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Village pump archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump. Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Edit conflicts confined to a single section

Is the software clever enough to detect whether an edit conflict is confined to a single section of an article? I ask because Dysprosia and I just clashed heads on this page whilst editing what was at that point the final section. I was explicitly editing that section, but I have no idea what Dysprosia had selected. Whatever the odds, I was presented with the entire page to sort out, just for the sake of about 10 lines at the bottom. Phil 12:06, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)

Oh yeah, gotta love that kind of edit conflict. And currently the software is that dumb :)

Best bet is to copy an addition ready to paste back if a conflict occurs - if your changes are less monolithic then there's no other really easy way... Dysprosia 12:09, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Agree. I learned during the many past times when one would save only to be told that page no longer exists. I always block and copy my additions in anticipation of something going South before the save goes through - Marshman 20:53, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

See MeatBall:EditConflict and MeatBall:MergingAutomatically for alternatives. See wikipedia:bug reports to suggest them to the developers. See Wikitech-l to volunteer to help develop the software. Martin 00:51, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Automated / Scripted Wiki Migration

Is there any software around or under development to migrate pages from the old Usemod wiki to the new MediaWiki ? 5pectre Fri Nov 28 13:16:01 GMT 2003

See the script importUseModWiki.php in the maintenance subdirectory. It's incomplete currently, requiring manual cleanup of case sensitivity changes, subpage links, etc. User accounts need to be recreated, and the article count is not set. There's an older, non-functional copy in maintenance/archives which has half-implemented a few of these other things. --Brion 23:55, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Copyright conflict

Is there a conflict with this image: Image:Urchintest2.jpg. The description says: "Copyright ©2003 by Daniel P. B. Smith. Licensed under the terms of the Wikipedia copyright." It doesn't sound right to me. Dori 22:41, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)

Sounds ok to me, though it should probably say "GNU Free Documentation License" by name rather than the vague "Wikipedia copyright". Remember that contributors retain copyright in their submissions here, and are licensing them under a common redistributable license. --Brion 23:43, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I asked Brion above the same Q months ago. Here's his A: [1] --Menchi 23:47, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

OK, just wanted to be sure (thought that Copyright and Copyleft were not compatible). Dori 23:51, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)

Copyleft requires copyright (and if those articles don't explain that, they should do). Martin 00:49, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Natacha Rambova

Why is Wikipedia's entry on Natacha Rambova filled with so many errors? -- Michael Morris

If you feel that there are errors, you should feel free to correct them. The information that is there was entered by other editors like you. Dori | Talk 05:06, Nov 30, 2003 (UTC)

That is to say, just click here, Mr. Morris, and correct away. ScareQuotes

GFDL from other authors

If we copy text from an article from another source released under the GDFL, into a wikipedia article, are we required to link to the other site and mention that the original text came from that site? Alexandros

Yes. See Bacterium and anachronism and time travel and Hydatius for recently updated examples that are (IMO) 100% compliant. Do you have a particular article in mind? Martin 19:22, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Nonexistent interwiki links

Someone has written new policy, wikipedia:blank page idiomatic link, about adding interwiki links to pages that don't exist. I think this is a bad idea. Having a link to a page in another language at the top, only to click on it and find that there is actually no such page is annoying and a waste of time, I really wish they would stop adding such links. Maximus Rex 18:41, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I agree - it should be policy that at least a stub should be created when adding a interwiki link to a not yet existing article. As interwiki links cannot be red it is not possible to see that the article exists or not. But even worse than a interwiki link that points into nothing is a page which only contains the interwiki link back - that one will make the red links in that language disappear with brown small article links. What I do when I have a interwiki link which will exist soon (e.g. the german districts which are created on both de: and en:) is that I add the interwiki link with HTML comments around it like <!--[[de:Kreis Neuss]]-->, so they are easy to activate once the target is created. This can also be useful for animals or plants - if one knows the name of an animal in the other language then a commented link can help to avoid that link being missed later. However too many commented interwiki links cluttering the beginning of the article is a drawback. andy 21:48, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Hmmmm... are policies on instant deletion of sub-stubs and similar issues the same in all the various languages? It seems to me that such policies should to some extent reflect the culture associated with the particular language. Is this how it works?

I've watched with interest the development of this new policy. There are more issues here than might at first meet the eye IMO. Andrewa 22:59, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I wouldn't call it a new policy. More like one person's ideas on how these links should be treated. The policies on sub stubs are certainly not the same across different Wikipedias. For example, on the Arabic Wikipedia, pages with no text at all, but some interlanguage links are not deleted, whereas here they usually are. There seem to be objections to the creation of these empty pages at the Hungarian, French and Dutch Wikipedias that were expressed on the mailing list when a Polish was sent round to create these, but it's unclear whether the issue was more with the fact it was a bot than the pages per se. Angela 23:37, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Google search not finding main entries

Back in October, I wrote new entries for Carl Spaatz and Lyman Lemnitzer. Today I decided to do a search and see if there were any mentions of their names that were not linked back to the main entries. I did, in fact, find two such mentions. But I also found that a google search under "Spaatz" or "Lemnitzer" failed to provide a hit on either of the main entries for these men. Obviously both names were mentioned several times in the relevant entry. Other entries with links to these entries were listed (such as List of people associated with World War II). Google even had the links from my user page which post-dated the creation of these entries. So why doesn't google pick up on them? MK 15:34 (EST) 30 November 2003

One month isn't that long for Google to find something, particularly if the pages that link to it have a low page rank. Angela 23:37, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Consensus decision-making--original article

How could I find out who wrote the original text on consensus decision-making or where it was taken from? I'm curious about the sources for certain assertions. Page history only seems to go back to January 2003. I was hoping to go back to the root article. Sunray

Looks like the original article is lost. mydogategodshat 06:09, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think the January version might be the original article. Angela. 06:26, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Voting on Brilliant Prose

The Wikipedia:Brilliant prose has articles which were added before the Nomination system. Some of the articles rise some doubts and there was a discussion on Talk: BP candidates about what to do. A voting was decided. So now, everybody, please vote on:

• Wikipedia:Refreshing brilliant prose - People and culture
• Wikipedia:Refreshing brilliant prose - History and religion
• Wikipedia:Refreshing brilliant prose - Others
• Wikipedia:Refreshing brilliant prose - Science

Cheers, Muriel Victoria 14:28, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Adding certain html codes

Well, after viewing a long article, and wanting to make a link into a certain section, which couldn't be defined in the table of contents with the double = sign without making the article all screwed up (Namely, I'm trying to link to the part in Modem about echo cancellation in the history section

So, rather than split it, I thought I would try changing 'Echo Cancellation' to '<a name=echo>Echo Cancellation</a> so I could link from Cancellation to Modem#echo

Any way to go about this other than to split the article --Fizscy46 14:46, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not allow manual insertion of anchors. However, for general stylistic reasons, the words Echo cancellation should be made a heading, using ===heading=== syntax. It is my understanding that such a heading is automatically made an anchor. -Smack 01:39, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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Quick reference on server status

• Web server for the other wikis and en2.wikipedia.org ("pliny") is online
  • Motherboard and CPUs have been replaced (2003-10-14), which hopefully will eliminate the frequent crashes we've had
• Webserver for the English-language Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org ("larousse") is online.
  • Back online 2003-10-14, running on older, slower processor temporarily
  • Faster processors and memory are being tested now (2003-10-17) and should be put back in soon if all is well
  • Can ping both en.wikipedia.org and larousse.wikipedia.org, which resolve to the same IP address, so I suppose they are the same. Now online, everyone now awaiting en explanation.
    • I'm not aware of any problem with larousse; when I got up today it was pliny which wasn't responding to web requests. It has been intermittently doing that for a few weeks. --Brion 01:19, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
      • en.wikipedia.org wasn't responding earlier today, for quite a long time (starting some time before 19:34 UTC, coming back up some time between 20:37 and 21:28). And at the same time, en2 seemed rather fast, except for the missing wikipedia logo and I could only view most pages with en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title= url syntax (seemed to be trying to access en.wikipedia.org with regular syntax, despite the en2 in the url). The ping command gives the same ip for en.wikipedia.org and larousse.wikipedia.org 130.94.122.197, while pliny and en2 were 130.94.122.199, so I guessed it was larousse. Think the problem seemed to go away about the same time as the post mentioning a voodoo recompile. Κσυπ Cyp   01:54, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
• New database server online
  • As of 08:45 UTC, 3 December 2003

Are copyright expired encylopedias suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia?

Why or why not? Has anyone worked on an automated tool to do an import?

Yes they are, but with some limitation. The most important one is that the information can be outdated, a minor one is old spelling. You can find most already discussed in Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, as that encyclopedia is the prime one used for import already. So a automatic import isn't recommended, most articles need at least a bit work. And don't forget the scanning/OCR errors of the internet version of the 1911 EB. andy 20:13, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

An example of suckiness, Britannica 1911 includes, as a norm, lengthy references on books written around late 19th century -- which are basically unreadable and impossible to find even in large library easily. But EB 1911 does have some applicable info that doesn't expire too. So, automatic import is not good, but taking stuff from them with good taste and selection is good. --Menchi 04:42, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Redirect question

The Whatlinkshere page for Baltimore Oriole shows Geography of Equatorial Guinea which links to Maryland, USA but certainly not to Baltimore Oriole. Is this a bug or a feature? Big Iron 20:13, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The Whatlinkshere page lists redirects, of which Baltimore oriole is one. Maryland, USA redirects to Baltimore oriole (this is called a double redirect, and is nonfunctional) and Geography of Equatorial Guinea links to Maryland, USA. The redirects should be sorted out by someone (of which you might be an excellent candidate) by redirecting Maryland, USA to Maryland and eliminating entirely the comparison in size currently at Geography of Equatorial Guinea, because the comparison means something only to a relatively small number of people worldwide, and could not be reasonably made more accessible without losing functionality. Feel free to leave a question of my talk page if needed, or consult Wikipedia:Redirect Tuf-Kat 05:08, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)

No, the double redirect is how it is displayed. But in fact Maryland, USA redirects to Maryland (everything else would be nonsense), and that one contains the link to Baltimore Oriole. Maryland USA should be listed in that list at all, as pages which link to pages which contain the link are not listed normally. So it is an actual bug in the WhatLinksHere, but IMHO not a serious one. andy 08:50, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Actually, because of the reference above, the Village Pumps is now showing as a double redirect, but it doesn't appear in Wikipedia:Defective redirects so it isn't a true double redirect. Big Iron 21:28, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I believe this is a known bug that has already been recorded at SourceForge. By the way, Wikipedia:Defective redirects hasn't been updated in a long time. Believe me, there are plenty of double-redirects floating around right now. --Minesweeper 09:22, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Slow page

I can't guarantee it wasn't just a browser anomaly (especially since it's MS-IE), but at one point most pages seemed normal, but Computational_geometry wouldn't load, but it would load quickly, with [2]. (But still wouldn't load the normal way.) At the same time, there was a several minute hole in recent changes. Doubt whether any of this has any significance, but mentioning it in case. Κσυπ Cyp   03:02, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I have never seen the system more unstable than it is right now. I assume the sysops are busy converting over to the new computer, but I cannot get anything in without one or two "server does not exist" errors and when I do finally get something accepted, the system has logged me out. Wikibooks is almost completely dead in the water. - Marshman 03:18, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

For someone who claims to have been here since July, I find that difficult to believe. ;)

We had a network accident waiting to happen in the configuration, which caused some problems (IP conflict) after the new machine was brought into the network. Pliny was offline for a little while, but this should now be resolved. --Brion 03:28, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I do try not to complain because invariably (due to you and other sysops' fine work) I'm going to eventually be embarassed by fantastic performance - as was the case this time (came back fast). Yes, there have been some bad days since July, and maybe this afternoon was not the worst (I'm known to exaggerate ;o), but the bad day at hand is always the worst, and I had as many as 3 or 4 inserts saved on my computer working file, for inability to get them in. And Wikibooks was just gone (could not raise). So - you are right, probably not the worst and seems very good now. - Marshman 04:52, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Watchlist defaults

I've mentioned this before, but once the new server is online, I wonder if the watchlist default could be upped to 12 hours or maybe 1 day? I presume that the watchlist default was changed to one hour (some months ago now) for performance reasons, though I suspect that those who use the watchlist feature will generally immediately ask for a redisplay with a longer interval (I know I do) which negates completely the performance advantage - the server is having to generate two lots of watchlist instead of just one. The result is that the not very useful default actuallly increases server load, the opposite of what was intended. I know I can craete my oen link with whatever default I wish, but then it's only accessible from my user page, not in the sidebar as I would like. GRAHAMUK 04:24, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Make a button in the Links button bar if you're using MSIE or Firebird, or make a bookmark in your browser. Fuzheado 04:27, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

My watchlist defaults to a lot more than 1 day (all the way to 2002) and I wish it would stop at 1 day :) Dori | Talk 04:34, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)

Mine too (to way back before I joined up) but that has to do with the total number of pages you are listing as "watching". You are in the lower number group (usually means a new person) that will get lots of time span. - Marshman 04:57, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

My watchlist is now showing everything, whereas yesterday it was defaulting to one hour; is this due to the installation of the new machine? I think it should be put back the way it was if so, to help system performance. - Hephaestos 16:26, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

This has been changed to a default of 3 days now or 12 hours for those with more than 1000 pages watched. Angela. 06:35, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

A question fixing disambiguation on a redirect

I am trying to disambiguate Hindu. There is an article referring to The Hindu (newspaper), and an article referring to Hinduism (religion). Hindu is the redirect clause presently for the latter page.

Converting the redirection page for Hindu to a disambiguation page seemed like a solution. But, the newspaper page has only three pages linking to it, whereas the religion page has hundreds. And every reference to Hindu redirect page presently, is to the religion and not to the newspaper. And hence, that seemed like an extreme step.

Nevertheless, considering the newspaper's popularity in India, sooner or later there will be more articles referring to it, and an early disambiguation seems necessary. So how do I proceed? chance 07:02, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)

I think the best way would be a disclaimer at the top of the Hinduism article:

This article is about the Hindu religion; for other meanings, see Hindu (disambiguation).

Then list the other meanings at that disambiguation page. - Hephaestos 07:06, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I agree with Hephaestos's solution. The [... (disambiguation)] format is suitable for situations like this. The newspaper will most likely never be more famous than the religion. It is, after all, named after the religion. Not the other way around. --Menchi 08:56, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Orphaned Pages

When will the list of the first 125 orphaned pages Special:Lonelypages be updated again? I believe that virtuall all the pages on the current list are either disambiguation pages or no longer orphans. -Anthropos 07:38, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Whats the criteria for a page to be included in that list? -Antonio Fatal Attraction for Men and Women Martin

An orphan is an article that has no other articles linking to it. I believe this list is just the first 125 such orphans alphabeticaly. - Anthropos 21:03, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Conflicts between users

Question by Angelique was moved to Wikipedia:Conflicts between users.

why do I see square boxes in math formula?

Often a square box appears in math formulas where I would expect a character. I guess this means my browser can't render the charachter. How can I fix this or get around the problem to find out what charachter should be in the place of the square box?

Thanks

If you log in, then you will be able to set the formula rendering style in your user preferences. It sounds like the "always render PNG" option would be best for you. -- Tim Starling 23:25, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)

FWIW, this is one reason to prefer always using TeX markup, even for relatively short formulas, rather than ∫ and other such HTML entities. Another reason is ease of future conversion to other (non-HTML) formats. --Delirium 04:32, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

Machaco Alert!

Please pay attention to the posts of this user, related to a Colombia's dialect that he name Machaco, Bambuco songs and others topics. Even when those contributions will be [3]poorly translated, this guy is very obstinate and bad-mannered and brought [4]us many problems (vandalism, non NPOV, flamewars...). His intentions to promote a wikipedia for this creole dialect has gone [5]quite far, using another [6]nick, or IPs in 200.21.108.xxx. Actually, we were forced to run a bot to delete his 'contributions' because of his intolerance, misunderstanding (read non observance) of the publishing policy and crude attitude with the community. -- Best regards -- 200.45.101.236 18:29, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC) ([7])

Editing a Redirect

Is this the right place to post a "how do I?" question? I am slowly working my way through Buckinghamshire creating articles for all the places therein. However one of the places is the village of Penn, ancestral home of William Penn after whom Pennsylvania is named. However as you will see Penn automatically redirects to University of Pennsylvania. First of all how do I turn the Penn page from a redirect into something else? Secondly what is the protocol for sorting this out? Should there be a disambig page for Penn or a note at the top of the University of Pennsylvania article? I personally feel that automatically linking Penn to the univerity page is not the right thing to do... Graham  :) 01:05, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Go to Penn. You will be redirected to the university article but there will be a link saying "Redirected from Penn" just below the article title. Click on that link. Then you will get a Penn article which says just "#REDIRECT [[University of Pennsylvania]]. Edit that page to create a disambiguation page rather than a redirect page. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:24, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Ok I couldn't resist doing it for you, but you'll know for next time. p.s. Penn is now a stub that you may care to expand upon! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:29, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Penn has now been destubbed. Graham  :) 21:03, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Watchlist takes too long to load

Now that the old settings have been restored, my watchlist takes a very long time to load. Is it possible to change my preferecnes from the default number of displayed days? --Jiang 21:43, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• It takes a longtime because the default is now ALL rather than 1 hour. How can we change that? Kingturtle 21:57, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)
  • D'oh!! This is going from one extreme to the other. I mentioned a few days ago that '1 hour' was a poor default - 'ALL' is an equally poor default. For me, 1 day is about right. I feel these should be user preferences, but as someone pointed out to me, a workaround is to make a bookmark in your browser with the desired parameters. I now have this as a button in my toolbar, very convenient. GRAHAMUK 22:02, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)
  • Agreed, 1 or 2 days would be better (barring the ability to set this as a user preference). 2 might be an acceptable default (if not 1) because it's easy to edit 25 hours later than your last set of edit. How about 36 hours? ;-) Daniel Quinlan 22:31, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)
    • So can someone fix this? Kingturtle 00:31, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Non-existent user somehow trashed entire Page history as well as most recent version

User S1rkull somehow managed to wipe out the entire page history for the article on Truism. The page that's there resembles an old copy of the article. Can the most recent version of the article before the intervention be recovered? Peak 04:19, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Sure? If so, they managed to wipe it off the google cache and internet archive as well... Martin 04:28, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Do you mean Truism? Hmmm... I see only the one stubby version, apparently created by S1rkull, who has no user page, on 7 December which is today. If there has previously been a proper article, it looks like corruption of some sort to me. If that's true I wouldn't necessarily blame the user, if they even exist.

On 08:53, 1 Dec 2003 Menchi wikified truism. At that time, there was definitely an article; I subsequently tweaked it a bit, and put a "watch" on it, which is how I came to notice that S1rkull had (seemingly) performed some dark wikimagic.Peak 06:59, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It not being on Google doesn't mean anything, their spider can take months to reach a new article (in theory may never reach it). What's the 'internet archive'? Andrewa 06:43, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There was no article Truism as of the database being moved to the new server on December 3. Looking further... There used to be one, with revisions on November 30 by Matty j and December 1 by Peak. It was deleted at 19:26, 2 Dec 2003 by Ed Poor with comment "Wikipedia is not a dictionary". --Brion 07:03, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The edit history/deleted edits thingy isn't showing up on it. A history-only reversion should probably be done. Dysprosia 07:08, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion. --Brion 07:11, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, sorry I didn't see that earlier. Dysprosia 07:13, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thank you, Brion. Can its prior contents be restored or made available in some way? At the time that Ed Poor deleted the article, it did not resemble a dictionary entry at all.

Dug out of the old database and restored. --Brion 07:36, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

As one of the contributors to the article, I would like to suggest that recent contributors to an article should at least be notified when an article on which they have worked is about to be deleted. E.g. they might like to make a copy of it before it gets zapped. It might also save this cycle where an article is created, evolves, gets deleted, recreated, .... Peak 07:20, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That's why we have Wikipedia:Votes for deletion, supposedly. --Brion 07:29, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Macromedia Flash

I'm desperately looking for someone who can tell me how to block Flash demands for installation. This is clogging up our e-mail and Internet Explorer usages; also, since we are NEVER planning to develop our own web site, I can't see why we would possibly need Flash. I've heard also that Flash stuff uses a lot of virtual memory, and we've recently been running out of virtual. Does this have anything to do with Flash barging in? I'm tired of this kind of activity, and want it to stop. I already have AdAware and Spybot installed, and our system has run MUCH better since I did that. But, for whatever reasons, Flash is still driving us nuts. Thanks in advance. I'm looking for anyone who can tell me anything about this situation.

To my knowledge, Wikipedia doesn't use even a single byte of Flash. If you are just asking about your computer, the requests for Flash installation that you see are to be able to see flash content on whatever site or email you are reading, not for your own web site. You have two choices: 1. install the Flash plugin and get over it - it's just a minor offence with regards to system resources, or 2. use an ad-blocker program that will also block flash from webpages. Alfio 23:25, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Request for reversion and page protection

Will a sysop please revert Wikipedia:Edit conflicts to it's state on 31 July 2003, prior to the current edit war, and protect it so the warring parties can follow Wikipedia policy to resolve their differences and sort out what it should say? Jamesday 22:59, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Constitution of Wikipedia

Is this a joke, or is it in any way vaguely official?

Don't mean to offend anyone, but I can't help wondering. Thanks. -- Pakaran 23:04, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• This is not a joke. It will be official. Alexandros
  • Ok thanks. -- Pakaran 01:35, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
    • Well, Alexandros saying it is official doesn't actually make it so but no-one has opposed it so far. Angela. 01:45, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
• I think it's quite hideous and terribly, offensively US-Centric. Just my $0.02, but there's some opposition FWIW. Not saying that a constitution per se is a bad thing though - just this particular one. --Rlandmann 01:53, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
  • Yet you say $0.02. ;-) Alexandros
    • Which happens to be the local currency where I'm writing.... Or did you think that only the US uses dollars as currency units? :) --Rlandmann 02:16, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Rlandmann, ignore it, this constitution has to be a bad joke. mydogategodshat 06:37, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• Not really true to say that nobody has opposed. The page is listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. Bmills 10:27, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
  • It was true at the time I said it. :) Angela. 21:01, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Alexandros, please explain why it is, or should be, official. I doubt it seriously. RickK 07:27, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Mare Island

I am the one who posted the Mare Island comment, my email address is KissTycal@aol.com should anyone need to contact me.

citation

How could I cite Wikipedia as a source in a research paper? (MLA format!)

What links here...

Since the database work done a few days ago, the information retrieved when doing a "What links here" is shown in alphabetical order, whereas it used to be shown in chronological order. As an editor and as one who is interested in recently internal link generation, I personally have more use for the information in chronological order. Is it possible to give users the option of choosing which format to retrieve in? Kingturtle 23:38, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I strongly agree. The alphabetical order makes the feature much, much less useful to me (especially for those pages that are linked a lot). Dori | Talk 04:04, Dec 6, 2003 (UTC)

On the other hand, there are many situation where alphabetical order is better. So clearly both options are needed. Loren Rosen 01:22, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I like it alphabetical myself. It only really matters when there are lots of links, but then the ordering is a big help. How hard is it to provide both options I wonder? Andrewa 09:38, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There is not and never has been a chronological order option. The unsorted order of the rows in the database may sometimes happen to be chronological but is not guaranteed to be so; it certainly isn't after the link tables are rebuilt en masse and longstanding errors are corrected.

The ordering of the display was recently changed to be alphabetical by default instead of unsorted. In addition we've rebuilt the link tables and will do so again to correct newly found bugs. --Brion 09:49, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I guess it was a feature not a bug :) It'd be nice if it became a real feature though because it helps with discovering new pages. It was sort of a Special:Recentchangeslinked on reverse. One could of course paste and save all the "what links here" links of an article, and then do a Special:Recentchangeslinked on that, but it is more cumbersome. Dori | Talk 18:41, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

Can't login -- what cookies do I need to enable ?

I am using Mozilla Firebird 0.7.

I created a new account.I Wikipedia tells me that it created the new account successfully, but that it cannot log me in because my cookies are disabled. I looked at the address bar, and went in to the cookie settings and unblocked "en.wikipedia.org". Yet still it cannot log me in. I suppose there is some other site I need to unblock, but I don't know how to find out what it might be ? Any clues ? :)

en2.wikipedia.org also? Dysprosia 05:01, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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Wikipedia:Brilliant prose candidates

Now that some steps are being taken to clean up the pre-nomination brilliant prose articles, I'd suggest that something needs doing with the current candidates at Wikipedia:Brilliant prose candidates. Some of the disputed pages have been listed for months (see Richard Wagner for instance) and there are lots of nominated pages with no seconder.

I's suggest that a new limit of one month be set (maybe too generous) and that any page still disputed or not seconded at the end of that time be removed from the list of candidates.

Any ideas? And anyone like to go second or dispute a candidate today? Bmills 15:59, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

To clarify: one month limit is there already for disputed candidates, one week for undisputed. Only self-added articles currently need a seconder. I'd suggest that all articles should be seconded and that one week is not long enough to allow for objections. Bmills 16:13, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Mare Island

I think there should be mention of Mare Island....

I have an American Flag from 1916 that says "Mare Island 1916" and

has a rank on it. It is the size that is flown over Capital buildings , so I believe it was the Shipyards. Maybe, if you include Mare Island, you can research this Flag? I have done some looking here and there, but have not been able to find information about the flying or the retirement from the Shipyard of this Flag. I know in 1906 there was the San Francisco earthquake, and I know in 1917 the Shipyard was blown up by espionage. I "aquired" the Flag 14 years ago and a wild tale goes with it, that's another story. Hopefully we can put this Flag back on the map,I am curious if it was the first and only Flag flown over Mare Island? If you can help, I would appreciate, or, simply I have a suggestion of "Mare Island" be included in "Wikipedia."

                                       Thank you,
                                                  Bryan Cross

Wikipedia:Requested articles, Wikipedia:Reference desk --Menchi (Talk)â 12:54, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps you were looking for Mare Island Naval Shipyard? --Minesweeper 12:57, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I am the one who posted the Mare Island comment, my email address is KissTycal@aol.com should anyone need to contact me.

Norberto Carlos Cagliotti

When I was adding Cecil H. Green to the list of people born on August 6, I decided to read the whole birthday list. Second-to-bottom on the list, just above JonBenét Ramsey, was an entry for someone called Norberto Carlos Cagliotti, born in 1980, a surfer and "accenturian". The boy didn't have his own Wikipedia article, and I had never heard of him either, even thoughh he was supposed to be famous and I wanted to find out what in the world an "accenturian" was. The 1980 birthdate compounded my interest -- we could have a new Sunshine Generation celebrity, but my suspicions of vanity were raised. I did a Google search on the name, and there doesn't seem to be any Net presence of note -- mostly just sites that borrowed from Wikipedia. Norberto did show up at one page -- http://www.udesa.edu.ar/departamentos/economia/tba_listado.html. It appeared to be merely a display of college theses. Does anyone know anything about this guy, or is it simply vanity being poured onto a Wikipedia birthdate page? Wiwaxia 12:46, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I removed him. Accenturian = works for Accenture? This is a case when you could have got away with being bold. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 12:54, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I was also born in 1980, so I suppose I'm somewhat sensitive to the issue, and regardless of whether he belongs on the page in question, referring to a 23-year-old as a "boy" seems needlessly agist. I hope I simply misinterpreted Wiwaxia's intended meaning. --Nohat 22:37, 2003 Dec 9 (UTC)

Hey! I was born in 1979! I take offense at your offense. And no, I do not believe he is too young to accomplish great things! Frankly, if Norberto had been born in 1970 or 1960 (or even 1930), I wouldn't have considered the same accomplishments (and number of Google hits) to be worthy of an inclusion in a Wikipedia celebrity birthday list either. It's not hard to say, from the response so far, that no one thinks Norberto belongs on the August 6 page. Of course, if people like Shawn Fanning (b. 1980), Alex Koroknay-Palicz (b. 1981), Michelle Branch (b. 1983), Cole Bartiromo (b. 1984), Ilya Andropolsky (b. 1987) or Miranda Rosenberg (b. 1987) want to add themselves to date pages, I or anyone else is not going to be against it, because their accomplishments and name recognition are full worthy of it, regardless of age. Wiwaxia 12:19, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Formatting help

The table at Australia has its margin on the right instead of the left. Can someone fix this? --Jiang | Talk 08:40, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

No, I don't see it. Must be a broswer thing. Try Mozilla IE. --Menchi (Talk)â 10:01, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I see it in Mozilla Firebird. Compare Australia and some other country page; Japan for example. Japan's table is flush with the right side of the page, while Australia's has a margin on the right of the table. --Delirium 10:30, Dec 8, 2003 (UTC)

I was using IE at the time, and assumed Mozilla would work too. Apparently not! --Menchi (Talk)â 10:36, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Fixed. --Menchi (Talk)â 10:36, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'm afraid it's still deeply broken on Opera. I'll see if I can figure out why later on (and I'll try it in Konqueror too). -- Finlay McWalter 12:16, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Works OK in Opera 6.03 - Alfio 12:34, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Opera 7 breaks on lots of the tables used in the standard country template. The "area" and "population" rows get smushed together in a very unpleasant way. The cause seems to the "E 12 m square" link, which looks like this: [[1 E12 m²|7,686,850 km²]]. I suspect Opera 7 (a different rendering and parsing engine to opera 6) doesn't think that superscript-2 in the URL is legal, and so misparses the page horribly. This is an issue for (at least) Austria, Australia, Argentina. Peru is even more broken (it's almost funny), I think for the same reason. (Note: Australia has unclosed td and tr tags after "ranked 6th", but this isn't the cause of the problem. -- Finlay McWalter

I use Opera 7.1, and I don't see any such problems. Which Opera build do you use? -- Baldhur 12:49, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

"v7.20 Build 3144 Platform Win32 System Windows XP" -- Finlay McWalter 12:55, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Apparently there is a major rendering difference between 7.1 and 7.2. I had 7.2 installed myself, but returned to 7.1 due to several problems. One of these problems was, that the RecentChanges were not displayed in a proper way (and that is my most frequently used site in the web) - perhaps you should leave a note on Wikipedia:Browser notes. -- Baldhur 13:07, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Good idea - thanks. (Australia, etc., are generlly okay on Konqueror, btw). -- Finlay McWalter 13:19, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

External Links

Hope this is the right page, if not please move it. QUESTION: Should we be posting External links to personal websites or any other kind of site that is not credible. It seems to me if the goal is to have Wikipedia be an "accurate" and relaible source, then any external link it references to has Wikipedia's "certificate of authenticity" equal to our own unless a clear disclaim notice is given as part of the External Link listing. It would seem that if you can refer to John Doe's personal website on the "History of apples", then it becomes legitimate to link to a personal KKK and the like website from numerous Wikipedia articles. Angelique 01:58, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think that's a bit of a jump - adding a couple of useful and interesting articles is different from linking to the KKK or whatever. As long as the external links aren't inaccurate or biased in some way, there shouldn't be a problem. In many cases it may be more useful to link to them, rather than put all the possible information in the article. Adam Bishop 02:03, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

IMHO you will run into the problem of agreeing what is "credible". I do not believe an editor needs to agree with a website to link to it. For instance a NPOV article might legitimately link to both Creationism and Evolutionist websites. I would see no problem with an article on racism linking to a KKK website, as long as it was a "mainstream" KKK site, not a here-today-gone-tomorrow personal hate rant. Would judging by Google rank be a yardstick for linking?Anjouli 05:39, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The actual websites in question are (from New France):

• Lists of Governors, Intendants, and Bishops
• New France: 1524-1763
  • Lirath Q. Pynnor

For me, external links are supplemental information that goes beyond Wikipedia's level of detail, so I generally only include ones that seem at least as knowledgeable and current as the content of the article referring to them. From a practical point of view, you don't want to link to bad data, otherwise future editors can mess up the WP article by using the external pages as sources. Many web pages are ephemeral too, be sure the WP article still makes sense if all the links stop working tomorrow. Stan 05:49, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The point that we don't want to link to bad data made by User:Stan Shebs is why I raised the matter. (and not for one specific page but relative to all of Wikipedia) Linking to an outside source that is only someone's personal page raises unnecessary risks and instead of adding benefit to Wikipedia has the potential to be detrimental. As such, my view would be never to add any outside link except those pointing to an source whose credentials are undoubted. Why would an Encyclopedia like Wikipedia ever want to refer anyone to the writings of sites where both the qualifications of the writer and the validity of their information is unknown to Wikipedia? In books, authors quote their references so as to prove they are quoting reliable sources. Why would Wikipedia want to do the opposite? Angelique 16:31, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Having now seen the discussion on Talk:New France, I think your reasons for deprecating the external links are not valid. The personal page of a world authority is unimpeachable, and oftentimes a hardworking person goes to a great deal of trouble to put accurate information on a website. The only way to be sure is to evaluate website content on a case-by-case basis. For example, hazegray.org has a project to enter the content of DANFS as close to verbatim, and from experience I can say that they are very accurate, with fewer mistakes and typos than the average WP article. Stan 17:17, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)~

Dear Stan Shebs: Your insinuation is unfounded. REPEAT: " ---- I raised the matter. (and not for one specific page but relative to all of Wikipedia). my view would be never to add any outside link except those pointing to an source whose credentials are undoubted." Equally as often, a hardworking bigot etc. goes to great lengths to put their slant on "accurate" information. Want a list of "factual" right wing Religious Right sponsored sites? Should Wikipedia link to these? Or is someone going to start judging links? Angelique 22:26, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

If an external link has some value and some bad points, just add a note ("the pictures are good but the dates on the site are inaccurate"). This is all a normal part of scholarly work; we don't try to pretend that things don't exist, we mention them and describe their good/bad points. If you insist on sites with "undoubted" credentials, you don't make the problem go away, you just turn it into a debate on whose credentials are doubtful and whose are not. Stan 07:04, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There are two main reasons for linking to an external website. One is to link to useful and accurate information contained on that website, and the other is because the website itself is the object of interest. In the second case the website does not need to be accurate, fair or anything else. An article on (for instance) an Arabic newspaper would be negligent if it did not show the address of that newspaper's website - whether or not the information contained on that site was accurate, NPOV or not. People seem to be defending the first type of link and objecting to the second. Anjouli 18:55, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The links are valid information sources. The first one is a list of all governors, intendants and bishops of New France, which in fact could be used to create a List of New France governors and intendants type page. The other, which is the one Angelique is clearly opposed to, is the personal Website of linguist and teacher Patrick Cousture from Montreal, Quebec. This Website features a rich chronology of the history of Quebec from New France until now and the sources that he used for this work are listed at the bottom of this page: http://www.republiquelibre.org/cousture/HIST1.HTM. There are over 30 different books he's read covering some 500 years of history. Because Patrick Cousture is a Quebecer, he writes in the way an American would write of America, an Australian of Australia, a Scot of Scotland etc. This is what Angelique doesn't like about the site. -- Mathieugp 19:15, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think I did in fact use that site to make a list of Governors of New France, which at the moment is on List of Governors General of Canada (but it has been discussed on that page that governors and Intendants of New France should be split off). Adam Bishop 19:22, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

linking to a French Wiki image

can someone tell me how to link to an image that's in the French wikipedia space (or tell me if this is a silly thing to do)? thanks. seglea 20:56, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It would be best if you re-uploaded it on the english wikipedia. The image may change afterwards, it could be deleted, etc. Anyway, currently the only way to do an inter-wiki image link is to use a full html link, like this: flag of the United States. Alfio 21:14, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Searching for missing knowledge

I was thinking that a page wikipedia really needs is a what's missing page, especially on the front page. So Searching For An Answer is now a page for it. Can we put it on the front page?

That would be a duplicate of Wikipedia:Reference desk, so I've made your page a redirect to there. Morwen 18:39, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Or maybe Wikipedia:Requested articles? Angela.

Are User and User:Talk pages personal

I remember seeing a related discussion on the pump earlier today, but I can no longer see it. Is a user allowed to do anything on his user page or his user talk page which would normally be against wikipedia conventions if done on a regular article, e.g., blanking of the entire page.

There is a user who blanks out his talk page after each discussion, so we don't get to know what discussions he's been having. Are there any rules on what a user is allowed or disallowed on his user page ? Jay 17:30, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It's their talk page, so they have a great deal more latitude there than other places. Lots of people clear their talk pages occasionally, and a few do so at the conclusion of a given conversation. If they remain responsive to other wikipedians, then this isn't an issue. Previous discussions are available in the article's history, as always. -- Finlay McWalter 17:42, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

You can always look at the history. The convention is that the User page is the user's and the User talk page is where discussions go and the user can blank or archive it periodically. However, it is generally considered to be in bad taste to quickly blank discussions or ignore questions. In extreme cases where a user is ignoring pleas to stop misbehaving, it might add weight to a request that someone be banned or desysoped. Personally, I leave discussions on my talk page forever. (I might have to start archiving, but they'll still be there.) Daniel Quinlan 17:43, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

Some people get away with blanking their talk page. Some don't. There aren't any agreed-on rules for who can do what with either your user page or talk page. Some people even invite others to edit their user page whereas others are strongly against the idea. Wikipedia talk:User page might be a good place to discuss it. Angela. 18:22, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks Angela for pointing out the Wikipedia:User page. I had tried looking for such a page in Wikipedia:Utilities but couldn't find it. (I've added it now). I should've looked up Wikipedia:List of articles in the Wikipedia namespace first thing, but its too long to type and I always get it wrong. Jay 18:53, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That would be because it's only existed for a couple of days. :) Angela.

Wholesale copyright violation by wordIQ

I have found a site, wordIQ, which appears to have copied most or all of Wikipedia and is passing it off as their own.

• Does not mention Wikipedia
• No GFDL notice
• Claims to own copyright and does not allow reuse without explicit permission

This seems to be a mass copy. Searching for wikipedia found hundreds of articles containing the word in boilerplate stub text, links to Wikipedia: pages, etc. Anyone who contributed before August 2003 (which unfortunately doesn't include me - Tualha) has probably had their copyright violated.

Analysis of the history of Cognitive science shows that this article was copied sometime between August 17 and September 1 of 2003. Compare the August 17 Wikipedia article with "their" page.

I found no explicit point of contact. Their "About wordIQ page gives an email address and the phone number 626-226-8279, which would be in the Los Angeles area. Their terms mention California law. Whois merely reveals that they're hiding behind Domains By Proxy.

I don't think this is an honest mistake. I think this is a massive intentional grab of Wikipedia content with no intent to abide by the terms of the GFDL. Let's nail these bastards. See Wikipedia:Standard GFDL violation letter.

I have added this to Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content.

Tualha 17:27, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Folks, please be nice! We don't need to bring down on ourselves a bad name. If you decide to contact them, please be polite and factual. I would encourage allowing Jimbo or someone else who's been around for a while to handle this. A lot of sites are very confused about GNU licensing and how it works, so it could be an honest mistake. And even if it's not, we still don't want to earn ourselves a bad name. Daniel Quinlan 17:34, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

Sigh. I suppose you're right. But I just can't believe that it's an honest mistake. They mass-copied the Wikipedia and slapped a copyright notice on it. How can that be an honest mistake? Tualha 17:37, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Well, the odds are that they'll calmly claim it was an honest mistake whether or not it was. And who would the average person believe, the screaming net community or the calm business? Hence, my request for civility. ;-) Daniel Quinlan 17:43, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

Point taken :) Tualha 18:20, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Did non-existent user trash entire Page history as well as most recent version?

It seems that user S1rkull somehow managed to wipe out the entire page history for the article on Truism. The page that's there resembles an old copy of the article. Can the most recent version of the article before the intervention be recovered? Peak 04:19, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Sure? If so, they managed to wipe it off the google cache and internet archive as well... Martin 04:28, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Do you mean Truism? Hmmm... I see only the one stubby version, apparently created by S1rkull, who has no user page, on 7 December which is today. If there has previously been a proper article, it looks like corruption of some sort to me. If that's true I wouldn't necessarily blame the user, if they even exist.

On 08:53, 1 Dec 2003 Menchi wikified truism. At that time, there was definitely an article; I subsequently tweaked it a bit, and put a "watch" on it, which is how I came to notice that S1rkull had (seemingly) performed some dark wikimagic.Peak 06:59, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It not being on Google doesn't mean anything, their spider can take months to reach a new article (in theory may never reach it). What's the 'internet archive'? Andrewa 06:43, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There was no article Truism as of the database being moved to the new server on December 3. Looking further... There used to be one, with revisions on November 30 by Matty j and December 1 by Peak. It was deleted at 19:26, 2 Dec 2003 by Ed Poor with comment "Wikipedia is not a dictionary". --Brion 07:03, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The edit history/deleted edits thingy isn't showing up on it. A history-only reversion should probably be done. Dysprosia 07:08, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion. --Brion 07:11, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, sorry I didn't see that earlier. Dysprosia 07:13, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thank you, Brion. Can its prior contents be restored or made available in some way? At the time that Ed Poor deleted the article, it did not resemble a dictionary entry at all.

Dug out of the old database and restored. --Brion 07:36, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Brion - Thanks very much. I thought your prior message on undeletion meant that I would have to write a note there, which I have already done. I guess I'll go back there to indicate that the problem has been resolved --- or has it? How can an article be deleted without "due process"? Peak 07:44, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

As one of the contributors to the article, I would like to suggest that recent contributors to an article should at least be notified when an article on which they have worked is about to be deleted. E.g. they might like to make a copy of it before it gets zapped. It might also save this cycle where an article is created, evolves, gets deleted, recreated, .... Peak 07:20, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That's why we have Wikipedia:Votes for deletion, supposedly. --Brion 07:29, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

CVS Blame

Is it possible to do a 'CVS Blame' on an article? Jahs 17:39, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

What does that mean? RickK 19:59, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

No, it's not possible. ("CVS blame" is really the "cvs annotate" command which shows who last modified each and every line, very useful tool, actually, and not just for blaming people for problems.) Daniel Quinlan 20:58, Dec 6, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry, should have explained for non-geeks. :) So it's not possible at the moment, but is there a technical reason against it? WikiPedia keeps the full history (AFAIK) so in theory it'd be doable.

Well, it's a somewhat expensive operation and non-trivial to implement. In addition, because Wikipedia is paragraph-based rather than line-based, I doubt it would be quite as useful. However, I agree it would be useful. It's open source, so you can always implement it and contribute the feature. Daniel Quinlan 00:52, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

Well, see: http://www.research.ibm.com/history/ --Brion 06:51, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Mind-blowing! Thanks for the pointer. So when do we get the open-source version?? Oh,well, anyway, there's another fine thing here, thanks to IBM's old pratcie of publishing research topics: some shmuck can't come along and patent the whole idea, now that it's published. Dandrake 19:12, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

To make feature requests, see wikipedia:bug reports. To contribute, start by reading wikitech-l. Martin 04:29, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Edit conflicts

Perhaps everyone could look at the history of Wikipedia:Edit conflicts and vote on which version they prefer, by reverting to it. Then a professional superhero could be hired to look through the resulting history, and choose the most reverted-to version. Κσυπ Cyp   11:18, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

But not more than 3 reverts a day :) Angela. 11:38, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

And carefully checking the IPs used for people with multiple IDs trying to "stuff the ballot box". Anjouli 13:59, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

And to be fair you would need to release all the protected page locks - which could be a recipe for chaos. I don't think this type of "vote" would be practical. But perhaps we need some alternative mechanism with the same effect. Anjouli 14:01, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I have been proposing two mechanisms to deal with this:

• Allow specific users to be blocked from editing a page.
• Allow alternate versions of very very contentious articles, then use Approval voting to select one.

Daniel Quinlan 21:00, Dec 6, 2003 (UTC)

Changing 'Bug reports' in the sidebar to 'Contact us'

I think it would be a good idea to replace the largely depreciated page link to "Bug reports" to Contact us in the sidebar. Please discuss the pros and cons at Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki namespace text. mav 09:47, 6 Dec 2003

Wikipedia used by other sites

I have noticed that other domains use Wikipedia's database. They always give wikipedia credit at the bottom. And that's cool....but, a page like http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/Dorothea_Dix.html has advertisements all over it. I don't like the idea of someone making money off of wikipedia text.

1. Who authorizes what sites can use wikipedia data?
2. What are the rules about how wikipedia data can be used?
3. Shouldn't we be upset when a site that uses wikipedia data makes a profit off said data? Kingturtle 09:21, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think if they acknowledge the source (namely, Wikipedia), then it's all legal.

To answer # 2, I think they can butch up our data if they cite "properly".

#3: Yes, I wish the $ goes back into Wiki-fund.

#1: I don't believe you need an authority to take Wiki-stuff.

I wish they have at least an "Edit" link that when people click on, brings them to our editable fun site.

--Menchi 09:25, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

www.4reference.net doesn't give a link back to the actual Wikipedia page. Should they? -- Tarquin 10:16, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Don't they have a hyperlink to our main page at the bottom of their page? --Menchi 10:24, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

You're looking for Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content.

On the subject of $, they are in effect contributing. They are delivering Wiki content on their bandwidth and taking the load off ours. Anjouli 13:56, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Under the terms of the GNU FDL that we have all written our articles under, anyone who wants to can take all our text and sell it. With numerous caveats of course. See the link for answers to all these questions. Tempshill 18:55, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

My main concern is the money issue. I don't like the idea of someone taking wikipedia content, putting it on a page, and then making an easy financial profit. Kingturtle 20:14, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There's nothing preventing someone from making a profit on Wikipedia articles. In fact, the GNU FDL is pretty consciously not a "for non-commercial use only" license. It's perfectly okay, by design, for someone to package up Wikipedia content and sell it in a book or on a CD-ROM, for example. --Delirium 21:20, Dec 6, 2003 (UTC)

How is this eazy money? Anyone can find the original Wikipedia and view it without ads. For them to make money, they have to add some value. pstudier 23:09, 2003 Dec 6 (UTC)

If we don't get around to it, eventually someone will provide a filtered version. If I had the money I might do it myself. The version I'd promote would be unedited, I'd just have a bunch of people choosing articles (which would then be fixed at that version) that were G-rated, seemed accurate, NPOV and well-written, and then automatically remove all broken links, talk etc from the result. I think the result would already be very saleable, both in online and DVD versions. I'd probably provide a year's ad-free online subscription bundled with the DVD, and a mechanism for getting the latest versions of articles when online if they differed from the DVD, automatically saving these updated articles on the hard drive or a CD-R or CD-RW for offline use (many new systems sold in Australia currently have separate CD-RW and DVD drives). Andrewa 09:23, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

If you plan to do this, do remember that such a version should fall under the GNU/FDL. In particular this means that others have the right to make copies of what you are selling, and sell them or give them away themselves. Andre Engels 11:41, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

True. I actually have no plans to fork Wikipedia at this stage, for profit or otherwise. I'm hoping we'll come up with our own sifter project soon. Andrewa 15:07, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

'Meta'

We are translating stuff at Chinese WP, and couldn't tell what "Meta" means in "Meta-Wikipedia". The dictionary's definitions all seem weird [8]. --Menchi 08:41, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

From Meta: In epistemology the prefix meta- is used to mean about. Thus, any subject can be said to have a meta-theory, which is the theoretical consideration of its foundations and methods. So, Meta-Wikimedia is about Wikimedia. Angela. 08:51, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Great! Thanks. --Menchi 08:54, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

When I see "meta" I think of self-reference. Bevo 05:36, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

VfD not being posted properly.

I notice a lot of people who post Votes for Deletion do so without putting a "delete" notice on the page, which is very unfair to the page's author.

Any suggestions how we can police this? Anjouli 02:39, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I agree with you completely. That is why I asked that the boilerplate be added to the top of VfD....yet, I am absent-minded enough to forget to place the message atop articles I nominate. I always mean to do it, but sometimes I forget. I am a little forgetful. It is part of my charm and part of my trouble! Alas. Kingturtle 02:47, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Take it up with The Cunctator. RickK 07:36, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I suggest it is "policed" in the same way that any additions to an article are "policed". If you see an article without the notice, add it. You can't expect people to be perfect and always remember to add the notice. A huge number of people look at the articles listed on VfD so surely one of them is going to notice the lack of the message. I don't think it's something you need to start getting overly worried about. A few months ago there was no requirement to add such a notice anyway, so whilst it is an excellent idea to add it, it isn't the end of the world when someone forgets. Angela. 07:52, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Ditto Angela - just add the notice. If the fact that the submitter did not put the notice on the page annoys you (I know it annoys the hell out of me when I don't see it), just move the listed page to the section corresponding to the date you put the notice on the page. You could also leave a short reminder on the submitter's talk page that adding the notice is considered to be good manners. --mav 09:38, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That is an excellent suggestion. Now watch me get flamed the first time I move a block to a different date :) Anjouli 13:52, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Agree it's an excellent suggestion. IMO it should be standard practice. I've seen it done several times, including by a sysop who was otherwise about to delete the article, and I haven't seen any flame wars result yet. It's a reasonable thing to do and avoids wasting time discussing undeletion later. Andrewa 09:33, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Two new pages????

1. (diff) (hist) . . Star Trek; 02:34 . . Yarvin (Talk)
2. (diff) (hist) . .N Leroy Jenkins; 02:33 . . Hyacinth (Talk)
3. (diff) (hist) . .N Leroy Jenkins; 02:33 . . Hyacinth (Talk)

This is what I see on recent changes. Whats the deal? Alexandros

Most likely, Hyacinth clicked save twice.

Noldoaran 06:12, Dec 6, 2003 (UTC)

What links here...

Discussion moved to meta:MediaWiki_feature_requests_and_bug_reports#What_links_here...

Some servers down?

At the moment, I can't access en.wikipedia.org , and seem to be able to access most of en2.wikipedia.org .

I can't access en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges but I can access en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges . Κσυπ Cyp   19:34, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

test.wikipedia.org also seems to be down, most or all others up. Can't see the Wikipædia logo on en2, by the way. Κσυπ Cyp   19:54, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

P.S. Need en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title= before everything, not just for recent changes. Κσυπ Cyp   19:56, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Damn, still noone answered. I wonder why... Κσυπ Cyp   20:28, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Japanese wikipedia seems to have been under a similar but slightly different condition, now for about 10 hours. I have sent an email to developers regarding regarding en & ja pointing BerliOS' Wikipedia Status page and here, among others. Tomos 20:35, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I came back after a while, and now the problem seems to have been fixed, thanks to Brion. Tomos 23:05, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Sub-pages on a WikiProject: link not working (sometimes)

Could someone who knows what's what take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Fictional Series#General Strategy and Discussion forum and hazard a guess at why the first sub-page link is permanently set to edit mode whereas the second, which is defined in exactly the same manner AFAICT, isn't?

Some clarification for the benefit of some of us confused participants (well, me, anyway) as to whether sub-pages are OK in the Wikipedia namespace would be appreciated: I'm sure that I've seen other Wikiproject pages use the same trick and get away with it.

Phil 17:20, Dec 5, 2003 (UTC)

• Glitch in the Matrix. I just resaved it with no change and it seems to have gone away. Dori | Talk 17:31, Dec 5, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia article name cannot begin with a lowercase character

Wikipedia:List of pages with capital first letters that should be lowercase describes the fact that a Wikipedia article's name cannot begin with a lowercase character. Can this constraint be lifted? Bevo 12:39, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I would doubt it. But without the express word from the developers... Dysprosia 12:43, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think it would be a good idea if something like "#lowercase" or "__LOWER__" made the first letter of the title lowercase... Κσυπ Cyp   15:12, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It would be good to lift the restriction somehow. These articles are rare, but pH in particular is an embarrassment IMO. Similarly iBook and lots of technology names. These articles look really silly as they are. Andrewa 09:45, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Database error?

Muggle gives:

Database error

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

SELECT cur_id FROM cur WHERE cur_namespace=1 AND cur_title='Muggle'

from within function "LinkCache::addLink". MySQL returned error "2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query".

May be temporary, but it's been doing it for a long time and everything else seesm fine. Anjouli 08:11, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Got it with another article. Tried again and was fine. --Menchi 08:13, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

MySQL problems. --mav 08:51, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Can anybody access 1958? I keep getting a MySQL error. --mav 09:21, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Loads fine for me. Dysprosia 09:23, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Seems okay now. Guess the reboot fixed it. Anjouli 12:20, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Anonymous edits

This cannot possibly be the first time this has been suggested, but I wonder if it might be better if anonymous IPs are only allowed to access WP read-only. Looking at the vandalism alerts, the vast majority are anonymous IPs. I suspect what happens is that a casual user browses in by chance, finds (to their surprise, probably) that they are able to change the content, and without much thought, does so. Usually this will be something facetious or silly, simply because this is what happens when people are presented with an unexpected opportunity. Those who are more considerate and understand what WP is about will be more than willing to register, it's not as if it takes much effort or costs anything. The ability to edit anonymously was probably very important when WP was first started, simply to get the ball rolling. It's rolling very nicely now, so this feature is no longer a blessing but a liability. I'd bet that implementing this would cut petty vandalism by 90% overnight, without having any significant effect on WPs growth. Thoughts? GRAHAMUK 07:03, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• User:Snoyes did an informal survey and found about a third of edits by anons were vandalism. The usual counter-argument to your suggestion is that "vandals will then register, making them harder to remove". This argument probably overestimates the resolve of most vandals, who tend to quickly leave, even without being banned meaning many would be unlikely to register. I think that if registered-only editing is implemented, then anons should still be able to edit talk pages. User:Adam Carr has suggested even stricter restrictions. Maximus Rex 07:10, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
• It might be useful to show the IP of even registered users when making edits. This would help to identify users with multiple IDs (used to support their own views in talk pages) as well as the ISPs of vandals with user accounts. Anjouli 08:03, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
  • Showing the whole IP isn't a great idea. If nothing else, it enables internet-based attacks on specific users. For example (in my evil spammer persona, below) I might conduct by wicked spamming while simultaneously DoS-ing as many developers as I could. Showing all but the tail octet (e.g. 192.168.22.???) would be okay, however. Lots of sites do this. -- Finlay McWalter 02:09, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• • I think it would be a violation of privacy. Just because other sites do it does not mean the wikipedia should do so too. One of the benefits of registering is that you're not showing your IP. If it were abtracted (or encrypted, hashed, whatever) I would be OK with it. In fact I would rather even the IP's of anons were not shown. People should also have a look at the Draft privacy policy and help improve it. Dori | Talk 04:02, Dec 6, 2003 (UTC)

• (slightly offtopic) A while ago, after reading a rather scary article about spammers were starting to spam into blogs, I sat down and figured out how a spammer might successfully spam wikipedia. Among the conclusions I came to was that I (in my hypothetical evil spammer persona) would only use signed-in users, never anons. This is because any regular admin can block an anon, but it takes a developer (and generally some discussion) to block a signed in user. Armed with a few dozen IPs (trivial for a professional spammer) and a few hundred automatically-created accounts, a smart spammer could easily flood us with so much crap that it would be a full-time job blocking and reverting them. To date we've been lucky that 99% of our vandals only want to put "Zaphod is l33t" into a couple of pages and then go play Mariocart. So I'm not expressing an opinion as to whether anons should be blocked, but be aware that such a move affords no protection against the smart, determined vandal or spammer (from whom we have greatly more to fear). -- Finlay McWalter 01:58, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
  • My understanding is that "regular admins" can block users, though the interface does not make it obvious how to, but only developers (or rather only one specific developer) should make that decision. --Pakaran 02:04, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
    • Or at least it doesn't make it obvious enough for me to see at first glance :( --Pakaran 05:06, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
  • Actually, the presence of anonymous IPs makes it easier to spot vandalism. When looking for vandalism, I usually just scan the IPs and ignore the user names. Kingturtle 09:12, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Kosovo and Metohia

Day before yesterday, User:G-Man vandalised article on Kosovo and Metohia in 15 subsequent edits, which include reediting his former edits, marking major edits as minor [9] and thus making next to impossible to see what are his edits. He also edited on controversial issues currently being discussed on the page's Talk page while not participating in the discussion himself. I have therefore reverted the page, and ask that it is protected. Nikola 08:27, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Why is this on Village pump? RickK 07:29, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Working in a language in which you are likely to make mistakes

Is it acceptable to work in a Wikipedia whose language you have only studied academically, and may make grammatical errors in? I was thinking about working in the Spanish Wikipedia, but I have only taken Spanish through a second-year college level (probably 7 years of classes in and before college) and I'd be likely to make grammar errors. Given my experience trying to fix up the travel article, I don't want to put anyone else in the same boat, but I feel I could make significant contributions there. -- Pakaran 01:35, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Personally, I think that would great. The small Wikipedias (Arabic for example) need all the help they can get and would probably welcome people with a less than perfect knowledge of the language. I don't know whether people at the Spanish Wikipedia would feel the as I do though. Maybe you could ask at es:Wikipedia:Café. Angela. 01:45, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Ok thanks, I just made an account and posted there. -- Pakaran 01:59, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I occasionally write stuff in the French wikipedia...despite about 15 years of French classes, I can still only write something that is almost French-like, but the French-speakers there don't seem to mind fixing my mistakes. Likewise, I don't mind fixing non-English peoples' mistakes when they post here. I think the idea is that it is better to have an article with grammar mistakes than no article at all. Adam Bishop 01:59, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That makes sense - and those of us who are multilingual are in a position to translate articles over, and they can then be fixed much faster than an article could be written from scratch, or so I'd like to think. -- Pakaran 02:07, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I can attest to French Wikipedians' willingness to patiently correct your...I mean, my, mistakes. My French knowledge is so "basic" (that reads "sucky") that sometimes things that came out make no sense except to myself. So we have to discuss those things in the Talk page, and once the native speaker got what I mean, he helps to make the French decent.

Chinese WP only rarely gets non-Chinese contributors. The only one we have currently is a Brittany linguist who happens to speak Chinese better than me. It's basically the same friendliness in all other Wikipedias I tried: Vietnamese and definitely English. So, get off your hesitating chair and just do it! --Menchi 04:54, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

One way around this is to set up an editing partnership, as we have been doing at the History of Poland series. I write a draft section in (I hope) good English. Various Polish users who do not have good English then make comments and add more material. I then edit their material into good English. This seems to work quite well. Adam 03:32, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

We have an extremely active contributor over on the Welsh Wikipedia, who is very keen. Unfortunately it's obvious that he's translating articles from the English Wikipedia word-for-word and hasn't twigged that Welsh is a Verb-Subject-Object language while English is Subject-Verb-Object so the word order is all wrong! However any article is better than none, and it's not much of a hassle to correct the articles afterwards once I have an idea what he meant. Hopefully the grammar will become clearer to him over time. Arwel 12:02, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

m:Constitution of Wikimedia

See m:Talk:Meta-Wikimedia:Constitution of Wikimedia

"Bolded" text

The watchlist page says that text will be "bolded". From dictionary.com:

\Bold\, v. t. To make bold or daring. [Obs.] --Shak.

Could we have "emboldened" or "displayed in bold", please, instead of this revived archaism? -- Paul G 15:00, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

dictionary.com has for "embolden":

To foster boldness or courage in; encourage.

and, for "to bold":

To be or become bold.

"to bold" is the appropriate term among those of us involved in the text editing field. RickK 16:14, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the clarification. I have seen "emboldened" used in the sense of "to make bold face" but don't have a reference. Paul G 09:41, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Edit date bizarreness

The article Charles Xavier was just now renamed to Professor X. The edit history of Talk:Charles Xavier correctly shows this as occurring at 7:39, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC) - but the edit history for the article itself claims it occurred at 3:46, 22 Nov 2002! (Regressing back to the last time someone renamed the page, or something?) —Paul A 07:51, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

An old but minor bug. I finally got around to fixing it; from here out such moves (renaming a page over a redirect to itself) should properly update the timestamp of the redirect. --Brion 06:44, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Duplicate articles

Apologies, not sure if this is the right place to point this out but I could not find any pages related to it--I have come across two pages, Magellanic Clouds and Magellanic clouds which relate to the same thing. What is the usual practice for fixing something like this?

--Chopchopwhitey 06:06, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

This is a proper name, so you want to edit the lower-case case version into a Wikipedia:Redirect to the upper-case one. Double-check that there aren't any useful info bits in the article you're overwriting, but Magellanic clouds looks pretty minimal. Stan 06:14, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Done. Thanks. --Chopchopwhitey 06:25, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

For future reference, see also Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. —Paul A 07:40, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Database error when trying to block a user

When I tried to block a user's address, I got the following error message: Database error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

INSERT INTO ipblocks (ipb_address, ipb_user, ipb_by, ipb_reason, ipb_timestamp, ipb_auto ) VALUES ('64.208.58.117', 0, 13800, 'you were warned','20031204044847', 0) from within function "Block::insert". MySQL returned error "1062: Duplicate entry '2147483647' for key 1". RickK 04:52, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

A bizarre auto-increment problem. Should be resolved. --Brion 05:15, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Reverting

I've seen people refer to the act of "reverting" text as if this were easy. I don't find it so - I have to show up the diff of an article and select the text, which (maybe it's my browser) usually selects across the page and hence both copies at once. I then have to manually edit out the parts of the old article that I don't want. This strikes me as awkward and error-prone. Is there an easier way I haven't discovered? Couldn't there be a simple "revert" link next to each version in the history? Not sure what this implies from a technical standpoint but it would make the occasional necessary revert much easier. GRAHAMUK 23:32, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version. --snoyes 23:48, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It's not that hard (see link posted above by Snoyes), but I'm not sure how much easier I want it to be. Making reverting to any version a one-click operation could make people less interested in moving an article forward. I'm not really sure that's a great idea. Daniel Quinlan 00:00, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

D'oh! Helps to RTFM.... thanks for pointing it out. I tend to agree that a one-click revert might be too tempting for some. GRAHAMUK

Search engine

Just wondering, now the new box is online, will the internal search engine be switched back on any time soon?. It's been out of action for ages now G-Man 23:08, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Maybe. See the thread on Wikitch-L called Fast. Angela 23:14, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Unicode

Please see the history of David Hume. An anonymous user is attempting to insert Unicode special characters into the article, and has had a modicum of support in this purpose. There's no problem when viewing the article, but when you attempt to edit it, you have to delete several characters in order to remove the codes if it becomes necessary. I'd hate to see this become a de facto standard on Wikipedia. RickK 16:42, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I hate them too. It makes it harder to edit, especially when there is a long string in a row. Don't most modern browsers support just pasting in the characters. What is the actual problem with doing that? If there is anything wrong with that, maybe the characters could be parsed so that when editing they look like normal characters, but when the page appears for display they are in Unicode. Dori | Talk 16:52, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)

I agree except for &mdash; (—) which I think is better than using two dashes (--). Here's the transform (perl code) I've been using to fix special characters. This (well, the guideline, not the code) should go into the manual of style if it's not there already.

   # smart quotes
   s/[\x93\x94]+/\"/gs;
   s/[\x92\xb2\xb9]+/\'/gs;
   s/[\xb3]+/\`/gs;
   s/[\x96]+/-/gs;
   # HTML escapes
   s/\–/-/gs;    # –
   s/\—/—/gs;
   s/\‘/\`/gs;   # ‘
   s/\’/\'/gs;   # ’
   s/\“/\"/gs;   # “
   s/\”/\"/gs;   # ”
   # unwanted HTML escapes
   s/\–/-/gs;
   s/\‘/\`/gs;
   s/\’/\'/gs;
   s/\“/\"/gs;
   s/\”/\"/gs;

Daniel Quinlan 17:40, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)

&mdash; and &ndash; do not display on some older browsers. So I use Unicode for them. This may be why you are seeing others as well. Fernkes 21:30, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)

&mdash; should be used in articles. If it's an issue for display in HTML, then the Wikipedia software could do a transform to the Unicode character when generating HTML from the Wiki source, but I doubt that Unicode characters actually work on a higher percentage of browsers and systems. For &ndash;, it is far easier (and well-accepted) to use a simple "-" character. Daniel Quinlan 22:29, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)

Dashes are annoying, everyone seems to have their own idea. People use -, --, &mdash; and &#8212;. The latter apparently works in more browsers than &mdash;, but nonetheless people go through articles chaotically changing each of the four styles to any other of the four styles, the target style being determined by the phase of the moon and various other astrological indicators. Let's just implement render-time automatic conversion from -- to some decreed standard and save everyone the hassle. -- Tim Starling 04:06, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

I thought about requesting that some time ago, but I had a bad feeling that "--" is sometimes used in other ways where it doesn't want to be &mdash;. Using &mdash; in article source may be safer. Anything to avoid numeric codes in article source, though! (If &#8212; is really more reliable, we should at least convert &amp;mdash; to that when producing HTML.) Daniel Quinlan 04:17, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

What else is -- used for? I don't think it's used for anything where the meaning would be obscured by converting it to —. But if there is such a case, it can be escaped: &#45;-. -- Tim Starling 04:26, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

It is used in C sources, so any article that contains a C source would be displayed most incorrectly. Nikola 06:52, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

If I understand your regexps, you're adding the backtick, by the Wikipedia:Manual of Style is still not a Good Thing... Dysprosia 04:08, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I only replace a Unicode/HTML backtick with a plain-old backtick. I add nothing. Much more manual editing is required to fix backticks since you need to figure out what the original editor intended or what is most appropriate in that context, so this script does additionally warn that a backtick was found. Daniel Quinlan 04:17, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

I'm no good at explaining things :) I'll let the MoS do it for me - not curved (smart) ones or the "backtick": Dysprosia 04:22, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

You're replacing left quotes with backticks, aren't you? Not backticks with backticks. -- Tim Starling 04:26, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the correction. Daniel Quinlan 04:42, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)~

For reference I mean this character ` <-- backtick. Dysprosia 04:33, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, for some reason I thought &lsquo; was the same, but it's not. I'll default to converting &lsquo to ' now. Daniel Quinlan 04:42, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

Link to redirect?

Is there a way to make a wikilink that will go to a redirect page, without redirection? Or must I use a regular HTML link?
Thanks, Tualha 15:39, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

AFAIK, you have to use a regular HTML link. Why do you want to do this, by the way? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:43, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

For a reference in Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion. It would save people having to go back. If there is a wiki way to do it, I'll note it in the page guidelines. If you have to use HTML, it's less trouble to go back. Tualha 15:47, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Internet Connection

Just curious, what type of Internet connection does Wikipedia use? What is the bandwidth?
66.32.17.177 09:09, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There's a statistics page for the Wikipedia (here), which say that for the last month, the peak throughput was 13650806 KiB/day ~= 1264 Kbps, or less than enough to saturate a T1.

The computers that host the Wikipedia (there are now three of them; huzzah) are all located in Bomis' data-centre, and Jimbo claims (semi-frequently, on the mailing lists) that the Wikipedia's traffic gets lost in the noise, though there is suspicion that he's just trying to be polite and modest about his expenditure on the project.

For this to be so (Wikipedia traffic < 10% of total), Bomis probably has a DS3 or better. Sorry I couldn't be more definite.

James F. (talk) 17:06, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Copyright vio and reversion, Stub warnings, Search engine

I created a page from text on a web site I am a contributing member of

spent a lot of time setting up the links to other enteries and potential enteries

and someone decided that as on paragraph of the text was the same as the web site that I was breaching copyright and the whole text was deleted.

My points are

1. Only one paragraph was taken from the web site so why was the whole page trashed? - I had to do the work over to recreate the links
2. As a contributing member I was not breaking copyright - so would not it have been better for someone to email me first to ask IF I had copyright.
3. I could not find out how to reinstate the original page.

Another point

I showed my 12 year old daughter the system and encouraged her to enter something - eventually we noticed her school was mentioned but had no entry so she typed in a short entry saying where it was a what type of school it was - just a couple of lines but factual.

Someone then put in a line saying 'THIS IS A STUB' etc. etc. and it just seemed to me to be insensitive and discouraging - given that the information did tell you the status of the school and where it was - may have been short but it was not valueless.

I'm sure many people have made this point - but the absence of an uptodate search engine seems to be a major major flaw in the credibility of the project.

Kevin Flude

As to your copyright issue - the page was not trashed and its content is all still visible. You merely need to make mention you own the copyright on the talk page and everything should be okay.

As to the stubnote thing - this is standard procedure to add a short note as an indication and an invitation for others to expand on an article. I trust the user who added the stubnote meant not to be insensitive or discouraging, but is merely a courtesy to other users. A stubnote is not a judgement of lack of value, but in my eyes an invitation for expansion.

The search engine issue is unfortunate, but I'm not sure how it impacts credibility - considered the Wikipedia runs on donations and support from Bomis, I believe. Dysprosia 09:01, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

To re-iterate and expand on Dysprosia's comments:

Sadly the number of people who simply take content off other people's websites and submit it as their own vastly exceeds the number of people who write their content, put it on the web, and then submit to Wikipedia as you did. To avoid legal problems we _HAVE_ to take down material as soon as its legality is questioned - happily in cases like yours when the fact that it is a false alarm is realized the material can be easily recovered. If this has not been done in your case yet, tell me the name of the article and I will do it. I hope this answers your questions 1&2. In response to 3, it is easiest if I point you to Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version.

Re the stub, I endorse Dysprosia's comments. The "THIS IS A STUB" notice is not a "THIS ARTICLE IS HOPELESS" euphemism. Actually it serves a technical purpose. If you go to the Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub page and click "What links here" you get a list of all the pages with a stub notice... i.e. a list of pages that, in an ideal encyclopedia, would be longer and more complete than they are. Without that notice, the technical trickery would not work.

Re the search engine, thanks to donations, we get a third server dedicated to Wikipedia turned on tonight. (This server alone cost around $6000.) Hopefully search facilities will be expanded as a result of this. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:38, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps that's not something to rush into.

What's the problem with using Google? I've found it works fine! It's not completely up-to-date, that's true, but that could even be an advantage. When someone is using a search engine in an encyclopedia, IMO they normally want stable content.

The other thing about using Google like this is it may promote our articles in Google when others use Google "native". I don't think Google actually reveals this either way, or even announces when their ranking algorithms change let alone how, rather they keep them a secret to hinder attempts to rig their rankings. But if our visitors from many different IPs use this feature, and then branch to a Wikipedia article, I'd expect Google to notice that. It's not rigging the ratings as such, just providing Google with some valid and accurate evidence which they will happily use IMO. Food for thought? Andrewa 19:57, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The new server has not been purchased for the search engine. It will help to solve the slowness problem that Wikipedia is experiencing since months (even if lately is quite better, but the increase in traffic will get us anyway). If, after this, there is enough spare capacity for the internal search engine, all the better. Alfio 20:37, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Why do you say all the better? That's what was originally suggested in this string, and I expect many agree, as it has generally been assumed that this is the case. But in reading this, it suddenly occurred to me that there are some good reasons for not having one. So, what are the reasons for wanting an in-house search? How does it assist readers? Is it just the vanity thing that other sites have them and we don't want people to think we're not able to?

Are there any problems with using Google apart from this 'credibility' issue? If not, is our credibility really increased by the in-house search engine? Or might it even be increased by being green hat enough to stay with Google?

As for stable content, not being up-to-date doesn't mean it will have the stable version. It would be possible for someone to search just as the page is changed, but it's also possible for Google to cache the page just as the page is changed too. Κσυπ Cyp   20:39, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

True. It certainly doesn't guarantee that the version will be stable. I'm not even sure whether it actually improves the probability of getting the content that the reader wants (I once studied such things, but that was more than 20 years ago), but my guess is that it doesn't make this probability any worse, that's all I was saying, probably not very clearly. If this is so, then it's not a valid reason for an in-house search engine.

This discussion has now been taken up on Wikitech-l. Andrewa 00:49, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

As for Special:Wantedpages, that's a different issue. If the capacity is there it could be turned back on. Perhaps, have a feature automatically disabling it and any similar processor-hungry frills on the fly whenever performance reaches an unacceptable level? Andrewa 18:21, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

We should add a couple of FAQs based on this query: 1) "Why has my material been deleted" 2) "Why has my page been marked as a 'stub'?". -- Tarquin 13:23, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes, good idea. Andrewa 08:56, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Uh, to find out what the stub thing is all about, one clicks on the link stub shown at that very article which is marked so. If the author doesn't want to click on that, he is not gonna go about to find an FAQ and discover where exactly his question would be answered. --Menchi 08:58, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Conflicts between users --> See Wikipedia:Conflicts between users

How to set up a disambiguation page

List of Australians lists a link to Daisy Bates, which the page describes as "self proclaimed psychologist" yet the link points to an article about an American civil rights activist. I want to set up a disambiguation page points to Daisy Bates (psychologist) for the Australian and Daisy Lee Gatson Bates for the American. I've never done such a thing before. Any tips on doing it well? Dmbaguley 22:16, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'd like to hear from some Aussies on whether a "self-proclaimed psychologist" is ever going to have a page of her own. If not, then remove Daisy Bates from the List of Australians and there ios then no need for a disambiguation page (I would not assume there is such a need). If later, any "other" Daisy Bates does deserve a page then the disammbiguation page can be created at Daisy Bates and the Daisies separated by middle names or some such - Marshman 03:16, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The Australian Daisy Bates was a pioneer ethnographer (and a very controversial one} and is an important figure in the history of Aboriginal Australians. She certainly should have an article. Adam 03:20, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

SUBST vs MSG

Is there general agreement on when one should use {{subst:...}} vs. {{mgsg:...}}? I notice that on Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages, it shows {{subst:stub}} but {{msg:disambig}}. Is this an intentional indication of preferred usage? --Anthropos 14:00, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

See the talk page - I prefer msg because it's easy to update messages, others prefer subst because they feel using msg would make it possible to cause lots of damage by editing a single page. In other words, what I see as an advantage, they see as a disadvantage. A vote is probably in order.—Eloquence 14:02, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

Personally, I prefer to know what I'm writing without the danger of this changing automatically as a result of someone vandalising or otherwise changing the message, so I always use subst. In some cases, when I've used subst:test, what I've added to the message afterwards would make no sense now that the wording of "test" has changed. It depends a lot on whether they message is protected or unprotected, but there is still no agreement on whether they should be. Angela. 14:28, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I can see Eloquence's point, but I agree with Angela. If I post something, I'd like to know what it is, and I wouldn't want someone else to change my wording afterwards, especially if I sign the message. Dori | Talk 14:41, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

That makes sense in some contexts, but I think we should agree to standardize stuff like stub notices, VfD notices, disambiguation notices etc.—Eloquence 14:47, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

Angela is right on one thing: It depends heavily on whether the message is protected. There are really two issues here (I guess that's why two methods are provided):

1. Some standard messages should (stub, dissambig, copyright notice...) are more a part of the user interface than a part of articles themselves - their wording is really a meta subject. These should be used with MSG. They should probably be protected, which shoudn't be such a big issue - anyone can change MSG to SUBST, save and edit at will.
2. Chunks of text that are commonly used and are good starting points for further work. These should obviously be inserted with SUBST, and probably should not be protected - as long as we trust ourselves to read the message after SUBSTing it, to make sure nobody has vandalised the message in the meantime. Zocky 15:01, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Good points, Zocky. I think maybe we are worrying too much about vandalism... a casual user is not going to vandalize the MSGs.. it would have to be someone more acquainted with how wikipedia works. Maybe we should use MSGs and SUBSTs as Zocky suggests but leave both types unprotected and see how often reversion is required. If it becomes a problem, we protect. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:15, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

SUBST vs MSG

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki custom messages#SUBST vs MSG

Compact TOCs up the creek all over the place

Take a look at Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki custom messages and List of science fiction authors. On both of these articles as they're appearing to me, the Compact TOCs are appearing in <nowiki> format. Does anyone have any idea what's going on? Phil 16:26, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

I think it's only section headers, see also m:MediaWiki feature requests and bug reports Dori | Talk 16:34, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

It's probably temporary. See the 'Link rendering' section above. Angela. 16:35, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Help - Need Name of Old Show

I have this memory of a show from when I was a child. I don't remember very much. All I remember is that there was a group of people on a very large spaceship. They spend their time moving from one large room to another. These were not rooms really but more like other worlds. In these other worlds, they would have adventures. I believe they were trapped on this ship and were trying to get off. I am not sure if this show really existed or is part of my imagination. If you know the name, please let me know at michaelmonge@msn.com. Thanks.

link exchange

Hello ,

I'm Alex, I run website http://www.webcam-list.com This is a big and convenient directory containing lots of links to free live webcams from all around the world (currently it has 1300+ links and growing).

I would like to exchange links with you and I think our visitors would both benefit from this. Please let me know what you think.

Thank you.

-- Best regards,

Alex Baldwin                          mailto:webmaster@webcam-list.com
http://www.webcam-list.com

The Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising. Dysprosia 23:00, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Talk Pages - Backward link request

Is there any chance of adding a backward link from a talk page to the page it is talking about? It's a little annoying to have to step back four or five pages to return to the page after an edit (or more if you've been browsing the talk history, for example!).

I would suggest making the second part of the heading (after Talk:) into a link back to the main page.

HappyDog 17:27, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

By 'main page' I of course meant the article the Talk page refers to. HappyDog 17:28, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand your question completely, but there is a link to the article page from that article's talk page: 1. down the bottom "View article", and in the sidepanel "This page">"View article". --snoyes 17:33, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There already is on the links to the left (i.e. for a Talk: there is a View article, for a User talk, there is a View user page; for a Wikipedia talk: there is a View meta page, etc.). Is that good enough? (through conflict edit) Dori | Talk 17:36, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

I see it now - it's not very clear, and importantly there is no equivalent link at the top of the page. I feel it would be a little more intuitive to make the second part of the page header (after Talk:) into a link back as well. Seriously, I double checked before writing this that there wasn't anything I'd missed, and I still didn't spot it! HappyDog 17:39, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Actually, can be hard to find quickly, even knowing where it is... Might be better if the link on the left was < View article instead of just {{msg:Articlepage}}. (And also < View meta page instead of just {{msg:Wikipediapage}}.) Κσυπ Cyp   20:17, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

What do people (that means you) prefer, this:

Edit this page

Post a comment

Stop watching

Move this page

< View article

Page history

What links here

Related changes

or how it already is?:

Edit this page

Post a comment

Stop watching

Move this page

View article

Page history

What links here

Related changes Κσυπ Cyp   20:17, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

We're is this list? I can't find it? HappyDog 20:56, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

OK - I've been playing around with my settings, and I now have the nav bar you describe. I'm not sure what caused it to appear, as I changed several settings at the same time.

The nav bar makes things a bit better, and easier to navigate. If the bar is there, my original request for a top-of-page link is no longer a necessity. However I still think it's desirable. It's the natural place for a backward link (it's the first place I looked), and given the wiki-philosophy of massively linking pages (e.g. every single date!) this does seem like a bit of an oversight, and an easy one to rectify. This is particularly true for people who haven't discovered how to turn on the menu (or don't even know that they can!). HappyDog 21:04, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I've played with Cyp's suggestion, sysops can edit the links in the Wikipedia:MediaWiki namespace.—Eloquence

Why are you making the lt a HMTL &lt; rather than a "real" lt, 0x3c? Just idly curious. -- Pakaran 01:50, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Just to avoid any possible display issues, should we add a > near to it. I tend to always escape < and > for that reason (see, that would have become an invisible tag if Wikipedia didn't use a tag whitelist for regular editing.—Eloquence 01:53, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

What "Skin" (under "preferences") are we talking about? I'm not sure they all have the same menu bar. Anjouli 15:04, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia/Guidelines for controversial articles

Hi all, I just started meta-page Wikipedia:Guidelines for controversial articles to help resolve problems with Israeli-Palestinian topics and it might be useful for other areas as well. Please take a look and help expand it. -- Viajero 15:24, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I moved it to the Wikipedia namespace. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:31, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

List of women poets

I created this list yesterday and it already has over 60 names on it. About half of the listed poets do not have articles yet. I think that, in a modest way, this list and the associated articles could be a real ornament to Wikipedia, being particularly useful to people doing Women's studies and the like, so I'm inviting everyone to a) check it out and add your favourite female poet, if she's not there already and b) add an article! Bmills 10:57, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

---

That's precisely what I did do, and the section title appeared later, as if by magic. JackofOz 22:37, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Prevalence of pages about places

I wonder why it is that the majority of times I use "Random page" I get a page about a locality, and an American locality at that. Is there some special programming designed to give such results, or is this just an amazing coincidence?

Cheers JackofOz 07:44, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

We just have a lot of them. See User:Rambot. --Brion 07:51, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It's because Wikipedia is full of junk. See my The Wikipedia Quality Survey Adam 08:26, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Don't blame JackofOz for the terrible title of this section; mea culpa. JackofOz, you should see a link near the top of the page called "Post a question now" - it creates a new section header. Tualha 13:56, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It's because a lot of stuff was robotically imported from US Census data. There are complaints about this from time to time, which are generally answered by people who note that their first introduction to Wikipedia was searching for their home town or birthplace on Google, which often turns up one of these very common Wikipedia articles. Tempshill 01:49, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with it myself. Yes, on average, pages are less edited, less "personal", than they were before Rambot did its stuff, and the article count can be considered inflated. But the other articles are no less useful or worthwhile. We just have a whole lot of other information, which is very useful itself, and as Tempshill pointed out, bring in plenty of new people. Tualha 04:40, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

So could there be a way to make "random page" produce more interesting results - e.g. maybe it would only select a page above a certain size, so the page is likely to be more "interesting" than a short page. But then I guess it would not be "random page" anymore ! Gandalf61 07:31, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

Referrers

Wikipedia:Referrers is interesting but quite old - it hasn't been updated since September 2002. I think it would be worthwhile to have an updated version.

Tualha 06:44, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Can't login -- what cookies do I need to enable ?

I was unable to login successfully until I allowed cookies from both en.wikipedia.org and en2.wikipedia.org (thank you for the information Dysprosia).

RFC MediaWiki talk:Loginprompt

I propose to change the login text for here - I always thought the current login prompt was too unintuitive. Since this is rather a largish change, I'm sending out a request for comments at MediaWiki talk:Loginprompt. Do let me know what you think, suggest something new, if you're interested :) Dysprosia 23:49, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Spell checking a Wikipedia article

What are good techniques that allow quick spell checking of a Wikipedia article? Bevo 19:19, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Unfortunately, for now, the only way that I know of is to use an external spell-checker. You can do this by pasting the displayed text into a word processor such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org and using their spell-checking capabilities, or using some command line program such as aspell or ispell. Dori | Talk 19:44, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

Using a Mac, with Safari. The spell checker is available to any editable text, including the text box for editing WP articles. Even as you type. I do wish they would make this panel support Undo though - maybe next version ;-) GRAHAMUK 23:27, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I hadn't actually noticed that before; that's kind of neat! Unfortunately it doesn't automatically detect the language, so I have to manually switch dictionaries on en/fr/etc. And it doesn't have an Esperanto dictionary built-in, I'll have to try and track one down... :D --Brion 00:34, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Search works!

Not much to discuss, but this certainly is good news, search is up again! -- Sverdrup 15:41, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Did they re-enable it because of the new server? —Noldoaran (Talk) 18:43, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

Yip. --snoyes 18:54, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yea! —Noldoaran (Talk) 03:44, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

There's something funny with the rubric: it seems to be repeating the hint on where to find help. Phil 12:26, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

citation

How could I cite Wikipedia as a source in a research paper? (MLA format!)

Check out the Columbia guide to online style. It gives examples of MLA style for online resources. Also see Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia. --MIRV 07:12, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

well unlike all other encyclopedia why wikipedia is not having sammm flash movies explaining any small topic like any bird or circuit woring etc. i would love to work on this.

A proposal on categorization

This is a little idea of mine that I have written up. Please read and comment. Zocky 03:44, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That's a very good idea. The only problem with it is that it has already been suggested, discussed, developed and implemented, and now only awaits some sort of decision on whether or not it should be released on the general public. Except it uses [[Category:xxx]], not [[cat:xxx]]. -- Tim Starling 03:47, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

Really? Well, it being the sensible solution, it's no wonder. I tried looking for it, but couldn't find anything of worth (and I did try suggesting something like this on meta quite some time ago). Please provide links. Zocky

It was mainly discussed on the mailing lists wikipedia-l and wikitech-l. See Eloquence's proposal from wikitech-l in February 2003 and Magnus Manske's completion note in July. -- Tim Starling 04:05, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

Heh, the same thing :) Is there anything in my text that's new, or should I just trash the whole thing? Zocky 04:13, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I finally found where I tried proposing it first! It was on sourceforge: [[10]], back in January, but it didn't get any comments until last week :) Turns out many people suggested it. Must mean it's a good idea. Zocky 04:29, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

So what's holding up a trial? That's the only way we'll see whether it works, ie (a) sits comfortably on existing culture and (b) achieves something. Andrewa 06:39, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wiki Farm for mediaWiki

I am trying to set up a special purpose wiki where only members of a special interest group can edit. I really like the MediaWiki that Wikipedia uses, and Wikipedia is an excellent example to show people how a Wiki works. Does anyone know of a Wiki farm that uses MediaWiki? I mean a host that runs MediaWiki that will allow me to set up my own Wiki, probably for a fee. pstudier 17:31, 2003 Dec 9 (UTC)

I don't know what a wiki farm is, but have a look at these sites Wikipedia:Sites using MediaWiki and see if you find what you're looking for. Also check out meta:MediaWiki. Dori | Talk 17:51, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any wiki farms using MediaWiki. Maybe you should try asking Jimbo Wales to set one up on our servers. -- Tim Starling 23:54, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

Congressional biographies

If every American Wikipedian visited List of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and contributed a short biography of their local Congress-person, we would have a complete set of Congressional articles in no time! Adam 01:30, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The Congressional biographical directory is in public domain (for anyone interested). --Jiang | Talk

But what do you do about the problem that (at least in my district) the representative is about as interesting as a congealed bowl of porridge? :-) Even his misdeeds are boring. Stan 07:09, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Write a boring article. You won't be penalized for doing so. --Jiang | Talk

Except that it maybe won't make the Brilliant Prose list. But then, how many do... -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 06:18, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

I might add that many of the Senators' biographies are mere stubs and could use some work as well. Adam 08:20, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Too slow

Can some developer please set the watchlist default back to 1 hour? --Wik 18:21, Dec 8, 2003 (UTC)

I think it should be set in user preferences. Noldoaran (Talk)[[.]] 18:23, Dec 8, 2003 (UTC)

1 hour is way to short, I myself would prefer 1 week - especially as I have a rather short watchlist with 1 hour I would miss all edits. As there are different ways to use the watchlist a user setting would be best. But for the time being I can accept the current setting as a compromise between both. andy 22:27, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

If I've just woken up, I would like it to be set to 6 hours. If I've just got home from work, 9 hours, and the rest of the time 1 hour please. :) Angela. 22:55, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

A day or two is a nice median. Daniel Quinlan 00:07, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

Anyone who needs a long watchlist can get it with one click. But why force it on those who don't need it? There are probably many power users who easily click on the Watchlist 50 times a day. And they just need a longer list one or two times, as Angela said. Sending them the long list the other 49 times is a pure waste and slows everything down. --Wik 00:21, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

I found a good solution was to bookmark the "one day" watchlist, but use the one-hour watchlist whilst editing. Martin 00:45, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

signatures

Is there a quick n' easy way to add a signature with username, and possibly date/time, etc? I see other people do it... :*( leigh

Yep, see Wikipedia:Sign. Good thing you asked. --Menchi 05:34, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Comments needed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries

User:Karukera has proposed to add "head of government" and "head of state" labels to the country template. Personally, I find this ugly, but does someone else want to comment? (Samples available) --Jiang|(Talk) 22:35, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Comments added to that page. Basically the template needs to be flexible for the moment IMO until the shape of the data becomes clear. Andrewa 09:09, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

What are messages?

What are messages (such as {{SUBST:vfd}})? What do they do? How do they work?

Noldoaran 21:56, Dec 6, 2003 (UTC)

They are explained at m:Meta-Wikimedia:MediaWiki namespace. Angela. 22:16, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks Angela, I saw that page before, but i couldn't find it when I looked again.

Noldoaran (Talk), 04:38, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

September 11 memorial

In following some semi-conversations on Votes for Deletion, it appears that a de-facto policy is to move articles about individual (non-famous) 9-11 victims to http://sep11.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tributes_to_individuals. Perhaps we need a local page to collect links to articles that need to be so moved. Any comments? -Anthropos 23:34, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Related discussion about expanding the focus of the Sep11Wiki is at meta:Wikimorial. --mav 09:40, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

How-to to Wikibooks?

I think that that page should be deleted, and all of the articles that it links to should be integrated into Wikibooks. I got a vote of consent on talk:How-to, but I want a little more discussion before I undertake such a significant change.-Smack

Are you proposing one or more "How-to" books for Wikibooks using as starters these articles at Wikipedia? If so, sounds like a good idea. How-to articles consolidated into one or more texts would probably be more suitable as a Wikibooks project IMHO - 24.94.82.245 02:59, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)- Marshman 03:18, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I have no doubt that that is a good idea. What I meant (sorry I wasn't clear the first time) is that the Wikipedia articles (or sections of articles, as the case may be) should be deleted. -Smack 07:15, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Would it be possible to leave the how-to pages but replace the contents of each one with a link (maybe even a redirect ?) to the relevant part of Wikibooks ? Articles that link to the how-to pages would then not be left with broken links. -- Gandalf61 10:10, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)

That's a sensible idea. Is it possible to create redirects like this ? Smack might I suggest you start with the cookery pages, as It is clear where you could put them in wikibooks. Drop me a line on my talk page when you are ready to start and I'll give you a hand. theresa knott 11:07, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes, it is possible to make interwiki redirects. Unfortunately, such a redirect seems to omit the familar Redirected from line. User:Smack/interwiki redirect test -Smack 02:18, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It is possible, but a lot of people see it as a bad thing, because of the difficulty in editing the redirect and the confusion that being at another site may cause. See m:Redirected user pages considered harmful. Angela 02:23, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Point taken. So would it be wise to delete the how-to content altogether? -Smack 04:00, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

If you just delete, you lose the edit history. Therfore, before deleteing you need to work out a list of authors for each article, and post their names in the edit summary of the page when you move it to wikibooks. ie {moved from wikipedia -authors are , name, name , name .....} So that we comply with the copyleft licence. Does this make sense ? theresa knott 11:13, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The most sensible thing would be to transfer the page with the complete editing history intact, wouldn't it? Note that Special:Export was specifically designed for this sort of thing, though the requisite import facility isn't done just yet. --Brion 12:01, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

welcome committee

Hey folks. Recently a new user showed up, created a "vanity page," and spent a while fussing over whether it was going to be deleted. I talked with him a bit, and got the impression that he was doing that because he didn't really know what else to do. He was willing to contribute but didn't know where.

After that experience, it occurred to me that it would useful to create a group of Wikipedians dedicated to guiding newcomers. I know that there are a number of people who make a point of posting welcome messages to new users' talk pages, but I'm talking about more than that. I mean making a project dedicated to discussion of how to better welcome newcomers and get them started working where they'll be the most help. This project would have a page somewhere (Maybe a WikiProject page or a page on meta) and a defined, if informal, membership. The ultimate goal would be to welcome newcomers, find out their interests, connect them to WikiProjects if appropriate, introduce them to veteran WikiPedians with similar interests, and maybe guide them in their early editing.

I believe this approach would be better than the current system of hoping newcomers will read guidelines, waiting for them to ask questions, and correcting their work when they screw up.

A more proactive approach would have several benefits:

• It would help get newcomers contributing faster and better, thus adding more good material to WikiPedia
• It would save time that people currently spend fixing work of newcomers who don't know what's going on.
• It would immerse new users in WikiPedia faster, and thus hopefully encourage a greater percentage of new users to stay.

Comments? Isomorphic 20:10, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

You know, we're usually pretty good about someone posting a "welcome to wikipedia" boilerplates, and whomever does so seems to be the newbie's first "wikifriend". I do try to do this, but I seem to be beaten 99% of the time either by Angela or Theresa_knott (lending support to my theory that they're both highly advanced, super-efficient, perlscripts). I'm beginning to think of amending my own boilerplate to be a bit clearer about autobiographies, as I think a lot of the supposed "vanity" pages are just people not knowing the difference between the main namespace and the User one. -- Finlay McWalter 20:19, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Great idea. Not sure how it would be implemented, except perhaps by having a newbie click on a selection of areas of interest that would then alert an editor with similar interests (that has volunteered to be in the position) who can serve as a "guide" in the beginning, possibly passing off to other subcommittee members. I note there are some such groups already at MetaWiki - Marshman 23:24, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• • Well, one implementation I'd imagined was having a page somewhere with a coded feature that showed all new accounts that have been created in, say, the last week (excluding anonymous IPs.) Also, where are such groups on meta? I haven't spent much time there. Could someone link? Isomorphic 00:12, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It might be worth anyone interested in setting up such a scheme to look at the way it works on h2g2 (technically another collaborative encyclopedia project, but also a fairly wide-ranging community). There, they(we) have a group of volunteers, known as ACEs, whose primary job is exactly this kind of encouragement/welcome. Obviously, the circumstances are very different, but the scheme is now fairly mature, so it may be interesting to investigate the tools and procedures that have been put in place. See the h2g2 ACEs page for details. - IMSoP 01:03, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

We could create a MediaWiki custom text (see Wikipedia:MediaWiki namespace) where people can fill in "tasks of the day" in newbiew-friendly language. Then all people who post welcome messages could add {{subst:totd}} to their boilerplace text to include the message. To avoid improper content, the page should be protected.—Eloquence

I like what I read about the H2G2 model. Anyway, I'd like to continue this discussion but suspect that Village Pump isn't the place. Is there a page somewhere on Meta? I really don't know anything much about Meta, as I'm still new here myself. Isomorphic 09:33, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

How about starting one at Wikipedia:Welcoming committee if it's going to be specific to the English Wikipedia or meta:Welcoming committee if it applies more widely? Angela. 14:28, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Maybe we should write a welcome page (Wikipedia:Welcome to Wikipedia?). It would merge some of the information from the top of the main page, Wikipedia:About, Wikipedia:Utilites, as well as other useful stuff - basics on etiquette, discussion, NPOV, everything needed for a newbie to find their way around. All written in newbie friendly language, style and formatting, and not longer than a screen of text, plus judiciously chosen and nicely formatted bunch of links to further reading. Make it nice and useful enough that people keep coming back to it.

Then post a link to this on the main page, on the anonymous edit page and on the login prompt pages (as well as under "You are now logged in...") Zocky 14:07, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

You do know Welcome, newcomers, right?—Eloquence

No, I didn't. I've always assumed that "Welcome, newcomers" under "Writing articles" was a crash course in wikitax. I see that it's only linked to from the main page. How about making it more prominent - bold the link or put it on the top of the main page, into "Wikipedia is...", as well as to other places mentioned above. Zocky 15:19, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Counties of England

There seem to be at least two groups of people, those who think 'county' means the current, administrative entity, and those who think it means a traditional or historical entitiy.

In itself this isn't a problem, but Wikipedia needs to have a policy on which county a particular place is in. Maybe such a policy has already been debated and agreed; if so I'd be grateful if someone could point me to it. There's no discussion about the article Counties of England, though the article itself mentions that the different meanings exist.

It's a problem because someone has gone through the article on St Neots and moved it from the current, administrative county of Cambridgeshire to the historical county of Huntingdonshire, which will confuse the reader. For now I've returned the article to its original form. And this is happening on a wide scale, articles on towns and villages are being modified wholesale.

Is there any guidance on this sort of thing, other than to kick off the talk page, debate the topic and see if we can come to a consensus view? Advice anyone? Chris Jefferies 10th December 2003

Common sense should prevail. The St Neots article should say it is in Cambridgeshire, but was formerly in Huntingdonshire, because the article is about the village both in the past and the present. An article about Junipero Serra should say he lived in Alta Mexico not the US state of California. The Romans invaded Gaul, not France, but Tabo M'Beki is the president of the Republic of South Africa, not of the Cape Colony. I can't for the life of me understand why this seems be be contentious in so many places (cf the enteral Danzig debate...). There can be few places that haven't been parts of many countries, or have had many names. -- Finlay McWalter 00:19, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Ah, yes. I've been trying to keep out of that mess apart from protecting Warwickshire overnight in one of the early outbreaks of the edit wars. It appears to me that the traditionalists, if I can name them that, are only one or two people, but they're very determined in their point of view! It'e even worse with the Welsh counties where the old names have mostly been reused to cover areas with little territorial commonality with the pre-1974 counties. My view is that all the county articles are currently untrustworthy, but for practical purposes the current administrative counties are the ones that an encyclopaedia ought to be concentrating on, with just a note on the former history such as e.g. "Stoke-on-Trent is now a unitary authority but was formerly in Staffordshire". In my view the only current relevance of the old traditional counties is to determine which cricket club covers the area! -- Arwel 00:27, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks Finlay, and Arwel, I appreciate your input. I'm afraid the person who altered St Neots has changed it back again. I don't particularly want to have a 'change war' (how childish, what a waste of time) and I'm trying to discuss it on his/her Talk page. There's also been an exchange of views on the Godmanchester Talk page and I can't say I'm encouraged. Chris Jefferies 11th December 2003

Clearly Finlay stated it perfectly. The current, on the ground, designations are the proper ones, but reference to historical standings are important contributions to the articles. I'm preparing a "Style" page for Proper names at Wikipedia:Proper_names and will use Finlay's sage advice there as well. - Marshman 01:09, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The encyclopedia should definitely concentrate on the current administrative divisions of the United Kingdom (and everywhere else) -- not to the exclusion of historical data, but certainly with much greater prominence. Granted, the UK has been IMO way too obsessed with messing with administrative boundaries in the last 30 years or so (it's crazy that somewhere like the United States has it all MUCH more settled) but we must document what is not push what we wish was. --Morven 01:15, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Quite. I can't remember if Chigley is in Trumptonshire, or Trumpton is in the Chigley unitary authority :) -- Finlay McWalter 01:29, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

"The current, on the ground, designations are the proper ones". Well, I wasn't being quite as sweeping as that, for the encyclopedia as a whole. I really mean that the context of the article determines the correct usage of placenames, languages, social groups, etc. This article should mention both counties, as its scope spans the period where each prevailed. If Alfred the Great had done something interesting there, it would be perfectly reasonable to mention it was in Mercia, or Wessex, or whatever. Equally, if an article were about a battle in the english civil war, the prevailing county at that time should be the dominant one in the article's text. -- Finlay McWalter 01:29, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I understood what you were saying. That first sentence was really intended for the discussion of the counties situation, and the point next made by Morven. - Marshman 01:59, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

OK guys, thanks for all your comments. I think there's a great deal of common sense in what you say, especially about the historical county relevant to the article being the correct one to use in each case.

So what are we going to do about User:80.255 who is throwing his weight around, agressively changing dozens of articles without consideration for either other editors or indeed (and more importantly) for the poor readers. He is damaging the Wikipedia and will also damage its reputation with readers if he's allowed to continue.

I don't mind having a dialogue with him, but if (as I suspect) he proves resistant to both reason and the majority view, what then? If that happens, maybe we should consider having his IP address blocked, though it would probably have only a temporary effect. Chris Jefferies 11th December 2003

The "80.255 vs everyone else" battle has been going on for some time (the particular battleground for my tussle was Kent). 80.255 has a particular view point, and argues for it in a consistent and eloquent manner. This is rather different from childish vandalism and I wouldn't support banning him at this time (despite having gone through the same sense of frustration as you, Chris). It is time however to formulate a policy on the specific issue of county names. If this policy can be rolled into a more general policy of historic place names then so much the better. Once this policy is in place, if 80.255's sense of how Things Should Be is so strong that he flauts the policy (in addition to common sense and the majority view) over several articles and over a reasonable period of time, then we may have to say "sorry 80.255, but this just isn't the community project for you". Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:22, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I believe we should have a wide and open debate with the aim of formulating the policy on current and historic place names mentioned by Pete above. And I think we should begin sooner rather than later to minimise the damage to Wikipedia.

I know there are correct procedures for doing this, but I'm going to need help from someone wiser and more experienced in the world of Wikipedia. What's the first step? Where should the discussion take place? Chris Jefferies 11th December 2003

Seconded. I've been trying to reason with some people over Oder/Odra for a last few days, and some just don't seem to give up. A clear policy on names, their use in text generally as well as in historical contexts, is definitely needed. Zocky 20:54, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

You may wish to take this discusion to the Talk: page for Wikipedia:Proper_names - Marshman 03:27, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I just started Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(places) before reading your comment. Comments are sorely required before that page can become policy. 80.255's input is obviously particularly required if the process is to work. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 10:13, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

My feeling is to use Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(places) as there's quite a large discussion going on and the final description of the convention will probably be fairly lengthy.

I'm therefore copying this discussion to Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(places) - please continue there, not here! Chris Jefferies 11:14, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The maps also need some standardization.

The following map appears on Dorset:

While the following map appears on Northumberland:

File:Uk-northumberland.png

Note that, in the second map, that peninsula at the tip of Scotland appears as all one county, while in the first, that peninsula appears as several counties. And that's just one of many differences between the maps.

Someone needs to figure out which map is correct, and fix the incorrect map. I'd do it if I knew more about British counties.

LuckyWizard 01:36, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Cancelling user account

is it possible to cancel my account? i.e. i no longer wishes my handle (p0lyglut) to show up in wikipedia in articles i edited or anywhere. Thanks.

P0lyglut 04:27, 2003 Dec 2 (UTC)

I hope you're not leaving us! If you just want to change your username, see Wikipedia:Changing username Dysprosia 04:29, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Links: Auto-generation?

Perhaps the very nature of semantics versus raw text makes this untenable, but has anybody thought about a system for auto-generation of inter-wiki linking? Many articles miss out of lots of meaningful links because the author's job is multiplied dramatically by having to track down terms that might or might not have pages on them. They could just add a link for everything they think should have a link, and lots of red links will appear. But it would be interesting if all existing pages automatically became active links. Of course, if that were feasible/desirable, the link style would have to change because otherwise too many words would be underlined and bright blue. What about using user-customizable CSS? I'll admit right away I'm a know-nothing, but I was sure that there was a way to allow the user to choose between styles with CSS.

Even if auto-linking as I've suggested it is too complex/absurd/would bring down the wiki, what about a link on every page for a database search for articles related to or words/phrases on the page? Too many results? A way to only return more likely hits? Categorization? Do pages currently have tags on them that associate them with wiki sub-sections or categories? Would this be workable? I would LOVE to be able to click a link on a page that would take me to a sort of local table of contents of related pages and/or a summary of the more general area of knowledge in which a page resides. And that one would link to the next level up, etcetera.

Brent Gulanowski 02:45, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

On your first paragraph, pages manually generated that have a lot of links quickly become unreadable and awful. Tempshill 03:53, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It would be cool, however, if somehow it could be designed that one could simply write text, and after hitting save page, the system automatically created internal links for any word or phrase in the article for which wikipedia-articles were already written. Kingturtle 05:16, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

No, please not. That would create a lot of useless links, while some useful links would not (because they're to another form of the word or a combination of words). Here is how the start of a randomly chosen page would look under that scheme. I think it's terrible, linking to all kinds of things having nothing to do with the subject:

Gestuno is a constructed sign language, which the World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf originally discussed in 1951. In 1973, a committee created and standardized a system of international signs. They tried to choose the most understandable signs from diverse sign languages to make the language easy to learn. The commission published a book with about 1500 signs. -- Anon

Not to mention that you would have to program in a choice between linking individual words or phrases: I would imagine a link to sign language would have been more useful. Phil 12:19, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

Enciclopedia Libre has that option button. It may be abused. Maybe we should ask our Spanish ambassador how they're dealing w/ that. I bet it leads to a kinda vandalism as well. --Menchi (Talk)â 09:10, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Linking requires human intelligence, and there's no way around that. It's not just about finding words to highlight, it's also about determining whether further information on a subject is desired in context. Not every occurrence of the word bed needs to be highlighted, but if we go into some detail as to what kind of bed a person used, we may well want to put a link on that word. Overlinking makes articles hard to read, distracts from the content and makes us look silly.—Eloquence 09:23, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia talk:Make only links relevant to the context. --Menchi (Talk)â 09:39, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Most browsers has a option for displaying underlines on links or not. Removing underlines makes pages with to many links much more readable. BL 12:47, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Since the general concensus here already is to overlink (something I have argued against), the most obvious solution would be to simply LINK EVERYTHING -- automatically or otherwise -- and switch off underlining and colored links. Make a link only visible when the mouse passes over (:hover in CSS) Would be an elegant solution to overlinking and improve readability of the pages. -- Viajero 21:53, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I don't really agree that it's elegant (other than visually). The trouble is that if everything is a link, then the author no longer has a way to draw the reader's attention to the links that are useful. So you'd have to let the author put in links that would be underlined and coloured. But then most current links would be put back in, so we'd be back where we started.

So, if there's an over-linking problem, I think it would be more sensible to identify pages that are over-linked to, and cut some of the links. This could probably be automated. For example, I personally don't see the point of linking to years, and certainly not to full dates such as December 12 2003. The trick would be to get a consensus, though, and that's another debate. Onebyone 22:19, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Over the (short) time I've been here, I've definitely become more conservative in my linking. But I still think linking all dates is the way to go, if only to ensure that the user's display preference (mm.dd or dd.mm) kicks in. I don't care about color or colour, but seeing dates the wrong way round upsets me. –Hjr 23:09, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Good lord, I didn't know you could do that. Isn't technology marvellous? OK, so with that plus what Angela says below, now I see the point of linking dates. Onebyone 02:48, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Auto-linking is going to have a hard time knowing to link to USS Philadelphia (C-4) and not USS Philadelphia (C-4), which is rather a different set of things! Fortunately or unfortunately :-), linking has to rely on the taste and judgment of editors, just as does the article-writing itself. I think people tend to link differently based on their mental model of the reader. An article about ships, for instance, will have lots of terms familiar to me, so I don't need the links, but a random reader will have no idea what is meant by topgallant or pink; the links are for them, not me or other knowledgeable Wikipedians. Stan 22:46, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

In my day job I work on a limited-domain project where we use automatic linking almost exclusively. The case you give is actually not that difficult; the linker simply has a preference for longer links over shorter ones. However generally I find auto-linking to be a big pain. Even English's limited set of grammatical variations have to be special-cased right and left, and context is much harder to deal with. It's bad enough that it can't tell whether "structure" refers to buildings or geology out of a thousand or so topic-limited articles; with tens or hundreds of thousands of titles and an everything-under-the-sun domain, it's not going to do a good job.

Thank you for this example, it illustrates the horribleness of the autolinking idea. Just because we have the technology to do something doesn't mean we should do it. By the way, 99.9% of users out there don't know how to change the look of the underlines in their browser and 99% of the remainder won't ever bother. But the real reason it's horrible is that if everything is a link then nothing is a link and editors won't actually be able to recommend other articles of interest anymore. 66.153.56.194 18:54, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

We took the auto-wikification button out after phase 2, and I don't recall any complaints at the time. --Brion 03:50, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

As said, there must be a way for the editor to point out which link is useful. I see the point of people who want auto-linking though. It's great for looking up things you don't know about. But it's ugly as hell.

A possible solution would be to show the autogenerated links as plain black text, without underlining, and change them to visible link on hover. Zocky 17:34, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I don't like over linking but I make an exception for dates, which should all be linked. It makes the date pages much more useful if you can click "what links here" and see a list of pages containing events for that date. Angela. 23:16, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Rollback Edit summary

Rollback (see Wikipedia:Administrators#Revert) currently gives a edit summary that shows up in the history as: reverted to last edit by .... Unfortunantly, this gives no indicatation as to why a edit was removed and makes no indication that a edit was reverted by an automated program. I think that one of two things should be done:

1. Make in blindingly clear that this is an automated process. The Message could be something like: reverted to last edit by GoodUser as part of an automated rollback of all of BadUser's edits.
2. Require rollbacks to have some kind of reason. reverted to last edit by GoodUser. Baduser has randomly deleted text in multiple articles.

This would make it clear to someone who is looking at the edit to try and figure out why on earth an edit has been reverted. It also gives a user some idea as to why their edits are being reverted (especially in cases of mistaken identity). Jrincayc 16:45, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes, that might be a good feature (similar to what's done with deletion). Currently, I think it's done this way as a timesaver feature (one click reverting). Whenever I revert something that is not obvious I usually leave a note on the article's discussion page. Note also, if someone deletes part of an article without mentioning why, (s)he may also be reverted without comment. That's why it's always a good idea to put something in the Summary. Dori | Talk 16:49, Dec 14, 2003 (UTC)

Request for permanent ban

The IP User:65.110.6.34 has a history of repeated vandalism. Apparently, it's the address of the free anonymous IP www.proxyweb.net. Can a developer permanantly ban this IP? See Vandalism_in_progress#65.110.6.34. Anyone using this IP would be doing so voluntarily. --Jiang | Talk 21:36, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Deleted stuff

Deleted pages are archived. Are these archived pages ever removed from the database? If so, how often? --Jiangan | Talk 10:05, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

So far just once, when we moved to the new database server the archives weren't copied over. Since the archive table doesn't (yet) store the date of deletion, it's hard to automatically throw away things that were deleted a long time ago and not contested, as distinct from pages that haven't been edited in a long time and were recently deleted. --Brion 11:07, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Hail Mary

Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen

Link rendering

The wikilink rendering seems to have been changed so wikilinks to (for example) #References sections has broken e.g. see Schizophrenia or delusional misidentification syndrome.

Is this a permanent feature and if so should I fix the referencing on such pages or should I wait until a wikicode fix does the job ?

Thanks - Vaughan 14:31, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'm hoping it's not permanent. It has been reported to the mailing list. [11]. Angela. 14:49, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Take a look at Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki custom messages and List of science fiction authors. On both of these articles as they're appearing to me, the Compact TOCs are appearing in <nowiki> format. Does anyone have any idea what's going on? Phil 16:26, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

I think it's only section headers, see also m:MediaWiki feature requests and bug reports Dori | Talk 16:34, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

It's probably temporary. See the 'Link rendering' section above. Angela. 16:35, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Fixed. --Brion 18:51, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Copyright Inquiry: Congressional Biographical Directory

Does anyone know if the bioguide.congress.gov Congressional Biographical Directory is copyright protected? If not, we could get lots and lots of stubby articles on various congresspersons, which'd be useful... john 08:26, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Edit Conflicts

Would it be possible for a developer to change the edit conflict code to give the conflicter an option of overriding the previous user's edit without needing to use copy and paste? I use a text browser called links, and I cannot copy or paste, so I loose all my work if I get into an edit conflict. It would be better if I could override the other user and at least he would have his work in the history. Presently I have no way of getting the work back once I get into a conflict. Thank you very much, Greenmountainboy 21:27, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

If you overwrite another user during an edit conflict, you are basically reverting them for no reason, and that's very bad form. It comes down to a question of being nice to other users, or nice to yourself. I think you should explore other ways of avoiding this problem (off the top of my head: changing software; making big edits incrementally; putting a "I'm doing a big edit right now, so please wait." notice at the top of the article, making big edits to a personal copy of the article, ...) before asking a developer to make this specific feature. See also our policy on edit conflicts. -- Cyan 21:58, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

If it's a linux-like browser, and you are used to windows, maybe Control+Space at the beginning of the text, and Control+W at the end to cut, then Control+Y to paste. (Meta+W to copy instead of cut, if the Meta-key exists.) Or, if it's a windows-like browser, and you are used to linux, Shift+Arrows to select, Control+C to copy, Control+V to paste. Or maybe it just can't copy/paste, anyway. Κσυπ Cyp   22:06, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Well, Its links, and you just cant copy/paste anyway, but I will get a "window manager" tommorow, and then mozilla firebird, but until then I will have to wait. I just got frustrated, but I am sure that there are others who are not so fortunate as me, and will have to continue using links or even lynx into eternity. Greenmountainboy 22:14, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Can't you specify using an editor for text fields? I think Lynx had an option for that - though not sure for Links... Dysprosia 22:47, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

(Hopefully) simple request

Can we have a "Watch this page"/"Stop watching" link in the sidebar when viewing a Revision History page, please? --Zero 11:27, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Please request features at sourceforge.

Current events or Breaking news?

Its not a proposal, only an idea of mine. Like I said its not a proposal, I dont neccesarily think the name SHOULD be changed , but Ive been thinking for a very long time that what we do at the current events page is essentially breaking the news.

What do you all think? Shall the page name be changed?

--Antonio Phenomenom Martin

Disagree. The stuff stays for a month. It's hardly breaking news by the end of the month. RickK 04:27, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

All our stuff is second-handed! Some are so seconded that we're basically the last news-oid website to talk about. And many important stuff are not included. It is not breaking anybody. --Menchi (Talk)â 04:33, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry

I don't know how many poets are around but you've been doing a lot of good work in this area... how about starting a Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry to bring it altogether? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 11:53, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

How? What's involved? Bmills 13:14, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Well, fool that I am, I've made an attempt to start this. Now I really need help. A one-person Wikiproject is not going to get very far. Bmills 14:16, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Is there any objection to this proposed WikiProject Poetry boilerplate text or to the suggested placing of it?

Please consider adding the following boilerplate text at the end of your articles and the top of their Talk page.

This article is part of WikiProject Poetry. Please read the guidelines set out there before editing the page.

In general, I'd prefer these notices to go on the talk page, not as boilerplate. They're a bit too "meta" to be inline info in the article text. --Delirium 09:33, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

Remove from watchlist coding thing

Why is it that when you click Stop watching, you are offered a link to return to Main Page when you've almost certainly come from your watchlist and want to go back there? Bmills 16:30, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

nothing-changed edits

What's going on with this edit [12]? There's nothing under the before-and-after boxes. But it was marked as an edit in the history (it was the last edit, by the anon). I've seen weird nothing-changed edits before, always by Anons. I'm always afraid it's vandalism. --Menchi (Talk)â 04:17, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think the diff doesn't show when spaces are added or deleted. RickK 04:35, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Spaces do show up, but on a green background, so you can't actually see them [13]. I'm not sure what is done to make the dif have no green background but I've seen it quite a lot. Angela. 14:28, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Don't those green spaces only show up when you're deleting a line? If you're deleting or adding spaces within a line, you don't see any difference. RickK 16:21, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

This can occur if two people wikipedia:revert to the same version, or after page histories are merged, and in various other ways. Martin 20:22, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Annoying new edit behavior

The code seems to have changed sometime in the last day or so: when you look at an edit preview, your cursor is automatically moved into the edit box. I hate this! Especially when the page is long enough that it scrolls and you can't even see the beginning. Can we please make this an option in Preferences? Thanks, Tualha 04:47, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I hate that too. Angela. 04:50, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I thought it was just me and my browser. Please, put it back the way it was! –Hjr 05:08, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

What was the prior behavior? Dori | Talk 05:21, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

This behavior was added for the edit page in January 2003. After several re-readings of the above comment, I see the complaint is related to the "preview" display specifically. A recent fix which removed a JavaScript error message upon trying to edit a locked page (either a protected page or the database locked) would have altered it to also perform the selection on preview, where in the previous behavior it did not do so.

In at least some browsers this will scroll down below the preview to show the edit box if 'show preview before edit box' is selected. This is indeed rather annoying since the preview is now hard to see; I'll fix it. --Brion 05:46, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Fix applied. --Brion 05:56, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks! Bevo 11:01, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Tualha says thanks too - Tualha 14:10, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

And so do I. Bmills 14:12, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Me too :) Angela.

Writing on the wall for Wikipedia:Votes for deletion?

Okay, I'll bite. I am of course refering to the quiet appearance of a new function called "dead end pages" (disabled though) on Special pages.

Now, does this mean that:

1. We are a mere community decision away from burying WP:VFD for good?
2. It is a mere place holder for a function not yet implemented?
3. Functionality intended to be included in the MediaWiki package, but not intended to be used on Wikipedia?
4. A practical joke, like the logo on French Wikipedia?
5. Something totally unrelated to a deletion management redisign?
6. What?

-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 08:58, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

What's a "dead end page"? Where's the link? Dysprosia 09:00, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Don't worry, VfD is safe for now. I'm not sure exactly what Special:Deadendpages is meant to do -- the code just has this rather odd SQL query:

SELECT cur_title FROM cur LEFT JOIN links ON cur_title = l_from WHERE l_from IS NULL AND cur_namespace = 0 ORDER BY cur_title LIMIT {$offset}, {$limit}

Perhaps it is intended to find pages with no links in them. -- Tim Starling 09:07, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

See [14]. --Brion 11:07, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Anonymous edits

[[15]]: Another good illustration why m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles. Adam 14:38, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• At least this way we can see the IP. Anjouli 14:58, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)
• [16], and others from the same anon in the same page: Counter-example - Muriel Victoria 15:17, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• Given what goes on at Wikipedia:Conflicts between users, I don't think that anonymity is the main problem. There will always people who want to use articles as a platform for their political or moral views, and if they can't do it as anon, they'll just log in. Personally, I've had lots of really good anon edits to articles I've started and a couple of bad ones. Bmills 15:24, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Umm, that's a broken link (to meta). I could point you to equally horrendous edit histories caused by logged in users - however, I'm not sure what I would prove by doing so. Martin

It's not a broken link. It's a page which has yet to be created. It was originally a link to the main Wikipedia namespace. I changed it to a meta link to prevent someone actually making that in the wrong namespace. It's a shame Meta links can't show up red or blue like internal ones do. Angela. 21:13, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Of course registered users make horrendous edits and behave badly in other ways. But at least you can argue with them. I find it really insulting when articles are anonymously messed around with, and I'm sure it terminally discourages contributors less thick-skinned than me. Of course if you ban anonymous edits some vandals will just acquire transient IDs to vandalise and leave, so I would also make it harder to register, by requiring an email address and imposing (say) a 12-hour waiting period. See my suggestions for improving WP in this respect at my user-page. Adam 00:20, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Um...Maybe a change in tactics is required. When we notice an anonymous vandal, simply make a note of it and come back an hour (or more) later to fix the page. My guess is that many vandals "get off" on causing people to jump on the changes. Just ignore them (of course, track their damage) and they'll go away. -Anthropos 00:52, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That's my feeling too. I think that in general we react too quickly, in this situation and many others. But it's a chicken-and-egg situation, in that the current tools (especially "Recent changes") encourage this way of working. Until we change the tools we can't expect the way of working to change; Until we change our way of working there's no incentive to change the tools. Andrewa 12:26, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'm totally against blocking all pages for anonymous edits, but I think that pages where there is a long history of anonymous vandalism should be blocked for anonymous users. For example, the George W. Bush article could be served by only allowing user edits. The talk page can be left open, so that people who don't want to login can request an edit there...

SUBST vs MSG

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki custom messages

Speedy deletion

As a relative WP newbie, I was a bit surprised to find that Wikipedia:Deletion_policy does not have a "Candidates for speedy deletion" category for "creative fiction", i.e. deliberate and demonstrable inaccuracy.

I'm refering to articles like Bonnie, which appears to be a deliberate attempt to misinform, by a known vandal.

Right now if I posted an article called "Paris, Capital of Germany", the policy requires it wait five days for a vote, while people confirm that Paris is not the capital of Germany. In practice, I'm sure someone would ignore the policy and delete it.

I can see that such a category may be open to abuse - particularly for esoteric subjects not easily researched online.

Any thoughts? Anjouli 14:50, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

In the light of the activity yesterday around this and related articles that fell into the "creative fiction" category (see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion, I agree that this should be added to the list of reasons for speedy deletion on Wikipedia:Deletion guidelines for administrators. Bmills 14:59, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think it's dangerous to assume sysops can make the judgement about whether something is purely fictional or not. In many cases it is obvious, but there are also times where it isn't and real content might be deleted. However, instant deletion of such pages could already be justified under the "no meaningful content" or "pure vandalism" criteria if someone did want to delete it. Angela. 15:10, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Agreed. What is or isn't fiction is not always obvious. Secretlondon 15:13, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

If the author could be asked to provide verifiable references and failed, maybe the full 5 days could be shortened? Bmills 15:17, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Even five days isn't a lot of time to find verifiable references: some people only login every weekend, for example. Not every contributor is an addict. Martin 19:37, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

In such cases, it is appropriate to blank the article when adding the boilerplate deletion notice to it. Then, there is no possibility that the article contents may be misconstrued by a casual visitor and yet the history is available to facilitate deletion discussions. Louis Kyu Won Ryu

Better, add a wikipedia:accuracy dispute. Martin 19:37, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes, much useful comment. I did not actually mean things that could not easily be verified. I meant things that could immediately be shown to be false. I take the point that "no meaningful content" could cover disinformation as well as no information. Probably that's the best way to go, with Martin's suggestion for borderline cases. Anjouli 14:22, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

duplicate article?

Why is there one article for cannabis and one for hemp? - it is about the same plant. Maybe the THC related things should go to THC and the rest be merged under cannabis or hemp?

wikipedia:duplicate articles

Pedantry dispute

In view of the increasing numbers of edit wars over increasingly irrelevant tweaks to articles, could someone write wikipedia:pedantry dispute? Martin 20:17, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Will that really help? Daniel Quinlan 20:19, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

I can't see it hurting. We have them already. So acknowledging it may bring some light rather than heat on the general subject, without focusing on a particular instance. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 23:25, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

I sympathise with the idea, but isn't labelling something pedantry essentially POV and inflammatory itself? DJ Clayworth 18:58, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Not to mention subject to hair-splitting over the definition of "pedantry"... Onebyone 22:20, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

142.177.etc

Hardbanned user 142.177.xxx.xxx paid us a little visit recently (contribs). I have scoured his contributions from our fair Wikipedia, but if anyone liked them, feel free to reinstate them. New articles he created can be found at User:Cyan/kidnapped. -- Cyan 21:16, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Louis's reaction to mav's outing of 142.177 on the mailing list

Backstory

In reaction to this post [17], Louis Kyu Won Ryu created an article about Craig Hubley, which was removed from the article namespace. It can be seen here.

My purpose

It has recently come to my attention that the reason this article was created was to foster discussion about mav's outing of Craig Hubley. Instead, most of the discussion concerned the disposition of the article here in Wikipedia. The purpose of this post is to help Louis foster discussion on this topic at m:Outing User:Louis_Kyu_Won_Ryu/Outing. Thanks, Cyan 16:45, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Is there supposed to be something at m:Outing? Because as of now, there isn't. --Menchi (Talk)â 18:12, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I had based this post on [18], but it presently reads like this. That might help explain things... -- Cyan 20:09, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• Pedantry dispute -> wikipedia talk:pedantry dispute

SUBST vs MSG

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki custom messages

• Anonymous edits -> m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles

• Deleting creative fiction -> wikipedia talk:deletion policy

• Why is there one article for cannabis and one for hemp? -> talk:cannabis

• Please discuss user:142.177.etc with Louis at User:Louis_Kyu_Won_Ryu/Outing

• Pedantry dispute -> wikipedia talk:pedantry dispute

Dead end pages

Special:Deadendpages is intended to find pages with no links in them. See [19].

• SUBST vs MSG -> Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki custom messages

• Anonymous edits -> m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles

• Deleting creative fiction -> wikipedia talk:deletion policy

• Why is there one article for cannabis and one for hemp? -> talk:cannabis

• Please discuss user:142.177.etc with Louis at User:Louis_Kyu_Won_Ryu/Outing

• Pedantry dispute -> wikipedia talk:pedantry dispute

2Pac conspiracy fans

Dear Tupac fans and historians, I have heard a long list of reasons supporting the claim that Tupac is still alive. I don't know enough about the history to know which claims have plausability, and which are simply made up. If you can help me learn more about the conspiracy theories, please visit User:Kingturtle/2Pac. I hope eventually to create a lecture for my History class on this topic...to help teach about checking facts and evidence. But I need to become more of an expert in the topic myself. Thanks in advance, Kingturtle 04:15, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• nothing-changed edits -> Wikipedia talk:Page history

• Annoying new edit behavior - fixed, deleted

• Special:Deadendpages is intended to find pages with no links in them. See [20].

• SUBST vs MSG -> Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki custom messages

• Anonymous edits -> m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles

• Deleting creative fiction -> wikipedia talk:deletion policy

• Why is there one article for cannabis and one for hemp? -> talk:cannabis

• Please discuss user:142.177.etc with Louis at User:Louis_Kyu_Won_Ryu/Outing

• Pedantry dispute -> wikipedia talk:pedantry dispute

Where do searches go?

This is probably a simple data error, but I don't yet know how to fix it myself: When I enter "ct scan" in Wikipedia's mini-search bar I end up on "Ultrasound scan" (a related but different subject). There is a much more relevant page available, computed_axial_tomography. Searching for "CT scan" takes me there. Is it possible for a mere site-visitor to change where a search will take me? --195.22.85.154 14:43, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Weird, when I enter "CT scan" (CT in caps) I get redirected to Computed axial tomography from CT scan, in lower case I get the same result as you do &mdash even though there is no ct scan. Strange. Anyway, you can also press on "search" instead of "go" and you can do a proper search for the words you entered. --snoyes 15:32, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Heh, it happens because of #redirect. Ultrasound scan which redirects to Medical ultrasonography contains both "CT" (as the ending of #REDIRECT) and "scan". So, that's what it finds :) Maybe stuff like #redirect should be excluded from searches? Zocky 15:40, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Search rubric

There's something funny with the rubric: it seems to be repeating the hint on where to find help. Phil 12:26, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

Flash

well unlike all other encyclopedia why wikipedia is not having sammm flash movies explaining any small topic like any bird or circuit woring etc. i would love to work on this.

Well, read the Macromedia Flash#Disadvantages to see why not. SVG might be a better alternative, but doesn't seem to be broadly supported yet.

well idea of yours is definately great but everyone here should be agreed on putting flash content on wiki.

• Deleted feature request. Please request features at sourceforge.

• Influence search results by creating redirects. See Wikipedia talk:Searching

How long do messages to anon editors talk-pages last?

How many minutes/hours/days/weeks do the messages I leave to a talk-page of an anonymous IP-address, last? If someone leaves a talk-page message to that anon editor after me, does the counter start from scratch? Curious minds want to know. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick 03:31, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

I don't think there's any hard and fast sort of rule as to when to remove previous messages, but they stay there until someone removes them... Dysprosia 03:33, 10

better stylesheet/css

I love wikipedia, but I think that the body text of articles can get a little hard to read with all the links.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to change the stylesheet a little to make the links integrate better with the text.

Not to the point where the links can't be told from text, but just enough to not make the disturb the reading.

Once users grasp the idea of wikipedia they should assume that most terms are links and a small effect when you move the mouse over a link could confirm that.

/Lasse

Not as the default stylesheet, please. I think there are two issues. One is making too many unrelated words into links. I think that definitely happens in some articles where every third word is linked (or worse). The second is that it might be worth having another style sheet that is more subtle about links. Daniel Quinlan 23:40, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

If you are using mozilla you can use custom styles in wikipedia by adding something like this to your userContent.css file:

    body[onload='setup("quickbar")'] <element> {
        <styles>
        ...
    }
    ...

This is a workaround because there is currently no way to make site-specific style sheets. So I took advantage of the fact that wikipedia is the only site I know of that has the onload property of its body element set to 'onload='setup("quickbar")'.

—Noldoaran (Talk) 00:07, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

Someone help?

I don't even know where to put this. A well-meaning (I am assuming) newcomer anonymously posted a lot of new pages in the last hour that are copyrighted...somewhere over a dozen. This is taking me forever to track down and fix...will someone help me? Just go to Special:Newpages and check anything from 217.77.109.222. I've tried to communicate with them, and have hopes that they are about to stop. Any help is appreciated. Jwrosenzweig 23:54, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Things are getting more confusing. While some of the posts were from copyrighted sources, others were from a site (www.nobel-winners.com) that claims to release under the GNUFDL. But! It turns out that the nobel-winners site in fact contains (at least in part) copyrighted material it is using from elsewhere, and I can't find anything that says they've gotten permission (see [21] vs. [22] for something they took from Britannica that I assume the EB didn't authorize). What do we do when sites appear to be offering copyrighted material under the GNUFDL? I am truly confused: can anyone provide advice/clarity? Jwrosenzweig 00:23, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Most of those articles seem to consist of one to two sentences. It is so small that calling them "copyright infringements" is worrying unneccessary. BL 00:56, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I am not a lawyer, but when the whole of a short article is copied or many such articles are copied, it is perhaps worth worrying about. See the article on fair use. Daniel Quinlan 02:35, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

page access stats

The stats function from Special pages still includes statistics about pages accessed. I suspect this is not functional. Most of the newly created Wikipedias have all the statistics related to accessed pages glued to zero, and even the english wikipedia has fallen from somewhere over 50 views per edit to around 30 views per edit. I question whether views of pages are relevant anyhow, now that there are numerous other sites offering Read-Only access to Wikipedia content, and we don't track how many folks access those. Could we edit the Statistics entry on MediaWiki to reflect the increasing irrelevance of the stat (that is remove it entirely)? -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 00:59, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Sitestatstext --Brion 01:04, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Heh, after freshly editing scores and scores and scores of MediaWiki-namespace files on the Finnish Wikipedia, I know full well where it is. The question is whether we should edit it. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 01:18, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

Will future generations forgive us if we get it wrong? (gasp) Yes, please do. :) --Brion 01:28, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Header protocol

I'm seeing a lot of pages where the Header hierarchy starts with a second-level Header (===). MediaWiki apparently has no trouble with this and just ignores the "hidden" level for the purpose of numbering the Sections; they start at 1. and continue. However if someone appends a further Section (say External Links) at the top level (==), this appears as another 1. Section which is confusing. Assuming that this is not the ideal state of affairs, is this explicitly stated somewhere? I have searched but have been unable to locate anything appropriate. If this is incorrect, is there an easy way to seek & destroycorrect or do we just keep an eye out? Phil 12:16, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:Manual of Style requests of you to start all headers at == and to work down from there. I go through now and correct mucked up headers when I see them - it looks rather ugly having === headers throughout and having == headers sporadically interspersed at the end, or whatever. Dysprosia 12:32, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

However, this can be usefull in a WikiProject, with the stuff at the begining (parent projects, sibling projects, list of contributers, etc.) on the "===" set of headings, and the template on "==", which then starts numbering at one again.Gentgeen 14:07, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

What, and form a Wikipedia Manual of Style brigade? :) Sounds cool, but I thought WikiProjects were dedicated to information, and not just formatting? Dysprosia 23:02, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Is there a log of "rename-events"?

(i posted this question on Wikipedia talk:How to rename (move) a page, but I don't know if anyone really frequents there)

Question: When a users renames (moves) an article, that change is not listed under the article's page history. How then are we to know who renamed (moved) the article and when it occurred? Is there a log (something akin to Wikipedia:Deletion log) that I don't know about? Kingturtle 05:14, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The user automatically creates a redirect at the place from where the article was moved. Like this: [23]. --Jiang | Talk 05:20, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

However, if the page is moved back to its previous name for some reason, the history of the original move is erased. —Minesweeper 08:04, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It would be especially helpful to have a log of all renames. An edit war of sorts could break out between two admins in regards to a name of an article. Name changes could go back and forth, and it would be very difficult to follow. Kingturtle 03:04, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I agree. A move log would be a good thing. KingTurtle: why don't you post this on the requested features at sourceforge. —Noldoaran (Talk) 06:13, Dec 14, 2003 (UTC)

I agree too, but I have an idea that might be more useful than one central move log: what about a "move history" for every page, just like there's a "page history"? This way, the "move history" would be transferred along with the article's contents and editing history whenever it is renamed. As a result, the log of rename events for a particular article would be stored in one place. If it were in one central log, I fear that it would become long, spread-out, and unwieldy in keeping track of a move-war, for example. Although, maybe a centralized move log could complement an individualized move history for each article. I'll post this to SourceForge unless someone has a better idea. —Minesweeper 10:58, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Why not just treat a change to the name of the article like any change in the article itself? Just include an entry in the existing change log, noting that the name was changed (the page moved) and when and by whom. -Anthropos 02:27, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That would keep it one place, but it would might break up the existing list and might confuse the "cur" and "last" features. It would help in keeping track of the timeline of the page's history, though. Minesweeper 09:52, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Agreed. Such a log would be useful to keep track of the insanity of those people indulged into moving wars. --Menchi (Talk)â 09:54, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• Header protocol -> Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (headings)

Links: Auto-generation?

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Make only links relevant to the context