Just a reminder that voting closes today. I hope to start implementing the changes on Monday. Bmills 09:56, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Note that a load of candidates after voting are now waiting seconding/objecting on Wikipedia:Brilliant prose candidates. Sorry for not posting this yesterday, but I just could not load this page. Bmills 09:30, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Apparently a vandal I just blocked thinks it's funny to send me a little mail bomb (5000 lines of garbage) and some insults as a thank you. However as he sent it via the wikipedia email it gives no hint on who actually sent it, the only IP in the email headers is the one of pliny. It would be quite helpful if the actual sending IP (or maybe even the username if it's a logged in user) would be present in the headers - not only in the case of tracing such childish revenge mails, but also in case a legitimate user gets blocked and it gets difficult to find which blocked IP needs to be unblocked. It is quite similar with what Hotmail does, they add a X-Originating-IP header line. andy 10:42, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Is there a preset icon or something when linking references that are in PDF? I have been editing a lot of articles lately where the references used are in PDF so I have to put a note like [1] ( PDF document) on the article's references. -- Maio 11:02, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)
..so it's a day late.
This is such a trememdous undertaking, and a blessedly welcome respite from commercial 'pedias. I was dismayed when Britannica when to a subscription format. I was even more dismayed when they refused to correct a factual error. I've not gone back since.
Long may Wiki prosper!
The article on
cosmotheism currently has some <nowiki>
ed links to necessary background material which is racist Neo-Nazi garbage. The anonymous user who's been working on this article insists that the links be active. What is Wikipedia policy on linking to obviously offensive content, i.e. the speeches and writings of
William Pierce?
— No One Jones
(talk) 19:56, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Let's make the links to possibly offensive sites as Preference, off by default. ilya 21:49, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Is there anyone out there with the power to update Wikipedia:Most Wanted Articles to about 200 articles? A whole bunch have been made and so we need fresh meat. jengod 22:23, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)
Well, I am not able to do that, but I do have an idea. What about including, on that most wanted page, a list of the most viewed broken links. Currently it shows the broken links that exist in the most places. However, this results in lots of them being from those generated pages like all the cities in the US. I don't know enough to know how hard this is, but perhaps a reasonable approximation of this would be to have the broken links that exist on the most viewed pages. Nroose 16:05, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
As of the posting of this comment, the September 11, 2001 attacks article shows 10 inbound links, despite the fact that there are hundreds, so I assume the various moving around has managed to corrupt the link table. Is it possible to fix this somehow? There's a bunch of dangling double-redirects that should be tracked down and fixed, but that's difficult to do without the "what links here" feature. -- Delirium 23:42, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)
The other day I was wandering through the Casualties of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks: City of New York and discovered a large number of names that link incorrectly to famous people of the same name. I pass this along in a note on the appropriate talk pages. How should we handle this? -- Paul, in Saudi
Originally this was a redirect to Group A streptococcal infection#Necrotizing fasciitis, then it was changed to a copy of that information without the original text deleted from the main article. It has had a few changes since. The redirect should be restored or the main article updated to remove the copied text. RedWolf 03:59, Jan 17, 2004 (UTC)
A user decided that the word "terrorist" is POV and had to be removed from the title of the article previously titled September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; he went and changed the title accordingly. Some users agree with this and some disagree. The vote is underway at Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks. Tempshill 19:52, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Eloquence has written a new feature: a JavaScript edit toolbar capable of formatting wikitext by clicking buttons. You can see a demonstration of it at test.wikipedia.org. It's a great idea but it seems to have a few minor issues at the moment:
Eloquence thinks it's good enough as it is, and it should be enabled by default. However some people think some more work should be done on it first. Does anyone else have an opinion? -- Tim Starling 04:08, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)
Everyone, please clear your caches before trying again (Shift+Reload may not work with IE). I've changed the JS so that the tags are inserted at the cursor position, but the scroll-up problem might be a Mozilla bug. At least now when you press a cursor key you're in the right place again, as the cursor is now in the right position. Everything should be perfect in IE now. —Eloquence 06:44, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)
Nice work (IMO) ... could I ask, can these be made into bookmarklets? thanks ... [mumbels about source code =-] ... JDR
If any major feature of this doesn't work in any browser, then end users using those browsers shouldn't even see any part of it. The behavior in Konqueror is very confusing; when I select text and click the B I expect that text to be bolded (or at least the markup needed to make it bolded should be imputed). If this confused and frustrated me (a person with a great deal of computer literacy), it most certainly will confuse and frustrate rank newbies (especially ones only familiar with highly sanitized GUIs). So it should not be shown to any browser that does not fully support its functionality! Erik wants to make things easier for newbies ? that's a great goal. But any newbie not using IE on Windows (maybe a few other configs) will be more confused and frustrated with this feature than without it. They will think that Wikipedia is broken, not their browser and then go away. So if it don't work in certain browsers, then run browser detection and don't serve broken bits to newbies. They will trip over them. -- mav 09:26, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I can't seem to find any explanation to how the "What links here" page works. I checked the FAQ, but I have missed it. If you put a [[ ]] link in an article, is that how thing show up in "What links here"?
-werbwerb 1/18/04
I am working on newly started Tamil Wikipedia, and have either created or translated most of the articles currently available there. I feel getting an adminship is useful to develop the Tamil Wikipedia in a more efficient way. Tamil WK does not have a Request page for this purpose, and does not have many registered users to have active discussion. can someone advise me on this issue? Mayooranathan 09:36, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
It strikes me as daft that withe the standard skin (the only one I am familiar with) that an =header= is bigger than the article title at the top of the page. May I suggest that we reduce the =header= to the same size as the article title and make ==90%==, ===80%===, ====70%====. -- SGBailey 10:07, 2004 Jan 18 (UTC)
I agree with Delirium; I don't think there are any good reasons to use level-1 headings in any article, and think they should be disabled or at the very least strongly discouraged. How does this usage improve the M1 Motorway article? If an article includes topic names thought to be more important than the article title itself, then they shouldn't be under that article title; An article entitled "M1 Motorway" should be about the M1 Motorway; it is clearly the most important topic in the article, and hence should be the largest (and the only one marked up with h1). Using a level-1 heading puts that topic on the same hierarchical level as the article itself; it's like having an "outline" of the article that looks like this:
Which, of course, is silly. -- Wapcaplet 21:32, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I created a stub for this use of the term nursery. It needs a disambig page for other meanings, but I know little of children's nurseries for example, and would not even know what to title such a page (if such a page does not already exist - I could not find one...) Anyone want to tackle this? Pollinator 03:29, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Hi, I need a sysop to add Geyser to the Philosophy, Mathematics and Natural Sciences section of Brilliant prose. It has gone through the nomination process, and all objections have been withdrawn. Thanks, Gentgeen 06:56, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Porque não tem versão em português? Um abraço. Luís Teixeira. Belém-Pará-Amazônia-Brasil
The current de facto standard for phonetic transcriptions on Wikipedia is SAMPA. With the transition to UTF-8, it is now possible to use IPA symbols directly in the text. Is it a good idea to start doing this? If you have any comments or opinions, please go to [2]. arj 12:45, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Are literal string enclosed within quotation marks?
Our page on Lagrangian point is in the top story on http://slashdot.org right now, so expect some extra traffic and some anonyvandals. Still, an anon (almost certainly from that source) just fixed my dodgy orbital arithmetic on JWST, so long live the anons, I say. -- Finlay McWalter 16:25, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
One question that's been bugging me lately is, Where do we draw the distinction between content that belongs on the wiki and content that is too trivial to be here? Some things are definitely trivial, for example the so-called "vanity pages" created by users about themselves (with exceptions for genuinely noteworthy people like Daniel C. Boyer). I remember reading something about a "1000-people rule," according to which a topic deserves to be here if and only if one thousand people, anywhere in the world, would want to know about it. I'm sure that there is at least one meta page about this, but I've been unable to find it. -- Smack 01:01, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I was editing the Vandalism in progress page and received an error message:
Database error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
SELECT HIGH_PRIORITY length(cur_text) AS x, cur_namespace, cur_is_redirect FROM cur WHERE cur_id='286398' from within function "". MySQL returned error "2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query".
From that point, I can't get back to it. I can see it when I look at the Diff, but not when I go direct to the page. RickK 04:29, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I noticed that wikipedia had almost no information on billiards and I have been adding some articles. Even if I only add a bio on each BCA hall of fame player, that is an incredible amout of work.
Is it a reasonable thing to look for shortcuts, such as asking BCA for permission to use the small bios they have for each hall of fame inductee?
Or is that bad form, or against the ruleson of wikipedia?
I plan on doing many of the bios myself, as I am sort of an amateur pool historian, and have a background information on many, but not on all of them.
I've always wistfully looked to the day when Wikipedia would be able to take established encyclopedias head-on. Just now, I looked up Encarta, and found that their biggest edition has less than 70,000 articles! In two years, we've created more than 2 and a half times the number of articles in Microsoft's encyclopedia. Well done, Wikipedians! -- Lunkwill
How about letting the google search be directly from the main page? Instead of the frustration of entering a search and then having to accept a google search (which b.t.w. gives completely acceptable answers) -- anon
There's a school project on cosmetics going on. See Mascara, Nail diseases, Manicure (existed already before), Pedicure, Eyebrows, Eyebrow makeovers, and maybe others. All are on Cleanup, the last one also on VfD. See also the page history of Manicure, where the author comments "Begining a page for a grade, do not edit"... I have the strong feeling that the other authors belong to the same class. Most of these articles are in a pretty bad shape, and anyway, others have edited some of them. I'll grant that some of these may yet become real articles, but somehow I doubt it. What to do with these? Lupo 13:00, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
See User:Craigbutz for a list of them. There are more than cosmetics articles. My concerns are that we correct and improve the English and they get marked on our corrections, some have been redirected (what mark to they get then?) and some are how-tos. The premise may not understand the wiki concept - people don't own articles here, they are collaborative efforts. Secretlondon 14:17, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
I have taken the liberty to write on his talk page and to email him. Hopefully he'll show up and can provide some reassurances and perhaps we can all gain some enlightenment. - UtherSRG 15:39, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC) ⊙
Thank you all for your interest in this experiment. Please do not about students being graded on work they didn't do. I will be looking at page histories, user contribution lists, as well as narrative response papers in assessing. I would think that wikipedians would understand that writing has value beyond the finished product, and have faith that people can be given credit for participating in collaboration.
One of the biggest frustrations of writing teachers is finding assignments to give where the writing actually matters. I work with vocational high school students who are learning a wealth of specialized knowledge worth sharing. Some of them, obviously, struggle with writing. They are the ones who need their writing to matter the most, or they won't take it seriously.
I do now see a number of aspects of the assignment that should be reworked, which I could not have foreseen without letting students giving it a shot. I opted not to have them work up drafts in MS-Word because it would have been a nightmare to explain why formatting doesn't tranfer. Even with a demo and basic guide, many are confused by the mark-up.
In the future, I may have to save this project for more proficient writers. I do like the idea of temporary pages. Is there a protocol for doing that? Would it work to create links to obscurely named articles, then change the titles to their real names when completed? Other ideas? - Craigbutz 00:33, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)
A lot of problem articles seem to be works in progress. Someone had an idea, got started, left things just barely started or incomplete, and you can't tell whether the project is still alive.
A related problem, which I think we may see more of, are pages started as school projects (see above, and also see Nurse assistant skills, which is currently the result of my efforts to fix grammar and language in an article of this type).
In such cases, Wikipedians are reluctant to delete the articles if a) the topic is worthy and b) the content that is there is considered to be better than nothing.
Still, it seems to me that it might be useful to have messages that are variants on the stub message. One might say something like "This page is a work in progress. You can help Wikipedia by adding to it." And it also might be useful to have a message that says something like "This page does not meet Wikipedia quality standards. You can help Wikipedia by improving it." In both cases, the message should be dated and should be handled as a sort of postpone vote for deletion. If someone notices that the page with such a notice is bad and hasn't been improved in months, that would be a prima facie case for deletion.
Thoughts? Dpbsmith 13:28, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
migration of the apaches? --> Wikipedia:Reference Desk
I noted some of the year (example 1988) have a box on the right to select other categories such as 1988 in sports, 1988 in film and the like. However, in 1954 (and others), this box does not appear. It is quite useful so if somebody knows how to add this, then I think it would be a good idea. Thank you. JackandJill 17:04, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
<div style="float:right; border:1px; border-style:solid; padding:2px"> '''See also:''' * [[1988 in aviation]] * [[1988 in film]] * [[1988 in literature]] * [[1988 in music]] * [[1988 in sports]] * [[1988 in television]] </div>
Is there any justification for case sensitive page names?
Is there any reason to want "climate change", "Climate change", "climate Change" or indeed "ClImAte ChangE" to be different pages? In this case, obviously no, but are there in others?
If not, could wiki perhaps internalise names based on capitalising the first letter and little-ing the others (ie "Climate Change" is canonical), and (if desired) undo this in the displayed page. Ie, if you search for "ClimATE CHange" wiki would search for "Climate Change" but could (if this is desirable; it would be, say, if you had searched on IPCC or ASEAN) reconvert to whatever you had searched on, and display a page headed "ClimATE CHange". This would I think be very little extra load. ( William M. Connolley 17:39, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC))
OK, so, can anyone either point to the earlier discussion, or, give an example where the different meanings occur? ( William M. Connolley 22:36, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC))
It looks like gnu and ova should be treated as disambiguisations. Why not gnu (acronym)? ilya 23:50, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Just a reminder that voting closes today. I hope to start implementing the changes on Monday. Bmills 09:56, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Note that a load of candidates after voting are now waiting seconding/objecting on Wikipedia:Brilliant prose candidates. Sorry for not posting this yesterday, but I just could not load this page. Bmills 09:30, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Apparently a vandal I just blocked thinks it's funny to send me a little mail bomb (5000 lines of garbage) and some insults as a thank you. However as he sent it via the wikipedia email it gives no hint on who actually sent it, the only IP in the email headers is the one of pliny. It would be quite helpful if the actual sending IP (or maybe even the username if it's a logged in user) would be present in the headers - not only in the case of tracing such childish revenge mails, but also in case a legitimate user gets blocked and it gets difficult to find which blocked IP needs to be unblocked. It is quite similar with what Hotmail does, they add a X-Originating-IP header line. andy 10:42, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Is there a preset icon or something when linking references that are in PDF? I have been editing a lot of articles lately where the references used are in PDF so I have to put a note like [1] ( PDF document) on the article's references. -- Maio 11:02, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)
..so it's a day late.
This is such a trememdous undertaking, and a blessedly welcome respite from commercial 'pedias. I was dismayed when Britannica when to a subscription format. I was even more dismayed when they refused to correct a factual error. I've not gone back since.
Long may Wiki prosper!
The article on
cosmotheism currently has some <nowiki>
ed links to necessary background material which is racist Neo-Nazi garbage. The anonymous user who's been working on this article insists that the links be active. What is Wikipedia policy on linking to obviously offensive content, i.e. the speeches and writings of
William Pierce?
— No One Jones
(talk) 19:56, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Let's make the links to possibly offensive sites as Preference, off by default. ilya 21:49, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Is there anyone out there with the power to update Wikipedia:Most Wanted Articles to about 200 articles? A whole bunch have been made and so we need fresh meat. jengod 22:23, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)
Well, I am not able to do that, but I do have an idea. What about including, on that most wanted page, a list of the most viewed broken links. Currently it shows the broken links that exist in the most places. However, this results in lots of them being from those generated pages like all the cities in the US. I don't know enough to know how hard this is, but perhaps a reasonable approximation of this would be to have the broken links that exist on the most viewed pages. Nroose 16:05, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
As of the posting of this comment, the September 11, 2001 attacks article shows 10 inbound links, despite the fact that there are hundreds, so I assume the various moving around has managed to corrupt the link table. Is it possible to fix this somehow? There's a bunch of dangling double-redirects that should be tracked down and fixed, but that's difficult to do without the "what links here" feature. -- Delirium 23:42, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)
The other day I was wandering through the Casualties of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks: City of New York and discovered a large number of names that link incorrectly to famous people of the same name. I pass this along in a note on the appropriate talk pages. How should we handle this? -- Paul, in Saudi
Originally this was a redirect to Group A streptococcal infection#Necrotizing fasciitis, then it was changed to a copy of that information without the original text deleted from the main article. It has had a few changes since. The redirect should be restored or the main article updated to remove the copied text. RedWolf 03:59, Jan 17, 2004 (UTC)
A user decided that the word "terrorist" is POV and had to be removed from the title of the article previously titled September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; he went and changed the title accordingly. Some users agree with this and some disagree. The vote is underway at Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks. Tempshill 19:52, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Eloquence has written a new feature: a JavaScript edit toolbar capable of formatting wikitext by clicking buttons. You can see a demonstration of it at test.wikipedia.org. It's a great idea but it seems to have a few minor issues at the moment:
Eloquence thinks it's good enough as it is, and it should be enabled by default. However some people think some more work should be done on it first. Does anyone else have an opinion? -- Tim Starling 04:08, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)
Everyone, please clear your caches before trying again (Shift+Reload may not work with IE). I've changed the JS so that the tags are inserted at the cursor position, but the scroll-up problem might be a Mozilla bug. At least now when you press a cursor key you're in the right place again, as the cursor is now in the right position. Everything should be perfect in IE now. —Eloquence 06:44, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)
Nice work (IMO) ... could I ask, can these be made into bookmarklets? thanks ... [mumbels about source code =-] ... JDR
If any major feature of this doesn't work in any browser, then end users using those browsers shouldn't even see any part of it. The behavior in Konqueror is very confusing; when I select text and click the B I expect that text to be bolded (or at least the markup needed to make it bolded should be imputed). If this confused and frustrated me (a person with a great deal of computer literacy), it most certainly will confuse and frustrate rank newbies (especially ones only familiar with highly sanitized GUIs). So it should not be shown to any browser that does not fully support its functionality! Erik wants to make things easier for newbies ? that's a great goal. But any newbie not using IE on Windows (maybe a few other configs) will be more confused and frustrated with this feature than without it. They will think that Wikipedia is broken, not their browser and then go away. So if it don't work in certain browsers, then run browser detection and don't serve broken bits to newbies. They will trip over them. -- mav 09:26, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I can't seem to find any explanation to how the "What links here" page works. I checked the FAQ, but I have missed it. If you put a [[ ]] link in an article, is that how thing show up in "What links here"?
-werbwerb 1/18/04
I am working on newly started Tamil Wikipedia, and have either created or translated most of the articles currently available there. I feel getting an adminship is useful to develop the Tamil Wikipedia in a more efficient way. Tamil WK does not have a Request page for this purpose, and does not have many registered users to have active discussion. can someone advise me on this issue? Mayooranathan 09:36, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
It strikes me as daft that withe the standard skin (the only one I am familiar with) that an =header= is bigger than the article title at the top of the page. May I suggest that we reduce the =header= to the same size as the article title and make ==90%==, ===80%===, ====70%====. -- SGBailey 10:07, 2004 Jan 18 (UTC)
I agree with Delirium; I don't think there are any good reasons to use level-1 headings in any article, and think they should be disabled or at the very least strongly discouraged. How does this usage improve the M1 Motorway article? If an article includes topic names thought to be more important than the article title itself, then they shouldn't be under that article title; An article entitled "M1 Motorway" should be about the M1 Motorway; it is clearly the most important topic in the article, and hence should be the largest (and the only one marked up with h1). Using a level-1 heading puts that topic on the same hierarchical level as the article itself; it's like having an "outline" of the article that looks like this:
Which, of course, is silly. -- Wapcaplet 21:32, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I created a stub for this use of the term nursery. It needs a disambig page for other meanings, but I know little of children's nurseries for example, and would not even know what to title such a page (if such a page does not already exist - I could not find one...) Anyone want to tackle this? Pollinator 03:29, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Hi, I need a sysop to add Geyser to the Philosophy, Mathematics and Natural Sciences section of Brilliant prose. It has gone through the nomination process, and all objections have been withdrawn. Thanks, Gentgeen 06:56, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Porque não tem versão em português? Um abraço. Luís Teixeira. Belém-Pará-Amazônia-Brasil
The current de facto standard for phonetic transcriptions on Wikipedia is SAMPA. With the transition to UTF-8, it is now possible to use IPA symbols directly in the text. Is it a good idea to start doing this? If you have any comments or opinions, please go to [2]. arj 12:45, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Are literal string enclosed within quotation marks?
Our page on Lagrangian point is in the top story on http://slashdot.org right now, so expect some extra traffic and some anonyvandals. Still, an anon (almost certainly from that source) just fixed my dodgy orbital arithmetic on JWST, so long live the anons, I say. -- Finlay McWalter 16:25, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
One question that's been bugging me lately is, Where do we draw the distinction between content that belongs on the wiki and content that is too trivial to be here? Some things are definitely trivial, for example the so-called "vanity pages" created by users about themselves (with exceptions for genuinely noteworthy people like Daniel C. Boyer). I remember reading something about a "1000-people rule," according to which a topic deserves to be here if and only if one thousand people, anywhere in the world, would want to know about it. I'm sure that there is at least one meta page about this, but I've been unable to find it. -- Smack 01:01, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I was editing the Vandalism in progress page and received an error message:
Database error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
SELECT HIGH_PRIORITY length(cur_text) AS x, cur_namespace, cur_is_redirect FROM cur WHERE cur_id='286398' from within function "". MySQL returned error "2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query".
From that point, I can't get back to it. I can see it when I look at the Diff, but not when I go direct to the page. RickK 04:29, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I noticed that wikipedia had almost no information on billiards and I have been adding some articles. Even if I only add a bio on each BCA hall of fame player, that is an incredible amout of work.
Is it a reasonable thing to look for shortcuts, such as asking BCA for permission to use the small bios they have for each hall of fame inductee?
Or is that bad form, or against the ruleson of wikipedia?
I plan on doing many of the bios myself, as I am sort of an amateur pool historian, and have a background information on many, but not on all of them.
I've always wistfully looked to the day when Wikipedia would be able to take established encyclopedias head-on. Just now, I looked up Encarta, and found that their biggest edition has less than 70,000 articles! In two years, we've created more than 2 and a half times the number of articles in Microsoft's encyclopedia. Well done, Wikipedians! -- Lunkwill
How about letting the google search be directly from the main page? Instead of the frustration of entering a search and then having to accept a google search (which b.t.w. gives completely acceptable answers) -- anon
There's a school project on cosmetics going on. See Mascara, Nail diseases, Manicure (existed already before), Pedicure, Eyebrows, Eyebrow makeovers, and maybe others. All are on Cleanup, the last one also on VfD. See also the page history of Manicure, where the author comments "Begining a page for a grade, do not edit"... I have the strong feeling that the other authors belong to the same class. Most of these articles are in a pretty bad shape, and anyway, others have edited some of them. I'll grant that some of these may yet become real articles, but somehow I doubt it. What to do with these? Lupo 13:00, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
See User:Craigbutz for a list of them. There are more than cosmetics articles. My concerns are that we correct and improve the English and they get marked on our corrections, some have been redirected (what mark to they get then?) and some are how-tos. The premise may not understand the wiki concept - people don't own articles here, they are collaborative efforts. Secretlondon 14:17, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
I have taken the liberty to write on his talk page and to email him. Hopefully he'll show up and can provide some reassurances and perhaps we can all gain some enlightenment. - UtherSRG 15:39, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC) ⊙
Thank you all for your interest in this experiment. Please do not about students being graded on work they didn't do. I will be looking at page histories, user contribution lists, as well as narrative response papers in assessing. I would think that wikipedians would understand that writing has value beyond the finished product, and have faith that people can be given credit for participating in collaboration.
One of the biggest frustrations of writing teachers is finding assignments to give where the writing actually matters. I work with vocational high school students who are learning a wealth of specialized knowledge worth sharing. Some of them, obviously, struggle with writing. They are the ones who need their writing to matter the most, or they won't take it seriously.
I do now see a number of aspects of the assignment that should be reworked, which I could not have foreseen without letting students giving it a shot. I opted not to have them work up drafts in MS-Word because it would have been a nightmare to explain why formatting doesn't tranfer. Even with a demo and basic guide, many are confused by the mark-up.
In the future, I may have to save this project for more proficient writers. I do like the idea of temporary pages. Is there a protocol for doing that? Would it work to create links to obscurely named articles, then change the titles to their real names when completed? Other ideas? - Craigbutz 00:33, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)
A lot of problem articles seem to be works in progress. Someone had an idea, got started, left things just barely started or incomplete, and you can't tell whether the project is still alive.
A related problem, which I think we may see more of, are pages started as school projects (see above, and also see Nurse assistant skills, which is currently the result of my efforts to fix grammar and language in an article of this type).
In such cases, Wikipedians are reluctant to delete the articles if a) the topic is worthy and b) the content that is there is considered to be better than nothing.
Still, it seems to me that it might be useful to have messages that are variants on the stub message. One might say something like "This page is a work in progress. You can help Wikipedia by adding to it." And it also might be useful to have a message that says something like "This page does not meet Wikipedia quality standards. You can help Wikipedia by improving it." In both cases, the message should be dated and should be handled as a sort of postpone vote for deletion. If someone notices that the page with such a notice is bad and hasn't been improved in months, that would be a prima facie case for deletion.
Thoughts? Dpbsmith 13:28, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
migration of the apaches? --> Wikipedia:Reference Desk
I noted some of the year (example 1988) have a box on the right to select other categories such as 1988 in sports, 1988 in film and the like. However, in 1954 (and others), this box does not appear. It is quite useful so if somebody knows how to add this, then I think it would be a good idea. Thank you. JackandJill 17:04, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
<div style="float:right; border:1px; border-style:solid; padding:2px"> '''See also:''' * [[1988 in aviation]] * [[1988 in film]] * [[1988 in literature]] * [[1988 in music]] * [[1988 in sports]] * [[1988 in television]] </div>
Is there any justification for case sensitive page names?
Is there any reason to want "climate change", "Climate change", "climate Change" or indeed "ClImAte ChangE" to be different pages? In this case, obviously no, but are there in others?
If not, could wiki perhaps internalise names based on capitalising the first letter and little-ing the others (ie "Climate Change" is canonical), and (if desired) undo this in the displayed page. Ie, if you search for "ClimATE CHange" wiki would search for "Climate Change" but could (if this is desirable; it would be, say, if you had searched on IPCC or ASEAN) reconvert to whatever you had searched on, and display a page headed "ClimATE CHange". This would I think be very little extra load. ( William M. Connolley 17:39, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC))
OK, so, can anyone either point to the earlier discussion, or, give an example where the different meanings occur? ( William M. Connolley 22:36, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC))
It looks like gnu and ova should be treated as disambiguisations. Why not gnu (acronym)? ilya 23:50, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)