Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2012 October 11

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October 11[edit]

My photos[edit]

Why do my photos I add to Edmonton Alberta page keeping getting taken off???? They are mine and the ones on the Edmonton page were ugly. How can I get my photos to stay?

Thanx — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dastyle 88 (talkcontribs) 04:49, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here are two things I think might be issues:
1) According to the revision history, apparently other editors seem to think the photos are not in the right location. Have you checked that the location where you are placing them is the correct place?
2) Are you sure your photos have been properly marked as free (your own work being released for anyone to use) on Commons?
Also, you might want to discuss about these photos on the talk page before adding them.
Finally, please remember to sign your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~).
Hope this helps,
–– Anonymouse321 (talkcontribs) 05:01, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Anonymouse321 makes a great point, unfortunately with something as specific as a certain file or edit (or deletion) the best HD can do is advise to politely contact that editor on their talk page, or deletion log or on the articles talk page as to the reasons/justifications for their actions so that you may better work out any differences or clear up any confusion. To answer your "why" beyond pointing you there would be to speculate. Marketdiamond (talk) 08:36, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Beltracchi Wolfgang wiki page external links.[edit]

Since a few days I am treying to remove the beltracchi-project link. Because this project does not exist any more since the September 1th. 2012

Regardes Beltracchi
Hi, Welcome to the Helpdesk! (Please take a moment to press the ~ 4 times in order to leave your signature and talk page for reference!) Your question/request is a bit confusing, might you be referring to the hyperlink on this: Wolfgang_Beltracchi#Notes_and_references list? I also see that there is a German language wiki article, does it also have a similar issue? Thanks. Marketdiamond (talk) 08:42, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You should discuss your proposed changes on the article talk page, Talk:Wolfgang_Beltracchi. Your username suggests you are the subject of the article (or someone closely connected with him. If you are, you are strongly discouraged from editing article directly; please read WP:COI. —teb728 t c 10:19, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The question has been addressed at Talk:Wolfgang_Beltracchi. Superp (talk) 10:30, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Repeated Selected Article, Selected Picture, Dou You Know and News[edit]

Hi,

It is my daily habit to come to office and visit news website and wikipedia and see Main page and above stated portals like (Technology, Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology), History and rarely Arts) for about 7 years.

I have notices that "Selected Article, Selected Picture, Dou You Know and News" gets repeated very often and infact I have seen same content more than 10 times. I have read them all and want to know more. Hence, It will be good if people like us gets new everyday without repetition. Offcource you can have links for most favourite or most popular if you wish people should know them since I feel that posting them on regular basis you want users to know these topics.

Also on some portals like Biology the contents does not change for long period of time. It is frustrating to see same page everyday. You have millions of information to give to us.

I hope you got my feelings that I want to convey.

Thanks and Regards, Vikash Anand — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.191.35.22 (talk) 11:01, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think so (i.e. selected articles (i.e. featured articles) etc get repeated). Can you mention an article or two which ha(s/ve) been repeated! --Tito Dutta 11:43, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Vikash refers to the portal pages linked at the top right of the main page, for example Portal:Technology. The editors of each portal can make different choices. Portal pages have a limited amount of selected content and many of them switch randomly between it each time the portal page is rerendered by our software. A reader can rerender Portal:Technology by clicking "View new selections below (purge)". Portal pages get far less attention from both readers and editors than Main Page. For example, Portal:Technology gets around 2,000 daily page views where Main Page gets 8,000,000. Portal:Biology only gets 300. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:24, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for providing information about the link "View new selections below (purge)". I was not aware of usage of this link. Repeated click brought new things to read but even then 90 percent of the things I have already read in wikipedia (cant help as I am avid fan of wikipedia and I use wikipedia daily for 1-2 hours reading anything that intrests me). Also, this link is not there in Portal like Biology. I like Biology portal since I was a good student of Biology in my college days. Can editors of wikipedia provide Random Articles in each portal that brings subjects related to that portal only. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.191.35.22 (talk) 13:32, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Above comment was by me (Vikash Anand) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.191.35.22 (talk) 13:33, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As mentioned, the editors of each portal can make different choices. Portal:Biology didn't make a random selection. If you are curious how many pages a random selection is made from then click the "Edit" or "View source" tab at top of a portal page and look for code of the form {{Random portal component|max=. For example, Portal:Technology has
{{Random portal component|max=50|seed=31|header=Selected article|subpage=Selected articles}}
{{Random portal component|max=33|seed=17|header=Selected picture|subpage=Selected pictures}}
{{Random portal component|max=20|header=Did you know...|subpage=Did you know}}
The code uses {{Random portal component}}. See http://toolserver.org/~erwin85/randomarticle.php for a way to get a random article about a chosen subject. This will often be a small article of lower quality than articles selected by a portal. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:56, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I used this infobox in few article, in those articles the code is working fine, right now I need to use this once again, but I can't see anything in Template:Infobox theatre group. Did they try to merge/redirect it to Template infobox organization? Confused!--Tito Dutta 11:40, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If you try to edit the template you'll see that it is a wrapper for Template:infobox organization, and this is what the documentation page says, but I think it might be clearer if the parameters were explained on the documentation page as they used to be. - David Biddulph (talk) 12:23, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

WP:SPI or WP:AE[edit]

Resolved

Note I'm not giving explicit details to avoid any drama here.

At a controversial topic, an IP user is suspected of being a sockpuppet of a user who is, topic banned, restricted to one account and prohibited from editing anonymously. The suspicions have not been investigated or tested to my knowledge, but several users have mooted them in the ongoing page move discussion.

Should the first step be to WP:SPI to see if the anonymous user is a sockpuppet of the topic-banned user or to WP:AE to report the suspected breaches of restrictions without evidence from SPI? Thryduulf (talk) 12:40, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fairly certain ArbCom members have CheckUser access, so WP:AE would get the attention of someone who BOTH knows the background of the case and can look into it. They deal with things like this a lot, so bringing it to their attention may be the best way to handle it. --Jayron32 13:55, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thryduulf, I'm guessing who you are referring to. If I'm correct, then if you decide to file at SPI you should get prompt action. Thanks, EdJohnston (talk) 14:13, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you both for the replies. I've chosen to report it at WP:AE based on Jayron32's comment that sockpuppet checks can be done by people active there too. Thryduulf (talk) 16:12, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Authority control template[edit]

I've done some editing on the article for Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, and today an edit was made by a VIAFbot which added an Authority Control template:

[1]

I clicked on the link to 'Authority Control', and it indicates that the template causes the page to be closely watched, and suggests that future proposed changes to the article should be discussed on the Talk page. From the time the article was first created the Talk page has only a single comment on it from 2 February 2008, and even then the editor who posted that comment was only musing about the fact that Edmund Mortimer should have been King.

I'm therefore rather puzzled about the addition of an Authority Control template to the page. Can anyone fill me in as to why a bot would have done this? It doesn't appear that the article is controversial in any way, and considering the lack of discussion on the Talk page to date, that anyone would respond even if prospective changes were posted on the Talk page. NinaGreen (talk) 14:58, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'd take another look at the link - it is nothing more than a library indexing and cataloguing system. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:04, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) I think you've misread. It doesn't say that the article on Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March is going to be closely watched and needs talk page discussion; that warning is on the page for the template. - David Biddulph (talk) 15:08, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the comments. I'm wondering whether the recent changes made by another editor to the sources I'd cited triggered the bot? Perhaps this particular bot is activated by changes made to cited sources? NinaGreen (talk) 15:47, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It seems unrelated to edits of the article. User:VIAFbot#About this bot says: "The purpose of VIAFbot is mass-inclusion of Authority control identifiers in articles on individual persons. Consensus about this was reached in Wikipedia:Authority control integration proposal/RFC". PrimeHunter (talk) 15:59, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the help. I read some of the discussion at the link provided above, and while much of it is beyond me, I did gather that the edit by the VIAFbot is part of a large Wikipedia project, and was unrelated to recent edits of the article on Edmund Mortimer. NinaGreen (talk) 22:08, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Graph view of past edits to a page[edit]

A few months ago, I was clicking around Wikipedia, and discovered a way to view past edits to a page as a histogram (or maybe it was a line graph) that showed me how many edits were made per day. I tried to find this feature again recently and was unsuccessful. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.212.195.39 (talk) 15:35, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Are you sure it didn't show page views per day? You can see page views per day as a histogram by clicking the "View history" tab and then "Page view statistics", for example leading to http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Wikipedia:Help_desk for this page. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:53, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ambiguity Page MVP Needs To Be Edited And Am Not Certain How[edit]

In the ambiguity page for MVP, it is stated Microsoft Most Valuable Professional under IT. While that is true, there are MVP (Most Valuable Professional) awards from other IT companies too, such as Telerik, CodeProject and CSharp. I am not sure how to divide or categorize the information. Should I simply remove "Microsoft" from there and add award from different IT companies? Kiran Kumar (talk) 16:33, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If you mean MVP (disambiguation), you merely edit it like any other page and add the links to those pages in the proper location, but the pages have to, of course, exist first and I don't think that they do. If, on the other hand, you're speaking of the redirect from the term "Most valuable professional" to Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, I'd say leaving that redirect intact until the pages about those other companies' programs have been established and proven to be Wikipedia-notable would be the right thing to do. If you want to dispute that position, however, you can raise it at redirects for discussion. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 16:48, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) No, you should not. The page MVP (disambiguation) contains a link to Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, which is a Wikipedia article and (though it has faults) has enough references to establish that the topic is notable and therefore merits an article. In order to add other companies, or a generic Most Valuable Professional, you would need to establish that these other companies' designations, or the generic designation, are themselves notable, i.e. have been written about in independent reliable sources. If this is the case (I don't know whether it is or not), then these designations could have articles written about them, and in that case they could appear in the disambiguation page. --ColinFine (talk) 16:50, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Resolving issues in order to remove the banner atop an existing entry.[edit]

Thomas Sanchez (writer) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

At the request of the individual profiled in it, I am updating the entry of Thomas Sanchez (Writer). I have made what I believe are the required changes to confirm to Wikipedia’s standards for living people, and so forth, but after my “saves” the following banner content continues to appear at the top of the entry:

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. (March 2012) This article is an orphan, as no other articles link to it. (February 2009) This article may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. (March 2012)

I have made a good-faith effort to make this entry accurate and professional (I am a working journalist for a radio network in Los Angeles) and would like to remove the banner according to Wikipedia procedures, but have not yet found guidance in “Help” content regarding that process.

Your advice on how to do this will be most helpful and sincerely appreciated.

Thank you.

Mhmllr---- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mhmllr (talkcontribs) 16:53, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The "cleanup" and "wikified" tags give links to the Manual of Style, so you need to read that. The "orphan" tag gives a "What links here" link, so you can see whether there are as many incoming links as you would expect for an article of significance. - David Biddulph (talk) 17:03, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I: would say that a greater issue that those in the banner are the overly-promotional tone of the article. The entire thing reads like a press release, not an encyclopedia article--Jac16888 Talk 17:05, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I did some clean up, but it still needs work. The article is still an orphan as it has only one qualifying incoming link, see WP:ORPHAN; the referencing needs to be sorted out because it currently uses two different formats and it is unclear what the second and third refs are actually referring to in the body of the article; it needs more references to support notability, see WP:BIO and WP:RS; it has too many external links, see WP:EL for guidance.--ukexpat (talk) 17:06, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The only link which was being used as a reference was pointing to a page in French. I've changed it to point to the English version, but it's the subject's own website so not an independent reliable source. - David Biddulph (talk) 17:22, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Possible Translation list based on high number of Interwiki links but none for in Language X[edit]

What I'm looking for is an automated list of the pages with the most Interlanguage Links that do not include a particular language. For example, if I'm looking for pages to add to the English Language Wikipedia, finding out that a page on the French Wikipedia has 50 Interwiki Links but no Interwiki link to English would probably indicate that the page should be created in English. I realize that lack of exact one to one links may cause problems, but is there any way to get such a list?Naraht (talk) 17:23, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Have you tried asking on WP:VPT?— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:47, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

How to remove boxes which refer to a page's "Orphan" state?[edit]

After having created a number of links to and from a page called Henry Stephens (doctor), how do I now remove the boxes which describe the page as an "Orphan"

Thanks: this was my first page.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Moascarman (talkcontribs) 17:38, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Remove the template {{orphan}} from the top. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:46, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Fair use rationale[edit]

There's a picture of the Prime Minister of Canada with a Canadian actor, would that lie within the range of fair use rationale? Thank you. Iowafromiowa (talk) 18:24, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Could you please post a link to the image? –– Anonymouse321 (talkcontribs) 18:25, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, here. Thank you. Iowafromiowa (talk) 18:29, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No, fails our non-free use criteria, see WP:NFCC, criterion #1.--ukexpat (talk) 18:44, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Exchanging photo on my brother in laws page[edit]

Hello, I am trying to put in the correct photo for Conte Candoli. Someone removed the original one and put their own photo up. It is not authorized by the family. I have a photo to exchange out, that I have rights to. I have never uploaded a photo myself and do need help to get the other one down. I have the photo ready to upload. I am in edit the page and find that it is all html code ( of course) and would appreciate any help with someone loading it.... Thank you I will keep checking the page for an answer — Preceding unsigned comment added by Walt67 (talkcontribs) 19:14, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

General advice on uploading images follows. You should note though that no one owns a Wikipedia article and the family have no rights to "authorize" the content of the article provided it complies with Wikipedia policy and guidelines. If you wish to make suggestions for improvement, please discuss on the article's talk page.
  • If you want to upload an image from your computer for use in an article, you must determine the proper license of the image (or whether it is in the public domain). If you know the image is public domain or copyrighted but under a suitable free-license, upload it to the Wikimedia Commons instead of here, so that all projects have access to the image (sign up). If you are unsure of the licensing status, see the file upload wizard for more information. Please also read Wikipedia's image use policy.
  • If you want to add an image that has already been uploaded to Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, add [[File:File name.jpg|thumb|Caption text.]] to the area of the article where you want the image to appear – replacing File name.jpg with the actual file name of the image, and Caption text with a short description of the image. See our picture tutorial for more information. I hope this helps.--ukexpat (talk) 19:48, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
What ukexpat says is right. However - it is possible that the photograph you have is more appropriate for Wikipedia than the gimmicky one now used in the article. I hope you can figure out how to upload your photograph, with a suitable licence that allows Wikipedia to use it; I know that this can be absurdly difficult for someone who has never done it before. Then you should announce on the article's talk page that the image is available, and let other, uninvolved, editors decide which one to use. Maproom (talk) 23:24, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I can't find any evidence that there was any other photo associated with the page before the current one was added two years ago in this diff. William P. Gottlieb's collection of jazz photos are a notable record of the era, are preserved in the Library of Congress collection, and are public domain. Another useful, properly licensed image for Wikipedia will be gratefully received, whether it replaces the existing one or not, but the user who added the latter to the article neither removed a previous image nor replaced it with "their own". - Karenjc 07:57, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

House Price Index[edit]

Hello,

I would like to know why you mention IAS360 as a source of house price index on page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_price_index This is a small private company that does not even answer the phone number listed on their web site. And you don't mention the Index provided my the Census Bureau, a government entity.

This leads to the impression that there are personal motives for mentioning a small company such as IAS...

Regards — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:F470:24:3:1E:AD71:DE7:DCCA (talk) 22:09, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We mention it, like everything else we mention in our four million articles, because an editor added it and no other editor has removed it, up to now. However, I have just been bold and removed the whole section, as I think all these external links are to specific indexes and are appropriate. (Of course, another editor may disagree with me and restore some or all of the links. Then we can have a discussion). --ColinFine (talk) 17:52, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]