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I have noticed reference links to subscriber content such as the Wall Street Journal versus ad-supported or just plain free as in price websites are common. Is this compatible with Wikipedia's goal of a free encyclopedia both in price and freedom? Tcrow777 Talk 00:32, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
Scientific journals and newspapers are available ot the public, for free, at major libraries throughout the world. Anyone can walk in the the library at my university and browse any journal in its general collection. The fact that an online version of the journal may not be free does not at all mean that the journal itself is not freely available. The link to the non-free online version is just a convenience for editors who may have access; the reference itself tells everyone how to find the journal in print in a library. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:11, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
Anyone who wanders into the inner parts of Wikipedia will notice that there is a lot of drama. There are basically two sides: the cabal and the rebels. The cabal consists of the upper echelons of administrators and other leaders. They are the people with power here. ArbCom. Jimbo himself. The rebels are a rag-tag team of anyone who opposes the cabal.
Like many people, my natural reaction was to side with the rebels. Nobody cheers for the empire after all.
What I have come to realize is that there really is no cabal. Most admins and other people with power here really just want to help make Wikipedia better. It's a tough and thankless job dealing with troublemakers. The "rebels" on the other hand are mostly people who were blocked or reprimanded for good reasons. When visiting the rebel hangouts I soon noticed that aside from all wanting to dethrone the cabal, they all have vastly different ideas about what needs to change in Wikipedia. 90% of those ideas are crap and would break everything that is good with Wikipedia.
Still, the rebel camp keeps attracting new recruits. People keep voting against admins accused of being in the cabal when they apply for Bureaucratship. They vote for prolific rebels at RfA. There is a widespread distrust of admins among ordinary editors. ArbCom members and the highly valuable admins who dare take on difficult cases keep quitting because their hard work earns them nothing by enemies and hatred. Former ArbCom member and bureaucrat UninvitedCompany just left the project and left some thoughtworthy points on his user page.
The solution I believe, is that not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done. While there mostly is no cabal, it looks like there is. Admins are elected for life. The only way to de-admin is though the even more cabal-looking ArbCom. There is a secret admin mailing list and IRC channel. They probably aren't plotting conspiracies and canvassing for votes there, but with no way to know people will assume the worst. Wikipedia needs proper checks and balances. If there is a way to remove abusive admins, then ordinary editors and will able to trust and support the admins. RfA wouldn't be such a nightmare.
Also, pages like WP:TINC(There Is No Cabal) really aren't helping. When I see that, I think "Who do you think you're fooling? If there is no cabal you wouldn't need a page saying so." Pages like List of cabals, Rouge admin and the "Cabal appoved" stamps some put on their user pages are even worse. Ridiculing those who think there is a cabal only gets them sympathy.
Finally, admins and Wikipedia veterans need to be a lot more respectful towards ordinary editors. The are many people who have a lot of knowledge, are good writers and have time to commit but who don't know the Wikipedia rules and traditions very well. Treating them like criminals does not help. An example is the great non-free image purge of 2007. Just about all editors got their talk pages filled with nasty templates about violating image rules because they didn't have the right stamp in field 10c of the neccessary paperwork in triplicate. Anyone who complained about it was shouted at. ArbCom eventually put their feet down against that behavior, but it took over a year and who knows how many lost editors. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 20:37, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
It isn't that a cabal does or doesn't exist; if Wikipedia was like it was back in the good old days, it wouldn't matter; everything was open to the community, and the community had the power to say "No". Now that the community no longer has that power (or at least, a significantly weakened version of it), a cabal is much, much, much more dangerous, and is something that has to be watched for carefully before it gets too far out of control.
Coming up with a process to remove admins from power that doesn't involve ArbCom is a step in the right direction. More transparency would be a step in the right direction. Taking the power to create policy from ArbCom and returning it exclusively to the community would be a step in the right direction. Checks and balances, as you say, would go a long way toward restoring the trust of the community. Celarnor Talk to me 21:53, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
User:Raul654 has too much power. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.162.8.65 ( talk) 06:34, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello! I thought I had seen a Wikipedia Project for fixing and maintaining introductions to articles to ensure they gave a general overview of the contents. Was it a dream or there is a project like that? Any information is surely welcome. Lwyx ( talk) 22:02, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
Please take a moment to review the 2007 and 2008 edits in one or more of the articles listed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive491#Disruptive school project?.
Many hands make light work. One article reviewed and cleaned up/reverted/otherwise dealt with by you is one less article for other editors to deal with. Thank you. Uncle G ( talk) 12:56, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
Nominations for the December 2008 Arbitration Committee Elections will be accepted from 10 November to 24 November, and voting is scheduled to run from 1 December to 15 December. In an effort to give all candidates the chance to answer general questions about themselves and their candidacy, we are currently soliciting input from the community. Any editor who wishes to submit questions for all the candidates should do so by visiting Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2008/Candidate statements/Questions/General and following the instructions. On 17 November, the list of questions will be posted to each candidate's questions page, where they will provide answers (Subsequent nominees will have their question pages created with the same list). Questions to specific candidates may be posted at that time, as well. Please discuss at the election talk page if you have any questions about the question process. Thanks, UltraExactZZ Claims ~ Evidence 14:00, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
the first book wansn't Harry Potter and the philosipher's stone it's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.166.34.124 ( talk) 17:04, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
So I'm unifying my login across projects with the nifty new single-login feature, and I have a question. I need to usurp "my" username here on en.wp. (I'm "scs" everywhere else, but "ummit" here.) Can I / should I get my edit history transferred when this happens? Is it held to be a good or a bad idea? — Steve Summit ( talk) 03:35, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
Special:UnwatchedPages pages needs you! Currently, and for good reason, this is an admin only page. If you are a non-admin and would like to help bring the (rather large) list down, drop a note here and get a list of 2, 20, 200, or however many you want. John Reaves 21:41, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
I created an account in wiki dictionary and I cannot log in through the wikipedia. I logged out of wikidictionary and tried logging into Wikipedia. It says that I have an account but it won't recognize me. If I log into dictionary I can get in. Finding help for account information around here is a joke. A test in tolerance that fails me today. Mar —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.32.127.230 ( talk) 16:13, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
Would someone please remove the 2-inch wide solid blood-red chiclet from the top of every Wikipedia page? It is really distracting for someone trying to work on this project. Or at least make the control called “hide” do what it promises. — Michael Z. 2008-11-05 07:02 z
Remember kiddies, donate now! Donate-donatedonatedonatedonatedonatedonate... Clark89 ( talk) 21:33, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
Also see the technical village pump sections
"Support Wikipedia: a non-profit project" omnipresent banner---
Dismiss banner--
The donation box looks really silly (AND SECTION JUST AFTER
Donation banner suppression gadget). These two for complications resultant—
inference with top-of-page icons—
request password for saving preferences. Also short section;an idea for smaller banner at proposals
Obtrusive banner. Clark89 (
talk)
23:54, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
I'm not contesting requesting donations. I simply think that the aesthetic design of the donation request panel does not fit with the rest of Wikipedia. Particularly the gradient-based donation graph, one would be hard-pressed to find something similar to that on another section of Wikipedia. Its a beautiful design, I'm just questioning whether its the best design to fit with the rest of Wikipedia, aesthetically. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.68.223.81 ( talk) 02:12, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
I think it's a little odd when WP uses copyrighted pictures, under fair use, on articles that are hostile to the owners of the copyrights. I have run into this a couple of times before. The latest is being discussed at Talk:Barbara West (TV news anchor). Steve Dufour ( talk) 01:14, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
BTW I have seen many discussions about what pictures to use or not use in an article without the discussion being taken to an IfD. Steve Dufour ( talk) 19:11, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
i find it mildly hard to believe that the upkeep for wikipedia and its servers is anywhere near 6 million... ya. what's all the money for? 207.161.63.45 ( talk) 04:10, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
Hi. What is an appropriate place on Wikipedia to express my appreciation for the awesome people who create and edit and maintain articles? I just want to say that I am full of love and appreciation towards all of you and if I could I would go and hug each one of you individually. Seriously this work you are doing here is awesome. I am an editor too and have started a handful of articles and edited many more but I have the feeling I take more than I give and I just want to express my thanks. Sorry if this is not an appropriate place to say it, please let me know what is. You all rock, fellas!! :) ReluctantPhilosopher ( talk) 12:27, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
Whose ingenious idea was this? (Note that I'm not complaining, I just find it hilarious for some reason.) MuZemike ( talk) 04:30, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
The Template Template:Otheruses should not be used in articles with brackets, since you get there only following a already qualified link in another text or a disambiguation page, not by searching. I removed all those cases in the German wikipedia (about 50), but there are much more in the English WP. You can find them by searching for ") (transclusion)" on http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Otheruses&limit=5000.
Couldn't that job be done easily by a bot?
Please discuss here: Wikipedia_talk:Disambiguation#Template:Otheruses_in_articles_with_brackets
-- Abe Lincoln ( talk) 11:59, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
If you are looking for something to do, WP:Suspected copyright violations could do with some more editors. The backlog there is more or less permanent and the job is fairly simple: either remove false positives, tag for history merge, rewrite, tag for deletion or move it to WP:Copyright Problems. None of this requires admin privileges, and non-admins are more than welcome to work there — in fact almost all of the editors who work there regularly or semi-regularly are non-admins. – Sadalmelik ☎ 10:05, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
I regularly see quality control volunteers argue in {{ afd}} discussions that a biographical article should be deleted, even if it is written from a neutral point of view, and cites verifiable, authoritative references -- because it does not cover the ordinary biographical milestones, like where and when the individual was born, or studied.
I regularly ask those quality control volunteers to consider "false Geber". He was the first person to describe the process for the purification and use of Sulfuric acid. Isaac Asimov thought his work was significant that he had an entry for his in his biographical encyclopedia of the World's top 1,000 most important scientists -- even though historians knew practially nothing about him, not his name, not when or where he lived, or his religion or occupation.
I suggest to them that while the milestones of a person's life are definitely worth including, if we can verify them, not having them available is a very poor reason to suggest we should suppress coverage of what we do know about what they did.
Well, since the last time I told someone about him, someone updated the false Geber article to incorporate a claim that a recent scholar feels sure he can establish that false Geber was a practically unknown monk called "Paul of Taranto". And, rather than writing under the name of the earlier, more famous Geber, as an act of altruism and self-abnegation, this scholar suggests Paul of Taranto was forging new works under Geber's name to help promote earlier work he published under his own name.
So, it seems to me, if the recent scholarship is correct, this would be the most recent instance of what we call sockpuppetry. Here is a passage from Openness, Secrecy, Authorship by Pamela O. Lang
|
According to the scholar in question, one William R. Newman, this Franciscan monk Paul wrote Theorica et practica under his own name, and then wrote another work entitled Summa Perfectionis under Geber's name.
I still hate sockpuppets. I still think a lack of information about the mundane milestones of a subject's life is a bad reason to argue for deletion.
Cheers! Geo Swan ( talk) 18:28, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
While looking at wikipedia's most visited articles I found HITS MUSIC ONLY at no. 26 – Ludicrously high for an article that actually doesn't exist! What is going on here? Google throws up a link to www.nrj.fr/ but why is this receiving more hits than the article for the United States presidential election, 2008? Can anyone understand what's happening here? Sillyfolkboy ( talk) 20:44, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
If one has a concern about an article and its discussion page has not responded, where should one post a request for other wikipedians to view/review the page and resolve the concern expressed on the discussion page? ( Talk:World Wrestling All-Stars#Quotes in this case, I deleted the quotes but Frank800 restored them. ) -- SGBailey ( talk) 09:57, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
I suspect that a large number of our casual readers are unaware of articles related to the ones that they are reading because they tune out at the bottom of the page where all the references begin and never see links in navboxes and "see also" sections. Case and point, in the List of Prime Ministers of Canada, there have been several users who have proposed adding additional information such as time in office and place of birth, even though these subjects have their own dedicated lists that are linked in the navbox at the bottom of the page. If we have users who don't know how to find related articles, then we must have tonnes of readers who don't. Is there any way that we could add something to the tops of articles directing new users to related articles and navboxes? -- Arctic Gnome ( talk • contribs) 17:38, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
"The Free Encyclopedia" always meant 'no charge' to me but now I've been told it means 'copyright free'. So why not change it...and why not have a little contest to think of a new tagline and raise some monies in the process.
Maybe it would be as easy as adding a field to the donate page that says "Wikipedia is considering a new tagline, would you like to suggest one? (Your tagline is part of the donation as well.)"
The Copyright Free Encyclopedia or Free Information - Free World are two that come to mind. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.242.173.40 ( talk) 17:31, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
WP:LEDE states that the introduciton to an article "should be written in a clear, accessible style to invite a reading of the full article." (emph added).
Are there any Wikipedia guidelines etc. where the community has reached consensus on what "accessible" means - in the lede in particular or general accessability level of articles themselves? -- The Red Pen of Doom 18:25, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
This WikiProject needs more members! There have been five members so far, and there need to be more, so we can make Wikipedia the world's foremost reference on Indy. Thanks. -- MISTER ALCOHOL T C 21:18, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
Checking articles on my watchlist, I observed that someone added a link to the official website for Franklin Township, Franklin County, Kansas; checking out the township website, I noticed that their " What's a Township?" page is sourced from "WikiPedia.com". I'm assuming that this isn't a violation, since they're obviously trying to say that we're their source; but is there a page where we list Wikipedia articles as sources for things other than news articles? I'm familiar with Wikipedia as a press source, but this doesn't quite fit into that. Since this is an official government (admittedly a small one, but a government anyway) using our data, I'm assuming there's an appropriate place to note that they're sourcing from us, but can someone tell me where to list this? Nyttend ( talk) 21:39, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
What's the best way to get support in an RfA? -- MISTER ALCOHOL T C 05:33, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Additional input is sought. Please see this discussion:
One of IP user in kowiki is blaiming (kowiki) admins for unfair speedy-deletions( ko:WP:Viliage pump#chickens' playground Wikipedia). Why I report this small happening here is, this user compared kowiki admins with enwiki admins, saying The reason why English Wikipedia succeeded is high-quality admins. Admins bulit up Wikipedia... Do you agree? -- Dus2000 ( talk) 10:48, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
See Encomienda and http://www.smso.net/Encomienda. Any way to tell which came first? Is smso.net in violation of the GFDL, or is our version a copyvio? Little Red Riding Hood talk 03:24, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
On the "my contributions" page, there is a link called "edit and action count". On the corresponding page, it states that there is a certain number of edits which I have made on Wikipedia which have been deleted. These edits, however, do not show up on the "my contributions" page. Is there any way that I can view a list of the edits I have made which have been deleted? Neelix ( talk) 16:43, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
Need someone's help with uploading a 7-minute audio file (35 MB) to a Wikipedia article. Can you please outline the steps? THANKS! cormster8@gmail.com —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rjmcormier ( talk • contribs) 18:07, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
Dear All,
My name is Avanidhar Chandrasekaran ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Avanidhar).
I work with GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. As part of my research, I am involved in analyzing the usefulness and Necessity of author reputation in Wikipedia.
In lieu of this, I have simulated an Interface to color words in an article based on their Age.
Being experienced contributors to Wikipedia, I invite you to participate in this study, which involves the following.
1. Please visit the following Instances of wikipedia and evaluate the interface components which have been incorporated into each of them. Each of these use their own algorithm to color text.
a) The Wikitrust project
http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php/Main_Page
b) The Wiki-reputation project at Grouplens research
http://wiki-reputation.cs.umn.edu/index.php/Main_Page
2) Once you have evaluated the two interfaces, kindly complete this survey on Wikipedia quality
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=hagN5S1JZHxH6pF9SmXkkA_3d_3d
We hope to get your valuable feedback on these interfaces and how Wikipedia
article quality can be improved.
Thanks for your time
Avanidhar Chandrasekaran,
GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota
Avanidhar ( talk) 21:55, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
Last weekend my wife & bought new cell phones -- Blackberry Curves -- & tonight as I was scrolling thru its list of applications I could buy, I encountered one by the name of Wikimobile, available for the price of $19.99. The description states
Now while I've been a user & contributor to Wikipedia for over 6 years now, I had never heard of Wikimobile. I did a quick search, & it appears no one else on Wikipedia has either: no articles, no references to it in Talk or other meta-space pages. (The name "Wikimobile" is the name of a project that someone proposed over on meta.wikimedia.org about 2 years ago, but that project doesn't appear to have any connection to this application.)
So is WMF getting any money from this? Is this application infringing on the Wikipedia/Wikimedia brand? Why doesn't Wikipedia have an article on this thing?
FWIW, I can attest that the browser on the Blackberry Curve can actually import & display pages from Wikipedia in a usable manner, so I don't know why anyone would want to buy this application. -- llywrch ( talk) 06:24, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Could someone add IPA pronunciation of Jostein Gaarder in his article, Jostein Gaarder? huji— TALK 18:15, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Do navboxes go below stub tags? Or is it the other way around?-- chaser - t 23:47, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
Dear friends, We are conducting a study on the motivation of the knowledge sharing on Wikipedia. Your experience of the read from and write to Wikipedia is very important to the design and management of this knowledge platform. The survey will take about three minutes. We deeply appreciate your help on answering the following questions.
After the survey is done, we will randomly select twenty persons and present them with USB 2GB Flash Drives. Besides, with each valid questionnaire, we will donate US $1 dollar to the Wikimedia Foundation. The result of this survey is analyzed in an anonymous way and is only regarded as the academic use. Please feel free to fill out the questionnaire. Thanks again for your time and valuable input.
May happiness and health be with you everyday!
On-line Questionnaire: http://140.119.19.152:8080/wiki/ [3] Shari S. C. Shang
Eldon Y. Li Professor, Department of Management Information Systems, National Chengchi University
Tel.: +886-2-82374038; Fax: +886-2-29393754 ; E-mail: s1213527@yahoo.com.tw —Preceding unsigned comment added by 吳雅玲 ( talk • contribs) 13:08, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
I note that this article was subject to VfDs in 2004 and 2005 ( 1 and 2).
I've written a stub that I humbly suggest passes WP:V and have overwritten the redirect.
Happy for anyone querying the verifiability of the new article to list it at AfD.
I thought that DRV was inappropriate, as the article was a redirect, not deleted and furthermore, I didn't want to recreate any of the old deleted versions - all the verified information in the article is from the last few days. -- Dweller ( talk) 14:58, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
I have not been able to find the exact number of registered Wikipedia users/editors at this time. Thank you for your help. Who wields me, wields the world! ( talk) 10:29, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
Thank you. Who wields me, wields the world! ( talk) 05:21, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
I noticed, that the flag is missing in the Featurebox in article Martinique. Prunk ( talk) 10:13, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Concerns over the use of text cut and pasted into Wikipedia articles using the Creative Commons License. Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#Creative Commons License, and add any comments there. -- PBS ( talk) 12:42, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
I wrote an article, Holy Cross Church (New York City). This church is also called Church of the Holy Cross. If someone enters that second title in "search," how can I get it to go to the article? Thank you. Hammerdrill ( talk) 14:17, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Good job, community! What have we been doing right? GetLinkPrimitiveParams ( talk) 14:53, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
By definition the entries on Wikipedia improve in accuracy and completeness--its in the DNA of the system. The old claim that the platform is not a credible source of information is steadily being eroded. Who wields me, wields the world! ( talk) 05:30, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello everyone, I was just wondering if there was a way to see a list of the all the pages that link to my user page? Basically, I know that I have created some sub-domains on my user page (Adasta/[name of page]) in the past, but have no idea what they are called. How can I find out where these pages "are"?
Thanks. -- Adasta 16:00, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Hi,
I’m Tabitha the Marketing Director of t5m, I'm writing to propose that the wikipedia community discuss whether they feel like the content we at t5m produce is relevant to wikipedia.
t5m is an online tv network who’s mission is to produce content which inspires and entertains. Unlike most video networks which either aggregate existing content or rely on user generate content. t5m creates, produces and syndicates original exclusive interviews with celebrities.
t5m prides itself on have a great relationship with the talent we interview, which ensure that we create candid, entertaining and by the very nature of the medium reliably informative interviews. The celebrities are all happy with the content and encourage us to make sure their fans see it as they firmly believe that we are no journalist or advertorial but just being a mouth piece for them.
I feel that many of the interviews we have are relevant to the wikipedia pages on the particular talent. I understand that it is unethical for me to link to t5m on all the pages where our content is relevant so i wanted to highlight our site to the wikipedia community and see whether people see our site as a valuable place to have an external link to.
I have been reading about how wikipedia is moving more into the video arena and i thought that some of our interviews might be a good place to start. So this is also something i would be really happy to discuss.
to check out the content visit www.t5m.com [5] Richard Dawkins interview [6] or Ray Winstone interview[7] as these interviews are good places to start looking.
below is a list of all out personality interview content...
thank you very much for your time
tabitha
Often, there will be a template, which, when added to an article, automatically puts that article in a certain category. I have noticed that often, however, the lists for that category are cluttered up with people who post on talk pages "I suggest we use this template:" and then the template, or, on userpages, "I really like this template! :". This creates an enormous hassle for people trying to find articles requiring improvement, and is very inefficient. I suggest you do something about this. Hello, My Name Is SithMAN8 ( talk) 17:14, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. Hello, My Name Is SithMAN8 ( talk) 23:21, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
Some articles contain lists of countries. Should Kosovo be included in such lists? For example, Glock pistol#Users has a list of the nations whose army or police force use the Glock pistol. The list includes only nations, or former nations. The issue is that there is a lack of agreement about whether or not Kosovo is a nation. As explained in International reaction to the 2008 declaration of independence by Kosovo, "52 out of 192 sovereign United Nations member states have formally recognised the Republic of Kosovo as an independent state. Notably, a majority of European Union member states have formally recognised Kosovo (22 out of 27)..." Among English speaking countries, Kosovo has been recognized by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. Quite a few other countries (e.g. New Zealand) are undeclared and "neither recognise nor not recognise" Kosovo. At the same time, some countries have declared that they do not accept Kosovo as a sovereign state. Also, the same article says, "According to the Secretary-General, the "United Nations has maintained a position of strict neutrality on the question of Kosovo's status"." So, should Kosovo be included in lists of countries in Wikipedia articles, or not? — Mudwater ( Talk) 20:11, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
I accidentally increased the size of the print, and now I'm having trouble getting it back to normal. What do I do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Saxon2k8 ( talk • contribs) 23:35, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
Please discuss my suggestion about making {{ wikinews}} a short-living link (the keyword here is "news") in Template_talk:Wikinews#Outdated_news. `' Míkka >t 17:11, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
Please people, tell me what you think of this article! I did my best to improve it and with me some others did the same! After days of hard work, I would love to hear some opinions from expierenced wikipedians! I have nominated it for Good Article in the morning and I hope it will pass. If you people think it would pass in its current state, then please inform me of that so I can have a good nights sleep. If not, then inform me of what should be done in order for the article to pass GA-nominations. I eagerly await your answers! Thanks in advance, J.B. ( talk) 14:34, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
As you say, Roger, it makes B-class. The thing is: I want it to make GA class. {{subst:User:Jouke Bersma/sig}} 11:04, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
As of now, it already is a GA nominee. Could I still bring it up for peer review as it is? Jouke Bersma Contributions 08:53, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello: Last 29th of July of 2008 it was added to Heidi Game that fans outside of the Pacific Time Zone were unable to see the end of the match. I've been searching in the web but haven't found anything that talks about it. I'm not from the USA and don't know what the policy was those years for what time to broadcast live (e.g. this football match) and recorded (e.g. this film about Heidi) programs in the different regions of the country with different times. Were all the TV viewers of the whole USA unable to see the end of the match or only those ones outside the PTZ? The difference is very big and should be clarified. Thanks, -- Edupedro ( talk) 22:37, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I pruned all of the unlinked names out of Chail Military School and got reverted. I tried to explain to the other editor that if he creates articles on the people which meet the requirements of WP:BIO (and based on the supposed qualifications of the unlinked names, they would be notable), then there's no problem, but if you just list a bunch of people and claim notability without creating articles on them, then it's a violation of WP:BIO and is making an end run around notability rules. Am I wrong? Little Red Riding Hood talk 20:54, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
I'm not really sure where to put this, but… Looking at the talk page for WP:RFE, I've noticed a lot of discussions regarding the usefulness of the Requests for Expansion, and I get the feeling that it's totally useless. I've submitted several articles here over time, and of them, not one has been expanded. Furthermore, it's backlogged all the way to September 2007! One comment on the talk page reads "If this page results in expansions, it must be very infrequent. I've just reviewed the last four weeks of edits. The only listings that were deleted were for articles that themselves had been deleted, not expanded. Some of the earlier debate on this talk page questioned whether a request for expansion (or an expansion tag) was really productive. Seems not." I looked at the first ten articles from the September 2007 listings and only one out of the whole bunch has been expanded. This whole project seems very unproductive to me, and I think that it should be marked as inactive/historical. As for its presence on the {{ expand}} template, that mention can simply be removed, as I at least find {{ Expand}} to be a useful flag. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ( Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP) 16:50, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
(undent) The original discussion was about the page Wikipedia:Requests for expansion, not about the {{ expand}} template and its related category. The WP:RFE page is now marked historical/inactive. The template and its category are still very much alive; anyone wanting to delete them should start another discussion, I suggest. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:30, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
Hi. So all I want to do is find out how to change the categorization of an article. I believe one is wrong (incorrectly categorized). I don't know how to do it. I don't care if someone else does it for me. But I've spent an hour going through the website on where to get this answer...and I'm getting frustrated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Inkarent ( talk • contribs) 14:24, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
Algebraist, Washington Group International does not belong in the category "Defunct engineering companies of the United States". Yes it has been merged with URS Corp. but that does not make it defunct. Technically, it is still doing business as a legal entity. (It still has open contracts as Washington Group International). Inkarent ( talk) 14:28, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
Does anybody know if there is a way to do a tabbed navbox? There are no examples under the {{ navbox}} documentation, so I have no idea if anybody has found a way to implement them. Thanks.— RJH ( talk) 16:58, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
I just made a typo and wound up at http://en.wikpedia.org/ . Egads! Ugly and awful! Kingturtle ( talk) 02:52, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
Not sure if it's already been/being discussed, but this article points out that
Consumers who rely on the user-edited Web resource Wikipedia for information on medications are putting themselves at risk of potentially harmful drug interactions and adverse effects new research shows. Dr. Kevin A. Clauson of Nova Southeastern University in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. and his colleagues found few factual errors in their evaluation of Wikipedia entries on 80 drugs. But these entries were often missing important information, for example the fact that the anti-inflammatory drug Arthrotec (diclofenac and misoprostol) can cause pregnant women to miscarry, or that St. John's wort can interfere with the action of the HIV drug Prezista (darunavir).
What can/should be done to correct these deficiencies? Also note the legal and ethical issues surrounding improper, incorrect, unverified, or unclear information. // Blaxthos ( t / c ) 18:22, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Does orphan bot remove the orphan tags from articles that get de-orphaned (i.e. articles that were formerly not linked to but that now have another article linking to them?). The reason I asked is that this edit [4] came on my radar screen, someone manually removing the tag.
Second "I should really figure out how to look this up but I don't know where to look" question, how could I go about getting a bot to notice new (or go through existing) articles scoring them for possible inclusion in the Bay Area, California project? I could look for articles with mentions or links to the various cities, institutions, people, etc. I've seen such lists around the encyclopedia so I assume there is a bot that will make them based on a configuration file. If you know, could you point me in the right direction?
Hope this is the right place to ask - if not I can ask the question on a bot page or the help desk. Thanks, Wikidemon ( talk) 01:43, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
After some false starts, I successfully created Talk:Analytic Hierarchy Process/Archive 3.
The false starts created two redirect pages that I think should be deleted: Talk:Analytic Hierarchy Process/Archive 4 - 01/08 through 06/08 and Talk:Analytic Hierarchy Process/Archive 3 - 01/08 through 06/08.
If I am right, could somebody please delete them? Skyrocket654 ( talk) 15:40, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
Does anyone know if there's any way to have a list of articles by number of pictures or something? (Or if there is one already that I couldn't find) Petero9 ( talk) 23:23, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
What is this site? I just found a link to an article ( http://static.wikipedia.org/new/wikipedia/en/articles/e/x/o/Exopolitics.html) that has now been deleted. I recently asked an administrator for a copy of this article (which I received), however, if I had known about it being extant on this site, I could perhaps somehow had gone and retrieved it for myself? __ meco ( talk) 15:08, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed a number of new articles and new users all editing in an interesting pattern. I started to suspect sock puppetry, until I read a note that an article was for a class. It seems like a professor or instructor has assigned the class the task of creating (or updating and expanding) articles on social movements. And from some IP checks on these articles, I believe these users are from North Carolina, and probably attend UNC. That said, because this is forced work, and because these are new users, there has been a number of problems resulting from this assignment. I've seen articles that qualified for speedy deletion, I've seen copyvios, and I've seen articles that need editing, formatting, clean up, and removal of trivia and non-encyclopedic content. So I'm asking if users could watchlist some of these, and go through and check for copyvio, clean up, etc. I have a list offline of the users that I suspect are in the class, but I'm not sure it is necessary to publish it here. But I will list the articles in question:
Thanks to anyone who can help weed through this and clean up and salvage. Should we perhaps try to contact all the users at once and give them tips? Should we try to contact the instructor or do anything more? Any other ideas? Thanks again!- Andrew c [talk] 02:36, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
I have noticed that on articles where an area needs to be expressed, eg the size of a national park, the sizes of these areas are expressed as km2 as opposed to hectares, as a person that works in agriculture when ever i talk about area size it is always expressed as hectares, i have noticed also that when the imperial equivalent is put in brackets it is always written as acres. I am not trying to change change policy or anything I am just curious why Km2 is used as opposed to Ha. Cheers Beaver ( talk) 10:42, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
My name, Richard Leach, has come up at two Wikipedia pages: Terrance Lindall and Amanda Husberg. I have prepared a very short and I think neutral page about myself, and am seeking consensus before creating it, as I know autobiographical pages are strongly discouraged. Here's the sandbox page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tinkwig/Sandbox Tinkwig ( talk) 12:09, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
Template:Infobox FBI Ten Most Wanted 1990s looks a bit too stylised, I think. It's a nice idea, but looks very odd when placed in an article. If someone agrees with me, could they give it a once-over and standardise it? I've tried to, but my knowledge of template code isn't good enough! Thanks, Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry ( talk) 16:37, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
Since Wiktionary is a sister project to Wikipedia would a link to it be considered an internal link or is it a separate entity? Copana2002 ( talk) 17:23, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
Using Wikipedia, can one post a biography about another person? Even if the person is not a 'world famous celebrity'? For example: I would like to write about a local author who writes about his stuggles with Insomnia. Mick Thandi tries to help people find <a href=" http://micksinsomniacures.blogspot.com">Insomnia Cures</a>. He writes on his research about <a href=" http://micksinsomniacures.blogspot.com/2008/11/insomnia-cures.html">Insomnia</a>.
Dear Sir/Madam
Could you please take off the picture posted on your website representing prophet Mohammed. Islam prohibts its display and Muslim all over world will be highly obilged and thankfull if you remove it as soon as possible. So that our faith in wiki pedia reamins fine
Thanks Dr Shah Hobart Australia —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.6.130.110 ( talk) 12:05, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello
Would you be able to answer my question.
I would like to know if articles i have made will get on to Google Earth, with my current coordinate layout.
Please look at these two pages to see:
Thank You Chris0693 ( talk) 17:51, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
I have been nominated for BAG, so per instructions I am posting this to invite comments at Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/Anomie. Thanks. Anomie ⚔ 03:13, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
What page can I find the address of The Simpsons?.-- intraining Jack In 09:11, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
Sorry to raise a subject that has probably been discussed a million times, but for some reason I cannot find it in all this Village Pump thing. As you know, the hosting site AOL Hometown has been shut down. Is there any way to find back material that was hosted there, if it is NOT in the wayback machine ? SyG ( talk) 09:48, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
Failed to parse: The article Resistor shows "Failed to parse (Cannot write to or create math output directory): V = I R" with red color letters. It seems relates to Cartesian coordinate system#Representing a vector in the standard basis. What is wrong in article itself or my browser setting? http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Resistor&diff=256196712&oldid=255365823 does show correctly.-- Namazu-tron ( talk) 01:57, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
If someone has created an account with what appears to be their real name and has identified themselves as a minor and has also given other personal information about themselves on their user page (where they live) - do we just notify them that that is not necessarily a safe thing to do or can administrators go in and remove that data? Trout Ice Cream ( talk) 20:49, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi.
First off, is this the right page for me to be asking this question--I'm still a bit of a beginner here.
Second, I want to contribute to Wikipedia, as I indeed like it a lot, but I loves my privacy.
What would happen if I sent cash--from $20 to $100--in a reasonably opaque envelop, with my username, an email address I got for free (in my case Yahoo! but I suppose there are many others), and maybe post a message on my username:talk page. Would it be accepted, used well, and would no one else accredit it to anyone but me?
Thanks
Yartett (
talk)
20:47, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
I really don't like IP addresses as user names. But I haven't come here to propose disallowing them; that has been proposed many times already and I guess there's a good reason why we have them. No, I just came here because I feel it's always better to take things in good humor. So I propose to refer to them as Beagle Boys. — Sebastian 19:52, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
The fishery articles use a number of fishery templates to form a somewhat hierarchical network across the articles. Since these have been installed, the traffic for fishery articles has much increased, particularly for the lower level articles. However, every now and then, someone comes along, and wants, usually without discussion, to introduce their own idea of layout, or simply removes templates or pushes them out of the way. Sometimes editors come along who seem malicious. Is there some forum where I can get these issues properly considered by capable editors without axes to grind? -- Geronimo20 ( talk) 02:12, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
Does anyone know if the 19th century author, Emily C. Orr is a pseudonym? "She" wrote, "Thoughts For Working Days"; published in 1894 in London, England by the Society For Promoting Christian Knowledge. The New York publisher was E.& J.B. Young & Co. "She" also wrote "Thoughts For Men & Women".
B. Clarke —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Baclarke (
talk •
contribs)
18:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I relisted virgin killer on IFD for the sole reason that for a fair-use image, the controvery that it has created makes it seem rediculous to keep. Thousands of users have had their acess impeded for the sake of "policy."[ 1] I say the product is the most important and no policy is too important never to be ignored. So lets let all those users back in by putting this picture out of it's misery for the sake of the project and it's content. I have asked for wider input on ths to see if the keepers of that content agree.-- Ipatrol ( talk) 23:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
I see, Well, I would like to keep this up as a more general discussion with fresh eyes as weather to grant the image an IAR exemption rather than delete it. I want the communtity to establish a consensus as to weather or not WP:NOTCENSORED or a few other policies should apply to this image. If the community agrees to grant an exemption, then we might re-nominated with that in mind. If the issue permenantly subsides and the IWF and the WMF can reach an agreement, then we can put this issue to rest.-- Ipatrol ( talk) 00:15, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
Could somebody who knows Roman History check the edits made by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/24.18.119.54? I'm not sure what they're doing is vandalism or is actually improving these articles. Little Red Riding Hood talk 02:53, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
This is either a request for information that already exists, or a suggestion for creating it... I have often wondered what types of articles make up the bulk of wikipedia, and would love to see, for instance, a pie chart showing this. E.g. what percentage of all articles are about places, about people, companies, entertainment, etc. It seems to me (particularly when I use the 'random article' function) that certain more or less un-historically important categories (TV shows of the late 20th c, minor bands, etc) are massively represented compared to other, more significant areas, but I'd love to see it in numbers. - Wormcast ( talk) 01:31, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
Why is stated that the reigns for the Hardcore Title at Wrestlemania 2000 are not recongised by the WWE, when they are recongised in all of the WWE Superstars bio pages. But when i change the info it gets deleted -- Wolfman123 ( talk) 17:07, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello, My name is Graham I am 13 years old and use wikipedia alot for school. What i think would be great is a Wikipedia for kids, because normal wikipedia is very complitcated and hard to understand often in 9th,8th,7th grade etc. Would be great, thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.6.55.225 ( talk) 16:50, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
The page for article expansion has been archived and more or less abandoned. So if I think there is an article that needs help (specifically, the article on angels although I would like to know the answer in general as well), where do I post such a request? Please don't tell me to do it myself, since the reason I'm asking is because I want information about the topic. Minaker ( talk) 09:44, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
is anyone aware of a template that calculates future and elapsed time (T+/T-) rendered: xx years, xx months, xx days. my first choice was {{ For year month day}}, however, it apparently cannot handle the future. -- emerson7 19:16, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
What channel are Manchester United playing their games in the world club championship on in england -- Wolfman123 ( talk) 02:47, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
I've been trying to update the game guide to include all the latest information about WikiPedia – could someone please check that I've included all the Game Master spells? In other words, what do you think of the updated page? It Is Me Here t / c 14:59, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
I noticed I was suddenly able to keep up with special:recentchanges again, and realised it had gone past midnight in the united states. Do we have any pretty graphs of number of edits per time interval to show how much variation there is in number of edits? -- fvw * 07:45, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
I couldn't figure out how to properly flag this, so I'm posting it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aterhov —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lumarine ( talk • contribs) 19:01, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
While participating in a recent TOV thread at ANI, I noticed that, while there are suggestions on how to respond to threats, there is doesn't seem to be a form letter to serve as an example of how a good contact attempt to a law enforcement agency should look. I've quickly thrown one together at User:Mendaliv/TOV letter, and would like some further outside input. —/ Mendaliv/ 2¢/ Δ's/ 19:09, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
This file has been included in the Moon article. While it is an excellent image, I feel a significantly reduced version should be created for article use. 9.64 MB is quite a download for bringing up an article, and a heavily trafficked one at that. Does anyone agree... or am I alone on this one? - Roy Boy 09:33, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I was pretty sure they were quite distinct, but a short time ago I found an editor who was quite adamant that they were quite the same.
"Conjecture is absolutely fine in a BLP, as per BLP policy/guidelines" with "By definition, all allegations are conjectural" and "Thus conjectures MADE BY SOURCES are just peachy. And nothing I have suggested is a conjectural interpretation of a source. You ARE A FLAT OUT LIAR so I am not sure if I am even going to bother to rebut the rest of your comments."
The issue was about a source making a decidedly conjectural prediction (I noted also WP:CRYSTAL in claiming that such a prediction of future events was a conjecture). But what is the word "conjecture" supposed to mean in WP? Is "allegation" a simple subset of "conjecture"? Many thanks! Collect ( talk) 12:42, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
As you can read on my user page, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is hosting a workshop this Tuesday, the 16th, to give their scientists a crash course in editing Wikipedia, especially for creating cell-biology articles. Tim and I are running the workshop, but we could benefit from your help! We'd like to find friendly, online Wikipedians who will greet the newbie scientists and offer to help them with their first articles. It seems like a great way to bring the scientific and Wikipedia communities a little closer.
The workshop will run from 12:30-2:30pm local San Francisco time. Tim and I will be speaking until ~1pm, and the participants won't start their user pages until 12:45pm at the earliest. We'll ask them to add the template {{ ASCB workshop}} to their user page, which will add them to the Category:ASCB 2008 Wikipedia workshop participants category. Then you'll be able to see who's participating and welcome them. Other help with categorization, finding/formatting images and references, etc. would be much appreciated. Proteins ( talk) 14:48, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Thank you very much, ukexpat! Welcoming and wiki-stuff is just what we're hoping for; the scientists will probably want to take care of the science themselves. ;) We'd just like to keep Wikipedia from seeming too poluphloisboisterous in their first steps, Proteins ( talk) 17:17, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I guess WorldNetDaily threatened to sue Wikipedia in 2007, which may or may not have anything to do with the ongoing push-pull going on in the last couple months at that article. But is seems odd to me that there has been (what looks to me as) an incessant pattern of anon IP editors dropping in to the article and scrubbing out the non-flattering content. I am interested in third opinions about this. SaltyBoatr ( talk) 18:59, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
<moved to Entertainment desk here
[5]
Julia Rossi (
talk)
10:04, 16 December 2008 (UTC)>
<moved to Computing Reference Desk here: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing#Conway's Game of Life. TenOfAllTrades( talk) 14:00, 16 December 2008 (UTC)>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_the_SubGenius From now on, you should consider this a guideline for your editors: If you don't know anything about it, find someone who does. Deleting an article on the Church of the SubGenius is about as lacking in cultural knowledge as deleting an article on Burning Man, Skull and Bones, or Survival Research Laboratories. Seriously, Kraftlos needs to be spanked for putting a Notability on the Church of the SubGenius. With three books, two of which were published by Simon and Schuster, and a film featuring Negativland and Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO, this one is a no-brainer. Even a basic search of the WWW provides several hundred thousand references to it. That should be relevance enough. 71.102.2.128 ( talk) 20:23, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
I desperately come here for advice. Anyone here know any prominent inclusionists who help form wikipolicy? Unfortunately, I know a hell of a lot of prominent, powerful, deletionists, but not one prominent inclusionist. I look forward to your reply. Inclusionist ( talk) 07:54, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
User:Benjiboi doesn't seem interested in policy. Inclusionist ( talk) 23:56, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
Warning, 4chan is spreading rumors on Erin Andrews, one of their target is to edit to article of Erin Andrews on Wikipedia. http://img.4chan.org/b/res/103218015.html -- 218.103.165.165 ( talk) 07:03, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Has anyone compiled any statistics on author reaction to speedy deletion? It might be interesting to know—and helpful in assessing possible improvements to the templates and notifications—the percentages of speedy deletion templates followed by:
—Largo Plazo ( talk) 22:14, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
To make WP vaguely readable on wide screens, I knocked up a script this afternoon to make the articles the right width and place images and boxes correctly in the margin. It should work on everything except IE, but only tested on FF (and monobook). This is probably not the best place to post, but I was wondering if anyone had any feedback. The code is not the best, but apart from that, any comments would be helpful.
To use it, edit Special:MyPage/monobook.js and add
importScript( 'User:Kan8eDie/columnlayout.css' );
then press Ctl-F5 (or similar) and enjoy!
The expected behaviour is for everything on the right to position itself close to the text margin. What do you feel about pre (the dotted box just above): should I make that narrow as well? — Kan8eDie ( talk) 19:06, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
What happens to an article when it is tagged? I've come across a couple of totally unreferenced articles, not been 100% comfortable about nominating them for deletion (as they may well be notable - I'm not sure how to interepret WP's policy on notability in the field of self help authors, for example) and so have tagged them as needing references, clean-up, etc... but what happens then? Does someone need to look at the specific article I've tagged and decide to improve it, or is there a general list of articles that need references, etc, based on tagging? Tagging the article seems the most appropriate thing to do in the circumstances if I'm not overly inclined to take it to AFD, but it seems a bit pointless if all it means is that the tag is on the top of the page. Any thoughts? Should I just take them to AFD and risk a speedy keep? Richard Hock ( talk) 16:07, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Tagging adds the article to appropriate tracking categories (e.g. Category:Articles lacking sources), which anyone can look through to find articles needing work. Whether people commonly do this or not, I don't know. Anomie ⚔ 17:32, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Remember, however, that tags are a visual blight which detracts from the ability of people to enjoy and use wikipedia (compared to the "stub" tag or Talk page discussion, which allows searching and editor interaction but doesn't interfere with casual usage). For that reason, they should be limited to *very important* topics, like concerns about bias, lack of sources, or debate about deletion. Also, if you encounter a tag that you think is inappropriate, you are free to remove it. Like all editing, whatever one person has added, another can remove; tags don't have some special protection.
When tags were first developed, people created frivolous ones about minor style issues and subjective beliefs, like "this introduction is too long" - I once ran across somebody who wanted to created a tag about semicolon usage - and hurtled them around with abandon. Wikipedia started to look like MySpace. Most of the silly tags seem to have disappeared, happily, at least as far as I can tell. - DavidWBrooks ( talk) 22:02, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello,
On fr, we've just added a new link/menu on picture pages to get a poster of the picture. It has just started with a first French printer WikiPosters.
I think that's worth announcing this here.
If you're interested, I translated the project page and a small press release.
Plyd (
talk)
16:53, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
English Project Page:
fr:Projet:Impression/en
English Press Release:
fr:Projet:Impression/Press Release
So I just clicked on "Featured content" and the first thing it showed me was a section labelled "Featured article: January 27, 2006". The content of the section was apparently lifted from €2 commemorative coins on that date. It includes the following sentence:
Needless to say, the article in question no longer says this. So that page is presenting information more than two years out of date as examples of "the best that Wikipedia has to offer". And I'm sure that particular example is not the only one. Doing things this way seems like a bad idea to me. -- 87.194.147.203 ( talk) 06:40, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
I think the question is, why does the "featured content" link take the viewer to the article as it was at the time it was featured, rather than its current version? And the answer is: changes made to the article since then may have degraded it so that it no longer would qualify as featured content. Featured status cannot give a seal of approval to all subsequent versions, only to the version that was approved. -- A Knight Who Says Ni ( talk) 14:32, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
I've just used some custom python scripts to parse, extract, and wikify a large portion of the Stanford Archive (a large repository of quiz bowl packets). The lists can be found linked from Wikipedia:Stanford Archive answers. I could use help polishing up the lists - fixing parse errors, removing blue links. And of course, creating redirects and writing articles. Raul654 ( talk) 10:37, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Who is George Mackenzie whom Richard Bright accompanied on a summer expedition in 1810? (See George Mackenzie (disambiguation)) George Mackenzie was dead in 1691.
Nicolae Coman ( talk) 19:28, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Hopefully this is the right place to ask for any opinions on this :) Basically, there are some really useful images on the Christmas Pudding article, but I feel that they are a little distracting/could be placed in a better layout. I've suggested placing the images in a gallery, but I want to get some editors opinions first. Am I just being terribly picky or is there a better solution? Thanks :) londonsista Prod 07:58, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
Jimbo has announced the results of the 2008 Arbitration Commitee elections. Ten new members have been appointed to ArbCom. The results can be found at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2008#Results. -- Jayron32. talk. contribs 04:04, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello. I am looking for a template that aligns other templates on the left side of the page, as well, a way to align the Table of contents on right side. Does anyone now where I can find this? Thanks, Do U(knome)? yes... or no 21:34, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
<div style="float: right">__TOC__</div>
Make sure you really need this though, as the WP:MOS wants the TOC undisturbed unless absolutely necessary. You can use {{clear}} if needed as well.— Kan8eDie ( talk) 21:47, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
For a new page I just wrote, Artillery Mountains, the stub tag & category are in the code, but for some reason, won't show up on the actual page. Help? TIA, Pete Tillman ( talk) 01:39, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
I figured its worth mentioning that there is a proposal to rename
Wikipedia:Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (
WP:ENC) under discussion, at
Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is an encyclopedia#Requested move. The present name seems to attract a lot of confusion, since the page is more "not" than "is". Since the page is something of an institution, I thought it worth inviting comment from the
Peanut gallery
Rogues Gallery
Rouges Gallery my fellow Wikipedians. —
DragonHawk (
talk|
hist)
03:31, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Forgive me as a greenhorn intruding on an area which appears to have somehow developed the aggressive cliquiness of a centuries old hall of learning.
I'm a new user to Wikipedia. I read occasional articles and check occasional facts here.
First may I congratulate you on the impressive achievement of this site. You have created an oracle - a bank that contains probably the greatest amount of general information ever gathered and distributed in human history. Some of the world's great libraries may have more - but how accessible are they ? So I post first in wonder and awe at your achievements.
Now the niggles.
First the sense of proportion in the topics. I read a feature on the PC computer game "Freedom Force". Fantastic. Very detailed, picture of the cover, what, from my own knowledge of superhero comics, was a very good commentary on the likely inspirations for the characters. Then I wanted some information about Oliver Cromwell. I think I found the quote but there was a nagging sense of disappointment. One of the pivotal figures in English history and the article on him was only two thirds of the length of the article on a PC game. Is there a maximum length to articles ? If so how would you cover the significance of a Leonardo Da Vinci or an Adolf Hitler appropriately ?
Secondly the "house style" is very bland. Whilst I expect there are editorial guidelines limiting opinion and conjecture, the article on Blondie, one of the seminal bands of the late 1970s early 1980s, whilst well presented and including excerpts of the band's music never even tried to capture the living essence of the band. Wikipedia risks becoming the entropic man - dessicating and withering its subjects. Perhaps you could encourage authors to include quotes from contemporary and later sources on topics that might enliven them ? Yes there will be historical figures - Bill Clinton for example - who will remain controversial for many years and for whom the only acceptable procedure will be to limit commentary to verifiable facts. But for bands, music, art, animals, places of beauty and wonder in our world - to not describe the emotional impact is to fail to describe them honestly at all.
S....x. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ScarletSorceror ( talk • contribs) 00:09, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
whyisFLEMISH/BRABANTIANnotcoded??[4BABEL-- Sven70 ( talk) 11:52, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
In picture File:SalMineo.jpg will be read that image is believed to be in public domain.
In webside Iballer will be read a lot of information.
Can I move this picture to commons without deletion. -- Musamies ( talk) 16:05, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
An article 'Speed of light' that I have been working on has recently been downgraded from FA to B-class. Can somebody please explain to me how the review process works, who takes part in it, and how I can find out why the article was downgraded.
Suggest that you add this to his "Other Projects"
http://www.ntcc.edu/index.php?module=Pagesetter&func=viewpub&tid=62&pid=1 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.193.103.149 ( talk) 21:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
My post relates to the Wikipedia article on the late Jamaican reggae singer, Hortense Ellis. I am not only the creator of the Official Hortense Ellis website http://hortense-ellis.com but Hortense and I were personal friends for over 20 years before her death in October 2000. The website and the MySpace pages http://myspace.com/hortenseellis http://myspace.com/altonandhortense http://myspace.com/hortenseellismusic have the full blessing and encouragement of the Ellis family. The existing Wiki bio for Hortense Ellis is considered by myself and the Ellis family to be woefully inadequate. We feel that she deserves much better. I have previously edited and greatly enlarged the existing Wiki bio. The Wiki "moderators" took it upon themselves to delete my efforts and restore the original bio commenting "a second bio is not considered necessary". It was not a second bio - it was the original bio considerably enlarged. I have invited Wikipedia to draw any material they choose from the Hortense Ellis website. They are simply not interested; apparently content to allow the existing inadequate Hortense Ellis bio to remain as the Wiki entry. If Wiki are happy to take such bizarre action against a person who actually knew the subject of the bio - i.e. rejecting a comprehensive bio in favor of the existing brief paragraph - how can they expect to be considered a reliable reference source. I find the Wikipedia moderators to be totally arrogant, not only by their action in rejecting a valid contribution, but also in the way they responded to the complaint that obviously followed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimobasa ( talk • contribs) 02:27, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
The giant "MESSAGE FROM JIMBO WALES" font size is way to large for the box and the amount of space it takes up, Its a giant distraction and i would suggest making the font a smaller size. 96.244.234.73 ( talk) 09:50, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
I get comments on this from several users, and they say it does not look professional. My standard reply is that the way the banner display is closely connected with the state of Wikipedia, that is, not much care is taken for details, so dont expect any improvement anytime soon... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.248.190.110 ( talk) 10:04, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
The problem also seems to be only with MSIE, both Firefox and Safari render it correctly, thus it can be considered a penalty on those jerks that use MSIE, as such users are not of interest for Wikipedia anyway... So shame on them and no problem for us! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.248.190.110 ( talk) 11:29, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I was wondering how I can delete my own account; I do not wish to contribute to Wikipedia anymore. And if this isn't possible, can someone responsible with this task delete it for me? Alexgb93 ( talk) 16:26, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Where is the best place to discuss the Personal Appeal From Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales that appears at the top of each page?? Can somebody at least change it to read co-founder as is the case?? Thank you,-- Tom 21:33, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Is it possible to transwiki articles to Wikia? Specifically, Meantime (video game) and Fountain of Dreams to the Fallout Wiki; is there a technical/political/legal reason this would not be possible? If it is possible, how is it done? If it is not possible, laaaame. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 02:40, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
For a second, I thought he was talking about Wikipedia there. If you change the last sentence a bit, it sums up Wikipedia better then Jimbo did when he wrote about "the sum of all human knowledge". Wikipedia doesn't need to be a sum. A small selection of our most fascinating articles may be enough to change someone's thoughts. Wikipedia is amazing. I hope it will continue to grow in 2009, and I hope you will help! Happy new year everyone! - Face 21:11, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
This could be interpreted to mean Wikipedia is Communism™, but fortunately our right to leave contradicts this. P.S. I recommend the Perfect Circle cover version. — CharlotteWebb 22:10, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
"Imagine every child, no matter where in the world they were, can access a universe of knowledge. They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want. I tried to do it through my music. But now, you can do it in a very different way. You can give a child a laptop, and more than Imagine, you can change the world." There, fixed that for you, John. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 23:45, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
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I have noticed reference links to subscriber content such as the Wall Street Journal versus ad-supported or just plain free as in price websites are common. Is this compatible with Wikipedia's goal of a free encyclopedia both in price and freedom? Tcrow777 Talk 00:32, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
Scientific journals and newspapers are available ot the public, for free, at major libraries throughout the world. Anyone can walk in the the library at my university and browse any journal in its general collection. The fact that an online version of the journal may not be free does not at all mean that the journal itself is not freely available. The link to the non-free online version is just a convenience for editors who may have access; the reference itself tells everyone how to find the journal in print in a library. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:11, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
Anyone who wanders into the inner parts of Wikipedia will notice that there is a lot of drama. There are basically two sides: the cabal and the rebels. The cabal consists of the upper echelons of administrators and other leaders. They are the people with power here. ArbCom. Jimbo himself. The rebels are a rag-tag team of anyone who opposes the cabal.
Like many people, my natural reaction was to side with the rebels. Nobody cheers for the empire after all.
What I have come to realize is that there really is no cabal. Most admins and other people with power here really just want to help make Wikipedia better. It's a tough and thankless job dealing with troublemakers. The "rebels" on the other hand are mostly people who were blocked or reprimanded for good reasons. When visiting the rebel hangouts I soon noticed that aside from all wanting to dethrone the cabal, they all have vastly different ideas about what needs to change in Wikipedia. 90% of those ideas are crap and would break everything that is good with Wikipedia.
Still, the rebel camp keeps attracting new recruits. People keep voting against admins accused of being in the cabal when they apply for Bureaucratship. They vote for prolific rebels at RfA. There is a widespread distrust of admins among ordinary editors. ArbCom members and the highly valuable admins who dare take on difficult cases keep quitting because their hard work earns them nothing by enemies and hatred. Former ArbCom member and bureaucrat UninvitedCompany just left the project and left some thoughtworthy points on his user page.
The solution I believe, is that not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done. While there mostly is no cabal, it looks like there is. Admins are elected for life. The only way to de-admin is though the even more cabal-looking ArbCom. There is a secret admin mailing list and IRC channel. They probably aren't plotting conspiracies and canvassing for votes there, but with no way to know people will assume the worst. Wikipedia needs proper checks and balances. If there is a way to remove abusive admins, then ordinary editors and will able to trust and support the admins. RfA wouldn't be such a nightmare.
Also, pages like WP:TINC(There Is No Cabal) really aren't helping. When I see that, I think "Who do you think you're fooling? If there is no cabal you wouldn't need a page saying so." Pages like List of cabals, Rouge admin and the "Cabal appoved" stamps some put on their user pages are even worse. Ridiculing those who think there is a cabal only gets them sympathy.
Finally, admins and Wikipedia veterans need to be a lot more respectful towards ordinary editors. The are many people who have a lot of knowledge, are good writers and have time to commit but who don't know the Wikipedia rules and traditions very well. Treating them like criminals does not help. An example is the great non-free image purge of 2007. Just about all editors got their talk pages filled with nasty templates about violating image rules because they didn't have the right stamp in field 10c of the neccessary paperwork in triplicate. Anyone who complained about it was shouted at. ArbCom eventually put their feet down against that behavior, but it took over a year and who knows how many lost editors. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 20:37, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
It isn't that a cabal does or doesn't exist; if Wikipedia was like it was back in the good old days, it wouldn't matter; everything was open to the community, and the community had the power to say "No". Now that the community no longer has that power (or at least, a significantly weakened version of it), a cabal is much, much, much more dangerous, and is something that has to be watched for carefully before it gets too far out of control.
Coming up with a process to remove admins from power that doesn't involve ArbCom is a step in the right direction. More transparency would be a step in the right direction. Taking the power to create policy from ArbCom and returning it exclusively to the community would be a step in the right direction. Checks and balances, as you say, would go a long way toward restoring the trust of the community. Celarnor Talk to me 21:53, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
User:Raul654 has too much power. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.162.8.65 ( talk) 06:34, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello! I thought I had seen a Wikipedia Project for fixing and maintaining introductions to articles to ensure they gave a general overview of the contents. Was it a dream or there is a project like that? Any information is surely welcome. Lwyx ( talk) 22:02, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
Please take a moment to review the 2007 and 2008 edits in one or more of the articles listed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive491#Disruptive school project?.
Many hands make light work. One article reviewed and cleaned up/reverted/otherwise dealt with by you is one less article for other editors to deal with. Thank you. Uncle G ( talk) 12:56, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
Nominations for the December 2008 Arbitration Committee Elections will be accepted from 10 November to 24 November, and voting is scheduled to run from 1 December to 15 December. In an effort to give all candidates the chance to answer general questions about themselves and their candidacy, we are currently soliciting input from the community. Any editor who wishes to submit questions for all the candidates should do so by visiting Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2008/Candidate statements/Questions/General and following the instructions. On 17 November, the list of questions will be posted to each candidate's questions page, where they will provide answers (Subsequent nominees will have their question pages created with the same list). Questions to specific candidates may be posted at that time, as well. Please discuss at the election talk page if you have any questions about the question process. Thanks, UltraExactZZ Claims ~ Evidence 14:00, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
the first book wansn't Harry Potter and the philosipher's stone it's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.166.34.124 ( talk) 17:04, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
So I'm unifying my login across projects with the nifty new single-login feature, and I have a question. I need to usurp "my" username here on en.wp. (I'm "scs" everywhere else, but "ummit" here.) Can I / should I get my edit history transferred when this happens? Is it held to be a good or a bad idea? — Steve Summit ( talk) 03:35, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
Special:UnwatchedPages pages needs you! Currently, and for good reason, this is an admin only page. If you are a non-admin and would like to help bring the (rather large) list down, drop a note here and get a list of 2, 20, 200, or however many you want. John Reaves 21:41, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
I created an account in wiki dictionary and I cannot log in through the wikipedia. I logged out of wikidictionary and tried logging into Wikipedia. It says that I have an account but it won't recognize me. If I log into dictionary I can get in. Finding help for account information around here is a joke. A test in tolerance that fails me today. Mar —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.32.127.230 ( talk) 16:13, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
Would someone please remove the 2-inch wide solid blood-red chiclet from the top of every Wikipedia page? It is really distracting for someone trying to work on this project. Or at least make the control called “hide” do what it promises. — Michael Z. 2008-11-05 07:02 z
Remember kiddies, donate now! Donate-donatedonatedonatedonatedonatedonate... Clark89 ( talk) 21:33, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
Also see the technical village pump sections
"Support Wikipedia: a non-profit project" omnipresent banner---
Dismiss banner--
The donation box looks really silly (AND SECTION JUST AFTER
Donation banner suppression gadget). These two for complications resultant—
inference with top-of-page icons—
request password for saving preferences. Also short section;an idea for smaller banner at proposals
Obtrusive banner. Clark89 (
talk)
23:54, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
I'm not contesting requesting donations. I simply think that the aesthetic design of the donation request panel does not fit with the rest of Wikipedia. Particularly the gradient-based donation graph, one would be hard-pressed to find something similar to that on another section of Wikipedia. Its a beautiful design, I'm just questioning whether its the best design to fit with the rest of Wikipedia, aesthetically. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.68.223.81 ( talk) 02:12, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
I think it's a little odd when WP uses copyrighted pictures, under fair use, on articles that are hostile to the owners of the copyrights. I have run into this a couple of times before. The latest is being discussed at Talk:Barbara West (TV news anchor). Steve Dufour ( talk) 01:14, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
BTW I have seen many discussions about what pictures to use or not use in an article without the discussion being taken to an IfD. Steve Dufour ( talk) 19:11, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
i find it mildly hard to believe that the upkeep for wikipedia and its servers is anywhere near 6 million... ya. what's all the money for? 207.161.63.45 ( talk) 04:10, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
Hi. What is an appropriate place on Wikipedia to express my appreciation for the awesome people who create and edit and maintain articles? I just want to say that I am full of love and appreciation towards all of you and if I could I would go and hug each one of you individually. Seriously this work you are doing here is awesome. I am an editor too and have started a handful of articles and edited many more but I have the feeling I take more than I give and I just want to express my thanks. Sorry if this is not an appropriate place to say it, please let me know what is. You all rock, fellas!! :) ReluctantPhilosopher ( talk) 12:27, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
Whose ingenious idea was this? (Note that I'm not complaining, I just find it hilarious for some reason.) MuZemike ( talk) 04:30, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
The Template Template:Otheruses should not be used in articles with brackets, since you get there only following a already qualified link in another text or a disambiguation page, not by searching. I removed all those cases in the German wikipedia (about 50), but there are much more in the English WP. You can find them by searching for ") (transclusion)" on http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Otheruses&limit=5000.
Couldn't that job be done easily by a bot?
Please discuss here: Wikipedia_talk:Disambiguation#Template:Otheruses_in_articles_with_brackets
-- Abe Lincoln ( talk) 11:59, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
If you are looking for something to do, WP:Suspected copyright violations could do with some more editors. The backlog there is more or less permanent and the job is fairly simple: either remove false positives, tag for history merge, rewrite, tag for deletion or move it to WP:Copyright Problems. None of this requires admin privileges, and non-admins are more than welcome to work there — in fact almost all of the editors who work there regularly or semi-regularly are non-admins. – Sadalmelik ☎ 10:05, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
I regularly see quality control volunteers argue in {{ afd}} discussions that a biographical article should be deleted, even if it is written from a neutral point of view, and cites verifiable, authoritative references -- because it does not cover the ordinary biographical milestones, like where and when the individual was born, or studied.
I regularly ask those quality control volunteers to consider "false Geber". He was the first person to describe the process for the purification and use of Sulfuric acid. Isaac Asimov thought his work was significant that he had an entry for his in his biographical encyclopedia of the World's top 1,000 most important scientists -- even though historians knew practially nothing about him, not his name, not when or where he lived, or his religion or occupation.
I suggest to them that while the milestones of a person's life are definitely worth including, if we can verify them, not having them available is a very poor reason to suggest we should suppress coverage of what we do know about what they did.
Well, since the last time I told someone about him, someone updated the false Geber article to incorporate a claim that a recent scholar feels sure he can establish that false Geber was a practically unknown monk called "Paul of Taranto". And, rather than writing under the name of the earlier, more famous Geber, as an act of altruism and self-abnegation, this scholar suggests Paul of Taranto was forging new works under Geber's name to help promote earlier work he published under his own name.
So, it seems to me, if the recent scholarship is correct, this would be the most recent instance of what we call sockpuppetry. Here is a passage from Openness, Secrecy, Authorship by Pamela O. Lang
|
According to the scholar in question, one William R. Newman, this Franciscan monk Paul wrote Theorica et practica under his own name, and then wrote another work entitled Summa Perfectionis under Geber's name.
I still hate sockpuppets. I still think a lack of information about the mundane milestones of a subject's life is a bad reason to argue for deletion.
Cheers! Geo Swan ( talk) 18:28, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
While looking at wikipedia's most visited articles I found HITS MUSIC ONLY at no. 26 – Ludicrously high for an article that actually doesn't exist! What is going on here? Google throws up a link to www.nrj.fr/ but why is this receiving more hits than the article for the United States presidential election, 2008? Can anyone understand what's happening here? Sillyfolkboy ( talk) 20:44, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
If one has a concern about an article and its discussion page has not responded, where should one post a request for other wikipedians to view/review the page and resolve the concern expressed on the discussion page? ( Talk:World Wrestling All-Stars#Quotes in this case, I deleted the quotes but Frank800 restored them. ) -- SGBailey ( talk) 09:57, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
I suspect that a large number of our casual readers are unaware of articles related to the ones that they are reading because they tune out at the bottom of the page where all the references begin and never see links in navboxes and "see also" sections. Case and point, in the List of Prime Ministers of Canada, there have been several users who have proposed adding additional information such as time in office and place of birth, even though these subjects have their own dedicated lists that are linked in the navbox at the bottom of the page. If we have users who don't know how to find related articles, then we must have tonnes of readers who don't. Is there any way that we could add something to the tops of articles directing new users to related articles and navboxes? -- Arctic Gnome ( talk • contribs) 17:38, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
"The Free Encyclopedia" always meant 'no charge' to me but now I've been told it means 'copyright free'. So why not change it...and why not have a little contest to think of a new tagline and raise some monies in the process.
Maybe it would be as easy as adding a field to the donate page that says "Wikipedia is considering a new tagline, would you like to suggest one? (Your tagline is part of the donation as well.)"
The Copyright Free Encyclopedia or Free Information - Free World are two that come to mind. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.242.173.40 ( talk) 17:31, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
WP:LEDE states that the introduciton to an article "should be written in a clear, accessible style to invite a reading of the full article." (emph added).
Are there any Wikipedia guidelines etc. where the community has reached consensus on what "accessible" means - in the lede in particular or general accessability level of articles themselves? -- The Red Pen of Doom 18:25, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
This WikiProject needs more members! There have been five members so far, and there need to be more, so we can make Wikipedia the world's foremost reference on Indy. Thanks. -- MISTER ALCOHOL T C 21:18, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
Checking articles on my watchlist, I observed that someone added a link to the official website for Franklin Township, Franklin County, Kansas; checking out the township website, I noticed that their " What's a Township?" page is sourced from "WikiPedia.com". I'm assuming that this isn't a violation, since they're obviously trying to say that we're their source; but is there a page where we list Wikipedia articles as sources for things other than news articles? I'm familiar with Wikipedia as a press source, but this doesn't quite fit into that. Since this is an official government (admittedly a small one, but a government anyway) using our data, I'm assuming there's an appropriate place to note that they're sourcing from us, but can someone tell me where to list this? Nyttend ( talk) 21:39, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
What's the best way to get support in an RfA? -- MISTER ALCOHOL T C 05:33, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Additional input is sought. Please see this discussion:
One of IP user in kowiki is blaiming (kowiki) admins for unfair speedy-deletions( ko:WP:Viliage pump#chickens' playground Wikipedia). Why I report this small happening here is, this user compared kowiki admins with enwiki admins, saying The reason why English Wikipedia succeeded is high-quality admins. Admins bulit up Wikipedia... Do you agree? -- Dus2000 ( talk) 10:48, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
See Encomienda and http://www.smso.net/Encomienda. Any way to tell which came first? Is smso.net in violation of the GFDL, or is our version a copyvio? Little Red Riding Hood talk 03:24, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
On the "my contributions" page, there is a link called "edit and action count". On the corresponding page, it states that there is a certain number of edits which I have made on Wikipedia which have been deleted. These edits, however, do not show up on the "my contributions" page. Is there any way that I can view a list of the edits I have made which have been deleted? Neelix ( talk) 16:43, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
Need someone's help with uploading a 7-minute audio file (35 MB) to a Wikipedia article. Can you please outline the steps? THANKS! cormster8@gmail.com —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rjmcormier ( talk • contribs) 18:07, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
Dear All,
My name is Avanidhar Chandrasekaran ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Avanidhar).
I work with GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. As part of my research, I am involved in analyzing the usefulness and Necessity of author reputation in Wikipedia.
In lieu of this, I have simulated an Interface to color words in an article based on their Age.
Being experienced contributors to Wikipedia, I invite you to participate in this study, which involves the following.
1. Please visit the following Instances of wikipedia and evaluate the interface components which have been incorporated into each of them. Each of these use their own algorithm to color text.
a) The Wikitrust project
http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php/Main_Page
b) The Wiki-reputation project at Grouplens research
http://wiki-reputation.cs.umn.edu/index.php/Main_Page
2) Once you have evaluated the two interfaces, kindly complete this survey on Wikipedia quality
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=hagN5S1JZHxH6pF9SmXkkA_3d_3d
We hope to get your valuable feedback on these interfaces and how Wikipedia
article quality can be improved.
Thanks for your time
Avanidhar Chandrasekaran,
GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota
Avanidhar ( talk) 21:55, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
Last weekend my wife & bought new cell phones -- Blackberry Curves -- & tonight as I was scrolling thru its list of applications I could buy, I encountered one by the name of Wikimobile, available for the price of $19.99. The description states
Now while I've been a user & contributor to Wikipedia for over 6 years now, I had never heard of Wikimobile. I did a quick search, & it appears no one else on Wikipedia has either: no articles, no references to it in Talk or other meta-space pages. (The name "Wikimobile" is the name of a project that someone proposed over on meta.wikimedia.org about 2 years ago, but that project doesn't appear to have any connection to this application.)
So is WMF getting any money from this? Is this application infringing on the Wikipedia/Wikimedia brand? Why doesn't Wikipedia have an article on this thing?
FWIW, I can attest that the browser on the Blackberry Curve can actually import & display pages from Wikipedia in a usable manner, so I don't know why anyone would want to buy this application. -- llywrch ( talk) 06:24, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Could someone add IPA pronunciation of Jostein Gaarder in his article, Jostein Gaarder? huji— TALK 18:15, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Do navboxes go below stub tags? Or is it the other way around?-- chaser - t 23:47, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
Dear friends, We are conducting a study on the motivation of the knowledge sharing on Wikipedia. Your experience of the read from and write to Wikipedia is very important to the design and management of this knowledge platform. The survey will take about three minutes. We deeply appreciate your help on answering the following questions.
After the survey is done, we will randomly select twenty persons and present them with USB 2GB Flash Drives. Besides, with each valid questionnaire, we will donate US $1 dollar to the Wikimedia Foundation. The result of this survey is analyzed in an anonymous way and is only regarded as the academic use. Please feel free to fill out the questionnaire. Thanks again for your time and valuable input.
May happiness and health be with you everyday!
On-line Questionnaire: http://140.119.19.152:8080/wiki/ [3] Shari S. C. Shang
Eldon Y. Li Professor, Department of Management Information Systems, National Chengchi University
Tel.: +886-2-82374038; Fax: +886-2-29393754 ; E-mail: s1213527@yahoo.com.tw —Preceding unsigned comment added by 吳雅玲 ( talk • contribs) 13:08, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
I note that this article was subject to VfDs in 2004 and 2005 ( 1 and 2).
I've written a stub that I humbly suggest passes WP:V and have overwritten the redirect.
Happy for anyone querying the verifiability of the new article to list it at AfD.
I thought that DRV was inappropriate, as the article was a redirect, not deleted and furthermore, I didn't want to recreate any of the old deleted versions - all the verified information in the article is from the last few days. -- Dweller ( talk) 14:58, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
I have not been able to find the exact number of registered Wikipedia users/editors at this time. Thank you for your help. Who wields me, wields the world! ( talk) 10:29, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
Thank you. Who wields me, wields the world! ( talk) 05:21, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
I noticed, that the flag is missing in the Featurebox in article Martinique. Prunk ( talk) 10:13, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Concerns over the use of text cut and pasted into Wikipedia articles using the Creative Commons License. Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#Creative Commons License, and add any comments there. -- PBS ( talk) 12:42, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
I wrote an article, Holy Cross Church (New York City). This church is also called Church of the Holy Cross. If someone enters that second title in "search," how can I get it to go to the article? Thank you. Hammerdrill ( talk) 14:17, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Good job, community! What have we been doing right? GetLinkPrimitiveParams ( talk) 14:53, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
By definition the entries on Wikipedia improve in accuracy and completeness--its in the DNA of the system. The old claim that the platform is not a credible source of information is steadily being eroded. Who wields me, wields the world! ( talk) 05:30, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello everyone, I was just wondering if there was a way to see a list of the all the pages that link to my user page? Basically, I know that I have created some sub-domains on my user page (Adasta/[name of page]) in the past, but have no idea what they are called. How can I find out where these pages "are"?
Thanks. -- Adasta 16:00, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Hi,
I’m Tabitha the Marketing Director of t5m, I'm writing to propose that the wikipedia community discuss whether they feel like the content we at t5m produce is relevant to wikipedia.
t5m is an online tv network who’s mission is to produce content which inspires and entertains. Unlike most video networks which either aggregate existing content or rely on user generate content. t5m creates, produces and syndicates original exclusive interviews with celebrities.
t5m prides itself on have a great relationship with the talent we interview, which ensure that we create candid, entertaining and by the very nature of the medium reliably informative interviews. The celebrities are all happy with the content and encourage us to make sure their fans see it as they firmly believe that we are no journalist or advertorial but just being a mouth piece for them.
I feel that many of the interviews we have are relevant to the wikipedia pages on the particular talent. I understand that it is unethical for me to link to t5m on all the pages where our content is relevant so i wanted to highlight our site to the wikipedia community and see whether people see our site as a valuable place to have an external link to.
I have been reading about how wikipedia is moving more into the video arena and i thought that some of our interviews might be a good place to start. So this is also something i would be really happy to discuss.
to check out the content visit www.t5m.com [5] Richard Dawkins interview [6] or Ray Winstone interview[7] as these interviews are good places to start looking.
below is a list of all out personality interview content...
thank you very much for your time
tabitha
Often, there will be a template, which, when added to an article, automatically puts that article in a certain category. I have noticed that often, however, the lists for that category are cluttered up with people who post on talk pages "I suggest we use this template:" and then the template, or, on userpages, "I really like this template! :". This creates an enormous hassle for people trying to find articles requiring improvement, and is very inefficient. I suggest you do something about this. Hello, My Name Is SithMAN8 ( talk) 17:14, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. Hello, My Name Is SithMAN8 ( talk) 23:21, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
Some articles contain lists of countries. Should Kosovo be included in such lists? For example, Glock pistol#Users has a list of the nations whose army or police force use the Glock pistol. The list includes only nations, or former nations. The issue is that there is a lack of agreement about whether or not Kosovo is a nation. As explained in International reaction to the 2008 declaration of independence by Kosovo, "52 out of 192 sovereign United Nations member states have formally recognised the Republic of Kosovo as an independent state. Notably, a majority of European Union member states have formally recognised Kosovo (22 out of 27)..." Among English speaking countries, Kosovo has been recognized by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. Quite a few other countries (e.g. New Zealand) are undeclared and "neither recognise nor not recognise" Kosovo. At the same time, some countries have declared that they do not accept Kosovo as a sovereign state. Also, the same article says, "According to the Secretary-General, the "United Nations has maintained a position of strict neutrality on the question of Kosovo's status"." So, should Kosovo be included in lists of countries in Wikipedia articles, or not? — Mudwater ( Talk) 20:11, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
I accidentally increased the size of the print, and now I'm having trouble getting it back to normal. What do I do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Saxon2k8 ( talk • contribs) 23:35, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
Please discuss my suggestion about making {{ wikinews}} a short-living link (the keyword here is "news") in Template_talk:Wikinews#Outdated_news. `' Míkka >t 17:11, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
Please people, tell me what you think of this article! I did my best to improve it and with me some others did the same! After days of hard work, I would love to hear some opinions from expierenced wikipedians! I have nominated it for Good Article in the morning and I hope it will pass. If you people think it would pass in its current state, then please inform me of that so I can have a good nights sleep. If not, then inform me of what should be done in order for the article to pass GA-nominations. I eagerly await your answers! Thanks in advance, J.B. ( talk) 14:34, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
As you say, Roger, it makes B-class. The thing is: I want it to make GA class. {{subst:User:Jouke Bersma/sig}} 11:04, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
As of now, it already is a GA nominee. Could I still bring it up for peer review as it is? Jouke Bersma Contributions 08:53, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello: Last 29th of July of 2008 it was added to Heidi Game that fans outside of the Pacific Time Zone were unable to see the end of the match. I've been searching in the web but haven't found anything that talks about it. I'm not from the USA and don't know what the policy was those years for what time to broadcast live (e.g. this football match) and recorded (e.g. this film about Heidi) programs in the different regions of the country with different times. Were all the TV viewers of the whole USA unable to see the end of the match or only those ones outside the PTZ? The difference is very big and should be clarified. Thanks, -- Edupedro ( talk) 22:37, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I pruned all of the unlinked names out of Chail Military School and got reverted. I tried to explain to the other editor that if he creates articles on the people which meet the requirements of WP:BIO (and based on the supposed qualifications of the unlinked names, they would be notable), then there's no problem, but if you just list a bunch of people and claim notability without creating articles on them, then it's a violation of WP:BIO and is making an end run around notability rules. Am I wrong? Little Red Riding Hood talk 20:54, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
I'm not really sure where to put this, but… Looking at the talk page for WP:RFE, I've noticed a lot of discussions regarding the usefulness of the Requests for Expansion, and I get the feeling that it's totally useless. I've submitted several articles here over time, and of them, not one has been expanded. Furthermore, it's backlogged all the way to September 2007! One comment on the talk page reads "If this page results in expansions, it must be very infrequent. I've just reviewed the last four weeks of edits. The only listings that were deleted were for articles that themselves had been deleted, not expanded. Some of the earlier debate on this talk page questioned whether a request for expansion (or an expansion tag) was really productive. Seems not." I looked at the first ten articles from the September 2007 listings and only one out of the whole bunch has been expanded. This whole project seems very unproductive to me, and I think that it should be marked as inactive/historical. As for its presence on the {{ expand}} template, that mention can simply be removed, as I at least find {{ Expand}} to be a useful flag. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ( Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP) 16:50, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
(undent) The original discussion was about the page Wikipedia:Requests for expansion, not about the {{ expand}} template and its related category. The WP:RFE page is now marked historical/inactive. The template and its category are still very much alive; anyone wanting to delete them should start another discussion, I suggest. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:30, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
Hi. So all I want to do is find out how to change the categorization of an article. I believe one is wrong (incorrectly categorized). I don't know how to do it. I don't care if someone else does it for me. But I've spent an hour going through the website on where to get this answer...and I'm getting frustrated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Inkarent ( talk • contribs) 14:24, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
Algebraist, Washington Group International does not belong in the category "Defunct engineering companies of the United States". Yes it has been merged with URS Corp. but that does not make it defunct. Technically, it is still doing business as a legal entity. (It still has open contracts as Washington Group International). Inkarent ( talk) 14:28, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
Does anybody know if there is a way to do a tabbed navbox? There are no examples under the {{ navbox}} documentation, so I have no idea if anybody has found a way to implement them. Thanks.— RJH ( talk) 16:58, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
I just made a typo and wound up at http://en.wikpedia.org/ . Egads! Ugly and awful! Kingturtle ( talk) 02:52, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
Not sure if it's already been/being discussed, but this article points out that
Consumers who rely on the user-edited Web resource Wikipedia for information on medications are putting themselves at risk of potentially harmful drug interactions and adverse effects new research shows. Dr. Kevin A. Clauson of Nova Southeastern University in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. and his colleagues found few factual errors in their evaluation of Wikipedia entries on 80 drugs. But these entries were often missing important information, for example the fact that the anti-inflammatory drug Arthrotec (diclofenac and misoprostol) can cause pregnant women to miscarry, or that St. John's wort can interfere with the action of the HIV drug Prezista (darunavir).
What can/should be done to correct these deficiencies? Also note the legal and ethical issues surrounding improper, incorrect, unverified, or unclear information. // Blaxthos ( t / c ) 18:22, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Does orphan bot remove the orphan tags from articles that get de-orphaned (i.e. articles that were formerly not linked to but that now have another article linking to them?). The reason I asked is that this edit [4] came on my radar screen, someone manually removing the tag.
Second "I should really figure out how to look this up but I don't know where to look" question, how could I go about getting a bot to notice new (or go through existing) articles scoring them for possible inclusion in the Bay Area, California project? I could look for articles with mentions or links to the various cities, institutions, people, etc. I've seen such lists around the encyclopedia so I assume there is a bot that will make them based on a configuration file. If you know, could you point me in the right direction?
Hope this is the right place to ask - if not I can ask the question on a bot page or the help desk. Thanks, Wikidemon ( talk) 01:43, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
After some false starts, I successfully created Talk:Analytic Hierarchy Process/Archive 3.
The false starts created two redirect pages that I think should be deleted: Talk:Analytic Hierarchy Process/Archive 4 - 01/08 through 06/08 and Talk:Analytic Hierarchy Process/Archive 3 - 01/08 through 06/08.
If I am right, could somebody please delete them? Skyrocket654 ( talk) 15:40, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
Does anyone know if there's any way to have a list of articles by number of pictures or something? (Or if there is one already that I couldn't find) Petero9 ( talk) 23:23, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
What is this site? I just found a link to an article ( http://static.wikipedia.org/new/wikipedia/en/articles/e/x/o/Exopolitics.html) that has now been deleted. I recently asked an administrator for a copy of this article (which I received), however, if I had known about it being extant on this site, I could perhaps somehow had gone and retrieved it for myself? __ meco ( talk) 15:08, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed a number of new articles and new users all editing in an interesting pattern. I started to suspect sock puppetry, until I read a note that an article was for a class. It seems like a professor or instructor has assigned the class the task of creating (or updating and expanding) articles on social movements. And from some IP checks on these articles, I believe these users are from North Carolina, and probably attend UNC. That said, because this is forced work, and because these are new users, there has been a number of problems resulting from this assignment. I've seen articles that qualified for speedy deletion, I've seen copyvios, and I've seen articles that need editing, formatting, clean up, and removal of trivia and non-encyclopedic content. So I'm asking if users could watchlist some of these, and go through and check for copyvio, clean up, etc. I have a list offline of the users that I suspect are in the class, but I'm not sure it is necessary to publish it here. But I will list the articles in question:
Thanks to anyone who can help weed through this and clean up and salvage. Should we perhaps try to contact all the users at once and give them tips? Should we try to contact the instructor or do anything more? Any other ideas? Thanks again!- Andrew c [talk] 02:36, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
I have noticed that on articles where an area needs to be expressed, eg the size of a national park, the sizes of these areas are expressed as km2 as opposed to hectares, as a person that works in agriculture when ever i talk about area size it is always expressed as hectares, i have noticed also that when the imperial equivalent is put in brackets it is always written as acres. I am not trying to change change policy or anything I am just curious why Km2 is used as opposed to Ha. Cheers Beaver ( talk) 10:42, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
My name, Richard Leach, has come up at two Wikipedia pages: Terrance Lindall and Amanda Husberg. I have prepared a very short and I think neutral page about myself, and am seeking consensus before creating it, as I know autobiographical pages are strongly discouraged. Here's the sandbox page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tinkwig/Sandbox Tinkwig ( talk) 12:09, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
Template:Infobox FBI Ten Most Wanted 1990s looks a bit too stylised, I think. It's a nice idea, but looks very odd when placed in an article. If someone agrees with me, could they give it a once-over and standardise it? I've tried to, but my knowledge of template code isn't good enough! Thanks, Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry ( talk) 16:37, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
Since Wiktionary is a sister project to Wikipedia would a link to it be considered an internal link or is it a separate entity? Copana2002 ( talk) 17:23, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
Using Wikipedia, can one post a biography about another person? Even if the person is not a 'world famous celebrity'? For example: I would like to write about a local author who writes about his stuggles with Insomnia. Mick Thandi tries to help people find <a href=" http://micksinsomniacures.blogspot.com">Insomnia Cures</a>. He writes on his research about <a href=" http://micksinsomniacures.blogspot.com/2008/11/insomnia-cures.html">Insomnia</a>.
Dear Sir/Madam
Could you please take off the picture posted on your website representing prophet Mohammed. Islam prohibts its display and Muslim all over world will be highly obilged and thankfull if you remove it as soon as possible. So that our faith in wiki pedia reamins fine
Thanks Dr Shah Hobart Australia —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.6.130.110 ( talk) 12:05, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello
Would you be able to answer my question.
I would like to know if articles i have made will get on to Google Earth, with my current coordinate layout.
Please look at these two pages to see:
Thank You Chris0693 ( talk) 17:51, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
I have been nominated for BAG, so per instructions I am posting this to invite comments at Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/Anomie. Thanks. Anomie ⚔ 03:13, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
What page can I find the address of The Simpsons?.-- intraining Jack In 09:11, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
Sorry to raise a subject that has probably been discussed a million times, but for some reason I cannot find it in all this Village Pump thing. As you know, the hosting site AOL Hometown has been shut down. Is there any way to find back material that was hosted there, if it is NOT in the wayback machine ? SyG ( talk) 09:48, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
Failed to parse: The article Resistor shows "Failed to parse (Cannot write to or create math output directory): V = I R" with red color letters. It seems relates to Cartesian coordinate system#Representing a vector in the standard basis. What is wrong in article itself or my browser setting? http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Resistor&diff=256196712&oldid=255365823 does show correctly.-- Namazu-tron ( talk) 01:57, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
If someone has created an account with what appears to be their real name and has identified themselves as a minor and has also given other personal information about themselves on their user page (where they live) - do we just notify them that that is not necessarily a safe thing to do or can administrators go in and remove that data? Trout Ice Cream ( talk) 20:49, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi.
First off, is this the right page for me to be asking this question--I'm still a bit of a beginner here.
Second, I want to contribute to Wikipedia, as I indeed like it a lot, but I loves my privacy.
What would happen if I sent cash--from $20 to $100--in a reasonably opaque envelop, with my username, an email address I got for free (in my case Yahoo! but I suppose there are many others), and maybe post a message on my username:talk page. Would it be accepted, used well, and would no one else accredit it to anyone but me?
Thanks
Yartett (
talk)
20:47, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
I really don't like IP addresses as user names. But I haven't come here to propose disallowing them; that has been proposed many times already and I guess there's a good reason why we have them. No, I just came here because I feel it's always better to take things in good humor. So I propose to refer to them as Beagle Boys. — Sebastian 19:52, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
The fishery articles use a number of fishery templates to form a somewhat hierarchical network across the articles. Since these have been installed, the traffic for fishery articles has much increased, particularly for the lower level articles. However, every now and then, someone comes along, and wants, usually without discussion, to introduce their own idea of layout, or simply removes templates or pushes them out of the way. Sometimes editors come along who seem malicious. Is there some forum where I can get these issues properly considered by capable editors without axes to grind? -- Geronimo20 ( talk) 02:12, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
Does anyone know if the 19th century author, Emily C. Orr is a pseudonym? "She" wrote, "Thoughts For Working Days"; published in 1894 in London, England by the Society For Promoting Christian Knowledge. The New York publisher was E.& J.B. Young & Co. "She" also wrote "Thoughts For Men & Women".
B. Clarke —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Baclarke (
talk •
contribs)
18:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I relisted virgin killer on IFD for the sole reason that for a fair-use image, the controvery that it has created makes it seem rediculous to keep. Thousands of users have had their acess impeded for the sake of "policy."[ 1] I say the product is the most important and no policy is too important never to be ignored. So lets let all those users back in by putting this picture out of it's misery for the sake of the project and it's content. I have asked for wider input on ths to see if the keepers of that content agree.-- Ipatrol ( talk) 23:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
I see, Well, I would like to keep this up as a more general discussion with fresh eyes as weather to grant the image an IAR exemption rather than delete it. I want the communtity to establish a consensus as to weather or not WP:NOTCENSORED or a few other policies should apply to this image. If the community agrees to grant an exemption, then we might re-nominated with that in mind. If the issue permenantly subsides and the IWF and the WMF can reach an agreement, then we can put this issue to rest.-- Ipatrol ( talk) 00:15, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
Could somebody who knows Roman History check the edits made by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/24.18.119.54? I'm not sure what they're doing is vandalism or is actually improving these articles. Little Red Riding Hood talk 02:53, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
This is either a request for information that already exists, or a suggestion for creating it... I have often wondered what types of articles make up the bulk of wikipedia, and would love to see, for instance, a pie chart showing this. E.g. what percentage of all articles are about places, about people, companies, entertainment, etc. It seems to me (particularly when I use the 'random article' function) that certain more or less un-historically important categories (TV shows of the late 20th c, minor bands, etc) are massively represented compared to other, more significant areas, but I'd love to see it in numbers. - Wormcast ( talk) 01:31, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
Why is stated that the reigns for the Hardcore Title at Wrestlemania 2000 are not recongised by the WWE, when they are recongised in all of the WWE Superstars bio pages. But when i change the info it gets deleted -- Wolfman123 ( talk) 17:07, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello, My name is Graham I am 13 years old and use wikipedia alot for school. What i think would be great is a Wikipedia for kids, because normal wikipedia is very complitcated and hard to understand often in 9th,8th,7th grade etc. Would be great, thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.6.55.225 ( talk) 16:50, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
The page for article expansion has been archived and more or less abandoned. So if I think there is an article that needs help (specifically, the article on angels although I would like to know the answer in general as well), where do I post such a request? Please don't tell me to do it myself, since the reason I'm asking is because I want information about the topic. Minaker ( talk) 09:44, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
is anyone aware of a template that calculates future and elapsed time (T+/T-) rendered: xx years, xx months, xx days. my first choice was {{ For year month day}}, however, it apparently cannot handle the future. -- emerson7 19:16, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
What channel are Manchester United playing their games in the world club championship on in england -- Wolfman123 ( talk) 02:47, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
I've been trying to update the game guide to include all the latest information about WikiPedia – could someone please check that I've included all the Game Master spells? In other words, what do you think of the updated page? It Is Me Here t / c 14:59, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
I noticed I was suddenly able to keep up with special:recentchanges again, and realised it had gone past midnight in the united states. Do we have any pretty graphs of number of edits per time interval to show how much variation there is in number of edits? -- fvw * 07:45, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
I couldn't figure out how to properly flag this, so I'm posting it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aterhov —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lumarine ( talk • contribs) 19:01, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
While participating in a recent TOV thread at ANI, I noticed that, while there are suggestions on how to respond to threats, there is doesn't seem to be a form letter to serve as an example of how a good contact attempt to a law enforcement agency should look. I've quickly thrown one together at User:Mendaliv/TOV letter, and would like some further outside input. —/ Mendaliv/ 2¢/ Δ's/ 19:09, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
This file has been included in the Moon article. While it is an excellent image, I feel a significantly reduced version should be created for article use. 9.64 MB is quite a download for bringing up an article, and a heavily trafficked one at that. Does anyone agree... or am I alone on this one? - Roy Boy 09:33, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I was pretty sure they were quite distinct, but a short time ago I found an editor who was quite adamant that they were quite the same.
"Conjecture is absolutely fine in a BLP, as per BLP policy/guidelines" with "By definition, all allegations are conjectural" and "Thus conjectures MADE BY SOURCES are just peachy. And nothing I have suggested is a conjectural interpretation of a source. You ARE A FLAT OUT LIAR so I am not sure if I am even going to bother to rebut the rest of your comments."
The issue was about a source making a decidedly conjectural prediction (I noted also WP:CRYSTAL in claiming that such a prediction of future events was a conjecture). But what is the word "conjecture" supposed to mean in WP? Is "allegation" a simple subset of "conjecture"? Many thanks! Collect ( talk) 12:42, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
As you can read on my user page, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is hosting a workshop this Tuesday, the 16th, to give their scientists a crash course in editing Wikipedia, especially for creating cell-biology articles. Tim and I are running the workshop, but we could benefit from your help! We'd like to find friendly, online Wikipedians who will greet the newbie scientists and offer to help them with their first articles. It seems like a great way to bring the scientific and Wikipedia communities a little closer.
The workshop will run from 12:30-2:30pm local San Francisco time. Tim and I will be speaking until ~1pm, and the participants won't start their user pages until 12:45pm at the earliest. We'll ask them to add the template {{ ASCB workshop}} to their user page, which will add them to the Category:ASCB 2008 Wikipedia workshop participants category. Then you'll be able to see who's participating and welcome them. Other help with categorization, finding/formatting images and references, etc. would be much appreciated. Proteins ( talk) 14:48, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Thank you very much, ukexpat! Welcoming and wiki-stuff is just what we're hoping for; the scientists will probably want to take care of the science themselves. ;) We'd just like to keep Wikipedia from seeming too poluphloisboisterous in their first steps, Proteins ( talk) 17:17, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I guess WorldNetDaily threatened to sue Wikipedia in 2007, which may or may not have anything to do with the ongoing push-pull going on in the last couple months at that article. But is seems odd to me that there has been (what looks to me as) an incessant pattern of anon IP editors dropping in to the article and scrubbing out the non-flattering content. I am interested in third opinions about this. SaltyBoatr ( talk) 18:59, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
<moved to Entertainment desk here
[5]
Julia Rossi (
talk)
10:04, 16 December 2008 (UTC)>
<moved to Computing Reference Desk here: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing#Conway's Game of Life. TenOfAllTrades( talk) 14:00, 16 December 2008 (UTC)>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_the_SubGenius From now on, you should consider this a guideline for your editors: If you don't know anything about it, find someone who does. Deleting an article on the Church of the SubGenius is about as lacking in cultural knowledge as deleting an article on Burning Man, Skull and Bones, or Survival Research Laboratories. Seriously, Kraftlos needs to be spanked for putting a Notability on the Church of the SubGenius. With three books, two of which were published by Simon and Schuster, and a film featuring Negativland and Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO, this one is a no-brainer. Even a basic search of the WWW provides several hundred thousand references to it. That should be relevance enough. 71.102.2.128 ( talk) 20:23, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
I desperately come here for advice. Anyone here know any prominent inclusionists who help form wikipolicy? Unfortunately, I know a hell of a lot of prominent, powerful, deletionists, but not one prominent inclusionist. I look forward to your reply. Inclusionist ( talk) 07:54, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
User:Benjiboi doesn't seem interested in policy. Inclusionist ( talk) 23:56, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
Warning, 4chan is spreading rumors on Erin Andrews, one of their target is to edit to article of Erin Andrews on Wikipedia. http://img.4chan.org/b/res/103218015.html -- 218.103.165.165 ( talk) 07:03, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Has anyone compiled any statistics on author reaction to speedy deletion? It might be interesting to know—and helpful in assessing possible improvements to the templates and notifications—the percentages of speedy deletion templates followed by:
—Largo Plazo ( talk) 22:14, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
To make WP vaguely readable on wide screens, I knocked up a script this afternoon to make the articles the right width and place images and boxes correctly in the margin. It should work on everything except IE, but only tested on FF (and monobook). This is probably not the best place to post, but I was wondering if anyone had any feedback. The code is not the best, but apart from that, any comments would be helpful.
To use it, edit Special:MyPage/monobook.js and add
importScript( 'User:Kan8eDie/columnlayout.css' );
then press Ctl-F5 (or similar) and enjoy!
The expected behaviour is for everything on the right to position itself close to the text margin. What do you feel about pre (the dotted box just above): should I make that narrow as well? — Kan8eDie ( talk) 19:06, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
What happens to an article when it is tagged? I've come across a couple of totally unreferenced articles, not been 100% comfortable about nominating them for deletion (as they may well be notable - I'm not sure how to interepret WP's policy on notability in the field of self help authors, for example) and so have tagged them as needing references, clean-up, etc... but what happens then? Does someone need to look at the specific article I've tagged and decide to improve it, or is there a general list of articles that need references, etc, based on tagging? Tagging the article seems the most appropriate thing to do in the circumstances if I'm not overly inclined to take it to AFD, but it seems a bit pointless if all it means is that the tag is on the top of the page. Any thoughts? Should I just take them to AFD and risk a speedy keep? Richard Hock ( talk) 16:07, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Tagging adds the article to appropriate tracking categories (e.g. Category:Articles lacking sources), which anyone can look through to find articles needing work. Whether people commonly do this or not, I don't know. Anomie ⚔ 17:32, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Remember, however, that tags are a visual blight which detracts from the ability of people to enjoy and use wikipedia (compared to the "stub" tag or Talk page discussion, which allows searching and editor interaction but doesn't interfere with casual usage). For that reason, they should be limited to *very important* topics, like concerns about bias, lack of sources, or debate about deletion. Also, if you encounter a tag that you think is inappropriate, you are free to remove it. Like all editing, whatever one person has added, another can remove; tags don't have some special protection.
When tags were first developed, people created frivolous ones about minor style issues and subjective beliefs, like "this introduction is too long" - I once ran across somebody who wanted to created a tag about semicolon usage - and hurtled them around with abandon. Wikipedia started to look like MySpace. Most of the silly tags seem to have disappeared, happily, at least as far as I can tell. - DavidWBrooks ( talk) 22:02, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello,
On fr, we've just added a new link/menu on picture pages to get a poster of the picture. It has just started with a first French printer WikiPosters.
I think that's worth announcing this here.
If you're interested, I translated the project page and a small press release.
Plyd (
talk)
16:53, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
English Project Page:
fr:Projet:Impression/en
English Press Release:
fr:Projet:Impression/Press Release
So I just clicked on "Featured content" and the first thing it showed me was a section labelled "Featured article: January 27, 2006". The content of the section was apparently lifted from €2 commemorative coins on that date. It includes the following sentence:
Needless to say, the article in question no longer says this. So that page is presenting information more than two years out of date as examples of "the best that Wikipedia has to offer". And I'm sure that particular example is not the only one. Doing things this way seems like a bad idea to me. -- 87.194.147.203 ( talk) 06:40, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
I think the question is, why does the "featured content" link take the viewer to the article as it was at the time it was featured, rather than its current version? And the answer is: changes made to the article since then may have degraded it so that it no longer would qualify as featured content. Featured status cannot give a seal of approval to all subsequent versions, only to the version that was approved. -- A Knight Who Says Ni ( talk) 14:32, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
I've just used some custom python scripts to parse, extract, and wikify a large portion of the Stanford Archive (a large repository of quiz bowl packets). The lists can be found linked from Wikipedia:Stanford Archive answers. I could use help polishing up the lists - fixing parse errors, removing blue links. And of course, creating redirects and writing articles. Raul654 ( talk) 10:37, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Who is George Mackenzie whom Richard Bright accompanied on a summer expedition in 1810? (See George Mackenzie (disambiguation)) George Mackenzie was dead in 1691.
Nicolae Coman ( talk) 19:28, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Hopefully this is the right place to ask for any opinions on this :) Basically, there are some really useful images on the Christmas Pudding article, but I feel that they are a little distracting/could be placed in a better layout. I've suggested placing the images in a gallery, but I want to get some editors opinions first. Am I just being terribly picky or is there a better solution? Thanks :) londonsista Prod 07:58, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
Jimbo has announced the results of the 2008 Arbitration Commitee elections. Ten new members have been appointed to ArbCom. The results can be found at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2008#Results. -- Jayron32. talk. contribs 04:04, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello. I am looking for a template that aligns other templates on the left side of the page, as well, a way to align the Table of contents on right side. Does anyone now where I can find this? Thanks, Do U(knome)? yes... or no 21:34, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
<div style="float: right">__TOC__</div>
Make sure you really need this though, as the WP:MOS wants the TOC undisturbed unless absolutely necessary. You can use {{clear}} if needed as well.— Kan8eDie ( talk) 21:47, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
For a new page I just wrote, Artillery Mountains, the stub tag & category are in the code, but for some reason, won't show up on the actual page. Help? TIA, Pete Tillman ( talk) 01:39, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
I figured its worth mentioning that there is a proposal to rename
Wikipedia:Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (
WP:ENC) under discussion, at
Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is an encyclopedia#Requested move. The present name seems to attract a lot of confusion, since the page is more "not" than "is". Since the page is something of an institution, I thought it worth inviting comment from the
Peanut gallery
Rogues Gallery
Rouges Gallery my fellow Wikipedians. —
DragonHawk (
talk|
hist)
03:31, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Forgive me as a greenhorn intruding on an area which appears to have somehow developed the aggressive cliquiness of a centuries old hall of learning.
I'm a new user to Wikipedia. I read occasional articles and check occasional facts here.
First may I congratulate you on the impressive achievement of this site. You have created an oracle - a bank that contains probably the greatest amount of general information ever gathered and distributed in human history. Some of the world's great libraries may have more - but how accessible are they ? So I post first in wonder and awe at your achievements.
Now the niggles.
First the sense of proportion in the topics. I read a feature on the PC computer game "Freedom Force". Fantastic. Very detailed, picture of the cover, what, from my own knowledge of superhero comics, was a very good commentary on the likely inspirations for the characters. Then I wanted some information about Oliver Cromwell. I think I found the quote but there was a nagging sense of disappointment. One of the pivotal figures in English history and the article on him was only two thirds of the length of the article on a PC game. Is there a maximum length to articles ? If so how would you cover the significance of a Leonardo Da Vinci or an Adolf Hitler appropriately ?
Secondly the "house style" is very bland. Whilst I expect there are editorial guidelines limiting opinion and conjecture, the article on Blondie, one of the seminal bands of the late 1970s early 1980s, whilst well presented and including excerpts of the band's music never even tried to capture the living essence of the band. Wikipedia risks becoming the entropic man - dessicating and withering its subjects. Perhaps you could encourage authors to include quotes from contemporary and later sources on topics that might enliven them ? Yes there will be historical figures - Bill Clinton for example - who will remain controversial for many years and for whom the only acceptable procedure will be to limit commentary to verifiable facts. But for bands, music, art, animals, places of beauty and wonder in our world - to not describe the emotional impact is to fail to describe them honestly at all.
S....x. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ScarletSorceror ( talk • contribs) 00:09, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
whyisFLEMISH/BRABANTIANnotcoded??[4BABEL-- Sven70 ( talk) 11:52, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
In picture File:SalMineo.jpg will be read that image is believed to be in public domain.
In webside Iballer will be read a lot of information.
Can I move this picture to commons without deletion. -- Musamies ( talk) 16:05, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
An article 'Speed of light' that I have been working on has recently been downgraded from FA to B-class. Can somebody please explain to me how the review process works, who takes part in it, and how I can find out why the article was downgraded.
Suggest that you add this to his "Other Projects"
http://www.ntcc.edu/index.php?module=Pagesetter&func=viewpub&tid=62&pid=1 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.193.103.149 ( talk) 21:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
My post relates to the Wikipedia article on the late Jamaican reggae singer, Hortense Ellis. I am not only the creator of the Official Hortense Ellis website http://hortense-ellis.com but Hortense and I were personal friends for over 20 years before her death in October 2000. The website and the MySpace pages http://myspace.com/hortenseellis http://myspace.com/altonandhortense http://myspace.com/hortenseellismusic have the full blessing and encouragement of the Ellis family. The existing Wiki bio for Hortense Ellis is considered by myself and the Ellis family to be woefully inadequate. We feel that she deserves much better. I have previously edited and greatly enlarged the existing Wiki bio. The Wiki "moderators" took it upon themselves to delete my efforts and restore the original bio commenting "a second bio is not considered necessary". It was not a second bio - it was the original bio considerably enlarged. I have invited Wikipedia to draw any material they choose from the Hortense Ellis website. They are simply not interested; apparently content to allow the existing inadequate Hortense Ellis bio to remain as the Wiki entry. If Wiki are happy to take such bizarre action against a person who actually knew the subject of the bio - i.e. rejecting a comprehensive bio in favor of the existing brief paragraph - how can they expect to be considered a reliable reference source. I find the Wikipedia moderators to be totally arrogant, not only by their action in rejecting a valid contribution, but also in the way they responded to the complaint that obviously followed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimobasa ( talk • contribs) 02:27, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
The giant "MESSAGE FROM JIMBO WALES" font size is way to large for the box and the amount of space it takes up, Its a giant distraction and i would suggest making the font a smaller size. 96.244.234.73 ( talk) 09:50, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
I get comments on this from several users, and they say it does not look professional. My standard reply is that the way the banner display is closely connected with the state of Wikipedia, that is, not much care is taken for details, so dont expect any improvement anytime soon... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.248.190.110 ( talk) 10:04, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
The problem also seems to be only with MSIE, both Firefox and Safari render it correctly, thus it can be considered a penalty on those jerks that use MSIE, as such users are not of interest for Wikipedia anyway... So shame on them and no problem for us! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.248.190.110 ( talk) 11:29, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I was wondering how I can delete my own account; I do not wish to contribute to Wikipedia anymore. And if this isn't possible, can someone responsible with this task delete it for me? Alexgb93 ( talk) 16:26, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Where is the best place to discuss the Personal Appeal From Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales that appears at the top of each page?? Can somebody at least change it to read co-founder as is the case?? Thank you,-- Tom 21:33, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Is it possible to transwiki articles to Wikia? Specifically, Meantime (video game) and Fountain of Dreams to the Fallout Wiki; is there a technical/political/legal reason this would not be possible? If it is possible, how is it done? If it is not possible, laaaame. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 02:40, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
For a second, I thought he was talking about Wikipedia there. If you change the last sentence a bit, it sums up Wikipedia better then Jimbo did when he wrote about "the sum of all human knowledge". Wikipedia doesn't need to be a sum. A small selection of our most fascinating articles may be enough to change someone's thoughts. Wikipedia is amazing. I hope it will continue to grow in 2009, and I hope you will help! Happy new year everyone! - Face 21:11, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
This could be interpreted to mean Wikipedia is Communism™, but fortunately our right to leave contradicts this. P.S. I recommend the Perfect Circle cover version. — CharlotteWebb 22:10, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
"Imagine every child, no matter where in the world they were, can access a universe of knowledge. They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want. I tried to do it through my music. But now, you can do it in a very different way. You can give a child a laptop, and more than Imagine, you can change the world." There, fixed that for you, John. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 23:45, 31 December 2008 (UTC)