I don't think this is related to the bolded server problem at the top of this page, but it might be. I am having a lot of trouble updating an image I made. There are three versions. The second wouldnt show up until I uploaded the third, and now the third won't show up, even though it is in the server because I can access it by clicking previous versions. With some reversion I have been able to make versions 1 and 2 show up, but not 3. I thought maybe I needed to wait a while but that's not it. I left it up overnight and it still won't update. The image is here and the image I actually want is here. The 1009 byte one. Please teach me how to fix it. - Omegatron
Hello all, this is just a friendly reminder about trolls (and sock puppets too). As Wikipedia increases in coverage, so too increases the meddling of trolls. There are times when it seems like trolls are everywhere, and it becomes a game (of sorts) to catch, nab or name the little buggers (and sock puppets too). It is in such moments that people begin to be overly suspicious of the actions of newcomers. Our trust in newcomers diminishes. Once distrust supercedes trust in a community, it is difficult to reverse the change. Let's not let that happen to Wikipedia. The project depends on a strong, friendly community. Build the database and build the community, too.
I realize you are all working hard at building our community. This messages is not to insult you or scold you. It is just a reminder. Welcome newcomers. Don't be overly suspicious of the actions of newcomers. Speak softly.
But carry a big stick, Kingturtle 04:20, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm concerned at the tendancy to use the label 'troll' to describe people with whom we disagree. What is trolling in this context? What is the difference between trolling and vandalism / abuse? 209.102.127.145 20:02, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
-- Ruhrjung 02:42, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
(And then see, Wikipedia:Meet the Feebles :) →Raul654)
Is it possible to quickly find out the number of edits made by myself or any other user (not which specific ones, just a total number)? If so, can this be filtered by date, etc - e.g. can I find out how many edits I made in December 2003, or in the last 3 weeks, and so on. Would find this handy. Graham 04:29, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I've noticed that Wikipedia's articles on the United States Congress are a bit lacking--for instance, we don't even have articles on most of the current members, let alone past ones. As I've been slogging through the List of House Committees, I've realized there's a number of separate WikiProjects I could start here. Where are good places I could advertise for help with these various things? I'm no good at starting new articles (prefer to edit) and I'm not a congressional scholar. Meelar 05:57, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC) P.S. Please reply at my talk page
I am confused about the time zone of the date stamps. It appears to be one hour ahead of California time, or MST - Mountain Standard Time. Shouldn't it be Coordinated Universal Time in order to be neutral? -- pstudier 06:07, 2004 Feb 20 (UTC)
Sorry, I just noticed this as I posted my question. Why are there different timezones? "Because the earth is round and it keeps spinning" by Radar, a character on Mash. ;-) -- pstudier 06:21, 2004 Feb 20 (UTC)
Having recently expanded an article on Nishapur in Iran following the recent rail disaster there, I've found that the place appears to be referred to more often as Neyshabur these days. Nishapur is the "traditional" English transliteration, Neyshabur is the current version (much like Peking/Beijing in China). However, Google reports that Nishapur is more often used (5640 results) than Neyshabur (2970 results). Which version would I be better off using in the article? -- ChrisO 13:11, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
In accordance with the recent discussion on the wikipedia-l mailing list and Jimbo's pronouncements (edit: this was not a decision - this was an opinion and discussion is ongoing Jamesday) on the matter I have created
This page serves as a discussion page for debating whether an image or other file can legitmately be considered fair use, and whether all alternatives have been exhausted. Images and other files that may be eligible should not be used until there is consensus on the page to do so; on the other hand, they should not be deleted until there is consensus that they are not eligible for fair use.
Image pages that have undergone due process should be tagged with {{msg:verifieduse}} ( Template:verifieduse).
All pages which are currently tagged with {{msg:fairuse}} (many older ones link to fair use instead) should undergo due process on this page to determine whether their status as fair use is justifiable. If so, they should be tagged with {{msg:verifieduse}} instead, if not, they should be deleted and efforts should be made to seek free alternatives.
Whenever a previously fair use image is deleted, a link should be added to Wikipedia:Requested pictures. Images without any copyright information should either be deleted or undergo the fair use process.
No newly uploaded images should be tagged with {{msg:fairuse}}.
This post is also cross-posted to the wikien-l mailing list. [2]
—Eloquence 17:01, Feb 20, 2004 (UTC)
Note that it is contrary to current policy to delete an image without listing it on either Wikipedia:Images for deletion or Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements. Not recommended for a sysop who wants to retain the deletion capability to delete without using due process. Jamesday 12:19, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'd enjoy a "random human-authored page" feature that excludes the robot-written descriptions of U. S. towns, which currently seem to constitute about 50% of the "random page" hits. Thoughts? Dpbsmith 17:14, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
A problem that has sometimes bothered me: when contributing to a field of knowledge in which there is not a well organised hierarchy of articles, it can be difficult to find out what has already been written. To get an overview, it is often necessary to follow many, many links and additionally search for individual words or phrases (further complicated by the current absence of direct database searching). I wonder if there are more effective means of understanding how articles are related to each other. It would help a lot if one could get a graphical representation of links between pages. Are there any tools to do this, or are there other ideas how to make it easier to understand the increasingly complex structure of our article namespace? Kosebamse 19:47, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
If I go to the "What links here" for Pelé I find Pele listed 3 times, but if I go to Pele, I find just 1 link to Pelé. Why's this so ? Jay 21:56, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Special:Whatlinkshere/National_capital_territory and Special:Whatlinkshere/Talk:National_capital_territory give scores of Village pump links. What's up? -- Paddu 10:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It seems that the discussion at meta:Page footers is pretty much over. It seems that there is no consensus between alternatives #1 and #3, but a clear opposition to suggestions #2 and #4. How would I proceed further now? What would be the next step in attempting to reach consensus? Thanks for any help. -- Timwi 22:52, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Hi, this is a great place!
I have just expanded a page containing a stub message Malvern Hills.
Is it cool to delete the stub message myself, or is that decision better left to someone else?
Thanks,
Chris B
20/2/04
There is no symbol for chemical equilibrium (the <-> thing is chemical resonance) Bensaccount
↔ or ⇔? Dysprosia 08:42, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
↔ is resonance, ⇔ is a box. Equilibrium is two half arrows like --\ over \-- . Someone needs to make a Wikipedia symbol for Equilibrium. Bensaccount 18:03, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I really like the New pages feature. But I've noticed that the IP addresses are not links to the associated user page. Is this intended or an oversight? - Rholton (aka Anthropos) 02:52, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I just noticed that Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry and associated articles like Poetry and English poetry don't follow Wikipedia section heading style in regards to capitalization found in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings). Is there some reason we should not edit these to be conformant to the standard section heading style? Bevo 16:28, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
A discusssion to replace the Main Page --> Wikipedia talk:Main Page
This has been a problem for several monthas, but I do it so seldom that I'm unsure if it a transient problem or one that is always been here since the servers became overloaded. It is not possible to change an image by loading it on top of an old image. Sometimes one might want to clean up an old image, or adjust its size, or even replace it with an improved version (better cropping, etc.) The present system does not allow images to be altered and then reloaded. Loading any image on top of an old image lays down all the proper "paperwork", but the actual image does not change. It does not change for several days. I'm unsure if it ever changes. Both the new and the old versions exist on the document page, but only the original image is used by an article. I've been forced to just abandon old images, rename the improved version, and load it as a new image, which is terribly inefficient and must be leaving orphans behind, but what other option is there? Is this just part of the silly behavior of the present server setup? - Marshman 00:03, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Image purging is enabled since yesterday, this problem should be solved mostly. -- Gabriel Wicke 17:00, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Not sure if this has been discussed before, but is there any need to have links to other articles in the printable version of an article? It seems unnecessary when its only purpose is for printing.
—chopchopwhitey 00:46, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Is there a reason why that from an anonymous IP address's user page, there is no link to "User Contributions"? ugen64 01:01, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Plain vanilla main page. Optim 02:55, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Is it possible to move/rename uploaded images? When looking at the Image: namespace page for the image, there's a Move link, but does that move the image itself, or merely the page that describes the image? I can't seem to find any mention of images on Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page. (The image in question is Image:YabokoLogo.png, the logo of Russia's Yabloko political party - it needs to be changed to "YablokoLogo" rather than "YabokoLogo".) Thanks. -- Vardion 03:23, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Only 1487 articles to go! A live count is available at http://wikimedia.org/count -- Tim Starling 09:43, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia_talk:Votes for deletion#VOTE:_NEW_LAYOUT_FOR_VFD! -- BL 11:29, 22 Feb, 2004 (UTC)
How hard would it be to add (possibly) two new links to the Difference Between Revisions page that is displayed when you click on "Last" in the page history. The links would be "Prev" and "Next" and would link to the Difference Between Revisions for the Previous and Next Revisions (if either or both existed). I recently wanted to skip though the revisions of a page to find when a recent change occurred and who changed it, and found it a very difficult thing to do. - Gaz 13:44, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Thank you both, I'll wait. As a Database Consultant, I know exactly what they are about to go through.
Its amazing that you spend ages creating a schema, think it is great, and come back (usually much) later
and think it more closely resembles doggy-doo. So you start all over again. Have fun ;-) -
Gaz 16:31, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This may seem like a trivial issue, but after half a dozen variations were uploaded to Mozilla Firefox, I decided we needed an agreed policy on the form of screenshots used to illustrate software articles. Since image copyright issues are currently a hot topic, and screenshots have specific issues in that regard too, I've created Wikipedia:Software screenshots as a central point for discussion of both. I'm pretty sure this isn't duplicated elsewhere, and would appreciate comments and refinements so that this can be linked into the hierarchy of "official" policy pages in due course. - IMSoP 15:46, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Is there an image that could be used to link to Wikipedia (button size — 88x31)? alerante 17:06, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Are there indexing guidelines or advice for Wikipedia?
Having contributed to the pages on Hyperthyroidism, and Graves-Basedow disease, it is disappointing that the search does not pick up on the name "Graves", "Graves'", nor the errant apostrophe version "Grave's". I created a "redirect" page for Graves' disease, which is the common name in the English speaking world, but this appears not to be indexed, which seems wrong to me.
Somethings amiss with Wikisource. When I try to submit something i've edited i get:
"The requested URL //wiki/Wikisource:Historical_documents was not found on this server."
and when i type wikisource.org into my browser i get:
"The requested URL //wiki/Main_Page was not found on this server."
The server seems to be adding an extra /:
http://sources.wikipedia.org//wiki/Main_Page
Perl 21:04, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I have a copyright question. I cut a few small sprites out of screenshots of a game taken from an emulator to use on the Rupee (Legend of Zelda) page. Is this a violation?
Also, I'd like to know when the "most linked disambiguation pages" will be updated again. I like to go through and disambiguate them. Thanks. Derrick Coetzee 02:07, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Can I use this image [3] even though it is "crown copyright"? Is it fair use? Perl 04:01, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
When I 'go' (button) to a non-existent page and the server guesses at the page (for example "greek koffee"), there is a "view source" link for the Main Page in the sidebar and top, along with that entire sidebar section. There are some similar links in the header. Is this a known bug? Also, is there a better place I should have posted this? -- Spikey 04:56, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
There were four images I uploaded in in the summer and fall of last year before the new fair use guidelines came into effect. They are:
(Councilman Davis's Details have since been removed from the site since his death)
What page should I go to to get these images deleted? -- iHoshie 06:20, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I've been getting a very annoying and long error message that ends with "acl stayaway browser ^Mozilla/3.0" off and on for the last couple hours while using Konqueror 3.1.3. I'm using Galeon 1.3.8 right now. Anybody have any idea what is going on? -- mav 08:19, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm getting it, on and off, with Opera 6.0x; Opera 7.x, Mozilla 1.6b, and Internet Explorer 5.0. (All under Win2K.) Clearly, it's a server-side problem, Mav.
Tannin 08:23, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Discussion about whether recipes belong in Wikipedia.
(Moved to
List_of_recipes/delete
Talk:List of recipes/Delete as per
Gentgeen's suggestion)
Anyone with heart problems should be careful when typing in the wikipedia address. i spent five minutes looking at various wikipedia pages (so i thought) and was told that the domain name is for sale. Even worse, the site is without content!! Had wikipedia people sold out??
www.wikpedia.org
Details of the Offer
Offer comprises: Domain Name wikpedia.org without content. Make Offer
The domain name is for sale by its owner. If you would like to buy the domain name please make your offer below:
It took me several minutes to realise i was missing an i in wikpedia.
This is just a comment, idle chit-chat - i'm not sure if village pump is the right place for it. Sorry if it's not...
Boud 14:55, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This looks like an example of a case where the uniform domain dispute policy would get the domain handed over to the Wikipedia. It looks like a bad faith attempt to capitalise on the good name of the Wikipedia. Jamesday 23:45, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Hey there, I'm an American teacher living in China andt I'm interested in using Wikipedia with my second-year college English students. Since they come from all over China (though they all go to school in Zhengzhou, Henan province) I figure they can add information about their hometowns and other topics in China, since in general it seems that info is lacking. Any suggestions on how to have my students write articles and not frustrate everybody in the process? Mjklin 11:22, 23 Feb 2004 (Beijing Time)
I suggest you to explicitely (in the manual) decide whether pages with this kind of title require msg:disambig. I started the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation. My position: msg:disambig for these pages is misleading, since links to these pages can only be intentional. I understand that these pages do need a message, because of slangish "disambiguation" word, but it must be customized for this page. Mikkalai 17:39, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Once upon a time, there was an article about food libel, but I can't find it anymore. Was it deleted? Moved? jengod 19:03, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)
Please follow the link above
The new main page looks awesome. I have one suggestion which I'd like a little feedback on: should the navigation bar on the left list Community Information Page or Wikipedia:Main Page or whatever right below Main Page? That way we can jump straight to either main page....we'd have to name them so that new users wouldn't get too confused, but I think it would be helpful. I assume this is a low-difficulty change for developers to make? Jwrosenzweig 21:52, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
(Which How-to articles to include? Where do How-to articles belong?) Moved to Wikipedia talk:How-to
I don't know whether this is a bug; I haven't noticed it before but maybe I was asleep. 1. I was logged in. 2. I started editing a page and didn't save it for quite a while. 3. Apparently I timed out, because it saved it as an anonymous user, not as me. 4. I logged in. 5. I realized that, to request a change to the edit history, I had to log out. So I did. Then I sat there for about 5 seconds, doing nothing. 6. It redrew my screen, with my username at the top, as if I were logged in! 7. I clicked on a link to another page, whereupon it claimed I was logged out. (I repeated steps 4-7 3 times to be sure I wasn't imagining things.) Any ideas what's going on? Is it a bug? Is it my brower? Elf 03:21, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Anyone want to help me create guidelines for Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools? There seem to be many schools on WP, but no guidelenes on how to add information or how to make them encyclopedic. Davodd 07:17, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)
I got a proposition for ya--adopt your birthday! :) In the interests of keeping all the date pages updated March 15, August 22, December 3, etc., I'd like to suggest (beg, implore) that you toddle on over to whereever your birthday is, and click on "what links here" and use it to check to make sure that everything is up to date, spelled right, and so on, and add anything that's been updated recently. This will be a great blessing to those who want to update Wikipedia:Events in history. Thank you for reading. jengod 07:28, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)
On a related topic, it'd be nice if we had a Wikipedia:Wikipedians by birthday kind of categorization. Jay 13:20, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It would be really nice to have a better way of inputing and editing phonetic notation. I've worked out a little example, whose conventions are loosely based on Tipa, a phonetics package for LaTeX:
Example sentence: "Dubbs asked his brother what it was like in the other world, and his brother said it was not unlike Cleveland."
Editing form of phonetic transcription: <ipa> [d2bz #askt hIz br2Dr#& w2t It w2z layk In Di 2Dr#& wr#&ld n#&d Iz br2Dr#& sEd It w2z nat @nlayk klivln#&d]</ipa>
Display form: [dʌbz æskt hɪz brʌðr̩ wʌt ɪt wʌz layk ɪn ði ʌðr̩ wr̩ld n̩d ɪz brʌðr̩ sɛd ɪt wʌz nat ənlayk klivln̩d]
(Character 809 is supposed to be a non-spacing diacritic, but my browser gets it wrong.)
GregLee 13:03, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Whoops. I should have put this in the feature request area. Sorry. GregLee 15:03, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk
I have created the first Wikimoney lottery at User:Silsor/lottery. silsor 23:33, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)
On certain pages I get the following error..
"Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper text ..."
but it happens with the most minute edit, when practically nothing has actually been modified. Is there a trick to not losing your work? I have tried the Preview page but it has not come up. Besides intelligence, what am I missing?
Thanks
I keep adding Sarah Polley to vfd because the entire article is copied from here but it seems to keep disappearing. What is going on? SD6-Agent 05:13, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Question: What happens when a contentious article, which is regularly VfD'ed or argued heatedly on its talk page -- what happens when such a page is about a person or group, and that person or group contacts WP to ask that the page be removed? Does this carry weight in VfD and similar discussions? Is there a proper procedure for politely getting a page about one's own life or affairs removed? Of course nothing can be done about mirrors or copies of the 'pedia elsewhere, but is there a way of asking (and receiving permission for) future versions of WP to leave out such a page? Often the reasons for wanting a controversial page to be actively left out include unhappiness that the primary content associated with one's name/group are ANGRY TALK-PAGE RANTS about the content, or reversion thereof, rather than the content itself; perhaps reflecting poorly on the subject of the article because of the pettiness of its adopted protectors.
Case I: Brianism. Lots of people wanted the page to go away, accused the page authors of trying to promote a small sect; the sect itself found out about the whole mess and wrote a public letter asking that its page be removed. Upshot: Brianism is still here; many W'pedians want the page to go away, while others want it to stay; the open letter is still up on the official Brianist website.
Csae II: Richard Genovese. Modern-day artist has resume-like bio pasted-in and wikified by a sequence of both anon users and old-timers; it is put on VfD multiple times without reaching consensus; emotions run high due to connections with older related 'is this important enough to be here' issues [cf. DCB]; W'pedians variously claim it is self-promotion or non-encyclopedic. An anonymous user claiming to be RG himself tries to blank out the page, replacing it with a LONG ALL-CAPS NOTE ABOUT HOW HE DOESN'T WANT A PAGE ABOUT HIS LIFE OR WORK ON WIKIPEDIA and would W'pedia kindly stop trying to maintain such a page. Currently: RG is still here, and still on VfD; Morwen recently protected it to keep the recent user from engaging in a reversion-war; no verification that the angry user is the subject of the article; no verification that the subject of the article is important or famous enough to be included in W'pedia. +sj+ 08:16, 2004 Feb 25 (UTC)
Right now I am seeing a mix of American and British English all over the place in Wikipedia. Is there a standard for this? If not, I think there should be one. It's kind of disconcerting to see "honor" on one page and "honour" on another. Not to mention that this generally affects page titles as well. -- Johnleemk 12:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Yes, really, this isn't a big deal. Some articles suggest one spelling over another (ie US articles should probably have US spellings) but I don't think anyone will take offense / misunderstand (with the possible exception of pants and suspenders! Mark Richards 19:50, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
In the article SkyTrain, we had a Wiki link to an article Vancouver SkyTrain. No matter what I did to modify--or delete and reinsert--the link, it always stayed in red; clicking on it opened up an edit window with all the article text in the window! If I changed the URL to go directly to the article (not via the link from SkyTrain), I could view the article properly. If I put an external link to the article on the SkyTrain page, I could link to the article properly. As you can see, the link to Vancouver SkyTrain works just fine from this page, and also from Wikipedia:Sandbox. Another editor changed the link to Vancouver Skytrain (which redirects to Vancouver SkyTrain, and that worked. After all of these experiments, I tried adding the original Vancouver SkyTrain link once again to the SkyTrain article, and once again it didn't work! What the heck is going on!? -- Sewing 15:19, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Hi,
we have in the German Wikipedia just a discussion going on about the use of the MediaWiki namespace for articles like an extra navigation list. Main argument against it is currently that this is mixing up text elements that were only meant for describing the software (e.g. "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.") with real content.
The idea was at the end of last week just copied from the english Wikipedia. So my question is: was there a discussion going on that finally led to the decision to use this namespace or did it just happen? And how is your experience in using these new text blocks? How many do already exist and did they cause any technical problems so far?
Thanks in advance,
Triebtäter
Squid disk caching has been turned on again, after a week with only RAM caching. This is in response to signs earlier today that the Apache web servers were starting to become overloaded and it's hoped that this will relieve them of enough load that things stay fast. If you see any sign of unusually slow response times on page requests (more than 30 seconds or a timeout) please post about it here. This time the cache is using asynchronous disk requests (the aufs filesystem instead of ufs) and the timeout problems which were experienced last time shouldn't happen. The previous ufs system is reported to have known problems abve 30 requests per second and we're seeing about 60 requests per second even at quiet times, so it's not surprising that there were delay problems with ufs. Jamesday 19:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
German TV coverage is expected this evening about one hour and 50 minutes after the timestamp of this post (at 22:45 CET, 21:45 UTC, 4:45PM Eastern). The show normally has about two million viewers. Don't be surprised if response times increase just after the broadcast. The broadcast is available via Real Player at [8]. Jamesday 19:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
On the HTTP access chart (green line) there's a spike exactly at 21:45 UTC (!) Alfio 22:41, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm just trying to draw some attention here to Rosa Parks. I found what I think is a pretty bad error, and I am hoping someone will look into it. See: Talk:Rosa Parks Katahon 22:16, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Some pages relating to Russia (e.g. describing Russian personalities or Russian geography) have Cyrillic spelling added after the head word. It is very useful to show the place of accent in Russian words (it matters!). The only correct way to add accents to Russian text is to use the character U+0301 ("combining acute accent") after the stressed vowel. (The HTML codes for it are ́ or ́). This complies with the Unicode standard. There are also some non-standard ad hoc ways of showing the place of Russian accent — e.g. making the stressed vowel bold. Such non-standard things must be avoided. If someone's browser cannot show the standard Russian accents, it is the browser's problem, not the Wikipedia's — Monedula 00:05, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Please read through the all new wikipedia:no personal attacks and wikipedia:no legal threats and edit them mercilessly. Thanks. Martin 00:07, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Kurt Jansson wrote on wikipedia-l: "Yesterday there was an article about Wikipedia in Spiegel-Online, the biggest German online news-magazine (30 million visits/month), and I'm sure we got more new German Wikipedians yesterday than ever before.
Through this article the TV took notice of us, and so there will be a feature about us in the "Tagesthemen" at 22:30 (ARD)."
For those who speak German, the Spiegel-Online article is at [10]
File:Wikipedia ARD TagesSchau.jpg
The ARD newsitem can be seen at ARD site, click video above right. Erik Zachte 00:09, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
WMV movie of this (9Mb): http://freecache.org/http://eza.gemm.nl/Wikipedia/Wikipedia_ARD_hi.wmv -- Gabriel Wicke 13:53, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
A translated transcript can be found at meta:German TV coverage of Wikipedia
I'm wondering whether anyone has approached Flags of the World ( [11] and many mirrors) for permission to reproduce flags (with attribution and links)-- in particular, local flags rather than the flags of countries, which we're already well placed for. For example, I'd like to ask them whether I could use their copy of the flag of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania on its Wikipedia page rather than redrawing it. There are dozens of similar examples.
I'd also like to do something similar with city, county and district arms in England and Wales; [12] has lots of good stuff and I'd like to ask them whether we could use any of it.
Has anyone done either of these things before? Should I? Any thoughts? Marnanel 01:28, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The article on National capital territory implies India is the only country to have it, but there are other countries which have it, some from even before India. Anyone who knows what other countries have it, please fix it. Thanks. -- Paddu 06:15, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
How can I know how many people viewed a page? It could be nice to know the impact a page had.
So there is no possibilty to know the exposure? Is this feature enabled from time to time?
I hope to enable the webalizer stats soon, the scripts are ready, but the old logs need to be processed before the new ones because webalizer chokes otherwise. Hope to find those soon. -- Gabriel Wicke 14:39, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Can someone rephrase the text at the top of the watchlist page? Isam was asking for help translating it, and I've realised just how confusing it is, I've never understood what the mysterious cutoff was until today. And there's at least one user who thinks that the number of edits listed is the number of edits he's made (a count of his user contributions).
I suggest that something like this would be clearer: (you have x pages on your watchlist not counting talk pages; users have made a total of y edits to articles on the English language wikipedia during the time-frame you have selected to view below; checking watched pages for recent edits... show and edit complete list of articles you are watching.) fabiform | talk 12:36, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
over at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_names_for_Village_Pump. If you are a cross-border contributor, please add your localised name. Some of us find this stuff oddly interesting! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:23, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone have an email address for the current US Speaker of the House (of Representatives), or a way to directly contact him? Even the newspapers say he is the hardest person to try and contact and have termed him "elusive".
Please respond to: mortmaat@netzero.com
Thank you.
I want to rename Evaluation of ζ(2) to "Basel problem", but it keeps giving me an error message "could not submit form". There is no content at "Basel problem", and I have renamed articles before, so I know the process. Any idea? Revolver 18:38, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It has trouble with the special charactar and thinks you want to move "Evaluation of &" This might be similar to the way the diff js feature had problems with the & charactar in titles. Perl 19:13, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Wow, such a great name — please, don't move it! I'm sure many people, like me, know what is ζ(2) but never heard about Basel. The current title is clear and self-explanatory. ilya 21:35, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Hello all, springtime soon approaches (for those of us north the equator) and with it comes the tradition of spring cleaning. This provides a clear opportunity to remind yourself to edit your watchlist. Remove the excess. Remove items that were once important and now you don't care about. Remove things you haven't a clue why they are even there. Tidy up.
It is important to all of us that we all parse down our watchlists. Smaller watchlists means less demands on servers. In a recent survey of regular users, the number of watchlist items ranged from 3 to 3393 (that is NOT a typo, and I am sure there are those out there with higher counts). I am at 876.
I believe the system is designed so that watchlists under 1000 retrieve info from the past three days, while watchlists over 1000 retrieve info from the past 12 hours.
The more tidy your whities are.....er......the more tidy your watchlist is, the more efficient your work here will be :)
Sincerely, Kingturtle 19:45, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
What is the most neutral term for describing moving of a group of people from one place to another? "Displacement", "relocation", or perhaps something third? Nikola 21:32, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I haven't found any news agnecies running the story! google search finds no mention of the press release. Has anyone found any newspapers with the story? Perl 22:13, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
On a personal level, I can't imagine wanting to own a print version. A hard copy would be a like a blurred snapshot. Wikipedia is a living and breathing document. Wikipedia is not paper. We don't write like it is paper. We don't think like it is paper. I hate the idea of a print edition.
On a practical level, I am not going to stand in the way of anyone working to create a print edition. Also....if there are people interested in owning such a thing, could we make a profit and put that money into the upkeep fund? Or are we non-for-profit? Or does that matter? Kingturtle 23:26, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
i'd like to see a graph (2001-present) showing the number of users/month who made 500+ edits. Is anything like that possible? Kingturtle 00:34, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It is proposed that a general article on Computer and video games be created to give an overview of the topic for the novice, and provide links to other, more specific articles for the passionate. This article is being drafted at Talk:Computer game/Computer and video games. It is proposed that the articles on Computer game, Video game, Adventure, Interactive fiction and Arcade game would remain, but focus on elements that are unique to those subcategories. Please edit, and discuss! Mark Richards 00:53, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Do we still have a page to report vandalism? If so, where is it? If not, do we report it here? If so, User 198.7.225.35 has been persistently vandalising Winged Victory of Samothrace. Can someone do something about this? Adam 01:33, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Could someone up to speed with Imperial (English) units please take a look at the conversation on Wikipedia:WikiProject_Aircraft/Table#Table_Size? Specifically, if the weight of an aircraft is being provided in a data table, should it conventionally be written "8,000-lbs" or "8,000 lbs"? -- Rlandmann 06:22, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
A convenient link to a) the set of messages and templates, or b) a place to discuss them, should be included with each message, like the section-edit links that are included with each section for long pages... These shortcuts are becoming more and more common, as the need for modular/scalable messaging grows and the elegance of article types increases through the creation of lovely mesg-based templates [cf, say, "calendar for February 2003"]. The annoyance factor in having to look at the "edit this page" source to find the mesg name, and then to remember to type in Mediawiki:{msg name} by hand to get the proper page, is significant.
For example, just now, I noticed that the month calendars should include links to the other months of the year, perhaps something like
J
F March 23
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
<calendar body, w/ the 23d selected>
.
Hi all,
I just wanted to let you know, that we have Wikipedians-meetings in Berlin and Munich every one or two months and it is really interresting/helpful/nice/... it's worth it.
So I just started the page Wikipedia:meetup, mybe some english speakers also want to meet or join one of the other meetings that are already happening.
See you :-) Fantasy 18:17, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Dispute over the name Sea of Japan needs urgent attention! The article is far from NPOV and there needs to be Wikipedia Naming Convention on this the name (to stop further unilateral changes). I suggest we use East Sea/ Sea of Japan at least in the Korean context. Maybe someone neutral can look into this (please!). Kokiri 22:19, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone know EoT's full username? I'm trying to remember and block the last few PHP/SQL/Proclamation only blocks, and I don't want to have to do a DB search for them. Thanks. Pakaran . 22:47, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
From the license:
functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom"
As I read it an image is not a document so it can be licensed.
Under which license should you release your pictures if not GNU Free Documentation License so they can be used under GNU Free Documentation License?
Chbs 00:25, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Does anybody know the whereabout of the artist Wanda Zagorska who painted the Black Madonna in approximately 1954? This painting was accepted by the Vatican in Rome.
This is an urgent matter
Please contact her sister's husband in Canada at e-mail address: morfw@shaw,ca
Would the edit box toolbar please stop inserting a space under headings? First, the MoS states that there should be no heading. Second, if I were to defy the MoS like everyone else, I would be adding the space myself. -- Jia ng 01:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Ladies and gentlemen, it came to my attention that transliterations in articles about Russia became ridiculously fat (I don't know a better word). The most recent example:
I understand that all of them are of certain use, but the first sentence of the article becomes unreadable, not to say about a series of microedit wars. I am urging to find a better solution. Mikkalai 02:26, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Today, I received the following note on my talk page.
I'm using IE 6.0, if that helps any. What should I do, and how can I fix this? Thanks very much, Meelar 06:31, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
For convenience, Sandbox maintainers can now replace headers with one "{{subst:sandboxpaste}}" message, instead of having to type "{{msg:sandbox}}" and the comment manually. HTH Dysprosia 07:57, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Probably a newbie question, but I've just uploaded an image and am having trouble displaying it in an article. I think the code I'm using is OK, because if I change the image name in the code to another one that exists in the image list, it displays that image just fine. Any suggestions? -- Gary Jones 08:08, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)
I thought the following article/interview might interest you.
Sincerely, Byron Merritt Grandson of Frank Herbert
http://www.fwomp.com/Int_steinbeck.htm
JeLuF has launched a design competition at meta:Image Box for people interested in changing the way thumbnails are displayed using the extended image syntax.
Note, this is for people who want to change the CSS which creates the (currently grey) boarder around the image, and what icon to use, if any – not for dicussing the ins and outs of how the images are resized and compressed on the fly. Voting is expected to begin on March 15, so all suggestions should be made by then. :) fabiform | talk 19:12, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
(Note: I have no scientific basis for the hypothesis I am about to put forth. All numbers are invented with the intention of striking your imagination.)
In light of the recent press release and Jimbo's conversations with "The Economist" and Yahoo, some concerns come to my mind. Are we really ready for the next spurt of growth? I mean, REALLY READY for a MAJOR, UNPRECEDENTED spurt?
Let's say Yahoo begins to use our content. After a month's time, the number of hits on our servers increases 12-fold. The number of editors increases 9-fold. The number of vandals triples. A growth spurt unparalleled in Wikipedia history. One of such size, it could collapse or paralyze Wikipedia.
I don't think such a scenario is far-fetched. We need to examine our experiences with previous growth spurts and the experiences of other websites (Friendster, Craigslist, Slashdot, etc.) and put together a plan of action to protect Wikipedia from such a population explosion.
Issues to consider:
Food for thought, Kingturtle 20:07, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
If it becomes a problem, we can block the googlebot. That'll slow down our growth. Martin 22:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
What are Wikipedia's (nascent?) connections with Yahoo! and The Economist? Can I read about on the website somewhere? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 00:14, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The stats pages are now built from the logs between 5 Feb - now. They are at http://wikimedia.org/stats/{DOMAIN}/, for example http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/. -- Gabriel Wicke 20:38, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I visited Lemon meringue pie after noting that someone edited it. It's a basic stub (and how) but clearly deserves its place in wikipedia. BUT. If someone embellishes it with a little history and adds informative content about how it's made, it will be removed from wikipedia. Moriori 22:15, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)
Take it to Talk:List of recipes/Delete. Martin
I think it would be cool if we had a standard statement to go at the top of articles (along the lines of the Featured Article statement, Nominated for Deletion statement, etc) that, due to their presence in current events, will be often updated as new developments occur. Examples for the present would be 2004 Haiti Rebellion, U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, 76th Academy Awards (which, BTW, is very stubbish right now), Same-sex marriage in the United States, etc. Something maybe like This is an article for a currently-occuring event and will be updated as new developments occur, or something more eloquently-phrased. Garrett Albright 01:03, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I have collected screenshots of all Main Pages of 53 Wikipedias at [15]. Complete pages are shown (I used a virtual screen of 1000*3000 pixels, some really fill all that space). Images were reduced to 40% size, so texts are barely readable, but the overall layout can be easily compared this way. Erik Zachte 00:28, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Has image formatting been changed recently? I have seen a few pages that look messed up now where previously they didn't. See for example: Vlorë (although you obviously can't see what it looked like previously). Dori | Talk 03:49, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)
It looks fine to me. RickK 04:13, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
As you may notice, I am adding dozens of towns and villages articles. Given its number of articles added at a time, you may have some opinion about the format, naming or anything. Please come to Wikipedia:Wikiproject Japanese districts and municipalites to discuss this matter. Thanks. -- Taku 04:10, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)
From my talkpage
Hi Taku, would you mind adding {{msg:stub}} at the end of those small articles you're adding? thanks, Dori | Talk 03:43, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)
I can't access the Recent changes page. It keeps killing my browser. Anybody else having this problem? RickK 04:39, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Well, it seems to have come back. Wish I knew what happened. RickK 05:07, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
IE 6.0. RickK 22:55, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Well, I used to use Netscape till they did a major revision (was it 5.0?) which I absolutely hated, so I switched to IE. RickK 03:17, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I have a question here for people who contribute to Wikis in other languages. On the english wikipedia, I very, very rarely run across articles translated from other languages. In all the time I've been here, I've run across *maybe* 2. My question is - how common are translated articles on the Wikis? Do they tend to be one area (like science), or are they well distributed? What is the quality of a translated article? →Raul654 08:51, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)
I've probably done about two dozen translated articles (into English) myself, mostly on cultural topics; usually when I do this, I find that I need to add a little more, because there are often cultural references that cannot be presumed clear to English-speakers. I've also done at least one on a scientific topic, adipose tissue, and I've often brought in material from other languages for an existing article, including expanding a stub to a full article. Some of the wikis (e.g. Romanian, Catalan) probably contain more translated content than not, at least on topics that don't specifically relate to the region where that language is spoken. Also, in this context, can I plug Wikipedia:Translation into English where you can request a translation of a foreign-language article into English (or sign up to help with that sort of work). -- Jmabel 23:27, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I don't think this is related to the bolded server problem at the top of this page, but it might be. I am having a lot of trouble updating an image I made. There are three versions. The second wouldnt show up until I uploaded the third, and now the third won't show up, even though it is in the server because I can access it by clicking previous versions. With some reversion I have been able to make versions 1 and 2 show up, but not 3. I thought maybe I needed to wait a while but that's not it. I left it up overnight and it still won't update. The image is here and the image I actually want is here. The 1009 byte one. Please teach me how to fix it. - Omegatron
Hello all, this is just a friendly reminder about trolls (and sock puppets too). As Wikipedia increases in coverage, so too increases the meddling of trolls. There are times when it seems like trolls are everywhere, and it becomes a game (of sorts) to catch, nab or name the little buggers (and sock puppets too). It is in such moments that people begin to be overly suspicious of the actions of newcomers. Our trust in newcomers diminishes. Once distrust supercedes trust in a community, it is difficult to reverse the change. Let's not let that happen to Wikipedia. The project depends on a strong, friendly community. Build the database and build the community, too.
I realize you are all working hard at building our community. This messages is not to insult you or scold you. It is just a reminder. Welcome newcomers. Don't be overly suspicious of the actions of newcomers. Speak softly.
But carry a big stick, Kingturtle 04:20, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm concerned at the tendancy to use the label 'troll' to describe people with whom we disagree. What is trolling in this context? What is the difference between trolling and vandalism / abuse? 209.102.127.145 20:02, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
-- Ruhrjung 02:42, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
(And then see, Wikipedia:Meet the Feebles :) →Raul654)
Is it possible to quickly find out the number of edits made by myself or any other user (not which specific ones, just a total number)? If so, can this be filtered by date, etc - e.g. can I find out how many edits I made in December 2003, or in the last 3 weeks, and so on. Would find this handy. Graham 04:29, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I've noticed that Wikipedia's articles on the United States Congress are a bit lacking--for instance, we don't even have articles on most of the current members, let alone past ones. As I've been slogging through the List of House Committees, I've realized there's a number of separate WikiProjects I could start here. Where are good places I could advertise for help with these various things? I'm no good at starting new articles (prefer to edit) and I'm not a congressional scholar. Meelar 05:57, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC) P.S. Please reply at my talk page
I am confused about the time zone of the date stamps. It appears to be one hour ahead of California time, or MST - Mountain Standard Time. Shouldn't it be Coordinated Universal Time in order to be neutral? -- pstudier 06:07, 2004 Feb 20 (UTC)
Sorry, I just noticed this as I posted my question. Why are there different timezones? "Because the earth is round and it keeps spinning" by Radar, a character on Mash. ;-) -- pstudier 06:21, 2004 Feb 20 (UTC)
Having recently expanded an article on Nishapur in Iran following the recent rail disaster there, I've found that the place appears to be referred to more often as Neyshabur these days. Nishapur is the "traditional" English transliteration, Neyshabur is the current version (much like Peking/Beijing in China). However, Google reports that Nishapur is more often used (5640 results) than Neyshabur (2970 results). Which version would I be better off using in the article? -- ChrisO 13:11, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
In accordance with the recent discussion on the wikipedia-l mailing list and Jimbo's pronouncements (edit: this was not a decision - this was an opinion and discussion is ongoing Jamesday) on the matter I have created
This page serves as a discussion page for debating whether an image or other file can legitmately be considered fair use, and whether all alternatives have been exhausted. Images and other files that may be eligible should not be used until there is consensus on the page to do so; on the other hand, they should not be deleted until there is consensus that they are not eligible for fair use.
Image pages that have undergone due process should be tagged with {{msg:verifieduse}} ( Template:verifieduse).
All pages which are currently tagged with {{msg:fairuse}} (many older ones link to fair use instead) should undergo due process on this page to determine whether their status as fair use is justifiable. If so, they should be tagged with {{msg:verifieduse}} instead, if not, they should be deleted and efforts should be made to seek free alternatives.
Whenever a previously fair use image is deleted, a link should be added to Wikipedia:Requested pictures. Images without any copyright information should either be deleted or undergo the fair use process.
No newly uploaded images should be tagged with {{msg:fairuse}}.
This post is also cross-posted to the wikien-l mailing list. [2]
—Eloquence 17:01, Feb 20, 2004 (UTC)
Note that it is contrary to current policy to delete an image without listing it on either Wikipedia:Images for deletion or Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements. Not recommended for a sysop who wants to retain the deletion capability to delete without using due process. Jamesday 12:19, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'd enjoy a "random human-authored page" feature that excludes the robot-written descriptions of U. S. towns, which currently seem to constitute about 50% of the "random page" hits. Thoughts? Dpbsmith 17:14, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
A problem that has sometimes bothered me: when contributing to a field of knowledge in which there is not a well organised hierarchy of articles, it can be difficult to find out what has already been written. To get an overview, it is often necessary to follow many, many links and additionally search for individual words or phrases (further complicated by the current absence of direct database searching). I wonder if there are more effective means of understanding how articles are related to each other. It would help a lot if one could get a graphical representation of links between pages. Are there any tools to do this, or are there other ideas how to make it easier to understand the increasingly complex structure of our article namespace? Kosebamse 19:47, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
If I go to the "What links here" for Pelé I find Pele listed 3 times, but if I go to Pele, I find just 1 link to Pelé. Why's this so ? Jay 21:56, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Special:Whatlinkshere/National_capital_territory and Special:Whatlinkshere/Talk:National_capital_territory give scores of Village pump links. What's up? -- Paddu 10:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It seems that the discussion at meta:Page footers is pretty much over. It seems that there is no consensus between alternatives #1 and #3, but a clear opposition to suggestions #2 and #4. How would I proceed further now? What would be the next step in attempting to reach consensus? Thanks for any help. -- Timwi 22:52, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Hi, this is a great place!
I have just expanded a page containing a stub message Malvern Hills.
Is it cool to delete the stub message myself, or is that decision better left to someone else?
Thanks,
Chris B
20/2/04
There is no symbol for chemical equilibrium (the <-> thing is chemical resonance) Bensaccount
↔ or ⇔? Dysprosia 08:42, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
↔ is resonance, ⇔ is a box. Equilibrium is two half arrows like --\ over \-- . Someone needs to make a Wikipedia symbol for Equilibrium. Bensaccount 18:03, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I really like the New pages feature. But I've noticed that the IP addresses are not links to the associated user page. Is this intended or an oversight? - Rholton (aka Anthropos) 02:52, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I just noticed that Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry and associated articles like Poetry and English poetry don't follow Wikipedia section heading style in regards to capitalization found in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings). Is there some reason we should not edit these to be conformant to the standard section heading style? Bevo 16:28, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
A discusssion to replace the Main Page --> Wikipedia talk:Main Page
This has been a problem for several monthas, but I do it so seldom that I'm unsure if it a transient problem or one that is always been here since the servers became overloaded. It is not possible to change an image by loading it on top of an old image. Sometimes one might want to clean up an old image, or adjust its size, or even replace it with an improved version (better cropping, etc.) The present system does not allow images to be altered and then reloaded. Loading any image on top of an old image lays down all the proper "paperwork", but the actual image does not change. It does not change for several days. I'm unsure if it ever changes. Both the new and the old versions exist on the document page, but only the original image is used by an article. I've been forced to just abandon old images, rename the improved version, and load it as a new image, which is terribly inefficient and must be leaving orphans behind, but what other option is there? Is this just part of the silly behavior of the present server setup? - Marshman 00:03, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Image purging is enabled since yesterday, this problem should be solved mostly. -- Gabriel Wicke 17:00, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Not sure if this has been discussed before, but is there any need to have links to other articles in the printable version of an article? It seems unnecessary when its only purpose is for printing.
—chopchopwhitey 00:46, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Is there a reason why that from an anonymous IP address's user page, there is no link to "User Contributions"? ugen64 01:01, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Plain vanilla main page. Optim 02:55, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Is it possible to move/rename uploaded images? When looking at the Image: namespace page for the image, there's a Move link, but does that move the image itself, or merely the page that describes the image? I can't seem to find any mention of images on Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page. (The image in question is Image:YabokoLogo.png, the logo of Russia's Yabloko political party - it needs to be changed to "YablokoLogo" rather than "YabokoLogo".) Thanks. -- Vardion 03:23, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Only 1487 articles to go! A live count is available at http://wikimedia.org/count -- Tim Starling 09:43, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia_talk:Votes for deletion#VOTE:_NEW_LAYOUT_FOR_VFD! -- BL 11:29, 22 Feb, 2004 (UTC)
How hard would it be to add (possibly) two new links to the Difference Between Revisions page that is displayed when you click on "Last" in the page history. The links would be "Prev" and "Next" and would link to the Difference Between Revisions for the Previous and Next Revisions (if either or both existed). I recently wanted to skip though the revisions of a page to find when a recent change occurred and who changed it, and found it a very difficult thing to do. - Gaz 13:44, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Thank you both, I'll wait. As a Database Consultant, I know exactly what they are about to go through.
Its amazing that you spend ages creating a schema, think it is great, and come back (usually much) later
and think it more closely resembles doggy-doo. So you start all over again. Have fun ;-) -
Gaz 16:31, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This may seem like a trivial issue, but after half a dozen variations were uploaded to Mozilla Firefox, I decided we needed an agreed policy on the form of screenshots used to illustrate software articles. Since image copyright issues are currently a hot topic, and screenshots have specific issues in that regard too, I've created Wikipedia:Software screenshots as a central point for discussion of both. I'm pretty sure this isn't duplicated elsewhere, and would appreciate comments and refinements so that this can be linked into the hierarchy of "official" policy pages in due course. - IMSoP 15:46, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Is there an image that could be used to link to Wikipedia (button size — 88x31)? alerante 17:06, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Are there indexing guidelines or advice for Wikipedia?
Having contributed to the pages on Hyperthyroidism, and Graves-Basedow disease, it is disappointing that the search does not pick up on the name "Graves", "Graves'", nor the errant apostrophe version "Grave's". I created a "redirect" page for Graves' disease, which is the common name in the English speaking world, but this appears not to be indexed, which seems wrong to me.
Somethings amiss with Wikisource. When I try to submit something i've edited i get:
"The requested URL //wiki/Wikisource:Historical_documents was not found on this server."
and when i type wikisource.org into my browser i get:
"The requested URL //wiki/Main_Page was not found on this server."
The server seems to be adding an extra /:
http://sources.wikipedia.org//wiki/Main_Page
Perl 21:04, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I have a copyright question. I cut a few small sprites out of screenshots of a game taken from an emulator to use on the Rupee (Legend of Zelda) page. Is this a violation?
Also, I'd like to know when the "most linked disambiguation pages" will be updated again. I like to go through and disambiguate them. Thanks. Derrick Coetzee 02:07, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Can I use this image [3] even though it is "crown copyright"? Is it fair use? Perl 04:01, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
When I 'go' (button) to a non-existent page and the server guesses at the page (for example "greek koffee"), there is a "view source" link for the Main Page in the sidebar and top, along with that entire sidebar section. There are some similar links in the header. Is this a known bug? Also, is there a better place I should have posted this? -- Spikey 04:56, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
There were four images I uploaded in in the summer and fall of last year before the new fair use guidelines came into effect. They are:
(Councilman Davis's Details have since been removed from the site since his death)
What page should I go to to get these images deleted? -- iHoshie 06:20, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I've been getting a very annoying and long error message that ends with "acl stayaway browser ^Mozilla/3.0" off and on for the last couple hours while using Konqueror 3.1.3. I'm using Galeon 1.3.8 right now. Anybody have any idea what is going on? -- mav 08:19, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm getting it, on and off, with Opera 6.0x; Opera 7.x, Mozilla 1.6b, and Internet Explorer 5.0. (All under Win2K.) Clearly, it's a server-side problem, Mav.
Tannin 08:23, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Discussion about whether recipes belong in Wikipedia.
(Moved to
List_of_recipes/delete
Talk:List of recipes/Delete as per
Gentgeen's suggestion)
Anyone with heart problems should be careful when typing in the wikipedia address. i spent five minutes looking at various wikipedia pages (so i thought) and was told that the domain name is for sale. Even worse, the site is without content!! Had wikipedia people sold out??
www.wikpedia.org
Details of the Offer
Offer comprises: Domain Name wikpedia.org without content. Make Offer
The domain name is for sale by its owner. If you would like to buy the domain name please make your offer below:
It took me several minutes to realise i was missing an i in wikpedia.
This is just a comment, idle chit-chat - i'm not sure if village pump is the right place for it. Sorry if it's not...
Boud 14:55, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This looks like an example of a case where the uniform domain dispute policy would get the domain handed over to the Wikipedia. It looks like a bad faith attempt to capitalise on the good name of the Wikipedia. Jamesday 23:45, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Hey there, I'm an American teacher living in China andt I'm interested in using Wikipedia with my second-year college English students. Since they come from all over China (though they all go to school in Zhengzhou, Henan province) I figure they can add information about their hometowns and other topics in China, since in general it seems that info is lacking. Any suggestions on how to have my students write articles and not frustrate everybody in the process? Mjklin 11:22, 23 Feb 2004 (Beijing Time)
I suggest you to explicitely (in the manual) decide whether pages with this kind of title require msg:disambig. I started the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation. My position: msg:disambig for these pages is misleading, since links to these pages can only be intentional. I understand that these pages do need a message, because of slangish "disambiguation" word, but it must be customized for this page. Mikkalai 17:39, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Once upon a time, there was an article about food libel, but I can't find it anymore. Was it deleted? Moved? jengod 19:03, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)
Please follow the link above
The new main page looks awesome. I have one suggestion which I'd like a little feedback on: should the navigation bar on the left list Community Information Page or Wikipedia:Main Page or whatever right below Main Page? That way we can jump straight to either main page....we'd have to name them so that new users wouldn't get too confused, but I think it would be helpful. I assume this is a low-difficulty change for developers to make? Jwrosenzweig 21:52, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
(Which How-to articles to include? Where do How-to articles belong?) Moved to Wikipedia talk:How-to
I don't know whether this is a bug; I haven't noticed it before but maybe I was asleep. 1. I was logged in. 2. I started editing a page and didn't save it for quite a while. 3. Apparently I timed out, because it saved it as an anonymous user, not as me. 4. I logged in. 5. I realized that, to request a change to the edit history, I had to log out. So I did. Then I sat there for about 5 seconds, doing nothing. 6. It redrew my screen, with my username at the top, as if I were logged in! 7. I clicked on a link to another page, whereupon it claimed I was logged out. (I repeated steps 4-7 3 times to be sure I wasn't imagining things.) Any ideas what's going on? Is it a bug? Is it my brower? Elf 03:21, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Anyone want to help me create guidelines for Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools? There seem to be many schools on WP, but no guidelenes on how to add information or how to make them encyclopedic. Davodd 07:17, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)
I got a proposition for ya--adopt your birthday! :) In the interests of keeping all the date pages updated March 15, August 22, December 3, etc., I'd like to suggest (beg, implore) that you toddle on over to whereever your birthday is, and click on "what links here" and use it to check to make sure that everything is up to date, spelled right, and so on, and add anything that's been updated recently. This will be a great blessing to those who want to update Wikipedia:Events in history. Thank you for reading. jengod 07:28, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)
On a related topic, it'd be nice if we had a Wikipedia:Wikipedians by birthday kind of categorization. Jay 13:20, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It would be really nice to have a better way of inputing and editing phonetic notation. I've worked out a little example, whose conventions are loosely based on Tipa, a phonetics package for LaTeX:
Example sentence: "Dubbs asked his brother what it was like in the other world, and his brother said it was not unlike Cleveland."
Editing form of phonetic transcription: <ipa> [d2bz #askt hIz br2Dr#& w2t It w2z layk In Di 2Dr#& wr#&ld n#&d Iz br2Dr#& sEd It w2z nat @nlayk klivln#&d]</ipa>
Display form: [dʌbz æskt hɪz brʌðr̩ wʌt ɪt wʌz layk ɪn ði ʌðr̩ wr̩ld n̩d ɪz brʌðr̩ sɛd ɪt wʌz nat ənlayk klivln̩d]
(Character 809 is supposed to be a non-spacing diacritic, but my browser gets it wrong.)
GregLee 13:03, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Whoops. I should have put this in the feature request area. Sorry. GregLee 15:03, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk
I have created the first Wikimoney lottery at User:Silsor/lottery. silsor 23:33, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)
On certain pages I get the following error..
"Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper text ..."
but it happens with the most minute edit, when practically nothing has actually been modified. Is there a trick to not losing your work? I have tried the Preview page but it has not come up. Besides intelligence, what am I missing?
Thanks
I keep adding Sarah Polley to vfd because the entire article is copied from here but it seems to keep disappearing. What is going on? SD6-Agent 05:13, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Question: What happens when a contentious article, which is regularly VfD'ed or argued heatedly on its talk page -- what happens when such a page is about a person or group, and that person or group contacts WP to ask that the page be removed? Does this carry weight in VfD and similar discussions? Is there a proper procedure for politely getting a page about one's own life or affairs removed? Of course nothing can be done about mirrors or copies of the 'pedia elsewhere, but is there a way of asking (and receiving permission for) future versions of WP to leave out such a page? Often the reasons for wanting a controversial page to be actively left out include unhappiness that the primary content associated with one's name/group are ANGRY TALK-PAGE RANTS about the content, or reversion thereof, rather than the content itself; perhaps reflecting poorly on the subject of the article because of the pettiness of its adopted protectors.
Case I: Brianism. Lots of people wanted the page to go away, accused the page authors of trying to promote a small sect; the sect itself found out about the whole mess and wrote a public letter asking that its page be removed. Upshot: Brianism is still here; many W'pedians want the page to go away, while others want it to stay; the open letter is still up on the official Brianist website.
Csae II: Richard Genovese. Modern-day artist has resume-like bio pasted-in and wikified by a sequence of both anon users and old-timers; it is put on VfD multiple times without reaching consensus; emotions run high due to connections with older related 'is this important enough to be here' issues [cf. DCB]; W'pedians variously claim it is self-promotion or non-encyclopedic. An anonymous user claiming to be RG himself tries to blank out the page, replacing it with a LONG ALL-CAPS NOTE ABOUT HOW HE DOESN'T WANT A PAGE ABOUT HIS LIFE OR WORK ON WIKIPEDIA and would W'pedia kindly stop trying to maintain such a page. Currently: RG is still here, and still on VfD; Morwen recently protected it to keep the recent user from engaging in a reversion-war; no verification that the angry user is the subject of the article; no verification that the subject of the article is important or famous enough to be included in W'pedia. +sj+ 08:16, 2004 Feb 25 (UTC)
Right now I am seeing a mix of American and British English all over the place in Wikipedia. Is there a standard for this? If not, I think there should be one. It's kind of disconcerting to see "honor" on one page and "honour" on another. Not to mention that this generally affects page titles as well. -- Johnleemk 12:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Yes, really, this isn't a big deal. Some articles suggest one spelling over another (ie US articles should probably have US spellings) but I don't think anyone will take offense / misunderstand (with the possible exception of pants and suspenders! Mark Richards 19:50, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
In the article SkyTrain, we had a Wiki link to an article Vancouver SkyTrain. No matter what I did to modify--or delete and reinsert--the link, it always stayed in red; clicking on it opened up an edit window with all the article text in the window! If I changed the URL to go directly to the article (not via the link from SkyTrain), I could view the article properly. If I put an external link to the article on the SkyTrain page, I could link to the article properly. As you can see, the link to Vancouver SkyTrain works just fine from this page, and also from Wikipedia:Sandbox. Another editor changed the link to Vancouver Skytrain (which redirects to Vancouver SkyTrain, and that worked. After all of these experiments, I tried adding the original Vancouver SkyTrain link once again to the SkyTrain article, and once again it didn't work! What the heck is going on!? -- Sewing 15:19, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Hi,
we have in the German Wikipedia just a discussion going on about the use of the MediaWiki namespace for articles like an extra navigation list. Main argument against it is currently that this is mixing up text elements that were only meant for describing the software (e.g. "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.") with real content.
The idea was at the end of last week just copied from the english Wikipedia. So my question is: was there a discussion going on that finally led to the decision to use this namespace or did it just happen? And how is your experience in using these new text blocks? How many do already exist and did they cause any technical problems so far?
Thanks in advance,
Triebtäter
Squid disk caching has been turned on again, after a week with only RAM caching. This is in response to signs earlier today that the Apache web servers were starting to become overloaded and it's hoped that this will relieve them of enough load that things stay fast. If you see any sign of unusually slow response times on page requests (more than 30 seconds or a timeout) please post about it here. This time the cache is using asynchronous disk requests (the aufs filesystem instead of ufs) and the timeout problems which were experienced last time shouldn't happen. The previous ufs system is reported to have known problems abve 30 requests per second and we're seeing about 60 requests per second even at quiet times, so it's not surprising that there were delay problems with ufs. Jamesday 19:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
German TV coverage is expected this evening about one hour and 50 minutes after the timestamp of this post (at 22:45 CET, 21:45 UTC, 4:45PM Eastern). The show normally has about two million viewers. Don't be surprised if response times increase just after the broadcast. The broadcast is available via Real Player at [8]. Jamesday 19:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
On the HTTP access chart (green line) there's a spike exactly at 21:45 UTC (!) Alfio 22:41, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm just trying to draw some attention here to Rosa Parks. I found what I think is a pretty bad error, and I am hoping someone will look into it. See: Talk:Rosa Parks Katahon 22:16, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Some pages relating to Russia (e.g. describing Russian personalities or Russian geography) have Cyrillic spelling added after the head word. It is very useful to show the place of accent in Russian words (it matters!). The only correct way to add accents to Russian text is to use the character U+0301 ("combining acute accent") after the stressed vowel. (The HTML codes for it are ́ or ́). This complies with the Unicode standard. There are also some non-standard ad hoc ways of showing the place of Russian accent — e.g. making the stressed vowel bold. Such non-standard things must be avoided. If someone's browser cannot show the standard Russian accents, it is the browser's problem, not the Wikipedia's — Monedula 00:05, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Please read through the all new wikipedia:no personal attacks and wikipedia:no legal threats and edit them mercilessly. Thanks. Martin 00:07, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Kurt Jansson wrote on wikipedia-l: "Yesterday there was an article about Wikipedia in Spiegel-Online, the biggest German online news-magazine (30 million visits/month), and I'm sure we got more new German Wikipedians yesterday than ever before.
Through this article the TV took notice of us, and so there will be a feature about us in the "Tagesthemen" at 22:30 (ARD)."
For those who speak German, the Spiegel-Online article is at [10]
File:Wikipedia ARD TagesSchau.jpg
The ARD newsitem can be seen at ARD site, click video above right. Erik Zachte 00:09, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
WMV movie of this (9Mb): http://freecache.org/http://eza.gemm.nl/Wikipedia/Wikipedia_ARD_hi.wmv -- Gabriel Wicke 13:53, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
A translated transcript can be found at meta:German TV coverage of Wikipedia
I'm wondering whether anyone has approached Flags of the World ( [11] and many mirrors) for permission to reproduce flags (with attribution and links)-- in particular, local flags rather than the flags of countries, which we're already well placed for. For example, I'd like to ask them whether I could use their copy of the flag of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania on its Wikipedia page rather than redrawing it. There are dozens of similar examples.
I'd also like to do something similar with city, county and district arms in England and Wales; [12] has lots of good stuff and I'd like to ask them whether we could use any of it.
Has anyone done either of these things before? Should I? Any thoughts? Marnanel 01:28, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The article on National capital territory implies India is the only country to have it, but there are other countries which have it, some from even before India. Anyone who knows what other countries have it, please fix it. Thanks. -- Paddu 06:15, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
How can I know how many people viewed a page? It could be nice to know the impact a page had.
So there is no possibilty to know the exposure? Is this feature enabled from time to time?
I hope to enable the webalizer stats soon, the scripts are ready, but the old logs need to be processed before the new ones because webalizer chokes otherwise. Hope to find those soon. -- Gabriel Wicke 14:39, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Can someone rephrase the text at the top of the watchlist page? Isam was asking for help translating it, and I've realised just how confusing it is, I've never understood what the mysterious cutoff was until today. And there's at least one user who thinks that the number of edits listed is the number of edits he's made (a count of his user contributions).
I suggest that something like this would be clearer: (you have x pages on your watchlist not counting talk pages; users have made a total of y edits to articles on the English language wikipedia during the time-frame you have selected to view below; checking watched pages for recent edits... show and edit complete list of articles you are watching.) fabiform | talk 12:36, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
over at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_names_for_Village_Pump. If you are a cross-border contributor, please add your localised name. Some of us find this stuff oddly interesting! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:23, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone have an email address for the current US Speaker of the House (of Representatives), or a way to directly contact him? Even the newspapers say he is the hardest person to try and contact and have termed him "elusive".
Please respond to: mortmaat@netzero.com
Thank you.
I want to rename Evaluation of ζ(2) to "Basel problem", but it keeps giving me an error message "could not submit form". There is no content at "Basel problem", and I have renamed articles before, so I know the process. Any idea? Revolver 18:38, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It has trouble with the special charactar and thinks you want to move "Evaluation of &" This might be similar to the way the diff js feature had problems with the & charactar in titles. Perl 19:13, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Wow, such a great name — please, don't move it! I'm sure many people, like me, know what is ζ(2) but never heard about Basel. The current title is clear and self-explanatory. ilya 21:35, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Hello all, springtime soon approaches (for those of us north the equator) and with it comes the tradition of spring cleaning. This provides a clear opportunity to remind yourself to edit your watchlist. Remove the excess. Remove items that were once important and now you don't care about. Remove things you haven't a clue why they are even there. Tidy up.
It is important to all of us that we all parse down our watchlists. Smaller watchlists means less demands on servers. In a recent survey of regular users, the number of watchlist items ranged from 3 to 3393 (that is NOT a typo, and I am sure there are those out there with higher counts). I am at 876.
I believe the system is designed so that watchlists under 1000 retrieve info from the past three days, while watchlists over 1000 retrieve info from the past 12 hours.
The more tidy your whities are.....er......the more tidy your watchlist is, the more efficient your work here will be :)
Sincerely, Kingturtle 19:45, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
What is the most neutral term for describing moving of a group of people from one place to another? "Displacement", "relocation", or perhaps something third? Nikola 21:32, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I haven't found any news agnecies running the story! google search finds no mention of the press release. Has anyone found any newspapers with the story? Perl 22:13, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
On a personal level, I can't imagine wanting to own a print version. A hard copy would be a like a blurred snapshot. Wikipedia is a living and breathing document. Wikipedia is not paper. We don't write like it is paper. We don't think like it is paper. I hate the idea of a print edition.
On a practical level, I am not going to stand in the way of anyone working to create a print edition. Also....if there are people interested in owning such a thing, could we make a profit and put that money into the upkeep fund? Or are we non-for-profit? Or does that matter? Kingturtle 23:26, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
i'd like to see a graph (2001-present) showing the number of users/month who made 500+ edits. Is anything like that possible? Kingturtle 00:34, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It is proposed that a general article on Computer and video games be created to give an overview of the topic for the novice, and provide links to other, more specific articles for the passionate. This article is being drafted at Talk:Computer game/Computer and video games. It is proposed that the articles on Computer game, Video game, Adventure, Interactive fiction and Arcade game would remain, but focus on elements that are unique to those subcategories. Please edit, and discuss! Mark Richards 00:53, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Do we still have a page to report vandalism? If so, where is it? If not, do we report it here? If so, User 198.7.225.35 has been persistently vandalising Winged Victory of Samothrace. Can someone do something about this? Adam 01:33, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Could someone up to speed with Imperial (English) units please take a look at the conversation on Wikipedia:WikiProject_Aircraft/Table#Table_Size? Specifically, if the weight of an aircraft is being provided in a data table, should it conventionally be written "8,000-lbs" or "8,000 lbs"? -- Rlandmann 06:22, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
A convenient link to a) the set of messages and templates, or b) a place to discuss them, should be included with each message, like the section-edit links that are included with each section for long pages... These shortcuts are becoming more and more common, as the need for modular/scalable messaging grows and the elegance of article types increases through the creation of lovely mesg-based templates [cf, say, "calendar for February 2003"]. The annoyance factor in having to look at the "edit this page" source to find the mesg name, and then to remember to type in Mediawiki:{msg name} by hand to get the proper page, is significant.
For example, just now, I noticed that the month calendars should include links to the other months of the year, perhaps something like
J
F March 23
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
<calendar body, w/ the 23d selected>
.
Hi all,
I just wanted to let you know, that we have Wikipedians-meetings in Berlin and Munich every one or two months and it is really interresting/helpful/nice/... it's worth it.
So I just started the page Wikipedia:meetup, mybe some english speakers also want to meet or join one of the other meetings that are already happening.
See you :-) Fantasy 18:17, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Dispute over the name Sea of Japan needs urgent attention! The article is far from NPOV and there needs to be Wikipedia Naming Convention on this the name (to stop further unilateral changes). I suggest we use East Sea/ Sea of Japan at least in the Korean context. Maybe someone neutral can look into this (please!). Kokiri 22:19, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone know EoT's full username? I'm trying to remember and block the last few PHP/SQL/Proclamation only blocks, and I don't want to have to do a DB search for them. Thanks. Pakaran . 22:47, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
From the license:
functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom"
As I read it an image is not a document so it can be licensed.
Under which license should you release your pictures if not GNU Free Documentation License so they can be used under GNU Free Documentation License?
Chbs 00:25, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Does anybody know the whereabout of the artist Wanda Zagorska who painted the Black Madonna in approximately 1954? This painting was accepted by the Vatican in Rome.
This is an urgent matter
Please contact her sister's husband in Canada at e-mail address: morfw@shaw,ca
Would the edit box toolbar please stop inserting a space under headings? First, the MoS states that there should be no heading. Second, if I were to defy the MoS like everyone else, I would be adding the space myself. -- Jia ng 01:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Ladies and gentlemen, it came to my attention that transliterations in articles about Russia became ridiculously fat (I don't know a better word). The most recent example:
I understand that all of them are of certain use, but the first sentence of the article becomes unreadable, not to say about a series of microedit wars. I am urging to find a better solution. Mikkalai 02:26, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Today, I received the following note on my talk page.
I'm using IE 6.0, if that helps any. What should I do, and how can I fix this? Thanks very much, Meelar 06:31, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
For convenience, Sandbox maintainers can now replace headers with one "{{subst:sandboxpaste}}" message, instead of having to type "{{msg:sandbox}}" and the comment manually. HTH Dysprosia 07:57, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Probably a newbie question, but I've just uploaded an image and am having trouble displaying it in an article. I think the code I'm using is OK, because if I change the image name in the code to another one that exists in the image list, it displays that image just fine. Any suggestions? -- Gary Jones 08:08, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)
I thought the following article/interview might interest you.
Sincerely, Byron Merritt Grandson of Frank Herbert
http://www.fwomp.com/Int_steinbeck.htm
JeLuF has launched a design competition at meta:Image Box for people interested in changing the way thumbnails are displayed using the extended image syntax.
Note, this is for people who want to change the CSS which creates the (currently grey) boarder around the image, and what icon to use, if any – not for dicussing the ins and outs of how the images are resized and compressed on the fly. Voting is expected to begin on March 15, so all suggestions should be made by then. :) fabiform | talk 19:12, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
(Note: I have no scientific basis for the hypothesis I am about to put forth. All numbers are invented with the intention of striking your imagination.)
In light of the recent press release and Jimbo's conversations with "The Economist" and Yahoo, some concerns come to my mind. Are we really ready for the next spurt of growth? I mean, REALLY READY for a MAJOR, UNPRECEDENTED spurt?
Let's say Yahoo begins to use our content. After a month's time, the number of hits on our servers increases 12-fold. The number of editors increases 9-fold. The number of vandals triples. A growth spurt unparalleled in Wikipedia history. One of such size, it could collapse or paralyze Wikipedia.
I don't think such a scenario is far-fetched. We need to examine our experiences with previous growth spurts and the experiences of other websites (Friendster, Craigslist, Slashdot, etc.) and put together a plan of action to protect Wikipedia from such a population explosion.
Issues to consider:
Food for thought, Kingturtle 20:07, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
If it becomes a problem, we can block the googlebot. That'll slow down our growth. Martin 22:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
What are Wikipedia's (nascent?) connections with Yahoo! and The Economist? Can I read about on the website somewhere? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 00:14, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The stats pages are now built from the logs between 5 Feb - now. They are at http://wikimedia.org/stats/{DOMAIN}/, for example http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/. -- Gabriel Wicke 20:38, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I visited Lemon meringue pie after noting that someone edited it. It's a basic stub (and how) but clearly deserves its place in wikipedia. BUT. If someone embellishes it with a little history and adds informative content about how it's made, it will be removed from wikipedia. Moriori 22:15, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)
Take it to Talk:List of recipes/Delete. Martin
I think it would be cool if we had a standard statement to go at the top of articles (along the lines of the Featured Article statement, Nominated for Deletion statement, etc) that, due to their presence in current events, will be often updated as new developments occur. Examples for the present would be 2004 Haiti Rebellion, U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, 76th Academy Awards (which, BTW, is very stubbish right now), Same-sex marriage in the United States, etc. Something maybe like This is an article for a currently-occuring event and will be updated as new developments occur, or something more eloquently-phrased. Garrett Albright 01:03, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I have collected screenshots of all Main Pages of 53 Wikipedias at [15]. Complete pages are shown (I used a virtual screen of 1000*3000 pixels, some really fill all that space). Images were reduced to 40% size, so texts are barely readable, but the overall layout can be easily compared this way. Erik Zachte 00:28, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Has image formatting been changed recently? I have seen a few pages that look messed up now where previously they didn't. See for example: Vlorë (although you obviously can't see what it looked like previously). Dori | Talk 03:49, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)
It looks fine to me. RickK 04:13, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
As you may notice, I am adding dozens of towns and villages articles. Given its number of articles added at a time, you may have some opinion about the format, naming or anything. Please come to Wikipedia:Wikiproject Japanese districts and municipalites to discuss this matter. Thanks. -- Taku 04:10, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)
From my talkpage
Hi Taku, would you mind adding {{msg:stub}} at the end of those small articles you're adding? thanks, Dori | Talk 03:43, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)
I can't access the Recent changes page. It keeps killing my browser. Anybody else having this problem? RickK 04:39, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Well, it seems to have come back. Wish I knew what happened. RickK 05:07, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
IE 6.0. RickK 22:55, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Well, I used to use Netscape till they did a major revision (was it 5.0?) which I absolutely hated, so I switched to IE. RickK 03:17, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I have a question here for people who contribute to Wikis in other languages. On the english wikipedia, I very, very rarely run across articles translated from other languages. In all the time I've been here, I've run across *maybe* 2. My question is - how common are translated articles on the Wikis? Do they tend to be one area (like science), or are they well distributed? What is the quality of a translated article? →Raul654 08:51, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)
I've probably done about two dozen translated articles (into English) myself, mostly on cultural topics; usually when I do this, I find that I need to add a little more, because there are often cultural references that cannot be presumed clear to English-speakers. I've also done at least one on a scientific topic, adipose tissue, and I've often brought in material from other languages for an existing article, including expanding a stub to a full article. Some of the wikis (e.g. Romanian, Catalan) probably contain more translated content than not, at least on topics that don't specifically relate to the region where that language is spoken. Also, in this context, can I plug Wikipedia:Translation into English where you can request a translation of a foreign-language article into English (or sign up to help with that sort of work). -- Jmabel 23:27, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)