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Greetings,
I run an informative website:
We have a *huge* amount of completely free information. Currently we have 102 separate grammar topics, located here:
http://www.studyspanish.com/tutorial.htm
For each of these topics, there is a complete explanation, as well as a written quiz and a written test, all free. For the first 84 lessons, there is also a free oral practice.
There are comparable sections on verbs and vocabulary, as well as other free features.
Because we have so much free and valuable information, it would be very beneficial for me to add multiple links to the pertinent Spanish language pages. But, I see that policy "strongly discourages" this, although it does not prohibit it.
The policy statement said that I should come to the Village Pump and seek approval before doing this, so that's what I'm doing.
Thanks,
Ken Ryan
Samurai Clinton seems to be in the middle of creating a new process for marking pages to be disambiguated, including a voting process. See Template:VfDis, Category:Pages being nominated for disambiguation and Wikipedia:Votes for disambiguation/Super Mario Bros.. (He hasn't yet built a Wikipedia:Votes for disambiguation to collect all the entries.) Is there any need for this? Is there controversy over building disambig pages -- why not go ahead and do it instead of calling for a vote? Being bold is all well and good, but a new process like this should be discussed. I'm leaving a note on his user talk page asking him about it and pointing him here. FreplySpang (talk) 18:37, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A number of individuals, certain political or religious leaders in particular, as well as many nobles, have a certain style. For instance, Rainier III, Prince of Monaco is styled "His Serene Highness"; the Pope is style "His Holiness"; Tony Blair is styled "The Right Honourable" (as member of the Privy Council). Note that those title carry some semantic content; the Pope's expresses that he is particularly holy, and Blair's expresses that he is particularly honourable.
The problem is, not everybody agrees that the Pope is holy and Blair is honourable. There are about 1 billion Catholics out of a population of 6 billion, thus it is quite probable that a wide majority of the world's population does not regard the Pope as particularly holy.
Of course, we may take the point of view that such titles are mere courtesy titles with no real semantic content.
Note, however, that there may be cultural differences playing here. In some countries, many official functions have styles (judges are called "Your Honor", etc.) and thus people do not pay attention to them. In other countries, official functions do not have styles, and thus people, not used to such kind of formulas, may pay more attention.
So I wonder what the Wikipedia policy should be. I note that John Paul II styles him "His Holiness" but that Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama is not styled. Maybe we should also strive to make this policy consistent and not favor such or such religion or leaders. David.Monniaux 07:50, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
In the United States (or at least in New York) all elected officials are introduced as "The honourable..." in formal occasions. For instance, if I'm inroducing my local state assembly member to someone, I would say "...the honourable Jonathan Bing..." but I would not consider that to be part of his name, in an encyclopedia article. For the pope (for example) I might call him "his holiness" if I was meeting him in person, but not if I was refering to him in an article. So I support the suggestion. Unfortunately, it is hard to draw the line between titles and "styles". What about talking about "The first lady"? That is very common usage, but it isn't a formal title either. Morris 13:26, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)
Controversy brews over whether "non-notable" is a criterion for speedy deletion. Before voting, consider if something you created might be thought "non-notable" by Someone.
Poll is open at: Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Poll: Speedy criterion: "non-notable". — Xiong talk 01:10, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)
What is the WP policy, if any, on placing both a category and its subcategory onto the same page? For example: placing [[Category:Photography]] as well as its subcategory [[Category:Photography companies]] into the same article?
I believe that categories are always helpful as long as they are relevant. So I like to place as many relevant categories into an article as possible to help direct readers to what they are looking for. Paradiso 09:58, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Would it not be more neutral and politically correct to use CE instead of AD when citing dates? Just a thought, but I know some people get edgy reading "AD"
According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), both AD/BC and CE/BCE are acceptable names for the era, and the Islamic calendar is perfectly appropriate provided dates are also given in the Julian or Gregorian calendar. The AD/BC versus CE/BCE issue has been discussed several times at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) (see the archives). The current MoS is a mostly acceptable compromise between the two extreme points of view so well caricatured above. Gdr 22:30, 2005 Apr 1 (UTC)
The use of CE/BCE is more academic and therefore more encyclopedic and appropriate for WP. They're both still based on the life of Jesus, but given the choice I'd go with the more academic version. Paradiso 09:48, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Why have years at all? And why start with the moon landing? Why not just declare today to be Day 1669192548320 of Earth's history (it's close enough) and leave it at that. In the meantime, while we're waiting for everyone else to adapt to our new system, we can just leave articles alone. If they say BC/AD, we leave them that way, and if they say BCE/CE, we leave them that way, and hope that users who have never seen those abbreviations can figure out what they're supposed to mean. -- Angr/ (comhrá) 20:41, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I shouldn't have to worry about distinguishing between what's accurate and what's supposed to be a joke when I visit Wikipedia. This April Fool's Day revision is tacky, and compromises the integrity of a database that's already coming under fire for being editable by anyone. Grossdomestic 06:22, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
THANK YOU! Exactly what I've been saying for two days now. How do we tell vandals not to vandalize the encyclopedia when we're encouraging it? Rick K 06:35, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)
Method Engineering Encyclopedia is not a standard Wikipedia article, and it strikes me as being out of place. The subarticles, too, do not conform to Wikipedia style. But this looks like a genuine effort in good faith, and could be worthwhile if the right place or format could be found. What to do? What to suggest? -- Woggly 10:56, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I say when a dedicated bunch of students makes an invasion, one has to expect a good deal of POV and original research. This poroject is better be on alert. Mikkalai 22:30, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Hello there,
Wikipedia was my favourite till I came to know that anyone can edit most of the documents and the change reflects on the page immediately. What is stopping anyone from posting rubbish, or worse posting "their individual views" on subjects. If this happens (maybe it is happening), then what degree of quality control do we have on the material available from Wikipedia. I am a researcher and I want to make sure that every information I gather is reliable. Thanks for your time.
Sam
This quality control business seems to be a non-issue to many of us. It is said vandalism and misinformation are house-cleaned very quickly, generally within minutes, by Wikipedians. Not exactly so.
Wikipedia is new. It's user base is growing. Many contributers learn from elsewhere and write previously unavailable materials. If you read a book about dairy cows and you write a short article based on that book, you introduced some fresh information to the knowledge pool.
In a few years, there will be kids grown up studying Wikipedia because it's cheap and, pardon my Hawaiian, wiki. Some Wikipedia knowledge will be used by them and then cycle back to Wikipedia to justify its own existence. Many of today's journalists use Wikipedia as a start point. Usually they have very little time to verify the information. It is possible that some Wikipedians will use these misinformed newspaper articles to justify questionable information. This is what happens today. Think of a decade after.
Wikipedia is not an Encyclopedia. There are more than 100 non-English versions. Trust me, counting out those dead and semi-dead versions, I have seen at least one top 70 "active" Wikipedia contributed only by a handful persons. Based on my observation three months ago, I have seen one Wikipedia (over 500 articles then) with 4500 edits out of a total 8000 edits contributed by just one person. Thanksfully that language is not English. If you call that trustworthy. -- Toytoy 23:59, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)
Do we have a de facto policy on using CIA maps for countries in the absence of better quality maps produced by the Wikipedia community? User:Kelisi has been replacing the maps on several countries with what I believe to be clearly inferior maps (albeit with more detail). Please enter the debate on talk:Panama Jooler 08:31, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hi all,
There is a template called {Infobox UNSecGen} that people have been adding to UN General Secretaries, such as Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. As you can see, it has fields for "date of death" and "place of death". These are displayed even when the subject is still alive. If one deleletes "| date of death=" and "| place of death=" they are still displayed, this time with what looks like a variable name.
Is there any one else here who finds this ghoulish? I realize that strictly speaking this is a technical issue, but I am just wondering if we could reach concensus for avoiding this kind of thing. -- Viajero 22:12, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I just submitted an article on the American poet Rod McKuen, yet Wiki posted it as "Rod mckuen," (lower-case "M") even though this isn't how the name appears anywhere in the text. Can I simply change the name?
Thanks!
-- LanceHawvermale 23:30, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've noticed lately a tendency to slap series templates (for example Template:Anarchy, Template:History of Spain onto articles that are not actually part of the series (although they are more or less related). I wouldn't think this was appropriate, though it is not insane. Is there any policy on this? If not, we should form one: this shouldn't be a matter of individual editors' caprice. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:11, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)
I created a new article about the proposal for creating Super-users, a class of administrators who would have full sysop rights, with the exception of blocking and unblocking powers. Rad Racer 00:41, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I think we should not include articles of some non-noteworthy high schools just because a single incident (see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Red Lake High School and Talk:Columbine High School. The majority of people do not agree with me. Is there an established policy?
Here are my views (edited):
Other than some magnet schools, high school articles are generally useless. These schools are local schools. You don't see a student from Tokyo in these high schools. You don't even see a student from another state, county or town over there. People in Baghdad are not sending their kids to a small school district in Colorado. The school information is not needed by the rest of us (6 billion earthlings). Any one of us may want to visit a small village populated by 10 somewhere off the shore of Congo River. But we usually don't consider to go a high school across the town. -- Toytoy 01:47, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
People usually say the shootings made these school noteworthy. I'll say that's totally nonsense. A shooting makes a school noteworthy only when:
Each school has some troubled students. This is not news. The school has to do something that caused the shooting to be any noteworthy. -- Toytoy 02:39, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
There has been much discussion on the notability of schools, and, unfortunately, no consensus has been established. The arguments go on on the VfD pages daily. Rick K 23:36, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
I disagree with the original writer (
User:Toytoy). The question is not about the value of the school, the question about the value of the article to someone who is trying to get some information or do some research. I suggest that someone wanting to reserach recent violence in schools is likely to want to look for "Columbine". Someone looking into the murders in Chicago is much more likely to type in "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" or "Al Capone" (Although I would have no objection to creating a redirect from the address if someone thinks it would be helpful.) Notice that the article is about "Columbine" not the exact address of the school. You can say many things, but using a dictionary definition of "notability" Columbine is certainly notable.
Morris 00:39, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)
I think the BEEFSTEW rating system is way too inclusive. IMO the only criterion that can make a school notable is the notability of its alumni. I would propose that a school have an article if and only if one of the following applies:
-- Angr 20:14, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
There seem to be a large number of images uploaded but not currently in use in any article (these are termed orphans). Many of these seem to lack source and licensing info. (unverified orphans, or UOs). A few Wikipedians feel that to reduce the load on the servers it makes sense to delete them. A few Wikipedians feel that unverified images uploaded before some date should not be deleted, since the image upload page was not always the way it is now. IIRC, earlier versions did not ask the uploader to tag the image with licensing info. and just asked them to check a box that said that they have permission to upload. IIRC long ago all content (including images) in Wikipedia were supposed to be GFDL, then fair-use images came along, and then came the possibility that Wikipedia could allow a myriad of "free licenses" and "permissions to use" to be used.
I would like to request more people to post their views on the threshold date for listing such images for deletion, whether to list such images for deletion at all, etc. at Wikipedia talk:Images and media for deletion/Unverified orphans#Two thoughts to deal with some of the images.. -- Paddu 06:41, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Paddu explained in length the issue. There are ten of thousands of untagged orphans. Some were recently uploaded and do not follow current rules which make tagging mandatory. However, many were uploaded before this became mandatory and in their uploaders mind, they were gfdl, since they agreed to follow gfdl when they uploaded it.
A couple of assumption should be clarified. It is not because an image is untaggued that it is necessarily a copyvio. We currently keep copyrighted images on Wikipedia. We assume we can use them under fair use doctrine. It sometimes happen we are wrong, and in this case, the board or anyone else receive a complaint from the copyright holder. The solution is generally to promptly delete the image and I can tell that in 4 years, all cases have been fixed to the satisfaction of the copyright holder. We should assume good faith from most uploaders and only delete untaggued images when someone raise a complaint about them.
In case the image is untaggued and is indeed a copyvio, it being an orphan reduces the risk of any legal complaint.
Another assumption is that an orphan image is "not interesting". It is not so. It may be that several images of the same topic already exist and not all may be put in the article. Which does not mean the ones non linked have no value. So, deleting them for having no value is not very wikilove.
Third point : we have room on our servers. If we were lacking room, I would agree we should not keep what is uncertain. But keeping these images is not hurting the whole system from a storage point of view.
Fourth point : the only case where the orphan untaggued would be likely to be problematic is when the whole content of the db is downloaded, possibly to be put on a cd rom. Here, if the image revealed itself a copyvio, we would not be able to do anything.
So, here is what I support
A self-appointed clique calling itself the Wikipedia:Office of Investigations has empowered itself to decide who is a "problem user" who needs to be "dealt with", primarily through arbitration. Do you support this move, or are you worried about vendettas and bullying? Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Office of Investigations. — Charles P. (Mirv) 22:46, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Any Wikipedia editor has a right to file an RfC, these editors have just organized themselves. It's up to the arbcom to decide if they want to hear the case, and if an editor or group of editors become nuisance litigators, an RfC can be filed against them. Just ignore them unless they bring you into an RfC, how is it hurting you? Rick K 23:33, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
This debate is currently at Wikipedia talk:Association of Member Investigations. Please direct your comments there. — Xiong talk 03:22, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)
What's better: "History of X" or "Xsh history"? This is a dilemma that has plagued Wikipedians since the dawn of time. I have proposed a new naming convention to deal with this issue. See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (country-specific topics). Any comments would be greatly appreciated. - Pioneer-12 00:46, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There is a policy proposal being voted upon at University of Maryland, College Park/Vote. Some users believe that all articles for universities should use short names, such as "University of Texas" vs. "University of Texas at Austin", "University of Massachusetts" vs. "University of Massachusetts Amherst", etc. The poll has two questions, one about the specific name for University of Maryland, College Park and the other is a general policy proposal which would change Wikipedia:Naming conventions, affecting many articles. I'm not sure if University of Maryland, College Park/Vote is the right page for a policy proposal, and I don't think there has been any input from a larger portion of the community before voting started. Still, please vote. Rhobite 18:33, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Scientific point of view ( WP:SPOV) is a discussion on SPOV and NPOV. Criticism and further development of ideas, improvemtn of my prose is welcome. :) Dunc| ☺ 23:56, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hi! I've attempted to start a discussion on Deletion policy/redirects regarding an argument I'm involved into (sigh) regarding deletion of redirects to missing articles. From what I've seen, I fear that page is not on many people's watch list; would there be a more appropriate location for it?
(I'm a bit anxious to get this resolved, as this has brought part of the Wiki Syntax cleanup effort to a halt, especially since one of its pages has been unilaterally put under protection.)
Thanks! -- Fbriere 04:34, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Last night, I went absolutely insane.
I am not Chinese, but I confess to a fascination with all things Chinese, and I would like to participate in projects relating to things Chinese. But every forum discussing things Chinese -- every Talk page on every article whose topic is Chinese -- seems to be full of a certain fanatic debate. This debate is so highly polarized that it cannot even be characterized in neutral terms -- but we have to call it Something, or you'll wonder what I'm talking about. Please allow me to call it the "PRC vs ROC" debate. You might just as well call it the "Mainland vs Taiwan" debate, or the "One China" debate, or the "Beijing vs Taipei" debate, or just the "Evil vs Good" debate -- and who is evil and who is good, I am sure I cannot say. Its most visible expression is argument over what to call it -- what names may be used to identify Chinese things, be they political, geographical, human, philosophical, or ethnic entities.
I have other contributions to make and am hardly a China expert, so I thought I would just leave this alone, though not without a comment or two on the ludicrousness of either side trying to convince the other. I can't imagine why I thought that would quiet either of these rabid parties. After all these years, I still manage to believe in the goodness of human nature and the rationality of the human animal.
What finally set me off was when a user came onto my Talk page to ask me to weigh in on the debate. Imagine! Here I have set it down in no ambiguous language that I consider the entire debate offensive, contrary to the WP Way, out of order, and incapable of resolution. I have real work to do, articles to edit, graphics to upload, typos to catch, links to fix, garbage to be emptied. Now I'm being dragged into this cesspool of contention.
I went absolutely insane.
I fired off a completely unsupported fiat -- my "last word" on the subject -- and began to archive all this useless debate into one page -- arena, battleground, what have you -- one place where the warring parties can slug it out until the end of Time. This immediately touched off protest, unsurprisingly not by neutral parties. I had the forethought to create a page to house this metadebate, too.
After a break of some hours to eat and relieve Wikistress, I returned to find that Curps had attacked my unilateral action with some unilateral action of his own. He has bypassed normal procedure, saying I have bypassed normal procedure. He has ordered me to cease and desist. I shall be delighted to lay this burden down, so unwillingly assumed in the first place. But I'm not going to drop the matter, either. All is not well.
I paraphrase for general consumption, highlights of my reply:
You don't like me to impose a solution? Please, you impose a solution. If you think you have more authority than I do, you probably do. If you have the power to unilaterally bypass social mechanisms and throttle me, then you have the power and the responsibility to impose a unilateral solution on these political fanatics before they destroy us all.
Every existing method of conflict resolution has failed. This endless, pointless debate is wrecking everything with which it comes in contact. It's not even limited to China-related pages; it spills into the Pump, a half-a-dozen policy talk pages and, I swear, I think I come across it while I'm trying to edit Graph theory. The debate is a cancer eating away at the fabric of WP society.
Curps moved the page I created for the debate to User:Xiong/Talk:PRC vs ROC. Fine by me; when I run out of bandwidth or storage, send me a bill. Pick a name -- any name, any namespace -- just so long as it doesn't overlap with real discussion. Believe me, I don't have a dog in this fight. I simply have no opinion on the "Taiwan question", the "Mainland China" question, or any of the other thousand forms of the debate.
My actions are only disruptive to those who need to disrupt WP to make their points. I haven't even interfered with those who just want to continue the eternal debate itself -- only those who feel it must be aired in every conceivable forum.
Before I started moving comments in this debate to a designated area, I saw Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese) grow to a whopping 150K; I could barely get it to load in my browser, let alone edit it or make any comment on any other issue -- one upon which some consensus might be reached, one having nothing to do with PRC, ROC, or any of that.
What I have done is to archive portions of a verbose, distributed discussion in a central location. I'll admit I have done so with a great deal of huffing and puffing, and you're welcome to censure me for that. But I contest any censure of my actions or characterization of them as disruption or vandalism. Archival of discussion is a normal user function on WP. I have contrived a method of quarantining this -- foolishness -- while preserving not only the foolishness itself for those who care to indulge, but also the legitimate business of the forums so polluted.
Please do not tell me everything is going to be okay. Don't ask me to wait around for consensus to pull out of this furball; it will not. Human beings have been executed by their leaders for expressing opinions on this subject; there are plenty of warriors on both sides who will not lay down their arms. You will not get these folks to the bargaining table, let alone get them to agree on anything. The debate itself is pointless. It has gone on for years; if a solution by consensus or any other existing method were possible, it would have taken place. No new information is going in; a great smoke and noise is coming out.
I took action. You don't like it? You take action. Be bold. If you think this needs to be decided at the Highest Levels, get together with the other bigwigs and thrash it out. There is not much point trying to do serious work on one corner of this project while holy wars rage everywhere. This debate is merely one egregious offender.
Please prove me wrong. Please prove me an insolent fool, a rude buffoon, a maniac on wheels. Prove my actions unwarranted, extreme, overreaction. You will earn my most sincere apologies. Show me. Bring the combatants together, or for that matter, allow them to continue their war, somewhere away from the general business of this project. Let your solution serve as a model for the other holy wars raging here, which are all too numerous and visible.
Meanwhile, I call for a Speedy quarantine procedure, which will permit any admin to immediately, without metadebate, establish a forum for any debate which threatens to engulf multiple unrelated forums. Note that all participants will automatically contest quarantine; they will assert that their debate belongs everywhere, right up front. Thus no metadebate on quarantine itself is permissible, except within the quarantine forum. The admin acts, and thereafter, all related comments will take place in the designated forum.
Let us disagree, but let us do so with some fragment of civility. — Xiong ( talk) 14:01, 2005 Mar 25 (UTC)
I'm glad to see that the majority are now angry with me, rather than at each other. Perhaps you can build on that feeling and extend it to other areas of agreement.
I have deleted nothing; all debate I have moved, I have moved to the designated area for such debate. Those who wish to pursue the matter may do so there. I absolutely agree that such debate is vital to the building of the actual articles so long as it remains in its proper place. When it spills out into other areas of the project; into demands for a restatement of general policy; it is One-Thingism, fanaticism, and disruption.
Of course nothing is ever the last word; I cannot even keep up with archiving debate, so I've abandoned any attempt to control edits -- a foolish, headstrong aspiration to begin with. Edit wars can be dealt with by the usual mechanisms.
Fortunately, I can enforce nothing "across the board". I am limited both in authority and resources. But if I come across debate disruptive to the community, I will deal with it as best I can -- as every Wikipedian should. — Xiong ( talk) 19:47, 2005 Mar 26 (UTC)
I had a peak at the new article Battle on the Irpen' River, & was mortified to see six different stub notices. I guess the original contributor was worried some people using Wikipedia might not think this article was a stub.
Seriously, are there any justifiable reasons to put more than one stub notice at the end of an article? Category stub notices admittedly can be of use to draw attention to a given article, but in this case, I'm strongly tempted to either delete all but {{russia-stub}} & {{lithuania-stub}} seeing how the other 3 categories could be folded into those two, or delete all but {{history-stub}}, & replace the rest with category markers. I prefer the second option, but am I going to find myself arguing with a majority of wikipedians who don't see the silliness in multiple stub notices? -- llywrch 00:16, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
If only these editors spent as much effort on expanding stubs as categorizing them... Gdr 02:37, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)
LOL...well, I count only five, but that still must be some sort of record! No, as pretty as some of the subject-stub tags are, there's no excuse for using more than one of them. — Matt Crypto 04:53, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I got some beating with a heavy stick here for puting several stub notices to the article under discussion. A relative newbie, I would be happy to comply with "Never ever more than one stub rule" in the future, if this is indeed the policy. However, could some one point out the reason behind it? My reason of putting several stub tags was to encourage other wikieditors, knowledgable in any of the fields of several stubs, to contribute by finding the article in the lists of stubs in the category, they feel competetent to write. Could someone point out why using the stub tags to attract editors was a bad idea. Thanks! Irpen 15:45, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)
OK, how about a rule of (at most) one stub tag, and then categorising the article into the other stub categories (but without the stub message). That way, the article isn't cluttered up with stubcruft, and still editors can find short articles to expand in their field of interest. — Matt Crypto 13:23, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I have made a proposal to solve this multiple stub thing at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Reform proposal: stubs and categories. -- Toytoy 04:55, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
One of the unique things that makes Wikipedia so great is that it offers a single-access-point to reference information, and the whole idea of splitting it into wikipedia and wiktionary seems very arguable to me. While making a copy of wiktionary-like entries to wiktionary seems totally appropriate to me, removing them from wikipedia is i.m.o. a bad thing. I have personally been a heavy promoter of the wikipedia effort with everybody i know, but i would feel deceived if i'd check on wikipedia for something (including dictionary terms) and not find it there. Please carefully reconsider your strategy, this split will hurt your efforts and i believe you'll only find yourself with many frustrated users in no time. Thank you for your time.
PS I am writing these lines becuase i recently submitted a QoR (Quality of Results) entry to wikipedia and found out it's listed as "candidate to moving to wiktionary".
The subject of Wiktionary entries are words the subject of Wikipedia articles are the actual thing the word names. There are also major format issues ; Wiktionary entries have a very standard layout with little prose while Wikipedia articles have many different formats with lots of prose (well they are supposed to :). More at Wikipedia is not a dictionary. -- mav 21:33, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I wouldn't mind some soft links somewhere in an article indicating we've got a wiktionary entry for it. But including wiktionary in Wikipedia will just make things messy for new users who don't know about namespaces. The mere fact Wikipedia and Wiktionary have different names, should help people in distinguishing where to put stuff, even if some people still ignore it. Also, as things currently stand. Dic defs clog up the namespace and make the whole redlink is no article less useful. 131.211.208.36 09:50, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
For articles needing to be cleaned up, shouldn't there be reasons why that article needs to be cleaned up (ex. Unorganized, Spelling, Grammar, ...) listed on the template? тəzєті 22:43, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
Help me understand: GFDL allows for future commercial use of material, but as a copyleft GFDL asserts said future commercial material must also be GFDL. How can something be both commercial and licensed under GFDL? If an advertisement using GFDL material is considered "commercial" then the dual GFDL/commercial nature does not seem contradictory, but what about someone selling a poster with GFDL material on it? Does that mean after I buy the poster I am free to copy and redistribute it, but not before I buy it? More cartoon examples might help me. Thanks. Lensim 18:10, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Let's say I print up the geographical articles into a book and call it SuperAtlas. I can sell it to you. Until you buy it, you have no rights to it. Just because I downloaded and printed the GFDL content, I'm not under an obligation to give it to anyone else. However, whenever I do give it someone else (whether I'm doing it because they bought it or I'm a nice guy), I must do so under the terms of the GFDL, insuring the person to whom I'm giving it the same rights I have.
In particular, that means that once you have one copy of the SuperAtlas, you can give it to your friends or reprint it or publish it on the web (as long as you do so under the licensing terms). You could try to get a copy of my SuperAtlas by asking someone who already has one for a copy; there's nothing wrong with that. Or you could do the same thing I did and consult the source. But I have no obligation to both sell copies of the SuperAtlas and give them away. Demi T/ C 19:12, 2005 Mar 24 (UTC)
Why doesn't the NPOV policy apply to Taiwan. Apparently Wikipedia treats Taiwan as a sovereign state called the Republic of China? Beijing totally refutes this and no-one officially on the world stage recognises the "Republic of China". Not even Taiwan recognises itself as independent. Surely we have to change to refer to Taiwan as "Taiwan" and to accept that Taiwan is not sovereign? I though the NPOV policy was sacrosanct, jguk 12:26, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
No, I'm saying that having a WP policy that is totally contradictory to Beijing's stance is POV. One completely accepting Beijing's stance would also be POV. It's best to have a convention to use terms on which the main sides agree. They all agree that (at present) Taiwan is not independent of China. They also all use the term "Taiwan" as a short-hand for territory that is currently controlled by Taipei. So it'd be best to adopt this approach rather than treating Taiwan as a separate sovereign state and referring to the "Republic of China" or "Cross-Straits", jguk 13:27, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Comment Something that the posters on NC:Chinese keep forgetting is that an NPOV isn't no POV. A neutral POV explains controversies, it doesn't try to bury them by creating and vigorously reinforcing "Naming Conventions". This goes to the heart of the entire current NPOV section on everything China. It's ridiculous to be creating categories and shoving articles around to non-existent entities (Mainland China) because it doesn't agree with everyone's POV about what "China" is. So long as everyone in Taiwan, HK and Macau get their way, "China" doesn't exist. SchmuckyTheCat 14:17, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
it is unreasonable for WP to take the view that there is a sovereign state based in Taipei called the Republic of China -- this is precisely the view of the ROC itself. It calls itself the "Republic of China", and its provisional capital is Taipei.
Apparently Wikipedia treats Taiwan as a sovereign state called the Republic of China? -- no, Wikipedia currently treats the ROC as a government / regime that controls Taiwan and a few other islands. Similarly the PRC is a government / regime that controls Mainland China, HK, and Macau. -- ran ( talk) 17:00, Mar 19, 2005 (UTC)
I propose that all further discussion take place here in order to avoid fragmentation. Let me briefly state here that the person who started this debate on the Pump is, IMHO, simply mistaken both about the intent behind the naming conventions and about the real world situation. -- MarkSweep 20:33, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This is some topic being long disputed. The reason we do not take PRC's view point as neutral point of view is because this encyclopedia is not based in Beiging. We reach a neutral point by reflecting the reality while keep all the POVs into the article. Whether Taiwan is neutral or not based on one's point of view. However, the reality is that PRC does not control Taiwan/ROC. Similarly, the U.S. does not recognize Cuba and this fact does not make Cuba less sovereign than other nations. We treat Taiwan/ROC as a sovereign country because it function like a sovereign country, not because it is a sovereign country in everyone's eye on this earth. We choose a treatment not to against PRC's POV but a treatment which is closest to the reality. When PLA start to patrol over the Taiwan coast daily, we will stop treating ROC as a sovereign country. Before that, I suggest we reflect the reality.
I do see the problem of the definition of China where the definition is affected by the regions outside of the mainland China. However, this is really the by-product of the NPOV policy in Wikipedia. As long as Chinese people makes assertions extending beyond current PRC's control and also as long as those being claimed regions objects the definition from PRC's view point, a clear cut definition of China, either geographically or politically, would always being occluded for the sake of NPOV not to biasing against those diagree with the PRC difinition. Again, this is being done to reflect reality, not because we want to bias against PRC. The only way to circumvent this issue is to define China as where PRC controls and take note of PRC's claim in the articles to reflect PRC's POV. However, it seems less likely to reach such a consensus. Mababa 05:36, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The people of Taiwan do not agree "there is one China". The government of Taiwan for decades used the fiction (excuse) that there was one China to avoid being voted out of office by the Taiwan people. 4.250.168.188 13:28, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Template:Cleanup-technical or {{cleanup-technical}}<br\>What's the practicality for the use of this template? Isn't the evaluation of what's too technical going to vary by each individual reader? For example, if I (as a non-principal author) can understand the content of an article, is that grounds enough for removing it, or do we have to put it to a vote every time we want to remove such a tag? I'm also unclear as to the overall intent of such a tag. Is this supposed to create pressure for evolving towards a "Wikipedia for Dummies" authorship style? - Bevo 19:50, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Is there a policy to move media to Wikicommons? If there is, is there a policy of deleting the media locally? Gareth Hughes 16:58, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I know this must have been discussed before, so if you have pointers to previous discussions/decisions, that would be great.
The idea is that (for non-redirect pages) if you can't muster a paragraph about something (at least, say, five lines or 400 characters) then it's really a request for an article, and not an article. Any edit that would record a page with a total size of less than 400 bytes would be refused (page creation or edit). Demi 22:41, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)
I also think that this is a dreadful idea. Articles have to start somewhere. Filiocht 10:31, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)
@Demi: What exactly is the problem you are trying to solve with this proposal? -- Plek 10:42, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
*I think that stubs and substubs should be deleted if not expanded on within 40 days. If the article itself admits there is little to say it should be deleted if not updated within 20 days. All spelling redirects should be removed after 100 days.
TAS 10:48, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
TAS 19:28, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Please see m:eventualism and m:immediatism. JRM 12:51, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)
I am so glad that TAS is in a tiny minority on this. Half of the articles I start are stubs tangentially related to the major articles I'm working on. They usually have solid references. They are certainly worth keeping in their own right (e.g. a bio-stub that identifies a relatively obscure figure, but doesn't necessarily do much more than that), and they have the potential for expansion. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:48, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
Better to light one candle than curse darkness. Keep stubs. — Xiong ( talk) 21:32, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)
I have created some simple diagrams for an article and uploaded them as .png files. I created them in Inkscape and they are nice, small, editable scalable vector graphics (svg) files.
Is there a way for me to put the .svg files up so it would be easier if someone wanted to edit the diagrams? Should I just upload them like they are pictures, and link to them from the page for the .png file? Is there a protocol for this? kris 23:34, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
So it is still impossible to upload .svg files, and will be for the near future? -- kris 22:42, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
User:HappyApple, a student of the National University of San Marcos in Lima, prefers this institution to be known as "National University of Saint Mark". In support of this, he cites an entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia. [5]
However, a Google search on the phrase "National University of Saint Mark" [6] returns just nine hits, all of them Wikipedia texts which he has edited.
A Google search on the phrase "National University of San Marcos" [ [7] returns nearly 1,000.
Wikipedia:Naming conventions states:
As I interpret this, it would be most appropriate to refer to this institution in our pages as "National University of San Marcos". HappyApple however still insists in using "Saint Mark" (piped to San Marcos) in Wiki articles. If other editors have an opinion, perhaps they could make themselves heard, either here or on Talk:Lima. Thanks. -- Viajero 14:27, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
There is the precedent that the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1912 called it "University of Saint Mark". This presumably predates "National" being added to its name. Oddly, the same same source also calls it "University of Saint Mark's".
I would suggest that this is a small issue and not worth fighting over. All commonly used versions of the name, past and present, should be mentioned in the article on the university itself, and all should redirect (or disambiguate) to the same article. In other articles, any reasonably clear version of the name should be acceptable. My only proviso is to avoid anachronisms. If the name has changed, an article about a period before the name change should refer to it by a formula like FOO, now BAR, and should use the most parallel versions possible: that is, one should not use an old Spanish name and a new English one. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:14, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
The name has not been changed, and the anglicise usage of the name it is entirely legal, and does not dissobey any Naming policies. HappyApple 22:33, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
If the 1000 to 0 [-wikipedia] it would seem to dissobey this one: Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Use common names of persons and things
-- Philip Baird Shearer 00:55, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Before to say this evidences i must remind to all friendly wikipedists this In the top of the article about Naming Policies said this:
Naming convention are not rules written in stone ... and there may be cases where a particular convention is "obviously" inappropriate.
Also there is another precedent of the use University of Saint Mark.
And i quote: earning a Doctor's Degree. He was then given the Chair of Theology at Saint Mark University, Lima.
Quote : Pablo Munoz SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 1981 - University of Saint Mark Gallery
Lima and Santo Domingo, were decreed in 1551. In some instances,such as that of the University of Saint Mark in Lima,the university has kept its colonial library.
Arguments based on a single search in Google is not reelevant evidence, there are many others online searchers as same other tools to find information about Saint Mark, and obviously this source User:Viajero hasn't used.
Users among wikipedia there are the evidence that proves the name is entirelly legal and conclusively that anglicize name of San Marcos to Saint Mark it applies to wikipedia and does not affect any kind of it's policies. HappyApple 03:53, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
For what it's worth - both of my parents taught at San Marcos for more than twenty years, and neither has ever referred to San Marcos, in English, by anything other than "San Marcos". Hasdrubal 19:31, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Okay, several weeks have passed and consensus has not yet been reached on this subject. So I think we should vote.
The majority of English speakers refer to the university as "(National) University of San Marcos" and therefore, this is the way it should be referred to on wikipedia. -- Tuomas hello 02:33, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
Decision: After 3 days of voting, the majority has voted in favor of the university's original name and against the anglicized version. Thus, this is the only way the university should be called on wikipedia. -- Tuomas hello 00:46, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
Is there a policy, semi-policy or just something comprehensive as guideline, whether and how "secret knowledge" (of the religious or quasi-religious type, for a start) should be handled? Yes, I've seen that Xenu even acquired the Featured Article predicate, but that's the rare case where court documents give some credible source. In other cases I'd assume lack of verifiability would speak against including it in an encyclopedia at all. Opinions? Pointers? -- Pjacobi 13:01, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
Other examples of "secret knowledge": the explanation of various magic tricks and illustions: see Magic_(illusion)#Secrecy. Locksmiths also tend to be very guarded about their trade.
In general, I think Wikipedia should be willing to include such things, although perhaps a warning analogous to fiction "spoilers" might be appropriate in some cases. And, as many people have already pointed out, any information included must be verifiable, in which case it's not exactly that huge a secret any more... — Matt Crypto 11:29, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The idea of "secret knowledge" runs counter to the entire purpose of having an encyclopedia. If a subject is verifiable and important (encyclopedic), then the fact that someone wants to suppress that subject makes it more important to include. We are about dissemination of knowledge here -- the opposite of suppression. Hence Xenu, or for that matter Hiram Abiff. Likewise, if it's a verifiable fact that massive copyright violation of music and pornography goes on at Something Awful, the fact that the site's operators don't want that information published is all the more reason to publish it. -- FOo 16:30, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I agree with FOo, we're here to extend and pool human knowledge, not to perpetuate power structures or attempts to create such power structures based on the withholding and concealment of knowledge. Projects like Wikipedia spell death to obscurantism, and I say good riddance and not before time. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 17:53, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I had inserted a detailed description of the techniques of Knowledge several times but followers found it sacrilege and reverted my edits all the time. Then I gave up. Andries 20:40, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I believe the appropriate policy statement is: "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Philwelch 23:52, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Pjacobi presentation of the subject is incorrect. The Knowledge that Maharaii teaches is free, it does not cost money. The "course" to prepare for Knowledge is also free.
The whole premise that the article is advertising is based on a wrong (and I must say, bigoted) assumption represented by PJacobp's disparraging coment "[sic] those of the pattern "X is a wonderful but secret technique. X will make you happy and the world peacefull. We won't reveal anything here, because it's secret, but you can join our organisation/pay $$$$ for the introductary course to learn more". The article does not even speak of a Secret Knowledge, neither it speaks of wonderful effects.
The other thing I find quite disturbing is the fact that Pjacobi placed this comment here, and did not announce it in the Talk: Techniques_of_Knowledge until today. I find this disingenous. When he posted his concerns there, I and others could do someting about making the article better.-- ≈ jossi ≈ 22:55, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)
The section in the article in question follows:
Students of Prem Rawat, also known as Maharaji, claim that references to similar techniques have been made throughout history, that the techniques of Knowledge have always been a prominent part of the teachings of Prem Rawat and have not changed throughout the years. See also the past teachings and current teachings of Prem Rawat. According to his followers, historical references to these techniques can be found in books and poems from many spiritual practices as "Light", "Sound", "Name" and "Nectar" or similar names.
These techniques are said to help students take their senses and invert them within to experience inner peace, and those who study them often describe the experience simply as "going within." To remove any cultural connotations from simplicity and clarity of understanding, nowadays Rawat refers to them as simply 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th techniques. Students see the ongoing relationship between the disciple and the teacher (guru in Indian culture) to be of central importance for the usefulness of the techniques.
The experience of Knowledge is described by followers as highly internal and "atomistically" individual. The techniques are to be practiced privately, there being no social structure or hierarchy related to their practice. According to students, there is no liturgy or social obligation involved, but Maharaji instructs them to practice the techniques daily for at least one hour to help in order to experience inner peace and fulfillment. The also say that the techniques are universally applicable and their practice has no impact on or relationship to a student's gender, race, sexual orientation, economic status or national origin [11]. Elan Vital also states that practice of Knowledge will not affect a person's religion.
Descriptions of Rawat's techniques have been posted on websites by critical former students, purportedly described by people authorized by Rawat to teach the techniques [12] in the past. Current students answer that the descriptions posted by these apostates are not accurate and moreover, to be useful, the techniques require preparation and mentoring by a living teacher. This article does not contain a detailed description of the techniques because current students find it inappropriate to publish them on the internet.
Is it policy, and if so, why is it, to litter articles with mainly redundant boxes such as Template:IPA notice. Any possibility we can stamp this thing out. Does Motörhead really benefit from the box, or is it just IPA proponents losing a sense of proportion? Wouldn't a photo of Lemmy be more appropriate. Further rant at Template talk:IPA notice -- Tagishsimon (talk)
It is time to have Wikipedia constructed on Classical Republican lines. Jimmy Wales as "king", a section of Aristocracy, and the rest of Wikipedians as democracy.
"Truth does no good in a democracy". Socrates and Jesus found out the hard way. We are letting 18 year old kids and people, who hide behind their anynimity to run things. Ideology and ignorance is running what gets put on here at Wikipedia.
It is time to instutite a "Jury of Peers". Most people have no inclination, no understanding of anything classical. Sparta is a Republic. Always was and the best at it. I have arguments with 20,000 British people about their own form of government but find out that John Aylmer introduced that language to his people and considered his government to be like Sparta and this was in c 1640. Why do I need to argue with punk ass public schooled idiot savants for? WHy does a mass of ignorance get to determine what goes on here??????
St. Maximos the Confessor said, "One man with the Truth is a Majority". We need checks and balances against the HERD on Wikipedia. The Minority has no voice in Wikipedia. Just like how the HERD tyrannized and destroyed Fox Hunting in England, is a prime example of the HERD tyrannizing the minority. So it is on Wikipedia. We need "Checks and Balances" not the herd mentality of Democracy. And we need to insitutute a JURY OF PEERS. WHEELER 15:02, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Just to name a two areas in which I have worked a great deal, I would gladly welcome comparison of our content related Jorge Luis Borges, or to the early years of Yiddish theatre, to any on the web in the English language (or any of the several other languages I can read), and I'm including specialist sites. I am also comfortable in saying that nearly all of our featured articles are also on this level, as are probably at least ten thousand more that don't have featured status. No, you can't use Wikipedia simply as if it were a reference book. Yes, you can use Wikipedia as a very valuable aid in research, once you understand what it is and is not. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:20, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)
My problem and Wikipedia formation
Here is a glaring example of what I am talking about:
Want another fine example
I can't believe what I am hearing! We are in the midst of building an encyclopaedia. Either I am charged with original research because i put the bare bones out and other Wikipedians charge me alone with having to write a complete and thorough article at the onset or now, they want to delete because, I WHEELER, haven't had the time and the knowhow to put other articles on the encyclopaedia to mesh with
vanavsos which is now the supposition and reasoning of WhiteC. This is absolutely outrageous! I am benumbed with consternation at all these floating reasons that have no bearing on the essence of the question! These people don't charge others with "these crimes" only myself and create "rules" that I must abide by but noone else. By WhiteC's argument, "The article must be deleted because it is not linked to any other article's". To WhiteC, this illogicity is glaring, "How are we to build an encyclopaedia when others are going to delete articles because they are not connected to something else?" I am floored by the "reasonings" imagined in order to get this article deleted. Sources be damned, delete delete delete. What the heck is going on here? Stupid question, I know exactly what is going on and the "Admins" or "Sysops" are not going to do anything about it.
WHEELER 18:17, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Problem solved
More Glaring Hypocrisy
This is from "Votes for deletion" for
vanavsos. Please look carefully at these comments:
Open letter to Jimmy Wales, Sysops and Admins
We are told everday that democracy is the best form of government. It is taught everywhere today in America from elementary grades through to the university graduate level. My point is that nowhere in
Classical Antiquity was Athens looked on with favor, either by the majority of Greek philosophers nor any Roman. In Medieval times, no one looked to Athens. Everybody looked to Lacedæmonia for an example of good government. If you notice, John Adams didn't like democracy either and if you read towards the end you will see his comment on democracy:
User_talk:Wheeler/Confusion_over_term_republic. That is why this page is important:
Wikinfo:Classical definition of republic. Every human institution runs on the Classical republican model:
Wikinfo:Philosophy of mixed government Trifunctionality. The army is the best example.
The importance of the distinction between a "politiea" and a "democracy" is very important that Paul A. Rahe, points out in his Republics, Ancient and Modern, Vol II, pg 256.
What democracy entails is that people who have no expertise, knowledge, philosophy are quite capable of running a government; which as experience point out that any ship run like a democracy will run aground. Where as in a "politiea" the mass is checked by a senate house of wisdom. A pilot, officers and midshipman, and the crew.
As to the charge of my constant diatribe against Marxism:
Democracy is the sign of Marxism. It is the mechanical process of the ideology of Marxism and therefore equality.
Democracy has always been and always will be the worst form of government. Heirarchy and the "rule of the best" by men who PROVE their capability and merit and worth are natural constituents of leadership. This is necessary for Wikipedia: A Classical Republic. WHEELER 15:22, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
what is this even about? vanavsos wasn't deleted. the process worked. it was put on vfd on grounds of being an essay on an ancient greek adjective. some keep votes were given on grounds that the original author (WHEELER) wouldn't let anyone touch it. the main problem seems to have been WHEELER's attitude towards whom he perceives as banausoi. I can't conceive how somebody who fears that he has no peers on Wikipedia should fail to understand the difference between transliteration and phonetic transcription [13]. Do we have Viology? Vrachistochrone? Come on. You do not need to be an expert to decide whether a subject is encyclopedic, as the author is required to provide references that document the subject's encyclopedicity. If anything, " Vanavsos" is a testimony that the VfD procedure works. I have written lots of obscure academic little articles, and none of them were put on VfD so far. Okay, there was Tyalië Tyelelliéva, which arguably is fancruft, but even that survived VfD. Hell, Time Cube is still with us. If anything, we have a problem of being unable to get rid of unencyclopedic articles, not the reverse. I agree that we also have a problem of expertise not being recognised by hoi polloi, usually on prominent articles, but VfD is not the spot to point to for this. The problem is also immanent in WP, and experts will get their way, they'll just have to put up with obstacles they're not necessarily familiar with. dab (ᛏ) 19:31, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
What the "Ding-Dong" is going on here at Wikipedia?
Check this out:
Wikipedia:Association_of_Member_Investigations.
This is absolutely ludicrious!!!!!!!!!!! We want to "create" prosecutorial bodies on Wikipedia to drive "our" thorns from our side so we can have ideological purity on Wikipedia before ever considering the establishment of professional boards for each subject on Wikipedia? Kevin M. Marshall, 13 years of Latin and Greek has pointed out where my contributions are well-researched and cited. Yet, my work comes up for frequent deletion. My edits are constantly reverted check out the history of
Arete (excellence) and
Ochlocracy where other wikipedians delete valuable information for what purpose? And then charge me with being "disruptive"? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO. The system itself brings on trouble!!! On Wikinfo, One can write a SPOV article and another writes a "Criticism" of the SPOV article. People stay out of each other's hair. If the rules were changed or there were EXPERTS in each field to decide probelms, there wouldn't be any need for this stupid "Association of Member Investigations".
You people have got your priorities ALL WRONG! Not everyone can edit in the "classical field" yet with this "democracy" you have got ignorant people editing articles they have no clue in. This is sooo stupid. What does Snowspinner and SimonP et al. who have no sense of the classical world CONTROL articles in the classical world? and then put me up for arbitration? This is stupid!
Kevin Marshall has 13 years of experience of Greek and Latin. This man should be my Arbitrator. This man and other Wikipedians with years of GREEK AND LATIN like User:Stan Shebs should be THE BOARD for Classical fields and Users!!!! Not a bunch of Self-Ordained British Modern Republican (marxist) hooligans!!! I am put up and attacked by the likes of SimonP, Snowspinner, Mackrakis, Mel etits, (and the best one of them all=) Milneau Trudeneau, et al, What are their qualifications or proof of their expertise????????? No where to be found. Yet, I am put up for arbitration and attacked and reverted by these people all the time. They have NO classical context whatsoever.
AND WE CREATE PROSECUTORIAL BOARDS ( Wikipedia:Association_of_Member_Investigations)BEFORE WE EVER THINK OF ESTABLISHING PROFESSIONAL SUBJECT INTEREST SPECIFIC BOARDS TO JUDGE USERS AND MATERIAL CONTENT. You people are OFF YOUR ROCKER!!!! WHEELER 16:21, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Things are getting out of hand at Wikipedia.
Democracy is no way to run anything. About a jury of my peers. If you look at the Users that delete, most of them have no expertize of any thing classical, most have edited things about sports and cricket. In all the people that voted for deletion, only two had a political degree. One is a British guy with degrees in philosophy and history and politics, yet denied that Britain had mixed government and yet I have scholary works that outlines this history of "mixed government". I made several new pages and added to the content of the History of the British constitution that more educated men can't do...or won't do. I want a jury of my peers not a bunch of ideological driven ignorant savants. That know nothing of the material in question. WHEELER 14:45, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC) Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28miscellaneous%29"
Is everyone of these really encylopedic? Seems someone is creating a stub page for each one in Canada. Vegaswikian 03:49, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The defenders, or defender, or a page listed in VfD cited in its support what's written in Wikipedia:Vanity Page, a "semi-policy" [?!] page of whose existence I must shamefacedly admit I hadn't previously been aware.
This page struck me as a mess. Where it made sense, I sometimes agreed with it and sometimes didn't. For example, its sample (fictional) vanity page strikes me as very unlike what is normally deleted as vanity. But often it didn't make sense. It said that notability was a factor in deciding whether something was vanity, and elsewhere implied that it was a factor; and that There is presently no consensus about what degree of recognition is required for a page to be included in Wikipedia, and therefore, lack of fame should be completely ignored in deletion debates which I think is close to saying "The value of X is unknown and therefore it is zero."
Not knowing how malleable "semi-policy" is, I only very hesitantly and cautiously altered the page so that (I hope) it isn't so obviously obscure and self-contradictory. But the longer I look at it, the less I like it. In my perhaps unrepresentative opinion, the whole thing should be scrapped and rebuilt, perhaps here and there using the odd sentence from the old page. Would this be OK for "semi-policy"?
As for my substantive disagreements with the page, I'd like to bring one up here. It's about the OKness of writing about oneself, one's group (musical or otherwise), company, friend, etc. We now read:
In principle, I agree. Yes, it's imaginable that some noteworthy people are overlooked and can write objectively and usefully about themselves. Moreover, in practice, pages about oneself can't simply be prevented: though I may insist that I'm a 59-year-old female Finnish florist, you've no certain way of knowing that I'm not the 32-year-old male Mauretanian musician I'm writing about. Still, authors often let slip that they are who they're writing about, and very often they seem to inflate their own significance. To me, that one should not create an article about oneself, one's group, etc. seems a very obvious rule of thumb: if I'm right in believing that I'm WP-worthy, then eventually some disinterested person will get around to writing about me, and from that point I would be able to step in to correct my birthdate, remove innuendo about my sex life, etc. -- but not to add more merit points.
In brief, I suggest that Wikipedia:Vanity Page should (i) clearly tell people not to start articles about themselves, their close friends, or the groups or companies they're in, and (ii) be rewritten to show more of the obnoxiousness of a lot of vanity pages as zapped via VfD. Comments? -- Hoary 06:25, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)
I noticed that one of the first articles I wrote for the Wikipedia has been redirected: [14], with the original article basically copied to the target and the old article deleted. The "new" article doesn't give any mention of the previous authors. Is there any way we can make it so when we decide to rename an article and redirect the original to the new, we can move the list of contributors as well? I don't want to come across as a credit-monger and editing the Wikipedia is my way of giving back to something I've benefited from tremendously. However, it is nice and encouraging to people to have their contributions recorded. Some of us tend to be rather meticulous and treat the Wikipedia with a great deal of respect. We end up taking a good amount of time just to produce a paragraph or two. It's not a huge deal but I thought I should bring it up.
Comatose51 03:48, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I think category listings in articles themselves should be alphabetized because it is completely objective. Postdlf & Oleg Alexandrov have posted on my talk page of sorting by a personally chosen preference of "importance". WP has seen some pretty petty reasons ( WP:LAME) for revert wars, but I can't see sorting categories based on personal opinion will do anything but foster more reverting wars and disrupt WP. I bring this here to discuss it and perhaps to come to some kind of conclusion about "how should categories appear in articles: alphabetically or 'by importance'?".
This all stems (between Postdlf and I) over James Stewart (actor), but you know...what if I think the most important thing about a person was that they were born? After all, James Stewart there couldn't have been an actor if he wasn't born. Perhaps I think It's a Wonderful Life is *THE BEST MOVIE* of all time but if James would have died in WW2 then I probably would have hated it, so thank god he didn't die — Postdlf thinks being a WW2 veteran is the least important category for James.
As you can see, pretty much anyone could come up with an argument for why their preference of "importance" is correct. Then again, maybe I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill here, but considering a revert war ensued over whether or not 3 is an odd number or not.....listing cats by anything subjective seems like a bad idea and is opening the flood gates and waiting for the rain to come... Cburnett 01:51, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
I expect this to be a lengthy conversation, and to keep some semblence of an idea of what WP editors want/think about this I ask you to *only* sign for what you support and keep discussion below it.
I don't intend this "voting" here to be means to establishing policy, only that I/we can get a general idea of where this issue lies.
I don't intend this "voting" here to be means to establishing policy, only that I/we can get a general idea of where this issue lies.
Briefly explain what it is
Put all discussion here.
Chronological--If a person became a farmer, lost a race for a state political office, entered the state house of reps, entered U.S. Congress, entered Senate, became a lobbyist, than categories go in that order. Birth and death year cats are the exception--they always come at the beginning. Meelar (talk) 02:16, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
State of nature--undoubtedly easiest to maintain. Categories have no particular order, except for the birth and death years, which are always together and at the front or back ends. Very few articles have so many categories that they're tough to read through quickly. Meelar (talk) 02:38, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
Importance—The first category you see should be the classification that most likely made you want to read the article in the first place—that George W. Bush is a U.S. president is obviously much more important than his birth in 1946 or membership status as a Bonesman. It's easier than it may seem at first to establish this kind of hierarchy, because there are obviously some categories that merely belonging to it mean per se notability. Every U.S. President, every Congressman, every SCOTUS Justice gets an article because by attaining that position they are necessarily notable. Not every lawyer gets an article, however, so obviously a U.S. President category trumps a lawyer category. Some lawyers attain notability through their practice, however. No one is notable because of the year they are born in or die in (except maybe the first baby of the millennium or other such nonsense, but that's likely to be the only category such an article receives anyway), so these come last. But there's no need to fix this in hard and fast rules, however, because the details don't matter outside of a general preference for trying to place more important categories first. Is a U.S. Senator more important than a state governor? That's a matter of opinion, but obviously both are more important than being a lawyer or having been born in 1970. Alphabetical, on the other hand, really means no true order at all beyond what letter or number a category happens to arbitrarily begin with. Postdlf 05:02, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Whatever's most applicable for the topic—For a computer game, reverse-chronological order would probably make the most sense. For a politician, decending order of office would be most appropriate. Alphabetical should be last resort--if 'd' came before 'b' in the alphabet, would you list date of death before date of birth? I don't think so. Also, is it 'cinema actors', 'film actors', or 'movie actors'? Alph just doesn't seem very helpful. It especially gets complicated with a person with multiple careers. Take Ronald Reagan. To me, first obviously should be 'presidents of the US'. However, what comes next? 'Movie actor' or 'Governor of California'? I guess "State of nature" would help here. Oh, and FWIW, I would put DOB, DOD, 'where from' all last, with 'veteran of WWII' next to last before those, since most male celebs/pols (and probably a surprising number of female celebs) that were 18-40 years old during WWII are veterans of that war--not something people are likely to be looking for the category of when looking at a celeb/pol article. All that said, I doubt I'd spend much time re-ordering cat, unless possibly if I was editing the article for other reasons anyway--in most cases, it just won't make that much difference. Niteowlneils 06:23, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Depends on the subject (mainly as above) Biographical articles could have chronological order of categories (political activist career, parliamentary career, ministerial career etc. as appropriate). (Thought I am not sure where to place the categories like "People of Chicago"). I also think that births and deaths should be in the end of the list.
However, we have to update articles about living people anyway. Therefore we could mention first the category that is most relevant right now ie. reference to the person's position or status at the moment. When their term expires or ends in any other way, the category list could return to chronological order.
However, many other subjects do not need chronological treatment. Articles on events (battles, catastrophes) or objects (weapons, tools, software) could easily use alphabetical order, with the year categories at the end of the list - Skysmith 08:42, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It seems to me that every town or county in the United States, no matter what size, is posting their entire census on Wikipedia. I do not approve of this. I hate wading through these ASCII pie charts on "family size" and "racial makeup", and it seems like they would be meaningless to other readers, too.
I would love it if these articles told me who the mayors of these towns are, or what industries the towns are rooted in, or what local sports teams and culture go on there. But whenever I go to these pages, all I get is paragraphs full of numbers, which have little or no value to me. Has anyone else noticed this flood of census data? Brendan62442 19:22, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Alright. I can understand if the article are written by a RamBot. A Bot article is better than no article. Brendan62442 01:13, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Why must I make 50 votes before my vote can be counted? I don't understand this policy. Should I make 50 nonsense votes on pages that I know nothing about just to have one vote counted on a page I do understand?
Please help me with this, I could find no mention of this policy anywhere in the users guide but it's cropping up on pages on which I voted.
Apologies, signing now. I was asking about VfD specifically, and about policy, since it says nothing in the policy guidelines about making 50 edits before you can be considered part of the community enough to contribute. It seems very exclusive to me. CatCrofts 15:58, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If you do not yet have 50 edits, you can still make statements on VFD pages, they just count as comments. If your comments are very convincing, you could still get the page immediately deleted, or immediately kept. Actual vote-counting on vfd only (should!) happen in cases where there's no clear consensus. :-) Kim Bruning 16:22, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This recent focus on the mode of death seems to me to be seriously messing up the category scheme. Up until now I've raised my objections on a few talk pages, but the most recent case seems to me to be particularly egregious. Numerous people—many of them prominent figures—have been moved from Category:French Revolution to Category:Guillotined French Revolution figures. Thus, for example, prominent revolutionary figures like Madame Roland or Georges Danton are classified, with respect to the revolution, only in a category about the mode of their death. I think this is entirely inappropriate.
I think that if someone is starting from Category:French Revolution and trying to find the key figures, they are very unlikely to head towards a category about their mode of death. It might be appropriate to add a category like this, but only if we also added a category that had something to do with what these people did while alive.
I'm really tired right now, I'm not going to try to get into this much further; I hope I'm being coherent. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:30, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)
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Greetings,
I run an informative website:
We have a *huge* amount of completely free information. Currently we have 102 separate grammar topics, located here:
http://www.studyspanish.com/tutorial.htm
For each of these topics, there is a complete explanation, as well as a written quiz and a written test, all free. For the first 84 lessons, there is also a free oral practice.
There are comparable sections on verbs and vocabulary, as well as other free features.
Because we have so much free and valuable information, it would be very beneficial for me to add multiple links to the pertinent Spanish language pages. But, I see that policy "strongly discourages" this, although it does not prohibit it.
The policy statement said that I should come to the Village Pump and seek approval before doing this, so that's what I'm doing.
Thanks,
Ken Ryan
Samurai Clinton seems to be in the middle of creating a new process for marking pages to be disambiguated, including a voting process. See Template:VfDis, Category:Pages being nominated for disambiguation and Wikipedia:Votes for disambiguation/Super Mario Bros.. (He hasn't yet built a Wikipedia:Votes for disambiguation to collect all the entries.) Is there any need for this? Is there controversy over building disambig pages -- why not go ahead and do it instead of calling for a vote? Being bold is all well and good, but a new process like this should be discussed. I'm leaving a note on his user talk page asking him about it and pointing him here. FreplySpang (talk) 18:37, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A number of individuals, certain political or religious leaders in particular, as well as many nobles, have a certain style. For instance, Rainier III, Prince of Monaco is styled "His Serene Highness"; the Pope is style "His Holiness"; Tony Blair is styled "The Right Honourable" (as member of the Privy Council). Note that those title carry some semantic content; the Pope's expresses that he is particularly holy, and Blair's expresses that he is particularly honourable.
The problem is, not everybody agrees that the Pope is holy and Blair is honourable. There are about 1 billion Catholics out of a population of 6 billion, thus it is quite probable that a wide majority of the world's population does not regard the Pope as particularly holy.
Of course, we may take the point of view that such titles are mere courtesy titles with no real semantic content.
Note, however, that there may be cultural differences playing here. In some countries, many official functions have styles (judges are called "Your Honor", etc.) and thus people do not pay attention to them. In other countries, official functions do not have styles, and thus people, not used to such kind of formulas, may pay more attention.
So I wonder what the Wikipedia policy should be. I note that John Paul II styles him "His Holiness" but that Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama is not styled. Maybe we should also strive to make this policy consistent and not favor such or such religion or leaders. David.Monniaux 07:50, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
In the United States (or at least in New York) all elected officials are introduced as "The honourable..." in formal occasions. For instance, if I'm inroducing my local state assembly member to someone, I would say "...the honourable Jonathan Bing..." but I would not consider that to be part of his name, in an encyclopedia article. For the pope (for example) I might call him "his holiness" if I was meeting him in person, but not if I was refering to him in an article. So I support the suggestion. Unfortunately, it is hard to draw the line between titles and "styles". What about talking about "The first lady"? That is very common usage, but it isn't a formal title either. Morris 13:26, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)
Controversy brews over whether "non-notable" is a criterion for speedy deletion. Before voting, consider if something you created might be thought "non-notable" by Someone.
Poll is open at: Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Poll: Speedy criterion: "non-notable". — Xiong talk 01:10, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)
What is the WP policy, if any, on placing both a category and its subcategory onto the same page? For example: placing [[Category:Photography]] as well as its subcategory [[Category:Photography companies]] into the same article?
I believe that categories are always helpful as long as they are relevant. So I like to place as many relevant categories into an article as possible to help direct readers to what they are looking for. Paradiso 09:58, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Would it not be more neutral and politically correct to use CE instead of AD when citing dates? Just a thought, but I know some people get edgy reading "AD"
According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), both AD/BC and CE/BCE are acceptable names for the era, and the Islamic calendar is perfectly appropriate provided dates are also given in the Julian or Gregorian calendar. The AD/BC versus CE/BCE issue has been discussed several times at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) (see the archives). The current MoS is a mostly acceptable compromise between the two extreme points of view so well caricatured above. Gdr 22:30, 2005 Apr 1 (UTC)
The use of CE/BCE is more academic and therefore more encyclopedic and appropriate for WP. They're both still based on the life of Jesus, but given the choice I'd go with the more academic version. Paradiso 09:48, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Why have years at all? And why start with the moon landing? Why not just declare today to be Day 1669192548320 of Earth's history (it's close enough) and leave it at that. In the meantime, while we're waiting for everyone else to adapt to our new system, we can just leave articles alone. If they say BC/AD, we leave them that way, and if they say BCE/CE, we leave them that way, and hope that users who have never seen those abbreviations can figure out what they're supposed to mean. -- Angr/ (comhrá) 20:41, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I shouldn't have to worry about distinguishing between what's accurate and what's supposed to be a joke when I visit Wikipedia. This April Fool's Day revision is tacky, and compromises the integrity of a database that's already coming under fire for being editable by anyone. Grossdomestic 06:22, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
THANK YOU! Exactly what I've been saying for two days now. How do we tell vandals not to vandalize the encyclopedia when we're encouraging it? Rick K 06:35, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)
Method Engineering Encyclopedia is not a standard Wikipedia article, and it strikes me as being out of place. The subarticles, too, do not conform to Wikipedia style. But this looks like a genuine effort in good faith, and could be worthwhile if the right place or format could be found. What to do? What to suggest? -- Woggly 10:56, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I say when a dedicated bunch of students makes an invasion, one has to expect a good deal of POV and original research. This poroject is better be on alert. Mikkalai 22:30, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Hello there,
Wikipedia was my favourite till I came to know that anyone can edit most of the documents and the change reflects on the page immediately. What is stopping anyone from posting rubbish, or worse posting "their individual views" on subjects. If this happens (maybe it is happening), then what degree of quality control do we have on the material available from Wikipedia. I am a researcher and I want to make sure that every information I gather is reliable. Thanks for your time.
Sam
This quality control business seems to be a non-issue to many of us. It is said vandalism and misinformation are house-cleaned very quickly, generally within minutes, by Wikipedians. Not exactly so.
Wikipedia is new. It's user base is growing. Many contributers learn from elsewhere and write previously unavailable materials. If you read a book about dairy cows and you write a short article based on that book, you introduced some fresh information to the knowledge pool.
In a few years, there will be kids grown up studying Wikipedia because it's cheap and, pardon my Hawaiian, wiki. Some Wikipedia knowledge will be used by them and then cycle back to Wikipedia to justify its own existence. Many of today's journalists use Wikipedia as a start point. Usually they have very little time to verify the information. It is possible that some Wikipedians will use these misinformed newspaper articles to justify questionable information. This is what happens today. Think of a decade after.
Wikipedia is not an Encyclopedia. There are more than 100 non-English versions. Trust me, counting out those dead and semi-dead versions, I have seen at least one top 70 "active" Wikipedia contributed only by a handful persons. Based on my observation three months ago, I have seen one Wikipedia (over 500 articles then) with 4500 edits out of a total 8000 edits contributed by just one person. Thanksfully that language is not English. If you call that trustworthy. -- Toytoy 23:59, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)
Do we have a de facto policy on using CIA maps for countries in the absence of better quality maps produced by the Wikipedia community? User:Kelisi has been replacing the maps on several countries with what I believe to be clearly inferior maps (albeit with more detail). Please enter the debate on talk:Panama Jooler 08:31, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hi all,
There is a template called {Infobox UNSecGen} that people have been adding to UN General Secretaries, such as Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. As you can see, it has fields for "date of death" and "place of death". These are displayed even when the subject is still alive. If one deleletes "| date of death=" and "| place of death=" they are still displayed, this time with what looks like a variable name.
Is there any one else here who finds this ghoulish? I realize that strictly speaking this is a technical issue, but I am just wondering if we could reach concensus for avoiding this kind of thing. -- Viajero 22:12, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I just submitted an article on the American poet Rod McKuen, yet Wiki posted it as "Rod mckuen," (lower-case "M") even though this isn't how the name appears anywhere in the text. Can I simply change the name?
Thanks!
-- LanceHawvermale 23:30, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've noticed lately a tendency to slap series templates (for example Template:Anarchy, Template:History of Spain onto articles that are not actually part of the series (although they are more or less related). I wouldn't think this was appropriate, though it is not insane. Is there any policy on this? If not, we should form one: this shouldn't be a matter of individual editors' caprice. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:11, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)
I created a new article about the proposal for creating Super-users, a class of administrators who would have full sysop rights, with the exception of blocking and unblocking powers. Rad Racer 00:41, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I think we should not include articles of some non-noteworthy high schools just because a single incident (see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Red Lake High School and Talk:Columbine High School. The majority of people do not agree with me. Is there an established policy?
Here are my views (edited):
Other than some magnet schools, high school articles are generally useless. These schools are local schools. You don't see a student from Tokyo in these high schools. You don't even see a student from another state, county or town over there. People in Baghdad are not sending their kids to a small school district in Colorado. The school information is not needed by the rest of us (6 billion earthlings). Any one of us may want to visit a small village populated by 10 somewhere off the shore of Congo River. But we usually don't consider to go a high school across the town. -- Toytoy 01:47, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
People usually say the shootings made these school noteworthy. I'll say that's totally nonsense. A shooting makes a school noteworthy only when:
Each school has some troubled students. This is not news. The school has to do something that caused the shooting to be any noteworthy. -- Toytoy 02:39, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
There has been much discussion on the notability of schools, and, unfortunately, no consensus has been established. The arguments go on on the VfD pages daily. Rick K 23:36, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
I disagree with the original writer (
User:Toytoy). The question is not about the value of the school, the question about the value of the article to someone who is trying to get some information or do some research. I suggest that someone wanting to reserach recent violence in schools is likely to want to look for "Columbine". Someone looking into the murders in Chicago is much more likely to type in "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" or "Al Capone" (Although I would have no objection to creating a redirect from the address if someone thinks it would be helpful.) Notice that the article is about "Columbine" not the exact address of the school. You can say many things, but using a dictionary definition of "notability" Columbine is certainly notable.
Morris 00:39, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)
I think the BEEFSTEW rating system is way too inclusive. IMO the only criterion that can make a school notable is the notability of its alumni. I would propose that a school have an article if and only if one of the following applies:
-- Angr 20:14, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
There seem to be a large number of images uploaded but not currently in use in any article (these are termed orphans). Many of these seem to lack source and licensing info. (unverified orphans, or UOs). A few Wikipedians feel that to reduce the load on the servers it makes sense to delete them. A few Wikipedians feel that unverified images uploaded before some date should not be deleted, since the image upload page was not always the way it is now. IIRC, earlier versions did not ask the uploader to tag the image with licensing info. and just asked them to check a box that said that they have permission to upload. IIRC long ago all content (including images) in Wikipedia were supposed to be GFDL, then fair-use images came along, and then came the possibility that Wikipedia could allow a myriad of "free licenses" and "permissions to use" to be used.
I would like to request more people to post their views on the threshold date for listing such images for deletion, whether to list such images for deletion at all, etc. at Wikipedia talk:Images and media for deletion/Unverified orphans#Two thoughts to deal with some of the images.. -- Paddu 06:41, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Paddu explained in length the issue. There are ten of thousands of untagged orphans. Some were recently uploaded and do not follow current rules which make tagging mandatory. However, many were uploaded before this became mandatory and in their uploaders mind, they were gfdl, since they agreed to follow gfdl when they uploaded it.
A couple of assumption should be clarified. It is not because an image is untaggued that it is necessarily a copyvio. We currently keep copyrighted images on Wikipedia. We assume we can use them under fair use doctrine. It sometimes happen we are wrong, and in this case, the board or anyone else receive a complaint from the copyright holder. The solution is generally to promptly delete the image and I can tell that in 4 years, all cases have been fixed to the satisfaction of the copyright holder. We should assume good faith from most uploaders and only delete untaggued images when someone raise a complaint about them.
In case the image is untaggued and is indeed a copyvio, it being an orphan reduces the risk of any legal complaint.
Another assumption is that an orphan image is "not interesting". It is not so. It may be that several images of the same topic already exist and not all may be put in the article. Which does not mean the ones non linked have no value. So, deleting them for having no value is not very wikilove.
Third point : we have room on our servers. If we were lacking room, I would agree we should not keep what is uncertain. But keeping these images is not hurting the whole system from a storage point of view.
Fourth point : the only case where the orphan untaggued would be likely to be problematic is when the whole content of the db is downloaded, possibly to be put on a cd rom. Here, if the image revealed itself a copyvio, we would not be able to do anything.
So, here is what I support
A self-appointed clique calling itself the Wikipedia:Office of Investigations has empowered itself to decide who is a "problem user" who needs to be "dealt with", primarily through arbitration. Do you support this move, or are you worried about vendettas and bullying? Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Office of Investigations. — Charles P. (Mirv) 22:46, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Any Wikipedia editor has a right to file an RfC, these editors have just organized themselves. It's up to the arbcom to decide if they want to hear the case, and if an editor or group of editors become nuisance litigators, an RfC can be filed against them. Just ignore them unless they bring you into an RfC, how is it hurting you? Rick K 23:33, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
This debate is currently at Wikipedia talk:Association of Member Investigations. Please direct your comments there. — Xiong talk 03:22, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)
What's better: "History of X" or "Xsh history"? This is a dilemma that has plagued Wikipedians since the dawn of time. I have proposed a new naming convention to deal with this issue. See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (country-specific topics). Any comments would be greatly appreciated. - Pioneer-12 00:46, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There is a policy proposal being voted upon at University of Maryland, College Park/Vote. Some users believe that all articles for universities should use short names, such as "University of Texas" vs. "University of Texas at Austin", "University of Massachusetts" vs. "University of Massachusetts Amherst", etc. The poll has two questions, one about the specific name for University of Maryland, College Park and the other is a general policy proposal which would change Wikipedia:Naming conventions, affecting many articles. I'm not sure if University of Maryland, College Park/Vote is the right page for a policy proposal, and I don't think there has been any input from a larger portion of the community before voting started. Still, please vote. Rhobite 18:33, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Scientific point of view ( WP:SPOV) is a discussion on SPOV and NPOV. Criticism and further development of ideas, improvemtn of my prose is welcome. :) Dunc| ☺ 23:56, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hi! I've attempted to start a discussion on Deletion policy/redirects regarding an argument I'm involved into (sigh) regarding deletion of redirects to missing articles. From what I've seen, I fear that page is not on many people's watch list; would there be a more appropriate location for it?
(I'm a bit anxious to get this resolved, as this has brought part of the Wiki Syntax cleanup effort to a halt, especially since one of its pages has been unilaterally put under protection.)
Thanks! -- Fbriere 04:34, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Last night, I went absolutely insane.
I am not Chinese, but I confess to a fascination with all things Chinese, and I would like to participate in projects relating to things Chinese. But every forum discussing things Chinese -- every Talk page on every article whose topic is Chinese -- seems to be full of a certain fanatic debate. This debate is so highly polarized that it cannot even be characterized in neutral terms -- but we have to call it Something, or you'll wonder what I'm talking about. Please allow me to call it the "PRC vs ROC" debate. You might just as well call it the "Mainland vs Taiwan" debate, or the "One China" debate, or the "Beijing vs Taipei" debate, or just the "Evil vs Good" debate -- and who is evil and who is good, I am sure I cannot say. Its most visible expression is argument over what to call it -- what names may be used to identify Chinese things, be they political, geographical, human, philosophical, or ethnic entities.
I have other contributions to make and am hardly a China expert, so I thought I would just leave this alone, though not without a comment or two on the ludicrousness of either side trying to convince the other. I can't imagine why I thought that would quiet either of these rabid parties. After all these years, I still manage to believe in the goodness of human nature and the rationality of the human animal.
What finally set me off was when a user came onto my Talk page to ask me to weigh in on the debate. Imagine! Here I have set it down in no ambiguous language that I consider the entire debate offensive, contrary to the WP Way, out of order, and incapable of resolution. I have real work to do, articles to edit, graphics to upload, typos to catch, links to fix, garbage to be emptied. Now I'm being dragged into this cesspool of contention.
I went absolutely insane.
I fired off a completely unsupported fiat -- my "last word" on the subject -- and began to archive all this useless debate into one page -- arena, battleground, what have you -- one place where the warring parties can slug it out until the end of Time. This immediately touched off protest, unsurprisingly not by neutral parties. I had the forethought to create a page to house this metadebate, too.
After a break of some hours to eat and relieve Wikistress, I returned to find that Curps had attacked my unilateral action with some unilateral action of his own. He has bypassed normal procedure, saying I have bypassed normal procedure. He has ordered me to cease and desist. I shall be delighted to lay this burden down, so unwillingly assumed in the first place. But I'm not going to drop the matter, either. All is not well.
I paraphrase for general consumption, highlights of my reply:
You don't like me to impose a solution? Please, you impose a solution. If you think you have more authority than I do, you probably do. If you have the power to unilaterally bypass social mechanisms and throttle me, then you have the power and the responsibility to impose a unilateral solution on these political fanatics before they destroy us all.
Every existing method of conflict resolution has failed. This endless, pointless debate is wrecking everything with which it comes in contact. It's not even limited to China-related pages; it spills into the Pump, a half-a-dozen policy talk pages and, I swear, I think I come across it while I'm trying to edit Graph theory. The debate is a cancer eating away at the fabric of WP society.
Curps moved the page I created for the debate to User:Xiong/Talk:PRC vs ROC. Fine by me; when I run out of bandwidth or storage, send me a bill. Pick a name -- any name, any namespace -- just so long as it doesn't overlap with real discussion. Believe me, I don't have a dog in this fight. I simply have no opinion on the "Taiwan question", the "Mainland China" question, or any of the other thousand forms of the debate.
My actions are only disruptive to those who need to disrupt WP to make their points. I haven't even interfered with those who just want to continue the eternal debate itself -- only those who feel it must be aired in every conceivable forum.
Before I started moving comments in this debate to a designated area, I saw Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese) grow to a whopping 150K; I could barely get it to load in my browser, let alone edit it or make any comment on any other issue -- one upon which some consensus might be reached, one having nothing to do with PRC, ROC, or any of that.
What I have done is to archive portions of a verbose, distributed discussion in a central location. I'll admit I have done so with a great deal of huffing and puffing, and you're welcome to censure me for that. But I contest any censure of my actions or characterization of them as disruption or vandalism. Archival of discussion is a normal user function on WP. I have contrived a method of quarantining this -- foolishness -- while preserving not only the foolishness itself for those who care to indulge, but also the legitimate business of the forums so polluted.
Please do not tell me everything is going to be okay. Don't ask me to wait around for consensus to pull out of this furball; it will not. Human beings have been executed by their leaders for expressing opinions on this subject; there are plenty of warriors on both sides who will not lay down their arms. You will not get these folks to the bargaining table, let alone get them to agree on anything. The debate itself is pointless. It has gone on for years; if a solution by consensus or any other existing method were possible, it would have taken place. No new information is going in; a great smoke and noise is coming out.
I took action. You don't like it? You take action. Be bold. If you think this needs to be decided at the Highest Levels, get together with the other bigwigs and thrash it out. There is not much point trying to do serious work on one corner of this project while holy wars rage everywhere. This debate is merely one egregious offender.
Please prove me wrong. Please prove me an insolent fool, a rude buffoon, a maniac on wheels. Prove my actions unwarranted, extreme, overreaction. You will earn my most sincere apologies. Show me. Bring the combatants together, or for that matter, allow them to continue their war, somewhere away from the general business of this project. Let your solution serve as a model for the other holy wars raging here, which are all too numerous and visible.
Meanwhile, I call for a Speedy quarantine procedure, which will permit any admin to immediately, without metadebate, establish a forum for any debate which threatens to engulf multiple unrelated forums. Note that all participants will automatically contest quarantine; they will assert that their debate belongs everywhere, right up front. Thus no metadebate on quarantine itself is permissible, except within the quarantine forum. The admin acts, and thereafter, all related comments will take place in the designated forum.
Let us disagree, but let us do so with some fragment of civility. — Xiong ( talk) 14:01, 2005 Mar 25 (UTC)
I'm glad to see that the majority are now angry with me, rather than at each other. Perhaps you can build on that feeling and extend it to other areas of agreement.
I have deleted nothing; all debate I have moved, I have moved to the designated area for such debate. Those who wish to pursue the matter may do so there. I absolutely agree that such debate is vital to the building of the actual articles so long as it remains in its proper place. When it spills out into other areas of the project; into demands for a restatement of general policy; it is One-Thingism, fanaticism, and disruption.
Of course nothing is ever the last word; I cannot even keep up with archiving debate, so I've abandoned any attempt to control edits -- a foolish, headstrong aspiration to begin with. Edit wars can be dealt with by the usual mechanisms.
Fortunately, I can enforce nothing "across the board". I am limited both in authority and resources. But if I come across debate disruptive to the community, I will deal with it as best I can -- as every Wikipedian should. — Xiong ( talk) 19:47, 2005 Mar 26 (UTC)
I had a peak at the new article Battle on the Irpen' River, & was mortified to see six different stub notices. I guess the original contributor was worried some people using Wikipedia might not think this article was a stub.
Seriously, are there any justifiable reasons to put more than one stub notice at the end of an article? Category stub notices admittedly can be of use to draw attention to a given article, but in this case, I'm strongly tempted to either delete all but {{russia-stub}} & {{lithuania-stub}} seeing how the other 3 categories could be folded into those two, or delete all but {{history-stub}}, & replace the rest with category markers. I prefer the second option, but am I going to find myself arguing with a majority of wikipedians who don't see the silliness in multiple stub notices? -- llywrch 00:16, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
If only these editors spent as much effort on expanding stubs as categorizing them... Gdr 02:37, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)
LOL...well, I count only five, but that still must be some sort of record! No, as pretty as some of the subject-stub tags are, there's no excuse for using more than one of them. — Matt Crypto 04:53, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I got some beating with a heavy stick here for puting several stub notices to the article under discussion. A relative newbie, I would be happy to comply with "Never ever more than one stub rule" in the future, if this is indeed the policy. However, could some one point out the reason behind it? My reason of putting several stub tags was to encourage other wikieditors, knowledgable in any of the fields of several stubs, to contribute by finding the article in the lists of stubs in the category, they feel competetent to write. Could someone point out why using the stub tags to attract editors was a bad idea. Thanks! Irpen 15:45, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)
OK, how about a rule of (at most) one stub tag, and then categorising the article into the other stub categories (but without the stub message). That way, the article isn't cluttered up with stubcruft, and still editors can find short articles to expand in their field of interest. — Matt Crypto 13:23, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I have made a proposal to solve this multiple stub thing at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Reform proposal: stubs and categories. -- Toytoy 04:55, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
One of the unique things that makes Wikipedia so great is that it offers a single-access-point to reference information, and the whole idea of splitting it into wikipedia and wiktionary seems very arguable to me. While making a copy of wiktionary-like entries to wiktionary seems totally appropriate to me, removing them from wikipedia is i.m.o. a bad thing. I have personally been a heavy promoter of the wikipedia effort with everybody i know, but i would feel deceived if i'd check on wikipedia for something (including dictionary terms) and not find it there. Please carefully reconsider your strategy, this split will hurt your efforts and i believe you'll only find yourself with many frustrated users in no time. Thank you for your time.
PS I am writing these lines becuase i recently submitted a QoR (Quality of Results) entry to wikipedia and found out it's listed as "candidate to moving to wiktionary".
The subject of Wiktionary entries are words the subject of Wikipedia articles are the actual thing the word names. There are also major format issues ; Wiktionary entries have a very standard layout with little prose while Wikipedia articles have many different formats with lots of prose (well they are supposed to :). More at Wikipedia is not a dictionary. -- mav 21:33, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I wouldn't mind some soft links somewhere in an article indicating we've got a wiktionary entry for it. But including wiktionary in Wikipedia will just make things messy for new users who don't know about namespaces. The mere fact Wikipedia and Wiktionary have different names, should help people in distinguishing where to put stuff, even if some people still ignore it. Also, as things currently stand. Dic defs clog up the namespace and make the whole redlink is no article less useful. 131.211.208.36 09:50, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
For articles needing to be cleaned up, shouldn't there be reasons why that article needs to be cleaned up (ex. Unorganized, Spelling, Grammar, ...) listed on the template? тəzєті 22:43, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
Help me understand: GFDL allows for future commercial use of material, but as a copyleft GFDL asserts said future commercial material must also be GFDL. How can something be both commercial and licensed under GFDL? If an advertisement using GFDL material is considered "commercial" then the dual GFDL/commercial nature does not seem contradictory, but what about someone selling a poster with GFDL material on it? Does that mean after I buy the poster I am free to copy and redistribute it, but not before I buy it? More cartoon examples might help me. Thanks. Lensim 18:10, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Let's say I print up the geographical articles into a book and call it SuperAtlas. I can sell it to you. Until you buy it, you have no rights to it. Just because I downloaded and printed the GFDL content, I'm not under an obligation to give it to anyone else. However, whenever I do give it someone else (whether I'm doing it because they bought it or I'm a nice guy), I must do so under the terms of the GFDL, insuring the person to whom I'm giving it the same rights I have.
In particular, that means that once you have one copy of the SuperAtlas, you can give it to your friends or reprint it or publish it on the web (as long as you do so under the licensing terms). You could try to get a copy of my SuperAtlas by asking someone who already has one for a copy; there's nothing wrong with that. Or you could do the same thing I did and consult the source. But I have no obligation to both sell copies of the SuperAtlas and give them away. Demi T/ C 19:12, 2005 Mar 24 (UTC)
Why doesn't the NPOV policy apply to Taiwan. Apparently Wikipedia treats Taiwan as a sovereign state called the Republic of China? Beijing totally refutes this and no-one officially on the world stage recognises the "Republic of China". Not even Taiwan recognises itself as independent. Surely we have to change to refer to Taiwan as "Taiwan" and to accept that Taiwan is not sovereign? I though the NPOV policy was sacrosanct, jguk 12:26, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
No, I'm saying that having a WP policy that is totally contradictory to Beijing's stance is POV. One completely accepting Beijing's stance would also be POV. It's best to have a convention to use terms on which the main sides agree. They all agree that (at present) Taiwan is not independent of China. They also all use the term "Taiwan" as a short-hand for territory that is currently controlled by Taipei. So it'd be best to adopt this approach rather than treating Taiwan as a separate sovereign state and referring to the "Republic of China" or "Cross-Straits", jguk 13:27, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Comment Something that the posters on NC:Chinese keep forgetting is that an NPOV isn't no POV. A neutral POV explains controversies, it doesn't try to bury them by creating and vigorously reinforcing "Naming Conventions". This goes to the heart of the entire current NPOV section on everything China. It's ridiculous to be creating categories and shoving articles around to non-existent entities (Mainland China) because it doesn't agree with everyone's POV about what "China" is. So long as everyone in Taiwan, HK and Macau get their way, "China" doesn't exist. SchmuckyTheCat 14:17, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
it is unreasonable for WP to take the view that there is a sovereign state based in Taipei called the Republic of China -- this is precisely the view of the ROC itself. It calls itself the "Republic of China", and its provisional capital is Taipei.
Apparently Wikipedia treats Taiwan as a sovereign state called the Republic of China? -- no, Wikipedia currently treats the ROC as a government / regime that controls Taiwan and a few other islands. Similarly the PRC is a government / regime that controls Mainland China, HK, and Macau. -- ran ( talk) 17:00, Mar 19, 2005 (UTC)
I propose that all further discussion take place here in order to avoid fragmentation. Let me briefly state here that the person who started this debate on the Pump is, IMHO, simply mistaken both about the intent behind the naming conventions and about the real world situation. -- MarkSweep 20:33, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This is some topic being long disputed. The reason we do not take PRC's view point as neutral point of view is because this encyclopedia is not based in Beiging. We reach a neutral point by reflecting the reality while keep all the POVs into the article. Whether Taiwan is neutral or not based on one's point of view. However, the reality is that PRC does not control Taiwan/ROC. Similarly, the U.S. does not recognize Cuba and this fact does not make Cuba less sovereign than other nations. We treat Taiwan/ROC as a sovereign country because it function like a sovereign country, not because it is a sovereign country in everyone's eye on this earth. We choose a treatment not to against PRC's POV but a treatment which is closest to the reality. When PLA start to patrol over the Taiwan coast daily, we will stop treating ROC as a sovereign country. Before that, I suggest we reflect the reality.
I do see the problem of the definition of China where the definition is affected by the regions outside of the mainland China. However, this is really the by-product of the NPOV policy in Wikipedia. As long as Chinese people makes assertions extending beyond current PRC's control and also as long as those being claimed regions objects the definition from PRC's view point, a clear cut definition of China, either geographically or politically, would always being occluded for the sake of NPOV not to biasing against those diagree with the PRC difinition. Again, this is being done to reflect reality, not because we want to bias against PRC. The only way to circumvent this issue is to define China as where PRC controls and take note of PRC's claim in the articles to reflect PRC's POV. However, it seems less likely to reach such a consensus. Mababa 05:36, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The people of Taiwan do not agree "there is one China". The government of Taiwan for decades used the fiction (excuse) that there was one China to avoid being voted out of office by the Taiwan people. 4.250.168.188 13:28, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Template:Cleanup-technical or {{cleanup-technical}}<br\>What's the practicality for the use of this template? Isn't the evaluation of what's too technical going to vary by each individual reader? For example, if I (as a non-principal author) can understand the content of an article, is that grounds enough for removing it, or do we have to put it to a vote every time we want to remove such a tag? I'm also unclear as to the overall intent of such a tag. Is this supposed to create pressure for evolving towards a "Wikipedia for Dummies" authorship style? - Bevo 19:50, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Is there a policy to move media to Wikicommons? If there is, is there a policy of deleting the media locally? Gareth Hughes 16:58, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I know this must have been discussed before, so if you have pointers to previous discussions/decisions, that would be great.
The idea is that (for non-redirect pages) if you can't muster a paragraph about something (at least, say, five lines or 400 characters) then it's really a request for an article, and not an article. Any edit that would record a page with a total size of less than 400 bytes would be refused (page creation or edit). Demi 22:41, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)
I also think that this is a dreadful idea. Articles have to start somewhere. Filiocht 10:31, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)
@Demi: What exactly is the problem you are trying to solve with this proposal? -- Plek 10:42, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
*I think that stubs and substubs should be deleted if not expanded on within 40 days. If the article itself admits there is little to say it should be deleted if not updated within 20 days. All spelling redirects should be removed after 100 days.
TAS 10:48, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
TAS 19:28, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Please see m:eventualism and m:immediatism. JRM 12:51, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)
I am so glad that TAS is in a tiny minority on this. Half of the articles I start are stubs tangentially related to the major articles I'm working on. They usually have solid references. They are certainly worth keeping in their own right (e.g. a bio-stub that identifies a relatively obscure figure, but doesn't necessarily do much more than that), and they have the potential for expansion. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:48, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
Better to light one candle than curse darkness. Keep stubs. — Xiong ( talk) 21:32, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)
I have created some simple diagrams for an article and uploaded them as .png files. I created them in Inkscape and they are nice, small, editable scalable vector graphics (svg) files.
Is there a way for me to put the .svg files up so it would be easier if someone wanted to edit the diagrams? Should I just upload them like they are pictures, and link to them from the page for the .png file? Is there a protocol for this? kris 23:34, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
So it is still impossible to upload .svg files, and will be for the near future? -- kris 22:42, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
User:HappyApple, a student of the National University of San Marcos in Lima, prefers this institution to be known as "National University of Saint Mark". In support of this, he cites an entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia. [5]
However, a Google search on the phrase "National University of Saint Mark" [6] returns just nine hits, all of them Wikipedia texts which he has edited.
A Google search on the phrase "National University of San Marcos" [ [7] returns nearly 1,000.
Wikipedia:Naming conventions states:
As I interpret this, it would be most appropriate to refer to this institution in our pages as "National University of San Marcos". HappyApple however still insists in using "Saint Mark" (piped to San Marcos) in Wiki articles. If other editors have an opinion, perhaps they could make themselves heard, either here or on Talk:Lima. Thanks. -- Viajero 14:27, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
There is the precedent that the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1912 called it "University of Saint Mark". This presumably predates "National" being added to its name. Oddly, the same same source also calls it "University of Saint Mark's".
I would suggest that this is a small issue and not worth fighting over. All commonly used versions of the name, past and present, should be mentioned in the article on the university itself, and all should redirect (or disambiguate) to the same article. In other articles, any reasonably clear version of the name should be acceptable. My only proviso is to avoid anachronisms. If the name has changed, an article about a period before the name change should refer to it by a formula like FOO, now BAR, and should use the most parallel versions possible: that is, one should not use an old Spanish name and a new English one. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:14, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
The name has not been changed, and the anglicise usage of the name it is entirely legal, and does not dissobey any Naming policies. HappyApple 22:33, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
If the 1000 to 0 [-wikipedia] it would seem to dissobey this one: Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Use common names of persons and things
-- Philip Baird Shearer 00:55, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Before to say this evidences i must remind to all friendly wikipedists this In the top of the article about Naming Policies said this:
Naming convention are not rules written in stone ... and there may be cases where a particular convention is "obviously" inappropriate.
Also there is another precedent of the use University of Saint Mark.
And i quote: earning a Doctor's Degree. He was then given the Chair of Theology at Saint Mark University, Lima.
Quote : Pablo Munoz SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 1981 - University of Saint Mark Gallery
Lima and Santo Domingo, were decreed in 1551. In some instances,such as that of the University of Saint Mark in Lima,the university has kept its colonial library.
Arguments based on a single search in Google is not reelevant evidence, there are many others online searchers as same other tools to find information about Saint Mark, and obviously this source User:Viajero hasn't used.
Users among wikipedia there are the evidence that proves the name is entirelly legal and conclusively that anglicize name of San Marcos to Saint Mark it applies to wikipedia and does not affect any kind of it's policies. HappyApple 03:53, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
For what it's worth - both of my parents taught at San Marcos for more than twenty years, and neither has ever referred to San Marcos, in English, by anything other than "San Marcos". Hasdrubal 19:31, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Okay, several weeks have passed and consensus has not yet been reached on this subject. So I think we should vote.
The majority of English speakers refer to the university as "(National) University of San Marcos" and therefore, this is the way it should be referred to on wikipedia. -- Tuomas hello 02:33, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
Decision: After 3 days of voting, the majority has voted in favor of the university's original name and against the anglicized version. Thus, this is the only way the university should be called on wikipedia. -- Tuomas hello 00:46, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
Is there a policy, semi-policy or just something comprehensive as guideline, whether and how "secret knowledge" (of the religious or quasi-religious type, for a start) should be handled? Yes, I've seen that Xenu even acquired the Featured Article predicate, but that's the rare case where court documents give some credible source. In other cases I'd assume lack of verifiability would speak against including it in an encyclopedia at all. Opinions? Pointers? -- Pjacobi 13:01, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
Other examples of "secret knowledge": the explanation of various magic tricks and illustions: see Magic_(illusion)#Secrecy. Locksmiths also tend to be very guarded about their trade.
In general, I think Wikipedia should be willing to include such things, although perhaps a warning analogous to fiction "spoilers" might be appropriate in some cases. And, as many people have already pointed out, any information included must be verifiable, in which case it's not exactly that huge a secret any more... — Matt Crypto 11:29, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The idea of "secret knowledge" runs counter to the entire purpose of having an encyclopedia. If a subject is verifiable and important (encyclopedic), then the fact that someone wants to suppress that subject makes it more important to include. We are about dissemination of knowledge here -- the opposite of suppression. Hence Xenu, or for that matter Hiram Abiff. Likewise, if it's a verifiable fact that massive copyright violation of music and pornography goes on at Something Awful, the fact that the site's operators don't want that information published is all the more reason to publish it. -- FOo 16:30, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I agree with FOo, we're here to extend and pool human knowledge, not to perpetuate power structures or attempts to create such power structures based on the withholding and concealment of knowledge. Projects like Wikipedia spell death to obscurantism, and I say good riddance and not before time. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 17:53, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I had inserted a detailed description of the techniques of Knowledge several times but followers found it sacrilege and reverted my edits all the time. Then I gave up. Andries 20:40, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I believe the appropriate policy statement is: "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Philwelch 23:52, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Pjacobi presentation of the subject is incorrect. The Knowledge that Maharaii teaches is free, it does not cost money. The "course" to prepare for Knowledge is also free.
The whole premise that the article is advertising is based on a wrong (and I must say, bigoted) assumption represented by PJacobp's disparraging coment "[sic] those of the pattern "X is a wonderful but secret technique. X will make you happy and the world peacefull. We won't reveal anything here, because it's secret, but you can join our organisation/pay $$$$ for the introductary course to learn more". The article does not even speak of a Secret Knowledge, neither it speaks of wonderful effects.
The other thing I find quite disturbing is the fact that Pjacobi placed this comment here, and did not announce it in the Talk: Techniques_of_Knowledge until today. I find this disingenous. When he posted his concerns there, I and others could do someting about making the article better.-- ≈ jossi ≈ 22:55, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)
The section in the article in question follows:
Students of Prem Rawat, also known as Maharaji, claim that references to similar techniques have been made throughout history, that the techniques of Knowledge have always been a prominent part of the teachings of Prem Rawat and have not changed throughout the years. See also the past teachings and current teachings of Prem Rawat. According to his followers, historical references to these techniques can be found in books and poems from many spiritual practices as "Light", "Sound", "Name" and "Nectar" or similar names.
These techniques are said to help students take their senses and invert them within to experience inner peace, and those who study them often describe the experience simply as "going within." To remove any cultural connotations from simplicity and clarity of understanding, nowadays Rawat refers to them as simply 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th techniques. Students see the ongoing relationship between the disciple and the teacher (guru in Indian culture) to be of central importance for the usefulness of the techniques.
The experience of Knowledge is described by followers as highly internal and "atomistically" individual. The techniques are to be practiced privately, there being no social structure or hierarchy related to their practice. According to students, there is no liturgy or social obligation involved, but Maharaji instructs them to practice the techniques daily for at least one hour to help in order to experience inner peace and fulfillment. The also say that the techniques are universally applicable and their practice has no impact on or relationship to a student's gender, race, sexual orientation, economic status or national origin [11]. Elan Vital also states that practice of Knowledge will not affect a person's religion.
Descriptions of Rawat's techniques have been posted on websites by critical former students, purportedly described by people authorized by Rawat to teach the techniques [12] in the past. Current students answer that the descriptions posted by these apostates are not accurate and moreover, to be useful, the techniques require preparation and mentoring by a living teacher. This article does not contain a detailed description of the techniques because current students find it inappropriate to publish them on the internet.
Is it policy, and if so, why is it, to litter articles with mainly redundant boxes such as Template:IPA notice. Any possibility we can stamp this thing out. Does Motörhead really benefit from the box, or is it just IPA proponents losing a sense of proportion? Wouldn't a photo of Lemmy be more appropriate. Further rant at Template talk:IPA notice -- Tagishsimon (talk)
It is time to have Wikipedia constructed on Classical Republican lines. Jimmy Wales as "king", a section of Aristocracy, and the rest of Wikipedians as democracy.
"Truth does no good in a democracy". Socrates and Jesus found out the hard way. We are letting 18 year old kids and people, who hide behind their anynimity to run things. Ideology and ignorance is running what gets put on here at Wikipedia.
It is time to instutite a "Jury of Peers". Most people have no inclination, no understanding of anything classical. Sparta is a Republic. Always was and the best at it. I have arguments with 20,000 British people about their own form of government but find out that John Aylmer introduced that language to his people and considered his government to be like Sparta and this was in c 1640. Why do I need to argue with punk ass public schooled idiot savants for? WHy does a mass of ignorance get to determine what goes on here??????
St. Maximos the Confessor said, "One man with the Truth is a Majority". We need checks and balances against the HERD on Wikipedia. The Minority has no voice in Wikipedia. Just like how the HERD tyrannized and destroyed Fox Hunting in England, is a prime example of the HERD tyrannizing the minority. So it is on Wikipedia. We need "Checks and Balances" not the herd mentality of Democracy. And we need to insitutute a JURY OF PEERS. WHEELER 15:02, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Just to name a two areas in which I have worked a great deal, I would gladly welcome comparison of our content related Jorge Luis Borges, or to the early years of Yiddish theatre, to any on the web in the English language (or any of the several other languages I can read), and I'm including specialist sites. I am also comfortable in saying that nearly all of our featured articles are also on this level, as are probably at least ten thousand more that don't have featured status. No, you can't use Wikipedia simply as if it were a reference book. Yes, you can use Wikipedia as a very valuable aid in research, once you understand what it is and is not. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:20, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)
My problem and Wikipedia formation
Here is a glaring example of what I am talking about:
Want another fine example
I can't believe what I am hearing! We are in the midst of building an encyclopaedia. Either I am charged with original research because i put the bare bones out and other Wikipedians charge me alone with having to write a complete and thorough article at the onset or now, they want to delete because, I WHEELER, haven't had the time and the knowhow to put other articles on the encyclopaedia to mesh with
vanavsos which is now the supposition and reasoning of WhiteC. This is absolutely outrageous! I am benumbed with consternation at all these floating reasons that have no bearing on the essence of the question! These people don't charge others with "these crimes" only myself and create "rules" that I must abide by but noone else. By WhiteC's argument, "The article must be deleted because it is not linked to any other article's". To WhiteC, this illogicity is glaring, "How are we to build an encyclopaedia when others are going to delete articles because they are not connected to something else?" I am floored by the "reasonings" imagined in order to get this article deleted. Sources be damned, delete delete delete. What the heck is going on here? Stupid question, I know exactly what is going on and the "Admins" or "Sysops" are not going to do anything about it.
WHEELER 18:17, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Problem solved
More Glaring Hypocrisy
This is from "Votes for deletion" for
vanavsos. Please look carefully at these comments:
Open letter to Jimmy Wales, Sysops and Admins
We are told everday that democracy is the best form of government. It is taught everywhere today in America from elementary grades through to the university graduate level. My point is that nowhere in
Classical Antiquity was Athens looked on with favor, either by the majority of Greek philosophers nor any Roman. In Medieval times, no one looked to Athens. Everybody looked to Lacedæmonia for an example of good government. If you notice, John Adams didn't like democracy either and if you read towards the end you will see his comment on democracy:
User_talk:Wheeler/Confusion_over_term_republic. That is why this page is important:
Wikinfo:Classical definition of republic. Every human institution runs on the Classical republican model:
Wikinfo:Philosophy of mixed government Trifunctionality. The army is the best example.
The importance of the distinction between a "politiea" and a "democracy" is very important that Paul A. Rahe, points out in his Republics, Ancient and Modern, Vol II, pg 256.
What democracy entails is that people who have no expertise, knowledge, philosophy are quite capable of running a government; which as experience point out that any ship run like a democracy will run aground. Where as in a "politiea" the mass is checked by a senate house of wisdom. A pilot, officers and midshipman, and the crew.
As to the charge of my constant diatribe against Marxism:
Democracy is the sign of Marxism. It is the mechanical process of the ideology of Marxism and therefore equality.
Democracy has always been and always will be the worst form of government. Heirarchy and the "rule of the best" by men who PROVE their capability and merit and worth are natural constituents of leadership. This is necessary for Wikipedia: A Classical Republic. WHEELER 15:22, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
what is this even about? vanavsos wasn't deleted. the process worked. it was put on vfd on grounds of being an essay on an ancient greek adjective. some keep votes were given on grounds that the original author (WHEELER) wouldn't let anyone touch it. the main problem seems to have been WHEELER's attitude towards whom he perceives as banausoi. I can't conceive how somebody who fears that he has no peers on Wikipedia should fail to understand the difference between transliteration and phonetic transcription [13]. Do we have Viology? Vrachistochrone? Come on. You do not need to be an expert to decide whether a subject is encyclopedic, as the author is required to provide references that document the subject's encyclopedicity. If anything, " Vanavsos" is a testimony that the VfD procedure works. I have written lots of obscure academic little articles, and none of them were put on VfD so far. Okay, there was Tyalië Tyelelliéva, which arguably is fancruft, but even that survived VfD. Hell, Time Cube is still with us. If anything, we have a problem of being unable to get rid of unencyclopedic articles, not the reverse. I agree that we also have a problem of expertise not being recognised by hoi polloi, usually on prominent articles, but VfD is not the spot to point to for this. The problem is also immanent in WP, and experts will get their way, they'll just have to put up with obstacles they're not necessarily familiar with. dab (ᛏ) 19:31, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
What the "Ding-Dong" is going on here at Wikipedia?
Check this out:
Wikipedia:Association_of_Member_Investigations.
This is absolutely ludicrious!!!!!!!!!!! We want to "create" prosecutorial bodies on Wikipedia to drive "our" thorns from our side so we can have ideological purity on Wikipedia before ever considering the establishment of professional boards for each subject on Wikipedia? Kevin M. Marshall, 13 years of Latin and Greek has pointed out where my contributions are well-researched and cited. Yet, my work comes up for frequent deletion. My edits are constantly reverted check out the history of
Arete (excellence) and
Ochlocracy where other wikipedians delete valuable information for what purpose? And then charge me with being "disruptive"? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO. The system itself brings on trouble!!! On Wikinfo, One can write a SPOV article and another writes a "Criticism" of the SPOV article. People stay out of each other's hair. If the rules were changed or there were EXPERTS in each field to decide probelms, there wouldn't be any need for this stupid "Association of Member Investigations".
You people have got your priorities ALL WRONG! Not everyone can edit in the "classical field" yet with this "democracy" you have got ignorant people editing articles they have no clue in. This is sooo stupid. What does Snowspinner and SimonP et al. who have no sense of the classical world CONTROL articles in the classical world? and then put me up for arbitration? This is stupid!
Kevin Marshall has 13 years of experience of Greek and Latin. This man should be my Arbitrator. This man and other Wikipedians with years of GREEK AND LATIN like User:Stan Shebs should be THE BOARD for Classical fields and Users!!!! Not a bunch of Self-Ordained British Modern Republican (marxist) hooligans!!! I am put up and attacked by the likes of SimonP, Snowspinner, Mackrakis, Mel etits, (and the best one of them all=) Milneau Trudeneau, et al, What are their qualifications or proof of their expertise????????? No where to be found. Yet, I am put up for arbitration and attacked and reverted by these people all the time. They have NO classical context whatsoever.
AND WE CREATE PROSECUTORIAL BOARDS ( Wikipedia:Association_of_Member_Investigations)BEFORE WE EVER THINK OF ESTABLISHING PROFESSIONAL SUBJECT INTEREST SPECIFIC BOARDS TO JUDGE USERS AND MATERIAL CONTENT. You people are OFF YOUR ROCKER!!!! WHEELER 16:21, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Things are getting out of hand at Wikipedia.
Democracy is no way to run anything. About a jury of my peers. If you look at the Users that delete, most of them have no expertize of any thing classical, most have edited things about sports and cricket. In all the people that voted for deletion, only two had a political degree. One is a British guy with degrees in philosophy and history and politics, yet denied that Britain had mixed government and yet I have scholary works that outlines this history of "mixed government". I made several new pages and added to the content of the History of the British constitution that more educated men can't do...or won't do. I want a jury of my peers not a bunch of ideological driven ignorant savants. That know nothing of the material in question. WHEELER 14:45, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC) Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28miscellaneous%29"
Is everyone of these really encylopedic? Seems someone is creating a stub page for each one in Canada. Vegaswikian 03:49, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The defenders, or defender, or a page listed in VfD cited in its support what's written in Wikipedia:Vanity Page, a "semi-policy" [?!] page of whose existence I must shamefacedly admit I hadn't previously been aware.
This page struck me as a mess. Where it made sense, I sometimes agreed with it and sometimes didn't. For example, its sample (fictional) vanity page strikes me as very unlike what is normally deleted as vanity. But often it didn't make sense. It said that notability was a factor in deciding whether something was vanity, and elsewhere implied that it was a factor; and that There is presently no consensus about what degree of recognition is required for a page to be included in Wikipedia, and therefore, lack of fame should be completely ignored in deletion debates which I think is close to saying "The value of X is unknown and therefore it is zero."
Not knowing how malleable "semi-policy" is, I only very hesitantly and cautiously altered the page so that (I hope) it isn't so obviously obscure and self-contradictory. But the longer I look at it, the less I like it. In my perhaps unrepresentative opinion, the whole thing should be scrapped and rebuilt, perhaps here and there using the odd sentence from the old page. Would this be OK for "semi-policy"?
As for my substantive disagreements with the page, I'd like to bring one up here. It's about the OKness of writing about oneself, one's group (musical or otherwise), company, friend, etc. We now read:
In principle, I agree. Yes, it's imaginable that some noteworthy people are overlooked and can write objectively and usefully about themselves. Moreover, in practice, pages about oneself can't simply be prevented: though I may insist that I'm a 59-year-old female Finnish florist, you've no certain way of knowing that I'm not the 32-year-old male Mauretanian musician I'm writing about. Still, authors often let slip that they are who they're writing about, and very often they seem to inflate their own significance. To me, that one should not create an article about oneself, one's group, etc. seems a very obvious rule of thumb: if I'm right in believing that I'm WP-worthy, then eventually some disinterested person will get around to writing about me, and from that point I would be able to step in to correct my birthdate, remove innuendo about my sex life, etc. -- but not to add more merit points.
In brief, I suggest that Wikipedia:Vanity Page should (i) clearly tell people not to start articles about themselves, their close friends, or the groups or companies they're in, and (ii) be rewritten to show more of the obnoxiousness of a lot of vanity pages as zapped via VfD. Comments? -- Hoary 06:25, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)
I noticed that one of the first articles I wrote for the Wikipedia has been redirected: [14], with the original article basically copied to the target and the old article deleted. The "new" article doesn't give any mention of the previous authors. Is there any way we can make it so when we decide to rename an article and redirect the original to the new, we can move the list of contributors as well? I don't want to come across as a credit-monger and editing the Wikipedia is my way of giving back to something I've benefited from tremendously. However, it is nice and encouraging to people to have their contributions recorded. Some of us tend to be rather meticulous and treat the Wikipedia with a great deal of respect. We end up taking a good amount of time just to produce a paragraph or two. It's not a huge deal but I thought I should bring it up.
Comatose51 03:48, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I think category listings in articles themselves should be alphabetized because it is completely objective. Postdlf & Oleg Alexandrov have posted on my talk page of sorting by a personally chosen preference of "importance". WP has seen some pretty petty reasons ( WP:LAME) for revert wars, but I can't see sorting categories based on personal opinion will do anything but foster more reverting wars and disrupt WP. I bring this here to discuss it and perhaps to come to some kind of conclusion about "how should categories appear in articles: alphabetically or 'by importance'?".
This all stems (between Postdlf and I) over James Stewart (actor), but you know...what if I think the most important thing about a person was that they were born? After all, James Stewart there couldn't have been an actor if he wasn't born. Perhaps I think It's a Wonderful Life is *THE BEST MOVIE* of all time but if James would have died in WW2 then I probably would have hated it, so thank god he didn't die — Postdlf thinks being a WW2 veteran is the least important category for James.
As you can see, pretty much anyone could come up with an argument for why their preference of "importance" is correct. Then again, maybe I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill here, but considering a revert war ensued over whether or not 3 is an odd number or not.....listing cats by anything subjective seems like a bad idea and is opening the flood gates and waiting for the rain to come... Cburnett 01:51, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
I expect this to be a lengthy conversation, and to keep some semblence of an idea of what WP editors want/think about this I ask you to *only* sign for what you support and keep discussion below it.
I don't intend this "voting" here to be means to establishing policy, only that I/we can get a general idea of where this issue lies.
I don't intend this "voting" here to be means to establishing policy, only that I/we can get a general idea of where this issue lies.
Briefly explain what it is
Put all discussion here.
Chronological--If a person became a farmer, lost a race for a state political office, entered the state house of reps, entered U.S. Congress, entered Senate, became a lobbyist, than categories go in that order. Birth and death year cats are the exception--they always come at the beginning. Meelar (talk) 02:16, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
State of nature--undoubtedly easiest to maintain. Categories have no particular order, except for the birth and death years, which are always together and at the front or back ends. Very few articles have so many categories that they're tough to read through quickly. Meelar (talk) 02:38, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
Importance—The first category you see should be the classification that most likely made you want to read the article in the first place—that George W. Bush is a U.S. president is obviously much more important than his birth in 1946 or membership status as a Bonesman. It's easier than it may seem at first to establish this kind of hierarchy, because there are obviously some categories that merely belonging to it mean per se notability. Every U.S. President, every Congressman, every SCOTUS Justice gets an article because by attaining that position they are necessarily notable. Not every lawyer gets an article, however, so obviously a U.S. President category trumps a lawyer category. Some lawyers attain notability through their practice, however. No one is notable because of the year they are born in or die in (except maybe the first baby of the millennium or other such nonsense, but that's likely to be the only category such an article receives anyway), so these come last. But there's no need to fix this in hard and fast rules, however, because the details don't matter outside of a general preference for trying to place more important categories first. Is a U.S. Senator more important than a state governor? That's a matter of opinion, but obviously both are more important than being a lawyer or having been born in 1970. Alphabetical, on the other hand, really means no true order at all beyond what letter or number a category happens to arbitrarily begin with. Postdlf 05:02, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Whatever's most applicable for the topic—For a computer game, reverse-chronological order would probably make the most sense. For a politician, decending order of office would be most appropriate. Alphabetical should be last resort--if 'd' came before 'b' in the alphabet, would you list date of death before date of birth? I don't think so. Also, is it 'cinema actors', 'film actors', or 'movie actors'? Alph just doesn't seem very helpful. It especially gets complicated with a person with multiple careers. Take Ronald Reagan. To me, first obviously should be 'presidents of the US'. However, what comes next? 'Movie actor' or 'Governor of California'? I guess "State of nature" would help here. Oh, and FWIW, I would put DOB, DOD, 'where from' all last, with 'veteran of WWII' next to last before those, since most male celebs/pols (and probably a surprising number of female celebs) that were 18-40 years old during WWII are veterans of that war--not something people are likely to be looking for the category of when looking at a celeb/pol article. All that said, I doubt I'd spend much time re-ordering cat, unless possibly if I was editing the article for other reasons anyway--in most cases, it just won't make that much difference. Niteowlneils 06:23, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Depends on the subject (mainly as above) Biographical articles could have chronological order of categories (political activist career, parliamentary career, ministerial career etc. as appropriate). (Thought I am not sure where to place the categories like "People of Chicago"). I also think that births and deaths should be in the end of the list.
However, we have to update articles about living people anyway. Therefore we could mention first the category that is most relevant right now ie. reference to the person's position or status at the moment. When their term expires or ends in any other way, the category list could return to chronological order.
However, many other subjects do not need chronological treatment. Articles on events (battles, catastrophes) or objects (weapons, tools, software) could easily use alphabetical order, with the year categories at the end of the list - Skysmith 08:42, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It seems to me that every town or county in the United States, no matter what size, is posting their entire census on Wikipedia. I do not approve of this. I hate wading through these ASCII pie charts on "family size" and "racial makeup", and it seems like they would be meaningless to other readers, too.
I would love it if these articles told me who the mayors of these towns are, or what industries the towns are rooted in, or what local sports teams and culture go on there. But whenever I go to these pages, all I get is paragraphs full of numbers, which have little or no value to me. Has anyone else noticed this flood of census data? Brendan62442 19:22, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Alright. I can understand if the article are written by a RamBot. A Bot article is better than no article. Brendan62442 01:13, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Why must I make 50 votes before my vote can be counted? I don't understand this policy. Should I make 50 nonsense votes on pages that I know nothing about just to have one vote counted on a page I do understand?
Please help me with this, I could find no mention of this policy anywhere in the users guide but it's cropping up on pages on which I voted.
Apologies, signing now. I was asking about VfD specifically, and about policy, since it says nothing in the policy guidelines about making 50 edits before you can be considered part of the community enough to contribute. It seems very exclusive to me. CatCrofts 15:58, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If you do not yet have 50 edits, you can still make statements on VFD pages, they just count as comments. If your comments are very convincing, you could still get the page immediately deleted, or immediately kept. Actual vote-counting on vfd only (should!) happen in cases where there's no clear consensus. :-) Kim Bruning 16:22, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This recent focus on the mode of death seems to me to be seriously messing up the category scheme. Up until now I've raised my objections on a few talk pages, but the most recent case seems to me to be particularly egregious. Numerous people—many of them prominent figures—have been moved from Category:French Revolution to Category:Guillotined French Revolution figures. Thus, for example, prominent revolutionary figures like Madame Roland or Georges Danton are classified, with respect to the revolution, only in a category about the mode of their death. I think this is entirely inappropriate.
I think that if someone is starting from Category:French Revolution and trying to find the key figures, they are very unlikely to head towards a category about their mode of death. It might be appropriate to add a category like this, but only if we also added a category that had something to do with what these people did while alive.
I'm really tired right now, I'm not going to try to get into this much further; I hope I'm being coherent. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:30, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)