Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2021 January 30

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January 30

Category question

Category:Former buildings and structures in Finland now includes both Vyborg railway station and Vyborg railway station (1913). However, this is a little bit confusing, as Vyborg railway station hasn't gone anywhere, it's still standing there in Vyborg, and in active use. It's just a "former building in Finland" because Vyborg itself is no longer in Finland. Is this OK, or should there be some sort of separate category for buildings that aren't former but just formerly were somewhere? JIP | Talk 00:19, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@JIP: You added Category:Former buildings and structures of Finland to Vyborg railway station in 2007.[1] That seems wrong. Category:Former buildings and structures says: This category is for buildings and structures that no longer exist. I don't think we have or should have categories for places which were formerly in another country. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:00, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, I did not remember that. I have removed the category from Vyborg railway station. You seem to have mistyped the name of the category in your reply but that is a mere technicality. I think this has sorted it out. JIP | Talk 03:11, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

I copied the category name you added in 2007. The category was renamed in 2013. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:45, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

edit

Hello, need to make an edit to the Oak Park-River Forest High School alumni section. I don't feel comfortable doing it myself. Ludacris should be on the page. Chris Bridges has mentioned several times that he went to the school. There is not a place to put musicians under media. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:B4D0:3000:F0DD:F1E1:B7E9:7CFA (talk) 03:51, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Nope. The only source in Ludacris "supporting" that claim was IMDb, which is unreliable. (The Chicago Tribune reference only mentioned his middle school.) I've removed it. If you have a reliable source, then it could be restored in the article and he could be added to the high school. Clarityfiend (talk) 05:43, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Also, this is the wrong forum for questions like this. The talk page of the high school (or possibly Ludacris) is where you should have gone. Clarityfiend (talk) 05:45, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

There's a Washington Post article which talks about it, but it requires a subscription. From what I can see (briefly), it sounds like it debunks the idea, but I can't tell for sure. Clarityfiend (talk) 05:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Clarityfiend: I can see (without a subscription – maybe they have an article views per day limit) what appears to be the article as published, which matches this archive, but it seems to end abruptly, simply saying that Ludacris said to Czarniak that he attended the school, and that she then tweeted that he was there, but it's not clear she remembers him. The author goes on to say that they are both 37, so there's a good chance they were there at the same time, but then makes no claim about the truth of the statement. OTOH, is it really something controversial? —[AlanM1 (talk)]— 06:52, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Okay. I see that both articles have been updated. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:13, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

I am a Washington Post subscriber, and this is the relevant quote from that article: "While it’s been reported that Ludacris attended Oak Park and River Forest High School in Illinois and later graduated from Banneker High School in Atlanta, there’s long been a rumor that he attended Centreville High School, Czarniak’s alma mater, for a short time. Czarniak asked him to set the record straight. 'One year, yep,' Ludacris said. 'One year. Because my mother lived in Centreville and I moved from Chicago to there. It was for one year'." Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 07:22, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Page Protection question

Hi there, I am looking for some guidance on page protection. Recently several IPs and editors have repeatedly deleted the "Recent Usage" section of the Pine Tree Flag page. This section now has multiple reliable sources cited, namely journalists and photojournalists, as well as linking to a short posting by the commentator Andrew Sullivan about the flag's recent use.

One IP making these deletions repeatedly calls these paragraphs "communist propaganda" and "hate speech" in his/her edit summaries for the deletions. This anonymous editor is not using the Talk page, which does have a discussion started on recent use of the flag. Neither this anonymous user or the other deleters are elaborating on their rationale. A national news article about the events at the US Capitol on Jan. 6 2021 linked to this wikipedia page which may have increased its traffic.

A request to semi-protect the page based on deletion of reliably sourced information temporarily was just rejected. The reasons given by the admin who rejected the request were that the citations include a link to a blog (the Andrew Sullivan opinion piece) and that a content dispute should be in the talk section.

If the Sullivan link is removed would it be worth it to make another request to try again to get this page temporarily semi-protected? Should I have indicated the reason for the request was vandalism instead of removal of reliably sourced information? I have never tried to protect a page before. It's kind of discouraging if the only option is to just keep reverting the deletion of actually factual and relevant content. Thanks in advance for any insight. Fathomharvill (talk) 04:08, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

What’s the point of archiving references and how do you do it?

Can someone explain to me why people archive references for Wikipedia article and how do you do it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikieditor6557 (talk • contribs) 04:38, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Wikieditor6557: the Wikimedia foundation (and Wikipedia) do not archive references. This is done by the Internet Archive, which is an entirely separate organization. The internet archive has a system called the "wayback machine" that crawls the web and captures snapshots of web pages that do not disallow it. You can explicitly request it to archive a particular page, and it will do so if allowed. The point of all this is that pages disappear on the web for various reasons. You might choose to request archiving for a page if you are concerned that the page will not remain in a stable location on the web. -Arch dude (talk) 05:59, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Wikieditor6557: We have a help page for this at Help:Archiving a source. I was unaware until I read it just now that we have a bot that asks the Wayback Machine to archive all new references in articles. However, we do not appear to have a bot to automatically add the archive URL to our references. I suspect that such a bot would be unworkable because there are too many potential problems that require human intervention. -Arch dude (talk) 06:21, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) @Wikieditor6557: The reason is that specific urls simply disappear from time to time, often when web server administrators reconfigure their web pages. This results in WP:LINKROT, and typically a 404 error, Page Not Found. Editors and bots can place {{Dead link}} by the ref as a warning. Sometimes the page has simply been given a new url, and a search within a website may find it. More often stuff just gets deleted or there is no search facility. The Wayback Machine, part of the internet archive.org may well have saved the page in the past, and Wikipedia's {{cite}} or {{citation}} templates allow the archived page to be referenced, and also refer to the dead one. The Wayback Machine[2] allows you to save individual live pages immediately, see Save Pages in the Wayback Machine. When searching for archived pages, only the blue dots work, the green and orange ones are no use.

The main two parameters to use within eg {{cite web}} are: |archive-url= and |archive-date=, along with the standard |url= and |access-date=. The optional |url-status=live or =dead determines whether to display either the current or the archive url as the first link in the ref. I get the feeling that either Good articles or Featured articles, or both, require all urls to be archived.

Here's an example: {{cite web |title=1870 A 5 French Silver Francs (Liberty head) |website=SilverAgeCoins |url=https://www.silveragecoins.com/en/details?item=7106 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200813003740/https://www.silveragecoins.com/en/details?item=7106#expand |archive-date=13 August 2020 |access-date=30 January 2021 |url-status=live}}, which results in
"1870 A 5 French Silver Francs (Liberty head)". SilverAgeCoins. Archived from the original on 13 August 2020. Retrieved 30 January 2021. >MinorProphet (talk) 07:01, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

(ec) @Arch dude and Wikieditor6557: IABot can add archive links to article(s). Check the "Add archives to all non-dead references" here. —[AlanM1 (talk)]— 07:08, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@AlanM1: Wow, I just registered and used it on an article with multiple links, took about 30 seconds. Pretty impressive, thanks. It's a bit clunky to get back to the user page after logging out, so I saved the toolforge url as a link on my own user page. Cheers, >MinorProphet (talk) 19:23, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Draft or sandbox?

When a user wants to create a page is it better to create it in the form of a draft or in the sandbox? Dr Salvus (talk) 08:08, 30 January 2021 (UTC)Dr SalvusDr Salvus (talk) 08:08, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Hello, Dr Salvus. There isn't a whole lot of difference, except that stale drafts are deleted after six months. So, if you are a good faith editor who works slowly, your personal sandbox space is best. I have been editing since long before draft space was created, so I use sandbox space instead, with no problems. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 08:31, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

The only other consideration I can think of, Dr Salvus, is that using the draft space might be easier for a collaborative effort, if you can identify other editors who might wish to chip in at the early stage of article creation. You can find such potential collaborators via WP:WikiProject Council/Directory, for example. Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:34, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Portal:Countries missing

In Portal:Countries, there is country missing, Ethiopia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.188.241.107 (talk) 09:03, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

The Ethiopian flag is missing from the list because the Ethiopia "portal" was deleted after this discussion. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:23, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

We have articles about all countries but around 60 countries don't have a portal, e.g. Algeria, Angola, Ghana, Mongolia, Mozambique, Myanmar, Sudan, Yemen. Portals are not meant to be exhaustive. They require volunteer editors to create and maintain them. This is often done by editors from the country but we have few Ethiopean editors. Ethiopia has the largest population for a country without a portal. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:36, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

How can Wikipedia support flat out slander.

User Gorilla Warfare has flat out slandered the Parler community with lies and dishonesty and allowed to lock these lies so they can't be edited in her post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:100A:B10A:4E34:742A:ECA4:74AD:4C77 (talk) 09:49, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia summarizes what independent reliable sources state. Unfortunately, due to disruption of the article, it is protected from editing. If you are interested in civilly discussing your concerns or any ideas you have for changes to Parler that you have independent sources for, please start a discussion on the article talk page. If the sources in the article are being summarized accurately, you will need to discuss your concerns with the sources themselves to get them to issue retractions. If you just want to push right wing talking points, you will have to do that somewhere else. 331dot (talk) 09:52, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

The article seems fair and factual to me. Keep up the good work wikipedians. And if its written down its not slander but libel.-not that this is of course.Spinney Hill (talk) 10:15, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Columns

Hi all, previously it used to be possible to arrange long lists of things into columns, using templates such as {{columns-list|colwidth=20em}}, {{reflist|20em}}, {{refbegin|20em}} etc. I distinctly remember once sorting List of people from Gloucestershire into 4 columns, although it wasn't popular. Now it seems that none of these tricks work, and everything has been forced into a single column. I find that scrolling through 100 refs and 50 sources at the end of an article is particularly tedious. Could anyone please explain what might have happened? I use ancient Firefox 47 on XP. Is it something to do with mobile? Is it going to stay like this? Cheers, >MinorProphet (talk) 10:34, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: The problem is almost certainly the age of your browser; see mw:Compatibility#Browsers. Using Firefox 85.0 on Windows 10, the list at List of people from Gloucestershire reformats itself into one, two or more columns dependent on the width of the window, as do the many references in long articles such as Bill Gates. -- John of Reading (talk) 10:43, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: (edit conflict) It depends on the available screen width. List of people from Gloucestershire uses a width of 30em per column. 30em are about 456px on my device, which means that two columns fit into my viewport. Because the number of columns is calculated on the client side depending on the available screen size, I can't give you a definitive way of how to create 4 columns. That being said, Firefox 47 is realy ancient and very likely has known vulnerabilities, the same goes for Windows XP, for which the last regular update was released in 2008 (!). I don't know if Windows XP /Firefox 47 is still secure, but I doubt it. Victor Schmidt (talk) 10:51, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@John of Reading: and @Victor Schmidt:, thanks very much for your helpful and swift replies. I have a huge wide-screen monitor running at at 1366 x 768. Until relatively recently (a few months ago) I could do a Ctrl+Scroll which produced the desired multi-column effect, but now it doesn't. One day I might upgrade from XP, I am one of the 1% of all PC users that have it. I was in IT for 20 years, but after a stroke 10 years ago anything to do with PCs except using them fills me with dread. Anyway, I have had an intense dislike for all versions of Windows since Vista. I used to be familiar with Linux, maybe I might try installing that, since you can install FF on it. Hmm, now where did I put that spare hard drive...? Cheers, >MinorProphet (talk) 13:21, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Radiography

1 Hospital occupational standard?

2 hospital wase management ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.190.52.219 (talk) 10:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@196.190.52.219: sorry, we only deal with questions about using or editing Wikipedia. Knowledge questions can be asked at the reference desk. Victor Schmidt (talk) 14:05, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

HeroWars

Cannot access my account when playing Hero Wars, I get a grey screen that shows its loading but never open, help — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.231.157.123 (talk) 13:18, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@64.231.157.123: I am afraid that this help desk only deals with questions about unsing or editing Wikipedia, we cannot Help you with hero wars. The sole support contact form I was able to find is this. Victor Schmidt (talk) 14:05, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

o — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:589:8401:D170:25A8:937E:3EFE:DBC3 (talk) 15:50, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

COVID-19 pandemic index table removal

The index table of COVID-19 pandemic in Wikipedia's main page was moved to Ongoing events. 196.188.241.107 (talk) 16:06, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

There's a long discussion about this at Wikipedia talk:In the news#COVID-19 banner. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:28, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Hidden text goes wrong

In 2021 New York City mayoral election, there are "results" tables with space for the results of the primary elections, but those elections are several months away, so I tried to comment them out so they would not display at this time, using the <!-- ... --> notation (see Help:Wikitext#Invisible text (comments)). We will need those tables or something similar when the primary occurs, but not before then. However, it didn't work properly (see [3]). Does anyone know what went wrong? I see that there are other uses of <!-- ... --> within the table itself; are embedded uses not allowed? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 16:38, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Metropolitan90: I just hid both "Results" sections for you. GoingBatty (talk) 16:49, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: Thanks, but it didn't work right. Instead of the table being hidden, it's displaying as a bunch of table code that looks like this:

| |- align=right |style="background-color:#3333FF" | |Democratic |Art Chang | | |- align=right | style="background-color:#3333FF" | |Democratic |Eddie Cullen | | |- ... --Metropolitan90 (talk) 20:53, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

--> ends a comment no matter how many <!-- have been encountered. <includeonly>...</includeonly> could be used instead. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:54, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Categorisation question

A further question about Vyborg railway station (1913). Does it belong in Category:Former buildings and structures in Finland or in Category:Former buildings and structures in Russia?

The background for this is:

• The station was built in 1913, when Finland was an autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, not yet independent.
• The station was part of independent Finland for 24 years from 1917 to 1941.
• The station was destroyed in 1941 by Soviet troops. It doesn't exist any more. At that time it was still in independent Finland.
• Vyborg itself was ceded to the Soviet Union as part of their demands after the Continuation War had ended.
• Vyborg remains in Russia to this day. Russia has never had any intention of returning it.

So is this a former building in Finland or a former building in Russia? JIP | Talk 17:41, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Can't it be both? Schrödinger's railway station? MinorProphet (talk) 18:34, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

I would say both too, so long as Russia includes the Russian Empire. Communist Russia is just a Red herring. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:31, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

OK, so I added it to Category:Former buildings and structures in Russia. But I don't think it should go to Category:Demolished buildings and structures in Russia as it was not demolished, it was destroyed. JIP | Talk 23:42, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Is it okay if references on a article aren’t archived?

I’m a little confused like do references ever expire? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikieditor6557 (talk • contribs) 17:44, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

• Physical references such as books and newspapers don't expire. Online references might, as websites can be taken down. That's why there is the Internet Archive which preserves copies of expired websites. JIP | Talk 17:48, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Another option for creating an archive of an online source is archive.today. I use it when the Internet Archive isn't able to save a copy of a source. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:26, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Marked a small content edit as minor. Can the "minor" tag be removed?

I opened an account to make an edit to a page to add a quantity that was missing. It seemed minor to me, so I marked it as such. Afterwards, I read the definition of Minor Edit on the wiki and find that since I added content, it was not minor. When I look at the "History" page, I don't see a way to alter my edit comments. Is there a way for me to edit my revision category to correctly label it as a standard edit? — Preceding unsigned comment added by FCwikiEdit (talk • contribs) 20:14, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@FCwikiEdit: There is no way to undo the "minor" tagging after you saved the edit. An alternative procedure is described in the 4th bullet point in Help:Minor_edit#Things_to_remember. Victor Schmidt (talk) 20:30, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Recently created page not shown in Google search

I realize that Google is separate from Wikipedia, but this is a query about how they interface. The BLP page Yaniv Iczkovits was created as a draft on 11 January and moved to article mainspace on 26 January. Its Wikidata item was created in March 2013, and there's an earlier article in the Hebrew Wikipedia. Searching the name in Google in Hebrew displays the Hebrew Wikipedia link, but still nothing appears in Google when searching the name in English. What will change the latter outcome? -- Deborahjay (talk) 20:45, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Deborahjay: Patience ;-) All new mainspace pages, no matter if they went through AfC, are noindexed until they either 1) they are marked as patrolled by the Wikipedia:New pages patrol folks or 2) they have been in mainspace for 90 days (whichever comes first). And even when Googlebot finally is allowed to index the page, it still takes him some time (up to a few hours) to notice that he is now allowed to do so. Victor Schmidt (talk) 21:19, 30 January 2021 (UTC)