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Wikipedia:Village pump/Archive I

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump.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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M.Becker's life story

Would anyone object of me creating a page about my life, my accomplishments, and generally about myself? It of course would be open for others to edit. MB 20:29, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

Don't you already have one here? ;^) Seriousely, we just had a discussion about this. I forget the user's name, but he created an entry on himself and it was decided that if other's hadn't written articles about him or heaped praise upon him, he wasn't worthy an entry. I guess the entry was deleted as a result. So I'd say, wait until you do something that makes you famous. If Warhol was right, we'll all get there eventually. :^D —Frecklefoot 20:39, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I object. I don't think wikipedians should be in the business of shameless self promotion. Oh, it was you that said that...[1]. :) Angela

Right, so based on your arguments, Daniel C. Boyer should be deleted? Otherwise, if it is kept, I will make one about myself, and suggest everyone I know do the same. The only reason I have seen to keep the article is b/c Daniel has been published. I too have publishments about me, so isn't this reason enough for me to create an article exagerating my importance and accomplishments?

If you do some serious research on the works listed on Daniel C. Boyer, you will see that he isn't important, or famous. His only claim to fame is art criticts telling people that his work is useless, and some of his "work" being published. To say that because he is published he is famous, and therefore warrents are article is ridiculous. I have tried to find proof that he is famous, but have been unable to do so. His published works that I have found online were published by VERY SMALL publishers (have a look for yourself). His book The Tailgating Spinster, isn't even listed on the publishers website anymore. The same publisher has published works of all types of unheard of artists (That don't have articles on wikipedia!), and if you e-mail the publisher, you can have your work published as well. I really have nothing against this guy, it's just that an article about him doesn't belong here, at least "until [he does] something that makes [him] famous." MB 21:04, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

Maybe we could just have an informal convention that User:FoobarKala/bio is where one might put ones capsule bio, without cluttering the userpage proper. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 12:33, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)

I agree with Mbecker that Boyer's entry doesn't belong in the 'pedia.
As for /bio pages, I don't think this is appropriate for the 'pedia. IMHO, the 'pedia shouldn't be a place to host a vanity site. If people really want to include their bio, they can do it on their user page. AFAIK, there's no limit to the size of the page. If people really want to do this, though, there is no stopping them I guess. :-) —Frecklefoot 14:26, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There are indeed several problems with vanity pages, of which I will mention a few:

  • Content. It is difficult to verify the content of pages such as Daniel C. Boyer or Florentin Smarandache. It is, however, safe to assume that they are biased. Even if there is independent information about little-known persons, it may take much time and work to find it.
  • Relevance. Enycyclopedia readers expect relevant content. Self-promotional pages are not likely to be relevant, perhaps with the exception of really important people whose views about themselves may be of some interest.
  • Authorship. That is the most serious problem here. No serious encyclopedia (scientific journal, publisher, etc) would allow its authors to glorify themselves in articles. I can't see why Wikipedia should. Methinks that such "articles" should be banned altogether.The very least that must be done is to make it policy that such pages contain warnings that they are autobiographic and should therefore be viewed as biased, and that they must be short and modest. Without a clear-cut policy about conflicts of interest, Wikipedia will not look credible to critical readers.
  • Intent. "Shameless self-promotion" - that seems to describe the thing very well. Wikipedia is not a showcase for personal vanities, and all attemps to use it as such are violations of the Wikipedia spirit.

In view of all this, I think it might be best to get rid of these pages altogether. An alternative solution might be to create a separate namespace (or even a project of its own) for biographies, (auto- or other). Nobody expects to find independently-verified truth in an autobiography. If biographies presented themselves apart from the encyclopedia and it were made obvious what is autobiographical and what is not, the damage to Wikipedia's credibility could be mitigated. Kosebamse 16:08, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'd vote against starting a new project for vanity biographies—auto- or other. Geez. If people are that self-absorbed, let them put up a vanity web site that they actually have to pay for (actually, many ISPs give subscribers one for free). As far as allowing vanity entries in the 'pedia, as I said before, I vote against them. I agree with everything that Kosebamse pointed out. —Frecklefoot 17:47, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps I should clarify that I absolutely don't want a vanity project - I am strongly opposed to everything that undermines Wikipedia's credibilty. I just think that if that disease can not be eradicated, it should at least be contained somewhere else so that it doesn't contaminate Wikipedia's article namespace. Kosebamse 18:05, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Temp articles

Should temp articles be deleted after they are no longer in use? --Jiang 04:52, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, but list on VfD first.—Eloquence 05:08, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)

Interchangable use of Academy Award and Oscar

I've seen "Academy Award" and "Oscar" used interchangeably (for example, in the new article on Frances McDormand). Should they be? Most people use the words interchangeably, but I didn't know if we ought to choose one for simplicity's sake, and to limit confusion for the many people worldwide who pay little attention to the AMPAS's awards, let alone their nickname? Jwrosenzweig 21:19 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, at least in the same article with all parts written by the same person. Being properly chastened, I've changed Frances McDormand accordingly. Bill 21:31 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Jtdirl and 172 continue to remove the link to New Imperialism (temp) from New Imperialism -- despite their having demanded a vote which then turned out to support the link. Pizza Puzzle

4Reference?

I stumbled on to 4Reference, which seems to feed exclusively on Wikipedia articles. Does anybody know more about this? -- Mic 20:43 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, see Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content. MB 21:29 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Log in problems

For some reason, I keep being logged out every so often. Is anyone else having this problem today? Angela 19:36 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

LOL, this happens to me everyday. Your login cookie expires I believe. MB 20:13 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Abbreviation Question

In several entries, there is the abbreviated reference "Jellinek, "B. H."" I'm guessing this is Adolf Jellinek, but to what does the "B. H." refer?

It's my understanding that if an image (a painting in this case) is out of copyright, one can't copyright a digital representation of that image. Am I right? CGS 18:31 24 Jul 2003 (UTC).

That's true, but only if the digital image is not a "derived work." This can be tricky and is very much of a gray area -- for example, a cropped image might be "creative," depending on how it's cropped. An image with color-enhancement or sharpening might be a derivative work subject to a separate coypright. It's often nearly impossible to tell whether something is a straight "accurate copy" or a copy with some sort of copyrightable modification.
The subtleties of this question are almost agonising, and there have been similar questions raised (offline) about the copyright in photographs of artwork. --Daniel C. Boyer 17:25, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
My policy as of late has been to assume the image is not copyrighted, and just to use it (this goes both for old paintings and for scans of 19th-century photographs). I usually make a note of where I got the digital image from, and a note that I the original work is out of copyright. I figure if someone really thinks their digital image is a creative work subject to copyright, they can always complain to us and we'll take it down at that time. --Delirium 19:50 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Photographs are copyright. If you photograph a nice sunset, the copyright belongs to you: ditto if you photograph a painting in a gallery. Hence galleries normally forbid photography, so that they can sell you postcards they own the copyright to. The copyright is not in the painting (unless it's recent, of course) but in the photo. A 19th-century photo is out of copyright. (IANAL) Gritchka 17:25 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)
In German copyright law, the work has to have an artistic expression to be copyrighted on its own. If the photographer just makes a 1:1 reproduction of the painting, it's the painting's copyright you have to obey. If he also pictures the frame and the little sign below it, the photographer has made a new artistic work and the selection of his motive qualifies for a copyright of the photography. The reason most galleries don't like photos being taken is a) flashlights not being good for the images and b) they want to sell their souvenirs. -- JeLuF 08:10, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
US law is similar. An accurate reproduction of any work (whether a painting or book) is simply a copy, and subject only to the original coypright. A new copyright is possible if the work is "creative" and thus constitutes a "derived work" in its own right, rather than merely another instance of the original work. So if you scan in a painting, or take a photograph which is cropped at the edges of the canvas, this isn't subject to copyright. You'd have to argue you did something creative in your photography (framing, postprocessing, etc.) for it to be copyrighted. Same with a book -- if you merely reprint an old book, it's not copyrighted. If you do something creative with it, then it is. --Delirium 19:30, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

When certain users repeatedly (I'm talking about the really really bad ones) vandalize Wikipedia, why doesn't Wikipedia seek to press criminal charges or file a civil lawsuit? Vandalism is a crime.

The whole point about Wikiweb is that everyone can format the content of the pages. This will necessarily, by knowing how some (or a lot of) people behave, also have its negative consequences. If Wikipedia would press criminal charges here and there, this would discourage the signup of new users such as myself. Vandalism is a crime, but when you leave your Lambhorgini Diablo unlocked in the streets it will be vandalized. The regular users of Wikipedia, should then see their responsibility in fixing things up. And they / you / we do. In the Norwegian wikipedia, however, I've found alot of articles that really upsets me, but this doesn't allow the management to file charges according to the wikiweb manifesto. That's my opinion..
Sigg3.net 09:41 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Wikipedia, and Wikipedians, reserve the right to complain to ISPs, workplaces, and/or schools, as appropriate, as well as take legal action if appropriate. See also: Wikipedia:replies to common objections. Martin 12:48 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I was thinking, in regard to pages like Yoism, Idealist Press International, Ltd., and so on, that in cases of pages on (really) minor subjects, the pages themselves can be perfectly fine but links to them from major articles are what's really irritating.

I was wondering if this was enshrined in policy somewhere - by all means, create pages on minor subjects (though really, really minor ones may be deleted anyway) but avoid the temptation to link to them in such a way that they seem very important.

If it's not an official policy, it should be. :-) How about Wikipedia:Links to minor subjects? Evercat 01:01 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This was kind of implied by the extended discussion of the wikipedia:neutral point of view policy that we nailed down (so long ago, it seems). However, making the point explicit can't hurt.
On this topic, there's been some mention of the "1000-person" or "5000-person" guideline for article inclusion (on the idea that if it's of relevance to less than that many people, we can't really write an article about it). Is this mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia yet? It's an interesting idea, and it would be nice to have guidelines for "too obscure to be on Wikipedia.". Some refinement would obviously be in order though... --Robert Merkel 04:46 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I threw out the idea a while back to see if it would stick, apparently it has. :-) I think I've pondered enough to write up a page now, I just hate to use up my precious article-writing time on meta-pages, and been putting it off. Stan 14:55 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm not sure I like this idea -- I think there are plenty of encyclopedic things known by fewer than 1000 people. For example, a lot of historical information in relatively obscure fields might fall into this category, or even some of the math pages on more specialized topics of which perhaps only 500 or so researchers in that particular field would be aware. I don't see any reason these sorts of things shouldn't go in an encyclopedia though. --Delirium 00:48 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Wasn't it 1000 people affected rather than know about it? That would cover the obscure historical facts, most of which (I assume) affected at least that number. Where it leaves pure maths though is a problem. :-) Evercat 00:52 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Style of dash

Question on Style. I recieved the following comment on a page I edited: (&#151; is not a valid HTML entity... it should be — or —). I think &#151; is perfectly valid for a "printer's em or em dash" Anyone know why it is not? Also, should not the em be separated by spaces from the rest of the text, since it is NOT an ordinary dash, but a device for redirecting rthouyght within a sentence? Anybody know about this? Marshman 04:47, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Mentoring/ Request for review

I've been inserting articles and editing for a few months now and would enjoy any critical feedback anybody might have so I can improve my contributions to this encyclopaedia. (If this isn't the proper place to ask for this, I apologise.) --MTR (严加华) 01:55 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I often feel like this myself. Perhaps we should setup a page such as Wikipedia:Requests for Review so people can ask people to cast an eye over new articles or contributions? This could help catch sp and typo errors. CGS 11:16 25 Jul 2003 (UTC).
I agree that this is a good idea. Perhaps it could include some sort of mentoring and offer advice rather than using the Village Pump for this. I'm not sure about the name Wikipedia:Requests for Review though. Angela 18:17 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps you can use Wikipedia:Pages needing attention? Maybe you can create a new section within the page. Tomos 12:24, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

North American Man-Boy Love Association

A matter of time. Now we have it: North American Man-Boy Love Association. Now is the time for all good men to go to work. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick

Fixed. My first article reversion.  :-( is now :-) Maybe this page needs to be protected. Daniel Quinlan 02:17 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Page protection should not be used except in extreme circumstances. MB 03:57 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Capitalisation of titles

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? should be the principle article, and all other with similer names should redirect to it. It is not a big deal but it is not quite okay to let Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to be the principle one. --wshun

Star Trek is spelt with all caps on the show's intro - shall we move that articles as well or use standard rules of English grammar (which would favor Who Wants to be a Millionare, BTW)? --mav
Standard English practice is to capitalize all words of a title except for articles and short prepositions, such as 'a', 'the', 'to', 'of', and so on (except where these are the first word of the title, in which case they are capitalized). So I believe Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? would be the correct way of capitalizing it. Of course the show itself may or may not follow standard English practice in its promotional materials; I haven't looked. as for be, I believe that all verbs in titles should be capitalized. --Delirium 23:02 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The explanation is good enough to me. Thanks. wshun 23:08 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The show name should be used as they render it. There are enough cases in popular culture where the rules of capitalization and grammar are purposefully ignored. For example, thirtysomething and er are two other TV shows that come to mind. Daniel Quinlan 02:17 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

How to move pages

I've rewritten a stub at Siena College at Loudinville NY. The problem is, a) it's spelled Loudonville, and b) I see no reason why it shouldn't be titled Siena College. How does renaming take place? I'm new enough that I haven't seen how this is done. Jwrosenzweig 20:47 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The move this page is for renaming. Moving a page also leaves a redirect to the new name behind. כסיף Cyp 21:12 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Vandal banning

I don't know what normal procedure is for banning people, but user:203.59.48.208 appears to deserve it richly. -Smack 18:06 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Should be taken to Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. I will ban this user. --Jiang 18:22 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)
has already been blocked a few hours ago--Jiang

I am creating a page that lists all the books that are reviewed on Wikipedia at List of books. Is there a way to get a list of all the pages that link to Wikipedia:Book sources? Only a few selected non-book articles show up using "What links here" on that page. GUllman 17:32 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Comments requested on WikiProject Countries

I would appreciate comments on my suggestion on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries. - Montréalais 18:01 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Deletions of text

Could someone take a look at vulva? It contains two image-links which point to deleted(?) images. I presume the whole block of stuff surrounding the links should be deleted, but I am hesitant to do so, since I haven't really figured out this whole image-thing. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 14:55 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Special Characters (Spanish enye)

I want to add an entry that contains a Spanish "enye" character - Buñol - should the entry/filename be:


  • Bun~ol
  • Bu&ntilde;ol
  • Bu + whatever hex unicode thing it takes + ol
  • Bunyol (English phonetic)
  • Bunol (just pretend the tilde isn't there)

???

AHands 11:58 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The usual practice I've seen is to use the unaccended (for example, Vasco Nunez de Balboa), so Bunol should probably be the article title. Of course, you can use the special characters within the article itself; it may also be good to redirect Buñol to Bunol, to aid in searching and whatnot. -- Wapcaplet 13:39 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Hello, AHands. According to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English), you should "Name your pages in English and place the native transliteration on the first line of the article unless the native form is more commonly used in English than the anglicized form." So for example the article about Christopher Columbus is there rather than at Cristóbal Colón (an alternative form of his name, which a certain rather controversial Wikipedian once recommended), because he is more commonly known as "Christopher Columbus" in English. However, if there is no well-known English-language form of a name, the native form should be used. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) says that "Languages like Spanish or French should need no transliteration". The system we have allows Spanish characters like "ñ" to be used, so you can use them. If a name is always spelt with "ñ" rather than "n", then I think we should use the right character in the title for accuracy. But the form with an "n" should be made a redirect, so that we don't accidentally end up with a duplicate article at the alternative title. -- Oliver P. 16:11 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

How to redirect a page (bellringing)

Can someone who knows about these things please do a redirect from Bell ringing and Bellringing to Campanology. I've just put "Bell ringing" into the Search box and apparently there was no article, but there is!
Adrian Pingstone 09:43 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Done. For the next time, you can do it yourself, it's rather easy:
  • Open any Wikipedia page.
  • Click into the address-field at the top of your browser. That's where http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_article stands.
  • Replace the name of the current article (Some_article in the above example) by the title of the page you want to create. Replace blanks by underscores. Hit Enter.
  • Click Edit this page on the following, empty page.
  • Insert #REDIRECT [[Campanology]] into the article field. Write redirect in upper case. Don't put a blank between # and REDIRECT. Put the target into double brackets.
  • Hit save. That's it.
-- JeLuF 10:03 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The article is at Bellringing and suggests that "Bellinging" is the correct term, JeLuf, you've made a double redirect. Mintguy 11:28 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

No, The Anome was, he moved from Campanology to Bellringing without fixing the redirects 2 hours after I created the redirects. -- JeLuF 08:18, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
My mistake. Sorry. -- The Anome 09:38, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Examining IPs of non-logged in users

It would be great if non-logged in users (specifically, their edit history) could be examined by class C network so all 256 (well, not quite 256) addresses on a particular subnet can be examined at once. Why? Because users with dynamic IP addresses tend to move around a lot, but are often allocated an address on the same class C network (especially for smaller ISPs and most non-public providers like companies). Daniel Quinlan 02:12 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Style of dash

Question on Style. I recieved the following comment on a page I edited: (&am; "#151;" is not a valid HTML entity... it should be & "mdash;" or & "#8212;"). I think & "#151;" is perfectly valid for a "printer's em or em dash" Anyone know why it is not? Also, should not the em be separated by spaces from the rest of the text, since it is NOT an ordinary dash, but a device for redirecting rthouyght within a sentence? Anybody know about this? Marshman 04:47, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

In ISO 8859-1 and Unicode, code point 151 is reserved as a control character. It is not an em dash except in Microsoft's proprietary code page extensions, and any program that displays an em-dash for "&#151;" is doing so either erroneously or in deliberate emulation of common bugs in Windows. Relying on buggy behavior is not recommended. :) Please use the standard, either &mdash; or &#8212;. --Brion 05:02, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thanks I will use ampemdash in the future. Coffee-Cup Software HTML Editor inserts &amp "#151" for an emdash and it certainly displays that way on browsers. Why the confusion? 24.94.86.252 05:36, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)me not logged inn Marshman 05:38, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Database dumps and mailing list archives

I have some questions regarding downloading the database dumps. On the page it says last dump made July 13. Does that mean what I think it means (i.e. if I download the English and non-English tarballs I only have revisions up to the 13th?). Also, as I understand it, I would only have to download the cur tarballs from here on in (if I saved the old ones), is this correct? I figure having an extra backup of the database can't hurt...especially after last night :). Addendum: should I also download the mailing list archives (from what I gather, they're separate from the dumps)? Geez, another question: is it safe to assume images are not included with the dumps? -- Notheruser 15:42 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ok, I think I've found most of the answers to my above questions; I'll list them here in case anyone else was curious. The database hadn't been backed up since July 13 at the time, but, currently, it is now updated until August 1. You have to download the cur and old files to completely backup the English Wikipedia (don't forget about otherlanguages.tar for a full backup). The mailing lists are archived offsite, so they seem safe and images are currently not backed up (about 1GB worth of files). -- Notheruser 18:53, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Move to Wikipedia talk:Database download

Date of death convention

What is the convention for listing the day of someone's death, if the time of death would make it ambiguous with respect to UTC? (For example, Bob Hope died at 9:29 pm Pacific time on Sunday, July 27; if I figured it correctly, this would be 4:29 am UTC July 28.) -lee 14:53 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I would say put it in local time. CGS 15:12 28 Jul 2003 (UTC).
I'm guessing the date he died in his time zone should be used. -- Notheruser 15:18 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

2000 Census

Throughout the articles on US cities and US states reference data are provided from the US Census. This fact is usually indicated by a statement such as 2000 census.... Should this not be 2000 Census (a proper noun) and an article developed for this significant event? Marshman 19:22 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

If someone wants to make such an article, I can have the rambot do a mass replace to link to the article. For consideration there is already an article on the U.S. Census Bureau which might contain all the information needed (instead of a specific article for the 2000 census). This article is, however, already linked to from the city/state/county articles. -- Ram-Man 02:26 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

A few questions (lists, see also, redirects)

Is there a bug in the software that adds a newline to large lists?

What's the correct format of the "See also"? When is it a good idea to use it? And should it come before or after the "External links" listing?

If you know that some article might be mispelled, is it a good idea to create a new article and redirect it to the correct one pre-emptively?

thanks

Dori 23:27 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Don't know about non bug with long lists... About "See also:" I suppose you should use it every time that you haven't figured out a way to include all the relevant links within the text of tha article itself. I would put it before the "External links". As to format, If I thought there were only going to be a few links, I would go for just plain "See also:" and the links following it on the same line. If I thought that there were going to be a huge list of other links that have something to do with it, then I would do:

== See also: ==

  • link
  • another link
  • third link
  • fourth link

...

and so forth.

About making redirects for misspellings, only advise is to use good sense, do if the misspelling is common, and the subject of the article popular. I would tend to create them pretty liberally, but others might disagree. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 23:51 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

If they're only one or two links on the "see also" list, I prefer not making a new subheading:

See also: [[first link]], [[second link]]

--Jiang 23:54 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Speed

Is it just me or does Wikipedia seem real fast right now? Has something changed? If so - me like. :) --mav 06:29, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It could be my link table optimisation, or it could be your imagination. I'm not sure because we never worked out exactly how much time link updates were taking. BTW, you should probably avoid undeleting for a few days. Eloquence has a feeling I might have broken it, and I haven't checked it out yet. -- Tim Starling 07:48, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)
The new link update code definitely helped (section editing could also have a minor effect), and the two major slowdowns today were from an inconsiderate sysop who ran (really) idiotic queries. No more sysop queries to bog us down are a good thing. I think they should be disabled on all wikis with more than 10K articles -- right now the Germans or the French can still bog us down because their DBs are already quite large. Then we need to optimize the search and the watchlist and we have a decent response time. For the next couple of months ;-) —Eloquence 07:54, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Discussion of changes

Can a page be set up so the entire community can discuss the new changes? I'm sure different people have different opinions and not everyone likes the new scheme. I have a couple concerns, but is village pump the place to voice them? --Jiang 05:04, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This is a wiki -- go ahead and create one. Wikipedia talk:Software updates, for example.—Eloquence 05:21, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Okay, I moved everything over there. -- Tim Starling 05:54, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

Nutty sysop queries

I don't know who did it because this can only be seen when the query is finished. But someone started several queries of the form

select count(*) from old

or

select count(*) from old where ...

This is crazy! InnoDB has no rowcount, so it has to go through the entire table to count it -- that can take ages with our multi gigabyte OLD table that stores all revisions. With a WHERE condition on the content it's even worse. Worse, after I manually killed the query the person started it again! Whoever did this should never do an SQL query again because they evidently don't know how to handle this feature properly.

Furthermore, I have disabled SQL queries for the time being because they cause constant slowdowns and I don't want to wonder each time the wiki is slow whether this is caused by yet another out of control query. If you want to run a query, paste it on my talk page, I'll take a look at it and run it if necessary.—Eloquence 03:09, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Tut! Some idiot's ruined it for everyone! CGS 10:24, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC).
Someone mentioned recently having different types of sysop - I can't remember who it was, but perhaps this coud be revisited now, so that those who can be trusted with SQL can read the database. I only ever use the queries that are shown on my user page. Is there a way that these could be okayed, and then I would allowed to run them, or do I have to go via Erik each time? Angela 12:31, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
In the long run it'd probably be better to have a separate server for analysis that runs a periodically updated copy of the database (maybe nightly). There's a lot of interesting (and potentially expensive) queries that don't really need to be run on the live database, but would be interesting to run on a backup copy (and not everyone has the knowledge or resources to download the dump and set up their own to play around with). For example, Wikipedia:Wikipedians by number of edits is an interesting page, but there's no reason that query would ever need to be run on the live database. --Delirium 19:36, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

BerliOS II

Another question about the temporary refuge (berliOS ? or was it BERLIos, anyway...) There was a page called This is not Wikipedia, and it spawned a handful of stubbish new articles, with the idea that they would be ported over into Wikipedia, when and if it could be raised again. Now Wikipedia does not outwardly appear to be in imminent fear of collapsing again (well, for all I know some tech-guy may be desperately holding a finger in the dyke, but then...); what I am querying is what is the preferred modus for transplanting those non-autochtonous wikipedia articles beneath the juicy mulch of wikipedia. Cut and paste? Or is there a way to transfer them wiki to wiki, without losing edit histories? Does it matter? Thank you for your attention. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 00:18, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Copy and paste is the only viable option I'm afraid.—Eloquence 01:23, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

BerliOS

When Wikipedia was down this morning there was a link to a wiki page on another site. Some of the discussion was quite funny, but I now have no idea where that site is now (and can't use browser history since I was at work at the time). So where was that page? Evercat 17:25 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It's berliOS, & the specific page u're looking for is Talk:Wikipedia Status/Archive. --Menchi 17:27 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Faroese

On the Recent Changes page "faroese" is listed as a requested article...there is a Faroese language article. Is lower-case faroese something different, or is that just a typo? Adam Bishop 21:43, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It was a typo, by me. I made it into a redirect. -- Notheruser 23:29, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Odd intentations with the new software

Since the new software has been installed, I see that several (but not all) articles have an odd one-character indentation in the first line. I can't find anything in the text that would cause this. I'm using IE 6.0. RickK 03:21, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, I looked at the same pages with Netscape 4.7, and I don't see the indentations. RickK 03:47, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I don't know the technical details, but it's connected to the right-floating [edit] buttons. (On some pages, you get a similar effect when there's a right-floating image at the beginning of a paragraph.)
—Paul A 04:55, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The solution is one or two blank lines between the top and the first paragraph in the wikisource, alternatively between the interlanguage-links and the first paragraph. The blank lines are certainly less disturbing the than the unintended space - as a remedy until it's somehow worked around through a software fix.
-- Ruhrjung 12:48, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Don't understand Redirect

I tried to make my first redirect page: Michigan Riding and Hiking Trail, and it doesn't seem to work. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? --Funpaul 20:53, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Nothing is wrong, Funpaul, everything works fine. Just click on the above link, it works. -- Cordyph 21:01, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Yes, I see it does now. But it didn't a few minutes ago, I tried a number of times...confused. There isn't a propogation time involved, is there?
This is explained at wikipedia:redirect. It's a feature to confuse newcomers... ;-) Martin

Automated Table of Contents

In many Wikipedia pages there are Automated [Table of Contents]. But I can't see, from an editing view of the page, how this is done. Can we please have some instructions somehwere on how to put an Automated Table of Contents into a page. Thanks. RB-Ex-MrPolo 09:52, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)~

This is a new feature under discussion. The TOC only shows up if their are at least three subheadings on the page. --Jiang 10:09, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
What I don't like about this new feature is the TOC below the first paragraphs of the article. It should be really on top, below the headline. Otherwise it's just chaotic, see Sociology for an example. -- till we *) 10:11, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Please discuss the new changes at Wikipedia talk:Software updates and not here. --Jiang 10:13, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Done that -- till we *)

Deleting images

Does anyone know how to delete an uploaded image? --David 19:28, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You have to be a sysop to delete images. What image do you want deleted and for what reason? -- Notheruser 19:34, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I want to delete Ludo.jpg and Parques.jpg because I regret having put it here. I have a website and I prefer that people download them from there.

I have deleted them. David is a new user who uploaded them yesterday. It only seems fair he is allowed to have them deleted. I have copies if anyone wants to vote for undeletion. Angela 20:32, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Physics main page is empty !

Aug 3, 2003 This page looks empty, although, when trying to edit it, there is text in it. Is it a bug ?

Physics is empty? Try refreshing (F5) the page. -- Notheruser 22:54, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Pruning this article

There is a large cache of lines at the top of this article which indicate where previous discussions have been moved. Currently, this article is 55 Kb long, and that makes it difficult for some browsers to edit. Could we move the moved articles section to another article, or to an archive? RickK 19:39, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Pruning the pump (sounds like a euphemism, doesn't it?) is unpopular. I don't know why - it really boosts your number of contributions. The list of items moved can be archived to Wikipedia:Village pump archive, but the latest few should stay. Be bold! CGS 19:46, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC).

Benzone

On Wikipedia:Requested_articles there is a request for Benzone. Is this just a misspelling of Benzene, or is it something different that I simply don't know about?

Or it may be a misspelling of benzine? -- Gutza 09:15, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I believe it's genuine: in chemistry you change the suffix of the name to represent different characteristics. For example sorbose - sugar; sorbitol - sugar alcohol, and so on. Dysprosia 09:23, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Benzone is apparently a non-standard name for Phenylbutazone -- Tim Starling 13:59, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

Style of dash

(move to Manual of style)

Question on Style. I recieved the following comment on a page I edited: (&am; "#151;" is not a valid HTML entity... it should be & "mdash;" or & "#8212;"). I think & "#151;" is perfectly valid for a "printer's em or em dash" Anyone know why it is not? Also, should not the em be separated by spaces from the rest of the text, since it is NOT an ordinary dash, but a device for redirecting rthouyght within a sentence? Anybody know about this? Marshman 04:47, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

In ISO 8859-1 and Unicode, code point 151 is reserved as a control character. It is not an em dash except in Microsoft's proprietary code page extensions, and any program that displays an em-dash for "&#151;" is doing so either erroneously or in deliberate emulation of common bugs in Windows. Relying on buggy behavior is not recommended. :) Please use the standard, either &mdash; or &#8212;. --Brion 05:02, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thanks I will use &mdash; in the future. Coffee-Cup Software HTML Editor inserts "&#151;" for an em-dash and it certainly displays that way on browsers. Why the confusion? 24.94.86.252 05:36, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)me not logged inn Marshman 05:38, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
please don't! &mdash; looks very ugly in wikisource and some editors may not know what it is. Stick to "--". I know it's ugly, but in future our parser may turn that into mdash automagically. -- Tarquin 12:17, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Does hardly look more ugly than L&uoml;beck.
"--" gets really ugly when broken between lines, " - " would be a better advice.
-- Ruhrjung 12:42, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

How to make my computer a Wikipedia copy?

I want to make my computer a Wikipedia platform so that I can browe and work offline, but I don't know much about programming, I tried several times to install the PHP, but failed. (It doesn't work! I did everything accroding to the instrument, but the source file just as what it is in .php, I am using Windows XP English edition + IE 6.0). Could anyone help me how to make that work? So that I can just edit articles offline as I do online in the Wikipedia? Or is there any software offering WYCIWYG platform? --Samuel 13:23, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

For the second idea I proposed (to include a Wikipedia search or go bar into custom webpages), I found out that a quick look into the sourcecode of Wikipedia generated pages is enough. There you'll find (with the small addition of http://www.wikipedia.org done by me) all that is needed to include a wikipedia search field on custom homepages: 

 <form name='search' class='inline' method=get
 action="http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml">
 <input type=text name="search" size=19 value="">
 <input type=submit name="go" value="Go">
 </form>

Is it okay to use this? Is there someone who could create a nice (in the result) sniplet of code out of this that could be included anywhere? -- And shouldn't the search function better be really disabled instead of only be commented out? -- till we *) 15:20, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)

((oh, and by the way: Why does the go field (neither this nor the one in wikipedia proper not work, but brings up random pages? -- till we *) 15:25, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)))

Enhance the wikipedia experience

Or, rather dully, I've two ideas someone could implement to spread wikipedia:

(1) A little "ask-wikip" tool/script for linux distributions, that from the unix prompt can be asked for wikipedia definitions and gives them or a no such definition if their is no page. Should be like the go-button, but a bit better in regard to uppercase/lowercase (try first the exact text, if this doesn't work, try it with all uppercase first letters, maybe even play a bit with hyphenation). Could get an X interface too, and some command line options for output (html, printable html to PS, pure ascii/using lynx as filter), and even display the wikipedia page in lynx or some other browser, maybe even including the edit functionality. 

> ask-wikip --ascii-only "Wikipedia:village pump"
[http://...]
Wikipedia Village Pump

This page is for asking questions. ...
 ((gives the actual text of the Village pump))

> ask-wikip ants

Opens lynx browser pointing to the article about "Ant"

(2) Another idea would be a "go" (or better performace given, even "search") button one could include in ones own website (like the amazon partner programme). So I could have a "Look something up at Wikipedia"-text input field + button on my website. This should be fairly easy and maybe does exist already.

What do you think about these ideas? -- till we *) 12:28, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)

Great idea! Please see the pyWikiAPI. Once it is done I (and others I am sure) will start making programs just like this. So feel free to post your suggestion on the forums there. MB 14:43, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
I really like the search text-field/button idea. I know I'd include it on my web site! Another tool to think about would be an add-on toolbar for IE. One that Merriam-Webster supplies (http://www.m-w.com) I find invaluable. It docks at the top of IE. Whenever I need to look up a word or synonym, I just type it in there and *BAM* a small window pops up with the info I need. I'd love a similar tool for Wikipedia. :-) —Frecklefoot 14:53, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Brilliant! Something much easier to code than an IE toolbar would be a Sherlock/Mycroft plugin to Mozilla. OTOH, only a few hundred thousand people use Mozilla, but I'm pretty sure that they're rather thickly concentrated on Wikipedia. -Smack 01:00, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Well, well, well. It seems that a certain Carey Evans made just such a thing - a year and a half ago. Now, children, go download the plugin. -Smack 01:13, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Did a google query, found Carey Evans homepage, but no plugin. And besides, I'd rather have something that could be included in websites, too. :-) -- till we *) 18:28, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)
To MB: The pyWikiAPI seems to be a bit empty, doesn't it? At least I didn't find any place where I easyly could mention my idea. I see the necessarity for a python (and also PHP) API to access Wikipedia from other sides, but I really can't believe something like that doesn't exist in the moment (could be a simple PHP-variables-in-the-URL-based approach or something with POST/GET-FORMs). -- till we *) 15:12, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
It would be very nice if I could do the following:
  1. highlight a word on a web page and right click. (Well, anyone can do it.)
  2. I get an option of "look up in Wikipedia"
  3. Upon selecting the option, a new Window opens with the highlighted word.
I have seen similar one for Google in Japanese. Tomos 11:56, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Well, if you use Mozilla, you can install the aforementioned plugin, which is almost as good. And if you don't use Mozilla, you have only yourself to blame. -Smack 18:02, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Possible Wikipedia in Nahuatl

I am from Wikipedia in Spanish. I contacted somebody called Citlalin Xochime' from a web Nahuatl-speaking a few days ago and told him about Wikipedia. This is whta he answered me to the suggestion of beginning a wikiversion in Nahuatl (a native American language with more than 1 million speakers):

Niltze! (Hello!) Papalotochtzin (Dear Rabbit Butterfly),
Tlazohkamati (Thank-You) for your email message! I am somewhat familar with the wiki-system and wikipedia sounds like something that stirs my interest. I won't have time to start the Nahuatl wiki-project until September at the earliest. Yet, I may pass along this valuable information to the NAHUAT-LIST :

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/nahuat-l.html

I agree, more Nahuatl speaking people will be attracted to the project, once established. I don't know if you got my email address from my Nahuatl Tlahtolkalli project, but I will surely pass along the information to the people at the Nahuatl Tlahtolkalli as well. My project is located at:
http://www.nahuatl.info/nahuatl.htm
So, once again, I am very interested, and I will pursue this project as time permits. Tlazohkamati for contacting me. (...)
I look forward to sharing Nahuatl with you!
Citlalin Xochime' (from, Nahuatl Citlalxochimeh = star flowers)
Nahuatl Tlahtolkalli
http://www.nahuatl.info/nahuatl.htm

I haven't heard of him/her since but he or other Nahuatl-speaking people may try to contact you. I will not be on Wikipedia for an indetermined period but I mentioned a cople of basics about the system as well as Youssefsan and Brion. I'd really like seeing a Wikiwikinahuatl around! -- Piolinfax 19:17 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

License compatibility

The norwegian SSB (Statistisk Sentralbyrå/Statistical Central Bureau) has a license for its data which states (my translation, see this page for the norwegian version):

SSB gives permission to store electronically, print, copy and propagate material from our web site (text, tables and figures). This permission requires reference to the source from whence the data is taken ("source: Statistisk sentralbyrå"). The source citation must be in direct connection to each table and figure used.

My question is, of course, can data from SSB be used in wikipedia articles, while complying with both their license and the GFDL? -lazyr 14:09 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Just because nobody is answering, I'm writing my not-so-educated ideas. (Don't take it as a legal advice, please.)

Say, you can put appropriate attribution with their data, making your edit compliant with both licenses. But GFDL allows others to modify the article. Attribution could be deleted by others. As soon as that happens, the article becomes what SSB doesn't want, but still GFDL compliant.

At the same time, I guess many would think there is a reasonable chance that the attribution would be kept. So, it could pragmatically be okay.

I think this is related to the issue of "fair use" if things like quotes are okay for Wikipedia to have. There has been a big discussion on mailing list (Wikipedia-l) during the last month or so, in case you are not aware of it.

Maybe you want to bring this question to the list, and see what people say? Tomos 09:36, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

M.Becker's life story

discussion moved to Talk:Daniel C. Boyer

Votes in progress

There should be a page listing all votes - so that people can find them and vote. Pizza Puzzle

See Wikipedia:List of ongoing votes. --Camembert

Decision making

Wikipedia is cool, but as an "user" more like a developer I still would like to have a chance to discuss important changes (like new TOCs). Couldn't there be something like a CfV in the Announcement section? For example, the new TOC could have been announced some weeks ago with something like "It's planned to introduce a new TOC-feature. If you want to discuss or test this feature, change over to metawiki/testwiki/whatever", so that it is possible for mere users to go into discussions about "big" changes without having to read the lists and the metawikipedia all the time? -- till we *) 10:25, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

It was announced on the wikitech mailing list, and discussed (a lot) over the past few months, and tested on the test server; however, I can appreciate that keeping up with all the various discussions going on Wikipedia is almost impossible. Perhaps a development log or somesuch?
James F. 10:37, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I know that it was discussed a lot on mailing lists (or at least I suppose that), but what I want is exactly this: a filtered-down announcement for "big" (what ever that may be) changes early enough so that there is time for all of us to decide if we want to join that particular discussion. Big changes would be major new features (as the TOC) or the new logo or a fictional decision to kill the english edition -- and to find these I just don't want to read a technical mailing list which, I suppose, mostly argues about database tuning etc. -- till we *) 12:10, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

This was discused on the general mailing list a great deal - only the technical aspects on how to do it were discused on WikiTech-l. It has also been on the test wiki for at least a month. --mav

Okay, okay, okay -- it's not the dark cellar with leopard on the next planet. But why not make wikipedia even more user-participation friendly and inform about things like that in wikipedia proper, i.e. the announcements section, early enough? -- till we *) 12:18, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

Nice of you to volunteer for the daunting task of scanning the mailing list for relevant news and summarizing them on the wiki. I was hoping someone would do that.—Eloquence

I'm thinking about it, but wouldn't it be even nicer if someone who already scans the mailing list(s) for his/her personal use would volunteer to summarize big news? -- till we *) 12:26, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

Definitely. Feel free to ask the most active mailing list participants to do it. :-) —Eloquence

Why are the "Move this page" (for non sysops) and "Post a comment" functions only present on the left sidebar but not on the bottom? --Jiang 09:27, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Why can I not see a "Search" button? Tiles 08:15, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Database problems. Systems slowed down dramatically on searches yesterday, so searching had to be disabled until the reason for the slow down has been found. -- JeLuF 08:35, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Help with images

I have uploaded Image: Sanya.jpg, but its far too big for the page (Hainan), and I don't have Photoshop or any similar software. Any help trimming it down or reducing it would be much appreciated.

I've also got a lot of other images for Hong Kong and Macau-related pages which I need help with Photoshop. If anyone has the time to assist generally, please contact me - David Stewart 03:04, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

New Imperialism

Please see talk:New Imperialism for discussion of whether New Imperialism (currently protected) should include a link to a temp page. Please reply and vote there rather than here, to avoid duplicating arguments. Thank you for your co-operation. Martin 17:27 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

We're back!

Horary! We're back! CGS 13:05 28 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Thanks to Jimbo, or so it is said. While we're on the topic, I vote Eloquence be given root access. -- Tim Starling 13:12 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I second that. (don't know what it means, but it sounds a good idea! FearÉIREANN 13:26 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Suggest it on the mailing list. The Wikipedia's really got its fast stripes on now everyone thinks we're down. CGS 13:27 28 Jul 2003 (UTC).
That, and eggs in several baskets in other ways too. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick

P.S. this message brought to you via 4 edit conflicts and counting.

Presentations on WP

I've seen people mentioning academic studies (conference presentations/ journal papers) of Wikipedia. Is there a page which lists all of them (known to us?)? Tomos 00:26 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't know if someone has started a list yet, but here are some starting points: I did an English presentation at the Open Cultures conference in Vienna (which also covered Slashdot and Kuro5hin), and also one on July 1 at the Merz-Akademie (exclusively about Wikipedia). There appears to be no video online for the latter one, even though it was filmed. I also wrote a four-part-series for the German netzine Telepolis about Wikipedia. [2] Lars Aronsson's Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website may also be of interest.—Eloquence 00:39 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I think it'd very informative (to non-Wikipedians) and fun (to Wikipedians) to see a list of formal or semi-formal oral presentations (academic or not) in which Wikipedia is mentioned (hopefully more than a sentence.) --Menchi 02:41 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Thanks! I tentatively created a list of references on my user page so that others can look or add. Tomos 01:41, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Time bubble (wrong date in contributions)

Have we hit a time bubble? Look at my contributions, right down at the bottom, with red dwarf. I made that contribution today, but it's listed as June 2002! My account didn't even exist then! CGS 20:22 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Renaming a page creates a redirect page from the old title. This page is given the date of the old page. Why? I'm not sure. But that's how it is. --Brion 07:14, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)

More (and different) search problems

I've figured out where these articles TITLED IN ALL CAPS are coming from; they're the result of a search that comes up empty. People just click "Edit this page" and away they go.

Last time we used Google for an extended period there was a search box on the empty results page that would take the search argument, add "site:wikipedia.org" to it automatically, etc., would it be possible to code that back in? At the very least though that page shouldn't be editable. - Hephaestos 07:08, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I've changed it so that it doesn't end up with all upper case titles. Hope that helps.—Eloquence 11:12, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)

Larousse problem back

I keep getting the following.

Host 'larousse.wikipedia.org' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'

It took 40 minutes to get on to wiki recent pages. My watchlist is inaccessible and every second page gets the above message. I am finding wiki at this stage almost unusable. FearÉIREANN 18:12, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, the database needs to be flushed. You would think this is something we could automate? MB 18:54, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)
Can't you flush through the web SQL interface? I know it's now banned, but was it possible? CGS 20:28, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC).
No and no.—Eloquence 20:40, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)
This is a wonderful project, but I've been a contributor since July 25 and the system has been down two of the 6 days. Is this typical? Marshman 21:19, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Price of success - number of users/editors keeps outpacing the infrastructure improvements. Somebody improves the internals, it's better for another couple of weeks, then starts bogging down again. I believe there are more technical performance improvement projects that are awaiting hackers. Stan 21:59, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It took me 41 attempts to get into this page because of this problem. I have made 19 attempts to edit one talk page. I cannot use by watchlist. I cannot get to my talk page. I cannot edit anyone else's talk page. Sorry the language but I am so frustrated. I have cleared my cache but nothing seems to work. I cannot even guarantee I will be able to save this. If this sort of problem is not sorted out soon people will just give up on wikipedia. FearÉIREANN 22:26, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'll second that I've been having the same problem, could someone explain why it's happening and whats causing it. I'v noticed the wikipedia seems to have gone haywire since the new Table of content thingies were introduced G-Man 22:39, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It is my professional opinion that the main reason for the problems is this article. Things should calm down a little later. Come back in a couple hours. MB 22:48, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)
Hmm, or maybe not, the site stats don't indicate an increase in traffic. MB 04:21, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)
  • Why blame the TOC? It's been like this before the TOC thing. Don't blame TOCs or sysop queries to the database or anything else anyone doesn't like. Apologies for the censorship Jtdirl. Angela 23:35, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)
  • Hey, it's back. The errors were happening every single time for me for the past 8 hours or so. -- Jake 03:47, 2003 Jul 31 (UTC)


  • And more than difficulty getting on or staying on. My watch list was wiped out 24.94.86.252 04:12, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    • I take that back. System tells me I've logged on successfully, then drops me back to anomymous as soon as I move on from my logged in page -- Marshman 24.94.86.252 04:16, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC). How would I report this problem, or are others also unable to procede after logging on as other than anonymous?

Today's problems have nothing to do with the software updates, which made things faster. They are related to Larousse hitting an internal connection limit on Pliny, which nobody without root access could take care of. Unfortunately, we only have a couple of administrators with root access -- Brion, who is on vacation, and Jimbo, who is a bit slow. Hopefully, we will 1) get more servers and 2) get some full or at least part time employed admin once we can start taking donations (in a couple of weeks or so).—Eloquence 04:33, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)

The problem, according to the MySQL manual, is some sort of network error. Apparently TCP connections between larousse and pliny are getting broken unexpectedly. I suggest setting max_connect_errors to a very large number, as a workaround -- Tim Starling 08:31, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)

I'm giving up for now. THis is something I do not understand about the data base. I can see that others are making changes under their loged in names, but I simply get bumbed out as soon as I leave my login page. Even earlierwhen the system was essentially all but crashed, I see Recent Changes progressing. Maybe try again tomorrow. Maybe I'll get an answer or the software will be back to normal. One can only hope. Marshman

You've probably got cookies disabled. -- Tim Starling 08:31, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)
You are exactly right. I slept on it, awoke and remembered that when the system was "down" yesterday, I tried a different security level for cookies to reduce popups. I forgot this might impact on my performance here. I'm back now Marshman 16:59, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
  • Not again? Getting this on about a quarter of the pages I go to;

Could not connect to DB on 130.94.122.197 etc Angela 23:50, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC) (This is my 999th edit by the way - you can vote on what the 1000th will be)

Wikipedia in the Media

Just a short note to let you know that I mentioned Wikipedia in a recent article on CMS for the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. The piece is available here in PDF format. Keep up the good work! --Laszlo 11:59, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Non-recognized countries

Is it just me are both the Chechnya and Somaliland articles neither NPOV nor entirely accurate? Both countries are basically unrecognized and the Somaliland article went so far as to modify the CIA factbook map, making it look like Somaliland was listed in the CIA factbook as a separate country (not that the CIA is the authority on what's a country or not, it just seems like the contributors to these articles are advocating independence rather than presenting facts. Daniel Quinlan 07:07, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)

I don't see the POV in Somiland - it clearly names it "territory" instead of country, and it states that it declared independence, but did not receive any international recognition of it. And making a map to show the territory is much better then many words to decribe it (OK, except for blind who need the words) - modifying the CIA map is probably the easiest way to create such a map. I guess it's just because you're used to see CIA maps for countries which makes you think it implies it being a country. andy 07:59, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)
"Territory" is the land and waters under the jurisdiction of a government. It's nearly synonymous in that context with "country" or "state".
Wrong-wrong-wrong-wrong-wrong. A territory can be not only the land and waters under the jurisdiction of a government, but can also be a defined (either officially by the government, or more or less loosely by others -- this can be taken to quite a degree of informality) part of the area of jurisdiction of some government (ex. the Kansas-Nebraska Territory of former days). This doesn't imply the soverignty of the "territory" in question; it might be a country, or it might not. --Daniel C. Boyer 17:20, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I don't have a problem with altering CIA maps when they are inaccurate, but altering the map to look like every other CIA map subtly implies that a government is recognized at some level. (On reading tha CIA article about Somalia, it does sound like the declaration could someday be recognized, but that's not at issue here.) On re-examining the article, I think some small touch-ups can probably fix it up. List the countries, if any, that recognize it. Note disputed status and recent history better, etc. Daniel Quinlan 08:48, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)
However the map in the Somalia article is definitely POV - as it shows Somalia without Somaliland. That one need replacement. andy 07:59, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Somaliland is not recognized by a single government. Replacing the Somalia map before Somaliland is recognized anywhere is premature and inaccurate. Daniel Quinlan 08:48, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)
Maybe the map could be modified in a different way as not to imply Somiland is not part of whichever countries it broke off of. (Maybe using dotted lines would help.) --Jiang 08:03, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Yes, and coloring the rest of Somalia in a different color then the other sorrounding countries would help as well - it would show that the remains of Somalia is on a different status then e.g. Ethopia. I'll try to paint something for the two maps later, unless someone else is faster of course. andy 08:22, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)
That would probably do most of the job. Probably should also be labeled as "region of Somalia claimed by Somaliland" or some such. Daniel Quinlan 08:48, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)
Done. I created two new maps from the original CIA map, which should visualize the status a bit better. The old JPEG maps (now they are PNG) I placed in Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion. andy 12:38, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Garbled Text

Laplace transform has the 37-character string "4LIQ9nXtiYFPCSfitVwDw7EYwQlL4GeeQ7qSO", which looks suspiciously like an MD5 string, appearing in several places where it seems there should be something more intelligible. Looking through the edit history, nearly every previous revision of the article is similarly garbled. I can't imagine this has been the case and nobody has noticed for months, leading me to believe something caused both the current version and previous revisions to get garbled recently. Perhaps some problem with the LaTeX rendering? --Delirium 22:40, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

It's not actually a MD5 string, it's $unique2, a string used internally to temporarily replace math sections. Quoting it in articles like that will cause weird things to happen, e.g. <math>ha\ ha\ I\ stole\ your\ string</math> ->  . Note that the source wikitext is not garbled, it just happens when it's rendered. It's clearly a bug, well spotted. -- Tim Starling 23:11, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)
The problem is <math> sections inside headings. As a workaround I've removed them from that article for now. -- Tim Starling 23:16, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)
Math sections should not occur within headings. They can't be properly displayed in the TOC (PNG images are the wrong size, non-transparent etc.)—Eloquence 06:28, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)


I think it would be better if <math> tags in headings were escaped, rather than producing the confusing output described above. -- Tim Starling 07:31, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)
Sure, go for it. Leave me a message as soon as it's committed (preferably to stable as well), and it'll go in with the next bunch of minor updates.—Eloquence 07:47, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)

Cyrillic characters

Does anybody know if there is a way to copy and paste Cyrillic characters? Whenever I try, I just get a row of question marks - is it possible at all? -- Cordyph 18:49, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It works for me with Mozilla - I did it several times with russian cosmonauts before, see e.g. Vladimir Komarov. Maybe your browser does not convert the russian characters to the Unicode numbers like Б. -- andy 21:23, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Wait a moment, I just activate my Mozilla browser - yes, that works fine. I just tried this in Opera 7, but next time I will activate my Mozilla for correct character conversion - thanks a lot for the hint. (Hephaestos just told me that he has entered all the unicode values directly - appears to be a lot of unnecessary work) -- Cordyph 21:44, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Edit disappeared

I attempted to edit, but my edit didn't appear on the page. My edit shows on Recent changes, but not on the page history. On Recent changes, the 'diff' links for my missing edit and the next edit have the same 'diff=' number, but different 'oldid=' numbers.

Unfortunately, it's gone. There's a known simultaneous editing bug which still hasn't been fixed..—Eloquence 13:16, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Fortunately, it was still on my clipboard, but I retyped the edit summary, not knowing it was in recent changes... Just wanted to be sure it was a known bug... (Suppose it isn't possible to view the wikipedia source code in C/C++..?) Ксйп Cyp 13:23, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Wikipedia is in PHP, not C or C++, but you can view the source at Wikipedia:Software. CGS 14:16, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC).
I know, I was thinking more along the lines of an option to set the preferred viewing language, like the new option for the preferred date format. (I was saying what I'd prefer, not what is possible, although after thinking about it, it wouldn't surprise me if there actually did exist some PHP/C++ converter, but I'm not sure the result would be very good, especially with being translated twice...) Ксйп Cyp 09:30, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Call for NPOV help on Homosexuality and Morality

The recent edit war on Homosexuality and Morality has lead to a new section to be added that basically discusses attacks on homosexuality through paedophilia. I'm extremely concerned about this section and what is precisely being said is actually true. I'm not qualified enough to necesarily make the correct edits fairly, so I would like others more qualified, people with some psychological training or knowledge of gay history, if they could examine the NPOV of this page. - Axon

Request for the word Contents to appear somewhere on the Main Page Community / About the Project section

This may seem a bit esoteric, but, I'll try... The search features are great, but, when trying to work out if Wikipedia can do something (I'm not talking about the encyclopedia content, but the functions of Wikipedia the system), the search may not find what you are looking for. Then you need to try a differnt research approach. You may want to look and see what it can do, a summary, overview, to see if it has something like what you are looking for. (I was looking for a Wish List) It is at this point at which, in books that have one, you turn to the contents page. But where is the contents page for the Wikipedia System documentation ? Actually, there is pretty much a contents page in the Wikipedia:About page. All I'm suggesting is that perhaps we rename that page as the About and Contents Page, or at least on the Main Page the pointer to the Wikipedia:About Page be changed to About and Contents I sure hope people see the point, because it is very hard to explain. RB-Ex-MrPolo 13:59, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I do see the point. Wikipedia:Utilities and Wikipedia:Help should serve as contents, of a sort, but I do feel the documentation area continues to need work. Martin 14:09, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Pizza Puzzle

It is obvious that certain users have become convinced that I am another user against which they hold a grudge. I will be changing my account name so that this is no longer a problem for me. Pizza Puzzle

Hold on a second. Two users can't be registered under the same name, right? So there should be only one Pizza Puzzle - the troll. -Smack 01:05, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Tell Lir that User:The troll isn't taken.
I think User:Vera Cruz is untaken. (I'm not convinced, but you're helping!) Daniel Quinlan 01:25, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)
I hope that the new Lir persona isn't interested in jumbled lists pertaining to New Imperialism! 172 12:11, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia in the news

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikipedia/index.html

-- NetEsq 01:40, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

See the discussion above...--Robert Merkel 03:30, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I.e., #CNN_Piece_on_Wikipedia. --Menchi 03:33, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)

Main Page Appearance

Does the main page look like this on other browsers?

File:User;Cyp⁄Main page.jpg Ксйп Cyp 18:46, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Are you referring to the new layout? If you are, apparently there was a "vote" on it (which I was unaware of, myself). -- Notheruser 18:50, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I'm sorry. I misinterperated the vote on dynamic content, thinking that the majority, which was in favor of adding dynamic content, wanted to use Temp5. The IE display bug for some reason doesn't affect me.LDan 16:30, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I was thinking of the text on the right, which isn't visible without scrolling to the right. Ксйп Cyp 18:54, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)


Seems to have been reverted. Perhaps the problem was it was too big for 800x600? Was that your resolution? Evercat 19:05, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Actually, slightly higher resolution, 1280x1024. (If I go higher than x1024, the refresh rate drops to 75Hz or worse, which looks horrible.) No matter how big or small I made the window, the main page scaled to be just the right amount too wide. (Extra width of page seemed to be the width of the wikipedia bar on the left.) Ксйп Cyp 20:24, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Having said that, Main_Page/Temp5 seems OK even in smaller windows. What browser were you using? Evercat 19:07, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I had the same problem. I'm using IE with a resolution of 960x720 and the edge of the page is cut off for me on both the temp page and the main page. - SimonP 19:31, Aug 4, 2003 (UTC)
Using Internet Exploiter, too. (Version 5.00.3502.1000/SP3.) Ксйп Cyp 20:24, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That's an IE bug. It can be fixed. -- Tarquin 20:26, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Hmm, it looks like the chopped-off part is about the width of the quickbar. How does it look if you turn off the quickbar in your preferences? -- Merphant 22:53, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
It looks fine, there is just a smidgen of scrolling room without the quickbar. But I also don't think abandoning the quick bar is a viable solution. - SimonP 01:25, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)
No, of course not; I was trying to determine the problem, since it looks fine on Mozilla. I was thinking that the width of the table is "100%", and that IE might not include the width of the quickbar in that figure. The layout has changed a little, btw. Does it still go off the page? -- Merphant 01:48, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I'm afraid there's no change. - SimonP 02:01, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)
How about now? Followup to Talk:Main Page/Temp5. -- Merphant 02:09, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Great job, it looks perfect now. - SimonP 12:05, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)

Ambitious 142.177.12.12

Someone with experience of this wikipedia project might want to look at http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.12.12

The user seem to be rather well versed in NPOV and wikipedia lingo. My first impression, particularly based on the democracy article, is however not quite positive. Inbetween additions and edits which I'm not competent to judge, there are also changes which I from my perspective find outrigh wrong (possibly advocating the writer's particular POV?) although presented with the cocksureness of a 21-years old who is sure he knows absolutely everything worth to know about the topic.

It's time to go to bed in our part of the world, why I think it's better if someone else take a look at this.

Good night!
-- Ruhrjung 23:51, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Judging by the IP range, and general editing style, this is a previous difficult user back again. They have been reasonably well-behaved recently, but are still the subject of a hard ban, so feel free to roll back any of their content if you object to it. -- The Anome 11:08, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

More New Imperialism Madness

172 continues to remove the link to New Imperialism (temp) from New Imperialism -- despite his having demanded a vote which then turned out to support the link. Pizza Puzzle

I put the link in after the vote was conclucded. Mav immediately removed it, without explanation. I put it back in again. Then it was gone again... This is lunacy. Pizza Puzzle, feel free to keep on putting it back in if you have the patience. I can't be arsed anymore. CGS 11:11, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC).

Enhance the wikipedia experience

Proposal

Or, rather dully, I've two ideas someone could implement to spread wikipedia:

(1) A little "ask-wikip" tool/script for linux distributions, that from the unix prompt can be asked for wikipedia definitions and gives them or a no such definition if their is no page. Should be like the go-button, but a bit better in regard to uppercase/lowercase (try first the exact text, if this doesn't work, try it with all uppercase first letters, maybe even play a bit with hyphenation). Could get an X interface too, and some command line options for output (html, printable html to PS, pure ascii/using lynx as filter), and even display the wikipedia page in lynx or some other browser, maybe even including the edit functionality. 


> ask-wikip --ascii-only "Wikipedia:village pump"
[http://...]
Wikipedia Village Pump

This page is for asking questions. ...
 ((gives the actual text of the Village pump))

> ask-wikip ants

Opens lynx browser pointing to the article about "Ant"

(2) Another idea would be a "go" (or better performace given, even "search") button one could include in ones own website (like the amazon partner programme). So I could have a "Look something up at Wikipedia"-text input field + button on my website. This should be fairly easy and maybe does exist already.

What do you think about these ideas? -- till we *) 12:28, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)

Great idea! Please see the pyWikiAPI. Once it is done I (and others I am sure) will start making programs just like this. So feel free to post your suggestion on the forums there. MB 14:43, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
I really like the search text-field/button idea. I know I'd include it on my web site! Another tool to think about would be an add-on toolbar for IE. One that Merriam-Webster supplies (http://www.m-w.com) I find invaluable. It docks at the top of IE. Whenever I need to look up a word or synonym, I just type it in there and *BAM* a small window pops up with the info I need. I'd love a similar tool for Wikipedia. :-) —Frecklefoot 14:53, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Brilliant! Something much easier to code than an IE toolbar would be a Sherlock/Mycroft plugin to Mozilla. OTOH, only a few hundred thousand people use Mozilla, but I'm pretty sure that they're rather thickly concentrated on Wikipedia. -Smack 01:00, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Well, well, well. It seems that a certain Carey Evans made just such a thing - a year and a half ago. Now, children, go download the plugin. -Smack 01:13, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Did a google query, found Carey Evans homepage, but no plugin. And besides, I'd rather have something that could be included in websites, too. :-) -- till we *) 18:28, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)
Don't go to Google; go here. -Smack 22:01, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
To MB: The pyWikiAPI seems to be a bit empty, doesn't it? At least I didn't find any place where I easyly could mention my idea. I see the necessarity for a python (and also PHP) API to access Wikipedia from other sides, but I really can't believe something like that doesn't exist in the moment (could be a simple PHP-variables-in-the-URL-based approach or something with POST/GET-FORMs). -- till we *) 15:12, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
It would be very nice if I could do the following:
  1. highlight a word on a web page and right click. (Well, anyone can do it.)
  2. I get an option of "look up in Wikipedia"
  3. Upon selecting the option, a new Window opens with the highlighted word.
I have seen similar one for Google in Japanese. Tomos 11:56, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Well, if you use Mozilla, you can install the aforementioned plugin, which is almost as good. And if you don't use Mozilla, you have only yourself to blame. -Smack 18:02, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Possible Solution

For the second idea I proposed (to include a Wikipedia search or go bar into custom webpages), I found out that a quick look into the sourcecode of Wikipedia generated pages is enough. There you'll find (with the small addition of http://www.wikipedia.org done by me) all that is needed to include a wikipedia search field on custom homepages: 

 <form name='search' class='inline' method=get
 action="http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml">
 <input type=text name="search" size=19 value="">
 <input type=submit name="go" value="Go">
 </form>

Is it okay to use this? Is there someone who could create a nice (in the result) sniplet of code out of this that could be included anywhere? -- And shouldn't the search function better be really disabled instead of only be commented out? -- till we *) 15:20, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)

((oh, and by the way: Why does the go field (neither this nor the one in wikipedia proper not work, but brings up random pages, when the page doesn't exist ("Student union" brought me to Soviet union as well as Christian Social Union in Bavaria, Student test brought up Student nursery)? -- till we *) 15:25, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)))

Curiosity: software glitch

See Talk:Belladonna lily - Hephaestos 17:45, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Wrapping text around Images in Wiki?

Is there any way in Wiki editing to wrap text around images as you can in HTML? --Niganit 16:02, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Simple, just copy the code from ANA.
Adrian Pingstone 17:37, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So, that's a "no", then?
(The ANA article uses HTML, not wiki markup, to wrap the text around the image.)
—Paul A 02:00, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
No, it's not a NO because I misunderstood your question and I'm not clever enough to answer your actual question. Can anyone else supply an answer?
Adrian Pingstone 09:07, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
No, there isn't; you must use HTML for this currently. Ideally there would be some sort of "float right/left" attributed and then the wikitext would generate the appropriate div elements and whatnot, but that's not implemented. See Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#Markup for a list of currently suggested HTML templates to use instead. --Delirium 09:10, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
Wow, that would be nice if that text wraparound code could be added to the new TOC boxes... -- Viajero 20:59, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)


Better not, or not in every case. Just envision a TOC box on the left, a country or biology box on the right, and inbetween on a small screen a single-word-per-line wrapped text. -- till we *) 21:06, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
Thank you all so much. It is interesting that I started such a discussion, asking what seemed to be a pretty basic question. I had tried the html mark-up for the IMG tag, but that didn't work. The secret is wrapping with the DIV tag. Thanks again!
--- Niganit 15:24, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)~

Enhance the wikipedia experience

move to wikipedia:ignored feature requests

Proposal

Or, rather dully, I've two ideas someone could implement to spread wikipedia:

(1) A little "ask-wikip" tool/script for linux distributions, that from the unix prompt can be asked for wikipedia definitions and gives them or a no such definition if their is no page. Should be like the go-button, but a bit better in regard to uppercase/lowercase (try first the exact text, if this doesn't work, try it with all uppercase first letters, maybe even play a bit with hyphenation). Could get an X interface too, and some command line options for output (html, printable html to PS, pure ascii/using lynx as filter), and even display the wikipedia page in lynx or some other browser, maybe even including the edit functionality. 


> ask-wikip --ascii-only "Wikipedia:village pump"
[http://...]
Wikipedia Village Pump

This page is for asking questions. ...
 ((gives the actual text of the Village pump))

> ask-wikip ants

Opens lynx browser pointing to the article about "Ant"

(2) Another idea would be a "go" (or better performace given, even "search") button one could include in ones own website (like the amazon partner programme). So I could have a "Look something up at Wikipedia"-text input field + button on my website. This should be fairly easy and maybe does exist already.

What do you think about these ideas? -- till we *) 12:28, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)

Great idea! Please see the pyWikiAPI. Once it is done I (and others I am sure) will start making programs just like this. So feel free to post your suggestion on the forums there. MB 14:43, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
I really like the search text-field/button idea. I know I'd include it on my web site! Another tool to think about would be an add-on toolbar for IE. One that Merriam-Webster supplies (http://www.m-w.com) I find invaluable. It docks at the top of IE. Whenever I need to look up a word or synonym, I just type it in there and *BAM* a small window pops up with the info I need. I'd love a similar tool for Wikipedia. :-) —Frecklefoot 14:53, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Brilliant! Something much easier to code than an IE toolbar would be a Sherlock/Mycroft plugin to Mozilla. OTOH, only a few hundred thousand people use Mozilla, but I'm pretty sure that they're rather thickly concentrated on Wikipedia. -Smack 01:00, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Well, well, well. It seems that a certain Carey Evans made just such a thing - a year and a half ago. Now, children, go download the plugin. -Smack 01:13, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Did a google query, found Carey Evans homepage, but no plugin. And besides, I'd rather have something that could be included in websites, too. :-) -- till we *) 18:28, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)
Don't go to Google; go here. -Smack 22:01, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
To MB: The pyWikiAPI seems to be a bit empty, doesn't it? At least I didn't find any place where I easyly could mention my idea. I see the necessarity for a python (and also PHP) API to access Wikipedia from other sides, but I really can't believe something like that doesn't exist in the moment (could be a simple PHP-variables-in-the-URL-based approach or something with POST/GET-FORMs). -- till we *) 15:12, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
It would be very nice if I could do the following:
  1. highlight a word on a web page and right click. (Well, anyone can do it.)
  2. I get an option of "look up in Wikipedia"
  3. Upon selecting the option, a new Window opens with the highlighted word.
I have seen similar one for Google in Japanese. Tomos 11:56, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Well, if you use Mozilla, you can install the aforementioned plugin, which is almost as good. And if you don't use Mozilla, you have only yourself to blame. -Smack 18:02, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Possible Solution

For the second idea I proposed (to include a Wikipedia search or go bar into custom webpages), I found out that a quick look into the sourcecode of Wikipedia generated pages is enough. There you'll find (with the small addition of http://www.wikipedia.org done by me) all that is needed to include a wikipedia search field on custom homepages: 

 <form name='search' class='inline' method=get
 action="http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml">
 <input type=text name="search" size=19 value="">
 <input type=submit name="go" value="Go">
 </form>

Is it okay to use this? Is there someone who could create a nice (in the result) sniplet of code out of this that could be included anywhere? -- And shouldn't the search function better be really disabled instead of only be commented out? -- till we *) 15:20, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)

((oh, and by the way: Why does the go field (neither this nor the one in wikipedia proper not work, but brings up random pages, when the page doesn't exist ("Student union" brought me to Soviet union as well as Christian Social Union in Bavaria, Student test brought up Student nursery)? -- till we *) 15:25, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)))

Enhance the wikipedia experience

move to wikipedia:ignored feature requests

Or, rather dully, I've two ideas someone could implement to spread wikipedia:

(1) A little "ask-wikip" tool/script for linux distributions, that from the unix prompt can be asked for wikipedia definitions and gives them or a no such definition if their is no page. Should be like the go-button, but a bit better in regard to uppercase/lowercase (try first the exact text, if this doesn't work, try it with all uppercase first letters, maybe even play a bit with hyphenation). Could get an X interface too, and some command line options for output (html, printable html to PS, pure ascii/using lynx as filter), and even display the wikipedia page in lynx or some other browser, maybe even including the edit functionality. 


> ask-wikip --ascii-only "Wikipedia:village pump"
[http://...]
Wikipedia Village Pump

This page is for asking questions. ...
 ((gives the actual text of the Village pump))

> ask-wikip ants

Opens lynx browser pointing to the article about "Ant"

(2) Another idea would be a "go" (or better performace given, even "search") button one could include in ones own website (like the amazon partner programme). So I could have a "Look something up at Wikipedia"-text input field + button on my website. This should be fairly easy and maybe does exist already.

What do you think about these ideas? -- till we *) 12:28, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)

Great idea! Please see the pyWikiAPI. Once it is done I (and others I am sure) will start making programs just like this. So feel free to post your suggestion on the forums there. MB 14:43, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
I really like the search text-field/button idea. I know I'd include it on my web site! Another tool to think about would be an add-on toolbar for IE. One that Merriam-Webster supplies (http://www.m-w.com) I find invaluable. It docks at the top of IE. Whenever I need to look up a word or synonym, I just type it in there and *BAM* a small window pops up with the info I need. I'd love a similar tool for Wikipedia. :-) —Frecklefoot 14:53, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Brilliant! Something much easier to code than an IE toolbar would be a Sherlock/Mycroft plugin to Mozilla. OTOH, only a few hundred thousand people use Mozilla, but I'm pretty sure that they're rather thickly concentrated on Wikipedia. -Smack 01:00, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Well, well, well. It seems that a certain Carey Evans made just such a thing - a year and a half ago. Now, children, go download the plugin. -Smack 01:13, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Did a google query, found Carey Evans homepage, but no plugin. And besides, I'd rather have something that could be included in websites, too. :-) -- till we *) 18:28, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)
Don't go to Google; go here. -Smack 22:01, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
To MB: The pyWikiAPI seems to be a bit empty, doesn't it? At least I didn't find any place where I easyly could mention my idea. I see the necessarity for a python (and also PHP) API to access Wikipedia from other sides, but I really can't believe something like that doesn't exist in the moment (could be a simple PHP-variables-in-the-URL-based approach or something with POST/GET-FORMs). -- till we *) 15:12, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)
It would be very nice if I could do the following:
  1. highlight a word on a web page and right click. (Well, anyone can do it.)
  2. I get an option of "look up in Wikipedia"
  3. Upon selecting the option, a new Window opens with the highlighted word.
I have seen similar one for Google in Japanese. Tomos 11:56, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Well, if you use Mozilla, you can install the aforementioned plugin, which is almost as good. And if you don't use Mozilla, you have only yourself to blame. -Smack 18:02, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Possible Solution

For the second idea I proposed (to include a Wikipedia search or go bar into custom webpages), I found out that a quick look into the sourcecode of Wikipedia generated pages is enough. There you'll find (with the small addition of http://www.wikipedia.org done by me) all that is needed to include a wikipedia search field on custom homepages: 

 <form name='search' class='inline' method=get
 action="http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml">
 <input type=text name="search" size=19 value="">
 <input type=submit name="go" value="Go">
 </form>

Is it okay to use this? Is there someone who could create a nice (in the result) sniplet of code out of this that could be included anywhere? -- And shouldn't the search function better be really disabled instead of only be commented out? -- till we *) 15:20, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)

((oh, and by the way: Why does the go field (neither this nor the one in wikipedia proper not work, but brings up random pages, when the page doesn't exist ("Student union" brought me to Soviet union as well as Christian Social Union in Bavaria, Student test brought up Student nursery)? -- till we *) 15:25, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)))

Enhance the wikipedia experience

moved to wikipedia:ignored feature requests

Possible Solution

For the second idea I proposed (to include a Wikipedia search or go bar into custom webpages), I found out that a quick look into the sourcecode of Wikipedia generated pages is enough. There you'll find (with the small addition of http://www.wikipedia.org done by me) all that is needed to include a wikipedia search field on custom homepages: 

 <form name='search' class='inline' method=get
 action="http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml">
 <input type=text name="search" size=19 value="">
 <input type=submit name="go" value="Go">
 </form>

Is it okay to use this? Is there someone who could create a nice (in the result) sniplet of code out of this that could be included anywhere? -- And shouldn't the search function better be really disabled instead of only be commented out? -- till we *) 15:20, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)

((oh, and by the way: Why does the go field (neither this nor the one in wikipedia proper not work, but brings up random pages, when the page doesn't exist ("Student union" brought me to Soviet union as well as Christian Social Union in Bavaria, Student test brought up Student nursery)? -- till we *) 15:25, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)))

... in the winner of the 2003 Legal Document of the Year. Apparently some kid got disciplined for a fuck laden outburst at school, and he defended himself all the way to the courts. His lawyers used Wikipedia as part of their defence sources. CGS 19:10, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC).

A bit disappointed at the slant of Wikipedia and lack of dialogue

Since we're airing disappointments, here are mine: I've been contributing to Wikipedia for about 6-8 months now, and a few questions have been nagging at me and just won't go away. I love the idea of Wikipedia, and the reality seems exciting so far in many respects. Yet some facets of the experience and the product bother me, to the point where I consider them problems to be actively corrected. These swirling disappointments may be summed up as:

  • Wikipedia content seems to be slanted way off into a geekish, fantasy-game obsessed, gadget-implanted, male, US, Grammy Award watching space, and
  • I'm trying to add content that seems widely useful or where I have some expertise. I expected my work to be edited, but not to be so fully ignored. (sniff) The experience is very one-sided - I appear to be the only one talking on most of these topics. So where is all the correction, additions, refining and enhancement to come from?

I understand the Wikipedian credo to be that such problems (and all problems?)will self-correct with time and participation by users. Does the Wikipedia experience, objectively viewed and evaluated by data, bear out this belief? Are the issues I describe problems? If so, is there any way to correct them other than waiting for improvement?

User:NuclearWinner 5 Aug 2003

I agree with you on the slant. Just look at all the Harry Potter articles created in the last few days! As for your articles: no edits in the wikiworld usually means people approve! You might want to indoctrinate friends who also know the subject into wikipedia -- Tarquin 23:05, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
The slant is a problem, particularly when video-game characters become featured articles (as one did a few days ago). As regards the lack of editing, any given Wikipedian is probably only knowledgeable enough to write on 4% or 5% of the articles we have. You just can't expect the odd knowledgeable person to come upon one of your contributions, and (as Tarquin said) disagree with it and edit it. -- Smack
Many of the U.S. city articles have not been added to, although many have. Yet over time people will add more of cities from other towns in the world. In fact there are a number of Wikiprojects created to do just that. This bias has diminished with the gradual increase of new wikipedians and the addition of new articles. The 'pedia is not as biased towards U.S. cities as it was 6 months ago and it will continue to get better. I've edited articles that I know nothing about, but it just takes time I guess. -- Ram-Man 23:29, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)


There is definitely a geeky slant, but it's not as bad as it may seem. We have historians, psychologists, mathematicians, biologists, theologians, marketroing experts, ... In my own comparisons with other encyclopedias I have found that Wikipedia often provides much more depth, and more critical analysis. Check out circumcision (ahem, a little self-promotion), Aztalan State Park, Milgram experiment, Bathing machine ... try looking these up in Britannica and Encarta. The Britannica article on circumcision alone is a disgrace, and last I checked Encarta didn't even have one about the Milgram Experiment.
The geeky slant is no big deal, really. It just means that these particular topics will be well-covered. We had a summary of the latest Harry Potter book online shortly after it hit the shelves. From this you cannot logically conclude that other topics are not also well-covered. Our main weakness seem to be the country articles -- these are not up to date, and for many of the more "exotic" countries, we have nothing but the CIA World Factbook information. We need more cosmopolitans! Perhaps Wikitravel will help with that.
As for the lack of corrections, refinements etc. -- I know how you feel. Long articles that are well rounded are often not edited much the moment they appear. The kind of changes made after a new edit appears on Recent Changes are primarily things like style, conventions, wikification etc. If your article is reasonably well written and not in violation of any policy, it will probably not be edited much at that point -- simply because the people who know enough about the subject to do so are probably not online, or busy with other things.
It can take months or even years for these people to discover your article, often via Google, and to make edits to it. If you want to speed up the process, a relatively safe bet is to locate the Wikipedians in your field of interest and to ask them for their input. Most people like getting messages :-). And if you want to be a little more daring, nominate your own page on Wikipedia:Brilliant prose candidates -- that's sure to get you some feedback.
We are still some way from wiki nirvana. In the future, we will have things like categories, and it might be possible to watch for articles in categories that interest you. Right now this is all manual labor. But the process does work. Please do check out Erik Zachte's statistics for the English Wikipedia -- the number of edits per page has been increasing from about 1.3 to 5.6, the mean article size has increased as well. On the other hand, we keep getting those pesky new users ;-), and the rate of new article creation has increased significantly as well. How well we can handle these new articles really depends on how much we can teach the new users to help with the process. The new users that join at this point are less technically sophisticated than those who were initially active, and need more training to become productive Wikipediholics..
We do need better policies for all those fiction articles to prevent them from flooding the system -- characters within one fictional realm should usually be merged into a single page, for example. But I would not worry too much about the slant. Just keep writing articles and ask others for their opinion when you desire immediate feedback.—Eloquence 23:33, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)
One strategy for increasing article viewership is to include plenty of related "See Also" links. Many people browse Wikipedia using these links. Another strategy is to include "your" articles in any appropriate "lists of related topics". We have to make it easy for browsers (the human kind) to find articles. mydogategodshat 23:47, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Another strategy is to place links at other web sites. For example I placed a link to [[list of marketing topics] at http://www.merlot.org . This is an open source resourse for educators. But beware, most of the users of the Merlot site are experts, so make sure the articles on the list are of a reasonably good quality, or they will give you a poor rating.mydogategodshat 00:21, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Regarding lack of editing: like you, I was initially very put out by the lack of interest in the pages I wrote. The hit counter served to bolster my ego somewhat, but since that is now disabled, you just have to take our word for it: people are reading your pages, they like what they see, so they don't bother editing them. If you want lots of comments, write really badly, or get involved in contentious topics. My best advice would be to stop worrying about interest, and get on with improving Wikipedia to the best of your ability. Your interaction with other Wikipedians will increase with time. -- Tim Starling 00:40, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)
I just keep throwing stuff up on the wall, and sometimes other people take an interest, and sometimes not. Cross-linking is important; sometimes I'm astonished to find articles that have been almost completely ignored because nobody can find them except by accident. My linking rule is that for every A -> B, one ought to seriously considering adding a B -> A link, or perhaps a B -> list of A. For example, if a famous tavern's sign is a bee, then the tavern link from the bee article will be an interesting bit of trivia, probably more interesting than notable beekeepers :-) or taxonomists' arguments. Sure it's redundant, but readers connect to things by going forward, backlink lists are really only of use to editors. Stan 01:20, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That way we end up with Harry Potter trivia in biology articles. Not good. I agree that we should strive for high interconnectedness, but articles should only discuss their actual subject and not all tangentially related ones. If you want more links, look for articles where they would actually be relevant.—Eloquence 02:07, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)
"In some cultures, bees are a symbol of industriousness, as seen for example in the state seal of Utah and on the sign of The Busy Bee in the Lincolnshire town of Wankers Corner." That's why I said "consider", not "always do". And to keep things in perspective, a valid Harry Potter connection to a biology article will be of interest to a million schoolchildren, and thus more pedagogically valuable than the navel-gazings of the three taxonomic specialists who care whether the Aleoideae are more similar to the Acanthuridae or the Zoefloridae. Always write for the reader. Stan 04:52, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
"Always write for the reader" sounds like a tautology to me. Every writer is also a reader. Always write for the average reader is a meaningful statement, but what does it mean? Does it mean that we should try to make connections to the average reader's knowledge, evoke as many associations as possible within every article? That is not the purpose of an encyclopedia -- the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge, and knowledge is only useful if it is structured. Now, by taking the reader's "knowledge" and building it into the article, you risk destroying the already existing structure within that particular field -- effectively you risk destroying knowledge itself. Now, this may sound extreme and it will take extreme examples to prove it -- inserting Ally McBeal references into intellectual property, and so forth. The effect: the reader is no longer presented with a meaningful structure that was developed by the experts in that particular field of law, but instead with a structure that has been optimized for his presumed popcultural "knowledge". This change in structure will negatively affect attempts to gather information that is actually meaningful within the context of the field in question.
"Always write for the average reader" means: Do not presume that the reader knows what you are talking about. Establish context, cite your sources and so on. But it does not mean bathing articles in pop cultural references. Of course I know that you're not suggesting to do this -- however, in the bee example, I would much rather have a specific article bees in culture (yay!) than have the knowledge structure of the bee article negatively affected by such pop cultural references. Keep fields of knowledge separate or knowledge will suffer.—Eloquence 05:14, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia on CNN

KEEP A LOOKOUT: There should be a news story airing CNN International Monday morning, Asia-Pacific time about Wikipedia and the class project that my class just finished. The correspondent is Kristy Lu Stout, and should be a Techwatch feature. Will link to the online version when it appears. - Fuzheado 03:56, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Pizza Puzzle

move to user talk:Pizza Puzzle

It is obvious that certain users have become convinced that I am another user against which they hold a grudge. I will be changing my account name so that this is no longer a problem for me. Pizza Puzzle

Hold on a second. Two users can't be registered under the same name, right? So there should be only one Pizza Puzzle - the troll. -Smack 01:05, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Tell Lir that User:The troll isn't taken.
I think User:Vera Cruz is untaken. (I'm not convinced, but you're helping!) Daniel Quinlan 01:25, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)
I hope that the new Lir persona isn't interested in jumbled lists pertaining to New Imperialism! 172 12:11, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Benzone

Move to Talk:Benzone (currently empty)

On Wikipedia:Requested_articles there is a request for Benzone. Is this just a misspelling of Benzene, or is it something different that I simply don't know about?

Or it may be a misspelling of benzine? -- Gutza 09:15, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I believe it's genuine: in chemistry you change the suffix of the name to represent different characteristics. For example sorbose - sugar; sorbitol - sugar alcohol, and so on. Dysprosia 09:23, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Benzone is apparently a non-standard name for Phenylbutazone -- Tim Starling 13:59, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

Style of dash

Move to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Question on Style. I recieved the following comment on a page I edited: (&am; "#151;" is not a valid HTML entity... it should be & "mdash;" or & "#8212;"). I think & "#151;" is perfectly valid for a "printer's em or em dash" Anyone know why it is not? Also, should not the em be separated by spaces from the rest of the text, since it is NOT an ordinary dash, but a device for redirecting rthouyght within a sentence? Anybody know about this? Marshman 04:47, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

In ISO 8859-1 and Unicode, code point 151 is reserved as a control character. It is not an em dash except in Microsoft's proprietary code page extensions, and any program that displays an em-dash for "&#151;" is doing so either erroneously or in deliberate emulation of common bugs in Windows. Relying on buggy behavior is not recommended. :) Please use the standard, either &mdash; or &#8212;. --Brion 05:02, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thanks I will use &mdash; in the future. Coffee-Cup Software HTML Editor inserts "&#151;" for an em-dash and it certainly displays that way on browsers. Why the confusion? 24.94.86.252 05:36, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)me not logged inn Marshman 05:38, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
please don't! &mdash; looks very ugly in wikisource and some editors may not know what it is. Stick to "--". I know it's ugly, but in future our parser may turn that into mdash automagically. -- Tarquin 12:17, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Does hardly look more ugly than L&uoml;beck.
"--" gets really ugly when broken between lines, " - " would be a better advice.
-- Ruhrjung 12:42, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Image help

I made some improvements (I think) to the pic at the top of this page, but when I re-uploaded it, it did not change the appearance of the Pump. It appears that there are two different pictures with the same title: this one, which is actually used in the page, and this one, which is the one where all the new uploads go. -Smack 05:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

How can I re-claim my meta log-in?

I have a log-in on meta that I set up some time ago in the name GrahamN, but I have forgotten my password. Given that I prefer not to communicate about Wikipedia via E-mail, how can I re-claim my log-in? GrahamN 18:13, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I've set it to the same as your en.wiki password. (Passwords cannot be recovered as such, since only a one-way encrypted hash is stored.) --Brion 20:15, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Breadth and depth

We seem to have an emerging format for writing broad articles (like New Imperialism) and deep articles (like Rise of the New Imperialism). Is there a page with guidelines for this practice? I would like there to be, so that we can discuss questions like "Can one page be part of more than one series?" and "What's the difference between a WikiProject, a series, and an informal group of pages about related topics?" Maybe at Wikipedia:Series, Wikipedia:Breadth and Depth or Wikipedia:Relationships between articles? DanKeshet 16:47, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I don't think it is necessary. You can always discuss the possibility of cutting up an article in its talk page. -wshun 18:16, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Maybe Dan's idea isn't stupid after all. It might be good to have kind of agreed guidiance for this. I think for instance at pages as World War II which, as far as I can judge, in practice has become shunned by authoritative contributors.
-- Ruhrjung 14:12, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Simultaneously logged in and not logged in?

I registered a few days ago as Vremya and have been adding information to a few articles, mostly on transit subjects. In particular, I have been expanding the rubber-tired metro, Paris Metro, and Fulgence Bienvenüe articles. Because these are closely related, I had them all open in separate browser windows for easy cross-referencing. I also had the editing FAQ open in a fourth window.

To my surprise, I received a welcome message from Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick under the heading User talk:152.163.252.166. It was only then that I realized that only some of the windows I had open showed me as logged in (that is, showed my username Vremya and the Logout option), while others did not show me as logged in.

Although the weird Schrödingerness of my being simultaneously logged in and not logged in does not seem to have done any damage, it would be nice if I could avoid such surprises in the future, so: What did I do wrong? Do I have to log in each time I open a Wikipedia page in a new window?

Just in case my signature doesn't "take" (this is one of the windows that has me as not logged in): I am Vremya 152.163.252.195 09:13, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

The login cookie expires after a while (and fails randomly for me every few days). You probably opened the windows where you are logged out after the cookie expired, and the ones where are are logged in before it expired. Simply log in again. CGS 10:19, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC).
Also, pages that you opened when you were logged in, and then revisit when no longer logged in, will be retrieved from your browser cache if they haven't been edited since. Thus they may still show the login info. --Brion 20:41, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I've seen this happen. If you login in one windows, sometimes you need to Shift-Click on the the Refresh button of the browser in other windows for them to login as well. In case you didn't know, Shift-Click forces the page cache to update the page. I think Ctrl-F5 does the same in IE, but I don't know for sure; I use Mozilla. -- Viajero 13:10, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I have another strange effect, probably unrelated with this one - recently it happens rather often that wikipedia seams to be dead, however when I change the URL from http://www.wikipedia.org to http://130.94.122.199 it works. Which is quite strange as the DNS lookup still works and obviously gives the same IP. And in the Recent Changes I can see it is really alive. andy 11:03, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Some browsers sometimes decide to stop working properly on certain sites, for reasons not necessarily clear. Closing and reopening the browser will likely fix this. --Brion 20:41, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Yes, seems to have been that. I had it again this afternoon, and after closing Mozilla (even had to kill it with the taskmanager) it was back to normal. Thanks for the hint. -- andy 15:58, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I am having similair problems. I have made major contributions to a few video game related articles, and I tend to type rather slowly and re-think my editing as I go. So it isn't uncommon for me to have the edit window open for a couple hours as I type. But then when I save it, my name (Dan Mazurowski) is not credited with the edit. How can I keep the cookie from expiring when I am engaged in a long edit?

Names of Portuguese Kings

I just noticed that the Afonso Kings of Portugal (I... VI) are all under Alfonso or Alphonso. This is VERY strange for a portuguese. Is like calling John Charles to the king of Spain. I plan to reorganize the mess in the portuguese kings in the end of August (after i comeback from wonderfull holydays). If somebody wants to object please do in my talk page: i want to discuss this. Muriel Gottrop 08:55, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yes, Juan Carlos is obviously correct for the current king of Spain as that is how the name is rendered by everyone in both Spanish and English. Sometimes, names are translated/transliterated, though. For example, in English, Christopher Columbus is correct even though it wasn't his real name. Let's see what Google thinks about Portuguese kings:

  • 11,800 hits total, 9,770 hits English, 186 hits Portuguese: "portugal Alfonso king OR kings"
  • 1,740 hits, 1,670 hits English: 14 hits Portuguese, "portugal Alphonso king OR kings"
  • 5,200 hits, 3,870 hits English: 940 hits Portuguese, "portugal Afonso king OR kings"

It seems pretty clear-cut to me. Their name in Portuguese is "Afonso", but, for some reason, probably historical, the name seems to be "Alfonso" in English. I'd leave them as "Alfonso" and note the original Portuguese on each page as is done for Christopher Columbus. The Columbia Encyclopedia, sixth edition, does the same: http://www.bartleby.com/65/al/Alfon1Por.html &mdash perhaps, check to see what other encyclopedias do.

I see that drastic changes have been made to the appearance and functionality of the wikipedia while I was gone... I'm going to have to get used to them! But there is one request that I'd like to make. Please please PLEASE can we have a 'random page' link back at the top of the screen next to 'main page' and 'recent changes'. In the absence of a workable 'search' function it's what I'd expect to use the most when trolling for useful tasks to perform.

Also, I'd consider moving 'New Pages' up a tier and giving it a link over in the left bar so you don't have to filter through the 'special pages' list to get to it. Again, it's one of the most useful functions and the easier it is to access directly the better. KJ 03:37, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

G'day Karen. You might be interested to know that the most recent batch of new features prompted quite a bit of discussion when they first came in (about a week ago), and it's now all been moved to Wikipedia talk:Software updates. The random page link sounds like a good idea but no doubt Eloquence will have some opinion on it... -- Tim Starling 03:52, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)
I don't understand why you want "Random page" in the top bar -- we should keep that as clean as possible because otherwise we get problems in low resolutions. It's already in the sidebar to the left, and if you set your sidebar to "floating" in Special:Preferences, always available and visible. Yes, "New pages" is useful, but usability-wise we've reached the maximum number of links in the sidebar.—Eloquence 04:12, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)
Right on cue :) -- Tim Starling 04:17, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)

Special:Wantedpages

I recognize the fact that regeneration of this page causes lag, but would it be possible to update the links, so that pages that have since been created are displayed as such? -Smack 23:32, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

If they were regular free links instead of edit commands, then filled-in ones would show up in blue, and in between updates you could see at a glance which ones remained to be done. Stan 01:25, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

A bit disappointed at the slant of Wikipedia and lack of dialogue

Simple.wikipedia.com

There are some new pages that just consist of links to entries at simple.wikipedia.com, and those entries in turn are short dictionary entries, not encyclopedic. Did I miss something, or is it cool to delete them? (These items include 109-byte or so articles on New and Principle.) I'm used to actual articles that also point to other Wikipedias, but these have nothing except a boilerplate redirect.Vicki Rosenzweig 18:58, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Well, I'm not an authority or a sysop, but I'd say go ahead and delete them. Our entries aren't supposed to just be links to other resources. However, I think links to Wiktionary for entries would be cool, but with a small icon instead of a text link. But that is another issue. Yeah, delete them IMHO. —Frecklefoot 19:17, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)


I'm disappointed with simple.wikipedia.com, in practice. I thought that the idea was to write the articles more simply. It appears that what's happening is simply a re-write without reference to the solutions to POV problems that have been addressed here. Maybe it's just my day to be grouchy. Mkmcconn 21:44, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

What's happened to the box

I've just noticed (maybe I'm a bit slow) that the scrolling box which used to be in the top left of the screen (the one where you could access long pages etc) is missing. When and why did this happen. G-Man 17:58, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

This was part of the last software update. Unfortunately, the combobox interfered with correct display of the Standard Skin on some browsers. Fear not, however, as the functions you seek are easily available through the "Special pages" link in the sidebar.—Eloquence 20:25, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)

I've got a question: I made some edits to a page: Gambit and now Harris7 removed some links to non-existing pages like Staunton, calling them "stub links". I wonder: I thought it is good to make links to non existing pages (If I think the subject needs a page), so other people can click and start with the page. Or should I just link to existing pages?

You can certainly add more links to non-existing page that are sometimes not added to the list of Wikipedia:Requested articles. More exposure they get, more chances a knowledgeable wikipedian would make them new articles. kt2 16:45, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Links to non-existing pages are generally fine, if an article is likely to be written. I don't know why Harris7 did remove these links. You should probably ask him. -- Cordyph 16:49, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
My interpretation, given "stub links", is that Harris7 felt that the potential articles would never be more than stubs even if they did exist. But that's just a guess; you'd have to ask Harris7. —Paul A 16:52, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I've put the links back (and added a few). I think they were fine - it's perfectly possible to write very lengthy articles about these gambits (entire books have been written about them). Note though that the link should be to Staunton Gambit, not just Staunton (which implies Howard Staunton). --Camembert
Ok thanx, it's clear to me Pascal 15:34, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Chemical Page

The wikipedia chemical page contained a good dictionary definition (formatted as such)), and accordingly I have moved it to wiktionary, which lacked such a definition. However, what do I do with the Wikipedia page? I have left it for the moment with a notice, but obviously this should be removed as soon as possible. Tompagenet 11:33, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Add it to the votes for deletion. --Delirium 23:51, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)

TOC placement revisited

Why is the system putting TOC's in the middle of articles? I understand that it has been instructed to place them before the first subtitle. But in many cases, that is well into an article. I have started putting subtitles at the beginnings of articles, new and extant, but that will take far too long. Is there some way of changing the instructions so yhis dosn't have to be done manualy? mydogategodshat 05:39, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Why is it that people who post comments on the Village Pump never read comments that have been posted on the Village Pump before they post comments on the Village Pump? —Eloquence

I did read the previous discussion. It did not answer my question of whether it was possible to automatically put the table of contents where it belongs, or whether this will have to be done manually? mydogategodshat 05:54, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Then I do not understand your question. The TOC is deliberately placed before the first section heading and not on top, because articles should have a short introductory paragraph (or two) before the table of contents. To prevent it from showing up in the middle, add a new heading, but not on top, but after the intro. —Eloquence 05:59, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)
I see. It seems that a decision has been made to put the table of contents in the body of the article. I think that is a mistake; the table of contents no more belongs in the middle of a body of writing, than a title page belongs there. But this is not my decision to make.mydogategodshat 06:08, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Opinions can certainly differ on the matter. If you consider it important, feel free to start a vote on the subject.—Eloquence 06:16, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)
The workaround is to put a header right before the first sentence of the article, maybe something like ==Definition==. That isn't regared as good practice currently, but will give the TOC placement before the article starts. -- till we *) 10:56, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)
Don't tell anybody that you are doing this. When I did it. adminsitrators systematically reverted the TOC back to the middle of the articles by deleting the headings. mydogategodshat 23:14, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
So, change it back ... till we *) 13:52, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)
floating the TOC might be nice, but it could interfere with tables in the article -- Tarquin 09:41, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I don't see why there should be a need for a "workaround." I think it makes good sense to have a short introductory paragraph (sorta like a preface) before the TOC. Keep the intro paragraph short, and it's not a problem. It may also help to encourage better article structure, since a lot of times the existing headings look very silly when placed into a hierarchical TOC :) Perhaps the TOC placement is something that can be configured in user preferences, for those who want it to come first? -- Wapcaplet 04:43, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I have nothing to say regarding vertical placement, but I do believe that TOC's should be centered. -Smack 22:03, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Ambitious 142.177.12.12

move to user talk:142.177.etc

Someone with experience of this wikipedia project might want to look at http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.12.12

The user seem to be rather well versed in NPOV and wikipedia lingo. My first impression, particularly based on the democracy article, is however not quite positive. Inbetween additions and edits which I'm not competent to judge, there are also changes which I from my perspective find outrigh wrong (possibly advocating the writer's particular POV?) although presented with the cocksureness of a 21-years old who is sure he knows absolutely everything worth to know about the topic.

It's time to go to bed in our part of the world, why I think it's better if someone else take a look at this.

Good night!
-- Ruhrjung 23:51, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Judging by the IP range, and general editing style, this is a previous difficult user back again. They have been reasonably well-behaved recently, but are still the subject of a hard ban, so feel free to roll back any of their content if you object to it. -- The Anome 11:08, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
See user:142.177.etc (though at some point someone should put a more detailed explanation there). Martin 14:13, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Table of contents

How is it possible to ensure the table of contents showing up on every article? Shall any Java code be incorporated? kt2 19:27, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I just put four headers on the page. Seems to work. And I would say that a Table of Contents is too obtrusive if you have only three headers. Rednblu 19:33, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
It works as you said. At least four headers trigger the table. Putting __NOTOC__ anywhere forces the table not showing up.kt2 19:46, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Many thanx to all for the info, but may I be referred to any current discussion (other than the one here) on how we can control excatly where we want the TOC to show up? kt2 19:57, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Right now the TOC always shows up before the first section header. I will probably implement __TOCHERE__ to let you determine the exact location, but currently that is not possible.—Eloquence

Location of Table of Contents

See Maya civilization. Should the table of contents really be located so many paragraphs down into the article? Does the location of the table of contents mean that we're going to have to start putting in an ==Introduction== header in every article to force the table of contents to the top? RickK 19:30, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Scroll this page up a bit. CGS 19:33, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC).


#TOC placement: Topmost or post-intro. --Menchi 19:43, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

TOC placement: Topmost or post-intro

Anon 209 has recently been given a number of medical articles, such as Aortic dissection, subheadings. This created TOCs. That's good. But the Anon also move the introductory paragraphs to be under the first section, "Definition". This made the TOCs to be the first things in the articles (unlike, say the Pump here).

But isn't the intros always assumed to be "good definitions"? Should we keep the intro as a preamble or not?
--Menchi 06:40, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

Please see also for instance History of Germany, where Wai-Shun Cheung systematically have reached a similar effect.
-- Ruhrjung 07:25, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)


yuck. An article starts with a definition, by definition! reverting/. -- Tarquin 08:38, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
It does mean exactly this until some __TOCHERE__ something or other wiki markup is included in the wiki markup language, which isn't the case yet. -- till we *) 19:34, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

Main Page Appearance

CNN Piece on Wikipedia

As promised, CNN International Tech Watch aired a segment this morning on the Wikipedia and our student project. See CNN TechWatch videos for a streaming video of the segment. -- Fuzheado 05:34, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Bring over to Wikipedia:Press coverage. --Jiang
Consider it done. - Fuzheado 06:29, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I love that video! It's short, but it captures the anxiety of newcomers, as well as our proud aspects. The download link is here, for those who wanna see our public appearance again and again. Or just want to stare at Kristie's beautiful face. Either way, it's a great clip! Thanks to Fuzheado! I'm looking forward to the day of a one-hour documentary on Wikipedia. ;-) --Menchi 05:49, Aug 4, 2003 (UTC)
It's actually quite funny (scary) because when they came to film the segment, that was the exact time (to the hour!) that they had the massive downtime of Wikipedia (Monday noon HK time, and Sunday night US time). I was panicked because they couldn't do any screen shots of students working on the 'pedia. Fortunately, they were able to get on later, but not nearly as much demonstration as I'd have liked. - Fuzheado 06:29, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That is very embarrassing. I remember other Wikipedians showed their dismay that when "showing off" WP to their friends, WP was down or snail-slow. So the threat of newbies finding us unappealing has always been there because of those technical problem. Now this semi-formal demostration met the down and has cost us some good screeshots -- the number of which I did find a bit lacking in the clip. Something needs to be done about the slowdowns and complete downs if we were to compete with Encarta Encyclopedia (we've beaten Britannica.com already!). --Menchi 07:28, Aug 4, 2003 (UTC)
Get your credit cards ready, it won't be long now. -- Tim Starling 07:46, Aug 4, 2003 (UTC)

In the interview, what did Abbie and Olivia say while they chuckle? Something "fake thin sunglasses... nerdy"? It's after Professor Lih explains the "shallow bug" motto, and Kristie says "a concensus develops... a single takes on the world seems rude". Somebody is asking me about this clip on the Chinese WP, and I've listened to that part six times and still couldn't get it. --Menchi 01:00, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)

If it's the bit I think you're talking about, they mention that the Wikipedia's take on the world seems to have "thick glasses" -- it's "fairly nerdy". That's entirely unfair ... I, for one, wear contacts :) --Robert Merkel 03:50, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
#ifdef HETEROSEXIST_PIG_MODE

As for the Wikipedia mascot, I don't think we need to search any further - Ms. Stout is obviously the standout candidate ;) --Robert Merkel 03:50, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC) 

#endif

[edit] and printable version

Hello, just wanted to mention that the [edit] links (to edit sections instead of the whole page) needs to be removed from the printable versions. Thanks. --Astudent 06:16, 2003 Aug 4 (UTC)

NPOV for death years in date pages

It's not a massively important thing, but "date" pages (eg. April 1) have a + indicating the year of someone's death. Surely that's Christian and not neutral? :) -- TY. 04:00, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

And I thought it was derived from the look in the eyes of dead comic book characters. 

 (+) (+)
    o
  _---_

—Eloquence 03:18, Aug 4, 2003 (UTC)

Sillyness aside, it does not represent a Christian cross; the + is a shorthand for a dagger symbol †, but some browsers still can't display daggers so we mostly use the plus sign. --mav 03:28, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

The dagger looks, if anything, even more like a Christian cross than the + does, and dagger (typography) explicitly states that it is used as a symbol for death date because of that resemblance. So TY's question still needs to be addressed. —Paul A 03:48, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It looks confusing either way. It doesn't get its intended meaning across to some people. I've got some Wikipedians asking about that on the Chinese WP. And more confusingly so, its opposite: (- 1943), intended to be birthyear. --Menchi 03:32, Aug 4, 2003 (UTC)


Then replace it with "died" - that seems reasonable enough to me. --mav

Or "d." for short would be better. --Jiang
I think in this case, we should use "died" or something similarly obvious as + or † is not clear. However, if we start stamping out any phrase originating to Christianity, it will get really silly and really annoying before too long due to the pervasive influence of Christianity on the English language. We should just stick to trying to communicate clearly and not be politically correct about where words came from. Daniel Quinlan 04:16, Aug 4, 2003 (UTC)
Agreed. The most important thing here is to be clear; + † and even d. are less clear than died. --mav
The old slippery-slope argument, I see. I think that we can expect ourselves to have sufficiently good judgment to curb the annoying silliness when we get that far. In the meantime, using d., died or even deceased instead of a profoundly Christian symbol wouldn't hurt, and neither would changing BC to BCE. -Smack 06:55, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I always thought the plus sign just meant "also" or something. You are looking at the year of their birth and it says "and they also died in (whatever year). As a lapsed Catholic who sometimes finds the pervasiveness of Christianity pretty annoying, I must say it didn't even "cross" my mind that it was supposed to be either a cross or a dagger. Oh well...I would think "died" or "d." would still be better anyway. Adam Bishop 04:30, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I would like to copy the main part of the First Aid page and distribute in on Palm handhelds (might save a life!). But then I got worried about getting sued. While the stuff seems correct, I'm no medical expert. What are the legal liabilities here? Should I include a disclaimer? How can I word the disclaimer so that it doesn't undermine the credibilty of the content? --Zipdude 01:00, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

How to make my computer a Wikipedia copy?

I want to make my computer a Wikipedia platform so that I can browse and work offline, but I don't know much about programming, I tried several times to install the PHP, but failed. (It doesn't work! I did everything accroding to the instrument, but the source file just as what it is in .php, I am using Windows XP English edition + IE 6.0). Could anyone help me how to make that work? So that I can just edit articles offline as I do online in the Wikipedia? Or is there any software offering WYCIWYG platform? Thanks! (please leave messages in my talk page, thank you!). --Samuel 13:23, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

There's a Mozilla plugin called Spiderzilla that may be able to do the trick. ([3])
Better yet, http://download.wikipedia.org offers the entire database in two archives and it won't kill the server with thousands of connection requests. -- Notheruser 22:22, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Samuel already knows about database downloads, but is having trouble installing the entire Wikipedia suite, which is required in order to view them. That's hardly surprising. I think meta:WINOR is what you're looking for. Its existence hasn't really been publicised, and I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know if it's any good. But according to the blurb, it does what you want. -- Tim Starling 01:18, Aug 4, 2003 (UTC)
Thank you, but the WINOR link is a dead link, i can't download from there. besides, it took me more than 5 hours to convert the sql files into TomeRaider (en version), but it still didn't finished, i had to just cancel the process. --Samuel 03:37, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Yes, I think it's been like that for a while. Email Magnus Manske and ask him to fix it. -- Tim Starling 01:10, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)

I miss Search!

Oops, just created a duplicate article for film director Costa-Gavras. Using the Go button on Costa-Gavras only returned Costa-Rica, so I started a fresh article. Just I discovered he already exists, as Constantin Costa-Gavras. :-(((

Sigh...


I will have to get used to using Google to check these things... Until Search is restored (soon???)... -- Viajero 10:25, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It's a bummer, but if search was enabled, you could not use the site at all right now.—Eloquence 10:29, Aug 3, 2003 (UTC)
Never mind, I merged Constantin Costa-Gavras into Costa-Gavras. I hope this doesn't seem controversial. He is known primarily by Costa-Gavras; moreover his real name is Constantino Gavras.
-- Viajero 10:56, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Why not try with:
http://www.google.com/custom?domains=wikipedia.org;1911encyclopedia.org&sitesearch=wikipedia.org or something similar in your favorite list?
-- Ruhrjung 14:37, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Can't we just put a text box on the Wikipedia site that will automagically redirect you to Google (with site:www.wikipedia.org set) for your query? I see other sites doing this all the time... Kwertii 05:51, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Physics main page is empty !

Move to Talk:Physics

Aug 3, 2003 This page looks empty, although, when trying to edit it, there is text in it. Is it a bug ?

Physics is empty? Try refreshing (F5) the page. -- Notheruser 22:54, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Maxwell's equations page is empty too !

Neither page is empty. What browser are you using? -- Notheruser 18:56, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I still see the Maxwell's equations page empty (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations): it returns (There is currently no text in this page) , whatever the browser. Browsers : Opera 7.11, Mozilla Firebird 0.6 and IE 6.0.26

Hmm, I have some questions (hopefully they can help me help you). Are all Wikipedia pages like this? Have you cleared the cache for each browser? Are you using a proxy server? -- Notheruser 08:01, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Pruning this article

Move to Wikipedia talk:Village pump

There is a large cache of lines at the top of this article which indicate where previous discussions have been moved. Currently, this article is 55 Kb long, and that makes it difficult for some browsers to edit. Could we move the moved articles section to another article, or to an archive? RickK 19:39, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Pruning the pump (sounds like a euphemism, doesn't it?) is unpopular. I don't know why - it really boosts your number of contributions. The list of items moved can be archived to Wikipedia:Village pump archive, but the latest few should stay. Be bold! CGS 19:46, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC).

added to wikipedia:press coverage

Anchors

I tried using achors with redicects but they dont seem to work properly. I used Kings of England and typed in this for the redirect #REDIRECT [[List of British monarchs#English monarchs]]. When I go to Kings of England page it does not direct me to the section I want, it doees not seem to understand achors. - fonzy

No, obviously doesn't redirect understand anchors, and maybe that's for the best. It's far too easy to change a heading without knowing of any references to that particular heading, and it's surely more important to keep that easy than to make it easier to use anchors. ;->
-- Ruhrjung 19:45, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Vandal Limbo

Please check out my Vandal Limbo proposal at Wikipedia talk:Vandalism in progress (the larger block of text by the end of the article at this moment), and comment on it. I'll move the discussion somewhere else if it sparks some interest, I'd just want to know if you people think it;s a good idea for now. -- Gutza 09:45, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Watchlists Disabled

Is there any way to view the items on our watchlists to bring the total down to less than 200 articles? -- NetEsq 19:38, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

(I just bumped the limit from 200 to 500, BTW.) Not yet, but I'm messing with it still. --Brion 19:42, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
For the too-big watchlist, it now dumps an alphabetical list of watched pages with the option to remove selected items. Primitive, but it seems to work for now. --Brion 21:12, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, Brion. That's just what the doctor ordered! -- NetEsq 21:17, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hey, that is the function, I was looking for!!! I wanted for months already to create a function that shows me, what I am watching. Now it is working ;-)
Please keep this function (add some button on the watch list page) so that we can manage better our "children"... (you know, how Wikipedians think about their pages... ;-) Fantasy 22:18, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, should have had that years ago. :) --Brion

How about automatically removing all redirect pages from all watchlists? I certainly don't want any redir pages on my watchlist, and removing the 100 or so that are on it would at least bring me a bit closer to 500. BTW, I noticed that special:recentchanges still shows watched pages in bold. I assume it isn't really helping the server load that I'm now using recentchanges since my watchlist is disabled? Mkweise 22:30, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I don't like this: you will not know if someone changed the redirect page... Fantasy 22:37, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Recent changes' use of watchlist entries is pretty much "free". To explain... the recentchanges table lists all edits (in the last few days) indexed by timestamp. The database just starts at the most recent and grabs entries in reverse time order until it reaches its limit. For each edit it looks at, it checks the watchlist table for that page, with the direct index keys of your user id and the namespace and title of the page. This should be quite fast, and it only has to check the watchlist for the same number of pages that it actually shows in the results. So if your limit is 200 pages, it looks at up to 200 pages.
The Special:Watchlist view works differently. It takes the entire set of your watchlist, and for each watched title looks up the page(s) that correspond to it. The database sorts them all by reverse timestamp order and then shows only the most recent X number. So if your limit is 200 pages, but you're watching 2000 pages, it had to look at and deal with the full 2000 pages. --Brion 05:26, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That's interesting, because all I've ever really wanted to see when loading my watchlist has been a list of watched pages that have changed since I last loaded my watchlist (usually < 24 h). It sounds like that could easily be done the same way recentchanges works, and just filtering out non-watched pages instead of bolding the watched ones. Certainly much less work to code than what you're planning... Mkweise 07:12, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Alas, the scale is about the same: we trawl through a couple thousand watchlist entries to see which are recent, or through a couple thousand recent edits to see which are watched. --Brion 07:28, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Same scale, perhaps. But my way, you're checking the same records for each user, meaning much more cache hits. Also, consider that the users who load their watchlist frequently tend to be the same users who have thousands of watched articles. Thus, a "Show new changes starting from ..." link at the top of the watchlist should really help reduce load. Mkweise 08:17, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I hope the disabling of longer watchlists is intended to be very short term only? I absolutely have well over 500 articles I wish to keep an eye on. I've created more than that number of articles. I would hate if my watchlist remains disabled. -- Infrogmation 00:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I'm working on rewriting the watchlist and hope to have something that's both workable and faster up soon. Probably by adding a duplicate timestamp field to the watchlist table, which should allow for a pre-indexed sort and hopefully won't slow down page saves significantly. --Brion 05:26, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Okay, the current state of affairs is thus:

  • no major restructuring of database yet :)
  • default time cutoff for Special:Watchlist is now 1 hour, you can select up to 7 days if you dare
  • it attempts to judge whether it will be more efficient to check every page in the watchlist or every page edited since the cutoff time, based on how many pages are in your watchlist and how many edited pages it might have to look at
  • there's a clickable link to the raw list page where you can remove multiple items

So hopefully this should be fairly usable for the meantime. --Brion 11:16, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Although I share some of the concerns expressed above (Infrogmation's not the least) I think you've done this in a laudable way! -- Ruhrjung 14:18, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Nice—the way it is now works for me. What would be even better is to have a link to show pages that have changed since the page was last loaded, just like on the recentchanges page. (Or, if you want to get fancy, store a watchlistlastloaded timestamp in the user table and just have the watchlist show pages that have changed since it was last looked at.) Mkweise 16:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)


I cannot in all honestness fault the way the watchlist works now. Nor most of all the way the change affects the wikipedia speed and functionality.
Nevertheless, I would like to "vent" the experience I was first faced with (without warning, or phase in). I had an excessive amount of items on my watchlist. Guilty. There was though not a warning to me that this might cause a problem. Rather it seemed to be that a healty watchlist was a guarantee of not many articles going astray for too long. In hindsight, I realize that this must have caused huge bits of duplication of effort both of the hardware, and of the wikipedians themselves.
This does not change the fact that when I was faced (quite unexpectedly) with the ultimatum to reduce my watchlist to below 750 "or else", I tried to think very carefully which pages could I really be the most competent watcher of. Well, guess what? My login timed out during the process. I guess I can just blame myself, but still the experience was not a positive one. And in a pique, next time around I scrapped without discrimination all the articles that weren't in the "User:" or the "Wikipedia:" spaces. In retrospect that may not be that bad, starting from a "clean slate" or something proximate to that, but... (maybe something should be learned about this, or maybe not) -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick

Benzone

Moved to Talk:Benzone

Style of dash

Move to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Pizza Puzzle

move to user talk:Pizza Puzzle

I'm new at this. Can we get a diferentiation between MUD and Mud? -- Marshman 03:06, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Mud

I'm new at this. Can we get a differentiation between MUD and Mud? -- Marshman 03:06, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC) Nevermind, it resolved itself, somehow (I guess by my making the link above) -- Marshman 03:08, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Move Comoros/Temp to Comoros

I am content with the current state of this page (Comoros/Temp). I think it is 'finished' (for as far as a wikipage can be finished...). Can anyone who knows how to move it the proper way to Comoros do this (or tell me how to)? (See: Wikipedia:WikiProject Countries
By the way, the subpages still need some work. Pascal 21:25, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Done Enchanter 22:39, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Question from newbie - privacy

I am considering signing up as a registered user. But I am curious if there is a privacy policy regarding e-mail addresses. I cannot find any. Is it a risk unless I set up an e-mail address via (e.g.) yahoo, hotmail, etc., from spam?66.80.243.130 23:48, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

You are not required to list an e-mail address when making an account. However it is helpful so other users can use the E-mail this user feature which is available on user pages. Your e-mail address will not be listed even if you do provide one, unless you list it somewhere on you own (some users put it on thier user page). MB 23:57, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)
Please see the draft privacy policy. --Brion 00:00, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thanks so much. here I go. 66.80.243.130 00:02, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Vandalism, Annoying User, or What?

Same person editing from least three IP addresses: 67.31.32.119, 67.31.35.141, and 67.31.18.253. Editor is adding obscure/POV/opinion/useless links to a lot of articles including: Stokely Carmichael, John Maynard Keynes, Attack on Pearl Harbor, J. Edgar Hoover, Sigmund Freud, and Francisco Franco. I can't really figure out what point this guy is trying to push (seems a bit all over the map), but he's adding pretty low quality links (user pages, random editorials, conspiracy theories) that are also rather unveriable/unaccountable sources of information and he's adding them somewhat rapidly. He's probably using more than just these three addresses, looks like a dynamic user. He has made a few good edits, though, so I was hesitant to label him as a vandal, but he has already re-added his pet links once or twice with no comments/summary ever in any articles or talk pages, so I'm not sure how to proceed. If anyone has the ability to look for other recent edits from 67.31.x.x, I'd also appreciate some help, etc. Daniel Quinlan 04:27, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)

Posting him to Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. -Smack 18:00, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Chinese characters

I have made a suggestion on the use of traditonal/simplifed chinese characters on Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese). Please give your comment. wshun 00:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I may have made a faux pas

When I first discoverded wikipedia, I went gung-ho and added an article, without reading anything much. The thing is I borrowed most of it. I totally forgot that I borrowed it and someone has called me on it. Should I take out the article?

Jon 10:05, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Don't worry, no-one's going to shoot you for it. Something has to be done, and now that it's out in the open, it's going to happen whether you do it yourself or not. But there's no reason you can't do it. List the page on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion with a brief explanation, and replace the article content with the copyright infringement notice from Wikipedia:Boilerplate text. Welcome to Wikipedia! -- Tim Starling 13:31, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)

Patrick Jennings

For those of you who may be wondering about this entry in Wikipedia:Deletion log:

  • 01:13, Aug 8, 2003 Eloquence deleted "Patrick Jennings" (deleting on direct request from Patrick Jennings because of slanderous statements against him)

I received a personal email from Patrick asking me to delete the page because it contained slanderous information about him. The content was indeed of a highly inflammatory nature (I will not reproduce it here), and no evidence for the claims therein was provided. I suggest that the page be deleted on sight if it is recreated, unless the author provides direct citations for his claims.—Eloquence 01:53, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)

Mud

Resolved

I'm new at this. Can we get a differentiation between MUD and Mud? -- Marshman 03:06, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC) Nevermind, it resolved itself, somehow (I guess by my making the link above) -- Marshman 03:08, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Problems with searching

Try searching for 'Thomas hardy' -- why does Thomas Hardy no show in the results? -- tarquin (logged out)

Search for '+Thomas +hardy' instead. Read more at Wikipedia:Searching, Limiting results. (I just asked the same question, see above) -- Cordyph 12:20, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Even better, use phrase search "Thomas hardy" with quotes. - Patrick 12:26, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Watchlists Disabled

First aproach: limiting the article count

Is there any way to view the items on our watchlists to bring the total down to less than 200 articles? -- NetEsq 19:38, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

(I just bumped the limit from 200 to 500, BTW.) Not yet, but I'm messing with it still. --Brion 19:42, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
For the too-big watchlist, it now dumps an alphabetical list of watched pages with the option to remove selected items. Primitive, but it seems to work for now. --Brion 21:12, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, Brion. That's just what the doctor ordered! -- NetEsq 21:17, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hey, that is the function, I was looking for!!! I wanted for months already to create a function that shows me, what I am watching. Now it is working ;-)
Please keep this function (add some button on the watch list page) so that we can manage better our "children"... (you know, how Wikipedians think about their pages... ;-) Fantasy 22:18, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, should have had that years ago. :) --Brion

How about automatically removing all redirect pages from all watchlists? I certainly don't want any redir pages on my watchlist, and removing the 100 or so that are on it would at least bring me a bit closer to 500. BTW, I noticed that special:recentchanges still shows watched pages in bold. I assume it isn't really helping the server load that I'm now using recentchanges since my watchlist is disabled? Mkweise 22:30, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I don't like this: you will not know if someone changed the redirect page... Fantasy 22:37, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Recent changes' use of watchlist entries is pretty much "free". To explain... the recentchanges table lists all edits (in the last few days) indexed by timestamp. The database just starts at the most recent and grabs entries in reverse time order until it reaches its limit. For each edit it looks at, it checks the watchlist table for that page, with the direct index keys of your user id and the namespace and title of the page. This should be quite fast, and it only has to check the watchlist for the same number of pages that it actually shows in the results. So if your limit is 200 pages, it looks at up to 200 pages.
The Special:Watchlist view works differently. It takes the entire set of your watchlist, and for each watched title looks up the page(s) that correspond to it. The database sorts them all by reverse timestamp order and then shows only the most recent X number. So if your limit is 200 pages, but you're watching 2000 pages, it had to look at and deal with the full 2000 pages. --Brion 05:26, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That's interesting, because all I've ever really wanted to see when loading my watchlist has been a list of watched pages that have changed since I last loaded my watchlist (usually < 24 h). It sounds like that could easily be done the same way recentchanges works, and just filtering out non-watched pages instead of bolding the watched ones. Certainly much less work to code than what you're planning... Mkweise 07:12, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Alas, the scale is about the same: we trawl through a couple thousand watchlist entries to see which are recent, or through a couple thousand recent edits to see which are watched. --Brion 07:28, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Same scale, perhaps. But my way, you're checking the same records for each user, meaning much more cache hits. Also, consider that the users who load their watchlist frequently tend to be the same users who have thousands of watched articles. Thus, a "Show new changes starting from ..." link at the top of the watchlist should really help reduce load. Mkweise 08:17, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I hope the disabling of longer watchlists is intended to be very short term only? I absolutely have well over 500 articles I wish to keep an eye on. I've created more than that number of articles. I would hate if my watchlist remains disabled. -- Infrogmation 00:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I'm working on rewriting the watchlist and hope to have something that's both workable and faster up soon. Probably by adding a duplicate timestamp field to the watchlist table, which should allow for a pre-indexed sort and hopefully won't slow down page saves significantly. --Brion 05:26, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Second aproach: 1 hour watchlist

Okay, the current state of affairs is thus:

  • no major restructuring of database yet :)
  • default time cutoff for Special:Watchlist is now 1 hour, you can select up to 7 days if you dare
  • it attempts to judge whether it will be more efficient to check every page in the watchlist or every page edited since the cutoff time, based on how many pages are in your watchlist and how many edited pages it might have to look at
  • there's a clickable link to the raw list page where you can remove multiple items

So hopefully this should be fairly usable for the meantime. --Brion 11:16, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Although I share some of the concerns expressed above (Infrogmation's not the least) I think you've done this in a laudable way! -- Ruhrjung 14:18, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Nice—the way it is now works for me. What would be even better is to have a link to show pages that have changed since the page was last loaded, just like on the recentchanges page. (Or, if you want to get fancy, store a watchlistlastloaded timestamp in the user table and just have the watchlist show pages that have changed since it was last looked at.) Mkweise 16:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Experiences with this unexpected changes

I cannot in all honestness fault the way the watchlist works now. Nor most of all the way the change affects the wikipedia speed and functionality.

Nevertheless, I would like to "vent" the experience I was first faced with (without warning, or phase in). I had an excessive amount of items on my watchlist. Guilty. There was though not a warning to me that this might cause a problem. Rather it seemed to be that a healty watchlist was a guarantee of not many articles going astray for too long. In hindsight, I realize that this must have caused huge bits of duplication of effort both of the hardware, and of the wikipedians themselves.

This does not change the fact that when I was faced (quite unexpectedly) with the ultimatum to reduce my watchlist to below 750 "or else", I tried to think very carefully which pages could I really be the most competent watcher of. Well, guess what? My login timed out during the process. I guess I can just blame myself, but still the experience was not a positive one. And in a pique, next time around I scrapped without discrimination all the articles that weren't in the "User:" or the "Wikipedia:" spaces. In retrospect that may not be that bad, starting from a "clean slate" or something proximate to that, but... (maybe something should be learned about this, or maybe not) -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick

Cimon, I was also really surprised, when I saw that I have to reduce my watchlist. My first thought was: NEVER! But I knew, Wikipedia is growing (probably faster that it can handle, sometimes), so there are some growing-problems, but we have really good people looking after this so I gave the problems 2 days. I was wrong, not even one day, and the problem was solved. ;-)
The other solution, to get around this problems, in the real world in real software-projects is the following:
  • A team works on the project, creates documents, discusses, tests, quality cecks, changes again, test, ... and after some months or years the real users get the (probably) working version of the software.
Wikipedia is able to support changes "on the fly".
  • There is a problem, lets try to solve it. One way is wrong, ok, lets take the other way.
Which one of this two aproaches do you prefer? I go for the Wiki-aproach ;-) Fantasy 08:01, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Here, have some unidentified Swedish plant photos

I snapped some photos of vegetation while in the wilds of Sweden. If anyone can identify them and would find them useful for illustrating Wikipedia articles, consider them FDL'd. --Brion 05:11, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Spanish football

Should Spanish football be made a redirect for Spanish football league teams? Much of the information given in the former seems to properly belong in sub-pages of the latter, although I'm not enthusiatic about wading into all that. Bill 15:04, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Personal Watch List

Is someone or something fooling with the way the personal watchlist is displayed? Seems like it used to come up pretty much however I had set it last session, but this week it is different each day, each session, and is now defaulting to "previous 1 hour." If there is an attempt to default this to some value to cut down on cpu time, put it at 1 day. Marshman 04:23, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I see you only have 40 items in your watchlist, so you probably aren't aware of how big a problem the watchlist code has been. A number of power users have a couple of thousand items in their watchlists, which leads to very very slow load times which tie up the database. I've been working on tweaking it to be easier on the server, and am not finished yet... a 1 day cutoff would not help with the problem population, where the number of edits per day and the number of watched items are of a similar magnitude. My next step is to get it to try to balance off the cutoff, so people with smaller watchlists will have a much longer default cutoff time (or even no time limit). --Brion 04:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Okay, users with fewer than 250 items watched should now get no time cutoff by default. Users with over 250 items will get the 1 hour cutoff by default. --Brion 05:11, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thanks. Noticed the difference as soon as I logged in. Probably a good idea to point ouit the expense to ther system of long lists under the instructions. Marshman 08:46, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Is there a record? I had over 5,500 pages watched when it was disabled! :) Martin
The current record-holder is Patrick with 9432 items watched. --Brion 02:46, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Apologies to all

I'm sorry for flooding the most wanted with about 50 Governor General's Awards pages (just as we were finally getting rid of the Grammies to). I will continue to work away at them, however, and they will hopefully be gone soonish. - SimonP 23:02, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)

Edit corruption

Does anyone know what happened at Wikipedia:Redirect? I only made one minor edit to it and now it looks like I vandalized it. -- 213.73.161.245 16:25, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Oh no, not again... Something like that happened earlier today, too, and Wikipedia went down for a while. Ксип Cyp 16:29, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Spanish football

moved to talk:Spanish football

Here, have some unidentified Swedish plant photos

moved to Wikipedia:GNU Free Documentation License resources

The search is up, Watson?

Full-text search is back up, with no apparent slowing of the server - what happened? Did a bug just get fixed? -Smack 05:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

See announcement on the mailing list. Search is temporarily running off a copy of the search index table on the other server. It's a static copy so it will slowly become more and more out of date. --Brion 06:25, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Will it ever be updated? -Smack 06:32, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
To reiterate: "temporarily". --Brion 06:38, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Ah, yes. I missed that. But then what? -Smack 06:47, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Quote from above-linked message: "I'd prefer to be running these sorts of things on a third machine, capable of being a full live backup database server, but we don't yet have one." --Brion 07:05, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thank you for bringing full-text search back, but there are some strange problems. If you type "west nile virus" or "history of germany" and click on "Search", then the desired result (article of exactly this name) is not displayed in the first place. The article West Nile virus is the 49th hit to be displayed. This may be a weak example, since you can access the article by clicking GO, but shouldn't the search function find articles with occurrences of all words first? Sorry, if this should have been discussed before. -- Cordyph 10:11, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
See section "limiting results" in Wikipedia:Searching. --Brion 10:16, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thank you. Sorry for asking the same questions again and again, but it is almost impossible to observe all articles in the Wikipedia namespace. -- Cordyph 10:19, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

The section edit feature is great, but the top link makes some existing pages look a bit funny. The problem is that if the first paragraph doesn't have a title, the first edit link sort of flows into the text. It also introduces a strange hanging indent.

This may be browser dependent, I'm using IE 5. Is there any recommended workaround? Mine for the moment is to add a first line consting of a blank, which seems to restore the appearance to what I'd expect. See cymbal alloys for an example. It doesn't seem to work to just view the previous version to see how it used to look, you need to actually save an edit to test the behaviour properly, so maybe compare it to Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers which is unfixed (it is as I write this anyway).

I'd also remove the section edit links from the printable version if that's easy. Andrewa 17:23, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Have you tried using right click editing instead of the [edit] links? The option is "Enable section editing by right clicking on section titles (JavaScript)" in Special:Preferences.—Eloquence 18:14, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)
That's not really the point. I'm not all that concerned about how it looks for me. What I want is for the article to look good to those who read Wikipedia. Andrewa 01:14, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Re: Printable.
It's been mentioned by 2 others already: [[#[edit]_and_printable_version]] & #Edit link in printable version.
--Menchi 18:22, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)
So it has! Don't know how I missed that. Looks like that's under control. This is my first use of Village Pump, it seems to work rather well. Andrewa 01:14, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

There's a problem with the workaround I described above. If you use the first edit link to edit this first paragraph, this first line is deleted (probably a quite reasonable thing to do) and you need to add it back. My workaround to this is not to use the top link! Andrewa 18:20, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Edit Section behavior

The Edit Section function behaves unexpectedly if an edit conflict occurs. Firstly, it is somewhat astonishing that there is an edit conflict when the only other edit was in a different section—but I suppose that's because it was done using Edit Page. But what's even more astonishing—not to mention ugly—is that I get shown a diff of the section I edited against the entire article as edited by my "edit opponent". Mkweise 16:12, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)


I've been wondering how edit conflicts were handled with that .... -- Tarquin 17:02, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I expected this to be reported as a bug somewhere already, why I didn't bother ...until the next software update... :->>
-- Ruhrjung 18:54, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I just wanted to point out that the edit section links appear even in the printable versions of articles, which is probably a bug. -- Arvindn 14:57, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, doesn't look too good. Somebody else mentioned this a few days ago: [[#[edit]_and_printable_version]]. --Menchi

I just wanted to point out that the edit section links appear even in the printable versions of articles, which is probably a bug. -- Arvindn 14:57, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, doesn't look too good. Somebody else mentioned this a few days ago: [[#[edit]_and_printable_version]]. --Menchi

Edit Section behavior

The Edit Section function behaves unexpectedly if an edit conflict occurs. Firstly, it is somewhat astonishing that there is an edit conflict when the only other edit was in a different section—but I suppose that's because it was done using Edit Page. But what's even more astonishing—not to mention ugly—is that I get shown a diff of the section I edited against the entire article as edited by my "edit opponent". Mkweise 16:12, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)


I've been wondering how edit conflicts were handled with that .... -- Tarquin 17:02, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I expected this to be reported as a bug somewhere already, why I didn't bother ...until the next software update... :->>
-- Ruhrjung 18:54, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

The section edit feature is great, but the top link makes some existing pages look a bit funny. The problem is that if the first paragraph doesn't have a title, the first edit link sort of flows into the text. It also introduces a strange hanging indent.

This may be browser dependent, I'm using IE 5. Is there any recommended workaround? Mine for the moment is to add a first line consting of a blank, which seems to restore the appearance to what I'd expect. See cymbal alloys for an example. It doesn't seem to work to just view the previous version to see how it used to look, you need to actually save an edit to test the behaviour properly, so maybe compare it to Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers which is unfixed (it is as I write this anyway).

I'd also remove the section edit links from the printable version if that's easy. Andrewa 17:23, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Have you tried using right click editing instead of the [edit] links? The option is "Enable section editing by right clicking on section titles (JavaScript)" in Special:Preferences.—Eloquence 18:14, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)
That's not really the point. I'm not all that concerned about how it looks for me. What I want is for the article to look good to those who read Wikipedia. Andrewa 01:14, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Re: Printable.
It's been mentioned by 2 others already: [[#[edit]_and_printable_version]] & #Edit link in printable version.
--Menchi 18:22, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)
So it has! Don't know how I missed that. Looks like that's under control. This is my first use of Village Pump, it seems to work rather well. Andrewa 01:14, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

There's a problem with the workaround I described above. If you use the first edit link to edit this first paragraph, this first line is deleted (probably a quite reasonable thing to do) and you need to add it back. My workaround to this is not to use the top link! Andrewa 18:20, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Feature request: Easier redirects to talk page

A feature request. Can we have a variable name like {{TALKPAGE}} ("TALKPAGE") which expands to a link to the talk page for a page. It will make certain boilerplate text much easier to edit.

New design of main page

A new design for the main page has been proposed at Main Page/Temp5. Please vote on whether the new design ought to replace the current design at Talk:Main Page/Layout design. Thank you. Angela 22:28, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Pump moved

I have moved the pump to the talk namespace so the "Post a comment" feature can be used. This makes attaching comments easier, as it does not require loading the entire page and it cannot trigger edit conflicts.—Eloquence 01:26, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the move breaks the interlanguage links because these are always rendered in-text on pages in the talk namespace. Have to think of a solution for that problem ..—Eloquence 01:28, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)
I've put it back for now. (By the way -- it takes a long time to rename a page with a hojillion history entries like this. If at first it looks like the history is gone, please wait a few minutes; it should turn up soon.) --Brion 02:01, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That's not good. All the redirects are now broken. That was unnecessary, just for the interlanguage links, which were still accessible anyway.—Eloquence
Or rather, all the redirects are now fixed. --Brion 02:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I still think moving it back was unnecessary, especially given the mega history which we now will have to move one more time. The last time something seemed to go wrong as the move returned an error after 2 minutes of churning, but the page was still moved. I presume it may have something to do with the page being edited during that period. Each move of this page is a risky procedure. I also think the interlanguage link behavior on talk pages and article pages should be identical anyawy.—Eloquence 02:58, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)
Where do we go if we want to talk about the Village Pump, now? —Paul A 01:31, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Just do it here.—Eloquence

This page seems to now have spent a time in the Meta, where I found it quite easily except it moved again before I could finish my editing. The link from the talk page that said it was to the Meta then brought me came back here. Confused? I was for a while. I suggest a cooling-off period and some more discussion before any more moves. Andrewa 02:29, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Is it possible to make a link show the table of contents of a page instead of its title? This could be useful for things like archived talks or lists where you would like to see an overview but not the full content. 141.83.55.66


Oh, you should write an overview yourself. AI is just not there yet. wshun 02:38, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Spam from Within

What is the recommended approach/remedy when somebody sends you "talk"/e-mail about their great T-shirts they have fore sale? Spam within this system is even more annoying (if possible) than spam to my regular e-mail address. I assume there must be a process for protesting against the activity of somebody who sends such junk. Patrick0Moran 06:46, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Has this ever actually happened? Your user talk: page doesn't show anything of the sort. Spam depends on high volume. A single message targeted at a single person is vanishingly unlikely to get any response. It's just so much easier to send real email in bulk. -Smack 06:50, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
According to my talk page, Patrick0Moran apparently believes I am the source of this spam he refers to. I have not, nor will I ever, sent spam, either in email or talk form, to anyone, least of all anyone on Wikipedia, and least of all about T-shirts which I don't even possess. Could you please show us where this has occurred, Patrick? I'm interested to know who is impersonating me. -- Wapcaplet 16:11, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I assume that
== Wikipedia T-Shirts ==

I've made some Wikipedia T-shirt designs. Check out my meta user page for designs which you are free to use for any purpose you like.

is what he is talking about... If you usually remember to sign your posts, and often post on talk: pages, there would be a link to an "advertisment" posted on many talk pages. I'm not sure about the e-mail part, watchlists, where you get an e-mail if the page changes, haven't been implemented, have they? (In writing this, I just noticed a quote from myself in your user page history - apparently I'm famous already...) Ксип Cyp 17:53, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
A search of the user talk: namespace for 't-shirt' revealed no spam. On the other hand, it also did not detect the table that Cyp just posted, so I don't know if it's meaningful at all. -Smack 01:57, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That's because the search is currently running off a static copy of the database, so it won't show anthing that was added in the last couple of days. Angela 02:00, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)
What I posted was from User:Wapcaplet, not from the User talk namespace. Ксип Cyp 10:05, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

FDL'ed Photos

Hi, I dunno if this is a good place to let people know about this but I have just put 10k+ photos under the FDL so they can be used here, I'm not going to have time to put many up here so if others want to do so please help your self :-) --ChrisCroome 16:22, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Very cool! That is quite a generous offering of pictures. I'm sure they will be useful. I will list your site on Wikipedia:Public domain image resources, if that's okay with you. -- Wapcaplet 16:43, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
You rule, Chris! Wikipedia:GNU Free Documentation License resources seems to be the right place to list this.—Eloquence 20:42, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)
Cheers for the compliments :-) I would add a link to the FDL resources page but I can't see where it the listings it would fit in exactly... --ChrisCroome 23:41, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Linking to original image from description page

I'm happy to see an image of mine used here:

File:Beer in glass (small).jpg

I'm concerned however that without a link to the original image other people don't have an oppertunity to see the source data and therefore can't re-crop it or do other things with it. Should there be a policy of linking to the source image?

--ChrisCroome 11:04, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia Mascot

I have added a mascot for Wikipedia- an Octopus. Later I read that some other Wikipedian has to second it. Will anyone interested have a look and do it if you find it OK? KRS

Wikipedia Mascot

I have added a mascot for Wikipedia- an Octopus. Later I read that some other Wikipedian has to second it. Will anyone interested have a look and do it if you find it OK? KRS

Does it fret? --Wik 18:19, Aug 10, 2003 (UTC)

Ogg uploads.. any guidelines for size, length, quality?

I'd like to upload some of my music, so that it can be used as examples of styles like ambient and techno. I licensed it under the Free Art license, so that will be no problem. (And if it would be a problem, I don't mind to pick another license.) But I guess it's not a good idea to upload very large files. Are there any guidelines for this? Like, using specific quality settings, or make sure the file size is not bigger than a certain size. I could also take an excerpt of the piece and link to the complete piece. Guaka 02:36, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

The upload system currently rejects any file larger than 2 megabytes. Anything approaching or exceeding that size should at present be hosted offsite. --Brion 04:12, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)
So I presume that it is okay to upload <2 MB files? The thingy I just uploaded is 1.6 MB. Is that okay, or is it a case of 'approaching that size'?

Guaka 21:30, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

You should also license them under the GNU FDL if submitting to Wikipedia or put the samples into the public domain (the entire song is not necessary unless you want to upload the entire piece). (You can license under both licenses such that the licensee must choose one license disjunctively if you wish.) Daniel Quinlan 04:27, Aug 10, 2003 (UTC)
Ok. Well, I prefer the entire piece. So I added the GFDL. But I wonder what this exactly means for musical pieces. Wouldn't it be better to simply allow other copylefted or free licenses?

Guaka 21:30, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Password not being accepted

Everytime I have tried to sign in I have been told my password is incorrect. What is going on? FearÉIREANN 02:54, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC) (And when I try to save this I am told I am in an edit conflict . . . with myself!!!'

I had the same problem; try turning off the 'remember my password' option. - Hephaestos 03:05, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Should be fixed. Old problem in the source cropped up again. --128.125.23.68 02:56, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I think it would be nice for talk pages to automaticly link to the main Wikipedia page. Anyone want to take this on?

They already do - that's what the "View article" (or "View user page" or "View meta page") link on the quickbar and at the bottom of each talk page does. Or if you mean they should link to Main Page, there's a link to there from every page too. --Camembert

Hmmm...We'll just see about that...so they do. Sorry, I looked several times. Jfeckstein 15:57, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Redirects after moving

Often after moving a page from one name form to another there are inbound links from other pages that point to the redirect(s) created during the move. Should one

  1. Modify the links to point to the new form of the name, even if it means aliasing the link (e.g. Bockscar|Bock's Car)?
  2. Change the form of the name in the pointing article (e.g. Bockscar, assuming this does no violence to the sense of the article)?
  3. Just leave the pointing article alone and let the the redirect do its work (e.g. Bock's Car)?

For a real-world case-in-point, visit: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Bockscar -- Bill 11:29, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)

This is one of those things that must be judged case-by-case. In the case of Bockscar, the correct action would be your second: change all references to the "Bockscar" spelling (if you're sure that spelling is the correct one?). —Paul A 14:03, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)
The U.S. Air Force thinks the name is Bockscar. I guess they're in a better position to know than I am (I hope so anyway). But, OK, decisions must be made on a case-by-case basis; all well and good, but what factors need to be considered when making the decision? This is something that comes up all the time. I've normally been fixing the redirects, but if that's not the right thing to do, I'd like to know. -- Bill 15:18, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Highlighted country maps

Having recently completed the daunting task of making maps highlighting thousands of U.S. counties, I'm surprised that there do not seem to be any (or at least very many) maps highlighting countries of the world. Many countries have nice maps taken from the CIA World Factbook, but there are few which show a country's location on the globe.

I'd be perfectly happy to work on this, provided it hasn't already been done, since it'd be good to have maps with a similar color scheme and appearance to the completed U.S. ones (for all U.S. states and all counties within those states). Finding a nice, high-quality outline map of the world is the first step, of course. I'm thinking a map similar in style and size to the U.S. map shown on, for example, Texas, showing the globe, with a highlighted county. These can be conveniently placed either on the main article for each country, or, probably more appropriately, on the "Geography of X" (for example, say, Geography of Canada). Thoughts? Criticisms? -- Wapcaplet 15:32, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I think it's a great idea. However, for some countries, especially those in Europe, it might be best to highlight them on a map of the continent rather than the world as they might not be very visible on a world map. - SimonP 16:11, Aug 12, 2003 (UTC)
I think this would be a great addition to the 'pedia. Many articles on certain countries have maps of the country, but give no context as to where on the globe they reside.
Just a thought, in line with what SimonP said, some countries are rather tiny and two images may be necessary to convey where it is located. For example, one large view of the entire globe may need an arrow pointing to an almost imperceptible red dot. A second image would show a moderately zoomed-in image of the country and it's relative position to adjoining nations. Then, of course, there would be the main image which would just be of the country itself, which you are not proposing to provide (since they should already have them). —Frecklefoot 16:18, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)
It's mainly a question of aesthetics, but what I don't like at the Texas example is the coloring -- white/blue/red might be cool for US states, but for highlighting countries all over the world (which is a good idea, but in my opinion more "Politics of X" than "Geography of X"), I'd suggest some colors that aren't political used together -- say, medium grey and orange. -- till we *) 16:21, Aug 12, 2003 (UTC)

Good point about the (relatively) smaller countries; two maps may be necessary in that case, with the world map using circle(s) to indicate approximate location (sort of like we have with Rhode Island, or Aleutians West Census Area, Alaska), and a larger map giving a better view.

As for colors which are not political... that is a pretty difficult task. The red-on-white colors were chosen only for their contrast, so I wouldn't be terribly opposed to orange (though, it would break the established tradition of red-on-white). Blue was chosen for the water because, well, think about it. It has nothing to do with politics; any color combination is going to be interpreted as political by someone, no doubt... -- Wapcaplet 16:29, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Colours: Maybe an overinterpretation by me. But nevertheless, it would be quite nice to see with one look at the map if this is a sub-national entity (colored red) or a national entity (colored don't-know-yet). -- till we *) 16:39, Aug 12, 2003 (UTC)
Personally, I really like the contrast of the red against the white. The color of blue used for the water isn't the same shade of blue that would be used to represent the US flag, so I don't find it objectionable. Personally, I never interpretted the red, white, blue (and greys) as any sort of political statement. I just thought it the color were used because they were the most appropriate for the task of indication. —Frecklefoot 17:34, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)

wikipedia.org is not redirecting to Main page

Un-typeable characters

Could someone give me info on how to display characters not on the standard US keyboard on Wikipedia. First of all, what is the best way to display such characters? I have seen a few ways in the past. Second, is there a listing or website somewhere which shows a table or something of all the different characters and their codes? MB 18:12, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)

Does the table on Wikipedia:Special_characters help? —Frecklefoot 18:17, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
And what about Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Character Map, if you have it? (Might need switching to Unicode.) (Or, just install a lot of keyboard layouts.) Ксип Cyp 18:21, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Charmap is fine for one or two characters otherwise a bit tedious to use. For several European languages you'll find a 'World Keyboard' at Bable Fish. Erik Zachte 23:14, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
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