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I wonder if before a disambiguation page is created, it might not be best to think it out in terms of true need and potential effects. Someone today created a disambiguation page for PGA. This puts a huge onus on my 50 years of work ALREADY done on "years in sport" where, now, in order for a user to click on my PGA listing, they are forced to go through a disambiguation page. Is not the computer terminology something better identified to avoid disambiguation? It is an obscure term for all but those who have a lot of computer knowledge. I hate to complain, but I have done a ton of work and I really do not want to go back and open 50 pages just to fix the PGA links in sports. Jacques Delson 17:20 24 May 2003 (UTC)
Martin? Who are you? I put the question here to be resolved. If you have a answer please give it. Either leave things as is and I will stop my work because I have no intention of wasting vast amounts of my time discussing something with someone who created the page without a great deal of thought. It makes no difference to me. If making a contributors work harder is the goal then so be it but I'm not up to that kind of task. Whoever has the authority, please get rid of a disambiguation page without much real use or find a resolution 64.228.30.130 18:02 24 May 2003 (UTC)
proper nouns in disambiguation parenthesis
Do the proper nouns in disambiguation parenthesis have to be uncapitalized? (e.g. Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (chinese) Such ungrammaticality pokes people in the pupils until coconut-white stuff comes out. -- Menchi 14:55 24 May 2003 (UTC)
I just want to say sorry for cluttering Recent changes page with a bunch of uploads. -- Taku 19:19 27 May 2003 (UTC)
Fortunately the server still seems working. Each file is actually really small, just a kilobyte. But unfortunately there is no way to hide uploads. -- Taku
I would like to create a bot that gets info from various U.S. Department of State websites, and makes articles. I have no experience making this type of program, could someone point me in the direction as to what I need to learn, or a where to start? MB 20:26 27 May 2003 (UTC)
Automated content is generally disliked here: the value of Wikipedia comes from the fact that human beings interested in each subject have written and edited the articles. If you really feel that you must auto-create, you can test the bot on my server first; mail me and I'll give you all the info. LDC
I was going to Bartleby.com. They have a ton of books online. While browsing their copy of the CIA World Factbook, they had this following info:
TITLE:
The World Factbook.
PUBLISHED: Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002.
ISBN: 1-58734-113-1.
CITATION: The World Factbook. Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002; Bartleby.com, 2002.
www.bartleby.com/151/. [Date of Printout].
ONLINE ED.: Published April 2003 by
Bartleby.com; © Copyright
Bartleby.com, Inc. (
Terms of Use).
As you see below, it appears that Bartleby.com is claiming a copyright on the Factbook! Does this overide the CIA's declaration that the World Factbook is public domain?
-- hoshie
I'm writing articles for all of the major poems of John Keats (this way I can revise for my A levels, and wiki at the same time!) If a poem is short, and out of copyright, could I put the whole text into the article? Or should I leave that for an external link? CGS 10:16 29 May 2003 (UTC).
Deletion of talkpages
I am wondering if I should delete an article's talk page when I delete an article. Or should I rather delete just the article and keep the talk page intact? How things are handled in English wikipedia? (I'm an admin for Japanese wikipedia) Tomos 09:13 29 May 2003 (UTC)
Image use
I applied to the Turnbull Library for permission to use images from their collection and gave them details of wikipedia. This was the reply:
Requirements Please note that the Library has the following special requirements for the reproduction of its images on websites.
Required text As well as including the caption details (provided on Timeframes), you must use the following text alongside the image: "Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, must be obtained before any re-use of this image".
No Alteration of Images In order to maintain the integrity of the Library's images, no manipulation of the image is allowed, for example, outlining, clear cutting, overlapping, distortion (alteration of the proportions of an image), cropping, or, duatone washes and other colouring. Sepia toning may be allowed (specific permission must be requested). Other writing, such as titles or underlying text, should not intrude on the images.
Best wishes with your website and thank you for your interest in the Alexander Turnbull Library Collection
Are these requirements acceptable? Tiles 00:54 29 May 2003 (UTC)
There's a very odd edit war raging on Alice in Chains. 152.163.252.167 puts in a line "On April 19, 2002, lead singer Layne Staley was found dead in his home.", and then User:Dante Alighieri takes it out again, repeated about a million times. Can anyone shed any light? Dante Alighieri is an upstanding Wikipedian, right? CGS 22:47 28 May 2003 (UTC).
Yeah, but you should still know better than to get into a simple edit war loop. I cleaned up those articles and put the info in the right place (after verifying it). If a piece of text entered by a banned user seems appropriate, but you don't have the time or ability to verify it easily, then reverting is fine. But if it is easily verified and useful, the article comes first. If that means an idiot like like Michael gets to "win" an edit war, sobeit. LDC
What is the etiquette in adding to articles that are listed as originally published in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica ? Beans
Simple: rewrite them in modern English, and update the facts. No attribution or other mention of EB is necessary. Many, if not most, of the subjects are already covered here. LDC
I have my preferences set to not underline links, but when looking at the following link media:Clitoris.jpg on the Clitoris page, it is underlined. Is this a bug or intentional? MB 14:03 27 May 2003
Apologies in advance if this has been asked and answered. I've had trouble creating an external link, and I think its due to the relatively new or uncommon practice of a dash included within the URL. See the lsat external link at the bottom of the Hamilton County, Ohio article. Any suggestions, or have I just done something stupid again? ;-). - Lou I 20:22 26 May 2003 (UTC)
I have noticed two very strange out-of-character edits from User:Andre Engels on the general lines of "I HATE THIS ... WORLD, and I hate myself too" -- either someone has cracked Andre's password, or he's having a really bad time... does anyone know how Andre is doing? The Anome 14:37 26 May 2003 (UTC)
Help! Please go to Panavia Tornado and click where it says "Click HERE for a picture of a Tornado GR-4". The picture comes up OK but there is then no way the reader can get to the copyright information except by noting its file name, going to the Image List and clicking on Descr. Clumsy! Should I therefore make the pic a proper Wikipedia page so that the pic can then be clicked on and the description will come up as normal? Thanks Adrian Pingstone 17:37 29 May 2003 (UTC)
For your information: Wikipedia is run by a bunch of Ayn Randite/US Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist loonies.
I find it is always helpful to know the ideologies of people when dealing with them. It can help you determine their motivations and what to watch out for.
In the case of "Wikipedia" (god I hate the term "wiki" .. almost as retarded as "blog"), they are creating an encyclopedia.
So I'm reading this thing, and some of the articles on it are okay, others are lousy, but at least none of them are as outright awful as "Everything 2"'s are. Then I stumble upon a synopsis of "Atlas Shrugged" .. ok.. but it's going on and on for pages upon pages of descriptions of each chapter, the setting, the characters, etc. and I'm thinking the author of this synopsis is going a bit overboard. Probably just another lone objectivist nutcase, right?
I kept investigating and following various other articles and visiting one of the editors home pages where I couldn't help but notice his big section of pictures of his gun shooting groceries (no joke).
Hey, I like shooting stuff too.. but you know when you see a home page that has pictures of the author's gun collection you are either dealing with a 1) Libertarian wacko or 2) Republican wacko (case in point:Eric Raymond)
I continued investigating, and find that these guys who are the editors of the encyclopedia all seem to work for a company called "Bomis" which also conveniently owns the encylcopedia as well.
Unfortunately, I was just following this investigative trail for my own curiosity... so I didn't bother to keep track of all the evidence I've found to determine the ideologies of the editors.... but trust me, !!!!Libertarian Wacko Alert!!!!
It's not that they are Libertarians that bothers me (for all you know, I could be one too), but that they are Randroid Libertarians Who Edit An Encyclopedia.
So what is my point? Any time idealogical extremists are in control of something, you better keep a close eye out for bias in the material. How can I rely on something for informational purposes when it is editted by people I wouldn't even trust to mow my lawn? Encyclopedia my ass.
Anyway, that wasn't my real point. It was "Why is the Linux community so full of political extremists?" aka "What about an obscure text-based operating system attracts the nutcases so well?"
Oh yeah, one last thing. What is it with the wild-eyed opposition of intellectual property by the Libertarian camp? It seems like something they should love?
For your information: Wikipedia is run by a bunch of Ayn Randite/US Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist loonies.
I find it is always helpful to know the ideologies of people when dealing with them. It can help you determine their motivations and what to watch out for.
In the case of "Wikipedia" (god I hate the term "wiki" .. almost as retarded as "blog"), they are creating an encyclopedia.
So I'm reading this thing, and some of the articles on it are okay, others are lousy, but at least none of them are as outright awful as "Everything 2"'s are. Then I stumble upon a synopsis of "Atlas Shrugged" .. ok.. but it's going on and on for pages upon pages of descriptions of each chapter, the setting, the characters, etc. and I'm thinking the author of this synopsis is going a bit overboard. Probably just another lone objectivist nutcase, right?
I kept investigating and following various other articles and visiting one of the editors home pages where I couldn't help but notice his big section of pictures of his gun shooting groceries (no joke).
Hey, I like shooting stuff too.. but you know when you see a home page that has pictures of the author's gun collection you are either dealing with a 1) Libertarian wacko or 2) Republican wacko (case in point:Eric Raymond)
I continued investigating, and find that these guys who are the editors of the encyclopedia all seem to work for a company called "Bomis" which also conveniently owns the encylcopedia as well.
Unfortunately, I was just following this investigative trail for my own curiosity... so I didn't bother to keep track of all the evidence I've found to determine the ideologies of the editors.... but trust me, !!!!Libertarian Wacko Alert!!!!
It's not that they are Libertarians that bothers me (for all you know, I could be one too), but that they are Randroid Libertarians Who Edit An Encyclopedia.
So what is my point? Any time idealogical extremists are in control of something, you better keep a close eye out for bias in the material. How can I rely on something for informational purposes when it is editted by people I wouldn't even trust to mow my lawn? Encyclopedia my ass.
Anyway, that wasn't my real point. It was "Why is the Linux community so full of political extremists?" aka "What about an obscure text-based operating system attracts the nutcases so well?"
Oh yeah, one last thing. What is it with the wild-eyed opposition of intellectual property by the Libertarian camp? It seems like something they should love?
There are 17576 possible abbreviations for TLA. Is it really in wikipedia's interest to list all 17,576 possibilities with links? Many of these links amount to nothing but dictionary entries. Kingturtle 03:38 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Google seems a better solution for this. -- Taku
The real value of TLA pages is as disambiguators; most TLAs these days have multiple meanings, more than most encyclopedists are aware of. If Wiktionary can disambiguate Wikipedia links, then great, but I don't think it can do that. Google is often useless for this sort of thing; if a TLA has 50,000 hits, then the less-common usage with "only" 5,000 pages will likely be invisible. Wikipedia disambiguator puts the common and less-common usages on an equal footing. The list of all possible TLAs is a useful index; Wikipedia is accumulating too many poorly-indexed articles because people aren't adding them to appropriate lists, luckily for this we can have a pregenerated list, and thereby save some work. Stan 18:28 31 May 2003 (UTC)
to whoever is responsible: Nice background color on Wiki pages. BF 02:53 31 May 2003 (UTC)
It seems that interlanguage redirects do work, but there is no "redirected from..." message at the top of the page when you access it through the redirect. That makes it a bit difficult to return to the redir page in order to edit it (the interlanguage redirect was really just a test, as I was curious to see whether it'd work.) Case in point: Bild. Perhaps it would be best to simply disable language prefixes in redirect statements, as that was probably never intended to work in the first place. Mkweise 21:12 30 May 2003 (UTC)
I have set up voting for naming convention of Emperors of Japan. If you care, come to Talk:Emperor_of_Japan for voting. Cheers! -- Taku 18:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)
What exactly are Temp pages? It just has a newer and more standardized outlook. It is confusing to have two pages on the same topic. And the notice on top of the page is often overlooked, as a result, many pages with temp pages have extensive history on both the Temp and the main pages. Unpleasant mergings are therefore necessary at some point in time. Why aren't the content of Temp simply on the main page? That'd eliminate all these problems. -- Menchi 14:44 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg. I've just had an absolute nightmare connecting all the Zygote articles together across en, nl, pl, da and es. Please could one of the devs implement this quick hack. It surely can't be more than a line of code or so, and it would be a GODSEND to people trying to further multilingual integration of articles. -- Tarquin 12:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Hi, could someone have a look at Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's basically a list of possible solutions and something of an analysis (from one user's opinions) of which are the best. They're currently adding links to it from lots of Israel/Palastine articles. In my opinion, this article will never cause anything but trouble, it's guaranteed to be hijacked at different times by people who are convinced that their particular 'solution' is best. I don't think we should be in the business of saying 'these ideas wouldn't work but these others would', it doesn't strike me as particularly encyclopaedic. I have to return to my much hated revision now but I couldn't bear to let this article slip by un-noticed. Happy editing -- Ams80 09:11 30 May 2003 (UTC)
I advice in the article when use the Chinese characters for specifying, use simplified Chinese characters instead of traditional Chinese, since the simplified Chinese has become the international standard. Samuel 04:31 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Maybe one day Taiwanese will also be included to give a genuine multicultural feel to the Han language and culture.
Why don't the ''emphasis quotes'' work in the LOOM article? CGS 20:14 29 May 2003 (UTC).
New Topic - Accessing Wikipedia
I'm a new user and new to programming. I want to access articles on a topic (e.g Battle of Hastings)in Wikipedia automatically (using a Java program)for study purposes. I want to transfer the first 100 or so words of each article to a file.
Is this ok ?
Its been suggested I should use a web crawler for this (but they seem to cause problems and I'm not sure I caould specify a particular topic either)
I thought of using database queries, any advice please? --
User:Searcher7
Rainclouds: I see some pages are being linked to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Raincloud - but wouldn't it be better to have this in Wikipedia instead of meta? That way, you could look at "what links here" and see all the pages. Evercat 23:22 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Michael has made edits (I'm pretty sure) under the following ip addresses. He keeps changing his ip, so be on the look out for 152.163.25x.x and similar ip's. Here are some of the ip's I have seen him using, please help revert, delete, fix: 152.163.253.34, 152.163.252.33, 152.163.252.100, 152.163.252.133, 152.163.252.36. Could we temporarily ban this ip range? MB 18:37 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Alright, there seems to be some disagreement as far as what should be done with pages that Michael has made/worked on, but others have worked on as well such as St. Anger. Zoe seems to think we should delete the articles all together, b/c Michael's name is in the history. Now, while I can understand why we don't want Michael's name anywhere on the wiki, it isn't fair to other users for us to delete articles they have contributed to. What should we do about these situations? Would it be acceptable to delete Michael from the history? Zoe seems set on making sure any record of his contributions are removed permanently. While I don't blame her, I don't think it is a solution for everything. MB 00:49 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What is the policy of deleting blank entries such as this one created by Michael Candlebox (album)? I just want to make sure this is something acceptable to do, before I delete it. MB 20:13 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My response to Wikipedia:Wikipedians by religion can be found at Wikipedia:Wikipedians by race. MB 22:00 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What's the consensus on User talk:Viking/ban? Should it be undeleted? -- Dante Alighieri 20:40 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Neutrosophy looks coppied. Do you think it is? LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I've been writing quite a bit (too much, in fact) on Middle-earth recently, and frankly, I'm getting tired of writing "Elendil is a character from
J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world
Middle-earth" at the start of each and every page. Furthermore, many, many of the Middle-earth pages are quite old, and do not have this blurb. I think that the best way to resolve this is to - yes, I am a newbie and I am suggesting that we bring back the subpages.
To use an analogy from Middle-earth, the resurrected subpages would be like
Lúthien redivivus - they would sit quietly in their assigned corner, rather than running loose in the wiki and doing all sorts of crazy things. I think that subpages are appropriate for fictional people and places. I have looked at many of the arguments against subpages, and found that they simply do not apply. It would, of course, be good to replace the slash character (and the concomitant subdirectory backend structure) with something else, such as the proposed "--" character.
;
So feel free to grab this idea by the tail and bash me over the head with it if you feel that it is appropriate, because I am afraid that I am being a stereotypical newbie and failing to see the gaping maw of some mistake or other.
Smack 07:04 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sorry, subpages, no matter which separator is used, are dead and gone, end of discussion. Everything has already been said on Wikipedia:Do not use subpages and people are tired of going through this again. The proper way to organize these pages is to create longer articles:
-- Eloquence 07:16 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Neutrosophy looks copied. Do you think it is? LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Should Vulcanology just be a redirect to volcano? If so, change it. LittleDan
Can anyone translate Roman Odzierzynski into english? Kingturtle 23:19 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I can't seem to move power supply to power supply unit, even though the destination never had anything but a redirect in it. Weird, huh? What I think should be done is for power supply unit and electronic power supply - which essentially cover the same subject - to be merged, and I think the most logical place for this article to reside is at power supply unit. Comments, anyone? Mkweise 20:31 31 May 2003 (UTC)
For some strange reason I got an error message trying to move Ess-tsett to ß, even though the target page didn't exist, but ß clearly is a valid page name as I was able to paste content there manually. Could a sysop please do the move? Having the page at Ess-tsett is inconsistent the way we handle other Latin-1 characters (e.g. Ä, Å.) Mkweise 17:34 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Here I am again with one of my great newbie ideas. This one concerns the short pages list, which I perceive is still down. I think there should be an option in the left-hand nav bar to add a page to the short pages list, interfacing to a little tiny program that edits said list. The list would be of a fixed length (the current 125 looks good), so that any time a new stub is listed, an old listing falls off the end of the list. -- Smack
A few weeks ago, somebody discovered a set of HTML code that makes aligning works in most versions of most browser. But I can't find it. -- Menchi 12:52 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
A question (yet again!) on copyright. I've come across a site which would be a good source for pictures of all kinds but I can't decide if the pics are public domain. Any opinions, please?
Go to
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/~aminet/pix/vehic/
then click on HELP, then on SECTION 8 (Copyright Status and Disclaimer). Thanks
Adrian Pingstone 09:03 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I have attempted to recruit contributors or photographers several times before, but have all failed until now. I just met a Mississippian photographer on a digital graphics DelphiForum, and convinced him to let Wikipedia to use, and modify if necessary, his photos on plants. For an example, see his Naked Lily (Lycoris radiata, L. squamigera).
Where do I announce this exciting (well, for me, anyway) information, so other contributors interested in gardening and botany can use them freely too? -- Menchi 07:37 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The Middle-earth/subpages discussion has been moved to wikipedia talk:do not use subpages.
Next Query: Pictures. I've just uploaded two, 0201peoplelikeus2.JPG and 0201peoplelikeus.jpg, and the former is not showing up on the page People Like Us, while I can't find the latters Image Page... um... -- ntnon 16:04 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
(No idea if I'm doing this right... oh well.....) I created a page for 'America's Best Comics', but due to an irritating Shift key, it's come up as America's best Comics... is it possible to change this at all..? -- ntnon 15:00 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Some CDs have noticeable cultural and/or historically significance, so it may be of interest to list all the tracks on the CD. But, is the complete track listing of every CDs of every non-garage band to be included on Wikipedia?
For example, all CDs of Blink-182 have Wiki-pages, created mostly by one or two anons. But except to the band's zealous fans, none of them is significant. The only Wiki-pages that link to them are just back the Blink-182 page, the members of the band, and a one-phrase mentioning in an "n-year in music".
Are they really encyclopedic (again, except to the fans)? -- Menchi 18:11 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
(was CD Track List)
Some CDs have noticeable cultural and/or historically significance, so it may be of interest to list all the tracks on the CD. But, is the complete track listing of every CDs of every non-garage band to be included on Wikipedia?
For example, all CDs of Blink-182 have Wiki-pages, created mostly by one or two anons. But except to the band's zealous fans, none of them is significant. The only Wiki-pages that link to them are just back the Blink-182 page, the members of the band, and a one-phrase mentioning in an "n-year in music".
Are they really encyclopedic (again, except to the fans)? -- Menchi 18:11 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Disinfopedia has taken wikipedia articles and expanded them usually with a back reference. Is it worthwhile to forward reference from Wikipedia to Disinfopedia? Zardoz 17:57 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
If anyone could take a neutral look at Limehouse, London, England, I would be very grateful. User:Harry Potter added things about spacejackers and sea monsters which I reverted assuming it was rubbish. However HP has reverted back again.. with a not totally pleasant Summary comment. I have had enough of HP and can't look at his contributions with a cool head any more... such has (IMO) the negative impact on Wikipedia by having him around. Can someone see what checks out. Thanks. Pcb21 22:13 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As regards specific points: The problem with the football article was that it stated early on that having two teams playing was an essential characteristic of football - something which is untrue, not merely since Asger Jorn developed Three sided football, but indeed since the Haxey Hood Game, which I have just noticed has been edited out of the football entry! The problem existed more with the way the original text put forward such an erroneous view right at the start of the article, that it needed correcting there.
The entry clearly refered to the Tony Hancock page. The exhibition certainly did take place, with real pictures and sculptures as represented in the film.
Well this is my understanding of the Queen's response to the Rastafarian request for an apology. What's your understanding of her response???
If you check the Nicholas Ferrar page you will find the reference to this. So what level of ignorance am I meant to assume - and why have been singled out to supply verification for the facts I share with you whereas others are not/ (On a more practical level if there was a facility to build Bibliographies as an adjunct to wikipedia and the wictionary, then that would facilitate a place where references could be located - something I would fully support.
Perhaps Wapcaplet does not realise how demeaning their epithet of silliness is! Serious issues are being raised here. The English invasion of North America is a singular event in history, it changed the world. Yet when I start working on this, looking at the involvement of such luminaries as Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Martin Frobisher in alchemy it is because I feel that this is relevant. The fact that the dead hand of bureaucratic historification has so chosen to obfuscate the facts and created a climate when people both from North America and the British Isles find their minds easily befuddled. Yes I have apologised for making mistakes. Mea culpa, it was Martin Frobisher who brought the Black rock back from Greenland. Although Humphrey Gilbert invested in the enterprise, this was not one of his voyages. And I corrected it. But I am not the only person to have made a mistake. OK maybe the assertion about Gilbert's fate at the hands of the sea monster was POV, But the essence of the encounter has been demonstrated. Compared to the range errors in the mass loading of information on places in London, I wonder why I am being singled out for attack. As for the question about the tube, this is a serious point for people with disabilities. I have not had a chance to verify the issue, but as I recall there are restrictions to wheelcahirs and push chairs on the tube which do not exist on the underground, and that they were subject to political action by disabled groups at some time. Now this may not be important from an able-bodied point of view, but if we are to make something useful to people with disabilities, then the issue has to be addressed. As for the remark that I have never said that I am interested in making an encylopedia or dealing with facts: I aim to help wikipedia realise its potential as an encyclopedia, even if that potential overflows from the eighteenth century notion of what an encyclopedia could be. I am particularly interested in the heuristic questions which must arise from such a project. I see the goal of NPOV as laudable, even if it has its own problematic. However, if this is to succeed, then I see that it cannot be constrained by a neocartesian epistemology. Harry Potter
Jiggy and Bonquisha are new users to the Wikipedia. Assuming that the number of articles remains constant at 130,000 - calculate the probability of Jiggy and Bonquisha editing the same page (over the course of a year), given that they each edit 100 articles per day. Pizza Puzzle
Jiggy and Bonquisha make 100 edits a day, to random articles. They can edit the same article more than once. Assume that if Jiggy and Bonquisha edit the same article at least 10 times each - then they will have "interacted"-For extra credit, calculate the liklihood of Jiggy and Bonquisha interacting. Pizza Puzzle
Collaboration is acceptable-thats the whole point of the wiki. Pizza Puzzle
In order for there to be a proper interaction at Foo- both Jiggy and Bonquisha must have edited it at least ten times AND there must be overlapping edits: for example J J J J J J J J J J B B B B B B B B B B is not an interaction; however, J J J J J J J J J B B J B B B B B B B is an interaction. Editing 10 seperate articles one time each is not an interaction. Heh, now its even more complicated. Pizza Puzzle
so probabilty that Bonquisha will edit that particular artilce is 0.245 Theresa knott 14:24 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)Bloody 'ell that's high have I made a mistake?
What I think you have done, is considered that J will edit any article. Then the question is, now that we have article X, what is the probablity of B hitting it after editing 36,500 articles. Since 36,500 is about 25% of the wikipedia, you can expect that any particular article would be edited about 25% of the time. I would hypothesize then that its very likely B and J would both edit the same article at some point. Pizza Puzzle
Indeed, the probability approaches 100%. Over the course of a year, B has edited about 25% of the articles in the wiki. So, for each article J edits, there is a 25% chance it is one that B either has edited, or will later edit over the course of the year. So we have 1-(1-.25)36500 for the probability that they ultimately edit the same article, which is close enough to 100% to exceed the precision of my spreadsheet. For more rigor, we could figure out the distribution of probabilities for the various number of articles B might edit (could be anywhere from 1 article 36500 times or 36500 articles one time each with most of the probability clustered towards the top) and calculate the 1-(1-x)36500 seperately, mutiply, and sum. But, as a practical matter, the answer is the same.
209.150.193.201 19:29 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could someone update Wikipedia:Recent Changes? It seems to be quite out of date (though that may just be a consequence of my having non-default settings that I don't remember setting), and it says nothing about blue arrows. Smack
Several of us (
Amillar,
Stan and
me) are engaged in a discussion at
Talk:List of people regarding the possibility of adding some kind of meta-data to biographical articles, in order to (among other things) ease the maintenance process for exceptionally long (and high-maintenance) lists like
List of people. Suggestions would be welcome, especially from any developers that have ideas about how such a thing could be implemented. Thanks! --
Wapcaplet 00:24 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
How do we register accounts on underdeveloped Wikipedias, like Latin, Estonian, and Simple English? Or do our account names automatically carry over when we log into the English WP? -- Menchi 11:30 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ahah, Menchi, I see you are probably a quite recent user :-)))
The in-development (or waiting for someone to take care of developing them) wikis you are refering to, are still in phase I (the french wiki was still in phase I until the 31 of oct 2002). In phase I, there is only one space, where everything is mixed. Articles, meta pages, users pages...That is one of the fun things to fix once the wiki is updated to phase III. I recommand what we did : prefixing every meta article with a "wikipedia:xxx" so that makes easier to identify articles from meta pages. French wikipedians pages just had similar look that articles pages till we upgraded phase III (that is not until we where phase III that articles about Curry and Anther were created since User:Curry and me occupied the place of an article :-). You might identify yourself with a prefixed user:xxx, but honestly, when the wiki is small, it is of little interest.
I edited once or twice the simple english a good year ago, so I went back there, and created an account for test. Go check it.
http://simple.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?RecentChanges
What you have to do to create an account, is to go to "preferences" (upper right). There, you enter your name, and a password. Confirm. And there you are. Your account is set. Next time you want to connect, you go back to preferences, enter your login and password, and that is it !!!
Oye, I feel "old" today. Memories...
If you need to delete pages or ban users (sigh!), you need to ask Jimbo for a password. There are no tech things to identify admin. Admin are virtual, their power relies in a password, the proper urls for deletion and banning, as well as the code to do so (note that deletions are permanent...*that* was scarry). If you need more info, drop a word on my talk page
User:Anthere
I'm confused. I have just renamed an article called Thrust SSC to its correct name of ThrustSSC by using a Redirect done via the Move command. However, as a result there's a problem. The ThrustSSC article, correctly, shows the redirect from Thrust SSC but, when I do a search on Thrust SSC I get no results at all. Why not! It seems that the Redirect page is not indexed. Should it be? Adrian Pingstone 08:40 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Rainclouds: I see some pages are being linked to meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud - but wouldn't it be better to have this in Wikipedia instead of meta? That way, you could look at "what links here" and see all the pages. Evercat 23:22 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My response to meta:Wikipedians by religion can be found at meta:Wikipedians by race. MB 22:00 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
"The Monkey is one of the 12-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar. It is thought that each animal is associated with certain personality traits. "
This appears for a number of other animals in the 12-year cycle. I removed the reference under Cattle, thinking it irrelevant to the topic, while performing other edits there. Now I see it is elsewhere as well. Should all 12 entries be consistent in their inclusion of this prose? And, if so, should it be removed from those where it exists, or add to those articles that lack it?
Some queries:
2, 3 and 4 are all fair use... i think. CGS 18:05 2 Jun 2003 (UTC).
1. No. There is a half-implemented feature in the software to do this, called "fragments", but development has stalled in the face of opposition from editors.
2. Maybe. I'm against it, but I think I'm in the minority. 3 & 4. Yes, quoting is okay (except if you follow the "no fair use" doctrine -- see
Wikipedia talk:Copyrights and
Wikipedia talk:Image use policy). 5. That's correct. In most countries, it's an (often unenforceable) infringement of copyright to post a copyright image even if a notice is not displayed. The international nature of this project means that the penalties for infringing copyright are uncertain, however I think most of us consider the risk to contributors to be quite low. --
Tim Starling 08:10 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
2. Why not email the band in question, and ask them to grant permission under the GFDL? Use the
wikipedia:boilerplate request for permission.
3. Why not email the author in question, and ask them to... (oh, and cover blurbs will need to be rewritten for neutrality)
4. Quoting full songs is generally not encyclopedically useful, except for short ones like
Happy Birthday.
5. Why not email the photographer in question, and...
Martin
New Topic - Accessing Wikipedia
I'm a new user and new to programming. I want to access articles on a topic (e.g Battle of Hastings)in Wikipedia automatically (using a Java program)for study purposes. I want to transfer the first 100 or so words of each article to a file.
Is this ok ?
Its been suggested I should use a web crawler for this (but they seem to cause problems and I'm not sure I caould specify a particular topic either)
I thought of using database queries, any advice please? --
User:Searcher7
I suggest that all articles about movies and tv shows be scrapped, and instead have the links point to the apropriate page on the Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com Their database is already amazingly thorough, and appears to be around to stay. No point in rewriting copious amounts of information which already exists in a well organized form elsewhere Vroman 23:12 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please see New England Patriots. Is it legal for us to include the logos of sports teams here? They're copyrighted. The NFL's website says "The team names, logos and uniform designs are registered trademarks of the teams indicated". -- Zoe
Well, just because NFL claims it doesn't make it so. I'm no attorney but I don't believe that copyright or trademark law could be construed to prohibit use of trademarks or logos for identification or news purposes, which is what we're doing.
When, for example, a page on en: has been made a redirect to m:, and that with an afterthought on want to make a proper page on en, how can she modify the page for it not to be a redirection any more ? Same question on m: with a page redirected on en: ?
I had been reading the online Wikipedia-L archives for info and for fun, but there seems to be something even easier to browse: the Wikipedia-L NNTP. But I tried it, and there are over 10,000 messages! How many bytes is it? I can't overload my Internet connection again. The last time I did, they phoned and threatened to disconnect me. :-} -- Menchi 18:54 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
An anonymous user is adding a lot of links from computing articles to his favourite computing website. Actually, I don't find this annoying yet, as they seem quite reasonable links. But I thought it worth mentioning, in case it gets out of hand. Here are the contributions. Evercat 02:44 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Opening
Ending
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Opening
(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA (Series Name)
Movies 1. "Movie name" (Translation)
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I uploaded an audio file, why does Wikipedia think it's an image? I never told it that it was an image, and the extension clearly shows it's an audio file. CGS 11:54 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
Opening
(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA (Series Name)
Movies
1. "Movie name" (Translation)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Suggestion: that a third Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page be created. The More bad jokes and other deleted nonsense is getting to be too long. Arno 11:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)
Opening
(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA (Series Name)
Movies
1. "Movie name" (Translation)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)
Opening
(#) "Bold Romanized Official Name"; Special charset (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA "Romanized Series Name"; Special charset (Translation)
Movies
1. "Romanized Movie name"; Special charset (Translation)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)
Opening
(#) "Bold Romanized Official Name"; «Special charset» (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA "Romanized Series Name"; «Special charset» (Translation)
Movies
1. "Romanized Movie name"; «Special charset» (Translation)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
«» - Optional
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
«» - Optional
Sections are optional based on whether they are used.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Also can we move this to a separate page? Emperorbma 06:16 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Does anyone think adding an Opening and Ending Songs section to series and movies sounds like a good idea?
I propose the following format (Revision 3.4.7):
Is there a discussion somewhere of the scope and topic suitabilitiy of the project?
Given no space limitations, what is the most appropriate approach to deep subjects? One could write volumes on many topics. How do we divide up articles that are lengthy and have logical subtopics? Even simple, noncontroversial topics, like cattle, have had volumes written about them. Must all pages be general interest? Where do we stop? Why?
Are articles on topics of narrow, professional interest encouraged? E.g. legal, accounting, medical, or other fields. If not where is the line drawn?
I observe that some of the most active editing has been on topics related to human sexuality. Is there a consensus (or a summary of the positions taken by whatever various schools of thought there may be on the subject) regarding the division between appropriate and inappropriate material for this topic?
I have seen some isolated stylistic recommendations, "the passive voice is to be avoided" (-: and "include all relevant content in one article rather than breaking it up". I can't find a summary of this information, and the style guide is no help. Is there one? Or shall my prose have to suffer such edits at the hands of others for me to understand the framework??
What is the policy on linking? Apparently some user's cant tolerate a link to international community on a page about a leader in the "international community"; whereas, other user think such linking is part of the very core of wikipedia.
I wonder why, if someone doesn't like the links, they don't edit their preferences differently. Pizza Puzzle
Are there any biologists out there who can look at the page respiration. It looks wrong to me. What this page desrcibes is what I would call gas exchange. I would guess that most people querying a search engine on respiration would be looking for cellular respiration, not this. Theresa knott 13:29 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Advice on lists, please. There are lists of country musicians at List of country musicians, country music and Alternative country. There is a great deal of duplication. Is it better just to leave this and cross reference or would it be better to have a comprehensive list at one page with a link to that page? Tiles 00:22 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
When and why did the IP address disappear from the top right of each page when you aren't logged in? -- SGBailey 22:59 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
OK & Thanks (I had done a search for <IP address> but hadn't found that reference. How do I find out what IP address I am / Others are? -- SGBailey 23:29 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'm uneasy about a very wide picture of the Severn Bridge I've put on to
Suspension bridge. Does anything strange happen on an 800 by 600 screen? I can't change my 1024 by 768 screen to check because all my icons pile up in a heap when I return my screen to 800 by 600 and it takes ages to return them all to their previous positions. I'm particularly concerned about what the screen looks like if a Skin has been set in Wikipedia preferences that has a menu list down the left side of the screen.
Thanks
Adrian Pingstone 18:58 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hey folks, what do you do when you find an external link is broken? Do you just delete it? Leave it there in hopes that it will fix itself? Put a note next to it on the page that it is broken? Post something on the talk page? -- Nelson
Question on Tables: I noticed that the figure of speech page, which (like many wikipedia pages) has a lengthy list, has had the list formatted as a table in order to make it into three columns (more attractive than one long list streaming down thep age).
This strikes me as fundamentally wrong, since what it is is not a table but a multi-column list. Is there a wikipedia policy to only use tables for actual tables, or do we translate the html practice of using tables for all formatting?
-- Tom
After doing the painstaking work of adding references to a number of articles, I'm thinking that maybe it doesn't get done enough because it's complicated, especially for books that have been around for a while and have long printing histories. So I was wondering what people think about a policy of routinely creating articles for references, especially for those that are useful for multiple articles? For instance, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships article makes DANFS easy to cite in all the articles about ships, and very often Bede is linked to from Anglo-Saxon articles because his Ecclesiastic History is the primary source for the article's info. In addition, the article can expand on the value and scope of the reference work, or mention a preferred edition. So many articles have nothing that enables readers to go beyond what they've just read... Stan 12:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
New Bad jokes/deleted nonsense page
Suggestion: that a third Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page be created. The More bad jokes and other deleted nonsense is getting to be too long. Arno 11:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Error: Fascism takes several screens of no text between mightiest and best-known. There is no reason why it should, having looked at the actual wiki. Is Mozilla at fault here, or is it Wikipedia? Emperorbma 03:49 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Something's wrong with the database. The only place I can think of where I can reproduce it every single time is my very own talk page. Smack
Thanks to whoever did the update of Special:Wantedpages. One problem: After I created Eddie Cantor, I went to remove him from the list, only to find it couldn't be edited. And Eddie Cantor is still a red link there. -- Infrogmation 23:21 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I found a bug. When moving
Favorite pages of banned users to
Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users and using the move talk page where aplicable option, it moved
Talk:Favorite pages of banned users to [[Talk:Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users]], which is not the correct page.
P.S. I made
Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users so that we could easily track when our favorite vadals have been making changes without cluttering out own watchlists with thier favorite pages (i.e. this works like a group watchlist).
MB 18:59 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My !!! Just to say hi. I just look at the 50 last contributions. And I fear about 40 of them are about fight against vandalism. Horrible. My virtual support. Ant
I uploaded an audio file, why does Wikipedia think it's an image? I never told it that it was an image, and the extension clearly shows it's an audio file. CGS 11:54 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
Can someone take a look at http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=62.60.78.153 ? -- Tarquin
Yeah, yeah, yeah... Whatever it is, what's it doing in the English Wikipedia, not being in English? CGS 11:42 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
Slashdot style morals aside, is it practical to upload an Ogg audio clip at the moment and expect the typical visitor to be able to play it? Can Windows Media Player decompress them? CGS 07:11 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
If we follow a convention of writing 1.2E31 instead we can avoid the problem of having a break in the quanity...1.2 x
1031 Pizza Puzzle
Many war-related pages have a banner attached:
I wonder where its best form and placement is discussed. Does anybody know?<br> -- Ruhrjung 21:03 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
best placed at the top Pizza Puzzle
It has occured to me the the photo on Mooning could be considers as offensive as the photo linked to on Clitoris. Therefore I move that we come to a concensus on photos exposing Intimate parts and follow it with all such articles. Please note, that IMHO to be totally NPOV, we should openly show any images. MB 20:25 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please can an admin undo Michael's page move of Crass to Crass (band), many thanks. quercus robur 17:19 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
For those who are interested, there has been some talk on the mailing list about putting a Content Advisory label on the Wikipedia. I have created Wikipedia:Content advisory so that the entire community can help develop the advisory. No decision has been made about whether we are actually going to put this up, so discussion should be had at Wikipedia_talk:Content advisory. MB 01:38 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could a developer check to see if User:Eddie is loging in using User:Michael's ip range (i.e. 152.163.25x.xxx)? He has been reverting articles of User:Michael's back to user Michael's content in a sneaky way. I just want to make sure it is or isn't User:Michael. If it is him, please ban the account. Thanks. MB 17:38 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My apologies if this suggestion is in the wrong place or has already been addressed, however I think it would be better if wiki links were not case sensitive. Its annoying having to either make a redirect page, or fix a bunch of links due to capitalization discrepancies. Vroman 22:06 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Is there a discussion somewhere of the scope and topic suitabilitiy of the project?
Given no space limitations, what is the most appropriate approach to deep subjects? One could write volumes on many topics. How do we divide up articles that are lengthy and have logical subtopics? Even simple, noncontroversial topics, like cattle, have had volumes written about them. Must all pages be general interest? Where do we stop? Why?
Are articles on topics of narrow, professional interest encouraged? E.g. legal, accounting, medical, or other fields. If not where is the line drawn?
I observe that some of the most active editing has been on topics related to human sexuality. Is there a consensus (or a summary of the positions taken by whatever various schools of thought there may be on the subject) regarding the division between appropriate and inappropriate material for this topic?
I have seen some isolated stylistic recommendations, "the passive voice is to be avoided" (-: and "include all relevant content in one article rather than breaking it up". I can't find a summary of this information, and the style guide is no help. Is there one? Or shall my prose have to suffer such edits at the hands of others for me to understand the framework??
I messed up. I need help. I was trying to make my profile on meta-wiki a redirect to my profile here, and it didn't work. However, it does work for editing; when I try to edit my meta profile, it takes me to the edit screen for my regular profile. I know there's a URL I can type in to get around that, involving the .phtml extension, but I don't know what exactly it is. - Smack 02:37 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I used to be able to view [diff] in my watchlist, now I can't. Also when I have the menu at the right-the edit box overlaps with it. Pizza Puzzle
I've been reading and wanting to participate a bit (probably not very actively) in the WP Mailing lists for several months now. But I never actually did, because I never tried a newsgroup or a mailing list before. I finally forced myself into trying it yesterday, but things didn't go smooth, and I couldn't find help or FAQ on the Wikipedia:Mailing lists.
-- Menchi 22:28 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Help! Help! Help! I'm drowning! :-S I thought it would be a good idea to direct all the precursors and descendants of Univac to that central article, since it seemed to provide a comprehensive overview of how all those companies merged... But now when I read closer, it seems that 'Sperry Corporation' separated from the pack, only to swerwe back into the fray very late in the game. It definitely isn't as clear cut as I Thought it would be. I Really hope I haven't gone overboard; It just seemed that many of those articles were just linking into each and every other of each other, when they really only covered the same historical ground. But I starting to get doubts, did I simplify things too much. Any comments wellcome. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 13:27 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sorry if this problem has been known. Interlanguage links (at the top of the page) from English Wikipedia to Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia don't work. But the links from Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia work just fine. Some people on Chinese Wikipedia experience the same. -- Lorenzarius 12:15 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'd like to propose some minor changes to the navbar at the top of every page. See this page for a mockup; it's a modified version of the Main Page. Comments? -- Merphant 06:58 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Multiple things with the same name. The Kings Highway article refers to one use of that term -- not the oldest or most frequently used. How do you handle other places with the same name? The existing Kings Highway article is about the British road up the East Coast. Another, older road by the same name ran from Florida to Mexico. And there is another one of interest in Jordan. How are these multiple meanings handled so that when someone goes to " Kings Highway" they can find the one they were looking for?
Surely "Orphaned articles" are those to which there are no links. I thought I'd try to link a few in and tried Berkhamstead (number 54 at the time I tried) and I find it is already linked from Hertfordshire. What is going on? -- SGBailey 21:54 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Everytime I attempt to edit the page List of organic gardening and farming topics, which is currently a redirect page, I'm taken to the edit screen for Organic gardening, which is the page it currently redirects to. I want to change List of organic gardening and farming topics to a 'list' page, splitting it from the Organic gardening article, and also cross linking to Organic farming as it will be relevant to both pages. However at present I don't seem able to do this. Can anybody advise? Is it something to do with having moved the page a couple of times? quercus robur 11:51 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Japanese Name Conventions. Does Wikipedia have any? I've seen so many various articles with names listed either way:
It might be a good idea to set something down if there isn't one set in stone already. I personally suggest Western-style, if written in English/Romaji, but Japanese-style if written in Kanji (Unicode character entities).
-- Pipian 05:38 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Japanese) would be the right place.-- Nanshu 22:45 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The moment everyone's been waiting for: Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians has been updated. Some highlights: Mav has overtaken Rambot and the conversion script, and now has almost 40,000 edits to his name. Zoe has moved up from #9 to #6, overtaking AxelBoldt and Koyaanis Qatsi. Lir, our most active troll, has moved from #30 to #10. Patrick jumped from #27 to #18 by clocking up another 3,700 edits. TakuyaMurata is a rising star, jumping from #54 to #23, now on 6,523 edits. Not that it's a competition or anything. :) -- Tim Starling 05:13 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
174 | Michael | 1106 |
Please note that my contributes are also due to that I can rely on those who copyedit my misspellings or gramatical errors. -- Taku 03:57 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'm sure this has been talked to death, and I am sure most people don't really want to hear about it anymore, but it's still an issue. The longer I contribute to the wikipedia, the more I dislike the current naming conventions. The current conventions obviously have thier down fall. For instance in the case of inheritence. Currently, we have an article called Inheritance (object-oriented programming). There is a debate going on right now, b/c some people think people will get cunfused between Inheritance (computer science) and Inheritence (object-oriented programming). I think people are hesitent to suggest Inheritence (computer science) (object-oriented programming) becuase this just sounds bad. I have been thinking about a solution to this problem, of seprating single articles into seperate article (for space reasons). I have a possible solution. How about using a slash (to denote that it is a sub-article) like this: Inheritance (computer science)/object-oriented programming? Would this be acceptable? Is there already a rule regarding this type of thing? The problem seems to be that this is being treated as a disambiguation problem, but the standard rules of disabiguation can not be applied here. Could we come up with (if it doesn't already exist) a standard naming practice for sub-topics? If this standard doesn't already exist, can we agree on using /'s? MB 15:04 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Can I get a few opinions on whether it's OK to remove any mention of neutrosophy and related stuff from serious articles? This stuff has been listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and the general concensus seems to be it's very obscure, but now MyRedDice opposes deletion, the articles may end up being kept. But nevertheless, I don't think serious pages should discuss it, until it becomes more widely accepted. Evercat 13:32 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What is the policy on linking? Apparently some user's (like User: Dan Keshet and User: Evercat) cant tolerate a link to international community on a page about a leader in the "international community" nor a link to governor- general about a man who was a governor-general; whereas, other user think such linking is part of the very core of wikipedia.
I wonder why, if someone doesn't like the links, they don't edit their preferences differently. Pizza Puzzle
Thats really not the point Brion, this isnt a case of their improving my link, they are simply deleting it. A link to governor is better than no link at all, when the topic is a "military" governor.
Pizza Puzzle
Actually, I just reverted to the last version that didn't have silly links to pressure and absolute, for example. I'll re-instate the link to international community. (we're talking about Abu Mazen, btw.) Evercat 20:53 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Any why not link to pressure, pressure is just as much of a concept in politics as it is in physics. And why not link to dialogue, if we have an article on dialogue, and a world leader states that dialogue is so important that its the only quote we have from him, it doesnt seem "silly" to link to dialogue. Pizza Puzzle
Or how about the deletion of my link to Muslim, at the page on Jinnah. Not linking to Muslim there is sort of like not linking to Christianity when one has an article on Aquinas. I believe the most recent biography on Jinnah refers to him as one of the 3 most influential Muslims in history; yet, my link is "excessive". Pizza Puzzle
A link to Muslim still exists at that page ( Muhammed Ali Jinnah). But some of your other links there were a bit excessive. I don't really think that when you say someone died, this actually requires a link to death, for example. Evercat 21:05 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
There is a Wikipedia:Make Links Relevant debate already. But the discussions there had been inconclusive, and eventually faded out several months ago. -- Menchi 21:42 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Linking to death would be appropriate in an article about the existence of the soul, or life after death, since in that case you would want to know as much as possible about the terms being discussed. Linking to death when talking about somebody who just happened to die is not relevant. -- Nelson 15:00 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Is there a reason why Wikipedia is very slow today? Or is this something I have to get used to? It is a little frustrating when it takes so long to see the edit screen that I forget what I was going to edit :) Kingturtle 18:26 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could a developer please check out the discussion at Wikipedia talk:How to edit a page? In particular, a couple of us are interested in having the default ALT text for images on Wikipedia to be changed to the empty string, "", rather than the filename, so that when contributors omit the ALT text, we aren't left with a filename which is potentially very confusing to users with speech readers, text-only browsers, etc. Refer also to the new article Wikipedia:Alternate text for images for some details on this issue. Thanks! -- Wapcaplet 16:30 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Type in great wall of china and click GO and you are taken to Talk:Great Wall of China. Type in baseball hall of fame and click GO and you are taken to Talk:Baseball Hall of Fame. This is bad. Obviously, users should be taken to Great Wall of China and Baseball Hall of Fame respectively. How can this be fixed? Kingturtle 23:21 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
So far I couldn't get any e-mails from Wikipedia:Mailing lists, even though NNTP shows that there are new ones. I think it's because of Hotmail's blocking system, which is ineffectively selective. Anyway, Hotmail has a solution, you enter the address or something:
So what should I enter? I doesn't accept the domain @wikipedia.org.
-- Menchi 00:38 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My watch list is growing and growing (as is yours, probably ;-). I just thought, it could sometimes be of help, if the links on a page that are already on my watch list, would show up in a different color. Would this make sense / be helpful / did someone already think of something like that? Thanks, Fantasy 06:44 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Regarding musician entries: if there is a discography listed, should we make separate pages for each album comprised of a track listing? Mick 19:56 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I've been reading and wanting to participate a bit (probably not very actively) in the WP Mailing lists for several months now. But I never actually did, because I never tried a newsgroup or a mailing list before. I finally forced myself into trying it yesterday, but things didn't go smooth, and I couldn't find help or FAQ on the Wikipedia:Mailing lists.
-- Menchi 22:28 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
1. I've found posting messages via GMANE (i.e. NNTP) to be a bit dicey. The one thing you really have to know is that GMANE will send an "autoauthorizer" message to the "from" address, which you have to reply to before the post will be forwarded to the list. You also have to use a "from" address which is subscribed to the mailing list, otherwise it will be delayed for a spam-check.
2. To reply to a hotmail message, you click on the message and then the "reply" button. If there's too many messages and the one you want to reply to is off the page, there are "previous" and "next" links to click on, at the bottom of the list. I would strongly recommend setting up folders for each of the mailing lists, and creating filters to send the posts to the correct folder. Note that wikien-l + wikitech-l will fill up your 2 MB limit in less than a week, so you have to regularly clean up.
-- Tim Starling 01:35 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hm. Rather than answering the above question, I'd like to add a new one. I just did a Google search on a lesser known contemporary British playwright called Winsome Pinnock. What I got among the first ten hits was http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Winsome_Pinnock&action=edit, which directly links to the edit page of a non-existing article. Could that sort of thing be avoided? Apparent vandalism in the form of "What the heck ..." etc. is probably due to people completely unfamiliar with wikis being suddenly faced with an edit page. -- KF 18:34 12 Jun 2003 (UTC) Ähnliche Seiten
Question: Who actually "runs" Wikipedia? Who provides the server space. Just curious... it seems a little odd to write/edit articles for an organization you know very little about.
- Alex S
Some thoughts (I hope my questions are not academic):
Kpjas 15:19 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
"Ancient pages" has only been added a few days ago and we'll have to see how it holds up for the purpose of reviewing past articles. An article will only disappear from that list if it has been edited -- but what if it needs no editing? The list may eventually show many very old, very good articles at which point it might stop being useful. Or we might work through past articles until we get to the User:Rambot imported US census data, and people would stop working through the list at that point because they have nothing to add to articles about 2000 people towns. -- Eloquence 16:18 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I used to be able to view [diff] in my watchlist, now I can't because I selected "enhanced recent changes" Why cant I have both? Also when I have the menu at the right-the edit box overlaps with it. Pizza Puzzle
In some articles with chinese wikipedia link, this link work in preview mode, but don't in read mode. ex: Provinces of China, the link is the good one in edit mode too ... 62.212.110.113 11:54 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
When I look at "My Contributions" some are followed by the reference "(top)" What does this mean? Thanks! Mkrose
This an S.O.S. to anybody who can help me, and especially to Paul A, who gave me the welcome. I have been smart enough to learn how to use Wikipedia's search engine, edit and create pages, enable links, create this account yesterday night, and successfully login "my" page and this one; but I WAS NOT clever enough to know how to login the rest. Despite my name, my "power" is limited, I'm just a warlock, not a magician... If you can lend me a hand, please write me a message; if I cannot login successfully having been registered I interfere with other users and with Wikipedia too. I'd like to stay, so I'll be grateful for any help.-- The Warlock June 12, 2003, 5:28 (GMT)
Do you have cookies blocked or disabled? Because if you do, the software will say "you are now logged in", but it will instantly forget who you are as soon as you go to another page. See HTTP cookie. -- Tim Starling 07:26 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Click here for a cookie test and tell us what it tells you. -- Tim Starling 11:03 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hey folks, sorry about dominating the Village Pump, but I don't know where to put this. There's a problem with numbering that I've noticed in many pages, most recently Paul_Simon_(album), where because the author has put spaces between paragraphs, the numbered list starts over again from one. There is no good way to fix this, because removing the space messes up the formatting, and if you were to manually input the numbers, this would make maintenance more annoying. This is one of those cases where I think HTML-like tags would serve us better, because within the <OL></OL> tags, you can put <br>'s without making the ordered list start over again. However, short of forcing Wikipedians to learn HTML, what can be done for pages like this? Change the code so that you must have two spaces in order to have #-numbered lists start over? That seems like the best solution to me, but I don't know how much work that would take, and how many current articles that would screw up. -- Nelson 04:13 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could a developer please update Special:Shortpages? The last update was made on May 13. -- mav
Hey folks, two questions:
-- Nelson 15:00 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I just realized that it might be possible that "existance" might be a British spelling of existence. Does anybody know if that is the case? Or is "existance" recognized as a misspelling on both sides of the Atlantic? -- Nelson 16:18 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Oh dear, I seem to have created some weird server bug while playing around with the redirect page from " existance" to existence. I put an extra "#" before the #REDIRECT, in order to see whether a search would turn up any more instances of "existance", I thought the redirect page might be messing up my search. Now, if I search for "existance", I get that demented non-working redirect page, and no matter how many times I edit it back to a normal redirect page and save it, when I search for "existance" I get the demented page again. Interestingly enough, when I actually type in the URL for the existance page, it redirects properly, and when I follow the "redirected from" link at the top of existence, it shows a normal redirect page. Help? -- Nelson 19:12 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ah, apparently I was hitting "Go", because I was simply hitting Enter instead of clicking the mouse, and it seems that defaults to "Go". Go is still bringing me to the demented page. -- Nelson 21:17 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ah, thanks guys, I am using Mozilla, and shift+reload fixed the problem. -- Nelson 20:31 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The periodic lag is annoying. What are the costs of running the wiki and how much would it cost to improve performance? Pizza Puzzle
There are two dedicated servers, a DB server and a page server, donated by Bomis, together with colo and bandwidth.
The DB server is running at a fairly smooth average 25% load on both CPUs, the page server is bouncing between < 10% load and almost saturating its single CPU. So it looks like the problems is either the page-server CPU, or disk IO fragmentation/contention on the DB (unlikely, it's got plenty of RAM).
Here are some possible routes to making things go faster:
The wikitech-l mailing list is a good place to discuss these things.
The Anome 14:04 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
If 100 wiki users donated $10 im sure we could buy an extra CPU and RAM. Pizza Puzzle
But is there any need to wait for a foundation to be formalized? Why not just create a PayPal account? 209.56.25.161
Im using a computer which doesn't allow a large screen size. Can I either get a no-frames option or have the menu placed on the right of the screen? (or the top) Pizza Puzzle
What is NASA's copyright policy? Text on Bell X-1 is copied word for word from [4]. Is that okay with NASA? Kingturtle 11:17 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Where did all the articles on U.S. municipalities come from? Did a bunch of people just copy and paste a Census database into the 'pedia? - Smack
User:Wrongbros, made a contribution to List of record labels and it was reverted. Is this Michael? If not, why was it reverted? MB 19:42 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hello! I try to color the statement of math theorems or conjectures in order to improve readability. However, I have discovered that the image generated by <math>-tag is not transparent and so the effect turns out to be ugly: see Riemann hypothesis. Could anyone give me a helping hand? -- Wshun
A friend of mine told me today that the Wikipedia "doesn't work" because he and a friend of his created a fake religion called Fieldism and it was still there. Needless to say, I deleted it, but this concerns me a bit. I think we should create a way for users to verify articles. To verify articles, you must have been around for a certain amount of time, or made at least x contributions, or something like that. And you shouldn't be able to verify articles you created. what do you guys think? Could someone post this to the mailing list? MB
-- Taku 20:26 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I've always been quite impressed with the security of Wikipedia. I was talking with someone last night about Wikipedia and he told me that the security was lapse, because he had been able to vandalise one of the pages, tea bag. I went to see what he had done, but it had already been reverted (less than 60 seconds). I told him that was our security. CGS 09:05 14 Jun 2003 (UTC).
One suggestion I have is simply to cite sources of information. Sometimes people just use sources in their own heads and that is fine, but in other situations they really should cite the source of the information. I've done a lot of work with geographical locations (cities, states, and counties) and citing them using Geographic references for one example. It helps critics of the articles to know that the information can be verified by checking the sources. Sometimes this requires someone to work slower and doing the boring part of adding citations even though it is not as fun as writing the article itself. -- Ram-Man
Thanks to all of you who helped me in solving my problem, it's fixed now. The Warlock.-- June 13, 2003, 6:37 (GMT)
Hey, I'm a newbie here. I just wanted to mention that there will probably a flood of newbies, as this site was just featured on the show The Screen Savers on Tech TV in the USA. I was really curious, and decided to check it out, and that's how I found out. :) ManicGypsy
I have re-protected Martha Stewart for now. Evercat 17:46 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Maybe it's just me, but the image on the Sylvia Saint page sure looks doctored. Can anyone confirm that the bomis.com logo really ought to be present in that image, or has it been Photoshopped in? -- Dante Alighieri 00:25 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Can some kind soul show me how to put a sequence of four images down the right hand side of the page so that they form one unit and no text can sneak in between them. I'm referring to
Sistine Chapel that I illustrated. I reckon the page would look nicer if I had all four pics together and there would be no problems with pics overlapping in different browsers. Thanks.
Adrian Pingstone 09:01 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
<table align=right> <tr><td> <div style="float:right;"> [[image:___Name___ | __Description_]] <br> <small>''More detailed explanation<br> [[media:___Name___ | Larger version]]''</small> <br><br> [[image:___Name2___ | __Description_]] <br> <small>''More detailed explanation<br> [[media:___Name2___ | Larger version]]''</small> <br><br> [[image:___Name3___ | __Description_]] <br> <small>''More detailed explanation<br> [[media:___Name3___ | Larger version]]''</small> <br><br> [[image:___Name4___ | __Description_]] <br> <small>''More detailed explanation<br> [[media:___Name4___ | Larger version]]''</small> </div> </td></tr> </table>
-- Menchi 09:08 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Would someone please rescue the poor former Prime Minister of Canada. John George Diefenbaker.
See the archive for older moved discussion links.
Can someone who knows how make the map on Kurds smaller? thanks Kingturtle 06:02 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I have a query about searching for acronyms. Typing acronyms into the Find box with periods produces an error message even when the page title includes periods (e.g., James Bond's nemesis S.P.E.C.T.R.E.) - but typing them in without periods does not find the page. Am I doing something wrong? - DavidWBrooks 19:53 18 Jun 2003 (UTC)
From Talk:Anti-Zionism:
Oh, lots of arguments get like this. I would let it drop. Evercat 13:30 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
That is RK's normal style of discussion. If you continue to discuss with him, he will sooner or later call you a vandal and a troll. It is always the same, and he will never learn to change his behaviour. So, follow Evercat's advice, and stop discussing with RK. It is absolutely useless. -- Cordyph 13:37 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
There could be a strict policy of banning users for rudeness. One ad hominem remark and poof, you're gone. Would get rid of a lot of geeky young males in a hurry, plus make it a much more enjoyable place. I am serious about this BTW - it's acceptable to call an act of editing "stupid", but wrong to characterize the whole person as such. Witness the "ignoramus" comment by RK quoted just below, and the well-meaning but misguided tolerance of this by Evercat. Stan 14:27 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could someone update the snapshot of the lonely pages list - It is May 13, over a month old (and incomplete then). -- SGBailey 2003-06-19
HI! Does anybody know about copyrights in France? The question i easy: Can I post on Internet images printed in France in 1912? - User:Dixi
They differ from USA to Europe, there may be some specifics... Since I want to publish images from 1912 Larousse, I need to know exactly, in order not to put Wikipedia on any risk...
I think I can help you: [5]. France is interesting in that copyright expiry was suspended for a few years during the world wars, so it can be up to life+84 years. I have a feeling that if the copyright is held by a corporation, or if there is no one single author, or something like that, then it's just 70 years from the date of publication, plus war time. I know this because we discussed it here and here. -- Tim Starling 10:21 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Would using TechTVs logo be a copyright violation? Would it be covered by the fair use doctrine? ilyanep 00:10 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
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I wonder if before a disambiguation page is created, it might not be best to think it out in terms of true need and potential effects. Someone today created a disambiguation page for PGA. This puts a huge onus on my 50 years of work ALREADY done on "years in sport" where, now, in order for a user to click on my PGA listing, they are forced to go through a disambiguation page. Is not the computer terminology something better identified to avoid disambiguation? It is an obscure term for all but those who have a lot of computer knowledge. I hate to complain, but I have done a ton of work and I really do not want to go back and open 50 pages just to fix the PGA links in sports. Jacques Delson 17:20 24 May 2003 (UTC)
Martin? Who are you? I put the question here to be resolved. If you have a answer please give it. Either leave things as is and I will stop my work because I have no intention of wasting vast amounts of my time discussing something with someone who created the page without a great deal of thought. It makes no difference to me. If making a contributors work harder is the goal then so be it but I'm not up to that kind of task. Whoever has the authority, please get rid of a disambiguation page without much real use or find a resolution 64.228.30.130 18:02 24 May 2003 (UTC)
proper nouns in disambiguation parenthesis
Do the proper nouns in disambiguation parenthesis have to be uncapitalized? (e.g. Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (chinese) Such ungrammaticality pokes people in the pupils until coconut-white stuff comes out. -- Menchi 14:55 24 May 2003 (UTC)
I just want to say sorry for cluttering Recent changes page with a bunch of uploads. -- Taku 19:19 27 May 2003 (UTC)
Fortunately the server still seems working. Each file is actually really small, just a kilobyte. But unfortunately there is no way to hide uploads. -- Taku
I would like to create a bot that gets info from various U.S. Department of State websites, and makes articles. I have no experience making this type of program, could someone point me in the direction as to what I need to learn, or a where to start? MB 20:26 27 May 2003 (UTC)
Automated content is generally disliked here: the value of Wikipedia comes from the fact that human beings interested in each subject have written and edited the articles. If you really feel that you must auto-create, you can test the bot on my server first; mail me and I'll give you all the info. LDC
I was going to Bartleby.com. They have a ton of books online. While browsing their copy of the CIA World Factbook, they had this following info:
TITLE:
The World Factbook.
PUBLISHED: Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002.
ISBN: 1-58734-113-1.
CITATION: The World Factbook. Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002; Bartleby.com, 2002.
www.bartleby.com/151/. [Date of Printout].
ONLINE ED.: Published April 2003 by
Bartleby.com; © Copyright
Bartleby.com, Inc. (
Terms of Use).
As you see below, it appears that Bartleby.com is claiming a copyright on the Factbook! Does this overide the CIA's declaration that the World Factbook is public domain?
-- hoshie
I'm writing articles for all of the major poems of John Keats (this way I can revise for my A levels, and wiki at the same time!) If a poem is short, and out of copyright, could I put the whole text into the article? Or should I leave that for an external link? CGS 10:16 29 May 2003 (UTC).
Deletion of talkpages
I am wondering if I should delete an article's talk page when I delete an article. Or should I rather delete just the article and keep the talk page intact? How things are handled in English wikipedia? (I'm an admin for Japanese wikipedia) Tomos 09:13 29 May 2003 (UTC)
Image use
I applied to the Turnbull Library for permission to use images from their collection and gave them details of wikipedia. This was the reply:
Requirements Please note that the Library has the following special requirements for the reproduction of its images on websites.
Required text As well as including the caption details (provided on Timeframes), you must use the following text alongside the image: "Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, must be obtained before any re-use of this image".
No Alteration of Images In order to maintain the integrity of the Library's images, no manipulation of the image is allowed, for example, outlining, clear cutting, overlapping, distortion (alteration of the proportions of an image), cropping, or, duatone washes and other colouring. Sepia toning may be allowed (specific permission must be requested). Other writing, such as titles or underlying text, should not intrude on the images.
Best wishes with your website and thank you for your interest in the Alexander Turnbull Library Collection
Are these requirements acceptable? Tiles 00:54 29 May 2003 (UTC)
There's a very odd edit war raging on Alice in Chains. 152.163.252.167 puts in a line "On April 19, 2002, lead singer Layne Staley was found dead in his home.", and then User:Dante Alighieri takes it out again, repeated about a million times. Can anyone shed any light? Dante Alighieri is an upstanding Wikipedian, right? CGS 22:47 28 May 2003 (UTC).
Yeah, but you should still know better than to get into a simple edit war loop. I cleaned up those articles and put the info in the right place (after verifying it). If a piece of text entered by a banned user seems appropriate, but you don't have the time or ability to verify it easily, then reverting is fine. But if it is easily verified and useful, the article comes first. If that means an idiot like like Michael gets to "win" an edit war, sobeit. LDC
What is the etiquette in adding to articles that are listed as originally published in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica ? Beans
Simple: rewrite them in modern English, and update the facts. No attribution or other mention of EB is necessary. Many, if not most, of the subjects are already covered here. LDC
I have my preferences set to not underline links, but when looking at the following link media:Clitoris.jpg on the Clitoris page, it is underlined. Is this a bug or intentional? MB 14:03 27 May 2003
Apologies in advance if this has been asked and answered. I've had trouble creating an external link, and I think its due to the relatively new or uncommon practice of a dash included within the URL. See the lsat external link at the bottom of the Hamilton County, Ohio article. Any suggestions, or have I just done something stupid again? ;-). - Lou I 20:22 26 May 2003 (UTC)
I have noticed two very strange out-of-character edits from User:Andre Engels on the general lines of "I HATE THIS ... WORLD, and I hate myself too" -- either someone has cracked Andre's password, or he's having a really bad time... does anyone know how Andre is doing? The Anome 14:37 26 May 2003 (UTC)
Help! Please go to Panavia Tornado and click where it says "Click HERE for a picture of a Tornado GR-4". The picture comes up OK but there is then no way the reader can get to the copyright information except by noting its file name, going to the Image List and clicking on Descr. Clumsy! Should I therefore make the pic a proper Wikipedia page so that the pic can then be clicked on and the description will come up as normal? Thanks Adrian Pingstone 17:37 29 May 2003 (UTC)
For your information: Wikipedia is run by a bunch of Ayn Randite/US Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist loonies.
I find it is always helpful to know the ideologies of people when dealing with them. It can help you determine their motivations and what to watch out for.
In the case of "Wikipedia" (god I hate the term "wiki" .. almost as retarded as "blog"), they are creating an encyclopedia.
So I'm reading this thing, and some of the articles on it are okay, others are lousy, but at least none of them are as outright awful as "Everything 2"'s are. Then I stumble upon a synopsis of "Atlas Shrugged" .. ok.. but it's going on and on for pages upon pages of descriptions of each chapter, the setting, the characters, etc. and I'm thinking the author of this synopsis is going a bit overboard. Probably just another lone objectivist nutcase, right?
I kept investigating and following various other articles and visiting one of the editors home pages where I couldn't help but notice his big section of pictures of his gun shooting groceries (no joke).
Hey, I like shooting stuff too.. but you know when you see a home page that has pictures of the author's gun collection you are either dealing with a 1) Libertarian wacko or 2) Republican wacko (case in point:Eric Raymond)
I continued investigating, and find that these guys who are the editors of the encyclopedia all seem to work for a company called "Bomis" which also conveniently owns the encylcopedia as well.
Unfortunately, I was just following this investigative trail for my own curiosity... so I didn't bother to keep track of all the evidence I've found to determine the ideologies of the editors.... but trust me, !!!!Libertarian Wacko Alert!!!!
It's not that they are Libertarians that bothers me (for all you know, I could be one too), but that they are Randroid Libertarians Who Edit An Encyclopedia.
So what is my point? Any time idealogical extremists are in control of something, you better keep a close eye out for bias in the material. How can I rely on something for informational purposes when it is editted by people I wouldn't even trust to mow my lawn? Encyclopedia my ass.
Anyway, that wasn't my real point. It was "Why is the Linux community so full of political extremists?" aka "What about an obscure text-based operating system attracts the nutcases so well?"
Oh yeah, one last thing. What is it with the wild-eyed opposition of intellectual property by the Libertarian camp? It seems like something they should love?
For your information: Wikipedia is run by a bunch of Ayn Randite/US Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist loonies.
I find it is always helpful to know the ideologies of people when dealing with them. It can help you determine their motivations and what to watch out for.
In the case of "Wikipedia" (god I hate the term "wiki" .. almost as retarded as "blog"), they are creating an encyclopedia.
So I'm reading this thing, and some of the articles on it are okay, others are lousy, but at least none of them are as outright awful as "Everything 2"'s are. Then I stumble upon a synopsis of "Atlas Shrugged" .. ok.. but it's going on and on for pages upon pages of descriptions of each chapter, the setting, the characters, etc. and I'm thinking the author of this synopsis is going a bit overboard. Probably just another lone objectivist nutcase, right?
I kept investigating and following various other articles and visiting one of the editors home pages where I couldn't help but notice his big section of pictures of his gun shooting groceries (no joke).
Hey, I like shooting stuff too.. but you know when you see a home page that has pictures of the author's gun collection you are either dealing with a 1) Libertarian wacko or 2) Republican wacko (case in point:Eric Raymond)
I continued investigating, and find that these guys who are the editors of the encyclopedia all seem to work for a company called "Bomis" which also conveniently owns the encylcopedia as well.
Unfortunately, I was just following this investigative trail for my own curiosity... so I didn't bother to keep track of all the evidence I've found to determine the ideologies of the editors.... but trust me, !!!!Libertarian Wacko Alert!!!!
It's not that they are Libertarians that bothers me (for all you know, I could be one too), but that they are Randroid Libertarians Who Edit An Encyclopedia.
So what is my point? Any time idealogical extremists are in control of something, you better keep a close eye out for bias in the material. How can I rely on something for informational purposes when it is editted by people I wouldn't even trust to mow my lawn? Encyclopedia my ass.
Anyway, that wasn't my real point. It was "Why is the Linux community so full of political extremists?" aka "What about an obscure text-based operating system attracts the nutcases so well?"
Oh yeah, one last thing. What is it with the wild-eyed opposition of intellectual property by the Libertarian camp? It seems like something they should love?
There are 17576 possible abbreviations for TLA. Is it really in wikipedia's interest to list all 17,576 possibilities with links? Many of these links amount to nothing but dictionary entries. Kingturtle 03:38 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Google seems a better solution for this. -- Taku
The real value of TLA pages is as disambiguators; most TLAs these days have multiple meanings, more than most encyclopedists are aware of. If Wiktionary can disambiguate Wikipedia links, then great, but I don't think it can do that. Google is often useless for this sort of thing; if a TLA has 50,000 hits, then the less-common usage with "only" 5,000 pages will likely be invisible. Wikipedia disambiguator puts the common and less-common usages on an equal footing. The list of all possible TLAs is a useful index; Wikipedia is accumulating too many poorly-indexed articles because people aren't adding them to appropriate lists, luckily for this we can have a pregenerated list, and thereby save some work. Stan 18:28 31 May 2003 (UTC)
to whoever is responsible: Nice background color on Wiki pages. BF 02:53 31 May 2003 (UTC)
It seems that interlanguage redirects do work, but there is no "redirected from..." message at the top of the page when you access it through the redirect. That makes it a bit difficult to return to the redir page in order to edit it (the interlanguage redirect was really just a test, as I was curious to see whether it'd work.) Case in point: Bild. Perhaps it would be best to simply disable language prefixes in redirect statements, as that was probably never intended to work in the first place. Mkweise 21:12 30 May 2003 (UTC)
I have set up voting for naming convention of Emperors of Japan. If you care, come to Talk:Emperor_of_Japan for voting. Cheers! -- Taku 18:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)
What exactly are Temp pages? It just has a newer and more standardized outlook. It is confusing to have two pages on the same topic. And the notice on top of the page is often overlooked, as a result, many pages with temp pages have extensive history on both the Temp and the main pages. Unpleasant mergings are therefore necessary at some point in time. Why aren't the content of Temp simply on the main page? That'd eliminate all these problems. -- Menchi 14:44 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg. I've just had an absolute nightmare connecting all the Zygote articles together across en, nl, pl, da and es. Please could one of the devs implement this quick hack. It surely can't be more than a line of code or so, and it would be a GODSEND to people trying to further multilingual integration of articles. -- Tarquin 12:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Hi, could someone have a look at Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's basically a list of possible solutions and something of an analysis (from one user's opinions) of which are the best. They're currently adding links to it from lots of Israel/Palastine articles. In my opinion, this article will never cause anything but trouble, it's guaranteed to be hijacked at different times by people who are convinced that their particular 'solution' is best. I don't think we should be in the business of saying 'these ideas wouldn't work but these others would', it doesn't strike me as particularly encyclopaedic. I have to return to my much hated revision now but I couldn't bear to let this article slip by un-noticed. Happy editing -- Ams80 09:11 30 May 2003 (UTC)
I advice in the article when use the Chinese characters for specifying, use simplified Chinese characters instead of traditional Chinese, since the simplified Chinese has become the international standard. Samuel 04:31 30 May 2003 (UTC)
Maybe one day Taiwanese will also be included to give a genuine multicultural feel to the Han language and culture.
Why don't the ''emphasis quotes'' work in the LOOM article? CGS 20:14 29 May 2003 (UTC).
New Topic - Accessing Wikipedia
I'm a new user and new to programming. I want to access articles on a topic (e.g Battle of Hastings)in Wikipedia automatically (using a Java program)for study purposes. I want to transfer the first 100 or so words of each article to a file.
Is this ok ?
Its been suggested I should use a web crawler for this (but they seem to cause problems and I'm not sure I caould specify a particular topic either)
I thought of using database queries, any advice please? --
User:Searcher7
Rainclouds: I see some pages are being linked to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Raincloud - but wouldn't it be better to have this in Wikipedia instead of meta? That way, you could look at "what links here" and see all the pages. Evercat 23:22 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Michael has made edits (I'm pretty sure) under the following ip addresses. He keeps changing his ip, so be on the look out for 152.163.25x.x and similar ip's. Here are some of the ip's I have seen him using, please help revert, delete, fix: 152.163.253.34, 152.163.252.33, 152.163.252.100, 152.163.252.133, 152.163.252.36. Could we temporarily ban this ip range? MB 18:37 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Alright, there seems to be some disagreement as far as what should be done with pages that Michael has made/worked on, but others have worked on as well such as St. Anger. Zoe seems to think we should delete the articles all together, b/c Michael's name is in the history. Now, while I can understand why we don't want Michael's name anywhere on the wiki, it isn't fair to other users for us to delete articles they have contributed to. What should we do about these situations? Would it be acceptable to delete Michael from the history? Zoe seems set on making sure any record of his contributions are removed permanently. While I don't blame her, I don't think it is a solution for everything. MB 00:49 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What is the policy of deleting blank entries such as this one created by Michael Candlebox (album)? I just want to make sure this is something acceptable to do, before I delete it. MB 20:13 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My response to Wikipedia:Wikipedians by religion can be found at Wikipedia:Wikipedians by race. MB 22:00 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What's the consensus on User talk:Viking/ban? Should it be undeleted? -- Dante Alighieri 20:40 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Neutrosophy looks coppied. Do you think it is? LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I've been writing quite a bit (too much, in fact) on Middle-earth recently, and frankly, I'm getting tired of writing "Elendil is a character from
J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world
Middle-earth" at the start of each and every page. Furthermore, many, many of the Middle-earth pages are quite old, and do not have this blurb. I think that the best way to resolve this is to - yes, I am a newbie and I am suggesting that we bring back the subpages.
To use an analogy from Middle-earth, the resurrected subpages would be like
Lúthien redivivus - they would sit quietly in their assigned corner, rather than running loose in the wiki and doing all sorts of crazy things. I think that subpages are appropriate for fictional people and places. I have looked at many of the arguments against subpages, and found that they simply do not apply. It would, of course, be good to replace the slash character (and the concomitant subdirectory backend structure) with something else, such as the proposed "--" character.
;
So feel free to grab this idea by the tail and bash me over the head with it if you feel that it is appropriate, because I am afraid that I am being a stereotypical newbie and failing to see the gaping maw of some mistake or other.
Smack 07:04 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sorry, subpages, no matter which separator is used, are dead and gone, end of discussion. Everything has already been said on Wikipedia:Do not use subpages and people are tired of going through this again. The proper way to organize these pages is to create longer articles:
-- Eloquence 07:16 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Neutrosophy looks copied. Do you think it is? LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Should Vulcanology just be a redirect to volcano? If so, change it. LittleDan
Can anyone translate Roman Odzierzynski into english? Kingturtle 23:19 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I can't seem to move power supply to power supply unit, even though the destination never had anything but a redirect in it. Weird, huh? What I think should be done is for power supply unit and electronic power supply - which essentially cover the same subject - to be merged, and I think the most logical place for this article to reside is at power supply unit. Comments, anyone? Mkweise 20:31 31 May 2003 (UTC)
For some strange reason I got an error message trying to move Ess-tsett to ß, even though the target page didn't exist, but ß clearly is a valid page name as I was able to paste content there manually. Could a sysop please do the move? Having the page at Ess-tsett is inconsistent the way we handle other Latin-1 characters (e.g. Ä, Å.) Mkweise 17:34 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Here I am again with one of my great newbie ideas. This one concerns the short pages list, which I perceive is still down. I think there should be an option in the left-hand nav bar to add a page to the short pages list, interfacing to a little tiny program that edits said list. The list would be of a fixed length (the current 125 looks good), so that any time a new stub is listed, an old listing falls off the end of the list. -- Smack
A few weeks ago, somebody discovered a set of HTML code that makes aligning works in most versions of most browser. But I can't find it. -- Menchi 12:52 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
A question (yet again!) on copyright. I've come across a site which would be a good source for pictures of all kinds but I can't decide if the pics are public domain. Any opinions, please?
Go to
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/~aminet/pix/vehic/
then click on HELP, then on SECTION 8 (Copyright Status and Disclaimer). Thanks
Adrian Pingstone 09:03 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I have attempted to recruit contributors or photographers several times before, but have all failed until now. I just met a Mississippian photographer on a digital graphics DelphiForum, and convinced him to let Wikipedia to use, and modify if necessary, his photos on plants. For an example, see his Naked Lily (Lycoris radiata, L. squamigera).
Where do I announce this exciting (well, for me, anyway) information, so other contributors interested in gardening and botany can use them freely too? -- Menchi 07:37 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The Middle-earth/subpages discussion has been moved to wikipedia talk:do not use subpages.
Next Query: Pictures. I've just uploaded two, 0201peoplelikeus2.JPG and 0201peoplelikeus.jpg, and the former is not showing up on the page People Like Us, while I can't find the latters Image Page... um... -- ntnon 16:04 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
(No idea if I'm doing this right... oh well.....) I created a page for 'America's Best Comics', but due to an irritating Shift key, it's come up as America's best Comics... is it possible to change this at all..? -- ntnon 15:00 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Some CDs have noticeable cultural and/or historically significance, so it may be of interest to list all the tracks on the CD. But, is the complete track listing of every CDs of every non-garage band to be included on Wikipedia?
For example, all CDs of Blink-182 have Wiki-pages, created mostly by one or two anons. But except to the band's zealous fans, none of them is significant. The only Wiki-pages that link to them are just back the Blink-182 page, the members of the band, and a one-phrase mentioning in an "n-year in music".
Are they really encyclopedic (again, except to the fans)? -- Menchi 18:11 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
(was CD Track List)
Some CDs have noticeable cultural and/or historically significance, so it may be of interest to list all the tracks on the CD. But, is the complete track listing of every CDs of every non-garage band to be included on Wikipedia?
For example, all CDs of Blink-182 have Wiki-pages, created mostly by one or two anons. But except to the band's zealous fans, none of them is significant. The only Wiki-pages that link to them are just back the Blink-182 page, the members of the band, and a one-phrase mentioning in an "n-year in music".
Are they really encyclopedic (again, except to the fans)? -- Menchi 18:11 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Disinfopedia has taken wikipedia articles and expanded them usually with a back reference. Is it worthwhile to forward reference from Wikipedia to Disinfopedia? Zardoz 17:57 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
If anyone could take a neutral look at Limehouse, London, England, I would be very grateful. User:Harry Potter added things about spacejackers and sea monsters which I reverted assuming it was rubbish. However HP has reverted back again.. with a not totally pleasant Summary comment. I have had enough of HP and can't look at his contributions with a cool head any more... such has (IMO) the negative impact on Wikipedia by having him around. Can someone see what checks out. Thanks. Pcb21 22:13 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
As regards specific points: The problem with the football article was that it stated early on that having two teams playing was an essential characteristic of football - something which is untrue, not merely since Asger Jorn developed Three sided football, but indeed since the Haxey Hood Game, which I have just noticed has been edited out of the football entry! The problem existed more with the way the original text put forward such an erroneous view right at the start of the article, that it needed correcting there.
The entry clearly refered to the Tony Hancock page. The exhibition certainly did take place, with real pictures and sculptures as represented in the film.
Well this is my understanding of the Queen's response to the Rastafarian request for an apology. What's your understanding of her response???
If you check the Nicholas Ferrar page you will find the reference to this. So what level of ignorance am I meant to assume - and why have been singled out to supply verification for the facts I share with you whereas others are not/ (On a more practical level if there was a facility to build Bibliographies as an adjunct to wikipedia and the wictionary, then that would facilitate a place where references could be located - something I would fully support.
Perhaps Wapcaplet does not realise how demeaning their epithet of silliness is! Serious issues are being raised here. The English invasion of North America is a singular event in history, it changed the world. Yet when I start working on this, looking at the involvement of such luminaries as Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Martin Frobisher in alchemy it is because I feel that this is relevant. The fact that the dead hand of bureaucratic historification has so chosen to obfuscate the facts and created a climate when people both from North America and the British Isles find their minds easily befuddled. Yes I have apologised for making mistakes. Mea culpa, it was Martin Frobisher who brought the Black rock back from Greenland. Although Humphrey Gilbert invested in the enterprise, this was not one of his voyages. And I corrected it. But I am not the only person to have made a mistake. OK maybe the assertion about Gilbert's fate at the hands of the sea monster was POV, But the essence of the encounter has been demonstrated. Compared to the range errors in the mass loading of information on places in London, I wonder why I am being singled out for attack. As for the question about the tube, this is a serious point for people with disabilities. I have not had a chance to verify the issue, but as I recall there are restrictions to wheelcahirs and push chairs on the tube which do not exist on the underground, and that they were subject to political action by disabled groups at some time. Now this may not be important from an able-bodied point of view, but if we are to make something useful to people with disabilities, then the issue has to be addressed. As for the remark that I have never said that I am interested in making an encylopedia or dealing with facts: I aim to help wikipedia realise its potential as an encyclopedia, even if that potential overflows from the eighteenth century notion of what an encyclopedia could be. I am particularly interested in the heuristic questions which must arise from such a project. I see the goal of NPOV as laudable, even if it has its own problematic. However, if this is to succeed, then I see that it cannot be constrained by a neocartesian epistemology. Harry Potter
Jiggy and Bonquisha are new users to the Wikipedia. Assuming that the number of articles remains constant at 130,000 - calculate the probability of Jiggy and Bonquisha editing the same page (over the course of a year), given that they each edit 100 articles per day. Pizza Puzzle
Jiggy and Bonquisha make 100 edits a day, to random articles. They can edit the same article more than once. Assume that if Jiggy and Bonquisha edit the same article at least 10 times each - then they will have "interacted"-For extra credit, calculate the liklihood of Jiggy and Bonquisha interacting. Pizza Puzzle
Collaboration is acceptable-thats the whole point of the wiki. Pizza Puzzle
In order for there to be a proper interaction at Foo- both Jiggy and Bonquisha must have edited it at least ten times AND there must be overlapping edits: for example J J J J J J J J J J B B B B B B B B B B is not an interaction; however, J J J J J J J J J B B J B B B B B B B is an interaction. Editing 10 seperate articles one time each is not an interaction. Heh, now its even more complicated. Pizza Puzzle
so probabilty that Bonquisha will edit that particular artilce is 0.245 Theresa knott 14:24 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)Bloody 'ell that's high have I made a mistake?
What I think you have done, is considered that J will edit any article. Then the question is, now that we have article X, what is the probablity of B hitting it after editing 36,500 articles. Since 36,500 is about 25% of the wikipedia, you can expect that any particular article would be edited about 25% of the time. I would hypothesize then that its very likely B and J would both edit the same article at some point. Pizza Puzzle
Indeed, the probability approaches 100%. Over the course of a year, B has edited about 25% of the articles in the wiki. So, for each article J edits, there is a 25% chance it is one that B either has edited, or will later edit over the course of the year. So we have 1-(1-.25)36500 for the probability that they ultimately edit the same article, which is close enough to 100% to exceed the precision of my spreadsheet. For more rigor, we could figure out the distribution of probabilities for the various number of articles B might edit (could be anywhere from 1 article 36500 times or 36500 articles one time each with most of the probability clustered towards the top) and calculate the 1-(1-x)36500 seperately, mutiply, and sum. But, as a practical matter, the answer is the same.
209.150.193.201 19:29 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could someone update Wikipedia:Recent Changes? It seems to be quite out of date (though that may just be a consequence of my having non-default settings that I don't remember setting), and it says nothing about blue arrows. Smack
Several of us (
Amillar,
Stan and
me) are engaged in a discussion at
Talk:List of people regarding the possibility of adding some kind of meta-data to biographical articles, in order to (among other things) ease the maintenance process for exceptionally long (and high-maintenance) lists like
List of people. Suggestions would be welcome, especially from any developers that have ideas about how such a thing could be implemented. Thanks! --
Wapcaplet 00:24 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
How do we register accounts on underdeveloped Wikipedias, like Latin, Estonian, and Simple English? Or do our account names automatically carry over when we log into the English WP? -- Menchi 11:30 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ahah, Menchi, I see you are probably a quite recent user :-)))
The in-development (or waiting for someone to take care of developing them) wikis you are refering to, are still in phase I (the french wiki was still in phase I until the 31 of oct 2002). In phase I, there is only one space, where everything is mixed. Articles, meta pages, users pages...That is one of the fun things to fix once the wiki is updated to phase III. I recommand what we did : prefixing every meta article with a "wikipedia:xxx" so that makes easier to identify articles from meta pages. French wikipedians pages just had similar look that articles pages till we upgraded phase III (that is not until we where phase III that articles about Curry and Anther were created since User:Curry and me occupied the place of an article :-). You might identify yourself with a prefixed user:xxx, but honestly, when the wiki is small, it is of little interest.
I edited once or twice the simple english a good year ago, so I went back there, and created an account for test. Go check it.
http://simple.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?RecentChanges
What you have to do to create an account, is to go to "preferences" (upper right). There, you enter your name, and a password. Confirm. And there you are. Your account is set. Next time you want to connect, you go back to preferences, enter your login and password, and that is it !!!
Oye, I feel "old" today. Memories...
If you need to delete pages or ban users (sigh!), you need to ask Jimbo for a password. There are no tech things to identify admin. Admin are virtual, their power relies in a password, the proper urls for deletion and banning, as well as the code to do so (note that deletions are permanent...*that* was scarry). If you need more info, drop a word on my talk page
User:Anthere
I'm confused. I have just renamed an article called Thrust SSC to its correct name of ThrustSSC by using a Redirect done via the Move command. However, as a result there's a problem. The ThrustSSC article, correctly, shows the redirect from Thrust SSC but, when I do a search on Thrust SSC I get no results at all. Why not! It seems that the Redirect page is not indexed. Should it be? Adrian Pingstone 08:40 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Rainclouds: I see some pages are being linked to meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud - but wouldn't it be better to have this in Wikipedia instead of meta? That way, you could look at "what links here" and see all the pages. Evercat 23:22 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My response to meta:Wikipedians by religion can be found at meta:Wikipedians by race. MB 22:00 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
"The Monkey is one of the 12-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar. It is thought that each animal is associated with certain personality traits. "
This appears for a number of other animals in the 12-year cycle. I removed the reference under Cattle, thinking it irrelevant to the topic, while performing other edits there. Now I see it is elsewhere as well. Should all 12 entries be consistent in their inclusion of this prose? And, if so, should it be removed from those where it exists, or add to those articles that lack it?
Some queries:
2, 3 and 4 are all fair use... i think. CGS 18:05 2 Jun 2003 (UTC).
1. No. There is a half-implemented feature in the software to do this, called "fragments", but development has stalled in the face of opposition from editors.
2. Maybe. I'm against it, but I think I'm in the minority. 3 & 4. Yes, quoting is okay (except if you follow the "no fair use" doctrine -- see
Wikipedia talk:Copyrights and
Wikipedia talk:Image use policy). 5. That's correct. In most countries, it's an (often unenforceable) infringement of copyright to post a copyright image even if a notice is not displayed. The international nature of this project means that the penalties for infringing copyright are uncertain, however I think most of us consider the risk to contributors to be quite low. --
Tim Starling 08:10 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
2. Why not email the band in question, and ask them to grant permission under the GFDL? Use the
wikipedia:boilerplate request for permission.
3. Why not email the author in question, and ask them to... (oh, and cover blurbs will need to be rewritten for neutrality)
4. Quoting full songs is generally not encyclopedically useful, except for short ones like
Happy Birthday.
5. Why not email the photographer in question, and...
Martin
New Topic - Accessing Wikipedia
I'm a new user and new to programming. I want to access articles on a topic (e.g Battle of Hastings)in Wikipedia automatically (using a Java program)for study purposes. I want to transfer the first 100 or so words of each article to a file.
Is this ok ?
Its been suggested I should use a web crawler for this (but they seem to cause problems and I'm not sure I caould specify a particular topic either)
I thought of using database queries, any advice please? --
User:Searcher7
I suggest that all articles about movies and tv shows be scrapped, and instead have the links point to the apropriate page on the Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com Their database is already amazingly thorough, and appears to be around to stay. No point in rewriting copious amounts of information which already exists in a well organized form elsewhere Vroman 23:12 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please see New England Patriots. Is it legal for us to include the logos of sports teams here? They're copyrighted. The NFL's website says "The team names, logos and uniform designs are registered trademarks of the teams indicated". -- Zoe
Well, just because NFL claims it doesn't make it so. I'm no attorney but I don't believe that copyright or trademark law could be construed to prohibit use of trademarks or logos for identification or news purposes, which is what we're doing.
When, for example, a page on en: has been made a redirect to m:, and that with an afterthought on want to make a proper page on en, how can she modify the page for it not to be a redirection any more ? Same question on m: with a page redirected on en: ?
I had been reading the online Wikipedia-L archives for info and for fun, but there seems to be something even easier to browse: the Wikipedia-L NNTP. But I tried it, and there are over 10,000 messages! How many bytes is it? I can't overload my Internet connection again. The last time I did, they phoned and threatened to disconnect me. :-} -- Menchi 18:54 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
An anonymous user is adding a lot of links from computing articles to his favourite computing website. Actually, I don't find this annoying yet, as they seem quite reasonable links. But I thought it worth mentioning, in case it gets out of hand. Here are the contributions. Evercat 02:44 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Opening
Ending
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Opening
(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA (Series Name)
Movies 1. "Movie name" (Translation)
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I uploaded an audio file, why does Wikipedia think it's an image? I never told it that it was an image, and the extension clearly shows it's an audio file. CGS 11:54 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
Opening
(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA (Series Name)
Movies
1. "Movie name" (Translation)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Suggestion: that a third Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page be created. The More bad jokes and other deleted nonsense is getting to be too long. Arno 11:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)
Opening
(#) "Bold Official Name" (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA (Series Name)
Movies
1. "Movie name" (Translation)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)
Opening
(#) "Bold Romanized Official Name"; Special charset (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA "Romanized Series Name"; Special charset (Translation)
Movies
1. "Romanized Movie name"; Special charset (Translation)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)
Opening
(#) "Bold Romanized Official Name"; «Special charset» (Italic Translation) by Singer (Eps a-z)
Ending
(#) (ditto)
OVA "Romanized Series Name"; «Special charset» (Translation)
Movies
1. "Romanized Movie name"; «Special charset» (Translation)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
«» - Optional
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
== Theme Songs == (regarding a series)
(eps a-z) - Episodes optional if song is the same for the whole series.
(#) - Number optional if series only has one Opening or Ending.
«» - Optional
Sections are optional based on whether they are used.
Anyone disagree? Emperorbma 07:48 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Also can we move this to a separate page? Emperorbma 06:16 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Does anyone think adding an Opening and Ending Songs section to series and movies sounds like a good idea?
I propose the following format (Revision 3.4.7):
Is there a discussion somewhere of the scope and topic suitabilitiy of the project?
Given no space limitations, what is the most appropriate approach to deep subjects? One could write volumes on many topics. How do we divide up articles that are lengthy and have logical subtopics? Even simple, noncontroversial topics, like cattle, have had volumes written about them. Must all pages be general interest? Where do we stop? Why?
Are articles on topics of narrow, professional interest encouraged? E.g. legal, accounting, medical, or other fields. If not where is the line drawn?
I observe that some of the most active editing has been on topics related to human sexuality. Is there a consensus (or a summary of the positions taken by whatever various schools of thought there may be on the subject) regarding the division between appropriate and inappropriate material for this topic?
I have seen some isolated stylistic recommendations, "the passive voice is to be avoided" (-: and "include all relevant content in one article rather than breaking it up". I can't find a summary of this information, and the style guide is no help. Is there one? Or shall my prose have to suffer such edits at the hands of others for me to understand the framework??
What is the policy on linking? Apparently some user's cant tolerate a link to international community on a page about a leader in the "international community"; whereas, other user think such linking is part of the very core of wikipedia.
I wonder why, if someone doesn't like the links, they don't edit their preferences differently. Pizza Puzzle
Are there any biologists out there who can look at the page respiration. It looks wrong to me. What this page desrcibes is what I would call gas exchange. I would guess that most people querying a search engine on respiration would be looking for cellular respiration, not this. Theresa knott 13:29 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Advice on lists, please. There are lists of country musicians at List of country musicians, country music and Alternative country. There is a great deal of duplication. Is it better just to leave this and cross reference or would it be better to have a comprehensive list at one page with a link to that page? Tiles 00:22 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
When and why did the IP address disappear from the top right of each page when you aren't logged in? -- SGBailey 22:59 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
OK & Thanks (I had done a search for <IP address> but hadn't found that reference. How do I find out what IP address I am / Others are? -- SGBailey 23:29 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'm uneasy about a very wide picture of the Severn Bridge I've put on to
Suspension bridge. Does anything strange happen on an 800 by 600 screen? I can't change my 1024 by 768 screen to check because all my icons pile up in a heap when I return my screen to 800 by 600 and it takes ages to return them all to their previous positions. I'm particularly concerned about what the screen looks like if a Skin has been set in Wikipedia preferences that has a menu list down the left side of the screen.
Thanks
Adrian Pingstone 18:58 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hey folks, what do you do when you find an external link is broken? Do you just delete it? Leave it there in hopes that it will fix itself? Put a note next to it on the page that it is broken? Post something on the talk page? -- Nelson
Question on Tables: I noticed that the figure of speech page, which (like many wikipedia pages) has a lengthy list, has had the list formatted as a table in order to make it into three columns (more attractive than one long list streaming down thep age).
This strikes me as fundamentally wrong, since what it is is not a table but a multi-column list. Is there a wikipedia policy to only use tables for actual tables, or do we translate the html practice of using tables for all formatting?
-- Tom
After doing the painstaking work of adding references to a number of articles, I'm thinking that maybe it doesn't get done enough because it's complicated, especially for books that have been around for a while and have long printing histories. So I was wondering what people think about a policy of routinely creating articles for references, especially for those that are useful for multiple articles? For instance, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships article makes DANFS easy to cite in all the articles about ships, and very often Bede is linked to from Anglo-Saxon articles because his Ecclesiastic History is the primary source for the article's info. In addition, the article can expand on the value and scope of the reference work, or mention a preferred edition. So many articles have nothing that enables readers to go beyond what they've just read... Stan 12:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
New Bad jokes/deleted nonsense page
Suggestion: that a third Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page be created. The More bad jokes and other deleted nonsense is getting to be too long. Arno 11:27 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Error: Fascism takes several screens of no text between mightiest and best-known. There is no reason why it should, having looked at the actual wiki. Is Mozilla at fault here, or is it Wikipedia? Emperorbma 03:49 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Something's wrong with the database. The only place I can think of where I can reproduce it every single time is my very own talk page. Smack
Thanks to whoever did the update of Special:Wantedpages. One problem: After I created Eddie Cantor, I went to remove him from the list, only to find it couldn't be edited. And Eddie Cantor is still a red link there. -- Infrogmation 23:21 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I found a bug. When moving
Favorite pages of banned users to
Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users and using the move talk page where aplicable option, it moved
Talk:Favorite pages of banned users to [[Talk:Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users]], which is not the correct page.
P.S. I made
Wikipedia:Favorite pages of banned users so that we could easily track when our favorite vadals have been making changes without cluttering out own watchlists with thier favorite pages (i.e. this works like a group watchlist).
MB 18:59 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My !!! Just to say hi. I just look at the 50 last contributions. And I fear about 40 of them are about fight against vandalism. Horrible. My virtual support. Ant
I uploaded an audio file, why does Wikipedia think it's an image? I never told it that it was an image, and the extension clearly shows it's an audio file. CGS 11:54 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
Can someone take a look at http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=62.60.78.153 ? -- Tarquin
Yeah, yeah, yeah... Whatever it is, what's it doing in the English Wikipedia, not being in English? CGS 11:42 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
Slashdot style morals aside, is it practical to upload an Ogg audio clip at the moment and expect the typical visitor to be able to play it? Can Windows Media Player decompress them? CGS 07:11 6 Jun 2003 (UTC).
If we follow a convention of writing 1.2E31 instead we can avoid the problem of having a break in the quanity...1.2 x
1031 Pizza Puzzle
Many war-related pages have a banner attached:
I wonder where its best form and placement is discussed. Does anybody know?<br> -- Ruhrjung 21:03 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
best placed at the top Pizza Puzzle
It has occured to me the the photo on Mooning could be considers as offensive as the photo linked to on Clitoris. Therefore I move that we come to a concensus on photos exposing Intimate parts and follow it with all such articles. Please note, that IMHO to be totally NPOV, we should openly show any images. MB 20:25 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please can an admin undo Michael's page move of Crass to Crass (band), many thanks. quercus robur 17:19 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
For those who are interested, there has been some talk on the mailing list about putting a Content Advisory label on the Wikipedia. I have created Wikipedia:Content advisory so that the entire community can help develop the advisory. No decision has been made about whether we are actually going to put this up, so discussion should be had at Wikipedia_talk:Content advisory. MB 01:38 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could a developer check to see if User:Eddie is loging in using User:Michael's ip range (i.e. 152.163.25x.xxx)? He has been reverting articles of User:Michael's back to user Michael's content in a sneaky way. I just want to make sure it is or isn't User:Michael. If it is him, please ban the account. Thanks. MB 17:38 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My apologies if this suggestion is in the wrong place or has already been addressed, however I think it would be better if wiki links were not case sensitive. Its annoying having to either make a redirect page, or fix a bunch of links due to capitalization discrepancies. Vroman 22:06 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Is there a discussion somewhere of the scope and topic suitabilitiy of the project?
Given no space limitations, what is the most appropriate approach to deep subjects? One could write volumes on many topics. How do we divide up articles that are lengthy and have logical subtopics? Even simple, noncontroversial topics, like cattle, have had volumes written about them. Must all pages be general interest? Where do we stop? Why?
Are articles on topics of narrow, professional interest encouraged? E.g. legal, accounting, medical, or other fields. If not where is the line drawn?
I observe that some of the most active editing has been on topics related to human sexuality. Is there a consensus (or a summary of the positions taken by whatever various schools of thought there may be on the subject) regarding the division between appropriate and inappropriate material for this topic?
I have seen some isolated stylistic recommendations, "the passive voice is to be avoided" (-: and "include all relevant content in one article rather than breaking it up". I can't find a summary of this information, and the style guide is no help. Is there one? Or shall my prose have to suffer such edits at the hands of others for me to understand the framework??
I messed up. I need help. I was trying to make my profile on meta-wiki a redirect to my profile here, and it didn't work. However, it does work for editing; when I try to edit my meta profile, it takes me to the edit screen for my regular profile. I know there's a URL I can type in to get around that, involving the .phtml extension, but I don't know what exactly it is. - Smack 02:37 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I used to be able to view [diff] in my watchlist, now I can't. Also when I have the menu at the right-the edit box overlaps with it. Pizza Puzzle
I've been reading and wanting to participate a bit (probably not very actively) in the WP Mailing lists for several months now. But I never actually did, because I never tried a newsgroup or a mailing list before. I finally forced myself into trying it yesterday, but things didn't go smooth, and I couldn't find help or FAQ on the Wikipedia:Mailing lists.
-- Menchi 22:28 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Help! Help! Help! I'm drowning! :-S I thought it would be a good idea to direct all the precursors and descendants of Univac to that central article, since it seemed to provide a comprehensive overview of how all those companies merged... But now when I read closer, it seems that 'Sperry Corporation' separated from the pack, only to swerwe back into the fray very late in the game. It definitely isn't as clear cut as I Thought it would be. I Really hope I haven't gone overboard; It just seemed that many of those articles were just linking into each and every other of each other, when they really only covered the same historical ground. But I starting to get doubts, did I simplify things too much. Any comments wellcome. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 13:27 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sorry if this problem has been known. Interlanguage links (at the top of the page) from English Wikipedia to Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia don't work. But the links from Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia work just fine. Some people on Chinese Wikipedia experience the same. -- Lorenzarius 12:15 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'd like to propose some minor changes to the navbar at the top of every page. See this page for a mockup; it's a modified version of the Main Page. Comments? -- Merphant 06:58 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Multiple things with the same name. The Kings Highway article refers to one use of that term -- not the oldest or most frequently used. How do you handle other places with the same name? The existing Kings Highway article is about the British road up the East Coast. Another, older road by the same name ran from Florida to Mexico. And there is another one of interest in Jordan. How are these multiple meanings handled so that when someone goes to " Kings Highway" they can find the one they were looking for?
Surely "Orphaned articles" are those to which there are no links. I thought I'd try to link a few in and tried Berkhamstead (number 54 at the time I tried) and I find it is already linked from Hertfordshire. What is going on? -- SGBailey 21:54 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Everytime I attempt to edit the page List of organic gardening and farming topics, which is currently a redirect page, I'm taken to the edit screen for Organic gardening, which is the page it currently redirects to. I want to change List of organic gardening and farming topics to a 'list' page, splitting it from the Organic gardening article, and also cross linking to Organic farming as it will be relevant to both pages. However at present I don't seem able to do this. Can anybody advise? Is it something to do with having moved the page a couple of times? quercus robur 11:51 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Japanese Name Conventions. Does Wikipedia have any? I've seen so many various articles with names listed either way:
It might be a good idea to set something down if there isn't one set in stone already. I personally suggest Western-style, if written in English/Romaji, but Japanese-style if written in Kanji (Unicode character entities).
-- Pipian 05:38 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Japanese) would be the right place.-- Nanshu 22:45 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The moment everyone's been waiting for: Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians has been updated. Some highlights: Mav has overtaken Rambot and the conversion script, and now has almost 40,000 edits to his name. Zoe has moved up from #9 to #6, overtaking AxelBoldt and Koyaanis Qatsi. Lir, our most active troll, has moved from #30 to #10. Patrick jumped from #27 to #18 by clocking up another 3,700 edits. TakuyaMurata is a rising star, jumping from #54 to #23, now on 6,523 edits. Not that it's a competition or anything. :) -- Tim Starling 05:13 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
174 | Michael | 1106 |
Please note that my contributes are also due to that I can rely on those who copyedit my misspellings or gramatical errors. -- Taku 03:57 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'm sure this has been talked to death, and I am sure most people don't really want to hear about it anymore, but it's still an issue. The longer I contribute to the wikipedia, the more I dislike the current naming conventions. The current conventions obviously have thier down fall. For instance in the case of inheritence. Currently, we have an article called Inheritance (object-oriented programming). There is a debate going on right now, b/c some people think people will get cunfused between Inheritance (computer science) and Inheritence (object-oriented programming). I think people are hesitent to suggest Inheritence (computer science) (object-oriented programming) becuase this just sounds bad. I have been thinking about a solution to this problem, of seprating single articles into seperate article (for space reasons). I have a possible solution. How about using a slash (to denote that it is a sub-article) like this: Inheritance (computer science)/object-oriented programming? Would this be acceptable? Is there already a rule regarding this type of thing? The problem seems to be that this is being treated as a disambiguation problem, but the standard rules of disabiguation can not be applied here. Could we come up with (if it doesn't already exist) a standard naming practice for sub-topics? If this standard doesn't already exist, can we agree on using /'s? MB 15:04 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Can I get a few opinions on whether it's OK to remove any mention of neutrosophy and related stuff from serious articles? This stuff has been listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and the general concensus seems to be it's very obscure, but now MyRedDice opposes deletion, the articles may end up being kept. But nevertheless, I don't think serious pages should discuss it, until it becomes more widely accepted. Evercat 13:32 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)
What is the policy on linking? Apparently some user's (like User: Dan Keshet and User: Evercat) cant tolerate a link to international community on a page about a leader in the "international community" nor a link to governor- general about a man who was a governor-general; whereas, other user think such linking is part of the very core of wikipedia.
I wonder why, if someone doesn't like the links, they don't edit their preferences differently. Pizza Puzzle
Thats really not the point Brion, this isnt a case of their improving my link, they are simply deleting it. A link to governor is better than no link at all, when the topic is a "military" governor.
Pizza Puzzle
Actually, I just reverted to the last version that didn't have silly links to pressure and absolute, for example. I'll re-instate the link to international community. (we're talking about Abu Mazen, btw.) Evercat 20:53 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Any why not link to pressure, pressure is just as much of a concept in politics as it is in physics. And why not link to dialogue, if we have an article on dialogue, and a world leader states that dialogue is so important that its the only quote we have from him, it doesnt seem "silly" to link to dialogue. Pizza Puzzle
Or how about the deletion of my link to Muslim, at the page on Jinnah. Not linking to Muslim there is sort of like not linking to Christianity when one has an article on Aquinas. I believe the most recent biography on Jinnah refers to him as one of the 3 most influential Muslims in history; yet, my link is "excessive". Pizza Puzzle
A link to Muslim still exists at that page ( Muhammed Ali Jinnah). But some of your other links there were a bit excessive. I don't really think that when you say someone died, this actually requires a link to death, for example. Evercat 21:05 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
There is a Wikipedia:Make Links Relevant debate already. But the discussions there had been inconclusive, and eventually faded out several months ago. -- Menchi 21:42 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Linking to death would be appropriate in an article about the existence of the soul, or life after death, since in that case you would want to know as much as possible about the terms being discussed. Linking to death when talking about somebody who just happened to die is not relevant. -- Nelson 15:00 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Is there a reason why Wikipedia is very slow today? Or is this something I have to get used to? It is a little frustrating when it takes so long to see the edit screen that I forget what I was going to edit :) Kingturtle 18:26 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could a developer please check out the discussion at Wikipedia talk:How to edit a page? In particular, a couple of us are interested in having the default ALT text for images on Wikipedia to be changed to the empty string, "", rather than the filename, so that when contributors omit the ALT text, we aren't left with a filename which is potentially very confusing to users with speech readers, text-only browsers, etc. Refer also to the new article Wikipedia:Alternate text for images for some details on this issue. Thanks! -- Wapcaplet 16:30 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Type in great wall of china and click GO and you are taken to Talk:Great Wall of China. Type in baseball hall of fame and click GO and you are taken to Talk:Baseball Hall of Fame. This is bad. Obviously, users should be taken to Great Wall of China and Baseball Hall of Fame respectively. How can this be fixed? Kingturtle 23:21 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
So far I couldn't get any e-mails from Wikipedia:Mailing lists, even though NNTP shows that there are new ones. I think it's because of Hotmail's blocking system, which is ineffectively selective. Anyway, Hotmail has a solution, you enter the address or something:
So what should I enter? I doesn't accept the domain @wikipedia.org.
-- Menchi 00:38 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
My watch list is growing and growing (as is yours, probably ;-). I just thought, it could sometimes be of help, if the links on a page that are already on my watch list, would show up in a different color. Would this make sense / be helpful / did someone already think of something like that? Thanks, Fantasy 06:44 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Regarding musician entries: if there is a discography listed, should we make separate pages for each album comprised of a track listing? Mick 19:56 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I've been reading and wanting to participate a bit (probably not very actively) in the WP Mailing lists for several months now. But I never actually did, because I never tried a newsgroup or a mailing list before. I finally forced myself into trying it yesterday, but things didn't go smooth, and I couldn't find help or FAQ on the Wikipedia:Mailing lists.
-- Menchi 22:28 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
1. I've found posting messages via GMANE (i.e. NNTP) to be a bit dicey. The one thing you really have to know is that GMANE will send an "autoauthorizer" message to the "from" address, which you have to reply to before the post will be forwarded to the list. You also have to use a "from" address which is subscribed to the mailing list, otherwise it will be delayed for a spam-check.
2. To reply to a hotmail message, you click on the message and then the "reply" button. If there's too many messages and the one you want to reply to is off the page, there are "previous" and "next" links to click on, at the bottom of the list. I would strongly recommend setting up folders for each of the mailing lists, and creating filters to send the posts to the correct folder. Note that wikien-l + wikitech-l will fill up your 2 MB limit in less than a week, so you have to regularly clean up.
-- Tim Starling 01:35 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hm. Rather than answering the above question, I'd like to add a new one. I just did a Google search on a lesser known contemporary British playwright called Winsome Pinnock. What I got among the first ten hits was http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Winsome_Pinnock&action=edit, which directly links to the edit page of a non-existing article. Could that sort of thing be avoided? Apparent vandalism in the form of "What the heck ..." etc. is probably due to people completely unfamiliar with wikis being suddenly faced with an edit page. -- KF 18:34 12 Jun 2003 (UTC) Ähnliche Seiten
Question: Who actually "runs" Wikipedia? Who provides the server space. Just curious... it seems a little odd to write/edit articles for an organization you know very little about.
- Alex S
Some thoughts (I hope my questions are not academic):
Kpjas 15:19 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
"Ancient pages" has only been added a few days ago and we'll have to see how it holds up for the purpose of reviewing past articles. An article will only disappear from that list if it has been edited -- but what if it needs no editing? The list may eventually show many very old, very good articles at which point it might stop being useful. Or we might work through past articles until we get to the User:Rambot imported US census data, and people would stop working through the list at that point because they have nothing to add to articles about 2000 people towns. -- Eloquence 16:18 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I used to be able to view [diff] in my watchlist, now I can't because I selected "enhanced recent changes" Why cant I have both? Also when I have the menu at the right-the edit box overlaps with it. Pizza Puzzle
In some articles with chinese wikipedia link, this link work in preview mode, but don't in read mode. ex: Provinces of China, the link is the good one in edit mode too ... 62.212.110.113 11:54 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
When I look at "My Contributions" some are followed by the reference "(top)" What does this mean? Thanks! Mkrose
This an S.O.S. to anybody who can help me, and especially to Paul A, who gave me the welcome. I have been smart enough to learn how to use Wikipedia's search engine, edit and create pages, enable links, create this account yesterday night, and successfully login "my" page and this one; but I WAS NOT clever enough to know how to login the rest. Despite my name, my "power" is limited, I'm just a warlock, not a magician... If you can lend me a hand, please write me a message; if I cannot login successfully having been registered I interfere with other users and with Wikipedia too. I'd like to stay, so I'll be grateful for any help.-- The Warlock June 12, 2003, 5:28 (GMT)
Do you have cookies blocked or disabled? Because if you do, the software will say "you are now logged in", but it will instantly forget who you are as soon as you go to another page. See HTTP cookie. -- Tim Starling 07:26 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Click here for a cookie test and tell us what it tells you. -- Tim Starling 11:03 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hey folks, sorry about dominating the Village Pump, but I don't know where to put this. There's a problem with numbering that I've noticed in many pages, most recently Paul_Simon_(album), where because the author has put spaces between paragraphs, the numbered list starts over again from one. There is no good way to fix this, because removing the space messes up the formatting, and if you were to manually input the numbers, this would make maintenance more annoying. This is one of those cases where I think HTML-like tags would serve us better, because within the <OL></OL> tags, you can put <br>'s without making the ordered list start over again. However, short of forcing Wikipedians to learn HTML, what can be done for pages like this? Change the code so that you must have two spaces in order to have #-numbered lists start over? That seems like the best solution to me, but I don't know how much work that would take, and how many current articles that would screw up. -- Nelson 04:13 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could a developer please update Special:Shortpages? The last update was made on May 13. -- mav
Hey folks, two questions:
-- Nelson 15:00 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I just realized that it might be possible that "existance" might be a British spelling of existence. Does anybody know if that is the case? Or is "existance" recognized as a misspelling on both sides of the Atlantic? -- Nelson 16:18 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Oh dear, I seem to have created some weird server bug while playing around with the redirect page from " existance" to existence. I put an extra "#" before the #REDIRECT, in order to see whether a search would turn up any more instances of "existance", I thought the redirect page might be messing up my search. Now, if I search for "existance", I get that demented non-working redirect page, and no matter how many times I edit it back to a normal redirect page and save it, when I search for "existance" I get the demented page again. Interestingly enough, when I actually type in the URL for the existance page, it redirects properly, and when I follow the "redirected from" link at the top of existence, it shows a normal redirect page. Help? -- Nelson 19:12 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ah, apparently I was hitting "Go", because I was simply hitting Enter instead of clicking the mouse, and it seems that defaults to "Go". Go is still bringing me to the demented page. -- Nelson 21:17 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ah, thanks guys, I am using Mozilla, and shift+reload fixed the problem. -- Nelson 20:31 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The periodic lag is annoying. What are the costs of running the wiki and how much would it cost to improve performance? Pizza Puzzle
There are two dedicated servers, a DB server and a page server, donated by Bomis, together with colo and bandwidth.
The DB server is running at a fairly smooth average 25% load on both CPUs, the page server is bouncing between < 10% load and almost saturating its single CPU. So it looks like the problems is either the page-server CPU, or disk IO fragmentation/contention on the DB (unlikely, it's got plenty of RAM).
Here are some possible routes to making things go faster:
The wikitech-l mailing list is a good place to discuss these things.
The Anome 14:04 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
If 100 wiki users donated $10 im sure we could buy an extra CPU and RAM. Pizza Puzzle
But is there any need to wait for a foundation to be formalized? Why not just create a PayPal account? 209.56.25.161
Im using a computer which doesn't allow a large screen size. Can I either get a no-frames option or have the menu placed on the right of the screen? (or the top) Pizza Puzzle
What is NASA's copyright policy? Text on Bell X-1 is copied word for word from [4]. Is that okay with NASA? Kingturtle 11:17 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Where did all the articles on U.S. municipalities come from? Did a bunch of people just copy and paste a Census database into the 'pedia? - Smack
User:Wrongbros, made a contribution to List of record labels and it was reverted. Is this Michael? If not, why was it reverted? MB 19:42 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hello! I try to color the statement of math theorems or conjectures in order to improve readability. However, I have discovered that the image generated by <math>-tag is not transparent and so the effect turns out to be ugly: see Riemann hypothesis. Could anyone give me a helping hand? -- Wshun
A friend of mine told me today that the Wikipedia "doesn't work" because he and a friend of his created a fake religion called Fieldism and it was still there. Needless to say, I deleted it, but this concerns me a bit. I think we should create a way for users to verify articles. To verify articles, you must have been around for a certain amount of time, or made at least x contributions, or something like that. And you shouldn't be able to verify articles you created. what do you guys think? Could someone post this to the mailing list? MB
-- Taku 20:26 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I've always been quite impressed with the security of Wikipedia. I was talking with someone last night about Wikipedia and he told me that the security was lapse, because he had been able to vandalise one of the pages, tea bag. I went to see what he had done, but it had already been reverted (less than 60 seconds). I told him that was our security. CGS 09:05 14 Jun 2003 (UTC).
One suggestion I have is simply to cite sources of information. Sometimes people just use sources in their own heads and that is fine, but in other situations they really should cite the source of the information. I've done a lot of work with geographical locations (cities, states, and counties) and citing them using Geographic references for one example. It helps critics of the articles to know that the information can be verified by checking the sources. Sometimes this requires someone to work slower and doing the boring part of adding citations even though it is not as fun as writing the article itself. -- Ram-Man
Thanks to all of you who helped me in solving my problem, it's fixed now. The Warlock.-- June 13, 2003, 6:37 (GMT)
Hey, I'm a newbie here. I just wanted to mention that there will probably a flood of newbies, as this site was just featured on the show The Screen Savers on Tech TV in the USA. I was really curious, and decided to check it out, and that's how I found out. :) ManicGypsy
I have re-protected Martha Stewart for now. Evercat 17:46 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Maybe it's just me, but the image on the Sylvia Saint page sure looks doctored. Can anyone confirm that the bomis.com logo really ought to be present in that image, or has it been Photoshopped in? -- Dante Alighieri 00:25 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Can some kind soul show me how to put a sequence of four images down the right hand side of the page so that they form one unit and no text can sneak in between them. I'm referring to
Sistine Chapel that I illustrated. I reckon the page would look nicer if I had all four pics together and there would be no problems with pics overlapping in different browsers. Thanks.
Adrian Pingstone 09:01 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
<table align=right> <tr><td> <div style="float:right;"> [[image:___Name___ | __Description_]] <br> <small>''More detailed explanation<br> [[media:___Name___ | Larger version]]''</small> <br><br> [[image:___Name2___ | __Description_]] <br> <small>''More detailed explanation<br> [[media:___Name2___ | Larger version]]''</small> <br><br> [[image:___Name3___ | __Description_]] <br> <small>''More detailed explanation<br> [[media:___Name3___ | Larger version]]''</small> <br><br> [[image:___Name4___ | __Description_]] <br> <small>''More detailed explanation<br> [[media:___Name4___ | Larger version]]''</small> </div> </td></tr> </table>
-- Menchi 09:08 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Would someone please rescue the poor former Prime Minister of Canada. John George Diefenbaker.
See the archive for older moved discussion links.
Can someone who knows how make the map on Kurds smaller? thanks Kingturtle 06:02 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I have a query about searching for acronyms. Typing acronyms into the Find box with periods produces an error message even when the page title includes periods (e.g., James Bond's nemesis S.P.E.C.T.R.E.) - but typing them in without periods does not find the page. Am I doing something wrong? - DavidWBrooks 19:53 18 Jun 2003 (UTC)
From Talk:Anti-Zionism:
Oh, lots of arguments get like this. I would let it drop. Evercat 13:30 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
That is RK's normal style of discussion. If you continue to discuss with him, he will sooner or later call you a vandal and a troll. It is always the same, and he will never learn to change his behaviour. So, follow Evercat's advice, and stop discussing with RK. It is absolutely useless. -- Cordyph 13:37 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
There could be a strict policy of banning users for rudeness. One ad hominem remark and poof, you're gone. Would get rid of a lot of geeky young males in a hurry, plus make it a much more enjoyable place. I am serious about this BTW - it's acceptable to call an act of editing "stupid", but wrong to characterize the whole person as such. Witness the "ignoramus" comment by RK quoted just below, and the well-meaning but misguided tolerance of this by Evercat. Stan 14:27 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Could someone update the snapshot of the lonely pages list - It is May 13, over a month old (and incomplete then). -- SGBailey 2003-06-19
HI! Does anybody know about copyrights in France? The question i easy: Can I post on Internet images printed in France in 1912? - User:Dixi
They differ from USA to Europe, there may be some specifics... Since I want to publish images from 1912 Larousse, I need to know exactly, in order not to put Wikipedia on any risk...
I think I can help you: [5]. France is interesting in that copyright expiry was suspended for a few years during the world wars, so it can be up to life+84 years. I have a feeling that if the copyright is held by a corporation, or if there is no one single author, or something like that, then it's just 70 years from the date of publication, plus war time. I know this because we discussed it here and here. -- Tim Starling 10:21 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Would using TechTVs logo be a copyright violation? Would it be covered by the fair use doctrine? ilyanep 00:10 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)