Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2016 November 22

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November 22

A product in Kickstarter

Dear editors: If a new product has been written about in several lengthy news and magazine articles, the company is raising funds on Kickstarter to produce it, has met the original goal, but the product isn't actually available for purchase yet, should it have an article? I have a draft in progress (User:Anne Delong/Pokito), but I am not sure what is the right time to move it to mainspace.—Anne Delong (talk) 00:27, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

The only part of that that matters is "written about in several length news and magazine articles." See WP:GNG. However, a possible counter-argument is WP:NOTNEWS and WP:NOTNEWS -- in the long run, the article will need to demonstrate that there's any lasting notability beyond the initial announcement of this product. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:37, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Ian.thomson. I found another news article today, so I decided to move it to mainspace. I guess time will tell if I made the right decision.—Anne Delong (talk) 03:59, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Topic bans

Do we have a policy or guideline about someone who is under a topic ban discussing topic bans without touching on his banned topic?

I am looking at a couple of recently topic banned users who are now discussing how unfair their topic bans were. On the one hand, there is a benefit to discussions where users protest admin actions (sometimes admins get it wrong, and sometimes admins get it right but users just need to vent). On the other hand I see a benefit to them dropping the stick and moving on. Plus there is a real risk that they will stray into actual topic ban violations.

So do we have a policy on this? --Guy Macon (talk) 00:44, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Per WP:BANEX, if they're earnestly asking for clarification or appeal, then it's OK. That said, I've seen precedent for users who just would not STFU about their ban after an appeal fails being banned from appealing for a set amount of time and being told that further complaints would be treated as violations of the topic ban. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:59, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Immaculate Heart College

I have not done references 1 and 7 correctly. The refs. are from the same JOURNAL (not a publisher) and I would like to put down the publisher. Please can you do it? (I always take ages to get it right) Please be kind Srbernadette (talk) 01:15, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

I think it would be good for you to practice.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:26, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Please help! sorry - Reference number 2 is a BOOK - I hope I got it right. I have left the other refs - 1 and 7 - as they were because I know I will stuff them up if I change them myself. Does it matter if these refs do not have publishers?

Why don't you learn referencing yourself instead of repeatedly asking for help with it on the help desk? Pppery 02:13, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Moortown, Leeds

I did not do this edit - reference number 1 on this page. Please fix if able. Thanks Srbernadette (talk) 03:13, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Resolved

@Srbernadette: - The title error? All I did was at |title= and add a title. it is not really a huge issue though.. and easily fixable. I "fixed" it though. --Jennica✿ ^{talk / contribs} 05:42, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

To clarify, this simple edit was what Jennica did. What stopped you from doing that, Srbernadette? --David Biddulph (talk) 05:51, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@David Biddulph: - I have offered to help this user on their talk page but they never answer me back, but I've noticed their posts on here asking for this similar thing. Oh well. --Jennica✿ ^{talk / contribs} 10:54, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Rowspans

Hi! The film tables are given in WP:FILMOGRAPHY, but no "rowspan"s are used for the same "year"s in the table. Does this mean that the rowspans shouldn't be used in film tables, or can be used but prefer not to, OR what does it mean? Because I can't see any info about rowspan there. Please reply, thanks! M. Billoo _(talk) 16:02, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Dunno M.Billoo2000. Maybe they wanted to keep it simple, or maybe it's because the table entries sometimes extend a long way vertically and the year would become invisible. Filmographies in articles like James Mason#Filmography use rowspan with no apparent problems. If it bothers you you could ask at the talk page: Noyster (talk), 17:57, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@Noyster: Hi! Thanks for your kind response. This means that there is no kind of any "blockage" for using rowspans, but it was witten at Emma Watson#Filmography that don't add rowspans. Thanks again! M. Billoo _(talk) 18:09, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

OK, having looked myself at the project talkspace I see that this has been repeatedly discussed. The most recent seems to have been here, the conclusion being that rowspan was OK to use in a left-hand "year" column, but not elsewhere - this postdated the adding of that comment to Emma Watson's page: Noyster (talk), 18:32, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind responce! M. Billoo _(talk) 05:23, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

NPP

I have recently been less active on Wikipedia and just learned about the new NPP rights. Firstly I'm a bit confused about the rationale. Doesn't this mean that less people are qualified to review? Secondly, the page about the user right says,

Editors who have not reviewed new pages since 1 January 2016 will no longer be able to do so until they have made a special, but straightforward, application for the right at WP:PERM.

so what about those who have? "Grandfathering" only involves those with more than 200 uncontested patrols, so what if I did less than that? And must I have used the Page Curation Tool to do patrol? I didn't like the look of the curation tool but I think I must have at least did some patrolling since January. Sorry if this sounds stupid but I have been on rather long Wikibreaks lately. The Average Wikipedian (talk) 05:30, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

• @The Average Wikipedian: see the links at Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol/RfC_on_patrolling_without_user_right#Previous_discussions. Basically, a (significant) restriction on who can patrol passed recently. In a nutshell, the consensus was that no patrol is better than substandard patrol. You can still access Special:NewPagesFeed.

As I understand it, the "200 uncontested patrols" refers to ticking the "mark as patrolled" button, so sending to AfD/CSD may not count towards grandfathering. I would expect admins at WP:PERM to be relatively liberal in granting the permission; the problem was barely autoconfirmed accounts jumping it without having read the guidelines. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 13:06, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@Tigraan: Thanks for the reply. I definitely think I did click the mark as patrolled button a couple of times at least, and Twinkle does mark pages as patrolled after tagging AfDs and CSDs. However, what happens if my number of patrols is larger than 0 (which if fallen short of would deprive me of the right to review new pages without applying) and smaller than 200 (which if exceeded would automatically grant me the right)? What happens in this zone? The page suggests that I do no have to apply but at the same time am not automatically granted the right... The Average Wikipedian (talk) 15:50, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

There was some debate about how exactly the number of previous patrols would be counted, but the grandfathering has been done now, and rather than try to re-open the question I think your best course is to read the updated WP:NPP tutorial page, then if you want a New Page Reviewer job and are qualified, apply for it at Requests for permissions: Noyster (talk), 17:40, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@The Average Wikipedian: Maybe the tutorial page is not clear, but from the discussion, I understood fairly clearly that the grandfathering applied to people having made 200+ patrols in the specified time window, hence a number <200 would not qualify. Again, looking at successful requests on Wikipedia:Requests_for_permissions/New_page_reviewer and comparing with your edit stats (and patrol log), I would think you will be granted the permission fairly easily if you just ask. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 18:18, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Succession box generated a second reflist?

Hello all. I tried to move the succession box to the bottom of a page and any way I did it, it would produce a 2nd reflist below it followed by errors. here is the edit I did, which I have since reverted. Can anybody tell me what I did wrong? --Jennica✿ ^{talk / contribs} 05:39, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@Jennica: That would be because you moved it after the reflist in the References section. The reflist displays the refs which appear before it. Any refs without a following reflist are displayed at the end of the article. —teb728 t c 09:31, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Editing image on sandbox

I wish to practice editing an image licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence on my sandbox page. I am very unsure about the regulations and implications regarding this. Firstly, would I be able to edit the image in sandbox without altering the image throughout the enterity of its use on Wikipedia, as I only wish to practice on it. Also, Would there be other issues which I'm not aware of? I have no idea what the licence actually entails in plain English. I will greatly appriciate any advice. Regards, Aardwolf A380 (talk) 05:50, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@Aardwolf A380: There is no way to edit an image on a page. If you need to edit an image, you download the image to your computer, edit it there on your computer, and then re-upload it to Commons (or Wikipedia). The CC-BY-SA license allows anyone to use or modify the image, subject to the restrictions that they credit the copyright owner and that any modification must be licensed under the same license. —teb728 t c 09:46, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks so much for your help! Regards, Aardwolf A380 (talk) 09:57, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

hi

Hello the locations that comes up after starts tracking is incorrect — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.167.119.5 (talk) 08:58, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

I suspect, based on your question, that you found one of our over 6 million articles and thought we were affiliated in some way with that subject. Please note that you are at Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and this page is for asking questions related to using or contributing to Wikipedia itself. Thus, we have no special knowledge about the subject of your question. You can, however, search our vast catalogue of articles by typing a subject into the search field on the upper right side of your screen. If you cannot find what you are looking for, we have a reference desk, divided into various subject areas, where asking knowledge questions is welcome. Best of luck. —teb728 t c 09:47, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Referencing errors on Virginia Conventions

Reference help requested. I am new to using wp:cite web, and received an error notice. I am sorry, I do not know enough about the convention to diagnose my error. Any assistance would be much appreciated, as it seems that I cannot advance my article to GA without conforming to wp:cite book and wp:cite web conventions. Thanks in advance. Thanks, TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 09:50, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

You are trying to use "cite web" for documents published in 1861. I'm not surprised it doesn't work. You could use "cite journal" and include a URL field. Maproom (talk) 10:03, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

It wasn't that which was flagging up an error. The error message was "Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page)", with the words "help page" being in blue to indicate that they were a wikilink, in this case to Help:Cite errors/Cite error included ref. Another editor has subsequently added the missing </ref> tag. --David Biddulph (talk) 10:10, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks to all for prompt responses. I'll try to be more careful. TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 09:39, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

User Name and other stuff

Hello everyone ! I am new around the block and also, even though I consider english my second language and I am quite confort using it I am from Argentina and my native language is spanish (but I want to be here and use this wiki insted of the spanish one) OK here si te thing. I have already done some editing and embarked this weekend in the gathering of an article BIG entreprise for a newbie...Since my endevour is to start the page of AVI KAPLAN (bass of Pentatonix) and I understood that being this a collective plataform would be usefull to start a hull that inmediatly would receive masive editing from around the world, I took as reference KEVIN OLUSOLA page (the other bass and beatbox of Pentatonix whose history is much more alike Avi s adn Pentatonix s page than of course has much info about Avi. rarely there are not many public pics I could use so I spent THE WHOLE week end working against the clock in order to understand to edit in font text and gathering all the reasonable NEW info I could, but I got slashed by censorships about using too much info from Olusola and Pentatonix pages ! Of course I understand it is not personal, so I took the advise and spent the whoe day studying from wiki about how to do it right AND HERE COMES THE MAIN QUESTION since I wrongly I know now changed my user name to a one with a non valid symbol my username disappear so I do not know now if I was banned or rejected by the system. I want to contribute here, by no means I want to do wrong things or vandalize SO HELP !!! Thank you ! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Florencia Pellejero (talk • contribs) 15:40, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

As is explained at User talk:Florencia Pellejero#Wikipedia and copyright, material which you added to Draft:Avi Kaplan had to be removed as it was a copyright violation. I'm not sure what you mean about a user name with a non valid symbol; have you edited under a different username? --David Biddulph (talk) 15:57, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for replying. No, I did not edit under a different ussername. On Monday I tried to shorten it an in Preferences I used an arroba (that I now know is not a valid symbol) I do not know if it has to do with that but now, everytime I sign in my name appears in red and it says that my name is not a username that exist. Florencia Pellejero (talk) 08:28, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

@Florencia Pellejero: When you see a red link in Wikipedia, it (almost always) means that it is a reference to a page that does not exist. So when you see the red link in your signature, it means that you have not created a user page yet. You don't need a user page, but if you want one, click on the red link, enter what you want to appear on your user page in the big text box (you don't have to enter anything), and then click "Save page" at the bottom. —teb728 t c 09:07, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Author

Hi

I am an author and want my name to be appear in India writers list Please hep

Vikrant — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vikrantsantt (talk • contribs) 22:23, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Dear Vikrantsantt. Since I could not find any author/writer on WP with the name "Vikrant"; I am guessing that you mean this list here: [1]? If so, this is not a "list" per say, but assembled links to article pages of notable Indian Writers on WP. If you are a notable Indian writer, chances are you would already be on this list. You must meet certain requirements as a subject to meet guidelines of notability for inclusion on WP; see here: [2]. If you feel you are a notable subject, you may "request an article" here: [3]; however, WP discourages subjects to create articles on themselves or partake in their creation due to "conflict of interest": [4]. My advice: if you are indeed a notable Indian Writer, it is best to simply wait until someone creates an article about you. Best of luck. Maineartists (talk) 23:22, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Search for bare URLs

Hi, is it possible to search all wikitext in the article namespace to fish out bare URLs in references, aka search for <ref>[ or ]</ref>? Icebob99 (talk) 23:23, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Here's a simple https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%2F%5C<ref%5C>https%3F%2F&title=Special:Search

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:11, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

If you use AWB you could identify pages with bare URL refs using the regex <ref[^>]*>\s*\[?(https?://[^][<>\s"]+)\]?\s*</ref> (CAUTION: do not run this against all pages; it will kill the server and return more hits than you can use.) If you want to see a partial list of such pages that I have been working through, take a look at User:Gronk Oz/Bare URLs. Feel free to fix them, and take them off this list when they are done. --Gronk Oz (talk) 00:26, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

@Icebob99: hope you're using the reflinks tool! --Jennica✿ ^{talk / contribs} 11:03, 23 November 2016 (UTC)