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I just wanted to correct a page that is in two categories, one of which is a sub-category of the other, to remove the parent category as redundant. I found this: {{Category:Computer companies of the United States|Alienware}}. This is a template, but I can't find it. How do I find templates? Is there a search function? Also, similar question for categories. I want to find categories that contain a particular word, how do I do that? PhilHibbs 11:38, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Could someone please have a look at my concerns about Image:Harlequin_valentine_panel.jpg on Copyvio#November_25? I suspect we have a copyvio image on our frontpage as part of Did you know... -- fvw * 09:01, 2004 Nov 26 (UTC)
If you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, have a happy day regardless! Maurreen 13:54, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Hms kite. The page was an unwikified cut and paste job from a very poorly laid out website. [425] ( http://www.mikekemble.com/ww2/kite_a.html)Rje 11:01, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC) Contributor claims that he is the copyright owner of the text of the external site and has re-contributed the article at /temp. Should be moved to HMS Kite. --Rlandmann 22:28, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Is an entry that I spotted today, the day after I posted a section on this ship, the first in this site. I am a full time worker who does history research as a hobby, I do not have a degree in grahpics or design and take serious offence about the phraseology used in describing my site. It must be really awful to be perfect as Rje seems to be (who lives not a dozen miles from me either). At least the goos emails I get, and the thanks outweigh Rje's comments by some 3000-1.
(unsigned post by User:82.36.200.223)
Hello dear Jim, is the only way for me to get into "Wikepedeia" some mention of 42nd Baltic Fraternities` Convention [ which Corps Concordia Rigensis/Hamburg will organize] to become a contributer/editor ? Greetings from Germany Jürgen Moeller-Nordhastedt@t-online.de
Sadly what we see here is a case of the misrepresentation of consensus which is now being "kicked" off the main page. The act itself and the subsequent failure to address the issue is not good for Wikipedia. What a pity. - Robert the Bruce 03:18, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)
After a large number of distressing debates about how and when to use things like diacritics (which I would guess most of our native-English speaking readers have no clue of how to enter), and whether to use Western name order in articles about people from other cultures, etc, etc, etc ad infinitum, I am half-ready to suggest that we really need two Wikipedias in English - one as a safe harbour for native speakers of English, and one for everyone else. The one for the rest of the world can put the articles at Zürich and Montréal, make sure the current events are properly spread out around the world, etc, etc.
But seriously, the current situation is really not even-handed. I have no interest in what {foo}-speakers do in the {foo-langauge} Wikipedia, and don't go over there to criticize and argue with their rules, and they are free to do whatever they like there. However, here the native-English speakers have to share everything with large numbers of people from the rest of the world, and it just gets a little old after a while. Noel (talk) 19:40, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
A modest proposal: actually I am going to propose that we split it on slightly different lines: one English language Wikipedia for people with an IQ > 1 and another for those who don't quite make it above the threshold, e.g. the kind of people who think that a fork like this has any point whatsoever. Sjc 06:58, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hi. As could be expected, the media attention that Roger Federer has been getting recently also put his article on Wikipedia on the spot light. Now, an anon user has made a staggering number of consecutive contributions to that article. I am particularly concerned with this section of the article. That looks a lot like it was taken from somewhere else, possibly a specialized publication. My research on Google has yelded no match, however, so I can't be absolutely certain that the text comes from some other source – not forgetting, the text might not be online, the guy might have typed it from some paper magazine that he had with him. What should we do, if anything? Redux 19:07, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
This is more of food for the mind rather than a question but it has been around my mind all day. What if an actual celebrity, say Cher, for example, decides to become a contributor? W'ed probably see a lot of POV on her page! And she can become a contributor just like the rest of us on the interet. When I ran into a perfect example, someone who calls herself Hilary Duff, I knew it was the perfect time to post this comment. Hey, it COULD really be her, after all shes only a human being with Internet access just like the rest of us as well....
(for the record, I dont believe it's her but you never know) " Antonio Tallest Tree in the neighborhood Martin"
Almost every article related to foreskin or circumcision has turned into an edit war including the article on phimosis. -- DanBlackham 06:50, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC) Recently Tannin made significant improvements to the foreskin fetish and circumcision fetish articles. Tannin explained the changes in detail on the Talk pages, but both articles were soon reverted without comment. -- DanBlackham 07:02, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Hey, since I'm taking a high level English class I'm learning a lot about how certain things are used in literature to symbolise things (For example, in most literature, light symbolises truth, so if somebody starts talking and the sun comes out, you can assume what they're saying is true). Would it be a good idea for me to add a section on to each article about something that I know the symbolism of stating what they symbolized in literature or is that a bad idea? -- -Cookiemobsta 04:25, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Alright-thanks guys :) -Cookiemobsta 05:40, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
What about Canada, for example? Maurreen 15:55, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Nader has been adding links to artist pages on http://bandnews.org on wikipedia band articles, ocassionally along with other minor edits (no other edits by that account). Unsurprisingly, all signs point to bandnews.org being run by User:Nader (whois says the domain is registered to Nader Cserny from Berlin). While there does appear to be some news about the bands in question there, it appears to be just scrapings off other fansites, and not much better (if not worse) than a google news search. While I'm sure it was done in good faith, I would like to hear some other opinions on whether these are valuable links or not and whether it's a good idea to ask Nader to remove them. -- fvw * 05:41, 2004 Nov 21 (UTC)
i see myself as a quite ok contributor to wikipedia in terms of article extensions like the moloko discography, band picture, links to the official band site but also to a free website with news. it hasn't gotten anything to do with getting money or something. the site's created by me, Nader (23) and a friend of mine Alex (22) to promote music bands from all over the world.
what about the other people linking to lyrics, allmusic.com, info sites? why not link to band specific news?
this should not sound like an offense, i'm just asking.
we have gotten great feedback from the bands and fans. they're happy about the site just like people who are happy to have wikipedia. greets from berlin, -- Nader 20:50, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I created a page mainly to discuss the tension between the goals of quantity and quality, and what, if anything, to do about it. If you’re interested, please see Wikipedia:Breadth and quality. Maurreen 02:31, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Having recently tried to initiate a discussion on an article talk page (see above) and only getting one reply I was thinking: would a Wikipedia:Discussions page, listing talk pages with ongoing discussion topics that are wanting more attention, help to get more involvement? Perhaps the number of ongoing discussions could get out of hand, but it may be worth a shot. violet/riga (t) 21:19, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I think RfC shouldn't need to be adversarial. But RfC needs help. I think people list pages, but few people go to the links to help other discussions. Maurreen 22:14, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I've proposed at talk:slashdot effect that the slashdot effect article should become more generalised and be placed in web traffic. With only other person replying (in opposition) it'd be nice to get some more opinions if some of you could take a look. violet/riga (t) 21:19, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
The text about Arthur Omar that has been removed from Wickipedia for infringing copyrights of Museuvirtual was written and published as a release and is used everywhere universaly as my current biography and can be presented anywhere without my previous authorization. The same text is publishe in Wickipedia in portuguese. It is copyright free. Based on this I ask Wickipedia to replace it again in the english version. museuvirtual.com.br/arthuromar is my personal site. Any doubts please get in touch with arthuromar@uol.com.br or arthuromar@alternex.com.br — 201.17.36.17 21:54, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone have thoughts on what standard of quality (articles) Wikireaders should be? — Matt 11:58, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/reversible.html
Comments?
I don't know whether this is the right place to ask this question. Apologies in advance if it is not and kindly point the right direction.
From Maruti Udyog website, in Terms of Use.
RESTRICTIONS ON USE OF MARUTI MATERIALS You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, products or services obtained from any Maruti Web Sites, directly or indirectly in any medium. Neither these materials nor any portion thereof may be stored in a computer except for personal and non-commercial use. Maruti will not be held liable for any delays, errors or omissions therefrom, or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof, or for any damages arising from any of the foregoing.
Based on this can we use images from this in Wikipedia?
Thanks,
Alren 23:35, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Is this copyrighted?
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html
I have seen other sites post articles from this site with the message
"Source: U.S. Library of Congress"
So it's not copyrighted? Can anything from the site be posted on wiki? If not, why not? And who holds the copyright? 65.66.156.171 19:52, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Hi I'm Lyndsey Perry and I'm only 13!
Hello, Lyndsey. It is somewhat unusual for a 13 year old to be so enthusiastic about their age. Can we help you? func (talk) 01:09, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
¡Hello, oh Lyndsey Perry!
¿How fare you?
I understand your enthusiasm; but unfortunately however, it is not wise to reveal so much about yourself on the Internet. Although 99% of all people on the Internet are good, that bad 1% does nothing else than look for people like you. You must be very careful.
I hate to sound preachy. I myself advocate for the rights of children as everyone here can attest to their chagrin -- most of the people here wish I would not be so vocal -- but this is very serious. I know that if I continue to preach, you will tune me out, so I shall stop here, with one least warning:
Never ever meet anyone from Cyberspace in Meatspace or give anyone any information which one could possibly use for finding you.
Regards, Ŭalabio 02:04, 2004 Oct 26 (UTC)
On the other hand, you might want to know that there are at least two other comparably young and very active Wikipedians, User:Revolutionary and Ilyanep. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:13, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)
Hi Lyndsey Perry !! Welcome to Wikipedia.Us young people should stick together huh? ( to others -depends on what you define as young! I'm entitled to my delusions.)But don't ask my age please. Have fun editing at wiki.-- Jondel 07:06, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Hey there, welcome. Us young 'uns ought to form a group or clan...accepting only under-18 Wikipedians. -- Etaonish 21:45, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)
Haha. As long as you're good at editing encyclopedia entries, Lyndsey Perry, welcome aboard! Infobacker 21:38, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I'm a new here so forgive me if this is the wrong category. I was wondering if there was some kind of policy regarding displaying reaction mechanisms (diagrams of molecules and their lone pairs, with arrow pushing) for any relevant page, since I haven't seen any? For instance, the page dealing with electrophilic substitution could benefit from showing a mechanism. Displaying Ar + NO2 -> Ar-NO2 is nice, but it doesn't really help explain what's happening.
Is this too advanced for the audience (or something like that) or is the lack of mechanisms just because no one has found/made any? I've drawn (with Chemdraw) several myself already and wouldn't mind uploading them or making more, so that settles any copyright issues.
While I'm on the subject of Chemistry, can we do something about the electrophilic substitution and electrophilic aromatic substitution pages? The former's reaction all include an aromatic compound so the name should be changed to the latter. For future reference, what's the protocol for situations like this? Do I do add a redirect? Ask for input in the Discussion page?
Thanks for your help! -- jag123 17:44, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I was looking at the movie called And the Band Marches on, And the Band Plays on or something like that, whatever the name actually is.
According to the movie, Patient 1 or X could have been one Bobby Campbell, or an airline stewart from the United States. Could it be true that any of these two men be the so called patient 1 or x?
Also, the movie tracks the AIDS virus to the Ebola River. Can it be possible that a connection exists between AIDS and the Ebola virus??
PLEASE respond here, as I seldom remember to look up Village Pump when I ask things.
Thank you, and God bless you all!
Sincerely yours " Antonio Interested in finding facts Martin"
Ken Weide (aka 65.68.200.238), sole proprietor of ElectGOP.net, has embarked on a campaign to include links to his site from every Republican wikipedia article he can find. I first noticed this on Republican Party (United States), but he's also creating links to his site on all the state party articles, sometimes creating new articles solely for that purpose. I've removed the link twice now from the main GOP article, drawing a colorful request to prohibit me from "sabbotag[ing] the viability of the Wikipedia, as well at the good name of the 'Grand Old Party'." I'm sure the link doesn't belong there, and the link-only articles have been listed as candidates for speedy deletion, but I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about the other state party articles. RadicalSubversiv E 22:24, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have 3 Gmail invites to give away to wikipedians so any Wikipedian who wants one is welcome to email me at john@collison.ie JOHN COLLISON [ L u d r a m an] 17:35, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
And in related news, I have 12:
Cross them out when you register them with <s></s> please. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:19, 2004 Dec 2 (UTC)
I only discovered recently that my local library in Massachusetts provides home access via the Internet to a number of databases, via (in my case) two Massachusetts regional library networks. Among other things, I can search the last decade-or-so of the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. More significantly, I can search the New York Times back to 1851(!) (Full text in the form of page images).
Since I doubt that my suburban town is especially unique, I encourage all Wikipedians to check with their local libraries to see what similar resources may be available. [[User:Dpbsmith| Dpbsmith (talk)]] 02:31, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
In general, I always thought the terminology for currency is to use "bill" for the United States (where this term is standard) and "banknote" elsewhere. Yet, another Wikipedian says it is more convenient to use "banknote" always including those of the United States. Any opinions?? 66.245.77.205 23:36, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone on en: speak Inuktitut? --[[User:Eequor| ᓛᖁ ᑐ]] 23:44, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Trevor Deaves and John Astbury are trying to find an old friend Iain Strang. He is married to Janetta Norwicki? Please reply to inenergy@sopris.net
Assume a page is protected, and a user creates their own version in a temp subpage. Is it allowed for that user to create wikilinks to the temporary article, effectively de-linking the "main" article from Wikipedia? For example, there was a version of La La (an Ashlee Simpson song) which linked to Autobiography (album)/Temp instead of the main article, Autobiography (album). The reason given was that the main article is protected at a sub-optimal version.
This strikes me as a no-brainer. Editors should not create wikilinks from articles into temp articles. Assuming the temporary article is eventually integrated into the main article, the merge will create double redirects and force people to go around changing a bunch of other articles. Linking to temp articles leaves wikipedia in an inconsistent state. It implies that the temp article is the "official" version, when it may not be. Most importantly, it allows groups to put forth their own POV versions of articles and integrate them into Wikipedia.
Thoughts? Rhobite 03:02, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)
Mac OS X Hints has an article on how to "Search wikipedia from the command line". Paul August 18:03, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)
What do you all think about a barnstar of vigilance for those that reliably and consistently fight the good fight against vandalism? Would somebody mind creating the image, because I'm pretty graphically inept... -- Clockwork Soul 16:29, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC
The film Black Night is misspelled it should read Black Knight (2001)
This seems like a perfect message to post here: if you're bored (how is that even possible on Wikipedia?!), you can always read User:JRM/Orange, a true hallmark of something. Oh, go on. I promise there is at least one thing in there that'll trigger at least a brief chuckle—or your money back. JRM 05:14, 2004 Dec 5 (UTC)
Hi. I have a potential issue, maybe even a potential edit war, coming up on this article. An user has decided to create a new article, the object of which is a part of the history of the city about which the article at hand is. Upon doing that, he simply decided that the whole section that made any mention to the topic on this article had to be erased and replaced with a "see main article" notice. That was particularly ludicrous, since the article he had created was still a stub, and in fact the information he erased from the article in question was simply not on the new article. I reverted his edit, but he rereverted it, now claiming that the paragraph was "inaccurate" (or unnacurate, as he wrote...) historically wise, which is preposterous, since I obtained the information from offical sources. In order to make a better case, he also decided to claim that the article was "confusing", which I find really hard to believe, since the article has been complimented on more than one occasion and translated into more than 5 other languages. But even it was unclear, the due process is rewording, not bluntly erasing the data. I restored the paragraph again, but I have a strong feeling he's just going to go back and do it over and over. If you follow the link above, you'll see his user main page. By what he chose to write there I get the feeling that this guy is up to no good, and I really don't feel like engaging in an edit war with someone like that. I need help on this one! Regards, Redux 14:42, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team is up and running. If anyone dislikes the name, your suggestions for a different name are welcome. Maurreen 09:11, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC) And of course anyone interested is invited to join us. Maurreen
The fourth round of the Wikipedia trivia quiz is now open. Find out how good you are in finding the most obscure facts on wikipedia! Eugene van der Pijll 21:24, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I was unable to quickly find a style guide for currency. I was faced with the phrase "N billion dollars" vs. "$N billion", and there wasn't any obvious guidance out there. The obvious place, to me, is Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Punctuation or Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), but there's nothing there about this. -- Dhartung 12:53, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Jallan 08:10, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)The value of billion is now 109 everywhere in the English-speaking world even in the UK. British usage has changed during the last twenty years, bringing it into line with American on this crucial issue, and so a billion means "a thousand million" (Ritter; 2002), rather than "a million million." The changeover was led by British financial institutions such as the Treasury, and has been reflected in reporting by the London Financial Times and The Economist for some time.
We should try to avoid the word billion for the same reason gas stations don't use the word 'inflammable' on gas pumps. While it is technically correct, there is room for confusion. Intrigue 23:08, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Note: Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse (no pictures) is current as of 2004 November 19, but has no pictures, captions are still retained. Since so many people asked for it and since it's not too difficult to replace pics with Image:null.png Pedant 02:00, 2004 Nov 18 (UTC)
I would like a version of the page on the Abu Ghraib scandal without the disturbing images. That way, I (and others) could get the information without having to see more than we want to. There are many minors who use this site; shouldn't there be an appropriate version for them?
There are too many pictures, imo - perhaps some could be taken out and placed in an image gallery. violet/riga (t) 18:48, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Shouldn't this be moved to the Village pump? func (talk) 16:35, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Hello. By the looks of the VfD, most people were opposed (as am I) to splitting the article in two. However, I think that I've come up with a clever solution which can be seen at Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse/pictures suppressed. Basically, I turned the article into a template with embedded parameters inside of potentially images' tags. Undefined parameters normally summon up a default templates, but in the middle of image tags they're meaningless and do nothing. On the subpage, I've used the main page as a template except with the "suppress image" parameter set to "-5px". This apparently causes the images to error out.
Thus, I've created a version without potentially offensive content that doesn't split the article in two. Cool Hand Luke 08:56, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Just heard a radio interview with Andrew F. Smith, who edited this two volume set, the contents of which, he claimed, were severely limited by space. It would be wonderful if we could fill in the gaps left by his 770 articles on (the minutia of) food and drink in America, as well as the rest of the world. Just wanted to share. It might be interesting to look at the kind of articles these guys consider 'encyclopedic' here. Mark Richards 21:30, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Should we rethink the guideline that an article shouldn't belong to a category as well as its parent? Many people either don't know this guideline, or don't choose to adhere to it. According to Wikipedia:Categorization, "An article should not be in both a category and its subcategory". For example Activity Based Costing belonged to Category:Management accounting, its parent Category:Accounting, and its grandparent Category:Business. Does this rule still apply? If people disagree with it we should get it out of policy.. if people do agree with it, we need to make the categorization style clearer, since many editors don't seem to follow it. Rhobite 19:56, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to try to roughly consolidate a few general issues from multiple pages.
A couple catalysts for this are discussions are related to Wikipedia:No original research and a vote here about whether or not to delete Image:Nevada-Tan.jpg for ethical reasons.
Wikipedia's uniqueness means we don't have a pure direct model for the whole of Wikipedia. Some Wikipedia matters seem to at least verge on journalism, and most Wikipedians don't have a journalism background.
I think some examination or re-examination is warranted concerning the following matters, and how they relate to each other:
If you're interested, please join the discussion at Wikipedia needs special standards. Maurreen 08:11, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't know if you know this, but people are now in the habit of editing the sandbox above the sandbox template. I suggest adding a message about saying that edits go below the template at all times to the {{sbox2}} template . 66.245.97.5 01:15, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I run http://www.lyricshead.com, which offers people many lyrics without popups and other annoying advertisements. I think that it would improve the usefulness of wiki album articles if a link was provided to users that provided lyrics for the album. You can see a sample of such a link at the Get a Grip album page.
The format of the link that I would like to make would be "[artist]: [album] lyrics," (as opposed to the link on the get a grip album page, which is simply "lyrics") so that it is more descriptive, but I am open to whatever format you think would best serve the community.
I wrote a program to do the following:
The wikipedia file name is recorded so I can later go back and manually check each page to ensure no formatting issues happened. I will also check to make sure the album does not already point to an official site (some do, but most do not link to any lyrics provider), so I can remove my link if it does.
I ran the program a few days ago and was kindly informed that by Rhobite that this is considered to be spamming / self-promotion. As you can see, it provides a service to users that are looking for album information and would also like to see the lyrics of the songs. He proposed that I bring it up to the community.
So, what do you think about adding a link to wikipedia album articles that direct the user to the album lyrics?
Rhobite: Yes, I will respect whatever the community decides. I want the community to be as excited about this as I am. My intentions are not to spam people, but to give people information that they are seeking. It is true that I am motivated to share more because it is my site, but I don't think it is strange for people to want to share their hard work with others. I am definetly guilty of feeling good when a new visitor e-mails me and tells me that they find my site useful or think the winamp plugin I just released is indispensible. It is because of this that wikipedia should link to my site; I take pride in it and I want to make it useful to people.
Also, I will definitetly look into the error in my program that breaks the code. Also, keep in mind, I will be manually reviewing every edited article page to correct any mishaps.
Rmhermen: The lyrics are provided for educational use only. They are user submitted and the site in no way endorses pirating (in fact, it encourages visitors to buy the album). The Web site provides a link to contact me in case of a legal issue. If I were to receive an e-mail to take down lyrics from a verifiable source, then I would promptly respond by removing the artist's lyrics. Since there is a method to get lyrics removed and damages would be very difficult to prove, there should not be a concern about a lawsuit against a site (not to mention, I have few assets). As far as I know, wikipedia would not be come liable for anything, even if the site gets sued. If there were problems with linking to potentially copyrighted material, then search engines would be sued out of existence.
Cyrius: This Web site is not going to just disappear. I am not doing this for profit, so the Web site will not be shut down because it is underperforming. I am a full time college student taking the load of two people (finishing my BS in two years) and working, so if there was a time for me to give up on this Web site, it is already behind me. Even with my expenses, I have no problem paying for this web site because I enjoy doing it and I enjoy that people find it useful. For proof of my long-term intentions, you will notice that I just released a winamp plugin. I would not release software for people to download if the Web site was potentially going to be closed in a year.
If, by some chance, I do shutdown my Web site. I will take responsibility and remove my links from wikipedia. This task would not be too difficult.
Jmabel: I do not know enough about wikipedia's backend to know if there is an easy solution to do this once the links are in place, but when I run the program to edit the articles, I will format the links however the community wants them to be formatted. Here are some examples:
As you can see, it is very flexible. Personally, I think the first or second one are the best because they are the most descriptive and does not include unnecessary information like the last one. -- Parahost | Talk 06:16, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)
For what it's worth, my suggestion is that if we do this — about which I am neutral — we design an appropriate {{lyricshead}} template that would let the titles be inserted into articles along the lines of
The resulting links would necessarily be uniformly presented; we could make any changes to presentation of these links in a single place; if we ever needed to suppress them all, we could also do that with no difficulty. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:43, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)
Since we don't have lyrics, it might be nice to provide links to them, although I have mixed feelings on the issue of the links, since the target site does have left side google ads (and most pop music lyrics don't seem to be very hard to find). What I did want to point out is that it seems like if this is done in an automated fashion, it should probably observe the guidelines given at Wikipedia:Bots, as discussed on Wikipedia talk:Bots. (BTW Yes, better link titles than just "Lyrics" would be a good thing, as would a template.) Niteowlneils 00:54, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
How do we reach a decision on whether we want to do this? -- Jmabel | Talk 06:19, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)
Good site Parahost, however I personally can't support these links from wikipedia because of the Google ads and Amazon associate program. — Jeandré, 2004-12-11t13:50
Yes:
No:
All right, that settles it. I will not add links to lyrics.
Discussion moved to User talk:TwentyQuestions.- gadfium 00:06, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Google has a new beta search engine called Google Scholar. This looks like a great reference to find scholarly articles about different topics. Check it out. This will be a great tool in addition to the upcoming Google library (see above). -- Chris 73 Talk 04:39, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)
Just discovered Wikipedia and have been spending all day reading about math, statistics, spiritual concepts, my favorite authors. The articles I've come across are very clear and easy to understand and seemingly accurate. Has all of this writing really just come from random people editing pages and adding articles? This is absolutely Amazing! My faith in humanity has seriously just increased orders of magnitude.( User:198.62.10.11)
I just came across WireImage.com and saw a fantastic selection of photos there that could massively benefit many of the articles we have. Obviously the licensing there is quite strict but perhaps with a little discussion we could get them to allow us to use them. I'd do it myself but really don't know very much about the various licenses. Anyone able to volunteer?
PS. I notice Will Sasso already has an image from there - is that allowed? violet/riga (t) 17:08, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hey all, I was thinking about making a bot to browse through Wikipedia and generally help out in any way possible. I've recently learned how to access the internet using Java (which I know well) and I wanted to make a little program for practice. My question is, what should this bot do? I've thought about it, and right now I'm leaning towards having it make links more efficient by changing them so they directly link to a page if they're currently linked to a redirect. I figure it can't hurt, right? Anyways, what other miscellaneous chores should this bot do? Any suggestions? -- pie4all88 06:49, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't understand why someone is adding complexity to the VfD main page, with a bunch of HTML comments, redundant links that need to be manually updated, etc. We have enuf problems with people not following the basic steps that appear on the bottom of the page--why add further complexity with a bunch of confusing asides in the code? I assume it's well-intentioned, but it seems to have a net effect of making it harder to make VfD nominations, not easier. Niteowlneils 18:49, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
There has been some discussion on IRC about whether the term "patrolling" of recent changes gives the right impression or not. In MediaWiki 1.4, there will be a feature that allows logged in users to click a link on a diff to say they have "patrolled" the edit. The edit can then be hidden from recent changes using "hide patrolled edits". The link on a diff will say "Mark as patrolled". After you click that, you will see "The selected revision has been marked as patrolled.". When it is disabled, it will say "The Recent Changes Patrol feature is currently disabled."
Are there any suggestions on what would be a better term for this, such as "checked", or do you feel "patrolled" is appropriate? Angela . 08:24, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)
How about just viewed or read. Other alternatives, scanned (elements of virus checking but also 'scan your eye over that'), perused or visited. -- Solipsist 07:45, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I've done four tables (
Rockingham County Public Schools,
Washington, DC schools(needs some work--I didn't think it thru fully), and
Rhode Island schools/
Providence County, Rhode Island schools with public domain/US Gov data from
here, but want some feedback on a number of issues before I do any more: besides establishing a naming convention (I want to avoid the word "list", as it usually means just a bunch of links, with the data at individual articles, which this isn't, I just wonder if it would be better as "Schools in Rhode Island", etc.), should the school names be hilited (IE italic or bold), should alternating schools have a different background color (like
Rockingham County Public Schools) to make it more clear what's going on and if so what color (I picked a supposedly "safe" gray--how important is it to use "safe" colors?), whether anybody has strong objections to leaving them as HTML tables instead of Wiki table markup (HTML seems much better for expansion and maintanence, as it allows a line-per-row correspondence that makes it more clear what data will be placed where), whether anybody thinks there might be enuf interest to make a formal 'US schools' WikiProject (once all the state and state/county or /district articles are created, it's probably possible to create stubs for the school district articles, from the same data (I'm thinking of creating Rambot-style article starters)), and any other thots people might have about what to include. Two things I'm looking to automate are: conversion to mixed case (most of the data is ALL CAPS)--I'm using a trial version of software that I don't like enuf to pay for at the end of the trial period,(found a way to do it in Excel) and hiding the redundant mentions of the state names, EG converting [[Bristol County, Rhode Island]] to [[Bristol County, Rhode Island|Bristol County]] and [[Barrington, Rhode Island]] to [[Barrington, Rhode Island|Barrington]].
Niteowlneils 20:09, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm having trouble locating the statement by Jimbo Wales deprecating the upload of 'non-commercial use only' images. I'm pretty sure it was on the mailing list and was posted on the Village Pump sometime before the the split into sections last September - but I also can't locate the pre-split archives.
Shouldn't a link to the earlier Village Pump archives be more obvious. And shouldn't the image upload pages make the policy against non-commercial use image clearer (its briefly mention on someway down on Wikipedia:Image copyright tags, but doesn't explain why). -- Solipsist 22:12, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The entry on the Baha'i faith is being held hostage by members of the Baha'i faith who will brook no criticism of the religion, regardless of its accuracy.
I am a former Baha'i and my entries were deleted wholesale, even though they are facts about the religion. I am posting IP only to avoid repercussions against members of my family who are still members of the Baha'i faith.
If this kind of violation of NPOV by deleting all factual criticism of the Baha'i faith continues, I am going to request that the Baha'i article be subject to protection. 65.184.35.245 21:09, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
My friend and I have recently created a game revolving around Wikipedia. We were wondering if any similar game exists. The goal is to get from any page on Wikipedia to any other page in as few clicks as possible. The rules are as follow:
- Thanks - Brett
Posting from school but my name is User:nrbelex
Yes. In fact someone has a tool that does it with software. Unfortunately i cant remember who it is. I' try to find out.
Theresa Knott
(The snott rake) 20:24, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
This game sounds a bit like Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia (which, I believe, is what the particular Kate's tool helped to solve). In any case, if you feel it is sufficiently different, you might like to add this game to the Wikipedia:Department_of_Fun. -- Solipsist 19:29, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
(Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (news) Paul August ☎ 21:58, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC))
What was Wikipedia's first article? And how long did it take for the word to be spread and for there to be lots of people editing here?
See History of Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles. Rmhermen 23:05, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
Just a quick request to find out if someone can tell me why Picture of the Day has been red-linked with some considerable regularity the past while. Denni ☯ 21:33, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)
Okay, so I've just become aware that I can get the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography through my university library. Of course, this is under copyright. But one can also get access to the articles from the old Dictionary of National Biography published starting in the 1890s. So my question, then, is whether the old dictionary is in the public domain, and available for use like the 1911 Britannica. The legal notice on the ODNB site talks about how they reserve all rights on the ODNB, but doesn't say anything about the older work. Anyone know about this? john k 20:32, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
That's what I'd have figured, but I wasn't sure about British copyright law. Also, new volumes continued to be put out up to 1980 or so with the newly dead, or missing people. At what point would copyright come into play? john k 20:55, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Just read this BBC news story about Google scanning pages from five academic institutions (libraries of Michigan and Stanford universities, and archives at Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library). Scans of works in the public domain will be made available for search and reading online. Presumably we will be able to 'borrow' bits? Does anyone know for sure?> -- ALoan (Talk) 20:51, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Google is doing this because it wants the metadata: Bibliographies and Footnotes, the original hyperlink. From that it can build a popularity index of searches. So for example a search on "Petrarch" turns up 2 million books, and then sorts them based on citation popularity.. it is the "wisdom of the crowds", Brilliant really. That they get public domain books online is a secondary bonus, the real money is a private database of all the metadata information linked in to full text searches of copyrighted work, no one else will have that.-- Stbalbach 03:58, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
If you don't celebrate Christmas, have a merry day anyway! Maurreen 06:00, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
OK, I f-ed up big time. Actually, a few days ago, the mistakes I made would have been easily recoverable, however one or more bugs in the 1.4 software seem to be preventing recovery. This morning, before I was fully awake, I meant to delete some VfD'd articles from the speedy cat, but forgot to hit Back after viewing the VfD subpage, and ended up deleting the subpages instead of the articles. The deletions do not appear in the new Deletion log, and if I manipulate the URL, in some cases MediaWiki says nothing has every existed there (even tho' I know it has), and even when it says it knows there are deleted edits, if I try to restore them it says it can't. Articles this applies to are the VfD pages for (probably) Nerdbrains, Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group, Private sozluk, Qurban Jan, That's My Sonic, and maybe William Cameron Menzies. A) If anyone can figure out how to undo this mess, I'd be eternally grateful. B) It seems there are one or more serious bugs in the new software that are probably more important to resolve than a few missing VfD discussions. Niteowlneils 00:28, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I am searching for information on Red Seal Record "His Masters Voice" Ignace Jan Paderwski Pianist. Recorded May 23, 1917.
I have Bach, Chopin and want to know the value.
It looks like nothing has been recorded at Wikipedia:Deletion log since the db was locked for the 1.4 upgrade. Niteowlneils 03:39, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
There's an interesting discussion going on at User talk:Jimbo Wales#Stop breaking Wikipedia policy. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 00:05, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I would greatly appreciate if some people with solid political-science backgrounds would check in on the discussion at Talk:Right-wing politics. I feel like I am engaged with people on the political right most of whom are more interested in scoring points for particular views than in writing a scholarly article. In particular, (1) there seems to be an effort to deny that any despicable regime was part of the right. Look, I'm on the left, and I'll own up to Stalin and (especially) Mao as having been leftists, but Hitler? Pinochet? (2) Slightly less important, this was all triggered by a discussion of whether the U.S. Libertarian Party belongs in the general list of right-wing parties. My view is that it shouldn't be listed there: while there are significant right-wing aspects to Libertarianism, their are also significant aspects that do not fit into a right-wing view. Certainly the party considers itself neither left nor right. I think the relation of Libertarianism to the political spectrum is an interesting question; it belongs (and is present) in the article political spectrum; I haven't checked where else, I presume it is also in Libertarianism, Nolan chart, and possibly even Left-right politics, but I think adding it without qualification to a list of right-wing parties does nothing to help explain either right-wing politics or the Libertarian Party. And explaining is what this ought to be about, not advocacy. And certainly not about politically expedient obfuscation. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:19, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)
I have uploaded an image for my user page which the copyright holder has allowed me to use for that page alone (understanding that the user pages are not counted under the GFDL/Creative commons licensises int he same way as the rest of Wikipedia). What tag do I use to mark it, since this doesn't seem to be comvered by any of the listed tags? Grutness| hello? 08:07, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've noticed some new features in diff management and on changes/wishlists, letting you go back to the previous diff and letting you jump directly to the section cited in the comments, respectively. And I think the Template list at the bottom of the edit is new too.
So, my question: Is there a page on here that mentions when such changes are made? -- Golbez 05:23, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)
For anyone wondering why many signatures are suddenly appearing with unmodified wikicode, this is bug 1142 on Mediazilla. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 04:13, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've been trying to make my own maps, but I've run into a little problem. I was wondering if anyone could help me out. My inspiration was Morwen, who has great maps, like at Image:LincolnshireBoston.png. Now, if you zoom in on the edges, you'll notice she seems to use *soft lines*; that is, the black line suitably turns more pink (and white on the outside) as it goes diagonal, thereby anti-aliasing it. However, when I try to do this, I get results like Image:Azerbaijan districts numbered.png. What I did here was draw the border, then use a fill tool - and the fill tool ignores the anti-aliasing, the soft lines.
I got Azerbaijan to look so good by filling in each area *three* times, and then going over manually to color any remaining transparent bits. This is not an ideal solution, and you can see, it still leaves a little border around every line. (For an even worse example, look at the upper half of my Image:Algeria provinces.png.)
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get maps that look like Morwen's? I COULD paint the area in first, then draw lines over it, and that would properly anti-alias them - except then they wouldn't properly anti-alias with the outer white/transparency. This is annoying enough that I'm holding off on making any more until I can figure out what I'm doing wrong, so I'd truly appreciate any help you can give me. Thanks! -- Golbez 06:10, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)
What is done about sites like this:http://www.knowledgeisfun.com/ that rip-off wikipedia and don't mention their source or the gpl?-- Deglr6328 02:34, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
(Moved to [[Wikipedia:Village pump (news). Paul August ☎ 03:59, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC))
(Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (news). Paul August ☎ 03:51, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC))
No
Solicitation
Tired of unsolicited bulk talk page messages? Someone else wants you to join a wikiproject or to vote for them on the Arbcom or to add cross-licensing tags to your user page? Try Template:NoSolicitors as a vaguely subtle hint! - Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 04:20, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Firstly, please reply on my talk page. OK, I see further up this page, that MediaWiki 1.4 (I think) will have a feature enabling a user to say that s/he has checked an edit? Well, excellent idea. When will it be up and running?-- Gabriel Webber (babble were rig) 18:14, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I just did some statistics on gender ratio on the Wikipedia community at orkut.com, and made a mailing list post about it. I thought some people might be interested: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-December/036142.html -- Tim Starling 08:32, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)
How do you know what sex wikipedians are? Women might be less likely to disclose their sex, or more likely to lie about it, or, in fact, the majority of wikipedians might be poodles for all we know. Intrigue 23:11, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I been looking at this issue for a while to try to better understand our systemic biases. I looked at Wikipedia's top contributors and found that 17% of them declared themselves to be female. (There were another 20% where I could find no declaration of gender).
I also did a very rough, and perhaps meaningless, search to try and see what effect this has had on our encyclopedia. In Wikipedia the word he occurs five times more than the word she, and the word man occurs three times as often as the word woman. I also compared this to other encyclopedias:
He:She | Man:Woman | Encyclopedia |
---|---|---|
5:1 | 3:1 | Wikipedia |
7:1 | 2:1 | Columbia |
4:1 | 2:1 | Encarta |
2:1 | 2:1 | Britannica |
Another factor is that some articles incorporate material from the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, which was written back when he was used as a pronoun for a person of indeterminate sex. Don't think that's enough to entirely explain the skew though. Most likely, the main factor is the "the encyclopedia Slashdot built" effect. crazyeddie 05:07, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Secret society lists a number of organizations that by definition we cannot verify like other facts in Wikipedia. Consider the recent addition of Noble Order of the Lamp and Sword: it was created by anonymous editors, likely students, and there's no obvious way to verify this. Is there any point in even listing secret societies that have no indepenedent verification? Samw 15:14, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I'm not happy about the changes that have been made to the above template, above all they make it look more unpleasant and it is so much larger. Anyone else agree?-- Gabriel (internal ID number: 118170) 12:39, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Is the license of this [4] page compatible with GFDL? Jayjg | (Talk) 04:34, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
An anonymous user from 195.146.134.53 ( contribs, talk) has been changing many lead sections of articles about geographical topics to de-link language names and bold (instead of italicize) foreign versions of names. I've asked them to stop, but there was no reply. They've also started making redirects from these other names to articles, which may be occasionally useful but is by default gratuitous unless something links there. The English Wikipedia doesn't need all this. Is there grounds for a temporary ban here, to get their attention?
(Please answer or notify me on my talk page, I don't watch VP.) -- Joy [shallot] 20:42, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have been working on a page called Views of creationists and mainstream scientists compared for some time with a couple of creationists of strong beliefs (I am not a creationist myself) and I have found it an almost dayly job to NPOV their various strongly biased statements. It is sometimes quite difficult to check a statement that has been made for authenticity as I am not an expert on all areas of science. I encourage others to take a look and check statements that have been made. Barnaby dawson 15:21, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
When realtime search is diabled, usually the search term is defaulted in the google/yahoo search boxes. But currently they show up blank. Niteowlneils 22:46, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Where is the best place to put up a notification that a known web/usenet kook is now on wikipedia making edits and his edits should be monitored closely? (It seems the infamous Jim Bowery [5] has graced us with his presence [6] [7](at bottom)) I'm not sure he belongs in request for comments....yet...-- Deglr6328 22:01, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
One (or maybe two) people moved pages to disambiguation titles unnecessarily, then another reverted using cut&paste, which has left a number (that I haven't determined yet) of articles with seriously messed up histories. Ones I've found so far are
Everybody Has Secrets/
Everybody Has Secrets (movie)--not sure I want to change while it's on VfD,
Untold Scandal/
Untold Scandal (movie)done,
Summer Scent/
Summer Scent (drama),
All In/
All In (drama), and
True To Love/
True To Love (drama), and I'm not going to have time to do it tonightdone today. Two that were caught it time (before both copies ended up with more or less equally long histories) are
Winter Sonata/
Winter Sonata (drama) and
Hotelier/
Hotelier (drama).
Niteowlneils 02:58, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Dear Jimbo,
I am a regular at nl. and sysop there, but I write this letter in which I would like to voice my concern as the only registered user and sysop of a fledgling wiki, the one in isiXhosa. (xh.) I am a Dutchman living in the USA and my isiXhosa is pretty limited. I just wish to repay the hospitality of the amaXhosa that I experienced as a VSO volunteer in South Africa 97-99 by helping this wiki to get going. I had tried to put a word of welcome on the main page in the hope of attracting some native speakers and was at first delighted to see it had been edited by one, who had also left a page about the National Language Services of South Africa on all wikis of the 11 languages of the country.
What I was not so happy with was the addition of the phrase 'kulo Mzantsi Afrika umtsha' for the New South Africa on the main page of the xh. wiki. Apart from the fact that 10 years after 1994 the expression is getting a bit stale it is a clear political reference and a pet phrase of the Pretoria government. Although the number of Xhosa speakers outside South Africa is limited, wikipedia is imho not owned by the Pretoria govt, nor is isiXhosa. Besides many of the other 10 are spoken widely outside the country, e.g. Tsonga in Mozambique, Afrikaans in Namibia and -dare I say- English in Bermuda and a few more places I believe.
The contents of the NSL page are even more worrying imho. It states that this agency is in charge of the communication between all these (11) languages. The Afrikaans version even says bestuur (=governs). Although I applaud Pretoria's efforts to translate documents across languages, I do not think that any goverment should presume to govern the communication between people, let alone whole languages even as they are spoken outside their borders. This simply does not chime with article 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that grants freedom of speech and expression to all global villagers. As wikipedia is concerned this sets a dangerous precedent. Even though the interpretation of the NLS is most likely rather benign, if other goverments presume to have the same rights of controle we might as well give up on wikipedia.
Sincerely Jaap Folmer xh:User:Jcwf
Hoi, {{ ChristmasWish}} Is getting atraction for a project that is done on the Italian wiktionary. This project has several aims:
There are some who consider it not correct to wish people a merry christmas because "they might feel offended". There need for righteousness goes so far that they remove both the content of the message AND the message. Both action are throwing away the baby with the washing water. Because either nothing is left or nothing is left what this project is about.
I am all in favour to have ALL traditional wishes for all festivities recorded both in Wiktionary and, the corresponding soundfiles in Commons. If this happens as a result of the Italian wiktionary's christmas project then that is a blessing.
Finally, Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar GerardM 08:49, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC) :)
I am not a christian and your being offended is something that amazes me. Why would you be offended by a project that is there to promote the use of Commons, Wiktionary, .ogg files and cooperation and, wishes you a merry christmas as well? Being against the efforts of many people who contributed to this project, what did you do to balance this project in a positive way? Where does our project manifest this endorsement of religion? Who said, Sir, I disagree with you totally but I will defend your right till the end that you may say what you say? Your wish for censureship has nothing to do with neutrality. GerardM 19:46, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
why are we allowing mulitple pages for the same nhl franchises? the hartford whalers page should be merge with the carolina hurricanes pages as it is the same franchise?
mine have all been used —Charles P. (Mirv) 13:58, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've got a fresh crop in. Eight invites, first come first serve. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 23:19, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Same here. Leave a message on my talk. -- Whosyourjudas\ talk 04:02, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have 6, just leave a message on my talk. talk Stuff ign 16:32, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Got a bunch. Leave message on my talk, or just [ email me and I'll respond back the gmail invite]. Ozzyslovechild 19:00, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I was looking at today's featured article, The Cathedral at Magdeburg, and saw that there was some discussion about the featured photo, that being the interior of the building. I was curious as to why that photo, and the other photos that accompanied the excellent article were not perspective corrected. I have downloaded the image, corrected the perspective, and it's beautiful. I would upload it to show you if I knew how.
Further to this, I would be willing to help correct and enhance photos for Wikipedia if there was a need. It is my profession. I don't know where to go to volunteer.
Okay, I'm curious: what is perspective correction? ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 21:21, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Okay, so I edited the stub perspective correction with some examples. I don't know how to embed images so so they are internal links. If someone could put the images in the page for me I would appreciate it. Emailing the original photographer sounds like a workable solution. How do you know who to email? Does it always say? Sorry if these are stupid questions. Like I said somewhere else, most of this seems to be in a foreign language to me.-- Jocsboss 03:50, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't know if I'm posting this in the right place (most village pumps I know are a lot easier to use). Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Antifinnugor is at a deadlock because of the lack of outside views. There has been much discussion already (rendering the RfC increasingly unreadable); however, most of the debating editors were previously involved in the issues at hand. The RfC is in desperate need of some fresh outside opinions. Please take a look there if you want! — mark ✎ 13:46, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I approached someone by email to see if they would be willing to license one of their photographs under the GFDL for inclusion within Wikipedia; the author agreed, and was even helpful enough to offer to (digitally) sign a license declaration using his GPG key. From Wikipedia's point of view, this might be a Good Thing for two reasons: 1) it gives other Wikipedia editors some assurance that the author has indeed licensed his work this way (rather than relying on the word of one single Wikipedia editor); and 2) it gives Wikipedia some protection from the author changing his mind later and denying that he ever licensed his work that way (that is, a little bit of non-repudiation).
See Image:Typex.jpg for the image in question. (I have verified the signature with a key downloaded from the author's website and on the key servers, but I haven't verified the key.) (And, I guess, he might better have included a SHA hash of the image rather than a URL, but it doesn't matter too much).
However, most people don't have the technical ability to create digital signatures, and those that do may not want to go to the effort. And, of course, a PGP/GPG signature doesn't guarantee us everything (for example, how can we tell that the owner of a certain email address has the authority to license an image found on the web? etc.)
— Matt Crypto 17:45, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Just found this website after trying to look up information on historical democracies that have failed and why. 1/6/05 NYT "Public Lives" "Warning from a Student of Democracy's Collapse" article by Fritz Stern by Chris Hedges . I was glad to see that a "scholar" was able to get this "what could happen" thought into national print. I had been thinking about the parallels of the religious right's influence to pre-war Germany. Nohing could have been done then and I doubt anything can be done now or in the future. anyone expressing such thoughts will be silenced. I'm not an agitator or radical. Just a student of "history repeating itself" in all sorts of areas. Brenda
That date (2005-02-09) will be:
What am I to make of this? -- Juuitchan
Well, I think the main thing you should conclude is that the Chinese calendar is based on a lunisolar calendar, the Islamic New Year is based on a lunar calendar, and the date of Easter, and so Ash Wednesday, is also complexly related to the lunar calendar. Since the date of each full moon is the same for all countries, it is not so surprising that these various lunar based calendars come into synchronisation every now and again. -- Solipsist 11:29, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I have a few questions about how the GFDL is interpreted on Wikipedia:
-- fvw * 17:46, 2005 Jan 5 (UTC)
For whatever it's worth, I think the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution process and violations of Wikipedia:Wikiquette are too frustrating. Is anyone interested in discussing possible improvements? Maurreen 07:27, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
What right does someone who does not contribute to this encyclopedia have to get up on a pedestal, flaunting their epalauts of epistemology and ribbons and medals of co-foundership alongside a nervous trembling for their reputation to come around and bash the Philosophy section without editing it to a higher standard? Absolutely none. And this is why Wikipedia is and will be succesful. If you don't believe me, read the growth charts. It will handle itself. Just as our growth has been exponential, so to are our capabilities to deal with the vast sum of human knowledge. Doomsaying us does not help and I, a contributor, personally do not welcome it.
Sanger, Larry (Dec 31st, 2004) Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism (Op-Ed). Kuro5hin. Retrieved January 2, 2005.
-- Alterego 19:59, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)
The only good points... well, problems of the Wikipedia, that likely will eventually get resolved is the lack public credibility... but again, this is the Internet. And the other, lack of expertise. Not so much as a respect for expertise, but more so of lack of. I have to be in agreement that there seems to be a lack of experts on the Wikipedia. But I can not say either way there has been respect or disrespect of the current experts on the Wikipedia. Yes, editing on the Wikipedia is a bit daunting at times... adherance to certain rules that one has to be familiar about may stem some of the elitism in which I think Mr. Sanger is talking about. This is only comes from my view, a person who's been trying to cleanup the Wikipedia a bit (like stub sorting), and making my small contributions. It is rather disappointing in the lack of experts... some stubs have remained stubs for a long time. -- AllyUnion (talk) 11:18, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think that there is some truth in the op-ed piece. I have no opinion on Sanger being a good person/bad person whatever (I never heard of him until this morning) but I will comment on the substance of the article.
My 14 year old son and my 11 year old son use wikipedia a lot, researching European history from several hundred years ago. They find it useful for their school related research. I stumbled upon the project helping them with their work. I have recently retired from a decade as head of quant research at one of the biggest banks in the world, having made some contributions to the mortgage securitization field (what Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae do for a living). I will probably never try to make a contribution in my own field of expertise. because I don't feel like getting into arguments with a bunch of grad students who don't even quite know what the field is. Whatever. I have made contributions to some pretty noncontroversial articles (I've been contributing biographies of mid-level U.S. government officials from the 1950's and 1960's.)
Mortgage securitization is an interesting topic (it certainly affects the finances of most American homeowners), but the current system does not make it likely that wikipedia will have a good article on that topic, because unlike a peer-reviewed journal, a wikipedia article is subject to review by non-peers. That works well if we are talking about Harry Potter, or Linux Distributions, or any subject that a large number of wikipedia contributors know a lot about; it does not seem to work very well on a topic that a lot of people know something about, but a few people know well. Morris 15:17, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
The Sanger comments are now featured on /. [9] The comments make interesting reading and have many thoughful insights on the points he has raised. Well worth reading. Apwoolrich 18:56, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
After this has had another day or two on the Pump, we should move it to a Wikipedia-space page of its own, ditto for other languages, and interwiki the discussions. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:06, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)
I have deleted a couple of instances of the word " sci-fi" from the Thunderbirds (television) article and replaced them with " science fiction".
I feel that "sci-fi" is little better than slang, does not constitute proper English usage, and should be replaced wherever it appears in a Wikipedia article with "science fiction", or if appropriate some alternative phrase such as " speculative fiction" or " fantasy". Lee M 16:26, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not paper. We can afford to write out "science fiction": the full term is clearer than its abbreviations. Gdr 18:54, 2005 Jan 2 (UTC)
moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries
Should Donations for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake be protected indefinitely (request here) to eliminate the possibility for scammers to take advantage of our readers? ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 16:56, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
The image Image:039_65658.jpg is a sample image from a poster selling website. I gather it would be copyright, but I'm not sure if it could be fair use. I'd like some advice on what to do with the image. There is a {{poster}} tag, which claims that reduced quality poster images can be fair use, but how reduced must it be? This image doesn't look reduced quality to me. Silverfish 15:16, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
The {{JanuaryCalendar}} is for 2004. Where is the 2005 version? Ancheta Wis 15:02, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've moved the discussion to Wikipedia:Reference_desk#Anti-randomness. crazyeddie 22:44, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
What do you think about people having an automatically updated copy of a VP discussion they start in their own user space (I'm trying this here, actually). This could even be used to have a discussion about a topic between two users on both user's pages. -- Sgeo T C 01:39, Dec 27, 2004 (UTC)
Considering that I posted a reply to the above thread in this thread by mistake, needs some work. Might be handy, but I think it would also be a pain to keep straight. crazyeddie 06:12, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I did this myself to make sure I have all the answers in a convenient place before it's archived. Most people click the correct link in large pages like the help and reference desks, so I don't expect much problems. Personally, I think it's a great idea. Just go ahead. Mgm| (talk) 19:16, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)
Well this certainly confused me when I tried to archive this discussion just now. Which I do by editing the "section" to be archived, selecting all the text of and doing a cut and paste. In this case that meant "blanking" your user subpage. This will make archiving a lot harder, if I have to check to see whether the "section" I'm editing is really an included subpage. Then if so just copy without deleting, then go back to the VP and delete the include — difficult and prone to error. Paul August ☎ 23:27, Jan 11, 2005 (UTC)
Some time ago, a user subpage was deleted against its owner's will following a series of hostile, tasteless comments by people with no sense of humor. For those who are interested, I've placed it on Votes for undeletion.
Policies and guidelines relevant to the matter are Wikipedia:User page, Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers, and Wikipedia:Wikiquette. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 12:49, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
--
Ŭalabio 01:19, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)
Wikipedia's servers have (despite recent improvements) a perennial problem of keeping up with demand. Question: how much of this is due to inefficient storage of images? For example, when a 200px or 100px image on-the-page is stored as a 100kb+ file, the whole of which needs to be provided by the server to the browser? Secondary question: if significant, what should be done about it?
A "List of Big Images" would be a start; some way of comparing the display size of images (in the image tag) with the stored size would also help identify wasted bandwith. Some way of focussing on the most popular pages (hits-wise) in order to optimise their images would be good. Comments? Rd232 14:37, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I deceided to do a test today after reading a critism of Wikipedia as being unreliable and full of incorrect information. I knew this is true at any point in time, but is usually resolved in a quick manner (no more than a few hours usually). To confirm this I edited the carrot article with a sentence that is not true at all. I haven't reverted it yet because I was curious to see if anybody would spot it. Now I understand that the "carrots" article is most likely not one of the most accessed pages on wp, but it a high quality page that doesn't deserve to be degraded by a outright untruth. Well, I edited it 7 hours 20 minutes ago and there have been 2 edits since then; and nobody noticed a thing. I'll leave it there and see how much longer it takes, but I have to say I'm disappointed. Wikipedia is always a source I turn towards when the rest of the web seems devoid of anything more than a stub. How do I know if one odd statement turns out to be wrong if I have no way to verify it? The statement I made may even make sense to someone with no knowledge of fruits and vegetables. bernlin2000 ∞ 04:04, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)
More tests
[10] preceded by flattery
[11] (this is supposed to make me less likely to revert?). So when does the "testing" stop? See
Wikipedia:Don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.
Long pause in contributions from October 6 to January 6. We regularly deal with sock puppets, but is this a podperson? -- Curps 06:17, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I've just had a minor edit war with anon user 81.174.158.223. He claims that the term "drugs and alcohol" is POV, implying that alcohol is morally different from other drugs, and therefore has been changing all references to "drugs (including alcohol)" particularly in a lot of articles about rock musicians (see his contributions). I maintain that, although alcohol is a drug, normal English language usage is "drugs and alcohol" and it is not POV, and cite Google in my favour (I wouldn't normally, but a 908,000 - 25,400 lead over "drugs (including alcohol)" is pretty decisive, I think). What does the assembled masses think? -- Arwel 01:33, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Is it just me or are the paragraphs way too close together?
Look! There's hardly any space between this line and the last! This makes for difficult reading.
Also, and this is being picky, the "edit" links seem to float too high above their associated content. I was confused at first as to whether the edit link applied to the above or the below text.
Paragraph 1: The default style statement Paragraph 2: to separate these paragraphs. |
Paragraph 1: The style statement Paragraph 2: to separate these paragraphs |
As long as we're talking about leading, I think the section headers look bad when there is more than one line. The ascenders and descenders of the letters run together. But I doubt I'll go to any trouble to fix it. Maurreen 05:21, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Hello everybody,
In Berlin at Dezember 2004 there was the critique that there is not enough connection in the work of all the different Wikipedias in their different languages. I think, that an internationally linked writing contest should be one possible chance to cooperate and work together. At March 1st there will be the start of the second writing contest in the german Wikipedia so I thought, we can start it as an international project. There had bee contests in the Wikipedia of the Netherlands nl:Wikipedia:Schrijfwedstrijd, the german Wikipedia de:Wikipedia:Schreibwettbewerb and the english one en:Wikipedia:Danny's contest and as far as I could see it, it worked really good.
I hope you will join the Contest, please visit meta:International writing contest to find out more. -- 149.225.56.90 08:40, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC) ( Achim Raschka aka Necrophorus
Hello, as a resolution to the ongoing debate surrounding the Country Infoboxes, I have created a forum for voting on which solution the wikipedia community would prefer. The vote can be found here. Thank you! Páll 19:26, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I just noticed a tremendous speed improvement in the last couple hours. What happened? Did someone add a gazillion servers? Keep up the good work. pstudier 02:31, 2005 Jan 11 (UTC)
Recently an article, Jump Gate Technology was added, based on material that is under the Open Gaming License, which you can read here. I would appreciate any well-informed comments (here, at Talk:Jump Gate Technology or at WP:CP as to whether this material (aside from any consdieration of whether it is encyclopedic) can be incorporated into Wikpedia articles. I suspect that it is impossible, as there are many requirements (distribution of the complete text of the OGL with the material, for example) that would violate the GFDL, but more words of wisdom would not go amiss. -- rbrwr ± 23:35, 10 Jan 2005 (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 just wanted to correct a page that is in two categories, one of which is a sub-category of the other, to remove the parent category as redundant. I found this: {{Category:Computer companies of the United States|Alienware}}. This is a template, but I can't find it. How do I find templates? Is there a search function? Also, similar question for categories. I want to find categories that contain a particular word, how do I do that? PhilHibbs 11:38, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Could someone please have a look at my concerns about Image:Harlequin_valentine_panel.jpg on Copyvio#November_25? I suspect we have a copyvio image on our frontpage as part of Did you know... -- fvw * 09:01, 2004 Nov 26 (UTC)
If you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, have a happy day regardless! Maurreen 13:54, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Hms kite. The page was an unwikified cut and paste job from a very poorly laid out website. [425] ( http://www.mikekemble.com/ww2/kite_a.html)Rje 11:01, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC) Contributor claims that he is the copyright owner of the text of the external site and has re-contributed the article at /temp. Should be moved to HMS Kite. --Rlandmann 22:28, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Is an entry that I spotted today, the day after I posted a section on this ship, the first in this site. I am a full time worker who does history research as a hobby, I do not have a degree in grahpics or design and take serious offence about the phraseology used in describing my site. It must be really awful to be perfect as Rje seems to be (who lives not a dozen miles from me either). At least the goos emails I get, and the thanks outweigh Rje's comments by some 3000-1.
(unsigned post by User:82.36.200.223)
Hello dear Jim, is the only way for me to get into "Wikepedeia" some mention of 42nd Baltic Fraternities` Convention [ which Corps Concordia Rigensis/Hamburg will organize] to become a contributer/editor ? Greetings from Germany Jürgen Moeller-Nordhastedt@t-online.de
Sadly what we see here is a case of the misrepresentation of consensus which is now being "kicked" off the main page. The act itself and the subsequent failure to address the issue is not good for Wikipedia. What a pity. - Robert the Bruce 03:18, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)
After a large number of distressing debates about how and when to use things like diacritics (which I would guess most of our native-English speaking readers have no clue of how to enter), and whether to use Western name order in articles about people from other cultures, etc, etc, etc ad infinitum, I am half-ready to suggest that we really need two Wikipedias in English - one as a safe harbour for native speakers of English, and one for everyone else. The one for the rest of the world can put the articles at Zürich and Montréal, make sure the current events are properly spread out around the world, etc, etc.
But seriously, the current situation is really not even-handed. I have no interest in what {foo}-speakers do in the {foo-langauge} Wikipedia, and don't go over there to criticize and argue with their rules, and they are free to do whatever they like there. However, here the native-English speakers have to share everything with large numbers of people from the rest of the world, and it just gets a little old after a while. Noel (talk) 19:40, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
A modest proposal: actually I am going to propose that we split it on slightly different lines: one English language Wikipedia for people with an IQ > 1 and another for those who don't quite make it above the threshold, e.g. the kind of people who think that a fork like this has any point whatsoever. Sjc 06:58, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hi. As could be expected, the media attention that Roger Federer has been getting recently also put his article on Wikipedia on the spot light. Now, an anon user has made a staggering number of consecutive contributions to that article. I am particularly concerned with this section of the article. That looks a lot like it was taken from somewhere else, possibly a specialized publication. My research on Google has yelded no match, however, so I can't be absolutely certain that the text comes from some other source – not forgetting, the text might not be online, the guy might have typed it from some paper magazine that he had with him. What should we do, if anything? Redux 19:07, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
This is more of food for the mind rather than a question but it has been around my mind all day. What if an actual celebrity, say Cher, for example, decides to become a contributor? W'ed probably see a lot of POV on her page! And she can become a contributor just like the rest of us on the interet. When I ran into a perfect example, someone who calls herself Hilary Duff, I knew it was the perfect time to post this comment. Hey, it COULD really be her, after all shes only a human being with Internet access just like the rest of us as well....
(for the record, I dont believe it's her but you never know) " Antonio Tallest Tree in the neighborhood Martin"
Almost every article related to foreskin or circumcision has turned into an edit war including the article on phimosis. -- DanBlackham 06:50, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC) Recently Tannin made significant improvements to the foreskin fetish and circumcision fetish articles. Tannin explained the changes in detail on the Talk pages, but both articles were soon reverted without comment. -- DanBlackham 07:02, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Hey, since I'm taking a high level English class I'm learning a lot about how certain things are used in literature to symbolise things (For example, in most literature, light symbolises truth, so if somebody starts talking and the sun comes out, you can assume what they're saying is true). Would it be a good idea for me to add a section on to each article about something that I know the symbolism of stating what they symbolized in literature or is that a bad idea? -- -Cookiemobsta 04:25, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Alright-thanks guys :) -Cookiemobsta 05:40, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
What about Canada, for example? Maurreen 15:55, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Nader has been adding links to artist pages on http://bandnews.org on wikipedia band articles, ocassionally along with other minor edits (no other edits by that account). Unsurprisingly, all signs point to bandnews.org being run by User:Nader (whois says the domain is registered to Nader Cserny from Berlin). While there does appear to be some news about the bands in question there, it appears to be just scrapings off other fansites, and not much better (if not worse) than a google news search. While I'm sure it was done in good faith, I would like to hear some other opinions on whether these are valuable links or not and whether it's a good idea to ask Nader to remove them. -- fvw * 05:41, 2004 Nov 21 (UTC)
i see myself as a quite ok contributor to wikipedia in terms of article extensions like the moloko discography, band picture, links to the official band site but also to a free website with news. it hasn't gotten anything to do with getting money or something. the site's created by me, Nader (23) and a friend of mine Alex (22) to promote music bands from all over the world.
what about the other people linking to lyrics, allmusic.com, info sites? why not link to band specific news?
this should not sound like an offense, i'm just asking.
we have gotten great feedback from the bands and fans. they're happy about the site just like people who are happy to have wikipedia. greets from berlin, -- Nader 20:50, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I created a page mainly to discuss the tension between the goals of quantity and quality, and what, if anything, to do about it. If you’re interested, please see Wikipedia:Breadth and quality. Maurreen 02:31, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Having recently tried to initiate a discussion on an article talk page (see above) and only getting one reply I was thinking: would a Wikipedia:Discussions page, listing talk pages with ongoing discussion topics that are wanting more attention, help to get more involvement? Perhaps the number of ongoing discussions could get out of hand, but it may be worth a shot. violet/riga (t) 21:19, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I think RfC shouldn't need to be adversarial. But RfC needs help. I think people list pages, but few people go to the links to help other discussions. Maurreen 22:14, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I've proposed at talk:slashdot effect that the slashdot effect article should become more generalised and be placed in web traffic. With only other person replying (in opposition) it'd be nice to get some more opinions if some of you could take a look. violet/riga (t) 21:19, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
The text about Arthur Omar that has been removed from Wickipedia for infringing copyrights of Museuvirtual was written and published as a release and is used everywhere universaly as my current biography and can be presented anywhere without my previous authorization. The same text is publishe in Wickipedia in portuguese. It is copyright free. Based on this I ask Wickipedia to replace it again in the english version. museuvirtual.com.br/arthuromar is my personal site. Any doubts please get in touch with arthuromar@uol.com.br or arthuromar@alternex.com.br — 201.17.36.17 21:54, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone have thoughts on what standard of quality (articles) Wikireaders should be? — Matt 11:58, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/reversible.html
Comments?
I don't know whether this is the right place to ask this question. Apologies in advance if it is not and kindly point the right direction.
From Maruti Udyog website, in Terms of Use.
RESTRICTIONS ON USE OF MARUTI MATERIALS You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, products or services obtained from any Maruti Web Sites, directly or indirectly in any medium. Neither these materials nor any portion thereof may be stored in a computer except for personal and non-commercial use. Maruti will not be held liable for any delays, errors or omissions therefrom, or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof, or for any damages arising from any of the foregoing.
Based on this can we use images from this in Wikipedia?
Thanks,
Alren 23:35, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Is this copyrighted?
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html
I have seen other sites post articles from this site with the message
"Source: U.S. Library of Congress"
So it's not copyrighted? Can anything from the site be posted on wiki? If not, why not? And who holds the copyright? 65.66.156.171 19:52, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Hi I'm Lyndsey Perry and I'm only 13!
Hello, Lyndsey. It is somewhat unusual for a 13 year old to be so enthusiastic about their age. Can we help you? func (talk) 01:09, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
¡Hello, oh Lyndsey Perry!
¿How fare you?
I understand your enthusiasm; but unfortunately however, it is not wise to reveal so much about yourself on the Internet. Although 99% of all people on the Internet are good, that bad 1% does nothing else than look for people like you. You must be very careful.
I hate to sound preachy. I myself advocate for the rights of children as everyone here can attest to their chagrin -- most of the people here wish I would not be so vocal -- but this is very serious. I know that if I continue to preach, you will tune me out, so I shall stop here, with one least warning:
Never ever meet anyone from Cyberspace in Meatspace or give anyone any information which one could possibly use for finding you.
Regards, Ŭalabio 02:04, 2004 Oct 26 (UTC)
On the other hand, you might want to know that there are at least two other comparably young and very active Wikipedians, User:Revolutionary and Ilyanep. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:13, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)
Hi Lyndsey Perry !! Welcome to Wikipedia.Us young people should stick together huh? ( to others -depends on what you define as young! I'm entitled to my delusions.)But don't ask my age please. Have fun editing at wiki.-- Jondel 07:06, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Hey there, welcome. Us young 'uns ought to form a group or clan...accepting only under-18 Wikipedians. -- Etaonish 21:45, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)
Haha. As long as you're good at editing encyclopedia entries, Lyndsey Perry, welcome aboard! Infobacker 21:38, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I'm a new here so forgive me if this is the wrong category. I was wondering if there was some kind of policy regarding displaying reaction mechanisms (diagrams of molecules and their lone pairs, with arrow pushing) for any relevant page, since I haven't seen any? For instance, the page dealing with electrophilic substitution could benefit from showing a mechanism. Displaying Ar + NO2 -> Ar-NO2 is nice, but it doesn't really help explain what's happening.
Is this too advanced for the audience (or something like that) or is the lack of mechanisms just because no one has found/made any? I've drawn (with Chemdraw) several myself already and wouldn't mind uploading them or making more, so that settles any copyright issues.
While I'm on the subject of Chemistry, can we do something about the electrophilic substitution and electrophilic aromatic substitution pages? The former's reaction all include an aromatic compound so the name should be changed to the latter. For future reference, what's the protocol for situations like this? Do I do add a redirect? Ask for input in the Discussion page?
Thanks for your help! -- jag123 17:44, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I was looking at the movie called And the Band Marches on, And the Band Plays on or something like that, whatever the name actually is.
According to the movie, Patient 1 or X could have been one Bobby Campbell, or an airline stewart from the United States. Could it be true that any of these two men be the so called patient 1 or x?
Also, the movie tracks the AIDS virus to the Ebola River. Can it be possible that a connection exists between AIDS and the Ebola virus??
PLEASE respond here, as I seldom remember to look up Village Pump when I ask things.
Thank you, and God bless you all!
Sincerely yours " Antonio Interested in finding facts Martin"
Ken Weide (aka 65.68.200.238), sole proprietor of ElectGOP.net, has embarked on a campaign to include links to his site from every Republican wikipedia article he can find. I first noticed this on Republican Party (United States), but he's also creating links to his site on all the state party articles, sometimes creating new articles solely for that purpose. I've removed the link twice now from the main GOP article, drawing a colorful request to prohibit me from "sabbotag[ing] the viability of the Wikipedia, as well at the good name of the 'Grand Old Party'." I'm sure the link doesn't belong there, and the link-only articles have been listed as candidates for speedy deletion, but I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about the other state party articles. RadicalSubversiv E 22:24, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have 3 Gmail invites to give away to wikipedians so any Wikipedian who wants one is welcome to email me at john@collison.ie JOHN COLLISON [ L u d r a m an] 17:35, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
And in related news, I have 12:
Cross them out when you register them with <s></s> please. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:19, 2004 Dec 2 (UTC)
I only discovered recently that my local library in Massachusetts provides home access via the Internet to a number of databases, via (in my case) two Massachusetts regional library networks. Among other things, I can search the last decade-or-so of the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. More significantly, I can search the New York Times back to 1851(!) (Full text in the form of page images).
Since I doubt that my suburban town is especially unique, I encourage all Wikipedians to check with their local libraries to see what similar resources may be available. [[User:Dpbsmith| Dpbsmith (talk)]] 02:31, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
In general, I always thought the terminology for currency is to use "bill" for the United States (where this term is standard) and "banknote" elsewhere. Yet, another Wikipedian says it is more convenient to use "banknote" always including those of the United States. Any opinions?? 66.245.77.205 23:36, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Does anyone on en: speak Inuktitut? --[[User:Eequor| ᓛᖁ ᑐ]] 23:44, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Trevor Deaves and John Astbury are trying to find an old friend Iain Strang. He is married to Janetta Norwicki? Please reply to inenergy@sopris.net
Assume a page is protected, and a user creates their own version in a temp subpage. Is it allowed for that user to create wikilinks to the temporary article, effectively de-linking the "main" article from Wikipedia? For example, there was a version of La La (an Ashlee Simpson song) which linked to Autobiography (album)/Temp instead of the main article, Autobiography (album). The reason given was that the main article is protected at a sub-optimal version.
This strikes me as a no-brainer. Editors should not create wikilinks from articles into temp articles. Assuming the temporary article is eventually integrated into the main article, the merge will create double redirects and force people to go around changing a bunch of other articles. Linking to temp articles leaves wikipedia in an inconsistent state. It implies that the temp article is the "official" version, when it may not be. Most importantly, it allows groups to put forth their own POV versions of articles and integrate them into Wikipedia.
Thoughts? Rhobite 03:02, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)
Mac OS X Hints has an article on how to "Search wikipedia from the command line". Paul August 18:03, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)
What do you all think about a barnstar of vigilance for those that reliably and consistently fight the good fight against vandalism? Would somebody mind creating the image, because I'm pretty graphically inept... -- Clockwork Soul 16:29, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC
The film Black Night is misspelled it should read Black Knight (2001)
This seems like a perfect message to post here: if you're bored (how is that even possible on Wikipedia?!), you can always read User:JRM/Orange, a true hallmark of something. Oh, go on. I promise there is at least one thing in there that'll trigger at least a brief chuckle—or your money back. JRM 05:14, 2004 Dec 5 (UTC)
Hi. I have a potential issue, maybe even a potential edit war, coming up on this article. An user has decided to create a new article, the object of which is a part of the history of the city about which the article at hand is. Upon doing that, he simply decided that the whole section that made any mention to the topic on this article had to be erased and replaced with a "see main article" notice. That was particularly ludicrous, since the article he had created was still a stub, and in fact the information he erased from the article in question was simply not on the new article. I reverted his edit, but he rereverted it, now claiming that the paragraph was "inaccurate" (or unnacurate, as he wrote...) historically wise, which is preposterous, since I obtained the information from offical sources. In order to make a better case, he also decided to claim that the article was "confusing", which I find really hard to believe, since the article has been complimented on more than one occasion and translated into more than 5 other languages. But even it was unclear, the due process is rewording, not bluntly erasing the data. I restored the paragraph again, but I have a strong feeling he's just going to go back and do it over and over. If you follow the link above, you'll see his user main page. By what he chose to write there I get the feeling that this guy is up to no good, and I really don't feel like engaging in an edit war with someone like that. I need help on this one! Regards, Redux 14:42, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team is up and running. If anyone dislikes the name, your suggestions for a different name are welcome. Maurreen 09:11, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC) And of course anyone interested is invited to join us. Maurreen
The fourth round of the Wikipedia trivia quiz is now open. Find out how good you are in finding the most obscure facts on wikipedia! Eugene van der Pijll 21:24, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I was unable to quickly find a style guide for currency. I was faced with the phrase "N billion dollars" vs. "$N billion", and there wasn't any obvious guidance out there. The obvious place, to me, is Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Punctuation or Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), but there's nothing there about this. -- Dhartung 12:53, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Jallan 08:10, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)The value of billion is now 109 everywhere in the English-speaking world even in the UK. British usage has changed during the last twenty years, bringing it into line with American on this crucial issue, and so a billion means "a thousand million" (Ritter; 2002), rather than "a million million." The changeover was led by British financial institutions such as the Treasury, and has been reflected in reporting by the London Financial Times and The Economist for some time.
We should try to avoid the word billion for the same reason gas stations don't use the word 'inflammable' on gas pumps. While it is technically correct, there is room for confusion. Intrigue 23:08, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Note: Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse (no pictures) is current as of 2004 November 19, but has no pictures, captions are still retained. Since so many people asked for it and since it's not too difficult to replace pics with Image:null.png Pedant 02:00, 2004 Nov 18 (UTC)
I would like a version of the page on the Abu Ghraib scandal without the disturbing images. That way, I (and others) could get the information without having to see more than we want to. There are many minors who use this site; shouldn't there be an appropriate version for them?
There are too many pictures, imo - perhaps some could be taken out and placed in an image gallery. violet/riga (t) 18:48, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Shouldn't this be moved to the Village pump? func (talk) 16:35, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Hello. By the looks of the VfD, most people were opposed (as am I) to splitting the article in two. However, I think that I've come up with a clever solution which can be seen at Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse/pictures suppressed. Basically, I turned the article into a template with embedded parameters inside of potentially images' tags. Undefined parameters normally summon up a default templates, but in the middle of image tags they're meaningless and do nothing. On the subpage, I've used the main page as a template except with the "suppress image" parameter set to "-5px". This apparently causes the images to error out.
Thus, I've created a version without potentially offensive content that doesn't split the article in two. Cool Hand Luke 08:56, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Just heard a radio interview with Andrew F. Smith, who edited this two volume set, the contents of which, he claimed, were severely limited by space. It would be wonderful if we could fill in the gaps left by his 770 articles on (the minutia of) food and drink in America, as well as the rest of the world. Just wanted to share. It might be interesting to look at the kind of articles these guys consider 'encyclopedic' here. Mark Richards 21:30, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Should we rethink the guideline that an article shouldn't belong to a category as well as its parent? Many people either don't know this guideline, or don't choose to adhere to it. According to Wikipedia:Categorization, "An article should not be in both a category and its subcategory". For example Activity Based Costing belonged to Category:Management accounting, its parent Category:Accounting, and its grandparent Category:Business. Does this rule still apply? If people disagree with it we should get it out of policy.. if people do agree with it, we need to make the categorization style clearer, since many editors don't seem to follow it. Rhobite 19:56, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to try to roughly consolidate a few general issues from multiple pages.
A couple catalysts for this are discussions are related to Wikipedia:No original research and a vote here about whether or not to delete Image:Nevada-Tan.jpg for ethical reasons.
Wikipedia's uniqueness means we don't have a pure direct model for the whole of Wikipedia. Some Wikipedia matters seem to at least verge on journalism, and most Wikipedians don't have a journalism background.
I think some examination or re-examination is warranted concerning the following matters, and how they relate to each other:
If you're interested, please join the discussion at Wikipedia needs special standards. Maurreen 08:11, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't know if you know this, but people are now in the habit of editing the sandbox above the sandbox template. I suggest adding a message about saying that edits go below the template at all times to the {{sbox2}} template . 66.245.97.5 01:15, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I run http://www.lyricshead.com, which offers people many lyrics without popups and other annoying advertisements. I think that it would improve the usefulness of wiki album articles if a link was provided to users that provided lyrics for the album. You can see a sample of such a link at the Get a Grip album page.
The format of the link that I would like to make would be "[artist]: [album] lyrics," (as opposed to the link on the get a grip album page, which is simply "lyrics") so that it is more descriptive, but I am open to whatever format you think would best serve the community.
I wrote a program to do the following:
The wikipedia file name is recorded so I can later go back and manually check each page to ensure no formatting issues happened. I will also check to make sure the album does not already point to an official site (some do, but most do not link to any lyrics provider), so I can remove my link if it does.
I ran the program a few days ago and was kindly informed that by Rhobite that this is considered to be spamming / self-promotion. As you can see, it provides a service to users that are looking for album information and would also like to see the lyrics of the songs. He proposed that I bring it up to the community.
So, what do you think about adding a link to wikipedia album articles that direct the user to the album lyrics?
Rhobite: Yes, I will respect whatever the community decides. I want the community to be as excited about this as I am. My intentions are not to spam people, but to give people information that they are seeking. It is true that I am motivated to share more because it is my site, but I don't think it is strange for people to want to share their hard work with others. I am definetly guilty of feeling good when a new visitor e-mails me and tells me that they find my site useful or think the winamp plugin I just released is indispensible. It is because of this that wikipedia should link to my site; I take pride in it and I want to make it useful to people.
Also, I will definitetly look into the error in my program that breaks the code. Also, keep in mind, I will be manually reviewing every edited article page to correct any mishaps.
Rmhermen: The lyrics are provided for educational use only. They are user submitted and the site in no way endorses pirating (in fact, it encourages visitors to buy the album). The Web site provides a link to contact me in case of a legal issue. If I were to receive an e-mail to take down lyrics from a verifiable source, then I would promptly respond by removing the artist's lyrics. Since there is a method to get lyrics removed and damages would be very difficult to prove, there should not be a concern about a lawsuit against a site (not to mention, I have few assets). As far as I know, wikipedia would not be come liable for anything, even if the site gets sued. If there were problems with linking to potentially copyrighted material, then search engines would be sued out of existence.
Cyrius: This Web site is not going to just disappear. I am not doing this for profit, so the Web site will not be shut down because it is underperforming. I am a full time college student taking the load of two people (finishing my BS in two years) and working, so if there was a time for me to give up on this Web site, it is already behind me. Even with my expenses, I have no problem paying for this web site because I enjoy doing it and I enjoy that people find it useful. For proof of my long-term intentions, you will notice that I just released a winamp plugin. I would not release software for people to download if the Web site was potentially going to be closed in a year.
If, by some chance, I do shutdown my Web site. I will take responsibility and remove my links from wikipedia. This task would not be too difficult.
Jmabel: I do not know enough about wikipedia's backend to know if there is an easy solution to do this once the links are in place, but when I run the program to edit the articles, I will format the links however the community wants them to be formatted. Here are some examples:
As you can see, it is very flexible. Personally, I think the first or second one are the best because they are the most descriptive and does not include unnecessary information like the last one. -- Parahost | Talk 06:16, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)
For what it's worth, my suggestion is that if we do this — about which I am neutral — we design an appropriate {{lyricshead}} template that would let the titles be inserted into articles along the lines of
The resulting links would necessarily be uniformly presented; we could make any changes to presentation of these links in a single place; if we ever needed to suppress them all, we could also do that with no difficulty. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:43, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)
Since we don't have lyrics, it might be nice to provide links to them, although I have mixed feelings on the issue of the links, since the target site does have left side google ads (and most pop music lyrics don't seem to be very hard to find). What I did want to point out is that it seems like if this is done in an automated fashion, it should probably observe the guidelines given at Wikipedia:Bots, as discussed on Wikipedia talk:Bots. (BTW Yes, better link titles than just "Lyrics" would be a good thing, as would a template.) Niteowlneils 00:54, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
How do we reach a decision on whether we want to do this? -- Jmabel | Talk 06:19, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)
Good site Parahost, however I personally can't support these links from wikipedia because of the Google ads and Amazon associate program. — Jeandré, 2004-12-11t13:50
Yes:
No:
All right, that settles it. I will not add links to lyrics.
Discussion moved to User talk:TwentyQuestions.- gadfium 00:06, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Google has a new beta search engine called Google Scholar. This looks like a great reference to find scholarly articles about different topics. Check it out. This will be a great tool in addition to the upcoming Google library (see above). -- Chris 73 Talk 04:39, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)
Just discovered Wikipedia and have been spending all day reading about math, statistics, spiritual concepts, my favorite authors. The articles I've come across are very clear and easy to understand and seemingly accurate. Has all of this writing really just come from random people editing pages and adding articles? This is absolutely Amazing! My faith in humanity has seriously just increased orders of magnitude.( User:198.62.10.11)
I just came across WireImage.com and saw a fantastic selection of photos there that could massively benefit many of the articles we have. Obviously the licensing there is quite strict but perhaps with a little discussion we could get them to allow us to use them. I'd do it myself but really don't know very much about the various licenses. Anyone able to volunteer?
PS. I notice Will Sasso already has an image from there - is that allowed? violet/riga (t) 17:08, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hey all, I was thinking about making a bot to browse through Wikipedia and generally help out in any way possible. I've recently learned how to access the internet using Java (which I know well) and I wanted to make a little program for practice. My question is, what should this bot do? I've thought about it, and right now I'm leaning towards having it make links more efficient by changing them so they directly link to a page if they're currently linked to a redirect. I figure it can't hurt, right? Anyways, what other miscellaneous chores should this bot do? Any suggestions? -- pie4all88 06:49, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't understand why someone is adding complexity to the VfD main page, with a bunch of HTML comments, redundant links that need to be manually updated, etc. We have enuf problems with people not following the basic steps that appear on the bottom of the page--why add further complexity with a bunch of confusing asides in the code? I assume it's well-intentioned, but it seems to have a net effect of making it harder to make VfD nominations, not easier. Niteowlneils 18:49, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
There has been some discussion on IRC about whether the term "patrolling" of recent changes gives the right impression or not. In MediaWiki 1.4, there will be a feature that allows logged in users to click a link on a diff to say they have "patrolled" the edit. The edit can then be hidden from recent changes using "hide patrolled edits". The link on a diff will say "Mark as patrolled". After you click that, you will see "The selected revision has been marked as patrolled.". When it is disabled, it will say "The Recent Changes Patrol feature is currently disabled."
Are there any suggestions on what would be a better term for this, such as "checked", or do you feel "patrolled" is appropriate? Angela . 08:24, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)
How about just viewed or read. Other alternatives, scanned (elements of virus checking but also 'scan your eye over that'), perused or visited. -- Solipsist 07:45, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I've done four tables (
Rockingham County Public Schools,
Washington, DC schools(needs some work--I didn't think it thru fully), and
Rhode Island schools/
Providence County, Rhode Island schools with public domain/US Gov data from
here, but want some feedback on a number of issues before I do any more: besides establishing a naming convention (I want to avoid the word "list", as it usually means just a bunch of links, with the data at individual articles, which this isn't, I just wonder if it would be better as "Schools in Rhode Island", etc.), should the school names be hilited (IE italic or bold), should alternating schools have a different background color (like
Rockingham County Public Schools) to make it more clear what's going on and if so what color (I picked a supposedly "safe" gray--how important is it to use "safe" colors?), whether anybody has strong objections to leaving them as HTML tables instead of Wiki table markup (HTML seems much better for expansion and maintanence, as it allows a line-per-row correspondence that makes it more clear what data will be placed where), whether anybody thinks there might be enuf interest to make a formal 'US schools' WikiProject (once all the state and state/county or /district articles are created, it's probably possible to create stubs for the school district articles, from the same data (I'm thinking of creating Rambot-style article starters)), and any other thots people might have about what to include. Two things I'm looking to automate are: conversion to mixed case (most of the data is ALL CAPS)--I'm using a trial version of software that I don't like enuf to pay for at the end of the trial period,(found a way to do it in Excel) and hiding the redundant mentions of the state names, EG converting [[Bristol County, Rhode Island]] to [[Bristol County, Rhode Island|Bristol County]] and [[Barrington, Rhode Island]] to [[Barrington, Rhode Island|Barrington]].
Niteowlneils 20:09, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm having trouble locating the statement by Jimbo Wales deprecating the upload of 'non-commercial use only' images. I'm pretty sure it was on the mailing list and was posted on the Village Pump sometime before the the split into sections last September - but I also can't locate the pre-split archives.
Shouldn't a link to the earlier Village Pump archives be more obvious. And shouldn't the image upload pages make the policy against non-commercial use image clearer (its briefly mention on someway down on Wikipedia:Image copyright tags, but doesn't explain why). -- Solipsist 22:12, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The entry on the Baha'i faith is being held hostage by members of the Baha'i faith who will brook no criticism of the religion, regardless of its accuracy.
I am a former Baha'i and my entries were deleted wholesale, even though they are facts about the religion. I am posting IP only to avoid repercussions against members of my family who are still members of the Baha'i faith.
If this kind of violation of NPOV by deleting all factual criticism of the Baha'i faith continues, I am going to request that the Baha'i article be subject to protection. 65.184.35.245 21:09, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
My friend and I have recently created a game revolving around Wikipedia. We were wondering if any similar game exists. The goal is to get from any page on Wikipedia to any other page in as few clicks as possible. The rules are as follow:
- Thanks - Brett
Posting from school but my name is User:nrbelex
Yes. In fact someone has a tool that does it with software. Unfortunately i cant remember who it is. I' try to find out.
Theresa Knott
(The snott rake) 20:24, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
This game sounds a bit like Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia (which, I believe, is what the particular Kate's tool helped to solve). In any case, if you feel it is sufficiently different, you might like to add this game to the Wikipedia:Department_of_Fun. -- Solipsist 19:29, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
(Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (news) Paul August ☎ 21:58, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC))
What was Wikipedia's first article? And how long did it take for the word to be spread and for there to be lots of people editing here?
See History of Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles. Rmhermen 23:05, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
Just a quick request to find out if someone can tell me why Picture of the Day has been red-linked with some considerable regularity the past while. Denni ☯ 21:33, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)
Okay, so I've just become aware that I can get the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography through my university library. Of course, this is under copyright. But one can also get access to the articles from the old Dictionary of National Biography published starting in the 1890s. So my question, then, is whether the old dictionary is in the public domain, and available for use like the 1911 Britannica. The legal notice on the ODNB site talks about how they reserve all rights on the ODNB, but doesn't say anything about the older work. Anyone know about this? john k 20:32, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
That's what I'd have figured, but I wasn't sure about British copyright law. Also, new volumes continued to be put out up to 1980 or so with the newly dead, or missing people. At what point would copyright come into play? john k 20:55, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Just read this BBC news story about Google scanning pages from five academic institutions (libraries of Michigan and Stanford universities, and archives at Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library). Scans of works in the public domain will be made available for search and reading online. Presumably we will be able to 'borrow' bits? Does anyone know for sure?> -- ALoan (Talk) 20:51, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Google is doing this because it wants the metadata: Bibliographies and Footnotes, the original hyperlink. From that it can build a popularity index of searches. So for example a search on "Petrarch" turns up 2 million books, and then sorts them based on citation popularity.. it is the "wisdom of the crowds", Brilliant really. That they get public domain books online is a secondary bonus, the real money is a private database of all the metadata information linked in to full text searches of copyrighted work, no one else will have that.-- Stbalbach 03:58, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
If you don't celebrate Christmas, have a merry day anyway! Maurreen 06:00, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
OK, I f-ed up big time. Actually, a few days ago, the mistakes I made would have been easily recoverable, however one or more bugs in the 1.4 software seem to be preventing recovery. This morning, before I was fully awake, I meant to delete some VfD'd articles from the speedy cat, but forgot to hit Back after viewing the VfD subpage, and ended up deleting the subpages instead of the articles. The deletions do not appear in the new Deletion log, and if I manipulate the URL, in some cases MediaWiki says nothing has every existed there (even tho' I know it has), and even when it says it knows there are deleted edits, if I try to restore them it says it can't. Articles this applies to are the VfD pages for (probably) Nerdbrains, Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group, Private sozluk, Qurban Jan, That's My Sonic, and maybe William Cameron Menzies. A) If anyone can figure out how to undo this mess, I'd be eternally grateful. B) It seems there are one or more serious bugs in the new software that are probably more important to resolve than a few missing VfD discussions. Niteowlneils 00:28, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I am searching for information on Red Seal Record "His Masters Voice" Ignace Jan Paderwski Pianist. Recorded May 23, 1917.
I have Bach, Chopin and want to know the value.
It looks like nothing has been recorded at Wikipedia:Deletion log since the db was locked for the 1.4 upgrade. Niteowlneils 03:39, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
There's an interesting discussion going on at User talk:Jimbo Wales#Stop breaking Wikipedia policy. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 00:05, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I would greatly appreciate if some people with solid political-science backgrounds would check in on the discussion at Talk:Right-wing politics. I feel like I am engaged with people on the political right most of whom are more interested in scoring points for particular views than in writing a scholarly article. In particular, (1) there seems to be an effort to deny that any despicable regime was part of the right. Look, I'm on the left, and I'll own up to Stalin and (especially) Mao as having been leftists, but Hitler? Pinochet? (2) Slightly less important, this was all triggered by a discussion of whether the U.S. Libertarian Party belongs in the general list of right-wing parties. My view is that it shouldn't be listed there: while there are significant right-wing aspects to Libertarianism, their are also significant aspects that do not fit into a right-wing view. Certainly the party considers itself neither left nor right. I think the relation of Libertarianism to the political spectrum is an interesting question; it belongs (and is present) in the article political spectrum; I haven't checked where else, I presume it is also in Libertarianism, Nolan chart, and possibly even Left-right politics, but I think adding it without qualification to a list of right-wing parties does nothing to help explain either right-wing politics or the Libertarian Party. And explaining is what this ought to be about, not advocacy. And certainly not about politically expedient obfuscation. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:19, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)
I have uploaded an image for my user page which the copyright holder has allowed me to use for that page alone (understanding that the user pages are not counted under the GFDL/Creative commons licensises int he same way as the rest of Wikipedia). What tag do I use to mark it, since this doesn't seem to be comvered by any of the listed tags? Grutness| hello? 08:07, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've noticed some new features in diff management and on changes/wishlists, letting you go back to the previous diff and letting you jump directly to the section cited in the comments, respectively. And I think the Template list at the bottom of the edit is new too.
So, my question: Is there a page on here that mentions when such changes are made? -- Golbez 05:23, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)
For anyone wondering why many signatures are suddenly appearing with unmodified wikicode, this is bug 1142 on Mediazilla. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 04:13, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've been trying to make my own maps, but I've run into a little problem. I was wondering if anyone could help me out. My inspiration was Morwen, who has great maps, like at Image:LincolnshireBoston.png. Now, if you zoom in on the edges, you'll notice she seems to use *soft lines*; that is, the black line suitably turns more pink (and white on the outside) as it goes diagonal, thereby anti-aliasing it. However, when I try to do this, I get results like Image:Azerbaijan districts numbered.png. What I did here was draw the border, then use a fill tool - and the fill tool ignores the anti-aliasing, the soft lines.
I got Azerbaijan to look so good by filling in each area *three* times, and then going over manually to color any remaining transparent bits. This is not an ideal solution, and you can see, it still leaves a little border around every line. (For an even worse example, look at the upper half of my Image:Algeria provinces.png.)
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get maps that look like Morwen's? I COULD paint the area in first, then draw lines over it, and that would properly anti-alias them - except then they wouldn't properly anti-alias with the outer white/transparency. This is annoying enough that I'm holding off on making any more until I can figure out what I'm doing wrong, so I'd truly appreciate any help you can give me. Thanks! -- Golbez 06:10, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)
What is done about sites like this:http://www.knowledgeisfun.com/ that rip-off wikipedia and don't mention their source or the gpl?-- Deglr6328 02:34, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
(Moved to [[Wikipedia:Village pump (news). Paul August ☎ 03:59, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC))
(Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (news). Paul August ☎ 03:51, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC))
No
Solicitation
Tired of unsolicited bulk talk page messages? Someone else wants you to join a wikiproject or to vote for them on the Arbcom or to add cross-licensing tags to your user page? Try Template:NoSolicitors as a vaguely subtle hint! - Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 04:20, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Firstly, please reply on my talk page. OK, I see further up this page, that MediaWiki 1.4 (I think) will have a feature enabling a user to say that s/he has checked an edit? Well, excellent idea. When will it be up and running?-- Gabriel Webber (babble were rig) 18:14, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I just did some statistics on gender ratio on the Wikipedia community at orkut.com, and made a mailing list post about it. I thought some people might be interested: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-December/036142.html -- Tim Starling 08:32, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)
How do you know what sex wikipedians are? Women might be less likely to disclose their sex, or more likely to lie about it, or, in fact, the majority of wikipedians might be poodles for all we know. Intrigue 23:11, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I been looking at this issue for a while to try to better understand our systemic biases. I looked at Wikipedia's top contributors and found that 17% of them declared themselves to be female. (There were another 20% where I could find no declaration of gender).
I also did a very rough, and perhaps meaningless, search to try and see what effect this has had on our encyclopedia. In Wikipedia the word he occurs five times more than the word she, and the word man occurs three times as often as the word woman. I also compared this to other encyclopedias:
He:She | Man:Woman | Encyclopedia |
---|---|---|
5:1 | 3:1 | Wikipedia |
7:1 | 2:1 | Columbia |
4:1 | 2:1 | Encarta |
2:1 | 2:1 | Britannica |
Another factor is that some articles incorporate material from the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, which was written back when he was used as a pronoun for a person of indeterminate sex. Don't think that's enough to entirely explain the skew though. Most likely, the main factor is the "the encyclopedia Slashdot built" effect. crazyeddie 05:07, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Secret society lists a number of organizations that by definition we cannot verify like other facts in Wikipedia. Consider the recent addition of Noble Order of the Lamp and Sword: it was created by anonymous editors, likely students, and there's no obvious way to verify this. Is there any point in even listing secret societies that have no indepenedent verification? Samw 15:14, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I'm not happy about the changes that have been made to the above template, above all they make it look more unpleasant and it is so much larger. Anyone else agree?-- Gabriel (internal ID number: 118170) 12:39, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Is the license of this [4] page compatible with GFDL? Jayjg | (Talk) 04:34, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
An anonymous user from 195.146.134.53 ( contribs, talk) has been changing many lead sections of articles about geographical topics to de-link language names and bold (instead of italicize) foreign versions of names. I've asked them to stop, but there was no reply. They've also started making redirects from these other names to articles, which may be occasionally useful but is by default gratuitous unless something links there. The English Wikipedia doesn't need all this. Is there grounds for a temporary ban here, to get their attention?
(Please answer or notify me on my talk page, I don't watch VP.) -- Joy [shallot] 20:42, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have been working on a page called Views of creationists and mainstream scientists compared for some time with a couple of creationists of strong beliefs (I am not a creationist myself) and I have found it an almost dayly job to NPOV their various strongly biased statements. It is sometimes quite difficult to check a statement that has been made for authenticity as I am not an expert on all areas of science. I encourage others to take a look and check statements that have been made. Barnaby dawson 15:21, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
When realtime search is diabled, usually the search term is defaulted in the google/yahoo search boxes. But currently they show up blank. Niteowlneils 22:46, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Where is the best place to put up a notification that a known web/usenet kook is now on wikipedia making edits and his edits should be monitored closely? (It seems the infamous Jim Bowery [5] has graced us with his presence [6] [7](at bottom)) I'm not sure he belongs in request for comments....yet...-- Deglr6328 22:01, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
One (or maybe two) people moved pages to disambiguation titles unnecessarily, then another reverted using cut&paste, which has left a number (that I haven't determined yet) of articles with seriously messed up histories. Ones I've found so far are
Everybody Has Secrets/
Everybody Has Secrets (movie)--not sure I want to change while it's on VfD,
Untold Scandal/
Untold Scandal (movie)done,
Summer Scent/
Summer Scent (drama),
All In/
All In (drama), and
True To Love/
True To Love (drama), and I'm not going to have time to do it tonightdone today. Two that were caught it time (before both copies ended up with more or less equally long histories) are
Winter Sonata/
Winter Sonata (drama) and
Hotelier/
Hotelier (drama).
Niteowlneils 02:58, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Dear Jimbo,
I am a regular at nl. and sysop there, but I write this letter in which I would like to voice my concern as the only registered user and sysop of a fledgling wiki, the one in isiXhosa. (xh.) I am a Dutchman living in the USA and my isiXhosa is pretty limited. I just wish to repay the hospitality of the amaXhosa that I experienced as a VSO volunteer in South Africa 97-99 by helping this wiki to get going. I had tried to put a word of welcome on the main page in the hope of attracting some native speakers and was at first delighted to see it had been edited by one, who had also left a page about the National Language Services of South Africa on all wikis of the 11 languages of the country.
What I was not so happy with was the addition of the phrase 'kulo Mzantsi Afrika umtsha' for the New South Africa on the main page of the xh. wiki. Apart from the fact that 10 years after 1994 the expression is getting a bit stale it is a clear political reference and a pet phrase of the Pretoria government. Although the number of Xhosa speakers outside South Africa is limited, wikipedia is imho not owned by the Pretoria govt, nor is isiXhosa. Besides many of the other 10 are spoken widely outside the country, e.g. Tsonga in Mozambique, Afrikaans in Namibia and -dare I say- English in Bermuda and a few more places I believe.
The contents of the NSL page are even more worrying imho. It states that this agency is in charge of the communication between all these (11) languages. The Afrikaans version even says bestuur (=governs). Although I applaud Pretoria's efforts to translate documents across languages, I do not think that any goverment should presume to govern the communication between people, let alone whole languages even as they are spoken outside their borders. This simply does not chime with article 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that grants freedom of speech and expression to all global villagers. As wikipedia is concerned this sets a dangerous precedent. Even though the interpretation of the NLS is most likely rather benign, if other goverments presume to have the same rights of controle we might as well give up on wikipedia.
Sincerely Jaap Folmer xh:User:Jcwf
Hoi, {{ ChristmasWish}} Is getting atraction for a project that is done on the Italian wiktionary. This project has several aims:
There are some who consider it not correct to wish people a merry christmas because "they might feel offended". There need for righteousness goes so far that they remove both the content of the message AND the message. Both action are throwing away the baby with the washing water. Because either nothing is left or nothing is left what this project is about.
I am all in favour to have ALL traditional wishes for all festivities recorded both in Wiktionary and, the corresponding soundfiles in Commons. If this happens as a result of the Italian wiktionary's christmas project then that is a blessing.
Finally, Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar GerardM 08:49, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC) :)
I am not a christian and your being offended is something that amazes me. Why would you be offended by a project that is there to promote the use of Commons, Wiktionary, .ogg files and cooperation and, wishes you a merry christmas as well? Being against the efforts of many people who contributed to this project, what did you do to balance this project in a positive way? Where does our project manifest this endorsement of religion? Who said, Sir, I disagree with you totally but I will defend your right till the end that you may say what you say? Your wish for censureship has nothing to do with neutrality. GerardM 19:46, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
why are we allowing mulitple pages for the same nhl franchises? the hartford whalers page should be merge with the carolina hurricanes pages as it is the same franchise?
mine have all been used —Charles P. (Mirv) 13:58, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've got a fresh crop in. Eight invites, first come first serve. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 23:19, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Same here. Leave a message on my talk. -- Whosyourjudas\ talk 04:02, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have 6, just leave a message on my talk. talk Stuff ign 16:32, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Got a bunch. Leave message on my talk, or just [ email me and I'll respond back the gmail invite]. Ozzyslovechild 19:00, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I was looking at today's featured article, The Cathedral at Magdeburg, and saw that there was some discussion about the featured photo, that being the interior of the building. I was curious as to why that photo, and the other photos that accompanied the excellent article were not perspective corrected. I have downloaded the image, corrected the perspective, and it's beautiful. I would upload it to show you if I knew how.
Further to this, I would be willing to help correct and enhance photos for Wikipedia if there was a need. It is my profession. I don't know where to go to volunteer.
Okay, I'm curious: what is perspective correction? ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 21:21, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Okay, so I edited the stub perspective correction with some examples. I don't know how to embed images so so they are internal links. If someone could put the images in the page for me I would appreciate it. Emailing the original photographer sounds like a workable solution. How do you know who to email? Does it always say? Sorry if these are stupid questions. Like I said somewhere else, most of this seems to be in a foreign language to me.-- Jocsboss 03:50, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't know if I'm posting this in the right place (most village pumps I know are a lot easier to use). Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Antifinnugor is at a deadlock because of the lack of outside views. There has been much discussion already (rendering the RfC increasingly unreadable); however, most of the debating editors were previously involved in the issues at hand. The RfC is in desperate need of some fresh outside opinions. Please take a look there if you want! — mark ✎ 13:46, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I approached someone by email to see if they would be willing to license one of their photographs under the GFDL for inclusion within Wikipedia; the author agreed, and was even helpful enough to offer to (digitally) sign a license declaration using his GPG key. From Wikipedia's point of view, this might be a Good Thing for two reasons: 1) it gives other Wikipedia editors some assurance that the author has indeed licensed his work this way (rather than relying on the word of one single Wikipedia editor); and 2) it gives Wikipedia some protection from the author changing his mind later and denying that he ever licensed his work that way (that is, a little bit of non-repudiation).
See Image:Typex.jpg for the image in question. (I have verified the signature with a key downloaded from the author's website and on the key servers, but I haven't verified the key.) (And, I guess, he might better have included a SHA hash of the image rather than a URL, but it doesn't matter too much).
However, most people don't have the technical ability to create digital signatures, and those that do may not want to go to the effort. And, of course, a PGP/GPG signature doesn't guarantee us everything (for example, how can we tell that the owner of a certain email address has the authority to license an image found on the web? etc.)
— Matt Crypto 17:45, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Just found this website after trying to look up information on historical democracies that have failed and why. 1/6/05 NYT "Public Lives" "Warning from a Student of Democracy's Collapse" article by Fritz Stern by Chris Hedges . I was glad to see that a "scholar" was able to get this "what could happen" thought into national print. I had been thinking about the parallels of the religious right's influence to pre-war Germany. Nohing could have been done then and I doubt anything can be done now or in the future. anyone expressing such thoughts will be silenced. I'm not an agitator or radical. Just a student of "history repeating itself" in all sorts of areas. Brenda
That date (2005-02-09) will be:
What am I to make of this? -- Juuitchan
Well, I think the main thing you should conclude is that the Chinese calendar is based on a lunisolar calendar, the Islamic New Year is based on a lunar calendar, and the date of Easter, and so Ash Wednesday, is also complexly related to the lunar calendar. Since the date of each full moon is the same for all countries, it is not so surprising that these various lunar based calendars come into synchronisation every now and again. -- Solipsist 11:29, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I have a few questions about how the GFDL is interpreted on Wikipedia:
-- fvw * 17:46, 2005 Jan 5 (UTC)
For whatever it's worth, I think the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution process and violations of Wikipedia:Wikiquette are too frustrating. Is anyone interested in discussing possible improvements? Maurreen 07:27, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
What right does someone who does not contribute to this encyclopedia have to get up on a pedestal, flaunting their epalauts of epistemology and ribbons and medals of co-foundership alongside a nervous trembling for their reputation to come around and bash the Philosophy section without editing it to a higher standard? Absolutely none. And this is why Wikipedia is and will be succesful. If you don't believe me, read the growth charts. It will handle itself. Just as our growth has been exponential, so to are our capabilities to deal with the vast sum of human knowledge. Doomsaying us does not help and I, a contributor, personally do not welcome it.
Sanger, Larry (Dec 31st, 2004) Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism (Op-Ed). Kuro5hin. Retrieved January 2, 2005.
-- Alterego 19:59, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)
The only good points... well, problems of the Wikipedia, that likely will eventually get resolved is the lack public credibility... but again, this is the Internet. And the other, lack of expertise. Not so much as a respect for expertise, but more so of lack of. I have to be in agreement that there seems to be a lack of experts on the Wikipedia. But I can not say either way there has been respect or disrespect of the current experts on the Wikipedia. Yes, editing on the Wikipedia is a bit daunting at times... adherance to certain rules that one has to be familiar about may stem some of the elitism in which I think Mr. Sanger is talking about. This is only comes from my view, a person who's been trying to cleanup the Wikipedia a bit (like stub sorting), and making my small contributions. It is rather disappointing in the lack of experts... some stubs have remained stubs for a long time. -- AllyUnion (talk) 11:18, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think that there is some truth in the op-ed piece. I have no opinion on Sanger being a good person/bad person whatever (I never heard of him until this morning) but I will comment on the substance of the article.
My 14 year old son and my 11 year old son use wikipedia a lot, researching European history from several hundred years ago. They find it useful for their school related research. I stumbled upon the project helping them with their work. I have recently retired from a decade as head of quant research at one of the biggest banks in the world, having made some contributions to the mortgage securitization field (what Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae do for a living). I will probably never try to make a contribution in my own field of expertise. because I don't feel like getting into arguments with a bunch of grad students who don't even quite know what the field is. Whatever. I have made contributions to some pretty noncontroversial articles (I've been contributing biographies of mid-level U.S. government officials from the 1950's and 1960's.)
Mortgage securitization is an interesting topic (it certainly affects the finances of most American homeowners), but the current system does not make it likely that wikipedia will have a good article on that topic, because unlike a peer-reviewed journal, a wikipedia article is subject to review by non-peers. That works well if we are talking about Harry Potter, or Linux Distributions, or any subject that a large number of wikipedia contributors know a lot about; it does not seem to work very well on a topic that a lot of people know something about, but a few people know well. Morris 15:17, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
The Sanger comments are now featured on /. [9] The comments make interesting reading and have many thoughful insights on the points he has raised. Well worth reading. Apwoolrich 18:56, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
After this has had another day or two on the Pump, we should move it to a Wikipedia-space page of its own, ditto for other languages, and interwiki the discussions. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:06, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)
I have deleted a couple of instances of the word " sci-fi" from the Thunderbirds (television) article and replaced them with " science fiction".
I feel that "sci-fi" is little better than slang, does not constitute proper English usage, and should be replaced wherever it appears in a Wikipedia article with "science fiction", or if appropriate some alternative phrase such as " speculative fiction" or " fantasy". Lee M 16:26, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not paper. We can afford to write out "science fiction": the full term is clearer than its abbreviations. Gdr 18:54, 2005 Jan 2 (UTC)
moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries
Should Donations for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake be protected indefinitely (request here) to eliminate the possibility for scammers to take advantage of our readers? ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 16:56, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
The image Image:039_65658.jpg is a sample image from a poster selling website. I gather it would be copyright, but I'm not sure if it could be fair use. I'd like some advice on what to do with the image. There is a {{poster}} tag, which claims that reduced quality poster images can be fair use, but how reduced must it be? This image doesn't look reduced quality to me. Silverfish 15:16, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
The {{JanuaryCalendar}} is for 2004. Where is the 2005 version? Ancheta Wis 15:02, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've moved the discussion to Wikipedia:Reference_desk#Anti-randomness. crazyeddie 22:44, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
What do you think about people having an automatically updated copy of a VP discussion they start in their own user space (I'm trying this here, actually). This could even be used to have a discussion about a topic between two users on both user's pages. -- Sgeo T C 01:39, Dec 27, 2004 (UTC)
Considering that I posted a reply to the above thread in this thread by mistake, needs some work. Might be handy, but I think it would also be a pain to keep straight. crazyeddie 06:12, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I did this myself to make sure I have all the answers in a convenient place before it's archived. Most people click the correct link in large pages like the help and reference desks, so I don't expect much problems. Personally, I think it's a great idea. Just go ahead. Mgm| (talk) 19:16, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)
Well this certainly confused me when I tried to archive this discussion just now. Which I do by editing the "section" to be archived, selecting all the text of and doing a cut and paste. In this case that meant "blanking" your user subpage. This will make archiving a lot harder, if I have to check to see whether the "section" I'm editing is really an included subpage. Then if so just copy without deleting, then go back to the VP and delete the include — difficult and prone to error. Paul August ☎ 23:27, Jan 11, 2005 (UTC)
Some time ago, a user subpage was deleted against its owner's will following a series of hostile, tasteless comments by people with no sense of humor. For those who are interested, I've placed it on Votes for undeletion.
Policies and guidelines relevant to the matter are Wikipedia:User page, Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers, and Wikipedia:Wikiquette. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 12:49, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
--
Ŭalabio 01:19, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)
Wikipedia's servers have (despite recent improvements) a perennial problem of keeping up with demand. Question: how much of this is due to inefficient storage of images? For example, when a 200px or 100px image on-the-page is stored as a 100kb+ file, the whole of which needs to be provided by the server to the browser? Secondary question: if significant, what should be done about it?
A "List of Big Images" would be a start; some way of comparing the display size of images (in the image tag) with the stored size would also help identify wasted bandwith. Some way of focussing on the most popular pages (hits-wise) in order to optimise their images would be good. Comments? Rd232 14:37, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I deceided to do a test today after reading a critism of Wikipedia as being unreliable and full of incorrect information. I knew this is true at any point in time, but is usually resolved in a quick manner (no more than a few hours usually). To confirm this I edited the carrot article with a sentence that is not true at all. I haven't reverted it yet because I was curious to see if anybody would spot it. Now I understand that the "carrots" article is most likely not one of the most accessed pages on wp, but it a high quality page that doesn't deserve to be degraded by a outright untruth. Well, I edited it 7 hours 20 minutes ago and there have been 2 edits since then; and nobody noticed a thing. I'll leave it there and see how much longer it takes, but I have to say I'm disappointed. Wikipedia is always a source I turn towards when the rest of the web seems devoid of anything more than a stub. How do I know if one odd statement turns out to be wrong if I have no way to verify it? The statement I made may even make sense to someone with no knowledge of fruits and vegetables. bernlin2000 ∞ 04:04, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)
More tests
[10] preceded by flattery
[11] (this is supposed to make me less likely to revert?). So when does the "testing" stop? See
Wikipedia:Don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.
Long pause in contributions from October 6 to January 6. We regularly deal with sock puppets, but is this a podperson? -- Curps 06:17, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I've just had a minor edit war with anon user 81.174.158.223. He claims that the term "drugs and alcohol" is POV, implying that alcohol is morally different from other drugs, and therefore has been changing all references to "drugs (including alcohol)" particularly in a lot of articles about rock musicians (see his contributions). I maintain that, although alcohol is a drug, normal English language usage is "drugs and alcohol" and it is not POV, and cite Google in my favour (I wouldn't normally, but a 908,000 - 25,400 lead over "drugs (including alcohol)" is pretty decisive, I think). What does the assembled masses think? -- Arwel 01:33, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Is it just me or are the paragraphs way too close together?
Look! There's hardly any space between this line and the last! This makes for difficult reading.
Also, and this is being picky, the "edit" links seem to float too high above their associated content. I was confused at first as to whether the edit link applied to the above or the below text.
Paragraph 1: The default style statement Paragraph 2: to separate these paragraphs. |
Paragraph 1: The style statement Paragraph 2: to separate these paragraphs |
As long as we're talking about leading, I think the section headers look bad when there is more than one line. The ascenders and descenders of the letters run together. But I doubt I'll go to any trouble to fix it. Maurreen 05:21, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Hello everybody,
In Berlin at Dezember 2004 there was the critique that there is not enough connection in the work of all the different Wikipedias in their different languages. I think, that an internationally linked writing contest should be one possible chance to cooperate and work together. At March 1st there will be the start of the second writing contest in the german Wikipedia so I thought, we can start it as an international project. There had bee contests in the Wikipedia of the Netherlands nl:Wikipedia:Schrijfwedstrijd, the german Wikipedia de:Wikipedia:Schreibwettbewerb and the english one en:Wikipedia:Danny's contest and as far as I could see it, it worked really good.
I hope you will join the Contest, please visit meta:International writing contest to find out more. -- 149.225.56.90 08:40, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC) ( Achim Raschka aka Necrophorus
Hello, as a resolution to the ongoing debate surrounding the Country Infoboxes, I have created a forum for voting on which solution the wikipedia community would prefer. The vote can be found here. Thank you! Páll 19:26, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I just noticed a tremendous speed improvement in the last couple hours. What happened? Did someone add a gazillion servers? Keep up the good work. pstudier 02:31, 2005 Jan 11 (UTC)
Recently an article, Jump Gate Technology was added, based on material that is under the Open Gaming License, which you can read here. I would appreciate any well-informed comments (here, at Talk:Jump Gate Technology or at WP:CP as to whether this material (aside from any consdieration of whether it is encyclopedic) can be incorporated into Wikpedia articles. I suspect that it is impossible, as there are many requirements (distribution of the complete text of the OGL with the material, for example) that would violate the GFDL, but more words of wisdom would not go amiss. -- rbrwr ± 23:35, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)