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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous). 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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Notability of individual train stations

I'm not sure how common it is with regards to other geographic areas, but there is a project which works on Australian-related pages which has a whole section dedicated to making/editing articles about seemingly non-notable train stations. Living in Melbourne, I can only really comment on the articles about Victorian train stations: Almost none are notable, as far as I'm concerned. See, for example Brighton Beach railway station, Melbourne, Parkdale railway station, Melbourne. Maybe the lines themselves can have pages, but even then, it seems to just be duplicate information of official transport websites. Some stations are notable, such as Flinders Street Station, and these should obviously be kept.

Anyway, my point is that I don't think these stations should all have their own pages, and I am seeking input about this, especially from users in different parts of the world, to determine whether we can just merge/AFD the articles and / or write a policy regarding whether a train station should have an article just because it's a train station. --Qirex 06:01, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Some people really love trains and trains stations, although not as many as schools. I don't think they're notable, but I've written some articles about individual dams and small rivers that others may find non-notable. Anyway, I don't think we'll be able to get a consensus. -- Kjkolb 06:59, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
As long as they are decently written, they are harmless. We have better things to do than to get rid of harmless articles. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:55, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Fair enough, I guess it may as well be left alone. Thank you Kjkolb and Jmabel for your input about this --Qirex 01:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Heading Nature's Call

Yonder there was a note about a nature article and editorial on wikipedia. The editorial encouraged professionals in science to contribute more to the encyclopedia. Today, my mother fowarded me a note sent out on the NSF Gender in Science and Engineering mailing list. In it, a rather famous person in the field said that she plans to contribute more to wikipedia and encouraged others on the list to do the same. I thought I'd let everyone know the good news, that our recent good press is having good results! --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 21:54, 21 December 2005 (UTC)


Can't find this specific subject addressed elsewhere, but I'm not perfect; please feel free to slap my hand and point me in the right direction if this has already been covered.

I would like to include links on my User page to some of the various websites I own, administrate, design, or participate in. These include my primary site, which is the domain of my web design business; my personal site, which has a similar address but markedly different purpose and tone; the website of the non-profit theatre group I work for; and my blogspot blog, which I use for discussions of a technical nature relating to website design.

Now, I understand that I can't run to every article with the string "HTML" in it and add "VISIT LOWGENIUS WEB DESIGN" at the bottom, but I *think* that it would be appropriate to add that, and the other links, to my User page; after all, those sites pretty well define who I am online, and establish a certain credibility (although I admittedly have yet to edit an article related to web design or theatre!).

I just didn't want to act first and get permission later; I'd rather not bother if it's going to cause a revert war or some other piddling nonsense. Guidance? --lowgenius [[User_talk:John_Henry_DeJong| My Talk Page]] 05:46, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Relevant guidelines are at Wikipedia:User page. I think as long as you refrain from overt advertising you'll be fine. -- Rick Block (talk) 06:03, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Many thanks--lowgenius [[User_talk:John_Henry_DeJong| My Talk Page]] 20:27, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Is the Roundhay Garden Scene public domain?

and what about other very old films? thx in advance --84.169.52.4 22:57, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

IANAL, but I'd certainly presume so. I don't think there's any way anything visual from 1888 could fail to be public domain now. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:01, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki 1.6

Does anybody know when an actual release will be availble for 1.6? Thanks, Deyyaz 02:03, 24 December 2005 (UTC)


vandalism

[1] this user is trying to advertise a resort in Costa Rica on relating pages. Yellowmellow45 15:36, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Please note that all of these edits have been reverted, and the anon blocked. xaosflux Talk/CVU 07:07, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Help with a template

The proximity of several award ceremonies, to take place in the next few months (especially the Golden Globe and the Academy Awards, which lead to high activity in certain articles), gave me an idea for creating something we seem to be missing. It would be interesting if we could come up with a template for quick insertion in the articles of movies, shows and individuals nominated and that have won the more prestigious awards. I've noticed that in some articles about people and movies that have won even the most prestigious awards, the information is not always present, or is "burried" in a "trivia" item, when it is well-known that being nominated and, even moreso, winning those awards becomes a relevant information for any movie or individual (actors, directors, writers, etc.). The reason why I'm posting here is because I really lack the skills to come up with a half-descent code for the board/infobox. Someone interested in a cooperation to come up with this? Regards, Redux 16:29, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Rather than a template, how about if there were simply a standard section called (perhaps) Awards. Some, but certainly by no means all, movie articles have such a section. Examples include Adaptation. and Chicago (2002 film). Alternatively, this could be added to Template:Infobox Film, but for some movies it would make the infobox very long. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Yes, but the template I'm proposing would be usable for articles on many, many subjects: movies, plays (theatre), tv shows, the sonographic industry (albums, singles) and individuals (actors, directors, writers, singers, etc.), because it would contain the basic information: "nominated for" (Academy Awards, Golden Globe, Emmy, Tony, Grammy, etc.) and whether or not the award was won, as well as the year of nomination/victory (not necessarily formatted exacly like that). It would, in my opinion, give the information a more fitting visibility, even if the template is inserted in the "Trivia", or "Awards" section of the article. Regards, Redux 16:45, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
If the article is pretty long, then create their own section, either called Awards or Honors. If the article is small, then maybe just make a small paragraph. Zach (Sound Off) 19:39, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


I'm frustrated

The action you have requested is limited to users with the "deletedhistory" permission assigned.

I see absolutely no reason why this was put in place. It was a read-only page as it were, and as such I can find no reason for the sudden existence of the block of seeing deleted page histories, as we were able to do before. I'm frustrated. It's like telling somebody who doesn't have a license to carry a gun that they can't even look at a gun. Search4LancerFile:Pennsylvania state flag.png 10:34, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Basically, we used to delete revisions when they contained massively defamatory material - allegations of child abuse, say - or material we did not wish to publish, like people's private information (You'd be amazed what people will add to articles) or copyright violations we were requested to remove.
This worked fine, since the deleted revisions weren't visible to everyone. However... then the vandals started being silly buggers, gaming the system, and adding the information we wished to delete to the actual edit summaries, which remained visible after deletion. So a dilemma - do we allow people to see these or not? The first step was to lock down access to the edit summaries, pending further work - there's two options, now, which is either to suppress edit summaries in the "deleted history" view, or allow the edit summaries to be themselves edited.
Work is, I believe, underway: "For the moment I'm shutting off this ability (restoring the pre-August behavior) until we get more fine-grained revision deletion / scrubbing in place" (Brion Vibber; see WP:VPT). Hope that explains things - it's not the best of solutions, but it's how it used to be and it solves an immediate problem. Shimgray | talk | 15:05, 27 December 2005 (UTC)


Link to main page on protected pages

Why is there a link "Return to Main Page" on pages that are protected, when you choose "view source". This link is not present when you choose edit on a non-protected page. →AzaToth 17:20, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

KAZT-TV to AZ-TV?

I'm at a halt over if to move KAZT-TV to AZ-TV (which is the alias for the station group in question). Recently, the Imperial Valley TV project discovered a new repeater in Yuma of KAZT-TV/KAZT-CA,K19CX. There are currently 4 stations (3 analog [2 LP], 1 digital) in one infobox at KAZT-TV (when K19CX was added, it got its own infobox, but an ANON consolidated them, leaving a mess. The Imperial Valley project discovered this station (the only US-licensed station that was not in the Imperial Valley template after an ANON expanded it greatly-all thanks to him), and I am wondering if what is currently available in that article is not enough to support three stations. It's no network, it's a nearly statewide (no repeater in Flagstaff or DMA 71, Tucson)station group that was estimated as 2 stations, but TVRadioWorld had K19CX for the Yuma market (Imperial Valley), and I added it immediately. The four different channels have the same programming and website. All three would become redirects to this, and KAZT as it is listed in Phoenix would become a double redirect (the Phoenix, Tucson, and Imperial Valley templates are going to be modified to go to (call letters)-TV, etc. to avoid it), K19CX would go to KAZT, which goes to KAZT-TV, which would feed into AZ-TV, creating a triple redirect, and KAZT would be relisted in the Phoenix template to mention KAZT-CA Phoenix (KAZT-TV is the main station, the latter two are repeaters, the fourth is the DT for the main station). -TrackerTV 01:15, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

More supporting evidence has been found. K43CO, a KAZT repeater in Casa Grande, is being added, and four stations in one infobox does not work. KAZT is being moved to AZ-TV due to the large amount of translators. More stations in Phoenix and Tucson to come immediately.


Masonic conspiracy?

what is going on here? [2] have i accidentally stumbled into a worldwide global conspiracy? a bunch of freemasons all trying to delete a so-called "secret word"? will they come after me for discovering the truth? if i go looking for the original author will i be dealing with forces i dont understand? i'm scared!! ;) Zzzzz 09:46, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

There's plenty reasoning being given on the articles AfD page and its talk page. If you think that any reasoning is invalid, then comment on it. I see no sign of a conspiracy. Paul Carpenter 13:49, 28 December 2005 (UTC)


Check of a proposed page

Hi, I have written a page at a subpage of my user space that I would like to be checked over, before moving into the main namespace. The reason I wish it to be checked is that it is about the company that I work for, and thus me writing it could be thought of as a bit iffy. If the consensus is that the article should remain unwritten then I shall of course get it deleted from my user space, however I have tried my damned hardest to be neutral, cite external sources etc. So comments please on User:MrWeeble/Filmnight.com. Cheers MrWeeble Talk Brit tv 18:44, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

The company seems notable enough and I don't see any signs of advertising, but it could be better written (it's nice to know what the company does in the first sentance et cetera). Paul Carpenter 13:53, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Serious Typo that No one has Noticed

There is a category page that has only one article in it, that no one, it seems has ever visited. It is called "Category:French civil utility aicraft," notice the missing R in 'aicraft' Rmpfu89 01:54, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

I apologize if this is the wrong place to put this, but I didn't know where else to put it or how to fix it!


Possible Stalker

Not sure where to put this, so I'll put it here. Talk:Carly_Kirkwood Check it out. User Tim Handscomb gives away his physical address and phone number and everything. Sounds like some serious cyberstalking/obsessive behaviour happening here. Your call people. Peter1968 10:13, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

I think so too: a stalker. But does he really think he can contact Carly Kirkwood through Wikipedia?!? Umh... --Thorri 12:09, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
Deleted the talk page, for now. El_C 12:40, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
Looking at his contributions, there's pretty much nothing else - three of his artworks (I assume) uploaded, a load of personal stuff on the userpage, two questions to another user. Nothing main namespace. We really should just delete all this junk when people are using the project as a host... Shimgray | talk | 03:18, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
I got distracted with other things and forgot about this. Quite right; blocked indefinitely. El_C 01:41, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Someone delete this image(!)

I went to see the gallery of newly uploaded files and this - erm - caught my eye. It's an image of rather pornographic nature, please delete it. I don't think it can be used in any articles... ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jc2.jpg

--Thorri 22:58, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

I went to see if there's more...and there is. Delete, please.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:D66_jordan_capri45.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Joy2.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Joy1.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:E90_jc20.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Joy.jpg

--Thorri 23:06, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Crap. On it, left a note at WP:AN for assistance.--Sean|Black 23:08, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
Looks like this has been dealt with. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:49, 31 December 2005 (UTC)


2-letter combinations vs. letter-number combinations

Can anyone answer this question:

2-letter combinations deserve their own special template rather than the regular dis-ambiguation template, but letter-number combinations deserve the regular dis-ambiguation template, according to current Wikipedia practice, What advantage is there of each one having its practical status?? This is inconsistent. Georgia guy 01:01, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


900,000th article

Here is something I think it is time for certain Wikipedians to do when we reach the day when Wikipedia reaches 900,000 articles:

For any Wikipedian whose native tongue is not English, check your native language Wikipedia for some articles that have no interwikis to the English Wikipedia. Any Wikipedias for which there are many of this kind?? If so, some Wikipedian who focuses on both Wikipedias (this one and the one of their native language) should try making the corresponding articles for this one. Anywhere this is already talked about at?? Georgia guy 16:28, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

People do this anyway. I sometimes look through the russian wp (even though I'm not russian) and look for unlinked articles. I'm sure people already do this.—Snargle 05:08, 3 January 2006 (UTC)


Category problem

Lately, I've been visiting categories of Wikipedia and see nothing but a description. No articles in the categories; no categories it is a sub-category of. What happened?? Georgia guy 19:31, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

It's a glitch in the software (same with the sudden increase of size in the text, from post above). It should be fixed any time now. This happens sometimes during upgrades or redesigns in the software. Usually, we just need to wait it out. Regards, Redux 19:39, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

No where else to take this

I don't know whether to be flattered or flabbergasted. An article I wrote is copied verbatum on this site [3]. I had checked the site when writing it a few months ago and there wasn't much there. They have replaced it with my article. That surprises me (but not nearly as much as a google search finding my sandbox). Can they use this without permission? Anyone have any input?--Dakota ~ ε 22:02, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

The article is not verbatim when I checked it against Jean Spangler just now, and lists Wikipedia as a source. Have they reverted their article as a result of you complaining to them?
Under the GFDL licence, which covers all text on Wikipedia, anyone is free to copy any or all of our material so long as they give proper credit. If their article was a verbatim copy, they should link directly to the article so their readers could see the original author(s). Since it isn't, what they're doing seems fine to me.-gadfium 02:34, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I did not and would not complain to them. They are doing a good job. One of the missing persons listed there is my first cousin. I just didn't know until you told me that they can use it, so that's fine. I guess it surprised me more that anything because there was little info there when I was checking for sources. Thank you for the info.--Dakota ~ ε 08:48, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


Someone??

Hi, this and this need sysop attention. --555pt 21:12, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Go to the Administrator Announcements page.

HELP!

Lately, when I visit pages in Wikipedia, I see something strange. The size of text increases, and a message on the top says something like "error on line 858". What does this mean?? Georgia guy 19:23, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

The servers seem to be experiencing some sort of problem. As of right now, it appears fixed.the1physicist 03:10, 4 January 2006 (UTC)


Are we going to shut down on January 6?

Im worried about the fund drive..what happens if we can't reach our goal of more than 750,000 dollars as stated by Jimmy Wales? Are we going to hang the gloves, in other words, shut down?

Antonio Aeropuerto Ezeiza Martin Talk

No. In fact, AFAIK on this fund drive there is not a set goal. --cesarb 14:34, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't know if it's official, but this page has a goal of 500,000. Given that $136,473 was donated in all of 2004, $94,650 was donated in the first quarter of 2005 and $243,930 was donated in the third quarter of 2005, I think that 500,000 was far too much to expect. $750,000 is the amount spent last year (I don't know where all of the money came from since the fundraisers didn't raise that much). I assume there will be more fundraisers later in the year, so we don't have to reach that level now. -- Kjkolb 16:01, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

I can't help but think there is a link between the answers.com deal and the lack of donations.the1physicist 03:11, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

What is it about the dates post 1 Jan that have caused the donation levels to soar to more than $33,000 in a single day? I mean, choosing the holiday period was a mistake anyway, but would we be gett ing $30,000 a day if we had avoided it?! -Splashtalk 03:18, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Nah, that's more likely the result of people seeing we're not going to make our goal who would otherwise not be donating.the1physicist 05:28, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
There appears to be a strong correlation between the increase in donations and the "personal appeal" from Jimmy Wales. The banner requesting donations went through a number of experimental variations before this with generally mediocre results. While the experiment is by no means rigorous, I'd say the current version has proved its effectiveness.-gadfium 07:39, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
Some comments I have seen around point to slashdot as being responsible for the jump in donations. --cesarb 16:19, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
Some techie wikipedians are obsessed with slashdot, but I'm sure most ordinary people have never heard of it.
  • No, we won't shut down. Wikipedia has more fundraisers during the year if we need them and I'm sure there's donations in a period when there's no official fund drive. - Mgm|(talk) 13:28, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
Yep, it's a safe bet there'll be more fundraisers. The prelim budget for 2006 first quarter alone is $528,500, and the just-finished fundraiser brought in only about $350,000. Something's got to give. This suggestion might get me killed, but maybe we should look at some advertising to keep this thing going. After all, that fundraiser appeal was pretty obvious advertising itself, a not-so-subtle banner at the top of every page. Casey Abell 19:51, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


Missing article

I created an article previously on heavy metal tribute band called Metal Studs (or Metal stüdz) of whom I am a fan, where has the article gone? How do I find out? -- Ejl

I see no article under either of those names, either existant or in deleted history. So I can't help you find out without knowing more. --Golbez 22:09, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I checked my contributions, it is not listed. I tried alternate spellings yesterday, and alternate cases based on the suggestion here (thanks MacGyvermagic). I'm new to wikipedia and enjoy the concept so would like to do more, but want to figure out what happened here first... if it was deleted why? And where did it go?Ejl
  • Thanks for providing me the reference, I reviewed it. It would have been nice to be notified of the deletion discussion before finding out it was deleted when I went to try and update the article! Also I would think the link to the article's deletion discussion could still show up under my "contributions" section when I log in. Again, thanks folks for your help.Ejl
Although IMO it's stunningly rude to list an article for deletion without notifying the creator, it seems to be fairly common practice. I suspect the thought is that anyone interested will have the page on their watchlist and will therefore notice (listing a page on AFD requires changing the page to link to the AFD discussion). I think a "page creation" log should be possible and has been suggested before. If/when this happens, I would think entries for deleted pages should be kept. I suspect it's not feasible to create a link to a deletion discussion. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:58, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


Question mark icon

Are there any significantly-visible templates on Wikipedia that I can safely add this icon to?  Denelson83  06:17, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Template:Verify perhaps? BL kiss the lizard 22:21, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
User:BlankVerse disagreed. When I put this question icon in that template, he immediately took it out.  Denelson83  22:45, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
well how about {{hoax}}? BL kiss the lizard 00:07, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
Added. I hope it'll be accepted there.  Denelson83  02:48, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
Bah! It got replaced with that cliché "stop hand." Any other suggestions?  Denelson83  16:46, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Foo. I like the question mark much better than the "stop hand" for the hoax template. Joyous | Talk 15:32, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
me too - given that no reason was given for changing it back, perhaps it could be re-added plus a comment on the talk page...? Grutness...wha? 23:16, 7 January 2006 (UTC)


Encyclonews

I don't think of myself as a "deletionist", as they call it, but I just found this article (it was linked in the Main Page, so it wasn't all that secret), and it got me thinking. While that's definitely news, I sincerely doubt that this is a worthy encyclopedic entry. That stuff should be over at Wikinews, not here — except maybe as a section of the real encyclopedic articles: those about New York City, or the New York Subway system. And that's not an isolated case, we've been seeing a widespread of entries on what's really news, not encyclopedic material.
And before anyone brings it up, I'll say that a differentiation is needed here: one thing is, for instance, the devastation caused by the Tsunamis that hit Asia almost an year ago: over 300 thousand dead; an earthquake so strong that actually affected the shape of the Earth. That's obviously enclycopedic, but subway strikes, even if they are massive and leave thousands on foot in one of the largest cities in the world, not so much. And the risk of establishing a precedent is particularly dangerous: when people start writing articles about subway strikes and power outages in all cities, we will not be able to tell them that that's not encyclopedic when we already have dozens of articles on subways strikes and power outages.
That got me thinking. Redux 01:23, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikinews is for news articles. That is an encyclopedia article. What do you consider the threshhold? If they have such a major and possibly lasting effect, what's wrong with an encyclopedia article? And at what point did the tsunami cease being news and became encyclopedic? At the 100th death? 10,000th? --Golbez 01:38, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
I think we should be careful about creating policy based on a fear of the "slippery slope". Wikipedia isn't a bureaucracy, and while we do tend to follow precedent, if a precedent is contrary to common sense, then we're not bound by it. If you do see discussions where the users forget this golden rule of common sense, then jump right in and remind them; I've seen instances where people get caught up in procedure and precedence and then someone drops by with a "use common sense" comment and everything works out. This is also useful for negating the need for hard rules about every little thing. --Qirex 08:40, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
My thoughts are that let it remain, if, a year or whatever down the line it seems to not be relevent it can be merged into the relevent parent article possibly with a link to wikiNews for the archived news article. MrWeeble Talk Brit tv 12:01, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

In order: Golbez, I believe you took my example to the letter. In fact, perhaps the tsunami tragedy wasn't that good an example, since in that case it was clear from the start that it was a large-scale event (undoubtedly encyclopedical). The point would be then: we can never be completely certain that a seemingly ordinary event might turn into something really encyclopedic. Therefore common sense, to connect with Qirex's comment, would dictate that we do not start articles on subway strikes until we can have some sort of notion that it is indeed something worthy of an entry — well, "do not start" would not be the appropriate term, since there would always be someone to start it, regardless of any common notion, but it should be an easy VfD, I think. That's because logic shows that in 99% of the cases, those seemingly ordinary events will not turn into anything more than what they are. This subway strike in NYC, for instance, it doesn't look like it's going to have a "lasting impact" of any sort. Then again, who knows the future? But that only means that the article shouldn't be there by now. It's just too soon. It should be a section in one of those titles I mentioned in my previous comment, which we could easily break into a separate article if the situation would justify it. That would be the right thing to do, but we are doing it backwards as it is.
The threshhold comes from common sense. And the precedent I was talking about was not so much on the policies and rules side, but rather on that of logical argumentation. We'll have a hell of a time keeping certain stuff from being included if we will have similar stuff on simply because they happened in a more conspicuous place. That's not how Wikipedia works. I cannot vote to delete an article on, say, a two-day strike in Moscow, Cape Town or Barranquilla if I support the existence of a similar article on a two-day strike in NYC. It's about logic: sure there's a lot more people in NYC, and sure the cost of such a strike is much higher there, but it's still just a public transportation strike (where I'm from, there used to be one like that a month in the early 90s). It's news, no doubt. But not necessarily encyclopedia material (only time and perspective will determine that, and we are jumping the gun here — and on a personal note, about the NYC strike, I really, really doubt that this will turn into something more than yesterday's news when it's over). Redux 15:40, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I think this article is really good, and it is labeled by a template as a current event. The big question is what to do with these things when they become stinky fishwrap. --Zeizmic 18:10, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
What we could do is just let the news event run it's course, but after a while, if the article is going no where, we could try to merge it into another article. Example, if there is an article about a blackout in Los Angeles or somewhere in California, after the news event has faded, we should move it into a general article about the California eletricity crisis. Zach (Sound Off) 19:36, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Well, the article may be good, but the subject might still not be suitable for an encyclopedic entry (the question was never the quality of the article per se). What Zach suggests is good, but still, it would be far better, I believe, if we could establish the habit of doing it the other way around: "covering" news in the main article first. The old practical example of the NYC strike article (this is for the sake of example, it's not about this particular article): the information on the strike should be added as a section of our article on the NYC Transit Authority (keeping to the essential only). And later, when and if it became important, or distinctive enough to merit its own entry, we would simply dismember the information from the main article and create a new one. It would not be easy to do that, I suppose, since people are rather quick to create those entries that are really about pieces of news. It's not that they are unimportant, but they are news, and that's what we have Wikinews for. They may be mentioned here, but not with a specific entry...or at least that's how I see it. Redux 20:09, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

How about after a suitable time period, the article is moved over to the Wikinews archives and the relevant main article here can cite Wikinews? Samw 13:31, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

I think this is a perfect example of an encyclopedic entry of a recent event. Note the wikinews is about news! and wikipedia about... well, everything. In ten years, of someone wants to know about this strike, this is the place where all the information is. If he wants to know the news of the current day, tought, he goes to wikinews.

Also, i think the enciclopedic value is very high! It happened, and we have an entry for it, and a very good one, with lots of information (well, I didn't really read it, but oh well...). Non-encyclopedic refers to teenagers making entries about themselves and their garage bands. Non-encyclopedic is about sites (that generally sells viagra or loose-wight stuff) with 20-30 visitors trying to make an article on wikipedia about themselves. For heaven sakes, an strike on the subways of new york is VERY encyclopedic!!! (like that old saying: "wikipedia is not made of paper")algumacoisaqq 03:04, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

If this event is truly isolated and unimportant in the grand scheme of things, I believe someone will AFD the article a few years from now and it'll get deleted. Don't worry about preempting these things - just let them follow their natural life cycle. Right now people care about this enough that it is notable; whether it's notable in the long term is something to worry about in the long term. Deco 02:27, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Deco makes a good point. I too grow more and more convinced of the inevitability of certain things on Wikipedia. We just have to learn to work around them. About Alguma's comment though, I must disagree. I believe you (and a lot of people) might be confusing conspicuity with encyclopedic worth. An example: if someone were to create an article like "June 2005 bus strike in San Felix" — where "San Felix" would be a small town who-knows-where — I have no doubts, and I don't believe anyone would too seriously, that this article would be VfD and deleted as "not notable". But when a bus strike happens in NYC (or any other large, conspicuous city), then it is encyclopedic automatically? The word in bold is key here: it might turn out to be encyclopedic after all, but that only time will tell (and this one in NYC, it really doesn't look like it). You see, a bus strike in NYC may be very visible, affect a lot more people, cost a lot more money than one in "San Felix", but, at least at first, it is just a bus strike, it's today's news, and tomorrow it will be yesterday's news. What I've been saying is that we are jumping the gun on topics such as these, and a lot of stuff that really aren't encyclopedic, but rather just conspicous news, are getting included. News sites also function as an archive of events: if you visit any newspaper's website, they'll have an archive of old news, where one can research about the news of the past and learn about what happened. That's the same with Wikinews. If someone wanted to know about a train strike in a city that happened a few years back, they should be researching a news archive, not an encyclopedia. Redux 16:31, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

While I would have trouble trying to get people to vote with me, I think that "June 2005 bus strike in San Felix" would be a perfectly valid article. After all, there "was" a bus strike in June 2005 at San Felix - it's a historical fact. If there are 3 or 4 lines about it, then you can place at San Felix or San Felix bus system, but if it's a 3 page article, you place it in it's own article. I believe news is about what's happening now. The difference between news and enciclopedia in my point of view is not the subject or facts they are dealing with, but the way you do that, the way you write about it. Mainly, enciclopedic entries aim for atemporal, and news for temporal. Furthermore, the San Felix topic would hold interest for just a few people, but that doesen't make it unciclopedic - if someone ever had interest in the topic, they would find it in wikipedia. And I think this is one of the main reasons wikipedia is so great - it has a lot of information you can't find anywhere alse.

As you can see, this is pretty much my opinion on the wikipedia sistem itself, and I believe lot's of people wouldn't agree with me. As I said, I just think that the AfD is about getting rid of teenagers doing articles about themselves and their garage bands, but it feels like people unconciently have a desire to delete stuff (of course, then there is this lot of garbage out there - sometimes stuff just need to be deleted). One more thing: what's conspicuity?? Sorry, I'm not an native speaker. algumacoisaqq 20:30, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

I see your point, but as you said it yourself, you'd have a hard time getting consensus around your opinion. Sometimes, the line between what's news and what's encyclopedic can be a fine one. In the case of a public transport strike that doesn't develop into anything bigger than just a temporary hault in operations, I do feel that this is news and it should be at Wikinews, which also functions as a news archive, so that people can research about the news of the past (to use your terms, it didn't develop into something atemporal, but rather it's just a temporal event, something that had some relevance while it was happening, but that leaves no marks that will distinguish it from other strikes of the past or the future). The role of Wikipedia in this would be a short description of the event in a related article (maybe one about the NYC transit authority) with a link to Wikinews. The fact that the article turned out to be extensive has not been an obstacle to the deletion of material finally deemed unsuited for Wikipedia (as in the deletion of the rather long article on "Roger Federer's playing style").
"Conspicuity" is the fact of being conspicuous, in the case at hand, I was referring to something that is visible for the mere fact that it happened in a place that is itself visible, or that attracts media and public attention. A great example: I've actually seen news about how it's been raining for three days straight in NYC (a coincidence, I suppose). In what topsy turvy world is a three-day-straight rain in a city news?? If that had been happening in..well..San Felix, no one would hear about it. The same with an ordinary train strike in NYC — except that the strike is actually news, although, as I see it, not encyclopedia material. Regards, Redux 11:48, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, it looks like this my positioning comes from my undertanding of the concept of encyclopedical. And my concept of that is pretty confuse, I admit, because I think everything, theoricaly, is encyclopedic. In pages for deletion, I generally vote only for vanity pages (and their respective garage bands) and spam from internet sites. When I come to think about it, it's not about the content itself, but it's because these entries are horribly biased and lack information a lot, and the authors wouldn't really want an impartial article about themselves. Of course, we can keep a pratical rule to "delete if no one else cares about it", to make things easier.

I'll try to focus on why the particular event was encyclopedic, however: First thing is to say there was a strike in the subways of New York (well, let's make it San Felix for scaling it to "not very relevant"). It's a information we can place in the San Felix article or whatever. Let's say someone wants to know more information about it. We can link them to the strike article, or to the news article. The thing is that, in the news article, we will be telling how things happened that day, as facts happens. The strike starts, and we have a news item saying it started. The strike ends, we have a news item saying it ended. People can dig information from that too. But in the wikipedia article, we have the article giving (or better: theoricaly the article should give) some background on the subways conditions, the history of the city, then saying how it started, how it ended, there can be concequences on the long run and etc.

Well, right now I explained from a point ov view of text structure, but not "enciclopedic material", so I'll try to do that now: I think that a single historical fact should always be enciclopedic. You can delete one or two if the only people that has any knowlegde about it is the one making the article, and the person is not telling it's sources, but if it's a fact of some repercusion, then we can place it. The strike on the subway of... San Felix can tell a lot about how that society works and things like that. The concept of strike might be clear to us, but for someone living in the Middle-East it might not be so clear. Shure he can look at the strike article, but there we will be telling him what a strike is, and in the strike of San Felix article he can get his conclusion based on what he saw, not what he was told. Something like: "Strikes are made to get better working conditions and etc..." and "In San Felix strike, they demmanded that the working shifts should be reduced from 8 to 6 hours, but that demmand wasn't attended".

And the last problem is... I kept saying San Felix, but it was pretty much about New York. Would an article about San Felix strike be accepted around here? I guess people would just say it was just a small happening in a small town. What if it was the San Felix's high school's anual celebration of something? It's a fact afterall. In this case, I could vote for deletion, if I saw someone from that school just tought the party was soo cool he came to wikipedia and posted an article about it. Actually, i would like to vote for deletion, because I think it's a waste of server space, but I would have to vote for keep it. This is because someone might come to wikipedia (well, not really, but could happen) searching for that annual party or searching for the school, and for that person the information would be usefull. Even if there is one person editing the article, and twelve persons reading it, we can keep it (Our strenght here lies in the fact that no one really wants to make such small articles, except when it's about themselves, and in these cases, we can just tell them to find a blog). (and of course, for strike in San Felix - Strong Keep) algumacoisaqq 12:58, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

It's clear that you have a much "broader" concept of what is encyclopedic than I do. As I had said, writing a long, or well-written article about a subject [that ends up being] deemed unencyclopedic would not save it from deletion. Personally, I cannot see how an ordinary event (in the case that originated this thread, a train strike in NYC), can be encyclopedic and be deserving of a separate article on Wikipedia (we can, after all, write a very good section, that could even be a long one, depending on the situation, in the general article about the NYC transit authority). For instance, I do believe that the only reason why this particular article on the strike in NYC has not been VfD is because, as I said, conspicuity got confused with encyclopedic worth. But ordinarily, there have been many cases of people writing articles (some of them rather well-written and comprising) about trivial subjects that got deleted following a VfD.
I do understand what you said, but under those guidelines, we'd become an "almanac about everything", and that's not exactly what the project is about — some past attempts at broadening this scope originated some of our sister projects, such as Wikitionary, Wikiquote and, of course, Wikinews.
Of course people (or some people) might want to read about it, but it doesn't mean that the subject should be included in an encyclopedia, which is what Wikipedia is. On the other side, the fact that someone is writing an article about something that no one else on Wikipedia knows about is no indication, per se, that the subject may not be encyclopedic. Regards, Redux 18:57, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, maybe I got carried away with my theories and forgot about practice. The example of the high school was more to test my believes then to explain something - and I didn't really liked the results, as that entry shouldn't be allowed, but yet I considered a strike should. Beyond that point, I can't really tell why it feels to me that the article merges perfectly with rest of the wikipedia. It's just that, the way the text is build up, it feels more like a wikipedia text then a wikinews text, and I think we would loose quality if it was on wikinews. Anyway, I guess this is why we have votations for... I can't really argue beyond this, but yet the idea of taking that article away looks like crazyness for me. One last defence I have is the "Wiki is not made of paper", but I guess we are talking here about categories, and not wikipedia maintance. Oh, one thing that cought my eye upon second reading is that you called it an ordinary event. I don't really considered it ordinary, but I think this will fall back at my "Everything in encyclopedical/that concept isn't clarified" argument again. algumacoisaqq 20:05, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Ah, but then we need to go back to one of my early comments on this thread. I was saying that it's not that every incident (such as a public transportation strike or a street fight) are automatically unencyclopedic, but nor are they automatically enclyclopedic. I was advocating that we are jumping the gun in the creation of articles about themes that we just can't know of whether or not they will become something more than a strike, or a fight. That takes perspective, and that can only come with time. Naturally, once the article is up there, a lot of people will want to defend it (and not just the people who crated it and have worked in it). Sometimes an event doesn't really reveals itself to be anything out of the ordinary until the very last moment, or maybe even after it is over per se. In the particular case of the NYC strike, I still can't quite see what is the "special factor" that would make it anything more than what it was: a temporary strike in NYC that complictated traffic a few days before Christmas, while the employees protested for better salaries and the government accused them of being irresponsible. Even if this was the largest strike ever, I would not award it anything more than a section of our principal article on the NYC transit authority. We might have to agree to disagree on this one. Regards, Redux 00:29, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

I understand what you are saying, but my position is that a single event that complicates traffic a few days before Christmas, specially when well written, should have room over here. There is another thing that got my attention, and I think it might help to explain our disagreement. I reached that Illnesses of Ariel Sharon article tought your talk page, and When I saw it, merge tag and all, I went in the talk page and said It shouldn't be merged. Funny thing is, later I discovered that it was you who placed the tag! My policy is to separate things as specifical as possible, I lake to have article pages short. Personaly, I think any single article should be no longer than three pages. More then that, and you can place the text in more specific articles. Like the Brazil article: it would be to big for one page, so it is split into Geography of Brazil, History of Brazil, etc. This is why, in the Ariel Sharon article, if the health condition of Ariel Sharon part of the article is too big, then we split it into a new article. This way, if someone wants to know about Ariel Sharon, he can go to the main articles. If he likes the political part, he can get a deeper analysis in politics of Ariel Sharon, if he wants to know more about his health conditions, he goes to health of Ariel Sharon. Aparently, the way is see things is diferent, saying the article of his Illness is to specific to stand alone. One could argue also that the pages aren really thig big to be separated - but for me, they actually are.

Of course, if we bring this to the New york strike: you have the New York article. there you have an article about the subway system. in that article, you get an article to the worker's union (well, not really, I haven't been there). There, you have an article on the strike. I believe all information we can get there is valid information, orginized where it fits best. Couldn't we have a wikinews article there instead of the article on the strike? I supose we actually could - I see your point - but I see no reason why the strike article wouldn't be legitimate. We could even move that entire article over there. But right now, it is not the wikipedia or the wikinews style to work like that. (Well, please don't pay much attention to this paragraph, it pretty much the same thing I'm saying - my point is a lot more clear in the previous paragraph). algumacoisaqq 14:26, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

I believe you might be mixing/confusing some things that are not exactly the same: first, the situation in articles such as the one about the NYC train strike is not quite the same as the one on the Illnesses of Ariel Sharon. In the first one, I have been advocating that that material should not be on Wikipedia, thus the procedure would be deletion (via VfD). In that article about Sharon, however, I do believe the material should be at Wikipedia, but not in a separate article, so the procedure would be to merge the content into the main Ariel Sharon article — which, incidentally, is the consensus that is surfacing in the discussion: people appear to want to keep them apart only for the time being, while the situation is developing, in order to minimize the impact on the main article on Sharon, but once that's done, merge them (which is why I've suggested moving the separate entry to a subpage position, as opposed to it being in the main article namespace).
And on the front of dismembering articles, there's just no comparison between a series of articles about a country and our coverage of an individual. Normally, the data about a single person will be kept in a single article, with perhaps very few exceptions. The level of complexity hardly ever justifies such a breakup (there might be lists pertaining to a person's work, or trivia, but not separate articles on parts or sections of a person's life or work — it's been attempted, but the resulting articles have usually been either deleted or merged with the main article on the subject).
We do have a guideline about preferably breaking up articles when they reach a certain length, since some browsers may have difficulties to edit on lenghty articles, but when it comes to biographic articles on people (obviously :S), our tendency is to keep the information together. In the case of Ariel Sharon, for instance, there doesn't seem to be a relevant number of people who would support so many articles about him (Life, Politics, Illness, etc.). Regards, Redux 15:28, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, problem is things look real nice inside my read, but not so in real world. Now that you mentioned it, it's true the Ariel Sharon article will never actually get that big, afterall. The reason I brought that up was to show how my ideas of page organization work, and on a broader spectre, how my ideas of information organization works. Problem is, I believe that not to much people would agree on my ideas of articles no longer than 3 pages, so there is really no point for trying to carry that on in the articles (afterall, we have a book of style). Regarding your first sentence, tought, about the strike material shouldn't be over here, but the Ariel Sharon should, there I disagree. If feels wrong to remove information. Of course, if it's somewhere, like in wikinews... anyway, we had this discussion allready. algumacoisaqq 03:11, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

When data is removed from Wikipedia to one of our sister projects (in this particular case, Wikinews), it's not really lost, or deleted information. Plus, the Wikipedia user should not be deprived of it, since we are supposed to link the Wikipedia main article (say, the one about the NYC transit authority) to the article where the information was moved to on the sister project (which is done with simple templates, usually). Sometimes people forget to link those articles, and that's...well... that's bad. Redux 03:39, 7 January 2006 (UTC)


Wikipedia:WikiProject New York Theatre

This is a call for help for a largely significant wikiproject that is being neglected. The wikiprojects for New York Theatre, Broadway Theatre, and Off-Broadway Theatre could use some tender loving care from a group of devoted individuals. If you are interested in the subject, please check out the to-do list and do as little or as much as you can find time to do. Thank you very much.

Clarkefreak ∞ 01:26, 10 January 2006 (UTC)


Check your college or university's entry please

Higher education institution articles are copied from the subject's own website more than any other type of article. 1/3 (low estimate) are partially or all copied. Can everyone check their school or alma mater's page?

Lotsofissues 18:59, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

When do the fundraiser end???

I've been using Wikipedia for close to two years, and have donated twice, in this fundraiser I gave EUR 200. And the fundraiser was supposed to go on to January 6th - but it seems it still runs, and so we probably did not give enough as Wales appeal is still at the top of all pages. Strange. Maybe I should give more - or maybe not give anymore at all, as it seems the guy up front keep changing the target... For sure it gives me a bad feeling - however much the money is needed, and I am sure we need a lot, it pays to keep to what has been said and told. Ulflarsen 12:55, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Looks like the begging banner is here to stay. I can understand why. The proposed budget for first quarter 2006 alone is over a half-million dollars. I chipped in $100 to the fundraiser (anonymously, though I guess it's not anonymous any more) but the financial needs are too great. We might as well start selling ads. That begging banner at the top of every page is already the most annoying ad possible. Casey Abell 17:05, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
On http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q4, it says "The primary aim is to raise at least US$500,000 to meet remaining income requirements in the fourth quarter 2005 budget and the first quarter 2006 budget." and here's the Q1 2006 proposed budget of $538,500. And they only got $321,350.02 from the Q4 fundraising drive, including $125 from me. Surely donations are welcome anytime, and sure I'll give more (fundraising-drive or not). Hardware is the biggest expense for them, though it appears they need to add more staff, which surely isn't cheap either. —Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 17:57, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

See related discussion/s at Talk:Main Page#Arbcom elections link please at [4] Thanks. IZAK 21:40, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Which directs users to come here - hours of wikitime spent going around in circles! When will the madness end?! - BanyanTree 21:51, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
Banyan: Firstly, what "madness" are you talking about? This entire discission is LESS than twenty fours old and very few people have been involved in it and hardly qualifies as "madness" I would say. Secondly, this is just a link to another page for those who may want to see a few more points in this so-far very limited discussion. Thirdly, I think people are smart enough, and Wikipedia's technology is quick enough, to let people see the so-far two places where any discussion about this took place. Finally, you aren't trying to squelch free discussion in any way are you? IZAK 13:17, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Should these articles be deleted?

While going through the cleanup backlog, I came across this article. I have no idea where it was dumped from, but if there's a any article is too obscure for wikipedia, it's a nonexistant railroad that was proposed over a hundred years ago. Also, I couldnt find any info online.

Category:Florida never-built railroads contains a bunch more of these, all virtually untouched since they were dumped over a year ago.—Snargle 03:08, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

user:SPUI is an active editor. Perhaps you should ask him where they came from. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:36, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
Nothing wrong with a never-built railroad if it was defined by state law. The formatting is shit, as they were some of my first articles. --SPUI (talk - don't use sorted stub templates!) 22:56, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Rwandan Genocide

If any one reads this, please respond by posting a few quick things on it asap. I'm doing a project on it.--205.202.240.104 16:18, 11 January 2006 (UTC)calvinsupergenius 15:17,11 January 2006 (UTC)

You would get better results by posting your question at the Reference Desk -- WP:RD. See also Rwandan genocide. User:Zoe|(talk) 19:34, 11 January 2006 (UTC)


Why is Wikipedia interface so unstable?

The home page keeps on being changed. Twice in the last hour it has been all text, no images, no news. At one point is said there were 15,000 articles and that 100,000 are hoped for. The Special characters box keeps changing. Yesterday it was pink. Today, most of the characters are gone and it is much less useful. Sometimes links are not underlined, despite the fact that I've selected that option. Some minutes later, underlines will be restored. What gives? Hu 15:10, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

The whole interface is editable; the "Special characters" box, for instance, is at Mediawiki:Edittools, and is being currently changed to a new style (see Mediawiki talk:Edittools for the discussion). As for the underlining problem, it is usually caused by a timeout when loading one of the stylesheets; a forced reload (see Wikipedia:Bypass your cache for instructions) usually clears the problem. --cesarb 16:01, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
There was a caching bug, it's been fixed. --Brion 16:54, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the updates. Hu 17:53, 14 January 2006 (UTC)


Wikipedia:Starter toolset

A page by the above name has been created to assist newbies. It is an eclectic index into Wikipedia. Here's hoping it will arouse some interest in improving upon it. —>normxxxtalk—> email 07:28, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Ethnic groups

Over the last two years, there has been a remarkable amount of work in the area of WikiProject Ethnic groups, and it's great to see how many people (most of them not officially project members) have used the project's suggestions for structuring articles and have made use of {{Infobox ethnic group}}.

During this time, a lot of information accumulated on the project's talk page. This last week or so, I've integrated a lot of that information into the project page and archived a great deal of talk page material; that work is still in progress. The project page, especially in the list of pages covered by the project, now identifies an enormous number of articles that need work.

If anyone is looking around for an area to work on, this is an important one. A lot has been done but a lot more remains to be done. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:11, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

All your base belong to us

I remember seeing a derivative work with Jimbo Wales substituted in with lines like "in the year 2345"..."edit war was beginning"..."what happen"..."somebody set us up the POV". Can someone post the link to the animation for me?--God of War 05:25, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Image:Wp_ayb.gif.--Sean|Black 05:43, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

disambiguation

would anybody like to disscus this topic? (the headline topic) if so contact me.[[--Teal6 01:26, 14 January 2006 (UTC)]]

Lots of people are already discussing it at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation, among other places. Wahoofive 06:46, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

ok thank you very much [[--Teal6 14:13, 14 January 2006 (UTC)]]

School songs lyrics

are they copyrighted?If they aren't can I post them on the school article? TDXianG!On Wikibreak! 08:50, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

They probably are; contact the school for information and ask for permission. --Brion 18:14, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
Their status probably varies; some might date back far enough (pre-1923) so the copyright is expired if they were ever copyrighted; others (1923-1977) would be copyrighted if the proper formalities/renewals were followed, which they may or may not have been in a particular case; newer ones will be covered by copyright (but whether they're owned by the school itself or an individual composer depends on what terms under which the songs were composed and published). There might also be trademark protection on a school tune if it's associated in the public's mind with the particular school and used to identify it. *Dan T.* 19:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
If they aren't copyrighted, they should go to Wikisource, unless you plan on writing an interpretation of the lyrics' meaning. User:Zoe|(talk) 21:10, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
I agree with brion and zoe.[[--Teal6 01:29, 14 January 2006 (UTC)]]

Donator recognition

Is there any way's to brag that you'r a donator for the foundraisers?

Shouldn't there be some kind of token recognition? Like, a category, or button for our userpage or something?

Donated last week, and without a login at wikimedia(?) it seems my money were just chucked out there, noone knowing who it was from or linking it back to Wikipedia commitment, and not wikimedia?

It just seemed a bit odd. Replies are welcome on my usertalk, or here.

-Snorre/Antwelm 21:26, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

It would be cool if for bigger donations (like $50, $100, $200, $500) we could give people thank you gifts like mugs and tee shirts the same way WNYC does. It would decrease the margin, but if it makes people feel all fuzzy and warm inside from donating (which you seem to imply it doesn't) there will be more donations (and in bigger amounts). — Ambush Commander(Talk) 22:36, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
My point exactly. Don't know about the bloody mugs though, but something. Wherever else I'v donated theres always been something. A thank-you letter, an addition in your profile (ie on forums) or something. At least _something_. A donation star like the barnstar? A little icon on your userpage? Anything really. -Snorre/Antwelm 04:54, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
What if anyone who gives a certain relatively small amount (say $25 US) gets one "priority" requested article. These would go on Wikipedia:Requested articles/Donors' articles and would be worked on by editors who feel a particular desire to repay contributors.--Pharos 08:43, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
By the way, since no one has said it, thanks for donating! --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 09:39, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Linking to a disambiguation page from a disambiguated article

Is it necessary to link to a disambiguation page when the page title has a disambiguation, like pavement (material) does. People are going to get to that page through the disambiguation page or from a link that should be sending them to the correct page since it has disambiguation in the title. Therefore, it seems unnecessary. If it is necessary, can the link just be provided without a lengthy explanation like the pavement article? -- Kjkolb 03:02, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

It is not only unnecessary, but I believe the policy explicitly recommends against it. I remove such links on sight. Such a link might arise by accident if a primary topic disambiguation is converted into an ordinary disambiguation page. Deco 06:29, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Update: I fixed it. The relevant discussion was briefened and moved to Pavement. Deco 06:38, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. -- Kjkolb 13:02, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Deco, I agree that these links on already disambiguated articles are unnecessary, however I can't find anything in policy at WP:DAB nor WP:MOSDAB, do you know of anywhere else I should be looking? Or have I missed it somewhere? If it isn't yet in policy, do you know what the procedure is to add it? --Qirex 11:10, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Most editors at WP:D consider that the "no risk of confusion" test forbids such links. —Wahoofive (talk) 06:51, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

DeMolay emblem

Would anyone like to express an opinion on how this interacts with Template:logo? --SarekOfVulcan 22:36, 13 January 2006 (UTC)


Disgraceful coverage (but not us)

Some may not know (you'll soon understand why), but the supreme commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Haiti, a Brazilian general, was found dead in his hotel room, with a gunshot to the head. Yesterday, when the event was only a few hours old, I turned to two of the most reputable news channels in the world to get a feeling of the international response to this unbelievable event: CNN and BBC. Not a word about it!! CNN had a three-word message on that irritating newsbar they've got running on the bottom of the screen; BBC completely ignored the event. Disgraceful! And just now, I visited CNN's website, and although there was a link to the story there, it wasn't even included with the top stories, unlike singer Pink's wedding. Pathetic!
Well, well. Look who screwed up royal this time. So we are unreliable; we are inaccurate. Our critics will have to eat crow now, and with lots of mayo. As it turns out, those who seek information on the event are better off looking it up here with us (on Wikipedia and Wikinews). Take that big media conglomerates!! Regards, Redux 12:10, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Incidentally, can you imagine what would happen if either a US or a British general had been killed in Iraq?? We'd never hear the end of it, that's what. Redux 12:17, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Well, we can translate the news at brasileiro morre no Haiti. I was trying to do that, but suddently I realised I hate to do translations, plus I don't know how the wikinews system works (oh, by the way, I left our discussion on top opened, but I don't think we will agree on that someday). Anyway, I couldn't even figure out a tittle for it. algumacoisaqq 01:01, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
Oh, I placed something in Brazilian general dies in Haiti. Don't know if this will ever get into a full article, but I tought better try. algumacoisaqq 01:23, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
The article is pretty much abandoned right now. I've placed a tag requesting expansion, but I highly doubt that it's going to make any difference. Something that would be fantastic for the article's expansion, and which I've not been able to find thus far (granted I've not spent too much time looking), is a decent biography, so that we can add details about his life (mainly in the Military, naturally). The news are basically focusing on his death and the circumstances surrounding it, which is pretty important, no doubt, but it doesn't make for a up-to-specs article on its own.
Blast those news channels that didn't even think it important to do a decent coverage of this. Regards, Redux 22:08, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I saw that, but I just find it a lot harder to contribute to wikinews than to wikipedia, and even more when in english! The article about him, however, isn't very good at the pt.wikipedia either. algumacoisaqq 22:29, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Giving permission to post an image but only here

One of my games has a page on Wikipedia, Chron X. I did not start the page. =)

The Chron X logo was once on the page, and now it is gone. I own the rights to the IP and I'd be willing to let Wikipedia carry the image without extending other rights. Is that possible?

I can't tell you if it is, but you might want to check the Fair Use (Wikipedia:Fair use) policy. Since there are several logos over here that the owner didn't told us we could use, but we use based on fair use, so I think wil won't have a problem, just especify in the image that it is copyrighted. algumacoisaqq 02:10, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

(after edit conflict) The image is still on Wikipedia - Image:Cxnewlogo.jpg, licensed as a fair use logo. Its use on the Chron X article is perfectly valid as I understand fair use - especially given your comment above - so I presume that the anon who removed it with the comment "Image removed, copyrighted." doens't understand fair use. I'll put it back on the article.
Regarding your permission - we do have a template {{Withpermission}} that can be added to the image description page that I think sums up your desires. Thryduulf 02:17, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Note that withpermission images are now speedies. There needs to be some other fair-use claim or licensing on the page to save the image. -Splashtalk 02:06, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
Because Wikipedia's entire purpose in existence is to be reproducible, terms that restrict materials from being reused are completely unacceptable. Such images will be removed. --Brion 03:12, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
But what about fair use? — Ambush Commander(Talk) 03:45, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
If fair use doesn't apply to third parties who reuse our content (as it said in the template), it's no good. --Brion 04:17, 12 January 2006 (UTC)


Improvement drive

Asteroid deflection strategies is currently nominated on WP:IDRIVE. Support the article with your vote if you would like to see it improved on the article improvement drive!--Fenice 18:25, 15 January 2006 (UTC)


Blocking over fair-use image disputes

The community's input would be appreciated at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Blocking_over_fair-use_image_disputes. Cheers, SlimVirgin (talk) 21:38, 17 January 2006 (UTC)


Template:Infobox Film

Perhaps adding in the age certificate given to the film? We have the guidance rating for games. KILO-LIMA 20:29, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

that would be good if every country used the same rating system and every country rated all films identically. They don't, so it's not really practical. A film might be R18 in the US and R16 in the UK, or GA in Australia but PG-R in the US. It would be very messy to do. Grutness...wha? 23:19, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Graffiti

Here's another weird guy, User:194.223.81.75. Every edit he makes seems to be nonsense. He's been warned on his talk page, but he's not slowing down. What can be done? John Reid 11:37, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Revert his edits, and add a test template per WP:VAND. If it is ongoing, list him on WP:VIP. You also might want to take these questions to Wikipedia:Clueless newbies, or you can ask me on my talk page. KillerChihuahua?!? 13:14, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Bogus Page?

I'm new here, and I'm not sure what to do about Talk:Toby du toit. I came across this while looking through Recent Changes. There doesn't even seem to be a real page attached to it. I'm pretty sure this is some sort of bogus page. If I just remove the comment, the page will still be there, right? Need advice. John Reid 11:18, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

The page has been deleted. If you see a page like that again, add it to Speedy Delete. KillerChihuahua?!? 13:11, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Suggestions

Get rid of this freaking-stupid-crude-dumb phrase "Sorry, there were no exact matches to your query" IT'S TOOOO CCCCCCCCOOOORRRRRNNNNNNYYYYYY!!!

Spencer Karter

Do you have a suggestion for a replacement? -- Rick Block (talk) 23:54, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

0 results found.

I've changed it to "No results found.", with a link to the help page. Better? -- Rick Block (talk) 01:44, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Question about Image etiquette

  • I originally posted this in cheetah talk, but this is probably a better place for it... sorry if i am incorrect about this assumption. Sorry if there is a place for etiquette questions that i missed, but i did not see one*

I feel that the second photo (cheetah in Kenya) in the entry on cheetahs is of somewhat low quality(both in terms of resolution and the fact that it is slightly Out of Focus). I was wondering if it would be inappropriate to replace it with either of these photos, and if not, which one would work better in the article. Both photos were taken by myself and licensed under CC-Attribution ShareAlike. I'm somewhat new to this and want to make sure I'm not committing a grave sin by replacing another's photo with my own.


Schuyler s. 02:06, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

any help here?
Asking on the talk page is the right approach. Since you got no response, feel free to update the image (I prefer your second image, if you're still looking for a choice). You're not replacing the image file (only changing the reference), so it would be very easy to change back to the other image later (so don't worry). Perhaps the most relevant guideline is Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:54, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Change to GFDL?

I have been uploading my images as public domain. I would like to change them to GFDL, as it looks better. Am I able to change them to GFDL once I relesased them to the public domain? --liquidGhoul 02:02, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Public domain is irrevokable I believe. — Ambush Commander(Talk) 02:08, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
Dang it, I will just do it with every new image I upload, it is no real problem. --liquidGhoul 02:12, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
You really should read up on what the licenses really are... — Ambush Commander(Talk) 22:34, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I think he can change the wording since his change would not make the pictures less free. Also GDFL is more accurate than PD so he should go ahead and change it.--God of War 03:53, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
    • This is simply wrong. PD (or free use licenses) allows derivatives to be licensed under full copyright and other licenses; it imposes less restrictions on users of the work, at the expense of more restrictions possibly being imposed on users of derivatives works. It is strictly more liberal in what it allows. Moreover, once you have made a statement releasing all rights, you cannot reclaim those rights or restrict the work in any way. To attempt to do so would have no legal effect, as long as the history shows it was once released under the more liberal PD. I am not a lawyer. Deco 04:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
Since LiquidGhoul doesn't see it as a major problem, it isn't necessary to take this matter further. What has been done in similar cases in the past (User:JShook released high quality image under GFDL, then wished to release only lower quality images), is to upload the images again under a slightly different title and using a GFDL tag, move all links to the new title, and then place the original images up for {{ifd}} with a suitable explanation. Anyone who takes a copy of the old image still has full rights to do what they like with it, but Wikipedia won't still be distributing copies, and the mirrors will over time follow suit.-gadfium 05:11, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
The last time I checked, IfD does not consent to unilateral deletion of good and freely released content based solely on the request of the uploader, nor should they. If you want to take your pictures off Wikipedia, or use a more restrictive license, too bad - some gifts can't be taken back. Deco 04:39, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
In this scenario, the same content would have been uploaded with a GFDL or CC licence, which as far as Wikipedia is concerned is just as good. There was no problem at IFD with JShook's photos, even though they were of lower resolution than the originals (they were still high quality photos).-gadfium 05:47, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Digital Universe Opens -- But what is it?

MSNBC in-depth

The site will be a network of topic portals managed by an expert. It will be another about.com but -- wtf! -- DU will be financed by also selling broadband?

Lotsofissues 08:55, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it's basically AOL. Go to our article on it, it's all discussed. -- user:zanimum


Rollback with edit summary

Is it possible to put an Edit Summary when doing a "rollback" on an edit? I don't think it is, but I want to make sure I'm not overlooking something. - DavidWBrooks 18:00, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

If you manually revert - go to the old version, click edit, save - you can leave an edit summary; if you just use the admin rollback tool, the edit summary is automatically filled in for you can you can't change it. Shimgray | talk | 18:02, 22 January 2006 (UTC)


Bias towards named concepts

One thing I've noticed is that we have a strong bias towards concepts that have a name. For example, there are some mathematical or scientific concepts that reoccur in many different contexts but which nobody has ever bothered to name, and many of them lack articles — a recent example is proof of impossibility, which I named. Until mathematical terms like matroid, topological space, and category were invented, these frequently reoccurring abstract concepts didn't have a name either. I'm sure you can think of more examples from your respective areas.

On the other hand, people are constantly trying to create articles on every unnotable garage band under the sun. It seems like the structure of Wikipedia encourages this disparity in encouraging articles on named concepts. Is this a good or bad thing? How can we encourage more writing on topics that are difficult to come up with good names for? Also frustrating are topics where there are a few names in circulation, but no widely accepted name. Deco 04:27, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I've been through the desert on a concept with no name... :-) Well, you've got the basic problem that when you want to write an article on a nameless concept... what do you call the article? *Dan T.* 04:33, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd say this is not so much a problem with Wikipedia but encyclopedias in general or perhaps with language in general? As Dan T. remarks, it is difficult to write an article on an unnamed concept. As far as ways to rectify it, I can think of a few. If there is a WikiProject on the subject, consider asking there. Or, if you can think of a good name for it, place it at Wikipedia:Requested articles. Or add wikilinks to it from other articles, encouraging others to write it. If there are multiple names for a subject, pick one and write the article there, and create redirects from the other names. If it's not the best name, a move request later can handle that. — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:55, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Unfortunately, when articles like this do appear they end up losing a VFD vote because they fail the google test. --Bachrach44 18:06, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes. In the past I've been quite alarmed when good articles received reams of delete votes because they failed the Google Test and were deemed neologisms, when really they just needed to be renamed to a more commonly used name. Sometimes we really just have to invent our own names - it may be original research, but if a name is required where none exists, it's not like we have a choice. Deco 02:47, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
I've written a few math-related articles for the Swedish Wikipedia on topics whose names apparently have never been translated to the language. For smaller language editions, the situation ought to be fairly common. If the choice is between making up an original name and having a gap in our coverage of the sum of human knowledge, then the choice is easy. Just make the origin explicit ("the concept has no standardized name and will therefore be referred to as foobar for the purpose of this article"). Fredrik Johansson - talk - contribs 11:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Boy, does that sound like opening a can of worms: The concept of the expression made by a Pokemon character when reciting titles of Simpsons episodes while listening to singles by Gwen Stefani has no standardized name and will be called pfstlyzk for the purpose of this article. - DavidWBrooks 12:29, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
...and isn't encyclopedic. Fredrik Johansson - talk - contribs 14:51, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd just note that, if a concept doesn't have a name, I'd either be leery either that it's not notable, or that writing about it would tend toward original research (WP:NOR)). Herostratus 06:21, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Why does salt melt ice? Eutectic and Freezing point depression are not obvious places to look. A Why does salt melt ice article is not unreasonable. Samw 03:00, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
A redirect is the most reasonable option.--Urthogie 19:58, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

The best thing you can do is to come up with a name that is a variation or an analogy of an existing name for a related concept. That way, it won't be a complete neologism, and people might know what you mean. --Chl 19:54, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

A catalogue of projectboxes

WikiProject Projectboxes is currently constructing a catalogue of existing projectboxes. If your wikiproject or noticeboard has a projectbox like a to-do list, please add it to Wikipedia:WikiProject Projectboxes/Catalogue. Zocky | picture popups 19:21, 21 January 2006 (UTC)


Please vote

Please vote for whether you think the more common term Islamic terrorism should be the name of the Islamist terrorism article at the talk page. Thanks for giving your two cents, wikipedia!--Urthogie 18:06, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia in the news

Wikipedia was mentioned in an article about a sex offender being unmasked.

"It was actually on a Wikepedia site. Wikepedia is sort of an online encyclopedia where users submit information. So it‘s basically a pool of knowledge that users submit. And we found an entry submitted for deletion actually for Caspian James Chrichton Stuart IV and the user who submitted it for deletion coincidentally submitted it because he suspected it was—quote—“largely nonsense” and next to the name Caspian James Chrichton Stuart IV was the name Joshua Adam Gardner in parentheses. So that‘s how we found his real name and that‘s what ultimately led us down the final stretch of our investigation."

-- Kjkolb 23:47, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Awesome! I am totally copy-pasting this to en:Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion. For the curious, here's the cited AfD article: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV (Joshua Adam Gardner), 5th Duke of Cleveland. Deco 03:36, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
This is off-topic, but branding him as a sex offender seems rather harsh (he was in a sex offender database), assuming his story about it being consensual sex with his 15 year old girlfriend when he was 18 is true. It doesn't seem to justify having to live the rest of your life as a known sex offender. He really blew it when he made up the story about being royalty and hanging out with celebrities, since it has gotten him a lot of attention that he wouldn't have received otherwise. -- Kjkolb 04:24, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
I agree, statutory rape as defined is ridiculous, but I was still surprised to see Wikipedia being used as a research tool by law enforcement (albeit in an unexpected way). Deco 06:41, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
They don't seem to know how to spell Wikipedia, though... who is it that said "I don't care what they say about me, as long as they spell my name right"? *Dan T.* 18:54, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
Incidentally, the misspelled wikepedia.(org|com|net|info|biz) is registered to a variety of people apparently not associated with Wikimedia, and most of those addresses wind up on one or another of those exploitative pseudo-portal search services that so many domains are parked on. *Dan T.* 19:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Copyrights vio

These sites, http://my-malaysia.info/manglish.html and http://west-malaysia.com/penang/francis-light.html stole Wikipedia articles and then claim the articles as its own. The webmaster even copyrighted it. See Manglish and Francis Light and then compare it. The webmaster or someone related to the site also from time to time spamlink his/her site and Wikipedia. There are many other pages on http://my-malaysia.info and http://west-malaysia.com stole Wikipedia's work and then claimed these Wikipedia's articles as its own instead sharing alike. I think this must stop. In fact, a lot of my work which is done for Wikipedia are being stolen by that site. Something needs to be done! __earth (Talk) 17:47, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

You can add this information to Wikipedia:Forks and mirrors. User:Zoe|(talk) 16:35, 23 January 2006 (UTC)


Fragments of obscure game to be deleted?

I've just happened to across the activities of the unlogged User:202.182.129.128. His (I assume it's a guy) total amount of contributions consist of three related game stubs, created one evening and the next morning in September 2005. The stubs are about an obscure (Google: 850 hits) online game (Alhazi Invasion), which apparently is based on another game called "Myrradel" (not in Wikipedia); a "class" of characters in that game (Ruiner); and the name of such a character (Drus). The "main article" also says that the game server was closed down in 2004. It also has two external links, which both lead to a home made website, where the same "main article" text appears. I suspect that the guy behind that website (a student in Oulu, Finland) also is our anonymous contributor. These three stubs have just been sitting there for four months, and nobody is likely to do anything more with them. So perhaps they should just be deleted? I've added deletion tags to all three to get things moving. Thomas Blomberg 02:39, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

You probably should have brought this up on Talk:Alhazi Invasion. Meanwhile, I'd suggest merging the stubs into the article on the game. If the game is nonnotable enough to be deleted, it'll take the rest away with it - otherwise things will at least be properly merged. Deco 02:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

The guy behind the Alhazi website (me) is not your anonymous contributor. The article on Wikipedia was apparently added by one of the former players of the game who copied the text from my site.

As for notability... there are hundreds, if not thousands, of average muds out there on Internet these days. Alhazi was one of them; dear and cosy to a small group of loyal players but probably not particularly significant otherwise.

-Teonhasgel/Methem, one of the former administrators/implementors/gods of the game

--Methem 18:12, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Little entry you all might find interesting

This isn't an authoritativee source(its my blog), but may give you some ideas about what to add to the criticism of Libertarianism section:[5] Thanks!-Urthogie 10:39, 24 January 2006 (UTC)


Ever see anything funny here at Wikipedia?

I know this isn't the purpose of Wikipedia, but I've seen several hilarious things here recently that are good for a laugh:

  1. On the page for The Real World (the show), the top of the page adds 'This article concerns the television program The Real World. For information on the concept of a real world, see reality.' That made me laugh.
  1. On the page for Anal Sex, the top has the 'verify' warning label, but in context it just seems so hilarious: 'This article or section contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please check for inaccuracies and modify as needed, citing sources.' God that's hilarious.

Anyone else spot anything funny while browsing here? Andrewdt85 04:27, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

There are pages and pages of funny stuff, see Wikipedia:Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense or Category:Wikipedia humor. -- Rick Block (talk) 05:25, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

find a grave

Please could someone clarify the copyright status of images from findagrave.com. I wish to add a pricture for the Herbert Baum page, and he does have a picture on that website, but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to use it.

Thanks Yellowmellow45 18:38, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

If you cannot find a statement on that site placing its images under a free license, you can't use it, unless you can persuade the copyright owner to do so. Chances are findagrave itself is using the image illegally, so I wouldn't bother asking them. Deco 20:21, 25 January 2006 (UTC)


I want to make this template

File:Infobox television black.JPG

This template is named {{Infobox television black}}, the black color of Infobox television

This template will used for:

  • The programs that mood is dark. (Example: Buffy, 24, Batman, Billy and Mandy, etc...)
  • If the picture (Titlecards and screenshots) that background color is black or dark color will included on infobox.
Go for it: Template:Infobox television black. You can base it off the original template at Template:Infobox television. If someone doesn't like it they may send it to Wikipedia:Templates for deletion. Deco 01:32, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
{{Infobox Television Black
| show_name = The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
| image = [[Image:Jimmy_Neutron_title.jpg|right|350px]]
| caption = The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
| format = [[animated television series]]
| runtime = 30 min
| rating = 
| creator = 
| starring = 
| country = [[United States]]
| network = [[Nickelodeon]]
| first_aired = 
| last_aired = 
| num_episodes = 
}}

I managed to made it in Template:Infobox Television Black. This is example. The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. 

{{Infobox Television Black
| show_name = 24
| image = [[Image:241002.jpg|225px|]]
| caption =  ''24''  poster (Season 3)
| format = [[Action]] - [[Thriller]] -[[Drama]]
| runtime = approx. One hour<br> per episode
| creator = [[Joel Surnow]] and [[Robert Cochran]]
| starring = [[Kiefer Sutherland]]
| country = [[United States|USA]]
| network = [[Fox Network|Fox]]
| first_aired = [[November 6]], [[2001 in television|2001]]
| last_aired = present
| num_episodes = 101 (greenlit to 144) 
}}

Second example. 24

This needs more fixing to look like first picture.--성혀니talk with mesee my work 13:22, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

These templates don't have enough contrast-- it hurts my eyes to read them.--Urthogie 13:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

  • The blue-on-black of links (blue is the default and my set preference for active links) is very hard to read. I suspect that will be true even for other colors. -- DS1953 talk 18:51, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

I suggest making the backrgound dark gray then.--Urthogie 19:05, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Magnus_Manske_Day

Only two people (I think) wished Magnus a Happy Magnus Manske Day. Let's not let this happen too often folks. --LV (Dark Mark) 04:19, 26 January 2006 (UTC)


Question

Why do we have to put past tense for a actor who recently died (for example from Chris Peen is an american actor to was an american actor)? Who's idea was it?

Spencer Karter

Well, it doesn't make sense to use the present tense if he's dead. User:Zoe|(talk) 17:00, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Tis a big big place

How big is Wikipedia? I'm not after stats and numbers and all that nonsense, but I mean "Is there any one individual user who actually knows of all the bits and pieces in Wikipedia? All the nooks and crannies and the etiquette in all of those places, and knows where all particular bits of info go?". Cos as this is gettin bigger and adpating all the time, nobody can understand everything about the site, even Jimmy Wales I doubt does. Thanks --Dangherous 22:08, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Are you including inactive projects and rejected policies in that question?--Urthogie 22:38, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
No, I guess they can be excluded --Dangherous 01:11, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
This is why having a large volunteer force is important. We have a large number of specialists who review detailed technical articles in specific topic areas. Some administrators who are more focused on administrating than editing have seen articles in many different areas, but don't have specific technical knowledge in all of them. We're a community with distinct complementary roles that is greater than the sum of its parts. Deco 06:04, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I know all of the important wikipedia pages(feel free to test me, i think i'll pass) that are active and accepted(this doesn't include meta-stuff, of course). Perhaps if there was a sitemap, it would be really helpful?--Urthogie 10:25, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Help:Contents is a pretty good sitemap. If you think otherwise, either edit it or go and talk to the good people at Wikipedia:WikiProject Help.
Incidentally, I'm looking forward to seeing any questions put forward to test Urthogie. I wouldn't dare make the same claim as he or she does, but I have been around for a while.-gadfium 22:09, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I've put some Questions for Urthogie(or anyone who wants to), on this page. JesseW, the juggling janitor 12:09, 27 January 2006 (UTC)


Bordering

I've been fiddling about with a table for a ages, and can't quite make it go right. What I need to do is simply to put a black 1px border around this template over at Wiktionary. Could someone please come over to Wiktionary for a couple of minutes and put a border on the template please. Not knowing code is starting go get me quite mad. Also, could you please tell me if there's a better place than this page to ask for assistance like this. All replies on my Wikipeda talk page, if you'd be so kind. Thanks so much, --Dangherous 16:22, 29 January 2006 (UTC)


Willy on Wheels

Willy just keeps creating new user names. I want to see if there is any way to find out why Willy has been in this mood for Wikipedia. Anyone able to find out Willy's real name?? Georgia guy 02:13, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Let's pool our money and hire a hitman private detective. :-)
More seriously, though, what do we know about Willy on Wheels? Well, take a look at Willy's first contributions ever. Notice his high level of sophistication - he knows about {{PAGENAME}}, he knows how to edit templates that are transcluded onto the main page, and these were his first edits ever. Later edits showed familiarity with the banning and deletion processes, among other things.
In my opinion, Willy is a highly-experienced but disgruntled Wikipedian gone berserk. Maybe a reincarnation of User:Wik or something? He looks to be just hitting Random article and vandalizing, so there's no pattern indicating any particular hometown, real name, interests, or prior identity. Maybe he's an admin that left Wikipedia or was de-admined. Deco 03:45, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
There was once some suspicion that he was the user known as Gazwim, but I'm not sure if anything was ever proven. - SimonP 04:01, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
Why are we so sure it's all the same guy? Maybe there is a whole cabal of WoW copycats out there... I seem to recall a message on the mailing list archive from someone saying he and some school buddies where the original Willy on Wheels who had some fun moving pages around and making page move bots and such, but that he had since stopped vandalising after realising just how usefull the Wikipedia could be after using it to pass some history class or something. Might have been a hoax though naturaly. Anyway I find this whole WoW paranoia to be a little exessive. Some poor World of Warcraft fan had half the CV unit on his back and got permabanned almost as soon as he signed in just because he had WoW in his username. It got sorted out fairly quick, but still. Not the best first impression... --Sherool (talk) 05:46, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
It's possible there are multiple people involved - perhaps a more detailed study of the many sockpuppets will reveal differences in methods and writing style to support this. I agree that preemptive blocking is dangerous and I generally oppose it - better to have to undo a little more vandalism than risk losing a prolific contributor. Deco 07:13, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

light speed Willy on large wheels! __earth (Talk) 05:49, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

How much linkage?

Hi, I've been wondering: is there a policy/guideline on just how much linking should happen in an article? I'm asking because this is one of the things that annoys me most about some of the otherwise high-quality Wikipedia articles. Obviously, if we were going to link every word that has a corresponding entry in wikipedia, every other noun would be a link; I think we can agree that that would be rather retarded.

The thing that prompted me to ask this was the article on Daniel Webster; in the first paragraph in "early life", the word "poor" is linked to the article on poverty. How is this at all relevant? I'm really trying to understand the logic behind this; how would anyone reading the article on Daniel Webster potentially want to also read a general article on poverty? How this works in my mind is that if I see a text on a particular family and the word "poor" is underlined, I'd expect that if I click that link, I'd get more information on THEIR financial situation. We can safely assume that I do know what poverty is.

I'm calling this information pollution, and bad layout as well. I don't mean to complain about this one article now--it's not TOO bad in there--but this is the article that reminded me of that annoyance, which I've observed much much worse in other articles were practically EVERYTHING was linked.

Thus: I'd be very grateful if someone could point me to a general WP guideline to linking. Also, if someone COULD explain the logic behind that link, that'd be nice too. And if nothing else, I'd like to make a plea for less links. My take is that we only need to link things that a relevant portion of the readers of the original article might really want to follow. Like the "second party system" link in the Daniel Webster text is perfect (since I didn't know about that, and I did want to follow the link there), while "poor" is completely nonsensical.

--Bringa 16:57, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes. Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context. Deco 01:11, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Permission Application

I'm writing to one of the authors of a journal article to get permission to use an image for wikipedia. I've already acquired permission from the publisher. My questions are; a) do I need permission from all authors? b) should I disclose that I already have permission from the publisher? c) the good Dr. emailed me with the option to email him back or to send a letter via post. If I email, do I put my address etc in the email like a paper based letter? d) Can you check my letter for me?

Dear Dr. R Higuchi,

I am writing to request permission to use an image from one of your published papers in an article on the subject of PCR overlap extension on www.wikipedia.com, a free user-edited encyclopedia on the Internet. The image in question was published in Nucleic Acids Research in 1988, in an article entitled “A general method of in vitro preparation and specific mutagenesis of DNA fragments: study of protein and DNA interactions”. The image is Fig. 4 of page 7360. I look forward to hearing from you in due course,

Yours sincerely, Sean Smith

--Username132 19:09, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I left a note on User:Username132's talk page directing him to Wikipedia:Boilerplate requests for permission, and reminding him that we need the image to be freely redistributable under the GFDL. FreplySpang (talk) 15:39, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

10,000th article celebration images

Hi Wikipedians,

As we are approaching the 10,000th article in the Persian Wikipedia, we are looking for ideas for a splash picture. I know there were some in other Wikipedias. Could anyone please help me to find those images. Thanks. JazzM

You might ask this on Commons:Village pump, since they deal exclusively with media. Deco 01:12, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

CFD indices

The idea of having monthly indices of archived category deletion vote results sorted alphabetically by title is a good one (example), but there hasn't been any recent activity along these lines. Please see Wikipedia talk:Categories for deletion/Archive debates and reply there, if interested -- especially if you can do the updates. - dcljr (talk) 00:12, 31 January 2006 (UTC)


When Admins screwup

Hey y'all I'm relatively new here. One thing that I am curious about is what happens when an Administrator, after they become an Administrator, breaks Wikipedia rules (3RR etc.). I would imagine that if this happened before a bid for adminship, your bid would be killed or severely damaged. But if you do this after you're an administrator, it seems as if you would get a slap on the wrist or you would block yourself for a few minutes (I've been to the ArbCom page) and you continue with your adminship merrily. Is there something I'm missing? BlueGoose 05:13, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

In theory, you're right, but what is more likely to happen is the admin will be taken to WP:RFC/WP:RFAr, especially if it happens more than once. it can lead to the loss of administrator status, though admittedly this is a rare occurrence. Grutness...wha? 08:48, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
The list of former administrators has those who had their adminship stripped by the ArbCom (I count 2), those who decided the additional responsibility and expectations weren't worth access to the shiny buttons, etc. As Grutness indicates, forcibly desysopping a user is a torturous process and it basically requires a decision that the credibility built up through good edits, which allowed someone to gain adminship, has been exhausted by subsequent bad edits. - BanyanTree 16:34, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

So you admit it is very rare. What happens if an admin repeatly erase section of talk pages(personal or article's) that have negative evidence or criticism about his action -? A normal user can't make a case when the very history of what has transpired is erased together with the conversation..? Furthermore ,admin can block the user ,and erase their own admin removal suggestion from parlament etc' .. At such a case not only is almosy all inner wiki communication beign altered,but the accumilation of proofs is not possible .An admin can lie his ass off ,and only other admins(who care for him as a freind of the community) are able to check deleted pages. (Real story...)--Procrastinating@talk2me 17:43, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, there are lots of admins and we really not all that close of friends. In fact most of us have never communicated even once with each and every other admin. It should be easy to get someone to check deleted edits. A request at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard, maybe. Rmhermen 18:31, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
Any deleted text should still be present in the history for exhibiting. If the admin goes so far as to delete previous versions for no other reason than to avoid criticism, this is a breach of policy and you should elevate it to a suitable forum like e-mailing another admin for a second opinion or RFC. Deco 21:45, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

It's important to remember that Wikipedia is not the whole world. If you want to "accumulate proof" do so on your personal hard drive, or on a free webhost. Provide full quotes, and specific oldid numbers. Then, when you have sufficient evidence, or just feel like it, check to see which (if any) of the pages you've cited have been deleted. Then, go to the list of administrators, look for one you've never heard of, use the Email this User function to send them a private request to confirm the contents of a particular page, and most likely, they will happily do so. Mention in the email that you will publish the results (if they agree to confirm or not) on the same page where you've kept your "proofs" before. Next question? JesseW, the juggling janitor 19:58, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


New article count

Is there any simple way of ascertaining how many articles a particular editor has started (i.e., been the first editor on)? Grutness...wha? 04:12, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I believe the answer is that it's not only not easy, but nearly ridiculously difficult (requires looking at every edit you've ever made to see if there was no previous version of the article you edited). -- Rick Block (talk) 15:09, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
And even then, issues over previously-deleted versions of the article could pretty much screw things over... Shimgray | talk | 20:24, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
You could do this with a suitable database query against a recent dump, but not online. I don't frankly believe this is very useful, as often a user just starts a stub and most of the credit for the article belongs to other editors who drastically expanded it. Not to say there aren't articles that spring into life full-formed. Deco 21:47, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

How much does something have to differ from the original to be free from copyright restrictions? E.g. if the Mona Lisa was copyrighted, then would http://username132.tasminslair.com/monalisa.jpg have been illegaly produced? --Username132 03:31, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

See derivative work. Gdr 13:08, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Image tagging

Just now I tagged a string of images that were tagged as something like "Source: Third Reich" as unsourced. Please, folks, that is no proper paper trail. WP:V applies to imagery, too, and there must be a way to determine where an image comes from just to make sure that the event/person/thing/whatever on there is really what the image claims it to be. Pilatus 18:27, 1 February 2006 (UTC)


This is funny!

Now, when I went to the article namespace of Special:Allpages some pages were in italics. What does this mean?? Georgia guy 23:42, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

They're redirects. —Cryptic (talk) 01:13, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Another user recently change a red link in an article to a link to a appropriately related category. I changed it to a redirect to an appropriate article. Do we have any policy on this? Can we link words in an article to a category? Rmhermen 15:53, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't know of any particular policy, but certainly wouldn't recommending linking words in articles to categories. Users have expectations that when they click a link in an article, they will go to another article about that topic — not a category. Let's not confuse users with such unexpected behaviors. Categories have their place at the bottom of articles. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 18:26, 2 February 2006 (UTC)


Did this actually appear ?

Does anyone know if this ever really appeared in Maxim Magazine's September 2005 issue as claimed, or is this bogus ? I can't verify it, but I also don't have access to the magazine. Would you know who the authority or monitors are who check this or that can be asked ? The article in question is Maxim magazine's 20 Most Annoying Songs Ever! -- Wikiklrsc 08:49, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Maxim, Oct 2005 The Most Annoying Songs Ever! -- potential copyvio? -- Guest458 12:31, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
And non-article-worthy, as I suggest in the article's Talk page. If we write about every magazine list ("317 ways to satisfy your man in bed" "92 things to do with artichokes" "the 17 best gadgets to buy this Arbor Day") it'll be worse than Pokemon characters!!! - DavidWBrooks 12:47, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, as I was concerned this hadn't appeared at all in print by Maxim. The original Wikipedia article's magazine date was wrong, as it was in the October 2005 issue, and not the September 2005 issue. I have corrected this and put a link to the original Maxim article for checking. The larger Wikipedia community will have to decide if the article stays or not, I guess. Again, thanks. -- (Bob) Wikiklrsc 20:17, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

I've listed it for deletion. Looks like it'll be a clear delete. Thanks for the heads up. Deco 10:29, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Surely. It was very controversial. Let's see what happens. -- (Bob) Wikiklrsc 10:56, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic. It's only received one merge vote so far, along with several deletes. If you know of parties interested in keeping it, please encourage them to participate while it's still on AfD. Deco 11:09, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely no sarcasm intended at all. Really. I was in agreement with you. And thanks for bringing it to the community ! -- (Bob) Wikiklrsc 18:21, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Userpage Templates

Where do I find more of those little templates that you stick on your userpage that say things like "This user is proud to be an American?" I like them, but can't find any. JaredW 12:11, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Start at Wikipedia:Userboxes and go from there to any of the subpages of it that you may find useful. Grutness...wha? 22:57, 3 February 2006 (UTC)


Wikipedia joke - old or new?

Can anyone help with this Wikipedia joke? I'm not sure if I've heard it somewhere before, or whether I just made it up. I suspect the former, and would be grateful if someone could find an earlier mention of the joke. The joke (or deep insightful comment - your mileage may vary), involves comparing Wikipedia to the classic story used to illustrate ideas about probability. The story runs along the lines of "given enough time, a group of monkeys tapping away at typewriters could produce the complete works of Shakespeare" (purely by chance). Was this the model on which Wikipedia was based? (Tongue firmly in cheek)... Carcharoth 09:43, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

That's been passed around. At one time it was even a suggested logo. The original version of the joke was actually about the Internet. Deco 10:53, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
And there's an article about this topic here. Enjoy JackofOz 10:58, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for that! Very funny. Especially the talk page, here and here (the bit about the useful life of the universe). Carcharoth 15:57, 4 February 2006 (UTC)


www.wikipedia.org post in news section

Posted something about www.wikipedia.org in the news section of the Village Pump. The post should probably have gone here, so I'm adding a very brief post here to direct people there. Carcharoth 09:37, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Commons

Can I put this image in Commons? --200.93.196.236 13:16, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

The tag says that is is public domain world wide, so i don't see why not. Be sure to copy allrelevant source and license info, and include a note that it came via the en wikipedia, please. DES (talk) 17:42, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Also see if you can find a higher-resolution original source. About.com's version is downscaled for their web page. Deco 19:18, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
OK, thanks. --200.93.196.236 14:20, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Skyring's flat tyre complaint

Are Wikipedians aware of (currently banned user) Skyring's report that a car tyre belonging to his daughter was vandalised by someone as the result of some Wikipedian having published his address. It's worrying if true. Details are on his user talk page. Arno 03:53, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Although I don't believe his address should have been exhibited in this fashion, his claims seem a bit farfetched. Tires get debris embedded in them all the time, the man looking in the window was probably completely harmless, and I doubt any editor is simultaneously immature enough and has means enough to travel a great distance to stalk and play pranks on a contributor they don't like. Also, if Skyring made his full real name and general location available, and has a listed address, the address could have been obtained by anyone at any time. Deco 04:57, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
I'm feeling a bit uncertain about the link between the tyre damage and Wikipedia myself, nonetheless his claims are of concern and worth mentioning here. Also, the man (assuming again that there is a connection between him and the tyre damage) could well have been a local. He need not have been a wikipedian, either, just someone who got cheesed off at Skyring after reading Skyring's admittedly erratic views on Australia. Arno 05:07, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
I just had a screw removed from my tire. It happens. I don't think anybody intentionally put it into my tire, any more than anyone intentionally put a nail in his tire. User:Zoe|(talk) 05:08, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
Don't people usually knife tires rather than leaving little nails in them? It seems like it would be easier and more effective. Kaldari 08:22, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
The nail was a tall one, Kaldari. His photos show that. I can understand his concerns about it not being accidental. However, he has now removed what he has written as it 'has served its purpose'. Arno 02:51, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Deletion review process

Discussion of the relative advantages of having an article fully restored following "any good faith request" while deletion review is underway. Some have suggested that articles may and should be improved while discussion takes place, other have complained that it obviates all XfD and DRv decisions if a single user can ask for and receive undeletion.

Please direct further discussion of this matter to Wikipedia talk:Deletion review.

brenneman(t)(c) 01:26, 6 February 2006 (UTC)


Image editing help

I was was wondering if anyone here could help me edit some pictures that I'm going to upload to Wikipedia. I'm trying to make panoramas with two or more images. Normally, I can just combine them with Photoshop with no special editing. However, these pictures have differing light levels and the division between them is very noticeable. I've tried adjusting the brightness and contrast and have gotten some better results, but still far from what I would consider acceptable. If anyone knows how to fix this, I would greatly appreciate it if they would help me. It would probably be better to leave a message on my talk page than responding here. I'm going offline now, so I'll get back to you tomorrow. Thanks, Kjkolb 12:48, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

In this case, I would probably adjust them as close as possible, then use a clone brush to eliminate the seam. There are more image editors at Commons:Village pump. You may have better luck asking at that forum. Deco 17:50, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, Kjkolb 04:41, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikifuture

Does anybody have an interest in a wiki futurist discussion topic about "What will wikipedia be like after 20 years?" :-) — RJH 23:07, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

The Last Wikipedian: Gerard hadn't been on Wikipedia in some time, being busy with other things. "What catching up I'll have to do!" he thought with a sigh. He looked at the Village Pump, but to his bewilderment the last post was in 2020, over 4 years ago. He checked his watchlist, and it was like a wasteland: half the edit summaries contained insults about his mother, and the other half claims of how large the vandal's penis is. He began to revert them only to discover that each vandal's work was preceded by that of 15 others. Every article, big and small, esoteric and well-known, had disintegrated into a dilapidated message-board/sandbox filled with pictures of large farm animals and stories about exotic dancers. In desperation, he clicked the random page link, but every time he clicked it, up came another ravaged article, and another, and another.
Finally, he decided to visit Meta to see what was going on. The logo had been replaced with profanity and the main page advertised a pirate web site, but for the most part the vandals had left it alone due to lack of interest. There, he found a note from the Jane Wales, the daughter of the traitor Jimbo (whose name was no longer spoken), who said that a series of conflicts over policy combined with a loss of support from Jimbo's former employer had resulted in massive fragmentation of the community, followed by decay. Even she had given up on Wikipedia. All that was left was a link to the last database dump from February 2021, a 250 gigabyte download, before the site was abandoned by its contributors altogether.
Gerard soberly clicked the link. Wikipedia would rise again. Deco 00:11, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
LOL. :) — RJH 21:31, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
More seriously, I think Wikipedia will continue to grow over the years, in both depth and breadth, but I expect there to be some big changes to the software and to our policies. For example, as we get more topics our standards for notability tend to shift downward. I think our international community from outside the U.S. and Britain will also grow more, perhaps leading to an emphasis on simpler language. New projects are sure to appear, and I think some of the fledgling 'pedias will become much more important. And of course, many text and image works of the early 20th century will fall out of copyright and become reused here, including old encyclopedias. May the Wikipedia live forever! Deco 03:27, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
And lets not forget Wikipedia:Semantic MediaWiki :o) CheekyMonkey 21:28, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

We have http://www.camerapedia.org which appears to be a part of Wikipedia, all about cameras, and all it does is repeat entries articles that Wikipedia already has. There appears to be no connection between the two, though Wikipedia links to Camerapedia. The latter may have a bunch of links and the former will have some detailed info - but there is little or no overlap, they use different templates, they're on different sites, changes on one won't reflect the other and so on. This is very frustrating for the WP/Camerapedia editor as it doubles the work. Can't we just merge all these articles and keep them on the same site and allow them to adhere to certain common standards? The Camerapedia site seems much easier to set down policies in, and the community appears close-knit and co-operative, but there is no similar presence on Wikipedia. The Wikiproject on digital cameras has almost no participants. The whole affair is confusing and simply redundant. Can someone please explain or remedy this? -- Simonides 08:16, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Camerapedia is actually not a part of Wikipedia. However, they do both adhere to the GFDL 1.2 so content from either can be freely used on the other. But, like many specialised wikis, content that is suitable for camerapedia may well not be notable enough for wikipedia. But then again camerapedia is not aiming to be a an enyclopedia of everything. Which is why it is good to have both. GeorgeStepanek\talk 10:45, 5 February 2006 (UTC)


nunca jamás

what is the difference between nunca and jamás. I can't find anything other than they both mean never. Do spanish speakers have a preference?--God of War 23:25, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

This should probably go to the Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language, but from my little understanding of the language (IANASS), I think nunca means "never", but particularly "never in the past", jamás is a bit more emphatic and bmeans "absolutely never", "at no time", and nunca jamás means something like "never again". Hopefully there are enough Spanish speakers here for someone to put me right on that if I'm wrong... Grutness...wha? 23:57, 7 February 2006 (UTC)


Habsburg-Valois War

This page has got to be close to the record for the most stub templates. The stub listings are almost longer than the article. Has anybody seen a page with more? :-) — RJH 18:40, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Not any more it hasn't. That was double the acceptable limit used by WP:WSS! Grutness...wha? 00:00, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

The welcome template

There are some disagreements about what would be appropirate to have on {{welcome}}. I started a poll about this, at template talk:welcome. Opinions would be most welcome. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:15, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm one of the people who believes each welcome notice should be custom written and different from all others, ideally incorporating personal elements the user has placed on their user page to make them feel like we care about them as a unique person. But then I haven't done too much welcome work and perhaps I underestimate the labour involved. Deco 08:46, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
Alost every welcome I place is for a realatively new user who has a redlinked user page, and often an empty user talk page as well. How exactly would I "customize" in that case (which IMO is the modal case)? DES (talk) 17:47, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I think a healthy compromise would be to have the default template which should be small, and have only a few very essential links. Below that, the welcoming user may add specific commments about the user to be welcomed. Usually you run into new users by them popping up on your watchlist, so you may have something to write them about. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:11, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I often start out with "Hi! I noticed your contributions to Xxxx..." You can check out their user contributions to find something. This helps them feel like their efforts are noticed and valued. Deco 19:22, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I got a welcome template on my talk page one day. It didn't make me feel any more welcome or provide any more info than I might have gotten browsing around, say, through Wikipedia:Community Portal. It just felt like junk mail. I'd rather have gotten two personal words than a long impersonal slab of template. John Reid 17:46, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

What do I need to know before I take new pictures of the chemical elements?

Most of the pages for the non-radioactive chemical elements contain a fairly grainy, in-test tube picture of a sample of the element (see RTC's listing of elements photos). I think we can do better.

I know someone who has a collection of all the non-radioactive elements, and I'd like to take pictures of them for Wikipedia when he comes in town (in about a month) using my girlfriend's Canon PowerShot Pro1 camera.

I've never undertaken a large photography project before, and I'll probably only have one shot at getting these photos. So I'd like to know what I need to know in order to do a good job. What do I need to bring with me when I go to take the photos? Under what lighting conditions should I take the photos? How should I take the photos so that I maximize quality and uniformity and minimize the amount of editing I have to do? What are the answers to the questions am I too ignorant to ask?

As always, any and all assistance is greatly appreciated.

Thanks, --Starwiz 04:08, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I assume this is the same image set at Commons:Category:Element samples, but also check out Commons:Category:Chemical elements first. Deco 05:32, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
RTK's elements look the same as Commons:Category:Element samples. Commons:Category:Chemical elements has a nice collection of element pictures, but it's not complete. Starwiz 18:23, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
Good idea. Thue | talk 15:52, 8 February 2006 (UTC)


Need Feedback on Open Source :: Free and Open Source

From a Wikipedia E-mail Response:

Dear Neil Das,

Thank you for your mail.

Greetings! You're right that this email address would be answered by one person who can't really speak for Wikipedia. But you might get a good variety of responses by asking the community on our community forum, the Village Pump, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)

Hope this helps; best of luck with your paper.

Yours sincerely, Kat Walsh

Letter - Edited:

Dear Wikipedia,

I am currently writing a paper on competition. To prove one of my points that competition is not necessary, and that peaceful collabation is a better alternative, I have written about the open-source community. Since Wikipedia is such an affluent element of this group, I'd like to hear some views on how open-source presents a dilemma to capitalism, in that it has people who do things for the common good without any monetary incentives, and view what they're doing more like an art than a job. Here is an excerpt from my paper:

Open-sourcing is a topic that must be included in any discussion of competition in the modern world. In the more discreet definition, open-sourcing is licensing software for open use to the public and allowing its source code to be distributed and built-upon for profit or personal use. In the more general view, open-sourcing is a mindset of public cooperation, passion for ingenuity, and freely distributed information. The dilemma to capitalists, or rather, competitionists, is the possibility of a growing, evolutionary field of products that somehow keeps up with the technological tidal wave and is supported by enthusiastic workers who devote time and energy for no monetary benefits whatsoever. To truly understand how contradictory capitalism’s portrait of human capability is with the reality of open-sourcing, one must first delve deeper into the root causes and mechanics of capitalism.

If you would like to read more if you can't understand what I'm saying, the open-source passage of the paper is here: Open-sourcing_Passion2.doc

That's a specific idea, and please feel welcome to respond on any topic regarding the philosophy of open source. I know this will probably be answered by an individual who can't really talk in the name of wikipedia, so your own comments would also be accepted. The paper is due February 8th, and a respose before then would be ideal.

Sincerely,

Neil Das

BTW, reading up on open-source in wikipedia ;) I'm seeing that my idea falls more under FOSS(Free and Open Source). I'll have to edit that later in my paper, so any ideas on the philosophy of Free and Open Source (if that is what I seem to be talking about) would be great.


Theuedimaster 00:27, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

For a paper like this I think a good thing to study is the motivations of contributors. In a competition model obviously competitors are motivated by access to resources like money, but the gift economy model is much more complicated. Another important aspect of free content models is how they can fit themselves into nooks and crannies of people's time, whenever they have a spare moment, and with minimal initial investment to participate, especially on Wikipedia where we strive to keep the participation bar as low as possible. I'm sure we have project pages with more info on this stuff somewhere. Deco 00:36, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm sort of a newbie on wikipedia, is there any way I could have some links to what you are talking about? Theuedimaster 00:46, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Closest thing I can think of is Wikipedia:Replies to common objections. I'm sure others have better links. Deco 03:11, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
How about m:Wikipedia sociology, where some of the earlier listed links may be relevant, and m:Power structure? There are also some interesting documents at Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies. My own not-too-passionate two cents on this subject is that Wikipedia participation is still understandable within an utility framework (at least to the extent that utility is understandable in any other economic argument), though obviously the common kludge that utility=money gets pretty much thrown out. I imagine that if one really wanted to, you could make an indifference curve that is not entirely ridiculous with "participation in an encyclopedia" on one axis, "everything else" on the other, and the Wikipedia model signified by a movement outward of the budget constraint along the "participation in an encylopedia" axis. I'm sure someone who actually remembers their econ classes can correct me on this. Cheers, BanyanTree 23:12, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Deco and BanyanTree! It's real honor for me to be able to include you guys in this paper. Most of it is just my own views, but its good to find some support and additional ideas by other people! Thanks! Theuedimaster 05:08, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject New York Theatre

This is a call for help for a largely significant wikiproject that is being neglected. The wikiprojects for New York Theatre, Broadway Theatre, and Off-Broadway Theatre could use some tender loving care from a group of devoted individuals. If you are interested in the subject, please check out the to-do list and do as little or as much as you can find time to do. Thank you very much.

Clarkefreak ∞ 22:51, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Why isn't it spelled Theater? User:Zoe|(talk) 17:01, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
See Theatre#Theatre_or_Theater.3F.-gadfium 20:39, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
MoS policy is to use the spelling that an editor starts an article with, unless it is use-specific (British spellings in articles about British subjects, American spellings in articles about American subjects.) Since this is clearly an American subject, it should be Theater. User:Zoe|(talk) 03:11, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
"In this case, "theatre" denotes a branch of the performing arts, whereas "theater" refers to the building in which performances or other entertainments are presented." quoted from above-cited grammar article.

Clarkefreak ∞ 02:04, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

In the United States, the alternative spelling theater has become more common. The general consensus of most American style guides is to use this spelling unless the word is part of the proper name of a performing arts facility or company, as some venues are branded with "theatre". User:Zoe|(talk) 19:25, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
However, among theatre professionals in the U.S., "theatre" is common for both the art and the building.
Surely the Wikiproject can choose to use the spelling used by theatre professionals rather than the one used by style guides.-gadfium 20:38, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
Can this be documented? User:Zoe|(talk) 22:01, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
My gosh, you guys. I put this notice up as a request for help in this project. Can we get this project on its feet first, and worry about spelling later, please? If you are not willing to help, then please do not continue to participate in this conversation. Clarkefreak ∞ 23:56, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Since this isn't helping spark interest, does anyone know another way I could try to attract people to help out with this project? Clarkefreak ∞ 23:59, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Comments on Image:Banner whose side are you on.png

Hi all. I'd like to get a few comments on an image at Wikipedia:Banners and buttons--I started a discussion on the talk page. I really don't think it's a good idea for that image to be posted on other websites advertising Wikipedia... I think it would encourage more vandalism. What do others think? Reply over there! ~MDD4696 00:21, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

No fair...the vandals get the cooler inverted version. I think I'm switching over :) ;) — Ilyanep (Talk) 00:52, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
That would definitely encourage vandalism if posted on outside websites. I also agree with Ilyanep - the black side looks way cooler. Terrible idea. Kafziel 18:51, 9 February 2006 (UTC)


Let's lighten up a bit, with a joke

Q: How many Wikipedians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: At least 115 – they are split as follows:
  • 1 to hold the lightbulb.
  • 2 to pull him off the lightbulb until consensus is reached.
  • 1 to propose what to replace the lightbulb with.
  • 13 to give opinions as to the proposal.
  • 2 to butt in and tell the 13 that they’re stepping out of line.
  • 3 to go through the debate adding links to mailing list rulings regarding the changing of lightbulbs.
  • 4 to go through the debate removing links as it’s not allowed to edit other people’s comments.
  • 1 to blank the debate.
  • 1 to revert the blanking.
  • 2 to propose the blocking of the blanker.
  • 7 to enter into a debate regarding the question of blocking the blanker.
  • 1 developer to talk about the technical difficulties of changing the lightbulb.
  • 2 to resign from Wikipedia because their comments have been ignored.
  • 3 to consistently add pornography to the debate page.
  • 4 newbies to mistakenly add their opinions in the wrong place.
  • 8 registered users to bite the newbies.
  • 1 to remove the old lightbulb.
  • 3 to painstakingly replace the old lightbulb.
  • 2 to close the debate.
  • 1 to inform everyone of the rules against closing debates without consensus.
  • 2 to begin a drive to get consensus to close the original debate.
  • 13 to give opinions as to the proposal.
  • 2 to butt in and tell the 13 that they’re stepping out of line.
  • 3 to go through the debate adding links to mailing list rulings regarding the changing of lightbulbs.
  • 4 to go through the debate removing links as it’s not allowed to edit other people’s comments.
  • 1 to blank the debate.
  • 1 to revert the blanking.
  • 2 to propose the blocking of the blanker.
  • 7 to enter into a debate regarding the question of blocking the blanker.
  • 1 developer to talk about the technical difficulties of changing the lightbulb.
  • 2 to resign from Wikipedia because their comments have been ignored.
  • 3 to consistently add pornography to the debate page.
  • 4 newbies to mistakenly add their opinions in the wrong place.
  • 8 registered users to bite the newbies.

And the punchline is… the lightbulb doesn’t end up getting changed! This is all nearly true.--TheDoctor10 (talk|email) 18:10, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

It's funny, because it's true. :-) Deco 18:27, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
115 people maybe, but I count myself at least four times in there. Can we multitask? --Golbez 23:53, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
at least 116! That lightbulb's a stub until it's been turned on - someone needs to mark it as such. Probably needs to be categorised as well... Grutness...wha? 04:16, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
I propose creating Wikipedia:Lightbulbs for Changing (WP:LfC) to vote on which bulbs should be changed, and what should replace them. *Dan T.* 00:26, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
I've outlined a process for adding a nomination to LfC:
  1. Turn the light bulb off. Make sure it's off for at least 5 hours before completing the next step.
  2. Stumble around until you locate an alternate light source such as a flashlight or whale blubber lamp. Use it to shine light onto the light bulb.
  3. Read the serial number. Post it to your talk page, the talk page of the last 3 people who changed the light bulb, and update the proposed date for next change on LfC.
  4. Edit {{LfCRecentEntries}} and locate the template for the most recent month. Edit this template and use the {{LfCNominate1}}, {{LfCNominate2}}, and {{LfCNominate3}} templates in the main page, subpage, and summary page. For each one, supply the serial number, a description of why you think the light should be changed, and your top three candidates for the type of light bulb to replace it with. Add the entry to your watchlist and add links to it from the LfC section of your talk page and user page.
  5. The entry will stay on LfC for 23 days. Each user will vote "Change", "Keep", "No Vote", or "I Have Seen the Light", including an explanation of at least 2 paragraphs. Each user is also required to comment on all votes by all other users.
  6. At the end of the nomination period, the closing admin must close the discussion using {{LfCChange}}, {{LfCKeep}}, or {{LfCIHaveSeenTheLight}}. There is one version of this template for the log, the subpage, and the main LfC template. They also have the discretion to replace the vote page with a picture of Bozo the Clown (and not any other clown - any other clown will result in instant and permanent banning).
  7. Next the admin elevates the discussion to Wikipedia:Requests for Lightbulb Changes, where they request a bureaucrat request a developer to change or not change the lightbulb. If there is any dissent, the light bulb is sent back to LfC for a new vote. Jimbo has the authority to override any and all light changes.
  8. Once the light bulb has been changed, the original nominator must within 5 days turn the light on, or it will be reverted to the previous lightbulb. They may also choose a "lightbulb elect" to turn on lightbulb nominations for them. Lightbulb elects must have at least 50,000 edits and a history of never breaking light bulbs. Any lightbulb elect found to have violated these terms is blocked indefinitely.
  9. After the new lightbulb is turned on, its serial number must be recorded at the user's talk page, they must add themselves to the list of users who changed that light bulb with a timestamp, and the corresponding entry in the lightbulb reference table should be filled in. If there is no room in the lightbulb reference table, it must be archived and a new table created.
You get the idea. Deco 00:47, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
You should post this in the proposals section so it'll get the right attention. If it takes so long to change lightbulbs here, we should get a working policy as soon as possible. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 05:08, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
  • It doesn't matter how many, as long as you have consensus!
  • I don't know, but if you don't put it in Bugzilla for the devs to see it'll never get changed.
  • After a 5-day discussion period, 75% of those who comment or so, unless someone has really good reasons not to—unless Jimbo decides he wants to go turn on the light.

Mindspillage (spill yours?) 05:44, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I strongly object to the suggestion of a "whale blubber lamp." Whale oil is an animal product from an endangered species. We clearly must spend an additional 137 posts arguing what would be better to put in place of the "whale blubber lamp." Don't forget to include a sprinkling of ad homs about tree-huggers vs. planet destroyers. KillerChihuahua?!? 09:35, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

You forgot one to start a poll to "gauge consensus", three to vote in support of changing the lightbulb, five to oppose, six to abstain, three to make nonsense votes such as "this poll is nonsense on stilts" or "I still haven't stopped beating my wife yet", and five to vote for "polls are evil". Johnleemk | Talk 16:28, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

nasty templates

From time to time a scowling demand appears at the top of an article I have done some work on. It demands that something be done about the article because it is in bad shape. Usually the fact that whoever attached the "Fix this!" notice is irritated by something is the only information that can be gained. I believe that these lugs are one of the most anger producing features of Wikipedia. "Either use British spelling or English spelling consistently," is much better than a virtually meaningless heading that disfigures an article. P0M 04:57, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Do you know how to figure out who added the template? If so, just ask them (on their talk page). -- Rick Block (talk) 05:21, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
People are divided about whether these templates are a good idea. Some say just to leave notes on the talk page, while others say that a template draws more attention from interested contributors. It could certainly be more useful to incorporate a message into the template supplying a more specific type of cleanup to perform. Deco 08:12, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
It used to be, that if you put a [[Cleanup]] tag on an article, you had to go to the Wikipedia:Cleanup page to explain there what you thought needed to be done to the article. Then a huge number of different Cleanup templates were added, and going to the Cleanup page to explain yourself was disparaged. I think we should make more use of the Cleanup page, myself. User:Zoe|(talk) 17:37, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
I think any cleanup-related template that doesn't link to Wikipedia:Cleanup is just spiteful. If someone is genuinely interested in getting help improving an article, they should be using a template that draws quality users from other pages, not just random visitors to that page (who will be able to see for themselves that it needs cleanup anyway). It's definitely frustrating to see vague cleanup tags with no explanation on the talk page. Kafziel 19:16, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Challenge: What is the IP range of your national legislature?

This could be fun.

Lotsofissues 01:15, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

This says the Parliament of Malaysia's domain name is registered to blah, blah, blah. I can't find the exact ranges, but it doesn't matter too much anyway — Malaysians are not known for being very tech-savvy. I doubt Parliament is well-equipped enough for Parliamentarians to have time to vandalise Wikipedia. ^_^ Johnleemk | Talk 16:39, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Watchlist Spam/Vandalism?

I checked out my full watchlist today for the first time ever, and noticed a number of things that either don't exist or never existed, or I am quite confident that I didn't put there (a number of red links). Has anyone noticed this type of--what I can only assume is--"Watchlist Spam"? --RealGrouchy 23:46, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

This really threw me, too, the first time I noticed it. What happened is that a vandal moved the page you were watching to a new title - ie, RealGrouchy to RealGrouchy being attacked by pelicans. When a page you watch is moved, you end up watching both the old page (now a redirect) and the "new" one. Someone will have then moved it straight back to RealGrouchy, and then deleted RealGrouchy being attacked by pelicans so it doesn't hang around as a pointless redirect. However, by the end of this, you have both pages on your watchlist... and your watchlist retains deleted pages, so you end up with this bizzare redlink there.
As to why you didn't notice it at the time, page moves don't show on watchlists until someone edits the newly-moved page, so a move and then move-back won't show up at all unless you go looking for it. Shimgray | talk | 23:52, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
Yeah - threw me the first time I saw that, too. It happens a lot when you have a vandal-fighter's homepage on your watchlist! Grutness...wha? 08:07, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation! I've wondered about that myself a few times. Kafziel 19:18, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

(copied from the Help desk):

Couldn't figure out where to bring this up, so I'll do so here. Placeopedia uses Wikipedia data - apparently perfectly legally, under the GFDL. However, it also uses a version of the Wikipedia logo, which as I understand it is not GFDLed but is copyright to the Wikimedia foundation. How should this be handled, as it's clearly not a simple GFDL violation?

Another issue is that the site is being promoted directly on Wikipedia, with the use of {{placeopedia}} and [[Category:Places on Placeopedia]]. (I realise this probably ought to go to WP:CFD and WP:TFD, but I thought I should mention it here as well).

I'm assuming good faith - the site appears to be a non-profit making mashup, and it's probably just some people getting over-enthusiastic - but I do think these issues need to be sorted out, the logo especially. --OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 16:36, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

I have visited the site. The use of wikipedia articles seems to be entirely via links back to wikipedia, not by reuse, so there seems to be no issue there. The logo is a problem, unless this site has obtained permisison for its use. As for the template, some such tempweltes have been deleted on TfD, while others have been kept. DES (talk) 17:30, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
The Board is aware of the logo use on Placeopedia. Our legal team are apparently working on a logo use contract for this sort of situation, but until then, Placeopedia have informal permission to use it. Angela. 09:08, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Oh...The Board! This is just another example of Wikipedia becoming scarily like Burundi under Firestone's control.--TheDoctor10 (talk|email) 19:30, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

anime

anime means Japanese animation and is the hip hop of the new age of teens who like japan. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gogoboi662 (talk • contribs)

Ha ha ha... man, I love this place. ;) Kafziel 19:13, 10 February 2006 (UTC)


is WP known?

how percent of US people know WP? & is TV speaking about WP? ty --Vev 19:23, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

There are no statistics for your first question, but for your second...our founder, Jimbo Wales, has appeared on CNN to speak about the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy. Johnleemk | Talk 19:28, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
ty. in fr, we need an advert on TV cause WP is collaborative, ask jimmy --Vev 19:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)


How may users are there

Does anybody have the link for information on how many users we currently have.--Dakota ~ ° 17:54, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, 916,730 (from the statistics page [6]) Yellowmellow45 17:57, 11 February 2006 (UTC)


Thanks. Thats 600,000 users since registered in Aug. 05. (comment by DakotaKahn)

I'm surprised the article to user ratio is so low, about 1.054. -- Kjkolb 18:58, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Swedish road signs

The most of them have been uploaded, so I trnaslated the common page to english at Road signs in Sweden, they are all in svg-format and ther are approx 400 of them. →AzaToth 01:47, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

That's great, although of course this article needs more textual content. Very nicely done and all uploaded to the right place (Commons). Good job. Deco 02:04, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

ambigious for me

can anyone please give the exact definition of the following short names people usually use in edit summary to flag reverted vandalism etc. The problem I am sometimes wondering what they exactly ment by that.

  • rvv
  • rvt
  • rmv
  • rmt

→AzaToth 13:34, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

rvv means reversion of vandalism, I beleive rvt simply means revert.--TheDoctor10 (talk|email) 13:58, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
And rm is "remove", so the last two would be "remove vandalism" and "remove test", respectively. --cesarb 16:03, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
See also the edit summary legend, or for more general uses, the glossary. --cesarb 16:05, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
some editors just use rmv for "remove" BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 22:53, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
Incidentally, I've offered these incredibly obtuse edit summaries as one reason why everybody should have the rollback link. Deco 00:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Biggest article unedited for the longest time?

I have absolutely no reason to ask about this other than pure curiosity, so I'll just put it in miscellaneous: Is there any easy way to determine what WP's biggest article is that has managed to survive without editing for the longest period of time? (Define "biggest" however you like: most-read, page size, whatever.) It's long fascinated me how even the most obscure articles rarely last more than 60 days maximum without being edited somehow, even if they're just stubs. So I can't help but wonder if, somewhere, there's an article so perfect and so uncontroversial that it has managed to not receive a single edit since 2004 or 2003. Any ideas? --Aaron 02:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Sure, a database query could identify some of these. A lot of articles from EB 1911 or another PD encyclopedia fit these criteria. Unfortunately your question is a bit vague - if one article is 120KB and unedited for 4 months, is that worse than being 110KB and unedited for 5 months? Deco 02:05, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
Try Special:Ancientpages; they aren't sorted by size, but you'll probably find something substantial there. There are people who like to look at this page and update the articles, so you'll find quite a few have been updated very recently specifically because they've been unedited for so long. Also, we introduced the concept (and software support for) categories sometime in 2004, so almost all articles have been updated since then to add a category. Ideally we'd have some way of finding articles which haven't received substantial edits (possibly by using the 'm' edit flag, but that wouldn't be very reliable_.-gadfium 04:25, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
The oldest article on that list is Czech lands: 880s-1198, which is pretty big. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 05:55, 13 February 2006 (UTC) d'oh forget that - its a redirect to a big article. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 05:57, 13 February 2006 (UTC)


Ancient pages

Now we have reached the pont where Special:Ancientpages is able to have articles rather than dis-ambiguation pages at the beginning. Any common things to do if I can't think of any possible edit?? Georgia guy 20:13, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Categories are probably the easiest. Many of the old articles are uncategorized, or need to be moved into more recently created subcats. A lot of dormant articles are quite obviously permanent stubs, and many should be merged somewhere. For instance, there was some talk about consolidating the FOLDOC stubs at Wikipedia talk:Centralized discussion/Federal Standard 1037C clean up. - SimonP 22:31, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
some of them are small enough to have stub tags too. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 05:26, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Materiel is a word

Posting this here probably won't make much of a difference, but for those who are unaware materiel is indeed a word, and not simply a misspelling for material. It seems that for any article that uses the word materiel, at least once a month someone drops by and "corrects" the spelling. Repeatedly reverting this is getting rather annoying. - SimonP 00:26, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I've encountered this too. Try using matériel; the accent makes it look less like a simple mispelling to the unintiated.--Pharos 01:48, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
You think that's bad - I've seen anons frequently changing "provably" to "probably", which of course completely alters the meaning. I've resorted to either rewording the sentence or putting BIG SCARY COMMENTS in the wikitext. Deco 02:25, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
Another problem spelling is the word haemophilia. I once corrected what seemed like a minor spelling error on the haemophilia page and that sparked off a hornet's nest. Arno 02:57, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
This is a regional thing: Americans just have no patience for æ. See List of words that may be spelled with a ligature.--Pharos 03:03, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
In that instance, the title spelt the word one way and the article spelt it another way. I corrected the article version to be consistent with the title and the next thing I knew I was under fire in my talk page. I think I must've upset some delicate standoff there between the American and British forces. Arno 03:18, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
Ah, but policy is on your side. The Manual of Style advocates consistency of American/British spelling conventions within single articles. Deco 03:23, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure how true that was back then. Good to hear about it , though. Arno 03:27, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
Actually policy is not completely on your side - policy is to have the common name as title, and use the correct name within the article, drawing attention to the distinction in the lead-in. Rich Farmbrough. 23:32, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
There are quite a number of pairs of words that cause this sort of problem. One I'm often running across is enquiries and inquiries (informal questions vs formal investigations) which can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And as for a sports star either re-signing or resigning... Grutness...wha? 12:36, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps we should be constructing a list of these, so that we can help track down incorrect "corrections" and, more importantly, advise editors on words to avoid so that this type of hypercorrection doesn't arise. I realise that it seems silly to have to fix something that's correct, but on the other hand, if some readers think it's incorrect, it does hurt their comprehension - any confusion is a potential problem. Deco 19:42, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

How about this?

How about making a new template that would be temporarily placed on top of high-traffic/high-vandalism pages (sort of something that is less drastic than semiprotection even). The template would say something along the lines of 'Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that strives to be written from a Neutral point of view and with a professional tone. Please try to word any contributions from such a tone. Also, do not destroy other users' hard work by vandalizing articles' (and link NPOV, tone, and vandalizing to the appropreate WP:... pages). Good idea? Bad idea? — Ilyanep (Talk) 00:35, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I can't imagine this would discourage anyone who normally vandalizes these articles. Quite the opposite. Deco 01:33, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Maybe not. I was just throwing a brainstorm out there. I was thinking that many people (just like the Stegenthaler [sorry bad spelling can't spell the name] controversy) think that this isn't a serious project and are just doing it for fun. I don't think anything would discourage the trolls — Ilyanep (Talk) 01:34, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps some do vandalize with that mindset, but I think the best way to discourage those who think Wikipedia is "just for fun" is to present a high-quality article that looks like one they'd see in a "real" encyclopedia. I'm not saying your idea wouldn't help, but I'm doubtful. Deco 08:26, 15 February 2006 (UTC)


New elections-article series proposal

I've been wanting to ask this for a while, but haven't found exactly the right place to, so I might as well just throw this up. I've started (with some help, of course) an article titled "Arizona statewide elections, 2006" about, as you can probably guess, elections in the US State of Arizona for State government positions that are decided by all voters statewide (meaning it excludes Federal elections). I think this could be expanded into a series, 'laterally' for all US states and 'chronologically' for all such elections going back to when each State was established. My question/proposal/whatnot is where would I go to let other elections-minded Wikipedians know about the new proposal and if there's any sort of agreement that needs to be hammered out regarding the composition of the articles and any tables involved. Thanks. --JMurphy 20:09, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

There doesn't seem to be a WikiProject:US state elections. You might want to start that and advertise it. User:Zoe|(talk) 21:36, 14 February 2006 (UTC)


????

Whats this all about? [7] Yellowmellow45 18:36, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Applied sociology, looks like. I wonder how this will affect our popularity among Muslims. Anyone know how the Arabic Wikipedia is handling the Muhammad cartoon issue? ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 19:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
There was also some previous disccusion of the Baghdad Museum thing here. Though I think it's an intriguing idea, his report is actually almost entirely talk page archives; it would be a bit more interesting if he really gave his own analysis. As to the Arabic Wikipedia, see for yourself. They've gone with the "show-the-less-offensive-cartoons" option.--Pharos 19:27, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

What is ConRunner?

see this It looks like wikipedia. It's copying material from wikipedia. so what is the point?

This seems to be a wiki using the MediaWiki software dedicated to information about conventions. Beyond that, mirroring Wikipedia is the latest internet fad, just like web portals once were. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 18:25, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Doubleplusgood

Apparently the "spam filter" blocks legitimate links too. I'm prevented from editing the Concerns section on my user page. This is absurd, blatant censorship. The developers should read 1984 again. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 01:50, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

It has some false positives. I really don't think the devs have a vested interest. I wouldn't mind seeing this faulty filter ripped out though until something better can be devised. Deco 02:30, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure this is a technical problem, not censorship. I remember a community magazine website I once couldn't link to just because there were a bunch of numbers (the community's ZIP code) in the magazine's name and URL; apparently a long series of numbers is one of the spam blocker triggers. I have to ask now, just how useful is that thing anyway?--Pharos 07:57, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
I can't see any way this could be a technical problem. www.kapitalism.net belongs to Lir. Many users don't like Lir or Lir's opinions. It seems obvious someone in power is not mature enough to accept the existence of criticism. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 13:37, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
Have a look at m:Spam blacklist. The comment on Lir's site says: "Lir's site - he's been spamming it (evading his arbcom block at the same time)" Johnleemk | Talk 18:30, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
And Eequor wonders why she keeps getting voted down when she applies for adminship. I thought you were past all of the admin cabal nonsense. User:Zoe|(talk) 21:34, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Russian Olympians

Russian Wikipedia has now bio-stubs about almost all Russian Olympians at Turin, see ru:Категория:Спортсмены России --213.170.65.38 11:23, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

followup on Philadelphia Inquirer story

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a critical story out [8], and a more critical interview with an editor [9], but the story by Andy Myer states "I logged my name into Wikipedia and was appalled to discover the mischief that Web hooligans have been up to in my own biographical information." and goes on to list a bunch of obvious falsehoods. First problem - there are no articles for Andy Myer, Andrew Myer, or Andy Meyers, Andrew Meyers, Andy Meyer, Andrew Meyer, Andy Myers, Andrew Myers. I don't see a relevant deletion either. Thinking they had somehow misattributed their writer to the editor who was bemoaning the lack of credibility, I checked and there is no John Timpane. Anyone else have any ideas on what article our good friend Andy is talking about? - BanyanTree 15:17, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

I assume this was intended as a tongue-in-cheek followup to the original news of the changes wrought by Capitol Hill staffers. Read his "corrections" closely! -- DS1953 talk 16:08, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
Ah, you are correct. I had gone straight to the wiki and didn't read the last several sentences closely. Thanks, BanyanTree 16:20, 16 February 2006 (UTC)


Merchandise

The wikimedia foundation makes comparatively little from selling shirts, so I've put together a new store for them on spreadshirt (which has higher quality plot prints, not just digital prints -- and which I am not in any way affiliated with) and come up with a few new designs and a fashion-y logo-ish thing. (I'm not a designer by trade, so I'm sure these could be improved on.)

The store is here -- let me know what you think (though for god's sake don't buy anything from it yet; nobody but the hosting/shirtmaking company will get any money). Tlogmer 08:24, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Question on user access

Hi, I hope this is the right place to ask for this. I asked for a new password since somehow the one I remembered typing was rejected, but I haven't received any new passwords in my mail accounts. This could mean that my user was registered with an e-mail I don't have anymore since I change my broadband provider. Could you help me or tell me how to solve this problem? I didn't have more than a few edits, so don't mind me if doing something about this is too complicated. Just let me know. Thanks 200.59.172.82 14:29, 8 February 2006 (UTC) User:Andraax

www.wikipedia.org.nz

Someone has registered www.wikipedia.org.nz. They're running a wiki on it, but not making any attempt to pass it off as wikipedia apart from the domain name. What if anything should we do about this? GeorgeStepanek brought this up on someone's talk page.-gadfium 21:15, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

If you would like any assistance in drafting the letter or challenging the owner of this domain then I have a lot of experience from my lawsuit with Scientology over scienTOMogy and I would be happy to help. It's a cut and dried case and no lawyers need be involved (see this site for NZ domain dispute resolution info. Just contact me from my user page. Glen Stollery 12:40, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

The foundation's legal people are looking into this. --mav 13:17, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Please take a look at the discussion currently taking place at the NZ notice board over this issue. This was my last post with "dramatic" as he is arguing that as 'wikipedia' is not a legal trademark in NZ (you can visit the NZ trademark office online here) that getting the domain back will be difficult - this is nonsense as I have written in my post:

"dramatic" please argue in subjects in which you are knowledgeable; You're obviously a smart guy but please... it may make it "harder" but as Wikipedia is a famous trademark and they are obviously trying to pass themselves off as wikiwi (as you stated no disclaimer and even then they are WIKIWI not WIKIPEDIA) so why do they need the domain name? Yu argument that they are non-profit is redundant as neither is Wikipedia and they still have a "donations" button so people may be donating to them under the false impression they are donating to Wikipedia. Finally, I fail to see what relevance my having a user page there has relevance at all in this matter (I can just see the judge "Sorry Jimmy your application to have this domain revoked from wikiwi is hereby denied due to Glen Stollery having a user page there. Motion dismissed.") If anything this illustrates your incredible lack of knowledge of trademark law in this country, whereby I have had 3 trademark infringement threats against me (all have been dropped), one $300,000 lawsuit, one US$100,000 threat from the Church of Scientology (see ScienTOMogy), successful had two domain squatters relinquish the domains back to me, and a NZ high court injunction taken against myself and my company, and have never once lost. What positive outcome do you attempt to achieve from your posts anyway? They make no constructive suggestions, just bate and negate any made by others. I see where your nick came from - very apt. Now if you have nothing positive to add why pipe down and let users like myself and George actually try to remedy this issue okay? Glen Stollery (My contributions) 05:49, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Consequently if would like some assistance in this matter I would be honored to assist (free of charge of course) and I believe lawyers not even be required. Email me [10] to see my user talk page. Thanks! Glen Stollery (My contributions) 05:49, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

At this stage I'd rather to leave it up to mav and the foundation's legal people, so I'd prefer not to comment further. I'm just happy that we've reached the right people, and that they're on to it already. GeorgeStepanek\talk 06:20, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
Take a look at this slap in the face: http://www.wikipedia.org.nz/index.php?title=Wikiwi_breaches_copyright_on_Wikipedia Clarkefreak ∞ 20:56, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Remember that it's a wiki, and that page was created by an anonymous editor (who has made no other contributions there [or here]). As such, it isn't any indication of the opinions of the site founders. They may not be aware of it.-gadfium 22:22, 17 February 2006 (UTC)


Chile educational use images

The Category:Chile educational use images, from Template:Chile-Educational-Use, is incorrect because the article 38 of Chilean Intellectual Property Law not establish a "chilean fair use", then only it establishes a right to mention written works (10 lines), according to this regulation. (reglamento). This template now includes the two involved legal norms (law and regulation) that explains this situation.

PD: Excuse me for my english ;) --Yakoo 21:29, 18 February 2006 (UTC)


User pages

Me and four other users have had their User pages changed by User talk:69.138.229.246. Not vandalism, just removing underscores and changing them into spaces and other stuff. Anyone have any thoughts about what to do? It's all harmless so it is not an issue to just ignore it. . . Banana04131 01:19, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Often bots are used to automatically fix things in large numbers of pages, and aren't written to distinguish namespaces properly. This sometimes results in this type of edit. Or someone might just be trying to help out, unfamiliar with our general convention of not editing the comments of others. I wouldn't worry. Deco 05:53, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Different point; on my user page amongst my userboxes I have a message saying something to do with speedy deletion. I don't want my user page to be deleted, and I also don't know what I am supposed to do about this. Can someone help me? --The1exile 22:58, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

That message is about one of your userboxes - specifically Template:user POV userbox. Don't worry, it doesn't apply to your whole user page. The message lets you know that the userbox template may be deleted soon, which would leave an odd-looking link on your page. FreplySpang (talk) 23:12, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

If you would like to keep the userbox there, even if it is deleted as a regularly used userbox, then edit your page and replace {{user POV userbox}} with {{subst:user POV userbox}} ASAP. That way, the raw text of the userbox will be placed on you page, rather than drawing down the template every time your page is opened. Grutness...wha? 00:51, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Footnotes

Quick question: Should footnotes (whether generated by {{ref}} or by Cite.php) be used to provide additional information when including it in an article might be overly cumbersome? For example, a footnote could do a good job of simplifying the massive sequence of names at the beginning of Zeus. Also, if they should be used in such a manner, what should be the criteria on when and how? Ingoolemo talk 23:30, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that can be a good use of footnotes. Generally I use them for short digressions on subjects that would interest a small number of readers. Durova 03:03, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
No, generally not. If it's worth mentioning, then there's probably a separate article where it would fit, so provide a crosss link instead. If it isn't worth putting in an article, then think seriously about whether it is really worth mentioning. One serious exception; tables where having long descriptions would make the table too wide to read easily. Mozzerati 19:52, 19 February 2006 (UTC)


Captcha

Has anyone else been given a captcha test on editing? I've just been presented with the following while attempting to comment on my talk page:

Your edit includes new URL links; as a protection against automated spam, you'll need to type in the words that appear in this image:
(What is this?)
File:Wiki captcha.png

It cannot be stressed enough that this is an extremely bad idea. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 17:38, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I got inputanode - cute! But a pathetic idea.--TheDoctor10 (talk|email) 17:39, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
In fact, come to think of it, WP's been going downhill a lot recently.--TheDoctor10 (talk|email) 17:40, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
I have to say, I don't completely hate it. A lot of my vandalism fighting is with spammers. Maybe if there's a way to make it only come up for anonymous IP users... Kafziel 18:53, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

The captcha was briefly enabled sitewide while investigating a vandalbot attack. This may happen from time to time. --Brion 20:04, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Looks like a good idea to me. Vandalism patrol takes a lot of effort - including finding vandalism from logged-in accounts. Rmhermen 14:25, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
I was introduced to it when wikipedia automatically logged me out and I had to log back in. That was a couple of days ago. Don't mind if it stops spam and vandals.–Dakota 21:46, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgh. Kim Bruning 22:03, 12 February 2006 (UTC) #include dislaimer.h; Not an endorsement of one, some, or either position. Just a statement about the need for this discussion to exit. #include panic.h; God No! The captcha's have caught up with me! Can I never stop running?

Actually, more seriously, The appearence of captchas often indicates to me that a particular site has Jumped the shark. <Scratches back of head>, hence my horror here. :-/ Kim Bruning 22:08, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Color me confused, why isn't everyone happy as clams that we have an additional impediment to vandalbots, spammers and sockpuppets. Captcha's indicates to me a website has become popular enough to warrant them. I'd appreciate it if someone eloquently informed me why on Earth this is bad idea? And why it shouldn't have been implemented months ago. (PS: I'm talking about new users registering, etc.) - RoyBoy 800 06:27, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

  • stops the visually impaired (blind & others not able to use graphical software) editing
  • can be automatically worked around and there are perl libraries to do so, which are better at it than many humans
  • can be worked around by selling porn for captcha solving
  • wastes user time
  • costs processing time
  • etc.
19:47, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Quality Surveys of Wikipedia

I'm searching for quality surveys of Wikipedia. E.g. lists of random articles and analysis of how good they are / what is wrong with them etc. In particular, there was one done near the end of last year and announced on the Village Pump, but now I can't find it, however, whilst searching for it I started coming across a set of other ones and listing them.

a) anybody know of any surveys at all, please tell me or add them to my list page.

b) do you have any hints for finding the recent survey? It included quality checks and statistics about the number of citations in each article. If you find it, please notify me on my talk page.

c) if you know any places to merge my research, please also tell me about that.

Thanks for your help. Mozzerati 20:38, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:External peer review --WS 20:53, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks very much. Adding it to my list. However, the survey I am most looking for was done internally so it isn't on the list unfortunately. Best hint so far ... maybe a user name beginning with C ... Mozzerati 22:28, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Now I found what I was looking for, and more. It's on the my list page; however, please feel free to add more things there if you know about something I haven't found. Thanks for all the help. Mozzerati 23:11, 20 February 2006 (UTC)


Seen this??

Have any of you guys seen this website: www.wikipediaclassaction.org ('.' changed to 'DOT' by Ingoolemo, to help lower the website's google rank.)? Its misinterpretation of Wikipedia is unbelievable. Has this been talked about somewhere already? Redux 22:26, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it has. To summarize, they've been around for ages, and nothing has come of it yet. It seems unlikely that anything will come of it anytime soon, if ever. – ClockworkSoul 22:35, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
Good to know. But it's worth pointing out (as Sasquatch did in the discussion linked above), that there's material for a lawsuit by the Wikimedia foundation against the owners of that website. Let's see: there's the slandering; copyright infringments by using the Wikipedia logo (I really doubt that they have consent for that), the "Wikipedia" name in their denomination (which can be misleading) and the copying of this website's skin (as part of the disparaging Wikipedia intention). Redux 22:46, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
You're probably right, but it's probably not worth the effort. – ClockworkSoul 22:52, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
That site is scam to get ad hits. Please ignore it. Kaldari 00:44, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
It may be a scam site, however, the new articles it points to have legitimate links to Wikipedia User pages and articles which now have me very concerned. Lady Aleena (sig buggy)
If these news articles are from a site called OfficialWire, it's from the same people who created that website. See QuakeAID and n:Wikinews:Story preparation/Wikipedia class action lawsuit linked to possible earthquake charity fraud for more information. --cesarb 20:53, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
I understand that completely, however, in those "news articles," there are links to valid Wikipedia users and articles on Wikipedia that have me concerned. So, no matter how invalid those "news articles" are, the valid Wikipedia articles and user pages that those articles point to are alarming. Lady Aleena (sig buggy)

Suggestion

First, thank you for having such a superb reference. I have a suggestion. I usually connect to Wikipedia to search a particular subject. I imagine many other people do the same thing. It would be helpful to have the cursor (text selector) come up in the search box. People could then just type in their request and hit enter.

Thank you.

David B. Gropper, M.D.

A useful feature, but you can hit Alt-F to move the cursor there too. --Golbez 02:19, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
Doesn't seem to work in Internet Explorer: opens the 'File' menu instead. Ingoolemo talk 23:32, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Main Page FAQ#Why doesn't the cursor appear in the search box, like with Google? seems to be relevant. - BanyanTree 03:36, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm glad that the cursor does not come up, as I hate having to get rid of the cursor every time a page loads to be able to scroll with the up and down arrows. -- Kjkolb 08:18, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Mailing list?

Anybody know what the deal is on the WikiEN-l mailing list? I subscribed to it a week or so ago, and I've sent two or three messages to it, and I got acknowledgements saying they were being held pending moderator approval, but then... nothing. How long does moderator approval normally take, and what does it take to be able to post without waiting for approval (as the regulars on the list seem to be able to)? --Steve Summit (talk) 16:20, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I think the theory is that if your first post looks reasonable then you get moved to the un-moderated list. This obviously hasn't happened with you. I think User:David Gerard (among other people who I can't remember right now) operate the mailing list so you might want to speak to him on his talk page.--Cherry blossom tree 11:26, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. WIll do. --Steve Summit (talk) 13:58, 22 February 2006 (UTC)


Spam

An editor only posts links to softdrinkguide.com (not even to the specific page of this site):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=TheBreeze

Is there a place (other than the articles themselves) to handle this sort of problem, e.g. by automatically removing all his edits? Apokrif 18:59, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

If a site is regularly spammed, it can be added to a blacklist. However, if it's low-grade spamming activity, better to handle it by reverting him. Matthew Brown (Morven) (T:C) 22:45, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
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