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I was just experimenting with My Preferences and something's gone horribly wrong. I've lost the link that's usually on the left of each page to My talk, plus those links have all moved around and it seems the page is a different colour, and some of the links at the bottom of each page seem all bunched up now, and I don't know what else. The only two things I changed were I unchecked Underline links and checked Show edit toolbar. I've changed both back, but nothing. Any suggestions? Exploding Boy 14:15, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
YESSSSSSSSSSS! But just so anyone else having problems knows, the Monobook skin turns everything into something resembling the blue screen of doom. It's the Cologne Blue skin that you want. Thanks Johnleemk. Exploding Boy 14:58, Jul 25, 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 agree that the link and site are information filled but if you check all additions that these users add not only to the NFL page but other football related articles, they have an agenda that sadly I believe because it is related to a sport is not being challenged by wikipedias. this comes from there website: It gives the appearence that some other source has come up with this conculsion instead they just wrote, regardless if they are selling something or not they are using wikipedia to further their cause.
Below are excerpts from several sources on the influence that the American Football League has had on modern professional football.
From Wikipedia, on-line encyclopedia:
Some innovative rules changes were also put into place, such as the two-point conversion (later adopted by the NFL in the 1990s); the use of the scoreboard clock as the official game clock (adopted by the NFL when the leagues merged--prior to this time, the official game clock was maintained by an official on the sidelines, and often did not match the scoreboard clock very closely); the use of player names on jerseys, (also adopted by the NFL); and the sharing of gate and television revenues between home and visiting teams (also adopted by the NFL). In short, the NFL adopted virtually every pioneering aspect of the American Football League, except its name.
By the way college football had adopted the two point conversion in the late 1950s, so the AFL "borrowed" that idea from them. One could argue that the talent level in the early years of the AFL was so poor that it lead to point a minute offensives because the defenses was so poor, Someone could write on the AFL page that they borrowed from the NFL the idea of divisions and a championship game, the idea of a college draft, a post season all star game, harsh marks, and seperate offensive and defense units, but that would be silly and pointless. I do believe that these users have provided a great deal of information but they have also slip in their agenda that gee the NFL really stoled everything from the AFL. I agree the AFL added a lot to modern day football but don't overstate it. Smith03 18:00, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Has there been any discussion of this anywhere? Specifically I'm wondering whether it's ever been suggested or debated whether we should require all editors to have a user name before editing? I ask because it would make recognising, tracking, and blocking vandals a lot easier. A quick look at the Block log shows that nearly all the accounts blocked for vandalism and other bad behaviour are anonymous. I think it would be fairly easy to implement such a change. Any thoughts? Exploding Boy 10:57, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, I see what you mean. I do like one of the suggestions (linked to the above) that anonymous users would be limited to a certain number of edits per day until registered (but not the bit about web-based email addresses).
How about coming up with some more ways to encourage people to sign up for user names? What about creating a {message} to place on anonymous users' pages? Perhaps something like:
What do you think? Exploding Boy 12:35, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
There actually is a page that lists the benefits already, but in very long form. Since the idea is to encourage people to create an account rather than remain anonymous, I thought it would be good to make a short(ish!), easy to read list of the benefits of signing up, in an effort to lure people into doing so. And since most anonymous users don't use their user/talk pages (maybe because they don't know they have them?) this will also draw their attention to that. And if it's too long, they can always delete it! Exploding Boy 12:56, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
No, not on every page, just on anonymous users' talk pages. Exploding Boy 13:25, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Well, I'm going to go ahead and give it a try Wikipedia:Template messages. Exploding Boy 13:41, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Recently an anon edited Homeopathy by adding an external link to the H2G2 Edited Guide Entry on the subject. A quick search showed several other places where H2G2 is in the external links. We should certainly keep the ones in the H2G2 article itself; there might be a reason to keep some other particular link (e.g. we might link to an entry on a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy topic if it was written by someone who had a unique personal connection with the subject). Despite these exceptions, I think most of the links should be removed. They don't meet the general standard for external links. Before I remove any of them, though, do people think we should apply a different standard to H2G2, e.g. as a courtesy to a somewhat similar project? JamesMLane 09:23, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I run a UK Discussion forum/online community. Within my forum I have subforums for each and every city/town in the UK. The forum is designed to be an interactive resource for the UK. However, I am in need of basic content to kick start these regional boards.
My question is: Can I use the content available here in my forum by posting it? If I can, what steps do I need to take?
Thanks
Polling opens on the proposed new policy for managing disruptive or antisocial editors at midday (UTC) today.
A number of us have been thrashing out the details for the policy for the last two weeks and I previously invited everybody at the troll polls and here at the pump to participate. There has been some healthy debate and the policy is now locked for two weeks to allow us to vote.
There are still some points that will need a bit more discussion and these may produce secondary poll questions or we may put them off until after the policy has been tried for a while.
Please come and vote! (from midday UTC)
Be warned this is a relatively complex proposal for a difficult problem. So if your initial reaction is to vote against the proposal then I urge you pause before voting. There is no rush. Voting is open for two weeks. Take the time to read the frequently raised objections on the talk page and re-read the policy. If the FROs dont deal with your concern then please raise it again on the poll or policy talk pages. Hopefully one of us can then explain the rationale for why policy is as it is and we can work through alternatives. We may also be able to frame a secondary poll question if needed. Best wishes to all and see you at the poll! Erich 04:38, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I tried to add Image:HAtomOrbitals.png to the quantum mechanics article, but images don't seem to be showing up right now; not even the VP picture in this page is showing up for me. Ancheta Wis 00:38, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Is there a policy in Wikipedia to deal with the inclusion of material that may be considered unsuitable for children?
Obviously Wikipedia is about open sharing of information. However there are entrie that will inflame some parents and terrify school administrators. (see Oral sex) What will inflame some parents will not cause a stir among others. Wikipedia and censorship to not go together, however it will be a tragedy if Widipedia is blocked in its entirity from schools.
Yes. The policy is that this is an encyclopedia, and it's up to parents to monitor what their children read, not us. Rick K 23:38, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)
So, for example, does a list of which movies Drew Barrymore appears nude suitable for inclusion in an encyclopeadia? Paul Beardsell 23:41, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
No, because the information is sub-trivial. That she has appeared nude, and even a semi-nude photo of her, would be of value to the encyclopedia, but a list of someone's opinion as to whether she was or was not nude is not. And besides, you've only given half the information. Was it full frontal nudity, rear nudity, side, partial, see, your trivia could get even more trivial, so why stop there? Rick K 23:53, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)
If resorting to bowdlerism is being grown up then I want none of it. Presumably Noisy actually knows what side of the argument I am on. Paul Beardsell 00:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Indeed, why stop there? [1] Paul Beardsell 00:07, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There is so much useless sub-trivia on Wikipedia. Why are we discussing only nudity references? Paul Beardsell 00:09, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There are two legitimate concerns here - protecting Wikipedia from being blocked by censorware vs keeping our content as accurate as possible. Our ad-hoc policy is one of common sense - if you go to penis, don't be surprised if you see an explicit photo - it's assumed that you knew what you were getting into by going to that article. By and large, it's generally understood that clinical anatomical pictures are OK, but that's about as far as we're willing to go.
Also, we only put that kind of content in places you would "expect it". By the same token, there's a concern that we shouldn't "push" that kind of content onto people, which is why it is unlikely that such a picture will ever make it to the main page.
As far as a list of nude pictures that Drew Barrymore has appeared in - a text list isn't even close to something we'd need to censor. →Raul654 00:16, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Well, where in Wikipedia would one expect to find a list of the pictures that Drew Barrymore appears nude in? I too am not entirely sure that the list is important enough to be included, but somebody thought so. What I was objecting to was the removal of that information, the Wikipedia default being that info is not removed. It is accurate info, presumably. That there is som much seemingly useless trivia in Wikipedia does not lead RickK to delete that. When he does the nudity but leaves the rest then that is nothing less than Bowdlerism. Paul Beardsell 00:30, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
This is a very topical subject these days on Wikipedia. In the general sense, the extreme ease by which materials are avaliable on the web will have a reconciling effect on the extreme interpretations of decency. On the practical side, the battle is between what should be done (according to common sensical, moderate, and agreeable standards) and what can actually be done about it. Artificial control means are completely antithetical to WP, and everything done here has to be done in the name of NPOV and openness, or it just doenst have resonance. If Wikipedia is to appeal to parents for their children's use, the basics should be considered; even vulgar topics are not to be treated profanely here, and articles that are problematic could be categorized as (adult) of (mature) in nature, and not included on certain DVD distributions of WP. If kids are online, they have access to any number of possibly profane things, and WP is the least of those. IMHO "A child-safe internet" is an oxymoron, wo then how much is Wikipedia expected to be like Netnanny or AOL, rather than what it is? - S V 00:34, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I agree with that wholeheartedly. But that very good point does not apply. We are not talking about porn or even the use of swear words. There is no way that I wish a first time user of an encyclopedia (a very advanced 6 year old, say, or an average 10 year old on their first independent school project) to be protected to the extent that (s)he is not allowed to know that sometimes people appear nude in movies. And that Drew Barrymore actually has a vagina! (Although that point does not yet appear in the article.) Paul Beardsell 00:48, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think the consensus of opinion is that there is no good reason to censor the article. Who disagrees? Paul Beardsell 02:25, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think it trivializes an article on a legitimate actress to highlight, in the list of her movies, which ones she appears nude in. This is not something we normally include in profiles of actors and actresses, nor shoudl we. It's one thing to discuss nude appearances, in the text of the article, where they are relevant to a person's career, and another to turn the list of what films someone has appeared into a "hey, if you want to see her naked, rent this movie." -- Jmabel 04:29, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps a generic article of Nude scenes of famous actresses would be somewhat appropriate; it *is* somewhat, vaguely, in a certain dimension and when you're looking at it with one eye closed, encyclopedic. At least for a perv like me. On a side note, every time I see "Drew Barrymore's nudity" in my Watchlist, I come here thinking someone's finally posted an example. Meanies. -- Golbez 09:31, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Maybe we should have a PICS label [www.w3.org/PICS/labels.html], or do we already? Kokiri 16:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The people here on this website do not care for children or about morality. As I have stated earlier, this is an adult playground and it has much filthy content that no child should read that many libraries and schools should censor this website but the great amount of contributors and the owners do not care about this. It is about them having fun. Another sign of the sickness of this society. I do not know why they think this ought to be a *source* for highschoolers. This is an anarchistic website. WHEELER 15:48, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
While you're making wikipedia safe for children to read, why not also simplify the language the articles are written in? Oh wait, that's already been done.
(Thanks Orthangonal for the excellent essay above!!!!) -- ssd 05:21, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Firstly, protecting children from TV, books, magazines etc. is their parents' job, not ours. "Children safety" should not be a concern. This is not a "family" encyclopaedia.
Secondly, use common sense. Listing all films where Drew appears nude on Drew Barrymore is like listing all films where her hair is blond. Non-encyclopedic, sub-trivial and entirely off-topic. I can understand it being mentioned in articles on individual films, if they deserve articles.
Thirdly, avoid bad taste. "Wow! She's nude, dude! nudge-nudge-wink-wink." Zocky 07:35, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Do you want this resource to be used? What parent wants their children exposed to "penetration this" or "penetration that"? What libraries are going to link to this website with fist fucking and gerbil insertion techniques? Is this a playground for perverts or for the general community at large? While our site is going to remain de-linked, other online encyclopaedias are copying our work, posting it on their website and getting credit. How about establishing a family wikipedia?? a child-safe wikipedia? or a Christian wikipedia? That libraries and families can safely link too. Otherwise I feel, this site is going to be taken advantage of others and be sidelined. Has Wikipedia been turned into an adult playground for academic perverts and homosexual propagandists? WHEELER 15:11, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've been creating a new custom user CSS which I call "Neptune". The background code is:
/* Main body */ #content { margin: 2.8em 0 0 12.2em; padding: 0em 1em 1.5em 1em; background: #0099ff; border: 1px solid #00ffff; border-right: none; line-height: 1.5em; position: relative; z-index: 2; }
This is supposed to make the background blue. The weird part is, on the main (or article) namespace, the background is white. On every other namespace (Wikipedia, Template, User, etc.) the background is blue (which is correct). All the other CSS code works correctly in all namespaces. How do I fix this? The entire code can be found here. [[User:Mike Storm| Mike Storm (Talk)]] 21:31, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
background: #0099ff !important;
or a more specific selector should work. --
Gabriel Wicke 00:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
i've been searching this on the faqs. i'm writing a open software and want that in a certain moment it picks displyas information from pages in the wikipedia. i want to control it's appearance, and also add one image if there's one. so three questions:
1-where do i learn how to do it? is it a crawl? shall i use a simple bot or what?
2-well some images are copyrighted. i'm not making money of this soft, how do i know if i can use them?
3-in the end i want to link back to wikipedia. what precautions should i have to avoid bringing a horde of barbarians (i don't know who is using my soft but could be a bunch of crazy teens) who don't know anything about wiki?
thanks. i promise to move everything to the right section after. -- Alexandre Van de Sande 16:44, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (headings) about using the singular vs plural form of the ext lk section heading in articles with one link only, where I make a case for the latter. Please comment. -- Wernher 13:54, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've been working on the clothing page intermittently and running into problems with Pedant17, who is extremely attached to his original article -- which strikes me as the work of someone sexually aroused by smelly torn clothing. Whatever I do to address his concerns, he retaliates by re-publishing his original work. Now it's up as "Sociology of Clothing" -- which it isn't. I'm editing out the link to his page from the Clothing page, but leaving his page up. I could use a mediator! Advice! Anything!
Zora 07:59, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
OK, I've slept on the issue and figured out what's bothering me so much about all this: the lack of any community of knowledgeable people on clothing/sewing topics. The more knowledgeable people involved and contributing, the greater the chance that the article is going to be state-of-the-art. But Wikipedia is still heavily biased towards a Slashdot demographic (not my observation -- it was someone on Usenet who'd used Wikipedia for this and that), which means that the geeky topics are well-done but others may be sketchy. I've noticed this not just with the "fashion" articles, but also with literature and the arts. IF there were others besides just me and Pedant17 working on the Clothing article, the Clothing: Talk page would be the venue for discussion and we'd probably hammer out something acceptable. But when there's just the two of us, we're stalemated. He thinks I'm a snob and I suppose I am; I'm not deferring to someone who can't tell a peplum from a toga virilis. But there are many thousands of people out there in the real world who know a heck of a lot MORE than I do -- how to get them involved in Wikipedia? Zora 21:55, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Surreal. Isn't there a Wikipedia:Silliest comments on talk pages yet?
Is it just me or are categories broken? I just went to Category:Political divisions of the United States and the list was empty and saw the same thing with a quick sampling of several other categories. older≠ wiser 14:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
###note:### the following part of the thread, about category sorting, will be moved to a thread below which primarily discusses that part of the "bug complex" ###
Is this bug also responsible for the stuff I've been seeing the last couple of days, which is that several categories have more than one section for a given alphabetical letter? For example, Category:Software has two separate occurrences of "F", with some subcats living under one section and the rest under the other. Same trouble with several other categories above/below/"to-the-side-of" the Software one (the part of the category tree where I've been working lately). I really, really, really hope that this bug (or maybe bug complex) is generally fixable ¹ -- i.e. that one doesn't have to redo stuff ad aeternum...? -- Wernher 02:15, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
( ¹ not at all having studied the wiki-software, I would nevertheless strongly assume that the category pages are regenerated regularly -- and that, if the wiki was a small one, they could in fact be regenerated on demand, i.e. per visit )
The Category:todo have articles with sort keys (i.e. [[category:todo|<sort key>]] or piped format), but it does not look correct to me. For example, "Talk:One-time pad" has a "T5" sort key, but comes before "Talk:Train station" that has a "T1" sort key. (these codes are meant to sort the articles by priority). Strangely, others are sorted correctly though, so that it is not a repeatable problem.
Has this problem been seen before ? Is someone working on it ? Should I report it somewhere else ? Pcarbonn 20:07, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(OT "linguistic" subthread moved into subsub "Todo is not a word" at the end of this thread)
"Todo" is not a word. — Chameleon Main/ Talk/ Images 13:43, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
First off, I want to say that I discoverd wikipedia yesterday and am estatic over it. I think the principals of "community cooperation" found within wikipedia, open-source software, creative commons and everything GNU are going to revolutionize the future in a HUGE way and will save all of us from ourselves....
But anyway, a couple of quick questions popped in my head about wikipedia that I couldn't really find an answer to:
1) As we've all seen in history (and no I can't really find a good example), it has been possible for a large group of people to, over a period of time, slowly believe something as true which very well may not be. Now I understand that fact is fact is fact. And I got the vibe that things like religion and such are explained in a very unbiased manner, as they should be. But my only concern is that I feel it IS possible for an entire population to believe something as true that isn't if its very slowly introduced to them. Like a very slow public "numbing to truth brought on by thier ability to believe whatever they read." Now I can't even begin to think of a scenario where that might happen, even if it's possible. But I just wanted to throw that out there.
2.)Advertising. What if someone writes up a pizza page and explains how to make it and such, then talk about history and blah blah blah. Then at the end put a http://www.dominos.com. Eventually someone will take it off because it's biased and advertising. Pretty simple. But what if everyone likes dominos? (just using it as an example, replace dominos with anything widely excepted). Then that opens up a way for people to advertise. Again, I can't really see that happening because there is nothing that everyone agrees on, even God, or god, or gods or allah or no god or aliens or etc,.
I'm just trying to find ways to scrutinize the system because I like it so much. I'M TRYING TO FIND FAULT AND CAN'T. By its very design, it WILL become the most in-depth, complete, and unbiased source of information on the planet. Good job guys.
I can't find my Game Boy Color! If you find it, send it by E-mail.
I propose that all pages describing a potentially harmful activity that the reader may like to try (chemistry experiment, sport etc...) should carry a disclaimer linking to a long version such as this proposal. In the past, there has been a number of people, generally older teenagers, who have harmed themselves or others trying to do stuff they had read about in a book (like making explosives). Even if Wikipedia is not legally liable for this (and this even remains to be seen, depending on the jurisdiction and how courts rule), there's a definite risk of adverse publicity. The media can well blow such incidents out of proportion: "Online encyclopedia a cookbook for explosives", "Youngster experiments as described in online site, loses both arms", etc... David.Monniaux 07:46, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Since i requested permission to run a warnfile on en three days ago and have not yet recived any reply i would like to draw some attention to the requst here so people wont go all postal when/if i actually run it.
Here goes. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:59, 2004 Jul 31 (UTC)
It seems to be the utility of "stub" and "substub" messages is...limited, and that the recently developed "substub" message was rude and reflected poorly on Wikipedia. I have discussed this at more length at template talk:substub and ask that others voice their opinions. I'm going to have a go at making it less off-putting. - Nunh-huh 02:51, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
For a good laugh, see my latest addition to the Wikipedia:Wikipedia_as_a_press_source#July_2004_.2818_articles.29 :))) Nikola 00:47, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
###Note:### OT "linguistic" subthread moved into subsub "Todo is not a word" at the end of this thread.
The Category:todo have articles with sort keys (i.e. [[category:todo|<sort key>]] or piped format), but it does not look correct to me. For example, "Talk:One-time pad" has a "T5" sort key, but comes before "Talk:Train station" that has a "T1" sort key. (these codes are meant to sort the articles by priority). Strangely, others are sorted correctly though, so that it is not a repeatable problem.
Has this problem been seen before ? Is someone working on it ? Should I report it somewhere else ? Pcarbonn 20:07, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Moved from "Categories broken":
Is this bug also responsible for the stuff I've been seeing the last couple of days, which is that several categories have more than one section for a given alphabetical letter? For example, Category:Software has two separate occurrences of "F", with some subcats living under one section and the rest under the other. Same trouble with several other categories above/below/"to-the-side-of" the Software one (the part of the category tree where I've been working lately). I really, really, really hope that this bug (or maybe bug complex) is generally fixable ¹ -- i.e. that one doesn't have to redo stuff ad aeternum...? -- Wernher 02:15, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
( ¹ not at all having studied the wiki-software, I would nevertheless strongly assume that the category pages are regenerated regularly -- and that, if the wiki was a small one, they could in fact be regenerated on demand, i.e. per visit )
"Todo" is not a word. — Chameleon Main/ Talk/ Images 13:43, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
IMHO, if people use it regularly, and widely agree upon its spelling and intended meaning, it's a word. Sort of like the words "today", "email", "handwritten", and "newspaper". "LOL" is an abbreviation. The phrase "todo list" is unlikely to be misunderstood by any native English speaker to mean "list of commotion."-- Wapcaplet 23:36, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Hi - could someone take a look at Intercontinental ballistic missile and let me know what I did wrong trying to put a caption under the photo? I can't seem to get non-thumbnail photos to display captions. Thanks - Tempshill 19:26, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Pcb21| Pete 11:26, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I will be making occasional awards to pairs of articles that typify this accusation, in the hope that it will motivate some (including me) to overcome our tech and pop biases and invest in some of the (apparently) less appealing articles. The first award goes to:
I make that a 1.69 Slashdot ratio, and will leave folks to draw their own conclusions about the relative significance of these two erstwhile organizations. Yours, hoping to meet you on the pages of some articles that traditionally don't get our focus, Mark Richards 15:28, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I recently created a stub about Ruth Krauss. I wanted to include her places of birth and death as well as the dates, without saying anything more about them. (biographies) recommends the standard format
but if you open like that, it is hard to think of a way of including the places succinctly. It's not as if it were a full biography, in which you could have a paragraph beginning "Krauss was born in a red-brick Mongolian yurt in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a poor but honest woodchopper and screenwriter Anita Loos. The influence of Baltimore's red-brick architecture can be seen every aspect of her work..." (or whatever the actual facts might be).
I settled for:
Ruth Krauss (b. July 25, 1901, Baltimore, Maryland; d. July 10, 1993, Westport, Connecticut)
Thoughts? Are there any experienced sages who have a recommendation (and might consider adding it to (biographies)?)
Increasingly, collaborative-edition mechanisms are using categories in templates to automatically generate the list of the concerned articles: Wikipedia:todo list, Wikipedia:disputed statement, Wikipedia:Cleanup, ... Those lists are sorted in alphabetical orders. Other popular collaboration mechanisms show the most-recently-posted first: Wikipedia:peer review, Wikipedia:Cleanup, ...
Sorting articles by popularity would bring the major benefit of focusing the editing effort where it is most useful, i.e. where many people will actually view it. The popularity could be measured by the number of links to that page (like Google does).
The category feature allows the entry of a sort key, e.g. [[Category:foobar|sort key]] (see m:Help:Category#Setting_sort_keys. This could be used for our purpose if we enter the popularity in the sort key. To have a descending order, we could use 999998 for an article referred once, 999997 for an article refered twice... (This sort key is not shown in the list of articles of the category).
As far as I know this is currently not possible in Wiki, because there is no "popularity" variable that we can automatically insert in a text, so we'll probably have to enter a request for new feature. Any other idea ?? Pcarbonn 06:05, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Take a look at Marauder's Map. The page redirects to an article that exists. It redirects to an article that isn't a redirect. Yet the redirect doesn't take you to the article.
It doesn't appear to be because of the anchor in the link; I checked another anchor redirect ( Sorting Hat), and even though anchor redirects don't take you to the anchor, they do take you to the right page. What's going on?
As a sidenote, I found the brokenness jarring enough that it took me a minute to remember why I was interested in reading the article. Lucky Wizard 02:09, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
How do I clear out the cache that retains the text I have used for edit summary? The cache is a useful feature but after a while, it contains so many similar text strings that the value decreases. I deleted the browser cookies but that didn't clear it. I also looked in the help but could not see anything about it. Thanks in advance. -- Bobblewik 15:56, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Excellent. I have IE6. I can now delete offending entries one by one. As you guessed, I don't want to turn it off, just remove a few. I tried to see if I could delete them all at once by following your second suggestion. I went to Tools, Internet Options..., Delete Files..., Delete all offline content, clicked OK then rebooted. Unfortunately that did get rid of any entries. However, deleting them one by one is a great advance and suits me fine. Thank you very much.
Bobblewik 20:54, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Using your clue, I found it. Tools, Internet Options..., Content tab, Autocomplete..., Clear Forms. That deleted them all. Many thanks!
Bobblewik 16:46, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Among the votes for deletion, the most commonly encountered category is personal articles. These articles are usually by some flaky person of no true interest to a Wiki-xxx. Though seldom encountered in votes for deletion, there also exist people who are of some minor interest, but who would not always justify an article. I propose a solution for both categories.
The idea is to create a separate Wiki with unlimited (except for size) personal articles. The idea is that if you can't easily deal with them, at least categorize them into a heap where they would be harmless. The existing Wikipedia would simply redirect via creator selection option, or by speedy VfD to the personalWIKI. The personal articles would not be searchable by Wikipedia, but would available through a different Wiki name.
A variation on this is to also require personal articles to have an selectable "open date" e.g. 50 years in the future, when the article would finally be posted to the public, but held confidential to Wiki (via password) prior to that date. The idea here is that some people actually are noteworthy, and that often such people would be reluctant to publish personal information prior to their death. I recently encountered an example of this. The lady was a former professor of French, had lead an interesting life, but was otherwise little known publically. She is also very old and probably near death. An article about her would be highly appropriate, and, it would be best done with her assistance. What do you do with such an article?
I think that such future open date personal articles would tend to attract the less flaky members of society, and, would be a useful content. Perhaps such articles could be automatically forwarded to Wikipedia after the open date. Posted by User:66.44.3.205
And the beauty of it is, people can just create an account under their real name (provides searchability!), and then link to their blog from their user page. Exploding Boy 16:42, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
I've posted this before, but I haven't gotten much of a response. Everyone can speak a language natively, so if you have a mic, how about adding some sounds to these pages (note that English hasn't been done either):
I suggest using Audacity to record and export the files to Ogg Vorbis format (See also Wikipedia:Ogg Vorbis help). Dori | Talk 12:45, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
I was just wondering if there was any effort to encourage linking to Wikisource for any sorts of documents/sources that might be mentioned in an article here on Wikipedia. It came to my attention after browsing through Wikisource and reading 'Civil Disobedience' by Thoreau, then coming over to Wikipedia for more info about him and the essay. There was an external link to the essay from the Civil Disobedience page to a college site or something, which I changed to link to the Wikisource document. I just think it would be a great idea to help out the sister projects and encourage people to add stuff to Wikisource, and hopefully it would strengthen both projects. So is there any policy/project to help these two projects help each other out?
p.s. Hope this is an appropriate place for this discussion since it concerns two different Wikimedia projects, but I didnt see anywhere on the MetaWiki to put it...
thanks, biggins 10:14, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
First off, I want to say that I discoverd wikipedia yesterday and am ecstatic over it. I think the principals of "community cooperation" found within wikipedia, open-source software, creative commons and everything GNU are going to revolutionize the future in a HUGE way and will save all of us from ourselves....
But anyway, a couple of quick questions popped in my head about wikipedia that I couldn't really find an answer to:
1) As we've all seen in history (and no I can't really find a good example), it has been possible for a large group of people to, over a period of time, slowly believe something as true which very well may not be. Now I understand that fact is fact is fact. And I got the vibe that things like religion and such are explained in a very unbiased manner, as they should be. But my only concern is that I feel it IS possible for an entire population to believe something as true that isn't if its very slowly introduced to them. Like a very slow public "numbing to truth brought on by thier ability to believe whatever they read." Now I can't even begin to think of a scenario where that might happen, even if it's possible. But I just wanted to throw that out there.
2.)Advertising. What if someone writes up a pizza page and explains how to make it and such, then talk about history and blah blah blah. Then at the end put a http://www.dominos.com. Eventually someone will take it off because it's biased and advertising. Pretty simple. But what if everyone likes dominos? (just using it as an example, replace dominos with anything widely excepted). Then that opens up a way for people to advertise. Again, I can't really see that happening because there is nothing that everyone agrees on, even God, or god, or gods or allah or no god or aliens or etc,.
I'm just trying to find ways to scrutinize the system because I like it so much. I'M TRYING TO FIND FAULT AND CAN'T. By its very design, it WILL become the most in-depth, complete, and unbiased source of information on the planet. Good job guys.
Before I created my second archive on my talk page, the TOC for the talk showed up fine, however it doesn't now, can somebody tell me why? Ilyanep (Talk) 03:15, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Are items and pics on state government official pages public domain, or are states allowed to copyright? Rick K 00:00, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
For all those zealots and anarchists who claim that the decimal number system, and so our usual milestones, have no real significance, let them witness that Wikipedia has exceeded Pi x 10^5, or about 314159, pages! Definitely deserves a press release. Derrick Coetzee 22:09, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The real milestone is that Wikipedia now contains over 19,683 (39) good articles. AsbestoSuit 355:113, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I'm looking for some clarification of the policy about external links. What makes a link acceptable on a page? Should new links be posted at the top, or the bottom, of the existing list of links? How does one determine if a link is spam or astroturfing, or a valid submission?
Frequently I've seen users putting in links that are relevant, but not the most important sites in relation to an article. E.g. a user linked photomigrations.com from Digital photography, which is relevant but it's not a very well-known site, and it's not a general digital photo site.
Even though they're just trying to increase traffic to their site, it's possible that the link should stay. Tips? Rhobite 18:42, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
And why does it feel right that it should be "external links" with an s, even when there is only one link? (Admittedly not everyone feels this, but plenty do). Pcb21| Pete
See Wikipedia:External links and m:When should I link externally. For link v. links, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Angela . 14:13, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
The " Duke University" entry is not displaying properly.
There will be a Wikipedian meetup in Boston this Saturday. Sign up at User:Jimbo_Wales/Boston if you plan to attend. Dori | Talk 16:52, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC) (Who unfortunately cannot)
###Note:### See the thread Wikipedia:Village pump#Categories with sort keys are not sorted properly for discussion of related alphasort issues.
Is it just me or are categories broken? I just went to Category:Political divisions of the United States and the list was empty and saw the same thing with a quick sampling of several other categories. older≠ wiser 14:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've just come up with a new item in the preferences: preferred size of the default thumbnail box. I've noticed that a couple of contributors define the width of the thumbnail when there is no reasons. I think most of the time, they do this, so the page looks nice. Now, what looks nice on a small screen might look rather weird on a big one, and vice versa.
My suggestion is to let users choose. Of course, there are cases when we want exactly 237px width (e.g. if the picture is that size). So, I suggest we have a preference to set the default size of thumbnails. Next, we of course encourage all Wikipedians not to add fixed size unless needed.
Can I at this stage also mention, that thumb should be used, because it includes the given description as a caption... many contributors seem to to know that thumb, right etc. are not exclusive statements... Kokiri 13:35, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Would some helpful veteran please take a look at the discussions of indoor/outdoor cats and declawing in
How to choose your pet and take care of it? These are both controversial topics where the majority opinion is different in the US and the UK (where I come from). I have done my best to include a balanced discussion of indoor/outdoor cats, but I'm not qualified to sort out the discussion of declawing, since in the UK it is illegal and generally regarded as cruel. As I said on the talk page, I think it deserves an article of its own.
131.111.8.103 13:09, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
That was me (Ekaterin) by the way!
Ekaterin 13:13, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Ekaterin 15:29, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I have written a draft FAQ for users who think that Wikipedia is biased against their country at User:Zocky/Country bias. Any improvements and suggestions are highly welcome. Zocky 12:43, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Here's an excerpt:
I've contributed a few things, but I think that it should be both a FAQ for people who think Wikipedia is biased on their country, and also a guideline for people writing on other countries. David.Monniaux 06:43, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Can anyone explain to me why the following, from Reign of Terror, shows a period (".") rather than a colon (":") after the italicized word Terror?
Source: On [[September 5]], the Convention, pressured by the people of Paris, institutionalized ''The Terror'': systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.
Result: On September 5, the Convention, pressured by the people of Paris, institutionalized The Terror: systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.
Jmabel 05:52, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
We should not be ignoring a browser used by a larger number of people than any other browser on the Internet. It's one thing to have a policy like that for tools used by our active participants, but we want our content to look good to people who are turning to us as an encyclopedia, not as a hobby. -- Jmabel 00:55, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)
Despite all the browser bashing (it looks bad in netscape too, btw), the correct solution is to italicize the : so that it does not run into the r. Italic punctuation was created specifically to fix that problem. -- ssd 05:13, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I do not think that articles should try to account for ephemeral font and browser issues, even of popular browsers. At most, the Wikipedia software could be tweaked to render such cases for buggy browsers, the underlying code staying the same (the tweaking could simply be removed once the browser improves). Many unicode entities used in existing articles are not rendered properly by any browser yet. But Wikipedia is here 'for ever', and unicode is here to stay too, so it is reasonable to expect them to render correctly in the near future. (in firefox, btw, the colon looks fine). Italic punctuation exists for whole italicized paragraphs. I don't think it's good practice to italicize punctuation after a single word in italics (but I am not Donald Knuth); Btw, is there any sort of punctuation-standards-enforcing wikipedia-bot/script? Dbachmann 08:15, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The lists of radio stations in the US are a little jumbled, e.g. List of radio stations in Massachusetts, List of radio stations in Ohio, List of radio stations in Oregon. Each state's page is formatted differently and contains different kinds of information. There are thousands of licensed stations in the US.
One of the few things the FCC's done right is publishing downloadable data [2] [3]. You can get a list of all the stations in the US. Thoughts on importing this data into Wikipedia? There are something like 8500 FM stations listed, so I'm not sure if that list includes defunct or trivial stations. Anyway we could filter by certain criteria like wattage, I'd have to do more research to find out possible filters. I could write the bot to do this but it might take a while given my schedule. Rhobite 04:26, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
I think it would be useful to extend the wikitext markup syntax to facilitate easy creation and especially maintenance of a list of external documents cited/referenced in a wikipedia article. The full proposal including syntax, an example, and anticipated problems can be found at User:Sperling/References.
Any comments would be appreciated. -- K. Sperling 01:51, 2004 Jul 28 (UTC)
The article on Effeminacy was changed in title to Effeminacy (classical vice). The person doing the changing did not bring over the history nor the old talk page. Since then the article has now been reverted back to the original. None of this my doing but I originated the article and would like the old history to come back.
Can a Sysop restore the old history and talk page elements? I now it has been done before. WHEELER 23:44, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The timeline for the arbitration committee election has been finalized. Candidates should present their candidate statements before midnight UTC on Monday, August 2, 2004. The election will start on Wednesday, August 4, and run through Friday, August 13. Anyone who has been a registered user for 3 months is eligible to vote. -- Michael Snow 23:15, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
On wikipedia-l, Jimbo proposed editing weekends be held as a part of the drive towards 1.0. This involves groups of Wikipedians meeting in libraries to finalise articles.
I have created a page to arrange smaller meet-ups prior to the final print drive next summer. I suggest the first of these be held this September and be only one day rather than a whole weekend as a trial run. Please see Wikipedia:Editing Weekend for details. Angela . 18:38, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
I finally wrote something to convert the Wikipedia into the DICT format: wik2dict.py. It tries to create reasonably layouted dict articles. It can also automatically fetch the database dumps. There are some requirements though (running mysql server, dictzip, Python modules for MySQL and dict stuff). And currently it is only version 0.2. So beware.
I would appreciate it if someone (possibly someone at Wikimedia?) could run the script regularly and put the dict files available for everyone to download. Too bad they can't be included in Debian though ("GFDL is non-free"). However, the script itself could probably be included in contrib :)
Hope it can also be useful to other people. G-u-a-k-@ 18:00, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(I submitted this to SourceForge [4] but I'm reporting it here in case anyone has any thoughts on how to fix this.)
Compare Image:Sidereal day (prograde).png with the thumbnail of the same image at Sidereal day. The latter image has artifacts (pixels of the wrong colour) around the yellow circle at the left representing the sun. These artifacts are not present in the original image. The artifacts are not just caused by aliasing because the wrong pixels are in a colour unrelated to the colour of neighbouring pixels. It is possible that the error has something to do with the alpha map on the original image: the artifacts are in places where pixels in the original image are partly transparent. Gdr 14:17, 2004 Jul 27 (UTC)
Knowing full well that I am probably going to suggest something that has been suggested and debated a million times before, but not knowing at least where to look for such a debate, I would like to propose that anonymous users and registered users with fewer than 50 edits be blocked from editing such pages as VfD, CfD, and VfU. These discussions get senselessly bogged down by the flocks and armies of sockpuppets (though it is at times amusing), and often after a flurry of them has passed through, a legitimate new user may get "sockpuppet!" yelled at him simply because we can't tell the difference. Having a per se block on those articles would prevent the easy proliferation of sockpuppets, and guarantee that anyone who contributes to the more esoteric debates on wikipedia about keeping articles and categories will have actually been here for a little while. We tend to think that no one will wander to VfD unless they are somewhat familiar with wikipedia, but this would help guarantee that.
a) what does everyone think? and b) is there somewhere that I can see a preexisting discussion of this kind of proposal? I know I've seen similar suggestions arise in VfD comments from time to time... Oh, and c) how would we make something like this official policy and have it built into the system? Is it something that can be done? I initially thought we could do it by namespace, but then I realized that there are pages just for newbies set up within the wikipedia namespace (like the sandbox...duh). Postdlf 07:52, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(Moved from Reference Desk)
Dear Wikipedia Administrators and Editors,
It is with great dismay and sadness that when I looked up the definition of the Hawaiian word Hapa, I found that it was not defined truthfully. Please advise. I would like to know how one can be sure that the true meaning and definition of a word will be present on an article site that has redefined a word as a usage. I tried a few times to edit the article "Hapa" to present all the facts and the true meaning of this Hawaiian word, but someone kept puting the incorrect definiton back before I could finish. (PikiPik and Pez?)
Hapa is a Hawaiian (kanaka maoli) word of Hawaiian (ethnicity, blood ancestry) origin. Hapa began as a word by Hawaiians (like my great grandmother) for Hawaiians of part Hawaiian ancestry. Hawaiian dictionaries define "hapa" as "part, fragment., portion" or "an indefinite part of a thing, a few, a small part". Later it was further defined to include "of mixed blood, person of mixed blood". Hapa does not mean "part or partial Asian".
To take a word which is a part of an indigenous language and then redefine it as a word used for part-Japanese people who came from Hawai'i and then further redefine it as "people of part Asian and European ancestry" is ethnocultural theft. At the very least, the article site on wikipedia that defines and explains the word "hapa" should give credit where credit is due-to the Hawaiian (kanaka maoli) people of Hawai'i. The word hapa was in use long before any of the foreign Asian, Portuguese and Filipino immigrants came to Hawai'i. Hawaiians and (the first foreigners) Europeans (like my grandfather) created the first hapa people of Hawai'i. An example is Princess Victoria Ka'iulani Cleghorn. Later, Hawaiians intermarried with the Chinese (like my great grandfather) who were the first non-European immigrants to Hawai'i. This then created many people of Hawaiian, European and Chinese ancestry. Hapa is a Hawaiian word, it is not a "Hawai'i Creole" or Hawai'i Pidgin English" word.
How can anyone just take a word that has original meaning, definition and usage of a native peoples and just redefine it to suit someone and something else? Why has no one looked up the word in the dictionaries that would be the authority as to the definiton of a Hawaiian word? People of Hawaiian language authority. Please look in the dictionaries of Hawaiian language. It is a terrible thing to present something wrong and false as being the "truth".
By the way, I am Hawai'i born and raised, and am hapa because I am part Hawaiian- I am of mixed ethnic/racial ancestry-Hawaiian, Chinese, French, Welsh, Dutch, Irish, Scottish, Mohawk, Prussian, Austrian, English and Seneca. Two of my nephews are all of this and part Japanese and Okinawan too; they are hapa. Please make sure the truth is presented. Please do not allow someone to put forth a false definition. It is hurtful to those of us who are hapa and grew up with this word as a part of our heritage. People of Hawaiian ancestry have always been known to share and give in a most generous way, easily mixing and intermarrying with all ethnicities and races, and the word hapa can evolve to include anyone of mixed ethnic and racial ancestry, but please do not state that the definition of hapa is part Asian mixed ancestry. It is defined as "part, partial or fragment; one of mixed blood". Kelly Hu is hapa. Kelly Preston is hapa. Keanu Reeeves is hapa, and so forth. I have seen many sites on the web where the defition of hapa has been redefined. Please do not be such a site, be fair and just. (This was posted on the Reference Desk by User:Ilikea)
(Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk)
Anyone interested in creating a barnstar of reconciliation to honor those who excel at patching things up between users? Neutrality 03:54, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm just curious, what do any of you do when you come across an article which you believe needs significant changes to its structure? Like if it restates facts, scatters facts under irrelevant sections, uses 'critics believe that...' too often, rambles, includes lots of citations which aren't relevant or noteworthy, or just generally has poor formatting - do you ever go in and rework an article significantly? If you do, how do you deal with previous editors who may get their nose bent out of shape that you redid their stuff? Or do you just leave well enough alone, limit your changes to specific details within the existing structure of the article, and trust that the people who edited before you knew what they were doing and your own opinion might be wrong? - Brian Kendig 00:49, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
That IBM research suggested that initial text is rarely taken away. With the exception of short stubs, the first edit tends to define an article. There of course plenty of exceptions (even 1% would be 3,000 articles). Pcb21| Pete 10:51, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
To facilitate the building of a consensus around what edits an article need, you can use the new Wikipedia:Todo lists. Any comments on it are welcome. Pcarbonn 17:04, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Could you help out with the Geheimrat page. Thanks -- Jondel 01:03, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
While I was working with Catgeory:Rivers, some interesting things happened:
I creating two new subcategories ( Category:Hawaiian rivers and Category:Middle Eastern rivers) and labeled articles in the new subcategories, as appropriate. But for some reason they still remain in the larger Category:Rivers. Anyone know why this is happening or how I can fix it?-- Neutrality 01:28, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
While I was working with Category:Rivers, some interesting things happened:
I creating two new subcategories ( Category:Hawaiian rivers and Category:Middle Eastern rivers) and labeled articles in the new subcategories, as appropriate. But for some reason they still remain in the larger Category:Rivers. Anyone know why this is happening or how I can fix it?-- Neutrality 01:28, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I hope there is a good html designing software other than frontpage
Following on from the comments above, I am quite surprised that there are so many redirects and links to empty pages. These are not on the list of good things and may even be on the list of bad things. Is it possible to reduce their numbers using some form of search and replace mechanism?
Bobblewik 19:52, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
he is deleting the article Avigad Berman for no reason
Can someone help me out? I am looking at Taoism, but would really like to read the article in Klingon. I notice that the Klingon Wikipedia has an article about Taoism, but, although it is in the source, it does not appear in the language bar, but rather, at the bottom of the article: Daw_lalDan. What is wrong? Apart from the obvious, of course. Mark Richards 23:25, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I can understand that, but the link does appear at the bottom of the article, it looks odd, and is confusing, since it is not apparent what it links too, it not being in the language bar, and links to a page that is uninteligible. Can we fix it in any way? My browser renders:
External links
* Taoism Information Page ( http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/) * Resources for East Asian Language and Thought ( http://www.acmuller.net) with Translation of the Daodejing * Lao Tse & Daoism ( http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/laotse.htm) * Taoist Restoration Society ( http://www.taorestore.org) * Taoist Culture & Information Centre ( http://www.eng.taoism.org.hk)
tlh:Daw lalDan
Mark Richards 18:30, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Can someone point me to where this discussion is had? The current 'compromise' is kind of kookey! Mark Richards 22:22, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
It had occured to me that this problem might be possible, but I had never come across it in practice before. So... Is there any established way to get around the problem that occures when a word in one language translates as two (or more) in the other? I wanted to link the Irish wiki article Cnáimhseachas to the English wiki, but the word translates either as midwifery or obstetrics. I can't find any synonyms (or near-synonyms) for the word in Irish that could be used to make two different titles, and I wouldn't dare suggest merge the two English articles. I know that there are other examples in other languages. Should altlang links be put in for both articles, or is there some technical trick I'm unaware of? -- Kwekubo 23:21, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
What monitor size and resolution do you use? Also what OS and Browser?(I use 17" and 1152x768x24, WinXP, Moz 1.7 BTW) I'm just wondering what the community uses. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 22:19, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Around 85% of visits to WP are via IE. I expect this self-selecting poll will show a much lower number. What conclusions can we draw? Pcb21| Pete 11:20, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The Village Pump/Help Desk/Ref Desk/VfD pages are all hella long, leading to crazy load times or even sometimes time outs. Is it ok to delete topics that are no longer active? For example, some pages have been listed in VfD and then speedy deleted. Can I delete the page entry? Another example is that I asked a question earlier today on this page about Baroque/Baroque art redirects that was answered and that would not be of any use to anyone else. Can I delete the question/answer?
VfD policy is that, once a page is listed, it stays for 5 days. Rick K 22:32, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I just had an idea and I thought I'd spit it out here because it might work well. Why not have links at the top of articles to the relevant Wiki pages like the interlingua links used to be? (So if I go to the 'surfboard' article at the top there'll be a link to the Wiktionary surfboard entry and if I go to the 'John Kerry' page at the top there'll be a link to the relevant WitiQuote article). Sorry if this has come up before - I've been away for ages because at first my internet crashed and didn't get fixed and by the time it was back I was really busy... and so on. Sorry for rambling. LUDRAMAN | T 21:46, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Good idea. Also we should be able to search all the Wikis at once. This might be one of those things to put in SourceForge feature requests. Salasks 22:12, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
There used to be an "[edit]" link at the top of every page which allowed you to edit the section of the page above the first Header. That link is gone. There now seems to be no way to edit a page if the part you want to edit is above the first header, except to edit the entire page. Are we going to have to put "Introduction" headers on every page so we can get to the unlabeled section? Rick K 20:09, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I've been trying to correct an editing error for several minutes now in the Current Events page, but every time I click "Save", I get:
Database error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software.
Rick K 19:38, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
And now I just got it editing George W. Bush. Rick K 20:09, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I have started an rtcl on the 2004 IAAF World Indoor Championships but cannot find any useful general information regarding which other countries bid for it or any problems the Hungarians had in staging it etc. to fill the introduction out. If anyone happened to be there?? a couple of photos of the stadium or something would be handy. Any help gratefully received. Scraggy4 18:29, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
This seems wrong, but Baroque seems like a better article. One sure problem is that Baroque links to Baroque art which redirects back to itself. Baroque is a featured article, so I'm a little weary of busting something up. Salasks 17:34, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I'm guessing that my horror of the Worm Ouroboros is irrelevant, and that none of the tech wizards will object to my edit at Talk:Priscilla Davis. But i just couldn't resist, and i hope that someone cautious (and perhaps a few irony-lovers) will follow the link from Talk:Priscilla Davis, and revert me if appropriate. -- Jerzy (t) 16:58, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)
The July stats are in (see http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/usage_200407.html ) and they make some interesting reading...
July was the English Wikipedia's busiest month ever (I think), with:
Excluding project and special pages (and the Main Page), the 10 most requested articles were:
For comparison, the 10 most requested for June were:
The top 10 search terms for July were:
From this, it looks pretty clear that Wikipedia is being heavily used as a resource for major ongoing news events, particularly Iraq. -- ChrisO 16:37, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I've started a page at Wikipedia:Send in the clones to discuss this. Any comments? -- The Anome 14:06, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I wonder if there are any problems for the google crawler going through our site. I usually check for the google rating of some of the articles I have created. For example monthon [8] it recently had the article in the top 10 of google hits, before it had the link only without a cached version (and much below top 10), and now it seems to have disappeared again. But the mirrors are all present. Does the google bot run into any traffic throttleling, or the measures to block mirroring by sucking all pages? It's of course impossible to guess what is really going on at google... andy 18:25, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
We've had this problem ever since Google redid its PageRank criteria in order, according to them, cut down on Googlebombing. If anything the opposite seems to have happened. But I would not push Google on this issue until we have a good handle on our finances/server situation. -- mav 07:53, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Is there any reason that the Wikipedia logo in the upper left corner "flashes" whenever I place my mouse pointer on it? This is really annoying.
Acegikmo1 13:59, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
/* show the hand */ #p-logo a, #p-logo a:hover { cursor: pointer; }
#p-logo { background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 35% 50% !important; background-image: url(/upload/b/bc/Wiki.png); } #p-logo a { background-image: none !important; }
Can anyone explain why my persistent login works on all (AFAIK) pages except for the main page where it displays Login at top right not SGBailey(Talk) and is in the defualt skin. If I move to another page, my loggedin-ness and skin (Classic) return. Puzzled. -- SGBailey 11:02, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)
Maybe you're looking at a cached Main Page? Try reload.
Salasks 15:19, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
There is currently a poll at Template talk:Protected regarding whether it should have an image or not. This affects enough high-profile articles that I think it's worth noting here. — Kate | Talk 08:49, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)
I was fiddling around with the article series boxes and the political succession boxes to see if I could come up with a good mixture of the two...I'm not sure where the best place to discuss this would be, so I thought I would post it here where lots of people would see it (as opposed to the Wikipedia:Article series page where hardly anyone will see it). If anyone would like to comment on/discuss/improve what I've been doing, it is at User:Adam Bishop/sandbox. (If I should post examples here as well, just let me know.) Adam Bishop 06:16, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Golbez - some of the succession boxes are already templates (the Byzantine emperors box, and some of the British peerage boxes, for example), but they don't all necessarily have to be templates. By the way, another possibility I have seen is some of the Roman emperors on fr: - such as fr:Auguste. Adam Bishop 17:14, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
After further attempts to make this work, I have noticed they aren't very useful for more complicated boxes like Charles of Anjou. So I guess the boxes should stay the way they are, or something else should be done. Ah well. Adam Bishop 19:19, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps this was discussed before but I don't know. It would be useful to have a part of the signup screen to say which wikis you want to sign up on, and then you have the same account for all of them and when you login, you login to all, and your userpage is automatically interlinked or redirected, etc. Also, when you sign up for another wiki you can have the option to add that to your existing unified account. This way, you can see the contribs for a user in one screen (with options to filter out depending on which wiki). This could have many benefits. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 06:13, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I'm putting this here because I couldn't figure out one logical place among all the categorization/category pages to put this request.
Thoughts? Elf | Talk 05:40, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I know I've been postin a lot here lately. Shouldn't the wikipedians by number of edits be updated more often? One is updated July 1st and the other one was May 7th. Ilyanep (Talk) 05:28, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Is there any way to have all my signatures prefaced with the mdash (without manually havine to add it all the time)? I've already learned how to change what's after the signature (as you can see...I added a link to my talk page), but not before. I don't want to make everything cluttered by making my name ' ]] &mdash: [[User:Ilyanep|Ilyanep]] [[User talk: Ilyanep|(Talk)]]' because that would show up in every signature as '[[User:Ilyanep| ]] &mdash: [[User:Ilyanep|Ilyanep]] [[User talk: Ilyanep|(Talk)]]'. Thanks in advance — Ilyanep (Talk) 05:21, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)-->
\'Your signature with timestamp\',\'--~~~~\'
\'Your signature with timestamp\',\'&mdash;~~~~\'
I am just wondering out of curoristy...Whatever happened to copyrights that were held by the USSR, SFRY, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR? Thanks! - iHoshie 04:12, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I found this "talk" page, Talk:Greatbigtwit, but apparently there's never been a Greatbigtwit article. Can I just speedy it, or do I have to VfD it? Seems like it has to qualify under one (or more) of the first four speedy cases, just not sure which one(s). Or maybe case 11 should be amended to cover cases like this. Niteowlneils 01:23, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I have set my time zone offset in preferences to "-04:00". However, every few weeks, it changes to "-4:00" and goes back to displaying timestamps as UTC. This is rather frustrating. Does anyone know how to fix it?
Acegikmo1 00:44, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps this has already been discusseed, but is there an easy way (aside from counting and using fancy offsets on my contribs) to count my contributions? Does this involve running a Perl/Python script? Ilyanep (Talk) 00:36, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Data_in_the_CSV:
Chris 73 | Talk 05:41, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Can someone tell the server about a phenomenon called Daylight Savings Time, so I don't have so switch between GMT-5 and GMT-6 every time we have DST?
Does anyone know about the picture on Hordaland? One picture that's supposed to be there isn't, and the other isn't on Wikipedia so it doesn't show up. I'd upload it and add it, but I'm not sure if it's fair use. Salasks 00:33, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I've reopened Wikipedia:Span tags poll, in case there are users who were unaware of it the first time or who were ineligible to vote. -- Eequor 21:12, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Chosen an arbitrary skin, how do I change back to the default skin, which I see when I'm not logged in? -- PuzzletChung
Is it just me or is the background color (#F8FCFF) for non-article namespaces prescribed at MediaWiki:Monobook.css basically the same as white? It says "light blue" but all I see it white. -- Jia ng 01:45, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Thanks. I was scared for a second there. Can we change it to a netsafe color, either #CCFFCC or #CCFFFF then? I don't think I'm alone, because Im not using particularly outdated or rare technology. -- Jia ng 02:07, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The "web-safe" palette is not all it's cracked up to be. See " Death of the Websafe Color Palette?" Also, if you find the background color annoying, or would prefer it to be a different color, simply edit User:YourUserName/monobook.css and add:
#content { background: #FFFFFF; /* Or whatever color you like */ }
-- Wapcaplet 02:39, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
third post in a row, wow. i see links all over the place on this site that are red and not blue, which typically means i have visited the site; however there are many i know i havent touched that show up as visited. anyone get this too and know why it happens?
thanks JoeSmack (talk) 22:57, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
is it possible to make an article that redirects to another that redirects back? wouldn't that make an infinite loop? wouldn't that make my computer and the server explode? wouldn't the world as we know it explode? ok, i got carried away there, but still, im curious.
JoeSmack
(talk) 21:43, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
i have been plowing through this site a lot lately - it's a fabulous idea. however, i notice now when poking around there is a small 2-5 second pause when moving anywhere on the site. what gives? is it a hardware issue? i myself am on the UCSC campus t1. if it is a hardware issue, what would the solution be?
thanks all. JoeSmack 20:38, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
I think it's a hardware issue - that's why they're doing the fundraising. Also, Wikipedia:Cleanup and Wikipedia:Offline reports/Nothing links to this article are good places to check out if you're poking around looking for stuff to improve. Salasks 21:37, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Forgive me if there's already some discussion about this somewhere: are there any plans to improve the image auto-thumbnail process to account for PNGs with indexed color? I'd much rather upload a high-resolution image and let the thumbnail be generated automatically, but since they're converted to true-color, the thumbnail often ends up larger (in bytes) than the original (for instance, the six images on Four-stroke cycle), or almost as large (the rotor breakdown on Enigma machine). Seems to me it should be a fairly simple matter to have the thumbnailing script (or whatever it is) look at the color depth in the original image, and convert appropriately (using true-color only for the intermediate resizing). I've noticed some rather heated disagreements over this issue that would be neatly solved if thumbnailing worked better for indexed PNGs. -- Wapcaplet 16:53, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
convert -depth 8
and pngcrush -brute
(with the appropriate nice value) when generating thumbnails of indexed-color PNG files? --
Ardonik 20:06, 2004 Aug 4 (UTC)How do I create a new category? -- Auximines 14:18, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Is it possible to upload a Java applet into Wikipedia?
Recently I added headings to Out of the Silent Planet. Why don't I see a Table of Contents in that article? I do in other articles, and this appears to be independent of computer and browser (at least between MSIE and Mozilla).
It would even be kind of nice to have the ToC there, since I moved the old articles Hrossa, Seroni, and Pfifltriggi to the OotSP page. In the unlikely event that someone searches for "Hrossa" etc., that person might like to see "Hrossa" in the ToC of Out of the Silent Planet and be able to jump there directly.
I hope this is the right place to ask what is undoubtedly a newbie question.
(By the, I apologize if this is a can or worms or a frequently rejected suggestion, but I think the Table of Contents should say just "Contents". We can see it's a table.)
-- JerryFriedman 16:48, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Is the information on House of Reps site in the public domain? I'm wondering because from what I've read, the federal government material is, but not state government. What is this considered? I just want to be sure before I use anything. Thanks.
I am sorry if I am wrong, but I notice the entry page of WikiPedia.org, which is automatically forwarded to en.WikiPedia.org, is encoded in ISO-8859-1. Though for pure English character set, ISO-8859-1 is as same as UTF-8, it would encode wide-character differently, as far as I see. For the multilingual purpose of WikiPedia.org, I would rather recommend to use UTF-8 as the uniform encoding scheme for all languages. Using UTF-8 commonly in all content of WikiPedia.org would avoid any possible conflict between different native encodings, since it is processed in unicode internally.
The {{cc-by-sa}} template (and no doubt others) has empty lines at the bottom, which annoyingly get inserted into the page when it is used. I would correct it myself, but it's protected. — Chameleon Main/ Talk/ Images 08:27, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Has Template:Opentask grown too large ? Please comment on this " hypertrophy" at Template talk:Opentask. Thanks. -- PFHLai 03:23, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)
I've pinched an idea from Google and created a Wikipedia:Zeitgeist page to keep a ready-to-hand record of the most popular articles and search terms. Ideally I'd like to be able to update it weekly but since Webalizer currently seems to be set up for monthly reporting periods that probably isn't practical... Anyway, comments are welcomed. -- ChrisO 23:11, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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I was just experimenting with My Preferences and something's gone horribly wrong. I've lost the link that's usually on the left of each page to My talk, plus those links have all moved around and it seems the page is a different colour, and some of the links at the bottom of each page seem all bunched up now, and I don't know what else. The only two things I changed were I unchecked Underline links and checked Show edit toolbar. I've changed both back, but nothing. Any suggestions? Exploding Boy 14:15, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
YESSSSSSSSSSS! But just so anyone else having problems knows, the Monobook skin turns everything into something resembling the blue screen of doom. It's the Cologne Blue skin that you want. Thanks Johnleemk. Exploding Boy 14:58, Jul 25, 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 agree that the link and site are information filled but if you check all additions that these users add not only to the NFL page but other football related articles, they have an agenda that sadly I believe because it is related to a sport is not being challenged by wikipedias. this comes from there website: It gives the appearence that some other source has come up with this conculsion instead they just wrote, regardless if they are selling something or not they are using wikipedia to further their cause.
Below are excerpts from several sources on the influence that the American Football League has had on modern professional football.
From Wikipedia, on-line encyclopedia:
Some innovative rules changes were also put into place, such as the two-point conversion (later adopted by the NFL in the 1990s); the use of the scoreboard clock as the official game clock (adopted by the NFL when the leagues merged--prior to this time, the official game clock was maintained by an official on the sidelines, and often did not match the scoreboard clock very closely); the use of player names on jerseys, (also adopted by the NFL); and the sharing of gate and television revenues between home and visiting teams (also adopted by the NFL). In short, the NFL adopted virtually every pioneering aspect of the American Football League, except its name.
By the way college football had adopted the two point conversion in the late 1950s, so the AFL "borrowed" that idea from them. One could argue that the talent level in the early years of the AFL was so poor that it lead to point a minute offensives because the defenses was so poor, Someone could write on the AFL page that they borrowed from the NFL the idea of divisions and a championship game, the idea of a college draft, a post season all star game, harsh marks, and seperate offensive and defense units, but that would be silly and pointless. I do believe that these users have provided a great deal of information but they have also slip in their agenda that gee the NFL really stoled everything from the AFL. I agree the AFL added a lot to modern day football but don't overstate it. Smith03 18:00, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Has there been any discussion of this anywhere? Specifically I'm wondering whether it's ever been suggested or debated whether we should require all editors to have a user name before editing? I ask because it would make recognising, tracking, and blocking vandals a lot easier. A quick look at the Block log shows that nearly all the accounts blocked for vandalism and other bad behaviour are anonymous. I think it would be fairly easy to implement such a change. Any thoughts? Exploding Boy 10:57, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, I see what you mean. I do like one of the suggestions (linked to the above) that anonymous users would be limited to a certain number of edits per day until registered (but not the bit about web-based email addresses).
How about coming up with some more ways to encourage people to sign up for user names? What about creating a {message} to place on anonymous users' pages? Perhaps something like:
What do you think? Exploding Boy 12:35, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
There actually is a page that lists the benefits already, but in very long form. Since the idea is to encourage people to create an account rather than remain anonymous, I thought it would be good to make a short(ish!), easy to read list of the benefits of signing up, in an effort to lure people into doing so. And since most anonymous users don't use their user/talk pages (maybe because they don't know they have them?) this will also draw their attention to that. And if it's too long, they can always delete it! Exploding Boy 12:56, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
No, not on every page, just on anonymous users' talk pages. Exploding Boy 13:25, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Well, I'm going to go ahead and give it a try Wikipedia:Template messages. Exploding Boy 13:41, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Recently an anon edited Homeopathy by adding an external link to the H2G2 Edited Guide Entry on the subject. A quick search showed several other places where H2G2 is in the external links. We should certainly keep the ones in the H2G2 article itself; there might be a reason to keep some other particular link (e.g. we might link to an entry on a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy topic if it was written by someone who had a unique personal connection with the subject). Despite these exceptions, I think most of the links should be removed. They don't meet the general standard for external links. Before I remove any of them, though, do people think we should apply a different standard to H2G2, e.g. as a courtesy to a somewhat similar project? JamesMLane 09:23, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I run a UK Discussion forum/online community. Within my forum I have subforums for each and every city/town in the UK. The forum is designed to be an interactive resource for the UK. However, I am in need of basic content to kick start these regional boards.
My question is: Can I use the content available here in my forum by posting it? If I can, what steps do I need to take?
Thanks
Polling opens on the proposed new policy for managing disruptive or antisocial editors at midday (UTC) today.
A number of us have been thrashing out the details for the policy for the last two weeks and I previously invited everybody at the troll polls and here at the pump to participate. There has been some healthy debate and the policy is now locked for two weeks to allow us to vote.
There are still some points that will need a bit more discussion and these may produce secondary poll questions or we may put them off until after the policy has been tried for a while.
Please come and vote! (from midday UTC)
Be warned this is a relatively complex proposal for a difficult problem. So if your initial reaction is to vote against the proposal then I urge you pause before voting. There is no rush. Voting is open for two weeks. Take the time to read the frequently raised objections on the talk page and re-read the policy. If the FROs dont deal with your concern then please raise it again on the poll or policy talk pages. Hopefully one of us can then explain the rationale for why policy is as it is and we can work through alternatives. We may also be able to frame a secondary poll question if needed. Best wishes to all and see you at the poll! Erich 04:38, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I tried to add Image:HAtomOrbitals.png to the quantum mechanics article, but images don't seem to be showing up right now; not even the VP picture in this page is showing up for me. Ancheta Wis 00:38, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Is there a policy in Wikipedia to deal with the inclusion of material that may be considered unsuitable for children?
Obviously Wikipedia is about open sharing of information. However there are entrie that will inflame some parents and terrify school administrators. (see Oral sex) What will inflame some parents will not cause a stir among others. Wikipedia and censorship to not go together, however it will be a tragedy if Widipedia is blocked in its entirity from schools.
Yes. The policy is that this is an encyclopedia, and it's up to parents to monitor what their children read, not us. Rick K 23:38, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)
So, for example, does a list of which movies Drew Barrymore appears nude suitable for inclusion in an encyclopeadia? Paul Beardsell 23:41, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
No, because the information is sub-trivial. That she has appeared nude, and even a semi-nude photo of her, would be of value to the encyclopedia, but a list of someone's opinion as to whether she was or was not nude is not. And besides, you've only given half the information. Was it full frontal nudity, rear nudity, side, partial, see, your trivia could get even more trivial, so why stop there? Rick K 23:53, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)
If resorting to bowdlerism is being grown up then I want none of it. Presumably Noisy actually knows what side of the argument I am on. Paul Beardsell 00:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Indeed, why stop there? [1] Paul Beardsell 00:07, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There is so much useless sub-trivia on Wikipedia. Why are we discussing only nudity references? Paul Beardsell 00:09, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There are two legitimate concerns here - protecting Wikipedia from being blocked by censorware vs keeping our content as accurate as possible. Our ad-hoc policy is one of common sense - if you go to penis, don't be surprised if you see an explicit photo - it's assumed that you knew what you were getting into by going to that article. By and large, it's generally understood that clinical anatomical pictures are OK, but that's about as far as we're willing to go.
Also, we only put that kind of content in places you would "expect it". By the same token, there's a concern that we shouldn't "push" that kind of content onto people, which is why it is unlikely that such a picture will ever make it to the main page.
As far as a list of nude pictures that Drew Barrymore has appeared in - a text list isn't even close to something we'd need to censor. →Raul654 00:16, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Well, where in Wikipedia would one expect to find a list of the pictures that Drew Barrymore appears nude in? I too am not entirely sure that the list is important enough to be included, but somebody thought so. What I was objecting to was the removal of that information, the Wikipedia default being that info is not removed. It is accurate info, presumably. That there is som much seemingly useless trivia in Wikipedia does not lead RickK to delete that. When he does the nudity but leaves the rest then that is nothing less than Bowdlerism. Paul Beardsell 00:30, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
This is a very topical subject these days on Wikipedia. In the general sense, the extreme ease by which materials are avaliable on the web will have a reconciling effect on the extreme interpretations of decency. On the practical side, the battle is between what should be done (according to common sensical, moderate, and agreeable standards) and what can actually be done about it. Artificial control means are completely antithetical to WP, and everything done here has to be done in the name of NPOV and openness, or it just doenst have resonance. If Wikipedia is to appeal to parents for their children's use, the basics should be considered; even vulgar topics are not to be treated profanely here, and articles that are problematic could be categorized as (adult) of (mature) in nature, and not included on certain DVD distributions of WP. If kids are online, they have access to any number of possibly profane things, and WP is the least of those. IMHO "A child-safe internet" is an oxymoron, wo then how much is Wikipedia expected to be like Netnanny or AOL, rather than what it is? - S V 00:34, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I agree with that wholeheartedly. But that very good point does not apply. We are not talking about porn or even the use of swear words. There is no way that I wish a first time user of an encyclopedia (a very advanced 6 year old, say, or an average 10 year old on their first independent school project) to be protected to the extent that (s)he is not allowed to know that sometimes people appear nude in movies. And that Drew Barrymore actually has a vagina! (Although that point does not yet appear in the article.) Paul Beardsell 00:48, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think the consensus of opinion is that there is no good reason to censor the article. Who disagrees? Paul Beardsell 02:25, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think it trivializes an article on a legitimate actress to highlight, in the list of her movies, which ones she appears nude in. This is not something we normally include in profiles of actors and actresses, nor shoudl we. It's one thing to discuss nude appearances, in the text of the article, where they are relevant to a person's career, and another to turn the list of what films someone has appeared into a "hey, if you want to see her naked, rent this movie." -- Jmabel 04:29, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps a generic article of Nude scenes of famous actresses would be somewhat appropriate; it *is* somewhat, vaguely, in a certain dimension and when you're looking at it with one eye closed, encyclopedic. At least for a perv like me. On a side note, every time I see "Drew Barrymore's nudity" in my Watchlist, I come here thinking someone's finally posted an example. Meanies. -- Golbez 09:31, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Maybe we should have a PICS label [www.w3.org/PICS/labels.html], or do we already? Kokiri 16:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The people here on this website do not care for children or about morality. As I have stated earlier, this is an adult playground and it has much filthy content that no child should read that many libraries and schools should censor this website but the great amount of contributors and the owners do not care about this. It is about them having fun. Another sign of the sickness of this society. I do not know why they think this ought to be a *source* for highschoolers. This is an anarchistic website. WHEELER 15:48, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
While you're making wikipedia safe for children to read, why not also simplify the language the articles are written in? Oh wait, that's already been done.
(Thanks Orthangonal for the excellent essay above!!!!) -- ssd 05:21, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Firstly, protecting children from TV, books, magazines etc. is their parents' job, not ours. "Children safety" should not be a concern. This is not a "family" encyclopaedia.
Secondly, use common sense. Listing all films where Drew appears nude on Drew Barrymore is like listing all films where her hair is blond. Non-encyclopedic, sub-trivial and entirely off-topic. I can understand it being mentioned in articles on individual films, if they deserve articles.
Thirdly, avoid bad taste. "Wow! She's nude, dude! nudge-nudge-wink-wink." Zocky 07:35, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Do you want this resource to be used? What parent wants their children exposed to "penetration this" or "penetration that"? What libraries are going to link to this website with fist fucking and gerbil insertion techniques? Is this a playground for perverts or for the general community at large? While our site is going to remain de-linked, other online encyclopaedias are copying our work, posting it on their website and getting credit. How about establishing a family wikipedia?? a child-safe wikipedia? or a Christian wikipedia? That libraries and families can safely link too. Otherwise I feel, this site is going to be taken advantage of others and be sidelined. Has Wikipedia been turned into an adult playground for academic perverts and homosexual propagandists? WHEELER 15:11, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've been creating a new custom user CSS which I call "Neptune". The background code is:
/* Main body */ #content { margin: 2.8em 0 0 12.2em; padding: 0em 1em 1.5em 1em; background: #0099ff; border: 1px solid #00ffff; border-right: none; line-height: 1.5em; position: relative; z-index: 2; }
This is supposed to make the background blue. The weird part is, on the main (or article) namespace, the background is white. On every other namespace (Wikipedia, Template, User, etc.) the background is blue (which is correct). All the other CSS code works correctly in all namespaces. How do I fix this? The entire code can be found here. [[User:Mike Storm| Mike Storm (Talk)]] 21:31, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
background: #0099ff !important;
or a more specific selector should work. --
Gabriel Wicke 00:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
i've been searching this on the faqs. i'm writing a open software and want that in a certain moment it picks displyas information from pages in the wikipedia. i want to control it's appearance, and also add one image if there's one. so three questions:
1-where do i learn how to do it? is it a crawl? shall i use a simple bot or what?
2-well some images are copyrighted. i'm not making money of this soft, how do i know if i can use them?
3-in the end i want to link back to wikipedia. what precautions should i have to avoid bringing a horde of barbarians (i don't know who is using my soft but could be a bunch of crazy teens) who don't know anything about wiki?
thanks. i promise to move everything to the right section after. -- Alexandre Van de Sande 16:44, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (headings) about using the singular vs plural form of the ext lk section heading in articles with one link only, where I make a case for the latter. Please comment. -- Wernher 13:54, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've been working on the clothing page intermittently and running into problems with Pedant17, who is extremely attached to his original article -- which strikes me as the work of someone sexually aroused by smelly torn clothing. Whatever I do to address his concerns, he retaliates by re-publishing his original work. Now it's up as "Sociology of Clothing" -- which it isn't. I'm editing out the link to his page from the Clothing page, but leaving his page up. I could use a mediator! Advice! Anything!
Zora 07:59, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
OK, I've slept on the issue and figured out what's bothering me so much about all this: the lack of any community of knowledgeable people on clothing/sewing topics. The more knowledgeable people involved and contributing, the greater the chance that the article is going to be state-of-the-art. But Wikipedia is still heavily biased towards a Slashdot demographic (not my observation -- it was someone on Usenet who'd used Wikipedia for this and that), which means that the geeky topics are well-done but others may be sketchy. I've noticed this not just with the "fashion" articles, but also with literature and the arts. IF there were others besides just me and Pedant17 working on the Clothing article, the Clothing: Talk page would be the venue for discussion and we'd probably hammer out something acceptable. But when there's just the two of us, we're stalemated. He thinks I'm a snob and I suppose I am; I'm not deferring to someone who can't tell a peplum from a toga virilis. But there are many thousands of people out there in the real world who know a heck of a lot MORE than I do -- how to get them involved in Wikipedia? Zora 21:55, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Surreal. Isn't there a Wikipedia:Silliest comments on talk pages yet?
Is it just me or are categories broken? I just went to Category:Political divisions of the United States and the list was empty and saw the same thing with a quick sampling of several other categories. older≠ wiser 14:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
###note:### the following part of the thread, about category sorting, will be moved to a thread below which primarily discusses that part of the "bug complex" ###
Is this bug also responsible for the stuff I've been seeing the last couple of days, which is that several categories have more than one section for a given alphabetical letter? For example, Category:Software has two separate occurrences of "F", with some subcats living under one section and the rest under the other. Same trouble with several other categories above/below/"to-the-side-of" the Software one (the part of the category tree where I've been working lately). I really, really, really hope that this bug (or maybe bug complex) is generally fixable ¹ -- i.e. that one doesn't have to redo stuff ad aeternum...? -- Wernher 02:15, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
( ¹ not at all having studied the wiki-software, I would nevertheless strongly assume that the category pages are regenerated regularly -- and that, if the wiki was a small one, they could in fact be regenerated on demand, i.e. per visit )
The Category:todo have articles with sort keys (i.e. [[category:todo|<sort key>]] or piped format), but it does not look correct to me. For example, "Talk:One-time pad" has a "T5" sort key, but comes before "Talk:Train station" that has a "T1" sort key. (these codes are meant to sort the articles by priority). Strangely, others are sorted correctly though, so that it is not a repeatable problem.
Has this problem been seen before ? Is someone working on it ? Should I report it somewhere else ? Pcarbonn 20:07, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(OT "linguistic" subthread moved into subsub "Todo is not a word" at the end of this thread)
"Todo" is not a word. — Chameleon Main/ Talk/ Images 13:43, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
First off, I want to say that I discoverd wikipedia yesterday and am estatic over it. I think the principals of "community cooperation" found within wikipedia, open-source software, creative commons and everything GNU are going to revolutionize the future in a HUGE way and will save all of us from ourselves....
But anyway, a couple of quick questions popped in my head about wikipedia that I couldn't really find an answer to:
1) As we've all seen in history (and no I can't really find a good example), it has been possible for a large group of people to, over a period of time, slowly believe something as true which very well may not be. Now I understand that fact is fact is fact. And I got the vibe that things like religion and such are explained in a very unbiased manner, as they should be. But my only concern is that I feel it IS possible for an entire population to believe something as true that isn't if its very slowly introduced to them. Like a very slow public "numbing to truth brought on by thier ability to believe whatever they read." Now I can't even begin to think of a scenario where that might happen, even if it's possible. But I just wanted to throw that out there.
2.)Advertising. What if someone writes up a pizza page and explains how to make it and such, then talk about history and blah blah blah. Then at the end put a http://www.dominos.com. Eventually someone will take it off because it's biased and advertising. Pretty simple. But what if everyone likes dominos? (just using it as an example, replace dominos with anything widely excepted). Then that opens up a way for people to advertise. Again, I can't really see that happening because there is nothing that everyone agrees on, even God, or god, or gods or allah or no god or aliens or etc,.
I'm just trying to find ways to scrutinize the system because I like it so much. I'M TRYING TO FIND FAULT AND CAN'T. By its very design, it WILL become the most in-depth, complete, and unbiased source of information on the planet. Good job guys.
I can't find my Game Boy Color! If you find it, send it by E-mail.
I propose that all pages describing a potentially harmful activity that the reader may like to try (chemistry experiment, sport etc...) should carry a disclaimer linking to a long version such as this proposal. In the past, there has been a number of people, generally older teenagers, who have harmed themselves or others trying to do stuff they had read about in a book (like making explosives). Even if Wikipedia is not legally liable for this (and this even remains to be seen, depending on the jurisdiction and how courts rule), there's a definite risk of adverse publicity. The media can well blow such incidents out of proportion: "Online encyclopedia a cookbook for explosives", "Youngster experiments as described in online site, loses both arms", etc... David.Monniaux 07:46, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Since i requested permission to run a warnfile on en three days ago and have not yet recived any reply i would like to draw some attention to the requst here so people wont go all postal when/if i actually run it.
Here goes. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:59, 2004 Jul 31 (UTC)
It seems to be the utility of "stub" and "substub" messages is...limited, and that the recently developed "substub" message was rude and reflected poorly on Wikipedia. I have discussed this at more length at template talk:substub and ask that others voice their opinions. I'm going to have a go at making it less off-putting. - Nunh-huh 02:51, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
For a good laugh, see my latest addition to the Wikipedia:Wikipedia_as_a_press_source#July_2004_.2818_articles.29 :))) Nikola 00:47, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
###Note:### OT "linguistic" subthread moved into subsub "Todo is not a word" at the end of this thread.
The Category:todo have articles with sort keys (i.e. [[category:todo|<sort key>]] or piped format), but it does not look correct to me. For example, "Talk:One-time pad" has a "T5" sort key, but comes before "Talk:Train station" that has a "T1" sort key. (these codes are meant to sort the articles by priority). Strangely, others are sorted correctly though, so that it is not a repeatable problem.
Has this problem been seen before ? Is someone working on it ? Should I report it somewhere else ? Pcarbonn 20:07, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Moved from "Categories broken":
Is this bug also responsible for the stuff I've been seeing the last couple of days, which is that several categories have more than one section for a given alphabetical letter? For example, Category:Software has two separate occurrences of "F", with some subcats living under one section and the rest under the other. Same trouble with several other categories above/below/"to-the-side-of" the Software one (the part of the category tree where I've been working lately). I really, really, really hope that this bug (or maybe bug complex) is generally fixable ¹ -- i.e. that one doesn't have to redo stuff ad aeternum...? -- Wernher 02:15, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
( ¹ not at all having studied the wiki-software, I would nevertheless strongly assume that the category pages are regenerated regularly -- and that, if the wiki was a small one, they could in fact be regenerated on demand, i.e. per visit )
"Todo" is not a word. — Chameleon Main/ Talk/ Images 13:43, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
IMHO, if people use it regularly, and widely agree upon its spelling and intended meaning, it's a word. Sort of like the words "today", "email", "handwritten", and "newspaper". "LOL" is an abbreviation. The phrase "todo list" is unlikely to be misunderstood by any native English speaker to mean "list of commotion."-- Wapcaplet 23:36, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Hi - could someone take a look at Intercontinental ballistic missile and let me know what I did wrong trying to put a caption under the photo? I can't seem to get non-thumbnail photos to display captions. Thanks - Tempshill 19:26, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Pcb21| Pete 11:26, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I will be making occasional awards to pairs of articles that typify this accusation, in the hope that it will motivate some (including me) to overcome our tech and pop biases and invest in some of the (apparently) less appealing articles. The first award goes to:
I make that a 1.69 Slashdot ratio, and will leave folks to draw their own conclusions about the relative significance of these two erstwhile organizations. Yours, hoping to meet you on the pages of some articles that traditionally don't get our focus, Mark Richards 15:28, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I recently created a stub about Ruth Krauss. I wanted to include her places of birth and death as well as the dates, without saying anything more about them. (biographies) recommends the standard format
but if you open like that, it is hard to think of a way of including the places succinctly. It's not as if it were a full biography, in which you could have a paragraph beginning "Krauss was born in a red-brick Mongolian yurt in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a poor but honest woodchopper and screenwriter Anita Loos. The influence of Baltimore's red-brick architecture can be seen every aspect of her work..." (or whatever the actual facts might be).
I settled for:
Ruth Krauss (b. July 25, 1901, Baltimore, Maryland; d. July 10, 1993, Westport, Connecticut)
Thoughts? Are there any experienced sages who have a recommendation (and might consider adding it to (biographies)?)
Increasingly, collaborative-edition mechanisms are using categories in templates to automatically generate the list of the concerned articles: Wikipedia:todo list, Wikipedia:disputed statement, Wikipedia:Cleanup, ... Those lists are sorted in alphabetical orders. Other popular collaboration mechanisms show the most-recently-posted first: Wikipedia:peer review, Wikipedia:Cleanup, ...
Sorting articles by popularity would bring the major benefit of focusing the editing effort where it is most useful, i.e. where many people will actually view it. The popularity could be measured by the number of links to that page (like Google does).
The category feature allows the entry of a sort key, e.g. [[Category:foobar|sort key]] (see m:Help:Category#Setting_sort_keys. This could be used for our purpose if we enter the popularity in the sort key. To have a descending order, we could use 999998 for an article referred once, 999997 for an article refered twice... (This sort key is not shown in the list of articles of the category).
As far as I know this is currently not possible in Wiki, because there is no "popularity" variable that we can automatically insert in a text, so we'll probably have to enter a request for new feature. Any other idea ?? Pcarbonn 06:05, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Take a look at Marauder's Map. The page redirects to an article that exists. It redirects to an article that isn't a redirect. Yet the redirect doesn't take you to the article.
It doesn't appear to be because of the anchor in the link; I checked another anchor redirect ( Sorting Hat), and even though anchor redirects don't take you to the anchor, they do take you to the right page. What's going on?
As a sidenote, I found the brokenness jarring enough that it took me a minute to remember why I was interested in reading the article. Lucky Wizard 02:09, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
How do I clear out the cache that retains the text I have used for edit summary? The cache is a useful feature but after a while, it contains so many similar text strings that the value decreases. I deleted the browser cookies but that didn't clear it. I also looked in the help but could not see anything about it. Thanks in advance. -- Bobblewik 15:56, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Excellent. I have IE6. I can now delete offending entries one by one. As you guessed, I don't want to turn it off, just remove a few. I tried to see if I could delete them all at once by following your second suggestion. I went to Tools, Internet Options..., Delete Files..., Delete all offline content, clicked OK then rebooted. Unfortunately that did get rid of any entries. However, deleting them one by one is a great advance and suits me fine. Thank you very much.
Bobblewik 20:54, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Using your clue, I found it. Tools, Internet Options..., Content tab, Autocomplete..., Clear Forms. That deleted them all. Many thanks!
Bobblewik 16:46, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Among the votes for deletion, the most commonly encountered category is personal articles. These articles are usually by some flaky person of no true interest to a Wiki-xxx. Though seldom encountered in votes for deletion, there also exist people who are of some minor interest, but who would not always justify an article. I propose a solution for both categories.
The idea is to create a separate Wiki with unlimited (except for size) personal articles. The idea is that if you can't easily deal with them, at least categorize them into a heap where they would be harmless. The existing Wikipedia would simply redirect via creator selection option, or by speedy VfD to the personalWIKI. The personal articles would not be searchable by Wikipedia, but would available through a different Wiki name.
A variation on this is to also require personal articles to have an selectable "open date" e.g. 50 years in the future, when the article would finally be posted to the public, but held confidential to Wiki (via password) prior to that date. The idea here is that some people actually are noteworthy, and that often such people would be reluctant to publish personal information prior to their death. I recently encountered an example of this. The lady was a former professor of French, had lead an interesting life, but was otherwise little known publically. She is also very old and probably near death. An article about her would be highly appropriate, and, it would be best done with her assistance. What do you do with such an article?
I think that such future open date personal articles would tend to attract the less flaky members of society, and, would be a useful content. Perhaps such articles could be automatically forwarded to Wikipedia after the open date. Posted by User:66.44.3.205
And the beauty of it is, people can just create an account under their real name (provides searchability!), and then link to their blog from their user page. Exploding Boy 16:42, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
I've posted this before, but I haven't gotten much of a response. Everyone can speak a language natively, so if you have a mic, how about adding some sounds to these pages (note that English hasn't been done either):
I suggest using Audacity to record and export the files to Ogg Vorbis format (See also Wikipedia:Ogg Vorbis help). Dori | Talk 12:45, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
I was just wondering if there was any effort to encourage linking to Wikisource for any sorts of documents/sources that might be mentioned in an article here on Wikipedia. It came to my attention after browsing through Wikisource and reading 'Civil Disobedience' by Thoreau, then coming over to Wikipedia for more info about him and the essay. There was an external link to the essay from the Civil Disobedience page to a college site or something, which I changed to link to the Wikisource document. I just think it would be a great idea to help out the sister projects and encourage people to add stuff to Wikisource, and hopefully it would strengthen both projects. So is there any policy/project to help these two projects help each other out?
p.s. Hope this is an appropriate place for this discussion since it concerns two different Wikimedia projects, but I didnt see anywhere on the MetaWiki to put it...
thanks, biggins 10:14, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
First off, I want to say that I discoverd wikipedia yesterday and am ecstatic over it. I think the principals of "community cooperation" found within wikipedia, open-source software, creative commons and everything GNU are going to revolutionize the future in a HUGE way and will save all of us from ourselves....
But anyway, a couple of quick questions popped in my head about wikipedia that I couldn't really find an answer to:
1) As we've all seen in history (and no I can't really find a good example), it has been possible for a large group of people to, over a period of time, slowly believe something as true which very well may not be. Now I understand that fact is fact is fact. And I got the vibe that things like religion and such are explained in a very unbiased manner, as they should be. But my only concern is that I feel it IS possible for an entire population to believe something as true that isn't if its very slowly introduced to them. Like a very slow public "numbing to truth brought on by thier ability to believe whatever they read." Now I can't even begin to think of a scenario where that might happen, even if it's possible. But I just wanted to throw that out there.
2.)Advertising. What if someone writes up a pizza page and explains how to make it and such, then talk about history and blah blah blah. Then at the end put a http://www.dominos.com. Eventually someone will take it off because it's biased and advertising. Pretty simple. But what if everyone likes dominos? (just using it as an example, replace dominos with anything widely excepted). Then that opens up a way for people to advertise. Again, I can't really see that happening because there is nothing that everyone agrees on, even God, or god, or gods or allah or no god or aliens or etc,.
I'm just trying to find ways to scrutinize the system because I like it so much. I'M TRYING TO FIND FAULT AND CAN'T. By its very design, it WILL become the most in-depth, complete, and unbiased source of information on the planet. Good job guys.
Before I created my second archive on my talk page, the TOC for the talk showed up fine, however it doesn't now, can somebody tell me why? Ilyanep (Talk) 03:15, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Are items and pics on state government official pages public domain, or are states allowed to copyright? Rick K 00:00, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
For all those zealots and anarchists who claim that the decimal number system, and so our usual milestones, have no real significance, let them witness that Wikipedia has exceeded Pi x 10^5, or about 314159, pages! Definitely deserves a press release. Derrick Coetzee 22:09, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The real milestone is that Wikipedia now contains over 19,683 (39) good articles. AsbestoSuit 355:113, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I'm looking for some clarification of the policy about external links. What makes a link acceptable on a page? Should new links be posted at the top, or the bottom, of the existing list of links? How does one determine if a link is spam or astroturfing, or a valid submission?
Frequently I've seen users putting in links that are relevant, but not the most important sites in relation to an article. E.g. a user linked photomigrations.com from Digital photography, which is relevant but it's not a very well-known site, and it's not a general digital photo site.
Even though they're just trying to increase traffic to their site, it's possible that the link should stay. Tips? Rhobite 18:42, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
And why does it feel right that it should be "external links" with an s, even when there is only one link? (Admittedly not everyone feels this, but plenty do). Pcb21| Pete
See Wikipedia:External links and m:When should I link externally. For link v. links, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Angela . 14:13, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
The " Duke University" entry is not displaying properly.
There will be a Wikipedian meetup in Boston this Saturday. Sign up at User:Jimbo_Wales/Boston if you plan to attend. Dori | Talk 16:52, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC) (Who unfortunately cannot)
###Note:### See the thread Wikipedia:Village pump#Categories with sort keys are not sorted properly for discussion of related alphasort issues.
Is it just me or are categories broken? I just went to Category:Political divisions of the United States and the list was empty and saw the same thing with a quick sampling of several other categories. older≠ wiser 14:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've just come up with a new item in the preferences: preferred size of the default thumbnail box. I've noticed that a couple of contributors define the width of the thumbnail when there is no reasons. I think most of the time, they do this, so the page looks nice. Now, what looks nice on a small screen might look rather weird on a big one, and vice versa.
My suggestion is to let users choose. Of course, there are cases when we want exactly 237px width (e.g. if the picture is that size). So, I suggest we have a preference to set the default size of thumbnails. Next, we of course encourage all Wikipedians not to add fixed size unless needed.
Can I at this stage also mention, that thumb should be used, because it includes the given description as a caption... many contributors seem to to know that thumb, right etc. are not exclusive statements... Kokiri 13:35, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Would some helpful veteran please take a look at the discussions of indoor/outdoor cats and declawing in
How to choose your pet and take care of it? These are both controversial topics where the majority opinion is different in the US and the UK (where I come from). I have done my best to include a balanced discussion of indoor/outdoor cats, but I'm not qualified to sort out the discussion of declawing, since in the UK it is illegal and generally regarded as cruel. As I said on the talk page, I think it deserves an article of its own.
131.111.8.103 13:09, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
That was me (Ekaterin) by the way!
Ekaterin 13:13, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Ekaterin 15:29, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I have written a draft FAQ for users who think that Wikipedia is biased against their country at User:Zocky/Country bias. Any improvements and suggestions are highly welcome. Zocky 12:43, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Here's an excerpt:
I've contributed a few things, but I think that it should be both a FAQ for people who think Wikipedia is biased on their country, and also a guideline for people writing on other countries. David.Monniaux 06:43, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Can anyone explain to me why the following, from Reign of Terror, shows a period (".") rather than a colon (":") after the italicized word Terror?
Source: On [[September 5]], the Convention, pressured by the people of Paris, institutionalized ''The Terror'': systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.
Result: On September 5, the Convention, pressured by the people of Paris, institutionalized The Terror: systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.
Jmabel 05:52, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
We should not be ignoring a browser used by a larger number of people than any other browser on the Internet. It's one thing to have a policy like that for tools used by our active participants, but we want our content to look good to people who are turning to us as an encyclopedia, not as a hobby. -- Jmabel 00:55, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)
Despite all the browser bashing (it looks bad in netscape too, btw), the correct solution is to italicize the : so that it does not run into the r. Italic punctuation was created specifically to fix that problem. -- ssd 05:13, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I do not think that articles should try to account for ephemeral font and browser issues, even of popular browsers. At most, the Wikipedia software could be tweaked to render such cases for buggy browsers, the underlying code staying the same (the tweaking could simply be removed once the browser improves). Many unicode entities used in existing articles are not rendered properly by any browser yet. But Wikipedia is here 'for ever', and unicode is here to stay too, so it is reasonable to expect them to render correctly in the near future. (in firefox, btw, the colon looks fine). Italic punctuation exists for whole italicized paragraphs. I don't think it's good practice to italicize punctuation after a single word in italics (but I am not Donald Knuth); Btw, is there any sort of punctuation-standards-enforcing wikipedia-bot/script? Dbachmann 08:15, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The lists of radio stations in the US are a little jumbled, e.g. List of radio stations in Massachusetts, List of radio stations in Ohio, List of radio stations in Oregon. Each state's page is formatted differently and contains different kinds of information. There are thousands of licensed stations in the US.
One of the few things the FCC's done right is publishing downloadable data [2] [3]. You can get a list of all the stations in the US. Thoughts on importing this data into Wikipedia? There are something like 8500 FM stations listed, so I'm not sure if that list includes defunct or trivial stations. Anyway we could filter by certain criteria like wattage, I'd have to do more research to find out possible filters. I could write the bot to do this but it might take a while given my schedule. Rhobite 04:26, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
I think it would be useful to extend the wikitext markup syntax to facilitate easy creation and especially maintenance of a list of external documents cited/referenced in a wikipedia article. The full proposal including syntax, an example, and anticipated problems can be found at User:Sperling/References.
Any comments would be appreciated. -- K. Sperling 01:51, 2004 Jul 28 (UTC)
The article on Effeminacy was changed in title to Effeminacy (classical vice). The person doing the changing did not bring over the history nor the old talk page. Since then the article has now been reverted back to the original. None of this my doing but I originated the article and would like the old history to come back.
Can a Sysop restore the old history and talk page elements? I now it has been done before. WHEELER 23:44, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The timeline for the arbitration committee election has been finalized. Candidates should present their candidate statements before midnight UTC on Monday, August 2, 2004. The election will start on Wednesday, August 4, and run through Friday, August 13. Anyone who has been a registered user for 3 months is eligible to vote. -- Michael Snow 23:15, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
On wikipedia-l, Jimbo proposed editing weekends be held as a part of the drive towards 1.0. This involves groups of Wikipedians meeting in libraries to finalise articles.
I have created a page to arrange smaller meet-ups prior to the final print drive next summer. I suggest the first of these be held this September and be only one day rather than a whole weekend as a trial run. Please see Wikipedia:Editing Weekend for details. Angela . 18:38, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
I finally wrote something to convert the Wikipedia into the DICT format: wik2dict.py. It tries to create reasonably layouted dict articles. It can also automatically fetch the database dumps. There are some requirements though (running mysql server, dictzip, Python modules for MySQL and dict stuff). And currently it is only version 0.2. So beware.
I would appreciate it if someone (possibly someone at Wikimedia?) could run the script regularly and put the dict files available for everyone to download. Too bad they can't be included in Debian though ("GFDL is non-free"). However, the script itself could probably be included in contrib :)
Hope it can also be useful to other people. G-u-a-k-@ 18:00, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(I submitted this to SourceForge [4] but I'm reporting it here in case anyone has any thoughts on how to fix this.)
Compare Image:Sidereal day (prograde).png with the thumbnail of the same image at Sidereal day. The latter image has artifacts (pixels of the wrong colour) around the yellow circle at the left representing the sun. These artifacts are not present in the original image. The artifacts are not just caused by aliasing because the wrong pixels are in a colour unrelated to the colour of neighbouring pixels. It is possible that the error has something to do with the alpha map on the original image: the artifacts are in places where pixels in the original image are partly transparent. Gdr 14:17, 2004 Jul 27 (UTC)
Knowing full well that I am probably going to suggest something that has been suggested and debated a million times before, but not knowing at least where to look for such a debate, I would like to propose that anonymous users and registered users with fewer than 50 edits be blocked from editing such pages as VfD, CfD, and VfU. These discussions get senselessly bogged down by the flocks and armies of sockpuppets (though it is at times amusing), and often after a flurry of them has passed through, a legitimate new user may get "sockpuppet!" yelled at him simply because we can't tell the difference. Having a per se block on those articles would prevent the easy proliferation of sockpuppets, and guarantee that anyone who contributes to the more esoteric debates on wikipedia about keeping articles and categories will have actually been here for a little while. We tend to think that no one will wander to VfD unless they are somewhat familiar with wikipedia, but this would help guarantee that.
a) what does everyone think? and b) is there somewhere that I can see a preexisting discussion of this kind of proposal? I know I've seen similar suggestions arise in VfD comments from time to time... Oh, and c) how would we make something like this official policy and have it built into the system? Is it something that can be done? I initially thought we could do it by namespace, but then I realized that there are pages just for newbies set up within the wikipedia namespace (like the sandbox...duh). Postdlf 07:52, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
(Moved from Reference Desk)
Dear Wikipedia Administrators and Editors,
It is with great dismay and sadness that when I looked up the definition of the Hawaiian word Hapa, I found that it was not defined truthfully. Please advise. I would like to know how one can be sure that the true meaning and definition of a word will be present on an article site that has redefined a word as a usage. I tried a few times to edit the article "Hapa" to present all the facts and the true meaning of this Hawaiian word, but someone kept puting the incorrect definiton back before I could finish. (PikiPik and Pez?)
Hapa is a Hawaiian (kanaka maoli) word of Hawaiian (ethnicity, blood ancestry) origin. Hapa began as a word by Hawaiians (like my great grandmother) for Hawaiians of part Hawaiian ancestry. Hawaiian dictionaries define "hapa" as "part, fragment., portion" or "an indefinite part of a thing, a few, a small part". Later it was further defined to include "of mixed blood, person of mixed blood". Hapa does not mean "part or partial Asian".
To take a word which is a part of an indigenous language and then redefine it as a word used for part-Japanese people who came from Hawai'i and then further redefine it as "people of part Asian and European ancestry" is ethnocultural theft. At the very least, the article site on wikipedia that defines and explains the word "hapa" should give credit where credit is due-to the Hawaiian (kanaka maoli) people of Hawai'i. The word hapa was in use long before any of the foreign Asian, Portuguese and Filipino immigrants came to Hawai'i. Hawaiians and (the first foreigners) Europeans (like my grandfather) created the first hapa people of Hawai'i. An example is Princess Victoria Ka'iulani Cleghorn. Later, Hawaiians intermarried with the Chinese (like my great grandfather) who were the first non-European immigrants to Hawai'i. This then created many people of Hawaiian, European and Chinese ancestry. Hapa is a Hawaiian word, it is not a "Hawai'i Creole" or Hawai'i Pidgin English" word.
How can anyone just take a word that has original meaning, definition and usage of a native peoples and just redefine it to suit someone and something else? Why has no one looked up the word in the dictionaries that would be the authority as to the definiton of a Hawaiian word? People of Hawaiian language authority. Please look in the dictionaries of Hawaiian language. It is a terrible thing to present something wrong and false as being the "truth".
By the way, I am Hawai'i born and raised, and am hapa because I am part Hawaiian- I am of mixed ethnic/racial ancestry-Hawaiian, Chinese, French, Welsh, Dutch, Irish, Scottish, Mohawk, Prussian, Austrian, English and Seneca. Two of my nephews are all of this and part Japanese and Okinawan too; they are hapa. Please make sure the truth is presented. Please do not allow someone to put forth a false definition. It is hurtful to those of us who are hapa and grew up with this word as a part of our heritage. People of Hawaiian ancestry have always been known to share and give in a most generous way, easily mixing and intermarrying with all ethnicities and races, and the word hapa can evolve to include anyone of mixed ethnic and racial ancestry, but please do not state that the definition of hapa is part Asian mixed ancestry. It is defined as "part, partial or fragment; one of mixed blood". Kelly Hu is hapa. Kelly Preston is hapa. Keanu Reeeves is hapa, and so forth. I have seen many sites on the web where the defition of hapa has been redefined. Please do not be such a site, be fair and just. (This was posted on the Reference Desk by User:Ilikea)
(Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk)
Anyone interested in creating a barnstar of reconciliation to honor those who excel at patching things up between users? Neutrality 03:54, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm just curious, what do any of you do when you come across an article which you believe needs significant changes to its structure? Like if it restates facts, scatters facts under irrelevant sections, uses 'critics believe that...' too often, rambles, includes lots of citations which aren't relevant or noteworthy, or just generally has poor formatting - do you ever go in and rework an article significantly? If you do, how do you deal with previous editors who may get their nose bent out of shape that you redid their stuff? Or do you just leave well enough alone, limit your changes to specific details within the existing structure of the article, and trust that the people who edited before you knew what they were doing and your own opinion might be wrong? - Brian Kendig 00:49, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
That IBM research suggested that initial text is rarely taken away. With the exception of short stubs, the first edit tends to define an article. There of course plenty of exceptions (even 1% would be 3,000 articles). Pcb21| Pete 10:51, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
To facilitate the building of a consensus around what edits an article need, you can use the new Wikipedia:Todo lists. Any comments on it are welcome. Pcarbonn 17:04, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Could you help out with the Geheimrat page. Thanks -- Jondel 01:03, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
While I was working with Catgeory:Rivers, some interesting things happened:
I creating two new subcategories ( Category:Hawaiian rivers and Category:Middle Eastern rivers) and labeled articles in the new subcategories, as appropriate. But for some reason they still remain in the larger Category:Rivers. Anyone know why this is happening or how I can fix it?-- Neutrality 01:28, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
While I was working with Category:Rivers, some interesting things happened:
I creating two new subcategories ( Category:Hawaiian rivers and Category:Middle Eastern rivers) and labeled articles in the new subcategories, as appropriate. But for some reason they still remain in the larger Category:Rivers. Anyone know why this is happening or how I can fix it?-- Neutrality 01:28, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I hope there is a good html designing software other than frontpage
Following on from the comments above, I am quite surprised that there are so many redirects and links to empty pages. These are not on the list of good things and may even be on the list of bad things. Is it possible to reduce their numbers using some form of search and replace mechanism?
Bobblewik 19:52, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
he is deleting the article Avigad Berman for no reason
Can someone help me out? I am looking at Taoism, but would really like to read the article in Klingon. I notice that the Klingon Wikipedia has an article about Taoism, but, although it is in the source, it does not appear in the language bar, but rather, at the bottom of the article: Daw_lalDan. What is wrong? Apart from the obvious, of course. Mark Richards 23:25, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I can understand that, but the link does appear at the bottom of the article, it looks odd, and is confusing, since it is not apparent what it links too, it not being in the language bar, and links to a page that is uninteligible. Can we fix it in any way? My browser renders:
External links
* Taoism Information Page ( http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/) * Resources for East Asian Language and Thought ( http://www.acmuller.net) with Translation of the Daodejing * Lao Tse & Daoism ( http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/laotse.htm) * Taoist Restoration Society ( http://www.taorestore.org) * Taoist Culture & Information Centre ( http://www.eng.taoism.org.hk)
tlh:Daw lalDan
Mark Richards 18:30, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Can someone point me to where this discussion is had? The current 'compromise' is kind of kookey! Mark Richards 22:22, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
It had occured to me that this problem might be possible, but I had never come across it in practice before. So... Is there any established way to get around the problem that occures when a word in one language translates as two (or more) in the other? I wanted to link the Irish wiki article Cnáimhseachas to the English wiki, but the word translates either as midwifery or obstetrics. I can't find any synonyms (or near-synonyms) for the word in Irish that could be used to make two different titles, and I wouldn't dare suggest merge the two English articles. I know that there are other examples in other languages. Should altlang links be put in for both articles, or is there some technical trick I'm unaware of? -- Kwekubo 23:21, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
What monitor size and resolution do you use? Also what OS and Browser?(I use 17" and 1152x768x24, WinXP, Moz 1.7 BTW) I'm just wondering what the community uses. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 22:19, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Around 85% of visits to WP are via IE. I expect this self-selecting poll will show a much lower number. What conclusions can we draw? Pcb21| Pete 11:20, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The Village Pump/Help Desk/Ref Desk/VfD pages are all hella long, leading to crazy load times or even sometimes time outs. Is it ok to delete topics that are no longer active? For example, some pages have been listed in VfD and then speedy deleted. Can I delete the page entry? Another example is that I asked a question earlier today on this page about Baroque/Baroque art redirects that was answered and that would not be of any use to anyone else. Can I delete the question/answer?
VfD policy is that, once a page is listed, it stays for 5 days. Rick K 22:32, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I just had an idea and I thought I'd spit it out here because it might work well. Why not have links at the top of articles to the relevant Wiki pages like the interlingua links used to be? (So if I go to the 'surfboard' article at the top there'll be a link to the Wiktionary surfboard entry and if I go to the 'John Kerry' page at the top there'll be a link to the relevant WitiQuote article). Sorry if this has come up before - I've been away for ages because at first my internet crashed and didn't get fixed and by the time it was back I was really busy... and so on. Sorry for rambling. LUDRAMAN | T 21:46, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Good idea. Also we should be able to search all the Wikis at once. This might be one of those things to put in SourceForge feature requests. Salasks 22:12, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
There used to be an "[edit]" link at the top of every page which allowed you to edit the section of the page above the first Header. That link is gone. There now seems to be no way to edit a page if the part you want to edit is above the first header, except to edit the entire page. Are we going to have to put "Introduction" headers on every page so we can get to the unlabeled section? Rick K 20:09, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I've been trying to correct an editing error for several minutes now in the Current Events page, but every time I click "Save", I get:
Database error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software.
Rick K 19:38, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
And now I just got it editing George W. Bush. Rick K 20:09, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I have started an rtcl on the 2004 IAAF World Indoor Championships but cannot find any useful general information regarding which other countries bid for it or any problems the Hungarians had in staging it etc. to fill the introduction out. If anyone happened to be there?? a couple of photos of the stadium or something would be handy. Any help gratefully received. Scraggy4 18:29, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
This seems wrong, but Baroque seems like a better article. One sure problem is that Baroque links to Baroque art which redirects back to itself. Baroque is a featured article, so I'm a little weary of busting something up. Salasks 17:34, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I'm guessing that my horror of the Worm Ouroboros is irrelevant, and that none of the tech wizards will object to my edit at Talk:Priscilla Davis. But i just couldn't resist, and i hope that someone cautious (and perhaps a few irony-lovers) will follow the link from Talk:Priscilla Davis, and revert me if appropriate. -- Jerzy (t) 16:58, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)
The July stats are in (see http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/usage_200407.html ) and they make some interesting reading...
July was the English Wikipedia's busiest month ever (I think), with:
Excluding project and special pages (and the Main Page), the 10 most requested articles were:
For comparison, the 10 most requested for June were:
The top 10 search terms for July were:
From this, it looks pretty clear that Wikipedia is being heavily used as a resource for major ongoing news events, particularly Iraq. -- ChrisO 16:37, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I've started a page at Wikipedia:Send in the clones to discuss this. Any comments? -- The Anome 14:06, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I wonder if there are any problems for the google crawler going through our site. I usually check for the google rating of some of the articles I have created. For example monthon [8] it recently had the article in the top 10 of google hits, before it had the link only without a cached version (and much below top 10), and now it seems to have disappeared again. But the mirrors are all present. Does the google bot run into any traffic throttleling, or the measures to block mirroring by sucking all pages? It's of course impossible to guess what is really going on at google... andy 18:25, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
We've had this problem ever since Google redid its PageRank criteria in order, according to them, cut down on Googlebombing. If anything the opposite seems to have happened. But I would not push Google on this issue until we have a good handle on our finances/server situation. -- mav 07:53, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Is there any reason that the Wikipedia logo in the upper left corner "flashes" whenever I place my mouse pointer on it? This is really annoying.
Acegikmo1 13:59, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
/* show the hand */ #p-logo a, #p-logo a:hover { cursor: pointer; }
#p-logo { background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 35% 50% !important; background-image: url(/upload/b/bc/Wiki.png); } #p-logo a { background-image: none !important; }
Can anyone explain why my persistent login works on all (AFAIK) pages except for the main page where it displays Login at top right not SGBailey(Talk) and is in the defualt skin. If I move to another page, my loggedin-ness and skin (Classic) return. Puzzled. -- SGBailey 11:02, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)
Maybe you're looking at a cached Main Page? Try reload.
Salasks 15:19, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
There is currently a poll at Template talk:Protected regarding whether it should have an image or not. This affects enough high-profile articles that I think it's worth noting here. — Kate | Talk 08:49, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)
I was fiddling around with the article series boxes and the political succession boxes to see if I could come up with a good mixture of the two...I'm not sure where the best place to discuss this would be, so I thought I would post it here where lots of people would see it (as opposed to the Wikipedia:Article series page where hardly anyone will see it). If anyone would like to comment on/discuss/improve what I've been doing, it is at User:Adam Bishop/sandbox. (If I should post examples here as well, just let me know.) Adam Bishop 06:16, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Golbez - some of the succession boxes are already templates (the Byzantine emperors box, and some of the British peerage boxes, for example), but they don't all necessarily have to be templates. By the way, another possibility I have seen is some of the Roman emperors on fr: - such as fr:Auguste. Adam Bishop 17:14, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
After further attempts to make this work, I have noticed they aren't very useful for more complicated boxes like Charles of Anjou. So I guess the boxes should stay the way they are, or something else should be done. Ah well. Adam Bishop 19:19, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps this was discussed before but I don't know. It would be useful to have a part of the signup screen to say which wikis you want to sign up on, and then you have the same account for all of them and when you login, you login to all, and your userpage is automatically interlinked or redirected, etc. Also, when you sign up for another wiki you can have the option to add that to your existing unified account. This way, you can see the contribs for a user in one screen (with options to filter out depending on which wiki). This could have many benefits. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 06:13, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I'm putting this here because I couldn't figure out one logical place among all the categorization/category pages to put this request.
Thoughts? Elf | Talk 05:40, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I know I've been postin a lot here lately. Shouldn't the wikipedians by number of edits be updated more often? One is updated July 1st and the other one was May 7th. Ilyanep (Talk) 05:28, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Is there any way to have all my signatures prefaced with the mdash (without manually havine to add it all the time)? I've already learned how to change what's after the signature (as you can see...I added a link to my talk page), but not before. I don't want to make everything cluttered by making my name ' ]] &mdash: [[User:Ilyanep|Ilyanep]] [[User talk: Ilyanep|(Talk)]]' because that would show up in every signature as '[[User:Ilyanep| ]] &mdash: [[User:Ilyanep|Ilyanep]] [[User talk: Ilyanep|(Talk)]]'. Thanks in advance — Ilyanep (Talk) 05:21, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)-->
\'Your signature with timestamp\',\'--~~~~\'
\'Your signature with timestamp\',\'&mdash;~~~~\'
I am just wondering out of curoristy...Whatever happened to copyrights that were held by the USSR, SFRY, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR? Thanks! - iHoshie 04:12, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I found this "talk" page, Talk:Greatbigtwit, but apparently there's never been a Greatbigtwit article. Can I just speedy it, or do I have to VfD it? Seems like it has to qualify under one (or more) of the first four speedy cases, just not sure which one(s). Or maybe case 11 should be amended to cover cases like this. Niteowlneils 01:23, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I have set my time zone offset in preferences to "-04:00". However, every few weeks, it changes to "-4:00" and goes back to displaying timestamps as UTC. This is rather frustrating. Does anyone know how to fix it?
Acegikmo1 00:44, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps this has already been discusseed, but is there an easy way (aside from counting and using fancy offsets on my contribs) to count my contributions? Does this involve running a Perl/Python script? Ilyanep (Talk) 00:36, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Data_in_the_CSV:
Chris 73 | Talk 05:41, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Can someone tell the server about a phenomenon called Daylight Savings Time, so I don't have so switch between GMT-5 and GMT-6 every time we have DST?
Does anyone know about the picture on Hordaland? One picture that's supposed to be there isn't, and the other isn't on Wikipedia so it doesn't show up. I'd upload it and add it, but I'm not sure if it's fair use. Salasks 00:33, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
I've reopened Wikipedia:Span tags poll, in case there are users who were unaware of it the first time or who were ineligible to vote. -- Eequor 21:12, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Chosen an arbitrary skin, how do I change back to the default skin, which I see when I'm not logged in? -- PuzzletChung
Is it just me or is the background color (#F8FCFF) for non-article namespaces prescribed at MediaWiki:Monobook.css basically the same as white? It says "light blue" but all I see it white. -- Jia ng 01:45, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Thanks. I was scared for a second there. Can we change it to a netsafe color, either #CCFFCC or #CCFFFF then? I don't think I'm alone, because Im not using particularly outdated or rare technology. -- Jia ng 02:07, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The "web-safe" palette is not all it's cracked up to be. See " Death of the Websafe Color Palette?" Also, if you find the background color annoying, or would prefer it to be a different color, simply edit User:YourUserName/monobook.css and add:
#content { background: #FFFFFF; /* Or whatever color you like */ }
-- Wapcaplet 02:39, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
third post in a row, wow. i see links all over the place on this site that are red and not blue, which typically means i have visited the site; however there are many i know i havent touched that show up as visited. anyone get this too and know why it happens?
thanks JoeSmack (talk) 22:57, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
is it possible to make an article that redirects to another that redirects back? wouldn't that make an infinite loop? wouldn't that make my computer and the server explode? wouldn't the world as we know it explode? ok, i got carried away there, but still, im curious.
JoeSmack
(talk) 21:43, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
i have been plowing through this site a lot lately - it's a fabulous idea. however, i notice now when poking around there is a small 2-5 second pause when moving anywhere on the site. what gives? is it a hardware issue? i myself am on the UCSC campus t1. if it is a hardware issue, what would the solution be?
thanks all. JoeSmack 20:38, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
I think it's a hardware issue - that's why they're doing the fundraising. Also, Wikipedia:Cleanup and Wikipedia:Offline reports/Nothing links to this article are good places to check out if you're poking around looking for stuff to improve. Salasks 21:37, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Forgive me if there's already some discussion about this somewhere: are there any plans to improve the image auto-thumbnail process to account for PNGs with indexed color? I'd much rather upload a high-resolution image and let the thumbnail be generated automatically, but since they're converted to true-color, the thumbnail often ends up larger (in bytes) than the original (for instance, the six images on Four-stroke cycle), or almost as large (the rotor breakdown on Enigma machine). Seems to me it should be a fairly simple matter to have the thumbnailing script (or whatever it is) look at the color depth in the original image, and convert appropriately (using true-color only for the intermediate resizing). I've noticed some rather heated disagreements over this issue that would be neatly solved if thumbnailing worked better for indexed PNGs. -- Wapcaplet 16:53, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
convert -depth 8
and pngcrush -brute
(with the appropriate nice value) when generating thumbnails of indexed-color PNG files? --
Ardonik 20:06, 2004 Aug 4 (UTC)How do I create a new category? -- Auximines 14:18, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Is it possible to upload a Java applet into Wikipedia?
Recently I added headings to Out of the Silent Planet. Why don't I see a Table of Contents in that article? I do in other articles, and this appears to be independent of computer and browser (at least between MSIE and Mozilla).
It would even be kind of nice to have the ToC there, since I moved the old articles Hrossa, Seroni, and Pfifltriggi to the OotSP page. In the unlikely event that someone searches for "Hrossa" etc., that person might like to see "Hrossa" in the ToC of Out of the Silent Planet and be able to jump there directly.
I hope this is the right place to ask what is undoubtedly a newbie question.
(By the, I apologize if this is a can or worms or a frequently rejected suggestion, but I think the Table of Contents should say just "Contents". We can see it's a table.)
-- JerryFriedman 16:48, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Is the information on House of Reps site in the public domain? I'm wondering because from what I've read, the federal government material is, but not state government. What is this considered? I just want to be sure before I use anything. Thanks.
I am sorry if I am wrong, but I notice the entry page of WikiPedia.org, which is automatically forwarded to en.WikiPedia.org, is encoded in ISO-8859-1. Though for pure English character set, ISO-8859-1 is as same as UTF-8, it would encode wide-character differently, as far as I see. For the multilingual purpose of WikiPedia.org, I would rather recommend to use UTF-8 as the uniform encoding scheme for all languages. Using UTF-8 commonly in all content of WikiPedia.org would avoid any possible conflict between different native encodings, since it is processed in unicode internally.
The {{cc-by-sa}} template (and no doubt others) has empty lines at the bottom, which annoyingly get inserted into the page when it is used. I would correct it myself, but it's protected. — Chameleon Main/ Talk/ Images 08:27, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Has Template:Opentask grown too large ? Please comment on this " hypertrophy" at Template talk:Opentask. Thanks. -- PFHLai 03:23, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)
I've pinched an idea from Google and created a Wikipedia:Zeitgeist page to keep a ready-to-hand record of the most popular articles and search terms. Ideally I'd like to be able to update it weekly but since Webalizer currently seems to be set up for monthly reporting periods that probably isn't practical... Anyway, comments are welcomed. -- ChrisO 23:11, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)