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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump.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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Copyright 2000 - 2004 © European Space Agency. All rights reserved.

If this agency is "inter-govermental" how can it claim copyright? Sennheiser 15:32, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The US govt does not claim copyright, but other govts can and regrettably do (crown copyright, etc). As such, the ESA can likewise claim copyright. Martin 15:51, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The crown copyright article states that the crown copyright isn't applicable in other countries, such as United States, that do not recognize moral rights in their copyright laws. Since our servers are in the United States, only United States regulations apply to Wikipedia. Unless the ESA is using something other than the crown copyright, I think we'd be ok. Am I correct, or am I totally misinformed? Sennheiser 19:22, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Also, I just found this image from usmint.gov: [1] which claims copyright. Could someone tell me why this image is copyrighted by the US Mint (or at least why it claims to be copyrighted)? thanks! Sennheiser 21:54, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Apparently the rule about government works being public domain only applies to works made by employees of the government. If the site was made by a contractor, the contractor would originally have owned the copyright, and then they could have tra0AIs this the place to suggest that rocks & minerals should have standard tables like those currently used for, for example, birds and dogs (e.g., Whippet)? I've got a sample of a rock and a mineral on my user page. Elf 20:19, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC) Comments?

The crown copyright article says that the moral rights will not be recognised in countries which do not recognise moral rights. The copyright itself remains recognised. There is generallly a license to use NASA/ESA images provided an image credit is given. See Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and Image:SOHO solar flare sun 20031026 0119 eit 304.png for an article and image combination which complies with the requirements of one joint project. Jamesday 15:30, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If we can use the ESA images, can we use the ESA text, provided credit is given in the talk page? Sennheiser 19:35, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Also, wouldn't some GNUFDL abiding applications of the material retrieved from wikipedia be the opposite of "public education efforts and non-commercial purposes"? I was under the impression that wikipedia material released under the GNUFDL is allowed to be used for commercial use (as long as credit is given). Wouldn't this cause some legal problems for Wikipedia? Sennheiser 19:43, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

.mov to .jpg

I've just been sent a wonderful quicktime panorama photograph (.mov format) from the person who gave permission for his two photographs on Tamar Bridge to be used. I really want to upload a flattened-out jpeg of the image. Is there any good way to convert this type of file into a jpg? The only thought I've had is that I could take several screenshots and lace them together. Replies to my talk page please, any help appreciated! Cheers, fabiform | talk 09:10, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Where has all the image gone?-- Senheiser ponders this enigma!

Sennheiser resized the original File:Lockmart.JPG. When he uploaded it, he realized that he had compressed it too much however. He decided to download the old one and save as a png instead, but the image is gone!

Where has all the image gone?-- Senheiser ponders this enigma!

Sennheiser resized the original media:Lockmart.JPG. When he uploaded it, he realized that he had compressed it too much however. He decided to download the old one and save as a png instead, but the image is gone!

Perhaps Vandalism?

-> User talk:RadicalBender

Vandalism and anonymous editors

-> meta:Talk:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles

So, which one, exactly, was article 200,000?

-> Wikipedia talk:Celebrating 200,000

Copyright 2000 - 2004 © European Space Agency. All rights reserved.

Sennheiser asks about Government's copyrights. Moved to Wikipedia talk:copyright.

small photos and big photos

Adam requests help with the new image feature. Moved to Wikipedia talk:Extended image syntax.

Feature request

-> wikipedia:ignored feature requests. Do not raise bug reports or suggest features here.

Articles on Business Entities

->wikipedia:Projects

Overlinking to overly-broad terms?

-> Wikipedia talk:Make only links relevant to the context

Fun with Phantoms (I.E. anon users)

Running down the new recent changes by anon users page reveals all manner of articles in need of wikification or other loving care and attention. I urge all Wikipedians to make time each day to review this list. Elde 03:17, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I wouldn't go that far, but I urge all Wikipedians with an interest in editing (some of us just write from new, and that's fine too) to have a look, and some of us should take up the challenge of reviewing it regularly. This is an excellent idea. Andrewa 03:23, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Interwiki link problem (ku:)

...I was just looking at Microsoft...it seems the software just isn't accepting ku as a proper language... - IMSoP 17:00, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)

This appears to have now been fixed. I've truncated my own comment to save space, and feel free to not archive this. - IMSoP 04:11, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Stealth Vandalism of Slashdot trolling phenomena

-> Talk:Slashdot trolling phenomena

RC bug?

This bug has been squashed. Thanks!

Searching

Search and edit bugs seem to be fixed. Thanks for the feedback!

Title of your page

-> Wikipedia:Overview FAQ

Minor mention of Wikipedia on Yahoo

-> wikipedia:press coverage

Fanny Kaplan vs Fanya Kaplan

-> Talk:Fanya Kaplan

Suggestion: faculty rooms

-->Wikipedia talk:Village pump

Mistake on sitewide redirect page

Fixed, thanks for the notice. --Brion 07:15, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

OpenOffice Software Documentation

--> Talk:OpenOffice.org

In praise of Wikipedia editors

Yesterday I wrote an article on Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear engineer. I uploaded it shortly before 8pm UTC. Only 16 hours later, it's already received a variety of useful edits from seven other editors. I think this is amazing - Wikipedia's editing community is incredibly responsive. It's a great tool, but it's the energy and enthusiasm of the contributors, so visible in this instance, which have made it so successful. Long may it continue. :-) -- ChrisO 13:01, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's a great job, by all concerned. If only Igor "The Beard" Kurchatov were as good. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:22, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Finlay, you shouldn't advertise this guy. His name almost outclasses yours.  ;) fabiform | talk 13:58, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Anyone for Great beards of the 20th century? I see a great need... :D -- ChrisO 15:09, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Here's a great starting point: [2] :) fabiform | talk 15:40, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have been floored in my whole Wiki week here by several things--the wonderful wiki markup that makes it so easy to do the necessary work, the instantaneous way in which the links become real (ok, when the servers aren't struggling their little behinds off), the ability to go in and clean up stuff, even minor, that you happen to notice, the tools for monitoring what's going on in every concievable manner, and the awesome community that has been nothing but supportive of me and my novice questions. Wiki, I love you, man! (OK, that's a little overdone--) Elf

Deleted pages reappearing (solved)

I have deleted Transient 3 4 5 times today. Why does it keep coming back? Bmills 12:38, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Maybe it's really Permanent? ;-) -- ChrisO 13:05, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's catching. I just deleted Casanova's Big Night for the 2nd time. Bmills 13:16, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sennheiser hypothesizes that this is related to Squid.

So what's the answer? Bmills 14:51, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Kill the squid, developers! -- till we *) 14:58, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sennheiser reccommends that the developers of Wikipedia and those who are pessimistic about squid read these two excellent O'Reilly articles concerning caching: [3] [4] Also look at this ad for the Web Caching O'reilly book: [5]

Sennheiser did a cachability test on this village pump and has posted his results.

Note that the deletion/undeletion trouble is not caused by the squid. The behaviour is the same without squid (try on de: for example). The Squid properly gets a notification that the page was changed.

Strangely, it works if you delete a page two times back-to back (click 'delete' again after the first try). The reason for the bug is yet unknown. When did this appear first? Anybody noticed this problem last week? -- Gabriel Wicke 15:57, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

First time I noted it was today. Bmills 16:05, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Solved - it was a namespace conflict in the doDeleteArticle() function that was triggered if the Squid purging was switched on. Renaming the variable solved it. Sorry for the trouble. -- Gabriel Wicke 16:58, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Where has all the image gone?-- Senheiser ponders this enigma!

Sennheiser resized the original [6]. When he uploaded it, he realized that he had compressed it too much however. He decided to download the old one and save as a png instead, but the image is gone!

Something to do with a server move. The images uploaded IIRC between January 24 and 29 are not presently located on the webserving machines, but some other ones. - snoyes 01:46, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Bug in the image resize code

Sennheiser points out a problem with the new image resize feature. Please see Igor Kurchatov to fully understand the problem.

Is that <center> tag allowed? If you take it out, the problem goes away. Not sure the new thumbnail feature allows that formatting. Fuzheado 14:47, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

the center is fine (although it shows in the alt text!), the problem is the "". I just chucked the pic in the Wikipedia:Sandbox with the "" and then replaced them with ', and it worked. You can't wikify the caption either, and I imagine that you might have a problem if the caption should read thumb, or right.  ;) (Wonderful beard, by the way!) fabiform | talk 14:52, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

In praise of Wikipedia editors

ChrisO praises wikipedia and its editors/memebers.  :)

Moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiLove

Code for pics in a column

Help, please, with putting 5 pics in a column on the page. In Sistine Chapel I need to know the new code to put the 5 pics in the same vertical arrangement as you see on the page now.
Thanks.
Adrian Pingstone 11:18, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I tried a version, leaving the <div> in. Personally I would probably have kept the previous version, it looked great already. -- User:Docu

Thanks for your help, that's exactly what I wanted (and I'm sorry I made you type it all in!). I wanted to change to the new code because if we have a mixture of the old and the new look in different articles, then (IMHO) Wikipedia is going to look amateur.

Will anyone else tell me if they think a mixture of the two pic styles (not within the same article, of course) is OK?

Adrian Pingstone 13:11, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Please don't post screenshots of wikitext. Just surround the text with <pre> and </pre>. Especially not as a 43 KB JPEG. -- Tim Starling 13:18, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, screenshot removed.

Adrian Pingstone 16:09, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Shouldn't that be <nowiki></nowiki>? - IMSoP 17:03, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Either way, they have basically the same function. <pre> is better for preserving line breaks, and uses a fixed rather than proportional font. e.g.

<div style="float:right; margin-left:10px; margin-right:10px; width:200px; text-align:center">
[[image:sistine.chapel.entire.500pix.jpg|200px|none|thumb|''The interior of the Sistine Chapel'']]

-- Tim Starling 23:43, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

3rd person

Sometimes Sennheiser talks in the third person. I recently got a note on my talk page from User:RickK. He told Sennheiser that this annoyed him. Sennheiser posted a reply to ricks page, [7] but he called it nonsense and deleted. Does the majority agree with Rickk? If so, I might be able to curtail my use of the 3rd person. (see I tried!) Sennheiser 04:14, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Delirium takes no particular stance on the issue, but does note that starting a post in that way may make it appear as if you are talking about that person and are not in fact that person yourself. --Delirium 04:17, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

Dysprosia thinks it's cute (however if everyone starts doing it, then...). But maybe it would help to sign at the end too, just to make sure. Dysprosia 04:24, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ok (hehe) In the future Sennheiser will sign at the end. Sennheiser 04:53, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It bugs me, but not enough to have ever mentioned if it you'd not asked.  :) fabiform | talk 05:02, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Agree with Fabiform, as it makes it look like the talk has been archived or something. May not be as annoying if you sign at the end. Tuf-Kat 05:53, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

Apparent new "bureaucrat" access

I stumbled over this at special:Specialpages... is there anyone with this access yet? Or is it a new thing? Just curious. Pakaran. 03:58, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I dont know what you mean. Sennheiser 04:01, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It says that "sysops with bureaucrat access" can promote other users to sysop. Pakaran. 04:15, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Oh, you mean Special:Makesysop. No idea where that came from, never heard of it before. Using the term "bureaucrat" suggests that it's either a non-native speaker or someone trying to be funny. -- Tim Starling 04:26, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

Disabled for now. -- Tim Starling 04:32, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

As you may not be aware if you don't work on the software, activating sysop accounts currently requires manually mucking about in the database. It's a big pain in the butt, and dangerous in that there's always the potential for making a mistake that wipes out all accounts (oops). This is just putting the sysop-activation into the wiki interface where it can be done easily and safely, and won't require pestering a small group of developers for every admin action on each of 100+ wikis. We picked the name "bureaucrat" because it sounded unattractive, no one will want to fight over it. ;)

There so far are no bureaucrats. --Brion 01:13, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Brilliant pictures candidates

Wikipedia:Brilliant pictures candidates is being ignored. Should it be merged with featured article candidates since this gets a reasonable number of people checking it? Example: Snoyes nominated someone else's image on 19 Nov 2003, there have been no comments/objections, but it's still sitting on Brilliant pictures candidates over two months later. By the way there are only 7 candidates in total at the moment (1 nomination, 6 self-nominations). fabiform | talk 20:47, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Album template and table help needed

I have created a table template for albums. Two examples can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums. Your comments are welcome. Somebody who knows how to use the table syntax should make it look better. -- [Presumably Tuf-Kat]

I've improved this a bit, but there are two stray incidents of "</table>" that I can't see where they come from. It's midnight, I'm going to bed, can someone else with HTML and wiki markup knowledge please take a look? -- Jmabel 08:09, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Fixed. The </table> tags were fine, it was the missing </small> tags (and possibly also the missing </td> tags) that were throwing it off. —Paul A 09:07, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Suggesting standard table for rocks/minerals

Is this the place to suggest that rocks & minerals should have standard tables like those currently used for, for example, birds and dogs (e.g., Whippet)? I've got a sample of a rock and a mineral on my user page.Elf 20:19, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC) Comments?

There would be too much overlap with compounds. So just use the compounds table with a few extra cells. See carbon dioxide. Develop that a bit and then start a WikiProject. At that point try to gain support and comments on your table. If and when others think it is a good idea, then start implementing it. --mav 00:21, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Just one suggestion: When choosing the colour, you might want to stay away from red because it is being used by the animal articles (see platypus or grouse), stay away from yellow because it is being used by the chemical compounds articles (see calcium carbonate) or carbon dioxide, and stay away from green because it is being used by the plant articles (see ginkgo). mydogategodshat 00:45, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

And it looks like the music albums project is going to use gold. mydogategodshat 09:23, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Colors for standard tables

Colors--Finding an unused color is going to become challenging as more topics are tableized, especially if each group subdivides the way the chemical elements project is doing, using pretty much all the colors for different categories. Elf 17:36, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Does this matter? Surely other projects will have tables of different shapes, sizes, positions, fonts, cell joins, photos and diagrams in different places and so on. Colour is only one of many eye-catchers, and probably the right one to use at a fairly fine level of detail ie within a project, as at this level the other features of the table, many of which are data-driven in a way that colour isn't, may be best left uniform. Andrewa 09:44, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Partial copyvio article

Part, but not all, of Ugly Rumours appears to be copied from here, and I suspect that the source may be more tongue-in-cheek than firm fact. Now I don't want to blank the non-copied content with the copyvio message. What's the best thing to do? Bmills 13:45, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

A complete rewrite. The article is not encyclopedic currently anyway. Put it on Cleanup if you don't feel up to the task (I would help if I knew anything about this topic). Jor 13:48, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. put it on Cleanup as I know very little about Blair myself. Bmills 13:53, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The Eagles

What album were The Eagles writing/recording when they occupied a beach house in Encinitas, Calif. in the early 1970's?

Anetra Wright 2-4-04 email address: oceanita@juno.com

The Eagles

What album were The Eagles writing/recording when occupying a beach house in Encinitas, Calif. in the early 1970's?

family

I WAS WONDERING IF THERE HAS BEEN A FAMILY GENEALOGY DONE ON MR. CLARK. AND IF SO CAN IT BE SEEN ON THE INTERNET OR OBTAINED/ THANKS CAROLYN CLARK

Hit the third key from the bottom on the left side of your keyboard once, please. It's labelled 'Caps Lock' and may hold a LED. Jor 23:25, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Bugs?

Since the last day or two, Wikipedia has become very buggy on Mozilla 1.6 (Mac 10.3). Right now and occasionally on other pages, I see the outline to part of a large grid in the upper left-hand corner of the screen (appears here, in the edit window, and on the displayed pump). The grid seems to be the normally invisible lines in between the sections of links on the left side of the page, but extended outward into the edit window and title. I also keep getting "connection was refused" and timeout errors, and sometimes pages just do not load, with no error message at all. About half the time I try to load a page, it doesn't appear. Tuf-Kat 20:57, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

I've often had pages load with lines of a table spread across the article (not just in the last day) and sometimes no left hand menu. I associate it with times the servers are failing to cope, and you only get part of the html of the page downloaded. Hopefully the newly bought servers (Wikipedia:Announcements) will be tested and installed soon. (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong about the cause). fabiform | talk 21:40, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I also get this almost every day. Usually a warning to paste my text into a text editor as it does seem to represent server load problems. Bmills 10:32, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Server change to http handling?

Currently when I check in a page edit, I'm getting back the pre-edit version; I have to do a shift-Reload on the browser (Mozilla) to get the correct version. Without expertise in writing http handlers, I'd guess that the server used to send the updated version with a command to override cached versions, but now the order to override is omitted. Of course, my browser (Mozilla) and my proxy servers have not changed at all. Has a new and better server gone in with, this little difference in prograBUser:Tim Starling|Tim Starling]] 04:51, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

Personally I think users should ber%h its own domain and URLs. Still others may be stand-alone CD-based versions that will run on a 386 in the 3rd world. It's all possible. This is what the . :)

What you experienced may be due to a clock skew issue; it should be fixed now if so. --Brion 07:38, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

VP text not appearing (should be fixed)

Probably a dumb question, but why is it that text that I can see in the history of this page is not visible in the page itself (e.g. Adam Carr's lates addition)? Bmills 10:52, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

(moved to meta:Cache bugs#VP text not appearing

homegrown images

What's a good rule of thumb for the quality and accurateness of an image for adding it to an article. I've been in a series of debates and disputes about a certain user's images which I feel are not encyclopedic in nature. (See talk:yeti and talk:paranthropus for instance.) - UtherSRG 02:20, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wesley Clark

Bold textCould you tell me if Mr. Wesley Clark could possibly be the same person who gave a talk at the Naval Air Station, Memphis, TN. in the late 70's? Thank you.

Using Wikipedia in a Bibliography

Copied from the reference desk because (a) my question pertains to Wikipedia itself, and (b) this page has a whole lot more viewers than the reference desk →Raul654

I need to know who wrote the article Subliminal Message, i need the location of the posting orginization, and the date of document. Please this is URGENT! thank you! e-mail me the info if you can (prefered) foxyroxy0709@aol.com

It sounds to me like this is for a bibliography. Is there some policy page somewhere which says how you are supposed to cite wikipedia in a bibliography? →Raul654 22:46, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

Uploading images

I'm having a strange problem when uploading images... (please tell me what I'm doing wrong!). I tweaked a diagram that I had drawn and previously uploaded to wikipedia. I saved the new version on my computer with an indentical file name to the original, and then uploaded it (with the intention of replacing the old version with the new one). Well the image file history does make it look like I've replaced the picture, but in fact it's the old version which shows (even after a shift-refresh). Have a look here: Image:Disposable menstrual diaphragm inserted.png (sorry about the subject matter!). The diaphragm should be two different shades of purple, like this image: Image:Disposable_menstrual_cup_inserted.png. fabiform | talk 22:59, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You get some weird cache-related effects sometimes, Fabiform. Your image does have two shades of purple now. Somewhere in your chain of caches, one has not updated. Don't worry about it, it will sort itself out over time. Consider just how many caches there are in the chain between the 'pedia server and you. You may have (a) a browser cache, (b) a firewall cache (if you use an intelligent firewall), (c) other software caches such as download "accellerators", (d) your ISP's cache (they all say they don't use proxies, but they do), (e), your ISP's provider's cache (i.e., the company that does the trans-oceanic cable or satellite link - they cache stuff too, to save bandwidth). Plus I probably forgot some. Tannin 23:06, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Page moves

Something's wrong. All page moves that I have done recently has timed out or resulted in a blank page while the rest of WP is speedy enough. BL 01:58, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I just tried to delete User:GenePoole/Self-aggrandizement, an obnoxious page that Wik had created, and move it back to George Francis Cruickshank, but somehow, the delete/move got timed out and now we don't have the George Francis Cruickshank data anywhere. Can somebody help me to get it back? RickK 04:05, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've usually found that the move goes ahead, despite not returning the confirmation page. Apparenly working around the bug, Wik replaced George Francis Cruickshank with a redirect -- the original text was in the history of that article. And fixing Special:Movepage is right at the top of my priority list, after real life and procrastination. OK, maybe 3rd. -- Tim Starling 04:21, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the moves still go through, even if the page times out. Wait a minute or so and check Recent Changes. --Delirium 04:26, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

an idea for preferential balloting

I have an idea. first, read the article on Preference_voting before going on. now, here's the idea when its mathematically impossible for someone to win, drop them! for example: <html>

Laura	30 votes
Billy	20 votes
Abu	15 votes
Boris	5 votes
Lee	2 votes
Shelia	1 vote

</html>

now, in this example, even if we drop both Shelia, AND Lee, and even if all of their voters vote for Boris, there is no way that Boris can over-take Abu.

I like this idea, but as far as I know its not the law anywhere, though it should be.

I'd like to add to some pages this idea, but am not sure how to do it. I'd like to name this idea after myself of course ;)

Pellaken 02:40, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

oh, please respond in my talk page if you have anything 'major' to say, as I am liable to forget about this

They tried that. It was called the 1984 US presidential election. It was a disaster. The media called the election before the polls closed in California. When everyone found out the presidental election was decided, they figured it wasn't worth it to vote. The other California elections got insanly low voter turnout, and a lot of upsets occured. That's why the media doesn't call it before 8 PM pacific time anymore. →Raul654 02:56, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

What does this have to do with Wikipedia? -- Tim Starling 03:02, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

I think he's asking if his original theory can have its own article on wikipedia. Raul says it's not original. The official line on original ideas/theories this sort of thing is that it's not suitable for wikipedia, right? Or I may have misunderstood the question. fabiform | talk 03:11, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, I missed the part where he said he wanted to add it to Wikipedia. Pellaken: no, you can't add it to Wikipedia, that would break several rules. Andrewa notes a few below, I would add importance tests under the deletion policy. -- Tim Starling 03:20, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

Have a look at What Wikipedia entries are not, especially point number nine, Personal essays, and ten, Primary research. But, if on the other hand the system has been tried, then the system used in this trial could be the subject of an article or a section, together with details of how it worked or didn't. Andrewa 03:16, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ok, let me clarify the above - he is the first person to actually propose doing it intentionally. The 1984 presidental election was an accident. His idea is definietely original and (as such) definetely does not belong here. →Raul654 03:17, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

ok... I have NO clue what the hack raul is talking about. this has nothing to do with the american electoral system, less with the electoral college, and much less then anything involving time zones. Either way, I was basacally looking if I could add this, as a logical alternative, to preferential balloting articles. for example: 'some people think blah blah blah' etc. If not that's cool, but I think it deserves a mention. Pellaken 03:59, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Bizarre occurrence with Wikipedia cookies?

I just had a strange experience and I wonder if anyone else has had the same. I use Mozilla for browsing Wikipedia, and I have saved my User Page, Recent Changes and Watchlist as a group, so I click one button when I start Mozilla and all three pages come up (kind of) simultaneously. Well just now I did this, and whilst my User Page came up fine, the other two swore blind that I was no longer logged in. Is this some sort of strange cookie behaviour or is there a different explanation? (BTW rather faster today than yesterday it seems) --Phil 09:40, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

We've just added a 'private' statement to the Cache-Control headers sent out by Squid. Some versions of IE apparently don't follow the http standard on a 'Cache-Control: max-age:0, must-revalidate, s-maxage=0' header. Hope this fixes it. -- Gabriel Wicke 16:14, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sennheiser adds that IE doesn't usually follow standards.

Thanks for the info, but since when has Mozilla been bothered by IE problems? I was under the impression that Mozilla is related to Netscape. --Phil 10:59, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

Actually Netscape (6/7) is nothing but Mozilla wrapped in AOL fluff. And Mozilla (actually Gecko, the engine) is doing its best to emulate as many IE bugs as possible, which in places means it violates standards. Jor 12:36, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, Gecko is the HTML (etc) rendering part of Mozilla. It switches from "standards compliant" to "quirks" mode if a page is not written correctly, and tries to behave how the page's author probably intended (i.e. it emulates oft-exploited harmless IE bugs). Cookies and caching would have nothing to do with this anyway, as far as I know, they'd be covered elsewhere in the code (Necko?) - IMSoP 15:41, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You're right of course. I posted my reply after discussing a similar report (IE in that case) on irc, oviously i didn't read very careful.

Caching is only on if no cookie is sent (anons), and even then the client is forced to revalidate the page on every request. When the browser sends a cookie it's the same as before (no caching on the Squid). Monday was a rough start, especially with Squid3 exhibiting unexpected bugs. It's not unlikely that some pages were sent out with improper header for short times. Now the dust has settled, the setup seems to work rather well. Is this problem still reproducible? -- Gabriel Wicke 20:08, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Update: i've tested this again with firebird, a set of pages opens logged- in for me. -- Gabriel Wicke 12:00, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Zero Sized Reply

Sennheiser recognizes this Squid problem and suggests the developers look at this squid documentation page.

Happens when the Apache is restarted while you're trying to get a page out of it through Squid- not much Squid can do about that. -- Gabriel Wicke 16:19, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Request for article

We have a user, Shaheen Lakhan (User:slakhan), who appears to be notable enough to warrant an article. Since doing an autobiography is discouraged, could someone please take up the task of creating such a page? (I would do it myself, but I am very pressed for time these days...). -Anthropos 05:15, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There was an article, but it was deleted. See [8]. --Jiang 09:52, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's back, this time as a redirect to User:slakhan. I just listed it on RfD. Bmills 16:43, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

As mentioned in Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion, I instituted the redirect because there was no article in place (it's best to at least have that). I agree that an article should be made by someone other than Shaheen (i.e. not an autobio). My hands are also full; can anyone take the task of creating an article? Accordingly, since an article will be created and Shaheen Lakhan not deleted, the listing should be deleted from the Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion page. --Willkins 17:01, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I agree that he should have an article. My solution: why not just move the current user page to the article at Shaheen Lakhan? Then, the user can write in the User:slakhan page in first hand and have an disserved article (where anyone can edit). The user, or perhaps others, have written in proper formatting and it is probably one of the better articles on individuals. --Kuhn3 17:35, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have moved the page. The request has been fulfilled. It is much better there and he needed it. --SOmai 17:44, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Current problems

Why do I have difficulty loading Recent changes and the page histories? I remember an announcement saying hardware problems would be over by the end of January? (I won't ask why it's me again and no one else who asks these questions.) <KF> 23:56, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There is definitely something strange going on this morning. I keep being told that pages don't exist and that edits can't be saved. There do seem to be a lot of bugs in the system recently. Adam 23:59, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The version that was put into production yesterday morning (Squid3) wasn't tested properly under high load and showed bugs. Now 2.5 is running without problems so far. In benchmarks the squid currently serves pages at up to 800 requests/second to anon visitors without hammering the DB or the Apache, so this helps a lot.

Edit/update: All wikipedias are currently running on 1 DB server, 1 Apache and 1 Squid. Geoffrin and some other server (don't recall which ;-) are broken. Without the Squid (running on old Larousse, a pentium3) wikipedia would be hardly reachable. The occasional 'Can't reach parent server' messages indicate that the Apache is overloaded and not reachable, so instead of a timeout you get a message now. Should make it a nicer and more explaining page though.

Yesterday evening Larousse ran out of disk space for the log which caused Squid to crash. Brion has set up log rotation and compression now, and there's a lot of space now on the drive. -- Gabriel Wicke 15:46, 3 Feb and 16:02, 4 Feb (UTC)

Some new hardware was put in, and there are some problems with the squid setup. Being on Slashdot didn't help things much. Dori | Talk 00:40, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

Can someone explain "squid" and "slashdot" to non-technopersons? Adam 00:52, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Squid is a proxy caching server. EDIT: See Squid cache Sennheiser

We've recently been slashdotted yet again. That's probably some of it. --Dante Alighieri 00:45, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The end of January date was when the new servers were being delivered. Well, they've been delivered, but they're still being tested, they're not doing anything useful yet. We are, however, being more creative in our use of the hardware we have. This creativity leads to improved speed especially for anonymous users, but lots of bugs and the occasional bit of downtime. A working squid server will be useful when the new hardware is ready for service. -- Tim Starling 04:22, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

mucho weirdness over on "Laocoon and his Sons"

Hmm. Twice now I've tried to delete a few paragraphis from Laocoon and his Sons (having already pasted them into Laocoon. Both times the deletion worked fine, but when I try to view the page (using the link on Laocoon, for example) my browser says "file not found" - note that it's not an HTTP (apache/squid or whatever) error. Is anyone else having weird save problems in other places (if so, well, you're probably not reading this!). If not, could someone go over to Laocoon and his Sons and see if the same thing happens to them as happens here. Thanks. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:34, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sounds like what I mentioned last night (see Wikipedia:Village pump#File not found). It hasn't happened today at all, and I can get to Laocoon and his Sons without difficulty. Perhaps you picked up my bug... Tuf-Kat 21:38, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

Yep, the two sound like just the same thing. I think Laocoon and his Sons works okay because I reverted myself - can you (or someone else) try to edit it (say delete the virgil passage) - it was in that post-edit state that the file was not found. Thanks -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:44, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Vitamin S?

Vitamin-S, fringe science or real science, YOU be the judge! Seriously though, is there any validity to this article? At the very least, the language needs a touch-up to be more encyclopedic (whatever that means).

While we're at it, can someone please write an article on fringe science? I'll also add it to the list of articles that need creating, but hey, as long as I'm here... --Dante Alighieri 19:16, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Is fringe science another name for pseudoscience? Or maybe junk science, or protoscience? Not to mention pathological science, and just plain bad science... Given the length of some of those talk pages, I'd tread carefully with your definitions! - IMSoP 19:54, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

None of the above, and here's why... Pseudoscience doesn't subscribe to scientific methodology, fringe science does. Junk science is agenda driven (with disregard for proper methodology), fringe science is not. A protoscience is a new "science" or field of inquiry in the process of becoming established, fringe science research occurs within established fields. It's not bad science because it's not characterized by sloppiness or lax standards. Fringe science is, simply, real science that's just kind of out on the edges of mainstream and widely-accepted theories. In other words, it's the kind of science/theory that stands a shot of becoming respected at some point, just not quite at the moment. This means that the researchers have to be real researchers (and not just some crank in his basement) and they have to use the scientific method. I guess the best alternative label would maybe be "speculative theories" that don't have quite the weight of established doctrine. At least, that's MY take on it. Maybe I should just write the darn article and be done with it... --Dante Alighieri 22:01, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There was an article about Aspirin as "Vitamin S" in New Scientist this week. Evercat 02:11, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Good enough for me, I read (pronounced reed, not red) that magazine. Now, if someone cares to examine the language to make it slightly less subjective sounding... --Dante Alighieri 06:44, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Awesome public domain site found

I, Sennheiser, have found an amazingly complete and detailed public domain site which has (long) articles about everything from SETI to the American Civil War. These articles are written by Greg Goebel, and many include diagrams created by Goebel (public domain). Sennheiser!

Someone needs to write him, explain the Wikipedia project, and ask if he minds having his work released under the GNU-FDL. --Dante Alighieri 16:28, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I did. He seems pretty cool and wants to help, but doesn't seem to want to do so directly. Apparently, he has had contact with some other Wikipedians, whom he calls "hacks". Here's the e-mail response I got from him:

Hi Dori: Forgive me if I chuckling a little bit, but Wikipedia hacks have ported about a dozen of my works to the Wiki and I've been corresponding with them for some time. However, I'm not unhappy to get in touch with you because I've been a little frustrated in my dealings with Wiki hacks -- not because they've been unkind to me (quite the opposite!) but because they haven't taken as much advantage of me as I am willing to give them. I don't want to monkey with the Wiki myself directly, since working on my site is enough of a job, but I would like to extend a standing invitation to Wiki hacks that I am willing to: % Consider requests, particularly if they are something close to what I am already doing. % Abridge or provide outlines of my documents, this being much easier for me to do than somebody else since I have my brain wrapped around them already. % Extract elements from larger documents and convert them into stand-along documents -- for example, say, yanking the story of the Battle of Gettysburg from my oversized Civil War history and turning it into a stand-alone item. I must say I am impressed that the Wiki seems to maintain surprisingly high standards of quality for a contribution based system. I suspect that a good review system is the key. PS: As a kindly-meant and minor suggestion, you might try more specific titles than simply "Hi". I opened up the email expecting it to be pornographic spam ... Nice chatting ... Greg Goebel

I think some of the editors interested in the subjects covered in the site should contact Greg and cooperate to bring some of that information into Wikipedia. Perhaps we should create a cooperation page to track this. Dori | Talk 17:03, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

He seems very nice. I have created a Short Sunderland, mostly from his article, but I did add pictures of each mark(it took a while to find an image of each different version, and they were hard to tell apart). Since he releases his work in the public domain, he gives away his work without any expectation that he will get credit. (i did, however, give him credit in the article I created) Sennheiser! 17:11, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I think it's important to give credit where credit is due (I usually do so in a References section at the bottom). We can make a MediaWiki message just for these artiles (like for 1911) so that they are the same. More importantly I think we should try to coordinate efforts so that there is no duplication and also so we can take advantage of the help Greg is offering. Apparently we have a page on Greg at Greg Goebel. I think this should be moved to the Wikipedia namespace. I propose: Wikipedia:Vectorsite import station. Dori | Talk 17:22, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

Yes (vectorsite import station sounds good to me). He only is frustrated because he is willing to do more for wikipedia? Thats kind of weird, but very nice. BTW, can someone add Short Sunderland to the main page? Sennheiser!

Wikistats unavailable

I've been sitting on this for a few days, thinking it might resolve itself, but to no avail. I want to see Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits, but it's ancient (an update would be appreciated), with a redirect to http://download.wikimedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#Wikipedians. The link is broken, however. →Raul654 09:18, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

It's been moved to http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#wikipedians. Link updated. --Delirium 09:45, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

Ah, thank you. That was generated on Sept 26 - Is that the most recent? →Raul654 09:54, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

PS - I'm astounded that in less than 2 years, Maverick racked up 31,000 edits!

Iraq updates needed

While some pages on Iraq will need some time to be fully updated, I think we can safely gut Military of Iraq as the chance of it being accurate ever again are just about nil. --Dante Alighieri 07:26, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Shouldn't it be shifted into the past tense, or moved to some kind of "history" article rather than bombed until the rocks bounce chopped down? Onebyone 10:45, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I agree, but I can already see the edit war over what it should be called. The Military of Iraq before .... (fill the gap at user's own risk). Bmills 10:48, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I suggest The Military of Iraq before 2003 as a neutral title. :) Jwrosenzweig

Except that that would be an inaccurate title, seeing as how the article remained descriptive of the Iraqi military through parts of 2003. :) How about Military of Iraq prior to 2003 US Occupation or some variation? --Dante Alighieri 19:00, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Actually, why even move it to a new article? Just go ahead and make the information current and move the existing stuff down to a heading called "History of Military of Iraq" or something... --Dante Alighieri 23:41, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

an idea for preferential balloting

→ Talk:Instant-runoff voting

(Yerzoplazistonian) Civil War Civil War

Looking at the list of contributions for User:SuperBee, I discovered an article called (Yerzoplazistonian) Civil War Civil War. When I click on it, it takes me to an empty article. The article is not nonexistant, it doesn't come up as an article to be created, it's there, though empty. I can click on the "Discuss this page" and get into an edit to create a Talk page. But there's no "Delete this page" link. How can we get rid of this? RickK 02:18, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Rick, it means the page doesn't exist :) SuperBee's MO is to put empty pages on his contribution list on his page. Don't worry about it, unless something's linked to the nonsense page. Thanks Dysprosia 02:29, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think you mean User:SmartBee. His actual list of contributions shows up the (Yerzoplazistonian) Civil War Civil War page, not just the list he's written on his user page. I've tried to delete it before, but it won't go. Angela. 07:08, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

Maybe it's a database thing, due to the previous upgrades &/c (I can't remember, I'm a goldfish or something). Dysprosia 07:11, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Signature talk link

After seeing color in parts of other user's signatures, Sennheiser attempted to make the exclamation mark talk page link(see User:Sennheiser#Sennheiser's Decision to use ! instead of . for the link to his talk page) in his signature black. Obviously he failed in implementing this feature. Any suggestions? Sennheiser! 01:31, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You probably saw a purple section, right? That is the "visited link" colour - you'd been to their talk page recently, so it shows up a different colour to their user page, which you'd not been to recently. Several people bold the part of their signature that links to their talk page. Or you can spell it out like this: fabiform | talk 01:40, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Dysprosia thinks that the stylesheet or wiki formatter is overriding your choice of font color for link. Dysprosia 01:45, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, Sennheiser saw Green in green's sig on Talk:Mars Exploration Rover Mission. BTW, Sennheiser has his visited link color set to light blue as Sennheiser finds purple ugly. Sennheiser! 01:52, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sennheiser has now found a nice way to do his signature and is happy with it. (I realized the bold was better than a different color as it prevents confusion) Sennheiser!

Looks like User:Greenmountainboy gets round it by putting the font tag inside the link text - I suppose that makes it <a><font></font></a> rather than <font><a></a></font>. [[foo|<font color="magenta">bar</font>]]->bar. But I agree that it's better to use bold, especially since you could potentially break someone's custom colourscheme if you specify absolute colours. - IMSoP 02:14, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Absolute colours are evil, particulary around links. Please use bold, italic, etc instead. Martin 20:26, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Uploading images

Fabiform panics when a cached copy of an image is briefly shown. fabiform | talk 22:59, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You get some weird cache-related effects sometimes, Fabiform. Your image does have two shades of purple now. Somewhere in your chain of caches, one has not updated. Don't worry about it, it will sort itself out over time. Consider just how many caches there are in the chain between the 'pedia server and you. You may have (a) a browser cache, (b) a firewall cache (if you use an intelligent firewall), (c) other software caches such as download "accellerators", (d) your ISP's cache (they all say they don't use proxies, but they do), (e), your ISP's provider's cache (i.e., the company that does the trans-oceanic cable or satellite link - they cache stuff too, to save bandwidth). Plus I probably forgot some. Tannin 23:06, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I hadn't quite realised there were that many caches between me and wikipedia, thanks for elucidating! fabiform | talk 23:25, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm experiencing something similiar to Fabiform. I'm trying to overwrite Media:Cnimitz.jpg (black and white) with a slightly modified (cropped and brightened) picture - http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/k06000/k06651.jpg (color). But no matter what I do, the old one keeps popping up. I know for a fact it isn't a cache issue - I ssh'd into a server on a totally different ISP, downloaded the image, and got the old one. What am I doing wrong? →Raul654 11:12, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

Screw it. I uploaded to a different name and deleted the old one. →Raul654 11:25, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

SWF picture format

Hello fellow Wikipedians, I am a newcommer and am very impressed with this fantastic collective Free Encyclopedia. I would be honnored to make contributions to it, graphics wise, but first I need to now if the format I use and specialize in is suitable for your programm scince I have not seen it in the list of requested formats.

I work with SWF format, wich is a open format. My original technical illustrations and animations uses vectors wich produces very light weight files for fast downloads.

Here is an example showing the innerworkings of a Manual Transmission. It is fully interactive and make only 37K. A single picture (still) would be at around only 2K. http://www3.lino.sympatico.ca/geebee/custom/transmis.htm

I also produce JPGs and PNGs , but mostly I do in SWF because of vectors been so light.

If you find the format acceptable, then I would be happy to contribute as much as I can. I have many already done and some of the requests I see here I can produce quite easily and to top quality.

Best regards, and bravo for this wonderfull project that is, in my opinion, totally in tune with the real nature and purpose of the Internet.

geebee@lino.sympatico.ca

Have you looked at Wikipedia:Image use policy, especially the section on "Format"? I think that's our policy for now. If you have questions, please post them at Wikipedia talk:Image use policy. Thanks, Jwrosenzweig 21:10, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I can't speak for others, but I would not be averse to including flash animations as links. I'd prefer they not be in-line in the articles, and normal still images be there instead. This may need to wait a bit for some technical issues, as currently the Media: links do not set a proper content-type header, so linking to SWF files that way won't work correctly in most browsers. --Delirium 23:49, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

Until there's a high-quality non-proprietary player/viewer/plugin, forget it. Steven G. Johnson

Wesley Clark

Question about whether he spoke in Tennessee in the 70s: already at Wikipedia:Reference desk.

Link Exchange

Hello, I'm looking to exchange links with your site I will place a link to your site from ours [9]. Please let me know if this is possible Regards, Matt

This site is editable by anyone. Theoretically, you could add the link, but I reccomend that you dont. Wikipedia doesn't advertise. If you add the link it will probably be deleted, and if you continue to add the link, you might be blocked from editing. Sennheiser!

Pakistan Nuclear Scandal

Given how big a deal this seems when I read the news articles about it, maybe we should have an article on it? See current events. --Dante Alighieri 18:39, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

We already have an article on Nuclear proliferation with a section about Pakistan that needs to be updated. See also Abdul Qadeer Khan for a related article. -- ChrisO 11:58, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well then, someone should update the nuclear proliferation article. ;) As for the article on AQK, it seemed a bit sparse on current information regarding the issue. Anyone know a good source for more data? I was browsing google news but didn't really come up with that much useful info. --Dante Alighieri 16:31, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

MPAA screeners

I've added a bit to the current events page and beefed up the article on screeners, but I think we should have a page on Carmine Caridi. Any takers? --Dante Alighieri 18:39, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Potential Paleoanthropology Issue

I was just browsing the 'pedia and I came across the following articles, Homo erectus soloensis and Homo erectus meganthropus. I know a bit about the Homo genus and hadn't heard of these guys before. Can anyone with more expertise than myself help determine if these articles reflect consensus views on the subject or are, rather, fringe science? Thanks. --Dante Alighieri 18:33, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think this might be catagorized as fringe science (i might be wrong). I did a google search for homo erectus soloensis site:.gov which yielded no results. I did a normal google search for the same homo, and one of the top results was an article from a Christ-Focused Creation Ministry. ON the other hand, there was a reference to it in www.thefreedictionary.com, but that might be a bogus source, and i haven't time to check. Sennheiser! 23:47, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This article at archeology.org [10] mentions soloensis in passing, and it seems the name is derived from the Solo River in Java. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:51, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hmmmm. Interesting. I think this might actually be valid. Further investigation led me to this university article which included a photogrpah of a Homo Soloensis skull. I also found another university article with an even better explanation. very exciting stuff. Sennheiser! 00:19, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

backlinks

As of November 7th, 2003, Google references 60,300 back-links to us... now its "about 73,700". We're going up quickly, I must say. --- user:zanimum

This number is rather unreliable, and seems to go up and down without any connection to the real number. It serves well as an order-of-magnitude estimate of the real number, but is not reliable enough to use in comparisons between one time and the other. Andre Engels 16:35, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Help with new image syntax

I've reformatted the Stratocaster article using the Wikipedia:Extended image syntax and the image captions have disappeared. Can someone please tell me what I've done wrong? They are quite important to the article. Andrewa 15:49, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Caption do not work without thumbnails in the new image syntax. On Wikipedia talk:New image syntax this has already been discussed, with a proposed syntax from your not-so-humbly. For now, you'll either have to make it a thumbnail (with the grey area and the microscope image), or not use the image syntax to get it to the right (but use table or div as before). Andre Engels 16:37, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll continue this on the talk page, and meantime I've used the workaround suggested there. Andrewa 20:46, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

...and I've now gone back to the old standard. Of the three versions of this article, the one that uses the cumbersome old syntax is by far the best, and it's not obvious how to get the same result with the new syntax.

Pity. Andrewa 02:19, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Conflict of information - ballpoint pen

Zagreb states it was invented by Slavoljub Penkala which article states he invented an automatic pencil. Ballpoint pen states it was invented by Laszlo Biro -- SGBailey 2004-02-05

At least one person went a bit overboard a while ago concerning Slavoljub Penkala. It has been claimed that he invented the propelling pencil (which IIRC checks out), the fountain pen (which doesn't, although he had a patent on at least one specific design), and apparently now the ballpoint pen too. I think it was Biro. Onebyone 21:05, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

As explained under ballpoint pen, several people have 'invented' it at different times. However, I don't think Slavoljub Penkala is widely thought to be one of them; indeed, the Zagreb article in question is rather in need of checking in several ways, so is like very unreliable. - IMSoP 03:38, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Recent Changes

Is it just me, or is Recent Changes not updating? Mine is stuck at 14:10. Bmills 14:47, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's just you. Try reload or <shift-reload>. Tannin

Thanks. Working now. Bmills 15:11, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Not sure what to fix next?

I have just re-written Wikipedia:Articles requested for over two years to give pointers to what the requested articles should be about. With a little vim from a user or two we could clear this list today! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 11:07, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Front page cached?

Trivial thing... but when I go to the front page the "you have messages" link is shown. But I don't, I've visited my talk page, checked the page history, refreshed the front page etc, but the message remains. Is this something to so with the squid that has recently been employed at wiki-central? I remember someone saying that he was caching pages.  ;) fabiform | talk 09:48, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If you're logged in nothing is cached by the Squid, same headers as before. It's only caching anon requests and takes a lot of load off the main server this way. -- Gabriel Wicke 11:56, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Moved all cache-related bug reports to meta:Cache bugs. -- Gabriel Wicke 14:22, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Mailing lists

What gives? It has been nearly a day since the last post was archived on the mailing lists. [11] --mav 09:05, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Brion mentioned in one post that mail might be interrupted for a while as part of the new server move. Maybe this it? Unfortunately I can't point you to the exact mail as URLs with the word *mail* in them are dynamic blocked from where I am accessing the internet. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:36, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Favorite quotes

I'm starting a Wikipedia:Favorite quotes page, because, well... I think there ought be one. My justification is that we already have a "Brilliant prose" page, and that a favorite quotes page is a good way to link to internal debates that were memorable, and should be read by people, rather than buried so that the issues would flame up again. T'will be done. -戴&#30505sv 08:29, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Are these supposed to be funny quotes, or just useful? I've been putting a lot of funny ones at Wikipedia:Yet more bad jokes and other deleted nonsense lately. →Raul654 08:40, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

Have you seen Angela's quote collections at User:Angela/Deletion, User:Angela/Stubs and User:Angela/What Wikipedia is not? -- Tim Starling 23:28, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

I'd not seen these. They're just beautiful.  :) fabiform | talk 23:42, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

wikipedia.org.uk

I have registered wikipedia.org.uk, and set it to forward to http://en.wikipedia.org. The forwarding only seems to be successful on the main page.

If anyone from wikipedia admin would like me to assign the site to them, please let me know. -- Chris Q 07:36, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

With an Apache redirect directive either in an .htaccess file or in the httpd.conf it should work for the subpages as well. Example:

   Redirect / http://en.wikipedia.org/

If this doesn't work http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue61/nielsen2.html should have a solution. Gabriel Wicke 12:23, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks,but I am using a cheap "domain parking" service from http://www.webconexion.net. All I can do (without paying extra) is set a "forwars to" page, -- Chris Q 07:31, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If all you're trying to do is to make Wikipedia easier to find, then you've done a good job. If you're trying to make the ".org.uk" domain masquerade as Wikipedia, then there will likely be extra work & expenses involved, which can be left to the "Wikipedia Organisation". I wouldn't sweat it if I were you. HTH --Phil 09:29, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

How do I help

I live in the jungle of Belize, Central America. I am well educated but not knowledgeable about correct names of various plants and animals I take picutres of. I take pictures of what intrest me and have a large collection but no ideal of prper names. I know the pictures would enhance wikipedia but don't know how to post em properly. For example I have on of a multicolore lizard have no Ideal of it's scientific name so can't post it. General stuff I can do like pictures of goverment buildings, villages, and such and I have started doing so. I also will take pics by request if you explain what you want. Also what is the approriate size / resoultion for post? I use a 4 mega pixil digital camera at it's highest rez, and a 35mm SLR film camera. Belizian 07:32, 2004 Feb 5 (UTC)

• Dimensions should be (at most) about 300 pixels square, but there are exceptions (usually for maps). If you want to upload them, just log in (only logged in users can upload), and click "Upload file" from the left. Pick the file, and it will be uploaded. I suggest you make a page (at User:Belizian/pictures, for instance), where you list all the pictures you have taken. Others could use it to identify them. →Raul654 07:35, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)
• Thanks ever so much for getting involved. Images of the kind you describe would be invaluable. Make a list of uploaded pictures as Raul describes then let the people at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life know about the wildlife pictures. The best expert we have in each area may be able to identify them and add to relevant articles. Full size colour images should be up to but less than 100KB - a smaller thumbnail is automatically created for use in articles and users can click to see the bigger picture - 100KB is much smaller than your digital camera will take so you will need to reduce them using one of many pieces of software available - shout again if you need a hand with this. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:43, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)
• Thanks for doing this. It will really help even if you don't know the names. Two things that I would suggest: 1) Upload them at around 640x480 pixel resolution (I would say up to 200KB). With the new image resizing options, it's not a problem to auto-generate thumbnails, but it is impossible to get higher quality from smaller pictures. 2) Make sure you write down where you took the picture (city, state, and if possible something about the specific place). Dori | Talk 13:35, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

The Eagles

Question about what album they were writing; moved to Wikipedia:Reference Desk

family

Request for genealogical information for "MR CLARK"; moved to Wikipedia:Reference Desk

Anyone know where Jtdirl has gone?

I'm not as much of a regular as I used to be around here so didn't notice he'd gone. Is he on holiday/gone cold turkey/coming back? If someone knows could they drop me a line on my talk page (to save space here) and delete this section if they think it won't be of interest to others? Cheers -- Ams80 19:54, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia's copyright is being violated

An example is http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Tic-tac-toe , which is a transparent clone of Tic-tac-toe. What is going to be done about this?

Bottom of that page: The Wikipedia article included on this page is licensed under the GFDL. Jor 13:50, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Nationmaster is discussed here.

A full list of known users of our content is linked from Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:17, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

anomaly in What links here

I wonder what made FUnaba (redirect page) apepars three times in "What links here" of Funabashi, Chiba. Is this need some fix? If so, how can it be fixed?

This is a known problem. Just ignore the duplicates for now; it's a bug that they're in the database at all, but filtering them from the list made the query much more expensive on the database server. --Brion 11:24, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. I failed to find a description of this problem in FAQ.

Re: Related Links on Gandhi

Dear Sir / Ms., Hello!

We would be happy if you could give link of our website www.gandhi-manibhavan.org in your website.

Herewith, we are sending you the brief description of our Museum and Website for your information.

URL of the website : http://www.gandhi-manibhavan.org

Description : Mani Bhavan is the place where Gandhi stayed from 1917 to 1934, whenever he was in Mumbai. It was from here that Gandhi initiated Civil Disobedience, Swadeshi, Khadi and Khilafat Movements. The house is now converted into a Museum. The website of Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya provides extensive information on Gandhi and his views, the books read by Gandhi, Gandhi's original voice, his personal documents, anecdotes, ashram prayers, photographs etc.....

To reciprocate, we will give link of your website in our related website on Gandhi. Please inform us when you add our link.

Thank you in advance.

With warm regards,

Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya 19 Laburnum Road, Gamdevi, Mumbai - 400 007, India Tel. No. +91-22-2380 5864 / 2380 8218 Fax No. +91-22-23806239 Email: info@gandhi-manibhavan.org

Kindly visit our most comprehensive and regularly updated website: www.gandhi-manibhavan.org and send us your comments and suggestions to make more user friendly

Done. See Mahatma Gandhi Sennheiser 14:16, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

"Thumb" image function annoyingly buggy

At least in my prefered browser Opera, the "thumb" function for images seems not to be producing the desired results. The smaller version of the pic is in the article all right, but the little "enlarge" icon is seldom anywhere near the pic, sometimes paragraphs away, often over irrelevent text. Could we please stop converting images to this new system until it works better? Thanks, -- Infrogmation 05:47, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Replies to Wikipedia talk:Extended image syntax please.

3rd person

Sennheiser will sign his posts at the end in future. (Sorry for cutting so soon, but the page is still too long).

Discussion moved to User talk:Sennheiser

Where has all the image gone?-- Senheiser ponders this enigma!

See FAQ at the top of page.

translation

Hi, what is your opinion of the most accurate Greek to modern English translation of New Testament to date ? And where may I purchase it ? Thanks, RustY Haynes hayneshunting@bellsouth.net

The best advice I have is to go here and see what we have to say about translations. We don't give advice, but we try to be comprehensive. Good luck finding what you're seeking. Jwrosenzweig 01:01, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC) (Note: also emailed to address provided above)

Viewing deleted articles

We need a category of non-sysop users who are allowed to view deleted articles. Anthony DiPierro 00:18, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy

"See Also"

We don't seem to be in the habit of putting See Also links in our articles. Isn't it common practice in paper encyclopedias to have a See Also section right under the article title?

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Lists (embedded lists)

Taxoboxes and beyond

I created Wikipedia talk:Taxoboxes and beyond to centralize discussion regarding the taxobox-style tables present on articles.

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Taxobox

Bug in the image resize code

You can't use " in the new thumbnail captions, use ' instead.

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Extended image syntax

Google does Fractals: slashdot on steroids

Sennheiser notes that Google's logo today includes fractals and links to an image search of "julia fractals". Practically every site in the results has been slashdotted. (::evil grin::) Sennheiser suggests that we take this opportunity to improve our fractal articles. The AOTD has been set to Fractal. [12]

In praise of Wikipedia editors

ChrisO praises wikipedia and its editors/members.  :)

Moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiLove

Upcoming change in section titles rendering

Hi folks. There's a fix going in for the problem with the empty space after ==Titles== being dependent on whether there's a empty line or not after the title. So, I need to know which you'd prefer as the standard behaviour for titles.

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:How to edit a page

Wikipedia:What is an article

Wikipedia:What is an article states that there is no means at present of automatically determining disambiguation pages. Could this be done by detecting the presence of the {{msg:disambig}} metatag-thing? -- SGBailey 11:40, 2004 Feb 3 (UTC)

ethnic group

Trying to determine my ethnic group -> Reference Desk

My Ancestors--Help, Please.--from Elizabeth L. Nice

--> taken to Wikipedia:Reference desk

Apparent new "bureaucrat" access

Discussion moved to Wikipedia:Bureaucrat

Transient Article

I just noticed the article for transient. It seems strange and off topic. Did the author know more than I do, or does the article need a rewrite? - Pingveno 03:30, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There is no such thing as Houston's Paranelium! hahah (Paranelium isn't even a word) LMFAO! *Teddy Boy hairs are demoted to the 50s quadrant*!!! Before this gets deleted please add it to the bad jokes page!!! Sennheiser 03:33, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Uncle Ed has now converted it to a good stub, so the original will remain in the history. Andrewa 19:46, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Traditional and Simplified Chinese reversed?

I don't know enough Chinese to go to the Chinese pages and figure out how to correct this, but the main "Traditional Chinese" page contains Simplified Chinese text, and vice versa.

There is only one version for each page. In other words, chinese simp is usually links to the same page as chinese traditional (most people can read both so why make two pages?). Sennheiser 03:21, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wha? Specific example? --Jiang

How to get anniversaries on the Main Page

Well, how do i do it? The Knights of Pythias was founded on February 19, 1864, so we gotta jump on this.

First, you'd have to write the article. Then, if it meets the guidelines on Wikipedia:Selected Articles on the Main Page, list it on Wikipedia talk:Selected Articles on the Main Page or Talk:Main Page and a sysop will add it to the main page on February 20th. Angela. 02:01, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

An interesting reference tool perhaps

Here's a little gem that a friend found and tossed my way. Let's just not all use it on Wikipedia.org or else we'll be in even worse shape. :) Graphical Google Browser

--Dante Alighieri 00:45, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Or, alternatively, I could have spent a minute thinking about what the tool actually does and realize that it just queries google, and not the sites themselves. ;) Oops. --Dante Alighieri 01:05, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Slashdot

[13] ker-boom -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:42, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured pictures candidates

Wikipedia:Featured pictures candidates is being ignored. Should it be merged with featured article candidates since this gets a reasonable number of people checking it? Example: Snoyes nominated someone else's image on 19 Nov 2003, there have been no comments/objections, but it's still sitting on Brilliant pictures candidates over two months later. By the way there are only 7 candidates in total at the moment (1 nomination, 6 self-nominations). fabiform | talk 20:47, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Renegade Table Tag on Maine

There's a renegade table tag on the main page. jengod 18:32, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

Code for pics in a column

Help, please, with putting 5 pics in a column on the page.

Discussion (with answer) moved to Wikipedia talk:Extended image syntax

Image position

There is now acres of white space next to the picture at the top of this page (at least on my not-excessively-high-res screen).

Oddly, it seems I have to hard refresh every time I come to this page to get the correct layout. i.e. I load the page, get whitespace, hard refresh, no whitespace. Something local to me? Something squidy? Something with the new image code? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 12:11, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Extended image syntax

New Features

I DO love the new features in this vision of new wiki. it's fantastic! --Yacht (Talk)Q 01:30, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

What new features? Ilyanep 01:34, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Oh my, the toolbar above the edit box disappears! :O --Yacht (Talk)Q 01:43, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

You can turn it back on in your preferences, click "show edit toolbar". Whether it should be on by default is controversial. -- Tim Starling 04:02, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, Tim. --Yacht (Talk)Q 01:56, Feb 7, 2004 (UTC)

Scarce information about small cities

Apologies if this isn't the correct place to ask, but I have a question about the entries for towns and cities. I have looked at dozens of small towns and cities and it seems that all have nothing more than the type of information that is available in an almanac. Is this intentional or simply because no one has added other things? As for example history of the area, current conditions, etc.

This is not intentional. Any additional information is welcome. Andres 01:04, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The basic information has been automatically (and contraversially) added from another source, with the intention of being fleshed out by anyone who is able. See the rambot FAQ for details. - IMSoP 01:09, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC) [via edit conflict with Andres]

IP address?

I was wondering [pardon if this isn't the right place] ... if I look up "wikipedia.org" IP @ DNSstuff ... I get 130.94.122.199 ... but when I navigate to 130.94.122.199 I get the followin msg "Note that the address for www.wikipedia.org should be 130.94.122.199. This server is 130.94.122.197" ... could anyone tell me what the problem is? Sincerely, JDR

You're not supposed to use IP to navigate here. .199 is where www.wikipedia.org as well as wikipedia.org are hosted, and that server redirects any requests for www.wikipedia.org or wikipedia.org to en.wikipedia.org at .197. You should only arrive at .199 when you request en2.wikipedia.org or are redirected there by the pedia itself. Thus, no problem. Jor 23:38, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Suggesting standard table for rocks/minerals

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Taxobox

Article count

For an article count updated rougly every 5-15 seconds, see #enrc.wikipedia on irc.freenode.net -- Tim Starling 14:49, Feb 1, 2004 (UTC)

Clarification: Freenode IRC. Optim 14:57, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

People with modern browsers may be able to get there by simply clicking this link: irc://irc.freenode.net/enrc.wikipedia

// E23 19:27, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Table markup

Could someone please check the table on my sandbox? I'm trying to switch from using HTML to the wiki code and am not sure I've got the hang of it yet. Thanks -- sannse 12:40, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

An easy way to check the table is to look at the HTML source of the page. You may even fix it there and place the result back into Wikipedia. -- User:Docu

Village pump is overpopulated

See the Village pump is overpopulated section in Wikipedia talk:Village pump or click here: [14] for a discussion on how to keep VP small and usable. Optim 18:19, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Harry Potter Madness

Earlier I removed the synopsis of the Harry Potter series from Harry Potter to Harry Potter (plot) in order to remove the spoilers from the main article.

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Warn readers about spoilers

This was the incorrect place to move the article to. It was a question about the massive duplication and obvious fan-based content (i.e. the summary of book 2 which would take nearly 20 minutes to read!) I will see if I can find a better place for it - suggestions would be appreciated. --HappyDog 18:33, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Unable to access article: Transvaal

When I try to get to the article on Transvaal, it gives a blank page. Same thing happened yesterday...

The page is still in Google's archive though.

I can access Transvaal ("The Transvaal was one of the provinces of South Africa"). Earlier I had a problem where one page (and only one) kept appearing without the left hand menu and the bottom of the screen menu, so there was no "edit this" link (which is what I was trying to do). It sorted itself out after a while. I think the pedia might be a bit glitchy today. fabiform | talk 03:02, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Reading level?

Has there been a discussion about the target reading level that we are aiming for? I see a wide range in the articles. I've watched many articles start out understandable by a layman but end up so qualified and academic that only a scholar already in the field can make sense of it. Rossami 21:51, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Continued at m:Reading level

Stats page is empty

The "Usage Statistics" page displays an empty apache page (since Jan. 28th at least)... Maybe because of recent server problems? Why not insert some dummy page?

Moreover, the display of the empty directory is bad from a security point of view: directory listings should be disabled in Apache's httpd.conf.

Lapinou 20:35, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Inserting comment before all introductory tables?

This topic came up in the infobox discussion, but I thought it warranted mentioning or discussing here:

For new wiki users trying to edit existing content, the table formatting is intimidating since it appears at the beginning of the entry and might scroll down a long way. ESPECIALLY so since we're now trying to use the wiki markup instead of HTML, so even experienced web users could easily be confused.

Should we suggest that, in all cases where there are tables, there should be a leading a comment (how do you do that in wiki--same as in HTML?) that says something like "This page starts with notation for the table displayed on the page. Scroll down to where the main article text begins"? Elf 04:25, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This all sounds sensible to me. And as for comments, there's one at the top of this page and it's the standard html, i.e. <!--- Your comment here will only show when you click edit this page --->. fabiform | talk 07:49, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Kickas*??

Hey, in the spirit of the Super Bowl happenings et. all, how about if we go Britney Spears-Janet Jackson-Dennis Rodmanesque and call ourselves Wikipedia, the kickas* encyclopedia instead of wikipedia, the free encyclopedia?..LOL Just a comment to light it up a little but wouldnt it be funny if we could do that? LOL

Antonio The Wikipedia Crazy Resident Martin

No. You are neither as crazy, nor as funny, as you think you are. Martin

testing

Seems to be working again -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 03:39, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

---

A division of the Miniseries of Information

SWF picture format

Have you looked at Wikipedia:Image use policy, especially the section on "Format"? I think that's our policy for now. If you have questions, please post them at Wikipedia talk:Image use policy. Thanks, Jwrosenzweig 21:10, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

HTML table problem

I recently attempted to make a table at U.S. Democratic Party presidential nomination, 2004 (superseding a previous one). The table itself has come out okay, but always seems to be put at the very end of the document when the page is viewed (it's supposed to appear part-way through). I've looked at the code several times, but I can't find out why this happens. Is there anyone knowledgable about such things who can tell me where I've messed up? Thanks. -- Vardion 03:17, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Further discussion at Talk:U.S. Democratic Party presidential nomination, 2004. —Paul A 04:03, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

George Francis Cruickshank

Can some sysop please delete George Francis Cruickshank? The VfD vote was 77.8% to delete, yet Angela just moved it to the talk page. --Wik 20:12, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

Added my vote. Then deleted it. -- Viajero 20:44, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It wasn't given 5 days. Anthony DiPierro 21:14, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I moved the discussion to the talk page. The item was still listed on VfD. As I have already explained to you in two places, this was because VfD was 110kb this morning and there was not room on the page for every discussion. It has only been listed for four days, and should not have been deleted until tomorrow. As a result Anthony has now listed on VfU. Angela. 22:46, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

Page without content: wiki/Internet_slang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_slang Thanks

Page without content: wiki/Internet_slang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_slang Thanks

(the above was by 200.207.163.47 --Delirium 11:04, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC))

idea for script to count contributions

I was thinking about creating a script to count contributions to wikipedia. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, however. Has anyone done this already? If one of you already has, could you send it to edwardsenft@yahoo.com? If not, feel free to ask me for a copy once I finish it. Sennheiser! 15:42, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have one in python. Any good? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:52, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

That would be great! Please send it to me. Sennheiser!

The "deadly Wikipedia virus"

Spotted on Xinhua, the official Chinese newswire, no less:

MAPUTO, Sept. 24 (Xinhua) -- When Yan Bincheng wearing a heavy glass mask, a shield to cover his surgical clothe and two sets of gloves, the Chinese volunteer looked more like a bio-chemical expert than a doctor from Chinese medical team in Mozambique.

In Maputo Central Hospital, the largest public hospital in Mozambique, Yan with his colleagues must wear these "uniforms" in everyday operation to avoid unexpected dangers from patients for some of them might be HIV carrier or even the deadly Wikipedia virus carrier.

Huh? Maybe this is a new explanation for Wikipediholism - it's actually an infectious disease! :-) -- ChrisO 11:46, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

---

A Community Information page

advertising

HI there, I am very intersted in setting up a link or affiliate with your http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara pages. I have a site that sells only Che Guevara items and I am in the process of setting up affiliates. I am very interested in working with you. Please let me know if your interested. Sincerely Johnnyhavana www.theCHEstore.com

Older revisions of images inaccessible

How comes that older revisions of images are no longer accessible. On the image description page, only the link to the current revision works, while the links to previous revisions give a 404. Are the older revisions lost, or is the link just pointing to the wrong location? I remember that last time I used that link (months ago) they worked. andy 20:39, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Some do seem to be missing, I'm not sure why (aside from a few -- see the big bold message at top). However, many are present. --Brion 22:44, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, three out of three I tried were missing, e.g. Image:Thailand provinces.png or one I uploaded just today Image:Thailand Surat.png. For the last one the previous version was existing until I uploaded a modified version today, thus I suspect a real problem there, not just the missing images as noted on top. andy 23:23, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I had this problem as well - when I uploaded a new version of an image the old one was no longer available. Evercat 23:25, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ok, it seems that there's been breakage somewhere that's causing it to link to the wrong directories. The files are there, but not where the links point. JeLuF's looking into it... --Brion 00:08, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Should be fixed now. Note that pages with the broken links may be stuck in the cache -- be sure to thoroughly reload the image page before reporting that things are still broken. --Brion 00:49, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

George Francis Cruickshank

--> Talk:George Francis Cruickshank

Formatting help needed

Plants and animals of Belize is in serious need of help. Since it's nothing but images at the moment, the formatting has become darn near impossible. Can someone who knows about these things PLEASE throw them into a table... preferrably one that's easy (read easy for people who don't know about tables) to add to? Thanks. --Dante Alighieri 19:58, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I gave it a try. -- User:Docu

software suggestion

where do software suggestions go?

There should be a verification screen after clicking on "Protect this page" and on "Unprotect this page" that says "Are you sure you want to do this?" The protection button is right next to commonly used buttons, and once in a while the mouse misses the intended target. Kingturtle 16:39, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think this page on meta willi do the trick Sennheiser! 16:52, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Unidentified flowers

Please have a look at Wikipedia:Unidentified flowers for some pretty pictures and see if you can help identify them. These were taken by Belizian, and I felt the page should be advertized a bit more so I am posting it here. Dori | Talk 05:02, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

Also look at Plants and animals of Belize. --Dante Alighieri 19:48, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

What the heck is happening with this page?

I put a question on here two days ago, and it's already been deleted. I had to dig through the history to find out that somebody had responded to it. I realize that the Pump is a busy place, but please give the people who post questions at least a couple of days to read the responses before you delete things! RickK 01:50, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree. I had the same problems. Sennheiser! 01:51, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The problem is that this page is very busy. In a couple of days it will have gone from 20k to 60 or 90k. One thing to do is to ask for replies to be posted to your talk page if you know it will be several days until you can come back. If you're talking about your question "(Yerzoplazistonian) Civil War Civil War" it's in the archive, which there are two links to at the top of the page. Sorry if you think I moved it too soon. Wikipedia:Village pump/February 2004 archive 1. If people prefer I will stop this agressive archiving. fabiform | talk 04:53, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Archiving and moving is fine, but instead of putting the moved links at the top, I would leave the section header where it is, and put the link right under it. That way, those who posted the question can find it more easily. The headers, with the links themselves should not take much space, so they can be archived after a few days. Dori | Talk 04:59, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

Well, at the moment the two work in parallel. The most recently moved discussions have their heading left in the TOC and the redirect is placed beneath it (along with a summary if appropriate). The next time the page is archived these are moved to the top of the page. I haven't been marking the discussions that have been moved to the archive, but perhaps that would be a good idea! Bear with me (and anyone else) while I sort myself out. Does this sound OK to everyone who cares? fabiform | talk 06:29, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sounds fine, as long as the second archiving isn't less than two days from the time of the original posting. RickK 22:23, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Web crawlers robots spiders grokker

I want to buy a Grokker, robot spider or crawler that will datamine internet WWW sites for all the trade boards such as

Alibaba.com chinalocator.com businesfinder.comebigchina.com china_excite.com ec21.com euro-trade.net

An estimated 20,000 such sites exist on the WWW all it needs to do is gather the URLs and then

The spider should also automatically register/enroll/list a company at each of the trade boards with, name, address, tel, fax, email, URL, by product category and its products together with graphic files at each trade board

Is such software available on the market?

Dr. Peter Palms PhD Palms & Company, Inc. Palms Harbour Lights Building, Suite 203 515lake Street South Kirkland (seattle), Washington State USA 98033 Tel 1 425 828 6774 Fax 1 425 827 5528 Email: Grokker@Peterpalms.com WWW: Peterpalms.com

maintenance

"Please note that the Wikipedia database will be locked for read-only access from 8 February 05:00 UTC = 9pm PST, midnight EST, 5am GMT, 6am CET. This should only last for a couple of hours, and is necessary to allow a major system upgrade."

Ooh, new servers? I've already saved some wikiwork to do in the donwtime.  :) fabiform | talk 22:16, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yeeehaaa. How exciting. I hope the new servers dont break. Sennheiser! 22:18, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

uploads broken?

When I tried to upload something, I got

Internal error

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Could not copy file "/tmp/phpfPlElt" to "/usr/local/apache/htdocs/en/upload/7/78/AlbaniaKorce.png".

Morwen 12:35, Feb 7, 2004 (UTC)

I had that to and then tried to archive the Wikipedia:Upload log .. it work shortly, but again it doesn't. -- User:Docu

Disk was full, many gigs free now. Fixed. -- Gabriel Wicke 01:42, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

help

please help if you can im trying to see if I can be on a list I dont know if you have it its called write to any sailor?? I know I use to write to people before on a diffrent ship and was wondering if you did the same thing or knew how to get ahold of someone who did?? please let me know lorrainej55@hotmail.com or lori_lo2003@yahoo.com thank you

An official Navy response to such requests can be found here. There are two specific programs available for Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Jamesday 10:04, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Inserting comment before all introductory tables?

This topic came up in the Infobox discussion, but I thought it warranted mentioning or discussing here:

For new wiki users trying to edit existing content, the table formatting is intimidating since it appears at the beginning of the entry and might scroll down a long way. ESPECIALLY so since we're now trying to use the wiki markup instead of HTML, so even experienced web users could easily be confused.

Should we suggest that, in all cases where there are tables, there should be a leading a comment (how do you do that in wiki--same as in HTML?) that says something like "This page starts with notation for the table displayed on the page. Scroll down to where the main article text begins"? Elf 04:25, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This all sounds sensible to me. And as for comments, there's one at the top of this page and it's the standard html, i.e. <!--- Your comment here will only show when you click edit this page --->. fabiform | talk 07:49, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Personally, I like the way it's being done in WikiProject Countries: the opening paragraph precedes the table. If you think the wiki markup is too intimidating for wikipedians, maybe you want to use HTML. (See Wikipedia_talk:Infobox for a suggestion of a special namespace). -- User:Docu

The German wikipedia uses this concept for some time already, there an article which starts with a table is preceeded with

<!-- Der eigentliche Artikel beginnt unter dem folgenden HTML-Code der Basistabelle. Wenn du die Tabelle nicht bearbeiten willst, einfach nur nach unten scrollen! -->

which translates to The actual article begins after the following HTML code for the basic facts table. If you don't want to edit the table just scroll down a bit. However I (and some others who discussed at the Infobox) would prefer to have something like the {{msg:something}} to incorporate tables into articles, e.g. with a {{table:Salamandra salamandra}}, which would contain the taxobox of the Fire Salamander. Then it would be much easier editable for the newbie - however as such infoboxes only belong to one article it would double the articles needed for such, and also spreads the information into two places. And last but not least would be work for our MediaWiki developers.

To put the table after the introductory paragraph does not look that much good in the displayed article, especially if the first paragraph is quite short. Then maybe there just one line of text above the infobox, which would looked better if the table is at top. andy 11:06, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

andy 11:06, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

---

As a side note to the above: I'd like some input on how to caption the covers. Just for expediency's sake, I would caption them with the title of the book. (See Lord of the Flies or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone or examples). Fabiform suggested publisher, date. I'd like to know if anyone else has suggestions. →Raul654 08:06, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

YAWU

Yet another wikipedia utility: Wikipedia:RC patrol. If you have spotted an edit which looks questionable (but is not blatant vandalism), go ahead and submit it to the aforementioned page. Hopefully people will browse the page once in a while and check whether specific edits to articles which they are knowledgeable about are "OK". More info on the page. - snoyes 19:45, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Vitamin S?

Vitamin-S, fringe science or real science, YOU be the judge! --> Talk:Fringe science

Awesome public domain site found

This is an amazingly complete and detailed public domain site which has (long) articles about everything from SETI to the American Civil War. These articles are written by Greg Goebel, and many include diagrams created by Goebel (public domain).

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Porting Vectorsite articles

List of blocked users

20:00, Dec 31, 2004, Tim Starling blocked 65.110.6.34 (contribs) (unblock) (Sorry, Wikipedia has been vandalised many times by www.proxyweb.net users)

21:38, Feb 29, 2004, Hephaestos blocked 204.96.197.145 (contribs) (unblock) (michael)

Has Wikipedia been the victim of inter-temporal vandalism? →Raul654 14:24, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

There isn't support in the software to block an anon IP for more than a day, and we had lots of vandalism from that address. So I think Tim manually inserted a block entry into the database for the end of the year. Quite clever, that. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 14:38, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Refreshing Featured Articles

Just a reminder that the four-week period for raising objections to articles that were not clear keeps in the original voting is at its exact mid point. If you voted to remove an article but have not raised a formal objection to it, please do so now at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates. Bmills 10:37, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikistats unavailable

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits was moved to [15].

Ah, thank you. That was generated on Sept 26 - Is that the most recent? →Raul654 09:54, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

PS - I'm astounded that in less than 2 years, Maverick racked up 31,000 edits!

Er, thanks! :) That only counts edits to articles, BTW. --mav 09:10, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Iraq updates needed

Update article, rename or move? --> Talk:Military of Iraq

File not found

I've been getting intermittent "file not found" messages. For example, I went to VfD, clicked on a link from there and then pressed "back", only to get an error message saying the file could not be found -- this was not a 404 or any such thing, it was a popup box like any other in Mac OSX (Mozilla). Is this part of the recent Wiki-madness due to servers and new features and slashdotting being flung about willy-nilly? Tuf-Kat 04:58, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

Pakistan Nuclear Scandal

--> Talk:Nuclear proliferation

Potential Paleoanthropology Issue

Homo erectus soloensis and Homo erectus meganthropus fringe science or what? --> Talk:Homo erectus soloensis

Mailing lists

Appear to have been disrupted during a server move.

Wikipedia:Favorite quotes

戴&#30505sv has started Wikipedia:Favorite quotes.

HTML table problem

-->Talk:U.S. Democratic Party presidential nomination, 2004

hitla

the only mistake hitla made he didnt get all you fucking jews

claymountains@yahoo.com

Lumpenproletariat, lumpen proletariat or lumpen-proletariat?

Don't know if Lumpenproletariat should be moved to lumpen ploletariat. Need help from whatever that language is (German?). Discuss at Talk:Lumpenproletariat please. --Maio 22:22, Feb 11, 2004 (UTC)

copyright

To The Permissions Department,

CECIERJ - Science and Distance Learning Foundation of Rio de Janeiro is the support foundation for the consortium CEDERJ, which is a consortium of six public universities (UERJ, UNIRIO, UENF, UFRJ, UFF, UFRRJ) located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The consortium aims to offer high quality distance public higher education.

By offering undergraduate distance learning courses, the consortium CEDERJ:

• Contributes to bringing high quality free higher education in the inner cities of the Rio de Janeiro State.
• Contributes to make higher education possible for those who can not study within the time/schedule of standard universities.

The consortium CEDERJ works by building local centers distributed across the state (eleven at the moment). The course’s quality is ensured by the consortium and in the face-to-face and distance tutoring system.

Our courses are based on printed material and online courses, whose content is enriched by images, videos, audio, links, texts, programs, simulators, etc.

All our courses are given at no charge for the students and the educational material is heavily subsidized so as to minimize the cost to the student. The educational material is only sold to students of the courses in the consortium. They are not sold to the open public.

We would like to request your authorization for using the images found in your site for undetermined time in our courses. We commit ourselves to credit the material and use it only in our educational material.

Thank you for your attention. Please contact us if you need any further information.

===========================

Dinah Kleve

Pesquisa e Produção de Imagens

CEDERJ

(21) 2299-4573

dinah@cederj.rj.gov.br

http://www.cederj.rj.gov.br

===========================

It should be perfectly fine to use all material here for educational purposes. Even other purposes, just as long as all materials remain under the GNU FDL (English) / GNU FDL (Portugûes). Κσυπ Cyp   21:23, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Copyright help, Examples would really help

I'm writing an estory which I hope to sell. It's about a geek who becomes a religious prophet but still sees the world as a geek. As a computer geek for over 30 years I've come to relish the term.

I suspect you might enjoy Nevil Shute's novel, Round the Bend. Dpbsmith 03:09, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Anyway, talk radio host are flamming trolls, the government is bloatware and stuff like that. I could easily write my own definitions for these terms, in fact I just finished adding to Internet troll, but would like to make the readers aware of Wikipedia, the good work being done here and the revolutionary approach it embodies. The problem is I've read the copyleft stuff several times and am still at a loss. Examples would really help. I just want to quote from Wikipedia articles as you would from any text but I'm just not sure how to do that.

Does the complete article have to be copied rather than the relevant bits. Does the entire GPL have to be included? Does that make the work GPLed?

From reading the docs it's seems that most of the GPL stuff is for large amounts of information rather than citations under fair use. It's clear that a lot of work went into constructing the GPL for legal correctness. But I'm not a lawyer and haven't got a clue. It seems that fair use should cover the few sentences I would like but even if it does I would prefer to abide by your decision.

Thanks

If you just want to use the odd snippet of information, then you can under fair use, regardless of our free licence. A note that you used Wikipedia as a source would be appreciated. Give you readers the URL etc. As for more wholescale copying - well there are lots of examples at Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content - neatly categorized according to how good they are at sticking to the licence we release content under :) Basically if you used a substantial amount of Wikipedia content, and then added your own content to it i.e. built on our content then your work would count as a derivative work and would have to be released under the same licence - i.e you work would have to be copyleft too. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 18:02, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Just like Pete says, under fair use you can quote small snippets like from any other encyclopedia. Copyleft is actually less restrictive than Copyright, so anything you are allowed to do under Copyright, you are allowed to do under Copyleft (at least that is my impression). See also: Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia. Dori | Talk 19:31, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

rice field price

hi I want to know how much cost every meter rice field in Ramsar (in Toman)? my e-mail address is : aria272002@yahoo.com

Dashes

User:Wik seems to insist on replacing ndashes – with ASCII dashes -. Style guides for printed work such as encyclopedias, as well as Unicode, state that for ranges such as dates an ndash (1998–2000) and not a dash (1998-2000) should be used. One advantage of using the correct dash is that a linebreak won't occur on the right of it. Is there some official policy from the Wikipedia on this, or should I just wait until Wik tires of his game and restore the correct dashes? Jor 01:00, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, if you're prepared to insert the "correct dashes" into all the tens of thousands of articles which now have the ASCII dashes, go ahead. --Wik 01:04, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Okay. I will interprete your quote above in that you'll start leaving them alone from now on. Jor 01:05, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

No, only if you go through all articles and make it consistent. I will always edit the articles to fit the de facto standard. Currently, that's the ASCII dash. --Wik 01:07, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Please use two ASCII hyphens -- in a future version of MediaWiki this will be automatically converted to &ndash;. The problem with using one hyphen is that they're very difficult to find and convert once the new feature is implemented. I'd be quite happy with people using &ndash; in the meantime. -- Tim Starling 01:11, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles are about being easy to read and edit. The average non techie reader has no idea what the sequence of characters "&ndash;" is supposed to mean. It makes the article source ugly and therefore harder to edit. This kind of stuff should be kept at a minimum.—Eloquence 01:34, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

I also don't like ndashes as they make editing harder. Dori | Talk 03:14, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

An ndash and and an mdash are NOT the same thing, and a '-' is not a substitute for an mdash;. I agree with Jo. Stop putting in ASCI dashes anywhere. Or else you are going to be real busy for the rest of your days because I use only ndash and mdash and will change any ASCI dashes I encounter to the correct form (something a BOT cannot do). And a -- should become an mdash not an ndash. The look of the "source code" is not an issue. Incorrect English prevails over making editing "easier" : Maybe we should just ignore spelling too - Marshman 05:42, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) uses regular ascii dashes in dates (1999 - 2005). I don't see what the problem with them is personally. It makes editing easier and looks fine when rendered to my eyes. The manual of style isn't compulsory, but it's the only guideline that should be applied to wikipedia IMO. If it's under debate then hash it out on the talk page and modify the guidlines if necessary when a consensus has been reached. fabiform | talk 06:57, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Can anybody please explain why this matters at all? A dash is a dash is a minus sign... or not? And minus signs are far easier to use compared with some "&..." character sequence. Furthermore, it is my impression that everything else looks ugly in Mozilla-based browsers. The advandages of "&..." listed above look not too significant compared with the ease of editing that "-" offers. So, what are the reasons for using the "&..." things? Specifically, why are they considered "correct"? Kosebamse 11:19, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See Dash (punctuation), and in particular, the external link at the bottom, The trouble with EM 'n EN. While you are at it. look over Typography Matters—a short essay on the theme "Typography, at the root, is all about providing as many helpful cues for the reader’s eye as possible." Tannin

It can also be important when "viewing" pages through a different kind of browser, for example having a text-to-speech engine read it aloud. The different kinds of dash/hyphen can be used to cue different pauses or emphasis. HTH HAND --Phil 12:17, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Fair enough. Still, everything except minus signs looks plain ugly on a monitor (at least under Mozilla et al.), i.e. there is not a helpful visual cue but a distraction, i.e. it is counter-productive to use the "n" and "m" things. Is there a solution to the display problem? Kosebamse 12:44, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Get your eyes adjusted, Kosebamse. No, I'm not making a smart crack here---if proper typography looks ugly to you, you have been spending too long reading badly set web pages, or student term papers, or some such. Take a break from the 'pedia and read some real printed-on-paper things (books, National Geographic, anything you like) till your eyes adjust themselves back to normality. As for Mozilla, it is ugly. Always has been. The most stable and practical browser around but ugly as a hatful of ar.... um ... bottoms. If you like pretty, use Opera. Or, if you must, Explorer. Microsoft have always been good at pretty. Tannin 13:14, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

PS: I usually use Mozilla for most things, but nearly always Opera here (don't ask why, just habit). Looking at the page as rendered by Mozilla just now, it's fine. Perhaps your problem is the font support in Linux. Linus still has crappy on-screen fonts. Tannin 13:21, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ah well... I like to see myself as a bibliophile and book maniac and could not agree more that good typesetting is A Good Thing. The "m" dashes are displayed too long, too high and without right or left spaces on Mozilla (under Linux). It would be A Very Good Thing to fix that but on which level? Browser? Style sheet? Font? Kosebamse 13:28, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Font, I suspect. Am m-dash should be exactly the same width as the letter "m" (uppercase or lowercase? I can't remember) in whatever font you are using. The "lack" of spaces is not an error. That's the way an m-dash is supposed to be rendered. Some---mostly American---publishing houses have taken to inserting spaces on either side of an m-dash in recent years. I have no idea why. A micro-space is acceptable if desired, but a full space ... well ... what is it they say? Two nations seperated by a common language? Tannin

Quite possible it's the fonts. I have played around a little and they all look either like a minus or as described above (much wider than a lowercase "m" and too high). Kosebamse 13:50, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well the new dash conversion has just gone live. One hyphen - ; two -- ; three --- ; and of course four is the horozontal rule. We've all been muttering about having confusing "&..." symbols in the wiki editing box, but it just occured to me that this wont happen with the new markup. In the editing box the n-dash (if it was entered that way) will just look like --, just as horozontal rules display as ----. fabiform | talk 12:38, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yay! Finally we can have correct dashes! No more ugly poor man's dashes! (I'm with the mdash-ndash camp on this one.) --seav 13:07, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Don't hooray too loud, as the same one breaks the new wiki table markup, where |- works, but |-- doesn't work anymore. But Tim already heard the complain on IRC... andy 13:10, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I briefly switched this on using a live patch of two lines of PHP code, which was a bit silly because it broke a few things. I switched it off when I realised it broke links to titles containing --, of which there are about 140. There was some contention on IRC as to whether -- should be expanded as an en dash or an em dash. -- Tim Starling 23:24, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Has this also got something to do with why the "nowiki" tags are showing at the top of this page: (3) Sign your name and date (by typing "nowiki"–~~ ~~"nowiki"? fabiform | talk 13:17, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC) (not on irc).

Seems to be related - on MediaWiki:Villagepump it shows correctly, but once imported here it shows the nowiki's and there is a double - inside the nowikis. andy 13:24, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Doesn't Wikipedia use UTF-8? Can't we just insert the actual mdash and ndash characters? That would make editing much easier. 137.222.10.57 17:03, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC).

No, most English and Western European wikis use ISO 8859-1, for maximum browser compatibility. -- Tim Starling 23:24, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

History of ALCO POWER

Sir/Madam

Re history of ALCO Power Inc the date GEC (UK) purchased the company was in the early 1980's (about 1982/3 I forget the exact) not 1970 as stated on the page as below.

"The diesel engine business was sold to White Motor Corporation in 1970, who formed them into White Industrial Power. In 1970, White Industrial Power was sold to the British General Electric Company (GEC) who renamed the unit Alco Power, Inc. The business was subsequently sold to the Fairbanks-Morse corporation, who ..."

Best Regards

John Lankester(ex employee)

made the change --denny vrandečić 21:50, Feb 11, 2004 (UTC)

I'd love to vandalize a page to make it as funny as possible but of course I DON'T do it (not important)

(My English might be weird because I'm from Europe.) Is there anybody else who'd love to make a vandalized page that has a lot of the original content of the article but with all kind of things added or changed so that it is very funny? I'd love to vandalize a page in such a way, but I think Wikipedia is really great and I really would like it to become a real encyclopedia. Many articles are awesome and could go right into a real encyclopedia. Because I don't want to "hurt" Wikipedia I will never do such funny vandalism.

The page that really would be my favourite to make funny is: Slashdot trolling phenomena in the page you would do everything that is described there. Like widening the page itself to demonstrate how trolls do that and at the same time making fun of it.

Couldn't we have a contest at April's Fools day who can make the funniest vandalism? Oh no, nobody is ever to take Wikipedia serious any more if we do that! :-P (If I'm correct English people make all kind of jokes on April's Fools day, don't they?)

Am I the only one longing to make such funny vandalized pages, although I would never do it? Laudaka 22:52, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC) (Paul/laudaka)

P.S. When I edit Wikipedia I normally do it very seriously. I like most correcting all spelling errors and I will also try to rewrite articles to make them more interesting to read, for example by comparing the weight of a space probe with something familiar like a car, so the dull statistics like weight, time of launch, etc. become more lively. Laudaka 23:01, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC) (Paul/laudaka)

There have been a handful of occasions on which I found myself unable to resist the temptation to put a joke in one of my contributions. In every single one of those cases, it took less than 24 hours for someone to notice and remove my joke—a fact I found very reassuring. Mkweise 23:01, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Done it once, stayed there for almost three days before someone removed it. Jor 23:03, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm glad I'm not the only one with these impulses. I very much wanted to change this article so it just read: WWJD? RTFM. fabiform | talk 23:16, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

When you have an impulse like that, it's clearly time to phone your Wikiholics Anonymous (WA) sponsor, even if it is a very late hour. (Maybe we need a WA chatroom?) -- Jmabel 23:40, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Uncle Ed posted this obituary of the pillsbury doughboy to the main page's recent deaths listing. It was hilarious. →Raul654 00:01, Feb 11, 2004 (UTC)

You bastard, this means we've all got to go over your edits with a fine-tooth comb looking for a scintilla of a flake of a whisker of a smidgen of humour in any edit you've ever made, and if any is found, pound it, smash it and grind it into dust. Humour vill not be tolerated! And I'm only half joking... one use of a little witticism in half of one sentence once led to LOTS OF CAPTIAL LETTERS in summary comments, a huge debate on the talk page, a listing here on the pump, a vote, a ballot stuffing and finally the removal of the humour from the page (though in fact the un-stuffed ballot was to do the opposite) (see Talk:London Congestion Charge) Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 13:17, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I put a subtle joke into an article months ago, hasn't yet been found, bwahaha. Personal subpages should be acceptable for parodies in any case, and one could give permission for others to "improve" them, in true wiki fashion. Stan 14:55, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Does anyone know whats the longest period of time a vandalism has remained on Wikipedia ? I recently reverted vandalism made in August 2003 !! or something like that. Need to recheck which article that was. Jay 11:32, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Need help with image restore

I just screwed up image:Gutenberg.jpg. I uploaded an image of the Gutenberg bible under the same title, then noticed the name conflict and deleted it again. Of course, then all Gutenberg images were gone, so I tried to restore, but it hasn't come back. Does Gutenberg.jpg still exist somewhere? AxelBoldt 22:15, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Probably. Check a mirror site that regularly downloads tarballs. They should still have it. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 22:27, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Images are not in the download tarballs, but you might still want to check archive.org, or one of the sites that copies Wikipedia's content. Dori | Talk 23:12, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

On a second though, the history appears to have the original image (unless it's another weirdness and it's actually the newly re-uploaded one): [16] Dori | Talk 23:18, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

Compare versions

I've been trying to compare versions in the Dungeons & Dragons article by using the spiffy new checkboxes. But after I click the second box, I always get a blank page called "Dungeon" (try it--you'll see). I suspect this is due to the "&" in the title? How do I fix this so I can compare versions? —Frecklefoot 21:29, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hmm. It does indeed seem to be the & causing the problem: it should be being turned into "%26", but the wrong value's being written in the PHP - unfortunately the only immediate way around it I can see is manually contructing the URL for the comparison (i.e. ignoring the new javascript gadget altogether) - if you look at the address of one of the "(cur)" links, you can substitute the numbers which represent the two versions you want into the "diff" and "oldid" values in the address (this is all the Javascript does). Looks like this feature got added in rather a hurry, doesn't it? - IMSoP 22:59, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Copyright terms

Just wondering whether the German copyright terms (70 years after death, I think) apply to German content (eg. a picture of an expressionist painting) we want to use. Or do the onerous American terms apply because the servers are in the US? - snoyes 15:06, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The Berne Convention has harmonised this, I believe, so that the copyright terms of signatories (including both Germany and the US) are recognised in all other signatories. The equivalent UK law's terms are "70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the last remaining author of the work dies, or, if the work is of unknown authorship: 70 years from end of the calendar year in which the work was created, or if made available to the public in that time, (by publication, authorised performance, broadcast, exhibition, etc.), 70 years from the end of the year that the work was first made available." -- ChrisO 15:29, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, Chris. - snoyes 15:45, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hi there,

Please can you help me to find where to buy a liquid crystal "sheet" I am in South Africa if it helps

Regards Ian Woolridge

Messed up characters

As someone can see by checking out my user page (or my sig at the end of this post), a lot of Wiki characters are not working. What is going on? →Raul654 01:24, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

They all look fine to me. Are you on a different machine than usual? -- Jmabel 02:18, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

No different than I've used for the last 2 months. It just started about 2-3 days ago, give or take. →Raul654 02:20, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

It must be a font issue, for whatever reason your browser is now using a different font to display the page, one which does not contain these characters. They work fine for me here as well, so it is not a problem on the wikipedia side. andy 09:45, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, if it helps, I took a screenshot of the relavant portion of my user page. It is here.

Just to reiterate what has already been said, this is not a Wikipedia issue - here's an unrelated HTML page to prove it [17]. As andy says, for whatever reason, your web-browser is now using a font which doesn't contain those symbols - you'll have to work out what's changed and do something about it (either you've hit a setting that's made it do the wrong thing, or you need to install a whole new font). - IMSoP 13:52, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The characters are fine here (Linux, Firefox 0.8, Bitstream Vera Sans font). -- Gabriel Wicke 14:28, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

FWIW, the error seems to have fixed itself about 2 hours ago. (The only "special" thing I did was reboot) →Raul654 21:18, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

Your font-rendering sub-system probably burped—maybe you hit something with a whole load of different fonts—and it didn't realise it had cached bogus versions of those characters. I hesitate to ask whether you use Windows because it's not necessarily confined to that particular OS :-) HTH HAND --Phil 12:22, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Translation

Is there anywhere people can sign up to list what languages they are capable of translating? I read quite a few languages, myself, but every so often I am out of my depth. For example, I've translated several articles from the Catalan or Romanian wikipedias, but I'd sure like to have some list of who I might consult when I run into a word that is beyond me to understand. -- Jmabel 01:07, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

m:Wikipedia Embassy might be a good place too look. Angela. 01:30, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

In principle, yes, but in practice it isn't there. For some languages, there is no one signed up. The criteria to sign up as an ambassador are moderately stringent, basically bilingual fluency (or near-fluency) and a willingness to monitor a mailing list. That last one eliminates me! But this isn't a matter of one or two ambassadors. What I'd like is a place where (for example) everyone with reasonable proficiency in a given pair of languages could sign up and where the talk page would be available as a place to discuss translation needs - and issues - between those languages. I don't think it exists. I also don't think it would be hard to start. However, having been at least mildly gnawed, though not severely bitten (by you, Angela, if I remember correctly) on another occasion when I tried to start something that already existed, I'm coming here first to see if it's out there and I just haven't been able to find it. -- Jmabel 02:15, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I don't think anything better than the embassies exists. I have signed up as an ambassador even though I don't follow the mailing lists. Am I going to be declared persona non grata from meta :) ? You could establish a page in meta, and then go around to every wiki and ask users to list themselves next to the languages they speak if they want to help with communication and/or translation. Dori | Talk 02:31, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

Could be done on meta, I suppose, but I suspect no one would get there to ask for help. What I was thinking of was mostly a specific place, maybe a WikiProject (and maybe maybe subprojects for individual languages) to work on mining foreign-language wikipedias for material to translate into English. Sort of like the existing WikiProject to mine the 1911 Britannica. Other languages could do the same within their own namespaces.

In any case, I'm beginning to become pretty certain that right now there is really nothing. -- Jmabel 07:15, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

So I've gone out on a limb (Be bold!) and created Wikipedia:Translation. Probably this can be improved upon, please come help out! Jmabel 08:33, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Printed Dictionary

I am interested in a printed dictionary of common words concerning all PC-vocabulary. Where can I order this? Is such a book available? Thank you for your answer in advance Yours sincerely,

Renate M. Degenfeld Austria

I found a few on Amazon.com. I'm not recommending the books in specific or that you buy them on Amazon, but they do seem to be the sort of book you're looking for. Click here --Dante Alighieri | Talk 20:21, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Have I been squidded?

This is the second time I tried to upload a sound clip and got this message (before the 100k warning, but after the upload appeared to be complete in the progress bar). The upload was apparently unsuccessful this time, though the first time it happened, last night, it did work (IIRC). After getting this message once today, I tried again with the same clip and the same thing happened. Tuf-Kat 19:05, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload

The following error was encountered:

   * Write Error 

The system returned:

   (32) Broken pipe

An error condition occurred while writing to the network. Please retry your request.

Your cache administrator is webmaster. Generated Mon, 09 Feb 2004 18:59:03 GMT by wikipedia.org (squid/2.5.STABLE4)

Squid is only used for anonymous editors. --Sennheiser! 21:04, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, all requests pass through the Squid, but only anon requests are allowed to be cached. This could be an Apache error, possibly Apache was restarted during your request. How big is the file you uploaded? Afaik there's an upload size limit of 2Mb in php, and there was a limit at 1Mb in squid. I just increased this to 3Mb, that will kick in after reloading the squid config. Please let us know if this happens again. -- Gabriel Wicke 23:42, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Limit is 7Mb now. -- Gabriel Wicke 22:06, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Soldiers on the Plains of Abraham

Is there a list of names of the soldiers who fought on the Plains of Abraham? I am specifically looking for the names of soldiers who came from other countries to join in the fight. Thanks, Jan

Just to clarify the above - the plains of abraham are located outside quebec. The above is (almost certainly) referring to the 1759 battle of Quebec -- Battle of the Plains of Abraham. →Raul654 07:46, Feb 11, 2004 (UTC)

Download entire section?

Hi!

I was wondering is it possible to download the whole mathematics section? There are so many interesting articles, but it is expensive to be online the whole time. How could I do that, and not use like a recursive wget tool which would surely take me outside the section (because it can tell the difference between Euler and peanut butter sandwitch) ;-)

Thanks

See Wikipedia:Database download. (you will download other sections but its all in a nice package) --Sennheiser! 17:27, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Need help on Dior

User:Ausir has changed Dior into a disambig page, but alas did so by copy-pasting all text into Dior (Middle-earth). Is it possible to move the edit history for Dior to Dior (Middle-earth)? I've left a (hopefully friendly) note at his user talk page explaining about the 'Move this page' feature. (This was written by user:Darkelf who didn't sign --Sennheiser!)

Fixed. --mav 01:16, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The "deadly Wikipedia virus"

Spotted on Xinhua, the official Chinese newswire, no less [18]:

MAPUTO, Sept. 24 (Xinhua) -- When Yan Bincheng wearing a heavy glass mask, a shield to cover his surgical clothe and two sets of gloves, the Chinese volunteer looked more like a bio-chemical expert than a doctor from Chinese medical team in Mozambique.

In Maputo Central Hospital, the largest public hospital in Mozambique, Yan with his colleagues must wear these "uniforms" in everyday operation to avoid unexpected dangers from patients for some of them might be HIV carrier or even the deadly Wikipedia virus carrier.

Huh? Maybe this is a new explanation for Wikipediholism - it's actually an infectious disease! :-) -- ChrisO 11:46, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Can I qualify for medical disability payments? --Delirium 12:42, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

I think I might have it too. When I went to the physician, she said it was a sinus infection, and gave me medicine. Now I realize that I have been misdiagnosed. This is very upsetting. I hope I never die (by the time i'm 100 years old, they should have already perfected immortality.) --Sennheiser! 13:44, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Take yourself over to Medical Scientism. That'll cure you. Bmills 14:22, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Seriously though, I have this odd feeling of deja vu. Has wikipedia ever been incorrectly classified as a virus (im thinking of a possible article on SARS) before? --Sennheiser! 14:55, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's way too late to do anything about this, and I'm sure it was talked to death ages ago, but I do have to report that whenever I mention Wikipedia to someone who doesn't already know about it, they (so far invariably) think it's a Wicca-pedia and I have to explain that it is not about New Age witchcraft. Dpbsmith 15:44, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Say "wi-kee-pedia" and people won't get confused. Thats what I do. --Sennheiser!!

Page without content: wiki/Internet_slang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_slang Thanks

(this post is by 200.207.163.47 --Delirium 11:04, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC))

Heads up, Virus on mailinglist!!?

I just received an e-mail, purporting to have been sent to the English wikipedia mailing list by Jimbo Wales, with the subject line "HI" and containing nothing but a binary attachement for windoze and macs. I know I am just guessing, but maybe this is forged, and contains a virus? Right? -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 09:15, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

• It came up as MyDoom here. Secretlondon 09:16, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

• This is why, IMO, mailing lists aren't all that {contray/inaddition to the mailing lists importance notes above} [and I don't particularly like the a full mailbox (cleans out the cobwebs)] JDR
  • I'd like to correct you. There is nothing wrong with mailing lists. Microsoft is the problem. I got the virus, but it didn't do anything because I don't use Windows. --Sennheiser! 21:24, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
    • Thanks [lites a smoke off of the OS-flame =-] JDR
  • I have Windows and I never got the message because my email program caught it and never passed it on. RickK 04:01, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

some helpful advice about vandals

If a vandal disrupts a page and you revert it, and the vandal reverts your revert, have restraint and do not revert immediately. The vandal is trying to start a revert war. Do not take the bait. Leave the vandal hanging. Go back in an few hours and THEN revert. It is unlikely that the vandal will still be around.

More times than not, this strategy works. And you can spend your time editing things you want, rather than having your time sucked into a revert war. Kingturtle 06:15, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Of course this leaves inaccurate or obscene information in the Wikipedia for a few hours. You could also try listing the vandal on Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress and having an administrator ban them. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 07:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

100k "images"

When I upload a sound clip, I always get the "we recommend you don't upload an image over 100k in size" and have to override it each time. Since a 100k sound clip must be a tiny fraction of a second, I venture that there will never be any .ogg files of less than 100k. Do I need to request a feature to have this disabled for .ogg files, or is there a mediawiki page somewhere? Tuf-Kat 05:10, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

100 kbytes mean 6 or 7 seconds for the average mp3 sound (128kbit), and .ogg should be similar. The relevant message is MediaWiki:Largefile, but it's the same for images and sounds. If one wants to have separate checks for them, the mediawiki software must be modified. Alfio 13:08, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Can't Get My Password Back

I inadvertently messed up my password by click the "Email New Password" button on the login screen. I never received the new password, though I tried several passes, and since my old password is gone, I don't know what to do. My email address was supplied, is this a bug? 24.47.182.47 03:09, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It could be a bug. I just tried it to see if it would work and it hasn't sent me a new password either. You could try entering it at sourceforge. Angela. 04:02, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

I informed sourceforge. So I can't get my account access back until the bug is fixed? 24.47.182.47 03:41, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If you can get to the wikipedia IRC channel, it is possible someone will be able to help you more quickly. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 10:59, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

All of the temporary passwords came through today, all at once, so something must have been fixed. However, curiously enough, I was able to resign in with my original password, so I'm back! Cecropia 20:23, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Most Wanted Articles

Can someone update Wikipedia:Most Wanted Articles. About half of them are created, now. Anthony DiPierro 01:45, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have updated it, but you could just go to Special:Wantedpages instead, which is pretty much up to date and contains the same list. Angela. 03:56, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

If Special:Wantedpages exists, contains the same information, and is more up-to-date, then why not just make Wikipedia:Most Wanted Articles a redirect to it? →Raul654 20:50, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

Unless Special:Wantedpages is updated live, I think it's preferable to use Wikipedia:Most Wanted Articles, as there is no way to see on Special:Wantedpages which articles were already created. -- User:Docu

What is a minor edit?

I was just wondering, what constitutes a minor edit, anyway? JB82 23:59, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

Continued at Wikipedia talk:Minor edit...

Academy Award for Best Director

Can somebody explain to me why the movie City of God is credited with two directors, Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, but only Meirelles has been nominated for the Academy Award? RickK 23:13, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

--> Talk:City of God (movie)

Older revisions of images inaccessible (fixed)

Should be fixed now. Note that pages with the broken links may be stuck in the cache -- be sure to thoroughly reload the image page before reporting that things are still broken. --Brion 00:49, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

--> Wikipedia:Village pump/February 2004 archive 1

software suggestion

There should be a verification screen after clicking on "Protect this page" and on "Unprotect this page" that says "Are you sure you want to do this?"

--> Wikipedia:Village pump/February 2004 archive 1

Bust size, height, and weight

After coming across Kasia Smutniak, I wondered, "is bust size encyclopedic?" That led me to further questiosn like whether or not weight, height, or eye color of model's should be included in wikipedia articles. Anyone have any feelings about this? Sennheiser! 15:57, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Discussion continues at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not

Format for terms in other languages

I haven't been able to find an answer yet. When it's important to provide translation of words in another language (German: Sprache), what is the standard?

--> Wikipedia talk:Use other languages sparingly

Unidentified flowers

Please have a look at Plants and animals of Belize and help to identify them.

--> Requests for help and comments (above)

complaint about the importance given to mailing lists

Many of the higher level decisions regarding wikipedia are not discussed or made within wikipedia, but are instead discussed and made on the mailing lists.

--> Wikipedia talk:Mailing lists

Line Breaks in Extended Image Format

Anyone know of an elegant way to force a line break between two images using the Extended Image Format?

Discussion continues at Wikipedia talk:Extended image syntax

Japanese Naming Conventions (Problem Solved, Hopefully)

After quite a bit of going back and forth, I think we've finally come to an agreement on the matter of Japanese naming conventions (see the talk page for conclusion and rationale).

--> Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Japanese)

What the heck is happening with this page?

I put a question on here two days ago, and it's already been deleted.

Discussion continues at Wikipedia talk:Village pump

uploads broken? (fixed)

Disk was full, many gigs free now. Fixed. -- Gabriel Wicke 01:42, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

help (write to any sailor)

lorrainej55@hotmail.com or lori_lo2003@yahoo.com would like to join a "write to any sailor" scheme.

An official Navy response to such requests can be found here. There are two specific programs available for Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Jamesday 10:04, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Inserting comment before all introductory tables?

Should we insert comments before complex infobox tables which appear at the top of the page to tell new users to scroll down to edit the page?

--> Wikipedia talk:Infobox

Fair use of book covers

Tonight, I got motivated and scanned the covers of a bunch of books I have, to use in their respective articles. But before I got to all the effort to upload then and put them into their respective articles, I'd just like to make sure that I won't be causing any copyright violations. →Raul654 01:54, Feb 7, 2004 (UTC)

--> Wikipedia talk:copyrights

YAWU

Wikipedia:RC patrol

--> Requests for help and comments (above)

Awesome public domain site found

[19] Wikipedia talk:Porting Vectorsite articles

--> Requests for help and comments (above)

Page History Checkboxes

What are the checkboxes that have suddenly started appearing beside items in the Page History lists for? Or am I seeing things? Bmills 14:31, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Discussion continues at Wikipedia talk:Page history

Refreshing Featured Articles

--> Requests for help and comments (above)

Requests for help and comments

1. Daniel's redirect project still needs your help with fixing thousands of broken links
2. Muriel Victoria and Bmills urge you to vote at Wikipedia:Refreshing brilliant prose
3. mav invites you to discuss expanding the focus of the Sep11Wiki at meta:Wikimorial
4. Adam suggests every American Wikipedian visits List of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and contributes a short biography of their local Congress-person (see also public domain congressional biographical directory)
5. Dysprosia requests comments on the new login text
6. Viajero asks for your help in expanding the Guidelines for controversial articles
7. moink wants help with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Fluid dynamics.
8. Gentgeen has started Wikipedia:WikiProject Games.
9. Use {{msg:inuse}} to avoid edit conflicts. See MediaWiki talk:Inuse
10. Eloquence requests feedback and comments on the changes to the Wikipedia:NPOV tutorial
11. Jmabel wants help with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups. Those of us actively working on this are getting close to consensus on a template, please weigh in soon if you might disagree. We have begun to create sample reworkings of relevant wikipedia articles according to our draft template.
12. Alex756 asks for comments and criticisms regarding Wikipedia:Submission Standards and Wikipedia:Terms of use and the watered down Wikipedia:Submission Standards (a) and Wikipedia:Terms of use (a) to be linked to the MediaWiki:copyrightwarning.
13. ilya invites all math geeks to discuss what articles should be written as we move towards 1.0
14. Feature plug: Tim Starling is running anIRC bot at #enrc.wikipedia that displays recent changes. (French and German bots at #derc.wikipedia and #frrc.wikipedia). See VP archive for more.
15. Elde notes that many recent changes by anon users need people who enjoy editing
16. Village pump is overpopulated, discussion on talk page
17. Sennheiser has created a WikiProject Space and he would like to invite Astronomy and Space Exploration enthusiasts to join his new project.
18. TUF-KAT has created Wikipedia talk:Infobox for all taxobox/infobox discussion to be centralized
19. Belizian is willing to take photos of plants and animals in the jungle for wikipedia, he requests your help in identifying species at Plants and animals of Belize
20. For those who enjoy writing and editing: Wikipedia:Articles requested for over two years, Wikipedia:RC patrol
21. The Wikipedia:Office of Members' Advocates is an intra-Wikipedia voluntary association looking for new members interested in helping members to understand and effectively participate in the Wikipedia:conflict resolution process.
22. If you voted to remove an article to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates but have not raised a formal objection to it, please do so now. Bmills
23. Wikipedians are encouraged to make use of this public domain site, see Wikipedia talk:Porting Vectorsite articles
24. Multilingual? Or need a foreign-language wikipedia article translated into English? Check out the newly created Wikipedia:Translation

Fix required: Talk page moved to article page

I erroneously deleted Talk:World War II atrocities and World War II atrocities in Poland. Sorry for screwing up.

The folloiwng should be undone by an admin: Talk:World War II atrocities must be restored, and World War II atrocities in Poland/Talk:World War II atrocities in Poland deleted.

BTW, could it be a good idea to forbid such kind of page move? Mikkalai 21:17, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Most unlikely edit war?

In my year watching Wikipedia I thought I'd seen all variations of edit wars - at religion articles, science/pseudoscience articles, history/politics articles, etc. - but for the last day or so an edit war has been raging at, of all things, Curse of the Bambino! (This is a jokey reference to the inability of Boston's baseball team to win a title.) That's like watching a fistfight over whether Twinkies are tastier than Ho-Hos (if I may be forgiven a USA-centric junk-food joke)

I'm curious: Has anybody else encountered a real, mean-spirited, you-revert-me-so-I-revert-you edit war over a less likely topic? DavidWBrooks 15:38, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I liked the one about wether Leland Stanford need a stub message. Gentgeen 15:45, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

For the record, the activity you are referring to is not an edit war over content, but a thwarting of recurring vandals. Kingturtle 15:46, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well it amused me to see Wik and Anthony squabbling on WWJD yesterday, not over religion, but the placement of hyphens and the correct formatting of a South Park reference. The irony. fabiform | talk 17:07, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

IIRC, the first edit war I ever witnessed was at Talk:List of famous Canadians -- of course, that was User:DW, and he has since been banned... Tuf-Kat

Math formulae question

Hi. I hope this belongs here. If not, please move elsewhere. My question is whether it is possible to modify the following math formula in such a way that the equations in each row are left-aligned:

${\begin{matrix}\log _{2}(n!)&=&\log _{2}(n)+\log _{2}(n-1)+\log _{2}(n-2)+...+\log _{2}(1)\\&<&\qquad \ \ \ \ \log _{2}(n)+\log _{2}(n)+\log _{2}(n)+...+\log _{2}(n)\\&=&\qquad \ \ \ \ \qquad \ \ \ \ \qquad \ \ \ \ \qquad \ \ \ \ \qquad \ \ \ \ \ \ \ nlog_{2}(n)\end{matrix}}$

Thanks for any help. -- Timwi 13:52, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, the original author (not you?) has used a load of spacing ("\ " and "\qquad") to force it to be right-aligned (it goes to the centre otherwise), so to put it on the left, you need to move that spacing to after rather than before the text:

${\begin{matrix}\log _{2}(n!)&=&\log _{2}(n)+\log _{2}(n-1)+\log _{2}(n-2)+...+\log _{2}(1)\\&<&\log _{2}(n)+\log _{2}(n)+\log _{2}(n)+...+\log _{2}(n)\qquad \ \ \ \ \ \\&=&nlog_{2}(n)\qquad \ \ \ \ \qquad \ \ \ \ \qquad \ \ \ \ \qquad \ \ \ \ \qquad \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \end{matrix}}$

I suspect there's a better way of doing this though - for one thing, this isn't really a matrix, so probably shouldn't be marked up as one - but I don't know much about TeX, I'm afraid. Also, doesn't the last line equal the second one, rather than equalling the left-hand side, as implied? But I'm going outside the scope of your question now. - IMSoP 16:15, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Failed to parse (syntax error): {\displaystyle \begin{align*} \log_2(n!) &= \log_2(n) + \log_2(n-1) + \log_2(n-2) + ... + \log_2(1) \\ &< \log_2(n) + \log_2(n) + \log_2(n) + ... + \log_2(n) \\ &= n log_2(n) \end{align*} }

IMSoP wishes to note that the above was added by "Recentchanges", presumably as a suggested solution to the problem. Also, "Theresa knott" "suggested" replacing "..." with "\cdots". Initially, both users decided to edit other people's comments, and I reverted them as I feel this is a breach of etiquette. - IMSoP 16:54, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Using matrices to align multiline equations is standard TeX practice, AFAIK. See Wikipedia:TeX markup for details. As for getting them to align to the left, why not use "&"?

${\begin{matrix}\log _{2}(n!)&=&\log _{2}(n)+&\log _{2}(n-1)+&\log _{2}(n-2)+&...+&\log _{2}(1)\\&<&\log _{2}(n)+&\log _{2}(n)+&\log _{2}(n)+&...+&\log _{2}(n)\\&=&n\log _{2}(n)\end{matrix}}$

Not perfect, but a little closer to what you want... -- Wapcaplet 19:32, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for all your suggestions, although I'm afraid to say I find none of them satisfactory. I didn't add those "\ "s and "\qquad"s; when I inserted the formula, it was all centered. Thanks for your help anyway. -- Timwi 22:29, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I added the \'s (i accidently added the spaces to the wrong side). Sorry about that. I think thats the only way to do what you want, however. --Ed Senft! 22:43, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Using matrices to align equations is long-deprecated in the field of mathematics. The standard method is using \begin{align*}, as the user above noted, which is part of the AMS Math package. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does not seem to currently support this. --Delirium 02:04, Feb 14, 2004 (UTC)

Extremely Silly Question

Who is the wikipedian who has a hysterical picture of a kitten stuck in a drinking glass on their user page? I stumbled across that and haven't been able to get it out my head and want to show it my friend LouLou. Thanks. jengod 21:25, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Raul654. The image is Media:Image:Cat in pint.jpg --No-One Jones 21:37, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

☺ →Raul654 21:33, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Did the kitten ever get over its hangover? Dieter Simon 00:02, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Is wiki a good P2P application?

With the hardware upgrade still fresh in everyone's mind it seems that moving Wikipedia to some sort of P2P network configuration might be a good idea. This way volunteers could host some articles and as the Wikipedia's user base grows so to does the processing power. Of course there would have to be many redundant copies of each article but that would give lots of bandwidth and fault tolerance. Articles in different languages could actually be hosted in their country or origin which would reduce bandwidth? It would also give P2P networks a legitimate use.

I have wondered whether a cluster-type solution would be a good idea. Maybe if we could move towards hosting different languages on separate machines, we could eventually end up where those machines didn't all have to be in the same room, or even country, and then we could have what you're talking about. Unfortunately I don't know enough about how MySQL works, or how Mediawiki drives it, to know how feasible this sort of thing might be. --Phil 17:02, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

There's a whole page somewhere with loads of weird and wonderful proposed server architectures, involving various degrees of distributedness. Can't for the life of me remember how I got there though - it wasn't here, on meta, or even on OpenFacts, but I drifted there while stuff was down once. Ooh, here we go, I found it: http://www.aulinx.de/oss/code/wikipedia/ (linked to from m:Cache_strategy, which may also have relevant discussion). Enjoy :-/ IMSoP 18:45, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

That was on a wikipedia server error message I believe. --Ed Senft! 00:24, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Personally, I would love to see wikipedia is more decentralized. Imagine you create a new article and it is simply stored in your local drive. As time goes, it spreads among other computers. In other words, there is no special thing like submitting articles. You may wonder what's nice about this? As wikipedia grows, I am quite confident that it cannot be sustained by the central scheme we have now. Edit conflicts become more common thus annoying. It would become normal that the same problem is resolved in different places in different ways. Those diversation may sound the deteriment of coherence but it also guarantees articles to be more durable because vundalism can be difficult and disputes can be reduced.

Well, this sounds more like P2P-based Internet idea. But this is what I think the future of wikipedia is. -- Taku 00:42, Feb 13, 2004 (UTC)

I see a big probleme in the loss of coherence. If wikipedia is distributed, everyone can have their own true version of a disputed article -- but there would be no need to discuss and converge into one "peer-reviewed" article. That wikipedia is centralized (or at least: that the edit function and every db transaction following this has to be sort of centralized) seems to me the only possible topology, if you don't want to mess around with cached edit conflicts (X on distributed Wikipedia Server A changes article #123, Y on distributed server B does the same, and only five days later in some move upwards the net the different versions of #123 meet and clash. And now?). Wikipedia has to be centralized (but can be mirrored) for the same reasons that the DNS-hierarchy and Sourceforge are in a way centralized. -- till we *) 18:37, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I guess my point is that wikipedia database can be distributed like usenet. For example, I doubt every single user is interested in an article of some village in Japan. As wikipedia articles resemble web pages on the Internet, some sort of diversion is inevitable. Also, why is it important to have one version, I am not meaning more than one "official" version. Imagine some article is created by a certain group of people even they use an offline mean. And in some places we debate which version is best and should be included. I think having more version can be beneficial when so many people are engaging in editing. My point is that having one autherlized true version is good but it doesn't necessalily imply the development should occur at one version. I see wikipedia 1.0 is evidence of this path.

Of course, I am talking about the era when an English wikipedia hits one or ten billion articles. Just brainstorming for fun.

-- Taku 00:00, Feb 14, 2004 (UTC)

images from awesome university website

I would like to use the images from this awesome university website. Would I be violating copyright? --Ed Senft! 21:48, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yes, you would most likely be violating copyright unless you have permission from the creater of the images. Jrincayc 22:40, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia is simply the best!

Above all, if one needs mathematical or scientific information, Wikipedia is simply the best, which brought the Web out in the last years. There are to some extent understandable, clear and extensive explanations to (nearly) each topic. Still to it the whole is free. It is fascinating that also in the today's Spam and garbage and troll contaminated Web still another project instructed on voluntariness, self-check and co-operation survive can.

Further so, Wikipedia!

Thank you! :) --mav 11:07, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Random Observations

I've spent most of today clicking Random page and have seen a (random, naturally) sample of a couple of hundred articles. Excluding the U. S. places from the census, the following are just a few observations/questions that spring to mind. All comments welcome.

1. there are a lot of stubs without {{SUBST:stub}} on them.
2. there are a lot of oldstubs.
3. given 1 and 2,what is the value of adding {{SUBST:stub}}? (I ask because I did this a lot today).
4. if my sample is good, we have a lot of articles on people who have had their 15 minutes of fame,and very few in the area of "high culture" (the arts, I suppose). What, if anything, can be done to redress this? Or am I worrying about nothing?
5. how can the biographical articles of living people be kept up-to-date?

Bmills 16:30, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

well, the stub boilerplate points to the stub page, and so (in theory) someone can hit "what links here" on that page and they'll get a list of stubs. I don't know if anyone actually does this, however. With regard to your biography question, perhaps we could have the same thing - perhaps have a wikiproject biography, add a "this is the wikiproject biography" boilerplate on each biography's talk page, and then one can get the list of biographies from "what links here". Moreover, with that tag present a fairly simple SQL query could be constructed, saying something like "give me a list of biographies of living people which haven't been updated in the last XXX months". -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:59, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Re: hitting what links here from the stub page, I do this. :) On occasion, anyhow: I believe that proposed changes by developers will make it possible to "surf" the What Links Here section, meaning stub boilerplate will serve an even more useful purpose. I like Finlay's suggested bio-boiler, but am not in WikiProject:Biographies, so I don't know how they would like the idea. Jwrosenzweig 22:52, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Another very useful function of the stub boilerplate is to annoy people like me, who have the strange idea that they are to decide for themselves which Wikipedia articles to edit. I hate those things. Andre Engels 03:49, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)~

Not sure what to do

I've come across this article - Oxford Revelation Rock-Gospel Choir but I'm not sure what to do with it, It looks like an advert rather than an encyclopedia article, should it be put on VFD G-Man 23:16, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think you should. A choir formed in 2002 is unlikely to be notable enough yet. Bmills 12:15, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Captions for fair use book covers?

As a side note to the earlier discussion of book covers and fair use (see Talk:Fair use): I'd like some input on how to caption the covers. Just for expediency's sake, I would caption them with the title of the book. (See Lord of the Flies or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone or examples). Fabiform suggested publisher, date. I'd like to know if anyone else has suggestions. →Raul654 08:06, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

Adding publisher & date would be nice, at least on the image page if not in the article. -- Jmabel 18:28, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wilfredo G. Santa

Is someone going to delete Wilfredo G. Santa or are we going to allow that to sit and rot? Refer to Talk:Wilfredo_G._Santa. Consensus is to delete.--Jiang 03:20, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

List it on vfd again. There was no consensus to delete last time it was listed. Anthony DiPierro 07:04, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

That's not needed. Votes to keep from last time have been reversed. --Jiang

OK, I deleted the page. I left the Talk page so that people can see how the voting went. RickK 08:03, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

New pages and the watchlist

Is it possible to add New pages to a watchlist? Bevo 16:51, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Bibliographic Citations

This is getting ignored on Manual of Style, so upping its profile by dropping it here...

I saw this is Wikipedia:History:

The following is a formatted reference link for external links and references:

STYLE: Doe, John, "Main page". Wikimedia Foundation, Florida, USA. January 1, 2000.

SOURCE: Last name, First name, "''[http://www.url.org Linked article name]''". Source publisher, Location. [[Month Day]], [[Year]].

Surely this is only the guideline for online resources? According to established Chicago Manual of Style practices, this is incorrect for most published print resources, which generally go something like this:

• LastName, FirstName, "Article Title," Periodical Title, Date.

or

• LastName, FirstName, Book Title, London: Arnold A. Knopf, 1963.

and so forth...

I've commented on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. See also Wikipedia:Cite your sources. --Camembert

GFDL requirements for a so-called "Title Page"?

Looking at the article Imperative programming I see that there is some attribution text atop the article that the history comments says should not be removed because it is a "Title Page" required by the GFDL. Is this advice correctly stated? Bevo 01:18, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I removed it. It is non-standard and ugly. See Wikipedia:Copyrights. We deal with that issue by having detailed history pages linked before articles. RMS is well-aware of us and how we operate - he would have said something ages ago if we were doing something wrong. --mav 01:50, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It may be non-standard. It may be ugly. It is also correct. RMS is not god, nor is he well aware of the precise details of how we operate, nor has he stated a position on this particular issue. If you disagree with my interpretation of copyright law, you are welcome to explain why. Martin 19:48, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's certainly not like anything I've seen elsewhere on the 'pedia - articles based on the 1911 Britannica or FOLDOC generally have a note at the bottom, but this seems to be out of politeness rather than anything else. - IMSoP 01:55, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC) [Comment written simultaneously to mav's]

From the article talk page

Mav, why did you remove the history and title page text? It's required under the GFDL for making a modified version, in this case from Nupedia. You said "see wikipedia:copyrights", but I can't tell to what you refer. Martin 16:10, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

He's under the delusion that the convoluted interpretation of the GFDL given on wikipedia:copyrights is the only interpretation that can be made. Anthony DiPierro 16:19, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If so, the point is that just because Wikipedia has a certain interpretation of the GFDL when others use our work, doesn't mean that we're allowed to use the same interpretation of the GFDL when we use the work of others. Now, if the authors of the Nupedia article in question to indicate that they share our interpretation, then that's great. However, if they do not (and they have not yet to date, AFAICT) then we should follow a comparatively strict interpretation to ensure that we are not violating copyright. Martin 16:38, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If the text is felt to be needed, I would favour a note at the bottom of the page similar to the one used for 1911 or FOLDOC articles, which would seem to contain the same information in a less obtrusive and more standard (in the sense of consistent within Wikipedia) way. Something like:

This text, or a previous version of it, was written by Stan Seibert for Nupedia.

Would that cover the potential copyright issues do you think? - IMSoP 18:56, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

No, the text needs to go on the "Title Page", as that text is defined in the GFDL:

The "Title Page" means, for a printed book, the title page itself, plus such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material this License requires to appear in the title page. For works in formats which do not have any title page as such, "Title Page" means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text.

See sections 4A, 4B, 4C of the Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License. Martin 19:48, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hmmm, that is pretty clear isn't it. I guess we need to hash out a standard text to go unobtrusively at the top of the articles then. Taking the suggested text on Nupedia and Wikipedia as starting point, how about:

An earlier version of this article was posted on Nupedia; editor: Robert Dyer, lead reviewer: James Allan Evans , lead copyeditors: Charles Peyser and Jeri Bates. This version has been modified by Wikipedia users and published by Wikimedia

Unwieldy, I know, but seemingly necessary for strict adherence to the licence. - IMSoP 20:51, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I thought it would look better to have a short note at the top of the page, and a longer note at the bottom of the page, but I'm open to suggestions. :) Martin 21:19, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, as I understand it, that would be fudging the licence requirement somewhat (as you quote above: "...preceding the beginning of the body of the text...") - but I guess not by much, and let's face it, the FDL wasn't written with such short texts in mind. - IMSoP 22:19, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

In fact, the page on Nupedia and Wikipedia has a suggested text, but of the half-dozen links I followed, only one had actually used it, and no two were alike. Perhaps someone needs to go through and make them consistent? [Although the attribution may be awkward with the site unavailable] - IMSoP 19:06, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The Internet Archive sees all. The other articles will be fixed in due course. Martin 19:48, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Aha, good thinking! Now we just need to decide how to format the information... - IMSoP 20:51, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

As a side note - in our article about Nupedia, don't you think it's time we declared them dead? The site has been gone since september. I think it's fair to say they aren't coming back. →Raul654 19:09, Feb 15, 2004 (UTC)

If this is, indeed, a requirement, it's going to be impossible to do it by editing every single article and putting it there, and making sure it stays there. It's going to have to be done by the operating system in an section which is not editable. RickK 21:14, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There aren't that many Nupedia articles, so it shouldn't be too difficult. The FOLDOC articles are more of a challenge, though. Martin 21:42, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yikes, I hadn't realised that the FOLDOC import is technically under the FDL. Maybe we could contact Denis Howe again, and ask for an even more relaxed licence? - IMSoP 22:19, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

GFDL requirements for a so-called "Title Page"?

-> Wikipedia talk:Nupedia and Wikipedia

where to find a book

I am looking for "Emilo" a spanish book published back in 1930s which is currently out of print. Any help?

Dashes

--> Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (biographies)

Remove all sysops

I propose that the term "sysop" be removed from the Wikipedia lexicon. We already have administrator (short admin), and it is kind of confusing to have both. Not to mention that sysop doesn't really fit the bill, unless you consider Wikipedia a system! I am bringing this up now because of the newly emerged Special:Makesysop seems to be introducing the term sysop even more. I am guessing this would be mostly a search and replace kind of deal, disruptive yes, but is it any more difficult than that? Are the benefits worth it? Dori | Talk 20:15, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)

When I saw the heading I thought "ACK!", but I think Dori has a nice point here about lingo. We needn't make it too confusing. "Sysop" does sound cooler than "admin", though.... :-) Anyway, I almost always say admin, and will try to do so in the future. Good idea! Jwrosenzweig 21:03, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with the idea of this person who calls herself "Dori" (what's in that name, anyway?). Sysop is a great word and should be used more often. 141 21:45, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sysop is an account switch and admin is the person who controls that account. Sadly many people use sysop to refer to people. That irks me. --mav 22:02, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Huh? So an admin is someone with sysop status? What kind of sense does that make? I agree that we should standardise on one term to minimise confusion. An admin should be somebody who has an admin account, which is defined by a switch called is_admin or somesuch. - IMSoP 22:42, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

For whatever reason the switch is (or at least was in phase II) is_sysop. Thus the distinction. --mav

So, let's be practical: given that it's confusing to have both terms in use*, would it be easier to standardise on sysop to avoid database changes, or would it be no big deal to just replace is_sysop with is_admin? [*:that is, assuming the consensus is that it is confusing] - IMSoP 23:51, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Honestly, I just use sysop and admin interchangably. →Raul654 23:05, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)

But do you think it sensible to do so, especially given that new users won't necessarily realise that they are synonyms? - IMSoP 23:14, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Dori (without any criticism of developers or the DB architects). It would be nice to have consistent naming, more importantly for the MediaWiki software to be useful to folks outside of Wikipedia-land.

Another related peeve is how we have "Talk" pages, yet the link to this is called "Discuss this page." When I give instructions to newbies to "Use the talk page!" I get dozens of emails asking how to get there. They are quite surprised that "Discuss this page" is the appropriate link, and I don't blame them. Fuzheado 00:28, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Where Can I Find A Transcript of Klingon from Star Trek?

Hi Trekkies and other folks enjoying Star Trek! I'm looking for a say 1 screen transcript of Klingon. From a series or movie of Star Trek. (A part of one of the books in Klingon seems less nice to me.)

It is for an article I'm editing about a special phenomenon that occurs only rarely in languages. Klingon has been made up using this phenomenon because it makes Klingon sound counterintuitive and weird. (Actually a sentence like "Ba'thar destroyed the ship with a photon torpedo" in Klingon becomes "The ship destroyed Ba'thar with a photon torpedo".)

To make the article (actually Object Verb Subject) more lively and to illustrate why this phenomenon is so rare it would be very nice to translate a fairly large piece of Klingon back to English but keeping the higly unusual word order of Klingon.

Where can I find such a transcript, preferably with extended translation annotations? I'm thinking of having a look at the Star Trek WikiWiki, but I really haven't a clue where to look else for this. BTW (by the way) if someone wants to make such a quasi-translation himself I'd really welcome that as I'm absolutely not familiar in Klingon and I have a hard time writing new text. Editing and copyediting text is much easier for me, so I can help extensively with such a translation.

I think it's nicest to use some Klingon text that people might have seen already on tv or could rent a video of (then the movies would be best). In this way I think it's also appealing for people that are not die-hard Trekkers but interested in language, or are just curious. (And reading Wikipedia for it's entertainment value, like I do File:Http://home.wanadoo.nl/laudako/tongue.gif Paul/laudaka (add me to your Y!M/AIM/etc. list if you like!) | Talk 16:41, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Extremely Silly Question

--> User talk:Jengod

i see's the biscuit!

The movie seabiscuit, was stupid you people went way out of your way to pretend that seabiscuit was a born & Bred horse from Canada,mexico,Washington,california,any... place, but where it really came from..KY

---

I'm tired of people posting fotos using the <div> tag. This format is extremely hostile to older browsers, and results in people who use older systems to explore wikipedia finding it unpleasant and unusable and not coming back. The <img> tag is perfectly adequate for the wikipedia and is friendly to just about every browser out there. Myself, I usually use Netscape 4.7, but I can no longer use it on graphics-containing wikipedia pages, forcing me to open Mozilla 1.6, which badly bogs down my antiquated computer and forces me to spend about three times as much time on-line to do the same thing. BTW, the Bomis Browser version I have won't handle the <div> stuff very well, either. jaknouse 18:06, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Bathyscaphe Triest

In your report you state that the Bathyscaphe Triest reached the bottom of Challenger deep. If this is indeed the case and all that was found where sole,shrimp and carp. Then what where the demensions at the bottom. Was there a shelf of any sort. Where there any tunnels or shafts? Was the entire bottom covered in a silt? Any rocks or other such matter?

I would appreciate if you or a representative would write back to me at b_m_hacking@hotmail.com

Edit wars

Edit wars II and (poposed) III. How to avoid them ?
It seems that phase two of the iridology page edit wars will rage again
The declaration of war reads like this:

Well, folks, it look like irismeister is confident he's bored everybody to tears with a gazillion tiny legitimate edits, and is back to turning this article into an advocacy piece through a gazillion POV edits. It'll soon be time to get to work ... again. DavidWBrooks 16:27, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I knew it wouldn't be long! I'm on dial up at the moment which is why I've been a bit quiet. I'm back on it tomorrow though. i notice that he is trying to inser the iris-ward link again. To irismeister - I will not allow you to insert bullshit into the page. I will not allow you to insert links to iris-ward. I don't care how much you harrass me, i don't care how much you follow me around wikipedia. I don't care how many compliants you make about me. Wikipedia will survive the likes of you - I will see to it that it does.theresa knott 19:20, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

My question is how to bring calm and serenity in David and Theresa, how to protect information, how to encourage them to always resort to documents in the talk page and (gasp) for myself - how to ignore the police alert attitude as put in evidence above outside the village pump? TIA - irismeister 19:52, 2004 Feb 19 (UTC)

And I suggest that first people read through the archived talk on talk:Iridology (always a good idea before editing a page on a controversial subject, of course). fabiform | talk 21:10, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

And with my salute, I second that, as the unexpected voice of reason :-) Will add that more well-documented material has been carefully moved here in order to escape information block (sadly the page is again protected, in the absence of edit wars.) Editor irismeister is again subject of a smearing campaign in a visible effort to silence him or his contributed information. Irismeister makes everybody sure that he will NEVER talk characters of fellow editors or EVER indulge into time-losing arbitrations and stuff. The issue here is ISSUES not CHARACTERS, complete with their attempted assasination. More information on updated Wiki policies here Sincerely, irismeister 23:29, 2004 Feb 19 (UTC)

Is pumpie a possible problem? Sennheiser ponders this perplexity

He keeps creating articles with basically no content. I don't know if I want to add him to Conflicts between users(im afraid of hurting his fealings), but this little bugger is getting on my nerves. It seems as if he is a 6-8 year old with an overactive imagination (the kind of child who gets pummelled in the school yard). I don't know if he understands how to login. (he usually edits as 67.60.27.122. He also keeps asking to be an admin, and has this misconecption that he will become one soon as long as he keeps pestering others and promises to create "en.wiktionary.org" and bots that translate things. He seems to be a problem at wiktionary(i don't contribute there so I cant say). Pumpie also keeps creating articles about HMS's which have basically no content. He has repeatedly been asked to include a stub message, but he seems unable to grasp the simple concept. Look at the article HMS Hermione, for an example of the kind of articles he creates. (this was created today and he wasn't even logged in) (notice it says "HMS Amazon" instead of Hermione). As I said, I am weary about adding him to the conflict page, but I don't know what else to do. --Ed Senft! 23:22, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

He does that on the Latin wikipedia as well. I can't expect people to communicate in English there, of course, but when I've tried he doesn't seem to understand what he's doing at all. Adam Bishop 04:09, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I note the image at HMS Hermione has no provinence. Doubt he took it himself, but no documentation as to source is provided, which could be worrisome - Marshman 05:37, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I added that image. It was taken around 1910 I believe. --Ed Senft! 12:40, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

DNS problem

Umm, I tried to load the main page via my usual link, and got this: "If you've gotten here, you're either having DNS trouble or you've followed some sort of invalid link.

Please see wikimedia.org for links to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Note that the address for www.wikipedia.org should be 130.94.122.199. This server is 130.94.122.197. If you thought you were coming to www.wikipedia.org, you're in the wrong place!"

Is this really my fault?" Surely www.wikipedia.org should get me to wikipedia!!! Graham 10:14, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's not just you, I get the same message. Just change www to en2 (en2.wikipedia.org) and you can probably get in.

Adrian Pingstone 10:56, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

en.wikipedia.org works OK as well.

Adrian Pingstone 11:02, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Anthony and Wik

After an edit war between Anthony DiPierro and Wik over VfD, that page was protected. Apparently recognising the inconvenience of an edit war on VfD, or the protection of this extremely heavily edited page, they both made comments suggesting the acceptability of a temporary mutual ban. Wik said in an edit summary:

ban Anthony, or, if you can't tell a serious contributor from a troll, ban both of us, but this can't continue

And Anthony said on IRC:

<anthony> as long as he gets banned as long as i do i'm fine with it

...

<anthony> i didn't volunteer to be banned

<AdamBishop> but you said you'd be happy as long as Wik was banned with you, and Wik asked to be banned

<anthony> wik asked to be banned?

<anthony> well, if that's true, let's do it

So I did it, and unprotected VfD. -- Tim Starling 02:38, Feb 13, 2004 (UTC)

So you admitted that you indeed can't tell a serious contributor from a troll. --Wik 17:09, Feb 14, 2004 (UTC)

That explains why my watchlist isn't filled with (rv) for once. Jor 19:26, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

So that's why it's so quiet tonight ;) →Raul654 02:46, Feb 13, 2004 (UTC)

So both Wik and Anthony are banned? :D --Ed Senft!

Just to be fair, while Wik can be (very, very) hard to work with sometimes, I think he is a very good contributor. If he were to reform and be more cooperative, I would have support making him an admin. →Raul654 03:33, Feb 13, 2004 (UTC)

PLEASE tell me you're joking. He requested admin status on Requests for adminship and was roundly voted down. RickK 05:00, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm not joking. If he were cut down the number of edit wars and used the discussion pages in a rational manner, I think he could be a good admin. You can't deny his experience. →Raul654 05:04, Feb 13, 2004 (UTC)

If hell freezes over it'd be a nice place to stay. While I am grateful for all the spelling and grammar fixes Wik did to my sometimes broken writings before, his annoying behaviour once someone disagrees with him is not acceptable, and I doubt it'd ever change. However a determined editor like Wik with a lot more social competence would make a great admin, and I guess that's what Raul meant. andy 10:38, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

He's got the experience, and every so often he makes some very nice corrections, but that is overshadowed by the other edits he makes, IMO. I'd oppose him as an admin just because of all the edit wars he gets into. Metasquares 19:19, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have not had many experiences with Wik, but most of his contributions seem to have the caption of (rv). --Ed Senft! 13:12, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This sort of nonsense is the reason why I signed up for the Office of Members Advocates. "I'm ok with being banned as long as he's banned too?" I used to make that sort of argument when I was 7. Let's work towards a solution that doesn't involve people getting banned. Metasquares 19:19, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Actually if the admins had the guts to make the bans permanent I think you would have seen quite an improvement in Wikipedia. I guess you were a smart 7 year old. A solution which doesn't involve wik getting banned is not going to happen. Anthony DiPierro 21:46, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Graphics-float question

I'm trying to edit this and just get a blank window, so not sure how this will post. I just uploaded: image:divshot1.jpg image:divshot2.jpg image:divshot3.jpg as examples of what happens when viewing div tags on Netscape 4.7 (the page shown is Oak). In fact, the pump grafik at the top of the Village Pump page floats ON TOP of much of the text! jaknouse 01:07, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

to troll or not to troll, and sock puppets too

Hello all, this is just a friendly reminder about trolls. As Wikipedia increases in coverage, so too increases the meddling of trolls. There are times when it seems like trolls are everywhere, and it becomes a game (of sorts) to catch, nab or name the little buggers. It is in such moments that people begin to be overly suspicious of the actions of newcomers. Our trust in newcomers diminishes. Once distrust supercedes trust in a community, it is difficult to reverse the change. Let's not let that happen to Wikipedia. The project depends on a strong, friendly community. Build the database and build the community, too.

I realize you are all working hard at building our community. This messages is not to insult you or scold you. It is just a reminder. Welcome newcomers. Don't be overly suspicious of the actions of newcomers. Speak softly.

But carry a big stick, Kingturtle 04:20, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Edit wars

Edit wars II and (as proposed below) III. How to avoid them ?
It seems that phase two of the iridology page edit wars will rage again
The declaration of war reads like this:

Well, folks, it look like irismeister is confident he's bored everybody to tears with a gazillion tiny legitimate edits, and is back to turning this article into an advocacy piece through a gazillion POV edits. It'll soon be time to get to work ... again. DavidWBrooks 16:27, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I knew it wouldn't be long! I'm on dial up at the moment which is why I've been a bit quiet. I'm back on it tomorrow though. i notice that he is trying to inser the iris-ward link again. To irismeister - I will not allow you to insert bullshit into the page (stress added). I will not allow you to insert links to iris-ward. I don't care how much you harrass me, i don't care how much you follow me around wikipedia. I don't care how many compliants you make about me. Wikipedia will survive the likes of you - I will see to it that it does.theresa knott 19:20, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

My question is how to bring calm and serenity in David and Theresa, how to protect information, how to encourage them to always resort to documents in the talk page and (gasp) for myself - how to ignore the police alert attitude as put in evidence above outside the village pump? TIA - irismeister 19:52, 2004 Feb 19 (UTC)

And I suggest that first people read through the archived talk on talk:Iridology (always a good idea before editing a page on a controversial subject, of course). fabiform | talk 21:10, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

And with my salute, I second that, as the unexpected voice of reason :-) Will add that more well-documented material has been carefully moved here in order to escape information block (sadly the page is again protected, in the absence of edit wars.) Editor irismeister is again subject of a smearing campaign in a visible effort to silence him or his contributed information. Irismeister makes everybody sure that he will NEVER talk characters of fellow editors or EVER indulge into time-losing arbitrations and stuff. The issue here is ISSUES not CHARACTERS, complete with their attempted assasination. More information on updated Wiki policies here Sincerely, irismeister 23:29, 2004 Feb 19 (UTC)