Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2022 March 28

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March 28

Help needed with an account

I had this account called Pact64 and I forgot the password and had no way of resetting the password. If there is any way I can prove the account is mine I will provide. 00:19, 28 March 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by TPTV (talk • contribs)

@TPTV: User:Pact64 has not specified an email address so you cannot get a password reset. The account has too few edits to be considered for proof of identity. You can write on the user pages that you are the same user. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:39, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Does a committed identity have to be memorized?

From {{Committed identity}}, the committed identity should end in a random string. Does that mean that it has to be memorized, because hashing is irreversible? I.hate.spam.mail.here (talk | contributions) 02:05, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes. In order to confirm your identity at a later date (in the hopefully unlikely event that you need to), you would need to recall the secret text you used to generate the hash, so if you decide to use a committed identity, you would want to record or memorize your secret string, including both your identity-establishing information, and the random passphrase at the end. RoxySaunders (talk · contribs) 02:59, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Help me publish the below article

Help me publish it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Shyam_Maheshwari — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lucygirl03 (talk • contribs) 06:54, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Your draft lacks substantial sourcing, so I'm going to reject it. Clarityfiend (talk) 10:24, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

@Lucygirl03: this is at least the fourth time that article has been rejected for the same reason. Please take the time to read the messages on your User talk:Lucygirl03 page for the specifics of why it has been rejected, and what you need to fix before it will be acceptable. Basically, you need to base the article on significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject in published, reliable, secondary sources that are independent of the subject - there is a good, short summary here.--Gronk Oz (talk) 13:45, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Fordham University

Fordham University pabe has a lat/lon that goes to an area near the Black Sea. Looks to be somewhere In Russia. I suspect ... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.248.20.16 (talk) 13:39, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

They look fine to me: [1] is on East Coast US, which looks correct for Fordham University, which is in New York. Joseph2302 (talk) 13:50, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

e/c The co-ordinates given for Fordham University, (40°51′43″N 73°53′10″W) describe a location in New York City, near the Botanical Garden.--Gronk Oz (talk) 13:52, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia a political movement?

Firstly, apologies if this is not the correct place to ask. I originally raised this issue on the talk page of Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedia but it was removed.

My question is: Is Wikipedia intended to be a neutral observer reporting the facts without any bias, or is Wikipedia a political movement which seeks to effect political change in the world? I have always assumed the former, but I recently found contradictory evidence, in the form of a highly political banner on Wikipedia, promoting a very strong view on a highly controversial social issue. I will not go into any more detail about the banner, because in my original question I went into detail, and one user accused me of posting "abusive" comments pertaining to the issue in question. That is obviously not my intention, I just want to address the issue of the very purpose of Wikipedia. Is it to report fact, or to effect political change? Grand Dizzy (talk) 18:48, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

We do not WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:03, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your reply. In light of what you have said, the banner I recently saw on Wikipedia would seem (to me at least) to be contradictory to this policy as it seemed to be encouraging Wikipedia users to 'right a great wrong' with regards to gender in society.

As far as I could understand from this banner (and please do correct me if I am wrong), Wikipedia rejects the traditional view that men and women are fundamentally different and naturally occupy different roles in society. Wikipedia therefore stands in opposition to all historical human societies, plus half the world today, including the Muslim and Christian world. Wikipedia basically seeks to set right what it sees as an erroneous view that has pervaded all human history until now.

Wikipedia's solution to this problem appears to be to 're-write history' by giving women more historical significance than they ever actually had. As we know, 99% of notable historical figures were male. But Wikipedia wants to create a new, fictional version of history by claiming that women had prominent, equal roles in society and made significant achievements equal to men, in order to bring the number of articles about women up to 50%.

Now may I make it extremely clear that by raising this issue, I do not wish to offend anyone on either side of the argument. Nor am I here to debate this issue itself or promote my own personal views. As it so happens, my own personal view on this issue is that this particular Wikipedia incentive is sexist, being anti-male. However, my personal views are not what's important, since Wikipedia contributors comprise a diverse range of cultures and political and religious ideologies. We are never going to agree on those issues, nor is the purpose of the site to debate or find agreement. The purpose (I should hope) is merely to report the world and its history - good or bad.

My only real concern here is simply that, as a lover of truth and integrity, I find the notion of 'lying about the past' very troubling, especially with regards to an encyclopedia. It seems to be entirely at odds with the WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS policy. So I would simply like to try and understand how such a banner, which, to me, seems highly political, can be reconciled with Wikipedia's stance on neutrality? I find the issue worthy of being raised. Sadly, a user named Dronebogus felt very strongly to the contrary and threatened to report me for merely asking about Wikipedia's policies. I find that quite baffling and sad. Grand Dizzy (talk) 20:02, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Nor do we entertain blatant misogyny. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:13, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Grand Dizzy Wikipedia does not claim to be free of bias. Everyone has biases. Sources are presented to readers so they can evaluate and judge them for themselves as to bias. Wikipedia claims to have a neutral point of view, which is different. Wikipedia does not tell facts, it summarizes independent reliable sources. 331dot (talk) 19:21, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

That is very good to hear. I would like to humbly suggest that, to my eyes, the banner in question did seem very clearly misandristic/sexist. Grand Dizzy (talk) 20:08, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia is both an encyclopedia and a community of contributing people. Wikipedia the community is organized as a community of absolutely equal people, and to uphold our views that each and every person is as equal and valuable is our ethos, not a political campaign. I understand you are objecting to Wikipedia the community having this point of view and are trying to conflate it with the neutrality we practice in the encyclopedia. But you are wrong to to confuse the two and wrong in your beliefs about people. StarryGrandma (talk) 19:28, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

I think you may benefit from reading the foundation:Policy:Human Rights Policy. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 19:37, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Let's take some of your questions and points one at a time

• "Is Wikipedia intended to be a neutral observer reporting the facts without any bias?"
  • No. Wikipedia is intended to be a neutral encyclopedia summarizing the information available in reliable, secondary sources about any given topic. It is not intended to be an observer or a reporter. The bias in Wikipedia reflects the bias in available sources.
• "or is Wikipedia a political movement which seeks to effect political change in the world?"
  • Yes. Wikipedia is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, one of the goals of which is political advocacy. The Wikipedia Prime objective, summed up in this quote by the founder, "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." is inherently political. The mission here is to create a free - in more ways than one - educational resource. The mission of the foundation is to work to ensure that free educational resource is accessible by all people. In that vein they lobby for freer copyright laws, expanded internet access and infrastructure, less censorship, etc. Individual Wikipedians may not always agree with the Foundation on all things, but everyone who contributes here is participating in the inherently political action of trying to make information free.
• "I recently found contradictory evidence, in the form of a highly political banner on Wikipedia, promoting a very strong view on a highly controversial social issue"
  • I have gone back and read your removed comment about the banner. I'm sorry the person who removed it did not assume good faith in their edit summary, although I understand why they thought it was, in their words "misogynistic trolling." Nevertheless you expressed concerns that deserve to be taken seriously, in so much as you clearly did not understand the message the banner was attempting to convey.
• You began your comment here by apologizing if this was not the correct place to ask your question. Let me help you explore the correct place to ask various types of questions.
  • Talk:Ideological bias on Wikipedia was an incorrect place to pose questions about the banner. The correct place to ask questions about the banner or discuss the banner and the message it conveys is Meta:Talk:Celebrate Women, which if you had clicked on the banner, is the talk page attached to the page it would have taken you to.
  • For more general philosophical discussion about Wikipedia, the Wikimedia movement, and their objectives, (such as the discussion you appear to be trying to start here), the miscellaneous and idea lab sections of the Village Pump are the appropriate places. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 19:40, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Gosh, more responses to my question than I was expecting. Thank you all sincerely for taking the time to answer. I found ONUnicorn's answer particularly excellent. I still have questions and concerns, however, I feel it would be wasting people's time (including my own) to continue responding to every answer, since I have already expressed my concerns and confusion surrounding this issue. I really just wanted to raise the issue, so if you folks here are satisfied that there is nothing amiss here, and that Wikipedia does not have a sexist anti-male agenda, then I suppose that is good enough for me. I thank you again for your answers and your time. Grand Dizzy (talk) 20:26, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

@Grand Dizzy: You refer to a banner which linked to meta:Celebrate Women. Banners and meta: are not article content. Banners may sometimes be displayed on top of Wikipedia articles but don't have to satisfy rules for article content. I don't think it's a sexist anti-male agenda to celebrate women and encourage writing about them but that discussion doesn't belong here. Wikipedia does not have a goal that subjects should be represented in a ratio corresponding to their perceived importance. Editors are volunteers and choose what to work on. Nobody is assigned to write a specific article. If an editor wants to write about a subject which satisfies Wikipedia:Notability then they are welcome. It doesn't force other subjects out. Wikipedia is not printed or size limited. There is plenty of server space for more articles about any notable subject. Anyway, it's very exaggerated that 99% of notable historical figures were male, and a large part of Wikipedia biographies are about living people where it's extremely exaggerated. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:49, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Is there an easy way to view maintenance messages for an article?

Currently when I do an edit preview for Legalization of non-medical cannabis in the United States, I see the following message at the top of the article:

Script warning: One or more {{cite web}} templates have maintenance messages; messages may be hidden (help).

When I click "help" I am directed to Help:CS1 errors#Controlling error message display. However, the help article does not explain an easy way to view the maintenance messages. It talks about using CSS to dispay the maintenance messages, but CSS is not real fresh in my memory (learned it a long time ago) and I have no idea how it would apply to a wikipedia article. There has to be an easier way to view the maintenance messages I am thinking. Can anyone help?--Jamesy0627144 (talk) 22:23, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Hmm, I am often able to scan the article in the non-visual editor and look for red exclamation points. I found one in that article (I think it was a unicode character that seemed to be causing a problem) and fixed it but it didn't seem to make the error go away. Will watch this question and see if there is a better approach. Jessamyn (my talk page) 03:35, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Jessamyn, I'll ping Trappist the monk and see if he can help since he recently fixed a few citation errors in the article and I think he is experienced dealing with this type of thing. If he can tell us then maybe I'll update Help:CS1 errors so it is easier for ordinary editors to find out what the maintenance messages for an article are.--Jamesy0627144 (talk) 04:19, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Jamesy0627144, I'm no expert on this, but learned a little recently. There are two kinds of messages that can appear at the top of the preview page: (1) Green ones about "maintenance messages", and (2) red ones about "errors". You (clearly) got the green one. I didn't get to the bottom of it, but my take is that ordinary editors can (and probably should) ignore the green "maintenance messages"; by default they are not displayed, I think for that reason.

On the other hand the red "error" messages should be fixed (if possible). Those errors will usually have red text shown somewhere in the preview, most often in the "References" section where citation footnotes appear. The red message down there will have some information about what it detected, and that may be enough for you to figure out how to fix the problem.

I'll also note that it's possible to get red error text down in "References" even when there is no red header message at the top about "errors", so it's good to check the References section anyway. If editors don't do that, they can leave broken citations which will appear, with red error messages, in the published article (maybe you've seen that in an article). - R. S. Shaw (talk) 04:38, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

If you want to see all of the CS1 maintenance messages all of the time, click on User:Jamesy0627144/common.css, insert the two lines

.mw-parser-output span.cs1-maint {display: inline;} /* display Citation Style 1 maintenance messages */

.mw-parser-output span.cs1-hidden-error {display: inline;} /* display hidden Citation Style 1 error messages */

and click Publish. Then any messages will become visible on each page you visit. I find such messages are rare, but useful, especially when I am adding citations myself. --Verbarson ^talk_edits 08:33, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

This reference is using |url-status=unfit because the original url now redirects to a site called https://theweedprof.com/.

There is no way to show maintenance messaging except with css. If the instructions at Help:CS1 errors § Controlling error message display are not clear, tell me how to make them more clear.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:00, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

R. S. Shaw, Verbarson, and Trappist the monk – thanks for the help as I can now see the maintenance message. I'm not really sure why I had such a hard time understanding the help page instructions before. I guess it was because I had never heard of a common CSS page before or using CSS on wikipedia, so the concept was pretty foreign to me.

Trappist, the instructions could maybe be improved slightly although I feel a little silly for not understanding it when I initially read it. If it were to be improved, I was thinking something like this could possibly be added just below where the CSS code is given:

For example, if the page User:[Your user name]/common.css is not already created, use the line of CSS code given above as the source code for the new page that you create. This will allow maintenance messages to be viewed on any page you visit.

Also, I'm kind of puzzled why a maintenance message is even shown for |url-status=unfit in the first place. As far as I know that parameter is not deprecated / obsolete, so I do not understand the purpose for bothering editors with a "warning" at the top of the page wherever it is used. Is this something you have any control over and if so what do you think of perhaps getting rid of the warning for the |url-status=unfit or |url-status=usurped parameters?--Jamesy0627144 (talk) 21:29, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Setting |url-status=unfit hides the original url in the rendered citation. Compare:

{{cite book |title=Title |url=//example.com |archive-url=//archive.org |archive-date=2022-03-29}}

Title. Archived from the original on 2022-03-29. ← 'original' is linked

with:

{{cite book |title=Title |url=//example.com |archive-url=//archive.org |archive-date=2022-03-29 |url-status=unfit}}

Title. Archived from the original on 2022-03-29.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) ← 'original' is not linked

This (and other) maintenance messages are an easy and explicit way, for those who are interested, to see which cs1|2 template might be improved with a bit of polishing – in this case, perhaps there is a better source ...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:27, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Is there a good reason that the Script warning: One or more… have maintenance messages… message isn't also under the CSS display:hidden default used for the maint messages themselves? Its presence seems to be useless to all but pretty sophisticated editors, yet raises concern in them, and will essentially waste their time trying to puzzle out the meaning. At a minimum, could the word "warning" be changed to "advisory" or something else more neutral? - R. S. Shaw (talk) 00:07, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Because the purpose of the messaging is to get en.wiki editors to write better citations and to fix citations that are in need of fixing. The number of editors creating citations far outweighs the number of editors who are attempting to make repairs. Bots, automated scripts, and visual editor are help and hindrance. If editors don't realize that they have created malformed citations (because they are at the bottom of the page so out-of-sight-out-of-mind) then the repair is left to someone else. The messaging is intended to draw attention. I suspect that most editors ignore the preview messages; there has been very little pushback since we enabled the preview messaging on 22 January 2022.

The 'script warning:' text is out of our control. That text is emitted by MediaWiki when Module:Citation/CS1 calls mw.addWarning(), a function in the Scribunto library. If you want that changed, WP:Phabricator is the place to raise that issue.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:49, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

@Trappist the monk: Yes, I've used the unfit parameter before on a few occasions where I came across a suspicious-looking website (possibly malicious) where a reference was previously located. I don't see the need for any editor to be notified that it is used in an article though, at least as long as an archive link is already provided for the reference. According to this page the purpose is to make sure the parameter is properly applied, but to me that seems like a small benefit at the expense of distracting and/or taking the time up of a lot of editors.--Jamesy0627144 (talk) 00:25, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

If you want to change how cs1|2 does things, this is not the proper venue. Raise the issue at Help talk:Citation Style 1.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:49, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, I posted something over there.--Jamesy0627144 (talk) 02:09, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

I just submitted an article. What should I do next?

Hello everyone, I just submitted an article about a persian Opera Singer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Anousha_Nazari

What should I do next?

Thanks,

PS: There's already an article about the same artist in the French version. How can I relink them together? [[2]] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ainsa12 (talk • contribs) 22:29, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

@Ainsa12: Welcome to the Teahouse. While you're waiting for it to be submitted, you can continue to work on it and make it even more presentable to a reviewer. I would not link the two unless the draft makes it into articlespace. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 22:41, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you so much!

Would be possible to find a way to accelerate the submission process?

Regards Ainsa12 (talk) 22:47, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi Ainsa12 Why do you want to process to be sped up? Generally, there are WP:NODEADLINEs when it comes to the draft review process. Are you connected to the subject of the article in some way? -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:55, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply.

The reason is that I just read an article about the release of an art work concerning this artist on Radio France internationale (RFI) and I would imagine that people may search about her. That's why I wanted it to be speed up.

Regards, Ainsa12 (talk) 23:20, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

@Ainsa12, 2 suggestions: Punctuation should go before the references, and crop the picture to head and shoulders, so the reader can more easily see what she looks like. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:08, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you very much !

I do not know how to crop the picture :( Ainsa12 (talk) 11:36, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Adding a message thread caused duplication of threads

You may or may not agree with the content of my very recent addition to another user's talk page, but I think you'll agree that there was no obvious technical jiggery-pokery involved. However, it seems that there was some: the thread has somehow caused itself and two others to be duplicated. What's the best way for me to fix the mess that I made, and what did I do wrong? -- Hoary (talk) 23:10, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

You didn't do anything wrong. An earlier editor transcluded the page itself.[3] I have fixed it.[4] PrimeHunter (talk) 00:52, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Duh! I should have spotted that, PrimeHunter. I've encountered the same goof in the past, but not so recently that the possibility was uppermost in my tired mind. Thank you for fixing it. -- Hoary (talk) 01:25, 29 March 2022 (UTC)