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Can user have a look to Wikipedia talk:Sound. I'm not conviced that this change is a good thing and I don't think it has received large support. Ericd 12:15, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(moved this down) A discussion about this is now at Wikipedia_talk:Sound#MP3_on_Wikipedia, announced here, at goings on and the mailing list -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:52, 2004 Jul 17 (UTC)
Here's a few suggestions for format for a footer table, taken from Ronald Reagan:
Preceded by: Jimmy Carter |
President of the United States 1981-1989 |
Succeeded by: George H. W. Bush |
Preceded by: Pat Brown |
Governor of California 1967-1975 |
Succeeded by: Jerry Brown |
Preceded by: Jimmy Carter |
President of the United States 1981-1989 |
Succeeded by: George H. W. Bush |
Preceded by: Pat Brown |
Governor of California 1967-1975 |
Succeeded by: Jerry Brown |
I don't want a formal vote, just an idea from someone other than me - which of these is easiest on the eyes and most immediately readable? Thanks. -- Golbez 01:41, Jul 17, 2004 (UTC)
Would it be possible to request a page somewhere in the Wikipedia: namespace where bugs can be reported? The instructions at the top of this page lead to one page, which leads to another, which leads to another, and the instructions for reporting are about as clear as mud. Would it be too much to ask for either a page here where suspected bugs can be reported, or clearer instructions on how to do it? I don't have access to IRC by the way so that's not an option either. -- Graham ☺ | Talk 22:50, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I thought of a nice idea to encourage users to browse through the Wikipedia pages:
A small contest, that requires users to 'click' through subjects to get from one subject to another, with the least possible stages.
For instance:
Get from: Tombstone, Arizona
To:
This is how i did it, there are possible other (shorter, funnier) ways as well...
Tombstone, Arizona -> Gunfight at the O.K. Corral -> Discovery Channel -> List of Discovery Channel programs -> The Blue Planet -> Ocean -> Titan (moon) -> Cassini-Huygens Mission
It could be possible to post a new challenge every day/month/week, and the one with the shortest route wins that contest (and ofcourse, receives enternal fame).
I did not know where to post this proposal, so i did it here. Maybe i could make an article of it, but its not really an encyclopedia article ;-)
-- K-Mile 12:35, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Wiki Link Contest for some more rather critical discussion of this idea. Please keep discussion in the VfD subpage to the topic of whether or not the page should be deleted. Andrewa 01:02, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The main Wikipedia logo has the words "The Free Encyclopedia" in an italic font. These words are very ugly, being full of aliasing. It is a shame that the beautiful multilingual spherical jigsaw is spoilt by this. Can someone improve it? At this size of text, I think an upright font would come out better than an anti-aliased italic font. The italic version could still be used at large sizes or higher resolutions. Gdr 13:01, 2004 Jul 16 (UTC)
I've checked the logo in the
GIMP and it also shows a white fringe around the text. Also,
here's what the logo looks like with a black background in
Mozilla Firefox. The image has areas of 100% opacity, and areas of 0% opacity; there's nothing in between. I'm fairly certain that Firefox correctly supports PNG transparency, and I know the GIMP does. Don't mind me. I don't know how to read. --
Wapcaplet 19:40, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Wikistats indicate that the number of new articles per day is rapidly decreasing, from about 600 a day a few days ago to 258 per day in July (as of July 14) [1]. I have some doubts whether this is accurate. Clicking on Special:Newpages shows that there are 750 new pages in last 24 hours and 4878 pages created in last 7 days (4878/7=698 per day) which is a lot more than 258 per day. Could this be a bug? Andris 10:30, Jul 16, 2004 (UTC)
There seem to be a number of these, for instance, List of gay-related topics. Should they be merged into categories? — Ashley Y 08:01, 2004 Jul 16 (UTC)
For some reason the image displayed at Penrose triangle is missing the bottom line of the triangle. If you actually click on the image it is fine, it is just being displayed wrong in the article. In case this is browser specific, I'm using IE 6 right now. -- Pascal666 07:08, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Looks to me like an off-by-one-pixel error, since the image had no margin. I've added some margin, and while I was at it added color and reduced the file size by 65% to boot. -- Wapcaplet 01:59, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm vaguely thinking of starting a project to encourage academics to contribute to Wikipedia (via university e-mail and poster campaigns perhaps). Although Wikipedia is certainly an excellent resource, it is still greatly lacking compared to subject specific encyclopedias ( The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is one I have had personal experience with). Academics have had years of experience explaining their subject areas to those with little prior knowledge and many have already contributed to other encyclopedias. It seems to me there are two factors stopping them from contributing: 1) ignorance of Wikipedia 2) technical barriers. My thought is that if we could set up a kind of "middle ground" between the willing academics and Wikipedia we could leave them to do what they're good at (writing about their subject using a format and media they're used to) while Wiki-volunteers take what they give them and beat it into a format appropriate for Wikipedia. I'm conscious of the fact that someone has almost certainly already had this idea, and that asking for help from people "with names" so to speak may seem anti-thetical to the Wiki spirit. Thus all comments/suggestions/flames are welcomed. Cfp 10:39, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Most academics probably don't have the time to contribute, or wouldn't want to because they might see it as a waste of time. On the other hand, it's worth a try. If nothing else we might get a lot more students. Exploding Boy 12:27, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)
It's probably a waste of time to get academics involved here, and unnecessary.
They need to publish papers under their own name in peer-reviewed publications. It's the only way they can continue in their careers. Whereas, we here toil anonymously, a little bit like the cathedral builders in the Middle Ages.
Academics aren't needed for most encyclopedia articles, which are just a very brief and broad overview at a level aimed at the intelligent layman reader, the sort of thing that someone with an undergraduate degree could write.
And there are a lot of people out there with undergraduate degrees or even PhDs who did not choose a career in academia, who probably make up the bulk of the contributors here. The Internet is a great equalizer, everyone has access to a wealth of reference material that at one time could only be accessible to someone with the resources of a university library.
Where the academics could really make a major contribution would be in the sister project Wikibooks. Free textbooks would be wonderful.
-- Curps 22:35, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
A few replies: I like the idea of getting academics involved at the editorial level, particularly due to the minimal technical skills this would require (it could be done exclusively through Talk pages). My thought behind particularly targeting academics to contribute is the teaching and communications skills they have of necessity picked up and I suppose this equally applies to "retired scholars". Certainly there are other specialists who it would be good to atract to Wikipedia, but there are none quite so easily reachable as active academics. Perhaps what is needed is a Wikipedia Advocacy Group (good initials at least...) I think it's worth checking out The Budapest Open Access Initiative to see the direction journals will hopefully progress in. Wiki's will never replace the traditional system of peer reviewed journals, and I don't think they should hope to. Wikipedia's strength (it seems to me) is as a comprehensive education resource, rather than a repository of the cutting-edge and often controversial material found in journals. As to whether we need academics, I genuinely believe we do. Yes for an article on why the sun rises and sets only undergrads are needed, but for articles making subtle distinctions between almost identical positions, greater experience and knowledge is necessary. It's unlikely that there are any undergrads capable of writing articles on the use of C* algebras in quantum mechanics or somesuch. REP (mentioned above) is exclusively written by fairly big name philosophers, and is an astounding size. I promise Routeldge wouldn't have been wasting their pennies on them if they didn't think they were strictly necessary. A final point is that academics are not some alien selfish species which is incapable of doing anything unless it's going to help get their department another star next time ratings come around; I'm sure many if not most contributors to Wikipedia have full time jobs, academics just happen to have the right knowledge and skills to make them ideal Wikipedia contributors. cfp 23:20, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There are two good reasons why most serious academics won't get involved with Wikipedia: (1) there is no quality control and no way of ensuring that one's work is not tampered with by idiots, and (2) there is a strong prejudice at Wikipedia against anyone who has expert knowledge or professional training. If anyone says, "Um, I know that 2 and 2 makes 4 because I am a professor of mathematics," they are imediately dismissed as an arrogant elitist who is "arguing from authority." Very few academics will put up with this. Adam 12:13, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I would like to start a Category. First there are no directions anywhere on how one starts a category. I put a new Category and it shows up in red. I can't firgure out how to make it blue. Second I found directions at mediwiki but there is nothing about starting a new name category. Third, For the Classics for topics like that of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. I know they have a category already but "Classics" needs their own category and ancient Greece and Ancient Rome need to be sub-categories for this one. And what should it be named "Classics", "Classical", "Classical Dept." (my choice), "Western Classics", ...??? If I am a classical scholar and want to go to all subjects dealing with the Classics what should be the category name? WHEELER 22:47, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Put in the [[category:types of shoe]] kind of thing which will give you the red thing at the top. All the articles in the category should be listed there. Then enter some text and a categorisation for that e.g. [[category:human]], which will appear at the top right, and since you've created the new category, it should then appear blue. Don't be shy to have a fiddle round; you can always nominate them for speedy deletion if you cock it up. Dunc_Harris| ☺ 00:08, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
This is a general request for help with biographies of members of this family; I've bitten off much more than I can chew. I have made several new stubs. These are linked on the page above. Happy editing. Dunc_Harris| ☺ 18:43, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
One a week takes about six months, and I don't fancy doing the artists much. I have a to do list if anyone wants a look:
The following is a list that needs to be done (please cross out if you have helped me!)
Aside from articles that deserve speedy deletion, why do people waste their time (and ours) on articles that have only one line? Surely, other than defining, say, a city or town, shouldn't there be more content if they are going to create the article? Please help me, I'm getting annoyed.-- naryathegreat 17:21, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
I just now found it necessary if some other ways of formatting the current page name were available, to facilitate their placement on links, for example. One could replace all spaces with "%20"; and another could replace all spaces with underscores. [[User:Poccil| Peter O. ( Talk)]] 16:21, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
(Sorry in advance if this is redundant/posted in the wrong section - I couldn't see any relavent spot at the top of Village_pump)
Is this scrolling text really necessary? I find the movement incredibly distracting when I'm trying to read articles. It occurs on the en.wikipedia site, which is almost exclusively English - why the need for different languages? Why those particular seven rather than every known language? I know I shouldn't complain as mostly a simple user of Wikipedia, but I find it much worse than the red begging box, which has thankfully been changed.
Profuse Apologies, it seems to have magically stopped now. I presume this was most likely a bug in my browser (Firefox) that maybe picked it up from a previous site I had visited. Unless it is something to do with cookies and first visits?. Again, sorry about that, I got a little too enthusiastic I think.
Does anyone think Wikipedia (and its sister projects) could benefit from some features focusing on keeping the WP community a community? At the moment it's all geared towards writing a great Wikipedia. I just thought that adding a bit of community could make Wikipedia a bit more attractive... Any thoughts? -- Kokiri 11:30, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Hi, folks, please take a look at the new Wikipedia:WikiProject Writing Captions - your comments will be much appreciated, as will be your participation. -- ke4roh 04:24, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedians have produced many maps, diagrams, graphs and figures available under the GFDL. But just having the image isn't quite enough, because it's hard to edit a diagram unless you have the sources that were used to make it. All you can really do with the image is scribble over the top.
(A real example: I noticed a couple of missing ships on User:Gsl's excellent map at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Battle_of_Aboukir_Bay.png. With access to the GIMP source for the image, I could have added the ships myself. But lacking the source, instead I asked Gsl to improve it.)
So I think that Wikipedia should encourage illustrators to upload their sources along with the image. Of course, not every contributor will be able to use the GIMP, or Adobe Illustrator, or 3D Studio Max or whatever. But having the source will mean that several people can work on an image, and there is a chance to continue to make improvements to the image when the original illustrator is busy or away. Gdr 13:01, 2004 Jul 16 (UTC)
I have created a new page for listing image source files: Wikipedia:Image source files. Please improve as needed, and link to it from appropriate places. -- Wapcaplet 03:07, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Agreed, the ideal place to link them is from the image description page. It is likely to become unwieldy once there are a lot more sources, but we can deal with that when it happens. Having a list like this is helpful in the (relatively few) cases where a source file doesn't seem to have a corresponding image; one in particular is Image:USA CountiesSVG.zip, which is somewhat general-purpose and could be the basis for a variety of images, while not itself being very useful for illustration. I suspect there may be some designers (particularly in the area of map-making) who are seeking a particular kind of source file to base their illustrations on. Maybe one day that page will just become a list of "raw materials" from which to work, rather than collecting every Photoshop or SVG file we upload. I don't know if prompting uploaders for a source file is the best idea; most of the time, one will not be available, and it may confuse people who don't have one. -- Wapcaplet 16:19, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
If at all possible, can someone who runs a registered bot set this bot to work on the Wikipedia, to remove not-necessary entities and replace them? Especially items like é are encoded as é, which is completely unnecessary as é is in ISO-8859-1, and a lot easier to edit. The same applies to the other accented letters such as á, ó, è etc. Anárion 23:10, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
áéíóú
àèìòù
äëïöü
最@ñ
?????
ç? 80.58.36.239 13:09, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I support any effort to make Wikipedia friendly to translation and multiple browswers. I can't quite follow the discussion but I noticed the reference to ISO-8859-1. I am sure you guys are already aware of it, but
ISO-8859-15 ('Latin 9')is available and contains the euro character.
Bobblewik 09:20, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
User:Nevillecampbell and User:Delsoares both seem to have been created for the sole purpose of posting unencyclopedic material to Wikipedia. What's the procedure for dealing with this? Andrewa 20:36, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Galant VR4 contains the line, "The ff. is from Mitsubishi Motors Motorsports Museum ( http://www.mitsubishi-motors.com/corporate/museum/motorsports/e/index.html)". Not sure what ff. means. Following? Anyway, since it said this is from another site, but I can't *find* it on the other site, what's the proper procedure? I didn't set {copyvio} since the page already seems to admit that it's a copyvio, but it may not be, since the info could simply refer to the list. I can't find any mention on the Mitsubishi site of much that's in the article, except maybe race results. Any ideas? -- Golbez 10:39, Jul 18, 2004 (UTC)
Image:Radovan.jpg shows an image which is most definitely NOT an image I uploaded; yet there is no upload history. What could have happened? Nikola 07:51, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Maybe my browser just acts funny, but I keep seeing whitespace appear and disappear over the course of days and hours on various different articles. Sometimes the Main Page has large gaps above and below the introductory text toward the top. Other times, it's a regular gap of one line. Is somebody twiddling a bit on the server code somewhere that is causing this? It's just weird and makes me think I'm going crazy sometimes... — Mulad 02:38, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
This is just a reminder that various members of the board, Wikimedia officials and anyone else interested in the Wikimedia Foundation website will be meeting in the #wikimedia IRC channel today (Saturday 24th) at 21:00 UTC to discuss various aspects of the site. Please see m:Foundation website meeting, July 2004 for details. For those who can't be present, a full log will be posted on Meta tomorrow. Angela . 09:15, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)
I have filed a request for comment aganist VeryVerily. You may wish to take a look. Neutrality 04:54, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
http://www.conigliofamily.com/AFLdotcom.htm
I think people who are associatied this website are using Wikipedia to promote their group. I just removed a para from the NFL which seems to be continously put back into the article. That para appears on this group website as a quote of what others are saying about the AFL. Basically implying that some neutral 3rd party thinks the AFL was so much better than the NFL.
Now I realize we are only talking about a couple of football leagues and not some hugely more important issue but spam is spam Smith03 13:56, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I have filed a new request for comment. You may wish to take a look. Neutrality 04:54, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
since the new namespace "Category" in introduced, are the "list of XXX" pages still necessary? -- Yacht (talk) 16:09, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
On the article for the US Senate Republicans are represented by red and Democrats by Blue. At the last presidential election, the map states being changed as votes came in shown on News bulletins followed this convention on some networks, but on others GOP was blue and Democrats were Red. The latter were predominantly BBC, SKY i.e. British whereas FOX and I think CNN i.e. Ameirican followed the former convention. In Britain Blue and Red are synonomous with Conservative and Labour; or right and left so perhaps that is the reason this method was used instead. Whilst as a non American I am likely to assume that Red for GOP and Blue for Dems is correct IS IT? or were the NEWS channels just selecting one colour for each for the sake of illustration which could just as easily been stripes and polkadots? Dainamo 15:54, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Goes back to the 19th century I beleive
Smith03 18:03, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
On the page located at: http://www.fact-index.com/b/br/bristol_centaurus.html, it says:
"Other piston engines of this size were developed by both Pratt and Whitney and Wright, but neither could be considered as successful during the war."
This is a foolish and incorrect statement. The B-17, B-24, and B29 were all powered by Wright radial engines. The P-47 Thunderbolt, F4U Corsair, F6F Hellcat, B-26 Marauder, and A-26 Invader were all powered by Pratt & Whitney Radials. These engines, especially the Pratt & Whitney, were highly successful during WWII, flying hundreds of thousands of combat sorites. The Centaraurus on the other hand, which the article implies was successful, NEVER SAW A SINGLE COMBAT SORTIE IN WWII!
Wade (RG_Lunatic@cox.net)
I have a gentleman that only speaks tongan and I need some general works written in Tongan and english for my staff and i to use. Could some one help. Example: Meal time Ride Bathroom Shower Shave Change your clothes join us for walk join us for music here is your medicine here is a snack ie cookie, banana, follow me please lets go now how our you today any one that could hep translate so I can put on flashcards in Tongan and English wouldbe greatly appreciated my E mail me at hcstoney @juno.com july26,04 Thanks
I want... | Then go to... |
---|---|
...help using or editing Wikipedia | Teahouse (for newer users) or Help desk (for experienced users) |
...to find my way around Wikipedia | Department directory |
...specific facts (e.g. Who was the first pope?) | Reference desk |
...constructive criticism from others for a specific article | Peer review |
...help resolving a specific article edit dispute | Requests for comment |
...to comment on a specific article | Article's talk page |
...to view and discuss other Wikimedia projects | Wikimedia Meta-Wiki |
...to learn about citing Wikipedia in a bibliography | Citing Wikipedia |
...to report sites that copy Wikipedia content | Mirrors and forks |
...to ask questions or make comments | Questions |
[[da:Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden]]
(Moved to Reference Desk)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_University The "Duke University" entry is not displaying properly.
There will be a Wikipedian meetup in Boston this Saturday. Sign up if you plan to attend. Dori | Talk 16:52, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC) (Who unfortunately cannot)
Can image files be renamed after they are uploaded? Justin Foote 00:12, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Jimbo has proposed that two new people be elected to the Arbitration Committee. Please see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections July 2004 for a draft page about how this will take place. The page is based on Jimbo's mailing list post and is not yet finalized. Angela . 23:01, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)
Is there any easily understandable reason why the "What links here" links are in only slightly alphabetical order? -- Picapica 19:41, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Just to say "many thanks, andy, Dori, and James F." - not only understandable answers, but supplied in alphabetical order of respondents too! -- Picapica 21:24, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I noticed that the English Statistics page lists 297,000 pages, but the Special:Statistics page lists 310,000 articles. Any idea why are they different? The wikistats seem to be lagging by over three weeks. Jrincayc 13:24, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Do we have an article about headbutting anywhere? I thought we did but can't find one, maybe it was deleted? Thx. Pcb21| Pete 08:15, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Alexa has a feature where you can put your logo into an alexa toolbar and distribute it to visitors on your site. Perhaps we should try it? Ilyanep (Talk) 21:12, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
An anonymous contributor (69.194.239.250) edited User:Trebor1990 and added quite some useless and unwanted junk. Does Wikipedia have certain etiquette for dealing with such problems? -- Trebor
I noticed vandalism on
Highland Park, Texas. I often see people reverting pages but I do not know how this is done. Feel free to revert it. For the future, please can somebody tell me how I can revert a page myself?
Bobblewik 11:07, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Go to History for the page. open the last unvandalised version (by clicking the time and date link for it) and save. Bmills 11:11, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Many thanks. I have learnt something useful.
Bobblewik 13:16, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version for all the do's and don'ts of reversion. - 11:18, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC) Lee (talk)
Ooh. I have just read lots of great advice and tips there. Thanks.
Bobblewik 13:16, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
When trying to rename Yabloko Russian Democratic Party to simply Yabloko (in keeping with the most-common-name rule), I cut-and-pasted "Yabloko" into the destination box, but somehow also pasted "To help support Wikipedia, please visit our fundraising page, or read about how we use the money" at the same time. I haven't any idea how that occured, but the article is now called To help support Wikipedia, please visit our fundraising page, or read about how we use the money. Yabloko. Could an admin please fix this? (And is there somewhere better to ask this sort of thing? Simply picking a random admin from the list and hoping that they're around seems a bit ... inefficient?) Thanks. -- Vardion 09:50, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Where would people suggest I look for helpful information on how to start a sister project in a new language? A clear step-by-step guide in English would be fanstastic, if one exists. (I am specifically interested in setting up a new-language version of WikiSource, and I posted a query there as well, but I know there are tons of extremely knowledgeable here.) It would be great if anyone could refer me to such a guide or other helpful materials. Dovi 04:27, Jul 22, 2004 (UTC)
Those who want to ban MP3 sound ( Wikipedia talk:Sound) from wikipedia might be interested in the Forgent patent affecting JPEG images which is in today's news. [4] So far Sony has signed a license and an unnamed other company has paid US$15 million for one. After moving to ban the world's music format, should the world's photo format should be next? Japan and the US are the major countries which allow these patents. Should we instead refuse to deliver MP3 and JPEG content to viewers in Japan, to pressure users there to get their laws changed? That's the approach copyleft takes: make a large set of resources available, but only let you use them if you agree to the terms, so applying pressure to change your license. Jamesday 01:44, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
sannse, co-chair of the Mediation Committee, has just written on the mailing list that she believes the committee could do with expansion to help ensure requests are answered as quickly as possible. Please see How does one become the member of the committee? and nominate yourself there if you are interested in playing a part in the dispute resolution process. Angela . 22:20, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Has anyone else noticed that "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." now appears in black under the title of each page above the main text? Also does the "edit this page" link at the top of the page look bold to you? (I'm using MonoBook, btw) — siro χ o 17:38, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
I still don't see why we can't have an edit this page link at the bottom of the page, where is where most people are (particularly in Talk pages) when they decide they want to edit. Adam 09:28, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Discovered something terrible when I typed in www.wikibooks.org . Some moron has forgotten to pay for the domain name and now it's for sale. Oh, no please admins or whoever is responsible for this. Get this domain back! I just wanted to add my first contribution in wikibooks but that's impossible now. By the way, I made sure to check whether I typed the right domain, but the link on the main page links to the same domain. If the domain is bought by someone else that's really a disaster. Please do something, whoever is responsible for this! Thanks a lot in advance. Laudaka
Hi, everyone. On my computer I got godaddy.com first and I get wikibooks now again, the problem seems to have been fixed. Hurray! Wikibooks is working again and I'll contribute my first page today. Paulus/laudaka (add me to your YIM/AIM/ICQ/M$N M contact list if you like!) Laudaka's talk page 14:24, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
An article titled Vai viegli but jaunam? which I have edited a few months ago has disappeared. Searching the database [5] returns the article among hits but clicking on the title gives the "Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this name" message. What has happened? Is there article deleted? Some software bug? Andris 12:27, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Note Wikipedians that an external link on the wikipage Isle_of_Sheppey references an offensive, self opinionated and unsuitable website that should not be on any wikipage. Yesterday I replaced it with a more suitable link, but it has been restored, and I am not about to begin a crusade over it, but feel the community should censor it Faedra 11:40, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
A new type of stub has been created: it's called a
substub. Substubs are like regular
stubs, only even smaller. You can read more about the difference between stubs and substubs
here, or view
examples of stubs vs. substubs. There is also a new substub
template message; the new message is meant to replace the normal stub message, but only where, of course, an article is a substub instead of a stub. The new message looks like:
This article is a substub! If it is not expanded soon, it may be deleted.
You can use this new message by either replacing {{stub}} with {{substub}} in cases when a stub is more accurately described as a substub, or simply inserting {{substub}} at the bottom of an article. Many substubs are automatically listed on Wikipedia:Shortpages. You can discuss this new type of stub here, on the template message's talk page, or, preferably, on the substub talk page itself. -- Mike Storm 03:10, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
How about {{nanostub}}? Exploding Boy 07:44, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Actually, if you go to Wikipedia:Shortpages, you'll see that there are no pages under 14 characters. I think the smallest right now is 46. -- Mike Storm 16:05, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
What exactly is this addition of another layer of complexity to the rules supposed to accomplish? You have a fancy new tag. Why? -- Cyrius| ✎ 22:45, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think this is really rather silly. It doesn't seem to accomplish anything useful, it's just over-categorization. —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 22:48, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
First topic: The whole idea is that substubs are in extreme need of improvement. Besides, while you complain about over-categorization, hundreds of other people scoff at Wikipedia and complain about how unorganized it is. Second topic: If you support the idea of having substubs, then please list your name on the substub talk page. Third topic: I have no plan to make a subsubstub. If anyone did, I would be against it. -- Mike Storm 00:03, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
If you support the idea of having substubs, then please list your name here. There's also lots more discussion about Wikipedia:substubs on the talk page.
Its one thing to encourage free use of articles, but there seem to be a lot of on line encyclopedias who are copying wiki without crediting. Even if they mention wikipeida they are lifting imcomplete articles and provide no facility to correct and sometimes have some kind of software conflict that makes the display wrong anyway, all of which make Wiki sources look less credible. What is the point of this? why don't they just link to wikipedia as a resource?. I think that the terms of free use should prevent this type of thing if this is possible. Dainamo 09:44, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Er, the whole point of the GNU FDL is to make Wikipedia a free and open resource which means that anyone, (even the unscrupulous), can make use of it. The real problem imo is the fact that Google ranks these pages higher than Wikipedia's in may cases due to the prevalence of spamdexing which these unscrupulous operators rely upon. If Google's engine were better and more discrimating than this would not be an issue. Sjc 09:53, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The search engine experience is the biggest problem, I agree In so far as "Free Use" is concerned, there are already conditions such as accreditation and an idea might be to exclude unapproved presentation in an another encyclopedia. Aa religious analogy might be: Whether he approves or not God gives us freedom to do what we want, but does not permit us to to be God I know its a bit crap, but its the nearest I could think of. I am not a lawyer so I might be suggesting something that is totally impractical, but in that case there could be some mileage of a polite request to those who have some scruples. In so far as they are concerned, surely a link to wikipedia would be much easier anyway? If you can't beat them join them Dainamo 11:43, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
No, a simple link wouldn't bring them Google traffic, and then they wouldn't get money for their ads. They have no scruples. — Chameleon My page/ My talk 12:47, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I wasn't sure about something, and wanted to bring it up here. Basically, mirror versions are appearing much higher in google than we are. The explanation people give for this is that they're somehow manipulating the pagerank system. My question is not "how" (I'm not technical enough to really grasp), but rather "Could we do this too?". [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 13:44, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
How could we do this without putting it in the article text? [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 19:42, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
<title>
, and presumably also in the meta tags. It could also be incorporated in small text at the bottom of the article.
— Chameleon
My page/
My talk 20:24, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)Wikipedia:Database download gives the technical reasons we are almost assured a low Google ranking: because we're database-bound, crawlers are restricted to one access per second. Our mirrors are typically flat HTML, so can be crawled much faster.
I suggest that there's not much point worrying about our Google ranking until we are confident we have the server power (enough Squid frontends, I would guess) to handle the traffic. Remember that the deal with Yahoo doubled our load in a week - David Gerard 10:40, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I just found my article on effeminacy on the free dictionary.com. I don't see where they referenced wikipedia nor myself. I wish I could get credit for all my hard work. WHEELER 23:58, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I would encourage everyone to submit the articles they care most about to DMOZ, the basis directory for Google and other search engines. This may eventually ameliorate some of the problems related to searchability. -- Stevietheman 17:39, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I wanna do something like this:
For some articles Ive written, for example, for Edwin Rosario. How can I do that?
Thank you and God bless you!
Sincerely yours, " Antonio Bananaramo Martin"
I don't think there's an entry in the naming conventions for this, so which is the proper format for a name with a II, III, etc, that isn't a royal name? Article in question is John H. Bankhead, II. Should it be with or without the comma? I note that "with" comma takes up the bulk of redirects to Bill Gates, but the article itself mentions him as William Henry Gates III, no comma. Any suggestions? -- Golbez 02:38, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Would it be a copyvio to use information (or copy-pastes) from http://bioguide.congress.gov/? It's a federal website, but the "copyright information" page at http://bioguide.congress.gov/copyright.htm only mentions the image; it mentions no copyright or license on the text at all. Ideas? -- Golbez 01:56, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
To avoid an editing circle of well meaning, but incorrect changes and then necessary correcting that is being made on a few particular pages (due to a commonly held misunderstanding) I would like to enter an explanation text that appears in editing but does not appear on the page. How do I do this? Dainamo 23:34, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
<!-- comment here -->
. It might also be a good idea to put your comment on the article's talk page as well. --
Wapcaplet 23:58, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)As per policy, I'm reporting here that I have blocked range 64.12.116.10/31 for 48 hours. This is probably wrong, since I really have no idea how to do it, but I used the Wikimedia calculator to try to figure it out. The user has been using IDs from 64.12.116.10 through 64.12.117.22. Rick K 22:24, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)
Add 205.188.116.19/31 for 72 hours. Rick K 22:38, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)
And this is bad because...? Adam 09:44, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I remember that in the old skin you could edit the article's summary with an [edit] link that always appeared at the top of the article. That link doesn't appear in the new skin and everytime I want to edit the summary of an article, I have to click the "edit this page" option which downloads the whole article instead of the summary alone. Could we get that back por favor?
What about [[Image:|thumb|center]]? It is not centering the thumbnails. :/
Could we have the images on the Image description page centered? They are now aligned to the left.. suxxors.
What the hell happened with that feature where you could specify if the image that you were uploading was public domain or not so that we didn't have to manually edit the Image description page? It fucking sucks to edit every image that I upload, that can be done with a simple form. Who was was developing that?
And, is there a way that when you categorize, the article put in the category appears as you specified it on the brackets? For example, if you list Einsten as [[Category:Scientists|Einsten, Albert]] could it be listed in the Category as Einstein, Albert instead of listing it as Albert Einsten under the E section?
— John | Talk 22:12, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Why are there so many British English spellings on Wikipedia? This is unacceptable. Is Wikipedia based in England or something? The default language of the Internet is American English, as Wikipedia's should also be.
I don't mind the english spellings. I am an American but I use English spellings all the time. American english is really the bowdlerization of Queen's English anyway. WHEELER 22:03, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia will be taken over by Australians. We are writing a script now to replace all instances of "hi" with "g'day", and to convert all IPA pronunciation guides to appropriately diphthongised versions. Jeronim and I are handling the technical aspects, and the Australian-controlled Fox Broadcasting Company will do the PR side. We have an informal alliance with the Board of Trustees and developer corps, both of which are dominated by Europeans. -- Tim Starling 03:11, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Why are there so many British English spellings idiotic trolls on Wikipedia? This is unacceptable. Is Wikipedia based in England an elementary school or something? The default language of the Internet troll is American poorly written English, as Wikipedia's should also it always has been and probably always will be. --
Jmabel 06:26, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Hahah Starling, your joke to use a script to convert all instances of Hi! to G'day is hilarious. I really ROFL'ed when I read that thanx for making me laugh. Thanks for your joke Jmabel it really made me smiley. I'm gonna make it a little better you forgot to repeat something in strikeout I believe. Hehehe, we can make the jokes better in true Wikipedia.org fashion. Now a serious reactien: It is possible it is a troll, but if it would really have been a troll he/she would have given a lot more arguments to keep us busy and to divide us. He's given so little arguments that everybody is against him. I think he/she's just naive. I've to following proposition: Having wikipedia in one more spelling gives practical problems. Everybody who has tried using a spelling checker to correct spelling of Wikipedia.org pages will know how clumsy it is that you have to find out each time whether it's Brittish English or American English spelling. Because we're against US cultural imperialism I would seriously propose to rewrite ALL of wikipedia.org in Australian English spelling. Australian spelling check is readily available in any major word processor so it shouldn't be that hard. And with this we would take a political stand AGAINST the Americanization of world culture. No about the fun again: I'm going to copy part of the messages here to Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense/Funny vandalism. Starling and Jmabel your replies will fit in excellently as a reply to a possible troll. Paulus/laudaka (add me to your YIM/AIM/ICQ/M$N M contact list if you like!) Laudaka's talk page 11:58, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I have no problem with either sets of spelling, and as a Brit even think that American spellings make more sense (I think "catsup" for ketchup is a notable exception to this :)). Aside from the Chinese, the English used print pretty early on leading to the spelling of words remaining the same while the language changed (If you did Chaucer at school you will know that knight was pronounced as it was spelt). There is however one spelling diiference in American english that rises my prejudices and thats using "izes" instead of "ises". The reason is bloody BILL GATES. Set your computer to British English and the spelling checks go British in everything but "ises" and you are constantly reminded to change these on a spell check! Whinging over now that's off my chest. Dainamo
I was so sure that you were wrong about this and that the choice between ize and ise was a modern one becasue of transantlantic influences. However, I have a four volume Imperial Dictionary c. 1890s and behold: "REALIZE" and "REALIZATION". Only in my modern "Chambers" dictionary do I get a choice and in my "Websters" I naturally get "ize"s. I bow to you as I am obviously not academic enough ;) Dainamo 19:31, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Incidentally, I gdon't understand why should using an "s" be a simplification when the sound is a Z anyway? And also how do you get word to accept "ises" other than adding each word everytime it picks it up? Dainamo 19:33, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I wonder if there is any wikipedians who has an article on him-/her-self in wikipedia? (What i mean is an valid article and NOT in namespace) SYSS Mouse 16:55, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Jacques Chirac never declared Ariel Sharon persona non grata in France. The whole thing is a misunderstanding. Please, check your info before publishing news! More details in:
[ [7]].
I'm sorry, this is a French newspaper, but I think you may find the same content in an US or UK one.
-- 146.169.6.192 14:16, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In the Geography section of Tasmania, I have a small list of geographical features (both natural and man-made). Following this I have a line that reads:
See also: List of Australian islands, lakes, bridges, highways, rivers, mountains and regions.
Looks clear enough, but if this is expanded, you can see the non-standard form of naming such articles:
I was going to move, rename and split articles so that they were consistent; but thought I would bring the point up here in case there were any other preferences or ideas? I thought (feature)s of Australia like the Lakes article currently is, would be nice and simple? -- Chuq 01:47, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Lists, which recommends "List of Xs". Also see Wikipedia:Lists (stand-alone lists). Personally, I would rather see the title as Xs rather than List of Xs, but that is apparently the convention at this time. older≠ wiser 14:05, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
For a good laugh, see my latest addition to the Wikipedia_as_a_press_source#July_2004_.2818_articles.29 :))) Nikola 00:47, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In the frame of the WikiProject Science, we have started to write "To do lists" in the talk page of articles needing improvements. The goal is to give specific suggestions to make the article "Feature class", and to encourage editors to do them.
We see this as a complement of the "Pages needing attention", i.e. those in which problems are know. "To do lists" are long term, while "pages needing attention" require immediate correction. This helps keep the list of "pages needing attention" short and accelerate the corrections. See the WikiProject for more details.
Was anything like this attempted before ? Any suggestion on how to do this better ? Would it be OK to generalize the process and write a general "List of articles with To do's". Pcarbonn 18:15, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I like the idea of a template. (I have changed yours a bit). One advantage is that it makes it easy to build the list of articles with todo's using the Wikipedia search list. I have already done this for the list of accuracy disputes in Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute (it is more accurate than the previously-used "What links here" mechanism). Unfortunately, the search index is not updated in real time. Actually, I found out that it is not updated at all for the moment. Can anyone say when it will be updated again ? Pcarbonn 17:44, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I have added it to Wikipedia:Peer review. Still, I would be bold, and launch it now. What's the risk ? If you agree, please proceed. Pcarbonn 21:40, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Mav suggested that proposals with over 75% support at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css be implemented on 3 July. Is there a plan in place to do this? -- Jia ng 01:07, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Mav suggested that proposals with at least 75% support at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css be implemented on 3 July. Is there a plan in place to do this? -- Jia ng 01:07, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Can we please finally set up a policy against Americentrism or American_exceptionalism especially where the Template:In the news and Current Events sections are concerned, as I requested earlier at the Village Pump. Asking more non-American users to edit the page is not the way to go about it - at this moment there are currently only four articles on In The News and they all relate headlines that're either only pertinent to domestic American issues or reinforce an American perspective, though only one - Lance Armstrong's win - is worth keeping in the manner it is written. There should be a clear policy stating that no more than one out of three, or two out of four articles should relate to any single country, and as for Current Events, at least one or two articles from each of the permanently inhabited continents. It is not that hard. You don't have to sacrifice reading your favourite news source. You don't have to learn a new language. If you're on the net, just navigate to the "World" section of your news site and review the general headlines or click on individual countries and you will get plenty of important news that relates to the approximately 6+ billion - 300 million people that aren't American or don't live in the US. The only effort it's going to take is intellectual and if you can spend ages copyediting and padding articles you can certainly spare a couple of minutes selecting headlines that don't universalise US news items. -- Simonides 22:32, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Yawn. Boring. Move on to other things. This same old song is falling on unresponsive ears. Rick K 04:25, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
This is a perfectly valid criticism, and has been met with the typical Wikipedia/open source response, i.e. "Fix it yourself" (ignoring the fact that yes, something is broken and shouldn't be). I am not interested in editing the current events thing (unless I spot something of interest that's been missed and add it), but yet that is no reason why the entries should be Americocentric. Zoney 13:46, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm tired of seeing the Modern Library's "100 Best Novels/ Non-fiction titles" mentioned on every article related to the list. The list was a marketing gimmick and is not an award or a critical evaluation - members of the board were themselves not aware of the ranking system and Random House themselves stated (sourced at article) that the list was partly meant to boost sales of their own stocklist (further it's ethnocentric and sexist and only lists novels in English): please stop mentioning it as if it were a literary standard - it isn't. If this doesn't sound annoying to you, consider mentioning a list of Best Films Of All Time drawn up by, say, Walt Disney corp., that mostly lists Walt Disney-funded films, admittedly ones that may have been popular all around the world, on every article related to the list and other film related articles as if it were an achievement - I think we can agree such lists are somewhat irrelevant. -- Simonides 22:32, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Sorry if that has already been discussed, but I couldn't find it anywhere.
I remember seeing it on other pages as well, now I came across it in the paternoster article: [[Great Britain]] being changed to [[United Kingdom|Britain]], in this particular case by a User:Bobblewik.
I think authors of articles can very well distinguish between England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom. In the case of the paternoster text, the change is irrelevant, but in other cases it might introduce a factual error. <KF> 00:23, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(please reply to my usertalk to reply, thanks!) Someone help, What is the point of having template:regnum and the other ones used in darwin-ridden articles? As far as I see it's pointless, "translating" latin words to english, basically obscuring the content without serving any visibly useful purpose. Enlighten me! Thanks. -- grin ✎ 21:10, 2004 Jul 26 (UTC)
I want to create a new category at the bottom of a page. How do I activate a new category and what are the criteria for addition? [[User:Nichalp|¶ nichalp | Talk]] 20:38, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)
In response to a recent negative article in the Register, I'm proposing a publicity committee, to handle responses to negative media coverage. Basically, it ensures that we have a liason between hostile media and the community. Feel free to edit or discuss it at User:Meelar/publicity committee. Best wishes, [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 16:14, 2004 Jul 26 (UTC)
Hi
If anyone is interested in contributing, I created * Wikipedia:WikiProject Irish literature today. The stated aim is to make Wikipedia an essential resource for anyone interested in the filed of Irish writing. Bmills 15:01, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
A number of historical and biographical articles appear with no references to sources. This is sloppy, because it can encourage readers to only use the Wikipedia article as their source. They ought to be encouraged to look wider. If a modern source is used, adding the ISBN to it may wall cause the reader to go out and buy the book! Even if a biographical article is based on the DNB, ( most of which is out of copyright, of course) a note about it as a source may cause readers to want to consult the latest version of the biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, out September 2004. Apwoolrich 12:52, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I was rather disturbed earlier today to find on the MainPage, specifically on selected anniversaries for July 26, an item about somebody being arrested for masturbation in an adult theatre in 1991. ( Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:July_26_selected_anniversaries&oldid=4849052 .) I have removed it right away.
I think Wikipedia should adopt some policy to prohibit various taboos on the MainPage. We have many other wonderful pages to choose. Why not use a little more common sense ? While the 'naughty' pages are available to all, and I give credit to those resourceful little brats with no classes to attend during the summer and know enough about computers to find the pages, I have to say that leaving items like masturbation on the MainPage is not that appropriate. It makes us look bad, especially in the eyes of a parent.
-- PFHLai 07:07, 2004 Jul 26 (UTC)
But that article isn't explicit content. Rick K 18:58, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)
I've noticed that the category links, interwiki headers, and carriage returns before the first line of visible text in an article cause extra whitespace to show up if they are placed at the top of the page. This is just a heads up request that people take a sec in their edits to move cat and interwiki links to bottom and remove any unncessessary carriage returns at top. See George W. Bush article as an example. - S V
... last line of article <!-- Categories --> [[Category:...]] <!-- Interwiki links --> [ca:...] [gd:...]
I'm not sure what is going on with this. When I check What links here for Beaver Island, I get a long list of articles, none of which, as far as I can tell, actually link to Beaver Island. Can anyone explain why this is? This certainly makes it difficult to check if it needs disambiguating. older≠ wiser 17:24, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
since the new namespace "Category" is introduced, are the "list of XXX" pages still necessary? -- Yacht (talk) 16:09, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
On the article for the US Senate Republicans are represented by red and Democrats by Blue. At the last presidential election, the map states being changed as votes came in shown on News bulletins followed this convention on some networks, but on others GOP was blue and Democrats were Red. The latter were predominantly BBC, SKY i.e. British whereas FOX and I think CNN i.e. Ameirican followed the former convention. In Britain Blue and Red are synonomous with Conservative and Labour; or right and left so perhaps that is the reason this method was used instead. Whilst as a non American I am likely to assume that Red for GOP and Blue for Dems is correct IS IT? or were the NEWS channels just selecting one colour for each for the sake of illustration which could just as easily been stripes and polkadots? Dainamo 15:54, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Goes back to the 19th century I beleive
Smith03 18:03, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
[
[10]] well you better edit this page if you doubt what I said
Smith03 02:04, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In general, I'd suggest avoid using colors that may needlessly confuse an international audience, but the cited use is a graph with a clear legend indicating its color codes without implying any meaning beyond the graph. It's fine by graph standards. While it may be a bit disconcerting on first glance to a UK audience, it's not ambiguous or misleading, unless someone looking for a fight in this heated political year wants to infer something about using red for Republicans. (Sure, many Communist parties and countries favor it, but so do we in the U.S. — as one of our three patriotic colors. Besides, as an independent, I'd have better grounds to complain about having my non-affliation coded in yellow. ☺) -- Jeff Q 23:30, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Jeff, as I asked the orginal question, let me clarify that there was no confusion from a clearly labeled table or map. I was just interested in the correct form according to tradition. If we are discussing a particular country, the best policy is to use their chosen designation. In the same fashion I would address a Lieutenant in the US Army "Lou-tenant" amd one in a Commonwealth country "Lef-tenant" thus adopting what is appropriate in the particular situation. Dainamo
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Can user have a look to Wikipedia talk:Sound. I'm not conviced that this change is a good thing and I don't think it has received large support. Ericd 12:15, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(moved this down) A discussion about this is now at Wikipedia_talk:Sound#MP3_on_Wikipedia, announced here, at goings on and the mailing list -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:52, 2004 Jul 17 (UTC)
Here's a few suggestions for format for a footer table, taken from Ronald Reagan:
Preceded by: Jimmy Carter |
President of the United States 1981-1989 |
Succeeded by: George H. W. Bush |
Preceded by: Pat Brown |
Governor of California 1967-1975 |
Succeeded by: Jerry Brown |
Preceded by: Jimmy Carter |
President of the United States 1981-1989 |
Succeeded by: George H. W. Bush |
Preceded by: Pat Brown |
Governor of California 1967-1975 |
Succeeded by: Jerry Brown |
I don't want a formal vote, just an idea from someone other than me - which of these is easiest on the eyes and most immediately readable? Thanks. -- Golbez 01:41, Jul 17, 2004 (UTC)
Would it be possible to request a page somewhere in the Wikipedia: namespace where bugs can be reported? The instructions at the top of this page lead to one page, which leads to another, which leads to another, and the instructions for reporting are about as clear as mud. Would it be too much to ask for either a page here where suspected bugs can be reported, or clearer instructions on how to do it? I don't have access to IRC by the way so that's not an option either. -- Graham ☺ | Talk 22:50, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I thought of a nice idea to encourage users to browse through the Wikipedia pages:
A small contest, that requires users to 'click' through subjects to get from one subject to another, with the least possible stages.
For instance:
Get from: Tombstone, Arizona
To:
This is how i did it, there are possible other (shorter, funnier) ways as well...
Tombstone, Arizona -> Gunfight at the O.K. Corral -> Discovery Channel -> List of Discovery Channel programs -> The Blue Planet -> Ocean -> Titan (moon) -> Cassini-Huygens Mission
It could be possible to post a new challenge every day/month/week, and the one with the shortest route wins that contest (and ofcourse, receives enternal fame).
I did not know where to post this proposal, so i did it here. Maybe i could make an article of it, but its not really an encyclopedia article ;-)
-- K-Mile 12:35, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Wiki Link Contest for some more rather critical discussion of this idea. Please keep discussion in the VfD subpage to the topic of whether or not the page should be deleted. Andrewa 01:02, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The main Wikipedia logo has the words "The Free Encyclopedia" in an italic font. These words are very ugly, being full of aliasing. It is a shame that the beautiful multilingual spherical jigsaw is spoilt by this. Can someone improve it? At this size of text, I think an upright font would come out better than an anti-aliased italic font. The italic version could still be used at large sizes or higher resolutions. Gdr 13:01, 2004 Jul 16 (UTC)
I've checked the logo in the
GIMP and it also shows a white fringe around the text. Also,
here's what the logo looks like with a black background in
Mozilla Firefox. The image has areas of 100% opacity, and areas of 0% opacity; there's nothing in between. I'm fairly certain that Firefox correctly supports PNG transparency, and I know the GIMP does. Don't mind me. I don't know how to read. --
Wapcaplet 19:40, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Wikistats indicate that the number of new articles per day is rapidly decreasing, from about 600 a day a few days ago to 258 per day in July (as of July 14) [1]. I have some doubts whether this is accurate. Clicking on Special:Newpages shows that there are 750 new pages in last 24 hours and 4878 pages created in last 7 days (4878/7=698 per day) which is a lot more than 258 per day. Could this be a bug? Andris 10:30, Jul 16, 2004 (UTC)
There seem to be a number of these, for instance, List of gay-related topics. Should they be merged into categories? — Ashley Y 08:01, 2004 Jul 16 (UTC)
For some reason the image displayed at Penrose triangle is missing the bottom line of the triangle. If you actually click on the image it is fine, it is just being displayed wrong in the article. In case this is browser specific, I'm using IE 6 right now. -- Pascal666 07:08, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Looks to me like an off-by-one-pixel error, since the image had no margin. I've added some margin, and while I was at it added color and reduced the file size by 65% to boot. -- Wapcaplet 01:59, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm vaguely thinking of starting a project to encourage academics to contribute to Wikipedia (via university e-mail and poster campaigns perhaps). Although Wikipedia is certainly an excellent resource, it is still greatly lacking compared to subject specific encyclopedias ( The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is one I have had personal experience with). Academics have had years of experience explaining their subject areas to those with little prior knowledge and many have already contributed to other encyclopedias. It seems to me there are two factors stopping them from contributing: 1) ignorance of Wikipedia 2) technical barriers. My thought is that if we could set up a kind of "middle ground" between the willing academics and Wikipedia we could leave them to do what they're good at (writing about their subject using a format and media they're used to) while Wiki-volunteers take what they give them and beat it into a format appropriate for Wikipedia. I'm conscious of the fact that someone has almost certainly already had this idea, and that asking for help from people "with names" so to speak may seem anti-thetical to the Wiki spirit. Thus all comments/suggestions/flames are welcomed. Cfp 10:39, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Most academics probably don't have the time to contribute, or wouldn't want to because they might see it as a waste of time. On the other hand, it's worth a try. If nothing else we might get a lot more students. Exploding Boy 12:27, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)
It's probably a waste of time to get academics involved here, and unnecessary.
They need to publish papers under their own name in peer-reviewed publications. It's the only way they can continue in their careers. Whereas, we here toil anonymously, a little bit like the cathedral builders in the Middle Ages.
Academics aren't needed for most encyclopedia articles, which are just a very brief and broad overview at a level aimed at the intelligent layman reader, the sort of thing that someone with an undergraduate degree could write.
And there are a lot of people out there with undergraduate degrees or even PhDs who did not choose a career in academia, who probably make up the bulk of the contributors here. The Internet is a great equalizer, everyone has access to a wealth of reference material that at one time could only be accessible to someone with the resources of a university library.
Where the academics could really make a major contribution would be in the sister project Wikibooks. Free textbooks would be wonderful.
-- Curps 22:35, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
A few replies: I like the idea of getting academics involved at the editorial level, particularly due to the minimal technical skills this would require (it could be done exclusively through Talk pages). My thought behind particularly targeting academics to contribute is the teaching and communications skills they have of necessity picked up and I suppose this equally applies to "retired scholars". Certainly there are other specialists who it would be good to atract to Wikipedia, but there are none quite so easily reachable as active academics. Perhaps what is needed is a Wikipedia Advocacy Group (good initials at least...) I think it's worth checking out The Budapest Open Access Initiative to see the direction journals will hopefully progress in. Wiki's will never replace the traditional system of peer reviewed journals, and I don't think they should hope to. Wikipedia's strength (it seems to me) is as a comprehensive education resource, rather than a repository of the cutting-edge and often controversial material found in journals. As to whether we need academics, I genuinely believe we do. Yes for an article on why the sun rises and sets only undergrads are needed, but for articles making subtle distinctions between almost identical positions, greater experience and knowledge is necessary. It's unlikely that there are any undergrads capable of writing articles on the use of C* algebras in quantum mechanics or somesuch. REP (mentioned above) is exclusively written by fairly big name philosophers, and is an astounding size. I promise Routeldge wouldn't have been wasting their pennies on them if they didn't think they were strictly necessary. A final point is that academics are not some alien selfish species which is incapable of doing anything unless it's going to help get their department another star next time ratings come around; I'm sure many if not most contributors to Wikipedia have full time jobs, academics just happen to have the right knowledge and skills to make them ideal Wikipedia contributors. cfp 23:20, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There are two good reasons why most serious academics won't get involved with Wikipedia: (1) there is no quality control and no way of ensuring that one's work is not tampered with by idiots, and (2) there is a strong prejudice at Wikipedia against anyone who has expert knowledge or professional training. If anyone says, "Um, I know that 2 and 2 makes 4 because I am a professor of mathematics," they are imediately dismissed as an arrogant elitist who is "arguing from authority." Very few academics will put up with this. Adam 12:13, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I would like to start a Category. First there are no directions anywhere on how one starts a category. I put a new Category and it shows up in red. I can't firgure out how to make it blue. Second I found directions at mediwiki but there is nothing about starting a new name category. Third, For the Classics for topics like that of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. I know they have a category already but "Classics" needs their own category and ancient Greece and Ancient Rome need to be sub-categories for this one. And what should it be named "Classics", "Classical", "Classical Dept." (my choice), "Western Classics", ...??? If I am a classical scholar and want to go to all subjects dealing with the Classics what should be the category name? WHEELER 22:47, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Put in the [[category:types of shoe]] kind of thing which will give you the red thing at the top. All the articles in the category should be listed there. Then enter some text and a categorisation for that e.g. [[category:human]], which will appear at the top right, and since you've created the new category, it should then appear blue. Don't be shy to have a fiddle round; you can always nominate them for speedy deletion if you cock it up. Dunc_Harris| ☺ 00:08, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
This is a general request for help with biographies of members of this family; I've bitten off much more than I can chew. I have made several new stubs. These are linked on the page above. Happy editing. Dunc_Harris| ☺ 18:43, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
One a week takes about six months, and I don't fancy doing the artists much. I have a to do list if anyone wants a look:
The following is a list that needs to be done (please cross out if you have helped me!)
Aside from articles that deserve speedy deletion, why do people waste their time (and ours) on articles that have only one line? Surely, other than defining, say, a city or town, shouldn't there be more content if they are going to create the article? Please help me, I'm getting annoyed.-- naryathegreat 17:21, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
I just now found it necessary if some other ways of formatting the current page name were available, to facilitate their placement on links, for example. One could replace all spaces with "%20"; and another could replace all spaces with underscores. [[User:Poccil| Peter O. ( Talk)]] 16:21, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
(Sorry in advance if this is redundant/posted in the wrong section - I couldn't see any relavent spot at the top of Village_pump)
Is this scrolling text really necessary? I find the movement incredibly distracting when I'm trying to read articles. It occurs on the en.wikipedia site, which is almost exclusively English - why the need for different languages? Why those particular seven rather than every known language? I know I shouldn't complain as mostly a simple user of Wikipedia, but I find it much worse than the red begging box, which has thankfully been changed.
Profuse Apologies, it seems to have magically stopped now. I presume this was most likely a bug in my browser (Firefox) that maybe picked it up from a previous site I had visited. Unless it is something to do with cookies and first visits?. Again, sorry about that, I got a little too enthusiastic I think.
Does anyone think Wikipedia (and its sister projects) could benefit from some features focusing on keeping the WP community a community? At the moment it's all geared towards writing a great Wikipedia. I just thought that adding a bit of community could make Wikipedia a bit more attractive... Any thoughts? -- Kokiri 11:30, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Hi, folks, please take a look at the new Wikipedia:WikiProject Writing Captions - your comments will be much appreciated, as will be your participation. -- ke4roh 04:24, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedians have produced many maps, diagrams, graphs and figures available under the GFDL. But just having the image isn't quite enough, because it's hard to edit a diagram unless you have the sources that were used to make it. All you can really do with the image is scribble over the top.
(A real example: I noticed a couple of missing ships on User:Gsl's excellent map at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Battle_of_Aboukir_Bay.png. With access to the GIMP source for the image, I could have added the ships myself. But lacking the source, instead I asked Gsl to improve it.)
So I think that Wikipedia should encourage illustrators to upload their sources along with the image. Of course, not every contributor will be able to use the GIMP, or Adobe Illustrator, or 3D Studio Max or whatever. But having the source will mean that several people can work on an image, and there is a chance to continue to make improvements to the image when the original illustrator is busy or away. Gdr 13:01, 2004 Jul 16 (UTC)
I have created a new page for listing image source files: Wikipedia:Image source files. Please improve as needed, and link to it from appropriate places. -- Wapcaplet 03:07, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Agreed, the ideal place to link them is from the image description page. It is likely to become unwieldy once there are a lot more sources, but we can deal with that when it happens. Having a list like this is helpful in the (relatively few) cases where a source file doesn't seem to have a corresponding image; one in particular is Image:USA CountiesSVG.zip, which is somewhat general-purpose and could be the basis for a variety of images, while not itself being very useful for illustration. I suspect there may be some designers (particularly in the area of map-making) who are seeking a particular kind of source file to base their illustrations on. Maybe one day that page will just become a list of "raw materials" from which to work, rather than collecting every Photoshop or SVG file we upload. I don't know if prompting uploaders for a source file is the best idea; most of the time, one will not be available, and it may confuse people who don't have one. -- Wapcaplet 16:19, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
If at all possible, can someone who runs a registered bot set this bot to work on the Wikipedia, to remove not-necessary entities and replace them? Especially items like é are encoded as é, which is completely unnecessary as é is in ISO-8859-1, and a lot easier to edit. The same applies to the other accented letters such as á, ó, è etc. Anárion 23:10, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
áéíóú
àèìòù
äëïöü
最@ñ
?????
ç? 80.58.36.239 13:09, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I support any effort to make Wikipedia friendly to translation and multiple browswers. I can't quite follow the discussion but I noticed the reference to ISO-8859-1. I am sure you guys are already aware of it, but
ISO-8859-15 ('Latin 9')is available and contains the euro character.
Bobblewik 09:20, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
User:Nevillecampbell and User:Delsoares both seem to have been created for the sole purpose of posting unencyclopedic material to Wikipedia. What's the procedure for dealing with this? Andrewa 20:36, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Galant VR4 contains the line, "The ff. is from Mitsubishi Motors Motorsports Museum ( http://www.mitsubishi-motors.com/corporate/museum/motorsports/e/index.html)". Not sure what ff. means. Following? Anyway, since it said this is from another site, but I can't *find* it on the other site, what's the proper procedure? I didn't set {copyvio} since the page already seems to admit that it's a copyvio, but it may not be, since the info could simply refer to the list. I can't find any mention on the Mitsubishi site of much that's in the article, except maybe race results. Any ideas? -- Golbez 10:39, Jul 18, 2004 (UTC)
Image:Radovan.jpg shows an image which is most definitely NOT an image I uploaded; yet there is no upload history. What could have happened? Nikola 07:51, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Maybe my browser just acts funny, but I keep seeing whitespace appear and disappear over the course of days and hours on various different articles. Sometimes the Main Page has large gaps above and below the introductory text toward the top. Other times, it's a regular gap of one line. Is somebody twiddling a bit on the server code somewhere that is causing this? It's just weird and makes me think I'm going crazy sometimes... — Mulad 02:38, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
This is just a reminder that various members of the board, Wikimedia officials and anyone else interested in the Wikimedia Foundation website will be meeting in the #wikimedia IRC channel today (Saturday 24th) at 21:00 UTC to discuss various aspects of the site. Please see m:Foundation website meeting, July 2004 for details. For those who can't be present, a full log will be posted on Meta tomorrow. Angela . 09:15, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)
I have filed a request for comment aganist VeryVerily. You may wish to take a look. Neutrality 04:54, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
http://www.conigliofamily.com/AFLdotcom.htm
I think people who are associatied this website are using Wikipedia to promote their group. I just removed a para from the NFL which seems to be continously put back into the article. That para appears on this group website as a quote of what others are saying about the AFL. Basically implying that some neutral 3rd party thinks the AFL was so much better than the NFL.
Now I realize we are only talking about a couple of football leagues and not some hugely more important issue but spam is spam Smith03 13:56, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I have filed a new request for comment. You may wish to take a look. Neutrality 04:54, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
since the new namespace "Category" in introduced, are the "list of XXX" pages still necessary? -- Yacht (talk) 16:09, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
On the article for the US Senate Republicans are represented by red and Democrats by Blue. At the last presidential election, the map states being changed as votes came in shown on News bulletins followed this convention on some networks, but on others GOP was blue and Democrats were Red. The latter were predominantly BBC, SKY i.e. British whereas FOX and I think CNN i.e. Ameirican followed the former convention. In Britain Blue and Red are synonomous with Conservative and Labour; or right and left so perhaps that is the reason this method was used instead. Whilst as a non American I am likely to assume that Red for GOP and Blue for Dems is correct IS IT? or were the NEWS channels just selecting one colour for each for the sake of illustration which could just as easily been stripes and polkadots? Dainamo 15:54, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Goes back to the 19th century I beleive
Smith03 18:03, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
On the page located at: http://www.fact-index.com/b/br/bristol_centaurus.html, it says:
"Other piston engines of this size were developed by both Pratt and Whitney and Wright, but neither could be considered as successful during the war."
This is a foolish and incorrect statement. The B-17, B-24, and B29 were all powered by Wright radial engines. The P-47 Thunderbolt, F4U Corsair, F6F Hellcat, B-26 Marauder, and A-26 Invader were all powered by Pratt & Whitney Radials. These engines, especially the Pratt & Whitney, were highly successful during WWII, flying hundreds of thousands of combat sorites. The Centaraurus on the other hand, which the article implies was successful, NEVER SAW A SINGLE COMBAT SORTIE IN WWII!
Wade (RG_Lunatic@cox.net)
I have a gentleman that only speaks tongan and I need some general works written in Tongan and english for my staff and i to use. Could some one help. Example: Meal time Ride Bathroom Shower Shave Change your clothes join us for walk join us for music here is your medicine here is a snack ie cookie, banana, follow me please lets go now how our you today any one that could hep translate so I can put on flashcards in Tongan and English wouldbe greatly appreciated my E mail me at hcstoney @juno.com july26,04 Thanks
I want... | Then go to... |
---|---|
...help using or editing Wikipedia | Teahouse (for newer users) or Help desk (for experienced users) |
...to find my way around Wikipedia | Department directory |
...specific facts (e.g. Who was the first pope?) | Reference desk |
...constructive criticism from others for a specific article | Peer review |
...help resolving a specific article edit dispute | Requests for comment |
...to comment on a specific article | Article's talk page |
...to view and discuss other Wikimedia projects | Wikimedia Meta-Wiki |
...to learn about citing Wikipedia in a bibliography | Citing Wikipedia |
...to report sites that copy Wikipedia content | Mirrors and forks |
...to ask questions or make comments | Questions |
[[da:Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden]]
(Moved to Reference Desk)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_University The "Duke University" entry is not displaying properly.
There will be a Wikipedian meetup in Boston this Saturday. Sign up if you plan to attend. Dori | Talk 16:52, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC) (Who unfortunately cannot)
Can image files be renamed after they are uploaded? Justin Foote 00:12, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Jimbo has proposed that two new people be elected to the Arbitration Committee. Please see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections July 2004 for a draft page about how this will take place. The page is based on Jimbo's mailing list post and is not yet finalized. Angela . 23:01, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)
Is there any easily understandable reason why the "What links here" links are in only slightly alphabetical order? -- Picapica 19:41, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Just to say "many thanks, andy, Dori, and James F." - not only understandable answers, but supplied in alphabetical order of respondents too! -- Picapica 21:24, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I noticed that the English Statistics page lists 297,000 pages, but the Special:Statistics page lists 310,000 articles. Any idea why are they different? The wikistats seem to be lagging by over three weeks. Jrincayc 13:24, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Do we have an article about headbutting anywhere? I thought we did but can't find one, maybe it was deleted? Thx. Pcb21| Pete 08:15, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Alexa has a feature where you can put your logo into an alexa toolbar and distribute it to visitors on your site. Perhaps we should try it? Ilyanep (Talk) 21:12, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
An anonymous contributor (69.194.239.250) edited User:Trebor1990 and added quite some useless and unwanted junk. Does Wikipedia have certain etiquette for dealing with such problems? -- Trebor
I noticed vandalism on
Highland Park, Texas. I often see people reverting pages but I do not know how this is done. Feel free to revert it. For the future, please can somebody tell me how I can revert a page myself?
Bobblewik 11:07, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Go to History for the page. open the last unvandalised version (by clicking the time and date link for it) and save. Bmills 11:11, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Many thanks. I have learnt something useful.
Bobblewik 13:16, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version for all the do's and don'ts of reversion. - 11:18, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC) Lee (talk)
Ooh. I have just read lots of great advice and tips there. Thanks.
Bobblewik 13:16, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
When trying to rename Yabloko Russian Democratic Party to simply Yabloko (in keeping with the most-common-name rule), I cut-and-pasted "Yabloko" into the destination box, but somehow also pasted "To help support Wikipedia, please visit our fundraising page, or read about how we use the money" at the same time. I haven't any idea how that occured, but the article is now called To help support Wikipedia, please visit our fundraising page, or read about how we use the money. Yabloko. Could an admin please fix this? (And is there somewhere better to ask this sort of thing? Simply picking a random admin from the list and hoping that they're around seems a bit ... inefficient?) Thanks. -- Vardion 09:50, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Where would people suggest I look for helpful information on how to start a sister project in a new language? A clear step-by-step guide in English would be fanstastic, if one exists. (I am specifically interested in setting up a new-language version of WikiSource, and I posted a query there as well, but I know there are tons of extremely knowledgeable here.) It would be great if anyone could refer me to such a guide or other helpful materials. Dovi 04:27, Jul 22, 2004 (UTC)
Those who want to ban MP3 sound ( Wikipedia talk:Sound) from wikipedia might be interested in the Forgent patent affecting JPEG images which is in today's news. [4] So far Sony has signed a license and an unnamed other company has paid US$15 million for one. After moving to ban the world's music format, should the world's photo format should be next? Japan and the US are the major countries which allow these patents. Should we instead refuse to deliver MP3 and JPEG content to viewers in Japan, to pressure users there to get their laws changed? That's the approach copyleft takes: make a large set of resources available, but only let you use them if you agree to the terms, so applying pressure to change your license. Jamesday 01:44, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
sannse, co-chair of the Mediation Committee, has just written on the mailing list that she believes the committee could do with expansion to help ensure requests are answered as quickly as possible. Please see How does one become the member of the committee? and nominate yourself there if you are interested in playing a part in the dispute resolution process. Angela . 22:20, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Has anyone else noticed that "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." now appears in black under the title of each page above the main text? Also does the "edit this page" link at the top of the page look bold to you? (I'm using MonoBook, btw) — siro χ o 17:38, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
I still don't see why we can't have an edit this page link at the bottom of the page, where is where most people are (particularly in Talk pages) when they decide they want to edit. Adam 09:28, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Discovered something terrible when I typed in www.wikibooks.org . Some moron has forgotten to pay for the domain name and now it's for sale. Oh, no please admins or whoever is responsible for this. Get this domain back! I just wanted to add my first contribution in wikibooks but that's impossible now. By the way, I made sure to check whether I typed the right domain, but the link on the main page links to the same domain. If the domain is bought by someone else that's really a disaster. Please do something, whoever is responsible for this! Thanks a lot in advance. Laudaka
Hi, everyone. On my computer I got godaddy.com first and I get wikibooks now again, the problem seems to have been fixed. Hurray! Wikibooks is working again and I'll contribute my first page today. Paulus/laudaka (add me to your YIM/AIM/ICQ/M$N M contact list if you like!) Laudaka's talk page 14:24, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
An article titled Vai viegli but jaunam? which I have edited a few months ago has disappeared. Searching the database [5] returns the article among hits but clicking on the title gives the "Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this name" message. What has happened? Is there article deleted? Some software bug? Andris 12:27, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Note Wikipedians that an external link on the wikipage Isle_of_Sheppey references an offensive, self opinionated and unsuitable website that should not be on any wikipage. Yesterday I replaced it with a more suitable link, but it has been restored, and I am not about to begin a crusade over it, but feel the community should censor it Faedra 11:40, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
A new type of stub has been created: it's called a
substub. Substubs are like regular
stubs, only even smaller. You can read more about the difference between stubs and substubs
here, or view
examples of stubs vs. substubs. There is also a new substub
template message; the new message is meant to replace the normal stub message, but only where, of course, an article is a substub instead of a stub. The new message looks like:
This article is a substub! If it is not expanded soon, it may be deleted.
You can use this new message by either replacing {{stub}} with {{substub}} in cases when a stub is more accurately described as a substub, or simply inserting {{substub}} at the bottom of an article. Many substubs are automatically listed on Wikipedia:Shortpages. You can discuss this new type of stub here, on the template message's talk page, or, preferably, on the substub talk page itself. -- Mike Storm 03:10, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
How about {{nanostub}}? Exploding Boy 07:44, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Actually, if you go to Wikipedia:Shortpages, you'll see that there are no pages under 14 characters. I think the smallest right now is 46. -- Mike Storm 16:05, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
What exactly is this addition of another layer of complexity to the rules supposed to accomplish? You have a fancy new tag. Why? -- Cyrius| ✎ 22:45, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think this is really rather silly. It doesn't seem to accomplish anything useful, it's just over-categorization. —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 22:48, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
First topic: The whole idea is that substubs are in extreme need of improvement. Besides, while you complain about over-categorization, hundreds of other people scoff at Wikipedia and complain about how unorganized it is. Second topic: If you support the idea of having substubs, then please list your name on the substub talk page. Third topic: I have no plan to make a subsubstub. If anyone did, I would be against it. -- Mike Storm 00:03, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
If you support the idea of having substubs, then please list your name here. There's also lots more discussion about Wikipedia:substubs on the talk page.
Its one thing to encourage free use of articles, but there seem to be a lot of on line encyclopedias who are copying wiki without crediting. Even if they mention wikipeida they are lifting imcomplete articles and provide no facility to correct and sometimes have some kind of software conflict that makes the display wrong anyway, all of which make Wiki sources look less credible. What is the point of this? why don't they just link to wikipedia as a resource?. I think that the terms of free use should prevent this type of thing if this is possible. Dainamo 09:44, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Er, the whole point of the GNU FDL is to make Wikipedia a free and open resource which means that anyone, (even the unscrupulous), can make use of it. The real problem imo is the fact that Google ranks these pages higher than Wikipedia's in may cases due to the prevalence of spamdexing which these unscrupulous operators rely upon. If Google's engine were better and more discrimating than this would not be an issue. Sjc 09:53, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The search engine experience is the biggest problem, I agree In so far as "Free Use" is concerned, there are already conditions such as accreditation and an idea might be to exclude unapproved presentation in an another encyclopedia. Aa religious analogy might be: Whether he approves or not God gives us freedom to do what we want, but does not permit us to to be God I know its a bit crap, but its the nearest I could think of. I am not a lawyer so I might be suggesting something that is totally impractical, but in that case there could be some mileage of a polite request to those who have some scruples. In so far as they are concerned, surely a link to wikipedia would be much easier anyway? If you can't beat them join them Dainamo 11:43, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
No, a simple link wouldn't bring them Google traffic, and then they wouldn't get money for their ads. They have no scruples. — Chameleon My page/ My talk 12:47, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I wasn't sure about something, and wanted to bring it up here. Basically, mirror versions are appearing much higher in google than we are. The explanation people give for this is that they're somehow manipulating the pagerank system. My question is not "how" (I'm not technical enough to really grasp), but rather "Could we do this too?". [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 13:44, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
How could we do this without putting it in the article text? [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 19:42, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
<title>
, and presumably also in the meta tags. It could also be incorporated in small text at the bottom of the article.
— Chameleon
My page/
My talk 20:24, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)Wikipedia:Database download gives the technical reasons we are almost assured a low Google ranking: because we're database-bound, crawlers are restricted to one access per second. Our mirrors are typically flat HTML, so can be crawled much faster.
I suggest that there's not much point worrying about our Google ranking until we are confident we have the server power (enough Squid frontends, I would guess) to handle the traffic. Remember that the deal with Yahoo doubled our load in a week - David Gerard 10:40, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I just found my article on effeminacy on the free dictionary.com. I don't see where they referenced wikipedia nor myself. I wish I could get credit for all my hard work. WHEELER 23:58, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I would encourage everyone to submit the articles they care most about to DMOZ, the basis directory for Google and other search engines. This may eventually ameliorate some of the problems related to searchability. -- Stevietheman 17:39, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I wanna do something like this:
For some articles Ive written, for example, for Edwin Rosario. How can I do that?
Thank you and God bless you!
Sincerely yours, " Antonio Bananaramo Martin"
I don't think there's an entry in the naming conventions for this, so which is the proper format for a name with a II, III, etc, that isn't a royal name? Article in question is John H. Bankhead, II. Should it be with or without the comma? I note that "with" comma takes up the bulk of redirects to Bill Gates, but the article itself mentions him as William Henry Gates III, no comma. Any suggestions? -- Golbez 02:38, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Would it be a copyvio to use information (or copy-pastes) from http://bioguide.congress.gov/? It's a federal website, but the "copyright information" page at http://bioguide.congress.gov/copyright.htm only mentions the image; it mentions no copyright or license on the text at all. Ideas? -- Golbez 01:56, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
To avoid an editing circle of well meaning, but incorrect changes and then necessary correcting that is being made on a few particular pages (due to a commonly held misunderstanding) I would like to enter an explanation text that appears in editing but does not appear on the page. How do I do this? Dainamo 23:34, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
<!-- comment here -->
. It might also be a good idea to put your comment on the article's talk page as well. --
Wapcaplet 23:58, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)As per policy, I'm reporting here that I have blocked range 64.12.116.10/31 for 48 hours. This is probably wrong, since I really have no idea how to do it, but I used the Wikimedia calculator to try to figure it out. The user has been using IDs from 64.12.116.10 through 64.12.117.22. Rick K 22:24, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)
Add 205.188.116.19/31 for 72 hours. Rick K 22:38, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)
And this is bad because...? Adam 09:44, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I remember that in the old skin you could edit the article's summary with an [edit] link that always appeared at the top of the article. That link doesn't appear in the new skin and everytime I want to edit the summary of an article, I have to click the "edit this page" option which downloads the whole article instead of the summary alone. Could we get that back por favor?
What about [[Image:|thumb|center]]? It is not centering the thumbnails. :/
Could we have the images on the Image description page centered? They are now aligned to the left.. suxxors.
What the hell happened with that feature where you could specify if the image that you were uploading was public domain or not so that we didn't have to manually edit the Image description page? It fucking sucks to edit every image that I upload, that can be done with a simple form. Who was was developing that?
And, is there a way that when you categorize, the article put in the category appears as you specified it on the brackets? For example, if you list Einsten as [[Category:Scientists|Einsten, Albert]] could it be listed in the Category as Einstein, Albert instead of listing it as Albert Einsten under the E section?
— John | Talk 22:12, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Why are there so many British English spellings on Wikipedia? This is unacceptable. Is Wikipedia based in England or something? The default language of the Internet is American English, as Wikipedia's should also be.
I don't mind the english spellings. I am an American but I use English spellings all the time. American english is really the bowdlerization of Queen's English anyway. WHEELER 22:03, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia will be taken over by Australians. We are writing a script now to replace all instances of "hi" with "g'day", and to convert all IPA pronunciation guides to appropriately diphthongised versions. Jeronim and I are handling the technical aspects, and the Australian-controlled Fox Broadcasting Company will do the PR side. We have an informal alliance with the Board of Trustees and developer corps, both of which are dominated by Europeans. -- Tim Starling 03:11, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Why are there so many British English spellings idiotic trolls on Wikipedia? This is unacceptable. Is Wikipedia based in England an elementary school or something? The default language of the Internet troll is American poorly written English, as Wikipedia's should also it always has been and probably always will be. --
Jmabel 06:26, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Hahah Starling, your joke to use a script to convert all instances of Hi! to G'day is hilarious. I really ROFL'ed when I read that thanx for making me laugh. Thanks for your joke Jmabel it really made me smiley. I'm gonna make it a little better you forgot to repeat something in strikeout I believe. Hehehe, we can make the jokes better in true Wikipedia.org fashion. Now a serious reactien: It is possible it is a troll, but if it would really have been a troll he/she would have given a lot more arguments to keep us busy and to divide us. He's given so little arguments that everybody is against him. I think he/she's just naive. I've to following proposition: Having wikipedia in one more spelling gives practical problems. Everybody who has tried using a spelling checker to correct spelling of Wikipedia.org pages will know how clumsy it is that you have to find out each time whether it's Brittish English or American English spelling. Because we're against US cultural imperialism I would seriously propose to rewrite ALL of wikipedia.org in Australian English spelling. Australian spelling check is readily available in any major word processor so it shouldn't be that hard. And with this we would take a political stand AGAINST the Americanization of world culture. No about the fun again: I'm going to copy part of the messages here to Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense/Funny vandalism. Starling and Jmabel your replies will fit in excellently as a reply to a possible troll. Paulus/laudaka (add me to your YIM/AIM/ICQ/M$N M contact list if you like!) Laudaka's talk page 11:58, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I have no problem with either sets of spelling, and as a Brit even think that American spellings make more sense (I think "catsup" for ketchup is a notable exception to this :)). Aside from the Chinese, the English used print pretty early on leading to the spelling of words remaining the same while the language changed (If you did Chaucer at school you will know that knight was pronounced as it was spelt). There is however one spelling diiference in American english that rises my prejudices and thats using "izes" instead of "ises". The reason is bloody BILL GATES. Set your computer to British English and the spelling checks go British in everything but "ises" and you are constantly reminded to change these on a spell check! Whinging over now that's off my chest. Dainamo
I was so sure that you were wrong about this and that the choice between ize and ise was a modern one becasue of transantlantic influences. However, I have a four volume Imperial Dictionary c. 1890s and behold: "REALIZE" and "REALIZATION". Only in my modern "Chambers" dictionary do I get a choice and in my "Websters" I naturally get "ize"s. I bow to you as I am obviously not academic enough ;) Dainamo 19:31, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Incidentally, I gdon't understand why should using an "s" be a simplification when the sound is a Z anyway? And also how do you get word to accept "ises" other than adding each word everytime it picks it up? Dainamo 19:33, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I wonder if there is any wikipedians who has an article on him-/her-self in wikipedia? (What i mean is an valid article and NOT in namespace) SYSS Mouse 16:55, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Jacques Chirac never declared Ariel Sharon persona non grata in France. The whole thing is a misunderstanding. Please, check your info before publishing news! More details in:
[ [7]].
I'm sorry, this is a French newspaper, but I think you may find the same content in an US or UK one.
-- 146.169.6.192 14:16, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In the Geography section of Tasmania, I have a small list of geographical features (both natural and man-made). Following this I have a line that reads:
See also: List of Australian islands, lakes, bridges, highways, rivers, mountains and regions.
Looks clear enough, but if this is expanded, you can see the non-standard form of naming such articles:
I was going to move, rename and split articles so that they were consistent; but thought I would bring the point up here in case there were any other preferences or ideas? I thought (feature)s of Australia like the Lakes article currently is, would be nice and simple? -- Chuq 01:47, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Lists, which recommends "List of Xs". Also see Wikipedia:Lists (stand-alone lists). Personally, I would rather see the title as Xs rather than List of Xs, but that is apparently the convention at this time. older≠ wiser 14:05, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
For a good laugh, see my latest addition to the Wikipedia_as_a_press_source#July_2004_.2818_articles.29 :))) Nikola 00:47, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In the frame of the WikiProject Science, we have started to write "To do lists" in the talk page of articles needing improvements. The goal is to give specific suggestions to make the article "Feature class", and to encourage editors to do them.
We see this as a complement of the "Pages needing attention", i.e. those in which problems are know. "To do lists" are long term, while "pages needing attention" require immediate correction. This helps keep the list of "pages needing attention" short and accelerate the corrections. See the WikiProject for more details.
Was anything like this attempted before ? Any suggestion on how to do this better ? Would it be OK to generalize the process and write a general "List of articles with To do's". Pcarbonn 18:15, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I like the idea of a template. (I have changed yours a bit). One advantage is that it makes it easy to build the list of articles with todo's using the Wikipedia search list. I have already done this for the list of accuracy disputes in Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute (it is more accurate than the previously-used "What links here" mechanism). Unfortunately, the search index is not updated in real time. Actually, I found out that it is not updated at all for the moment. Can anyone say when it will be updated again ? Pcarbonn 17:44, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I have added it to Wikipedia:Peer review. Still, I would be bold, and launch it now. What's the risk ? If you agree, please proceed. Pcarbonn 21:40, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Mav suggested that proposals with over 75% support at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css be implemented on 3 July. Is there a plan in place to do this? -- Jia ng 01:07, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Mav suggested that proposals with at least 75% support at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css be implemented on 3 July. Is there a plan in place to do this? -- Jia ng 01:07, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Can we please finally set up a policy against Americentrism or American_exceptionalism especially where the Template:In the news and Current Events sections are concerned, as I requested earlier at the Village Pump. Asking more non-American users to edit the page is not the way to go about it - at this moment there are currently only four articles on In The News and they all relate headlines that're either only pertinent to domestic American issues or reinforce an American perspective, though only one - Lance Armstrong's win - is worth keeping in the manner it is written. There should be a clear policy stating that no more than one out of three, or two out of four articles should relate to any single country, and as for Current Events, at least one or two articles from each of the permanently inhabited continents. It is not that hard. You don't have to sacrifice reading your favourite news source. You don't have to learn a new language. If you're on the net, just navigate to the "World" section of your news site and review the general headlines or click on individual countries and you will get plenty of important news that relates to the approximately 6+ billion - 300 million people that aren't American or don't live in the US. The only effort it's going to take is intellectual and if you can spend ages copyediting and padding articles you can certainly spare a couple of minutes selecting headlines that don't universalise US news items. -- Simonides 22:32, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Yawn. Boring. Move on to other things. This same old song is falling on unresponsive ears. Rick K 04:25, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
This is a perfectly valid criticism, and has been met with the typical Wikipedia/open source response, i.e. "Fix it yourself" (ignoring the fact that yes, something is broken and shouldn't be). I am not interested in editing the current events thing (unless I spot something of interest that's been missed and add it), but yet that is no reason why the entries should be Americocentric. Zoney 13:46, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm tired of seeing the Modern Library's "100 Best Novels/ Non-fiction titles" mentioned on every article related to the list. The list was a marketing gimmick and is not an award or a critical evaluation - members of the board were themselves not aware of the ranking system and Random House themselves stated (sourced at article) that the list was partly meant to boost sales of their own stocklist (further it's ethnocentric and sexist and only lists novels in English): please stop mentioning it as if it were a literary standard - it isn't. If this doesn't sound annoying to you, consider mentioning a list of Best Films Of All Time drawn up by, say, Walt Disney corp., that mostly lists Walt Disney-funded films, admittedly ones that may have been popular all around the world, on every article related to the list and other film related articles as if it were an achievement - I think we can agree such lists are somewhat irrelevant. -- Simonides 22:32, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Sorry if that has already been discussed, but I couldn't find it anywhere.
I remember seeing it on other pages as well, now I came across it in the paternoster article: [[Great Britain]] being changed to [[United Kingdom|Britain]], in this particular case by a User:Bobblewik.
I think authors of articles can very well distinguish between England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom. In the case of the paternoster text, the change is irrelevant, but in other cases it might introduce a factual error. <KF> 00:23, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(please reply to my usertalk to reply, thanks!) Someone help, What is the point of having template:regnum and the other ones used in darwin-ridden articles? As far as I see it's pointless, "translating" latin words to english, basically obscuring the content without serving any visibly useful purpose. Enlighten me! Thanks. -- grin ✎ 21:10, 2004 Jul 26 (UTC)
I want to create a new category at the bottom of a page. How do I activate a new category and what are the criteria for addition? [[User:Nichalp|¶ nichalp | Talk]] 20:38, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)
In response to a recent negative article in the Register, I'm proposing a publicity committee, to handle responses to negative media coverage. Basically, it ensures that we have a liason between hostile media and the community. Feel free to edit or discuss it at User:Meelar/publicity committee. Best wishes, [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 16:14, 2004 Jul 26 (UTC)
Hi
If anyone is interested in contributing, I created * Wikipedia:WikiProject Irish literature today. The stated aim is to make Wikipedia an essential resource for anyone interested in the filed of Irish writing. Bmills 15:01, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
A number of historical and biographical articles appear with no references to sources. This is sloppy, because it can encourage readers to only use the Wikipedia article as their source. They ought to be encouraged to look wider. If a modern source is used, adding the ISBN to it may wall cause the reader to go out and buy the book! Even if a biographical article is based on the DNB, ( most of which is out of copyright, of course) a note about it as a source may cause readers to want to consult the latest version of the biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, out September 2004. Apwoolrich 12:52, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I was rather disturbed earlier today to find on the MainPage, specifically on selected anniversaries for July 26, an item about somebody being arrested for masturbation in an adult theatre in 1991. ( Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:July_26_selected_anniversaries&oldid=4849052 .) I have removed it right away.
I think Wikipedia should adopt some policy to prohibit various taboos on the MainPage. We have many other wonderful pages to choose. Why not use a little more common sense ? While the 'naughty' pages are available to all, and I give credit to those resourceful little brats with no classes to attend during the summer and know enough about computers to find the pages, I have to say that leaving items like masturbation on the MainPage is not that appropriate. It makes us look bad, especially in the eyes of a parent.
-- PFHLai 07:07, 2004 Jul 26 (UTC)
But that article isn't explicit content. Rick K 18:58, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)
I've noticed that the category links, interwiki headers, and carriage returns before the first line of visible text in an article cause extra whitespace to show up if they are placed at the top of the page. This is just a heads up request that people take a sec in their edits to move cat and interwiki links to bottom and remove any unncessessary carriage returns at top. See George W. Bush article as an example. - S V
... last line of article <!-- Categories --> [[Category:...]] <!-- Interwiki links --> [ca:...] [gd:...]
I'm not sure what is going on with this. When I check What links here for Beaver Island, I get a long list of articles, none of which, as far as I can tell, actually link to Beaver Island. Can anyone explain why this is? This certainly makes it difficult to check if it needs disambiguating. older≠ wiser 17:24, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
since the new namespace "Category" is introduced, are the "list of XXX" pages still necessary? -- Yacht (talk) 16:09, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
On the article for the US Senate Republicans are represented by red and Democrats by Blue. At the last presidential election, the map states being changed as votes came in shown on News bulletins followed this convention on some networks, but on others GOP was blue and Democrats were Red. The latter were predominantly BBC, SKY i.e. British whereas FOX and I think CNN i.e. Ameirican followed the former convention. In Britain Blue and Red are synonomous with Conservative and Labour; or right and left so perhaps that is the reason this method was used instead. Whilst as a non American I am likely to assume that Red for GOP and Blue for Dems is correct IS IT? or were the NEWS channels just selecting one colour for each for the sake of illustration which could just as easily been stripes and polkadots? Dainamo 15:54, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Goes back to the 19th century I beleive
Smith03 18:03, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
[
[10]] well you better edit this page if you doubt what I said
Smith03 02:04, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In general, I'd suggest avoid using colors that may needlessly confuse an international audience, but the cited use is a graph with a clear legend indicating its color codes without implying any meaning beyond the graph. It's fine by graph standards. While it may be a bit disconcerting on first glance to a UK audience, it's not ambiguous or misleading, unless someone looking for a fight in this heated political year wants to infer something about using red for Republicans. (Sure, many Communist parties and countries favor it, but so do we in the U.S. — as one of our three patriotic colors. Besides, as an independent, I'd have better grounds to complain about having my non-affliation coded in yellow. ☺) -- Jeff Q 23:30, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Jeff, as I asked the orginal question, let me clarify that there was no confusion from a clearly labeled table or map. I was just interested in the correct form according to tradition. If we are discussing a particular country, the best policy is to use their chosen designation. In the same fashion I would address a Lieutenant in the US Army "Lou-tenant" amd one in a Commonwealth country "Lef-tenant" thus adopting what is appropriate in the particular situation. Dainamo