Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2023 November 12

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November 12

Article review plus input on possible vandalism. What to do?

Hello, after reverting a possible vandalism link insertion on ZeroGPT, I noticed suspect and false citations (https://www.sociobits.org/2023/03/gpt-zero-a-tool-to-recognise-texts-written-by-ai/12260) I flagged for deletion but think it would be better if the article was moved to drafts.

Also, this user User:Mackgrav seems to have add a link to a competing service (https://hix.ai/gpt4 |website=HIX.ai), rather than an actual reputable and reliable source. I am new here but trying to really help this community and would like advice. I have warned the user. Comintell (talk) 03:11, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Removing the link and the message you put on their talk page seem reasonable to me. PiGuy3 (talk) 03:14, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Comintell (talk) 03:27, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I think the message is reasonable, Comintell, but please be aware that vandalism has a specific meaning in Wikipedia: it means editing intended to damage Wikipedia. Promotional editing, even spamming, is not necessarily vandalism: they may be well-intentioned, but just not understand quite what Wikipedia is. ColinFine (talk) 19:12, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

The ZeroGPT page seems to be rige with hoax and vandalism. Am I crazy? Could you review it? Comintell (talk) 01:19, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

What's going on with the ref desk archives?!

I tried to look up some questions that were supposed to be archived from early November, but they were nowhere to be found -- the archives only run until October 31, and there is nothing after that point (even though questions from early November were supposed to be archived automatically)! What's going on, and when can we expect these questions to be recovered??? 2601:646:9882:46E0:C195:DC40:D019:40A6 (talk) 09:01, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Pinging scs.  --Lambiam 10:09, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Except for the Computing section, where there was nothing yet to be archived, the November 2023 archives had been created, but, for some reason unknown to me, the links to these archives had not been made accessible through page Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives. I have now added them (manually, on page Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Answered questions).  --Lambiam 10:37, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I see now that they were always added by User:CiaPan, not by a bot as I expected. The entries are actually already present but commented out in the HTML code. The "adding" consists of the undoing of the commenting-out of the entries in the column for a new month. Rather than each month undoing the commenting-out for one column, it may be easier, when adding a section for the new year, not to comment out any months. The links to the month archives will then initially all be red, but I think this is harmless.  --Lambiam 11:07, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that part of the archiving task has always been manual.

Oblivious me, I didn't even know who was taking care of it. Thanks to @CiaPan: and now @Lambiam: for their assistance. —scs (talk) 12:31, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a million to all 3 of you! 2601:646:9882:46E0:14C6:F9B5:5479:2A27 (talk) 03:17, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

@Lambiam, Scs, and PrimeHunter: Thank you all for taking care of the archives index. Hopefully I will continue updating it with the next month turn. CiaPan (talk) 13:23, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Cecaelia

Hi, there are some instances in en.wiki of the fan word Cecaelia, indicating a fictional human-octopus hybrid. Is it acceptable?-- Carnby (talk) 10:11, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@Carnby It will depend on context. Taking the Chesley Awards, it seems an artist called his work that. Assuming that's correct, what problem do you see? The List_of_hybrid_creatures_in_folklore#Modern_fiction example seems fine too IMO, though I haven't checked the source. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:21, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

In Ursula (The Little Mermaid) and Descendants 2 it doesn't seem correct, IMHO. The characters weren't called this way.-- Carnby (talk) 10:30, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I see 3 uses in the Ursula article. IMO, the Ursula_(The_Little_Mermaid)#Part_of_Your_World:_A_Twisted_Tale one is ok-ish, but it doesn't justify the other 2, the use by Braswell doesn't justify the use by WP in this case. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:52, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Apparently, there's also Octopan (non-RS source). Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:16, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cecaelia and Wiktionary:cecaelia.  --Lambiam 10:42, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I am reminded of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Great spider. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:46, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Scylla is probably related. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:58, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I want to ask how to make an information box for weapon.

Hi Wikipedia editors, and administrators too, in the article SIG MCX Spear, there is no summary box. How should I insert the code to keep the box appear. Thanks. 2001:EE0:4BC2:9B40:8C60:E4FE:CDA3:8239 (talk) 11:28, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

See Template:Infobox weapon.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 11:37, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Right Sidebar (Quicknav to Wikiquote/Commons) has disappeared?

How come the right sidebar has vanished? Is that permanent or something that is merely optional, wherein each user could opt to show/hide it as they choose? I noticed it when I was on actors'/films' articles, and didn't have quick links on the side to jump over to the Media/Commons or Quotes. Please let me know. Thanks. --Cinemaniac86^Talk_Stalk 11:52, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@Cinemaniac86: Look for a menu saying "Tools" at the top right. It has a "move to sidebar" option. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:05, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Aha! Thank you @PrimeHunter, you rock. Enjoy your day. Rather, enjoy my birthday! --Cinemaniac86^Talk_Stalk 17:28, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

my hotmail account

I cannot get hotmail email as I normally do. I ask google for hotmail and it usually goes to Outlook.com I then press ok and I then fill in my email and password as requested and then I access my emails. Today I am taken to wikipedia with a load of waffle as far as I'm concerned and I don't appear to have an way to get to my emails! Can you please explain what is going on. thank you 2A02:C7C:3E29:C200:2F7:9DA7:E483:F1E2 (talk) 12:41, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Google search results give a high position to the Wikipedia article Outlook.com which is an encyclopedia article about outlook.com. Try the actual website https://outlook.com. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:58, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Searching Wikipedia using wildcards to find people with certain initials

I'm interested in finding a list of notable people with certain initials. I've been all over the search FAQ's, and I understand * stands for any string of characters not at the beginning of a word. But searching on "B* C*" does not give anything useful. Any suggestions?

71.214.71.49 (talk) 15:54, 12 November 2023 (UTC)Erich

Special:Search does support regular expressions, but my poor old brain has forgotten too much about them to provide you with a functional search string. Someone at WP:RD/C will probably have an answer for you. Folly Mox (talk) 17:33, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi Erich. The search box in the default vector 22 skin is pretty clever. You can just type in the initials you are looking for with spaces in between (and no * character) and you'll be likely to find the correct biography if it exists. So "A J B" for example gives ten suggestions. Mike Turnbull (talk) 17:46, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

The search box has some limitations which makes it poorly suited for this. Here is instead a search at https://grep.toolforge.org. It's for all articles and cannot be limited to people. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:44, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter I tried your link and aborted it after it had run for over a minute without returning anything. Is the code correct? (My suggestion may be dirty but it's quick!) Mike Turnbull (talk) 15:07, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

@Michael D. Turnbull: It works for me in Firefox and took 18s. It may depend on server load at the time. I haven't tried it without limit=on to only show 100 results. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:52, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Still no result after another try (over 3 minutes elapsed), using Edge. Maybe it doesn't like people in the UK! Anyway, don't worry, I don't actually need the answer and no doubt the OP can find something that does work for them from one or other of our responses. Mike Turnbull (talk) 16:07, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Chinese Politburo Articles Redux

I raised this issue on October 31 and was advised to take it to "the talk page" before pursuing dispute resolution. Since it relates to an entire series of articles there is no particular "the talk page" on which to debate the matter on an article-content level. The user TheUzbek in recent months undertook to start Politburo Standing Committee articles for each iteration thereof and simultaneously delete any hint of which members of any successive Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party served on its standing committee. Having attempted to restore a bare bolding of the names of PSC members in one instance and been promptly reverted with a comment that there was no reason to include this information I mentioned the matter here. As I strongly believe that the inclusion of this information is absolutely standard (I have almanacs dating back to the 1970s and Statesman's Yearbooks from the 1990s that never fail to indicate which members of a Politburo are in its inner circle when a list is given) and being forced to follow a link to a PSC article for any hint is a nuisance, days later I went through and put back the bolding on the 16th/17th/18th/19th/20th Politburos and when he started reverting me posted to TheUzbek's talk page. TheUzbek responded that I was trying to force my opinion against a consensus that began when he deleted the always-previously-present information from the articles.

I can not see any way the Politburo articles are improved by enforcing the lack of any indication of which members are on the Standing Committee and believe they are better with it included. The "third opinion" option on "Dispute resolution" appears geared to single articles rather than series. Can someone else please look over the issue in toto? 71.105.190.227 (talk) 16:49, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

71, I'm looking into this now. It is difficult to open a discoverable discussion when the topic is spread out over multiple pages, so I'll try going "one level up" to find a good spot for it. I have some separate notes about the formatting on the Politburo pages that I'd like to bring up with the user who has undertaken the tabulation formatting on these pages. I'll notify around whenever I've posted the discussion opener. Folly Mox (talk) 17:30, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I left out any mention of my own stylistic concerns with table formatting for now, and opened a discussion at Talk:Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party § Should Standing Committee members be indicated on individual Politburo articles? Hopefully a consensus can be found. Folly Mox (talk) 18:37, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Archive

How can I create an archive to store all my discussions? They are beginning to be too many. JackkBrown (talk) 17:16, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@JackkBrown: Hi there! See Help:Archiving a talk page. GoingBatty (talk) 17:22, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Help:Archiving (plain and simple) Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:13, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Transcluding tables

Is there a way to transclude only a certain amount of rows of a table from a different page? I doubt it, but it would be useful if that was possible, so I thought I would ask. PARAKANYAA (talk) 20:28, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Not really. Transclusion inserts a whole page in another. You could in principle put the rest of the table in <noinclude> ... </noinclude> tags and include the whole page, but I'm not sure how that would interact with table formatting.

You could also possible cut and past the part of the table that was to be transcluded into a template, which could get transcluded in both places; but again, I'm not sure how that would interact with table formatting, and it would make editing the source page harder. ColinFine (talk) 20:44, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I think labeled section transclusion should be able to handle individual table rows without breaking the formatting of the source table or destination table, but may be confusing both to implement and to edit afterwards.

Doing the "shared rows" template thing mentioned just above would work as well, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if such a template ended up at TfD within a few months, and then substed back into the destination articles. Folly Mox (talk) 21:03, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

First reference: "Error 404. Page not found. Go back to the homepage"

On the pecorino sardo page, the first reference does not work. JackkBrown (talk) 21:02, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Archive retrieved. Folly Mox (talk) 21:06, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@Folly Mox: thank you very much for this. JackkBrown (talk) 21:10, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

JackkBrown, you can find archives for deadlinked sources by following the instructions at WP:LINKROT. I have almost no success with archives other than Internet Archive, so I'll usually just try that one. I copy the dead url, go to https://web.archive.org/, and paste the link into the search bar. Usually, there's an archive, because URLs inside citation templates on Wikipedia are added to Internet Archive by an automated process. Most of the time, the first available archive will have the content that supports the article prose citing it. Sometimes, the earliest archive will already be a 404 or usurped domain, so the citation can be tagged with {{dead link}}. Very rarely, you'll need to check the |access-date= of the deadlinked citation to determine which archive snapshot is appropriate to source the content. Dead links shouldn't just be removed: please tag them instead if you're unable to fix them or find an alternative source. Folly Mox (talk) 21:13, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Putting in a external ref when the URL has spaces

Specifically, a page in the Russian Wikipedia: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Андросов, Валерий Владимирович. The external link machine assumes that "Валерий Владимирович", coming after a space, is a comment. The spaces are necessary. Squeezing them out or replacing them with underlines doesn't work. This is for a talk page, to be used inline, so {{translated page}} can't be used (altho it surely contains code to handle this), and doesn't point to any template that could. Herostratus (talk) 21:54, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Have you tried replacing them with %20? That's the standard for URL escaping. Folly Mox (talk) 22:17, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, what you're actually looking for is [[:ru:Андросов, Валерий Владимирович]], which produces ru:Андросов, Валерий Владимирович. Folly Mox (talk) 22:19, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

H:IW for the deets. Folly Mox (talk) 22:22, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@Herostratus: Please always link pages where you have a problem. I don't know the circumstances or what you mean by "The external link machine" but underscores work fine in all situations I know: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Андросов,_Валерий_Владимирович. %20 also works: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Андросов,%20Валерий%20Владимирович. A wikilink can keep the spaces: ru:Андросов, Валерий Владимирович. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:55, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Well boy howdy, you're right. I must have made a typo or something when I put in the underscores. Oof, sorry for bothering you. Carry on, and fear no evil. The page in question is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Valery Androsov. Herostratus (talk) 01:44, 13 November 2023 (UTC)