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Chinese WP is suffering mass attack from several IPs, continuously creating nonsense pages like "Shizhao再麻煩你砍一下吧44daf22d99161b01a4148a8c3cffedc4". Can the developers ban the feature of creating new pages in Chinese WP for a while? -- Samuel 18:11, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
Hello,
the chinese Wiki is experincing massiv vandalism with a bot and a proxy again. Please help.-- Philopp 18:13, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
Dear Sir, Can you give use the E-mail address or the Contact address of National Congress, actualy we want to give congratulation to Congress President Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, Please sir, help us in this matter, please give reply us on accesspuri@sancharnet.in, pointaccess@eth.net, dilu_mishra@yahoo.com.
With warm regards,
M/s. Access Point, Puri, Orissa India
Watchlists were temporarily cached to save server load. See Wikipedia talk:Watchlist help.
Where should Wikipedia awards be recorded? Discuss at Wikipedia talk:Trophy box
Quantum optics is a very lively field of current physics research. But so far we only have articles on its more application-related neighbouring field, laser science. I've done a start by writing the article quantum optics, but there's much to do: MOTs, optical tweezers, PDC, and the like should be covered as well. Any fellow physicists out there willing to help? Or other people knowing about it? ( Sanders muc)
As an example, the article Julio-Claudian family tree has a single image with the entire family tree. I'm wondering if it's possible to create a family tree that appears similar but has a feature linking the individual names in the tree to the articles about those people. Does the software exist to do this? MK 06:22, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
The May 2004 press release at Wikipedia:Press_releases/May_2004 looks to be about finished and, as it is nearing the end of May, should be finalized. Aside from quotes which may be added, it looks to be production quality. Anyone who has edits or comments should make them soon.
As for the proposed quotes, the first would be from Jimmy Wales the founder, which we don't have yet. The second is the five word acceptance speech that was delivered or will be delivered at the awards ceremony, which of course is dependant on a fact or decision about that. Also, it would be nice to be able to include the date and location of the ceremony, so anyone who has that information should step up to the plate.
Dear Sir, We are pleased to inform you that our company want to supply good quality of Football on very competitive prices. We are new in the Polish market. Please supply us useful addresses of the clubs and teams to offer such goods. Thanking you in advance, With best wishes, Syed Sajjad Haider Wolrdwide Marketing Chilanzar 3, House 69, Suite 39, Tashkent 700115 Uzbekistan Tel 00998712 778411 fax 778903
Is there a way to remove Vandalism from the edit history. My impression is that the general response to Vandalism is to just revert the edit, but I recently noticed a problem where the vandal also included the offensive text in the Edit Summary so that it continues to show up in the edit history. You can see an example on the page history for Ridley Scott or [1] --- Solipsist 06:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
What the hell happened to the automated selected anniversaries section? I thought that the English Wikipedia was not going to be upgraded until the ' variable in template messages bug' was fixed. This really pisses me off! Also, what happended to the background fill color for all non-article pages? The distinction before was a very useful one, now it is vague. So the only difference between Sandbox:maveric149, user:maveric149/sandbox, talk archive:Sandbox would be the tab at the top of those pages. This will only encourage the misuse of the article namespace and lessen the distinction between metadata and content.
I also see that some links to stub articles are showing up as red links for those with a stub threshold set. The new "blue" links have a very hard to read muted color and the external link icon is hideous. This is especially true for [1] wiki ref links in articles. So please:
And don't give me the "you can change your preferences" line since all of the above needs to be default. Also, is it just me or is the default font size way too small? -- mav 20:52, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Just wondering, how many is too many? I can't remember if I've asked this before, but someone is creating literally dozens of redirect pages for Japanese topics employing every combination of correct, incorrect and mixed romanization systems and misspellings he can think of, the vast overwhelming majority of which are not used at all or are exceedingly rarely used in Japanese or English. Some articles have 9 different redirect pages. So where do we draw the line? Exploding Boy 09:25, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to encourage everyone here to go take a myers briggs personality test (like this one) and then add yourself to Meta:Wikipedians by MBTI type. I'm curious to see how wikipedia's users compare to the general public. →Raul654 05:17, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
All of Wik's machinations have cause the history of the Vandalism in Progress page to be lost. It appears to be at Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress (other than Quagga's). Can somebody figure out how to get the history back and at the same time keep the current version of things on the ViP page? Rick K 02:07, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
I noticed to my surprise today that links to nonexistent image pages (of the form [[:image:this_is_not_an_image.png]]) do not show up in red: image:this_is_not_an_image.png. --Smack 00:25, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
The way I understand things now, sysops can quickly rollback a page by clicking a link on the page history, whereas anyone—even anons—can achieve the same effect by editing an old version of the page. Is there any reason for this difference? It seems to me that if anyone can revert a page, there's no point in making non-sysops go through an extra couple of clicks and pageloads (which can be a real pain on a slow server day). Does the rollback link do something sysop-only that I'm not aware of? If not, can the rest of us have the link? Thanks for reading. - Etaoin 05:49, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
Is there a formulated policy on items in books, films, television, etc.? For example, I am dealing with Stargate (film) and the TV show Stargate SG-1 and have encount ered many articles on items of the fictional universe, such as Jaffa (Stargate SG-1), George Hammond, and Goa'uld. I think these should be merged with one of the main articles or put in an article like "Stargate (universe)". The advantage of the second option is that many universes have multiple books, films, and shows, like Star Trek or Star Wars. This present on has a film and two TV shows. Another option would be to create a new namespace for fiction and use the same unique names for every item, with the parenthesis of the context, as it is done now. It would also allow for the fiction to be separated for certain releases or archives of the encyclopedia. Comments? Have I missed something obvious? - Centrx 23:48, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
A user asked me to roll back a page that had undergone several vandalism-reversion cycles, because the vandal had included rude remarks in the edit summaries. That is, he wanted the offensive edit summaries removed. I couldn't figure out how to do it. For the time being, I moved the page to an inconspicuous place, deleted the original page, then re-created it with the same contents. Advice welcome. Sorry if I missed something obvious. (The "rollback" function simply appears to be a convenient way to revert, and preserves all previous page history). Dpbsmith 22:28, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
Nick Berg conspiracy theories has been paralyzed by conflict for about a day now--would people please check it out? I've used up my 3 reverts for the day, and would appreciate someone stepping in to help mediate and hopefully bring this to a good resolution. See Talk:Nick Berg conspiracy theories for the full details. Yours, Meelar 17:11, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
Maybe this has been invented already, and maybe this isn't the best place to mention it, but...
If you are currently visiting Wikipedia as an excuse to waste time, you might be dissatisfied with the Random page link due to the high likelihood of arriving at some obscure little town in Arkansas (hopefully fixed in next version of Wikipedia which looks like it might have article categories).
As an alternative why not try The Wiki-Link Game. For the moment I've but the rules on my user page. -- Solipsist 13:12, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
There was an article about color consulation where I read it from Laurel Gazette. I would like to get in contact with the color consultant, Ms. Lopez from Hyattsville, Maryland. Will you be willing to give me her phone number or e-mail address where I can get in contact with Ms. Lopez. If not, you can give this message to Ms. Lopez to get in contact with me as: shodge913@aol.com I have been looking for a color consultant lately. Hopefully, I will be hearing from you soon. Thank you. Sherry Hodge shodge913@aol.com
Ms. Hodge, can you tell us what web site you think you're posting to? Rick K 01:43, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
Usually when perusing Wikipedia and reading articles for the first time, I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of writing and information. I've learned all kinds of things on all kinds of subjects — I'm sure everyone else here has had the same experience — and this has given me high expectations for the quality of the Wikipedia’s content. Unfortunately, I've lately been stumbling upon pages in very bad shape. My first reaction of course is to try to fix them. But, in another departure from the normal Wikipedia, these articles are practically impossible to edit.
The articles I'm talking about have one thing in common: their titles themselves are loaded. Take a look at Political Correctness, Anti-American sentiment, and Terrorism. The articles read as though they were written by a committee whose members despise each other. Some people say this, others assert that, etc. Over time, these articles don't improve; they just get longer, less structured, and less coherent.
It's not every controversial subject that suffers so. I thought that Noam Chomsky might be a battleground, but instead it's a nicely written and informative article. The same goes for Hiroshima, Hiroshima and Adolf Hitler. The Wiki system works its usual magic there.
The problem with the other articles is that their titles overshadow everything. Half the people reading (and writing) at Political Correctness can't stop thinking about how the name itself is unfairly applied. The other half can't stop laughing — and adding dumb jokes to the article text — about how great they think the name is, especially with its communist overtones.
What a waste of everyone's time! I don't want to fight with other people over the content of these articles, but I also don't want the encyclopedia as a whole devalued by their juvenile content. I recommend that we adopt a policy for articles whose titles fit the loaded (language) definition. First, if there is an uncontroversial name for the subject, use it. Problem solved. (This is generally not the case; slanted language is the fundamental problem.) Otherwise, do one two things:
This problem spans languages, by the way. Stay away from fr:Terrorisme unless you want to see Allied bombing of Germany in WWII equated with the 9/11 attacks.
Nathan 11:46, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
just curious... anybody been banned recently? user:Paulbmann is new and seem to have hit the ground running with one or two dodgy contributions to some health topics... just curious... (very sorry Paul if you are a legitamte newbie rather an old hack in lamb's clothing) best wishes to all Erich 11:46, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
I have a feeling I may not be the first person to suggest this, but... Would it be completely unacceptable for Wikipedia to serve advertisements to raise funds? I have donated money to support Wikipedia, and will probably do so again, but in the meantime I wouldn't have a problem with occasional banner ads, or Google AdWords, if it was raising money supporting Wiki. My idea was to implement such a thing, turned off by default, such that people intentionally TURN ON ads as a way to send money towards the project. If this is an idea that has been suggested and shot down already, please forgive me, as I'm still relatively new here. Cheers!
-- Randyoo 23:07, 25 May 2004 (UTC)
I encountered yet another mirror today, which is complete lookalike of Wikipedia, though images are missing. See [2] I quote Eloquence "There's plenty of these mirrors, most of them end up serving Wikipedia content with ads". Since we don't seem to care too much about those that do not follow our rules, and let them make a lot of money over our backs (it must be a lot given the huge number of pages they have on offer and the fact they often rank higher than the real thing in Google), this made me think: maybe we should start an unoffical mirror ourselves that serves ads, with proper attribution etc, which might channel some money to WikiMedia. I'm not sure how much money it would bring in, but it might take some load of our servers. It would be a read-only copy, refreshed say every week after dump have been made (some mirrors show content which is 6 months old), and which channels all edits to the real Wikipedia. Being unoffical it would not cause any forks, I'm sure. Just brainstorming. Anyway Wikipedia needs some drastic measures to improve and sustain performance. Erik Zachte 01:13, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
About edit conflicts in lively discussions: At a glance it looks like the most common place they occur. There are two kinds of edits -- make that three. Creating, modifying, and appending. Typically, and almost always, entries to discussions are appended to a particular point, perhaps most often at the end of a section. It seems like a simple matter to make another kind of edit page to append, just append, and a whole bunch of people can do that all at once. Their parts get put in right in the order they are submitted. That way it becomes feasible to compose online (which I am not doing now since I had an edit conflict already this morning when I thought I was whipping out my piece pretty quickly; so now I'll generally compose offline for my discussion stuff). ;Bear 18:10, 2004 May 25 (UTC)
A bit of fun: what do people think should be Wikipedia's official song? -- ChrisO 17:25, 25 May 2004 (UTC)
Crystal Method - Busy Child. Bensaccount 18:13, 25 May 2004 (UTC) (Esp. for the "Did you know" section.)
I'd like to invite discussion on how to treat the "cypher" spelling, a variant of "cipher", in cryptography articles: See Wikipedia:WikiProject Cryptography/Cipher vs Cypher for arguments. — Matt 15:44, 25 May 2004 (UTC)
Someone has mucked up the article on the Asian theatre of World War II. As a result, there are now Asian theatre of World War II and Asian Theatre of World War II, neither of which contains the page history (it's at Pacific War). Can a sysop with some time on his/her hands sort this out and move/delete/merge these things back together and fix all the redirects? -- Minesweeper 13:22, May 25, 2004 (UTC)
So apropos of a discusion on Talk:Wiki it turns out that not everybody pronounces "Wiki" the same way. I think it's "weekee" but to some it seems to be "wicky". Possbily there are even stranger variants out their. Shall we have a poll?
The obviously correct way to pronounce "Wiki" is:
http://www.informationblast.com/
This site seems to have taken the content of wikipedia and rearranged it into rather useless terms. The point is that they seem to have blatently stolen content from wikipedia. Can anything be done about this?
This is a two part Business Development Proposal
PART ONE:
Attention: Website Administrator/Marketing Director My name is Terry Schembari and I'm the Marketing Director for Mentura Inc. I was just looking at your website and was impressed with the design and content. My company Mentura, is the largest Educational/Family Friendly DVD rental company in the world.... [a lot of commercial deleted, see the article history if you're really interested]
I would like to start translating English-language articles into languages that are currently not available or not as exhaustive as their English counterpart. The problem is, I do not know how to get into the servers for the other languages to start. I'm probably overlooking it, but I can't find it. Please help.
Kylefr635 18:59, 24 May 2004 (UTC)
hi , i have a school science fair thing and i need to know why nylon was named nylon. do you have any clue on htis and could u send me any information if you have it of about this question . thanks .
Since people don't read the Talk:List of Australian post codes page ;) I'll copy what I wrote here:
Geez Chuq, that's a curly one. dunno how I missed the chat at the post codes page! never knew about the 9nnn post codes. If in doubt it sounds like you're better off with the CIA than at odds with them... a page on Communications in Australia sounds reasonable. more power to your elbow! Erich 10:14, 24 May 2004 (UTC)
Whenever I log into wikipedia ,I get a blank page.I am using aol version 8 plus and internet explorer version 6.
S. A. G.
Moved to Wikipedia talk:Creative commons migration
Wikipedia is running so slow today that most of my attempts at posting are timing out. What's going on? Rick K 21:51, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
--> Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dashes
Language links to tokipona: aren't working any more. (See, for example, Drug, which ends with the text "tokipona:ilo nasa" because the link isn't interpreted correctly. Can someone fix that, maybe? Marnanel 05:39, May 23, 2004 (UTC)
Believing that the correct title of the famous Sousa march was The Washington Post, I confidently tinkered, moving The Washington Post March to The Washington Post (march), and editing articles accordingly. (E. g. in The Washington Post I wrote, " The Washington Post is also the title of a march..."
Then I decided to see whether I could notate the melody of the opening strain. And found to my chagrin that one of my three recordings simply calls it Washington Post (no "The", although some of the other marches, like "The Thunderer," had their titles given with a "The"). Another calls it The Washington Post... and a third calls it The Washington Post March.
a) Anyone know which really is the correct title of the march?
b) Anyone know a convenient way to resolve this sort of question? Googling isn't it, both because of the difficulty of constructing proper searches to pick up only one of the three variants, but also because it is obvious that writers are not punctilious about the title of this work and "most frequent" would not necessarily be "correct." For example, I'm pretty darn sure the title of the famous Strauss waltz is "On the Beautiful Blue Danube", not "The Blue Danube waltz," but both give almost identical numbers of Google hits.
Zen answers, such as that it doesn't matter because nobody cares, or that the correctness of the title of marches is not altered by adding the word "march" to a title that lacks one or removing the word "march" from a title that has one, are not needed. (And no, don't bother to tell me that the actual title of the Strauss waltz is "An Der Schonen Blauen Danau...") Dpbsmith 00:21, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
I too have heard it call both "The Washington Post" and the "The Washington Post March". After Googling "Sousa, Washington, and Post, I find that internet sources are 2-1 in favor of "The Washington Post". Logically, if it were "The Washington Post March", wouldn't it also be "The Stars and Stripes Forever March"? Scout32 19:41, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
This may be of interest to those who use Verdana as the default font in their browsers. This bug has already caused some misunderstandings. See Verdana#Combining characters bug — Monedula 20:48, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
And recently the default style of Wikisource has been changed — exactly to use Verdana! This should be reversed ASAP, because there are some accentuated Russian texts there, and Verdana shows accents in the wrong places! — Monedula 21:20, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
#bodyContent { font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; }
It seems like the article and re-dir should be reversed. I don't want to ruin the page histories by doing it via cut&paste, but I can't move it because I can't delete the redir. Can some admin do it? Niteowlneils 17:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm a big fan of Linux and of its Tux mascot. Wanting a Tux sticker and not finding any on the internet, I manufactured some, selling them by myself (see Tux Sticker). I'm also a contributor of the french Wikipedia and wanting to share with the community, I decided to give 10% of all profits to the Wikimedia foundation. Dirac
The new version of the software used on meta does not work on IE5 (Mac). It is completely impossible to view the content of the page, or to edit. 83.109.133.44 12:35, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
Not sure where else to write this, so I'm asking here: How far should the extent of writing articles about places go? Let's use Malaysia as an example. There's district level ( Petaling). Or you can go for subdivisions, or mukim in Malay, which would be, for example, Damansara. And some subdivisions have several townships in them, so you might have an article like Bandar Utama. How far should this go? I see some villages in the United States which have populations in three or four digits, and yet have articles, and as townships presumably have a comparable if not even larger population, I presume such articles are ok. Is this alright? Johnleemk 10:14, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
http://www.tinyurl.com Very handy. Andries 09:49, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
--> Wikipedia talk:Dealing with vandalism
something funny is happening with votes for deletion Dunc Harris | Talk 16:52, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Many wikis are being converted to MediaWiki 1.3 today. The log of the process shows they are being converted alphabetically, and it is currently up to da:, so expect some changes here on en soon. Further details can be seen at m:MediaWiki roadmap. Please report bugs at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports. Angela . 10:25, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
I might have missed it, but i have been looking for a discussion about an international wiki. The point is that the current english wiki is in my experience culturally bound to mainly the US and the UK. When i read the en-wiki, i sometimes meet typical us-views and issues, and i feel that i should not interfere with my dutch background - i probably don't understand the culturally bound subtilities, although i do understand the language. Let's face it: objectivity means in fact inter-subjectivity and the same text can sound objective for one culture and very subjective for another. Also there sometimes are problems with international linking: the definition of terms in different cultures is not precisely the same, causing trouble with international linking of adjacent subjects Am i the only one who feels the need of a real international wiki? The "simple english" is no option, it is there for another purpose. -- Taka 13:36, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses. I will consider the English wiki to be international. The point is that I could not find anything about it. But the Talk:Comic book discussion is a really good example of how things (apparently) are meant. -- Taka 15:10, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
There have been discussions lately on Wikipedia-l and Wikitech-l as to whether we should have wikipedias for artificial languages, such as Klingon and Toki Pona:
There are other scattered discussions as well.
It seems to me that this subject should have input from the wider community. Have at it! - Rholton 14:52, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
When using the Standard skin, if I look at a page that contains an external link, whether the link is renamed or not, the external link is listed after the closing bracket. For example, if I posted [externallink.com], it is displayed as [1] (externallink.com). Rick K 20:38, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
The Daily Kos political blog has opened the dKosopedia wiki. There are a number of original articles, however some are copied from Wikipedia (see: Democratic Party). The copied pages contain this notice: "This article was copied from Wikipedia. See Discussion section." The Discussion section of each article contains this notice: "I believe it is initially important that a foundation is laid with a list of intelligent links to build a comprehensive database. After many of these important links are filled, perhaps it would be wise to rewrite the article.
That is to say, this should be temporary."
Are there any copyright, licensing, etc. issues here? Please take a look, I don't know much about this stuff.
24.118.116.241 23:41, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
I would like to have some detailed information on how to create non governmental organization. This may include like how to register for, where to register it and what things should be done first before reaching the final process of registering.
It was proposed on VfD that the page on Heck should be made a redirect, either to Hell or Euphemism. The problem I have is that neither of these pages (as of this writing!) actually say anything about the word heck. That is, a user entering heck would have the odd experience of being directed to a page that does not discuss the entry word and does not explain why.
Should there be (is there already?) a form of redirect that would allow for inclusion of a comment, so that entering "Heck" could bring up a page with the notice
rather than merely
16:20, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
I copied this discussion to sourge forge (as anonymous entry), see [5] -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 19:37, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Should toki pona or Klingon Wikipedias be allowed to exist? Discuss at m:Artificial languages
Is Wikipedia biased? Discuss at Wikipedia talk:POV
I've been going through the comments at MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports regarding the new skin. Many comments suggest a revert to the standard skin and then go further one step at a time. But I don't get to see any replies to these comments from any developers/admins. Is anything being done, where are the decisions being made, where to know the latest ? Jay 07:08, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Why is it gone? I want it back. -- Jia ng 05:04, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Hmm... were things just recently changed? The text size on every page suddenly got very small and some comments on WP:RFA aren't parsed correctly. The # and : signs by my comments and those of one other user aren't converting to indents/lists. Is this just something on my end? – Jrdioko (Talk) 00:01, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
How are other folks' browsers displaying 101010100, encoded as 10<sup>10<sup>10<sup>100</sup></sup></sup> (the googolplex, ten to the (ten to the hundredth))? In mine (Safari 1.2.2 under OS X 10.3.4) it is displaying exactly the same way as 101010100, encoded as 10<sup>10</sup>10<sup>100</sup> This markup was from an existing page; I haven't tried to enter this sort of expression before. Did multiple nested levels of superscripting ever work? or is the special WikiTex math markup needed? Dpbsmith 17:57, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Someone created the page Golden Age of Freethought by Moving the Wikipedia:Sandbox to it.
Thus there is an obscure page with no incoming links, yet with a History of thousands of modifications.
This must take up an enormous amount of storage space. Can some admin person go ahead and truncate the history? Any way to prevent such a situation from recurring? Curps 20:16, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I would like to inform the user who calls himself Moriori that his continued defamation of my character and false allegations against me have forced me to take drastic action. I am now going to sue you for libel. This is not a threat. I will be taking my first formal actions as you're reading this. I am not seeking money, but rather a VERY PUBLIC APOLOGY AND RETRACTION AND TERMINATION OF ALL OF YOUR TIES WITH WIKIPEDIA. I would further like to warn Raul654 that if he does not remove his false accusations against me from his "user talk" page, that he too will be included in my lawsuit. Anyone else accusing me of copyright violations will also be sued. This is not a hoax or a bluff. Moriori, you are is serious legal trouble. In addition to having the truth on my side, I have sufficient evidence to prove in court that you have indeed slandered me. You have obviously not even read my explanation for my actions, but another user of this very site has and believes me, regardless of how you attempt to poison the minds of fellow users with your lies. The only way to prevent a lawsuit that will ruin you, even as you have attempted to ruin my reputation, is an immediate and obvious retraction of all that you have said stating or implying that I have committed a copyright infringement, as well as resigning your status or any status at Wikipedia. (Felix F. Bruyns)
Could someone please tell me what a skin is? Adam 04:41, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This page is no longer edible. However, neither on the page itself, nor on the talk page is there any clue who protected it, or why it is protected. Can anyone shed a light? Abigail 10:14, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It would have been nice if Template namespace initialisation script had first editted all pages so that {{msg:foo}} became
and then went and moved all the MediaWiki message to the Template namespace, instead of just moving the messages to the new namespace.... Redirected messages do not work! All taxonomy pages that were using messages in the taxoboxes, and many, many, many other pages with the now redirected messages are b0rk, b0rk, b0rk! I've very disappointed. - UtherSRG 16:05, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Help seems to be deleted. Not blanked by a vandal, gone. No History, nuthin'. "Help:Contents From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (Wikipedia does not have an article on this topic yet. To start the article, click Edit this page.)" Niteowlneils 22:14, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
(Already reported at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports)
The oddest thing has been happening to me. I tried several times, both some hours ago and both now, to edit MediaWiki:Feature ("Austrian" should like to "Austria"), but to no avail. Every time I press "Edit this page", get to the edit page, make the modification, press "Save page" - and my Mozilla Firefox appears to be loading the page, until, several minutes later, it gives up. Wikipedia isn't the most reliable site when it comes to performance, so I wouldn't be surprised were it not for the fact that in the meanwhile I successfully edited and saved other pages. Is there some sort of curse hanging above the MediaWiki: namespace? -- Itai 20:20, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
Question moved to the Reference desk.
This is probably not the right place for this request, so feel free to move it.
If you have time, or don't know what to do, I'd appreciate some help with the Chemical Elements category. It seems pretty essential that we have such a category, but adding the tag to every element article takes ages.
You'll earn my Eternal Gratitude
Wyllium 06:37, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Where should discussions regarding the look/feel/layout of Wikipedia go? 217.159.81.197 13:11, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
How do categories work? I want to understand subcategories (and any other related goodies). Lupin 12:02, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Category placement: At the top (before the article proper) or at the bottom (along with the interwikis)? Bottom placement seems preferable to me (same reasons as with the w:xx's), but maybe I'm missing something. –Hajor 18:58, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
And a simple English-language "category" link is certainly less likely to scare off a random monolingual anon editor than a list of strange foreign words at the top of the article text (which was, IIRC, the chief reason for sending the interwikis to the bottom). Even so, I still think there's a case to be made for all the "non-text" meta-information at the end of the article (ctrl-end in most browsers). Why the placement question in the first place? As you can see here, it seems that in monobook the formatting can be broken if the article starts with a table straight after the Category. FWIW, –Hajor 19:37, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Categorization and Wikipedia talk:Categorization. I believe category tags should be at the end, just before the interwiki links. Angela . 04:26, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
When I go to Current events, the calendar is spreading across the whole of the page. The pink table (deaths in May, etc.} is spreading across the whole page. The supposedly hidden notes ("<!-- To archive this page at the beginning of the month, see Wikipedia:How to archive Current Events --> ", "<!-- Election sections are for up-to-date articles about current or recently concluded elections. Once articles are updated with results, they are moved to the results section.) --> ", "<!-- NOTE: PLEASE LOG NEW EVENTS IN THE PRESENT TENSE. THANK YOU! --> <!-- PLEASE ALSO PROVIDE LINKS TO NEWS STORIES AFTER EACH ENTRY, NEWS STORIES WITHOUT LINKS MAY BE REMOVED. LINKS TO STORIES MUST BE IN ENGLISH. --> ", etc. are displaying. These problems were not happening the last time I logged in to Wikipedia. What's going on? Rick K 06:08, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
I like the new skin but the link colours all look the same. Luckily, theres an easy fix: Go to < User:yourusername/monobook.css> and enter
/* standard link colors */ a { color: #0000FF; } a:visited { color: #7F007F; } a:active, a.new { color: #FF0000; } a.interwiki, a.external { color: #3366BB; } a.stub { color: #772233; }
and save and shift+f5 to refresh. Bensaccount 03:54, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
See m:User styles for more details on what you can change. Angela . 08:12, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Hurray for the new skin! I really like the new skin for the main page and the edit pages. Could we skin this page (which is a sickly yellow) in the new format? - 24.199.99.174 02:26, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
I see in the time it took me to post, the Village Pump was newly skinned! Very nice look. - 24.199.99.174 02:27, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
I tried to log in from home with two different browsers and I got some kind of creepy new skin and I hate it. I had to go across the street to a machine where it remembers me. I could not log in at home -- not only that, one of the browsers would not even display the "log in" link, and the other had it crammed way up in the corner and it did basically nothing. The latter was Internet Exploder 5 on a Mac with 9.2.2 ;Bear 04:19, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
[ hate the new skin]. We used to be going forward, and now in one fell swoop we managed to create a look that's worse than that of the very first Wikipedia.--Branko.
The new skin looks terrific! Bravo on a job well done. Quadell (talk) 15:14, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
I hate the new skin, but by setting preferences to "Nostalgia" I got something that at least dumps that almost unreadable font. However, whatever happened to being able to get to "My Contributions"? I can't seem to find it now. -- BRG 16:57, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone know why there is a large gap before the table in the "Marshall Plan expenditures" section of Marshall Plan? It appears in all the different skins. Is something clashing with the new software? -- Minesweeper 01:19, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
See Template talk:NihonG. What's going on? Rick K 23:03, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Headers are entirely too large. hd2 levels are larger than the main header of the page. Rick K 21:18, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Tables are way too wide using the Standard skin. For example, when I came to this page, the table at the top of the page spread all the way across my screen and even made me have to scroll right to see all of it. That didn't happen before. Rick K 21:18, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Aaahh! The links in my navigation box (eg, "Main Page", "Recent changes" "Current events" etc) don't do anything when I click on them in this new fancy-pants design. Are they now using some other type of sripting? Horrified, -- Infrogmation 20:53, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Overall I really like the new skin but:
What the hell happened to the automated selected anniversaries section? I thought that the English Wikipedia was not going to be upgraded until the ' variable in template messages bug' was fixed. This really pisses me off! Also, what happened to the background fill color for all non-article pages? The distinction before was a very useful one, now it is vague. So the only difference between Sandbox:maveric149, user:maveric149/sandbox, talk archive:Sandbox would be the tab at the top of those pages. This will only encourage the misuse of the article namespace and lessen the distinction between metadata and content.
I also see that some links to stub articles are showing up as red links for those with a stub threshold set. The new "blue" links have a very hard to read muted color and the external link icon is hideous. This is especially true for [1] wiki ref links in articles. So please:
And don't give me the "you can change your preferences" line since all of the above needs to be default. Also, is it just me or is the default font size way too small? -- mav 20:52, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
I have to agree about the link colors and the font. I would be using the Standard skin, except that the link problem I listed above makes it unusable. Rick K 21:14, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Change the link colours back to the original please .. Jay 03:19, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
The new layout looks great, but it unfailingly crashes my installation of Firefox 0.8. The old look loaded without a hitch; I'm guessing the new layout is heavy with tables and forms?
I am using Firefox .8 and it looks fine to me SD6-Agent 23:21, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
With the new monobook skin, several of the links have a curious little icon next to them. The icon is a box, with an arrow exiting to the top right. Can I ask: What is the significance of this icon?-- Fangz 19:34, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
body {font: x-small serif; }
#globalWrapper { font-size:140%; }
Now that we have Verdana as our default font, the accents in Russian words will appear in the wrong places (due to the "Verdana bug"). Do not attempt to move accents — simply switch Wikipedia skin to "Standard". — Monedula 19:13, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Is there no consideration of changing over to a less stupid font? I notice that Verdana doesn't include all the diacritics for transliterating indic langauges, either. And those are quite necessary.
-- कुक्कुरोवाच|
Talk‽
19:32, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
A concrete illustration:
English: fóobar
Russian: фо́обар
Non-Verdana font works correctly:
English: fóobar
Russian: фо́обар
The Russian version incorrectly displays the acute accent (stress mark) over the second о rather than over the first (when using Verdana font).
It seems pointless to argue whether this is "necessary" for Russian, since there are other languages where combining diacritics are essential, as others have pointed out. Verdana has to go.
Curps 04:26, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Is there a way to add subscript to text being used in a caption? I'm trying to get a few numbers as subscripts in the caption for the Spirometry article. It just shows the wikimarkup being used: e.g. <sub>3</sub>
Any help appreciated
-- Prisonblues 21:06, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
I notice that the skin in Chinese WP has been updated, but it seems that, it makes even the "Standard" one not work well. The external links are the biggest problems: their source codes are just displayed there! some source codes do not work, like this one "<a class=internal href='/wiki/Wikipedia:首页'>维基社群</a>" which should be link to the Community Portal in Chinese WP, but i just see the source codes; pics with hyperlinks have ugly borders... :-| -- 哈越中 ( talk) 18:32, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
Rafael Cordero and Rafael Cordero (educator) need to be disambiguated, I still dont know how to do it.
Thanks and God bless!
Antonio Im a Barbie Girl! Martin
This page is no longer editable. However, neither on the page itself, nor on the talk page is there any clue who protected it, or why it is protected. Can anyone shed a light? Abigail 10:14, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
<irony>wow</irony>
I notice someone has applied the msg:stub message to Category:WikiHolidays; I can only assume that this is not the only case. Category descriptions are highly likely to be short (and hopefully sweet): is there really any point in marking them as stubs? -- Phil | Talk 09:11, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
At Apostle Titus, the box containing the Category link overlaps the caption to the photo. This should be fixed or deleted. Adam 05:21, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Why does this need to be brought here instead of to the article's Talk page? Rick K 19:10, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Standard skin should be the default. Let users change the preferences to any other skin they want. Customization is for getting comfortable with the user interface, customization is NOT for making an unusable user interface usable. The latter is what the developers and admins seem to be suggesting nowadays.
customization = usable -> better<br\> customization NOT unusable -> usable<br\>
What is the level of usability is debateable, but it should satisfy the majority. For a website, the default browser behaviour is a good guideline. Refer Usability testing to check if the new Wikipedia format passes the test. It has a line that says "A common mistake that designers make, for instance, is to focus too much on creating designs that look "cool", but compromise on usability and functionality."
Jay 05:35, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Could someone please tell me what a skin is? Adam 04:41, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
You can change your Skin at your Preferences. There are 4 skins. -- Menchi 05:38, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Thanks to Gabriel Wicke, sysops can now add a stylesheet for their wiki using MediaWiki:Monobook.css. The content of these stylesheets should be similar to the user stylesheets. I have used this feature to increase the font size on the CJK wikis, as requested on wikitech-l. Stylesheets for the other skins and configurable javascript will be implemented soon. See m:User styles for examples of the kinds of things which could go in these pages. -- Tim Starling 03:05, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Some admin might want to replace the recent cut&paste "move" with a proper move, before either page gets edited. Niteowlneils 18:23, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I just switched to the Monobook skin, and I see a <!--> at the bottom of the home page (as if someone messed up a comment). I did not have this problem with the Cologne Blue skin. I apologize if someone has already reported this and is working on it. I see the error in both Mozilla and IE. Also, is there a better forum for problems like this that can only be handled by admins? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 14:47, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
I give notice that I will delete every one of these "Category" links I see so long as they have the effect of creating a huge white space on the right side of the page and pushing everything else to the left. If people think these links are valuable (which I don't), they should find a way to add them without causing such distortion of the page. Adam 07:29, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
When will you people grasp that an encyclopaedia is for readers and not for a cabal of computer nerds? I don't know what a "skin" is, and I don't know, or want to know, how to redesign or reconfigure my screen. Nor will many other readers and potential readers. Nor should we have to do so just because we want to read an encyclopaedia article. I do know that the "Category" links make the pages look very ugly, and until this is fixed I will delete them, at least when they are installed at articles I have written. Adam 09:33, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Wow. Good way to get blocked for vandalism. And use the Standard skin. Everything looks fine to me. Rick K 20:09, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
OK well I will refrain from deleting the links since I am assured that someone is working on fixing the formatting problem they cause. Could someone please explain what a "skin" is? Adam 23:53, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Indira_Gandhi&action=history, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Indira_Gandhi&diff=3770937&oldid=3770809 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Indira_Gandhi&diff=0&oldid=3770937.
There's this mysterious [[User:]] in the diffs, and the revision history calls it Special:Contributions (with empty target). -- Paddu 06:11, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I'm trying to pass a vertical bar as part of a template parameter for a piped link to put into a wiki table being generated by the template. How do I do it? There is minimal documentation in the roadmap article on templates. For example, I want to do this
{{Template:something|name=test| topo=[[National Topographic System|NTS]] 83N/03}}
If I don't try to escape the vertical bar somehow, the "NTS]] 83N/03" is being treated as another parameter it seems. I've tried || and a \| without success.
RedWolf 03:41, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
If you simply want the vertical bar to be displayed, just use |. However, if you want to pass a piped link that it turns into a link, forget about it. RedWolf 22:30, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
Hmm... were things just recently changed? The text size on every page suddenly got very small and some comments on
WP:RFA aren't parsed correctly. The # and : signs by my comments and those of one other user aren't converting to indents/lists. Is this just something on my end?
–
Jrdioko
(Talk) 00:01, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This appears to have been fixed. – Jrdioko (Talk) 21:24, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Is it just my browser or is the category link on George VI of the United Kingdom screwing up the layout of the page, making the picture appear in the middle? I've tried everything to get it to line up properly, and the only thing that seems to work is to remove the category tag. Any hints? - Chrism 19:25, Jun 1, 2004 (UTC)
Wow, I like Categories. What a great idea. It might even replace all the List articles when it's working properly.
However I see some problems. First is that we don't have any kind of policy on how to use them, and no help on how to use them, or indeed a discussion page on how to create a policy or a help page. (I may be wrong on these, in which case feel free to point me at these pages).
Also we already have several duplicate categories (playwright and dramatist, writer and author). We need to work on resolving these; in the long term this is probably a job for the Help and policy pages.
In the short term, does anyone have a script that will move all articles in one category into another? In the above example I would like to move dramatist (the shorter category) into playwright (the longer). Can we do this automatically?
DJ Clayworth 15:28, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Please vote: Meta:Artificial languages equal rights Thanks! -- Timwi
The Gallery of user styles is open for business. If you have a cool skin, please share it with your fellow Wikipedians. Dori | Talk 07:23, Jun 1, 2004 (UTC)
I've been going through the comments at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports regarding the new skin. Many comments suggest a revert to the standard skin and then go further one step at a time. But I don't get to see any replies to these comments from any developers/admins. Is anything being done, where are the decisions being made, where to know the latest ? Jay 07:08, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
See the history of John Kerry. The questions below pertain to the categories I added there before they were removed by another user. LuckyWizard 01:24, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
One of the reasons the links were removed was that they made the page ugly by pushing the table off to the side. What should be done if categorization makes a page look ugly, as happened with the John Kerry article? Should the categories be removed, or should the page be rearranged slightly to make it non-ugly? I feel that the page should be rearranged slightly; what's the point of categories if they don't include everyone who should be included? (Of course, the ideal solution would be to reprogram the software to put the category links elsewhere; the sidebar, below the interwiki links, seems the best place. But what do we do until someone does that?) LuckyWizard 01:24, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Another reason the links were removed was that one of them ( Category:American major party presidential candidates) did not yet have a page, and was therefore a red link. Is it OK to add redlinked categories to articles? I can't see why category links should be removed just because they're red links; after all, part of the Wiki idea is that people can come along, see the red links, and create the article. Why should it be different for categories? (Also, I had already seen other redlinked categories. Another point is that I might have created the category myself, were it not for the fact that it was midnight.) LuckyWizard 01:24, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
The redirect at Sergio Vieira de Mello does not seem to work; it just brings up the redirect page. It does not appear to be a double-redirect. Could it be because there's an accent in the page it's trying to redirect to? -- Golbez 23:30, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
With the new category feature, god willing, a number of Article Series Boxes are going to go the way of the dodo shortly. Hopefully, a very large number. Do we have some protocol in place to handle these? Are they just going to flood VfD? Are we going to leave a lot of them around? Can we temporarily create some deletion level between speedy and VfD for redundant boxes? Snowspinner 21:15, May 31, 2004 (UTC)
The proposed "law" for Wikipedia font policy is this:
The reason for this is that prescribing a particular font will almost certainly lead to incorrect display for some languages (as is the case with Verdana). It's important to be nice, but it's much more important to keep Wikipedia readable. — Monedula 20:12, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
as t
I'd like to ask a question. No one seems to be able to answer me. Today the font of monobook was changed, and the result is absolutely ugly for me. When I asked why it was changed, I was answered there was a poll. Now, when I asked where the poll took place, I never had any answer. I come around, and I find these nice comment about the english wikipedia being the only reasonable place to discuss this because 1) noone goes to meta and 2) everyone comes to en in the end.
And that is so unfortunately true. When I want to find how a decision was taken without asking us, I indeed come here, and find my answer. So, my question is : where did you hide this poll ? :-)
First off, let me say that I like the new default skin very much. But, when I view Mount Vernon (plantation), the top two right-floated images are positioned near the middle of the page. This compresses the text to the left into a very narrow column that makes reading difficult and leaves a large white space to the right of the images. I'm using Mozilla 1.5. Are others seeing this? If so, is this really intended? Bill 11:42, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Overall, i like the category scheme. Is there a place to discuss the new category scheme? To me it looks like a lot of the List of ... articles become redundant with the category scheme. Also, is there a suggested system for common schemes, e.g.:
Is it possible to format the listing of the sub-categories and the contained articles? Finally, how much introduction text is suggested for a category scheme? One line like e.g. Category:Harry Potter, none like Category:Films, or a lengthy introduction that makes the category more like an article like Category:Japanese culture (made by me for demonstration purposes)? -- Chris 73 | Talk 04:56, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
How about a place where wikipedians can showcase their custom user styles, and comment on others? I for one, would like to show off my minor modifications to MonoBook and ask for some feedback (and a fix to why the search buttons suddenly look bloated in Camino...). kelvSYC 04:28, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
The question mark at the end of this title is making it impossible to get to the article. Rick K 02:32, May 31, 2004 (UTC)
At the top it says don't report bugs here. People are, however, doing so. Is this OK really? If I don't have to go over to some other namespace to do so I would rather not. -- Nevilley 21:02, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
no time to explain/comment.
-- AbboTT 20:23, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Sorry, I was kind of in a rush... Either I didn't notice that or it wasn't there at the time.
My bad. -- AbboTT 03:54, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
At Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and Chiang Kai-shek, for example, the catgories tag is pushing the image inward and creating whitespace. How can this be fixed? -- Jia ng 19:22, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Empty link by itself doesnt work for me. Two br tags seems to do the trick, but a large border around the tag remains. -- Jia ng
Is there someplace running the old MediaWiki version, where I could compare how things are being formatted? I think I've noticed some changes that don't seem desireable. Niteowlneils 17:34, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
When you check your watchlist, you know how it tells you "Users have made X edits in the time period selected"? That number is up about 25%, at least for me. Meelar 17:15, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Listen, this has probably come up a dozen times, but it's buried somewhere on the Villiage Pump page where I can't find it easily. Sorry, but I really don't like the new skin. It's a beautiful design, really, tabs, etc but the font is killing me. If you look at the word and for example I see the letter d with much thicker walls than the letter a, and the ns walls are much thinner than both. As a result, the text of an article seems to vibrate under these conditions. Maybe I'm doing something wrong here. I have Firefox running in a Windows XP system. Do I have to download a special font or something? Please, browseing wikipedia is getting me punch drunk over here. Trust me, I'm usually more coherent than this.
Windows 2000 Mozilla 1.6 on LCD 1024x768 and I think the font is fab and I do not experience the above problem! But I have always favoured sans serif fonts. Paul Beardsell 17:13, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Heck! I have just installed the Bitstream Vera fonts on Windows 2000 and using Mozilla 1.6 now I have the weirdnesses complained of by the poster of the original para of this section. I will uninstall - returning to Verdana. Paul Beardsell 03:44, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
The (current default) font is terrible under both Mozilla and IE on my Windows 2000 box. It's pixilated almost to the pint of being unreadable in both the italic variant and whatever text decoration sis used to indicate a
link. Honestly, using this new format makes Wikipedia look ugly and -- more importantly -- makes it far less usable to unregistered users who can't their preferences to something else.
I realize that a lot of effort must have been expended on this, and I don't mean to denigrate the effort, but, I'm sorry, this change just doesn't work. orthogonal 08:22, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Also, in preferences, what's called "Standard" is what I think of as what wikipedia looked like prior to the "upgrade" to the new skin. orthogonal 08:32, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
An example of what I'm talking about can be seen here:
Could someone please please make Verdana the default, and throw out this Bitstream thing? I'm using Firefox 0.8 w/ Windows XP Home, and the rendering of the font is terrible: The characters are just very uneven. I tried to change my personal style sheet, but to no avail.
Micha 03:38, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
On my machine, a RedHat Linux 9 box, the font also looks not very nice. It is not pixelized, as others complain above, but the tracking is far too wide for my taste. (But I do like the other features of the new skin). Sanders muc 16:02, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
body { font-family: Verdana; }
in their
user stylesheet. --
Gabriel Wicke 00:15, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)I must be doing something wrong over at Template:Mancala 2x6. I expect to be able to use it like {{Mancala 2x6|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12}} since the appropriate image names are defined. However, I end up with this, where it claims it cannot find images I know exist. Could someone suggest the correct way to do this? - Kevin Saff 20:59, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It would have been nice if User:Template namespace initialisation script had first editted all pages so that {{msg:foo}} became {{foo}} and then went and moved all the MediaWiki message to the Template namespace, instead of just moving the messages to the new namespace.... Redirected messages do not work! All taxonomy pages that were using messages in the taxoboxes, and many, many, many other pages with the now redirected messages are b0rk, b0rk, b0rk! I'm very disappointed. - UtherSRG 16:05, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
What the <bleep> happened to it? Where's the Yahoo Search, and, more importantly, where's the 'if you think you know what should be on this page, click here' link?!? Niteowlneils 15:39, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Since many people have complained about the style, and since now we have the option of fixing it at least for the entire english wikipedia, I think we need to have a discussion and possible some votes, and fix the major problems. As far as I can tell the biggest changes that people are irked about are:
How about Wikipedia:MonoBook styling for the discussion? Dori | Talk 15:22, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Next question: Where do we say what we *like* about the new interface? Here, or at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css, or at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports? Elf | Talk 17:32, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
How do I replace a picture with a new upload? Uploading again with the same name doesnt work. Bensaccount 00:49, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It seems since the new skin was implemented that the form completion dropdown box does not appear directly below the original box I am typing in but may be elsewhere on the page.
My OS and browser stats:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
SD6-Agent 22:12, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
I can't believe I couldn't find this in Wikipedia:Naming Conventions... On the talk page for Talk:O. Henry, HamYoyo suggested that "the page ought to be filed under "Henry, O." I wanted to point to the naming convention that says that in Wikipedia article titles, names are given in normal order rather than inverted order (surname; comma; first name; middle-name(s)-or-initial(s)). But I couldn't find it! Where is it? Dpbsmith 18:55, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
We always give names in the "natural" order, hence " George Washington", " Mao Zedong", " José Ortega y Gasset". -- Jmabel 20:31, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
I accept the principle that there should be some type of 'minimum service' requirement on voters, but would have to query the sole option selected of '90 days elapsed since registration' as there are people with fewer than 100 edits to their name on there (indeed I noted at least one in single figures!) whereas there are probably members who have a reasonable track record with more edits in a shorter timeframe. It would be wrong to change the process now, but just as some sort of 'heads-up' for the future maybe there should be a minimum time and minimum contribution together. -- VampWillow 16:51, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
In response to my efforts to determine exactly how to pronounce " Abu Ghraib", someone suggested uploading a sound clip to Wikipedia, much as one can upload images for articles. I found, however, that there seems to have been little discussion on the uses of sound on Wikipedia. The Special:Upload page, which discusses images at length and provides useful links, only makes a passing reference to sound files, provides no link, and gives an example that seems to require the use of "OGG" files, which are unquestionably much less well-known than either WAV or MP3 files and are not supported natively by browsers.
After some digging, I found the article Wikipedia:Sound and Wikipedia, which calls itself "a place to discuss issues surrounding using sound in Wikipedia". It seems, though, to have the exclusive POV of a community of users who merely want to download music into portable players (possibly just iPods!). I thought a much more logical use of sound in Wikipedia was to enhance articles (for pronunciations and obvious sound-related issues, not the ghastly practice of forcibly "entertaining" Website visitors!). When I asked why OGG and why not something more browsable, Tuf-Kat suggested I bring it up here in the Village pump.
So I put it to you, the Wikipedia community:
(By the way, please don't post your responses to these questions inside this single multi-paragraph posting. This is very confusing. Please create your own contiguous posting and excerpt mine as needed.) I invite your opinions and suggestions. -- Jeff Q 12:02, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Somebody did that sorta thing with Poutine. Quite humorously (not that humour is necessarily helpful in this situation).
I think it's a great idea to add a pronunciation bit to exotic names. Unless you are into news, chances is the accepted pronunciation of many foreign names will always be a mystery to you. And dictionaries are no help with modern proper names. So, having sounds for such words would increase the informativeness of the article. -- Menchi 07:19, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Without being egotistical, I think I'm probably one of the most experience users when it comes to sounds on wikipedia (last time I checked, I have 4 or 5 of the top 10 largest files uploaded). To answer your question about format - mp3 would be the ideal choice for its support, but it is patent encumbereed. The other formats (real, quicktime, microsoft) are proprietary and encumbered. That leaves ogg. Ogg is supported in the newest version of winamp, and you can get free programs that convert it to other formats (I *STRONGLY* recommend Audacity). →Raul654 18:00, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Currently it seems that an election notice has been placed on every page, although it is only shown when logged in under a username. It says Wikimedia Board Elections: Vote open until June 12. However it is currently positioned after the main article heading and before the start of the article text. To me this seems the wrong place to have it as it appears to be part of the article text. I think if it is to remain it should be moved before the main article heading or else to the bottom of the page. -- Popsracer 09:32, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
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Chinese WP is suffering mass attack from several IPs, continuously creating nonsense pages like "Shizhao再麻煩你砍一下吧44daf22d99161b01a4148a8c3cffedc4". Can the developers ban the feature of creating new pages in Chinese WP for a while? -- Samuel 18:11, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
Hello,
the chinese Wiki is experincing massiv vandalism with a bot and a proxy again. Please help.-- Philopp 18:13, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
Dear Sir, Can you give use the E-mail address or the Contact address of National Congress, actualy we want to give congratulation to Congress President Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, Please sir, help us in this matter, please give reply us on accesspuri@sancharnet.in, pointaccess@eth.net, dilu_mishra@yahoo.com.
With warm regards,
M/s. Access Point, Puri, Orissa India
Watchlists were temporarily cached to save server load. See Wikipedia talk:Watchlist help.
Where should Wikipedia awards be recorded? Discuss at Wikipedia talk:Trophy box
Quantum optics is a very lively field of current physics research. But so far we only have articles on its more application-related neighbouring field, laser science. I've done a start by writing the article quantum optics, but there's much to do: MOTs, optical tweezers, PDC, and the like should be covered as well. Any fellow physicists out there willing to help? Or other people knowing about it? ( Sanders muc)
As an example, the article Julio-Claudian family tree has a single image with the entire family tree. I'm wondering if it's possible to create a family tree that appears similar but has a feature linking the individual names in the tree to the articles about those people. Does the software exist to do this? MK 06:22, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
The May 2004 press release at Wikipedia:Press_releases/May_2004 looks to be about finished and, as it is nearing the end of May, should be finalized. Aside from quotes which may be added, it looks to be production quality. Anyone who has edits or comments should make them soon.
As for the proposed quotes, the first would be from Jimmy Wales the founder, which we don't have yet. The second is the five word acceptance speech that was delivered or will be delivered at the awards ceremony, which of course is dependant on a fact or decision about that. Also, it would be nice to be able to include the date and location of the ceremony, so anyone who has that information should step up to the plate.
Dear Sir, We are pleased to inform you that our company want to supply good quality of Football on very competitive prices. We are new in the Polish market. Please supply us useful addresses of the clubs and teams to offer such goods. Thanking you in advance, With best wishes, Syed Sajjad Haider Wolrdwide Marketing Chilanzar 3, House 69, Suite 39, Tashkent 700115 Uzbekistan Tel 00998712 778411 fax 778903
Is there a way to remove Vandalism from the edit history. My impression is that the general response to Vandalism is to just revert the edit, but I recently noticed a problem where the vandal also included the offensive text in the Edit Summary so that it continues to show up in the edit history. You can see an example on the page history for Ridley Scott or [1] --- Solipsist 06:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
What the hell happened to the automated selected anniversaries section? I thought that the English Wikipedia was not going to be upgraded until the ' variable in template messages bug' was fixed. This really pisses me off! Also, what happended to the background fill color for all non-article pages? The distinction before was a very useful one, now it is vague. So the only difference between Sandbox:maveric149, user:maveric149/sandbox, talk archive:Sandbox would be the tab at the top of those pages. This will only encourage the misuse of the article namespace and lessen the distinction between metadata and content.
I also see that some links to stub articles are showing up as red links for those with a stub threshold set. The new "blue" links have a very hard to read muted color and the external link icon is hideous. This is especially true for [1] wiki ref links in articles. So please:
And don't give me the "you can change your preferences" line since all of the above needs to be default. Also, is it just me or is the default font size way too small? -- mav 20:52, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Just wondering, how many is too many? I can't remember if I've asked this before, but someone is creating literally dozens of redirect pages for Japanese topics employing every combination of correct, incorrect and mixed romanization systems and misspellings he can think of, the vast overwhelming majority of which are not used at all or are exceedingly rarely used in Japanese or English. Some articles have 9 different redirect pages. So where do we draw the line? Exploding Boy 09:25, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to encourage everyone here to go take a myers briggs personality test (like this one) and then add yourself to Meta:Wikipedians by MBTI type. I'm curious to see how wikipedia's users compare to the general public. →Raul654 05:17, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
All of Wik's machinations have cause the history of the Vandalism in Progress page to be lost. It appears to be at Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress (other than Quagga's). Can somebody figure out how to get the history back and at the same time keep the current version of things on the ViP page? Rick K 02:07, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
I noticed to my surprise today that links to nonexistent image pages (of the form [[:image:this_is_not_an_image.png]]) do not show up in red: image:this_is_not_an_image.png. --Smack 00:25, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
The way I understand things now, sysops can quickly rollback a page by clicking a link on the page history, whereas anyone—even anons—can achieve the same effect by editing an old version of the page. Is there any reason for this difference? It seems to me that if anyone can revert a page, there's no point in making non-sysops go through an extra couple of clicks and pageloads (which can be a real pain on a slow server day). Does the rollback link do something sysop-only that I'm not aware of? If not, can the rest of us have the link? Thanks for reading. - Etaoin 05:49, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
Is there a formulated policy on items in books, films, television, etc.? For example, I am dealing with Stargate (film) and the TV show Stargate SG-1 and have encount ered many articles on items of the fictional universe, such as Jaffa (Stargate SG-1), George Hammond, and Goa'uld. I think these should be merged with one of the main articles or put in an article like "Stargate (universe)". The advantage of the second option is that many universes have multiple books, films, and shows, like Star Trek or Star Wars. This present on has a film and two TV shows. Another option would be to create a new namespace for fiction and use the same unique names for every item, with the parenthesis of the context, as it is done now. It would also allow for the fiction to be separated for certain releases or archives of the encyclopedia. Comments? Have I missed something obvious? - Centrx 23:48, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
A user asked me to roll back a page that had undergone several vandalism-reversion cycles, because the vandal had included rude remarks in the edit summaries. That is, he wanted the offensive edit summaries removed. I couldn't figure out how to do it. For the time being, I moved the page to an inconspicuous place, deleted the original page, then re-created it with the same contents. Advice welcome. Sorry if I missed something obvious. (The "rollback" function simply appears to be a convenient way to revert, and preserves all previous page history). Dpbsmith 22:28, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
Nick Berg conspiracy theories has been paralyzed by conflict for about a day now--would people please check it out? I've used up my 3 reverts for the day, and would appreciate someone stepping in to help mediate and hopefully bring this to a good resolution. See Talk:Nick Berg conspiracy theories for the full details. Yours, Meelar 17:11, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
Maybe this has been invented already, and maybe this isn't the best place to mention it, but...
If you are currently visiting Wikipedia as an excuse to waste time, you might be dissatisfied with the Random page link due to the high likelihood of arriving at some obscure little town in Arkansas (hopefully fixed in next version of Wikipedia which looks like it might have article categories).
As an alternative why not try The Wiki-Link Game. For the moment I've but the rules on my user page. -- Solipsist 13:12, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
There was an article about color consulation where I read it from Laurel Gazette. I would like to get in contact with the color consultant, Ms. Lopez from Hyattsville, Maryland. Will you be willing to give me her phone number or e-mail address where I can get in contact with Ms. Lopez. If not, you can give this message to Ms. Lopez to get in contact with me as: shodge913@aol.com I have been looking for a color consultant lately. Hopefully, I will be hearing from you soon. Thank you. Sherry Hodge shodge913@aol.com
Ms. Hodge, can you tell us what web site you think you're posting to? Rick K 01:43, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
Usually when perusing Wikipedia and reading articles for the first time, I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of writing and information. I've learned all kinds of things on all kinds of subjects — I'm sure everyone else here has had the same experience — and this has given me high expectations for the quality of the Wikipedia’s content. Unfortunately, I've lately been stumbling upon pages in very bad shape. My first reaction of course is to try to fix them. But, in another departure from the normal Wikipedia, these articles are practically impossible to edit.
The articles I'm talking about have one thing in common: their titles themselves are loaded. Take a look at Political Correctness, Anti-American sentiment, and Terrorism. The articles read as though they were written by a committee whose members despise each other. Some people say this, others assert that, etc. Over time, these articles don't improve; they just get longer, less structured, and less coherent.
It's not every controversial subject that suffers so. I thought that Noam Chomsky might be a battleground, but instead it's a nicely written and informative article. The same goes for Hiroshima, Hiroshima and Adolf Hitler. The Wiki system works its usual magic there.
The problem with the other articles is that their titles overshadow everything. Half the people reading (and writing) at Political Correctness can't stop thinking about how the name itself is unfairly applied. The other half can't stop laughing — and adding dumb jokes to the article text — about how great they think the name is, especially with its communist overtones.
What a waste of everyone's time! I don't want to fight with other people over the content of these articles, but I also don't want the encyclopedia as a whole devalued by their juvenile content. I recommend that we adopt a policy for articles whose titles fit the loaded (language) definition. First, if there is an uncontroversial name for the subject, use it. Problem solved. (This is generally not the case; slanted language is the fundamental problem.) Otherwise, do one two things:
This problem spans languages, by the way. Stay away from fr:Terrorisme unless you want to see Allied bombing of Germany in WWII equated with the 9/11 attacks.
Nathan 11:46, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
just curious... anybody been banned recently? user:Paulbmann is new and seem to have hit the ground running with one or two dodgy contributions to some health topics... just curious... (very sorry Paul if you are a legitamte newbie rather an old hack in lamb's clothing) best wishes to all Erich 11:46, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
I have a feeling I may not be the first person to suggest this, but... Would it be completely unacceptable for Wikipedia to serve advertisements to raise funds? I have donated money to support Wikipedia, and will probably do so again, but in the meantime I wouldn't have a problem with occasional banner ads, or Google AdWords, if it was raising money supporting Wiki. My idea was to implement such a thing, turned off by default, such that people intentionally TURN ON ads as a way to send money towards the project. If this is an idea that has been suggested and shot down already, please forgive me, as I'm still relatively new here. Cheers!
-- Randyoo 23:07, 25 May 2004 (UTC)
I encountered yet another mirror today, which is complete lookalike of Wikipedia, though images are missing. See [2] I quote Eloquence "There's plenty of these mirrors, most of them end up serving Wikipedia content with ads". Since we don't seem to care too much about those that do not follow our rules, and let them make a lot of money over our backs (it must be a lot given the huge number of pages they have on offer and the fact they often rank higher than the real thing in Google), this made me think: maybe we should start an unoffical mirror ourselves that serves ads, with proper attribution etc, which might channel some money to WikiMedia. I'm not sure how much money it would bring in, but it might take some load of our servers. It would be a read-only copy, refreshed say every week after dump have been made (some mirrors show content which is 6 months old), and which channels all edits to the real Wikipedia. Being unoffical it would not cause any forks, I'm sure. Just brainstorming. Anyway Wikipedia needs some drastic measures to improve and sustain performance. Erik Zachte 01:13, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
About edit conflicts in lively discussions: At a glance it looks like the most common place they occur. There are two kinds of edits -- make that three. Creating, modifying, and appending. Typically, and almost always, entries to discussions are appended to a particular point, perhaps most often at the end of a section. It seems like a simple matter to make another kind of edit page to append, just append, and a whole bunch of people can do that all at once. Their parts get put in right in the order they are submitted. That way it becomes feasible to compose online (which I am not doing now since I had an edit conflict already this morning when I thought I was whipping out my piece pretty quickly; so now I'll generally compose offline for my discussion stuff). ;Bear 18:10, 2004 May 25 (UTC)
A bit of fun: what do people think should be Wikipedia's official song? -- ChrisO 17:25, 25 May 2004 (UTC)
Crystal Method - Busy Child. Bensaccount 18:13, 25 May 2004 (UTC) (Esp. for the "Did you know" section.)
I'd like to invite discussion on how to treat the "cypher" spelling, a variant of "cipher", in cryptography articles: See Wikipedia:WikiProject Cryptography/Cipher vs Cypher for arguments. — Matt 15:44, 25 May 2004 (UTC)
Someone has mucked up the article on the Asian theatre of World War II. As a result, there are now Asian theatre of World War II and Asian Theatre of World War II, neither of which contains the page history (it's at Pacific War). Can a sysop with some time on his/her hands sort this out and move/delete/merge these things back together and fix all the redirects? -- Minesweeper 13:22, May 25, 2004 (UTC)
So apropos of a discusion on Talk:Wiki it turns out that not everybody pronounces "Wiki" the same way. I think it's "weekee" but to some it seems to be "wicky". Possbily there are even stranger variants out their. Shall we have a poll?
The obviously correct way to pronounce "Wiki" is:
http://www.informationblast.com/
This site seems to have taken the content of wikipedia and rearranged it into rather useless terms. The point is that they seem to have blatently stolen content from wikipedia. Can anything be done about this?
This is a two part Business Development Proposal
PART ONE:
Attention: Website Administrator/Marketing Director My name is Terry Schembari and I'm the Marketing Director for Mentura Inc. I was just looking at your website and was impressed with the design and content. My company Mentura, is the largest Educational/Family Friendly DVD rental company in the world.... [a lot of commercial deleted, see the article history if you're really interested]
I would like to start translating English-language articles into languages that are currently not available or not as exhaustive as their English counterpart. The problem is, I do not know how to get into the servers for the other languages to start. I'm probably overlooking it, but I can't find it. Please help.
Kylefr635 18:59, 24 May 2004 (UTC)
hi , i have a school science fair thing and i need to know why nylon was named nylon. do you have any clue on htis and could u send me any information if you have it of about this question . thanks .
Since people don't read the Talk:List of Australian post codes page ;) I'll copy what I wrote here:
Geez Chuq, that's a curly one. dunno how I missed the chat at the post codes page! never knew about the 9nnn post codes. If in doubt it sounds like you're better off with the CIA than at odds with them... a page on Communications in Australia sounds reasonable. more power to your elbow! Erich 10:14, 24 May 2004 (UTC)
Whenever I log into wikipedia ,I get a blank page.I am using aol version 8 plus and internet explorer version 6.
S. A. G.
Moved to Wikipedia talk:Creative commons migration
Wikipedia is running so slow today that most of my attempts at posting are timing out. What's going on? Rick K 21:51, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
--> Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dashes
Language links to tokipona: aren't working any more. (See, for example, Drug, which ends with the text "tokipona:ilo nasa" because the link isn't interpreted correctly. Can someone fix that, maybe? Marnanel 05:39, May 23, 2004 (UTC)
Believing that the correct title of the famous Sousa march was The Washington Post, I confidently tinkered, moving The Washington Post March to The Washington Post (march), and editing articles accordingly. (E. g. in The Washington Post I wrote, " The Washington Post is also the title of a march..."
Then I decided to see whether I could notate the melody of the opening strain. And found to my chagrin that one of my three recordings simply calls it Washington Post (no "The", although some of the other marches, like "The Thunderer," had their titles given with a "The"). Another calls it The Washington Post... and a third calls it The Washington Post March.
a) Anyone know which really is the correct title of the march?
b) Anyone know a convenient way to resolve this sort of question? Googling isn't it, both because of the difficulty of constructing proper searches to pick up only one of the three variants, but also because it is obvious that writers are not punctilious about the title of this work and "most frequent" would not necessarily be "correct." For example, I'm pretty darn sure the title of the famous Strauss waltz is "On the Beautiful Blue Danube", not "The Blue Danube waltz," but both give almost identical numbers of Google hits.
Zen answers, such as that it doesn't matter because nobody cares, or that the correctness of the title of marches is not altered by adding the word "march" to a title that lacks one or removing the word "march" from a title that has one, are not needed. (And no, don't bother to tell me that the actual title of the Strauss waltz is "An Der Schonen Blauen Danau...") Dpbsmith 00:21, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
I too have heard it call both "The Washington Post" and the "The Washington Post March". After Googling "Sousa, Washington, and Post, I find that internet sources are 2-1 in favor of "The Washington Post". Logically, if it were "The Washington Post March", wouldn't it also be "The Stars and Stripes Forever March"? Scout32 19:41, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
This may be of interest to those who use Verdana as the default font in their browsers. This bug has already caused some misunderstandings. See Verdana#Combining characters bug — Monedula 20:48, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
And recently the default style of Wikisource has been changed — exactly to use Verdana! This should be reversed ASAP, because there are some accentuated Russian texts there, and Verdana shows accents in the wrong places! — Monedula 21:20, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
#bodyContent { font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; }
It seems like the article and re-dir should be reversed. I don't want to ruin the page histories by doing it via cut&paste, but I can't move it because I can't delete the redir. Can some admin do it? Niteowlneils 17:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm a big fan of Linux and of its Tux mascot. Wanting a Tux sticker and not finding any on the internet, I manufactured some, selling them by myself (see Tux Sticker). I'm also a contributor of the french Wikipedia and wanting to share with the community, I decided to give 10% of all profits to the Wikimedia foundation. Dirac
The new version of the software used on meta does not work on IE5 (Mac). It is completely impossible to view the content of the page, or to edit. 83.109.133.44 12:35, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
Not sure where else to write this, so I'm asking here: How far should the extent of writing articles about places go? Let's use Malaysia as an example. There's district level ( Petaling). Or you can go for subdivisions, or mukim in Malay, which would be, for example, Damansara. And some subdivisions have several townships in them, so you might have an article like Bandar Utama. How far should this go? I see some villages in the United States which have populations in three or four digits, and yet have articles, and as townships presumably have a comparable if not even larger population, I presume such articles are ok. Is this alright? Johnleemk 10:14, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
http://www.tinyurl.com Very handy. Andries 09:49, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
--> Wikipedia talk:Dealing with vandalism
something funny is happening with votes for deletion Dunc Harris | Talk 16:52, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Many wikis are being converted to MediaWiki 1.3 today. The log of the process shows they are being converted alphabetically, and it is currently up to da:, so expect some changes here on en soon. Further details can be seen at m:MediaWiki roadmap. Please report bugs at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports. Angela . 10:25, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
I might have missed it, but i have been looking for a discussion about an international wiki. The point is that the current english wiki is in my experience culturally bound to mainly the US and the UK. When i read the en-wiki, i sometimes meet typical us-views and issues, and i feel that i should not interfere with my dutch background - i probably don't understand the culturally bound subtilities, although i do understand the language. Let's face it: objectivity means in fact inter-subjectivity and the same text can sound objective for one culture and very subjective for another. Also there sometimes are problems with international linking: the definition of terms in different cultures is not precisely the same, causing trouble with international linking of adjacent subjects Am i the only one who feels the need of a real international wiki? The "simple english" is no option, it is there for another purpose. -- Taka 13:36, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses. I will consider the English wiki to be international. The point is that I could not find anything about it. But the Talk:Comic book discussion is a really good example of how things (apparently) are meant. -- Taka 15:10, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
There have been discussions lately on Wikipedia-l and Wikitech-l as to whether we should have wikipedias for artificial languages, such as Klingon and Toki Pona:
There are other scattered discussions as well.
It seems to me that this subject should have input from the wider community. Have at it! - Rholton 14:52, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
When using the Standard skin, if I look at a page that contains an external link, whether the link is renamed or not, the external link is listed after the closing bracket. For example, if I posted [externallink.com], it is displayed as [1] (externallink.com). Rick K 20:38, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
The Daily Kos political blog has opened the dKosopedia wiki. There are a number of original articles, however some are copied from Wikipedia (see: Democratic Party). The copied pages contain this notice: "This article was copied from Wikipedia. See Discussion section." The Discussion section of each article contains this notice: "I believe it is initially important that a foundation is laid with a list of intelligent links to build a comprehensive database. After many of these important links are filled, perhaps it would be wise to rewrite the article.
That is to say, this should be temporary."
Are there any copyright, licensing, etc. issues here? Please take a look, I don't know much about this stuff.
24.118.116.241 23:41, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
I would like to have some detailed information on how to create non governmental organization. This may include like how to register for, where to register it and what things should be done first before reaching the final process of registering.
It was proposed on VfD that the page on Heck should be made a redirect, either to Hell or Euphemism. The problem I have is that neither of these pages (as of this writing!) actually say anything about the word heck. That is, a user entering heck would have the odd experience of being directed to a page that does not discuss the entry word and does not explain why.
Should there be (is there already?) a form of redirect that would allow for inclusion of a comment, so that entering "Heck" could bring up a page with the notice
rather than merely
16:20, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
I copied this discussion to sourge forge (as anonymous entry), see [5] -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 19:37, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Should toki pona or Klingon Wikipedias be allowed to exist? Discuss at m:Artificial languages
Is Wikipedia biased? Discuss at Wikipedia talk:POV
I've been going through the comments at MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports regarding the new skin. Many comments suggest a revert to the standard skin and then go further one step at a time. But I don't get to see any replies to these comments from any developers/admins. Is anything being done, where are the decisions being made, where to know the latest ? Jay 07:08, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Why is it gone? I want it back. -- Jia ng 05:04, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Hmm... were things just recently changed? The text size on every page suddenly got very small and some comments on WP:RFA aren't parsed correctly. The # and : signs by my comments and those of one other user aren't converting to indents/lists. Is this just something on my end? – Jrdioko (Talk) 00:01, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
How are other folks' browsers displaying 101010100, encoded as 10<sup>10<sup>10<sup>100</sup></sup></sup> (the googolplex, ten to the (ten to the hundredth))? In mine (Safari 1.2.2 under OS X 10.3.4) it is displaying exactly the same way as 101010100, encoded as 10<sup>10</sup>10<sup>100</sup> This markup was from an existing page; I haven't tried to enter this sort of expression before. Did multiple nested levels of superscripting ever work? or is the special WikiTex math markup needed? Dpbsmith 17:57, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Someone created the page Golden Age of Freethought by Moving the Wikipedia:Sandbox to it.
Thus there is an obscure page with no incoming links, yet with a History of thousands of modifications.
This must take up an enormous amount of storage space. Can some admin person go ahead and truncate the history? Any way to prevent such a situation from recurring? Curps 20:16, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I would like to inform the user who calls himself Moriori that his continued defamation of my character and false allegations against me have forced me to take drastic action. I am now going to sue you for libel. This is not a threat. I will be taking my first formal actions as you're reading this. I am not seeking money, but rather a VERY PUBLIC APOLOGY AND RETRACTION AND TERMINATION OF ALL OF YOUR TIES WITH WIKIPEDIA. I would further like to warn Raul654 that if he does not remove his false accusations against me from his "user talk" page, that he too will be included in my lawsuit. Anyone else accusing me of copyright violations will also be sued. This is not a hoax or a bluff. Moriori, you are is serious legal trouble. In addition to having the truth on my side, I have sufficient evidence to prove in court that you have indeed slandered me. You have obviously not even read my explanation for my actions, but another user of this very site has and believes me, regardless of how you attempt to poison the minds of fellow users with your lies. The only way to prevent a lawsuit that will ruin you, even as you have attempted to ruin my reputation, is an immediate and obvious retraction of all that you have said stating or implying that I have committed a copyright infringement, as well as resigning your status or any status at Wikipedia. (Felix F. Bruyns)
Could someone please tell me what a skin is? Adam 04:41, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This page is no longer edible. However, neither on the page itself, nor on the talk page is there any clue who protected it, or why it is protected. Can anyone shed a light? Abigail 10:14, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It would have been nice if Template namespace initialisation script had first editted all pages so that {{msg:foo}} became
and then went and moved all the MediaWiki message to the Template namespace, instead of just moving the messages to the new namespace.... Redirected messages do not work! All taxonomy pages that were using messages in the taxoboxes, and many, many, many other pages with the now redirected messages are b0rk, b0rk, b0rk! I've very disappointed. - UtherSRG 16:05, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Help seems to be deleted. Not blanked by a vandal, gone. No History, nuthin'. "Help:Contents From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (Wikipedia does not have an article on this topic yet. To start the article, click Edit this page.)" Niteowlneils 22:14, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
(Already reported at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports)
The oddest thing has been happening to me. I tried several times, both some hours ago and both now, to edit MediaWiki:Feature ("Austrian" should like to "Austria"), but to no avail. Every time I press "Edit this page", get to the edit page, make the modification, press "Save page" - and my Mozilla Firefox appears to be loading the page, until, several minutes later, it gives up. Wikipedia isn't the most reliable site when it comes to performance, so I wouldn't be surprised were it not for the fact that in the meanwhile I successfully edited and saved other pages. Is there some sort of curse hanging above the MediaWiki: namespace? -- Itai 20:20, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
Question moved to the Reference desk.
This is probably not the right place for this request, so feel free to move it.
If you have time, or don't know what to do, I'd appreciate some help with the Chemical Elements category. It seems pretty essential that we have such a category, but adding the tag to every element article takes ages.
You'll earn my Eternal Gratitude
Wyllium 06:37, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Where should discussions regarding the look/feel/layout of Wikipedia go? 217.159.81.197 13:11, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
How do categories work? I want to understand subcategories (and any other related goodies). Lupin 12:02, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Category placement: At the top (before the article proper) or at the bottom (along with the interwikis)? Bottom placement seems preferable to me (same reasons as with the w:xx's), but maybe I'm missing something. –Hajor 18:58, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
And a simple English-language "category" link is certainly less likely to scare off a random monolingual anon editor than a list of strange foreign words at the top of the article text (which was, IIRC, the chief reason for sending the interwikis to the bottom). Even so, I still think there's a case to be made for all the "non-text" meta-information at the end of the article (ctrl-end in most browsers). Why the placement question in the first place? As you can see here, it seems that in monobook the formatting can be broken if the article starts with a table straight after the Category. FWIW, –Hajor 19:37, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Categorization and Wikipedia talk:Categorization. I believe category tags should be at the end, just before the interwiki links. Angela . 04:26, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
When I go to Current events, the calendar is spreading across the whole of the page. The pink table (deaths in May, etc.} is spreading across the whole page. The supposedly hidden notes ("<!-- To archive this page at the beginning of the month, see Wikipedia:How to archive Current Events --> ", "<!-- Election sections are for up-to-date articles about current or recently concluded elections. Once articles are updated with results, they are moved to the results section.) --> ", "<!-- NOTE: PLEASE LOG NEW EVENTS IN THE PRESENT TENSE. THANK YOU! --> <!-- PLEASE ALSO PROVIDE LINKS TO NEWS STORIES AFTER EACH ENTRY, NEWS STORIES WITHOUT LINKS MAY BE REMOVED. LINKS TO STORIES MUST BE IN ENGLISH. --> ", etc. are displaying. These problems were not happening the last time I logged in to Wikipedia. What's going on? Rick K 06:08, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
I like the new skin but the link colours all look the same. Luckily, theres an easy fix: Go to < User:yourusername/monobook.css> and enter
/* standard link colors */ a { color: #0000FF; } a:visited { color: #7F007F; } a:active, a.new { color: #FF0000; } a.interwiki, a.external { color: #3366BB; } a.stub { color: #772233; }
and save and shift+f5 to refresh. Bensaccount 03:54, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
See m:User styles for more details on what you can change. Angela . 08:12, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Hurray for the new skin! I really like the new skin for the main page and the edit pages. Could we skin this page (which is a sickly yellow) in the new format? - 24.199.99.174 02:26, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
I see in the time it took me to post, the Village Pump was newly skinned! Very nice look. - 24.199.99.174 02:27, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
I tried to log in from home with two different browsers and I got some kind of creepy new skin and I hate it. I had to go across the street to a machine where it remembers me. I could not log in at home -- not only that, one of the browsers would not even display the "log in" link, and the other had it crammed way up in the corner and it did basically nothing. The latter was Internet Exploder 5 on a Mac with 9.2.2 ;Bear 04:19, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
[ hate the new skin]. We used to be going forward, and now in one fell swoop we managed to create a look that's worse than that of the very first Wikipedia.--Branko.
The new skin looks terrific! Bravo on a job well done. Quadell (talk) 15:14, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
I hate the new skin, but by setting preferences to "Nostalgia" I got something that at least dumps that almost unreadable font. However, whatever happened to being able to get to "My Contributions"? I can't seem to find it now. -- BRG 16:57, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone know why there is a large gap before the table in the "Marshall Plan expenditures" section of Marshall Plan? It appears in all the different skins. Is something clashing with the new software? -- Minesweeper 01:19, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
See Template talk:NihonG. What's going on? Rick K 23:03, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Headers are entirely too large. hd2 levels are larger than the main header of the page. Rick K 21:18, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Tables are way too wide using the Standard skin. For example, when I came to this page, the table at the top of the page spread all the way across my screen and even made me have to scroll right to see all of it. That didn't happen before. Rick K 21:18, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Aaahh! The links in my navigation box (eg, "Main Page", "Recent changes" "Current events" etc) don't do anything when I click on them in this new fancy-pants design. Are they now using some other type of sripting? Horrified, -- Infrogmation 20:53, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Overall I really like the new skin but:
What the hell happened to the automated selected anniversaries section? I thought that the English Wikipedia was not going to be upgraded until the ' variable in template messages bug' was fixed. This really pisses me off! Also, what happened to the background fill color for all non-article pages? The distinction before was a very useful one, now it is vague. So the only difference between Sandbox:maveric149, user:maveric149/sandbox, talk archive:Sandbox would be the tab at the top of those pages. This will only encourage the misuse of the article namespace and lessen the distinction between metadata and content.
I also see that some links to stub articles are showing up as red links for those with a stub threshold set. The new "blue" links have a very hard to read muted color and the external link icon is hideous. This is especially true for [1] wiki ref links in articles. So please:
And don't give me the "you can change your preferences" line since all of the above needs to be default. Also, is it just me or is the default font size way too small? -- mav 20:52, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
I have to agree about the link colors and the font. I would be using the Standard skin, except that the link problem I listed above makes it unusable. Rick K 21:14, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Change the link colours back to the original please .. Jay 03:19, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
The new layout looks great, but it unfailingly crashes my installation of Firefox 0.8. The old look loaded without a hitch; I'm guessing the new layout is heavy with tables and forms?
I am using Firefox .8 and it looks fine to me SD6-Agent 23:21, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
With the new monobook skin, several of the links have a curious little icon next to them. The icon is a box, with an arrow exiting to the top right. Can I ask: What is the significance of this icon?-- Fangz 19:34, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
body {font: x-small serif; }
#globalWrapper { font-size:140%; }
Now that we have Verdana as our default font, the accents in Russian words will appear in the wrong places (due to the "Verdana bug"). Do not attempt to move accents — simply switch Wikipedia skin to "Standard". — Monedula 19:13, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Is there no consideration of changing over to a less stupid font? I notice that Verdana doesn't include all the diacritics for transliterating indic langauges, either. And those are quite necessary.
-- कुक्कुरोवाच|
Talk‽
19:32, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
A concrete illustration:
English: fóobar
Russian: фо́обар
Non-Verdana font works correctly:
English: fóobar
Russian: фо́обар
The Russian version incorrectly displays the acute accent (stress mark) over the second о rather than over the first (when using Verdana font).
It seems pointless to argue whether this is "necessary" for Russian, since there are other languages where combining diacritics are essential, as others have pointed out. Verdana has to go.
Curps 04:26, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Is there a way to add subscript to text being used in a caption? I'm trying to get a few numbers as subscripts in the caption for the Spirometry article. It just shows the wikimarkup being used: e.g. <sub>3</sub>
Any help appreciated
-- Prisonblues 21:06, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
I notice that the skin in Chinese WP has been updated, but it seems that, it makes even the "Standard" one not work well. The external links are the biggest problems: their source codes are just displayed there! some source codes do not work, like this one "<a class=internal href='/wiki/Wikipedia:首页'>维基社群</a>" which should be link to the Community Portal in Chinese WP, but i just see the source codes; pics with hyperlinks have ugly borders... :-| -- 哈越中 ( talk) 18:32, May 28, 2004 (UTC)
Rafael Cordero and Rafael Cordero (educator) need to be disambiguated, I still dont know how to do it.
Thanks and God bless!
Antonio Im a Barbie Girl! Martin
This page is no longer editable. However, neither on the page itself, nor on the talk page is there any clue who protected it, or why it is protected. Can anyone shed a light? Abigail 10:14, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
<irony>wow</irony>
I notice someone has applied the msg:stub message to Category:WikiHolidays; I can only assume that this is not the only case. Category descriptions are highly likely to be short (and hopefully sweet): is there really any point in marking them as stubs? -- Phil | Talk 09:11, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
At Apostle Titus, the box containing the Category link overlaps the caption to the photo. This should be fixed or deleted. Adam 05:21, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Why does this need to be brought here instead of to the article's Talk page? Rick K 19:10, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Standard skin should be the default. Let users change the preferences to any other skin they want. Customization is for getting comfortable with the user interface, customization is NOT for making an unusable user interface usable. The latter is what the developers and admins seem to be suggesting nowadays.
customization = usable -> better<br\> customization NOT unusable -> usable<br\>
What is the level of usability is debateable, but it should satisfy the majority. For a website, the default browser behaviour is a good guideline. Refer Usability testing to check if the new Wikipedia format passes the test. It has a line that says "A common mistake that designers make, for instance, is to focus too much on creating designs that look "cool", but compromise on usability and functionality."
Jay 05:35, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Could someone please tell me what a skin is? Adam 04:41, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
You can change your Skin at your Preferences. There are 4 skins. -- Menchi 05:38, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Thanks to Gabriel Wicke, sysops can now add a stylesheet for their wiki using MediaWiki:Monobook.css. The content of these stylesheets should be similar to the user stylesheets. I have used this feature to increase the font size on the CJK wikis, as requested on wikitech-l. Stylesheets for the other skins and configurable javascript will be implemented soon. See m:User styles for examples of the kinds of things which could go in these pages. -- Tim Starling 03:05, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Some admin might want to replace the recent cut&paste "move" with a proper move, before either page gets edited. Niteowlneils 18:23, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I just switched to the Monobook skin, and I see a <!--> at the bottom of the home page (as if someone messed up a comment). I did not have this problem with the Cologne Blue skin. I apologize if someone has already reported this and is working on it. I see the error in both Mozilla and IE. Also, is there a better forum for problems like this that can only be handled by admins? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 14:47, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
I give notice that I will delete every one of these "Category" links I see so long as they have the effect of creating a huge white space on the right side of the page and pushing everything else to the left. If people think these links are valuable (which I don't), they should find a way to add them without causing such distortion of the page. Adam 07:29, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
When will you people grasp that an encyclopaedia is for readers and not for a cabal of computer nerds? I don't know what a "skin" is, and I don't know, or want to know, how to redesign or reconfigure my screen. Nor will many other readers and potential readers. Nor should we have to do so just because we want to read an encyclopaedia article. I do know that the "Category" links make the pages look very ugly, and until this is fixed I will delete them, at least when they are installed at articles I have written. Adam 09:33, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Wow. Good way to get blocked for vandalism. And use the Standard skin. Everything looks fine to me. Rick K 20:09, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
OK well I will refrain from deleting the links since I am assured that someone is working on fixing the formatting problem they cause. Could someone please explain what a "skin" is? Adam 23:53, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Indira_Gandhi&action=history, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Indira_Gandhi&diff=3770937&oldid=3770809 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Indira_Gandhi&diff=0&oldid=3770937.
There's this mysterious [[User:]] in the diffs, and the revision history calls it Special:Contributions (with empty target). -- Paddu 06:11, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I'm trying to pass a vertical bar as part of a template parameter for a piped link to put into a wiki table being generated by the template. How do I do it? There is minimal documentation in the roadmap article on templates. For example, I want to do this
{{Template:something|name=test| topo=[[National Topographic System|NTS]] 83N/03}}
If I don't try to escape the vertical bar somehow, the "NTS]] 83N/03" is being treated as another parameter it seems. I've tried || and a \| without success.
RedWolf 03:41, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
If you simply want the vertical bar to be displayed, just use |. However, if you want to pass a piped link that it turns into a link, forget about it. RedWolf 22:30, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
Hmm... were things just recently changed? The text size on every page suddenly got very small and some comments on
WP:RFA aren't parsed correctly. The # and : signs by my comments and those of one other user aren't converting to indents/lists. Is this just something on my end?
–
Jrdioko
(Talk) 00:01, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This appears to have been fixed. – Jrdioko (Talk) 21:24, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Is it just my browser or is the category link on George VI of the United Kingdom screwing up the layout of the page, making the picture appear in the middle? I've tried everything to get it to line up properly, and the only thing that seems to work is to remove the category tag. Any hints? - Chrism 19:25, Jun 1, 2004 (UTC)
Wow, I like Categories. What a great idea. It might even replace all the List articles when it's working properly.
However I see some problems. First is that we don't have any kind of policy on how to use them, and no help on how to use them, or indeed a discussion page on how to create a policy or a help page. (I may be wrong on these, in which case feel free to point me at these pages).
Also we already have several duplicate categories (playwright and dramatist, writer and author). We need to work on resolving these; in the long term this is probably a job for the Help and policy pages.
In the short term, does anyone have a script that will move all articles in one category into another? In the above example I would like to move dramatist (the shorter category) into playwright (the longer). Can we do this automatically?
DJ Clayworth 15:28, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Please vote: Meta:Artificial languages equal rights Thanks! -- Timwi
The Gallery of user styles is open for business. If you have a cool skin, please share it with your fellow Wikipedians. Dori | Talk 07:23, Jun 1, 2004 (UTC)
I've been going through the comments at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports regarding the new skin. Many comments suggest a revert to the standard skin and then go further one step at a time. But I don't get to see any replies to these comments from any developers/admins. Is anything being done, where are the decisions being made, where to know the latest ? Jay 07:08, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
See the history of John Kerry. The questions below pertain to the categories I added there before they were removed by another user. LuckyWizard 01:24, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
One of the reasons the links were removed was that they made the page ugly by pushing the table off to the side. What should be done if categorization makes a page look ugly, as happened with the John Kerry article? Should the categories be removed, or should the page be rearranged slightly to make it non-ugly? I feel that the page should be rearranged slightly; what's the point of categories if they don't include everyone who should be included? (Of course, the ideal solution would be to reprogram the software to put the category links elsewhere; the sidebar, below the interwiki links, seems the best place. But what do we do until someone does that?) LuckyWizard 01:24, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Another reason the links were removed was that one of them ( Category:American major party presidential candidates) did not yet have a page, and was therefore a red link. Is it OK to add redlinked categories to articles? I can't see why category links should be removed just because they're red links; after all, part of the Wiki idea is that people can come along, see the red links, and create the article. Why should it be different for categories? (Also, I had already seen other redlinked categories. Another point is that I might have created the category myself, were it not for the fact that it was midnight.) LuckyWizard 01:24, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
The redirect at Sergio Vieira de Mello does not seem to work; it just brings up the redirect page. It does not appear to be a double-redirect. Could it be because there's an accent in the page it's trying to redirect to? -- Golbez 23:30, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
With the new category feature, god willing, a number of Article Series Boxes are going to go the way of the dodo shortly. Hopefully, a very large number. Do we have some protocol in place to handle these? Are they just going to flood VfD? Are we going to leave a lot of them around? Can we temporarily create some deletion level between speedy and VfD for redundant boxes? Snowspinner 21:15, May 31, 2004 (UTC)
The proposed "law" for Wikipedia font policy is this:
The reason for this is that prescribing a particular font will almost certainly lead to incorrect display for some languages (as is the case with Verdana). It's important to be nice, but it's much more important to keep Wikipedia readable. — Monedula 20:12, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
as t
I'd like to ask a question. No one seems to be able to answer me. Today the font of monobook was changed, and the result is absolutely ugly for me. When I asked why it was changed, I was answered there was a poll. Now, when I asked where the poll took place, I never had any answer. I come around, and I find these nice comment about the english wikipedia being the only reasonable place to discuss this because 1) noone goes to meta and 2) everyone comes to en in the end.
And that is so unfortunately true. When I want to find how a decision was taken without asking us, I indeed come here, and find my answer. So, my question is : where did you hide this poll ? :-)
First off, let me say that I like the new default skin very much. But, when I view Mount Vernon (plantation), the top two right-floated images are positioned near the middle of the page. This compresses the text to the left into a very narrow column that makes reading difficult and leaves a large white space to the right of the images. I'm using Mozilla 1.5. Are others seeing this? If so, is this really intended? Bill 11:42, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Overall, i like the category scheme. Is there a place to discuss the new category scheme? To me it looks like a lot of the List of ... articles become redundant with the category scheme. Also, is there a suggested system for common schemes, e.g.:
Is it possible to format the listing of the sub-categories and the contained articles? Finally, how much introduction text is suggested for a category scheme? One line like e.g. Category:Harry Potter, none like Category:Films, or a lengthy introduction that makes the category more like an article like Category:Japanese culture (made by me for demonstration purposes)? -- Chris 73 | Talk 04:56, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
How about a place where wikipedians can showcase their custom user styles, and comment on others? I for one, would like to show off my minor modifications to MonoBook and ask for some feedback (and a fix to why the search buttons suddenly look bloated in Camino...). kelvSYC 04:28, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
The question mark at the end of this title is making it impossible to get to the article. Rick K 02:32, May 31, 2004 (UTC)
At the top it says don't report bugs here. People are, however, doing so. Is this OK really? If I don't have to go over to some other namespace to do so I would rather not. -- Nevilley 21:02, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
no time to explain/comment.
-- AbboTT 20:23, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Sorry, I was kind of in a rush... Either I didn't notice that or it wasn't there at the time.
My bad. -- AbboTT 03:54, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
At Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and Chiang Kai-shek, for example, the catgories tag is pushing the image inward and creating whitespace. How can this be fixed? -- Jia ng 19:22, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Empty link by itself doesnt work for me. Two br tags seems to do the trick, but a large border around the tag remains. -- Jia ng
Is there someplace running the old MediaWiki version, where I could compare how things are being formatted? I think I've noticed some changes that don't seem desireable. Niteowlneils 17:34, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
When you check your watchlist, you know how it tells you "Users have made X edits in the time period selected"? That number is up about 25%, at least for me. Meelar 17:15, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Listen, this has probably come up a dozen times, but it's buried somewhere on the Villiage Pump page where I can't find it easily. Sorry, but I really don't like the new skin. It's a beautiful design, really, tabs, etc but the font is killing me. If you look at the word and for example I see the letter d with much thicker walls than the letter a, and the ns walls are much thinner than both. As a result, the text of an article seems to vibrate under these conditions. Maybe I'm doing something wrong here. I have Firefox running in a Windows XP system. Do I have to download a special font or something? Please, browseing wikipedia is getting me punch drunk over here. Trust me, I'm usually more coherent than this.
Windows 2000 Mozilla 1.6 on LCD 1024x768 and I think the font is fab and I do not experience the above problem! But I have always favoured sans serif fonts. Paul Beardsell 17:13, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Heck! I have just installed the Bitstream Vera fonts on Windows 2000 and using Mozilla 1.6 now I have the weirdnesses complained of by the poster of the original para of this section. I will uninstall - returning to Verdana. Paul Beardsell 03:44, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
The (current default) font is terrible under both Mozilla and IE on my Windows 2000 box. It's pixilated almost to the pint of being unreadable in both the italic variant and whatever text decoration sis used to indicate a
link. Honestly, using this new format makes Wikipedia look ugly and -- more importantly -- makes it far less usable to unregistered users who can't their preferences to something else.
I realize that a lot of effort must have been expended on this, and I don't mean to denigrate the effort, but, I'm sorry, this change just doesn't work. orthogonal 08:22, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Also, in preferences, what's called "Standard" is what I think of as what wikipedia looked like prior to the "upgrade" to the new skin. orthogonal 08:32, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
An example of what I'm talking about can be seen here:
Could someone please please make Verdana the default, and throw out this Bitstream thing? I'm using Firefox 0.8 w/ Windows XP Home, and the rendering of the font is terrible: The characters are just very uneven. I tried to change my personal style sheet, but to no avail.
Micha 03:38, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
On my machine, a RedHat Linux 9 box, the font also looks not very nice. It is not pixelized, as others complain above, but the tracking is far too wide for my taste. (But I do like the other features of the new skin). Sanders muc 16:02, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
body { font-family: Verdana; }
in their
user stylesheet. --
Gabriel Wicke 00:15, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)I must be doing something wrong over at Template:Mancala 2x6. I expect to be able to use it like {{Mancala 2x6|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12}} since the appropriate image names are defined. However, I end up with this, where it claims it cannot find images I know exist. Could someone suggest the correct way to do this? - Kevin Saff 20:59, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It would have been nice if User:Template namespace initialisation script had first editted all pages so that {{msg:foo}} became {{foo}} and then went and moved all the MediaWiki message to the Template namespace, instead of just moving the messages to the new namespace.... Redirected messages do not work! All taxonomy pages that were using messages in the taxoboxes, and many, many, many other pages with the now redirected messages are b0rk, b0rk, b0rk! I'm very disappointed. - UtherSRG 16:05, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
What the <bleep> happened to it? Where's the Yahoo Search, and, more importantly, where's the 'if you think you know what should be on this page, click here' link?!? Niteowlneils 15:39, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Since many people have complained about the style, and since now we have the option of fixing it at least for the entire english wikipedia, I think we need to have a discussion and possible some votes, and fix the major problems. As far as I can tell the biggest changes that people are irked about are:
How about Wikipedia:MonoBook styling for the discussion? Dori | Talk 15:22, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Next question: Where do we say what we *like* about the new interface? Here, or at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css, or at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports? Elf | Talk 17:32, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
How do I replace a picture with a new upload? Uploading again with the same name doesnt work. Bensaccount 00:49, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It seems since the new skin was implemented that the form completion dropdown box does not appear directly below the original box I am typing in but may be elsewhere on the page.
My OS and browser stats:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
SD6-Agent 22:12, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
I can't believe I couldn't find this in Wikipedia:Naming Conventions... On the talk page for Talk:O. Henry, HamYoyo suggested that "the page ought to be filed under "Henry, O." I wanted to point to the naming convention that says that in Wikipedia article titles, names are given in normal order rather than inverted order (surname; comma; first name; middle-name(s)-or-initial(s)). But I couldn't find it! Where is it? Dpbsmith 18:55, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
We always give names in the "natural" order, hence " George Washington", " Mao Zedong", " José Ortega y Gasset". -- Jmabel 20:31, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
I accept the principle that there should be some type of 'minimum service' requirement on voters, but would have to query the sole option selected of '90 days elapsed since registration' as there are people with fewer than 100 edits to their name on there (indeed I noted at least one in single figures!) whereas there are probably members who have a reasonable track record with more edits in a shorter timeframe. It would be wrong to change the process now, but just as some sort of 'heads-up' for the future maybe there should be a minimum time and minimum contribution together. -- VampWillow 16:51, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
In response to my efforts to determine exactly how to pronounce " Abu Ghraib", someone suggested uploading a sound clip to Wikipedia, much as one can upload images for articles. I found, however, that there seems to have been little discussion on the uses of sound on Wikipedia. The Special:Upload page, which discusses images at length and provides useful links, only makes a passing reference to sound files, provides no link, and gives an example that seems to require the use of "OGG" files, which are unquestionably much less well-known than either WAV or MP3 files and are not supported natively by browsers.
After some digging, I found the article Wikipedia:Sound and Wikipedia, which calls itself "a place to discuss issues surrounding using sound in Wikipedia". It seems, though, to have the exclusive POV of a community of users who merely want to download music into portable players (possibly just iPods!). I thought a much more logical use of sound in Wikipedia was to enhance articles (for pronunciations and obvious sound-related issues, not the ghastly practice of forcibly "entertaining" Website visitors!). When I asked why OGG and why not something more browsable, Tuf-Kat suggested I bring it up here in the Village pump.
So I put it to you, the Wikipedia community:
(By the way, please don't post your responses to these questions inside this single multi-paragraph posting. This is very confusing. Please create your own contiguous posting and excerpt mine as needed.) I invite your opinions and suggestions. -- Jeff Q 12:02, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Somebody did that sorta thing with Poutine. Quite humorously (not that humour is necessarily helpful in this situation).
I think it's a great idea to add a pronunciation bit to exotic names. Unless you are into news, chances is the accepted pronunciation of many foreign names will always be a mystery to you. And dictionaries are no help with modern proper names. So, having sounds for such words would increase the informativeness of the article. -- Menchi 07:19, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Without being egotistical, I think I'm probably one of the most experience users when it comes to sounds on wikipedia (last time I checked, I have 4 or 5 of the top 10 largest files uploaded). To answer your question about format - mp3 would be the ideal choice for its support, but it is patent encumbereed. The other formats (real, quicktime, microsoft) are proprietary and encumbered. That leaves ogg. Ogg is supported in the newest version of winamp, and you can get free programs that convert it to other formats (I *STRONGLY* recommend Audacity). →Raul654 18:00, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Currently it seems that an election notice has been placed on every page, although it is only shown when logged in under a username. It says Wikimedia Board Elections: Vote open until June 12. However it is currently positioned after the main article heading and before the start of the article text. To me this seems the wrong place to have it as it appears to be part of the article text. I think if it is to remain it should be moved before the main article heading or else to the bottom of the page. -- Popsracer 09:32, 31 May 2004 (UTC)