Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 December 11

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December 11[edit]

Change name on listing for Q (music video director)[edit]

Hi,

I wanted to change my name to "Director Q(Quattro)" instead of "Q (music video director)" are you able to do this for me?

Thank you —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lafilmguru (talk • contribs) 00:22, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The title is ambiguous, therefore should have a parenthesized phrase describing the subject. It should rarely include proper nouns. Also, we do not use honorifics in titles, as you suggested using "Director". ZooFari 00:53, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
You can change the title of an article by using the Move tab. However, Q (music video director) has been nominated for speedy deletion as it does not establish the importance of the subject, and besides that it is unacceptable to Wikipedia in tone and in lack of sources. Furthermore, if you are Q (as it appears from your question above) you should not be editing the article in the first place, as it is a conflict of interest.
Sorry for this, but Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a place for self-publicity. --ColinFine (talk) 01:04, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If however, you wish to change your user name, then WP:CHU is the place to go. You might find that they recommend simply abandoning this account and starting another. --AndrewHowse (talk) 01:38, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It's not his user name that's the issue, Andrew: that's 'Lafilmguru', and seems unexceptionable to me. It's the article itself: you've nominated it for speedy, though Jayron's declined and suggested WP:AFD, and others have added other cleanup templates; but only from this question here does WP:COI become apparent. --ColinFine (talk) 08:13, 11 December 2009 (UTC) [reply]
I agree with most of that, Colin, but I only made my preceding comment when I looked at the username change request sitting on his userpage. When he says "my anme" in the first sentence of the OP, that's conceivably ambiguous. --AndrewHowse (talk) 16:19, 11 December 2009 (UTC) [reply]
Right. I hadn't seen that. --ColinFine (talk) 16:42, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That spam's long overdue for an AfD anyway; could somebody start one (don't have the tools here)? --Orange Mike | Talk 15:03, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Now playing at AfD. --AndrewHowse (talk) 16:27, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

How do you link to a category?[edit]

Resolved
 –  – ukexpat (talk) 04:18, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

How do you make a wikilink to a category, rather than adding the page to that category? Samwb123T-C-@ 03:47, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Put a colon. [[:Category:Tests]] will give you Category:Tests. Tim Song (talk) 03:58, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. Samwb123T-C-@ 04:12, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Search box drop-down: ordering?[edit]

Does anyone know what determines the order of suggestions that drop down when you start typing in the search box? -- saberwyn 05:43, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea, but you might find clues by following links from:
such as:
Why do you ask? --Teratornis (talk) 09:03, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Just curiosity, stemming from the fact that when I type "HMAS" into the left-hand search box, the results come up in the following order:
  1. HMAS
  2. HMAS Melbourne (R21)
  3. HMAS Sydney (D48)
  4. HMAS Creswell
  5. HMAS Sydney (R17)
  6. HMAS Perth (D29)
  7. HMAS Australia (D84)
  8. HMAS Albatross (air station)
  9. HMAS Canberra (D33)
  10. HMAS Cerberus, Victoria
There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to why these results appear, and in this order. Same in other searches: the ten suggested results are not alphabetical order, and it doesn't appear to be based on the article's assessment or importance rating. -- saberwyn 00:51, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe the order the articles were created?  Ronhjones  (Talk) 01:02, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It is based on number of links to articles and if it perfect match or not. --rainman (talk) 01:13, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Creating a Topic[edit]

I am the IT Administrator for a non-profit organization that has approx. 40 major US Companies as it's members. We are a community of licensors who share best practices for protecting, promoting and enhancing brand integrity. Our visions is to continuously improve brand licensing. This company is less than 10 years old but half of its membership is Fortune 500 and we would like to list our company, its mission, vision and accomplishments. How can I create a page for this company and have sole responsibility for it's content and modifications. If necessary telephone contact with myself and the company Executive Director is possible if necessary for verification of authenticity. Please let me know the best way to do this. I can also provide a link to our main website. Thank you! —Preceding unsigned comment added by DakotaSurfer (talk • contribs) 06:38, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You should not create articles for organizations you are affiliated with. See WP:COI. Also, you have no control over any content you post to Wikipedia, see WP:OWN. The upshot is there is no practical way to do what you are asking. If your organization is notable, then someone who has no connection to your organization will likely create an article about it someday. If your organization does not meet the qualifications listed here, or most importantly, the qualifications listed here, then it is not notable enough to merit an article at Wikipedia. --Jayron32 06:44, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Problem accessing in site[edit]

Hi,

Am not able to access the site en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–10_UEFA_Champions_League

since the HYPHEN is there between 2009 and 10, its getting an error. Please let me know how to access this link.—— —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.242.16.14 (talk) 06:59, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It works fine for me. Try following this wikilink: 2009–10 UEFA Champions League. -- saberwyn 07:02, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Also note that Google search is pretty robust against funny characters and so on. Try this search:
I bookmarked a Google search on Wikipedia in my browser toolbar, and I use it to look up articles on Wikipedia because Google is faster and usually less annoying than any other method I know. Wikipedia's built-in search has improved, but I still like Google better. --Teratornis (talk) 09:09, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The problem arises because the character in the title is not a hyphen (-) but something else (–), It looks line an &ndash; to me. Is there a policy about using such characters in article titles? Jan1naD (talk • contrib) 09:59, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
See MOS:DASH. 2009-10 UEFA Champions League (with hyphen) redirects to 2009–10 UEFA Champions League (with en dash) so things are in order. I have not heard of other users being unable to access page names with dashes. Which browser or software do you use to try to access the page and what happens? Are you clicking a link to Wikipedia from a Google search results page? That sometimes causes problems for some Internet Explorer users but it doesn't appear related to use of dashes. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:28, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Cross reference to other languages[edit]

I wonder if the following question was discussed / decided upon in the Wikipedia environment, I surfed a bit around but did not yet find an entry on this.

Some of us read more then one language. Some of us even contribute to Wikipedia in more then one language.

My question is: If searching for a certain topic in Wikipedia english and there is no entry in english - why not show that there are entrys (if there are) in other languages, or at least provide a link how to search for entry's in other languages. This would make Wikipedia more international.

Same question refrased more general: Is there a way to meta -search wikipedia if there is an entry on a certain subject in any language wikipedia? Rembertbiemond (talk) 08:28, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: As far as I am aware, there is no way to search different Wikipedias from this one - it would be hard to keep the indexs updated for 266 (at last count) Wikipedias together, if not almost impossible! Add to this the fact that most searchers wouldn't want to see other-language-Wikipedia results in their search. An interesting question, though! -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 08:52, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The closest approximation that comes to mind is that you can search for all the Wikimedia Foundation wikis that display a given image on Wikimedia Commons. For example, an image I uploaded appears on four projects. If you have a particular topic in mind, you can look at image categories on Commons to find images that might appear in articles about that topic. However, this would not help at all with articles that only show images that are on the local Wikipedia and not on Commons. If you are feeling ambitious, you might be able to write a multilingual search tool on the Toolserver - which does try to maintain a central index for all the Wikipedias. Among the many problems you would have to solve would be coming up with a robust method to guess the probable titles of articles for a given topic in all the other language Wikipedias. Given that we don't always find articles under the titles we expect in our native language, that would be a challenge to say the least. --Teratornis (talk) 09:23, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • The problem is that a lot of potential articles won't have the same name in different WPs because of language differences. For such a system to make sense, it would need to differentiate between names and other article titles. - Mgm|(talk) 09:24, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much for the answers so far. Is this something to take to another forum? to let more people reflect on it? I think the idea (suppose others have thought about it also) would especially valuable for other languages then english because for so many people english is their first second language. It would be extremly user friendly when in those countries where almost everybody speaks english as a second language like most countries in europe and you search for a person or topic and have no search result you would get the answer: click here to search for- or to get- an answer in XY lets say english...

And i dont think it is technically imposseble although i am not a techie. I agree on the point about distinction between names and other topics. Rembertbiemond (talk) 12:17, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

How are you searching? If you use an external search engine and limit the search to wikipedia.org sites, then you can search for names in Wikipedias of any language. You might have to look through a few screens, but if you Google ' "Cristiano Ronaldo" site:wikipedia.org ' then you'll see a few different languages show up. Only works for proper names, of course. --AndrewHowse (talk) 16:32, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Help.[edit]

Hello,

I recently wrote a wiki article for one of my favorite bands that I saw didnt have a wikipedia article yet. I can see the article under the "my contributions" tab, but when I search for the band in the search bar on the left, the article doesnt come up. I checked all my grammar, and I have a fairly good writing style, so I guess I trying to figure out if my article was accepted or not, and if not why. Any help here would be greatly appreciated, because I spent a lot of time writing this article and I dont want to have wasted my time for no reason. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hfmrock (talk • contribs) 09:47, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reboot The Robot? SpitfireTally-ho! 10:00, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The search bar auto-completion can take several days to notice that an article has been created. I wouldn't worry about it. Jan1naD (talk • contrib) 10:02, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The job queue appears to be rather long right now, so it could take some time. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 12:17, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
@Gadget850: Domas fixed the job queue today, it's back at 150000 jobs now, relatively healthy compared to the 65 million of last week. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:52, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're misunderstanding the process, Hfmrock. Your article doesn't have to be 'accepted' - as soon as you created it, it was there in en.Wikipedia for anybody to look at, though as others have said it may be some time before it gets indexed.
However, your article has a number of problems, which others have noticed and added tags to it for. The most pressing one is about notability: if you are not able to demonstrate that the band is notable (by Wikipedia's criteria) the article will certainly be deleted. --ColinFine (talk) 16:50, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
(e/c x2) To clarify, whether an article is found through the search function, as opposed to using the Go Button has nothing to do with acceptability or not of the article, which has indeed been successfully posted by you as an entry in the mainspace of the encyclopedia, where articles reside. Articles will appear through searches once Wikipedia indexes its pages, which can take some time. Please note that the article is deficient in a number of ways. Please read the maintenance tags posted at the top of the article, explore the links provided in them, and reform the article appropriately. Thanks.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 16:55, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Aligning tables and images[edit]

In List_of_National_Treasures_of_Japan_(sculptures)#Statistics the two tables and one image (map) are properly aligned in firefox, meaning the two tables are one above the other aligned left on the page and the map is positioned right aligned. In IE however the small "Age/National Treasures" table becomes center aligned between the large "Prefecture/City/National Treasures" and covers part of the map. How do I make the three objects aligned properly in any browser without one object covering another? bamse (talk) 10:47, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Looking both from Safari and IE8, I cannot see any misalignment. Perhaps it was already fixed? Otherwise, what verison of IE are you using? Intelligentsium 22:40, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
IE8 and a rather small screen (1024x768). The problem is still present. Maybe browsershots can reproduce the result if you don't have a small screen.bamse (talk) 09:25, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Un-archiving a discussion[edit]

Is there any policy against the moving of an archived discussion back onto an active talk page? I ask because my last one was auto-archived while I was taking my time to make a response. Thanks in advance -- Chelydramat (talk) 17:07, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure about any policy statement on this, but in general practice I think it's OK to bring back a discussion if it was auto-archived after a short period of time. If a thread has been inactive for more than a few days it might be better to start a new thread.
Note however, that the term "archiving" can be applied to a discussion that has been closed. This can be done if the discussion is off-topic, in bad faith, or for other reasons, and is usually denoted by a coloured box appearing in the background and some text above the thread. I don't think that's what you're describing, but I hope to avoid any misunderstanding. --AndrewHowse (talk) 17:27, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Page created not posted[edit]

Yesterday I created a page called Nutrition Department. I did not complete it before I needed to logout. Now I can't find how to get back to it. I saved it several times while I was writing it. Please don't tell me that work is lost. Can you tell me how to navigate to it? Thanks.Nutritiondept (talk) 17:25, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm afraid it is lost. By the time you posted this, this account had only one other edit ([1]). The page Nutrition Department was never created. You probably couldn't have saved it properly, and there is no way to retrieve it unless you have saved it offline somewhere. There's nothing we can do about it. ≈ Chamal talk ¤ 17:30, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The most common cause of this problem is that you clicked on the Show Preview button instead of the Save Page Button:


If you do not click on Save Page, the edit will not be kept. You have not created any pages from the account you are using, so unless you saved a local copy, the work has been lost. --Mysdaao talk 17:35, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I did click Save Page several times while I was working on it. I thought that since I was in the user section of wiki that it would save it to a place where I could retrieve it. This is my first attempt to write an article, so I'm a little challenged with the navigation. Since I saved it, is it hiding somewhere? Nutritiondept (talk) 19:27, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is not listed in your contributions, so it would appear not. – ukexpat (talk) 19:31, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Your contribution history (here) shows that you have 4 edits (1 to the Sandbox, 3 to this page). As I am not an admin, I can't see if you have any deleted contributions. I would have suggested that perhaps it had been deleted, but Chamal_N above is an admin, and would have seen it. This must mean that you didn't save the page - it is very easy to click on "Show Preview" instead of "Save Page" by mistake - I think most of us have done it, even if we have a bit of experience here! -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 19:32, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Just gone back through 12 pages (of 500 items) of deleted - that's back to the middle of the 9th. Nothing there, checked for strings "nutr" and "depa" - in case it was miss-spelled. Same result in "new pages". Did the page actually save? - i.e after saving you would have had to select "edit" again to edit some more. Also sorry to add even more woes, but if the article is about a company/organisation, then your user name could be in violation of user name policy - see WP:ORGNAME.  Ronhjones  (Talk) 19:52, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
And are you absolutely sure you were editing here on the English Wikipedia? There are many mirrors and forks of Wikipedia, as well as thousands of other wikis running on the same MediaWiki software, many of which look very similar to Wikipedia. You could try scrolling back through your Web browser's history to see what pages you have recently visited. You should try working through the Wikipedia tutorial so you are familiar with basic editing. Also note that new articles by new users are very likely to get deleted because Wikipedia has complex rules for content, and few new users will guess the rules correctly without reading our friendly manuals first. See WP:YFA and WP:BFAQ. --Teratornis (talk) 20:47, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps you mean this draft in a subpage of your userspace?LeadSongDog come howl 21:27, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
That subpage was created just 10 minutes before you posted the link so I doubt it. – ukexpat (talk) 21:35, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
And 5 minutes after Teratornis' comment, which was the last one before yours. As Ronhjones is an admin who has carefully checked the deleted logs, we know it didn't exist in at least the last 50 hours. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 21:57, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I should add that I have reported the user name to WP:UAA as the user page clearly indicates it is a group/multi-user account in violation of WP:ORGNAME. – ukexpat (talk) 22:08, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I've therefore popped a {{uw-username}} on his talk page - maybe (s)he will change their name to a more suitable one.  Ronhjones  (Talk) 22:23, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I checked Soxred93's edit counter and it reported that 4 edits made by the user had been deleted. Perhaps an oversighter deleted the revision in question? --TheGrimReaper 11:43, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The user has 4 deleted edits that are visible to administrators and not oversighted. All 4 were made after the user posted here. It was creation and editing of User:Nutritiondept and User:Nutritiondept/drafts. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:24, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The user has been blocked as promotional.--Unionhawk Talk E-mail 14:29, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Report corporate sock-puppets[edit]

How does one go about reporting a user who's sole purpose appears to be to promote a particular group, company, or other interest?--Anthonzi (talk) 22:58, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See Requests for administrator attention. Please do not actually edit that page; it is only for directing you to the correct page. For sockpuppets, see WP:SPI. Intelligentsium 23:02, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Also see the Conflict of interest/Noticeboard. --Orange Mike | Talk 01:58, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Signature[edit]

Hi i was wondering how do i change my signature as u can see my username is Brianwazere but my signature for signing comments is Brian Moore,how can i change it?? brian moore (talk) 23:36, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, if you read Wikipedia:Signatures#Customizing_your_signature, that should help you. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 23:44, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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