This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 25 | ← | Archive 30 | Archive 31 | Archive 32 | Archive 33 | Archive 34 | Archive 35 |
I am extremely unhappy about the fact that major changes to the introduction of the main page is now being made in a new subsection, even though there is a link up the top. I did NOT give permission for my text to be moved in a place that is out of the way! When and who decided that we would do this? - Ta bu shi da yu 13:04, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I can understand you're not happy it's been moved - I was suprised at first - but it does kinda make sense, not having it spread down this page mixed up with other stuff. The new subpage has also been linked to from the Village pump and Request for Comments, to draw attention to it. Dan100 16:38, Dec 25, 2004 (UTC)
leonardo davinchi -> Leonardo da Vinci
On the "selected anniversaries", it mentions Boxing Day as being today, which is obviously incorrect. Although it could be construed as being an "anniversary" of Boxing Day in most other years, it is misleading and suggests that today is Boxing Day. -- Thomas 11:34, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I think I know what he means, I thought the same thing - how can you have an anniversary of a 'day'? It's either Boxing Day or it's not, it can't be an anniversary of boxing day. Or another way around - today is boxing day, so today can't also be an anniversary of it. Dan100 12:38, Dec 26, 2004 (UTC)
We have lived in Texas for over 50 years and have been seeing extraordinarily large bobcats in the last few years. They are more of a russet color than the typical sandy bobcats we have always seen and are much taller with larger heads.They are being seen along the Trinity River south of the DFW metroplex where the terrain begins to change to small hills, rocky cliffs, and a number of lakes. Mountain lions have been prevalent in this area for many years. Could it be they are hybrids of bobcats and the mountain lions? Also, there are a number of exotic animal parks and ranchers who own various types of wild game and hybrids in the vicinity. Or could it just be there is enough genetic variability to allow for changes in diet that would lead to such enormous bobcats?
I have refreshed the Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion page several times now, but it will not completely display, so I can't get to the bottom of the page to post a new comment, so I'm going to do it here. Why are all of the VfD listings from Dec 20-Dec 24 repeated on the Wikipedia: Votes for deletion page? 172.198.86.142 22:41, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm removing this from "In the news": "Early reports indicate that pro-democracy opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko is leading."
The "pro-democracy" part indicates that his opponent is somehow anti-democracy or less democratic, which is clearly POV. Spazzm 00:28, 2004 Dec 27 (UTC)
THis is referred to on the main page but withut a link to the article. Where is it?
Hi, just to let you know the Shroud of Turin page seems to have been vandalised. My computer won't let me edit it so I thought I'd post up here so someone can fix it.
FUGIO: literally, Latin for "I flee".
"Fugio" was one of three mottoes the American Founding Fathers ordered to be used in our earliest currency ? twice, on 17 February 1776 (prior to the Declaration of Independence) and on 6 July 1787 (while the Constitutional Convention was in session). In that context, "Fugio" was placed on the obverse of coins and paper money, next to a sundial (representing "Time"), so that together they meant "I, Time, am fleeting", or "Time Flies".
The other motto on the obverse was "Mind Your Business" (in English). On the reverse was the motto "We Are One" (in English). The design of that currency is sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin.
[On 4 July 1776, immediately after the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress appointed a committee to design a Great Seal of the United States. The members were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The motto "E Pluribus Unum" ("From Many, One") was considered for inclusion in the Great Seal; Congress tabled that design on 20 August 1776. The final design for the Great Seal was approved on 20 June 1782; it included "E Pluribus Unum" which remained as the national motto until 30 July 1956 when we were dis-united by the new motto "In God We Trust".]
[The first use of the words "In God We Trust" on currency was on a Union 2-cent coin in 1864, over a year before the end of the Civil War.]
Consistency with the Wikipedia:Naming conventions policy regarding the non-capitalization of second and subsequent title words that are not proper nouns. I assume the reason for it to be titled Main Page is for aesthetics, that the lowercase p does not look balanced. I admit wholeheartedly, I do not care for this naming convention policy, and I cite aesthetics and balance as my reasons. But even Caesar's wife must be above reproach, and thus Wikipedia itself must stand tall before the wagon of her conventions. — ExplorerCDT 21:32, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Have there been animated GIFs on the main page before? I'm not principally opposed to one — as long as it doesn't loop, like this one. Animation is a perpetual eye-catcher and not a good thing to add to the main page. Have it play three times and keep the final frame, or something. I acknowledge its usefulness in this instance, but please, no looping, no matter how kewl the animation. JRM 09:01, 2004 Dec 29 (UTC)
A bunch of large pages like Google, Yahoo! and [http://www.amazon.com Amazon.com] has put up links where you can donate money to disaster-relief organizations because of the earth-quake. I think Wikipedia should have one on the main page too. It doesn't necassarily need to be on the top, but wouldn't it be nice to have it just below the browse bar? I quickly made a little page that shows how it might look. What do you think? Gkhan 17:32, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)
"The death toll from the Indian Ocean Earthquake and subsequent tsunamis on December 26 has exceeded 80,000 people in 12 countries from Malaysia to Somalia." And South Africa, which is outside those bounds. Grutness| hello? 23:27, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
First of all let us condole the death of many people .Had this occured if the South and South-east Asian Governments had been proactive ?
I support this. - Ta bu shi da yu 04:35, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I must say i object to the removal of the banner inserted by Ugen64, sannse removed it stating removing donations box on the suggestion of Jimbo. link is now included in "in the news".
Of course it's still there, but alot less noticeable, and with the lack of noticeability arguably fewer people will donate, and after reading comments such as these: ( 1, 2.), just here on wikipedia not to mention whats been going around other news sources i really don't think it's such a big thing to ask to have that put back up if it could help just one person.
We put a similar notice when we reached one million articles, i think we can afford something similar when +100K people have already died with thousands more comming, especially if we can somehow do our part in preventing any of it. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:50, 2004 Dec 31 (UTC)
I really ought to comment, as I did the edit. I have to say I agree with Jimbo here. It's not so much about this particular campaign, but a more general worry that this is setting a precedent ... where do we stand the next time there is a terrible war, or a famine, or terrorist attack? Can we remain neutral and unbiased while having a donations banner on our main page in those cases? Of course I have great sympathy for those involved, but I honestly feel that this is not a good idea on our main page. Isn't there some other way we can promote this? Perhaps on a community page or something? Or on as many user pages as possible? -- sannse (talk) 22:14, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
You won't get anywhere trying to persuade Jimbo Wales to allow Wikipedia to be used to help victims of the tsunami. Jimbo Wales is a notorious follower of Ayn Rand's ideas, and therefore would have little sympathy for organised efforts to reduce the suffering caused by the tsunami, see [2]. See his own Wikipedia article at Jimbo Wales ? "He admires the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand". - XED. talk. stalk. mail. csb 01:20, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Stop reserving places in hell for people who don't agree with you, please. Of course
Sannse is overgeneralizing by throwing human-caused violence and natural disasters on one big heap. Yes, we can remain "neutral" even if we "blame" the earthquake for "badly" killing tens of thousands of people, and even if we then encourage people to give money to relief funds. But as far as analogies go: has everyone looked at the
britannica.com homepage? That's right, no donations. How about the
New York Times article linked from there? Bupkis. In fact, the makers of those sites must feel the fires of eternal damnation grow pretty hot around them, because they blatantly advertise for themselves instead of asking money for relief.
Stop using corporate sites as examples. Corporations cannot feel concern. Their employees might, and since corporations are not harmed by efforts to get people to donate (and in fact strengthen their public image with it) they'll endorse it. Don't give me the "even Microsoft is doing it and you know profit-oriented those guys are" argument, it just doesn't wash.
And there is a question of precedent here, no matter how moved you are personally. (Yes, I have donated.) How can we live with ourselves by agreeing with everyone that this warrants us encouraging donations while every other natural disaster does not? Isn't that a lovely statement for a neutral encyclopedia? You can make your arguments about "precedent" another time. Sounds like a neat contradiction in terms.
Back to the main point. Donate your life's savings. Get all your friends to do it. Yes, even urge Wikipedia to do it, you can. The argument's not over. All I'm saying is this: don't label everyone who doesn't immediately fall over to do anything possible in support an evil person. Are you going to argue next that Jimbo is killing people by not doing enough? If so, I can think of plenty of people you've killed that way.
This is just a "community" versus "encyclopedia" issue. The community wants to help out, of course, while the encyclopedia really has nothing to do with it. Should we let the community override the encyclopedia this time? I can't tell you — I'm not qualified to speak for the community. Personally, I would allow it. (Surprised? You shouldn't be.)
JRM 01:23, 2005 Jan 1 (UTC)
I sincerely and deeply agree with every word you are saying David. A picture says a thousand words. Hopefully these can help save hundreds of thousands of lives:
— RaD Man ( talk) 02:02, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I disagree wholeheartedly with this removal by sannse. Who cares if it was on the suggestion of Jimbo Wales? If he has a beef with it being up there, then he can exercise his supreme powers as billpayer of this website and remove it himself. Remember the unsightly red-bordered begging banner on every Wikipedia page when we were raising money for Wikipedia? This banner was not very obtrusive. This is one of those situations when people need to pull their fingers out and shut up about meaningless stuff like 'remaining neutral in times of crisis'. It's a natural disaster, sannse. There is no 'other side' towards which we need to remain neutral. We're not posting a link saying "click here to donate money to the US War Effort in xxx country", it's a "click here to help save lives" style of link. I don't care if Jimbo Wales 'authorised' the banner's removal, he was deeply wrong. - Mark 05:50, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I don't mind the donations box, so long as we all consider this to not be a precedent-setting action. We just need to keep in mind the unprecedented nature of this disaster and act accordingly. I would really hate to see the Main Page turned into a place where anybody on the Internet could have a chance to expose their cause to the many eyeballs that see this page. -- mav 16:15, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
JRM put it wisely: This is just a "community" versus "encyclopedia" issue. The community wants to help out, of course, while the encyclopedia really has nothing to do with it. Do we, as a community, want to ask people to donate? We certainly seem to. But should we as an encyclopedia get into general fund-raising? Probably not. I say move the banner to the Community portal. Zocky 21:27, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It's not like these people had food before everybody came in arms to donate money. How about all the starving people in Africa? Masterhomer 05:12, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Where are we getting our tsunami death-toll numbers? They are consistently higher than all other major news sources I have seen. Wikipedia should be the most conservative source when it comes to this kind of information. These numbers are hard to verify, and news organizations take a gamble and race to jack up their numbers to appear to have the latest information. (I work for the media.) -- Andrew Phelps 17:16, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
It still constantly shows 155,000 but now it has exeeded 165,000 -- 23:34, 9 Jan 2005
I don't care that Jimbo doesn't like it. I don't care that Brittanica haven't got one. There is clear community consensus for it and let's be honest here, it is the right thing to do.
If any admin is reading this, please restore it at the earliest possible opportunity. Thanks in advance. Dan100 10:00, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)
Obviously I won't remove it, though I stand by my opinion (and yes, I've donated. and no, I'm not a heartless bitch) -- sannse (talk) 11:27, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
People, I've put it back. The objection (quite reasonable in my view) was that there were two links to the donations page. I've removed the one from WP:ITN and readded the donations box. - Ta bu shi da yu 15:58, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think the ability to e-mail an article to user or even subscribe to any updates to a topic would be really useful. Is that something easy to do?
Today's featured article is Johnny Cash that has a real strange new and not to a user attributed redirect to an unnamed page.
Can anyone enlighten me what`s going on? Deleteme42 00:35, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Don't know where to ask this question (sorry if it doesn't belong here), but what's the reason for all history pages having "no index, no follow" robot instructions, thus telling search engines not to index them? -- rydel 02:04, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
there has been some discussion on Template talk:Wikipedialang about how to best list WPs in other languages. We have developed a Template based on word count rather than article count. A summary of the reasoning follows:
The main motivation is the observation that mean article lengths vary significantly across different WPs, and there is some evidence that the present hierarchical arrangement in tiers based on article count has the effect on some editors of smaller WPs to create lots of very short articles in order to rise above the 1,000 or 10,000 threshold. An extreme case seems to be sa:. Less extreme, but prominent, is sv: which comes up 5th by article count, but only (a still impressive) 9th by word count.
The aims of the template were summarized as conveying that:
I am aware that word count is not a precise measure either (especially in the cases of Chinese and Japanese), but it has turned out to be more reliable than article count. The proposed Template is in my opinion also superior by consicely providing additional information (word count; en: has 143M words) and does without the optical separation in three or four major tiers. The 1/4M and 1/2M number naturally allow smaller tiers at the 'bottom', and 1/4M (rougly 1,000 printed pages?) seems a good threshold for 'usefulness' as an encyclopedia.
Please do not immediately revert to the article count template, even if unhappy with this change, but comment here or on Template talk:Wikipedialang, Template:Wikipedialang (word count) so that we have a chance to improve this approach. dab (ᛏ) 11:05, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
accuracy: e.g. the size of de: in percent of en:
and sv: in terms of en:
finally, ja: in terms of en:
of course none of these methods are accurate (to some 20%, maybe), but I think these comparisons show that they give at least a meaningful idea. The point of changing from article to word count is to reduce the "award" for creating lots of articles with no content. dab (ᛏ) 16:32, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think an article count might be more accessible than a word count for the reader. I personally have no idea what to make out of 10 versus 100 million words, but 10 versus 100 thousand articles is somehow tangible. In any case the list should NOT include the word count for each language. This granularity is useless to the visitor and in fact it makes the list harder to read. Splitting the list into groups, as with the article count, is a superior solution. Fredrik | talk 22:57, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I agree with
dab that there is a negative side-effect of listing languages with article counts on the main page. For example in the Hungarian Wikipedia there has been sort of a campaign to reach 5000 articles before the end of 2004 and several editors measure our "performance" comparing our article count to other Wikipedias and following our position in the list. A lot of editors do get obsessed with this single number. :)
Dab's proposal would be one way to deal with this undesirable side-effect.
Nyenyec 15:43, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Anyone else find the mainpage is running wider than normal. I have to scroll to see it all at 800x600, never used to before. -- user:zanimum
The "In the News" box has the first item related to the Indian Ocean Earthquake and shows a New Turkish Lira coin, which is related to the second item.
Shouldn't the picture be lighned with the second item instead of the first?
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 25 | ← | Archive 30 | Archive 31 | Archive 32 | Archive 33 | Archive 34 | Archive 35 |
I am extremely unhappy about the fact that major changes to the introduction of the main page is now being made in a new subsection, even though there is a link up the top. I did NOT give permission for my text to be moved in a place that is out of the way! When and who decided that we would do this? - Ta bu shi da yu 13:04, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I can understand you're not happy it's been moved - I was suprised at first - but it does kinda make sense, not having it spread down this page mixed up with other stuff. The new subpage has also been linked to from the Village pump and Request for Comments, to draw attention to it. Dan100 16:38, Dec 25, 2004 (UTC)
leonardo davinchi -> Leonardo da Vinci
On the "selected anniversaries", it mentions Boxing Day as being today, which is obviously incorrect. Although it could be construed as being an "anniversary" of Boxing Day in most other years, it is misleading and suggests that today is Boxing Day. -- Thomas 11:34, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I think I know what he means, I thought the same thing - how can you have an anniversary of a 'day'? It's either Boxing Day or it's not, it can't be an anniversary of boxing day. Or another way around - today is boxing day, so today can't also be an anniversary of it. Dan100 12:38, Dec 26, 2004 (UTC)
We have lived in Texas for over 50 years and have been seeing extraordinarily large bobcats in the last few years. They are more of a russet color than the typical sandy bobcats we have always seen and are much taller with larger heads.They are being seen along the Trinity River south of the DFW metroplex where the terrain begins to change to small hills, rocky cliffs, and a number of lakes. Mountain lions have been prevalent in this area for many years. Could it be they are hybrids of bobcats and the mountain lions? Also, there are a number of exotic animal parks and ranchers who own various types of wild game and hybrids in the vicinity. Or could it just be there is enough genetic variability to allow for changes in diet that would lead to such enormous bobcats?
I have refreshed the Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion page several times now, but it will not completely display, so I can't get to the bottom of the page to post a new comment, so I'm going to do it here. Why are all of the VfD listings from Dec 20-Dec 24 repeated on the Wikipedia: Votes for deletion page? 172.198.86.142 22:41, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm removing this from "In the news": "Early reports indicate that pro-democracy opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko is leading."
The "pro-democracy" part indicates that his opponent is somehow anti-democracy or less democratic, which is clearly POV. Spazzm 00:28, 2004 Dec 27 (UTC)
THis is referred to on the main page but withut a link to the article. Where is it?
Hi, just to let you know the Shroud of Turin page seems to have been vandalised. My computer won't let me edit it so I thought I'd post up here so someone can fix it.
FUGIO: literally, Latin for "I flee".
"Fugio" was one of three mottoes the American Founding Fathers ordered to be used in our earliest currency ? twice, on 17 February 1776 (prior to the Declaration of Independence) and on 6 July 1787 (while the Constitutional Convention was in session). In that context, "Fugio" was placed on the obverse of coins and paper money, next to a sundial (representing "Time"), so that together they meant "I, Time, am fleeting", or "Time Flies".
The other motto on the obverse was "Mind Your Business" (in English). On the reverse was the motto "We Are One" (in English). The design of that currency is sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin.
[On 4 July 1776, immediately after the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress appointed a committee to design a Great Seal of the United States. The members were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The motto "E Pluribus Unum" ("From Many, One") was considered for inclusion in the Great Seal; Congress tabled that design on 20 August 1776. The final design for the Great Seal was approved on 20 June 1782; it included "E Pluribus Unum" which remained as the national motto until 30 July 1956 when we were dis-united by the new motto "In God We Trust".]
[The first use of the words "In God We Trust" on currency was on a Union 2-cent coin in 1864, over a year before the end of the Civil War.]
Consistency with the Wikipedia:Naming conventions policy regarding the non-capitalization of second and subsequent title words that are not proper nouns. I assume the reason for it to be titled Main Page is for aesthetics, that the lowercase p does not look balanced. I admit wholeheartedly, I do not care for this naming convention policy, and I cite aesthetics and balance as my reasons. But even Caesar's wife must be above reproach, and thus Wikipedia itself must stand tall before the wagon of her conventions. — ExplorerCDT 21:32, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Have there been animated GIFs on the main page before? I'm not principally opposed to one — as long as it doesn't loop, like this one. Animation is a perpetual eye-catcher and not a good thing to add to the main page. Have it play three times and keep the final frame, or something. I acknowledge its usefulness in this instance, but please, no looping, no matter how kewl the animation. JRM 09:01, 2004 Dec 29 (UTC)
A bunch of large pages like Google, Yahoo! and [http://www.amazon.com Amazon.com] has put up links where you can donate money to disaster-relief organizations because of the earth-quake. I think Wikipedia should have one on the main page too. It doesn't necassarily need to be on the top, but wouldn't it be nice to have it just below the browse bar? I quickly made a little page that shows how it might look. What do you think? Gkhan 17:32, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)
"The death toll from the Indian Ocean Earthquake and subsequent tsunamis on December 26 has exceeded 80,000 people in 12 countries from Malaysia to Somalia." And South Africa, which is outside those bounds. Grutness| hello? 23:27, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
First of all let us condole the death of many people .Had this occured if the South and South-east Asian Governments had been proactive ?
I support this. - Ta bu shi da yu 04:35, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I must say i object to the removal of the banner inserted by Ugen64, sannse removed it stating removing donations box on the suggestion of Jimbo. link is now included in "in the news".
Of course it's still there, but alot less noticeable, and with the lack of noticeability arguably fewer people will donate, and after reading comments such as these: ( 1, 2.), just here on wikipedia not to mention whats been going around other news sources i really don't think it's such a big thing to ask to have that put back up if it could help just one person.
We put a similar notice when we reached one million articles, i think we can afford something similar when +100K people have already died with thousands more comming, especially if we can somehow do our part in preventing any of it. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:50, 2004 Dec 31 (UTC)
I really ought to comment, as I did the edit. I have to say I agree with Jimbo here. It's not so much about this particular campaign, but a more general worry that this is setting a precedent ... where do we stand the next time there is a terrible war, or a famine, or terrorist attack? Can we remain neutral and unbiased while having a donations banner on our main page in those cases? Of course I have great sympathy for those involved, but I honestly feel that this is not a good idea on our main page. Isn't there some other way we can promote this? Perhaps on a community page or something? Or on as many user pages as possible? -- sannse (talk) 22:14, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
You won't get anywhere trying to persuade Jimbo Wales to allow Wikipedia to be used to help victims of the tsunami. Jimbo Wales is a notorious follower of Ayn Rand's ideas, and therefore would have little sympathy for organised efforts to reduce the suffering caused by the tsunami, see [2]. See his own Wikipedia article at Jimbo Wales ? "He admires the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand". - XED. talk. stalk. mail. csb 01:20, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Stop reserving places in hell for people who don't agree with you, please. Of course
Sannse is overgeneralizing by throwing human-caused violence and natural disasters on one big heap. Yes, we can remain "neutral" even if we "blame" the earthquake for "badly" killing tens of thousands of people, and even if we then encourage people to give money to relief funds. But as far as analogies go: has everyone looked at the
britannica.com homepage? That's right, no donations. How about the
New York Times article linked from there? Bupkis. In fact, the makers of those sites must feel the fires of eternal damnation grow pretty hot around them, because they blatantly advertise for themselves instead of asking money for relief.
Stop using corporate sites as examples. Corporations cannot feel concern. Their employees might, and since corporations are not harmed by efforts to get people to donate (and in fact strengthen their public image with it) they'll endorse it. Don't give me the "even Microsoft is doing it and you know profit-oriented those guys are" argument, it just doesn't wash.
And there is a question of precedent here, no matter how moved you are personally. (Yes, I have donated.) How can we live with ourselves by agreeing with everyone that this warrants us encouraging donations while every other natural disaster does not? Isn't that a lovely statement for a neutral encyclopedia? You can make your arguments about "precedent" another time. Sounds like a neat contradiction in terms.
Back to the main point. Donate your life's savings. Get all your friends to do it. Yes, even urge Wikipedia to do it, you can. The argument's not over. All I'm saying is this: don't label everyone who doesn't immediately fall over to do anything possible in support an evil person. Are you going to argue next that Jimbo is killing people by not doing enough? If so, I can think of plenty of people you've killed that way.
This is just a "community" versus "encyclopedia" issue. The community wants to help out, of course, while the encyclopedia really has nothing to do with it. Should we let the community override the encyclopedia this time? I can't tell you — I'm not qualified to speak for the community. Personally, I would allow it. (Surprised? You shouldn't be.)
JRM 01:23, 2005 Jan 1 (UTC)
I sincerely and deeply agree with every word you are saying David. A picture says a thousand words. Hopefully these can help save hundreds of thousands of lives:
— RaD Man ( talk) 02:02, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I disagree wholeheartedly with this removal by sannse. Who cares if it was on the suggestion of Jimbo Wales? If he has a beef with it being up there, then he can exercise his supreme powers as billpayer of this website and remove it himself. Remember the unsightly red-bordered begging banner on every Wikipedia page when we were raising money for Wikipedia? This banner was not very obtrusive. This is one of those situations when people need to pull their fingers out and shut up about meaningless stuff like 'remaining neutral in times of crisis'. It's a natural disaster, sannse. There is no 'other side' towards which we need to remain neutral. We're not posting a link saying "click here to donate money to the US War Effort in xxx country", it's a "click here to help save lives" style of link. I don't care if Jimbo Wales 'authorised' the banner's removal, he was deeply wrong. - Mark 05:50, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I don't mind the donations box, so long as we all consider this to not be a precedent-setting action. We just need to keep in mind the unprecedented nature of this disaster and act accordingly. I would really hate to see the Main Page turned into a place where anybody on the Internet could have a chance to expose their cause to the many eyeballs that see this page. -- mav 16:15, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
JRM put it wisely: This is just a "community" versus "encyclopedia" issue. The community wants to help out, of course, while the encyclopedia really has nothing to do with it. Do we, as a community, want to ask people to donate? We certainly seem to. But should we as an encyclopedia get into general fund-raising? Probably not. I say move the banner to the Community portal. Zocky 21:27, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It's not like these people had food before everybody came in arms to donate money. How about all the starving people in Africa? Masterhomer 05:12, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Where are we getting our tsunami death-toll numbers? They are consistently higher than all other major news sources I have seen. Wikipedia should be the most conservative source when it comes to this kind of information. These numbers are hard to verify, and news organizations take a gamble and race to jack up their numbers to appear to have the latest information. (I work for the media.) -- Andrew Phelps 17:16, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
It still constantly shows 155,000 but now it has exeeded 165,000 -- 23:34, 9 Jan 2005
I don't care that Jimbo doesn't like it. I don't care that Brittanica haven't got one. There is clear community consensus for it and let's be honest here, it is the right thing to do.
If any admin is reading this, please restore it at the earliest possible opportunity. Thanks in advance. Dan100 10:00, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)
Obviously I won't remove it, though I stand by my opinion (and yes, I've donated. and no, I'm not a heartless bitch) -- sannse (talk) 11:27, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
People, I've put it back. The objection (quite reasonable in my view) was that there were two links to the donations page. I've removed the one from WP:ITN and readded the donations box. - Ta bu shi da yu 15:58, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think the ability to e-mail an article to user or even subscribe to any updates to a topic would be really useful. Is that something easy to do?
Today's featured article is Johnny Cash that has a real strange new and not to a user attributed redirect to an unnamed page.
Can anyone enlighten me what`s going on? Deleteme42 00:35, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Don't know where to ask this question (sorry if it doesn't belong here), but what's the reason for all history pages having "no index, no follow" robot instructions, thus telling search engines not to index them? -- rydel 02:04, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
there has been some discussion on Template talk:Wikipedialang about how to best list WPs in other languages. We have developed a Template based on word count rather than article count. A summary of the reasoning follows:
The main motivation is the observation that mean article lengths vary significantly across different WPs, and there is some evidence that the present hierarchical arrangement in tiers based on article count has the effect on some editors of smaller WPs to create lots of very short articles in order to rise above the 1,000 or 10,000 threshold. An extreme case seems to be sa:. Less extreme, but prominent, is sv: which comes up 5th by article count, but only (a still impressive) 9th by word count.
The aims of the template were summarized as conveying that:
I am aware that word count is not a precise measure either (especially in the cases of Chinese and Japanese), but it has turned out to be more reliable than article count. The proposed Template is in my opinion also superior by consicely providing additional information (word count; en: has 143M words) and does without the optical separation in three or four major tiers. The 1/4M and 1/2M number naturally allow smaller tiers at the 'bottom', and 1/4M (rougly 1,000 printed pages?) seems a good threshold for 'usefulness' as an encyclopedia.
Please do not immediately revert to the article count template, even if unhappy with this change, but comment here or on Template talk:Wikipedialang, Template:Wikipedialang (word count) so that we have a chance to improve this approach. dab (ᛏ) 11:05, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
accuracy: e.g. the size of de: in percent of en:
and sv: in terms of en:
finally, ja: in terms of en:
of course none of these methods are accurate (to some 20%, maybe), but I think these comparisons show that they give at least a meaningful idea. The point of changing from article to word count is to reduce the "award" for creating lots of articles with no content. dab (ᛏ) 16:32, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think an article count might be more accessible than a word count for the reader. I personally have no idea what to make out of 10 versus 100 million words, but 10 versus 100 thousand articles is somehow tangible. In any case the list should NOT include the word count for each language. This granularity is useless to the visitor and in fact it makes the list harder to read. Splitting the list into groups, as with the article count, is a superior solution. Fredrik | talk 22:57, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I agree with
dab that there is a negative side-effect of listing languages with article counts on the main page. For example in the Hungarian Wikipedia there has been sort of a campaign to reach 5000 articles before the end of 2004 and several editors measure our "performance" comparing our article count to other Wikipedias and following our position in the list. A lot of editors do get obsessed with this single number. :)
Dab's proposal would be one way to deal with this undesirable side-effect.
Nyenyec 15:43, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Anyone else find the mainpage is running wider than normal. I have to scroll to see it all at 800x600, never used to before. -- user:zanimum
The "In the News" box has the first item related to the Indian Ocean Earthquake and shows a New Turkish Lira coin, which is related to the second item.
Shouldn't the picture be lighned with the second item instead of the first?