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recently I came across the article for the civil rights activist Alice Walker and it had been vandalized by some idiot who ridiculously called her a "racist, sexist, and totalitarian" and he/she/it also called Fidel Castro a "dictator" something that is completely false. I just can't believe how many people think they can insert their own bigoted, racist, sexist, idiotic remarks into articles, it delegitimatizes Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia needs to extend the banning period from 24-hours to 78-hours or require users to register before editing. - Stancel
Another possibility is to have a button, kind of "Semi-protect this page", in addtion to the "Protect" one. admins could then semiporotect pages that are being vandalized most often, like pope, gay, vagina, etc.
For starters, I would suggest two basic criteria for semiprotection:
Anons may be directed to the talk page. (Of course they will happily vandalize talk pages as well, but this ewill be not that visible.)
Also, as of today I don't see any particular reason why would we be overly meek with anons. In the early days of wikipedia every single contributor was dear. Isn't it time to be just a bit more selective? Mikkalai 20:24, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has a large collection of images from medieval illuminated manuscripts online at http://www.bnf.fr/enluminures/accueil.htm ( English version). Their copyright statement ( French, English) says:
and the images (e.g. [1], which I would like to use in Seraph) contain "©Bibliothèque nationale de France"—but as accurate reproductions of public domain artworks, are these nonetheless in the public domain under U.S. law, per Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.? Does the fact that Wikimedia has servers and a chapter in France make it in any way subject to French law? — Charles P. (Mirv) 19:10, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Museums typically claim copyrights when they don't have them, to try to earn money. Most of them do this. That doesn't make them right. Digital images of the art are not capable of having new copyrights. These images are 100% free and clear and in the public domain by a long, long ways. DreamGuy 05:26, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)
There is only one relevant question—do copyrights have a limited term of protection in France? If copyrights don't expire, then under French law they could claim copyright in the manuscripts and all reproductions. If that's the case, just stay out of France. ; ) Never underestimate the IP ignorance of museum staff, btw. I was visiting the Gilbert Stuart exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in DC last week and noticed a sign saying no photography was allowed in the exhibit. So I asked the guard if he knew why, first word out of his mouth was "copyright", which I unsuccessfully tried to dissuade him from as even the youngest of Stuart's paintings are approaching 200 years old. Ok, not surprising that a security guard wouldn't know better, but I encountered the same misinformation at the information desk. Both of them seemed to confuse physical ownership of the object with ownership over the image. I'm sure that a couple of the private collectors who lended their Stuart paintings to the NGA for the exhibit restricted photography by contract, but telling people that it's due to copyright rather than the owners imposing access restrictions on the public at a federally owned and funded museum is shady. Postdlf 07:05, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Sample | |
---|---|
Color coordinates | |
Hex triplet | #000000 |
sRGBB ( r, g, b) | (0, 0, 0) |
HSV ( h, s, v) | (0°, 0%, 0%) |
CIELChuv ( L, C, h) | (0, 0, 0°) |
Source | [ Unsourced |
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte) |
A question has arisen in connection with {{ infobox color}} (seen to the right): is it permissible to have a link from a sectional caption in the Infobox to an explanatory article in the Wikipedia: namespace? In particular, is it permissible to link the Color Coordinates caption to a page describing how the various color systems are represented in Wikipedia (early draft currently living here)? -- Phil | Talk 11:17, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)
I've proposed a change to wikipedia:disambiguation (an official policy page). Please add your comments to the talk page. Thank you. -- Rick Block 04:26, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
When does a quote reach the limit of being copyright? Does wikipedia have a policy of a certain length tops, or no copyrighted quotes etc?
Basically, I can understand that someone might want to say
but at the same time there must be a limit - I can't quote whole books in wikipedia (ignoring the fact that it might be a bad article). Is there a rought limit to a couple of sentences, a paragraph? a page? Or should we just paraphrase everything?
Sorry if this is a repeat -- Tomhab 20:33, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Would you further argue that as the CPUs and disks are in the States, other country's copyright laws don't apply? Philip Baird Shearer 00:51, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I am not sure that if a resident in a foreign country uploads data onto Wikipedia which is then downloaded by another resident of the same country is so protected. There was a court case in England a few years ago, (R v. Thompson [1984] 3 All ER 565 ->English Court of Appeal in Thompson (1984) 79 Cr App R 191 at 196), where a person working as a computer contractor in Kuwait, set up a program to move money from two little used accounts into his own within the bank. When left unsupervised he ran it. He then flew back the the UK and asked the Kuwaiti bank to transfer the money from his account in Kuwait to another account owned by him in another country. When the yearly audit was done his theft was spotted. The English Judge ruled that the theft did not take place until the money left the bank as before that it was mealy the equivalent of moving figures in a ledger. At the time there was no extradition to Kuwait, so the contractor would have gone free if the theft had taken place in Kuwait, as it was, he committed the theft in the UK and got sent down for it. So under UK law the physical site of the computer was not relevant it was the place where the criminal was when the crime is committed. I am not sure if this precedent would be used in such a case as copyright infringement but it could be. [2]. Also searching for the case on the net I came across an article where the UK case was quoted for guidance in an Australian court case Claire Frances Capewell (1994) ACrimR 228 Court of Appeal Queensland -- Philip Baird Shearer 01:42, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This topic is causing much confusion and hard feelings (including mine) on the Talk: Terri Schiavo page. It appears that Wikipedia adopted what is refered to as American Journalistic Style, as opposed to Formal Style. The NYT, WSJ, Times and Organization of American Historians use Formal style. All endorse the use of "Ms." where the marital status or preference of the lady in question cannot be determined.
I personally find Journalistic Style to be offensive in the extreme, in regards to the Terri Schiavo case. Less so, in general. Ms. Schiavo was a person, not an object, and use of Formal Style would recognize her as such. I also believe that adoption of Formal Style would present a more professional face for Wikipedia. Finally, the non-American English-speaker will expect Formal Style. Please guide me in the best way to help Wikipedia adopt Formal Style.-- ghost 18:52, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thank you for the feedback. Some of my arguments are based on the following Style guides:
My interest in considering a switch to Formal Style is based on a designation in Formal Style for the recently deceased. [3] This means to Mozart would not receive an appellation because he was a public figure and is not recently deceased. Terri Schiavo was a public figure, but not of her choosing.-- ghost 21:33, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If I accept that Wikipedia is not a newpaper, why are we using a newspaper style? Almost no one refers to Ms. Schiavo as "Schiavo" in casual speech. It would be rude. And non-American readers view it as rude here. I argue for compassion.-- ghost 14:12, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Eugene, my reasoning for those sources is that all three support the MoS's statement, "After the initial mention of any name, the person may be referred to by surname only." Unfortunately, this is vague. That has led to some people, enforcing what is meant to be a flexible policy, to treat and defend it as Dogma.
Paradiso, I understand the reasoning behind not normally using Casual Speech as a guide. In cases like this, it is non-sequitor. Why on Earth would we use a less formal standard in writing than we do in speech? This cultural taboo alone indicates the need for Formal Style, and explains why people create style guides. As too athletes, etc., these people are (in)famous by choice. The recently deceased are not.
Finally, I've contemplated long and hard on the idea that I am the only person that takes offence to this. ("If a tree falls in a forest...") It's irrelevant. I do. If it's one person, or a thousand, it doesn't matter. The MoS, albiet vague, allows for situations like this. Therefore, I simply seek support in envoking the flexability of the MoS to avoid a revert war.-- ghost 03:33, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This entry caught my eye from the newly created pool, Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth, P.A. Barely notable entities creating their own Wikipedia pages. The page might be factually accurate but promotional in tone. There will be no third party source to verify the info. As wiki grows, the likelyhood of these advertisement entries dressing themselves in the brand credibility and prestige our hard work made will grow. The only defense I suppose is a policy that explicitly blocks these articles. Lotsofissues 11:31, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Britannica defines an encyclopedia as a reference work, which how I have always understood the word yet wikipedia only defines encyclopedia as a compendium. Wikipedia is not a reference work due to its open nature and lack of certainty about any article at any perticular time.
It would seem wikipedia is redefining the word encyclopedia to include itself. whats with that??
-- Deus777 05:11, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Sorry everybody, this may be a stupid suggestion, but I think the NPOV tag may be too vague. The most obvious of all, I think there should be a tag like "Political" for some articles (e.g. Taiwan Independence, etc.) since there may still be arguments about if something is written with a natural point of view. If there is a tag as described, viewers will be reminded that a specific document is political and the point of view may not be accurate. And therefore they can decide if they agree with the author or not.
Sorry if the suggestion is rude.
-- Wen 13:11, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There are a number of existing policies relating to linking to external sites, for example
and there is probably more. The general intension appears to be to discourage all external links because we would rather have material added to Wikipedia, discourage links to commercial sites which might be seen as advertising and to discourage links which simply serve to boost the ranking of the 3rd party site. Whilst at the same time not banning links to commercial sites, because the article on Yahoo! should link to the official yahoo site.
But the other day I came across a new issue;
In particular I noticed a number of links being added for www.armeniapedia.org, which is a semi-commercial copyrighted wiki. For example to Mint along with some other herbs. There is also tourist information on some Armenia related pages, such as Shirak.
My impression is this is a little like spam linking to blog sites. On the other hand we actively encourage interlinking between Wikimedia Foundation projects. You could also argue this is just like linking any other external web site, but it feels like there is something qualitatively different about it. -- Solipsist 07:56, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Would there be any possible way to branch W out to make some sort of Braille version? You know, for the blind and deaf people of the world. The blind but not deaf have the spoken project, and Braille is a natural progression. However, my mind thinks: How can one put Braille on the Internet? Dammit. -- Wonderfool t (c) e) 12:31, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to participate -meaningfully- in Wikipedia. I suggest that the W. staff show their site to some test volunteers and watch them to see all the places they get frustrated. Then the introductory material should be massively revamped. One place that could and should be immediately modified is the section called something like "editing a page" - writing a new page is HIDDEN there.
Here's a start wrt KISS principle for rules: Wikipedia:Simplified Ruleset. Is there a similar project for Wikipedia:Simplified editing instructions? Kim Bruning 16:49, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
What is the process / template that should be used in a disputed move of an article that still lacks concensus on the talk? There is no disputed move template so I don't know what to do. A disputed name would also work. The current {{ TitleNPOV}} however doesn't fit as the name is not really NPOV, but incorrect. -- metta, The Sunborn 21:25, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
Ever been to one of those disambiguation page which only confuses you more? Something like:
Foo can have a million meanings, some of them more useful than others.
In anthropology, the ancient Balinese art of Foo dancing influenced Balinese and Sumatran styles as well. See also:
|
If so, you probably want to weigh in on the proposed manual of style page for disambiguation pages, Wikipedia:Disambiguation/Style. Only 24 hours left to register your opinion! — Wahoofive ( talk) 22:00, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
I am now proposing a formal vote at this article on the following proposition:
User:Skyring, who has argued for a contrary position, was given an opportunity to present an alternative position but declined to do so.
I propose that the vote remain open for 48 hours from now (2.30pm AEST 25 May), and that ten votes be required to produce a valid outcome, but I am open to other suggestions on this. Adam 04:46, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
How would Wikipedia handle such a scenario?
My imagination didn't prompt me - rather I stumbled across this thread [4] The thread is located on a forum of a coarse humor website populated with large numbers of young males with a lot of time. Members had a grievance with Wikipedia, which they felt was insensitive to so they declared an open season on the controversial entry. If you browse through the pages and pages of "reports", you can appreciate the headache for some admins that day. At one point a forum member caught on to more sophisticated tactics and suggested creating edits that appeared in summary boxes as anti-vandal work. Fortunately for Wikipedia, the little war stopped owing in part to previous positive experiences some vandals had using the site. In this case, only obvious vandalism was unleashed upon the site. What about in the future? What if don't have the benefit of self restrained vandals? Or even worse imaginative vandals? There are plenty of online associations of young males that would gleefully relish working together to cause a gigantic shit storm. A LA Times commentary discussed one such incident, although that fizzled out more quickly. The iniator was merely prompted by a perceived left bias at Wikipedia. If such a tireless group prompted by whatever were to go on a subtle false edit campaign (e.g. date alterations, plausible expansion, etc.) what could Wikipedia do?
I don't have an idea - although I have a minor suggestion. If you browse through the pages, you will find some Wikipedians joining the forum and entering the fray. I think editors who engage in self-indulgent troll feeding should themselves be punished for prolonging a miserable task upon other editors.
lots of issues | leave me a message 16:43, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
Eh, sometimes the quickest way to deal with such goblins is to cripple them. The problem here is that this takes an experienced and aggressive jacker, and encouraging such retaliation isn't likely to make good politics for Wiki. There'll always be a population of goblins out there, and probably the only long-term fix is to keep up with business as usual and hope it doesn't get worse at a faster rate than the local script-captains consolidate security. Also, the more articles up here, the more work they'll find it to cause lasting havoc. In other words, don't become discouraged, and keep the project growing.
Often with persistent vandals they have some pretty specific reason why they are angry, fx an article they like which was deleted. In my experience, if you catch the problem at the root and really explain why the article was deleted with references to politics etc. then they may still don't like it, but they usually understand it and don't go out on a vandalism spree. I have seen many angry questions which have gone unanswered; it is very important that angry questions are answered (even if the answer seem too obvious to you to be worth answering), otherwise the person making the comments will feel that he was in the right and was wronged, and perhaps be angry enough to go out on a vandalism spree!
For the same reason it is a good idea to use vfd instead of speedy deletion when the contributor contributed the article in good faith. Even when article should obviously (to you) be deleted. Vfd is a way to legitimize the deletion, show that community consensus is behind the deletion, and give the contributor a chance to ask questions and understand why his article is being deleted. Thue | talk 19:17, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
I've read Wiki's procedure on dealing with vandalism, but I was just wondering, are we able to add the wherabouts of anonymous users on their talk pages. I realise that this isn't quite 'naming and shaming' and it's a little harsh, but is it ok to do so for persistent vandals? File:UK Royal Coat of Arms.png Craigy File:Uk flag large.png ( talk) 21:48, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
Yes I see your point (although IP searches match-up to towns and not as far as streets). I just thought saying "We know where you are [though we're not going to come and see you]" might deter them a little. Anyhoo, just an idea. Thanks File:UK Royal Coat of Arms.png Craigy File:Uk flag large.png ( talk) 22:28, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
In my travels in wikipedia, I see some articles about foreign subjects with the English name in bold, of course - but then people make the foreign script bold too. This can make it very difficult to read, especially with Japanese or Arabic articles which have very busy characters or scripts which bold can muddy together. An example: Compare 東條 英機 with 東條 英機 (courtesy General Tojo), or أسامة بن محمد بن عود بن لاد with أسامة بن محمد بن عود بن لاد (courtesy Osama bin Laden). The Arabic makes a valiant attempt to remain legible but at the standard font size, it looks like a difficult battle, but I don't read Arabic so I don't know. However, I do read Japanese, and the bold kanji are more difficult to read than the regular kanji. Some of them are just too busy to handle the extra pixels required by bold. Can we make it a policy never to bold stuff in a non-Latin script unless absolutely necessary, and this includes not enbolding it in the lead? (Having the English be bold is sufficient, isn't it?) I'd like to hear the opinions of people who know Arabic on this. -- Golbez 08:19, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
I have listed Ross Flitney for deletion in the hope that this result in some form of policy decision regarding reserve team footballers. At this time of year football teams will be releasing players, many of whom are youngsters who have not quite made the grade. However, we seem to have articles on some of these players, who have no premier league experience, simply because they have been assigned a squad number.
I can live with these articles while the players concerned are still attached to a top team, although I far from consider them to be encyclopedic. But I would like to encourage some form of policy debate regarding articles about players who have been on the books of Premier League sides but never actually appeared in the league for them. If we could come to some form of catch-all decision it would save a lot of repetitious discussion on VfD about these sub-stubs. Rje 21:10, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
Shit happened finally. I have no time to write much right now. Please take a look at Wikipedia talk:Categories for deletion#Moved from main page (Fooish battles --> Battles in Fooland). I am not good at writing policies, so please someone do it. Otherwise ardent democrats may do much harm, because unlike deleted articles, deleted categories are very difficult (and sometimes almost impossible) to undelete. Mikkalai 16:45, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Given the substantial divisions thrown up by Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate, which with 80 opposers is most unlikely to reach the necessary level of consensus, I would like to see a policy proposal that can find some consensus in this area. I do not, however, wish to spark divisive argument; I seek constructive discussion with a view to consensus. Is it feasible to start a policy debate with a set of proposed tenets before developing a proposal. In other words, would posting a page that postulated a number of points about which there might be no argument be a viable starting point? I would expect the process to be: propose the tenets; modify these until agreement is reached that they are tenets; propose a policy draft that conforms to the tenets; modify this until it is stable; vote on the agreed version; hoop la! -- Theo (Talk) 11:16, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Recently, there has been several requests from various people to run interwiki bots. While such use is praised and accepted without comment, apparently one bot has caused disasterous results... removing several pages' interwiki links when it should not have. My proposal does not change the fact that anyone who wishs to run such a bot must request permission to do so at Wikipedia talk:Bots, but that a person who runs an interwiki bot should have a grasp of the language in which they are linking to and from. The reason behind this is that a person who runs an interwiki bot should be responsible enough to understand whether or not the interwiki linking that is being performed is done correctly and that if they are running it automatically (without user intervention) that the person who is running it should review the edits of the bot periodically. For example, if I wanted to run an interwiki linking bot between the Chinese (zh) Wikipedia and the English (en) Wikipedia, I should be able to read and understand Chinese to a reasonable degree. Likewise for English.
I'm sorry, but if you don't understand English enough to understand that your bot is breaking pages and people are complaining about it on your user talk page, then you shouldn't be running a bot. Same goes for the other languages you're running the bot on. The only exception that I'd give this rule is if your bot is merely going to all the other Wikipedias using the interwiki links and making certain that the interwiki linking is the same on all the pages. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:12, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
To be specific in what I mean, I will explain by an example:
Your bot visits en:Star Trek. It looks at the interwiki links, then visits:
Then on each one of those pages, makes certain that they have all the interwiki links found on en:Star Trek. Furthermore, your bot attempts to find interwiki links on these pages not found on en:Star Trek. It then creates a "master list" and makes certain that all the interwiki links are the same on all the language Wikipedias it has visited.
Basically, an interwiki linking bot shouldn't be removing interwiki links period. Modifying yes, but perferably under manual control by a person who understands both languages from which he or she is modifying. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:12, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Sock puppet/Proposal is a proposed guideline to hold people responsible if they create a secondary account with the sole purpose of disruption or harrassment. Wording is agreed upon, are there any objections? If so please join the discussion.
R adiant _* 12:19, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
User:Beland has listed Wikipedia:Chess championship, Wikipedia:Mornington Crescent Championship and Wikipedia:WikiHangman Tournament for deletion: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Chess championship, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Mornington Crescent Championship and Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/WikiHangman Tournament. It appears the user attempted to generate discussion on the subject of appropriateness of games in the Wikipedia: namespace on the village pump, but didn't get a response, and so has listed the pages on VfD in an attempt to gather other people's opinions. Demi T/ C 04:07, 2005 May 19 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Disambiguation/Style is a proposed supplement to the Manual of Style. Please register your votes and comments on the article's talk page. Survey closes May 25, 2005. — Wahoofive ( talk) 17:19, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Do we intend the dict-def and orig-research policies to preclude an article Gunning down? "To gun down" is ambiguous (between resulting in death vs. at least temporarily disabling injury) and IMO a discussion of the ambiguity of this belovedly "punchy" broadcast-news second-string cliche would be both valuable and encyclopedic, in the same way that our discussions of the words f***, ye, and thou are.
The question is not merely academic, bcz there is an information gap here:
Restating the good (but accurately inconclusive) one in WP would be merely a dict-def. Supplementing that with some examples of ambiguous use, is an unjustified non-sequitur, without a statement involving the word "ambiguity" or "ambiguous". Thus:
-- Jerzy~ t 17:13, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
His supporters clear mentions about human rights violations in Cuba, with links to Amnesty International report. They also call Batista a dictator, but when I call Castro a dictator, they erase this without any reason. One of them called me a sockpuppet. What to do against an agressive POV bashing in this and other political pages? Frankly, my opinion about political articles in english wikipedia is law, most of them are far away from NPOV.
A discussion is taking place at Template talk:Guideline about whether the {{ guideline}} template should explicitly permit/encourage users to edit the guideline page on which it is placed. Kappa 08:09, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Take for example this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grunwald#Opposing_forces
The line regarding the Soviet era joke is very difficult to verify. If it is true, then it adds to the depth of the article. However, it is nearly impossible to verify. I can easily think of many instances where little tibbits like this are found in articles. Should they be removed? It is quite easy to introduce minor misinformation using these tibbits. To err on the side of safety, I propose that we remove any such little tibbits because: 1. They're not essential to the article. 2. They're impossible or very difficult to verify.
Please advise. Comatose51 04:57, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
These three article appear to be very related Morpholino, Antisense mRNA and Antisense therapy. They could easily be merged into the same article. Is there a policy for merging such articles with redirects or is it encouraged to keep them as separte articles with links? David D. 18:48, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
User:Radiant! has taken it upon himself to delete the content of Wikipedia:Semi-policy and redirect it to Category:Wikipedia guidelines based, as far as I can tell, on the contents of four CFD votes against Category:Wikipedia semi-policy, and his dislike for the recent vote at Wikipedia talk:Don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.
This strikes me as grossly out of process, since it appears no general discussion of the virtues of semi-policy has occurred and there has not been any general notice of this proposed change or a VfD posted for the page Wikipedia:Semi-policy.
Perhaps consensus will support Radiant!'s position, but I believe it at least needs to be discussed before such actions are taken. Dragons flight 14:40, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
Ammendment: There is also some discussion of this change at Wikipedia talk:Semi-policy. Dragons flight 14:45, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
This shouldn't be too big of a deal; this is just substituting the word "guideline" for the term "semi-policy". They mean, as far as anyone can tell, the same thing, and the former is older. The renaming process shouldn't promote anything to official policy or demote anything to rejected or thinktank status, unless it's been labelled improperly. Has that been happening? Other than that minor concern, I say hurray for streamlining. -- Beland 02:02, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Although I agree with Radiant's agenda, even I'll admit that his aggressiveness is unwelcome. There is such a thing as going to fast. -- Netoholic @ 14:52, 2005 May 18 (UTC)
Seems that failed proposals, formerly known as semi-policy, have been renamed ambiguous. I suggest we stop the charade. They should be
Zocky 16:42, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
I agree that the "ambiguous" template is a bad idea. If there's a dispute, punt the page back to the policy thinktank, call for votes, and give an explanation at the top of the page until the dispute is resolved. I will list it on WP:TFD. Since Wikipedia:Google test is disputed by BlankVerse on Wikipedia talk:Semi-policy, I will follow this procedure for that page. I agree that if any other pages are misclassified, they can and should be handled on an individual basis. But they need to be classified into other existing categories, such as "proposed", "guideline", "offical", "rejected", or "historical", not returned to "semi-policy". -- Beland 02:05, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
I posted a longish chunk of text about these things at the Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines, which looked like an appropriate place. Zocky 12:27, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
It's neither a proposal nor accurate description of the current state of affairs, it's more of an attempt to define terms through discussion so that we're at least fairly sure what we're talking about. I hope nobody's changing any pages based on it - hardly half a dozen people have commented on it yet. That said, I'm rather puzzled by the implied statement that there's something wrong with talking about Wikipedia's policies and guidelines at Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines. Zocky 20:32, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
I naïvely thought there was a consensus that institutions of tertiary education were considered "inherently notable" or "encyclopedic" or whatever term you want to use. This would be useful, as it would keep a lot of potentially contentious articles away from VfD and thus waste less contributor time on deletion discussions.
In the last few weeks there have however been two cases of institutions of higher education being nominated for deletion, first the Claremont School of Theology, and currently the Avans Hogescholen ( Avans University) in the Netherlands. Although they were both listed partly because the state of the stubs, my suspicion is that a contributing factor was the presence of the word "school" in the names of both articles. In both cases I have seen voters vote "Delete. Non-notable" or similar even after the article has been cleaned up and it has been explained that this is in fact not a secondary school, but an institution of tertiary education.
Although I am tempted, I would prefer not to believe that some people are so dense that they vote "delete" without as much as looking at the previous discussion. The conclusion must be that there a significant number of people who think that we should weigh notability in the case of universities and colleges as well. Am I right? I have asked for explanations at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Avans Hogescholen, but have so far not received any reply.
If there is a consensus for keeping all articles on universities and colleges and comparable institutions, I think that ought to be made clear. Then these discussions can be avoided, or closed and the articles sent to cleanup as soon as the character of an institution has been made clear. If there is not such a consensus, there are a lot of articles on U.S. community colleges, many of which are two-line stubs, which could be purged. I don't think anybody could claim that a community college is notable. Generally speaking, I think most tertiary-level institutions with only undergraduate studies and no or very little research are to be regarded as of dubious notability, unless they are particularly prestigious or important in some way. But do we really want to go down that road? Tupsharru 08:50, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
I would say that any university or college is absolutely encyclopedic, given the fact that it exists, and it is important. Given the low rate of matriculation world-wide I would have serious criticisms of people who desire to exclude schools from the ongoing discussion here in the encyclopedia. How else are people supposed to find a school to go to? And, a lot of people from religious families have no choice whatsoever in their choice of school. Don't leave them hanging. -- McDogm 16:58, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
I would agree that in general, universities and most community colleges are Wikipedia-worthy. The exception would be the degree mills described by Hoary and Daycd above. They are legitimate candidates for deletion, or they can be redirected to degree mill. As to people who don't read the articles before voting; give them a Wikislap with a wet noodle. -- TenOfAllTrades ( talk/ contrib) 17:26, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Votes for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper appears to have turned into an argument over whether (or which) professors are automatically worthy of their own entries. That strikes me as an odd place for such a discussion. I think a much better place would be the talk page of whichever page it is that talks about the "average professor test" (or similar) -- but unfortunately I forget where that was. Perhaps somebody who remembers can post a link below, and encourage the participants in the relevant (lower) chunk of Votes for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper to discuss it there. But if I'm wrong and Votes for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper is a good place for this discussion, well, this is a heads-up for interested parties to head over there and discuss.
(If anybody's interested, my own opinions on this matter are confused; and as I can't be bothered to sort them out, I'm keeping mum for the most part.) -- Hoary 08:40, 2005 May 17 (UTC)
Recently I have been adding links to my site [ Law-Ref.org] where I am gradually indexing and crosslinking important international documents (UN conventions and other treaties, EU and US constitutions, ...). Today I have received a talk message naming this a link spam: [ [5]] While I have also a private motivation as links from Wikipedia are obviously very useful, I do not consider my links to be a spam as I am convinced they are useful because:
Examples of my links in Wikipedia:
and just at this moment, when I was writting this message and was looking for a second example I discovered that the author of the talk message started to remove my links without ending the disscussion with me
I am planning to add other links to my crosslinked documents when available and remove the last edits by
User:Rhobite which removed my links, but I will do it only if I am confirmed that my
contributions so far are not to be considered as spam. --
nicmila 07:36, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
* TREATY ESTABLISHING A CONSTITUTION FOR EUROPE
According to my opinion indexes to 100+ pages of text are of some value.
-- nicmila 09:07, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
with an example of such a case?
You have removed some links from pages where relevance must be obvious to everyone, and from others where relevance is obvious to me. In some cases I can see opposite points in some not. I have asked you to point to other resources which are better suitable for addition - your single criterion "it must be spam because it points to your site" is rather strange. I have an expertize in some fields and have produced quite a lot of usable public source materials, some of them in the field of XML were translated to many languages and they are widely used around the world, see Zvon.org - Miloslav Nic. Being rather busy I would not even argue about these deletions although I consider them senseless and based on a very strange criteria. But as I am trying to understand how the wikipedia process works it is a useful exercise. External links are the things I am using from Wikipedia most often and consider them extremely useful as they are quite often of high quality. At this moment I am convinced that if you want to find hidden connections in international treaties, you should use Law-Ref.org. Because I am the author of the engine it is not a modest claim, but I still argue it is true. I would like to know if Rhobite really tried the links before deleting them and btw. also if this discussion is of interest to anyone than me. As I am thinking about Wikipedia quite a lot in recent weeks, I may be reached at address nicmila@zvon.org if somebody is interested in informal disscussion. I consider preparation of a very short research paper about pros and cons of wikipedia and opinion of people who are not anonymous would be valuable. -- nicmila 05:26, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Please overview this new policy proposal and give your opinions on it. LevelCheck 01:32, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
I went a head and broke up a massive List of biomedical terms into smaller sections. Some are still long but it is better than the ultra massive page we had before. Lists of biomedical topics: | # | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
My real question is do massive lists such as this one serve a sensible role?
Many of the topics are not linking since they are not articles or stubs and never will be. Unless someone is willing to manually fix the links to the appropriate pages these lists will never be a useful indexing aid. For example, the topic antisense nucleic acid in the biomedical list should be linked to Morpholino or Antisense mRNA or Antisense therapy. The fact it does not link to any of these highlights the problems with unedited lists. We certainly do not want another antisense page yet these lists are almost invitations to start a new article. In contrast, I think we need to be consolidating pages such as the three antisense articles since they could easily be merged together.
Also note that despite this list being huge it is not up to date since none of Morpholino or Antisense mRNA or Antisense therapy are in the list. Yet 75% of the lists content does not link to an article. This seems like a terrible way to index material.
Another point that others have mentioned is that some of the categories in this list are completely off topic. i realise that this list was compiled by NIH, nevertheless it is clear that many categories in these lists do not belong. David D. 21:55, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
I notice that vandals sometimes remove their IPs from Vandalism in progress. Although many anonymous contributers help the project greatly before deciding that WikiPedia is for real and creating a login, most people reporting vandalism in V.i.p have accounts (by the time people discover V.i.p., they already have accounts). Most anonymous IPs editing V.i.p. are vandals. They remove their IPs and steal themselves a few more hours before being blocked. We should require an account for editing V.i.p.
--
— Ŭalabio 07:15, 2005 May 16 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedia games has grown to include not only a Wikipedia-based trivia contest, but also story writing pages, and now, an international chess championship. Is this OK? -- Beland 06:06, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
I want Wikipedia to accept a general policy that BC and AD represent a Christian Point of View and should be used only when they are appropriate, that is, in the context of expressing or providing an account of a Christian point of view. In other contexts, I argue that they violate our NPOV policy and we should use BCE and CE instead. See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate for the detailed proposal. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:34, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
There is an editor who wishes to contribute to Wikipedia, but who does not wish to license his Talk page contributions under the GFDL. (He has no problem with the normal licensing of his contributions throughout the remainder of Wikipedia.) I am not an intellectual property lawyer and not qualified to address the correctness of his legal claims, nor am I familiar with any Wikipedia policy which allows individual editors to exempt specific contributions from the GFDL.
Extensive discussion on his user talk page has failed to reach a conclusion, so I would invite discussion and commment from a wider audience. Are there are any historical cases/discussions on Wikipedia of editors who wished to restrict the distribution and licensing of their contributions? Since this is a general question, it might make sense to move the discussion here: out of user space. Assistance appreciated. -- TenOfAllTrades ( talk/ contrib) 16:26, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
I reluctantly suggest that this editor should be blocked from editing as he disputes the terms of use of Wikipedia. I will do so and raise the matter on the mailing list Wikien-L. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 15:12, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
So much cross-pollination occurs between talk pages and the articles themselves that I don't see any other options. Tracking just one user's submission under non-compliant licensing would be an administrative nightmare; if everyone were permitted to choose different licenses for their talk pages, we'd have to completely separate the talk from the rest of the project, destroying the community nature of the project. I support an immediate block, only because it is necessary to protect the project. -- Unfocused 15:38, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
I've blocked him indefinitely (which is of course reversible) and, assuring him that he has not done anything wrong, politely invited him to subscribe to Wikien-L. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 15:33, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
It has been brought to my attention that street addresses are not encylopedic. When is it acceptable to include an address? Apparently it is not OK for a building but is OK for Amtrak stations based on changes being made. Vegaswikian 02:36, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
10 Downing Street seems to be alive and well as an article ;) Physchim62 02:29, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
Please vote. Intrigue 21:59, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
I am an alumnus of Alpha Phi Omega, National Service Fraternity. After publicizing the previously existing Wikipedia page for the fraternity, various members of our National Board have expressed concern over the contents of the Wikipedia entry not being under their control. I'm trying to balance the desires of our National Board (specifically the Marketing Director) with the standards of Wikipedia. I'm *not* including the disclaimer that the Fraternity wants on all chapter and region websites, but have provided a great deal of contact information for those wishing further (and thus official) information. (its not on the current page, it was modified, go back to the page prior to 1500 on 15May (two revisions ago at this point)).
The marketing director would like for proposed changes to at least be checked with a representative of the National Office (likely to be me, unless I violently flee from it.)
Suggestions on balancing here? I *know* there will be a Wikipedia page for my Fraternity no matter what happens because even if I erase it all, someone will add to the information on the page. Would it be proper to place a note stating that I would prefer to be checked with before changes are made?
Thank You Randolph Finder (Naraht)
Member (because I didn't run fast enough) Alpha Phi Omega National Marketing Committee.
Naraht 20:22, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Mr Tan includes complaints that he has created Temp pages for articles (such as Wee Kim Wee/temp), produced new versions of articles, and then simply replaced the existing articles with his own versions, that he has placed notices with links to the Temp pages on the articles, and that he has placed notices on his temp pages telling other editors not to edit them. Part of his defence is that another User – indeed, an admin – has done the same, and that user has confirmed that he does it. It seems to me that this is contrary to the Wikipedia in a number of ways.
What is the general feeling about this? Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 21:34, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
I agree that temp pages can be useful in various situations (though I feel in general that there are better ways of doing things), but my points are:
1. and 2. have been done on Maharashtra, Wee Kim Wee, and Zanskar; 3. has been done on Zanskar. I've removed the offending notices, and I'll keep an eye on the relevant articles to make sure that they're not misused. Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 11:05, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
Tan 22:46, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
Since my name has been brought here over my methodology, I would like to add my inputs.
Resuming after where I left off...
= Nichalp ( talk · contribs)= 20:04, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
A long-standing part of the Manual of Style was recently neutered after less than a week's unpublicized discussion between less than a half-dozen Wikipedians. I strongly feel that any such changes should only be made after trying to solicit input from as many editors as possible. I don't like instruction creep, so I am reluctant to suggest a new policy, but I would think it should be common sense that any change to Wikipedia-wide policy should have the support of at least 20-30 editors, not 4 or 5. The specific instance I am referring to is here. Niteowlneils 00:08, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
Okay, so recently I suggested on British cuisine that we move the article to Cuisine of Great Britain. Now, aside from the political disagreement (what is GB vs. UK, other names for it) which was not what I was getting at, there was actually a lot of debate, so I thought I would put the question to you all here. It seems to me that the proper naming convention for all country subarticles is "X of Country". This is holds true for "economy of X", "religion of X", "demographics of X", "history of X", "military history of X", "culture of X", etc. So I thought that cuisine should be no different. The reason we always put the noun form first, I think, is to avoid irregular consructions. So, let's say I want Cote d'Ivoire's cuisine, would I know how to construct Ivorian? Or Congo --> Congolese, or Equatorial Guinea --> Equatoguineans, or Kiribati --> Gilbertese, or Myanmar --> Burmese, you get the idea. Putting "Cuisine of X" allows someone with minimal knowledge to search and find the article. While British is a common construction, it should be moved for consistency's sake. Can we have some discussion on the matter, what is proper? (btw, Jooler subsequently began to move two "Cuisine of X" to "Xian cuisine" in the middle of our debate, offering no discussion as I did. It strikes me as bad faith.) -- Dmcdevit 02:12, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
Right, I guess what I really wanted was to see if we could reach a consensus as to the proper naming convention for this type of article, not just a quick fix. What do you all think the correct titles should be. This is the right place to post this, right? -- Dmcdevit 03:52, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
Go tell the Germans. A few years ago I had a chat with the German owner of an Indian restaurant in Frankfurt. He told me that the German authorities would give Indians short term work visas to cook in his restaurant, but not Pakistanis because "The are not Indians". Philip Baird Shearer 09:36, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
I think Jooler could perhaps understand that the more we use neutral (eg. geographic) rather than political (eg. culture) criteria as designators for article naming and categorization, the less time wikipedia contributors may eventually waste on moronic debates about whether baked aubergines are Turkish, Bulgarian, Syrian, Ottoman or Byzantine cuisine. Also Jooler glues geographical to political and proposes culture as the alternative. This is wrong. Culture is political and these two are bedmates, while geography is the more neutral, at least for now. If you have any doubts consult any of the articles on nations, nationalism or ethnicities. Very complicated stuff and bound to spoil the meal! -- Modi 11:51, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
The article FHM-US's 100 Sexiest Women 2005 has been stuck in a debate at Wikipedia:Copyright problems over whether or not it's a copyright violation. The article lists, in order, the 100 names that had been reported in FHM magazine as the results of an annual poll it conducts (here is the 2004 list to show what it looked like). Some people are arguing that FHM has the copyright on this list. Others (including myself) think that the list itself is not copyrightable because the magazine editors did not select and rank the results; they reported the results of a poll. The magazine also added editorial content by selecting pictures and text to accompany the list, but none of this was included in the Wikipedia article so it wasn't an issue.
The issue is still unresolved. Some people say it is a copyright violation and others disagree. Unfortunately the original discussion has died down with no agreement reached. So in order to seek a wider range of information and hopefully reach a consensus, I'd like to open a discussion here. MK2 15:21, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
We appear to have reached another deadlock. Based on the comments posted here and at the original discussion, this is what we have (with my paraphrasing of people's opinions)
Believe the list is protected by copyright:
Believe the list is not protected by copyright:
Other
MK2 18:09, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
You can't vote on what the law is! It's like voting on whether gravity keeps us on the planet - a majority vote against it won't make us all float away. Leave it to the experts (in this case, Postdlf). See also Kregos v. Associated Press, 937 F.2d 700 ( 2d Cir. 1991), holding that a particular selection of factors to gauge the performance of pitchers could not be copyrighted, nor could a mere arrangement of such factors, but a particular arrangement of those specific factors could (e.g. not "A" alone, nor "B" alone, but "A+B" together). Here, we are not copying the arrangement, just the results of applying the particular selection of factors. -- BDAbramson talk 23:17, 2005 May 18 (UTC)
It seems to me it's hard to argue it either way. See U.S. Copyright Office - Copyright Basics: What Is Not Protected by Copyright? -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:05, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Example Organizers Contest Method 2nd Party 1 Major League Baseball Baseball team standings Played a bunch of games Newspaper Sports page 2 FHM Sexiest women rankings Asked a bunch of people Wikipedia
The article [[Wikipedia:Finding network abuse contacts]] in the Wikipedia namespace has been marked for transwiki to Meta for two months now. Besides the fact that I'm not at all sure how one would go about doing that, I'd like to know where we make the distinction between WP namespace and Meta. Also, what is the criteria for transwiki to Meta (never heard of it happening before)? And how is it done (really I'd appreciate if someone else just took care of it, :P ) Thanks. -- Dmcdevit 09:02, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I quote from the article on The Myth of Islamic Tolerance:
Et cetera. Uninterested by books written by "popular counter-terrorism authors" from the US about the alleged awfulness of Islam, I have no intention of getting hold of this book and checking these and the other chapter titles, of which there are 58. I'd guess that this listing above is correct. Anyway, it's factual and verifiable (or refutable) information.
But why give a chapter title unless you expect that somebody is later going to say something about it? Yet this would necessitate an article on this book of at least 58 sections. That's hugely more than the number of paragraphs in the article The Origin of Species, which I venture to suggest is a more important work than The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. The listing is less like an article, more like a text dump (or advertising).
Should articles on books have long lists of chapter titles? -- Hoary 03:36, 2005 Jun 22 (UTC)
My thoughts from User_talk:CltFn
One problem with just listing a TOC is that it really amounts to a copyright violation. You can't call it "derivative work" or "fair use" if you are doing nothing more than just presenting a list taken right out of the book. Applicable policies include those which address copyright issues, ad-spam, and the idea of a "data dump". Unless you add content, it's a problem. In addition, it is not sufficient, with regards to NPOV simply to report one side. These books are controvertial - only to present the author's view (even if you do so accurately) is not NPOV because it ignores the opposing view. In addition, you can always set up "temp" pages to work on these articles - that way you can take your time and create balanced NPOV article about these books. Guettarda 03:44, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- The "data dump" idea is a common interpretation of a section of the "What Wikipedia is not" article.
- The idea that NPOV should provide both sides of controvertial topics is found in a section of the NPOV policy
- As for what constitutes "fair use", I am not a lawyer, but there is a lot of material and discussion regarding the use of copyright material. As I understand it, in order to use copyright material you need to somehow add to it. You can quote from other works, but you can't simply reproduce a quote and call it "fair use" or a "derivative work". You need to add substantial "value". When you lift the TOC of a book you are reproducing copyright material. If it were incorporated into a broader article which was new material, then it would constitue "fair use" of this material. It's something of a "signal to noise" issue. The TOC of the book would be fine if each chapter listing were followed by an analysis of the chapter (an NPOV analysis, from referenced, reputable sources, including both pro- and con, since it's a highly controvertial topic) - then it would be fine. But without some further use of the material it runs the risk of being a copyvio.
Hope this helps to clarify things. Guettarda 04:12, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Guettarda 04:36, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I encountered a problem with some Wikipedia content: your Web pages need publication dates. Many Wikipedia writers seem to be using a present-tense style, and often use terms such as "now" and "currently," among other similar references to time. Without an initial publication date and perhaps even a "last update" date displayed on each page, readers have no way of knowing whther information is current. As time progresses, this problem increases.
For instance, this Wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35mm_film) uses the following phrase:
"Most films today are shot and projected using..."
When was this content written? Will the information in this entry still be true if read in 2010, 2020 or 2030? In the future, will I have any way of knowing if a page actually has been recently updated, and thus is accurate? I realize Wikipedia is constantly being updated, but readers still have no real way of knowing the technological accuracy of information presented.
Don't you need to add a publication date to all Wikipedia pages?
George Wedding Elk Grove, CA gmwedding1@comcast.net
Several users have imported the voting templates {{ Support}} and {{ Oppose}} from Commons (e.g. Commons:Featured picture candidates) and have begun using them on Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates and other places. These templates have been nominated for deletion, however, I do not believe that TFD is an appropriate venue for discussing this issue since it centers on the user behavior and whether the potentially pervasive insertion of little tags such as:
poses a significant threat to server resources and/or is too obnoxious to tolerate.
I would encourage a general discussion of this behavior to occur here, and ask that voting on the TFD be suspended pending a consensus on the more general issue of whether users should be allowed to use templates / images when voting. Dragons flight 22:57, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
I think it is a good idea to draw more attention to the issue at hand, but at the same time I think we should keep the real discussion over at WP:TFD to avoid repeating arguments over and over. I oppose this template, by the way. — mark ✎ 18:13, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Not everyone will use this method, thus defeating the argument of votes being easier to scan through. violet/riga (t) 20:34, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone have any thoughts about the maximum number of External links that an article should have? I just had a peek as Ethiopia, & was a bit surprised to find about 35 external links at the bottom of the page! Seeing this many links at the bottom, I can't help but think that there's something wrong with the article -- e.g., it's not complete enough, it's very controversial (& needs the proper warning added), or someone needs to audit all of these links & prune the less useful ones.
So can someone justify having more than a dozen external links at the bottom of any article? Two dozen? 35? Wikipedia:External links does not address this issue. -- llywrch 18:54, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hi. Jombo Jimbo recently announced a change in the Image use policy
[8]. I.e. as I understand it, only images that allow derivatives and commercial use are OK. Is there a central page to discuss this? Most image policy pages are not yet updated. A link to a relevant (talk) page would be appreciated. thanks --
Chris 73
Talk 15:26, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
I was overzealous and {{copyvio}}'d these two pages: Second Treatise of the Great Seth and The Devil's Walk. The first is some kind of ancient text so is out of copyright. However, it is effectively a personal essy, POV etc etc of whoever originally wrote it and, more importantly to my question, was a straight copy-paste into Wikipedia. The second is a copy-paste of a poem, along with a copyvio bit at the top that I removed. What's the policy for these things? Always leave lone? VfD and see what people think? - Splash 16:34, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, people. Well, maybe I'll take them to VfD and see what happens. Regarding the translation, I did do some digging before removing my copyvio tag and, (IANAL) it seems that, if the translation is entirely derivative, with no original work of the translator(s) then copyright remains with the original author. Splash 00:14, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)
I've been using Wikipedia a lot more than usual recently, because I've been researching things for a gigantic fiction project I'm taking part in and this means I've been accessing a wide variety of articles on Wikipedia and one very significant thing I have noticed is that certain articles seem significantly culture-influenced without something being done about it.
Take for instance the Privateer and Letter of Marque and Reprisal, the latter being an especially good example, since Letters of Marque and Reprisal are a European phenomenon from around the 17th century (a bit earlier and a bit later) and yet somehow more than half of the article consists of a statement about the US Constitution's view on LoM&R and how a dean from a US Law school interprets that. All in all the article offers no information on the LoM&R other than: a dictionary definition and the US Constitution's view on it.
The articles above and certain others I've noticed here (the fact that it would take up too much time and space to search for all of the ones I've noticed) contain information that does not contribute in any significant way to the article (for the US constitution's opinion on something, a person would look at the US Constitution article, not the article for that specific thing) and it seems to have no other purpose than the person 'contributing' waving a flag saying 'hey look, I'm proud to be an American'.
Well I know that the NPOV section tells us to just remove cultural bias, but would it be a good idea to warn contributers that posting things that do not have any significance to the article and that only show a cultural viewpoint unrelated to the subject is not permissable.
Don't think I'm being anti-amerian because of the examples I chose, there are also articles, especially certain military articles, that only mention British or Australian or Dutch or German flagwaving. Robrecht
Not totally sure this is the right forum for this but...
In my additions to Wikipedia it has been my intent to produce tables (particularly chronoligical lists of incumbents) to a certain standard, incorporating such amendments as made by fellow Wikipedians into the standard where they further the format. However, and no derogation is intended against those who in all good faith have updated the tables, there have been amendments i.e. to Bishop of Birmingham and Bishop of Coventry whereby different standards are being applied, to no overall benefit.
I don't want to start appearing to be dictating as to which format is correct or risk causing offence in broaching the subject directly on the Wikipedians' own talk pages, but I would like to elicit general opinion on this, if there is an opinion.
Now I may be wrong, but I feel that the recent updates in the format don't add to or enhance the tables. Indeed, in particular, the use of text formatting (now removed) were specifically employed either as a method of best making use of the page-space, or as part of accepted use (i.e. it is accepted that dignities etc, are placed in smaller font) or for purpose of clarity, employing the use of font-weight to emphasise the commonly used names where the full name is known and should, IMO, be shown
I would say that:-
|
and
|
are clearer, more informative, and make better use of page-space (especially when larger text can make the left (where full dates are known) and right columns extend over more lines than necessary) than either:-
1991– 2001 | James Lawton Thomson | Resigned |
or
2001 to present | John William Hind, BA | Bishop of the Diocese in Europe |
What does everyone else think?? -- JohnArmagh 19:03, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The latter presentation with the use of toccolours and use of font adjustments only for footnotes and the like is what you will find used very widely in Wikipedia, so I prefer it over your style. I didn't know that small tags were automatically closed at the end of the cell: you learn something every day. Noisy | Talk 19:41, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
I am uncertain what to do about List of warez groups and the individual groups listed there, such as Again (warez). Clearly some of these groups are interesting enough to deserve articles, but I am very reluctant to have Wikipedia advertising the existence of active warez groups. Kelly Martin 05:08, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Survey guidelines, a guideline for all manners of surveys and votes on Wikipedia, is deeply flawed in its existing rules and fails to adress several important issues. A prime example is that in Gdansk/Vote it allows both sides of the dispute to claim they are immune from 3RR rule, as well as disputing the very vote results. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 19:31, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is incredibly naive OR deceitful and fraudulent. The so-called POV issues are always resolved from a Politically Correct atheistic view point. I tested the system and introduced powerful factual arguments which were deleted...Congratulations but no cigar! Another honest Wikipedia needs to be built!
Jean-Francois Orsini, Ph.D. jorsini1@earthlink.net June 16 2005
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recently I came across the article for the civil rights activist Alice Walker and it had been vandalized by some idiot who ridiculously called her a "racist, sexist, and totalitarian" and he/she/it also called Fidel Castro a "dictator" something that is completely false. I just can't believe how many people think they can insert their own bigoted, racist, sexist, idiotic remarks into articles, it delegitimatizes Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia needs to extend the banning period from 24-hours to 78-hours or require users to register before editing. - Stancel
Another possibility is to have a button, kind of "Semi-protect this page", in addtion to the "Protect" one. admins could then semiporotect pages that are being vandalized most often, like pope, gay, vagina, etc.
For starters, I would suggest two basic criteria for semiprotection:
Anons may be directed to the talk page. (Of course they will happily vandalize talk pages as well, but this ewill be not that visible.)
Also, as of today I don't see any particular reason why would we be overly meek with anons. In the early days of wikipedia every single contributor was dear. Isn't it time to be just a bit more selective? Mikkalai 20:24, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has a large collection of images from medieval illuminated manuscripts online at http://www.bnf.fr/enluminures/accueil.htm ( English version). Their copyright statement ( French, English) says:
and the images (e.g. [1], which I would like to use in Seraph) contain "©Bibliothèque nationale de France"—but as accurate reproductions of public domain artworks, are these nonetheless in the public domain under U.S. law, per Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.? Does the fact that Wikimedia has servers and a chapter in France make it in any way subject to French law? — Charles P. (Mirv) 19:10, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Museums typically claim copyrights when they don't have them, to try to earn money. Most of them do this. That doesn't make them right. Digital images of the art are not capable of having new copyrights. These images are 100% free and clear and in the public domain by a long, long ways. DreamGuy 05:26, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)
There is only one relevant question—do copyrights have a limited term of protection in France? If copyrights don't expire, then under French law they could claim copyright in the manuscripts and all reproductions. If that's the case, just stay out of France. ; ) Never underestimate the IP ignorance of museum staff, btw. I was visiting the Gilbert Stuart exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in DC last week and noticed a sign saying no photography was allowed in the exhibit. So I asked the guard if he knew why, first word out of his mouth was "copyright", which I unsuccessfully tried to dissuade him from as even the youngest of Stuart's paintings are approaching 200 years old. Ok, not surprising that a security guard wouldn't know better, but I encountered the same misinformation at the information desk. Both of them seemed to confuse physical ownership of the object with ownership over the image. I'm sure that a couple of the private collectors who lended their Stuart paintings to the NGA for the exhibit restricted photography by contract, but telling people that it's due to copyright rather than the owners imposing access restrictions on the public at a federally owned and funded museum is shady. Postdlf 07:05, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Sample | |
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Color coordinates | |
Hex triplet | #000000 |
sRGBB ( r, g, b) | (0, 0, 0) |
HSV ( h, s, v) | (0°, 0%, 0%) |
CIELChuv ( L, C, h) | (0, 0, 0°) |
Source | [ Unsourced |
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte) |
A question has arisen in connection with {{ infobox color}} (seen to the right): is it permissible to have a link from a sectional caption in the Infobox to an explanatory article in the Wikipedia: namespace? In particular, is it permissible to link the Color Coordinates caption to a page describing how the various color systems are represented in Wikipedia (early draft currently living here)? -- Phil | Talk 11:17, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)
I've proposed a change to wikipedia:disambiguation (an official policy page). Please add your comments to the talk page. Thank you. -- Rick Block 04:26, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
When does a quote reach the limit of being copyright? Does wikipedia have a policy of a certain length tops, or no copyrighted quotes etc?
Basically, I can understand that someone might want to say
but at the same time there must be a limit - I can't quote whole books in wikipedia (ignoring the fact that it might be a bad article). Is there a rought limit to a couple of sentences, a paragraph? a page? Or should we just paraphrase everything?
Sorry if this is a repeat -- Tomhab 20:33, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Would you further argue that as the CPUs and disks are in the States, other country's copyright laws don't apply? Philip Baird Shearer 00:51, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I am not sure that if a resident in a foreign country uploads data onto Wikipedia which is then downloaded by another resident of the same country is so protected. There was a court case in England a few years ago, (R v. Thompson [1984] 3 All ER 565 ->English Court of Appeal in Thompson (1984) 79 Cr App R 191 at 196), where a person working as a computer contractor in Kuwait, set up a program to move money from two little used accounts into his own within the bank. When left unsupervised he ran it. He then flew back the the UK and asked the Kuwaiti bank to transfer the money from his account in Kuwait to another account owned by him in another country. When the yearly audit was done his theft was spotted. The English Judge ruled that the theft did not take place until the money left the bank as before that it was mealy the equivalent of moving figures in a ledger. At the time there was no extradition to Kuwait, so the contractor would have gone free if the theft had taken place in Kuwait, as it was, he committed the theft in the UK and got sent down for it. So under UK law the physical site of the computer was not relevant it was the place where the criminal was when the crime is committed. I am not sure if this precedent would be used in such a case as copyright infringement but it could be. [2]. Also searching for the case on the net I came across an article where the UK case was quoted for guidance in an Australian court case Claire Frances Capewell (1994) ACrimR 228 Court of Appeal Queensland -- Philip Baird Shearer 01:42, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This topic is causing much confusion and hard feelings (including mine) on the Talk: Terri Schiavo page. It appears that Wikipedia adopted what is refered to as American Journalistic Style, as opposed to Formal Style. The NYT, WSJ, Times and Organization of American Historians use Formal style. All endorse the use of "Ms." where the marital status or preference of the lady in question cannot be determined.
I personally find Journalistic Style to be offensive in the extreme, in regards to the Terri Schiavo case. Less so, in general. Ms. Schiavo was a person, not an object, and use of Formal Style would recognize her as such. I also believe that adoption of Formal Style would present a more professional face for Wikipedia. Finally, the non-American English-speaker will expect Formal Style. Please guide me in the best way to help Wikipedia adopt Formal Style.-- ghost 18:52, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thank you for the feedback. Some of my arguments are based on the following Style guides:
My interest in considering a switch to Formal Style is based on a designation in Formal Style for the recently deceased. [3] This means to Mozart would not receive an appellation because he was a public figure and is not recently deceased. Terri Schiavo was a public figure, but not of her choosing.-- ghost 21:33, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If I accept that Wikipedia is not a newpaper, why are we using a newspaper style? Almost no one refers to Ms. Schiavo as "Schiavo" in casual speech. It would be rude. And non-American readers view it as rude here. I argue for compassion.-- ghost 14:12, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Eugene, my reasoning for those sources is that all three support the MoS's statement, "After the initial mention of any name, the person may be referred to by surname only." Unfortunately, this is vague. That has led to some people, enforcing what is meant to be a flexible policy, to treat and defend it as Dogma.
Paradiso, I understand the reasoning behind not normally using Casual Speech as a guide. In cases like this, it is non-sequitor. Why on Earth would we use a less formal standard in writing than we do in speech? This cultural taboo alone indicates the need for Formal Style, and explains why people create style guides. As too athletes, etc., these people are (in)famous by choice. The recently deceased are not.
Finally, I've contemplated long and hard on the idea that I am the only person that takes offence to this. ("If a tree falls in a forest...") It's irrelevant. I do. If it's one person, or a thousand, it doesn't matter. The MoS, albiet vague, allows for situations like this. Therefore, I simply seek support in envoking the flexability of the MoS to avoid a revert war.-- ghost 03:33, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This entry caught my eye from the newly created pool, Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth, P.A. Barely notable entities creating their own Wikipedia pages. The page might be factually accurate but promotional in tone. There will be no third party source to verify the info. As wiki grows, the likelyhood of these advertisement entries dressing themselves in the brand credibility and prestige our hard work made will grow. The only defense I suppose is a policy that explicitly blocks these articles. Lotsofissues 11:31, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Britannica defines an encyclopedia as a reference work, which how I have always understood the word yet wikipedia only defines encyclopedia as a compendium. Wikipedia is not a reference work due to its open nature and lack of certainty about any article at any perticular time.
It would seem wikipedia is redefining the word encyclopedia to include itself. whats with that??
-- Deus777 05:11, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Sorry everybody, this may be a stupid suggestion, but I think the NPOV tag may be too vague. The most obvious of all, I think there should be a tag like "Political" for some articles (e.g. Taiwan Independence, etc.) since there may still be arguments about if something is written with a natural point of view. If there is a tag as described, viewers will be reminded that a specific document is political and the point of view may not be accurate. And therefore they can decide if they agree with the author or not.
Sorry if the suggestion is rude.
-- Wen 13:11, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There are a number of existing policies relating to linking to external sites, for example
and there is probably more. The general intension appears to be to discourage all external links because we would rather have material added to Wikipedia, discourage links to commercial sites which might be seen as advertising and to discourage links which simply serve to boost the ranking of the 3rd party site. Whilst at the same time not banning links to commercial sites, because the article on Yahoo! should link to the official yahoo site.
But the other day I came across a new issue;
In particular I noticed a number of links being added for www.armeniapedia.org, which is a semi-commercial copyrighted wiki. For example to Mint along with some other herbs. There is also tourist information on some Armenia related pages, such as Shirak.
My impression is this is a little like spam linking to blog sites. On the other hand we actively encourage interlinking between Wikimedia Foundation projects. You could also argue this is just like linking any other external web site, but it feels like there is something qualitatively different about it. -- Solipsist 07:56, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Would there be any possible way to branch W out to make some sort of Braille version? You know, for the blind and deaf people of the world. The blind but not deaf have the spoken project, and Braille is a natural progression. However, my mind thinks: How can one put Braille on the Internet? Dammit. -- Wonderfool t (c) e) 12:31, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to participate -meaningfully- in Wikipedia. I suggest that the W. staff show their site to some test volunteers and watch them to see all the places they get frustrated. Then the introductory material should be massively revamped. One place that could and should be immediately modified is the section called something like "editing a page" - writing a new page is HIDDEN there.
Here's a start wrt KISS principle for rules: Wikipedia:Simplified Ruleset. Is there a similar project for Wikipedia:Simplified editing instructions? Kim Bruning 16:49, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
What is the process / template that should be used in a disputed move of an article that still lacks concensus on the talk? There is no disputed move template so I don't know what to do. A disputed name would also work. The current {{ TitleNPOV}} however doesn't fit as the name is not really NPOV, but incorrect. -- metta, The Sunborn 21:25, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
Ever been to one of those disambiguation page which only confuses you more? Something like:
Foo can have a million meanings, some of them more useful than others.
In anthropology, the ancient Balinese art of Foo dancing influenced Balinese and Sumatran styles as well. See also:
|
If so, you probably want to weigh in on the proposed manual of style page for disambiguation pages, Wikipedia:Disambiguation/Style. Only 24 hours left to register your opinion! — Wahoofive ( talk) 22:00, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
I am now proposing a formal vote at this article on the following proposition:
User:Skyring, who has argued for a contrary position, was given an opportunity to present an alternative position but declined to do so.
I propose that the vote remain open for 48 hours from now (2.30pm AEST 25 May), and that ten votes be required to produce a valid outcome, but I am open to other suggestions on this. Adam 04:46, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
How would Wikipedia handle such a scenario?
My imagination didn't prompt me - rather I stumbled across this thread [4] The thread is located on a forum of a coarse humor website populated with large numbers of young males with a lot of time. Members had a grievance with Wikipedia, which they felt was insensitive to so they declared an open season on the controversial entry. If you browse through the pages and pages of "reports", you can appreciate the headache for some admins that day. At one point a forum member caught on to more sophisticated tactics and suggested creating edits that appeared in summary boxes as anti-vandal work. Fortunately for Wikipedia, the little war stopped owing in part to previous positive experiences some vandals had using the site. In this case, only obvious vandalism was unleashed upon the site. What about in the future? What if don't have the benefit of self restrained vandals? Or even worse imaginative vandals? There are plenty of online associations of young males that would gleefully relish working together to cause a gigantic shit storm. A LA Times commentary discussed one such incident, although that fizzled out more quickly. The iniator was merely prompted by a perceived left bias at Wikipedia. If such a tireless group prompted by whatever were to go on a subtle false edit campaign (e.g. date alterations, plausible expansion, etc.) what could Wikipedia do?
I don't have an idea - although I have a minor suggestion. If you browse through the pages, you will find some Wikipedians joining the forum and entering the fray. I think editors who engage in self-indulgent troll feeding should themselves be punished for prolonging a miserable task upon other editors.
lots of issues | leave me a message 16:43, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
Eh, sometimes the quickest way to deal with such goblins is to cripple them. The problem here is that this takes an experienced and aggressive jacker, and encouraging such retaliation isn't likely to make good politics for Wiki. There'll always be a population of goblins out there, and probably the only long-term fix is to keep up with business as usual and hope it doesn't get worse at a faster rate than the local script-captains consolidate security. Also, the more articles up here, the more work they'll find it to cause lasting havoc. In other words, don't become discouraged, and keep the project growing.
Often with persistent vandals they have some pretty specific reason why they are angry, fx an article they like which was deleted. In my experience, if you catch the problem at the root and really explain why the article was deleted with references to politics etc. then they may still don't like it, but they usually understand it and don't go out on a vandalism spree. I have seen many angry questions which have gone unanswered; it is very important that angry questions are answered (even if the answer seem too obvious to you to be worth answering), otherwise the person making the comments will feel that he was in the right and was wronged, and perhaps be angry enough to go out on a vandalism spree!
For the same reason it is a good idea to use vfd instead of speedy deletion when the contributor contributed the article in good faith. Even when article should obviously (to you) be deleted. Vfd is a way to legitimize the deletion, show that community consensus is behind the deletion, and give the contributor a chance to ask questions and understand why his article is being deleted. Thue | talk 19:17, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
I've read Wiki's procedure on dealing with vandalism, but I was just wondering, are we able to add the wherabouts of anonymous users on their talk pages. I realise that this isn't quite 'naming and shaming' and it's a little harsh, but is it ok to do so for persistent vandals? File:UK Royal Coat of Arms.png Craigy File:Uk flag large.png ( talk) 21:48, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
Yes I see your point (although IP searches match-up to towns and not as far as streets). I just thought saying "We know where you are [though we're not going to come and see you]" might deter them a little. Anyhoo, just an idea. Thanks File:UK Royal Coat of Arms.png Craigy File:Uk flag large.png ( talk) 22:28, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
In my travels in wikipedia, I see some articles about foreign subjects with the English name in bold, of course - but then people make the foreign script bold too. This can make it very difficult to read, especially with Japanese or Arabic articles which have very busy characters or scripts which bold can muddy together. An example: Compare 東條 英機 with 東條 英機 (courtesy General Tojo), or أسامة بن محمد بن عود بن لاد with أسامة بن محمد بن عود بن لاد (courtesy Osama bin Laden). The Arabic makes a valiant attempt to remain legible but at the standard font size, it looks like a difficult battle, but I don't read Arabic so I don't know. However, I do read Japanese, and the bold kanji are more difficult to read than the regular kanji. Some of them are just too busy to handle the extra pixels required by bold. Can we make it a policy never to bold stuff in a non-Latin script unless absolutely necessary, and this includes not enbolding it in the lead? (Having the English be bold is sufficient, isn't it?) I'd like to hear the opinions of people who know Arabic on this. -- Golbez 08:19, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
I have listed Ross Flitney for deletion in the hope that this result in some form of policy decision regarding reserve team footballers. At this time of year football teams will be releasing players, many of whom are youngsters who have not quite made the grade. However, we seem to have articles on some of these players, who have no premier league experience, simply because they have been assigned a squad number.
I can live with these articles while the players concerned are still attached to a top team, although I far from consider them to be encyclopedic. But I would like to encourage some form of policy debate regarding articles about players who have been on the books of Premier League sides but never actually appeared in the league for them. If we could come to some form of catch-all decision it would save a lot of repetitious discussion on VfD about these sub-stubs. Rje 21:10, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
Shit happened finally. I have no time to write much right now. Please take a look at Wikipedia talk:Categories for deletion#Moved from main page (Fooish battles --> Battles in Fooland). I am not good at writing policies, so please someone do it. Otherwise ardent democrats may do much harm, because unlike deleted articles, deleted categories are very difficult (and sometimes almost impossible) to undelete. Mikkalai 16:45, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Given the substantial divisions thrown up by Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate, which with 80 opposers is most unlikely to reach the necessary level of consensus, I would like to see a policy proposal that can find some consensus in this area. I do not, however, wish to spark divisive argument; I seek constructive discussion with a view to consensus. Is it feasible to start a policy debate with a set of proposed tenets before developing a proposal. In other words, would posting a page that postulated a number of points about which there might be no argument be a viable starting point? I would expect the process to be: propose the tenets; modify these until agreement is reached that they are tenets; propose a policy draft that conforms to the tenets; modify this until it is stable; vote on the agreed version; hoop la! -- Theo (Talk) 11:16, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Recently, there has been several requests from various people to run interwiki bots. While such use is praised and accepted without comment, apparently one bot has caused disasterous results... removing several pages' interwiki links when it should not have. My proposal does not change the fact that anyone who wishs to run such a bot must request permission to do so at Wikipedia talk:Bots, but that a person who runs an interwiki bot should have a grasp of the language in which they are linking to and from. The reason behind this is that a person who runs an interwiki bot should be responsible enough to understand whether or not the interwiki linking that is being performed is done correctly and that if they are running it automatically (without user intervention) that the person who is running it should review the edits of the bot periodically. For example, if I wanted to run an interwiki linking bot between the Chinese (zh) Wikipedia and the English (en) Wikipedia, I should be able to read and understand Chinese to a reasonable degree. Likewise for English.
I'm sorry, but if you don't understand English enough to understand that your bot is breaking pages and people are complaining about it on your user talk page, then you shouldn't be running a bot. Same goes for the other languages you're running the bot on. The only exception that I'd give this rule is if your bot is merely going to all the other Wikipedias using the interwiki links and making certain that the interwiki linking is the same on all the pages. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:12, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
To be specific in what I mean, I will explain by an example:
Your bot visits en:Star Trek. It looks at the interwiki links, then visits:
Then on each one of those pages, makes certain that they have all the interwiki links found on en:Star Trek. Furthermore, your bot attempts to find interwiki links on these pages not found on en:Star Trek. It then creates a "master list" and makes certain that all the interwiki links are the same on all the language Wikipedias it has visited.
Basically, an interwiki linking bot shouldn't be removing interwiki links period. Modifying yes, but perferably under manual control by a person who understands both languages from which he or she is modifying. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:12, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Sock puppet/Proposal is a proposed guideline to hold people responsible if they create a secondary account with the sole purpose of disruption or harrassment. Wording is agreed upon, are there any objections? If so please join the discussion.
R adiant _* 12:19, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
User:Beland has listed Wikipedia:Chess championship, Wikipedia:Mornington Crescent Championship and Wikipedia:WikiHangman Tournament for deletion: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Chess championship, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Mornington Crescent Championship and Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/WikiHangman Tournament. It appears the user attempted to generate discussion on the subject of appropriateness of games in the Wikipedia: namespace on the village pump, but didn't get a response, and so has listed the pages on VfD in an attempt to gather other people's opinions. Demi T/ C 04:07, 2005 May 19 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Disambiguation/Style is a proposed supplement to the Manual of Style. Please register your votes and comments on the article's talk page. Survey closes May 25, 2005. — Wahoofive ( talk) 17:19, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Do we intend the dict-def and orig-research policies to preclude an article Gunning down? "To gun down" is ambiguous (between resulting in death vs. at least temporarily disabling injury) and IMO a discussion of the ambiguity of this belovedly "punchy" broadcast-news second-string cliche would be both valuable and encyclopedic, in the same way that our discussions of the words f***, ye, and thou are.
The question is not merely academic, bcz there is an information gap here:
Restating the good (but accurately inconclusive) one in WP would be merely a dict-def. Supplementing that with some examples of ambiguous use, is an unjustified non-sequitur, without a statement involving the word "ambiguity" or "ambiguous". Thus:
-- Jerzy~ t 17:13, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
His supporters clear mentions about human rights violations in Cuba, with links to Amnesty International report. They also call Batista a dictator, but when I call Castro a dictator, they erase this without any reason. One of them called me a sockpuppet. What to do against an agressive POV bashing in this and other political pages? Frankly, my opinion about political articles in english wikipedia is law, most of them are far away from NPOV.
A discussion is taking place at Template talk:Guideline about whether the {{ guideline}} template should explicitly permit/encourage users to edit the guideline page on which it is placed. Kappa 08:09, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Take for example this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grunwald#Opposing_forces
The line regarding the Soviet era joke is very difficult to verify. If it is true, then it adds to the depth of the article. However, it is nearly impossible to verify. I can easily think of many instances where little tibbits like this are found in articles. Should they be removed? It is quite easy to introduce minor misinformation using these tibbits. To err on the side of safety, I propose that we remove any such little tibbits because: 1. They're not essential to the article. 2. They're impossible or very difficult to verify.
Please advise. Comatose51 04:57, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
These three article appear to be very related Morpholino, Antisense mRNA and Antisense therapy. They could easily be merged into the same article. Is there a policy for merging such articles with redirects or is it encouraged to keep them as separte articles with links? David D. 18:48, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
User:Radiant! has taken it upon himself to delete the content of Wikipedia:Semi-policy and redirect it to Category:Wikipedia guidelines based, as far as I can tell, on the contents of four CFD votes against Category:Wikipedia semi-policy, and his dislike for the recent vote at Wikipedia talk:Don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.
This strikes me as grossly out of process, since it appears no general discussion of the virtues of semi-policy has occurred and there has not been any general notice of this proposed change or a VfD posted for the page Wikipedia:Semi-policy.
Perhaps consensus will support Radiant!'s position, but I believe it at least needs to be discussed before such actions are taken. Dragons flight 14:40, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
Ammendment: There is also some discussion of this change at Wikipedia talk:Semi-policy. Dragons flight 14:45, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
This shouldn't be too big of a deal; this is just substituting the word "guideline" for the term "semi-policy". They mean, as far as anyone can tell, the same thing, and the former is older. The renaming process shouldn't promote anything to official policy or demote anything to rejected or thinktank status, unless it's been labelled improperly. Has that been happening? Other than that minor concern, I say hurray for streamlining. -- Beland 02:02, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Although I agree with Radiant's agenda, even I'll admit that his aggressiveness is unwelcome. There is such a thing as going to fast. -- Netoholic @ 14:52, 2005 May 18 (UTC)
Seems that failed proposals, formerly known as semi-policy, have been renamed ambiguous. I suggest we stop the charade. They should be
Zocky 16:42, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
I agree that the "ambiguous" template is a bad idea. If there's a dispute, punt the page back to the policy thinktank, call for votes, and give an explanation at the top of the page until the dispute is resolved. I will list it on WP:TFD. Since Wikipedia:Google test is disputed by BlankVerse on Wikipedia talk:Semi-policy, I will follow this procedure for that page. I agree that if any other pages are misclassified, they can and should be handled on an individual basis. But they need to be classified into other existing categories, such as "proposed", "guideline", "offical", "rejected", or "historical", not returned to "semi-policy". -- Beland 02:05, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
I posted a longish chunk of text about these things at the Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines, which looked like an appropriate place. Zocky 12:27, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
It's neither a proposal nor accurate description of the current state of affairs, it's more of an attempt to define terms through discussion so that we're at least fairly sure what we're talking about. I hope nobody's changing any pages based on it - hardly half a dozen people have commented on it yet. That said, I'm rather puzzled by the implied statement that there's something wrong with talking about Wikipedia's policies and guidelines at Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines. Zocky 20:32, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
I naïvely thought there was a consensus that institutions of tertiary education were considered "inherently notable" or "encyclopedic" or whatever term you want to use. This would be useful, as it would keep a lot of potentially contentious articles away from VfD and thus waste less contributor time on deletion discussions.
In the last few weeks there have however been two cases of institutions of higher education being nominated for deletion, first the Claremont School of Theology, and currently the Avans Hogescholen ( Avans University) in the Netherlands. Although they were both listed partly because the state of the stubs, my suspicion is that a contributing factor was the presence of the word "school" in the names of both articles. In both cases I have seen voters vote "Delete. Non-notable" or similar even after the article has been cleaned up and it has been explained that this is in fact not a secondary school, but an institution of tertiary education.
Although I am tempted, I would prefer not to believe that some people are so dense that they vote "delete" without as much as looking at the previous discussion. The conclusion must be that there a significant number of people who think that we should weigh notability in the case of universities and colleges as well. Am I right? I have asked for explanations at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Avans Hogescholen, but have so far not received any reply.
If there is a consensus for keeping all articles on universities and colleges and comparable institutions, I think that ought to be made clear. Then these discussions can be avoided, or closed and the articles sent to cleanup as soon as the character of an institution has been made clear. If there is not such a consensus, there are a lot of articles on U.S. community colleges, many of which are two-line stubs, which could be purged. I don't think anybody could claim that a community college is notable. Generally speaking, I think most tertiary-level institutions with only undergraduate studies and no or very little research are to be regarded as of dubious notability, unless they are particularly prestigious or important in some way. But do we really want to go down that road? Tupsharru 08:50, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
I would say that any university or college is absolutely encyclopedic, given the fact that it exists, and it is important. Given the low rate of matriculation world-wide I would have serious criticisms of people who desire to exclude schools from the ongoing discussion here in the encyclopedia. How else are people supposed to find a school to go to? And, a lot of people from religious families have no choice whatsoever in their choice of school. Don't leave them hanging. -- McDogm 16:58, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
I would agree that in general, universities and most community colleges are Wikipedia-worthy. The exception would be the degree mills described by Hoary and Daycd above. They are legitimate candidates for deletion, or they can be redirected to degree mill. As to people who don't read the articles before voting; give them a Wikislap with a wet noodle. -- TenOfAllTrades ( talk/ contrib) 17:26, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Votes for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper appears to have turned into an argument over whether (or which) professors are automatically worthy of their own entries. That strikes me as an odd place for such a discussion. I think a much better place would be the talk page of whichever page it is that talks about the "average professor test" (or similar) -- but unfortunately I forget where that was. Perhaps somebody who remembers can post a link below, and encourage the participants in the relevant (lower) chunk of Votes for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper to discuss it there. But if I'm wrong and Votes for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper is a good place for this discussion, well, this is a heads-up for interested parties to head over there and discuss.
(If anybody's interested, my own opinions on this matter are confused; and as I can't be bothered to sort them out, I'm keeping mum for the most part.) -- Hoary 08:40, 2005 May 17 (UTC)
Recently I have been adding links to my site [ Law-Ref.org] where I am gradually indexing and crosslinking important international documents (UN conventions and other treaties, EU and US constitutions, ...). Today I have received a talk message naming this a link spam: [ [5]] While I have also a private motivation as links from Wikipedia are obviously very useful, I do not consider my links to be a spam as I am convinced they are useful because:
Examples of my links in Wikipedia:
and just at this moment, when I was writting this message and was looking for a second example I discovered that the author of the talk message started to remove my links without ending the disscussion with me
I am planning to add other links to my crosslinked documents when available and remove the last edits by
User:Rhobite which removed my links, but I will do it only if I am confirmed that my
contributions so far are not to be considered as spam. --
nicmila 07:36, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
* TREATY ESTABLISHING A CONSTITUTION FOR EUROPE
According to my opinion indexes to 100+ pages of text are of some value.
-- nicmila 09:07, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
with an example of such a case?
You have removed some links from pages where relevance must be obvious to everyone, and from others where relevance is obvious to me. In some cases I can see opposite points in some not. I have asked you to point to other resources which are better suitable for addition - your single criterion "it must be spam because it points to your site" is rather strange. I have an expertize in some fields and have produced quite a lot of usable public source materials, some of them in the field of XML were translated to many languages and they are widely used around the world, see Zvon.org - Miloslav Nic. Being rather busy I would not even argue about these deletions although I consider them senseless and based on a very strange criteria. But as I am trying to understand how the wikipedia process works it is a useful exercise. External links are the things I am using from Wikipedia most often and consider them extremely useful as they are quite often of high quality. At this moment I am convinced that if you want to find hidden connections in international treaties, you should use Law-Ref.org. Because I am the author of the engine it is not a modest claim, but I still argue it is true. I would like to know if Rhobite really tried the links before deleting them and btw. also if this discussion is of interest to anyone than me. As I am thinking about Wikipedia quite a lot in recent weeks, I may be reached at address nicmila@zvon.org if somebody is interested in informal disscussion. I consider preparation of a very short research paper about pros and cons of wikipedia and opinion of people who are not anonymous would be valuable. -- nicmila 05:26, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Please overview this new policy proposal and give your opinions on it. LevelCheck 01:32, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
I went a head and broke up a massive List of biomedical terms into smaller sections. Some are still long but it is better than the ultra massive page we had before. Lists of biomedical topics: | # | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
My real question is do massive lists such as this one serve a sensible role?
Many of the topics are not linking since they are not articles or stubs and never will be. Unless someone is willing to manually fix the links to the appropriate pages these lists will never be a useful indexing aid. For example, the topic antisense nucleic acid in the biomedical list should be linked to Morpholino or Antisense mRNA or Antisense therapy. The fact it does not link to any of these highlights the problems with unedited lists. We certainly do not want another antisense page yet these lists are almost invitations to start a new article. In contrast, I think we need to be consolidating pages such as the three antisense articles since they could easily be merged together.
Also note that despite this list being huge it is not up to date since none of Morpholino or Antisense mRNA or Antisense therapy are in the list. Yet 75% of the lists content does not link to an article. This seems like a terrible way to index material.
Another point that others have mentioned is that some of the categories in this list are completely off topic. i realise that this list was compiled by NIH, nevertheless it is clear that many categories in these lists do not belong. David D. 21:55, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
I notice that vandals sometimes remove their IPs from Vandalism in progress. Although many anonymous contributers help the project greatly before deciding that WikiPedia is for real and creating a login, most people reporting vandalism in V.i.p have accounts (by the time people discover V.i.p., they already have accounts). Most anonymous IPs editing V.i.p. are vandals. They remove their IPs and steal themselves a few more hours before being blocked. We should require an account for editing V.i.p.
--
— Ŭalabio 07:15, 2005 May 16 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedia games has grown to include not only a Wikipedia-based trivia contest, but also story writing pages, and now, an international chess championship. Is this OK? -- Beland 06:06, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
I want Wikipedia to accept a general policy that BC and AD represent a Christian Point of View and should be used only when they are appropriate, that is, in the context of expressing or providing an account of a Christian point of view. In other contexts, I argue that they violate our NPOV policy and we should use BCE and CE instead. See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate for the detailed proposal. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:34, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
There is an editor who wishes to contribute to Wikipedia, but who does not wish to license his Talk page contributions under the GFDL. (He has no problem with the normal licensing of his contributions throughout the remainder of Wikipedia.) I am not an intellectual property lawyer and not qualified to address the correctness of his legal claims, nor am I familiar with any Wikipedia policy which allows individual editors to exempt specific contributions from the GFDL.
Extensive discussion on his user talk page has failed to reach a conclusion, so I would invite discussion and commment from a wider audience. Are there are any historical cases/discussions on Wikipedia of editors who wished to restrict the distribution and licensing of their contributions? Since this is a general question, it might make sense to move the discussion here: out of user space. Assistance appreciated. -- TenOfAllTrades ( talk/ contrib) 16:26, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
I reluctantly suggest that this editor should be blocked from editing as he disputes the terms of use of Wikipedia. I will do so and raise the matter on the mailing list Wikien-L. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 15:12, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
So much cross-pollination occurs between talk pages and the articles themselves that I don't see any other options. Tracking just one user's submission under non-compliant licensing would be an administrative nightmare; if everyone were permitted to choose different licenses for their talk pages, we'd have to completely separate the talk from the rest of the project, destroying the community nature of the project. I support an immediate block, only because it is necessary to protect the project. -- Unfocused 15:38, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
I've blocked him indefinitely (which is of course reversible) and, assuring him that he has not done anything wrong, politely invited him to subscribe to Wikien-L. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 15:33, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
It has been brought to my attention that street addresses are not encylopedic. When is it acceptable to include an address? Apparently it is not OK for a building but is OK for Amtrak stations based on changes being made. Vegaswikian 02:36, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
10 Downing Street seems to be alive and well as an article ;) Physchim62 02:29, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
Please vote. Intrigue 21:59, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
I am an alumnus of Alpha Phi Omega, National Service Fraternity. After publicizing the previously existing Wikipedia page for the fraternity, various members of our National Board have expressed concern over the contents of the Wikipedia entry not being under their control. I'm trying to balance the desires of our National Board (specifically the Marketing Director) with the standards of Wikipedia. I'm *not* including the disclaimer that the Fraternity wants on all chapter and region websites, but have provided a great deal of contact information for those wishing further (and thus official) information. (its not on the current page, it was modified, go back to the page prior to 1500 on 15May (two revisions ago at this point)).
The marketing director would like for proposed changes to at least be checked with a representative of the National Office (likely to be me, unless I violently flee from it.)
Suggestions on balancing here? I *know* there will be a Wikipedia page for my Fraternity no matter what happens because even if I erase it all, someone will add to the information on the page. Would it be proper to place a note stating that I would prefer to be checked with before changes are made?
Thank You Randolph Finder (Naraht)
Member (because I didn't run fast enough) Alpha Phi Omega National Marketing Committee.
Naraht 20:22, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Mr Tan includes complaints that he has created Temp pages for articles (such as Wee Kim Wee/temp), produced new versions of articles, and then simply replaced the existing articles with his own versions, that he has placed notices with links to the Temp pages on the articles, and that he has placed notices on his temp pages telling other editors not to edit them. Part of his defence is that another User – indeed, an admin – has done the same, and that user has confirmed that he does it. It seems to me that this is contrary to the Wikipedia in a number of ways.
What is the general feeling about this? Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 21:34, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
I agree that temp pages can be useful in various situations (though I feel in general that there are better ways of doing things), but my points are:
1. and 2. have been done on Maharashtra, Wee Kim Wee, and Zanskar; 3. has been done on Zanskar. I've removed the offending notices, and I'll keep an eye on the relevant articles to make sure that they're not misused. Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 11:05, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
Tan 22:46, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
Since my name has been brought here over my methodology, I would like to add my inputs.
Resuming after where I left off...
= Nichalp ( talk · contribs)= 20:04, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
A long-standing part of the Manual of Style was recently neutered after less than a week's unpublicized discussion between less than a half-dozen Wikipedians. I strongly feel that any such changes should only be made after trying to solicit input from as many editors as possible. I don't like instruction creep, so I am reluctant to suggest a new policy, but I would think it should be common sense that any change to Wikipedia-wide policy should have the support of at least 20-30 editors, not 4 or 5. The specific instance I am referring to is here. Niteowlneils 00:08, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
Okay, so recently I suggested on British cuisine that we move the article to Cuisine of Great Britain. Now, aside from the political disagreement (what is GB vs. UK, other names for it) which was not what I was getting at, there was actually a lot of debate, so I thought I would put the question to you all here. It seems to me that the proper naming convention for all country subarticles is "X of Country". This is holds true for "economy of X", "religion of X", "demographics of X", "history of X", "military history of X", "culture of X", etc. So I thought that cuisine should be no different. The reason we always put the noun form first, I think, is to avoid irregular consructions. So, let's say I want Cote d'Ivoire's cuisine, would I know how to construct Ivorian? Or Congo --> Congolese, or Equatorial Guinea --> Equatoguineans, or Kiribati --> Gilbertese, or Myanmar --> Burmese, you get the idea. Putting "Cuisine of X" allows someone with minimal knowledge to search and find the article. While British is a common construction, it should be moved for consistency's sake. Can we have some discussion on the matter, what is proper? (btw, Jooler subsequently began to move two "Cuisine of X" to "Xian cuisine" in the middle of our debate, offering no discussion as I did. It strikes me as bad faith.) -- Dmcdevit 02:12, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
Right, I guess what I really wanted was to see if we could reach a consensus as to the proper naming convention for this type of article, not just a quick fix. What do you all think the correct titles should be. This is the right place to post this, right? -- Dmcdevit 03:52, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
Go tell the Germans. A few years ago I had a chat with the German owner of an Indian restaurant in Frankfurt. He told me that the German authorities would give Indians short term work visas to cook in his restaurant, but not Pakistanis because "The are not Indians". Philip Baird Shearer 09:36, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
I think Jooler could perhaps understand that the more we use neutral (eg. geographic) rather than political (eg. culture) criteria as designators for article naming and categorization, the less time wikipedia contributors may eventually waste on moronic debates about whether baked aubergines are Turkish, Bulgarian, Syrian, Ottoman or Byzantine cuisine. Also Jooler glues geographical to political and proposes culture as the alternative. This is wrong. Culture is political and these two are bedmates, while geography is the more neutral, at least for now. If you have any doubts consult any of the articles on nations, nationalism or ethnicities. Very complicated stuff and bound to spoil the meal! -- Modi 11:51, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
The article FHM-US's 100 Sexiest Women 2005 has been stuck in a debate at Wikipedia:Copyright problems over whether or not it's a copyright violation. The article lists, in order, the 100 names that had been reported in FHM magazine as the results of an annual poll it conducts (here is the 2004 list to show what it looked like). Some people are arguing that FHM has the copyright on this list. Others (including myself) think that the list itself is not copyrightable because the magazine editors did not select and rank the results; they reported the results of a poll. The magazine also added editorial content by selecting pictures and text to accompany the list, but none of this was included in the Wikipedia article so it wasn't an issue.
The issue is still unresolved. Some people say it is a copyright violation and others disagree. Unfortunately the original discussion has died down with no agreement reached. So in order to seek a wider range of information and hopefully reach a consensus, I'd like to open a discussion here. MK2 15:21, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
We appear to have reached another deadlock. Based on the comments posted here and at the original discussion, this is what we have (with my paraphrasing of people's opinions)
Believe the list is protected by copyright:
Believe the list is not protected by copyright:
Other
MK2 18:09, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
You can't vote on what the law is! It's like voting on whether gravity keeps us on the planet - a majority vote against it won't make us all float away. Leave it to the experts (in this case, Postdlf). See also Kregos v. Associated Press, 937 F.2d 700 ( 2d Cir. 1991), holding that a particular selection of factors to gauge the performance of pitchers could not be copyrighted, nor could a mere arrangement of such factors, but a particular arrangement of those specific factors could (e.g. not "A" alone, nor "B" alone, but "A+B" together). Here, we are not copying the arrangement, just the results of applying the particular selection of factors. -- BDAbramson talk 23:17, 2005 May 18 (UTC)
It seems to me it's hard to argue it either way. See U.S. Copyright Office - Copyright Basics: What Is Not Protected by Copyright? -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:05, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Example Organizers Contest Method 2nd Party 1 Major League Baseball Baseball team standings Played a bunch of games Newspaper Sports page 2 FHM Sexiest women rankings Asked a bunch of people Wikipedia
The article [[Wikipedia:Finding network abuse contacts]] in the Wikipedia namespace has been marked for transwiki to Meta for two months now. Besides the fact that I'm not at all sure how one would go about doing that, I'd like to know where we make the distinction between WP namespace and Meta. Also, what is the criteria for transwiki to Meta (never heard of it happening before)? And how is it done (really I'd appreciate if someone else just took care of it, :P ) Thanks. -- Dmcdevit 09:02, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I quote from the article on The Myth of Islamic Tolerance:
Et cetera. Uninterested by books written by "popular counter-terrorism authors" from the US about the alleged awfulness of Islam, I have no intention of getting hold of this book and checking these and the other chapter titles, of which there are 58. I'd guess that this listing above is correct. Anyway, it's factual and verifiable (or refutable) information.
But why give a chapter title unless you expect that somebody is later going to say something about it? Yet this would necessitate an article on this book of at least 58 sections. That's hugely more than the number of paragraphs in the article The Origin of Species, which I venture to suggest is a more important work than The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. The listing is less like an article, more like a text dump (or advertising).
Should articles on books have long lists of chapter titles? -- Hoary 03:36, 2005 Jun 22 (UTC)
My thoughts from User_talk:CltFn
One problem with just listing a TOC is that it really amounts to a copyright violation. You can't call it "derivative work" or "fair use" if you are doing nothing more than just presenting a list taken right out of the book. Applicable policies include those which address copyright issues, ad-spam, and the idea of a "data dump". Unless you add content, it's a problem. In addition, it is not sufficient, with regards to NPOV simply to report one side. These books are controvertial - only to present the author's view (even if you do so accurately) is not NPOV because it ignores the opposing view. In addition, you can always set up "temp" pages to work on these articles - that way you can take your time and create balanced NPOV article about these books. Guettarda 03:44, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- The "data dump" idea is a common interpretation of a section of the "What Wikipedia is not" article.
- The idea that NPOV should provide both sides of controvertial topics is found in a section of the NPOV policy
- As for what constitutes "fair use", I am not a lawyer, but there is a lot of material and discussion regarding the use of copyright material. As I understand it, in order to use copyright material you need to somehow add to it. You can quote from other works, but you can't simply reproduce a quote and call it "fair use" or a "derivative work". You need to add substantial "value". When you lift the TOC of a book you are reproducing copyright material. If it were incorporated into a broader article which was new material, then it would constitue "fair use" of this material. It's something of a "signal to noise" issue. The TOC of the book would be fine if each chapter listing were followed by an analysis of the chapter (an NPOV analysis, from referenced, reputable sources, including both pro- and con, since it's a highly controvertial topic) - then it would be fine. But without some further use of the material it runs the risk of being a copyvio.
Hope this helps to clarify things. Guettarda 04:12, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Guettarda 04:36, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I encountered a problem with some Wikipedia content: your Web pages need publication dates. Many Wikipedia writers seem to be using a present-tense style, and often use terms such as "now" and "currently," among other similar references to time. Without an initial publication date and perhaps even a "last update" date displayed on each page, readers have no way of knowing whther information is current. As time progresses, this problem increases.
For instance, this Wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35mm_film) uses the following phrase:
"Most films today are shot and projected using..."
When was this content written? Will the information in this entry still be true if read in 2010, 2020 or 2030? In the future, will I have any way of knowing if a page actually has been recently updated, and thus is accurate? I realize Wikipedia is constantly being updated, but readers still have no real way of knowing the technological accuracy of information presented.
Don't you need to add a publication date to all Wikipedia pages?
George Wedding Elk Grove, CA gmwedding1@comcast.net
Several users have imported the voting templates {{ Support}} and {{ Oppose}} from Commons (e.g. Commons:Featured picture candidates) and have begun using them on Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates and other places. These templates have been nominated for deletion, however, I do not believe that TFD is an appropriate venue for discussing this issue since it centers on the user behavior and whether the potentially pervasive insertion of little tags such as:
poses a significant threat to server resources and/or is too obnoxious to tolerate.
I would encourage a general discussion of this behavior to occur here, and ask that voting on the TFD be suspended pending a consensus on the more general issue of whether users should be allowed to use templates / images when voting. Dragons flight 22:57, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
I think it is a good idea to draw more attention to the issue at hand, but at the same time I think we should keep the real discussion over at WP:TFD to avoid repeating arguments over and over. I oppose this template, by the way. — mark ✎ 18:13, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Not everyone will use this method, thus defeating the argument of votes being easier to scan through. violet/riga (t) 20:34, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone have any thoughts about the maximum number of External links that an article should have? I just had a peek as Ethiopia, & was a bit surprised to find about 35 external links at the bottom of the page! Seeing this many links at the bottom, I can't help but think that there's something wrong with the article -- e.g., it's not complete enough, it's very controversial (& needs the proper warning added), or someone needs to audit all of these links & prune the less useful ones.
So can someone justify having more than a dozen external links at the bottom of any article? Two dozen? 35? Wikipedia:External links does not address this issue. -- llywrch 18:54, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hi. Jombo Jimbo recently announced a change in the Image use policy
[8]. I.e. as I understand it, only images that allow derivatives and commercial use are OK. Is there a central page to discuss this? Most image policy pages are not yet updated. A link to a relevant (talk) page would be appreciated. thanks --
Chris 73
Talk 15:26, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
I was overzealous and {{copyvio}}'d these two pages: Second Treatise of the Great Seth and The Devil's Walk. The first is some kind of ancient text so is out of copyright. However, it is effectively a personal essy, POV etc etc of whoever originally wrote it and, more importantly to my question, was a straight copy-paste into Wikipedia. The second is a copy-paste of a poem, along with a copyvio bit at the top that I removed. What's the policy for these things? Always leave lone? VfD and see what people think? - Splash 16:34, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, people. Well, maybe I'll take them to VfD and see what happens. Regarding the translation, I did do some digging before removing my copyvio tag and, (IANAL) it seems that, if the translation is entirely derivative, with no original work of the translator(s) then copyright remains with the original author. Splash 00:14, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)
I've been using Wikipedia a lot more than usual recently, because I've been researching things for a gigantic fiction project I'm taking part in and this means I've been accessing a wide variety of articles on Wikipedia and one very significant thing I have noticed is that certain articles seem significantly culture-influenced without something being done about it.
Take for instance the Privateer and Letter of Marque and Reprisal, the latter being an especially good example, since Letters of Marque and Reprisal are a European phenomenon from around the 17th century (a bit earlier and a bit later) and yet somehow more than half of the article consists of a statement about the US Constitution's view on LoM&R and how a dean from a US Law school interprets that. All in all the article offers no information on the LoM&R other than: a dictionary definition and the US Constitution's view on it.
The articles above and certain others I've noticed here (the fact that it would take up too much time and space to search for all of the ones I've noticed) contain information that does not contribute in any significant way to the article (for the US constitution's opinion on something, a person would look at the US Constitution article, not the article for that specific thing) and it seems to have no other purpose than the person 'contributing' waving a flag saying 'hey look, I'm proud to be an American'.
Well I know that the NPOV section tells us to just remove cultural bias, but would it be a good idea to warn contributers that posting things that do not have any significance to the article and that only show a cultural viewpoint unrelated to the subject is not permissable.
Don't think I'm being anti-amerian because of the examples I chose, there are also articles, especially certain military articles, that only mention British or Australian or Dutch or German flagwaving. Robrecht
Not totally sure this is the right forum for this but...
In my additions to Wikipedia it has been my intent to produce tables (particularly chronoligical lists of incumbents) to a certain standard, incorporating such amendments as made by fellow Wikipedians into the standard where they further the format. However, and no derogation is intended against those who in all good faith have updated the tables, there have been amendments i.e. to Bishop of Birmingham and Bishop of Coventry whereby different standards are being applied, to no overall benefit.
I don't want to start appearing to be dictating as to which format is correct or risk causing offence in broaching the subject directly on the Wikipedians' own talk pages, but I would like to elicit general opinion on this, if there is an opinion.
Now I may be wrong, but I feel that the recent updates in the format don't add to or enhance the tables. Indeed, in particular, the use of text formatting (now removed) were specifically employed either as a method of best making use of the page-space, or as part of accepted use (i.e. it is accepted that dignities etc, are placed in smaller font) or for purpose of clarity, employing the use of font-weight to emphasise the commonly used names where the full name is known and should, IMO, be shown
I would say that:-
|
and
|
are clearer, more informative, and make better use of page-space (especially when larger text can make the left (where full dates are known) and right columns extend over more lines than necessary) than either:-
1991– 2001 | James Lawton Thomson | Resigned |
or
2001 to present | John William Hind, BA | Bishop of the Diocese in Europe |
What does everyone else think?? -- JohnArmagh 19:03, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The latter presentation with the use of toccolours and use of font adjustments only for footnotes and the like is what you will find used very widely in Wikipedia, so I prefer it over your style. I didn't know that small tags were automatically closed at the end of the cell: you learn something every day. Noisy | Talk 19:41, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
I am uncertain what to do about List of warez groups and the individual groups listed there, such as Again (warez). Clearly some of these groups are interesting enough to deserve articles, but I am very reluctant to have Wikipedia advertising the existence of active warez groups. Kelly Martin 05:08, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Survey guidelines, a guideline for all manners of surveys and votes on Wikipedia, is deeply flawed in its existing rules and fails to adress several important issues. A prime example is that in Gdansk/Vote it allows both sides of the dispute to claim they are immune from 3RR rule, as well as disputing the very vote results. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 19:31, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is incredibly naive OR deceitful and fraudulent. The so-called POV issues are always resolved from a Politically Correct atheistic view point. I tested the system and introduced powerful factual arguments which were deleted...Congratulations but no cigar! Another honest Wikipedia needs to be built!
Jean-Francois Orsini, Ph.D. jorsini1@earthlink.net June 16 2005