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I need quick/immediate translation from German to English for the article de:Böhmisch-Rixdorf. The reason: see m:Chapters meeting 2010/Berlin activities for the stranded#April 20, 2010 - i.e. tomorrow, it would be nice to make some print copies for them so that they do not have to listen to me only :-). If somebody translate it: please inform me on the German Wikipedia - de:User:-jkb-. Thanks, -jkb- ( talk) 13:53, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Just a quick note I thought I would drop regarding Template talk:Userpage. There's an ongoing discussion about a possible change to this widely-used template. I encourage anyone to get involved in the discussion. -- Shirik ( Questions or Comments?) 19:40, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Could somebody take a look at International Business Entry Modes? Entirely written by several editors who have no other edits, this looks like some sort of textbook, I'm not sure it's an encyclopedia article, and the capitalizing of the title is certainly wrong, if nothing else. Woogee ( talk) 21:39, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Sorry because my english is bad, but I didn't find the Village pump destined to non-english speakers. I work on fr.wikipedia, and I saw there was a copyright violation in the french article, from the website ( here in french and here in english). I think there's the same problem in the english article. Thanks you, Kvardek du ( talk) 12:58, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Paragraph three line one of the "Antonin Scalia" article reads in part, "Scalia was appointed by Reagan to the role of Supreme dumbass". I presume this has been hacked, but I don't know whom to tell about it...I'm not a registered user, so I can't correct it myself. I am not a Scalia supporter by any means but a factual article shouldn't contain sophomoric graffiti. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.92.140.23 ( talk) 16:36, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Attention Wikipedia. New article in First Monday journal discusses your featured article process. Please see [1]. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.228.78.160 ( talk) 19:31, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
The report indicates that FA is a MOS grade, not a content quality grade. Skäpperöd ( talk) 14:01, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
I added an {{unsourced section}} tag to a section of a college article which listed 13 alumni as "notable alumni", none of which had a source to verify that claim. Another editor came in, added sources for four of the 13, then removed the unsourced tag. When I asked why, they said that since they had added sources to 4 of 13, the section was no longer unsourced, and it was incumbent upon me to add the {{fact}} tag to all of the others. Wonderful. What happens when we get huge lists of people, such as List of Columbia University alumni, or some such, which have no sources (I'm not saying my example has that), if somebody adds one source to one person in the list? Is it now incumbent on somebody else to have to {{fact}} every other single person in the list? Woogee ( talk) 05:02, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Goods is redirected to good (economics) and the article is about goods in economics and accounting. I found that in the legal area, "goods" can be defined in a different way.
For example, in the Sale of Goods Act 1979 s. 61, "goods" includes all personal chattels other than things in action and money, and in Scotland all corporeal moveables except money; and in particular "goods" includes emblements, industrial growing crops, and things attached to or forming part of the land which are agreed to be severed before sale or under the contract of sale; [and includes an undivided share in goods;] (see the original text). Also according to the law of Hong Kong, in the Cap 362 s 2 Interpretation of TRADE DESCRIPTIONS ORDINANCE, "goods" includes vessel and aircraft, things attached to land and growing crops (see the original text). Therefore, some economic goods such as land and residential property are not goods by these definition.
I would like to add these definition to Wikipedia, but I'm afraid that the article good (economics) is not the suitable place as "economics" is used as the disambiguating word for the title. Should I rename it or do something else? -- Quest for Truth ( talk) 15:26, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
(EC)
Wikipedia talk:Words to watch#RFC. There's a proposal to merge several pages as part of a project to streamline the MoS. One part of the proposal is to merge Words to avoid, Avoid peacock terms, Avoid weasel words, and Avoid neologisms into a new page, Words to watch ( W2W). Fresh input would be appreciated at the RfC. SlimVirgin talk contribs 00:46, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
The Times (and The Sunday Times) web site is being restructured and going behind a paywall in early May. It will be available on free trial till sometime in June, when content will be charged for. [2] It's not clear whether current links will still work, even if paid for. Ty 07:59, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
It would be useful if a bot could produce a list of "Bare URL" links to the Times or Sunday Times (should be findable by URL) so that these could be flagged up and, with luck, turned into proper references before the Paywall starts. PamD ( talk) 18:15, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
There are just over 21,000 links on wikipedia to http://www.thetimes.co.uk at the moment. [3] Ty 02:19, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
I've received an acknowledgement of receipt of my email, and a response is being prepared. Ty 00:57, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
American journo Edwin Black has published an article about Wikipedia, The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge. It's a bit long, but folks might be interested to see how some people view the project. Chzz ► 13:53, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
Take a look at the strewn wreckage from his encounter at History of IBM. I added a thread at the bottom suggesting that they resolve their differences at an article, IBM during World War II. Wonder if that's something you'd support. Andrew Gradman talk/ WP:Hornbook 16:22, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
I noticed that on Special:DeletedContributions, when a non-admin is viewing it, the first line says "The action you have requested is limited to Administrators, researcher." The thing that confuses me is why it says "researcher" at the end of it. Is this a problem, or was it always there? If it isn't supposed to be there, please fix it. Thank you. -- Ha dg er 01:47, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
While I was NPPing a while ago, I saw some articles that were non-notalbe, and decided to click on them. Before I tapped the mosue though, I saw that the pre-made edit summary (-Created page with...) had a speedy tag plopped down before the text. I checked the history on that article and others, and there was only one edit, which was the creator (not the same one on all of them). Has anyone else seen this, as I think it's weird. Buggie111 ( talk) 03:31, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
As a frequent user (reader) of Wikipedia, I often am searching it for obscure things, whether using the wikipedia search function, or google with '+wikipedia'. A frequent frustration is when the results (both methods) are swamped with results that are articles about fiction. I don't want these. Is there a way to filter out articles about fiction? If not, would it help this desire if all articles about fiction (including fictional universe games) were categorised as "about fiction" or were tagged with a phrase that could be used to exclude it. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 06:13, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
I'm not sure if I'm in the right place, but I need help with this image. A while ago, I put a watermark on the image, not knowing that that was a bad thing to do. I'm now trying to fix my mistake, in removing the watermark. I uploaded a version of the image without the watermark, but it was still present in the image preview and in the articles the image is in. I tried again, except I uploaded the oldest version, thinking that this would fix problem. Again, the image preview and the articles the image is in still displayed the newest version, but, when I clicked on the image to view the full resolution, it brought up the version I had just uploaded. I then tried to revert back to the oldest version of the image, but the same thing occurred. Can someone with a better understanding of this problem please help fix it? Thanks, Megan| talk contribs 19:24, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
In the wake of this NYT article, an editor has changed the "epistemic disclosure" page so it's no longer a redirect to Deductive closure; now it's a dab page.
I don't think this is appropriate. The NYT article itself states that Mr. Sanchez misused the term. ("Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.") I don't believe that one NYT article about one guy who misused a word [err, and a few people he inspired to follow suit] is enough for WP to say that he created a new meaning.
Thoughts? 128.59.181.17 ( talk) 01:41, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Wikimania 2010, this year's global event devoted to Wikimedia projects around the globe, is accepting submissions for presentations, workshops, panels, and tutorials related to the Wikimedia projects or free content topics in general. The conference will be held from July 9-11, 2010 in Gdansk, Poland. For more information, check the official Call for Participation. Cbrown1023 talk 22:10, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
Now recovered from the developer meeting, we have made further progress, and have only a few known issues between us and release.
If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start on our labs site.
To see what we've changed this week, check out the latest list of items completed.
We are very close now; only a few UI issues remain between us and final testing, after which will hopefully come a launch on the English Wikipedia.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William Pietri ( talk) 05:46, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Anybody else here loath bloated hatnotes? They are usually fluffy messages about redirects that are probably of no interest to 99% of the page visitors, and distract from the real meat of the article. It feels like having a sack of untidy junk sitting on the porch next to your front door. Sigh.— RJH ( talk) 16:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
This issue may be touched on in WP:D#Usage guidelines: "There is no need to add disambiguation links to a page whose name already clearly distinguishes itself from the generic term. For example, Solaris (1972 film) is clearly about one specific movie and not about any of the many other meanings of "Solaris". It is very unlikely that someone arriving there from within Wikipedia would have been looking for any other "Solaris", so it is unnecessary to add a link pointing to the Solaris disambiguation page. However, it would be perfectly appropriate to add a link to Solaris (novel) (but not, say, Solaris (operating system)) to its "See also" section." - DavidWBrooks ( talk) 19:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
{{dablink|Mom, Mommy, Moms, and Mum redirect here. For other uses, see [[Mom (disambiguation)]], [[Mommy (disambiguation)]], [[Moms (disambiguation)]], and [[Mum (disambiguation)]].}} {{redirect|Motherhood|the 2009 comedy film|Motherhood (film)}} {{redirect|Mothering|the bimonthly parenting magazine|Mothering (magazine)}} {{For|other uses|Mother (disambiguation)}}
{{For|other uses of Mother and terms redirecting here|Mother (disambiguation)}}
In the course of researching the House Energy and Commerce Committee, I came across two wikis that contain encyclopedic information that ours lacks: sourcewatch.org, and opencongress.org.
Why do people bother to create other encyclopedic wikis that compete with Wikipedia? The founders of those sites could better accomplish their organization's mission of transparency if they just import their content into wikipedia and shut themselves down.
Until such time as they do, are there any restrictions on Wikipedians porting in the content themselves? The sites use a creative commons & gnu license, respectively. Andrew Gradman talk/ WP:Hornbook 14:46, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
Hi. Is there any tool that lists all fair-use images that are used in templates, user pages, etc? -- Bojan Talk 14:33, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
We continue to work on UI display issues and on getting up a Labs version of the German Wikipedia. We're pretty close to release, and we believe only minor UI issues remain before final testing.
If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start on our labs site.
To see the upcoming and in-progress work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William Pietri ( talk) 21:23, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
From Morningside Heights: "Morningside Heights is bounded by the Upper West Side to the south, ... The streets that form its boundaries are 110th Street on the south, ..."
From Upper West Side: "The Upper West Side ... lies above West 59th Street and below West 86th Street".
Knowing the proper answer to this question is essential in formulating a proper craigslist post! Thanks :) 128.59.179.81 ( talk) 23:29, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Given the need to reference facts in an article (which I understand and support), the amount of space those references take up in the over-all size of the article can become extensive. As an example, Glee (TV series) has 125 references and it takes up about 1/3 of lenght of the article. Also, the External links and templates gets lost below the screens of references. I am wondering if it is possible to "hide" the references section or move it below the links and templates. Given the homogeny of the section order, at least at the ends of articles, on the pages, I wondered if there was a technical reason for the reference section to appear before the external links? Thanks. -- Jordan 1972 ( talk) 22:53, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
.references {display: none;}
That suppresses the list of references when {{ reflist}} is called. – MuZemike 23:21, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
This is exactly what I was looking for... thanks so much. -- Jordan 1972 ( talk) 00:33, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
I am trying to look more "professional" since I will be requesting copyright permission to use a photograph. User:Malik Shabazz/Requesting free content says that I should have a good user page to make a good first impression. Therefore, I made some changes to it. Compare my old page with my new page. What do you think; am I on the right track? PleaseStand (talk) 00:44, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
That is: Add the term "
myth" to the explicit list of terms in
WP:LABEL.
Ironically, Village pump itself tends to contrast "myth" with "fact". While Wikipedia should certainly allow the term "myth" when its academic/technical sense is plain (or when quoting a work, of course), the word "myth" should be explicitly listed at
WP:LABEL and the policy at
WP:WTA#Myth_and_legend should even more explicitly discourage other use of the term "myth". The term's use on Wikipedia has been contentious for years, and there are plenty of less ambiguous, less contentious terms for any particular sense of "myth" to be communicated. See also
WT:WTW#Myth, and
WP:Village pump (policy)#Clarifying WP:RNPOV (or at its likely
archive). --
AuthorityTam (
talk)
15:19, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
People might like to compare what's said about "fundamentalist" at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/FAQ#Religion. Peter jackson ( talk) 09:54, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Has anyone else noticed that "aluminum" is incorrectly and consistently spelled "aluminium." Is Wikipedia British, or is it vandalism?
I'd like to suggest a guideline should be deleted. Where should I list it, as it'll need some community discussion? Grandiose ( me, talk, contribs) 10:58, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Why do administrator actions such as blocking a user and deleting an article not show up in the users contributions? Immunize ( talk) 18:30, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Am I being silly- or should this be debated. Today I have just watched a slew of articles on my watchlist having another interwiki link added. I use these links- gleaning details from fr: de: es: nl: and other real languages, to cross verify an article. So look at Calvisson, something called war: was added, this appears as Winaray. Then look at Lecques, and we see the exact same template- no attempt even to translate the Infobox, or even to copy the images. So what is Winaray- well, this redirects to Waray-Waray which appears to be a dialect of Cebuano spoken by 3.1 million people, in the Phillipines. Assuming that all 3.1 million folk, are avid Wikipedians bereft of language skills in French, Spanish or Catalan- don't they at least deserve a stub with an infobox. Now the other mystery is Volapuk, a language with 20 speakers- this time the Infobox has been split in two and half appears in the lede. So, what is the point? They just waste screen real-estate, and appear to me to be a bot writers joke. Conversely, to put a interwiki link on the minority language page to the fr: catalan, and es page could be useful. If policy is needed: Links are only made when the page has reached start level, or where 0.1% of the subjects of the page speaks the language. There you are. Discuss.-- ClemRutter ( talk) 19:55, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I recently learned about http://www.webcitation.org, and so I was really glad to see that there have been previous discussions ( [6] [7] [8]) about creating a bot that takes WP's external links, feeds them through webcitation.org, and ADDS the the result alongside the external links, as backups. I have two questions, which I'm going to deliver in two sub-threads.
I'm wondering if someone who's been involved in the process of creating a Webcitation.org bot, can give the VPM community an update on the status of this proposal? Could use any help to make it succeed? - user:Agradman, editing (for complicated reasons) as 160.39.221.164 ( talk) 06:09, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
I'd also like to start a discussion about the pros and cons of WikiMedia foundation creating its own version of Webcite. I say "pros and cons" because am hoping for a discussion in the spirit of a brainstorming session. If I wanted to get my idea shot down I would have posted it at WP:VPP. :)
I see the main Con being Cost. I don't know what that cost would be. But I am hoping it would be offset by the benefits. Linkrot is a constant problem. But Webcitation.org has been known for experiencing downtime (e.g. RIGHT NOW). Whenever that happens, people starting removing links from articles. It would be valuable if we had control over our backup service.
Of course, a lot of details would have to be worked out (e.g., do we make this resource available to the general public, as Webcitation.org has done?). We can talk about those details, but I just want to ask that we not think of those details as Cons ... we should think of them as details. - user:Agradman, editing (for complicated reasons) as 160.39.221.164 ( talk) 06:09, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
All right -- my take-away from the discussion so far is,
(1) Never break one thread into two sub-threads.
(2) If we were to emulate webcitation.org, it would only make sense if those folks were willing to give us their code. Or their business. (Maybe we should ask. Once we get our bot up and running, we would immediately become their #1 consumer by an exponential margin.)
(3) The people at
User_talk:WebCiteBOT#User:WebCiteBOT.2FStats seem to be on top of the process of recruiting people with free time and bot-coding-skills, to assist with the bot, or to create a second bot. I CAN'T WAIT!! this bot is so awesome!!!
-
user:Agradman editing for today as
128.59.179.246 (
talk)
05:03, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Somebody please check out the recent edits of a Wikipedian who claims that Kama Chinen died without providing a source. Georgia guy ( talk) 15:00, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
To find out what Dialectic means, looking it up on Wikipedia is not advisable. May be someone can remove some fog? Talk:Dialectic#Completely_puzzled Joepnl ( talk) 21:31, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Hello, i have 2 templates that are questionable. {{ Mureş County}} ( at this article) and this one. Both are in violation with basic naming policy and WP:NAME, WP:PLACE. Also it violates the basic conception of the idea of template, a template has to be short and informative not cramped with alternative names. Both templates are introduces silently and not to mention that in Romania only 6.5% of the population is Hungarian or Szekely so minority names are constantly forced by this user like he tried to do here even if the only official language spoken by the 93%+ of the population is Romanian. Also every other template uses one official language even if more languages are official like in Vojvodina and others. Can i get some advice on this? Thank you. iadrian ( talk) 13:04, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
The main news is that the team had a meeting this week with Danese and Erik to discuss rollout plans. Everybody concurs that we're close enough to launch to start a few release-related activities:
This will pull in a variety of people, all of whom we're excited to have involved, including Tim, Jay, Moka, Rob L., Rob H, and even Mike G. a bit. Adam has also offered us to help us solve some cross-browser CSS issues that have been confounding us, for which we are grateful. Keep an eye out for activity relating to these efforts in the coming days and weeks.
The actual release schedule depends on a number of factors, including the results of testing, the speed with which we resolve a couple of remaining UI difficulties, and the extent to which community testing on Labs turns up new issues.
Speaking of which, if you'd like to try out the current software, start on our labs site. Lest you think it has achieved perfection, both User:Tango and Eper turned up interesting issues just this week. Thanks to them and the other testers!
To see what we've changed this week, check out the latest list of items completed.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William Pietri ( talk) 06:08, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Eddie_Rabbitt/1 This has been sitting at WP:GAR since March and no one seems to be pushing either way. Can someone please SAY something at it so we can get something going there? Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ( Many otters • One bat • One hammer) 22:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Hello, I am an administrator of the Basque Wikipedia (eu) and we have implemented the flag template system from the English Wikipedia into our wiki. In the country data XXX templates we have added an extra parameter (as you can see for example in eu:txantiloi:Herrialde info Gibraltar). We want that in a template put that extra parameter (called "nongo"). In English would be "Geography of Gibraltar", but in Basque "Gibraltarko geografia" (that -ko means of). I think I haven't explained myself correctly, here an invented example:
By typing {{geography stub|GIB}}
Gibraltarko geografia |
--->
[[{{{nongo}}}|{{{alias}}}]] geografia |
Can anyone help us? Is it possible to do it?-- An13sa ( talk) 08:58, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
I am wary to incur the wrath of regulars on these high-profile articles by removing these nice pics, but IMO we shouldn't use pictures such as this and many (really many) others, taken in a certain place, to illustrate various random locations (such as Iran, Albania, Sweden, Aggtelek National Park, Tâmpa, Braşov, Prokletije, Lura Mountain, Republic of Macedonia, Geography of the Cucuteni–Trypillian culture and so on). In my opinion, the fact that the species of animals and plants in question presumably occur there is not enough to warrant inclusion of such pictures, often taken in other parts of the world. It would be like illustrating the article on Greeks with a picture of Spaniards taken in Spain, as long as they are all humans. Thoughts?
Colchicum ( talk) 15:23, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Cifrão is a dollar sign with two vertical lines. I would like to change to $ which I believe will work on most (all?) windows and MacOs X systems. I don't know if Linux installations have Garamond. Is this a sensible edit to do? -- SGBailey ( talk) 14:43, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
... whose input is a page name, and whose output is a URL to the most recent version of that page?
So for example, {{lastchange|dog}} would generate http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dog&oldid=360687969, which I got by clicking on "Permanent link" at the dog page.
The idea is that this would work by substitution, so that I could put it at the top of an edit whenever I make a comment on a talk page, so that people centuries hence know what version of teh page I was looking at.
user:Agradman, editing right now as 160.39.221.144 ( talk) 06:58, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
... to have a "New section" button which is pre-populated with some text?
I am thinking that the WikiProject banners (in article talk pages) could have a button that lets you edit a new section at the wikiproject, whose header is pre-populated with
RE: {{subst:freeze|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}: ...
.which renders as
Except that, instead of using {{FULLPAGENAME}}, it uses the name of the page you were coming from.
user:Agradman, editing as AConcernedChicken ( talk) 08:11, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
&preloadtitle=
–
xeno
talk
18:47, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
... to have a "new section" button which, when you're all done and hit "save", will also edit ANOTHER page, i.e. inserting a simple talkback template indicating that you've put your message on the first page?
I'm thinking this feature should be incorporated into the "new section" button described in the previous post. (All of this is apropos my proposal at VPD.
user:Agradman, editing for the moment as AConcernedChicken ( talk) 08:15, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
According to the {{ uw-mos4}} template series, it sounds as if you can eventually get blocked for a comma or something. If we enforced that, we would lose some of Wikipedia's most experienced editors, such as at this debate. If I actually used those templates, which I can't imagine using without further explanation, would the guy actually get predictably blocked after the fourth warning as if they were vandalism warnings? Or would everybody just laugh? In the latter case, should we delete the uw-mosx templates so nobody makes the mistake of using them? Art LaPella ( talk) 05:56, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
What is it with these guys who smash every tool they don't understand? Perhaps they don't see that they, personally, have any use for the tool? They pick up the tool by the wrong end, stare at it, bang it on the bench a couple times, and smash it. Why? Why is this tolerated?
I'm sick to death of seeing obnoxious messages on my Talk complaining about tools I built years ago. I've been extremely consistent in documenting what I've built, using yet another tool of my device, {{ doctl}}. It's obvious from the deletion nominations that people aren't even reading the docs. They check the inlinks and say, "It's unused." Well, most exotic templates are best substituted; you never will see any inlinks.
A well-stocked workbench or tool cabinet is full of rarely-used tools and tools whose purpose is not immediately clear. Some tools are mere refinements; you could do a job without them but they make the job just a little easier. Some tools are built for a single, immediate purpose and sit idly for years before a similar task arises. Some tools will be heavily employed by only a few users; some will be used by only one.
In a metal, wood, or auto shop, it's a potent argument in favor of throwing out or selling a tool that it takes up too much space and isn't used enough. Space is limited in any physical shop and each tool must justify its consumption of that space. But wiki is not even paper, let alone concrete and steel. This argument holds no water here.
Another argument says, this tool is broken or dangerous. Certainly, if a damaged or badly-built tool cannot be repaired, it must be discarded. I hope nobody reading this fails to see how silly this attitude is, in many cases, here on WP. I don't speak of the many, many "weapon" templates, which should be deleted as soon as assembled. Templates intended for constructive purposes may be flawed but rarely create an actual hazard. Fix them or leave them alone.
During my active editing time I built several tools and have watched most of them fall under the hammer of I don't understand it, therefore I will smash it. I will go so far as to say I don't really care about the senseless destruction itself. You should, if you're an active editor, if you think you have a stake in WP. I'm just irritated that it's brought to my attention. If active editors can't suppress this kind of foolishness, why is it thought that I can? I'd be much happier if the nasty little attack tags were left off my Talk.
Some of the tools I built have become popular; others have not. I don't consider the less-popular tools worthless any more than I consider a wheel cylinder hone worthless, simply because I don't rebuild brakes. I get a lot of use out of a combination screwdriver but I wouldn't grab one on the way out of a burning building.
The only tool I have built here that I have truly regretted is {{ divbox}}. This was badly conceived and built without the modern conditional template syntax; it has been transcluded endlessly, all over this project; and it has been used to build a procession of silly tag templates. I built it in hopes of standardizing the little colored boxes and it has only accelerated the explosion. I tinkered awhile with a more sophisticated approach before I realized that I was only contributing to the tag problem. For this, I'm truly sorry.
If there is one tool of mine that desperately needs to be deleted, it's divbox. But is this nominated? No. It's stupid, therefore everyone understands immediately what it does and what it's for. It's Widely Used; therefore It Is Good.
So long as I can still find useful info quickly, I'm going to browse WP. I'm not going to throw myself under the wheels, though. Now let me be, please, and leave the nasty little tags off of my Talk. If you want to let the kids root through the toolbox and smash everything they think isn't pretty, fine. But tell them to leave me out of it.
— Xiong 熊 talk * 22:39, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Talk:Bishop Hill (blog)#Straw poll. Fresh eyes would be appreciated at an RfC to decide whether to merge Bishop Hill (blog), an article about a climate-change-skepticism blog, into a BLP about the man who operates the blog, Andrew Montford, or to merge the BLP into the blog article. Or do neither and keep them as stand-alone articles. Many thanks, SlimVirgin talk contribs 04:42, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
I started the RfC Wikipedia:Requests for comment/BQZip01 nearly four weeks ago. In that time, I've seen considerable activity on other RfCs. However, on this RfC there's been virtually no activity. As it stands, there are no outside views by anyone. The other four currently active RfCs have an average of 7 outside views. I'm concerned that the basis of this dispute remains unresolved. I am not looking for yes/no people. I am looking for input, whatever your opinion may be. You are invited to participate in this RfC. Thank you, -- Hammersoft ( talk) 15:02, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Could you please explain why the clicks suddenly sky-rocket from nowhere in this article? Any idea what the reason is? Gun Powder Ma ( talk) 10:52, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
As an Internet dealer, I have become familiar with the U.S.P.S. Priority tape, which now is not available to United States Postal Service customers. The Priority (or Express) packing tape is of the highest quality with best gripping pwer I've discovered. Does anyone happen to know if there is a retail version of this same tape, available for purchase to the public under its own brand name? —Preceding unsigned comment added by DMPrdctns ( talk • contribs) 18:13, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
FYI, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) has been controversially merged into Gavin Menzies. An RfC has been opened on the issue, see Talk:1421: The Year China Discovered the World
You are invited to participate, as the book itself is a controversial topic, a wide audience of participation would be a good idea.
70.29.208.247 ( talk) 03:07, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Hi (I don't know if this is the right place for discussing this but) I thing this article is a kind of hoax. Such a thing doesn't exist (yet?) (at the bottom of the (MIT blog) reference article, one reads : the prototype produce 25 ...nanoWatts). (the 'hype' also pollutes the Atomic battery article). (but I am not a nuclear physicist...) -- Xofc ( talk) 13:16, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
I don't want to get into an edit war over this, but the first sentence of Center for Civic Education says that it's a "leading" non-profit ... . I added a citation needed tag, which the creator of the article removed without providing a source which proves that it's a leading anything. I restored the citation needed tag, and the article's creator added a link to the Center for Civic Education's own web page, which doesn't say it's a leading anything. What is my next step? Everard Proudfoot ( talk) 07:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
As I mentioned last week, we are starting pre-rollout activities while we finish up the last bits of development. Now that the successful launch of the new enwiki UI is out of the way, we will be getting together with Rob H. and the rest of the ops ninjas to discuss release dates.
Also upcoming is a final pass at the terms and text, some more fiddling with cross-browser CSS and JavaScript issues, some work with the community to figure out the remaining details of the community side of the trial (keep an eye on RobLa's activity there), and a call for the nice people at the German Wikipedia to try our shiny new software with their config and make sure we haven't broken anything for them. (Regarding that, if some German speaker reading this would like to help set up the test site, we could use a hand. Contact me via direct email.)
The discussion of rollout means that we think the software is, some minor nits aside, basically ready. Want to be sure? You can test it out on our labs site, and we'll even give you admin rights [1] to do so.
To see what we've changed this week, check out the latest list of items completed.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 05:26, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
[1] You know that you [2] have always wanted admin rights!
[2] Except those of you who already have them. But for you, we have a whole wiki that you can go wild on. You can even have a wheel war if you want and we won't tell a soul.
To me the IPA notation appears as arcane as, say, the Hausdorff–Young inequality looks to a non-mathematician. If you are lucky, then the IPA notation is linked to an unsourced descriptive page (in 'Wikipedia:' space[!]). (It isn't linked, for example, on the David Hilbert article.) You can then attempt to figure out what each of the IPA symbols means by flipping back and forth between the pages.
Doesn't the IPA notation fall under WP:Jargon? Would it be out of bounds to tag each of the IPA pronunciation entries with a {{ clarify}} tag? Thanks.— RJH ( talk) 14:42, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
The article Special:UsabilityInitiativePrefSwitch, which I guess is now linked from all pages, violates the Manual of Style in at least three respects. This is a special article but I see no reason for that to require these violations.
1. The article title should appear or be mentioned in the article: in a normal article it would appear or be paraphrased in the WP:LEAD#Opening paragraph. In this case I think it would make more sense to change the title rather than the contents, i.e. intead of Special:UsabilityInitiativePrefSwitch it should be Special:New features, the way the first heading reads; or perhaps that phrase combined with a date. I was actually surprised to see that that was not its real title when I went to link to it from here.
2. It uses the peacock language "we are excited to share".
3. In violation of WP:MOSNUM#Precise language, it doesn't say when the new features were new. And the page doesn't even have an edit history (why not?), so it's not possible to tell when it was created to announce the features.
Could someone with appropriate authority please attend to these points or explain why it is unreasonable to do so? -- 70.48.232.24 ( talk) 20:47, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I watch alot of rollercoaster videos, but I want to actually feel the motion in them using some form of mental motion simulation, which requires that I trick my brain. So, which perceptive parts of my brain should I trick? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Racecarlock ( talk • contribs) 23:24, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
The most part of articles about historical topics (biographies, decades-long events, specific events resolved a few days or a single day, etc.) is a summary of the step-by-step events within the topic. But what should be done when a same point is described in different ways by different historians? (for example, whenever the leader of a revolution was initially seeking independentism, small changes in domestic policies, or just personal power). It's clear that, to follow the neutral point of view, this must be done by atributing the views to the reliable authors that hold them, with inline citations and all the stuff. But there are 2 alternatives: the dispute may be described at the point where it took place, or at a later specific section. The problem is that, unless the dispute is general enough as to be about the whole topic (and then a specific section becomes justifiable), describing it at the point where it takes place may distract the reader and lost the focus on the event itself, while a stand-alone section for disputes may seem redundant if they focus on something that has been already explained some sections above. So, which one should be the approach? MBelgrano ( talk) 11:55, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Dear Wikipedians,
Wikimedia Commons is happy to announce that the 2009 Picture of the Year competition has now opened. Any user registered at a Wikimedia wiki since 2009 or before with more than 200 edits before 16 January 2010 (UTC) is welcome to vote.
Over 890 images that have been rated Featured Pictures by the international Wikimedia Commons community in the past year are fighting to impress the highest number of voters. From professional animal and plants shots, over breathtaking panoramas and skylines, restorations of historically relevant images, images portraying world's best architecture, maps, emblems and diagrams created with the most modern technology and impressing human portrays, Commons features pictures for all flavours.
Check your eligibility now and if you're allowed to vote, you may use one of your accounts for the voting. The vote page is located at: Commons:Picture of the Year/2009/Voting.
Two rounds of voting will be held: In the first round, you can vote for as many images as you like. In the final round, when only 20 images are left, you must decide for one image to become the Picture of the Year.
Wikimedia Commons is looking forward for your decision in determinating the ultimate featured picture of 2009.
Thanks, Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year committee http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2009 -- The Evil IP address ( talk) 17:11, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
I am going to create a topic-of-interest wiki and would really appreciate anyone's suggestions for how to make it great.
So far, here is my thinking:
After the core is there, I'll publicize it in forums related to the topic of interest.
Anyone else have other ideas? I'm also working with a godaddy installation of mediawiki. I'd be appreciative if anyone has a good link for how to install extensions or create a village pump. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.197.42 ( talk) 00:00, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
Is there such a tool? It would be helpful for finding the inserting/deleting editor. Anthony ( talk) 01:20, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you. Anthony ( talk) 13:36, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
The Jerusalem Post has today (16 May) published an article on Wikipedia's treatment of the Israel-Palestine conflict. [9] Headed "Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on Wikipedia: Editors fight against anti-Israel ‘mobs'", the article claims that editors on Hebrew Wikipedia have been canvassed to take part in edit wars on English Wikipedia. In the discussion following the article, a correspondent urges "all Zionists" to follow the example of the Runtshit vandal, and to vandalise articles and attack editors described as "teams of anti-Semites, some who serve as senior editors on Wikipedia, including several British communists." RolandR ( talk) 18:58, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
You have a potential-editor's attention, and a laptop.
What 2 pages would you first navigate to, to demonstrate how Wikipedia works? (I'll give my own 2¢ later) -- Quiddity ( talk) 18:13, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Should citations be placed before or after a comma? See List_of_cutaneous_conditions#Monocyte-_and_macrophage-related. Should those citations come before or after the comma? Thanks again! --- kilbad ( talk) 02:20, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
Please, please, please don't segregate because i'm new!!! this is my signature: ~Monk ( Chat Harrass) 00:46, 19 May 2010 (UTC) tell me what you think!
When explaining wikipedia to people, I prefer to eat our own dog food. I think it's important to show that wikipedia is a usable source of information in this 21st century world.
However, lately, I've been running into trouble. Several concepts I use to explain wikipedia... are either no longer on wikipedia or much reduced.
Now some folks here might go WP:OR/WP:RS/WP:V and spin an entire spiel about how some articles don't deserve to be on wikipedia, etc etc, bla bla. Don't bother. I know that entire story by heart, backwards, forwards, upside down, with my eyes closed and both arms tied behind my back. I also understand the full reasoning. I was there when those policies were formed.
However, I'm not buying all of it in this case. Each of these articles clearly has an encyclopedic purpose. They are needed to understand wikipedia itself. Removing these articles is a bizarre form of self denial. It just doesn't wash.
It indicates that (some part) of the community apparently are going through the motions, but they're clearly not entirely convinced that wikipedia actually exists. :-P
So I'm going to stick my neck out and say that our policy went wrong with these articles, somehow. Can we figure out what went wrong and fix it?
-- Kim Bruning ( talk) 14:10, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
(undent)
1. I'll doublecheck OCP at your insistence. I had recalled that more sourcing existed. [The WP community has had to deal with several events that might be considered OCP or close to OCP in its history. Fortunately it survived.]
2. The implied redirect is false. The correct reference would be to Larry Niven's story. [Wikipedia operates by swarming (aka. flash crowd effect) on issues that need dealing with, either through watchlists, or due to recent events. ]
3. I think you may find that Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen were at least somewhat responsible for the concept of Lie To Children. ;-) H2G2 was the original source from which the article was obtained *AFTER* which additional sources and information was added. But removing mention of H2G2 as the starting point of the article is imo not permissible and borders on plagiarism. One might find that H2G2 is not always equally reliable, however, the contents of this particular h2g2 article does or did meet requirements for WP. [Wikipedia policy itself is a sort of Lie-To-Children. At some point, experienced users-> admins are supposed to learn that the actual manner in which wikipedia operates is through the consensus model. Also, when working on scientific articles, people sometimes don't understand that they were taught lies-to-children, and will have a tendency to edit articles incorrectly.]
4. let's hope so. the term has been in use for at least 2-3 decades, afaict. [this term describes the current issue at hand]
Here's the interesting part: I get the feeling you want to go back to the free-wheeling days when a content dump off the top of your head was a good way to begin an article - but we've moved beyond that.
I agree that this is the current orthodoxy on wikipedia. I am also aware why this was considered a good idea at the time. However, (for the fourth time now ;-) ), I am now not sure that this was such a good idea at all. Our current declining growth suggests that perhaps we haven't quite chosen the right path.
My issues in using wikipedia as a reference to explain wikipedia is an indication that -something- isn't quite right somewhere. Perhaps the issue lies not with wikipedia, but with academic/jouranlistic society in general not doing a good job of documenting important things; but I tend to believe that "everyone is crazy but us" is usually indicative of "us" being the crazy ones.
Though, to link another thread: Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources#Reliable sources— some of these babies are ugly, there are problems with some of the sources we've been thinking of as "reliable".
I would like to explore ways in which we can ensure that articles are correct, while having less of the negative side-effects we are experiencing. I think that the wiki-consensus model, in combination with NPOV actually go a long way towards that goal, even without RS, V, NOR. In fact, we know so, since we know that wikipedia operated superlatively without them; the only issue being our reputation for reliability. Having introduced RS, V, NOR; our reputation for reliability apparently hasn't changed all too much, but our growth has faltered.
A wiki acts like ratchet, with pages being created and slowly being improved over time, and not falling back (the traditional Eventualist position). With the current mode of editing and deletion on wikipedia, the ratchet is broken, and articles do fall back or end up deleted. This violates the fundamental assumptions behind why a wiki works, and leads to a decline in growth. Hence the decline we see in the statistics (QED).
So where do we go from here?
-- Kim Bruning ( talk) 20:25, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
User Jhex blacklotus has a strange userpage. As far as I see this content is completely fictional, including some sexual remarks about film producers (see personal life). He has uploaded several private joke images. He has no further edits. For me this text and the images are completely out of scope of wikimedia-projects. I stumbled upon his images in the commons. Plehn ( talk) 05:42, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks! I was to lazy to look up the history of the page. Plehn ( talk) 14:19, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
I have deleted the userpage, completely outside the scope of the namespace and the encyclopedia. Keegan ( talk) 06:47, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Ok, I'm sort of lost on what you are supposed to write on your userpage. I searched it and there were no real results. I assumed that you are supposed to write about yourself, but i wasn't sure. Can I receive some help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tetobigbro ( talk • contribs) 18:52, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Ok, so how do you get the stickers and other things on your pages? I've seen people with stickers and I noticed the eight ball on your page. When I try to copy and paste these types of things, they don't work, any help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tetobigbro ( talk • contribs) 19:35, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Remember, we're not here to make our userpages awesome; we're here to build an encyclopedia. Awesome userpages should be a secondary concern. OrangeDog ( τ • ε) 20:03, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I understand this, and I have edited an article already, I was wondering for future reference so that i would not be "In the Dark" on this. Tetobigbro ( talk) 20:14, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
I'm relatively new to Wikipedia and I'm having trouble understanding the layout of the site. I usually can understand websites well and I know that it shouldn't be too complicated, but some of this site seems overwhelming. I love this website for informational reasons, so I decided to create a profile. If anyone can offer some assistance, it would be much appreciated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tetobigbro ( talk • contribs) 19:08, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Ok, I understand this a bit better. I should've just tried it out first. Tetobigbro ( talk) 19:40, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Another user has generated a list of untagged derm-related redirects. I wanted to know if someone could help tag these redirect talk pages with
{{WPMED|class=redirect|importance=|dermatology=yes}}
? Perhaps there is an automated way to do this? Thanks in advance for your help! ---- kilbad ( talk) 00:49, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
The quick summary is that we are continuing with pre-rollout activities, including UI polish, text and naming cleanup, and rollout planning.
One important milestone passed is that Tim Starling has looked over the code and done some profiling and given it his blessing from a performance perspective. He and the rest of the ops folks feel like the production gear is also in good shape for rolling this out. However, to prevent unpleasant launch surprises we've put in a configurable limit to the number of pages protected with this. We'll start out at a limit of 2000 and bump it up based on actual production performance.
We believe we are technically ready to try out a labs version of the German config, just to double-check that our recent work will cause them no headaches. However, we need some German-speaker at least hazily familiar with FlaggedRevs to prepare the main page and help us with a call for testers. Any assistance there would be appreciated!
Speaking of assistance, we always welcome people trying out the extension before it goes live. You can do so on our labs site.
To see what we've changed this week, check out the latest of items completed.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 06:13, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
There's a troubling trend I think needs some attention... namely, attempts to use Wikipedia as a vehicle to legitimize questionable information. I direct the community's attention to this post, which I will now transcribe to save you an extra click (emphasis mine):
I don't edit nearly as much as I used to, but we've both been around here a while and dealt in some cases with controversial and political topics. I don't know if this is a new phenomenon, but based on the last two controversies at the Media Matters article, it seems that some editors are very determined to push memes from conservative media into the encyclopedia. The Hillary Clinton/George Soros thing is such an obvious non-issue to the mainstream press. I suppose that in a lot of ways, this isn't really new--there will always be stuff like this going on in one form or another. What troubles me is that these editors then claim that anyone who does not go along with their conservative meme is a liberal and therefore it's just some sort of political squabble. I don't know if this is happening with left-wing memes; if it is, I haven't seen it. My fear is that editors who don't recognize right-wing memes for what they are or editors who buy into the notion that this is just a political battle will end up unintentionally supporting these right-wing memes. For some people here, the notion that in any dispute, both sides should be forced to compromise is a powerful one. That has obvious deleterious effects when one side is just making shit up.
Before chalking anything up to a political tit-for-tat (the easy way out), read the statement again please. The gentleman has a point -- there seems to be a massive influx of conservative talking points into what should be an objective and balanced encyclopedia. Despite what some believe Fair & Balanced means, in the real world if there are 25 sources alleging the same crock of shit is true, and they're all Beck/Hannity/Limbaugh/Coulter sources (with no support from mainstream sources or academia), I don't think an encyclopedia should give equal weight to sources that seem to publish in bad faith or with the sole intent of generating revenue by firing up their base. I also direct the community attention to the first quote here, which states (in part):
While I'd say it's admirable to try to include all viewpoints and reach mass consensus, blindly seeking this end lets a vocal minority bog down reasonable POVs through technicality.
It would be easy to give the standard "it will work itself out in the end" answer, but I've been editing these tedious sorts of articles for well over half a decade and the issue raised here is becoming much more significant -- I've seen plenty of reasonable editors abandon trying to improve the POV target articles -- eventually, it's my concern that eventually the inmates will be running the asylum (pardon the terrible analogy). I'm not bringing up any particular content issue or event, but there are plenty of examples: Cornell is not the real Cornell, Hillary Clinton founded Media Matters, Obama is not a citizen, et cetera ad infinitum. I guess my point here is to try and start a discussion regarding the long-view effects to Wikipedia, their desirability, and the best way(s) to deal with such. Input is encouraged and appreciated -- any takers? // Blaxthos ( t / c ) 16:23, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
When video exists of the quote ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHTydb5js-E at about 2:15), of Secretary Clinton herself talking about "institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress." (Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/01/hillary-clinton-told-yearlykos-convention-she-helped-start-media-matt#ixzz0mnyMkVp3) then I would hardly put that issue in with WP:FRINGE things like idiots that believe the President wasn't born in Hawaii (there is a birth announcement in a local paper for him back then). What this "Cornell" argument you attempted to source (please provide real links to support your arguments, not non-sensical ones that a person has to dig for) has to do with anything I have no idea. The examples are not comparable. What you've set up is a strawman argument with the Media Matters issue built into these others when it clearly doesn't belong. Very disingenuous Blax. Rapier ( talk) 20:34, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
This website is an encyclopedia, correct? I realize that information must be given to make this encyclopedia. I have also realized, however, that some things are not included in this encyclopedia. So I am asking, is it wrong to create articles on people and things that are not famous or "important?" Any feedback would be much appreciated. Tetobigbro ( talk) 20:51, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
So if I were to, just as an example, write an article on myself or others I know, would it be worth the time or would it just be deleted? Tetobigbro ( talk) 21:09, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
a link in the List of sculptors to an article in the German wikipedia. Is this okay? Einar aka Carptrash ( talk) 19:45, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
I have created a request for comment on the flagged revisions trial, motivated by an unexpected, unannounced and publicly undiscussed change of configuration removing the reviewer usergroup. Please weigh in there. Cenarium ( talk) 12:58, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
There is an article about Tree shaping which talks about the real world practice of shaping tree trunks. Some fantasy text and art with references has crept into the article. I have created a new section within the article called Art and literature about Tree shaping. The section could easily have references to shaped trees that appeared in 1940s Mickey Mouse cartoons, Wizard of Oz's apple tree people and Winnie the Pooh's tree houses.
Should this section be created into a new article? What I wanted comments on, is the appropriateness of mixing a real-world practice and fanciful literature within the same article. Blackash have a chat 11:38, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
What will there be next? Star Destroyers under the heading "space"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Denting5 ( talk • contribs) 11:58, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
I am pleased to advise you that, effective immediately, requests for oversight/suppression will be accepted using the OTRS system. Please bear with us as the Oversight team becomes accustomed to this new method of receiving and replying to requests. We will strive to maintain timely service.
If you have found yourself reporting concerns to the oversight mailing list, please take a moment to add the new email address to your list of contacts: oversight-en-wpwikipedia.org
We look forward to continuing to work with the community in protecting the privacy of editors and others.
For the Oversight team,
Risker (
talk)
04:25, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
We're about to post an RfC. The dispute is over the accuracy of the article's definition of the term. We will tag various "pseudo-" categories but the dispute is about how to contrive the definition. Are there projects or categories with an interest in lexicography, or Wikipedia's policy on how to define terms? Anthony ( talk) 07:05, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Would this be the correct place to propose a Wiki-wide assessment drive, or should it be at WP:VPP or somewhere else?
Dear Sir,
My query is, can i give internal link of your website, to in our website.
Regards Alka Dujodwala <redact> —Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.143.10.136 ( talk) 09:22, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
The loose-end tidying and rollout prep proceeds apace. This week's rollout prep includes preparing for an emergency rollback, something that we don't expect will be necessary but for which we nonetheless need to be ready.
We've been working diligently on the text, which is a key component of the user interface. You can see the enwiki-specific parts of that in our message updates.
As part of that text work, we are also considering changing the name of the English Wikipedia deployment from Flagged Protection to something more easily comprehended by the general public. If you'd like to weigh in on the many options, go to Wikipedia talk:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions/Terminology.
The main thing standing between us and being able to give a release date is some trouble with part of the UI. If you're a HTML & CSS guru, we could use your help.
We also fixed a bug this week. Thanks to Sonia, who found and reported that bug. Want to emulate her? Start here.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 05:32, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
Just out of curiosity, does anybody know what percentage of all the Wikipedia articles have a stub tag? Thank you.— RJH ( talk) 18:17, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
I transformed from the "Laszlo Garai" the following paragraph
into a new item "Specifically human basic need". This was in a couple of hours deleted, although it has been referred to a monograph published by the Hangarian Academic Press, a paper entitled "The specifically human basic need" and published by the review of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and an annotated list of the further writing in the topic and published by the above mentioned Academy. Consequently, I claim the immediate redtoration of the article in question. Szalagloria ( talk) 19:38, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
I was going to make an article, but I then realized that I didn't know how to set up the main format for making the articles. I know how to get to the point to make it, but I need a guide to the formatting, and I haven't been able to find it yet. Can I receive some help, please? Tetobigbro ( talk) 21:14, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
What is the correct accessdate= for a reference being filled by a bot — the original date the citation was added or the day the bot retrieves the page? Say a user placed {{citeweb|url=myurl.com}} on April 1, 2008. Along comes a bot on May 10, 2010 and fills in some info: {{citeweb|url=myurl.com|title=cool page|work=myUrl}}. So should the bot place the current date in? How can it know the contents did no change since? After all, the original author referenced material in 2008. Cheers! — Hellknowz ▎ talk 16:57, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
Further question: Is it acceptable for a bot to fill in the access date the url was added? So the bot would check revisions, find the addition and mark that date. I assume this is the day the user actually accessed the content. The only possible problem is that the user may expand the article from the same source at a later date; however the editors usually do not update accessdates anyway. — Hellknowz ▎ talk 20:58, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
I'm so lost. I have been trying to make a subpage and I am following the directions as best as I can, but I keep ending up where I started. Can someone tell me how to make a subpage?
Also, I was looking up a few articles and following links and noticed that many of them lead back to a Wikiproject. I was going to join a certain one, but I couldn't figure out how they made a certain signature. Instead of it just saying-(talk)-theirs also had a contributions button beside it. How do I make that certain signature?
If there is any way this is possible, is there a place that I can go to just to see every guideline plainly and simply, perhaps in just a list? If someone could show me this it would be much appreciated. Tetobigbro ( talk) 23:21, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
About a third of the archive pages listed at Wikipedia:Files for deletion/Log appear to have been blanked. Why? ╟─ Treasury Tag► belonger─╢ 11:28, 30 May 2010 (UTC)
Can anyone give me instructions on using the external editor? (mentioned in prefs) ~ Qwerp Qwertus · _Talk_· _Contribs_· The Wiki Puzzle Piece Award 02:58, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Hi, is there anyone with access to Jstor who could retrieve this article?
Graham Petrie (1970) A Rhetorical Topic in "Tristram Shandy", Modern Language Review, 65, 261-66
If so I would get in contact privately, I need it for the article on Tristram Shandy.-- Sum ( talk) 09:00, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Hey, I was wondering if there was any way to directly link User subpages directly to your userpage so that it would be easier to go straight to them. If anyone can help, thanks. Tetobigbro ( talk) 22:12, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Use {{User subpages|Tetobigbro}}
... –
xeno
talk
22:14, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Result:
Thanks, that helps a lot. Tetobigbro ( talk) 22:21, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
What is wikipedia take, on article about a word example Edilma? I put it up for 7 day deletion and HJ Mitchell removed tag after on the 8th day with this as the edit summary (decline PROD. We have many articles on names. Take to AfD if desired). So are articles about names deleted or not? I don't want to waste time trying to have it deleted if not the done thing. Blackash have a chat 08:49, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
Hi, I just realized it is my one year anniversary. Is there some sort of birthday candle or some other icon or badge I can now put on my user page to celebrate this? Yworo ( talk) 22:10, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
I pointed out at m:Commercialization that for-profit entities benefit from market signals that tell them whether they are doing well. E.g., a private company has financial statements that reflect whether its earnings are going up or down, and its stock price reflects what investors think are the present value of the future cash flows that firm will generate. Wikimedia, on the other hand, doesn't seek to maximize income from operations, and it has no stock price because ownership is not for sale.
So then, what signals can we use to assess whether we're doing a good job? We could look at popularity statistics, e.g. number of page views and number of edits. But the effectiveness of those measures in pointing us in the right direction seems to be undermined by the fact that any downturns are explained away. E.g., management basically tells the media, "We've managed the site so well that now we're victims of our own success, and don't need as many edits and new articles as we did in the past." There might be some truth in that, but only because we've arbitrarily restricted the scope of the site to the point where we really are running short on new notable topics that people want to write about.
I theorize that the project is so big now that individual members of the community have trouble seeing the big picture and assessing how well the overall project is doing and what is best for the overall project. E.g., a person who focuses on new page patrol may see that new pages deemed undesirable are not showing up as frequently, and that when they do show up, they are deleted quickly; and view that as an indicator of success. Is that a sign of overall health of the project, though, or could the project be in the beginning stages of stagnation? It could be a little of both.
So then, how do we judge whether a new initiative (e.g. FlaggedRevs) is good or bad for the project overall? The most visible signs, such as vandalism, may be improved by something, but there may be less visible costs, e.g. hindering of collaboration or discouraging of new users. Debates seem to devolve into speculation most of the time, rather than being based on hard evidence, and what little evidence there is doesn't really take the big picture into consideration, as it only addresses some concerns and not others. Tisane ( talk) 12:20, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
Just about every piece of news lately says about Pixar films:
If there are many, that almost definitely means that this is right. However, Bovineboy2008 says that Wikipedia is supposed to accept without proof:
What decides what Wikipedia is supposed to accept without proof?? Please give a detailed answer, as well as examples about more random things. Georgia guy ( talk) 14:31, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
The Spanish Wikipedia has an extensive discussion of the genre rap metal, which is listed as a GA there. Can anyone who speaks Spanish translate this article and incorporate it into the English version? ( Sugar Bear ( talk) 00:03, 3 June 2010 (UTC))
Can some people look over this? I think it's being archived at excessive speed, seemingly to hide previous discussions from view. 76.66.193.224 ( talk) 05:14, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
Hi, I've been on here for a while & don't usually log in- am I able to transfer my edits from my IP address to my user? Also, have noticed a new editor adding information with no references/purely specualtive & personal opinion. Am I able to message him pointing him towards the rules, if so how would I do that? Aurelius2007 ( talk) 10:14, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
I put an important HTML comment at the start of every Wikipedia article in the list at the Trans woman article, but I got a message I originally didn't see that there was a more complete list at List of transgender people. Anyone able to complete the assignment on putting this HTML comment at the start of all Wikipedia articles about trans women?? (With only those in the list at the Trans woman article, it already was busy work that made me tired; it took 25 minutes.) Georgia guy ( talk) 22:12, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
Assume the following situation: An article with some stub tag and with no categories i.e. no [[Category:foo]]. The stub tag generates a non-hidden category. Do we still tag the article as uncategorised? I expect "no" as an answer since the article has been categorised somehow.
Assume now the following situation: An article with the general stub tag and with no categories i.e. no [[Category:foo]]. The stub tag generates a non-hidden category. Do we still tag the article as uncategorised? I expect "yes" as an answer since the article hasn't been categorised at all.
Any other opinions? We would like to implement the following in WP:AWB. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 21:07, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Pending Changes update.
The big news is that we have picked a date for releasing the new version of Flagged Revisions and launching the trial of Pending Changes on the English Wikipedia: June 14.
I'd like to stress that this will be a trial. The goal is to learn, which means that things will not be perfect at launch. There are many areas where we hope to verify our current work and see what improvements can be made:
We think we have something that is workable as is, and have notions for possible improvements down the road. To know what improvements are the right ones, we'll need real use and community feedback. We intend to respond speedily to community concerns and lessons learned from actual use. To that end we aim to keep to the same weekly release schedule that we've been using on labs these last few months.
More mundanely, the work completed this week includes ops documentation, the completion of the terminology work, and some interface improvements. We've also had some vigorous testing done by the folks at Calcey, who discovered a few bugs for us.
If you'd like to see the current condition of things, you can try it here.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, , after which we intend to go live on the English Wikipedia.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 06:01, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
As part of testing/vetting the planned organization for WP:Research and WP:SRAG, proposed research and recruitment guidelines for academics to interact with Wikipedia(ns), we (SRAG) are running a trial on a new study and are inviting participation from the community. See Wikipedia:Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group/Requests/Political_Knowledge_Production for a description of the study and discussion about its details. Please don't hesitate to participate. -- EpochFail( talk| work) 15:57, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
Hi, this is just a notice that I have opened a brfa for an adminbot to delete images that are available as identical copies on the Wikimedia Commons per WP:CSD#F8 -- Chris 10:14, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
I recently formed a new userbox, but I don't know what to do now. How do I make it become a userbox like all the others? Regards, Tetobigbro talk 04:06, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Pending Changes update.
We proceed boldly toward launch. The main update is that we have pushed the English Wikipedia launch back one day to Tuesday, June 15. That will let us avoid stepping on the WP Academy Israel event, and it means Jimmy Wales will be available to talk to the press, which in turn will yield a better public understanding of Pending Changes.
However, we will still be rolling the new FlaggedRevs code into production on Monday, June 14th (circa 4 pm Pacific, or 23:00 GMT). We hope that this, aside from some minor UI improvements, will pass unnoticed on the project currently using FlaggedRevs. If there are bugs, we look forward to hearing about them via the usual channels, including #wikimedia-tech. Minor bugs will be fixed in place; any major issues will result in a quick rollback to the existing code.
More prosaically, we had a number of bits of work verified complete this week, including a number of little bugs. Our thanks to the German community for their diligent testing of a labs instance of the German configuration.
If you'd like once last chance to see what's coming, try the latest code updates
on our labs site.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 23:58, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
In addition, there are a few remaining issues to settle, such as usage of flagged protection/pending changes, please see
Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Flagged revisions trial. We also need to finalize documentation pages among other things, any help would be appreciated. Thanks,
Cenarium (
talk)
03:28, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
Hi, I have sad news from the French Wikipedia. I was blocked indefinite last year and I have recently propose to be unblocked. (I don't speak French very well, but I've tried to request in French). I have only apologized and asked for unblock (in French; I was blocked by user:Nakor). Answer was protecting my talk page on edit=sysop level and blanking it (by one administrator). What I can do now? See fr:User_talk:Aleksa_Lukic. Aleksa Lukic ( talk) 12:20, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
Is there an article or section somewhere regarding the parade in Chicago today? My understanding is that the turnout was substantial (~2million). Perhaps someone could help us get images of it off flickr, or somewhere else? Thanks in advance! --- kilbad ( talk) 02:41, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
An open Wikimedia discussion (on IRC) is proposed for the coming week; input is requested on the time and agenda. – SJ + 08:02, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
I don't see anything in the text at File:LizzieVanZyl.jpg which says that this photo is of Lizzie Van Zyl. It just relates a story about her. Can we reliably claim that this is her? Everard Proudfoot ( talk) 22:44, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
Yes, it's her. I've seen her on this photo before, on the page about the Second Bour War.-- Nvlado ( talk) 23:11, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
As of now, it seems the majority of music album articles with external links to Rolling Stone reviews are actually linking to 404 pages. For example, this is supposed to be a review for David Bowie's Low. In a lot of cases, the original reviews may not exist anymore on the RS site. Shouldn't there be some kind of cleanup? Bjones ( talk) 03:49, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
Hey, I was wondering, how do you add pictures to certain things...such as userboxes,infoboxes,etc. Tetobigbro talk 02:12, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
image
or similar that you can use. You should look at the template's documentation, for example if you want to know how add image to {{Infobox book}}
look at the page
Template:Infobox book.Actually, I was just wondering if there was a...I don't know...a code I guess, that you could insert. For example, I already have found an image, what do I need to type to make it appear? Tetobigbro talk 02:40, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
http://corp.kaltura.com/ The name of the company and the link are now provided at the end of every video, like for example in the Tourette's syndrome article (I have enabled the wmEmbed gadget). Is this an example of advertising in Wikipedia? Has it been payed for? Is it in accordance with the mission of a neutral, non-profit website which aims to educate? -- Eleassar my talk 17:15, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
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I need quick/immediate translation from German to English for the article de:Böhmisch-Rixdorf. The reason: see m:Chapters meeting 2010/Berlin activities for the stranded#April 20, 2010 - i.e. tomorrow, it would be nice to make some print copies for them so that they do not have to listen to me only :-). If somebody translate it: please inform me on the German Wikipedia - de:User:-jkb-. Thanks, -jkb- ( talk) 13:53, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Just a quick note I thought I would drop regarding Template talk:Userpage. There's an ongoing discussion about a possible change to this widely-used template. I encourage anyone to get involved in the discussion. -- Shirik ( Questions or Comments?) 19:40, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Could somebody take a look at International Business Entry Modes? Entirely written by several editors who have no other edits, this looks like some sort of textbook, I'm not sure it's an encyclopedia article, and the capitalizing of the title is certainly wrong, if nothing else. Woogee ( talk) 21:39, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Sorry because my english is bad, but I didn't find the Village pump destined to non-english speakers. I work on fr.wikipedia, and I saw there was a copyright violation in the french article, from the website ( here in french and here in english). I think there's the same problem in the english article. Thanks you, Kvardek du ( talk) 12:58, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Paragraph three line one of the "Antonin Scalia" article reads in part, "Scalia was appointed by Reagan to the role of Supreme dumbass". I presume this has been hacked, but I don't know whom to tell about it...I'm not a registered user, so I can't correct it myself. I am not a Scalia supporter by any means but a factual article shouldn't contain sophomoric graffiti. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.92.140.23 ( talk) 16:36, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Attention Wikipedia. New article in First Monday journal discusses your featured article process. Please see [1]. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.228.78.160 ( talk) 19:31, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
The report indicates that FA is a MOS grade, not a content quality grade. Skäpperöd ( talk) 14:01, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
I added an {{unsourced section}} tag to a section of a college article which listed 13 alumni as "notable alumni", none of which had a source to verify that claim. Another editor came in, added sources for four of the 13, then removed the unsourced tag. When I asked why, they said that since they had added sources to 4 of 13, the section was no longer unsourced, and it was incumbent upon me to add the {{fact}} tag to all of the others. Wonderful. What happens when we get huge lists of people, such as List of Columbia University alumni, or some such, which have no sources (I'm not saying my example has that), if somebody adds one source to one person in the list? Is it now incumbent on somebody else to have to {{fact}} every other single person in the list? Woogee ( talk) 05:02, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Goods is redirected to good (economics) and the article is about goods in economics and accounting. I found that in the legal area, "goods" can be defined in a different way.
For example, in the Sale of Goods Act 1979 s. 61, "goods" includes all personal chattels other than things in action and money, and in Scotland all corporeal moveables except money; and in particular "goods" includes emblements, industrial growing crops, and things attached to or forming part of the land which are agreed to be severed before sale or under the contract of sale; [and includes an undivided share in goods;] (see the original text). Also according to the law of Hong Kong, in the Cap 362 s 2 Interpretation of TRADE DESCRIPTIONS ORDINANCE, "goods" includes vessel and aircraft, things attached to land and growing crops (see the original text). Therefore, some economic goods such as land and residential property are not goods by these definition.
I would like to add these definition to Wikipedia, but I'm afraid that the article good (economics) is not the suitable place as "economics" is used as the disambiguating word for the title. Should I rename it or do something else? -- Quest for Truth ( talk) 15:26, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
(EC)
Wikipedia talk:Words to watch#RFC. There's a proposal to merge several pages as part of a project to streamline the MoS. One part of the proposal is to merge Words to avoid, Avoid peacock terms, Avoid weasel words, and Avoid neologisms into a new page, Words to watch ( W2W). Fresh input would be appreciated at the RfC. SlimVirgin talk contribs 00:46, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
The Times (and The Sunday Times) web site is being restructured and going behind a paywall in early May. It will be available on free trial till sometime in June, when content will be charged for. [2] It's not clear whether current links will still work, even if paid for. Ty 07:59, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
It would be useful if a bot could produce a list of "Bare URL" links to the Times or Sunday Times (should be findable by URL) so that these could be flagged up and, with luck, turned into proper references before the Paywall starts. PamD ( talk) 18:15, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
There are just over 21,000 links on wikipedia to http://www.thetimes.co.uk at the moment. [3] Ty 02:19, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
I've received an acknowledgement of receipt of my email, and a response is being prepared. Ty 00:57, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
American journo Edwin Black has published an article about Wikipedia, The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge. It's a bit long, but folks might be interested to see how some people view the project. Chzz ► 13:53, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
Take a look at the strewn wreckage from his encounter at History of IBM. I added a thread at the bottom suggesting that they resolve their differences at an article, IBM during World War II. Wonder if that's something you'd support. Andrew Gradman talk/ WP:Hornbook 16:22, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
I noticed that on Special:DeletedContributions, when a non-admin is viewing it, the first line says "The action you have requested is limited to Administrators, researcher." The thing that confuses me is why it says "researcher" at the end of it. Is this a problem, or was it always there? If it isn't supposed to be there, please fix it. Thank you. -- Ha dg er 01:47, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
While I was NPPing a while ago, I saw some articles that were non-notalbe, and decided to click on them. Before I tapped the mosue though, I saw that the pre-made edit summary (-Created page with...) had a speedy tag plopped down before the text. I checked the history on that article and others, and there was only one edit, which was the creator (not the same one on all of them). Has anyone else seen this, as I think it's weird. Buggie111 ( talk) 03:31, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
As a frequent user (reader) of Wikipedia, I often am searching it for obscure things, whether using the wikipedia search function, or google with '+wikipedia'. A frequent frustration is when the results (both methods) are swamped with results that are articles about fiction. I don't want these. Is there a way to filter out articles about fiction? If not, would it help this desire if all articles about fiction (including fictional universe games) were categorised as "about fiction" or were tagged with a phrase that could be used to exclude it. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 06:13, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
I'm not sure if I'm in the right place, but I need help with this image. A while ago, I put a watermark on the image, not knowing that that was a bad thing to do. I'm now trying to fix my mistake, in removing the watermark. I uploaded a version of the image without the watermark, but it was still present in the image preview and in the articles the image is in. I tried again, except I uploaded the oldest version, thinking that this would fix problem. Again, the image preview and the articles the image is in still displayed the newest version, but, when I clicked on the image to view the full resolution, it brought up the version I had just uploaded. I then tried to revert back to the oldest version of the image, but the same thing occurred. Can someone with a better understanding of this problem please help fix it? Thanks, Megan| talk contribs 19:24, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
In the wake of this NYT article, an editor has changed the "epistemic disclosure" page so it's no longer a redirect to Deductive closure; now it's a dab page.
I don't think this is appropriate. The NYT article itself states that Mr. Sanchez misused the term. ("Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.") I don't believe that one NYT article about one guy who misused a word [err, and a few people he inspired to follow suit] is enough for WP to say that he created a new meaning.
Thoughts? 128.59.181.17 ( talk) 01:41, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Wikimania 2010, this year's global event devoted to Wikimedia projects around the globe, is accepting submissions for presentations, workshops, panels, and tutorials related to the Wikimedia projects or free content topics in general. The conference will be held from July 9-11, 2010 in Gdansk, Poland. For more information, check the official Call for Participation. Cbrown1023 talk 22:10, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
Now recovered from the developer meeting, we have made further progress, and have only a few known issues between us and release.
If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start on our labs site.
To see what we've changed this week, check out the latest list of items completed.
We are very close now; only a few UI issues remain between us and final testing, after which will hopefully come a launch on the English Wikipedia.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William Pietri ( talk) 05:46, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Anybody else here loath bloated hatnotes? They are usually fluffy messages about redirects that are probably of no interest to 99% of the page visitors, and distract from the real meat of the article. It feels like having a sack of untidy junk sitting on the porch next to your front door. Sigh.— RJH ( talk) 16:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
This issue may be touched on in WP:D#Usage guidelines: "There is no need to add disambiguation links to a page whose name already clearly distinguishes itself from the generic term. For example, Solaris (1972 film) is clearly about one specific movie and not about any of the many other meanings of "Solaris". It is very unlikely that someone arriving there from within Wikipedia would have been looking for any other "Solaris", so it is unnecessary to add a link pointing to the Solaris disambiguation page. However, it would be perfectly appropriate to add a link to Solaris (novel) (but not, say, Solaris (operating system)) to its "See also" section." - DavidWBrooks ( talk) 19:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
{{dablink|Mom, Mommy, Moms, and Mum redirect here. For other uses, see [[Mom (disambiguation)]], [[Mommy (disambiguation)]], [[Moms (disambiguation)]], and [[Mum (disambiguation)]].}} {{redirect|Motherhood|the 2009 comedy film|Motherhood (film)}} {{redirect|Mothering|the bimonthly parenting magazine|Mothering (magazine)}} {{For|other uses|Mother (disambiguation)}}
{{For|other uses of Mother and terms redirecting here|Mother (disambiguation)}}
In the course of researching the House Energy and Commerce Committee, I came across two wikis that contain encyclopedic information that ours lacks: sourcewatch.org, and opencongress.org.
Why do people bother to create other encyclopedic wikis that compete with Wikipedia? The founders of those sites could better accomplish their organization's mission of transparency if they just import their content into wikipedia and shut themselves down.
Until such time as they do, are there any restrictions on Wikipedians porting in the content themselves? The sites use a creative commons & gnu license, respectively. Andrew Gradman talk/ WP:Hornbook 14:46, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
Hi. Is there any tool that lists all fair-use images that are used in templates, user pages, etc? -- Bojan Talk 14:33, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
We continue to work on UI display issues and on getting up a Labs version of the German Wikipedia. We're pretty close to release, and we believe only minor UI issues remain before final testing.
If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start on our labs site.
To see the upcoming and in-progress work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William Pietri ( talk) 21:23, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
From Morningside Heights: "Morningside Heights is bounded by the Upper West Side to the south, ... The streets that form its boundaries are 110th Street on the south, ..."
From Upper West Side: "The Upper West Side ... lies above West 59th Street and below West 86th Street".
Knowing the proper answer to this question is essential in formulating a proper craigslist post! Thanks :) 128.59.179.81 ( talk) 23:29, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Given the need to reference facts in an article (which I understand and support), the amount of space those references take up in the over-all size of the article can become extensive. As an example, Glee (TV series) has 125 references and it takes up about 1/3 of lenght of the article. Also, the External links and templates gets lost below the screens of references. I am wondering if it is possible to "hide" the references section or move it below the links and templates. Given the homogeny of the section order, at least at the ends of articles, on the pages, I wondered if there was a technical reason for the reference section to appear before the external links? Thanks. -- Jordan 1972 ( talk) 22:53, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
.references {display: none;}
That suppresses the list of references when {{ reflist}} is called. – MuZemike 23:21, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
This is exactly what I was looking for... thanks so much. -- Jordan 1972 ( talk) 00:33, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
I am trying to look more "professional" since I will be requesting copyright permission to use a photograph. User:Malik Shabazz/Requesting free content says that I should have a good user page to make a good first impression. Therefore, I made some changes to it. Compare my old page with my new page. What do you think; am I on the right track? PleaseStand (talk) 00:44, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
That is: Add the term "
myth" to the explicit list of terms in
WP:LABEL.
Ironically, Village pump itself tends to contrast "myth" with "fact". While Wikipedia should certainly allow the term "myth" when its academic/technical sense is plain (or when quoting a work, of course), the word "myth" should be explicitly listed at
WP:LABEL and the policy at
WP:WTA#Myth_and_legend should even more explicitly discourage other use of the term "myth". The term's use on Wikipedia has been contentious for years, and there are plenty of less ambiguous, less contentious terms for any particular sense of "myth" to be communicated. See also
WT:WTW#Myth, and
WP:Village pump (policy)#Clarifying WP:RNPOV (or at its likely
archive). --
AuthorityTam (
talk)
15:19, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
People might like to compare what's said about "fundamentalist" at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/FAQ#Religion. Peter jackson ( talk) 09:54, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Has anyone else noticed that "aluminum" is incorrectly and consistently spelled "aluminium." Is Wikipedia British, or is it vandalism?
I'd like to suggest a guideline should be deleted. Where should I list it, as it'll need some community discussion? Grandiose ( me, talk, contribs) 10:58, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Why do administrator actions such as blocking a user and deleting an article not show up in the users contributions? Immunize ( talk) 18:30, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Am I being silly- or should this be debated. Today I have just watched a slew of articles on my watchlist having another interwiki link added. I use these links- gleaning details from fr: de: es: nl: and other real languages, to cross verify an article. So look at Calvisson, something called war: was added, this appears as Winaray. Then look at Lecques, and we see the exact same template- no attempt even to translate the Infobox, or even to copy the images. So what is Winaray- well, this redirects to Waray-Waray which appears to be a dialect of Cebuano spoken by 3.1 million people, in the Phillipines. Assuming that all 3.1 million folk, are avid Wikipedians bereft of language skills in French, Spanish or Catalan- don't they at least deserve a stub with an infobox. Now the other mystery is Volapuk, a language with 20 speakers- this time the Infobox has been split in two and half appears in the lede. So, what is the point? They just waste screen real-estate, and appear to me to be a bot writers joke. Conversely, to put a interwiki link on the minority language page to the fr: catalan, and es page could be useful. If policy is needed: Links are only made when the page has reached start level, or where 0.1% of the subjects of the page speaks the language. There you are. Discuss.-- ClemRutter ( talk) 19:55, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I recently learned about http://www.webcitation.org, and so I was really glad to see that there have been previous discussions ( [6] [7] [8]) about creating a bot that takes WP's external links, feeds them through webcitation.org, and ADDS the the result alongside the external links, as backups. I have two questions, which I'm going to deliver in two sub-threads.
I'm wondering if someone who's been involved in the process of creating a Webcitation.org bot, can give the VPM community an update on the status of this proposal? Could use any help to make it succeed? - user:Agradman, editing (for complicated reasons) as 160.39.221.164 ( talk) 06:09, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
I'd also like to start a discussion about the pros and cons of WikiMedia foundation creating its own version of Webcite. I say "pros and cons" because am hoping for a discussion in the spirit of a brainstorming session. If I wanted to get my idea shot down I would have posted it at WP:VPP. :)
I see the main Con being Cost. I don't know what that cost would be. But I am hoping it would be offset by the benefits. Linkrot is a constant problem. But Webcitation.org has been known for experiencing downtime (e.g. RIGHT NOW). Whenever that happens, people starting removing links from articles. It would be valuable if we had control over our backup service.
Of course, a lot of details would have to be worked out (e.g., do we make this resource available to the general public, as Webcitation.org has done?). We can talk about those details, but I just want to ask that we not think of those details as Cons ... we should think of them as details. - user:Agradman, editing (for complicated reasons) as 160.39.221.164 ( talk) 06:09, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
All right -- my take-away from the discussion so far is,
(1) Never break one thread into two sub-threads.
(2) If we were to emulate webcitation.org, it would only make sense if those folks were willing to give us their code. Or their business. (Maybe we should ask. Once we get our bot up and running, we would immediately become their #1 consumer by an exponential margin.)
(3) The people at
User_talk:WebCiteBOT#User:WebCiteBOT.2FStats seem to be on top of the process of recruiting people with free time and bot-coding-skills, to assist with the bot, or to create a second bot. I CAN'T WAIT!! this bot is so awesome!!!
-
user:Agradman editing for today as
128.59.179.246 (
talk)
05:03, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Somebody please check out the recent edits of a Wikipedian who claims that Kama Chinen died without providing a source. Georgia guy ( talk) 15:00, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
To find out what Dialectic means, looking it up on Wikipedia is not advisable. May be someone can remove some fog? Talk:Dialectic#Completely_puzzled Joepnl ( talk) 21:31, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Hello, i have 2 templates that are questionable. {{ Mureş County}} ( at this article) and this one. Both are in violation with basic naming policy and WP:NAME, WP:PLACE. Also it violates the basic conception of the idea of template, a template has to be short and informative not cramped with alternative names. Both templates are introduces silently and not to mention that in Romania only 6.5% of the population is Hungarian or Szekely so minority names are constantly forced by this user like he tried to do here even if the only official language spoken by the 93%+ of the population is Romanian. Also every other template uses one official language even if more languages are official like in Vojvodina and others. Can i get some advice on this? Thank you. iadrian ( talk) 13:04, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
The main news is that the team had a meeting this week with Danese and Erik to discuss rollout plans. Everybody concurs that we're close enough to launch to start a few release-related activities:
This will pull in a variety of people, all of whom we're excited to have involved, including Tim, Jay, Moka, Rob L., Rob H, and even Mike G. a bit. Adam has also offered us to help us solve some cross-browser CSS issues that have been confounding us, for which we are grateful. Keep an eye out for activity relating to these efforts in the coming days and weeks.
The actual release schedule depends on a number of factors, including the results of testing, the speed with which we resolve a couple of remaining UI difficulties, and the extent to which community testing on Labs turns up new issues.
Speaking of which, if you'd like to try out the current software, start on our labs site. Lest you think it has achieved perfection, both User:Tango and Eper turned up interesting issues just this week. Thanks to them and the other testers!
To see what we've changed this week, check out the latest list of items completed.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William Pietri ( talk) 06:08, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Eddie_Rabbitt/1 This has been sitting at WP:GAR since March and no one seems to be pushing either way. Can someone please SAY something at it so we can get something going there? Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ( Many otters • One bat • One hammer) 22:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Hello, I am an administrator of the Basque Wikipedia (eu) and we have implemented the flag template system from the English Wikipedia into our wiki. In the country data XXX templates we have added an extra parameter (as you can see for example in eu:txantiloi:Herrialde info Gibraltar). We want that in a template put that extra parameter (called "nongo"). In English would be "Geography of Gibraltar", but in Basque "Gibraltarko geografia" (that -ko means of). I think I haven't explained myself correctly, here an invented example:
By typing {{geography stub|GIB}}
Gibraltarko geografia |
--->
[[{{{nongo}}}|{{{alias}}}]] geografia |
Can anyone help us? Is it possible to do it?-- An13sa ( talk) 08:58, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
I am wary to incur the wrath of regulars on these high-profile articles by removing these nice pics, but IMO we shouldn't use pictures such as this and many (really many) others, taken in a certain place, to illustrate various random locations (such as Iran, Albania, Sweden, Aggtelek National Park, Tâmpa, Braşov, Prokletije, Lura Mountain, Republic of Macedonia, Geography of the Cucuteni–Trypillian culture and so on). In my opinion, the fact that the species of animals and plants in question presumably occur there is not enough to warrant inclusion of such pictures, often taken in other parts of the world. It would be like illustrating the article on Greeks with a picture of Spaniards taken in Spain, as long as they are all humans. Thoughts?
Colchicum ( talk) 15:23, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Cifrão is a dollar sign with two vertical lines. I would like to change to $ which I believe will work on most (all?) windows and MacOs X systems. I don't know if Linux installations have Garamond. Is this a sensible edit to do? -- SGBailey ( talk) 14:43, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
... whose input is a page name, and whose output is a URL to the most recent version of that page?
So for example, {{lastchange|dog}} would generate http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dog&oldid=360687969, which I got by clicking on "Permanent link" at the dog page.
The idea is that this would work by substitution, so that I could put it at the top of an edit whenever I make a comment on a talk page, so that people centuries hence know what version of teh page I was looking at.
user:Agradman, editing right now as 160.39.221.144 ( talk) 06:58, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
... to have a "New section" button which is pre-populated with some text?
I am thinking that the WikiProject banners (in article talk pages) could have a button that lets you edit a new section at the wikiproject, whose header is pre-populated with
RE: {{subst:freeze|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}: ...
.which renders as
Except that, instead of using {{FULLPAGENAME}}, it uses the name of the page you were coming from.
user:Agradman, editing as AConcernedChicken ( talk) 08:11, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
&preloadtitle=
–
xeno
talk
18:47, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
... to have a "new section" button which, when you're all done and hit "save", will also edit ANOTHER page, i.e. inserting a simple talkback template indicating that you've put your message on the first page?
I'm thinking this feature should be incorporated into the "new section" button described in the previous post. (All of this is apropos my proposal at VPD.
user:Agradman, editing for the moment as AConcernedChicken ( talk) 08:15, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
According to the {{ uw-mos4}} template series, it sounds as if you can eventually get blocked for a comma or something. If we enforced that, we would lose some of Wikipedia's most experienced editors, such as at this debate. If I actually used those templates, which I can't imagine using without further explanation, would the guy actually get predictably blocked after the fourth warning as if they were vandalism warnings? Or would everybody just laugh? In the latter case, should we delete the uw-mosx templates so nobody makes the mistake of using them? Art LaPella ( talk) 05:56, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
What is it with these guys who smash every tool they don't understand? Perhaps they don't see that they, personally, have any use for the tool? They pick up the tool by the wrong end, stare at it, bang it on the bench a couple times, and smash it. Why? Why is this tolerated?
I'm sick to death of seeing obnoxious messages on my Talk complaining about tools I built years ago. I've been extremely consistent in documenting what I've built, using yet another tool of my device, {{ doctl}}. It's obvious from the deletion nominations that people aren't even reading the docs. They check the inlinks and say, "It's unused." Well, most exotic templates are best substituted; you never will see any inlinks.
A well-stocked workbench or tool cabinet is full of rarely-used tools and tools whose purpose is not immediately clear. Some tools are mere refinements; you could do a job without them but they make the job just a little easier. Some tools are built for a single, immediate purpose and sit idly for years before a similar task arises. Some tools will be heavily employed by only a few users; some will be used by only one.
In a metal, wood, or auto shop, it's a potent argument in favor of throwing out or selling a tool that it takes up too much space and isn't used enough. Space is limited in any physical shop and each tool must justify its consumption of that space. But wiki is not even paper, let alone concrete and steel. This argument holds no water here.
Another argument says, this tool is broken or dangerous. Certainly, if a damaged or badly-built tool cannot be repaired, it must be discarded. I hope nobody reading this fails to see how silly this attitude is, in many cases, here on WP. I don't speak of the many, many "weapon" templates, which should be deleted as soon as assembled. Templates intended for constructive purposes may be flawed but rarely create an actual hazard. Fix them or leave them alone.
During my active editing time I built several tools and have watched most of them fall under the hammer of I don't understand it, therefore I will smash it. I will go so far as to say I don't really care about the senseless destruction itself. You should, if you're an active editor, if you think you have a stake in WP. I'm just irritated that it's brought to my attention. If active editors can't suppress this kind of foolishness, why is it thought that I can? I'd be much happier if the nasty little attack tags were left off my Talk.
Some of the tools I built have become popular; others have not. I don't consider the less-popular tools worthless any more than I consider a wheel cylinder hone worthless, simply because I don't rebuild brakes. I get a lot of use out of a combination screwdriver but I wouldn't grab one on the way out of a burning building.
The only tool I have built here that I have truly regretted is {{ divbox}}. This was badly conceived and built without the modern conditional template syntax; it has been transcluded endlessly, all over this project; and it has been used to build a procession of silly tag templates. I built it in hopes of standardizing the little colored boxes and it has only accelerated the explosion. I tinkered awhile with a more sophisticated approach before I realized that I was only contributing to the tag problem. For this, I'm truly sorry.
If there is one tool of mine that desperately needs to be deleted, it's divbox. But is this nominated? No. It's stupid, therefore everyone understands immediately what it does and what it's for. It's Widely Used; therefore It Is Good.
So long as I can still find useful info quickly, I'm going to browse WP. I'm not going to throw myself under the wheels, though. Now let me be, please, and leave the nasty little tags off of my Talk. If you want to let the kids root through the toolbox and smash everything they think isn't pretty, fine. But tell them to leave me out of it.
— Xiong 熊 talk * 22:39, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Talk:Bishop Hill (blog)#Straw poll. Fresh eyes would be appreciated at an RfC to decide whether to merge Bishop Hill (blog), an article about a climate-change-skepticism blog, into a BLP about the man who operates the blog, Andrew Montford, or to merge the BLP into the blog article. Or do neither and keep them as stand-alone articles. Many thanks, SlimVirgin talk contribs 04:42, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
I started the RfC Wikipedia:Requests for comment/BQZip01 nearly four weeks ago. In that time, I've seen considerable activity on other RfCs. However, on this RfC there's been virtually no activity. As it stands, there are no outside views by anyone. The other four currently active RfCs have an average of 7 outside views. I'm concerned that the basis of this dispute remains unresolved. I am not looking for yes/no people. I am looking for input, whatever your opinion may be. You are invited to participate in this RfC. Thank you, -- Hammersoft ( talk) 15:02, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Could you please explain why the clicks suddenly sky-rocket from nowhere in this article? Any idea what the reason is? Gun Powder Ma ( talk) 10:52, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
As an Internet dealer, I have become familiar with the U.S.P.S. Priority tape, which now is not available to United States Postal Service customers. The Priority (or Express) packing tape is of the highest quality with best gripping pwer I've discovered. Does anyone happen to know if there is a retail version of this same tape, available for purchase to the public under its own brand name? —Preceding unsigned comment added by DMPrdctns ( talk • contribs) 18:13, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
FYI, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) has been controversially merged into Gavin Menzies. An RfC has been opened on the issue, see Talk:1421: The Year China Discovered the World
You are invited to participate, as the book itself is a controversial topic, a wide audience of participation would be a good idea.
70.29.208.247 ( talk) 03:07, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Hi (I don't know if this is the right place for discussing this but) I thing this article is a kind of hoax. Such a thing doesn't exist (yet?) (at the bottom of the (MIT blog) reference article, one reads : the prototype produce 25 ...nanoWatts). (the 'hype' also pollutes the Atomic battery article). (but I am not a nuclear physicist...) -- Xofc ( talk) 13:16, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
I don't want to get into an edit war over this, but the first sentence of Center for Civic Education says that it's a "leading" non-profit ... . I added a citation needed tag, which the creator of the article removed without providing a source which proves that it's a leading anything. I restored the citation needed tag, and the article's creator added a link to the Center for Civic Education's own web page, which doesn't say it's a leading anything. What is my next step? Everard Proudfoot ( talk) 07:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
As I mentioned last week, we are starting pre-rollout activities while we finish up the last bits of development. Now that the successful launch of the new enwiki UI is out of the way, we will be getting together with Rob H. and the rest of the ops ninjas to discuss release dates.
Also upcoming is a final pass at the terms and text, some more fiddling with cross-browser CSS and JavaScript issues, some work with the community to figure out the remaining details of the community side of the trial (keep an eye on RobLa's activity there), and a call for the nice people at the German Wikipedia to try our shiny new software with their config and make sure we haven't broken anything for them. (Regarding that, if some German speaker reading this would like to help set up the test site, we could use a hand. Contact me via direct email.)
The discussion of rollout means that we think the software is, some minor nits aside, basically ready. Want to be sure? You can test it out on our labs site, and we'll even give you admin rights [1] to do so.
To see what we've changed this week, check out the latest list of items completed.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 05:26, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
[1] You know that you [2] have always wanted admin rights!
[2] Except those of you who already have them. But for you, we have a whole wiki that you can go wild on. You can even have a wheel war if you want and we won't tell a soul.
To me the IPA notation appears as arcane as, say, the Hausdorff–Young inequality looks to a non-mathematician. If you are lucky, then the IPA notation is linked to an unsourced descriptive page (in 'Wikipedia:' space[!]). (It isn't linked, for example, on the David Hilbert article.) You can then attempt to figure out what each of the IPA symbols means by flipping back and forth between the pages.
Doesn't the IPA notation fall under WP:Jargon? Would it be out of bounds to tag each of the IPA pronunciation entries with a {{ clarify}} tag? Thanks.— RJH ( talk) 14:42, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
The article Special:UsabilityInitiativePrefSwitch, which I guess is now linked from all pages, violates the Manual of Style in at least three respects. This is a special article but I see no reason for that to require these violations.
1. The article title should appear or be mentioned in the article: in a normal article it would appear or be paraphrased in the WP:LEAD#Opening paragraph. In this case I think it would make more sense to change the title rather than the contents, i.e. intead of Special:UsabilityInitiativePrefSwitch it should be Special:New features, the way the first heading reads; or perhaps that phrase combined with a date. I was actually surprised to see that that was not its real title when I went to link to it from here.
2. It uses the peacock language "we are excited to share".
3. In violation of WP:MOSNUM#Precise language, it doesn't say when the new features were new. And the page doesn't even have an edit history (why not?), so it's not possible to tell when it was created to announce the features.
Could someone with appropriate authority please attend to these points or explain why it is unreasonable to do so? -- 70.48.232.24 ( talk) 20:47, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I watch alot of rollercoaster videos, but I want to actually feel the motion in them using some form of mental motion simulation, which requires that I trick my brain. So, which perceptive parts of my brain should I trick? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Racecarlock ( talk • contribs) 23:24, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
The most part of articles about historical topics (biographies, decades-long events, specific events resolved a few days or a single day, etc.) is a summary of the step-by-step events within the topic. But what should be done when a same point is described in different ways by different historians? (for example, whenever the leader of a revolution was initially seeking independentism, small changes in domestic policies, or just personal power). It's clear that, to follow the neutral point of view, this must be done by atributing the views to the reliable authors that hold them, with inline citations and all the stuff. But there are 2 alternatives: the dispute may be described at the point where it took place, or at a later specific section. The problem is that, unless the dispute is general enough as to be about the whole topic (and then a specific section becomes justifiable), describing it at the point where it takes place may distract the reader and lost the focus on the event itself, while a stand-alone section for disputes may seem redundant if they focus on something that has been already explained some sections above. So, which one should be the approach? MBelgrano ( talk) 11:55, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Dear Wikipedians,
Wikimedia Commons is happy to announce that the 2009 Picture of the Year competition has now opened. Any user registered at a Wikimedia wiki since 2009 or before with more than 200 edits before 16 January 2010 (UTC) is welcome to vote.
Over 890 images that have been rated Featured Pictures by the international Wikimedia Commons community in the past year are fighting to impress the highest number of voters. From professional animal and plants shots, over breathtaking panoramas and skylines, restorations of historically relevant images, images portraying world's best architecture, maps, emblems and diagrams created with the most modern technology and impressing human portrays, Commons features pictures for all flavours.
Check your eligibility now and if you're allowed to vote, you may use one of your accounts for the voting. The vote page is located at: Commons:Picture of the Year/2009/Voting.
Two rounds of voting will be held: In the first round, you can vote for as many images as you like. In the final round, when only 20 images are left, you must decide for one image to become the Picture of the Year.
Wikimedia Commons is looking forward for your decision in determinating the ultimate featured picture of 2009.
Thanks, Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year committee http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2009 -- The Evil IP address ( talk) 17:11, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
I am going to create a topic-of-interest wiki and would really appreciate anyone's suggestions for how to make it great.
So far, here is my thinking:
After the core is there, I'll publicize it in forums related to the topic of interest.
Anyone else have other ideas? I'm also working with a godaddy installation of mediawiki. I'd be appreciative if anyone has a good link for how to install extensions or create a village pump. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.197.42 ( talk) 00:00, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
Is there such a tool? It would be helpful for finding the inserting/deleting editor. Anthony ( talk) 01:20, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you. Anthony ( talk) 13:36, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
The Jerusalem Post has today (16 May) published an article on Wikipedia's treatment of the Israel-Palestine conflict. [9] Headed "Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on Wikipedia: Editors fight against anti-Israel ‘mobs'", the article claims that editors on Hebrew Wikipedia have been canvassed to take part in edit wars on English Wikipedia. In the discussion following the article, a correspondent urges "all Zionists" to follow the example of the Runtshit vandal, and to vandalise articles and attack editors described as "teams of anti-Semites, some who serve as senior editors on Wikipedia, including several British communists." RolandR ( talk) 18:58, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
You have a potential-editor's attention, and a laptop.
What 2 pages would you first navigate to, to demonstrate how Wikipedia works? (I'll give my own 2¢ later) -- Quiddity ( talk) 18:13, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Should citations be placed before or after a comma? See List_of_cutaneous_conditions#Monocyte-_and_macrophage-related. Should those citations come before or after the comma? Thanks again! --- kilbad ( talk) 02:20, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
Please, please, please don't segregate because i'm new!!! this is my signature: ~Monk ( Chat Harrass) 00:46, 19 May 2010 (UTC) tell me what you think!
When explaining wikipedia to people, I prefer to eat our own dog food. I think it's important to show that wikipedia is a usable source of information in this 21st century world.
However, lately, I've been running into trouble. Several concepts I use to explain wikipedia... are either no longer on wikipedia or much reduced.
Now some folks here might go WP:OR/WP:RS/WP:V and spin an entire spiel about how some articles don't deserve to be on wikipedia, etc etc, bla bla. Don't bother. I know that entire story by heart, backwards, forwards, upside down, with my eyes closed and both arms tied behind my back. I also understand the full reasoning. I was there when those policies were formed.
However, I'm not buying all of it in this case. Each of these articles clearly has an encyclopedic purpose. They are needed to understand wikipedia itself. Removing these articles is a bizarre form of self denial. It just doesn't wash.
It indicates that (some part) of the community apparently are going through the motions, but they're clearly not entirely convinced that wikipedia actually exists. :-P
So I'm going to stick my neck out and say that our policy went wrong with these articles, somehow. Can we figure out what went wrong and fix it?
-- Kim Bruning ( talk) 14:10, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
(undent)
1. I'll doublecheck OCP at your insistence. I had recalled that more sourcing existed. [The WP community has had to deal with several events that might be considered OCP or close to OCP in its history. Fortunately it survived.]
2. The implied redirect is false. The correct reference would be to Larry Niven's story. [Wikipedia operates by swarming (aka. flash crowd effect) on issues that need dealing with, either through watchlists, or due to recent events. ]
3. I think you may find that Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen were at least somewhat responsible for the concept of Lie To Children. ;-) H2G2 was the original source from which the article was obtained *AFTER* which additional sources and information was added. But removing mention of H2G2 as the starting point of the article is imo not permissible and borders on plagiarism. One might find that H2G2 is not always equally reliable, however, the contents of this particular h2g2 article does or did meet requirements for WP. [Wikipedia policy itself is a sort of Lie-To-Children. At some point, experienced users-> admins are supposed to learn that the actual manner in which wikipedia operates is through the consensus model. Also, when working on scientific articles, people sometimes don't understand that they were taught lies-to-children, and will have a tendency to edit articles incorrectly.]
4. let's hope so. the term has been in use for at least 2-3 decades, afaict. [this term describes the current issue at hand]
Here's the interesting part: I get the feeling you want to go back to the free-wheeling days when a content dump off the top of your head was a good way to begin an article - but we've moved beyond that.
I agree that this is the current orthodoxy on wikipedia. I am also aware why this was considered a good idea at the time. However, (for the fourth time now ;-) ), I am now not sure that this was such a good idea at all. Our current declining growth suggests that perhaps we haven't quite chosen the right path.
My issues in using wikipedia as a reference to explain wikipedia is an indication that -something- isn't quite right somewhere. Perhaps the issue lies not with wikipedia, but with academic/jouranlistic society in general not doing a good job of documenting important things; but I tend to believe that "everyone is crazy but us" is usually indicative of "us" being the crazy ones.
Though, to link another thread: Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources#Reliable sources— some of these babies are ugly, there are problems with some of the sources we've been thinking of as "reliable".
I would like to explore ways in which we can ensure that articles are correct, while having less of the negative side-effects we are experiencing. I think that the wiki-consensus model, in combination with NPOV actually go a long way towards that goal, even without RS, V, NOR. In fact, we know so, since we know that wikipedia operated superlatively without them; the only issue being our reputation for reliability. Having introduced RS, V, NOR; our reputation for reliability apparently hasn't changed all too much, but our growth has faltered.
A wiki acts like ratchet, with pages being created and slowly being improved over time, and not falling back (the traditional Eventualist position). With the current mode of editing and deletion on wikipedia, the ratchet is broken, and articles do fall back or end up deleted. This violates the fundamental assumptions behind why a wiki works, and leads to a decline in growth. Hence the decline we see in the statistics (QED).
So where do we go from here?
-- Kim Bruning ( talk) 20:25, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
User Jhex blacklotus has a strange userpage. As far as I see this content is completely fictional, including some sexual remarks about film producers (see personal life). He has uploaded several private joke images. He has no further edits. For me this text and the images are completely out of scope of wikimedia-projects. I stumbled upon his images in the commons. Plehn ( talk) 05:42, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks! I was to lazy to look up the history of the page. Plehn ( talk) 14:19, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
I have deleted the userpage, completely outside the scope of the namespace and the encyclopedia. Keegan ( talk) 06:47, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Ok, I'm sort of lost on what you are supposed to write on your userpage. I searched it and there were no real results. I assumed that you are supposed to write about yourself, but i wasn't sure. Can I receive some help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tetobigbro ( talk • contribs) 18:52, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Ok, so how do you get the stickers and other things on your pages? I've seen people with stickers and I noticed the eight ball on your page. When I try to copy and paste these types of things, they don't work, any help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tetobigbro ( talk • contribs) 19:35, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Remember, we're not here to make our userpages awesome; we're here to build an encyclopedia. Awesome userpages should be a secondary concern. OrangeDog ( τ • ε) 20:03, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I understand this, and I have edited an article already, I was wondering for future reference so that i would not be "In the Dark" on this. Tetobigbro ( talk) 20:14, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
I'm relatively new to Wikipedia and I'm having trouble understanding the layout of the site. I usually can understand websites well and I know that it shouldn't be too complicated, but some of this site seems overwhelming. I love this website for informational reasons, so I decided to create a profile. If anyone can offer some assistance, it would be much appreciated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tetobigbro ( talk • contribs) 19:08, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Ok, I understand this a bit better. I should've just tried it out first. Tetobigbro ( talk) 19:40, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Another user has generated a list of untagged derm-related redirects. I wanted to know if someone could help tag these redirect talk pages with
{{WPMED|class=redirect|importance=|dermatology=yes}}
? Perhaps there is an automated way to do this? Thanks in advance for your help! ---- kilbad ( talk) 00:49, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
The quick summary is that we are continuing with pre-rollout activities, including UI polish, text and naming cleanup, and rollout planning.
One important milestone passed is that Tim Starling has looked over the code and done some profiling and given it his blessing from a performance perspective. He and the rest of the ops folks feel like the production gear is also in good shape for rolling this out. However, to prevent unpleasant launch surprises we've put in a configurable limit to the number of pages protected with this. We'll start out at a limit of 2000 and bump it up based on actual production performance.
We believe we are technically ready to try out a labs version of the German config, just to double-check that our recent work will cause them no headaches. However, we need some German-speaker at least hazily familiar with FlaggedRevs to prepare the main page and help us with a call for testers. Any assistance there would be appreciated!
Speaking of assistance, we always welcome people trying out the extension before it goes live. You can do so on our labs site.
To see what we've changed this week, check out the latest of items completed.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 06:13, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
There's a troubling trend I think needs some attention... namely, attempts to use Wikipedia as a vehicle to legitimize questionable information. I direct the community's attention to this post, which I will now transcribe to save you an extra click (emphasis mine):
I don't edit nearly as much as I used to, but we've both been around here a while and dealt in some cases with controversial and political topics. I don't know if this is a new phenomenon, but based on the last two controversies at the Media Matters article, it seems that some editors are very determined to push memes from conservative media into the encyclopedia. The Hillary Clinton/George Soros thing is such an obvious non-issue to the mainstream press. I suppose that in a lot of ways, this isn't really new--there will always be stuff like this going on in one form or another. What troubles me is that these editors then claim that anyone who does not go along with their conservative meme is a liberal and therefore it's just some sort of political squabble. I don't know if this is happening with left-wing memes; if it is, I haven't seen it. My fear is that editors who don't recognize right-wing memes for what they are or editors who buy into the notion that this is just a political battle will end up unintentionally supporting these right-wing memes. For some people here, the notion that in any dispute, both sides should be forced to compromise is a powerful one. That has obvious deleterious effects when one side is just making shit up.
Before chalking anything up to a political tit-for-tat (the easy way out), read the statement again please. The gentleman has a point -- there seems to be a massive influx of conservative talking points into what should be an objective and balanced encyclopedia. Despite what some believe Fair & Balanced means, in the real world if there are 25 sources alleging the same crock of shit is true, and they're all Beck/Hannity/Limbaugh/Coulter sources (with no support from mainstream sources or academia), I don't think an encyclopedia should give equal weight to sources that seem to publish in bad faith or with the sole intent of generating revenue by firing up their base. I also direct the community attention to the first quote here, which states (in part):
While I'd say it's admirable to try to include all viewpoints and reach mass consensus, blindly seeking this end lets a vocal minority bog down reasonable POVs through technicality.
It would be easy to give the standard "it will work itself out in the end" answer, but I've been editing these tedious sorts of articles for well over half a decade and the issue raised here is becoming much more significant -- I've seen plenty of reasonable editors abandon trying to improve the POV target articles -- eventually, it's my concern that eventually the inmates will be running the asylum (pardon the terrible analogy). I'm not bringing up any particular content issue or event, but there are plenty of examples: Cornell is not the real Cornell, Hillary Clinton founded Media Matters, Obama is not a citizen, et cetera ad infinitum. I guess my point here is to try and start a discussion regarding the long-view effects to Wikipedia, their desirability, and the best way(s) to deal with such. Input is encouraged and appreciated -- any takers? // Blaxthos ( t / c ) 16:23, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
When video exists of the quote ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHTydb5js-E at about 2:15), of Secretary Clinton herself talking about "institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress." (Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/01/hillary-clinton-told-yearlykos-convention-she-helped-start-media-matt#ixzz0mnyMkVp3) then I would hardly put that issue in with WP:FRINGE things like idiots that believe the President wasn't born in Hawaii (there is a birth announcement in a local paper for him back then). What this "Cornell" argument you attempted to source (please provide real links to support your arguments, not non-sensical ones that a person has to dig for) has to do with anything I have no idea. The examples are not comparable. What you've set up is a strawman argument with the Media Matters issue built into these others when it clearly doesn't belong. Very disingenuous Blax. Rapier ( talk) 20:34, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
This website is an encyclopedia, correct? I realize that information must be given to make this encyclopedia. I have also realized, however, that some things are not included in this encyclopedia. So I am asking, is it wrong to create articles on people and things that are not famous or "important?" Any feedback would be much appreciated. Tetobigbro ( talk) 20:51, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
So if I were to, just as an example, write an article on myself or others I know, would it be worth the time or would it just be deleted? Tetobigbro ( talk) 21:09, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
a link in the List of sculptors to an article in the German wikipedia. Is this okay? Einar aka Carptrash ( talk) 19:45, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
I have created a request for comment on the flagged revisions trial, motivated by an unexpected, unannounced and publicly undiscussed change of configuration removing the reviewer usergroup. Please weigh in there. Cenarium ( talk) 12:58, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
There is an article about Tree shaping which talks about the real world practice of shaping tree trunks. Some fantasy text and art with references has crept into the article. I have created a new section within the article called Art and literature about Tree shaping. The section could easily have references to shaped trees that appeared in 1940s Mickey Mouse cartoons, Wizard of Oz's apple tree people and Winnie the Pooh's tree houses.
Should this section be created into a new article? What I wanted comments on, is the appropriateness of mixing a real-world practice and fanciful literature within the same article. Blackash have a chat 11:38, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
What will there be next? Star Destroyers under the heading "space"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Denting5 ( talk • contribs) 11:58, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
I am pleased to advise you that, effective immediately, requests for oversight/suppression will be accepted using the OTRS system. Please bear with us as the Oversight team becomes accustomed to this new method of receiving and replying to requests. We will strive to maintain timely service.
If you have found yourself reporting concerns to the oversight mailing list, please take a moment to add the new email address to your list of contacts: oversight-en-wpwikipedia.org
We look forward to continuing to work with the community in protecting the privacy of editors and others.
For the Oversight team,
Risker (
talk)
04:25, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
We're about to post an RfC. The dispute is over the accuracy of the article's definition of the term. We will tag various "pseudo-" categories but the dispute is about how to contrive the definition. Are there projects or categories with an interest in lexicography, or Wikipedia's policy on how to define terms? Anthony ( talk) 07:05, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Would this be the correct place to propose a Wiki-wide assessment drive, or should it be at WP:VPP or somewhere else?
Dear Sir,
My query is, can i give internal link of your website, to in our website.
Regards Alka Dujodwala <redact> —Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.143.10.136 ( talk) 09:22, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
The loose-end tidying and rollout prep proceeds apace. This week's rollout prep includes preparing for an emergency rollback, something that we don't expect will be necessary but for which we nonetheless need to be ready.
We've been working diligently on the text, which is a key component of the user interface. You can see the enwiki-specific parts of that in our message updates.
As part of that text work, we are also considering changing the name of the English Wikipedia deployment from Flagged Protection to something more easily comprehended by the general public. If you'd like to weigh in on the many options, go to Wikipedia talk:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions/Terminology.
The main thing standing between us and being able to give a release date is some trouble with part of the UI. If you're a HTML & CSS guru, we could use your help.
We also fixed a bug this week. Thanks to Sonia, who found and reported that bug. Want to emulate her? Start here.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 05:32, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
Just out of curiosity, does anybody know what percentage of all the Wikipedia articles have a stub tag? Thank you.— RJH ( talk) 18:17, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
I transformed from the "Laszlo Garai" the following paragraph
into a new item "Specifically human basic need". This was in a couple of hours deleted, although it has been referred to a monograph published by the Hangarian Academic Press, a paper entitled "The specifically human basic need" and published by the review of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and an annotated list of the further writing in the topic and published by the above mentioned Academy. Consequently, I claim the immediate redtoration of the article in question. Szalagloria ( talk) 19:38, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
I was going to make an article, but I then realized that I didn't know how to set up the main format for making the articles. I know how to get to the point to make it, but I need a guide to the formatting, and I haven't been able to find it yet. Can I receive some help, please? Tetobigbro ( talk) 21:14, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
What is the correct accessdate= for a reference being filled by a bot — the original date the citation was added or the day the bot retrieves the page? Say a user placed {{citeweb|url=myurl.com}} on April 1, 2008. Along comes a bot on May 10, 2010 and fills in some info: {{citeweb|url=myurl.com|title=cool page|work=myUrl}}. So should the bot place the current date in? How can it know the contents did no change since? After all, the original author referenced material in 2008. Cheers! — Hellknowz ▎ talk 16:57, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
Further question: Is it acceptable for a bot to fill in the access date the url was added? So the bot would check revisions, find the addition and mark that date. I assume this is the day the user actually accessed the content. The only possible problem is that the user may expand the article from the same source at a later date; however the editors usually do not update accessdates anyway. — Hellknowz ▎ talk 20:58, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
I'm so lost. I have been trying to make a subpage and I am following the directions as best as I can, but I keep ending up where I started. Can someone tell me how to make a subpage?
Also, I was looking up a few articles and following links and noticed that many of them lead back to a Wikiproject. I was going to join a certain one, but I couldn't figure out how they made a certain signature. Instead of it just saying-(talk)-theirs also had a contributions button beside it. How do I make that certain signature?
If there is any way this is possible, is there a place that I can go to just to see every guideline plainly and simply, perhaps in just a list? If someone could show me this it would be much appreciated. Tetobigbro ( talk) 23:21, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
About a third of the archive pages listed at Wikipedia:Files for deletion/Log appear to have been blanked. Why? ╟─ Treasury Tag► belonger─╢ 11:28, 30 May 2010 (UTC)
Can anyone give me instructions on using the external editor? (mentioned in prefs) ~ Qwerp Qwertus · _Talk_· _Contribs_· The Wiki Puzzle Piece Award 02:58, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Hi, is there anyone with access to Jstor who could retrieve this article?
Graham Petrie (1970) A Rhetorical Topic in "Tristram Shandy", Modern Language Review, 65, 261-66
If so I would get in contact privately, I need it for the article on Tristram Shandy.-- Sum ( talk) 09:00, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Hey, I was wondering if there was any way to directly link User subpages directly to your userpage so that it would be easier to go straight to them. If anyone can help, thanks. Tetobigbro ( talk) 22:12, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Use {{User subpages|Tetobigbro}}
... –
xeno
talk
22:14, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Result:
Thanks, that helps a lot. Tetobigbro ( talk) 22:21, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
What is wikipedia take, on article about a word example Edilma? I put it up for 7 day deletion and HJ Mitchell removed tag after on the 8th day with this as the edit summary (decline PROD. We have many articles on names. Take to AfD if desired). So are articles about names deleted or not? I don't want to waste time trying to have it deleted if not the done thing. Blackash have a chat 08:49, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
Hi, I just realized it is my one year anniversary. Is there some sort of birthday candle or some other icon or badge I can now put on my user page to celebrate this? Yworo ( talk) 22:10, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
I pointed out at m:Commercialization that for-profit entities benefit from market signals that tell them whether they are doing well. E.g., a private company has financial statements that reflect whether its earnings are going up or down, and its stock price reflects what investors think are the present value of the future cash flows that firm will generate. Wikimedia, on the other hand, doesn't seek to maximize income from operations, and it has no stock price because ownership is not for sale.
So then, what signals can we use to assess whether we're doing a good job? We could look at popularity statistics, e.g. number of page views and number of edits. But the effectiveness of those measures in pointing us in the right direction seems to be undermined by the fact that any downturns are explained away. E.g., management basically tells the media, "We've managed the site so well that now we're victims of our own success, and don't need as many edits and new articles as we did in the past." There might be some truth in that, but only because we've arbitrarily restricted the scope of the site to the point where we really are running short on new notable topics that people want to write about.
I theorize that the project is so big now that individual members of the community have trouble seeing the big picture and assessing how well the overall project is doing and what is best for the overall project. E.g., a person who focuses on new page patrol may see that new pages deemed undesirable are not showing up as frequently, and that when they do show up, they are deleted quickly; and view that as an indicator of success. Is that a sign of overall health of the project, though, or could the project be in the beginning stages of stagnation? It could be a little of both.
So then, how do we judge whether a new initiative (e.g. FlaggedRevs) is good or bad for the project overall? The most visible signs, such as vandalism, may be improved by something, but there may be less visible costs, e.g. hindering of collaboration or discouraging of new users. Debates seem to devolve into speculation most of the time, rather than being based on hard evidence, and what little evidence there is doesn't really take the big picture into consideration, as it only addresses some concerns and not others. Tisane ( talk) 12:20, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
Just about every piece of news lately says about Pixar films:
If there are many, that almost definitely means that this is right. However, Bovineboy2008 says that Wikipedia is supposed to accept without proof:
What decides what Wikipedia is supposed to accept without proof?? Please give a detailed answer, as well as examples about more random things. Georgia guy ( talk) 14:31, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
The Spanish Wikipedia has an extensive discussion of the genre rap metal, which is listed as a GA there. Can anyone who speaks Spanish translate this article and incorporate it into the English version? ( Sugar Bear ( talk) 00:03, 3 June 2010 (UTC))
Can some people look over this? I think it's being archived at excessive speed, seemingly to hide previous discussions from view. 76.66.193.224 ( talk) 05:14, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
Hi, I've been on here for a while & don't usually log in- am I able to transfer my edits from my IP address to my user? Also, have noticed a new editor adding information with no references/purely specualtive & personal opinion. Am I able to message him pointing him towards the rules, if so how would I do that? Aurelius2007 ( talk) 10:14, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
I put an important HTML comment at the start of every Wikipedia article in the list at the Trans woman article, but I got a message I originally didn't see that there was a more complete list at List of transgender people. Anyone able to complete the assignment on putting this HTML comment at the start of all Wikipedia articles about trans women?? (With only those in the list at the Trans woman article, it already was busy work that made me tired; it took 25 minutes.) Georgia guy ( talk) 22:12, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
Assume the following situation: An article with some stub tag and with no categories i.e. no [[Category:foo]]. The stub tag generates a non-hidden category. Do we still tag the article as uncategorised? I expect "no" as an answer since the article has been categorised somehow.
Assume now the following situation: An article with the general stub tag and with no categories i.e. no [[Category:foo]]. The stub tag generates a non-hidden category. Do we still tag the article as uncategorised? I expect "yes" as an answer since the article hasn't been categorised at all.
Any other opinions? We would like to implement the following in WP:AWB. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 21:07, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Pending Changes update.
The big news is that we have picked a date for releasing the new version of Flagged Revisions and launching the trial of Pending Changes on the English Wikipedia: June 14.
I'd like to stress that this will be a trial. The goal is to learn, which means that things will not be perfect at launch. There are many areas where we hope to verify our current work and see what improvements can be made:
We think we have something that is workable as is, and have notions for possible improvements down the road. To know what improvements are the right ones, we'll need real use and community feedback. We intend to respond speedily to community concerns and lessons learned from actual use. To that end we aim to keep to the same weekly release schedule that we've been using on labs these last few months.
More mundanely, the work completed this week includes ops documentation, the completion of the terminology work, and some interface improvements. We've also had some vigorous testing done by the folks at Calcey, who discovered a few bugs for us.
If you'd like to see the current condition of things, you can try it here.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
We expect to release to labs again next week, , after which we intend to go live on the English Wikipedia.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 06:01, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
As part of testing/vetting the planned organization for WP:Research and WP:SRAG, proposed research and recruitment guidelines for academics to interact with Wikipedia(ns), we (SRAG) are running a trial on a new study and are inviting participation from the community. See Wikipedia:Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group/Requests/Political_Knowledge_Production for a description of the study and discussion about its details. Please don't hesitate to participate. -- EpochFail( talk| work) 15:57, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
Hi, this is just a notice that I have opened a brfa for an adminbot to delete images that are available as identical copies on the Wikimedia Commons per WP:CSD#F8 -- Chris 10:14, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
I recently formed a new userbox, but I don't know what to do now. How do I make it become a userbox like all the others? Regards, Tetobigbro talk 04:06, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
As requested, here's the weekly Pending Changes update.
We proceed boldly toward launch. The main update is that we have pushed the English Wikipedia launch back one day to Tuesday, June 15. That will let us avoid stepping on the WP Academy Israel event, and it means Jimmy Wales will be available to talk to the press, which in turn will yield a better public understanding of Pending Changes.
However, we will still be rolling the new FlaggedRevs code into production on Monday, June 14th (circa 4 pm Pacific, or 23:00 GMT). We hope that this, aside from some minor UI improvements, will pass unnoticed on the project currently using FlaggedRevs. If there are bugs, we look forward to hearing about them via the usual channels, including #wikimedia-tech. Minor bugs will be fixed in place; any major issues will result in a quick rollback to the existing code.
More prosaically, we had a number of bits of work verified complete this week, including a number of little bugs. Our thanks to the German community for their diligent testing of a labs instance of the German configuration.
If you'd like once last chance to see what's coming, try the latest code updates
on our labs site.
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog.
Thanks, William Pietri ( talk) 23:58, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
In addition, there are a few remaining issues to settle, such as usage of flagged protection/pending changes, please see
Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Flagged revisions trial. We also need to finalize documentation pages among other things, any help would be appreciated. Thanks,
Cenarium (
talk)
03:28, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
Hi, I have sad news from the French Wikipedia. I was blocked indefinite last year and I have recently propose to be unblocked. (I don't speak French very well, but I've tried to request in French). I have only apologized and asked for unblock (in French; I was blocked by user:Nakor). Answer was protecting my talk page on edit=sysop level and blanking it (by one administrator). What I can do now? See fr:User_talk:Aleksa_Lukic. Aleksa Lukic ( talk) 12:20, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
Is there an article or section somewhere regarding the parade in Chicago today? My understanding is that the turnout was substantial (~2million). Perhaps someone could help us get images of it off flickr, or somewhere else? Thanks in advance! --- kilbad ( talk) 02:41, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
An open Wikimedia discussion (on IRC) is proposed for the coming week; input is requested on the time and agenda. – SJ + 08:02, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
I don't see anything in the text at File:LizzieVanZyl.jpg which says that this photo is of Lizzie Van Zyl. It just relates a story about her. Can we reliably claim that this is her? Everard Proudfoot ( talk) 22:44, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
Yes, it's her. I've seen her on this photo before, on the page about the Second Bour War.-- Nvlado ( talk) 23:11, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
As of now, it seems the majority of music album articles with external links to Rolling Stone reviews are actually linking to 404 pages. For example, this is supposed to be a review for David Bowie's Low. In a lot of cases, the original reviews may not exist anymore on the RS site. Shouldn't there be some kind of cleanup? Bjones ( talk) 03:49, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
Hey, I was wondering, how do you add pictures to certain things...such as userboxes,infoboxes,etc. Tetobigbro talk 02:12, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
image
or similar that you can use. You should look at the template's documentation, for example if you want to know how add image to {{Infobox book}}
look at the page
Template:Infobox book.Actually, I was just wondering if there was a...I don't know...a code I guess, that you could insert. For example, I already have found an image, what do I need to type to make it appear? Tetobigbro talk 02:40, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
http://corp.kaltura.com/ The name of the company and the link are now provided at the end of every video, like for example in the Tourette's syndrome article (I have enabled the wmEmbed gadget). Is this an example of advertising in Wikipedia? Has it been payed for? Is it in accordance with the mission of a neutral, non-profit website which aims to educate? -- Eleassar my talk 17:15, 12 June 2010 (UTC)