy 12:28 18 May 2003 (UTC)
I've added it to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. CGS 13:03 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Nested redirect

Why is Calligrapher redirect nested... three times? --Menchi 12:21 18 May 2003 (UTC)

It disappeared! --Menchi 12:26 18 May 2003 (UTC)
Ams removed the redirect temporarily.... I thought it's the system self-fixes! :-D --Menchi 12:32 18 May 2003 (UTC)
It looks from the edit history that you created the page with #REDIRECT Calligrapher as its content. I'm not sure if you did this deliberately or that something has gone wrong with the software. The reason it's nested is that if a redirect points to a redirect then the software doesn't perfrom the second redirect. I assume this was done to avoid unending loops either from an article to itself or between two or more articles. So I think in the What links here page it shows up three times as it links to itself and then to itself again but then stops as the software doesn't look any further. I hope that made some sense. Regards -- Ams80 12:36 18 May 2003 (UTC)
I meant to do #REDIRECT Calligraph'''y'''! Don't know what I was thinking, getting myself into a loop.... --Menchi 13:58 18 May 2003 (UTC)

I'm just wondering if there is any convention regarding the use of dates in the Julian Calendar and how they should be mentioned along with the Gregorian Calendar dates. I just did an initial draft of Tikhon of Moscow and had both dates for his death, I put them both in the parenthetical date listing at the beginning and User:Eloquence took out the Gregorian Calendar date not knowing it was an alternate date (I've now tried to make it clear and put the mention to the Julian calendar date at the end). As the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union used these Old Style calendar dates it is often not clear which date is being used, also the O.S. dates are still used in many eastern Orthodoxy churches such as January 7 for Christmas (december 25) and January 14 as the date for the Christian religious celebration of News Year's Day. Alex756 11:20 18 May 2003 (UTC)

While I have a similar problem, with years rather than dates, in some of my articles on British coinage, I just quote "Old Style" as necessary, e.g. British coin Guinea begins "The Guinea coin of 1663 was the first British machine-struck gold coin. The first one was produced on 6 February 1663 (1662 Old Style), and was made legal currency by a Proclamation of 27 March 1663." since 25th March was New Years' Day at the time. -- Arwel 12:07 18 May 2003 (UTC)


How are readers supposed to know what "old style" means? CGS 12:18 18 May 2003 (UTC)
By reading the linked article at old style, of course. :-) Stan 13:06 18 May 2003 (UTC)
Would be better to explicity write Julian Calendar -- old style could mean other things -- Tarquin 13:37 18 May 2003 (UTC)
Should it be Old Style, old style or both? I've redirected Old Style to Julian Calendar and am mentioning it in the first sentence there. I have not heard any other use of O.S. or Old Style. It only seems to like to my usage of it. Alex756 13:42 18 May 2003 (UTC)
I seems it is also used for the same meaning on Cocos Island. Alex756
"Old Style" is commonly used in the field of history (I'm not sure about the capitalisation of it, just the words) when discussing a period where both forms of calender were in use. Link it to the article. Someone will write it sooner or later. Tannin 13:55 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Regarding the news on the front page, users may click a link and ask themselves, "Why is this in the news?". IE: Why is EU in the news? I suggest that links have a "Purpose" clause. When you hover over a link, this text should be shown after the article name in the word bubble. And when you click the link the Purpose clause should also appear above the article text highlighted. Example: [ [ European_Union|EU|On April 16, 2003 the treaty of Accession was signed by the 10 new members and the 15 old ones in Athens. ] ] 24.198.144.163

How about a link to a news website too? CGS 12:03 18 May 2003 (UTC)

When detailing Swedish subjects I have run into the problem that I don't know how or when to translate names. For example, say I want to write about Gyllene Tider which is a Swedish pop music band. Since there is AFAIK no official English translation to that name should I make up one on my own. Golden Times? Or Falukorv which is a trademark and the closest english translation I can think of is "Falu Wurst" which isnt that accurate.

Just use the Swedish name if there is no English translation. I'd say use Gyllene Tider for the pop band. -- Tarquin 23:06 17 May 2003 (UTC)

help! i dove into where i shouldn't have dove. i thought it would be easy to change September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack to September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks....but there are toooooo many other pages that are effected, and I want to switch them back. Could someone do me a favor and ROLL BACK everything i did from 22:10 17 May 2003 until 22:25 17 May 2003....i would be much obliged. Kingturtle 22:48 17 May 2003 (UTC)

Man, I sure learned that lesson the hard way. Once something gets named it gets so entrenched into wikipedia that changing an article title can be a real nightmare. And changing it back is the best thing to do. Turns out, the ROLL BACK feature doesn't work for MOVING BACK articles to original names. alas. I think I put everything back where it was before I made my attempts. sigh. I was sweating like a pig about it. Kingturtle 00:16 18 May 2003 (UTC)
Can I say "I told you so" now, or would that not be an appropriate expression of WikiLove? ;-) Martin
I thought you could just create a new page called "...attacks," move all the source code into it, and turn the old page into a redirect. Smack
I thought so too...but there are also:

September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Aftermath -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Timeline September 11 -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Hijackers -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Celebrations -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Casualties -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Plane casualties -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/City of New York casualties -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Pentagon casualties -- Timeline of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Donations -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Non-American casualties -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Back history -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Closings and Cancellations -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Footer template -- September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Memorials and services -- And that isn't even a quarter of them. I realized I was in over my head and that I'd do more harm than good over changing just one little letter. And what if I missed a few? It is too complex a set of pages. Kingturtle 09:49 18 May 2003 (UTC)


You don't have to change all the links; that's why we have redirects. Moving a page automatically creates a redirect from the old title to the new title, so anyone following a link to the old title is automatically brought to the new one. The one thing you do have to do is make sure that any redirects to the old title are updated, since the wiki refuses to automatically forward a chain of redirects in order to avoid potential infinite loops. You can find the redirect pages from the "what links here" list: September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, September 11 Terrorist Attack, September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, September 11 terrorist attack, September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, September 11th, Nine-eleven, Nine eleven, 9/11, September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Bush September 14, 2001 speech, Michael Carroll, Peter Carroll, September 11, 2001, 9-11, September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks. Yeah, it's a few, but it's not a gajillion, and it's not too hard to find where the links are in them. :) --Brion 10:37 18 May 2003 (UTC)
This has been mentioned several times before: The current way redirects work is ugly and that is why people prefer direct links. The way things are now, "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." is replaced by a "redirected from" statement. This just screams to the user, "the method you have used to access this page is deprecated." Few people took issue with redirects in Phase II - it might have been due to the fact that the redirect statement was higher up on the page then. --mav 10:45 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Nicknames

For some reason none of my emails to the list are getting through (you guys fed up with me or something? ;) So here's my ideas for the current nicknames debate:

In itself, the nickname function is fine. Lee can sign "LDC", Mav "Mav". Like many things, if it's used *responsibly* there isn't a problem.

Three options:

  1. remove the function (ie, exercise "dev power" and remove it for all the well-behaved people)
  2. allow sysops / devs to edit the nicknames of users who are abusing (sysop power)
  3. suggest that anyone feel free to edit an instance of a signature that obscures the real user name, just by editing the wiki text. (people power)

I'd say go with 3. -- Tarquin 14:45 17 May 2003 (UTC)

Yup: 3 is good. Tannin
I've been doing #3 already, as and when I run into old Kanji signatures and the like. Martin

This was brought up at Talk:Main Page. It seems the article counter on the Main Page and Special:Statistics is stuck at 120701 articles. Does this have something to do with the recent webserver/database reconfiguration? -- Minesweeper 11:10 17 May 2003 (UTC)

Some articles are long enough but just plain bad, viz. French Revolution. It's short on facts, and stylistically worthy of a fifteen-year-old. There is a talk: entry calling for it to be rewritten, and detailing various and sundry problems. That entry was written no later than March, but apparently nothing substantial has been done.

Here's an idea that could force the rewriting of the article. Just delete the entire text, place a link to the article in its former state, and a note kindly asking history buffs to step forward and whip up a new article.

as poor as this article is, I believe it is more informative than a blank sheet of paper. Martin 13:13 17 May 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, but that's what the helpful link to the prior revision is for. Smack

Is there a page which details progress so far in this project? -- 195.137.39.195 04:20 17 May 2003 (UTC)

See:

I was trying to get the alt text of an image on my user page to be the url where the original could be found, so I tried the following as the wiki link [[Image:Mbeckerhawaii1.jpg|<nowiki>http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~mdb29/images/hawaii1.jpg]]</nowiki> and this is the html that the pedia shot out: <a href="/wiki/Image:Mbeckerhawaii1.jpg" class='image' title="http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~mdb29/images/hawaii1.jpg"><img border=0 src="/upload/b/b0/Mbeckerhawaii1.jpg" alt="3iyZiyA7iMwg5rhxP0Dcc9oTnj8qD1jm1Sfv4"></a>.
How come the alt tag for the image is "3iyZiyA7iMwg5rhxP0Dcc9oTnj8qD1jm1Sfv4"? How come what I expected to be the alt tag " http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~mdb29/images/hawaii1.jpg" ended up being the title tag? Is this a bug? MB 23:23 16 May 2003 (UTC)

hmmm, there is is again. When I type http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~mdb29/images/hawaii1.jpg the wiki outputs "3iyZiyA7iMwg5rhxP0Dcc9oTnj8qD1jm1Sfv4". Please see the wiki source (i.e. edit this page) to see what I mean. MB 23:26 16 May 2003 (UTC)
WOW! When I typed "3iyZiyA7iMwg5rhxP0Dcc9oTnj8qD1jm1Sfv4"? look what it outputed! " http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~mdb29/images/hawaii1.jpg"? Hehe I can't display it with <wiki>" http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~mdb29/images/hawaii1.jpg"?</nowiki> I bet! This is really wierd. I bet this is a parsing problem. What can I say, I am good at breaking things :) MB 23:32 16 May 2003 (UTC)
Known bug. Don't put 'nowiki' text inside a link. --Brion 23:35 16 May 2003 (UTC)
Alright, I found a sutable alternative User:Mbecker. MB 23:43 16 May 2003 (UTC)

What is the policy on blocking vandals? Why should they be unblocked? MB 22:53 16 May 2003 (UTC)

We can't block vandals, only IP addresses or login names. Many IP addresses are dynamic, meaning they are reassigned frequently to different customers of some ISP, or belong to public terminals or proxy servers which may serve many different people over a long period of time. As such, long-term IP bans are in general not a useful solution: they often wouldn't catch the same person coming back later, and often will hit legitimate users who had nothing to do with the vandalism. IP bans are only a short-term tool, and should not be left in place over a long period of time. --Brion 22:59 16 May 2003 (UTC)

An oddity I've noticed... In the history of The Conservative Party (UK) [8] there are two edits from earlier today by User:Realpolitik; however, the link under the name "Realpolitik" is not to his/her (empty) user page, but to his/her contributions [9], as if "Realpolitik" were an anon IP address. Curiously, there are no contributions listed there, not even the edits to The Conservative Party (UK). I'm getting the "contributions" link in my watchlist as well, and saw it on Recent Changes earlier, and see it whether I'm logged in or not. Do other people see this behaviour? Can anybody explain it to me? --rbrwr

This is a known bug that seems to be related to some change in the server configuration. Haven't yet had a chance to figure out the exact cause, but it seems to be triggered when a user who was logged in but no longer is (logged out? timeout?) makes additional edits. The edit is incorrectly marked with the last-used username, but still not with the user ID, leading to the buggy contribs links. --Brion 22:22 16 May 2003 (UTC)
Thanks, Brion. --rbrwr

Is there some way to automatically insert your user name and a time stamp into an article? I see people with things like lommer 04:48 16 May 2003 (UTC), and it's always the same format, so I guess there is something, but I've had a good search and I can't see any reference to such a tool. Cgs

Three tildes in a row thus: ~~~ will give a link to your user page thus: Camembert. Four tildes in a row will add the date stamp as well (it's covered in Wikipedia:How to edit a page, by the way, though isn't easy to find among everything else). --Camembert 18:36 16 May 2003 (UTC)
Thanks CGS 21:13 16 May 2003 (UTC)

There isn't a page titled E=mc^2 (or some variant). shouldn't there be? Are = signs not allowed in titles or is there another reason why this isn't so? -- lommer 04:48 16 May 2003 (UTC) (moved by Cgs to the bottom of the page, it was at the top for some reason)

The policy of putting new text at the bottom does seem counterintuitive. Pizza Puzzle

Yes, because most texts read from bottom to top :) Cgs

"=" doesn't seem to be a legal character: the PHP script says the legal characters are "-,.()' &;%!?_0-9A-Za-z\\/:\\xA0-\\xFF". We do have a nice discussion of E=mc2 at special relativity. -- Tim Starling 01:52 17 May 2003 (UTC)

Goatse.cx is going way overboard with its content. Do we really need such graphic details?

  • Another parody, showing a wide open mouth instead of a gaping anus, and an ice cream instead of a man with a large penis.
  • A cartoon rabbit with a pancake on its head opens its anus

Are we going to start giving graphic details of shitfreaks.com and snuffx.com next? (NOTE: DO NOT VIEW SHITFREAKS.COM or SNUFFX.COM; they were just an example to mention for my argument). Kingturtle 04:52 20 May 2003 (UTC)

I do believe they are important to the following warning ('This link takes you directly to the picture described above'). Remember, not all readers or users are 'adults', however how responsible they may be for their own actions. -- Sigg3.net
You obviously didn't read my question. I said nothing about the content of goatsex. I was raising a question about the lengthy, explicit details given in the wikipedia article. How about replacing Another parody, showing a wide open mouth instead of a gaping anus, and an ice cream instead of a man with a large penis with Parody site involving an open mouth and ice cream. Kingturtle 22:00 20 May 2003 (UTC)
With things such as this and the clitoris image (it was a photograph of a clitoris if you didn't see it, taken from a porn page) how about we implement some sort of flag system. Articles that could be very offensive could be flagged, allowing Wikipedia to generate ratings meta information and just so that it is recorded that something could seriously offend. And yes, I do think an article on Goatse.cx is overboard, although it is linked to from slashdot trolling, so it's not usless content. CGS 09:20 20 May 2003 (UTC)
I really like this idea! We could even implement adult filtering this way, like google has with it's image search. MB 14:20 20 May 2003 (UTC)
Absolutely not. Wikipedia must be a complete and informative encyclopedia. Please take your offsenses and set up your own Censorpedia if that's what you want. --Brion 17:29 20 May 2003 (UTC)
For heaven's sake Brion, who said anything about censorship? A note saying that an article may be seriously offensive is giving the reader more information, not taking it away as in censorship. CGS 17:54 20 May 2003 (UTC).
MB did, see above. The first step is a "family-friendly" filter. The next step is to enable it by default. The third step is to remove access to "adult" articles without a click-through page (after all, someone might accidentally click a link and be offended!) The fourth step is requiring a credit card to prove one is an adult in order to read clitoris or homosexuality. No slippery slope for me, thanks. --Brion 18:18 20 May 2003 (UTC)
We should abondon Wikipedia! The first step is a "free" encyclopedia. The next step is to overthrow the US government and destroy the world!. Joking aside, I think I should explain what I mean by flag. You see in the goatse.cx article there is a warning that the user might find the site very offensive? Do you have a problem with that? All I'm saying is that we could make that warning part of the system, allowing potentionaly very offensive articles to be spotted before you start reading them or look at the picture (I remember the first time I saw goatse.cx after a link on Slashdot - it's forever burned on my retina now, I wouldn't have minded a flag next to the slashdot link). CGS 18:28 20 May 2003 (UTC).
And actually, having this flag would enable us to be a more "complete and informative encyclopedia", because we wouldn't have to worry about if articles like goatse.cx and the clitoris photograph were too offensive anymore. CGS 17:59 20 May 2003 (UTC).
Nonsense. The only thing we have to worry about is whether they are informative, useful, and usable here under our copyright/license terms. They aren't required to not be "offensive". NPOV requires that we describe and ascribe the relevent points of view on a subject, not that we take active steps to hide information. --Brion 18:18 20 May 2003 (UTC)
What is wrong with having an adult filter option? Or at least some way of flagging particular pages as having offensive material. If we don't have this type of option, then companies that make filtering software will add us to thier lists of offensive sites, and then a lot of people who could use the 'pedia, won't have access to it. If I have a child, I wouldn't want them using the 'pedia, and accidentally wondering into goatse.cx, or some other pages unsuitable for children. I am totally against censorship, but this is something that we should seriously consider working into the 'pedia. MB 18:33 20 May 2003 (UTC)
Wikipedia's editing model is inherently "dangerous" from the point of those who would censor. After all, your hypothetical child could click on Pokémon and be presented with naughty words / porn / dangerous political ideas that someone has just inserted. I fully expect censorware to block this entire site for a number of reasons -- removing fuck, felching, and clitoris isn't going to change that once we're discovered -- and those foolish enough to purchase their products are welcome to it. Those unfortunate enough to be stuck behind censorware that someone else has purchased to "protect" them should visit http://peacefire.org/ for more information on censorware, and should engage in community activism to get their rights restored and the software removed. If you don't think that's going to be effective, then you are welcome to make a derivitive site that includes only the non-"offensive" content. (Censorware tends to mark a *lot* of things "offensive", including left-wing politics, criticism of their software, and any number of pages including legitimate words in a non-offensive context, like the name "Dick".) --Brion 20:22 20 May 2003 (UTC)
Y'know, you could possibly put a "warning: some may find the content below offensive..." thingie somewhere near the top of the page(like the standard "spoiler warning") though I'm not convinced it's necessary it would be useable without having to write special filter software then determine which things need to be filtered Logotu 20:07 20 May 2003 (UTC)
That would be silly, but fine. --Brion 20:22 20 May 2003 (UTC)
Unfortunately, I think Brion VIBBER is right. Outside of actually removing pages that could get our site blocked by censorware, there is really nothing we can do to keep the site from being blocked by censorware. But this doesn't mean we shouldn't create some sort of option that can be turned on/off to omit potentially offensive material from the search engine. To help obtain this, I think a flag of some sort, or a standard disclaimer would be a good start. No one should have any problem with this, b/c if you want to see potentially offensive material, you just turn the filter off. MB 20:54 20 May 2003 (UTC)

We've been through this before and I'm thinking about creating an FAQ on the subject. No matter what you think about censorship, the fact remains that if we allow our users only to filter by "adult" content / no "adult" content we already make an explicit choice about what is or isn't "appropriate" for children. Such a choice is, by definition, POV and thus unacceptable by our current NPOV policy. Some parents want their children to be kept away from sexual information, other parents think that children should have full access to all information, others again may have entirely different standards about what it is "inappropriate", e.g. articles critical of certain religions, lifestyles or governments. If we implement any filtering system, it must be a generic one that can be used to meet these different standards, not a simplistic "family filter" checkbox. --Eloquence 22:43 20 May 2003 (UTC)

I am not asking for filtering. I am asking for a simple acknowledgement on that article telling the reader of what is in store. Kingturtle 23:06 20 May 2003 (UTC)
"Its main page contains a gory picture (with filename "hello.jpg") of a man opening his anus and rectum to approximately three times the normal size of such an orifice." I think this is a reasonable and light-hearted description of the page's content -- what more do you want? WARNING: THIS SITE IS EVIL? --Eloquence 23:13 20 May 2003 (UTC)
Reading a man opening his anus and rectum to approximately three times the normal size is not a warning. Once you've read that, it's too late. Something should be said before it so someone doesn't have to read that sentence to decide the don't want to read that sentence.
Movie spoilers are placed before the information that spoils things. A simple content warning atop the goatsex article can allow users who prefer to to leave. Kingturtle 23:52 20 May 2003 (UTC)
It's easy to decide whether an article gives a lot about a movie's plot away. It's far less trivial to decide whether an article is "offensive". The counter argument here is essentially the same as the one against filtering -- see above. Next thing you know, all our articles about potentially "offensive" human body parts have disclaimers on top. I will then proceed to add such disclaimers to articles about all religions which I do not like, and there are a lot of those. Can you see where this is going?--Eloquence 00:02 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Anyone feel like writing Chelsea Flower Show, sicne it's in the news? -- Tarquin 19:22 20 May 2003 (UTC)

It's not normally my cup of tea, but I have a spare half hour. I'll take it up. Where do I go when I have something decent to submit it for the front page as a "in the news" item? CGS 19:28 20 May 2003 (UTC).
Hier: Current events. --Menchi 22:21 20 May 2003 (UTC)


I've written more than a stubb (dates, short history, external links... well, have a look), but is this enough for a current events article? CGS 22:23 20 May 2003 (UTC).
The article's got everything I can think of: history, nowadays, awards... But the intro seems so short. But since I never attended a flower show, I'm not sure what should be added. You're now a quasi-expert on this show, maybe you can think of something? --Menchi 23:16 20 May 2003 (UTC)

Move Article & Redirect

Is it true that we cannot move an article if there is an existing redirect by the desired title, even if after we deleted the redirect's content?

If so, so what do we do in this case? Often redirect actually contains a more suitable title. --Menchi 01:37 21 May 2003 (UTC)

List the redirect on Votes for Deletion, and if it's justified someone will come along and delete it for you (taking care to preserve the history) so you can recreate it. Tannin

Large Version is Smaller

In IE, the link to a larger picture on International Phonetic Alphabet actually reveals a smaller picture. A page with png alone automatically shrinks the png within the constraint of the page. I use 1024 x 768, and it's still slightly small. So the popular 848 will definitely reveals something even smaller, making the "Click here for larger version" label seems like a trick! ;-p

Is there any way to get around it? --Menchi 09:49 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Not, to my knowledge, without automagically convincing every Wikipedia user to go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced and switch off "Enable Automatic Image Resizing". -- Paul A 10:03 21 May 2003 (UTC)

If there is no limit to how offensive we can get on wikipedia, then there should be no restrictions on offensive user names. Kingturtle 00:24 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Offensive content is found in potentially offensive article. You wouldn't (expect to) find offensive content in an article about, say, yellow. Offensive usernames, however, may be owned by users who edit any page, including yellow; the edit history of yellow thus becomes offensive. However, if an offensively-named user wants to only edit offensive articles, that might be acceptable...or not... --Geoffrey 01:31 21 May 2003 (UTC)
KT is, probably deliberately for rhetorical effect, missing the distinction between facts presented being found offensive by some people, and gratuitously provoking offense with non-informational elements of presentation. The first case is defensible, as it is our mission to be informative and our goal to present facts in a balanced, neutral fashion as much as possible; if some people will take offense no matter what, that is their problem. The second case is not defensible, as being able to sign one's edits as "Throbbing Monster Cock" etc is not in any way related to the mission of an encyclopedia. It adds no content, but subtracts productivity as people fight over it instead of working on articles. If such deliberately provocative users gum up the works, the project is not required to put up with it. Now, someone with such a pseudonym is more than welcome to make derivitive works under the GFDL license -- it's a free encyclopedia after all -- but we don't have to keep them around. --Brion 02:36 21 May 2003 (UTC)
To be honest, I am really working through this distinction in my head. Why is gaping anus allowed in an article, but I can't be User:Gaping Anus? Kingturtle 02:41 21 May 2003 (UTC)
This is exactly the kind of response which has driven some people to oppose the nickname policy. However, as Brion has said, there is a substantial difference between the two. If we allow users named "gaping anus", we gain no valuable information, yet we are likely to lose contributors and readers. Allowing this (or an equivalent phrase) in articles that inform the reader about a certain subject (in this case, goatse.cx), on the other hand, improves our encyclopedia. If, at the end of the day, we can say that Wikipedia has a comprehensive, non-trolling article about the phenomenon that is goatse.cx, I think that is quite an accomplishment. I for one have already learned quite a bit from that article. --Eloquence 03:14 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Out of personal curiosity, what have you learned from the article? Kingturtle 04:23 21 May 2003 (UTC)
I was not aware of the other pictures on the site, because frankly, I immediately closed it when I first visited it and then have only used it to shock others a couple of times (what has been done to you, do unto others at least twice ;). I had no idea there was also an IRC server, and I found the throatse.cx parody amusing. I will gladly explain again to you my main point: Most people do not want to visit goatse.cx. It's a shock site. Still, many people who have visited it may be curious about its further contents and history. We can provide this information without requiring the reader to visit the site. It may not be the most important information in Wikipedia, but hey, we have information about every Disney character out there, so I don't see why we shouldn't have a comprehensive article about a shock site. --Eloquence 04:37 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Ditto on the value of the content - always wondered what the slashdot sniggering was all about, but didn't really want to explore it first, uh, hand... :-) Stan 03:29 21 May 2003 (UTC)

The point Kingturtle is trying to make, I think, is precisely that there is indeed "a distinction between facts presented being found offensive by some people, and gratuitously provoking offense with non-informational elements of presentation". He would agree that "the first case is defensible, as it is our mission to be informative" and he would agree that "the second case is not defensible". However, he is not such a fool as to think that any and every fact presented in an article must be there only for its ostensible purpose, which is to inform and educate. What Kingturtle is saying is that there is a difference between presenting the relevant facts in order to inform and educate on the one hand, and presention of things which happen to be factual under the pretence of "informing and educating", when in truth the clear and only purpose is to shock and/or offend.

Kingturtle brilliantly demonstrated the truth of this by writing what was essentially the same article on a different and non-offensive topic, at Microsoft.com. When we look at that same entry, shorn of it's offensive shock value, we can immediately see that its level of detail and style of presentation is inappropriate. Tannin 07:49 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Goatse.cx is a poorly-structured article in desperate need of rewriting, yes. What that has to do with demanding that warnings be added about "offensive" material, I don't know. --Brion 07:58 21 May 2003 (UTC)
I was not speaking about warnings, Brion. That's a seperate issue. Tannin
Not much of a point, without a goatse article to complete the comparison, though, is it? Microsoft's raison d'etre (pardon my lack of diacritics) is not its website. Goatse.cx's is. Which of the logical fallacies would this be, now? -- John Owens 07:59 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Microsoft is an important organisation of global significance, Goatsex is a trivial prank site. Now which of the logical phallusies would that be? Tannin
You and Kingturtle are delibaretely missing the point. The Goatse.cx article is there specifically to provide readers with information about that shock site without them having to view its offensive pictures. Microsoft.com may be a shock site to Linux users, but most people are probably quite happy with visiting the site and finding out about its different sections. We list the contents of goatse.cx so that readers can find out whether there is anything they want to view on that site (e.g. the MP3 or the giver.jpg picture) without having to go through the "gaping anus" entry page. It also allows those who know that it's a popular site but who have never dared to visit it to figure out what all the fuss is about.
This all should be obvious, any I am increasingly convinced that you and/or Kingturtle are simply not comfortable with Wikipedia discussing certain subjects in precise language. That is of course your right, but we will not change Wikipedia's standards because of your personal feelings. --Eloquence 08:29 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Well, you have got the wrong end of the stick, big time. Indeed, were you to put that theory to people that know me, you'd quite possibly cause a serious injury, they's laugh so hard. (I speak for myself only here, obviously. Kingturtle may (or may not) be the biggest prude this side of the black stump, I wouldn't know.) It is not me that is missing the point here. What you are saying is that Wikipedi users need to be protected from the evil site by having it all explained to them in nice, safe black and white text. It's a trivial site that exists only to garner publicity, and has no broader significance. There is absolutely no reason for it to be covered in any depth, when interested people can go and look for themselves if that's what they want. (Oh, and by the way, as a matter of detail, I do find the Microsoft site more personally offensive than the goatse one, substantialy so. I could bore you with the reasons I find it so depressing and offensive if you wish, but this is probably not the place to do so.) ----
goatse.cx is no more or less fringe than the various other Slashdot trolling phenomena, Google records about 9000 hits for the phrase. It may or may not be "evil", I certainly found it offensive, and would prefer not to be exposed to sites like it without knowing what to expect. I would also be opposed to uploading the goatse.cx picture to Wikipedia (say, to illustrate the article about anus) for legal reasons. What I fail to see is how the article about the site is "gratuitously provoking offense with non-informational elements of presentation". It is doing the exact opposite: helping people to avoid offense. So I still do not see any reason for you to want to remove or shorten the article so badly, other than a general discomfort with the subject (note that I wrote "and/or"). --Eloquence 08:58 21 May 2003 (UTC)
It's exactly the same as that craze we had a while back for "Micronations" pretending to have some sort of actual significance. I have no objection to the article itself: the site exists and has some minor (very minor) noteriety. But there is balance in all things. Listing the individual filenames? Hoolie Doolie! Why don't we do it properly, and add in the absolutely vital information that some of the page layout was done with BluntPage but there was also some hand tweaking of the HTML code using Wizzo TexEdit (V. 2.03b, with service pack 2, or possibly service pack 3a depending on which source you believe) to correct an issue with margins overlapping on the third illustration down from the left? As Kingturtle demonstrated, even for a site that is much more important in every possible way bar giving jollies to smirking teenagers, the level of pointless detail in the entry is absurd. Tannin (PS: I did note the and/or. Now that I've taken care of the "and", KT can deal with the "or", if he likes. Or something.)
I still disagree about the level of detail for the reasons above, but I can see your point about lots of goatse.cx-like articles popping up. What do you think about my compromise?--Eloquence 09:47 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Yes, Eloquence, much better. It reads like an encylopedia article now, where before it was more just a prank. Well done. Tannin
Is this better, then? ;) -- John Owens 09:34 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Ahh John, I do enjoy your sense of humour. :) Perhaps what we need is to put the hard word on Jimbo for an extra server so we can start up the Parodypedia. Between Kingturtle's Microsoft.com, my comment-without-commenting (listing it on Brilliant Prose), and now your Goatse.cx edit, once the word gets around, we will have more hits than Google! Tannin

Is there some sort of (meta)page that will list, instead of all recent changes, only those recent changes made by users who are not logged in? This might be an easy way to track vandalism, as it seems to me that most vandalism is caused by passersby rather than established users... with the obvious exception of "career" vandals such as Lir or Michael. --Dante Alighieri 00:29 22 May 2003 (UTC)

I've discovered quite an annoying problem recently, concerning edits that include special characters and I'm wondering whether this is known more generally? The examples I've encountered has transcribed characters such as "Å" into "AA" and "ü" into "u:". This is thoroughly annoying, and what's worse it has also broken established links to other articles. At first I suspected merely carelessness by the individual editors, but now I'm more inclined to believe that it's some form of configuration problem on their systems. Examples include:

All these changes broke established links, but the changes has been reverted. Does anyone have more information on this, and has there been any action taken to stifle the effects of this malice? -- Mic 08:12 19 May 2003 (UTC)

Grepping some logs.... Aha! Links (0.97pre3; Linux 2.4.18-6mdk i586) IIRC Links has some problems with editing text with non-ASCII chars, particularly if running in console mode. At least it's trying to convert the characters to an ASCII representation instead of random binary garbage, but it's still a problem. --Brion 08:31 19 May 2003 (UTC)
Coincidentally, this is usually closely related to something I just added a note about on Wikipedia:Special characters. It seems to happen mostly when people copy the text of the page into a word processor kind of application, do something there they can't do in the browser itself, like a search & replace or whatever, then copy & paste that back into the edit window. Often, it seems, even though the browser itself might be able to deal with the special characters, either the WP program or the clipboard itself doesn't, and you end up with "u:" instead of "ü", etc. My own particular rant on the page was about how this can mangle HTML markup, because some programs will automatically "help" by replacing all the quotes with "smart quotes", including in HTML tags, which is where the real damage is done. However, despite its strong connection with certain products related to Bill Gates, I don't think any actual malice is usually intended. ;) -- John Owens 08:34 19 May 2003 (UTC)
In light of Brion's comment added during edit conflict, I'll footnote the above by saying OK, that probably wasn't the case in these particular instances, though. -- John Owens 08:34 19 May 2003 (UTC)

On my work, where I suspect the Windows NT-version run is rather old, due to a policy of not doing unneccessary updates, I have noticed a similar phenomenon. If I, in a www-interface for e-mail similar to the wiki-interface with text-boxes, open a received letter, intending to forward it, then non-danish characters are conversed to their "&something;" equivalents on save. I.e. I don't notice it unless I make a temporary save. It's even more irritating when less usual characters (as English quotation marks or em-dashes) are converted to "&digits;". I suspect I've seen traces of the same behavior here. Is it, beside the more serious problem User:Mic addresses, also a problem if <<Åland>> is converted to <<&Aring;land>>?
-- Ruhrjung 09:01 19 May 2003 (UTC)

I'll step up to the plate here and admit that the guilty party in the cases mentioned by 'mic' is me: 'cimon avaro'. No malice was intended however. The problem seems to have stemmed from not always remembering to set the character-set to ISO 8859-1 (the default is 7 bit ASCII). I twiddled it so that it is set automatically on launch of the program. So far so good, knock on wood. Do let me know if the problem persists with edits I make. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 06:21 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Anyone feel like writing Chelsea Flower Show, since it's in the news? -- Tarquin 19:22 20 May 2003 (UTC)

It's not normally my cup of tea, but I have a spare half hour. I'll take it up. Where do I go when I have something decent to submit it for the front page as a "in the news" item? CGS 19:28 20 May 2003 (UTC).
Here: Current events. --Menchi 22:21 20 May 2003 (UTC)


I've written more than a stub (dates, short history, external links... well, have a look), but is this enough for a current events article? CGS 22:23 20 May 2003 (UTC).
The article's got everything I can think of: history, nowadays, awards... But the intro seems so short. But since I never attended a flower show, I'm not sure what should be added. You're now a quasi-expert on this show, maybe you can think of something? --Menchi 23:16 20 May 2003 (UTC)

Move Article & Redirect

Is it true that we cannot move an article if there is an existing redirect by the desired title, even if after we deleted the redirect's content?

If so, so what do we do in this case? Often redirect actually contains a more suitable title. --Menchi 01:37 21 May 2003 (UTC)

List the redirect on Votes for Deletion, and if it's justified someone will come along and delete it for you (taking care to preserve the history) so you can recreate it. Tannin

At absolute value, I linked the inequalities to inequality; however, doing so underlines the inequality and essentially changes the meaning of the inequality. Pizza Puzzle

So don't link them. Didn't we whip up a page of standard math symbology for this kind of thing? -- John Owens 12:33 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Try: (see also: inequality). --Menchi 12:37 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Why are links underlined? Pizza Puzzle

See Special:Preferences. -- John Owens 12:48 21 May 2003 (UTC)
You mean hyperlinks in general? Well, I suppose it's to distinguish from regular text. --Menchi 12:59 21 May 2003 (UTC)

I know this is slightly offtopic, but can someone explain what "modulus" means? I know two conflicting mathematical definitions:

  • The same as the absolute value
  • To divide and take the remainder (in C, "%" is the modulus operator, in BASIC it's "MOD")

I can't believe there are two seperate mathmatical definitions of the same word - are they related in some way? CGS 14:43 21 May 2003 (UTC).

I've never heard of modulus used in the first sense. Google is always a good resource though. MB 16:01 21 May 2003 (UTC)
There's one reference on Magnitude. It might be a British thing, alghough the British are using both definitions (my computing tutors tell me it means the second definition, my maths tutors tell me it means the first). CGS 16:08 21 May 2003 (UTC).
both. Though in maths, the second is called "modulo" or just "mod", as in "3 = 8 modulo 5". Example of the first: "the modulus of -5 is 5" -- Tarquin 16:11 21 May 2003 (UTC)
The term modulus generally refers to the size of something. The modulus of some object is always a non-negative real number. The modulus of a vector, using the usual i, j, k notation is basically the length of the vector given by |ai+bj+ck|=(a2+b2+c2)1/2. A special case of this would be the complex numbers, |a+bi|=(a2+b2)1/2 which, when b=0, i.e. for a real number, gives |a|=(a2+02)1/2=(a2)1/2, the absolute value.
The modulus of the congruence a=b(mod m) is the number m. It tells you the number of distinct elements, i.e. every number is congruent to one of m elements. So I suppose this use is also a measure of size. I don't know anything about the origin of the use of the word in these two siuations I'm afraid, mathematicians seem quite fond of using the same word to describe different things though and usually rely on context to expalin the meaning. -- Ams80 16:40 21 May 2003 (UTC)

I hate to be picky, but shouldn't the article titled Linux be housed at GNU/Linux since Linux =/= GNU/Linux? I would like to make the current Linux page a disambiguation page that points to the Linux kernel article, and GNU/Linux. It would be something like this:

Linux is commonly used when refering to GNU/Linux whose distributions include Redhat Linux, SuSe Linux, and other commmon distributions. It can also be used to refer to the Linux Kernel. MB 18:44 21 May 2003 (UTC)

This is a source of much contention. I think the operating system can be called Linux because the name of an operating system is not the place for a list of credits. And who said everyone who uses Linux also uses all the GNU tools with it? If I install MinSys and MinGW on my Windows box am I running GNU/Windows? However, I think a disambiguation page would be sensible. If you look at the article, it is already broken down into Linux kernel and Linux operating system. CGS 18:54 21 May 2003 (UTC).
GNU/Linux is used by a minority for the OS, Linux is used by the majority, article should therefore be under Linux but explain naming controversy, end of story. --Eloquence 19:04 21 May 2003 (UTC)
I am not sure what point you are trying to prove with your link's to google. I don't know anyone that uses Linux without GNU tools. If you think you don't use GNU tools, then maybe you don't know you are using GNU tools. But that really doesn't matter. It appears that at some point GNU/Linux and Linux were merged. Although they are very closely related, they are not the same thing. Just b/c Linux is used as short term to refer to GNU/Linux, doesn't mean that Linux is the proper place for it in an encyclopedia. I will try and work out a total solution to this article problem, since these articles have become very tangled together, and I will post it to temp pages for review before commiting the changes. MB 19:09 21 May 2003 (UTC)

It is not a fact that the name of the operating system is GNU\Linux, but you are presenting it as such. It's the POV of the GNU project. Why do they have the authority to dictate the offical name for this software? I think there should be a page Linux refering to the Linux operating system, and a page Linux Kernel talking just about the kernel. CGS 19:35 21 May 2003 (UTC).

We already have very useful policies for cases like these in place. Please read Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names). There's no point arguing about which version is more or less "correct" from a scholarly point of view, the simple fact is that many very intelligent people consider it correct to use "Linux" to refer to the operating system, not just the Kernel, and a much smaller minority of also very intelligent people considers it important to refer to the operating system as "GNU/Linux". According to our existing policy, the more common name should be preferred, and the different treatment should be explained under that label.
Cgs: Inflammatory language is not helping. --Eloquence 19:38 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Well then it should probably stay as it is then. CGS 19:42 21 May 2003 (UTC).
Thanks for clairifying Eloquence. Makes sense. MB 19:45 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Three comments/suggestions/questions:

Though I know little about the subject, from what I've heard of XML/XHTML, if it could or has been combined with wiki, interactive databases (with sortable tables, etc.) should become an easy possibility for wiki users including at wikipedia. Are there any plans in the works?

Two, for convenience sake, particularly for slightly long pages such as this one, could "edit this page" be also at the top of the page also?

Three, again, for medium sized pages--such as List of reference tables, I think anchors could be invaluable....It seems as pages get too large, people will move stuff to a new page. It is too inconvenient to have to click on new pages all the time, particularly for pages which benefit from a bird's eye view.

Thanks! - Brettz9 19:46 24 May 2003 (UTC)~

Since no one responded before, I'll ask again. Is there some sort of (meta)page that will list, instead of all recent changes, only those recent changes made by users who are not logged in? This might be an easy way to track vandalism, as it seems to me that most vandalism is caused by passersby rather than established users... with the obvious exception of "career" vandals such as Lir or Michael. I'm thinking a DDQ would probably do it, but I'm new to such fancy-shmancy type stuff. Any help would be appreciated. --Dante Alighieri 08:32 23 May 2003 (UTC)

No. Might be useful, but keep in mind that you would then be missing in-between and on-top edits by non-anonymous users, making it hard to get a coherent picture. But just to detect unchecked vandalism it might be a good idea, perhaps in the same style as the contributions page, with the "(top)" flag to indicate whether a change has been edited since, or only listing (top) edits. --Eloquence 09:21 23 May 2003 (UTC)
That's what I was thinking. I was hoping to have some sort of resource to make it easier to find unchecked vandalism. Can someone construct such a page or at least direct me how to do it myself? --Dante Alighieri 09:33 23 May 2003 (UTC)
"SELECT * from recentchanges where rc_user=0 order by rc_timestamp desc" gets you the anonymous changes. The top mark is a little harder, take a look at SpecialContributions.php in the Wikipedia source code and search for "topmark". Feel free to hack a page together, we can always use more developers. --Eloquence 09:41 23 May 2003 (UTC)

I submitted this exact idea to the Sourceforge feature request tracker months ago, and I also pointed out that it would only take a few lines of PHP code to implement. Preferably the option would be hidden to the "anonymous" users themselves -- if it was displayed in full view on RC, it would encourage vandals to log in. -- Tim Starling 05:23 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Yes, a quick hack that only shows anonymous edits would be simple -- but not very useful, because you need to know if someone else has already edited the page in question, and you need the proper diff links. But since you seem to know enough about PHP to implement it yourself, we look forward to seeing your full implementation. --Eloquence 11:18 24 May 2003 (UTC)
I don't like writing code when I can't test it. My one submission so far (salted passwords) broke the code in about 5 different ways -- it took Lee quite some time to find all the bugs. I might be able to set up my own test server in a few weeks from now... Unless someone wants to lend me an account on test.wikipedia.org? Can I have CVS access as well? -- Tim Starling 15:04 24 May 2003 (UTC)
Give me the name of your SourceForge account and I'll set you up with CVS access. Double-check with Jimbo about a login on the server, I guess. I don't think I'm supposed to hand them out willy-nilly ;) --Brion 16:34 24 May 2003 (UTC)

If anybody is wondering what I was doing vandalising soid, I'm afraid it was a girl friend. I assure you that she has been punished. CGS 17:20 25 May 2003 (UTC).

I posted this on J.Hoffman Kemps page and on the List of French monarchs discussion page. This person has kept up her nonsense for a long time, driving several users away. Whatever her agenda, someone has to put an end to it, because despite polite, then stern warnings about her conduct, this man or woman going by the user name of J. Hoffman Kemp ignores everything. It is vandalism to delete facts because they disprove what are unfounded theories that smell of racism and I certainly do not to continue to work at this website if this kind of behavior is allowed to continue.

  • I take very strong objection to you constantly changing the List of French monarchs and imposing your personal view without benefit of facts and in contradiction of facts on the page that go against your views. This is an encyclopedia, not a forum for airing personal views or a place to set a personal agenda. I accept Edward James, "The Origins of France: Clovis to the Capetians 500-1000." ISBN: 0333270525 to clearly mean that Clovis is part of the history of France. And, I accept Paul Fouracre and Richard A. Gerberding, Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography, 640-720. Manchester University Press - ISBN: 0719047919 as meaning the Merovingian were part of France. But, I repeat, I do not accept your unfounded views. And, I take strong exception to you inserting your own misleading text into the REFERENCES in a deceitful attempt to legitimize your unsubstantiated ideas. Kindly put an end to your obsessive behavior. Jacques Delson 21:22 25 May 2003 (UTC) Jacques Delson 22:25 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Well, it's too bad that somehow someone called J Hoffman Kemp has Administratibve powers to delete peoples work and others do nothing about her vanadalism. I came here to contribute, but not to spend my time to argue with someone who posts opinions and POV articles and has the audacity to inform Wikipedia in an article that SHE will allow the Carolingians on the list of French monarchs. This makes a joke out of Wikipedia. So, I say goodbye, and thank User:AntonioMartin for his valued help. Jacques Delson 23:16 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Is there a way for me to merge the contributions I made when I first started out at the wiki, while I was at work 139.85.23.43, to my contributions page? MB 02:59 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Sure; I can remark the edits as belonging to your user name, so 'Mbecker' will appear in the history of those pages, and the edits will appear in your contribs list. As long as there's nothing from that IP that's not by you? --Brion 04:00 23 May 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, it was a static IP at my job. Also, same with 66.250.142.130. Thanks! MB 04:01 23 May 2003 (UTC)


Okay, both should be switched over now. --Brion 04:48 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Hey, cool. Can you merge 144.137.254.230's edit into my edit history? It was just the once, but knowing it's there and not marked as mine has been slowly eating away at my sanity...  :) -- Paul A 07:26 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Is the image on Mario_(Nintendo_character) a copyright violation? MB 02:43 23 May 2003 (UTC)

If not copyright, I presume it is apparently againt use of trademark. -- Taku 03:01 23 May 2003 (UTC)
There is a similar situation on The Simpsons. -- Minesweeper 03:04 23 May 2003 (UTC)
Well then, is someone going to delete them? MB 18:05 23 May 2003 (UTC)
Wouldn't those images be fair use? -- 129.93.10.144
I dunno, would they? MB 19:56 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Someone needs to delete Theravada and move Theravada Buddhism there so that the edit history will be preserved. Mkweise 01:14 22 May 2003 (UTC) DONE - Tannin

dito for Mahayana Buddhism. Mkweise 01:23 22 May 2003 (UTC)
Also, if possible, do the same for Zen Buddhism - Zen and Pure Land - Pure Land Buddhism. Theravada and Pure Land have the content so a reminder to save the article before deletion. Confusing, i know. Thanks. Usedbook 02:19 22 May 2003 (UTC)
OK, I've swapped Theravada and Theravada Buddhism around, such that the article formerly called Theravada is now at Theravada Buddhism, complete with its edit history and redirecting to Theravada; the old Theravada Buddhism is now at Theravada, with the correct content and its history; and because of an interesting little bug to do with page caching and showing me out-of-date history listings for the wrong pages as I was checking that I hadn't got them mixed up and deleted the wrong things by mistake, the hair on Tanin's head turned a little greyer until he hit "reload" a few times. But it worked ot OK in the end. (Phew!)
Now it seems to me that it is entirely fair and sensible to list the other mages mentioned above at Zen, Mahayana Buddhism, and Pure Land - after all, we don't have articles on Catholicism Christianity or Protestantism Christianity. But there would be quite a bit of stuffing about to revert the swap of those two, and there is some inconclusive discussion on the talk pages, so maybe it might be wise to announce my intention to swap them and then wait a little while to see if there are any objections. Tannin 03:31 22 May 2003 (UTC)
We really appreciate your understanding and kind effort to help. As you know, the attachment of 'Buddhism' on the denominations is quite inconvenient and awkward. I hope it won't be too much trouble. Thanks again and be well. Usedbook 14:44 22 May 2003 (UTC)
My pleasure, Usedbook. It's been quite a while since this was mentioned here, and I don't hear any screams of anguish about the moves, so I'll take care of the others shortly. Tannin 14:51 22 May 2003 (UTC)

hi everybody....i don't have really a question but i dont know where to put this else.... i have a little idea, perhaps you know www.babylon.com, its a translater software with MANY other dictionaries, also encyclopedias. everybody can make its own dictionary (http://www.babylon.com/display.php?id=15&tree=3&level=2) so why can't anybody build a little tool to put the wikipedia material into the right format for babylon?? the great thing is that many babylon have many users an all the wiki links in topics page will lead directly into the wikipedia article (if formated as a web link)....sorry my english is very bad, and please shift this idea to the right place (but leave a message here for me please) its only an idea....ok....thnx for reading this (posted by User:Esteban Franz Tichy)

Last I checked Babylon was spyware. I do not think Wikipedia would want to be directly associated with a company that engages in such shady business practices, but any of our developers may of course choose to implement your idea as he sees fit. --Eloquence 20:01 21 May 2003 (UTC)


Can you please sign your comments, so we know who you are. CGS 20:05 21 May 2003 (UTC).
You sign your comments and add a time/date stamp by using the tilde key 4 times. Like this: ~~~~ --Dante Alighieri 20:07 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Why would we want to do that? I think a better goal could be to convert the wikipedia material to HTML, not some proprietary dictionary format. LittleDan
It would also likely break the GFDL - proprietary formats are generally not "Transparent". Martin
Non-transparent formats (such as printed paper ;) are fine, so long as you distribute with it or make available the network address of a transparent copy. --Brion 16:34 22 May 2003 (UTC)
LittleDan, it's converted to HTML format ever time you load a page... ;) -- Tarquin 12:26 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Nearly every page in Wikipedia has a Talk page, with a 'Discuss this page' link at the bottom of the associated article. Several pages do not, mainly the Special pages, which are mostly dynamically generated (or dynamically generated into a static page).

Is there a talk page to discuss the Special pages? For example, what wording should go on them (the contents of several of them are not really explained very well), what their contents should actually be, etc. -- Nanobug 21 May 2003

No, there's no talk page to discuss Special pages. I think a Special_talk namespace would be useful. For the moment however, special pages are discussed all over the place, but mainly on the Wikipedia:Mailing lists. If you just want to change the English translation of a Special page, and not the functionality, WikiEN-l would probably be a good forum. -- Tim Starling 02:49 22 May 2003 (UTC)


Sysop

I am really sorry to insist, but I would be very pleased if someone took the time to explain to me that oddity.{...}

Anthere

I don't imagine anyone is deliberately not answering, given the readiness to take up pens on almost anything. Maybe it is a mistake, or maybe the French sysop status has been carried across. As you may gather, I don't have a clue.
jimfbleak
No idea what happened here, Brion or someone else probably picked the wrong database by accident (can happen easily when doing the request directly on the DB server). I have reset Alvaro's status. --Eloquence 19:54 21 May 2003 (UTC)
weird. I asked Alvaro directly on icq (I thought he was reading en.list, but he was not). We really need a processus such as the one Brion set on meta m:User details special page ant

Large Version is Smaller

In IE, the link to a larger picture on International Phonetic Alphabet actually reveals a smaller picture. A page with png alone automatically shrinks the png within the constraint of the page. I use 1024 x 768, and it's still slightly small. So the popular 848 will definitely reveals something even smaller, making the "Click here for larger version" label seems like a trick! ;-p

Is there any way to get around it? --Menchi 09:49 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Not, to my knowledge, without automagically convincing every IE-enslaved Wikipedia user to go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced and switch off "Enable Automatic Image Resizing". -- Paul A 10:03 21 May 2003 (UTC)
"Automagically," nice word. "Enable Automatic Image Resizing" sure seems like the trigger, but mine has been off for a long time, and yet it still resizes automatically. :-? --Menchi 10:15 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Or, at least on the version of IE I'm occasionally forced to use (and to think, they don't even need full physical restraints on me!), you can hover the cursor over the picture, and then click on the blue square with the arrows that pops up in the lower right hand corner, which will make it go back to full size. -- John Owens 10:08 21 May 2003 (UTC)
You use Apple, don't you? Because nothing happens to me when I hover my cursor on the picture in Windows. Maybe freezing or crashing after Windows can't handle me anymore. But other than that, nothing. --Menchi 10:15 21 May 2003 (UTC)
No, that's on a friend's computer, WinME, with a fairly up-to-date IE 6 on it. I don't know just where the option comes from myself, I would have assumed Paul A's suggestion to be all there is to it. -- John Owens 10:23 21 May 2003 (UTC)

I have a 1881 book called The Young Folks' Cyclopedia of Persons and Places by John D. Champlin, Jr. It was published by Henry Holt and Company, NY. What is the copyright status of something like this? Would I be able lift portions into wikiarticles, the way we can with 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica? Kingturtle 05:50 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Yup, no problem, see public domain. The question is, do you want to? Young folks' interests have changed a bit in the last 122 years .. --Eloquence 05:58 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Something that old is definitely in the public domain and, legally speaking, material could be included into Wikipedia. (See Wikipedia:Public domain resources.) Keep in mind of course that old material (including the 1911 EB) can be problematic: information is out of date and needs to be cross-checked with more recent sources, strange points of view abound which need NPOVing. If there is useful material though, by all means make use of it. (If it has pictures that could be scanned, those could be useful too on historical subjects.) --Brion 06:05 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Is there a specific date/year on the source we're allowed to copy? I.E before 1920 or something like that? I have huge amounts of old pedias and stuff. -- Sigg3.net
Anything created before Jan 1, 1923 should be safe, according to public domain. --Eloquence 09:08 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Woa! A century ago! I'd like to know how young people like to do a century ago! I think it'd be valuable historical insights. --Menchi 09:49 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Long discussion of shock sites moved to Talk:Shock site by me, Tannin 10:21 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Could someone that knows something about quantum mechanics or such take a look at the contributions of User:Stupidmoron? I don't know anything about this subject, but the first change this user made had the comment "some vandalism." As far as I can tell, the information is on valid subjects, but I can't tell if the information is valid. MB

All User:Stupidmoron's contributions were fine (except for an unfortunate spelling error). I don't think "stupidmoron" quite understands the stir his/her edits created. Hopefully we haven't scared this intelligent contributor away. -- Tim Starling 00:45 21 May 2003 (UTC)

I've noticed that a few times when I am editing a text in the editing Wikipedia browswer window that the page would get saved inadvertently &#8212 probably by hitting the enter key on my numberpad &#8212 though I think it happened otherwise and I haven't figured out why. I was wondering &#8212 why does it default to the save page (that seems to be highlighted when I open an editing page) rather than the Show Preview button? Wouldn't it make sense to highlight the preview button, either for these accidents or to prevent people from uploading minor edits by default when they should be previewing their pages until they get them right? &#8212 Alex756 12:15 20 May 2003 (UTC)

I use enter to submit pages all the time. I've never accidentaly submitted a page by pressing enter. At most this could be a user preference, off by default. -- Tim Starling 00:45 21 May 2003 (UTC)
The only time I have trouble is when I am using my laptop, which has a touch pad. When I get tired, I will mis-navigate my finger on the touch pad in such a way that I tell the computer to go forward to the next page. And POWWIE, I've posted my unfinished edit. It happens to me about three times a week, usually many hours past my appropriate bedtime. Kingturtle 00:51 21 May 2003 (UTC)

I'm planning to include one or two tables but, as I'm not very good at that sort of thing, I don't know exactly how to go about it. In particular, I'd need headings not just for the columns (i e at the top of the table) but also on the left-hand side for each row. I had a look at false friend and cover version, but there the left-hand column I'm talking about is missing. Can anybody refer me to instructions on how to do it or a similar table which I could then copy and adapt? Thanks in advance, --KF 12:34 19 May 2003 (UTC)

Is this approximately what you're looking for? (Please delete at least the table once you've seen it, don't want to clutter the Pump up too much.) -- John Owens 12:39 19 May 2003 (UTC)
Have a look at the tables on the country pages (e.g. Australia), the element tables (e.g. Beryllium), and the taxoboxes (e.g. Crow). What exactly do you want to do? -- Tim Starling 12:46 19 May 2003 (UTC)
John and Tim, thanks a lot. I've moved the table to the Sandbox, where I'll experiment a bit. My tables will contain words only, no images, so I think now I know what to do. It's nice to get answers so fast. All the best to both of you, --KF 12:54 19 May 2003 (UTC)
http://www.htmlgoodies.com has a very good tutorial on tables. MB 17:30 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Please see Image talk:Philadelphia.jpg. Is the copyright requirement at http://openphoto.net/doc/html/license.html in concert with the GNU Free Documentation License? - Zoe 01:45 19 May 2003 (UTC)

The words infamous is not NPOV. I am considering removing usage of the word in wikipedia, and sometimes replacing it with a more NPOV word (except in cases of fictitious accounts, which I will leave alone).

  • Lucy's infamous football which Charlie Brown has never kicked would stay
  • Some of the most infamous examples [of President for Life] include Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa... would instead read Some notable examples [of President for Life] include Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa...
  • The ILLIAC IV was one of the most infamous supercomputers ever becomes The ILLIAC IV was a celebrated and noteworthy supercomputer.

It is going to take some thought to get the sentences right, but the word infamous is overused and not NPOV. However, before I even set out on the project, I wanted to get some other opinions. Am I just over reacting? Am I not seeing the value of the word? Can the word be NPOV? Kingturtle 19:46 18 May 2003 (UTC)

then what about other subjective words that can be POV depending on use such as adorable, outstanding. Take Yamamoto Isoroku the intro says he is outstanding general. The trouble is how the word infamous is used not the word itself. -- Taku 20:04 18 May 2003 (UTC)
I agree - infamous means 'famous for a (morally) bad reason', and thus is inherently non-NPOV, in all situations.
James F. 20:05 18 May 2003 (UTC)
Dictionary.com defines infamous as meaning "having an exceedingly bad reputation". I think that's NPOV. CGS 20:15 18 May 2003 (UTC)
I agree with CGS. We may want to avoid "x is bad", but we should be able to say "x is usually considered bad" or "x is infamous", cautiously of course, only in very pronounced cases. - Patrick 01:04 19 May 2003 (UTC)
Infamous is a perfectly good word to use where appropriate. I see absolutely no reason for advocating a kind of Wikipedia NPOV newspeak. (Reminds me of my argument with User:Isis about "unfortunate death") Mintguy 02:11 19 May 2003 (UTC)


I think you're going a bit NPOV crazy here, Kingturtle. If you think about it, "notable" is POV. You may think it's notable, but I may not give a monkey's. If something is infamous to the general public, I think we should say infamous. If something is notable to the general publlic, I think we should say notable. CGS 21:25 19 May 2003 (UTC)

Quote marks in article title?

I have created an article for "Live free or die" - the delightfully quirky state motto of New Hampshire. The question is: Should the title have quotation marks in it?

I didn't put them in because it seemed weird, but since the title refers to the words as words rather than their meaning, maybe they should be there. I can't find other article titles that are phrases to act as guidelines, although that's probably just due to lack of imagination on my part. Any thoughts? - DavidWBrooks 15:04 27 May 2003 (UTC)

It won't be an issue like that. You can't have double quotes in article titles. You can have single quotes in a title, but I wouldn't recommend it for this case, just the bare words. Furthermore, I would suggest having the actual article at State motto of New Hampshire, New Hampshire (motto), State motto (New Hampshire), or something like that, and Live free or die as a redirect to that. -- John Owens 15:10 27 May 2003 (UTC)
P.S. Hmm, judging by the single blue link I now see above, it looks as though someone else has pre-emptively disagreed with me, though. ;) -- John Owens 15:12 27 May 2003 (UTC)
There is, it turns out, already a List of state mottos page. I linked to Live Free or die from there. I'm not enthusiastic about titling the article some variant of New Hampshire (motto), since nobody cares about state mottos as such - in this case people are vastly more likely to have heard the phrase and want to find out about it, and IMHO the article title should reflect that approach. But I'm not wedded to the idea, since a search on the phrase would find the article either way -- DavidWBrooks 15:25 27 May 2003 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (slogans), where some discussion/voting on the subject is under way. I recommend Live free or die, myself. Martin

I have a strategic question regarding the use of <i>...</i> as opposed to ''...''. I know that <i>...</i> has been deprecated, but it is endorsed by How to edit a page. If I'm writing a foreign-language expression (i.e. sine qua non, or something in Elvish), I want it to be italicized, as convention dictates, not just emphasized. I'm afraid that non-italics-supporting browsers would use a contra-conventional mode of formatting, thus obviating the reason why italics were deprecated in the first place. I'm bringing this up because I've been copyedited at least once after using <i>...</i>.   Smack 05:50 30 May 2003 (UTC)

To answer your question: Pornography law of the United States of America, such content like within fisting or rimming or Anal sex might endanger the whole survival of wikipedia, which is standing on relatively weak feet (just remember how fast Larry died, and you do need a host and somebody to carry the expenses and responsibilities - like it or not - you should at least become a sysop before critcizing others in such a way) - if you are interested and capable: read the German or Dutch sites of our project, those correspond to the laws (which is much more liberal, even in Germany)
Viking 12:52 30 May 2003 (UTC)
our editing was constructive, we just tried to make some ugly content more tolerable and conforming to the law - wikipedia can not be a "handbook" with direct instructions to sexual activities - the old content was outside the limits of what an enzyclopedia is (such instructions you will also not find in Britannica etc., not even in the very tolerant countries of the Norse, where we come from)
Viking 13:49 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Actually, your "answer" to me consisted of copying a random piece of text from my user page and saying it was hard to understand. You've also lied about being a sysop, and used this claim to try to make yourself above criticism. Evercat 14:06 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Why do you think I can't criticise you unless I'm a sysop, and why did you complain about Evercat's English, when your's is worse? CGS 14:02 30 May 2003 (UTC).

Quote Viking (I think in this mess): "if you are interested and capable: read the German or Dutch sites of our project, those correspond to the laws (which is much more liberal, even in Germany)" -- Where on earth did you get the idea that an American based company who offers a page in the German language must conform to the laws of the country of Germany. Was that from paragraph 3(a) from the California Civil Code of Gilbert? Triton

Yes CGS, you are right, but that sysop does not want to be brought into connection with the old content of fisting anal sex or rimming - maybe you can understand that - luckyly the direct instructions for sex are not up any longer on the english version, so our efforts were worthwhile - this is the end of the Viking Project - it becommes too dangerous: people inquiring for names, just like in the inquisition times - that is not what we think of of free education Viking 15:43 30 May 2003 (UTC) (over 7 people)
Viking, if you were so concerned that someone might start asking questions about your identity, maybe you shouldn't have repeatedly tried to intimidate others by asserting your alleged sysop status. You seemed to expect us to acknowledge your authority, when we have absolutely no proof of it. You shouldn't be too surprised if we start wondering whether you're just making it all up. -- Wapcaplet 17:07 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Ban Viking

Viking, no matter who they are, is clearly a vandal, and a troll. Just look at thier original contribution to fisting. They replaced the entire article with:

Fisting is also a gesture by a viking, forming the hand into a fist.


it can be used as a friendly but fast signal to show that there are limits for a decent encyclopedia if it wants to be used and endorsed by schools, universities and parents

and then continued to delete the article, and other articles, after being reverted.
In addition, Viking harased other users multiple times. I think this account should be banned. MB 18:27 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Seconded. Viking has made precisely zero useful contributions to Wikipedia; on the contrary, article vandalism/blanking, harassment and unhelpful criticism have been the only things we've heard from Viking (regardless of what the other allegedly sysop member(s) of the Viking Collective have contributed under any pseudonym). Banning sounds good to me. -- Wapcaplet 18:37 30 May 2003 (UTC)
To be fair, the edits of Fisting could have been innocent attempts to make Wikipedia conform to his idea of a civilised standard. However, his repeated lies about being a sysop to intimidate people are unacceptable, surely? Thirded. Evercat 18:43 30 May 2003 (UTC)
To be fair, the wiki isn't about one person (or person's) idea's of how things should be. MB 19:07 30 May 2003 (UTC)
the viking group made altogether over 630 contributions and many constructive system operations in many languages over the last months, and only 6 minor edits on unlawfull content on minor and not well visited pages - remember: wikipedia is based on trust, not on "proof" - Viking 18:52 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Well, they weren't well visited until you started making a fuss over them. Now Fisting is probably one of the most popular pages on Wikipedia. Anyhow, those 630 (alleged) contributions were not made by Viking, but by some unknown number of other contributors under other names, so banning Viking will have no effect on these contributions, right? -- Wapcaplet 19:05 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Viking Group: What is this trust and proof you speak of. I realize english may not be your first language, since you are a Viking, but what do you mean? MB 19:10 30 May 2003 (UTC)

User:Viking

User:Viking has been censoring articles because she/he thinks that they are illegal under US pornography laws. I asked him about this, and she/he basically said don't challenge me - I'm a sysop. Another user challenged her/him about this, and Viking took the piss out of the user's English. See the talk page. Looking back over the page, she/he seems to do this a lot, and has a bit of a snobbery problem. CGS 13:16 30 May 2003 (UTC).

Viking's claims to be a sysop under a different account are highly implausible, given this user's behaviour. He or she is just a troll. Evercat 13:21 30 May 2003 (UTC) ---

you aparently have not understood the meaning of troll. Here was our anwer:
Regarding Anal sex, where does the pornography law you refer to apply? I don't think that you should be editing articles to make them comply with local laws. Should people in Iran come in an edit all the articles so that they fit their laws? We wouldn't have much of a Wiki left if they did, would we? CGS 12:42 30 May 2003 (UTC).
To answer your question: Pornography law of the United States of America, such content like within fisting or rimming or Anal sex might endanger the whole survival of wikipedia, which is standing on relatively weak feet (just remember how fast Larry died, and you do need a host and somebody to carry the expenses and responsibilities - like it or not - you should at least become a sysop before critcizing others in such a way) - if you are interested and capable: read the German or Dutch sites of our project, those correspond to the laws (which is much more liberal, even in Germany)
Viking 12:52 30 May 2003 (UTC)
our editing was constructive, we just tried to make some ugly content more tolerable and conforming to the law - wikipedia can not be a "handbook" with direct instructions to sexual activities - the old content was outside the limits of what an enzyclopedia is (such instructions you will also not find in Britannica etc., not even in the very tolerant countries of the Norse, where we come from)
Viking 13:49 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Actually, your "answer" to me consisted of copying a random piece of text from my user page and saying it was hard to understand. You've also lied about being a sysop, and used this claim to try to make yourself above criticism. Evercat 14:06 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Why do you think I can't criticise you unless I'm a sysop, and why did you complain about Evercat's English, when your's is worse? CGS 14:02 30 May 2003 (UTC).

Quote Viking (I think in this mess): "if you are interested and capable: read the German or Dutch sites of our project, those correspond to the laws (which is much more liberal, even in Germany)" -- Where on earth did you get the idea that an American based company who offers a page in the German language must conform to the laws of the country of Germany. Was that from paragraph 3(a) from the California Civil Code of Gilbert? Triton

Triton: (sorry we can not address you better, you have no user page) allow us to answer to your brought up question: We meant of course the USA law - sorry about the confusion on your side - and if it is within the USA law it is within the German law, which is broader (opener) in respect to pornography - sorry about our language Viking 14:49 30 May 2003 (UTC)


Viking is basing his law on the right Gilbert, one assumes? But seriously now, there is absolutely nothing that says a sysop's opinion on Wikipedia policy issues is more important than the opinion of any other contributor. Sysops are people who have been around a little while and are trusted to do a few rather mundane administrative tasks, that is all. I am a sysop, CGS isn't - but we both have exactly the same right to determine policy matters. Viking's ignorance of this Wikipedia fundamental clearly demonstrates the vacuity of his claims. Tannin 14:43 30 May 2003 (UTC)
your comment is right, we all have the same rights, but sysops are more visible and give their name to the good cause, and it is our responsiblity to check on rules - if there would be one definite question we would anser it, but we can see none in all the ado, like bringing us up on village pump - keep up with the good work - best greetings from another sysop within the group of Viking 15:01 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Are you some sort of secret society, Viking? How about discolosing who your members are? CGS 15:04 30 May 2003 (UTC).
You want us to give you the name of the children associated with this user? So what are your plans? Go after them or us (like the wife of a sysop) with a "secret society"? What exactely have we done wrong? Viking 15:18 30 May 2003 (UTC)
WTF? No, I don't want to harass your children. You say that you (the user Viking) are a sysop, that is not true (see the list of administrators), so one of your members (the one who replied to my post on your talk page) must be a sysop, I just want to know who it is. CGS 15:34 30 May 2003 (UTC).

Discussion of User:Viking has been moved to User talk:Viking/ban.

Damn, looks like I missed all the fun/excitement last night/tonight, however you look at it. -- John Owens 11:07 24 May 2003 (UTC)

More like annoyance heh -- Poor Yorick

Something to be a bit concerned about: 66.13.172.18 has created a non-NPOV article titled Hacker community. It needs serious revision. While looking over her/his other contributions, I noticed other non-NPOV articles Richard Stallman, Hacker. We need to do something about these 3 articles. Should we delete Hacker community since it is just some guy ranting? MB 01:52 24 May 2003 (UTC)

I did some work on the hacker community article (rewrote most of it). See Talk:hacker community. The other articles seem to be fairly NPOV. -- Merphant 04:01 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Invisible Hyphen

Following the link on Taiping Rebellion, I created a page on its leader, "Hong Xiuquan." But for some reason, while the title on the page says "Hong Xiuquan", the status bar says "Hong Xiu-qun", and the URL says [[Hong_Xiu%ADquan]]. It apparently is neither Hong Xiuquan or Hong Xiu-quan.

But how can this be? In the editing field of Taiping Rebellion, it expliciyly spells the name without any weird hyphen.

I tried to move [[Hong_Xiu%ADquan]] to Hong Xiuquan, its proper spelling, but it says that the title already exists. --Menchi 09:01 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Well, for what it's worth, that "%AD" in the URL means ASCII character #173, which looks like a hyphen on my calculator :p, and is described as a "soft hyphen" on Wikipedia:Special characters. I guess this means it only turns into a visible hyphen when the first half of the word would fit at the end of a line, but not the whole word. So it definitely doesn't need to be in there. Since there's essentially no edit history (just initial creation by Menchi), it wouldn't be a great loss to lose its edit history by deleting it, then copying & pasting it and making it again. That would probably be the easiest route, or we could get a developer to do Strange and Mighty Things with the Database. -- John Owens 09:18 23 May 2003 (UTC)
Oh, two extra notes: On my Mozilla-based browser, it won't break the word there. And to help you find it on "Special characters", it's in section 1.1, called, oddly enough, "Unsafe characters". -- John Owens 09:24 23 May 2003 (UTC)
Goed! How did you do it? Was it some admin trick? --Menchi 10:09 23 May 2003 (UTC)

How many images are too many? I've only ever seen one image. I wanted to add the famous picture of the soldier shot in the head to the Spanish Civil War page, as well as a typical propaganda poster of the times. wji 0000 EDT 23 May 2002

IMO, a couple more legal images would be fine. The article only has 1 image after all. MB 04:17 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Is there any way of ftp-ing to Wikipedia, so as to be able to save specific pages quicker? Thanks in advance... --thehumanchimp

Not really. If you have a large number of uploads, all you can do is ask a developer really nicely to do it for you, or write a bot. -- Tim Starling 02:28 27 May 2003 (UTC)
Oh rite, thanks

It came to my attention today that all of the data in the Broomfield County, Colorado article was actually data for Boulder County, Colorado. This makes me question the accuracy of the bots that have been used to load location data. How many other articles about locations have misdirected data? Kingturtle 22:40 24 May 2003 (UTC)

See User:Rambot. --Brion 22:53 24 May 2003 (UTC)

When looking at random pages in Wiki I've found many many pages on small towns and cities in the US. Where are all of these coming from? CGS 21:50 24 May 2003 (UTC).

See User talk:Rambot. -- John Owens 21:54 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Some wikipedians have drawn up discussions on proper Wikipedia format of the Name of Emperors at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese). Any comment, especially from points of view in English language, is welcomed before a generally agreed format is decided by poll. thanx kt2 22:08 25 May 2003

If anybody is wondering what I was doing vandalising solid, I'm afraid it was a girl friend. I assure you that she has been punished. CGS 17:20 25 May 2003 (UTC).

I assure you we don't want to know :). MB 18:29 25 May 2003 (UTC)

I've seen a few people adding language links when there is no corresponding page in that language. I imagine they see links like {{de:foo}} in the page source, and think we are simply tying to list the translations of the page name. It's obviously not malicious. But we need two things:

  1. something on the FAQ about what language lists are for
  2. a simple page name we can use as a redirect to point people to when they make this mistake; a link we can stick on their talk page quickly, like {{don't link to languages unless there is a page}}. (but that's a bit too long.) -- Tarquin 17:03 25 May 2003 (UTC)
If Wikipedia:Interlanguage links is insufficient for these needs, please improve it. --Brion 17:16 25 May 2003 (UTC)
In some cases, a reasonable assumption that a page exists in another language I happen to know turns out to be wrong. In those cases I figure I might as well leave the link I've added, trusting that the destination article will be created soon. All it would really take to prevent any disappointment, is for empty interlanguage links to be displayed red, just like other empty links. Mkweise 17:54 25 May 2003 (UTC)
That can't be done with the current database structure; eg the English wiki doesn't know what exists on German wiki and vice-versa, and if they did they wouldn't know how to invalidate cached pages on each other when the status changes. --Brion 18:07 25 May 2003 (UTC)
I know, but several moons ago you told me that a db unification was planned for after the separate db server was in place. Is it not still planned? We would be foolish to invest much work in accomodating limitations whose days are numbered. Mkweise 18:15 25 May 2003 (UTC)
It's planned for someday. Don't hold your breath; we don't even have all languages converted to the current software yet. --Brion 18:37 25 May 2003 (UTC)
I'll hold my breath someday ;-) Mkweise 18:55 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Image Use
I'd like to use this picture for my old article Silkworm missile. http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/irfna/fig6.htm It's from a US military, therefore a government, site about gulf war sickn.. oops.. gulf war illness.

I was wondering if it was fair use or what? Tristanb 06:49 25 May 2003 (UTC)

It's on a US military site and there isn't a copyright notice. Therefore it is safe to assume that it is in the public domain. But please do give them credit and a link to the original. --mav 06:56 25 May 2003 (UTC)
It's quite large and slow to download on my dialup connection. Crop it and try converting it to .jpg Theresa knott 07:03 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Oops :-) too late, i'll crop convert it to JPG now. Pity they started with a gif eh! Thanks Tristanb 07:20 25 May 2003 (UTC)

What's the prefix for Project Sourceberg (ps.wikipedia.org, meta:Project Sourceberg)? Our own fulltext of The Raven would be better than a link to a non-Wikipedia site, but [[ps:The Raven]] just disappears: "", and the actual URL for Sourceberg is not optimal. On a side note, I noticed that a link to any language code not set up disappears: I was earlier today trying to convert a wikipedia.org URL on the Internet-Encyclopedia (which uses Wikipedia3 software) to an en: link, but it simply displayed blank. So do we need the Pashto language configured to get minimal Sourceberg support? --Geoffrey 04:35 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Actually, it doesn't disappear: Check the top language bar of for this page. It is not interpreted as an InterWiki link but as an inter-language link. Sourceberg needs to be moved anyway (new software, new name), bug Brion or Lee to set it up. But please come up with a better name first .. Alternatively, you could upload the text as a file and refer to it using a media: link. --Eloquence 05:05 25 May 2003 (UTC)
I was about to ask why Pashto was treated differently from en:, fr:, es:, etc. links, by making an example. Then I realised it isn't. Whoa. Weird! And not the behavior I expected. Only inter-language links on the first line should be interpreted as translations. In my opinion, an inline en:, ps:, etc. inter-language link is the same as a w:, m:, etc. inter-sister (for lack of a better term) link - though possibly different from a UseMod:, MeatBall:, etc. InterWiki link. Otherwise, you can't make inter-language links within articles that work like intra-language links. It looked as good as disappeared to me...and The Raven is no Pashto Village Pump. This currrent behavior doesn't seem reasonable to me. --Geoffrey 02:43 28 May 2003 (UTC)
I think the name's kind of cute... it makes me think of a big hunk of frozen text. ;) It's not entirely clear to me that a wiki is the best medium for that kind of resource, however. (The text mustn't change, though we may want commentary attached.) And certainly the Pashto Wikipedia is not where it belongs, and indeed the fact that interlanguage links don't do what you'd want to for linking to something like Sourceberg should be a clue. :) --Brion 05:18 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Two comments/suggestions/questions:

Though I know little about the subject, from what I've heard of XML/XHTML, if it could or has been combined with wiki, interactive databases (with sortable tables, etc.) should become an easy possibility for wiki users including at wikipedia. Are there any plans in the works (for wikipedia or in wiki projects in general)?

Two again, for medium sized pages--such as List of reference tables, I think anchors could be invaluable....It seems as pages get too large, people will move stuff to a new page. It is too inconvenient to have to click on new pages all the time, particularly for pages which benefit from a bird's eye view.

Thanks! - Brettz9 19:47 24 May 2003 (UTC)~

Wiki still generates HTML 4.01. We need to change this so the output is XHTML 1.0 before we can start to think about using other XMLs such as MathML and so on. CGS 22:18 24 May 2003 (UTC).
So then people could enter XML code which could be recognized by queries and manipulations (like doing special searches, choosing to view only certain columns of data, inverting a table to see rows as columns and vice versa, and even viewing items in a tree/list or even column format (as in the Mac OSX filebrowser) etc.)? If so, how could the XML code be accessed? Could some canned script be designed to allow users to have customizable options in viewing tabular data that they themselves have entered? A programmer friend has told me something briefly about XSLT and libraries which can operate on XML, but unless this is preinstalled, it sounds like it would not be easy for average users to work with the latter items. My apologies for my ignorance on this, but before I would like to know whether it could even achieve what I'm hoping will be possible in the future before I invest time in researching it further. It seems that XML is fairly straightforward and could be manipulated just as well by average

users as HTML or aliases on wikipages, but I'm curious how the structure XML seems to provide could be harnessed.

I realize we're not there yet, but I wonder whether it is worth my time to learn XML since my purpose of learning it would be to start converting documents into it in anticipation of being able to share them collaboratively and have them be customizably sorted. Thanks! - Brettz9 18:27 25 May 2003 (UTC)

If wikipedia is using a database to keep the pages here, does that mean it is conceivable that the anchor issue could be resolved by allowing users to choose--if they wish--to load multiple pages at once (i.e., by treating each page as a record and then requesting multiple records)? If this is possible, it would seem that pages could be kept short, but also combined by a user. It might be complicated for editing though, I imagine, if it is at all possible.

If it is using a database, I also wonder whether people could collaboritively add new or edit existing categories for individual pages. This would prevent a lot of duplication of effort (as well as make connections people might otherwise miss), as I see it, as pages could simply be called up by their categories rather than being a jungle of links. It is nice to have the latter option perhaps also (i.e., to collaboritively make a page of reference links), but it seems a lot of this could be done more smoothly by a collaboritive and queriable database. Thank you... - Brettz9 18:27 25 May 2003 (UTC)

And one more question if anybody knows...Is there some way that people may be able to perform "find" operations on text inside an edit box (without cut-and-pasting it to another document). It seems it could save some time.

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