Wikipedia:Village pump/July 2004 archive 1

Disappearing page history

Hi,

The page history for the public defender article has changed at least twice. Changes that have been made are no longer listed in the history. There were once four entries in the page history; there are now two. This is really puzzling. Does anyone know what's going on?

Thanks,

Acegikmo1 14:19, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)

I noticed a similar thing happening last night: the old edits sometimes disappear from the page history when newer ones are made, though they are still reflected in the article. In time, the old edits do reappear in the history, so there are no lasting problems (at least where ordinary edits are concerned - I don't know what might happen with page moves or deletions), but it's obviously rather confusing. When I asked about this on the IRC channel, there seemed to be a feeling that the problem may be caused by us now using two database servers. A bug report has been filed [1]. --Camembert

Have a look at the entry 'Missing edits from History' further up the page - it explains what is happening and why. It is a known bug to do with the paired database servers. SkArcher 14:59, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I've been seeing this since 1.3 was installed, well before the second db server was put into rotation. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:05, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Ah, then I'm not crazy. Thanks for your responses. Acegikmo1 15:27, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I experienced that too. I thought it was an automatated anti-flooding control. :o) Well, so long as the changes are still all there. --Menchi 00:32, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Racism policy

There is clearly a demand for some tidying up in relation to racism on the whole of Wikipedia. The pages directly concerning the different concepts of the theory of separate human races obviously nead re-editing (not least the article race).
The United States have a special view of the term race (see Race (U.S. census)) that is controversial and abnormal in most of the world and it should not be given that this view is to be accepted by the Wikipedia community (and stand unchalenged in the articles).
Furthermore some places in the U.S. are, for some reason, noted down with a population of 0.00% of one or more "races" (f.ex. Lima, Rock County, Wisconsin). Moravice 20:00, 02 July 2004 (UTC) I agree we should be reasonably careful, but let's not confuse the reader by trying too hard to be politically correct. Perhaps we can appologize in the text to persons who feel that clarity is less important than tact. Neil

Recent Changes no longer enough

I was reading through Wikipedia:replies and noticed that the primary method it seems to think that exists to keep out vandalism is Recent Changes. That may have been true when Wikipedia was first started, but now there are around 300,000 edits a month. That works out to around 7 edits a minute, giving our intrepid RC watcher less than 9 seconds to examine each edit, assuming that they work night and day. Not likely. The problem is that some vandalism slips by, for example, this May 2 edit, that was not fixed until June 3, after getting noticed by a Virgina Pilot news reporter, who wrote about it in the paper (see Wikipedia:Press coverage). I am certain that there are other vandalism that occurs and is missed in recent changes (I certainly have found more in the past year in my watchlists than I used to). So, in conclusion, recent changes can no longer be regarded as a reliable method to find vandalism.

I would like to propose two possible ways to improve finding vandalism (and feel free to discuss more). First of all, watchlists are probably finding the majority of vandalism now adays. But, not all articles are being watched. However, right now, there is no way to find the changes that are not being seen in somebodies watchlist. I propose that first of all, there should be a "info" link from each article. It could list the number of people (but not who is watching it) who have it on their watchlist, and also break it down by the last login time (#logined-in in the past day, week, month). As well, there needs to be a way to find non-watched changes. I would suggest that Recent Changes should have a utility to find changes that are not in any "active" editor's watchlist. For example, the utility could give a list of changes that are not in any watchlist of anyone who has viewed their watchlist in the past two days. This would give edits that are less likely to be found by another editor a higher chance of being looked at.

My second proposal is that edits should be able to be commented on. I would propose that each edit has a dropdown like Approve, Neutral, Needs Work, Disapprove and also a little summary field to add a text comment. Each logged in user of wikipedia could then add comments to any edit made by any user. Then, the recent changes page could have a utilitiy to find edits that have been commented on by less than N users. As well, in the history page, there should be a link to all the comments for each edit. This effectively makes sure that there is less duplication of looking at recent changes, and allows more edits to be thouroghly reviewed.

Wikipedia is being used more and more as a reference. It is being seen by more and more people. Some of them are finding too many errors and vandalism. Wikipedia needs more powerful ways of finding vandalism and errors, if we wish to truthfully reply to our critics. Jrincayc 02:43, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I tend to agree that something needs to be done. I've been meaning to raise my concern that the increased churn in Recent Changes has also affected the number of new pages being reviewed. Based on my overall impression after many hours of New Pages Patrol (which seems to be done by many fewer people than RC patrol), plus a more rigorous review of 100 new pages from a list I loaded 4 days earlier, I would estimate that at least 1/4 to 1/3 of new pages go in without any review by an experienced Wikipedian. I had thot that just having more people doing new pages patrol would be enuf, but now I'm not sure. Niteowlneils 04:08, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps Wikipedia could modify its script to allow only new pages to show up in the recent changes, or, even better, move this functionality to a new but similar page (perhaps called "Recently Created Pages"). [[User:Poccil|Poccil (Talk)]] 05:12, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)

You mean like Special:Newpages? -- Cyrius|✎ 05:34, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I would like to see this Special:Newpages page in the navigation bar! I didn't know it existed, and I think I am not the only one in this situation! --Alexandre 20:55, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It is on Special:Specialpages however i agree with you on the point that it should be more visible.

About that Chesapeake, Virginia article, i think one way to defend against this is to actually have real articles, not pointless crap made by bots. The way we defend against such things is that it shows up on alot of watchlists. so that article is not a fair example. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:34, 2004 Jul 6 (UTC)

My feeling is that more vandalism/poor editing slips through when the wiki is slooow. RC or New Pages patrol is much harder when you have timeouts etc, and I guess I am not alone in giving up trying when that is the case. However creation of a long but poor new page is affected much less by slowness. Happily we are getting dramatically better speeds at the moment, so we can get back on our game a bit.

However RC watching will have to change. As I've said before we now really need some mechanism by which edits can be marked as "checked". This would result in a massive increase in RC-watch productivity as duplication would be dramatically reduced. Anyone fancy joining me in getting a bounty together to offer to a developer to create this feature? Pcb21| Pete

I feel as if I'm out of touch with the editors on en these days. Wikipedia is a different place now to when I got most of my editing experience. I have trouble working out what people think are the most important features. So I have decided to run a poll: User:Tim Starling/Feature poll. I'm interested in overall directions for MediaWiki development, rather than specific features, at the current time. But your comments and feature suggestions would also be welcome, on that page or elsewhere. -- Tim Starling 08:53, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)

I agree there needs to be some mechanism by which edits can be marked as checked. I think that it needs to have some way to add a comment as to why the edit is being checked or reject, otherwise we have just created a new way to bite the newcomers since it is incredibly frustrating to have an edit rejected without a reason given. It also should have a way to say good edit, needs more work (like spelling, grammar etc.) What where you thinking in the way of a bounty? Jrincayc 13:14, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I can't spend any more time on Wikipedia than I already do, there are no more hours left in the week. I already work on it solidly through the weekend, and some weeknights too. I'm not setting a price for my work but I do accept donations via paypal, see my user page. -- Tim Starling 01:36, Jul 6, 2004 (UTC)

Know what I do? I just set the Recent Changes page to hide logged in users. Most vandalism comes from anonymous users. Usually if it comes from logged in ones, the chances of detection are higher because logged in users are more likely to get involved with the community; I think most vandalism from logged in users comes from users involved in edit wars (though I could be wrong). So, I monitor recent changes made by anons only, which makes tracking down vandalism a lot more easier. I'd like to see a way to also view edits of logged in users who have less than a hundred edits to their name, though. Johnleemk | Talk 15:11, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

What do you think the "hide logged in users" link does?

Below are the last 50 changes in the last 3 days.

Show last 50 | 100 | 250 | 500 changes in last 1 | 3 | 7 | 14 | 30 days

hide minor edits | show bots | hide logged in users

Show new changes starting from 01:25, Jul 6, 2004

After I implemented it, people told me that it wasn't as useful as they thought it would be, since it doesn't show which edits have already been reverted, corrected or checked. As for users with less than 100 edits, well you could try [2]. I don't think these simple ad-hoc features are sufficient. -- Tim Starling 01:36, Jul 6, 2004 (UTC)

There is brainstorming going on at Wikipedia:Checked edits brainstorming on how to do the checked edits. Jrincayc 16:23, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Maybe Recent changes should be broken up by catagories, so that someone can look at only changes in some catagory and the subcatagories of that catagory. Jrincayc 19:39, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Simple English collaboration

I've recently started working at the Simple English WP, and from what I've seen over the past few weeks, growth there is very sloooooow. This WP is in a unique position to help its little cousin, though. I believe that anyone who edits at this WP has the potential to edit at Simple: of course, writing in Simple English isn't that easy straight off, but at least it's the same language! It seems that Simple is often relegated as "just another language I don't know", as its listed amongst all the non-English languages most of us here wouldn't have a clue about; hiding at the bottom of the Main Page. I really think there could be a strong collaboration set up between these two WPs, seeing as they're only different shades of the same language, and not something like English compared to Swahili!

Although I don't have any carefully thought-out proposals on how to do all this, I do have some ideas, and hopefully others do too.

• For example, there could be a Wikipedia:Simple English collaboration page created and linked to from the Community Portal. This could include a list of the most desperately needed pages and open tasks at Simple, among other things. Of course, it would have to be prominently stated that Simple English is not exactly the same as the English here, so a crash-course in writing Simply would be needed at the very least. But the idea is to show that it's not some alien language after all, so the more accessable, the better.
• How about a message related to new pages/editing pages, which asks the editor, if it's not too much trouble, to please create at least a stub of their new/edited article over at Simple, with a link to the equivalent (probably non-existant) page over there. It would need the same link to the above-mentioned intro to Simple, but again need to be easy enough that people will actually do it.
• An article of the week style page where established articles here that don't have much, (if anything) yet over there, could be nominated for simplification and "translation".
• I'm sure there are other things that could be done to help Simple. I think it's a valuable resource as a "step up" to this WP for people who are learning the language, as well as being a handy "Wikipedia for Kids". It is of little use though at its present stage. The help would be appreciated.

(As a reference, the Simple Community Portal contains the open tasks list. Also: Simple Requested articles).

TPK 06:58, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC) (Talk, My Simple user page)

Is there a good introduction or tutorial anywhere, to guide us through what is expected and what should be avoided in attempting to write sufficiently "simple" English? —Stormie 04:13, Jul 6, 2004 (UTC)

I've contributed to Simple, but I've often wondered if anyone actually reads it, or is it just a bunch of native English speakers writing in simple English for... no good reason? Exploding Boy 04:18, Jul 6, 2004 (UTC)

There is a FAQ/introduction to writing Simply at How to write simple English articles; it can do with some expansion though, but it gives you the idea. As for whether anyone reads it, I'm sure they will once there's a decent amount to read. The English WP wasn't as popular when it was in its infancy as it is now, now was it? I still think it's worth the effort. TPK 11:42, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

simple:Saddam Hussein needs to be simplified and updated. It has the potential to be a very informative but simple article. Guanaco 20:12, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Differnet Browsers - Differnent Content

Yesterday I edited the article about Munich using Firefox and everything was fine. By pure chance I tried it today with IE and it seemd to show the old content (without my changes). Back in Firefox it was the new content, even the history was different. Note that this is not a browser cache issue, since I tried it, besides others, on newly installed machine which I had at hand by coincidence.

Try Munich with Firefox or Mozilla and IE and serach for FHM to see what I mean.

How can it be that different browsers show different content?

I have found this too. Bizarre. — Chameleon My page/My talk 18:22, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It may have nothing to do with the particular browser. I think we have some chronic problems with caching, for example at present my most recent changes to VfD aren't showing up regardless of clearing my own cache, refreshing, forced refresh, whatever. I see them viewing the individual subpages, but not on the VfD page itself. Andrewa 00:09, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I really find it only occurs in IE. I get old content even for pages I have never visited in IE (and therefore it is impossible for them to be in my cache). — Chameleon My page/My talk 08:05, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I'm using IE6, having upgraded from IE5.0 in the vain hope that Wikipedia would then behave on some other glitches. It seems to have made no difference to my problems, and others are raised below by other users. I guess we should raise them on Sourceforge, but the developers seem to have more urgent problems and I think this is going to raise some difficult strategic issues. Andrewa 20:10, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This seems to have been raised on Sourceforge, request ID 987901 is this explicitly, but 982773 is IE too and sounds like it may be the same problem to me. Nobody has taken either of them on yet. Three questions:

1. Is this a problem with the MediaWiki code, or is it the way the current servers are set up? Or is it a bit of both? (Yes, I know that in the opinion of some the only problem is with IE.) It's pointless raising it as a code problem if it's not this at all.

2. Can anyone give me a suggestion as to a browser that will work reliably with Win98SE and the current English Wikipedia setup, and preferably (negotiable, I said preferably) will also coexist with some version of IE (which seems to work fine on all other sites I visit)?

3. IE6 seems worse affected than IE5.0, but not enough to justify going back. Is anyone in a position to comment as to whether IE5.5 would be any better? Andrewa 17:48, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Ad 2: Any browser can peacefully coexist with IE (even different versions of IE can coexist on one system, despite MS trying to convince us of the contrary; see http://www.skyzyx.com/downloads/ ) – in theory at least, it is my experience that you can never predict what will actually happen in Windows, so please don't blame me if something goes wrong ;-) – "Remember me" 19:21, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment, and the link. But, without wanting to doubt (or endorse for that matter) what you say, I was really hoping to hear from some Wikipedian who is currently using a 3rd party browser on Win98SE. I guess I should add, preferably with Eudora... incompatibility with Eudora has been one of my gripes with one other 3rd party browser... but that's not a show-stopper.

As you say, it's hard to predict what Windows will do (IMO Micro$oft want it that way!). I think your generalisation assumes that some CM rules are obeyed... don't reuse DLL names for an obvious example... and even M$ themselves haven't always followed these in my experience. Some previous browsers were highly incompatible, I had to rebuild the OS to remove one and install a stable rival on one occasion. I'm prepared to believe that current browsers are all compatible, but I'd still like to hear from someone who has actually done it before relying on it. Andrewa 21:07, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I have no idea how relevant the differences are between SE and ME, but I can report that I installed several versions of both Mozilla and Opera on ME and never ran into any troubles with that. Sorry I can't help you any further. – "Remember me" 16:02, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Is there any particular version of either of these that seems to work well with the current Wikipedia and Windows ME?

Windows ME is Millenium Edition, which was intended to replace Windows 98. Win98SE is Windows 98 Second Edition. Relatively few people stuck with ME, and it was always unpopular with OEMs, both for good reasons IMO. However Win98SE still has its fans particularly with people such as myself who think that XP introduces some worrrying features designed to strengthen our reliance on Microsoft. Andrewa 22:02, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The above comment is fairly correct, except it should be mentioned that Windows 98 leaks memory like a gunshot victim loses blood ;) →Raul654 22:05, Jul 13, 2004 (UTC)

I can't see newly-created articles

When I click on newly-created articles from Recent changes, I get "(Wikipedia does not have an article on this topic yet. To start the article, click edit this page", even though the article is right there in Recent changes.

For example:

(diff) (hist) . . George Andrew Olah; 23:35:30 . . Tyler McHenry (Talk) (Link to USC)
(diff) (hist) . . N Yemenite Jew; 23:35:29 . . 63.168.169.142 (Talk | block)
(diff) (hist) . . Vending machine; 23:35:27 . . Random832 (Talk)

Yemenite Jew is a new article, but when I click on it, I get the error message. RickK 06:39, Jul 9, 2004 (UTC)

This looks like the same issue as above under the heading "Differnet Browsers - Differnent Content". Are you using IE? — Chameleon My page/My talk 08:08, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I'm using IE. But it just started happening in the middle of my session last night. RickK 18:50, Jul 9, 2004 (UTC)

Sometimes you will also find that a new article that appears in Recent Changes has been deleted before you get to look at it. It's surprising how often that happens. DJ Clayworth 14:07, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

No, when it's been deleted there's a link to the deleted article at the top of the page if you're a sysop. These articles dont' have those links. RickK 18:50, Jul 9, 2004 (UTC)

Firstly, stop using IE. Secondly, we need some geek to figure out why this is happening. — Chameleon My page/My talk 20:18, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This is getting onto those strategic issues I was talking about above. IMO we need to support IE5.0, IE5.5 and IE6 at least so far as the default skin is concerned. Otherwise, we should put a notice on the Main Page "Please use the browsers we like. If you can't or won't comply to this request, get lost. You can't even complain as the pages that would let you do this are the very ones your browser won't support. Goodbye."

Seriously, I have this sort of conversation with website designers regularly. One responded (to a question about screen resolution) "less than 10% of the Internet is affected", to which I replied "let me paraphrase that: One user in ten can't use our site, and we don't care". Let's have in-your-face features by all means, but they should not compromise the basic functions working reliably on a wide variety of platforms. This includes consumer packages that have never been upgraded and never will be. Basic functions IMO means the default skin, the others are frills. Food for thought?

This is getting beyond the Pump I think. What is the proper forum? Andrewa 20:57, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

You seem to be implying someone is saying the bug should not be tackled. Nobody is saying that. Wikipedians should simply use non-IE browsers to solve the problem. Then, the geeks should get their thinking-caps on to fix the bug so that the plebs can use the site correctly. — Chameleon My page/My talk 21:08, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Telling the majority of the world to stop doing something because you can't get your website to work is absurd. Make the website work. RickK 04:20, Jul 11, 2004 (UTC)

One of the fascinating things about Wikipedia is that there is no clear distinction between plebs and Wikipedians. Many registered users are just here for a look (and a few for some more sinister purpose). Some regular contributors are anons.

I guess I qualify as a Wikipedian, I've added myself to a couple of lists of Wikipedians, created a gushing user page and recently been given admin priviledge. And, I'm probably a technically competent one too. But I don't want to spend a lot of time finding out which browser will work! I have little enough time for editing as is. I've done the obvious upgrade, it was no help (introduced some extra problems in fact, no surprise) and is unlikely to survive my next system rebuild. I've tried several other browsers over the years, and rejected them for various reasons. The only response I have had to my request for help as to what to try next wasn't very helpful.

What I do object to are statements to the effect that IE is flawed. These are both vague and irrelevant. In terms of Wikipedia's aims, IMO it is more important to support IE than to support every other browser on earth. OTOH you can't blame the techies for developing and testing on the browsers they prefer, and obviously these will tend to be Unix-based and standards-compliant... the very opposite of IE.

Lots of issues here. I'm not saying be IE-compliant, even if we could tell what that means. I'm just saying, the default skin should generate conservative HTML that will work well on any platform. And of course SQUID and other configuration decisions need to support this strategy as well. Andrewa 20:42, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I don't know who you're explaining this to. The site is already as IE-compliant as it can be. There just appears to be some bizarre recent bug affecting new content. I'd fix it myself, but I'm not a developer/hacker (just knowing XHTML is obviously not enough). We all agree that whoever has the technical know-how should get onto this problem. — Chameleon My page/My talk 21:26, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

At the risk of replying to an implied and probably rhetorical question, I'm trying to explain both to you and also to anyone else reading this.

I'm glad if you believe that it's important (or even possible) that the site should be IE-compliant. I don't think it's that simple myself, and it's not the impression I gained from your earlier advice. I think that there are lots of management and strategy issues here that are becoming more relevant as Wikipedia grows. I'm a bit disappointed nobody has yet referred us to any existing discussions or policies in the Meta. Andrewa 00:33, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Has this been proven to be an IE-specific problem or is this just speculation? Either way, please report bugs to m:bugs or sourceforge. They won't get dealt with by developers if left here. Angela. 00:52, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)