Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2022 November 4

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November 4

am I violating canvassing

I don't know if this is the right place to do this, just let me know if I'm doing something wrong.

I'm confused about Wikipedia's canvassing rules, I've been pinging a lot of people on discussions just to get responses, and people have been saying that I've been canvassing, I read Wikipedia's canvassing rules and it said nothing about pinging a lot of people, I have done this in a lot of discussions [1], [2]. I want to know if this is okay cuz I don't want to get blocked. I just want a tutorial, can you tell me if I'm doing right or wrong, and if there's any other incidences were people who did canvassing get blocked, cuz I feel like I'm breaking a rule I don't know, I really want to be taught it, just so I can learn from my mistakes, cuz I don't want to be blocked. 4me689 (talk) 03:46, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi, pinging many people on a discussion goes against the "Spamming" rule of canvassing. This is seen as a way to get more people to vote/decide in said discussion, thus being favored to you since you were the one who mentioned them. It's made even worse if the people you pinged are not involved in the discussion. You said you are pinging people just to get responses, and this is why it's bad: because you're using it to get responses and not to start a thoughtful discussion. Also, it can be viewed as annoying. To avoid being seen as a canvassing rulebreaker, ping less people. I hope this helps. - 𝘾𝙤𝙤𝙡𝙢𝙖𝙣2917 (talkpage) 11:26, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Personally, I don't have an issue with this - I find it to be better than pinging specific people who you know a certain viewpoint. Pinging people at random is a bit of a pain - usually people don't mind so much if you ping people who have already taken part of a discussion or a parallel discussion. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 11:37, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi folks. I was planning to create a help request. If your looking for "input", for intellectual discussion, for example on a talk page or an RFC, then pinging lots of folks is ok. But if your looking to ping lots of folk where you looking for "support" for a particular action, or for a particular political point your trying to make, for example at Afd or an RFC, then that would be canvassing. Your going around asking for help to push in a particular direction, is not cool. scope_creep^Talk 12:09, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

We Bear Bears 2

There is no proof that We Bare Bears 2 is happening because it is a fake, because the references are from three years ago for announcements for We Bare Bears: The Movie in production and We Baby Bears in development, and there is no way that Crunchyroll ever teams up with Cartoon Network. 2600:4040:5BE1:3300:F9FC:D1F4:AE41:D7DE (talk) 04:25, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm the culprit here. I restore the above editor's removal of the We Bear Bears 2 addition to List of Cartoon Network Studios productions. I was mislead by the pseudo-sources. My apologies! Cheers Adakiko (talk) 04:51, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

New section

New section links are broken with Javascript off. Elephas X. Maximus (talk) 08:14, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Elephas X. Maximus: If you have JavaScript off then disable "Enable quick topic adding" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:01, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Donations/poor practice in reporting and or presentation.

I don't donate to you because you are not partial in your publishing. When posting something like "they shared false information" but don't post any proof of that, you lose credibility. See the notes under Kari Lake for reference. Garbage reporting. Get better and I'll support your cause. 199.96.122.147 (talk) 11:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

If sources in the Kari Lake article are not being summarized accurately, please detail the specific errors on Talk:Kari Lake. If the sources are summarized accurately, but you disagree with what they say, you will need to take that up with the sources themselves.

Donating or withholding donations has no impact on article content, as donations are collected by the Wikimedia Foundation, that operates the computers Wikipedia is on. 331dot (talk) 12:00, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Searching page history

Is it possible to discover when a word/phrase/sentence was deleted if key words don't appear in the Edit summary? Mcljlm (talk) 11:58, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Mcljlm you can use Wikiblame for this purpose. – robertsky (talk) 12:02, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I posted here after using Wikiblame but getting "0 versions found". I searched twice, at first ticking/checking "Look for removal of text (binary only)", "Ignore minor changes (experimental)" and "Force searching for wikitext" and then without "Ignore minor changes (experimental)". Should I have searched in a different way?

Why is that the tool's name? Mcljlm (talk) 12:21, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Mcljlm It's called Wikiblame because it is often used to find out which editor made a particular change. For the purpose you want, I would suggest using just the less-common words from the phrase you want to check and take the default options. Since you are looking for removal of those words, you do need to use the "Look for removal of text (binary only)" option. If you still have no luck, please specify the article and the phrase whose removal you are trying to find so we can help further. Mike Turnbull (talk) 12:47, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

A few times someone has given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jibril_Rajoub as the source for Rajoub having an account at Bank Leumi. Since the current text doesn't include the word leumi (or any other bank account) it must have been deleted, assuming it was once there. Mcljlm (talk) 15:10, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Mcljlm, there are several possibilities. Someone could be incorrectly giving Jibril Rajoub as the source for Rajoub having an account at Bank Leumi. The content could have been added, then removed and the revisions could have been hidden (showing as a struck through date and time in the edit history). Finally, the information could have been added and removed, but not detected by the tool. I think the last scenario is the least likely. TSventon (talk) 18:29, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Is there any certain way of finding it? Mcljlm (talk) 18:46, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

In scenario three you could check all 180 edits, except the hidden ones. Obviously if the information was never added or has been hidden, you would not find it. TSventon (talk) 19:21, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Well, this can be quite a job, but it's still less than going through all edits. What I've done before: I go to the last edit on the first page. If the edit I want is already there, I go to the next page and check the last one there. When I finally get to one that DOESN'T show the edit I want to find, I go about half way up the page and look. If the edit is there, I go about half way down the bottom half of the page; if it isn't I go about half way up the top half. Keep subdividing, and at some point (to be decided by you) it becomes easier to start checking next or previous edits. Uporządnicki (talk) 19:37, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Mcljlm: Binary search doesn't examine all revisions. If it ever finds both a revision with and without the text then it tracks down the removal by repeatedly halving the possible interval. But if it never finds the text then it doesn't try every revision to see if it was added and removed quickly somewhere in a long page history. Linear search examines each revision in an interval but the tool limits the interval size to 50 revisions for performance reasons, and search for removal doesn't allow linear search at all. You could use linear to search 50 revisions at a time for addition of the text but it's harder to make separate searches and it's a way to circumvent a performance limit on the server making the searches. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:22, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Mcljlm Having read the background, I think the most likely explanation is that Wikipedia never had such information and even if it did WP:Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Mike Turnbull (talk) 21:50, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Mcljlm: I used (linear) Wikiblame to check all revisions of Jibril Rajoub (except the suppressed ones, of course), and none have leumi within them. - R. S. Shaw (talk) 01:01, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Blockquote issue

I've made a bit of a mess of Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria#21 June - I added a load of wikilinks and now the blockquote template markup appears. Are the wikilinks the problem or have I done something else wrong? Alansplodge (talk) 14:46, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Looks like you forgot to close one of the wikilinks, which caused this. ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 14:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Marvellous! Thank you most kindly. Alansplodge (talk) 15:01, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Resolved

How do I get a Wikipedia page as an actor?

Hi there my name is Richard Price a uk actor I do a lot of work on a uk show called Doctor Who I have a verified Twitter @richard_price2 and also on IMDb I have no clue when it comes to Wikipedia as to how it works and wondered how you get a page on the site?

Can anyone help? Or does anyone write submissions etc? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C7:83A2:BD01:1063:7341:AFB:694E (talk) 15:12, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

We don't have pages, we have articles, typically written by independent editors unconnected with the subject in any way. If you meet the special Wikipedia definition of a notable actor or a notable person, someone will eventually take note of your career and choose to write about you. That is how the vast majority of articles are created- trying to force the issue is not usually successful. Please read about how an article is not necessarily desirable. 331dot (talk) 15:20, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I looked you up just now! You are indeed a Cyberman; I'm impressed (truly!).

That said, yes, IMDb does sound impressive; it did to me for a long time. But now I'm on IMDb, too. I had a secondary, but significant, recurring, speaking role in an independent movie. I play a one of a race of multi-colored, humanoid beings; I'm a member of a tribe that believes in going around completely naked. As far as I know, the movie only ever appeared on Vimeo.com. It was there for a few years, and then just a short time ago, Vimeo yanked it and the site on which it appeared--presumably because I was running around naked too much.

Facetiousness aside, other people who answer are probably going to explain why IMDb is not considered a reliable source by Wikipedia. Uporządnicki (talk) 15:36, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

WP:IMDB explains it fairly well. 199.208.172.35 (talk) 16:30, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi Richard. Given how many articles Wikipedia has on Doctor Who, including The Power of the Doctor in which you are mentioned as part of the cast, it is probably only a matter of time until someone writes an article about you, especially if your contributions are mentioned in reliable secondary sources. You are allowed to create a draft if you wish and can be bothered to learn how to do so: use the WP:AFC process (explained at that link) but beware that writing acceptable articles is quite tough, particularly the need to meet Wikipedia's specialist definition of a notable actor! Mike Turnbull (talk) 22:16, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

A lot of solid actors, whether legit, TV or film, work for a lifetime without ever becoming high-profile enough to merit an article in a global encyclopedia such as this one. (And yes, I too have an IMDb entry; big deal.) --Orange Mike | Talk 00:06, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Copying articles from Wikipedia without attribution

Hello! I noticed that someone copied a Wikipedia article into Draft:Sandbox without proper attribution. Could this be considered a copyvio or no? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:28, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Why are you policing a sandbox? AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:34, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm not really. However I do know that certain policies do still apply to the sandbox so I just wanted to know if it was something that was allowed or not. I don't exactly remember how I came across the page again (I removed it from my watchlist for a while and then I probably reverted something there for a valid reason and it got added back) but I wanted to make sure as copyright still applies to the sandbox per WP:NOCOPYRIGHT (which is on WP:BADSAND) ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:40, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Draft:Sandbox is cleared automatically. Nothing is going to stay there long. If someone copies a Wikipedia article there, so what? The warning on WP:BADSAND presumably refers to content copy-pasted from external sources. Unattributed copying of Wikipedia content only becomes an issue if it is either in article space, or is liable to remain in other spaces for some time. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:48, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Ah alright sounds good. I'm not all that familiar with how copyright works regarding copying stuff from Wikipedia within Wikipedia itself. I guess really the only harm would be the sandbox getting categorized into categories it doesn't belong to but most of the time as you said that's not a big issue. (really the only time I think it would be an issue would be if it gets placed in a category that tells the cleaner bot to ignore the page, and even then editors themselves can still undo that) ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:52, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for asking the question, I'm not on the same page as AndyTheGrump. As a regular at CopyPatrol, reports of issues requiring investigation show up involving the sandbox regularly. It is not uncommon that edits to that page include copyright violations. I am aware that the sandbox is cleared automatically, but when I note a copyright violation, I typically perform an RD1. Per WP:BEANS, I don't plan to elaborate. That said, copying an existing article is less serious because it is simply an attribution problem, and that is likely to go away, but I don't want anyone left with the impression that copyright issues in the sandbox can simply be ignored. Thanks for asking the question, I'm sorry the response was so dismissive. S Philbrick(Talk) 23:48, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia seems to take a more lenient view, suggesting that such internal copy-pasting can be dealt with via nothing more dramatic that an edit summery added after the fact: "pages that contain unattributed text do not normally need to be deleted". And that applies even to stuff that isn't being deleted every few hours, at maximum. If there is even a technical violation of copyright involved in the sandbox edit, it seems too minor to be worth bothering about, in my opinion. Nobody is going to court over such trivia. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:14, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Susannah Scaroni

She should be a famous person listed for the town of she is from in the state of Washington, USA. 70.57.201.221 (talk) 15:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Does she have an article? If not then this won't happen unless a consensus is reached among editors to include her in the article. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 16:00, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

She does have an article (as you could easily have verified). I've added her to the list at Burns, Oregon.   Maproom (talk) 16:30, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Glitch on Pages

Hello, there’s a bug I’ve found on a few pages which is present in the page I’ve just created, 2023 British Touring Car Championship. This bug means that all sections of the page are grouped under the first section, and I can see no issue in the source code and no way of resolving it. Does anyone know how to fix this? DRYT.Motorsport (talk) 17:15, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@DRYT.Motorsport, are you saying that the article doesn't have a table of contents? That's not a bug - TOCs don't show up until an article has at least four headings. (WP:TOC) 199.208.172.35 (talk) 17:18, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@199.208.172.35, No, is it not an issue on the page for you? There are multiple sections, titled Teams and drivers, Race calendar, References and External links, yet the latter three don’t show up as expandable sections on their own, the first section has to be expanded in order to view the others, which shouldn’t be the case. I’ll add that I am using the mobile version, it is not apparent on the desktop version. DRYT.Motorsport (talk) 17:28, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

 Fixed. One of the tables in the first named section wasn't closed properly. Victor Schmidt (talk) 17:57, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Capitalization problem

There is a Wiki page for the English drum and bass record producer "dBridge". But in "Category:English_drum_and_bass_musicians" he appears as "DBridge". This causes my app to include two entries for the same person. I cannot find the source of "DBridge" to correct it. Where is it? Thanks! Ron (talk) 17:29, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Vossron: Interesting question. I don't think it can be fixed. All articles start with a capital letter, but there is a trick that lets some display it as lower case, such as on IPhone and DBridge. But, the article actually does start with upper case, so thats what appears in the category. The same way that Category:Mobile_phones_introduced_in_2007 lists IPhone and not iPhone. RudolfRed (talk) 17:40, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Vossron: RudolfRed is right. DBridge contains {{lowercase title}} to display dBridge on the article itself but it cannot be displayed in other places like categories and search results. It's the same for all 4000 articles using {{lowercase title}}, and others which don't use this specific template. What does "my app" refer to? PrimeHunter (talk) 20:56, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Vossron:, @PrimeHunter:, @RudolfRed: Now, this IS interesting! I'm not sure how relevant this is, but it hearkens back to my earliest days here, when I was doing massive edits as an IP user (YEARS ago). I was almost exclusively reorganizing Category pages, mostly for lists of species within a genus. In those days, Category pages used to alphabetize capital and lower case letters in separate alphabets on the page; for reasons I won't take time here to explain, that made some particularly large categories much easier to navigate. And something I read suggested that the system was designed that way. But then one day, all my beautiful Category pages started interfiling capital and lower case entries. I inquired everywhere I could find. But some answers I got seemed to say that this thing that I saw as a neat and useful feature was regarded by others as a glitch that had finally been fixed. Uporządnicki (talk) 14:49, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

“my app” is an iOS app I am writing based on Wikipedia data. Ron (talk) 04:23, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Editing a company page

Hi, our company has a wikipedia page which we did not create. Can we update the page and correct inaccuracies directly? 2001:8F8:1129:DD42:B710:93DC:6B34:B9DE (talk) 18:20, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I am afraid the answer is no. First, it is Wikipedia's article about your company, not "a Wikipedia page". Second, Wikipedia's Terms of Service mandate that Paid contributions must be disclosed. Third, editing the article about a Company you are a staff member of triggers what we call a Conflict of interest. Therefore, you are generally discouraged from editing the article directly and are asked to submit edit requests instead. Victor Schmidt (talk) 18:26, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

(ec) Yes you can. You can update facts (not opinions) directly, using a reliable source. Using a company page may require recognizing the source as the company and not a third party. You must also say you are paid by the company to edit the article.

If there is an issue, for example highlighting your failures too much or inaccurate style, make an edit request instead. For the full policy see WP:COI. Sungodtemple (talk) 18:28, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Sungodtemple It is highly preferred that COI editors not directly edit articles in most cases. They should make edit requests. 331dot (talk) 22:22, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Material Design's release dates are going haywire

There's a lot of red text saying that a parameter is wrong. Is this a problem with the wikidata formatting? How could I solve it? Aaron Liu (talk) 19:41, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Aaron Liu, I took a crack at it. It appears to be an issue with Wikidata. When the page Template:Latest stable software release/Material Design, transcluded onto Material Design, was created, there was only one stable release of the software listed on Wikidata. The template took release dates from Wikidata using Template:Wikidata, and that was fine at the time with only one stable release. However, more updates have been released since then, so the article now lists multiple dates.

Template:Latest stable software release/Material Design uses Template:Start date and age, which parses a date and calculates how long ago it was. The use of Template:Wikidata returned multiple dates, as there were multiple stable releases, so Template:Start date and age broke, not being able to parse multiple dates.

I don't know how to fix this, presumably by separating the releases into different sections. The original creator appears to be taking a Wikibreak. Sungodtemple (talk) 21:56, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I managed to fix it.

It appears that the issue was actually with the wikidata entries. There was a bot that automatically added releases from GitHub to the wikidata page. The repositories were also specified on the wikidata page. However, even though each repository's platform was specified, the bot didn't add them to the releases entries. The issue was fixed after I added the platform to releases. Aaron Liu (talk) 14:37, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Expanded template

How come at Bertelsmann#External links, the corresponding template is still rendered collapsed, even though |state=expanded is set? Hildeoc (talk) 19:57, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Hildeoc: Some templates falsely claim to support a state parameter. The claim is made by adding {{collapsible option}} but the parameter also has to actually be coded. Гармонический Мир removed it [3] when changing the default. I have restored it.[4] PrimeHunter (talk) 20:38, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Dear PrimeHunter! Thank you so much – once again! You're always a great help. All the best, Hildeoc (talk) 20:53, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

WiKifx

Hi Folks, I have just researched what is being said about a company I am involved with. I came across a site named WiKifx and assumed it would be upfront and unbiased and connected to this site. However that was not my experience! They are a scamming company giving false reviews on companies that do not pay them to give reviews or vice versa. Not only that, they offer a paid service to resolve any issues you may think you have and with th company I am involved in, NovaTechfx there are no issues that the company do not and can not resolve. This is clearly a scamming site operating under the pretext of being affiliated to WiKipedia. 92.1.219.162 (talk) 19:58, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

We can't do anything here in this forum about scammers, unfortunately. You might want to contact the Wikimedia Foundation's legal department (I believe you want the first address there). Remember, scammers prey on those who are desperate for Wikipedia articles and haven't considered the consequences of having one. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{a little blue Bori} 20:06, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

A wiki is a type of website with collaborative editing. The concept is older than Wikipedia and lots of unrelated websites have "wiki" in their name. I'm not sure WikiFX actually has a wiki but it's their chosen name and nothing the Wikimedia Foundation can do something about unless they claim or imply to be affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:26, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

That website does not make any claims that it is affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation. Their logo is completely different and the appearance of the website is different. "Wiki" is not a trademark and anyone is free to use it. Wikileaks, for example, is a well-known website that is not affiliated with Wikipedia. Cullen328 (talk) 20:33, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't think the term is technically copyrightable/trademarkable either since it's a general use term (I think it's why Google does not want you to say that you "googled something") ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 20:35, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Education (1920-1970)

I am trying to develop a timeline (1920-1970) for events that could effect Education (K-12) in the United States. So I need to identify WW1 and WW2 Korean War Viet Nam Wars but also innovations such as computers or digitization of education. So I would appreciate any assistance to get me in the right direction. Dr Paul Hollandsworth 2600:8805:3200:110:6D76:59D7:B14F:990C (talk) 21:37, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

You're better off asking at the reference desks, Dr. Hollandsworth. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{a little blue Bori} 21:40, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Events that could "effect education"? Where did you get your doctorate, Paul? --Orange Mike | Talk 03:38, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Woke U, where thinking is regarded as an immoral waste of time! Uporządnicki (talk) 14:52, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

My comment above was uncalled for; I apologize. I myself have gone back to things I've written, and discovered to my horror that in a moment of brain short circuit, I wrote some blatant illiteracy.