Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 29

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous). 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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Unrefernced BLPs

As many are aware there are numerous unreferenced BLPs, many of which do not really pose the type of threat that BLP is designed to prevent. in my spare time <cough> over the last day or so I have compiled a list of unreferenced BLPs that use terms descriptive of sexuality, prejudice, drink and drug problems, illegal activity, etc. Of course there are "false positives" - a prison governor is not going to be a high risk article simply because he spent 40 years in prison. But I hope the list is useful, I have posted it to the BLP noticeboard. Any suggestions for improvements appreciated as ever. Rich Farmbrough, 01:42, 25 October 2010 (UTC).

Appropriate use of images containing oneself and overuse of one's own images?

Many of you are probably aware of the work of David Shankbone, who has contributed literally hundreds of quality portraits and other images to Wikimedia Commons. David recently added an image to Michael Lucas (director). The image is not of very good quality (having been taken with a cellphone in dark conditions), bears no apparent relevance to the section to which it was added, and would be the fourth image in this article (each of which was similarly uploaded and added by David).

I removed the image, but my removal was reverted by David with the edit summary "Sigh, sure, maybe, I won't revert again, but don't you think you are being a little officious?". Since David and I have had disagreements in the past -- perhaps most notably about the appearance of conflict of interest that may arise from his relationship with Michael Lucas -- I thought rather than just reverting, I would open this up for a broader discussion about the topic in a more general sense.

While I don't think that this addition helps the reader at all, I can see that there is an argument to be made for its inclusion. On the other hand, I think that adding images of oneself to articles is something that should only ever be done to rectify a lack of a needed and necessary image. Do we need to beef up our guidelines to include guidance about using your own images or should common sense be enough? Does common sense suggest that one should not use one's own images, or is this perfectly acceptable? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 19:13, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

For myself, I don't necessarily have a problem with including a picture of yourself, and being close to the subject may give you some opportunities to take a picture of somebody in a setting that might not be typical for others. Please make sure you have the "subject's" permission before you take that photo, or be in a public place.

My only criteria would be that the photo would have to be on topic with regards to the article that it is included. That is something best left to the talk page of the article if you have an editorial dispute and to work it out with the other editors on that particular article... not something necessarily to be decided via some global policy change. Does it add anything meaningful to the article and what alternatives might there be for that photo? It really is something perhaps appropriate for the Style Manual in terms of how many photos and what kinds ought to be included in an article. I have seen some tastefully placed photos but I've also seen some photos simply thrown into an article because it looked like something to do at the time, not because it necessarily enhanced the article.

Be grateful... at least it wasn't a full gallery at the end of the article with dozens of photos of this person in random contexts. It could have been much worse. Concern is legitimate here, but don't go overboard. MOS:IMAGES is perhaps what you are looking for and if you feel that needs to be updated in this case for those overdoing images, contact the usual places or make the changes you seem to think ought to apply in this kind of situation. The style manual can always use some tweaking in terms of what high standards ought to be. --Robert Horning (talk) 22:17, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia on TV!

So, I was watching the season finale of AMC's Rubicon the other day, and one of the characters was looking at a book they'd written (at the 25:50-ish minute mark, if anyone wants to/can take a look). Curious about what the text on the cover of the book said (because the show occasionally pops in fourth wall-breaking easter eggs), I searched around for a while, until I found a fan who'd transcribed the entire text of the back cover of the book. But, hey, wait a second! The show writers didn't come up with a lot of that info themselves! It looks like it came from...the Wikipedia article on communication theory! Wiki probably should have been attributed...but, hey, a TV appearance by the world's best encyclopedia ain't too shabby. 67.220.5.154 (talk) 01:59, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Abuse

What is the correct thing to do with such "vandalism"? [1]. Aaadddaaammm (talk) 19:28, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I always just politely point them toward WP:Civility. Responding in kind just feeds the flames.—RJH (talk) 20:26, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Also, in my opinion, feel free to revert the edits as they have absolutely no value.oknazevad (talk) 22:14, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

From what I can tell, this is one editor (209.2.48.79) using a false signature to impersonate another editor (Aaadddaaammm). That is totally, 110% not okay, never mind what the content of the post is. I'd remove it, immediately, and warn the IP editor that their conduct is unacceptable and will lead to a block if continued.--Fyre2387 ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:44, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Linking to Google Books pages

WT:CITE#Linking to Google Books pages. RfC on whether WP:CITE should say Google Books page links are allowed in footnotes, although not required, and that editors should not go around removing them. All input welcome! SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 20:13, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

How to handle the "TMax Window OS" hoax

Tmax Window was a purported "100% Windows and Linux compatible" operating system under development from TmaxSoft a couple of years ago. They had an "official launch" event, complete with hundreds of press, booth babes, and a somewhat working demo.

The company, preposterously, claimed to have developed everything within the past few years entirely in house so that they could sell the result as proprietary software -- including a web browser, office suite, kernel, and Windows compatibility layer. In the west it seems no one heard about them, largely because it was easy to dismiss them as frauds who were at best just using open source software. In Korea they seem to have gotten more attention (particularly from the Korea Times), although there was accusations of fraud as well.

The product never made anything available to the public, although they did make a "delayed" announcement. If you go to Tmax's website today, it appears that they've erased all traces of "Tmax Window" from their website -- even though, oddly, it comes up as a suggested search when you partially type it. It seems that Tmax was near bankrupt at the beginning of the year, and are being bought out by a larger Korean Telecom.

Anyway, that leaves us with the question of what to do with the articles. My inclination is that there's not enough sources on Tmax Window to constitute a complete article, and it doesn't look like there will be any more new ones coming out. But I'm not really sure. I don't want to venture into original research, but it's also pretty hard to find an article that says "welp, nothing happened for two years so it probably was a fake" Scott Ritchie (talk) 02:56, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

That is an interesting problem, and I've seen it happen with other companies too. One in particular that I've even gone so far as to nominate for an AfD was Galactic Suites, which was at the time it was created there was a big flurry of press released presumed to be a legitimate enterprise but seems to have dropped off the face of the Earth having never produced anything notable or at least noteworthy. They technically pass the "notability" requirements because major news media sources did write up a bunch of stuff about this company and their products, but I still think it was largely vaporware.

I'm not sure what to do with companies like this or like you have suggested with Tmax here. There are many such companies that show up, and my gut feeling is that Wikipedia shouldn't really support these kind of companies unless they can actually prove they are doing something rather than merely holding press releases. The problem is that I don't know how to form a proper policy to establish that concept and maintain the other standards of Wikipedia like NPOV and WP:BITE if such articles are created. They do fit a measure of notability because major news outlets do cover these kind of companies but that notability doesn't continue for more than a couple of months or years at the most.

What should happen to vaporware company articles years after their products are painfully obvious that they will never be released or be produced? Is it NPOV to point out that they are vaporware? Would putting companies like this into a "vaporware" category constitute NPOV as well? I think it is certainly legitimate to suggest that the product has never been actually developed years after it was supposedly going to be released. Perhaps they deserve something like Douglas Adams suggested with his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and leave the extent of the wording of the article "Mostly Harmless". I don't think these companies deserve more than that kind of attention. --Robert Horning (talk) 04:00, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Since in those cases, the press coverage is exclusively based on their own press releases, they don't really pass the notability requirement of independent coverage. If nothing but their own vapor (and echoes thereof) has ever been seen in the wild, I'd support to delete the articles without hesitation. --Latebird (talk) 13:28, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

The problem is how to define notability in a situation like this. The raw notability guidelines require at least two "independent" sources of information. As I mentioned with Galactic Suites, I even went so far as to nominate it for an AfD, where it was "judged" by consensus at that time to have met notability concerns at least on a superficial level. This article was also being included on templates where I'm presuming that those who added it were trying to make it seem more like other companies who were producing real products.

My point is that this isn't going to be the last of these kind of companies, and how do you establish policy to cover these? They do meet notability guidelines in a formal sense, even though on a technical level it is all based upon the same "publicity event". --Robert Horning (talk) 18:38, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

One thing I don't think, though, is that the article should be tagged hoax like it is -- yes the PRODUCT may be a hoax, but the article itself is still sourced and thus correct, right? Something should be tagged as a hoax only if the person writing the article is doing the hoaxing, not what the article is about (otherwise stuff like Ave Maria (Vavilov) would be tagged hoax...) ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:16, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

History of the University: Jstor request

Hi, this paper would be an excellent ref for the origin of modern University:

Bahti, Timothy (1987) Histories of the University: Kant and Humboldt, in MLN Vol. 102, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 1987), pp. 437-460

Is there anyone with access to Jstor who could retrieve it and send it to me?--Sum (talk) 21:30, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Try Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange. Svick (talk) 01:58, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I was looking for a page like that but didn't find it.--Sum (talk) 11:19, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Educational Organization plagiarizes from Wikipedia

Information from Wikipedia has been plagiarized by the IB (International Baccalaureate) which has admitted to the act. This is already being discussed on the IB talk page: Talk:International Baccalaureate#IB admits marking guides plagiarized from Wikipedia, pledges inquiry But I believe that it deserves more attention than it is already getting; perhaps some action should be taken (at least adding some information on the IB page concerning the issue). MONODA (talk) 19:31, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Signpost already covered this. See [2]. Editorial decisions regarding how this should be incorporated into the article (Signpost itself is NOT a reliable source, though Signpost's sources may be), should be discussed on the article talk pages. --Jayron32 01:27, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Formatting References

I do minor edits but have bitten off too much in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGU_plc

Among the references is an item in black and even by comparing with other items I can see no means of changing it to blue. Advice please Segilla (talk) 21:23, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Only links are in blue; nothing in that reference is a link. → ROUX ₪ 21:40, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

In addition, every one of the references listed is a dead link. Please seehere. There should be links there for you to find cached versions of the pages so you can fix the references. → ROUX ₪ 21:49, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia editing stats over time

Graph of edits over time

Some of you may remember User:Dragons flight/Log analysis, a discussion of how editing rates on Wikipedia had changed over time (and certain other editing patterns). The most surprising result from that analysis, done in October 2007, was that editing rates, although they had been increasing over time, had started decreasing. I posted on the talk page with my own independent collected data, finding results which largely supported Dragons flight's.

Still, October 2007 is 3 years ago now, so I decided to redo the analysis to see what had happened to edit rates since. My results are shown in the graph linked on the right (raw data: User:ais523/Stats, in case anyone can think of an interesting use for it); as far as I can tell, after peaking in May 2007, there was a small decline in edits, and since then it's mostly levelled off, maybe declining slightly over time, with the occasional sharp spike or dip (no doubt there are explanations for these, but I haven't looked into them). The graph shows the total edit count per day (pink line) and total (blue line, on a different scale), as well as two smoothed versions of the pink line (the green line shows edits per day averaged over a week, the black line shows them averaged over 31-day periods).

My data for this experiment were obtained by taking the revision ID of the first edit to WP:AIV on any given day; thus the results won't be completely accurate, but should be relatively accurate, as WP:AIV is a rather active page. Using the revision ID means that every edit is counted, including things like deleted edits and edits outside mainspace; the sort of technique used here cannot break the edits down more precisely without causing unacceptably high levels of server load.

I don't really have a point to make here; I just thought others might be interested in the data. I'm interested to know what other users think of what's going on here, and to hear any comments people might have on this. --ais523 19:27, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! It seems roughly consistent with the Foundation's "Edits per month" graph. Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:10, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, I did take a mini-Wikibreak in early July.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 20:14, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

See also these charts —Preceding unsigned comment added by Erik Zachte (talk • contribs) 09:09, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Now that we have some hard data, I'm curious if there have been some major "events" within the Wikipedia culture that might also account for some of these inflection point? Clearly there are some seasonal cycles at play and some changes to the community. I'm curious if there were any sort of policy changes in March, 2007 that may have impacted Wikipedia growth. --Robert Horning (talk) 20:57, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Not allowing unregistered editors to create articles, following the Seigenthaler incident doesn't seem to have had any noticeable effect. The abruptness of the decline makes something technical rather than just policy seem likely. I would have thought, even a change to the number of protected articles would have taken longer to have an effect. Could it have been a technical change such as a new UI or bot that allowed more changes to be made with a single edit, perhaps (counterintuitively) something affecting the ease of making section edits? Or a change that reduced spam?--Boson (talk) 22:14, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

ClueBot seems to have begun life during July 2007 (a few months after the peak), and I believe there were others before it. I wonder whether effective anti-vandalism tools have reduced the payoff for vandalism, and thereby discouraged some "edits".

In general, what I'd like to know about the data is whether vandalism and its prompt reversion is counted as "two" edits -- because in terms of building the encyclopedia, it's "minus one": No net progress, and we've wasted someone's time (or some bot's time). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:23, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

The method I used to compile these stats isn't precise enough to distinguish a revert from a legitimate edit from vandalism, so vandalism and an immediate revert would indeed count as two. --ais523 23:31, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Revert statistics have been produced by several researchers, see [3] and http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/EditsRevertsEN.htm .

Regards, HaeB (talk) 10:57, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

That's very interesting. Think about the implications. If you've got a fairly constant amount of work being done altogether, something's got to give. You can't keep on increasing the number of articles and keep them all up to date. Peter jackson (talk) 15:22, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm guessing that the hypothesis being brought forward to explain this data is that perhaps at some point in early 2007 that Wikipedia saturated the English-speaking internet community, where large new groups of people who haven't edited Wikipedia but were able to read/write English, were technologically savvy enough to be regularly on-line to contribute, and had the necessary basic skill sets to be able to be involved with writing encyclopedia like articles. Is this a valid presumption, or could there be another explanation?

I'm also suggesting that another explanation is that somehow some changes to the community discouraged new users from participating. Again, this is an unsupported hypothesis or perhaps even a raw conjecture here, but seeking to make sense out of the situation. Saturation of the internet seems likely, as certainly you find search engines placing Wikipedia pages in the top 10 results on a regular basis where it is hard to imagine that somebody who regularly using the internet and routinely goes to many different websites including random sites has never heard about Wikipedia. I'm not saying that is impossible and it may certainly be true that there are many people who really don't understand Wikipedia still, but grand announcements to introduce the concept of Wikipedia as some kind of new thing are going to be for relatively small groups of people.

It seems weird, however, that it hit in 2007. An interesting bit I've noticed: It was about March 2007 that the Village Pump was separated into the various sections instead of being a single page, and some other trends happened where essentially the "community" was fractured and broken up into smaller constituents. I don't know if that had an impact or not. It was about that time when the Wikimedia Foundation really started to kick in as a formal organization as opposed to having Jimmy Wales run everything on an ad hoc basis. There were also some other policy changes that happened about that time too, and it would be interesting to see if new users are being discouraged from participating on Wikipedia or if there simply aren't new users left who could join in substantial numbers. --Robert Horning (talk) 17:56, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I think this is very interesting and helps us understand the edit activity but there are a couple of things in addition to straight edit counts that we might want to take into account as well. Perhaps there is a math student or 2 at a university that needs a project. Below are a couple of thoughts I have:

1. The count of articles created
2. The count of users along with analysis of new users versus the same regular user activity. Along with this it might also be interesting to see the breakout of Ip edits versus Username edits to see variations in that activity as well.
3. Perhaps a timeline of Wikipedia events (both outside media and within the community) (both positive and negative) that could have cause fluctuations in the traffic to the site.
4. A graph showing actual user activity versus bot activity. This will tell us if the edit rate has stayed the same because of increased use of bots or because editors are coming and going at an even steady rate.
5. Is this based solely on the English WP or is this analysis from all Wikipedias?
6. Did we notice any recurring trends such as more or less edits in certain months, certain times of the month, certain times of the day?
7. If we look at this analysis closer we can use it to get ideas of why users start editing, why they leave, when they edit and when they do not, etc. We can potentially then start anticipating increases or decreases and try and affect changes to better the Pedia. --Kumioko (talk) 19:09, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

On your sixth question: Fewer people edit on weekends, on holidays, and whenever school is out. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:58, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

What effect did the edit filter have? There must have been a few hundred thousand edits that just never happened because people couldn't replace the article on their local school with "POOP!" 76.244.158.64 (talk) 23:07, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Pure speculation, but ... 2007 ... Facebook. Or more precisely the mass-uptake of social networking sites. People can now go online and devote thier time to writing about thier favorite subject - that handsome chap/chapess in the mirror. Who wants to write about boring old encyclopaedic stuff now? -TB (talk) 23:39, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I'll throw in a few: "Mature" articles tend not to undergo major revision as frequently. Many topics on which people may want to contribute now have an extended article. Rampant deletionism has caused some loss of interest. Silly extended arguments about dubious edits have caused some loss of interest. Some tools have been put in place to limit vandalism, so the rate of unhelpful edits may be lower. More people are out of work now and may not have a network connection. Those who are at work are putting in longer hours, so there is less time after work to devote to recreational activities such as Wikipedia. &c. &c. I don't think there's a problem yet.—RJH (talk) 19:33, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

What I'd be interested in in some calculation of editing activity of established editors - maybe those over 5000 (?) or 10000 (??) to see how active 'regulars' are over time. There has been discussion elsewhere that this is tailing off. Casliber (talk · contribs) 20:17, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

There are figures for that somewhere - link, anyone? Oh yes, 2nd table here. In the old days vandalism was not only more "rewarding" as it stayed up longer, but the whole sequence of warning, block discussions etc meant that a single teen with 10 idle minutes could generate maybe 20 edits beside his own. Now they just get reverted very quickly & give up. WP clearly had a period of being the current fad in 2006/7, like twitter now - god knows how their figures will look in 4 years time - they'll have a far steeper fall-off I bet. Plus now we have articles on (nearly) all the baseball players, Italian villages etc etc it is certainly harder for new users with average interests to find stuff to add. What I found interesting on the graph was that in fact the editing level is almost exactly the same just now as when i joined in late 2006. But then it felt like WP was exploding with new stuff everywhere, & now it doesn't. Odd. Johnbod (talk) 03:51, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps we are starting to "hit the wall" as far as the topics out there that can conceivably be created. Perhaps it's our culture, but people tend to lean towards creating new articles from scratch (especially newcomers) than attempting to work on current articles, regardless of size or quality. Because of that, people are trying a lot harder to try and create a new article on something which is a better chance that it is not needed or can easily be included in an existing article; worse, some try to make up topics in order to create new content. I briefly commented on stuff like this on the wikiEN-l mailing list, but I think many people out there still do not understand that this is ultimately a wiki, and that they can edit what others write and that they should expect to have others edit what they themselves write. –MuZemike 15:38, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

People interested in this will probably also be interested in User:Squidonius/who_watches_the_watchmen, which is specific to the WP:MCB project. Interestingly (to me, at least), a non-trivial fraction of the drop off seems to be due to fewer edits by bots. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:37, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Let me echo a comment from above: Facebook. It's not only that there are more opportunities now than there were in 2007 (see also Twitter, for example) - it's that those other opportunities are much easier for people to learn. For all the money spent so far improving the Wikipedia user interface, it's still not easy to use, plus there are hundreds of unfamiliar policies and guidelines lurking to trip up new editors. And yes, we're not supposed to bite newcomers, but people still don't like being told (however nicely) that they have violated some rule they've never heard of. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:47, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

See also the slides from a recent presentation by Ed Chi: Large Scale Social Analytics on Wikipedia, Delicious, and Twitter (Wikipedia part starts on p.11 and has some intriguing charts), and the earlier analyses[4] by him and the PARC team, e.g. about revert statistics. And Felipe Ortega's work, and the Foundation's ongoing Editor Trends Study. Regards, HaeB (talk) 01:39, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Humph! Why don't those guys go back to just screwing up the financial markets? Johnbod (talk) 01:57, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Trademark infringement at Communism?

I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't the red star on the Communism article violate Macy's trademark? --J4\/4 <talk> 13:20, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Um...it's a red star. A red STAR. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:51, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Even if Macy's has registered a red star, or their logo including a red star, as a trademark, it would almost certainly be in a limited number of trademark classes (all retail related I would guess). Use of a red star in the Communism article is almost certainly not going to be an infringement of any such registration as there is close to zero likelihood of confusion. – ukexpat (talk) 14:20, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

In otherwords, the use of a trademark is context specific; that is Macy's registration of the "red star" trademark does not prevent public usage of the red star in all places, ONLY in contexts which would conflict with Macy's commercial interests. Encyclopedia articles about communism are not among Macy's commercial interestes, so the use of that symbol is not a trademark infringement against Macy's. The article Trademark infringement is cogent here, especially in the lead, where it states:

"Infringement may occur when one party, the "infringer", uses a trademark which is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by another party, in relation to products or services which are identical or similar to the products or services which the registration covers" (emphasis mine)

I hope that clears things up. --Jayron32 04:03, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

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User name in use and not recognized at same time

I want to use ths same name on Wikipedia that I use on other forums. If I try to create an account it it, I'm told the name is in use. If I ask for a password reset, I'm told there is no such name in the directory. If I search for the name on the resolver, it appears in use on "dewiki" but a few searches have not clarified what that is.

Would appreciate help understanding what is happening when a name can be in use and unknown at the same time. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.255.97.136 (talk) 00:22, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Dewiki is the German Wikipedia. That means that your username is in use at the German Wikipedia, which because of unified login, which was enacted a few years ago to allow people to use the same username across all Wikimedia sites, may block your use of THAT username here, even if it is not in use here (enwiki, or English Wikipedia). I have not run into this problem myself before, but that is my guess as to what is going on here, --Jayron32 01:19, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Yep, that sounds about right to me. Graham87 12:48, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Miscellaneous (Mark Zuckerberg)

"Zuck" (Zuckerberg)...as his friends apparently know him by...has been all over the news/pop culture recently, but edits to his bio on WP have been fairly quiet. Nevertheless, I myself added a few small tidbits to the article and I came across an interesting phenomenon. The other contributors on the article are more than reasonably well versed in Wikipedia practices and guidelines (or at least it would seem so to me!), yet somehow their arguments all trend toward removing things that conceivably could be construed as being--positive? Eg, I added the word "prodigy" per the sources, and it was objected to as hyperbole. The word "philanthropist" was objected to due to the fact that the timing of the subject's philanthropy had been criticized. Brief reference to items having to do with the subject's home life, his childhood tutor, his secondary schooling, were all thought not of interest to anyone. It's very subtle but it almost seems the editors there are more interested in a polarized pov than the balanced one that exists in the actual sources. (In fact, editors seem to decline to read the sources I add but simply state "no one cares about this" or "not notable" without their seeming to even consider them.)

My interpretation may be off. Maybe the crew there simply like extremely lean biographies of people under the age of 30. But, I thought I'd broach the subject here in the hopes that some people or editor from the general community might take a gander at the page and offer his/her or their fresh editing perspective?--Hodgson-Burnett's Secret Garden (talk) 14:47, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

WP:DR is thataway. --Jayron32 21:09, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Limerick (song)

The Limerick (song) article has not been bothered for a long time. The only edits ever made lately are me putting an expert message and a bot changing messages. Georgia guy (talk) 16:18, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

2010 Fundraiser and Contributions Team notice

Greetings all,

If you haven't seen it yet, I'd like to make you guys aware of a memo from the Foundation to the community, regarding the Fundraiser that is rapidly coming up.

Along those same lines, I'd like to announce the launch of the Wikipedia Contributions team over at WP:CONTRIB. It's a joint team of staff and editors that will be doing a two-part effort to help bring in and retain new editors and improve the quality of our editing contributions, as well as to support the ongoing fundraiser and help bring in financial contributions. Anyone is welcome to join, but we especially invite the administrator body to join and help out. Any questions about the team can be answered on that page, rather than cluttering up VP.

Regards, Drosenthal (talk) 16:46, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject cleanup listing

I have created together with Smallman12q a toolserver tool that shows a weekly-updated list of cleanup categories for WikiProjects, that can be used as a replacement for WolterBot. See the tool's wiki page and the tool itself. Svick (talk) 18:16, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Should user talk pages be deleted under the right to vanish?

This is an issue that is raised time and again, with inconsistent application by admins, so it would be good to get it sorted out. Please comment at Wikipedia talk:Right to vanish#RfC on deleting user talk pages. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 06:27, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Help with my english redaction in the "Sea Peoples" article.

Hi, I'm argentinian, and I need the help of native englishspeakers. Could someone please look at the edition i´ve made in the Sea Peoples article, and see if it presents a good english redaction?

I´m spanishspeaker, and sometimes i have my doubts, like in this case.

Please, could you check? The edition is made upon the section "Reign of Ramesesses II", in its last paragraph, and it says: "There is a list of the peoples that conformed it, and they are mainly "land peoples", but there are also some "sea peoples" like the Lukka as well." I'll aprecciate your help.--Nolemaikos (talk) 00:37, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it needs a little fixing. If nobody does this sooner, I'll see if I can improve it in the next day or so - I'd better look at the article and source properly first so I get it right. Thanks for adding the information. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:37, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

A quick look suggest this:

You've written 'Ramesses had defeated the Syrian Hittites, the previous year. The poem relates that the Hittites were at Kadesh now with a force "like grasshoppers". There is a list of the peoples that conformed it, and they are mainly "land peoples", but there are also some "sea peoples" like the Lukka as well'.

I think this reads better as 'Ramesses had defeated the Syrian Hittites the previous year. The poem states that the Hittites arrived at Kadesh "like grasshoppers (*)". Although the Hittite army were mainly 'land peoples' there were also 'sea peoples' such as the Lukka'. I'll make the change later though, after checking the source if I can find it.

(*) I wonder whether "like grasshoppers" would be better translated as "like locusts"? The section needs a bit more work anyway, as other parts are a little unclear. If a convenient Egyptologist doesn't appear, I'll see if I can at least improve the grammar. This (Sea_peoples) is an interesting article. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:54, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you AndyTheGrump, nice to talk to you. I consider that your redaction is better, and feel free to add it at anytime you want. I could do it too, but I´m not sure about it, because making new refections about the matter, I´ve realised there is a bit of information that I forgot to expose, and it's important, and I suspect your redaction displays a sense that goes a little away from the one it was intended in my redaction and in what concerns to the presentation of that bit of information that remained unposted. So I´ll get to the job of adding that information, and then we will see what to do with its estructure in the redaction level.--Nolemaikos (talk) 02:28, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

By the way I wanned to ask you, Is this matter I´ve presented here aproppiate for the Village Pump? Isn't there another section that is more according? May not that be the "Reference Desk"?--Nolemaikos (talk) 02:33, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

To be honest, I'm not really sure about the best place to ask for help like this, though the reference desk probably isn't it. I've got involved in other issues at the moment, so I'll have to get back to the 'Sea Peoples' article in a day or two. If you do add something else, I'd say that citing the correct source is more important than worrying about grammar though. That can be corrected later. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:38, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Ok. We'll see about the section matter. And about the article, the thing is that the information that's exposed there wasn't posted by me; I saw it already presented and after analyzing it I decided to make those changes present in my redaction, I don't remember right now from which perspective. And the information I wanna add right now, it was also present in the previous edition or I've seen it in the spanish article for the matter, I'll have to check to know.

Also I wanna say you that you are right; the Sea peoples article is an interesting one. In my opinion, the Sea Peoples matter is one of the best of all the historical matters, if not directly the best. I advise you to do research about it, you will find it very enjoyable.--Nolemaikos (talk) 03:00, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Maybe it would be simpler to use my talk page to discuss this further - let me know what you propose to do by posting there. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:09, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'll do so, but I'll also post my requests in here, so it will be possible to get help from much more people.

I've already got one: I'd like someone to tell me if now this new redaction I've prepared for the section just discused, is well written:

"The poem has a list of the peoples that went to Qadesh as allies of the Hitites. Between them appear some of the sea peoples who are spoken of in the egyptian inscriptions previously mentioned, and many of the peoples who would later took part in the great inmigrations of the 12th century".

It's a translation of the redaction in spanish language that I've made in the spanish site for this part of the article.

I'd like you to make your comments mainly about the redaction, but also comments about the content will be well received.--Nolemaikos (talk) 04:26, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I wanna state that my purpose concerning to that section of the article is to present the sea peoples in the political context of the Battle of Qadesh and to show their participation and their relations with Egypt and Hatti.

I think that was the intention of those who first constructed that part of the article, because it so it is noticed through its structure of parragraphs in which we see, first one dedicated to the battle of Qadesh, in second place one that describes the relation of the Sherden and the Egyptians, and in third place, one that talks about the Hitites allies and the presence between them of some of the Sea Peoples and other migratory nations of the 12th century.

The realization of that intention came to be obstructed for some reason, maybe people unaware who made editions that changed around the structure in all what concerned to the expression of the original sense. But since I've recognized, I considered necessary to give to the text the nature presented in this last redaction I'm purposing.

This is, and this goes for you AndyTheGrump, my method in this matter, and I explain it to give to the content that I expose the base that it already has beyond the presence of any bibliographic source, which is something concerning to the first person who added the information. If I should trust in that apport and mantein it or look for the sources, that's something i'd like to hear your opinions about.--Nolemaikos (talk) 04:29, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Temporary de Gruyter trial, November, 2010

See   http://www.degruyter.de/journals/journalsFoaEn.cfm) -- 

first register at https://www.reference-global.com/action/registration -- then use the access token degruyterjournals_MK -- thnx Cherubino (talk) 16:19, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

yes, this works in the US. It is a useful free trial for 14 days of 150 of the deGruyter journals, a general academic publisher known particular for its very strong list of journals in the humanities, especially the classics, history, philosophy, literature, linguistics, and religion (and I note that even the German language journal titles usually contain many articles in English in the more recent years, and even the German language articles have short English abstracts.). (After registering, the list of journals list will appear at http://www.reference-global.com/action/showJournals?type=byAlphabet ) DGG ( talk ) 19:41, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate

Moved to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents § Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate

— Gavia immer (talk) 09:57, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Please HELP need to find this forror/thriller!!!

Hope someone can help me, I'm trying to find the name of a film that was released late 90's early 00's. It was about a man who was a manager/doctor at a mental hospital who had to deal with a new patient. The patient was convinced that he was satan, the devil and whilst he was at the place he convinced the other inmates that he was and the manager/doctor started to believe him as well. I remember one scene where the patient said something to the manager then turned to the other patients and started saying " Fizaar, fizaar, fizaar" and the other patients all went completly nuts!! I cant remember who starred in the film but any help will be appreciated, thanks. P.s. Its not "Tales that witness madness" already checked its a bit newer than that film. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Terrifying Evil (talk • contribs) 11:25, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Mister Frost?—RJH (talk) 19:56, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Problems logging in

Lately, when I have logged in to Wikipedia, I have been told that there have been problems. Does any one know why? I wonder whether it is to do with the fact that my username, as you can see, uses only letters - I have read the information that usernames with both numbers and letters are better safeguards against phishing. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 19:42, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Try asking at the technical pump, and being far more specific about what problems you are having. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 21:20, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Userbox for halfwits who forget to sign their posts

A quickie: Is there a userbox anywhere for people like me who habitually forget to sign their posts? And if there isn't where do I have to go to get one made - I'd try this myself, if I could figure out how.AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:44, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether one already exists or not. WP:Userboxes has all the coding information to create a custom one, if you can figure it out. Alternatively, you can do what I did (the one userbox I have is a custom job) and copy another userbox, then just change the text and coloring to suit your preferences. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 05:46, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I should probably be able to figure it out, one way or another, as you say. Copying an existing one is probably the way to go: I'll add it to the standard ones when it's done. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:54, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

If you're familiar with more common templates (like cite web), I think that {{Userbox}} is easier to understand. You can just put the template on your page and fill in the parameters you like. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:48, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Nominations now open for the 2010 Arbitration Committee Elections

Nominations are now open for candidates to run in the 2010 Arbitration Committee Elections.

To become an arbitrator is to take on an important and demanding role, and there is perennial need for new volunteers to step forward. This year, an unprecedented 11 arbitrators are expected to be chosen. Nomination is open to any editor in good standing over the age of 18, who is of legal age in their place of residence, and who has made at least 1,000 mainspace edits before the opening of the nomination period; candidates are not required to be administrators or to have any other special permissions. Experienced and committed editors are urged to seriously consider standing. Thoughts and advice from past and present members of the Arbitration Committee are available at the following pages:

• October 2010 Signpost interview: "So what is being an arbitrator actually like?"
• Arbitrator Risker's "Thoughts for Arbitration Committee Candidates"

Nominations will be accepted from today, 14 November 2010 through 23 November 2010, with voting scheduled to begin on 26 November. To submit your candidacy, proceed to the candidates page and follow the instructions given. For the coordinators, Skomorokh 00:45, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

red links in disambiguation pages

There is a disambiguation page for the name Rappoport (or Rapoport) - I inserted the eminent cell biologist Tom Rapoport (now ad Harvard) to it as a red link - this was reverted (together with other stuff) by an IP: [5] - is it a policy not to have red links in disambiguation pages in the english WP? - I have found some examples for the contrary. Additionally this will be a difference to the German WP, that I know much better. Plehn (talk) 10:01, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that's the policy - a disambiguation page is a way to find existing wikipedia pages, not a sort of dictionary of all possible options. The policy is sometimes broken. The solution, of course, is to create a stub for Tom Rapoport! - DavidWBrooks (talk) 12:20, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

It's actually not a policy but rather a guideline, but I don't see any clear reason to go against it. PleaseStand ^(talk) 21:13, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! Plehn (talk) 18:19, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the guidance doesn't mandate removal of all red links from disambiguation pages. DavidWBrooks, before pronouncing that something is policy it'd be good to check what our policies or guidelines state! Our guideline allows red links if the red link is used in other articles and an article is possible. See MOS:DABRL. Fences&Windows 21:30, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

And I wrote a stub at Tom Rapoport, so it's a moot point in this case. Fences&Windows 22:30, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Holy cow, that MOS page sure has expanded since I read it last ... sheesh; it's work to keep with stuff on wikipedia these days! - DavidWBrooks (talk) 22:57, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

By the way: I did not follow the links to policies (or guidelines) or whatever - but for me it is a question if this habit is wise - in the German WP you sometimes have disambiguation pages that consists only of red links, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumach (the guy who created this is an admin) - for me there is an informative value for the reader even if the links are red. Plehn (talk) 09:41, 5 November 2010 (UTC) (PS: Reading is better than writing: If it is not a guideline, it seems to be a widely accepted habit.) Plehn (talk) 10:09, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

• That's a good point with no obvious right answer. When we old farts started in wikipedia, red links were highly encouraged as a way to prod the creation of articles, but that thinking has faded as the number of articles has exploded and the effect of over-linking on readability became more of an issue. Perhaps we've gone too far in the anti-redlink direction.

  FYI for other link non-followers, here is a key part of the text from the MOS page: A link to a non-existent article (a "red link") should only be included on a disambiguation page when an article (not just disambiguation pages) also includes that red link. Do not create red links to articles that are unlikely ever to be written, or are likely to be removed as insufficiently notable topics. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:41, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

  • We have swung a bit too far. But one reason for that is in part because people started internally linking every person's name in the encyclopaedia, thinking that that was what they were supposed to do, and we ended up awash in temptation to write bad biographies of people who are actually no more than footnotes in human knowledge. The backlash on disambiguation articles in particular has been against people adding everyone that they could possibly think of namechecking as a redlink for a biographical article. I've seen plenty of "dab cleanup" where all of the redlinked people have been removed almost by reflex, by editors whose experience, day after day, is disambiguations with redlinks for completely undocumented and unknown people in them. So it's not necessarily a rejection of redlinks in general, but of redlinked people in particular. Uncle G (talk) 01:53, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

As someone who does a fair bit of dabpage cleanup, I have to say that Uncle G is right. That is, names of people are the most common thing to be added as redlinks on a dabpage, and redlinked names of people are the first thing to get removed from dabpages. Part of the issue is needless linking, and of course you have issue of possible self-promotion (or its middle school equivalent, the "awesome dude" listing), but another part is that a personal name alone conveys less context than "Theory of X" or "Village of Y", and so there may not be enough information there for later editors to do anything with the red link. — Gavia immer (talk) 02:20, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

It's not only people. If there is no article, it can be difficult ascertain the validity of claims made about a redlinked subject on a disambiguation page. WP:DABRL contains an exception for articles with internal links to it as a minimal indication that it might be an encyclopedic topic. older ≠ wiser 02:44, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Common sense applies. There is also space for non-linked entries, somewhere between red-linked and deleted. Rich Farmbrough, 21:49, 15 November 2010 (UTC).

What costs are associated with running wikipedia.org?

Hi,

I have just read the seasonal request for donations for wikipedia. I am just curious as to what exactly I would be donating towards if I decide to do so. Everyone who works on the pages are just regular people and volunteers right? There's no marketing of the website on other sites. I assume the hosting is donated, and if not there are a million companies that would love to. Software updates like bug fixes and new features? There are literally thousands of open source projects that developers donate time to on sites like SourceForge and gnu. If wikipedia is paying people to maintain this software, they shouldn't be. So what exactly does wikipedia need any money for? JohnLowenthal (talk) 21:54, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Do The Foundation's FAQ help? – ukexpat (talk) 21:58, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Hosting is not donated; the Foundation pays for its own hosting. My personal interpretation of this is that a) the Foundation want to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest by accepting hosting from a for-profit company and b) hosting needs to be reliable, not subject to the whims and fiscal crests and troughs of any outside organization, even a non-profit. The case with developers is similar: the Foundation need reliable, professional developers. Moreover, there are other expenses such as rent for the Foundation's physical facilities that must be paid, as well as future expansion costs. If you choose to donate, you can see where your donation goes in the Wikimedia Foundation's Financial Statements. Intelligentsium 22:11, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Some hosting is donated by organizations such as Kennisnet, and the financial statement contains a monetary value for these donations, see e.g. this Signpost summary. Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:21, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

You can see a full breakdown here: [6] which is up-to-date for the 2010 fundraiser goals. ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 01:04, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Instance of a paid wikipedia editing service

Just a heads up; I came across this press release today - Getting Visibility on Wikipedia Becomes Easier - WikipediaExperts Turns Dreams of a Wikipedia Presence into Reality - , which points to this WikipediaExperts website. We have a policy proposal at Wikipedia:Paid editing (policy) and a guidelines proposal at Wikipedia:Paid editing (guideline). Given the undecided state of policy, I'll leave the matter here, but thought others might be interested in this sign of the times service. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:36, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Discussion also at Wikipedia:AN#Wikipedia_Experts. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 17:37, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

New features/Take me back links

These links have been at the top of all pages for over six months now. Nobody seems to be minding the store at Wikipedia:User experience feedback and repeated inquiries as to how long they are expected to remain have simply been ignored. I suppose we will need a developer or something to remove them, and I think it is high time we did so. Anyone who is a long-term user has made their choice by now, and anyone who isn't doesn't know the difference anyway. I'm not sure if we should have an RFC or a poll or what, but I since no answers have been forthcoming from the persons supposedly managing the transition I feel it is time to take matters into our own hands and try to reach our own consensus on the issue which the developers or whoever is needed to make the change can then implement on our behalf. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:01, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

• Agree --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:07, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

It looks like the links could be easily hidden in sitewide CSS if we wanted to do it, assuming that there's no response from the foundation. I do agree that it's time for them to go; at this point they just use up space. — Gavia immer (talk) 22:22, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea what CSS is but if I get your gist correctly you are saying we can do this locally if we have a consensus to do so? Beeblebrox (talk) 22:40, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Probably shouldn't unless the Foundation is completely unresponsive, but yes, we could alter some local files to stop them from displaying. — Gavia immer (talk) 23:47, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

What I love is that I abandoned that god awful vector skin a long time ago, yet I still have a "take me back" link. I've always been worried it would take me back to the site design in 2002! ;) Resolute 00:08, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

• How should we go about contacting the Foundation? As I noted in my initial posting repeated queries at the feedback page have gone unanswered. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:32, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

We are already planning on removing this link this week. Plans were originally set to remove the link in October, but this got delayed, and not for any particular reason. A bug has been added to the Wikimedia Bugzilla site (bug #25850) and should be addressed promptly. The software changes needed to phase it out without any technical issues have already been made and merged into the deployment branch (r76411). -- Trevor Parscal (talk) 00:35, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

If I can chime in, any kind of CSS changes you might do to hide this, please be very very very careful that it does not interfere with the fundraising banner (CentralNotice). Otherwise, it's my personal suggestion you wait for the tech team to do it, several of them are aware of it (we were just discussing it up among the fundraising team) in addition to Trevor. If you don't like it, you could modify your own skin to hide it, but it seems a bit wrong to me to take that choice away from other users who may be making their first edits as a result of our fundraiser and contribution campaigns. That's just my personal opinion, however. ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 02:12, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

I just removed them. --Catrope (talk) 08:40, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for that, Catrope. — Gavia immer (talk) 23:14, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Indeed thanks a lot. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:52, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Exceptional individuals wanted for challenging two-year assignment

You are:

Y an effective communicator with a sound grasp of policy;

Y able to see all aspects of a problem and find solutions;

Y courteous, disciplined and open-minded;

Y able to deal calmly with trolls, bigots and editors with issues;

Y able to make up your own mind under stress.

If you can answer "yes" to most of the above, you are probably arbitrator material. Learn more about standing in the upcoming election. But don't delay, nomination close very soon!

Tony (talk) 16:29, 19 November 2010 (UTC), for the election coordinators

• PS: YYou must also be able to prove your real name (with a copy of your passport) to "The Office" in case any litigation as a result of your actions arises.  Giacomo  18:00, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

How much does it pay? ;^) — Frεcklεfσσt | Talk 18:12, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Nout lad, but you get to meet rich and famous people.  Giacomo  18:53, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

• The purpose of providing identification is to verify age. All editors are responsible for their actions, regardless of whether or not they are identified. Risker (talk) 19:32, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Paying for a Wikipedia article

Freelance job - Wikipedia Listing. Hmmm. Clearly hasn't bothered to read Wikipedia policies. Failure to understand WP:Otherstuffexists, WP:COI, or WP:Verify were just three of the problems I spotted in the advert. GDallimore (Talk) 23:55, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

I see this kind of thing all the time, and seen far worse (at least one employer said "you must ensure the article will not be deleted"). When I see them I report them, but more will come. This is part of the reason Wikipedia:Paid editing (guideline) was written, to explain the various issues such employers can run into and encourage them to hire editors responsibly, but that was never adopted. Dcoetzee 03:14, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Using WP:Bounty Board to get a working WebCiteBOT

I was going to donate $35 to the WikiMedia fundraising campaign, but I decided that Wikimedia will be better off if I visit WP:Bounty Board and condition my donation on the completion of some very-important-task -- namely, a working WebCiteBOT. Now, I know that my $35 won't get anything done at the bounty board. So I'm soliciting folks to join me and make the pool larger. If so, please visit the bounty board post.

FYI, the vision for WebCiteBOT is that it will go through an article's footnotes, locate the external links, "archive" these links using http://webcitation.org/, and then add the archived link to the footnote. This will fight linkrot, and it will also fight the spreading scourge of paywalls that are going around online newspapers. (For example: "Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access.") AGradman / talk / how the subject page looked when I made this edit 00:23, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

I recommend adding this to Wikipedia:Proposed tools to get some additional developers to look at. Also feel free to mention your bounty there. Dcoetzee 00:16, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Alright, I'll bite. "What does WebCiteBOT do that Checklinks does not?" is the question I start out with and in nearly all cases it does what the bot does with finer control available to editors. This leads me to believe that the correct answer is documentation and possibly interface design. So does the bounty go to the best documentation? — Dispenser 02:56, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

The original WebCiteBot would have taken the feed of new external links and actually archived them. However, it broke (as did webcitation for a bit) before it got through the initial backlog and the developer disappeared. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:34, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

If someone has a test page they would like me to work on, I think I can get something up. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 13:45, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm glad to see these responses. Right now I'm chronically plagued by (1) schoolwork and (2) incompetence about technology. However, at some later date I will take a close look-see as to what's going on here, and will of course disburse the money if/when justified. I just want to point out that everyone who's tried to get this bot working has reportedly run up against awful obstacles, so I am going to urge anyone who wants to get involved to communicate with one of those "veterans" in designing the bot. AGradman / talk / how the subject page looked when I made this edit 22:51, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Ive got a working proto-type see here for one example. 21:25, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

WebciteBOT's continued downtime is a massive disappointment, but we need something better than another version. The Wikimedia Foundation should be working on this, we don't want another closed source version operated by one volunteer, it should be in control at WMF. Given the amount of links that get added to Wikipedia on a daily basis, the Foundation should be working with Webcite directly to establish best practices. This is too important to leave to one anonymous guy. - hahnchen 16:20, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

hahnch, I agree 1,000% percent that the Foundation should be working on this. I've probably asked a half-dozen times in as many months, trying to figure out how to bring this issue to their attention, but everywhere I post, people say, "that's not what this page is for." (They should make that one of Wikipedia's pillars.) At least I'm glad you agree how important this is ... I was beginning to think I was crazy. -user:Agradman, editing as 128.59.179.238 (talk) 21:30, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm not too sure how to bring things to Foundation attention either, but did make a stab here. - hahnchen 15:27, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Although implementing this task (or, to be precise, WebCite api) for H3llBot is in my priority list, I don't think I'll get around to it until mid-December. In any case, redundancy is probably necessary. I also agree that WMF could create an online library branch for archiving, although I kind of doubt this will be done in near future. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:12, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Jimbo Wale's Brand

Why are all the donation advertisement's "an appeal from Jimbo"? Is the WMF seeking to develop Jimbo brand recognition?Smallman12q (talk) 23:32, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Apparently the Face-of-Jimbo banners always test and perform significantly better than any other fundraising efforts. My understanding is that there will be other species of advertisements, but it makes sense to start off with the strongest attention-getter. — Gavia immer (talk) 00:31, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

We are actively testing some different Jimmy banners at the moment to mix it up. Jimmy banners test orders of magnitude better than text banners. We are also in the process of putting together an "appeal from an editor" campaign, which will feature various editors making their own personal appeals. Our initial tests of those have gone very well, also significantly better than text banners, but not beating Jimmy. We're still in the data collection and analysis phase right now, but those banners are going to be coming in the future. As an aside, if you're outside the US, you might not be seeing any of this. If you want to get a peek at the other banners, come in IRC and ask in #wikimedia-fundraising and someone should be able to help you. ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 02:07, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

This kind of question comes up basically every other day during fundraising season. Should we start a FAQ, maybe providing a little bit of basic education on advertising, like "annoying ads often work better than pretty ones"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:18, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Recent spate of Indonesian articles

Someone once told me there's no such thing as coincidence. Within the last hour or so at RC patrol I've come across three separate users creating duplicate articles in Indonesian on topics that we already have covered at en.wikipedia. The users in question are:

• Adena dwi ratnasari (talk · contribs)
• Yunirpas (talk · contribs)
• Venatrivena (talk · contribs)

Is there something going on that we should know about? -- role^player 13:34, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Sock puppetry. Investigating right now with CheckUser. –MuZemike 21:41, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

It's already off ANI, but please see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Elf021. –MuZemike 01:14, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Symptomatology

A large number of articles created by a multiple-account, multiple-IP user, who I shall christen The Indonesian Chef, appear to all be copyright violations of some kind, and are all articles describing Indonesian cuisine; they sometimes include recipes. The Indonesian Chef creates new, copyvio articles reclassifying content from Indonesian-language websites under what appear to be either unknown transliterations or colloquial terms. For example, the original content of Pangsit goreng sayur (before the redirect) was lifted from this Indonesian website -- the formatting text, which resulted in correct formatting on that source, was left in the Wikipedia incarnation. In other cases, it appears that specific words have been added to otherwise translatable text that is indeed a copyvio, such as the former Gempo article. To further complicate the issue, the source websites for the copyvio text have, in some cases, apparently been originally machine-translated from English into Indonesian, as the Google Translate output is eerily perfect. The correct action is to speedy-delete articles created by The Indonesian Chef as copyright violations on sight. --NicholasTurnbull | (talk) 22:54, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

A personal appeal...

Does the personal appeal box remain if I make a financial contribution? I don't like the screen real estate it takes up. --DThomsen8 (talk) 21:11, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

You should be able to click the close button on the top-right corner of the image. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 21:18, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

It seems to keep poping up even after has been closed.--Sum (talk) 21:23, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

It's really annoying to see Wales face after his moronic sexual censorship and his attack on Julian Assange. And the ad style itself is ridiculus, better suited for some cheap populist politician.--Sum (talk) 21:23, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

You can also completely turn it off using the gadgets panel of your preferences. And whatever you think about the advert, no-one's come up with a better one yet for getting the donations needed to keep this site running. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 22:38, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

I really liked the little videos featuring Wikipedia editors. Why aren't we doing something based on that theme? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 12:59, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Be bold then. — Dispenser 14:37, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

As it turns out, we're testing appeals from various editors today. ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 23:32, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps WIKIPEDIA FOREVER was indeed a better choice, then. Ugh, nobody is ever happy with anything... –MuZemike 08:08, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Apparently through banner tests conducted, the banners with Jimmy have been by far the most popular and effective in getting the most donations. That said, I know help is needed in coming up with other banner ideas and graphics: meta:Fundraising_2010/GraphicBanners --Aude (talk) 19:36, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for using up wikibytes for this, but Jimmy Wales is freaking me out! I am accessing various wiki projects for my categorizing work at commons, and in each new wiki I open there is JW staring ominously at me with bright piercing eyes before I can close the banner. I'm sure that is not the intention, but every time it happens I have the urge to hide under my desk. Sorry again for my rambling, I'll go away now. --Santosga (talk) 21:05, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Jimmy, but no thanks.. I contribute my time, my knowledge, my expertise to the projects. As a UK citizen I don't get tax-deductible contributions, and I am living on my pension now. If you don't take your smiling face away from my visits, I will stop visiting Wiki.Dwarner30uk (talk) 11:35, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

There are other ways you can contribute. See signature. ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 23:31, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Don't say "Wiki" --NYKevin @085, i.e. 01:02, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Geez, folks. Lighten up. --LilHelpa (talk) 22:11, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Is there a difference between: Jimmy Wales putting his face in a huge banner on ever page and putting an advertisement to replace it, that can generate real money? Leveni 15 Nov 2010 —Preceding undated comment added 02:43, 15 November 2010 (UTC).

Yeah, only one of those doesn't make Wikipedia beholden to its sponsors. --Jayron32 05:14, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Would it be possible to hold a vote on the subject of advertising? Another idea: Many profit making companies around the world use Wikipedia everyday in order to get a rough idea or some basic information on a topic/subject. And they do this for free. If people here don't want advertising then maybe focus on ip addresses. Can it be determined which ip addresses are businesses and which belong to private citizens? Maybe use this information to get money from profit making businesses that use Wikipedia. Leveni 16 Nov 2010 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.63.139.96 (talk) 02:34, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

People raise the issue pretty much every year. Pretty much every year it gets shot down. It's pretty clear how the community as a whole feels about ads. ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 03:04, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

ok lets forget ads. What about profit making companies that use Wikipedia everyday. Should they be making 'donations' to the cause? I'm not suggesting they be allowed to advertise, I'm suggesting profit making companies that use Wikipedia be asked to donate. By using the ip addresses, profit making companies can be targeted to donate, by having something like the present Jimmy Wales ad asking them for money in a polite way. Or is it better to just continue the way it is going at the moment. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.63.139.96 (talk) 13:16, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Of course. So, there are generally two ways we get donations. Community giving is for smaller gifts, like those that come in from the banners -- small businesses often donate directly to those. Major gifts is for larger, more planned gifts, either by philanthropic-minded individuals, or occasionally by larger corporations (I assume, I have no data whatsoever on major gifts, so I could be wrong about that). The major gifts team is really the ones who handle the donation targeting for those kind of businesses; they don't really respond that well to ads. But yes, it is something we're acting on. Thanks for the question! ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 02:10, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Just so long as it is understood that they are indeed voluntary donations, and there's no requirement to pay. The "free" part of "free encyclopedia" does indeed include the financial meaning of the word, that is there's no charge for using Wikipedia, and it is equal for all users, whether it's a private individual or a commercial corporation. The idea that commercial enterprises should pay while others need not undermines the principal that all users are treated equally that is part of the underlying principles. oknazevad (talk) 15:37, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Grace Sherwood / Rlevse affair

I see a great amount of history removed in the history of Grace Sherwood. I heard something about Rlevse or Vanished 6551232, so what happened? Also, where did Rlevse go? I haven't seen him on Wikipedia since earlier this month. Περσεύς|Talk to me 14:18, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-01/Arbitration report - hahnchen 15:57, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
• The fact that you can see it is a fairly clear indicator that the history has not been removed. Uncle G (talk) 12:32, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I can see that there were extensive revdels there. I can't see what was deleted or why it was deleted. Now there may be good reasons for that (libel protection is a good thing), but asking why shouldn't invite such snippy responses. oknazevad (talk) 15:37, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
    • You weren't the one doing the asking, neither response was in fact snippy, and if you applied the effort to read the logs for yourself you could see exactly why content has been deleted. Uncle G (talk) 20:07, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

WP:FAIL

I honestly am not sure where to go with this. It's probably not here, but hopefuly someone can quickly point me in the right direction. Recently, I was commenting on an AFD that was so blatantly unencyclodepic that I chose, in humor, to write WP:FAIL as my reason for deletion. I was surprised that WP:FAIL was actually an active link that directed me to two essays that seemed to be at odds were with each other. One seemed to indicate that failure, in general, was an inherint part of Wikipedia, and it was OK to learn from your mistakes. The other essay was about how Wikipedia, as a concept, has failed. This doesn't seem right. I don't want to delete, or even disagree with either essay...I just think that two very unrelated views shouldn't link to the same "short cut." Thanks, The Eskimo (talk) 03:39, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

• I don't understand the purpose of this discussion. Essays are essays, they are the opinion of one or more people are can be (and rather often are likely to be) at odds with each other. There is nothing wrong with this. Essays only have as much weight as you are willing to put on them. Now, as for specifics, the second essay isn't really all that important, though I do feel that it expresses an important enough view. And, as for the first, it is a direct contrast to WP:NOTFAIL and has been around forever as a representation of the two views on whether Wikipedia is working or not and what needs to be done in the future. What exactly did you want to result from this discussion? Silverseren^C 19:08, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
• This is one reason why one shouldn't use shortcuts as substitutes for the actual pages one wants to link to, or for actual English. Uncle G (talk) 12:35, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't know about you, but I really like not having to type out full names of policy pages everytime I cite them, especially in edit summaries that are so limited in number of characters. oknazevad (talk) 15:37, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Laziness does not justify miscommunication, as pointed out by the page linked-to. Uncle G (talk) 20:07, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
      • It's not about laziness, it's about working around the technical limitations of an edit summary. Even with the extended summaries turned on, as I have, there's a limit to the number of characters available. As such, spelling out long page titles when there's a shortcut available is a waste of a limited resource. oknazevad (talk) 01:49, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
• Just to clarify, I don't want anything to result from this discussion necesarily. Just some clarification. Your comment that "essays are essays" perhaps says all there needs to be said. It just didn't seem right that the same abbreviated link would to lead to two completely separate trains of thought, especially when experienced editors tend to use these links as "Wiki-language" to make points during discussions. I understand essays are not guidelines...but it just seemed that if this was allowable, then, in some cases, the context in which the abbreviate link was used would be up for interpratation, and clarification would have to be further determined, or asked for from the original posting editor. That seems to be counterproductive to the purpose of abbreviated links. Anyway, long story short, it just didn't seem right, and I was merely hoping to foster some discussion. Thanks, The Eskimo (talk) 02:49, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Problem solved. WP:FAIL is now a redirect, and the target essay has a hatnote to WP:Failure, thus reversing the change of Nov 2009. Fences&Windows 01:56, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Cluebot-NG Help Needed

Some of you may have noticed that there's a new bot going around, making a lot of edits. Cluebot-NG is not an extension of the original Cluebot, but rather is a complete redesign and rewrite using entirely different principles and with a different author writing the core, and is 5 to 10 times more effective than the original Cluebot. Statistics show that it catches over half of all vandalism in the main namespace. But it needs help.

Cluebot-NG uses machine-learning algorithms to learn exactly what should be considered vandalism from a set of manually classified edits (called the training dataset). The bot is performing very well right now, but it can perform even better if the dataset is grown and improved. We need help improving the dataset, and need volunteers to manually review edits.

If you spend your time manually fighting vandalism, and review 1000 edits, reverting maybe 20% of them, then you've reverted 200 vandalism edits. On the other hand, if you spend that time helping with the Cluebot-NG review interface, and classify 1000 edits, it may help Cluebot-NG catch thousands more instances of vandalism over a period of just a few months.

We do ask that volunteers be at least semi-experienced vandal fighters, because accuracy is critical. The bot can only be as accurate as its dataset. Also, we ask that you have at least a hundred or so edits under your belt, so we can be sure that you're not a vandal trying to mess up the system.

If you'd like to volunteer and help out, see Dataset Review Interface. Even if you're already helping out, improvements have been made to the interface over the last few days, so you may want to take another look.

The Cluebot-NG team and all Wikipedians opposed to vandalism thank you sincerely for your help. Crispy1989 (talk) 07:55, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Bold Characters

My last post just now has been made confusing by inbuilt formatting. Try again, rephrased.

I'm trying to understand why these are used in some articles for no reason that I can see. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_of_British_Industry#Role includes one such. Why is Confederation [etc] bold? Also I want to edit the abbreviation CBI(sic) in a different article. [[Confederation [etc]|CBI]] produces a different effect when, within [[]], CBI precedes the vertical line. Please give an example or point to the relevant Instruction. Also name of the line and keystroke for it please. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Segilla (talk • contribs) 15:56, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure what you're asking with your first question. Are you asking why the subject of the article appears in bold at the beginning of the article? That's a Wikipedia convention that's been here for as long as I can remember.

As for the second, take a look at the page on piped links on Wikipedia. In short, [[Confederation of British Industry|CBI]] produces a different link that [[CBI|Confederation of British Industry]] because the page being linked to goes first, before the pipe (thats the name of the vertical line), while the text that it will appear as goes after the pipe. CBI doesn't go straight to Confederation of British Industry, as there are numerous things whose names are abbreviated "CBI". They are listed at the CBI page, which is what is known as a disambiguation page. They're used when there's no single primary topic that uses that name.

I hope this helps.oknazevad (talk) 21:15, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

All now understood,Thanks.Segilla (talk) 22:43, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

CfD on service award categories

The service award categories were deleted in 2007, recreated in July 2010, deleted recently under CSD 64, taken to deletion review, restored, and are up for deletion again here: service award categories here: Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 November 22#Wikipedian Service Award Level categories. I'm posting this because CfD (Categories for Discussion) is not highly populated, and if anyone wants to stick their head in that'd be welcome. Herostratus (talk) 14:55, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

A personal appeal . . .

I have read the personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I was moved to make a donation. Could some whizbang programmer, perhaps by use of a cookie, remove Mr. Wales's personal appeals from subsequent pages on donors' computers for a reasonable length of time, say, two months? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Phlup (talk • contribs) 17:55, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

If you have an account, you can turn it off somehow... anyone? (I did this a long time ago!) ╟─TreasuryTag►constablewick─╢ 18:54, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

The fundraiser itself should only last two months. I believe if you are logged in or not there is a little "X" in the top right corner that will store a cookie on your computer that hides it. If you have an account you can go to Special:Preferences --> Gadgets --> Disable site notice or something like that. Killiondude (talk) 19:09, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Killiondude is correct -- if you are logged in. Logged in users can simply click the "X" in the top right corner to hide the fundraiser image. As for the cookie thing, changes to the fundraising banner (i.e. centralnotice) must go through the foundation. ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 23:42, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

I just wanted to say, I fucking HATE HATE HATE that "personal appeal from Jimmy Wales". You want to beg, do it without a goddamned face shot. 68.36.117.147 (talk) 05:31, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

And you were going to tell us your idea? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:43, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Arbitration Committee Elections: voting now open

Voting is now open in the November-December 2010 elections to elect new members to the Arbitration Committee. Voting will be conducted using the Securepoll extension and will close on Sunday 5 December 2010 at 23:59 (UTC).

In order to be eligible to vote, an account must have had made at least 150 mainspace edits on or before 1 November 2010 (check your account). Blocked editors may not vote, and voting with multiple accounts or bot accounts is expressly forbidden. Note that due to technical restrictions, editors who have made more than 150 mainspace edits on or before 1 November 2009 but no longer have access to the account(s) used will not be able to vote. If you have any questions about this, please ask on the election talkpage.

For each candidate, voters may choose to Support or Oppose the candidacy, or to remain Neutral (this option has no effect on the outcome). Voting must be done in a single sitting, with a verdict made on every candidate. After your entire vote has been accepted, you may make changes at any time before the close of voting. However, a fresh default ballot page will be displayed and you will need to complete the process again from scratch (for this reason, you are welcome to keep a private record of your vote), as your new ballot page will erase the previous one. You may verify the time of acceptance of your votes at the real-time voting log. Although this election will use secret ballots, and only votes submitted in this way will be counted, voters are invited to question and discuss the candidates throughout the election.

To cast your vote, please proceed here.

For the coordinators, Skomorokh 00:51, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

While IE8 is open a new (unwanted/unsolicited) tab appears with a Wikipedia Page. How can I stop this?

While IE8 is open a new (unwanted/unsolicited) tab appears with a Wikipedia Page. How can I stop this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.136.96.66 (talk) 13:28, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Sounds as if you may have Wikipedia set as your homepage. I dunno I use Firefox, I stay far away from IE ;) Try checking your settings under "Internet options" where it says "Home page" and see if there's a Wikipedia address in the box there, just remove it or change it. BTW, we have a Wikipedia:Help desk for these kinds of questions so you can also try asking there. -- œ^™ 18:47, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Too many guidelines

A common complaint I hear from new editors is that they try to create an article but there's just "too many guidelines to follow!" and it confuses them. I try to ease their worries by pointing them to WP:BOLD and WP:NODEADLINE, and explaining that what matters is that we have an article covering a subject that previously wasn't covered, not to worry about following all the guidelines, that Wikipedia is a work in progress, and that everything would fall into place eventually. I do not want to diminish the importance of all our many different policies and guidelines. Reducing their amount is not the answer, they are all needed and have worth. But I don't want newbies worrying their poor little heads over having to learn and follow every single one of them right from the start. I think what we need is an essay such as Wikipedia:Too many guidelines or some similar title that we can point them to. One that will collate and summarize the other essays on this topic, briefly list only the essential policies that all articles must follow, tell them to relax and that this is supposed to be an enjoyable hobby. I would prefer if someone more proficient at prose than I could write this essay and do it justice. -- œ^™ 18:42, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Good idea. Personally I always encourage newbies to read and understand WP:5 and worry about the details later. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:25, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

If I can pick up on a new user's interests, I try to point them to a more experienced user with similar interests as well; that way, they can begin to work without worrying about mistakes, because someone is there to help as necessary. I like OlEnglish's idea too, because it can be overwhelming when new users start out. Speaking as someone who does a lot of NPP, I have to do a lot of explaining, especially about WP:N and WP:ADVERT, and having something shorter than those two pages to just give something basic would be really useful. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:38, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

There is the WikiProject WP:PROJPOL, one of whose aims is to simplify policy as much as possible. Rd232 ^talk 12:54, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

User page fetched by content category

For example, is it accurate that Category:Recommender_systems fetches the user draft User:Nighting4le/Scarab Research? Technicaly, this is normal. Qualitatively, this isn't. Is there a policy for the use of categories in user pages? Lacrymocéphale 12:35, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

I have removed the page from that category (and other categories as well), see WP:USERNOCAT. Svick (talk) 14:07, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Wiki UK Ltd to be struck off?

I am somewhat concerned that Wiki UK Limited is late in filing accounts, and is about to be struck off- it has already been gazetted!

Can anyone comment as to why/what is going on?

Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tiekey (talk • contribs) 19:07, 28 November 2010

I'd be surprised if there was any connection between Wikipedia and this company. Rd232 ^talk 12:53, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

It's listed as doing business as Wikimedia UK at foundation:Local chapters. See also meta:Wikimedia UK. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:00, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Wiki UK is the legal name for Wikimedia UK, the local chapter covering Britain and Northern Ireland. I'm afraid we've had a series of problems with these, our first set of accounts since we were formed in Autumn 2008 and we are now 3 months late. Companies House have now given us until 9th February to file our accounts. However, the papers are all with the accountants at the moment and we are expecting the draft accounts back from them imminently. Please see this email thread for more information. We appreciate that this looks alarming and could cause concern among our supporters. However, please be reassured that there is no significant risk to donors' money from this procedure, given that our accounts are close to completion. I apologise for any alarm caused. AndrewRT(Talk) 22:33, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Transparency in chapter’s activities and Community involvement in chapter approval decisions.

I have presented a Request For Comments at meta addressed to give voice to the communities in chapter approval decisions and to give transparency to chapter activities.

Chapters are increasingly acquiring more importance in wikimedia movement. Moreover this year they can get a meaningful share of the funds collected trough fundraising campaign. Please go to meta and give your opinion. --CàlculIntegral (talk) 11:38, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Duplication at plantation

Someone has copied and pasted in a section of the text so it appears twice - needs a bit of clean-up! 217.206.228.6 (talk) 15:40, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for catching that. I have fixed it. -- John of Reading (talk) 22:28, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

A Campaign for Linear Talk Page Dialogue

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I'll raise it again, if only to vent my frustration. As a relative newbie, I'm being driven nuts by the seemingly-random way some contributors add their comments to talk pages: in the middle of others' remarks, half-way up the page just so they can add it next to the last vaguely-relevant comment they made, or basically anywhere else but at the end of a section, which seems to me to be the most logical place to put it if the discussion is to remain in chronological order. I'll see from my watchlist that an edit has occurred, and have to look at the history to find it...

And then there are the self-correctors, and adders-on-of-afterthoughts. Ok, correct your spelling, punctuation and obvious typos if you must, but please don't edit your entries for meaning. How the heck am I supposed to frame a reply to a sentence that may later say something else entirely? Discussion on talk pages can get convoluted enough without the complications of a non-linear textual sequence. If you didn't think of it when you first wrote it, don't engage in revisionist history to make out you did...

If I'm on my own in complaining about this (which I doubt), I'll just have to form my own one-person 'Campaign for Linear Talk Page Dialogue' and take direct action by ignoring entirely anything not added at the end of a section. If enough others will join me I'm sure we can make a difference though, and impose some chronological order on this temporal chaos. (and as a gesture to the sensitivities of our transatlantic colleagues, I'll even spell 'dialogue' in your way if it keeps you happy ;) ). AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:40, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

As there's no direct quoting feature, it's very problematic to just put every new comment at the end. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 03:14, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

"As there's no direct quoting feature...". True enough, but it isn't that difficult to copy, add quotation marks, and paste (sorry, I couldn't resist...). AndyTheGrump (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 03:19, 22 November 2010 (UTC).

To some extent I agree with you, Andy, at least on the latter point.

Responding directly to a specific comment by placing the response directly below it is fine in my estimation, as long as proper indentation level is used. It's a form of threaded discussion, which is common on the Internet.

However, changing a talk page comment after someone else has responded to it is a big no-no, for, as you say, the accuracy of the response can no longer be guaranteed. It's just rude. I agree that some sense of linearity is needed. It also helps late comers to the conversation follow along; joining in is not only allowed, it even encouraged at Wikipedia. oknazevad (talk)

Depends on how they change it. If it actually DOES change the meaning, then I can see your point. Many times people with use strikeout to keep what they did say. There's also the fact that they may press the edit button after the next response and not see the new one (or the new comment is done responding to the preedited in the same fashion). Do note this is HARDLY something unique to Wikipedia -- the majority of message boards have an post editing feature, as well as moderators who will delete specific posts, and one very often will see responses to things that don't exist any more. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 05:16, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Please no. I know linear forums are in vogue now, but they make complex logical conversations more difficult to follow. When reading a post, it's more important to be able to visualize the logical progression of the posts rather the temporal order they were posted in.

(I miss USENET, where users could touch a button (on any decent client) and switch between threaded mode and sorted-by-date mode.) APL (talk) 08:42, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Talk pages are like the walls of bathroom stalls. Comments are ordered in accordance to the logic of the agent user. Visually, it makes more sense. Whereas wikipedia articles are like the walls of bathroom stalls, inasmuch as every so often a fussy janitor comes by and wipes out all the best bits. :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.32.126.15 (talk) 18:55, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Login unification - snag with Japanese WP

Resolved

This is my first trip to VP - hope this is the right place Sorry to bother you all about this (please redirect me if appropriate), but my login unification was unsuccessful for reasons I don't understand, and the Help page on this suggests contacting a beaurocrat or steward. A few pages suggest Brion Vibber, so I posted to his Talk page about 5 months ago to no avail (certainly he deserved a wikibreak - just saying that the suggested lead has gone cold). At issue is the Japanese wikipedia (I'm confident that I never logged in there), where there's a userpage that looks like it was copied from an old version of my English wikipedia userpage. My English WP password doesn't work there. When I click the "send me a new password" button, I don't get anything in my email Inbox. Any suggestions on how I can finally unify my login worldwide (thus removing a nagging reminder in my Preferences)? Sorry if I missed instructions that address this - I did search the VP archives (to no avail) prior to posting. Cheers and thanks for any guidance! -- Scray (talk) 01:20, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Brion is no longer the one to talk to about this, since he's not a part of the Foundation staff anymore (though apparently he has been hired back freelance to do some specific things). In any case, your account here was created in November 2005, SUL didn't go live until November 2006, and the ja.wiki account was created in March 2006 and edited for all of two days, so it's not related to SUL. You will have to contact a bureaucrat on ja.wiki and see if they will allow usurpation; the list of bureaucrats is here. If you have trouble communicating (for instance, you don't speak Japanese), you can ask for help at ja:Wikipedia:Help_for_Non-Japanese_Speakers, but there's not much else that can be done here. — Gavia immer (talk) 01:48, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks very much!!! -- Scray (talk) 02:16, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Resolved by an admin on the Japanese WP. Thanks. -- Scray (talk) 17:42, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Db

Hello. I have been wondering what "db" (as in {{db}}) means. could someone please tell me? Thanks. -- Hazard-SJ  ±  00:46, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

"deletebecause" (see Template talk:Db-meta/Archive 1). Fences&Windows 22:33, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I already found out, though. Does anyone know the colors used for the background and border of the Db templates?  Hazard-SJ  ±  02:34, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Anyone?  Hazard-SJ  ±  00:25, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, they're red and pink. ...For specifics, from clicking around (not a template guru myself) they seem to involve the {{mbox}} template family and in turn {{ambox}}; see also Wikipedia:Ambox CSS classes & Ambox CSS classes/Skins. Hope that helps a little. –Whitehorse1 01:02, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Problem with Egyptian parliamentary election, 2010

So every time I attempt to submit an edit (even a minor one), I get a Error Code 64: Host not available ("This page cannot be displayed/Explanation: The Web server connection was closed.") message. Since I'm not finding any trouble editing any other page and I am editing from Egypt itself, I suspect censorship. Just sayin'. Lockesdonkey (talk) 15:11, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Works for me (from Egypt as well). --Meno25 (talk) 23:45, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Reminder: last chance to vote in the Arbitration Committee Elections

This is a brief reminder to all interested editors that this weekend is the final chance to vote in the December 2010 elections to elect new members to the Arbitration Committee. Voting began last Friday and will close just before midnight UTC, end of Sunday 5 December (earlier for North America: just before 4 pm west coast, 7 pm east coast). Eligible voters (check your eligibility) are encouraged to cast their votes well before the closing time in light of the risk of server lag.

Arbitrators occupy high-profile positions and perform essential and demanding roles in handling some of the most difficult and sensitive issues on the project; editors are urged to vote for the candidates they consider best suited to service. The following pages may be of assistance to voters in coming to an informed decision: candidate statements, questions for the candidates, discussion of the candidates and personal voter guides.

Proceed here to cast your vote

For the election coordinators, Skomorokh 19:07, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Google search results

It's remarkable sometimes how wikipedia pages can get higher search page rankings than the primary web site they represent. A good example of this is "Secure Shell". The first two links are to wikipedia articles (including a disambig. page!); the third is to the actual openssh site that distributes the software. That seems awful squirrelly.—RJH (talk) 22:37, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

I've noticed that occasionally. An important note is that if you're logged into a Google account, it keeps track of your search patterns, what you click on in results (I am assuming on that point), etc. So if you tend to search for wiki things, it will provide those items further up in the results. Killiondude (talk) 22:48, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Another part of the puzzle is that we have to use "nofollow" on our links to prevent spam from being even worse than it is. That wasn't always true, and before we started using nofollow our usual linking policy had the effect of giving the most relevant websites quite a bit of Google juice. It's unfortunate that that's no longer true. — Gavia immer (talk) 06:41, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

It's quite likely that part of Google's algorithm gives relevance boosts to Wikipedia articles. Experience also suggests that they also pull direct from a live feed rather than spidering us. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 23:59, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I actually think that's a very poor example. The word "shell" doesn't even occur on http://www.openssh.com/ so it's only in the Google results because "shell" appears on other pages linking to it. Secure Shell has "Secure Shell" in url, html title and 24 occurrences in the body. It's more surprising that the disambiguation page SSH comes second. http://www.openssh.com/ is the first hit on "openssh". Note: I started this reply before this section was archived a few minutes ago. PrimeHunter (talk) 06:52, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

BAG nomination

Hello! I invite you to comment on my BAG (Bot Approvals Group) nomination: Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/H3llkn0wz. Thank you. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 11:20, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

General notice

More reviewers are desperately needed at Wikipedia:Editor review. Just as in the Requests for feedback process as noted in the post above, there's a backlog of editors waiting to get feedback from experienced and established editors at WP:ER as well, and I realize we're all just volunteers but it sucks that these users should have to wait for so long for a review. Support the process! Review at least one editor, just a few words of advice, some encouragement or some constructive criticism, anything will do. Thanks, œ^™ 01:14, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Cool. I will give it a try. I promise to be nice. Borock (talk) 06:34, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

"Award winning"

What do people think of the expression "award winning"? As in an article starting out "So-and-so is an award winning"... whatever the person is. Wolfview (talk) 13:34, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Probably not a good start. If the award is of note, then what they did to win it should be as well. Now, relevant awards may well be worth mentioning, possibly even in the lede if such awards are of real significance to the career etc for which the person is notable, but not right at the start. It looks too much like tabloid journalism. At least, that's the way I see it. AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:15, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. It is one of those phrases that is routinely edited out of press releases because it is content-free. Kill it. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 21:07, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

In new articles, I assume that it's an assertion of notability to stave off the CSD folks. I classify it with the phrase "is notable because..." WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:42, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (words to watch)#Puffery is the general guide for this. Fences&Windows 01:27, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Image layout question

1. Who is/are some gurus of page layout, with images and all? (name of an editor).

2. I want do know how to put 4 images at the bottom of a section, below the text and before the next section. (I have a reason for doing this. For not just making it another image on the side with text wrapping around. The page is Painted turtle, section Description. I want to put those 4 turtle pictures in order, in a sort of ribbon, like I described.

TCO (talk) 07:47, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

 Done -- Not claiming to be a guru but I used the <gallery> tag to do this for you. See Wikipedia:Gallery tag for more details on usage. You may also want to read the policy on galleries.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 13:54, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

That's cool. I will learn galleries. One more thing. Is it possible to make it so the pictures distribute across the bottom? IOW, instead of all justifying right. One justifies right, one left, and the other two split the middle?TCO (talk) 15:09, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

I didn't see what you have described. Using Firefox on Linux, they were all justified to the left. No matter, I've switched them to use Template:Gallery instead. Is that better?
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 19:39, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

I misspoke. They were to the left. Centered is better. In an ideal world, would like them to distribute across the bottom (spread). But centered is pretty good. You rock, man! TCO (talk) 20:18, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

People to watch out for

I was disgusted to see this blatant advert for a Wikipedia writing service. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 21:45, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

These appear to be part of the articles they have had a hand in influencing which may help in hunting them down. These spam interlinks may also be useful:

• morpheme.wikidot.com (*|search current)

• wikidot.com (*|search current)

• gnosisarts.com (*|search current)

• Staff & Recent partnerships

• Satisfied clients

Very disgusting, indeed.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 22:17, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Wow! What a thoroughly unpleasant character! We need to work out what he and his company have submitted and delete it without mercy. If his clients start asking for their money back we will soon see the back of him. This business model must be made demonstrably unprofitable in order to discourage copycats. --DanielRigal (talk) 22:30, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Good thing he is so easily baited into publicly acting like a jerk and resorting to petty name calling, if I saw the current content of his forum I wouldn't hire him to represent me. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:06, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Not a "he". User:Petrosianii is a sockpuppet of User:Smkovalinsky whose info is readily available through a web search.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 23:25, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, she is ranting like a full-on maniac now. I don't often say this but, LOL. --DanielRigal (talk) 23:29, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

And don't you just love the bogus 'endorsements' at the start of the forum thread! As if they'd convince anyone... AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:13, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

I've started a sockpuppet investigation here.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 05:28, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Looks like he realized how petty and unprofessional the anti-Wikipedia ranting came off, it's all been removed now. I wouldn't worry to much about this one. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:05, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

See this remarkable declaration. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 00:43, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

...and User:Petrosianii is User:Artemis84, the company owner. Confirmed by Checkuser. I was wrong about the gender.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 02:06, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Inbound links

I was perusing a competitors website and saw that he had many "inbound links" from en.wikipedia.org as well as www.answers.com and others. My web site "inbound links" are only from a site named fotocuisine.com and my own site.

Can I interact with Wikipedia in order to drive more traffic to my blogs?

Thank you,

[redacted] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.63.239.91 (talk) 13:39, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

(not emailing) No. Under no circumstances should Wikipedia be used to manipulate internet traffic. Please see our guidelines on this as well as what not to link. Thank you for politely asking though.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 14:19, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

(redact, albeit it late in the day) Neither would you want to; it would do you no good with e.g. Google to do so. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 15:16, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Did you know update for "tulip"

It seems that linking "virus" to the actual virus would be more useful than just to the virus article. It took me three clicks to find it and seems more accurate. Just a thought. sohmc (talk) 14:30, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

The point of DYK is to showcase new or recently expanded articles, so that's why it's the one bolded. Though I would agree that perhaps the actual virus article should have been linked to as well. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:44, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Is www.tv.com a reliable source?

Hello I have been trying to source the airdates for List of The Powerpuff Girls episodes but do not know of a reliable source for them. Someone on the talk page is saying that tv.com is okay, does it pass WP: Reliable sources? I would post this in a wikiproject but most are dead that have to do with this. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:44, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

You might want to ask at WP:RSN, a dedicated forum for such questions. Beeblebrox (talk) 03:32, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Okay thanks =). - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:57, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

GAR

What do I have to do to get someone TALKING at a GAR? Wikipedia:Good_article_reassessment/Travis_Tritt/1 has been open 10 days and no one besides the GA reviewer has talked there. Can I please get a couple outside opinions? Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Otters want attention)} 21:30, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia author -- what?

I have personal appeals from Wikipedia authors pop ups. I looked up WP:AUTHOR and was taken to an explanation of famous people. I looked up the authors in wikipedia. One may be the son of Hindu deity or a Dutch member of parliment, the others do not have articles, leading me to question the substance of their personal appeals.

Maybe the banners mean "editor," but say "author" instead. I looked up the users. One user is an academic who writes about wikipedia, another takes me to a deleted user page created by the wrong person and the third does not exist.

I remain clueless. What is a "wikipedia author," and why do their appeals have substance when most of them don't appear to either have substance as authors or exist as editors? Or maybe I missed something completely? Thanks to all the wikipedia editors who can help me understand this. --Kleopatra (talk) 15:09, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

It's a marketing gimmick developed by the fundraising team, it is not really a term used within the project. Nobody is the "author" of Wikipedia. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:00, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I suspect the term "author" is used rather than "editor" because, to someone no familiar with our jargon, "author" better gets the desired meaning across than "editor" does. Someone seeing "editor" for the first time tends to assume it means something senior and with authority, whilst an author is merely someone who writes things and doesn't imply a particular status. I've noticed the "editor" terminology being a problem in past attempts to explain the project.

As to the individuals - looking at meta:Fundraising 2010/Banner testing/Stats/Banner history, the people there are indeed active Wikipedia editors - they are (mainly?) active on non-English projects, however, which may be why you're not immediately finding them. Shimgray | talk | 00:14, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

If these people are the authors of wikipedia, people ought to and might want to find them as authors. Only one out of 3 exist.

I've already come across half-a-dozen articles mocking the Jimmy Wales banners. Is it really necessary, really necessary to use 2 out of 3 non-English wikipedia editors as appeals to English speaking wikipedia readers? Why would I want to read the banner, much less donate, when our editors aren't good enough to be making the pleas and don't even exist on wikipedia? --Kleopatra (talk) 06:01, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Are you volunteering to have your picture made and make an appeal?
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 06:16, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Why not? But why not someone who has been editing for a lot longer than I have (or at least with a name), created a handful of featured articles, uploaded some great pictures, wrote everything you wanted to know about the biota of Australia, or hurricanes or battleships? Why not appeal to wikipedia readers and writers and show us one or two of the thousands of interesting people who create the things we come to read about every day on en.wikipedia. What a disappointment, an author who writes about wikipedia and two editors who don't exist. --Kleopatra (talk) 06:24, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, you answered part of your question when you said "people ought to and might want to find them as authors". People who edit anonymously might not want to be found. Is your focal point the actual appeal or finding interesting Wikipedians? If the latter is what you're after that can be accomplished differently.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 06:44, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

What? If the point of the appeal is that these "wikipedia authors" have status as editors, they ought to be editors. But they're not editors, they have no English wikipedia editing history, at least 2 out of 3 have no English wikipedia editing history, and the other one links to a user page that talks about her writing about wikipedia. So, if their status is they're editors, but they're not editors, what value does their appeal have? None. It's pointless. I have no idea what your comment about anonymous people not wanting to be found has to do with this. --Kleopatra (talk) 07:11, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

What makes you think the funds appeal is for the English Wikipedia only? Corvus cornix_talk 07:13, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

For some stupid reason I assumed that the funds appeal for English Wikipedia was the English one, the funds appeals for the French Wikipedia would be in French, the funds appeal for Polish Wikipedia would be in Polish, the funds appeal for Chinese Wikipedia would be in Chinese.... --Kleopatra (talk) 07:22, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

The text certainly would be, but the campaign is foundation-wide. A quick check of other Wikimedia sites confirms that the French Wikipedia uses a French banner while the Chinese Wikipedia uses a Chinese banner. Some of the smaller Wikipedia's appear to default to English, however. The Limburgish Wikipedia uses an English banner, as does the Haitian Creole and Hawaiian Wikipedias. --Jayron32 07:30, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

And they all have the same 3 editors? Of course the campaign is foundation-wide--why woulnd't it be? Where did I assume it wasn't? What does that have to do with the fact that English wikipedia couldn't seem to find 3 English editors willing to go to bat and plea for funds? Wikipedia couldn't find 3 English editors for English banners, 3 French editors for French banners, 3 Chinese editors for Chinese banners, a single Creole editor for the Haitian Creole banner? There's not one Hawaiian editor in all of Hawaiin wikipedia who thinks the encyclopedia is worth speaking up for? --Kleopatra (talk) 07:38, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

You might not understand my comments now but give it a year or two. Most users don't want to place info out there on themselves especially on this wiki. There are evil bastards who collect such info for the worst reasons. Going public has led to people on this wiki being stalked and harassed in person (especially females). Websites exist for making their lives hell. Your complaints amount to asking people to go public and I'm responding they (mostly) don't want to.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 07:54, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I, for one, have been threatened in real life. I once received a phone call by someone who did not identify himself, but made veiled threats against my wife by name and indicated he was calling because of something that happened on-wiki. This was years ago, long before I was publicly hive-minded, so he went through some significant lengths to dig up my real name, phone number, and wife's name. --Jayron32 08:01, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

There are hundreds of editors all over en.wiki who edit under their real names. However, I see I've touched nerves or provided opportunities that have nothing to do with my comments, so, I give the discussion to you for whatever topic you want and will got back to editing bugs and slime. --Kleopatra (talk) 08:09, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

(re to Jay) I wasn't going to mention that place by particular name but how in the hell did they get everybody's photos including yours? How do they get the info? I've avoided meetups because I expect they show up with cell phone cams.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 08:21, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

It usually just takes some stalkerish google skills and some free time to kill. Connect username A to former username B, and see what info they've posted across the internet so that you can reach their real name. I became quickly paranoid about what I've left about, and have since tried to clean up and be mindful about what I post. Killiondude (talk) 08:30, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

(re to Berean) It's not hard, really. To be fair, though I have never revealed my identity on Wikipedia, so am still covered by WP:OUTING, someone could find me pretty easily since I have been using the Jayron32 handle online since 1994. It doesn't really bother me, since I don't actually fear real, physical danger because of my online activities. But I was making clear that it does happen quite often that people get VERY pissed about what one does at Wikipedia, and will sometimes go through great lengths to intimidate. --Jayron32 15:27, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I've never edited under my real name, but I am rather open about it, reveal it on my userpage, and freely giver out my email, which follows the first.last convention. After talking in the IRC channel about a Christmas trip to my parents during the same time as Brandt was curiously obsessed with me, my layover in SeaTac was spent being verbally harassed by three of his little minions. That was three years ago though and nothings happened since. -- ۩ Mask 06:23, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Criminal–Crime-noted-for

Notice: I've posted a discussion on the wp:MERGE page's discussion page asking about how to determine when to create separate articles about both a criminal and the crime for which s/he is noted and when to combine them.--Hodgson-Burnett's Secret Garden (talk) 18:06, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Requests for feedback

WP:FEED - where users can request feedback on articles - is starting to fail, because older requests are slipping by without people responding; for examples, see e.g. Wikipedia:Requests for feedback/2010 November 15 or 16 or, well, any of 'em. Nav page here.

I used to do lots of these requests myself, but I'm on a wikibreak.

Wasn't quite sure of the best place to post this, but here seemed reasonable.

I'm hoping some more people can help providing feedback. But please note, this is a long-term ongoing issue; simply clearing the backlog will only help briefly; it needs editors to dive in every so often and help out.

Best,  Chzz  ►  00:42, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

I would suggest that the best solution would be to advertise this more widely in some way (I, for one, was unaware of this process before just now) and then, if that doesn't work, to simply ditch the process. Remember that we are all volunteers, and the the nature of this project is that only procedures that volunteers are willing to support will get used. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:00, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

How is this different to peer review? AD 22:01, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

It tends to be much shorter, almost 'generic advice' - some tips in how to make the article better. Something that can be done in quite a short time (minutes) - whereas PR tends to be much more detailed and leading to articles becoming GA. The articles in FEED are mostly new, mostly new-ish users, who need basic guidance.  Chzz  ►  15:48, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, I think they could easily be merged. AD 16:21, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I disagree, but I'm open to ideas. I see them as totally different roles. When FEED is working well, some 30+ users per day get prompt responses to beginner-level questions which leands to improvement of many drafts before they go live, thus saving CSD. It can set a shining example of how helpful wikipedia is, to new users. PR is a lengthy, and much more complex system, aimed at more experienced editors, and often takes weeks or months to provide detailed reviews.  Chzz  ►  21:24, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I think WP:FEEDBACK is very important towards our goal of getting and keeping more new editors to fill our ranks, but alas I fear Phil Bridger is right, if the process is not being supported then it will eventually be relegated to the dump, which is very unfortunate. But maybe, if the ratio of requests to volunteers is too high on the requests side, maybe instead of trying to get more volunteers we could try reducing the amount of requests somehow, like tightening the criteria required to post? But I don't think merging it with WP:PR would work well, it's already an established process and mixing widely separate skill levels of editors would frustrate advanced users and confuse beginners. -- œ^™ 18:59, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree. It's not failing totally, it's just struggling due to volume of requests and lack of people helping out. Please, anyone reading this, can you spare just a few minutes to look at WP:FEED and try to answer the basic questions that new users are asking there.  Chzz  ►  00:04, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

You know what? A major source of all the requests is the links from the {{Userspace draft}} template and the Article Creator pages. Before those areas were revamped and the links added WP:FEEDBACK was not nearly as busy. I don't know if removing the links would be the best thing to do though.. it does seem like a step backwards.. but desperate times call for desperate measures I guess.. -- œ^™ 01:03, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Another way we could approach this problem is listing the possible reasons why volunteers don't seem to be flocking to the process and what could be done to fix this. At least for me, I know one of the reasons why I sometimes avoid WP:FEED is because it gets depressing.. it demotivates me, seeing all those unanswered requests and so many low quality articles.. it just doesn't inspire me with much hope, and I'm afraid I lack the amount of patience Chzz has to thoroughly and efficiently deal with all the requests, especially when I believe each and every one deserves to be dealt with the highest quality and attention to detail. I can't help but set my standards way high in all aspects of Wikipedia work, but my laziness often overpowers my work ethic sometimes, but that's just me. Another reason why I think editors tend to avoid WP:FEED is because they see it as a waste of time to help users with a clearly promotional agenda. Many of the requests at WP:FEED are from SPA's in a COI who just want to put up their one article and have no interest whatsoever in staying and improving the encyclopedia. Why bother putting in the time and effort to give feedback and instruction to a new editor when it's obvious they just want to take advantage of Wikipedia to promote themselves? If anything, WP:FEED can act as a noticeboard of sorts, a way in which we can guage progress of new article creation and discover potential new editors while weeding out the advertisers. -- œ^™ 02:16, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I used to post to WP:FEED, but then I gave up because many of the original posters never stopped back to check on the input or to act on the comments. Perhaps it would work better if the post to WP:FEED was also included on the article's talk page? That way it would have an indefinite life span.—RJH (talk) 22:44, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Well I'll be - been here 4 years and never seen that page before. I see this as duplicating Peer Review - we really really need to streamline some of these pages Casliber (talk · contribs) 23:01, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

It's nothing like peer review - it's more a 'new editor requests help' type function. Might it be possible in fact to merge it with that more generic page, as new editors often ask there how to get an article 'uploaded' (that's always what they ask), and it often results in advice being given that the article needs more work, a source etc etc. Elen of the Roads (talk) 00:06, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

I've been trying it out since this was posted, and it's kind of fun. It's a good way to get new editors off on the right foot, and it's not at all difficult or time consuming. Typical experience: You click on the link to the article and do some simple clean up work. Then you go back to the FEEDback page and leave a message that tells them that they need to find some WP:Independent sources, and if it's not hopelessly promotional, give them a concrete, specific task that they do to improve the page. For example, I just explained how to create wikilinks.

I would think that any WP:Inclusionist or person interested in growing the number of editors would find this congenial work, and that anybody who posts here would find it very, very easy work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

I think that both Wikipedia:Requests for feedback and Wikipedia:Peer review do both accomplish the same objective, to post requests for people to give feedback on an article. I think that these two projects should eventually be merged, although in their current state that would probably be suicide. As of right now, there are about 74 active peer reviews going on at Wikipedia:Peer review, and WP:FEED goes back all the way to 2006! Nevertheless I do agree that these two projects should be merged at some point in time. --vgmddg (look | talk | do) 21:55, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Of course, we have lots of overlapping Wikipedia pages. And although these kinda overlap a bit, they do provide to quite a different audience. It's rather like comparing WP:HD and WP:NCHP.

Most ^{no, I don't have figures, but I'm sure it is 90%+}of the editors asking for feedback are asking about their first article. Also, the typical response is a paragraph or two. Compared to PR, which is mostly for articles being worked up to WP:GA / WP:FA, and responses tend to cover several pages.

I am absolutely certain that WP:FEED can, has, and sometimes does, provide a very useful service to newer users seeking a bit of guidance.

I don't think that is the question; I think the issue is, that we're struggling to get enough people helping 'em out.

It does not need many people. Previously, when I was able to be more active, between myself and a few other editors, we managed to provide good feedback within a very short timeframe (usually a day or two of the request).

I don't think it needs a merger. All it needs is a bit of help.  Chzz  ►  17:42, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

File:MyOldDutch-chorus.ogg

Apparently the temporarily uploaded image contains a template from the Wikimedia commons called {{Pd/1923}}, but no such template exists on Wikipedia. It should probably be created in case another such image is uploaded. mechamind90 07:18, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Newbie Questions...I Need Help!

Two issues that I cannot seem to figure out through t14:02, 13 December 2010 (UTC)Whysosirius (talk)he maze of Wikipedia info:

1. I have a photo that I have been given permission to use by the photographer. She authorized use via an e-mail to me and I cited that when I posted the photo. Not good enough; the photo was removed for copyright issues. Can anyone help?

2. This should have been very easy to find but I'll be danged if I can. My page is almost ready to be launched. How the heck do I do that?

1. Please follow the process set out at WP:IOWN to send the copyright permission to Wikipedia - note that it must be a release for all purposes, a Wikipedia-only release is insufficient.

2. See WP:SYMUD for guidance and please read WP:BAND for guidance about the notability of bands. – ukexpat (talk) 17:28, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

About {{Recent changes article requests}}

There are some blue links inside the template. I once informed administrators to replace them with articles I requested on its talk page in October 2010, but the links are not changed! So I put a notice here to let more Wikipedians know this.--RekishiEJ (talk) 14:16, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice. I will replace them with the red links you mentioned. The rest will be removed. -- œ^™ 01:20, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

The blue links should not be removed. They should be replaced with red links on Wikipedia:Requested articles, Wikipedia:Requested lists, Wikipedia:Most wanted articles and Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles and their subpages.

I suggest that Spurion, Inventor's paradox, Symphony No. 5 (Glass), Civic Union, Lee Academy, Kochen-Specker paradox, Minami-Setaka Station, Kharwar, Worlebury camp, Castle Ditches, Gamma Comae Berenices, Mercurius Gallobelgicus and Wound care be replaced with Robert Eisner, John G. Gurley, Edward S. Shaw, News Media Corporation, Andrew Jackson and the Bank of the United States, The Urban Review, Misocapny, Misoxeny, mmconfig, Mulindi, Rwanda and Rapid Alert System for Non-Food Products, Giovanni Caicedo-Tascon and experimental animation. And Forced normalization should be replaced with experimental sociology.--RekishiEJ (talk) 08:38, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Also Gurdwara Nanaklama should be replaced with Subedar Major Bhullar.--RekishiEJ (talk) 11:31, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Grameen Foundation Australia

Hi, could someone check that there is such a thing as 'Grameen Foundation Australia'. See, by example, User:Maiiina but it is also mentionned in Grameen Foundation since a (very) long time (?!). I am not able to find something I can trust about it... -- Xofc (talk) 12:56, 10 December 2010 (UTC) (WP.fr)

See: ASIC record, ABN recordABN history Jojalozzo 17:24, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. -- Xofc (talk) 13:33, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Request to all admins

Not sure where is the best place to drop this request, so I'm doing it here. When closing a discussion and putting your summary at the top, please please please avoid using internal links (like [[Example#Section|this]]), because once a section is archived it becomes burdensome to find the originally-referenced section. Instead, please use absolute hardlinks (like [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Example&oldid=123456789#Section this]). Thanks! //Blaxthos ( t / c ) 22:57, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

• … which of course cause unpleasantness for people using the secure HTTP server, since it drops them onto the insecure servers. There is an ugly and not futureproof way to get {{oldid}}, which generates hyperlinks that stay on the same servers, to do what you want. {{oldid2}} is better in this regard, but it hasn't been modernized to use {{fullurl:}} and its syntax is not fully intuitive. Uncle G (talk) 00:29, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
  • {{oldid|Example#Section 1|123456789|}}, looks like it works to me. — Dispenser 04:59, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
    • Some archive bots (*cough*ClueBot III*cough*) will actually go through and fix most internal links to sections that it breaks. It cannot fix external links to the section ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VPM#Request_to_all_admins]). -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 10:55, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Google indexed a vandalised version

Resolved

Google search has indexed a vandalised version of Wikipedia (as in the article about Wikipedia). A search for this shows a snippet from the lead which says something offensive about Wikipedia being "for Jews". Is there something that can be done? Brambleclawx 00:58, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject newsletter guide page and centralized bot distribution (both currently missing - are they needed?)

I've just finished drafting the third irregular newsletter for WikiProject Sociology (here). Some time ago I realized that we have bots capable of delivering newsletters, but to my surprise WP:Newsletter took me to Signpost, and instead of one dedicated bot, it seems we have various bots "working" for different projects. Signpost uses User:EdwardsBot (which says nothing about on its user page about that function). MilHist Bungle uses User:BrownBot, which, clandestinely, advertises itself as a newsletter bot for WikiProject Films. I sense MILHIST intelligence department at work :) Wikipedia:WikiProject Anime and manga/Newsletter seems to be delivered manually... Other newsletters I listed at Category:Wikipedia news (a category I just found, and that I am sure is not 100% comprehensive). This brings me to my points:

• do we need a policy on newsletters? I agree with WP:CREEP, but at the very least, it would be nice to have a community discussion on whether projects can send newsletters to 1) all signed members, 2) to all Wikipedians who are part of project-relevant Category:Wikipedians subcategory (for example, last SOC newsletters went out to Category:Wikipedians interested in sociology), and how to give people and opt-out option if they don't want to receive them
• even if we don't need a policy, a good practices guide would be nice, perhaps with an easy "create a newsletter for your project how-to", and a section on bots that can automate the process for you (I am not looking forward to sending another 100 or so newsletters manually). While this is quite a foreign territory for me, locating all the newsletter-delivering bots and getting their operators to talk shop and perhaps create an official newsletter-delivery bot, with how-to add your newsletter to it, and standardized opt-in/opt-out procedure, sounds useful.

Thoughts? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 22:23, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

We don't need a community-wide guideline to tell any particular group of editors how they ought to communicate with each other.

However, you should feel free to post how-to information and/or your best advice at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Guide (or one of its subpages). Perhaps Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide#Use_bots_to_save_work would be a reasonable place for a link to a newsletter-delivering bot. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:19, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

^ What he said. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:54, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Buttons and more buttons

What's it with these buttons? Perseus (t • c) 21:07, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

{{Big Yellow Button}}

Click this button.

Reference this BLP.

Click this button.

Copy edit an article.

They're buttons, and you click them and are presented with a random article to fixup. What's the problem with that? Many editors are looking for work to do, these provide a cute way to present them with random articles which they can do work on. What's the harm? --Jayron32 21:45, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

If anyone is really looking for work to do, Requests for feedback is very understaffed. Providing some feedback to a new editor may well turn someone into a regular, who could then help out with many of the tasks.--SPhilbrickT 23:00, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

How about adding a button for Requests for feedback then? Roger (talk) 16:37, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, someone has to create a button to request more buttons before you can request that button. Resolute 18:38, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Click this button.

Help train ClueBot NG.

Heh ... :) -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 01:38, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Units in 1910 London to Manchester air race

Several editors have attempted to clarify the units used in the article 1910 London to Manchester air race. However, they keep being removed by the most frequent editor.

I see the following claim:

• Featured content represents the best that Wikipedia has to offer. These are the articles, pictures, and other contributions that showcase the polished result of the collaborative efforts that drive Wikipedia. All featured content undergoes a thorough review process to ensure that it meets the highest standards and can serve as an example of our end goals

The choice appears to be between delisting the article or persuading the most frequent editor to allow improvements. Would anyone else like to try? Lightmouse (talk) 16:59, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

• According to the sources quoted in the article a prize was awarded for making an aeroplane flight one hundred years ago between two named places subject to certain time constraints and limitations on the number of stopovers. The prize was awarded and the mileage, flight time and number of stops/location of stops quoted. The quoted figure for the flight was x miles. A "war of words" has then ensued with one side requiring confirmation of whether the miles were measured in miles or nautical miles and what the equivalent number of kilometres would be. This is patent nonsense. Straight lines could be drawn on a modern map between the starting point, the named intermediate stopover point and the final point; and a mileage figure obtained. This derived figure could be compared against the mileage figure quoted in the source; and an estimate made as to whether the "miles" were nautical or not, but such a comparison is fraught with uncertainties and it would be WP:OR. Whilst such a comparison could easily be carried out, it could not be used to prove that the wining flight involved flying along those two straight lines; it cannot take into account the effects any head winds, tail winds or cross winds on the aircraft; and it fails to consider whether such flight data was every collected and still exists. The "argument" seems to be that, firstly, if the flight were done today GPS could be used to collect such data; and it could be collected in accordance with wikipedia's manual of style. Secondly, since it can be done today (and wikipedia exists) those who did the flight 100 years ago "should" also have done it that way. One side seems to think they should have done it and the other side sees the absurdity of such a "mind set". Data should be considered in historical context and current usage should not be back projected as a Straight jacket on to prior generations. Pyrotec (talk)

I agree with you that the values are approximate. Wikipedia is full of approximate values with helpful conversions. The question of nautical versus statute is a secondary issue. By default, ordinary people will read a distance in 'miles' and assess it against their experience of distances in statute miles. Similarly, conversions of the unqualified term 'mile' will default to statute miles. As you suggest, it's likely to be near enough and that's better than nothing for metric readers. Multiple editors have tried to make this article accessible to metric readers. But continual removal of km values by the most frequent editor is unfair on ordinary readers. Lightmouse (talk) 20:23, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

We have some common ground. In that time period (1910), aircraft flight over land seems to have been by "line of sight", so they might well have flown along the path of railway lines, or roads, between London and Manchester. Planes did not have odometers, so the mileage might well have been that given by the railway companies, such as in "Bradshaw", rather that "aircraft" mileage. In which case, I suspect, the mileage was in miles (statute miles), so 185 miles (298 km) might be sufficient with a footnote. It becomes more problematic where Manual of Style is brought in and the use of nautical miles is insisted upon. The sources say "miles", so statue miles is assumed and I can see no strong arguments against adding a km equivalent. However, I'm not convinced that we need nautical miles with statue miles and km equivalent if that is being made the "price" of the article remaining an FA. Pyrotec (talk) 12:26, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Your analysis seems reasonable to me. As far as I can see, the Manual of Style doesn't mandate either form of mile. If editors of an aviation article think a value in 'miles' is statute and say so, there's no requirement to mention nautical miles. Lightmouse (talk) 13:38, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Those damn "Please read" notices

Is there any way of getting rid of those annoying "Please read: A personal message from..." items which pop up a couple of seconds after a page loads? You start editing a page then find you're editing the wrong line. It happens every damn time and it's thoroughly annoying,t o say the least. There's a click box under the notice, but it doesn't do anything. Every other message that's put at the top of pages by WP, you can simply hide. These, you can't, and it's driving me up the wall! Grutness...wha? 09:44, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Special:Preferences, Gadgets, "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner". PrimeHunter (talk) 14:24, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Really good thing would be a "Suppress the fundraiser"... Is this turning into the gimme-some-money-pedia? I haven't logged for some months (a couple of years?...) [Hello, Grutness, good to see you're still around! Sorry to greet under an IP but I'm not into logging...] I simply point that using WP is getting quite annoying, it looks like a permanent fundraiser. - 2.82.177.86 (talk) 22:29, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Oh, thank god. These have been pushing my buttons for days. Hmmwhatsthisdo (talk) 22:39, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Many thanks PH - that did the trick. And yes, 2.82 (whoever you are :), I'm still here, though not as much as I used to be by a long way. Grutness...wha? 22:42, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I think the missed opportunity here is that I don't mind seeing the banner, but I made a substantial donation and really think that my reward could be a way (a code?) to enter into the banner and suppress it. The next time there's a fundraiser, go ahead and take me through that cycle again. I understand it takes money to run WP well, I don't mind the occasional appeal, and I would hope that a broad swath of the public would give a little, but let me turn it off easily for the current drive. -- Scray (talk) 01:45, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Are people are missing the close button or are they annoyed that it comes back after 1 week? — Dispenser 02:06, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Tried the close button dozens of times. It doesn't work - not in Safari, at least. Grutness...wha? 04:09, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

And every-time you change browsers, computers, accounts or projects, back it comes! Luckily I only use my named account on more than a couple of projects. Rich Farmbrough, 11:21, 15 December 2010 (UTC).

Presumably, the way to do this is to elect a WMF board that devises a way of funding WP more sustainably (for example, by not paying $150K to one staffer), and gets rid Jimmy Wales and his insistence on using these to self-servingly up his own profile, and highly fictionalised status as "found". Or had you something shorter-term in mind? Smartiger (talk) 14:41, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

I think it's important to say this clearly: Jimmy didn't inflict this campaign on the projects. In fact, he's fairly uncomfortable with it. It was my call. I took a ton of data to him that demonstrated through fairly exhaustive testing that nothing else was anywhere near as effective... banners with his personal appeal and face actually yield more than 300% more than other banners. It's incorrect to say that this is an ego campaign on his part. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 10:59, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

You could probably substantially diminish the perceived Jimbo annoyance factor without effecting donations by pairing this image of Mr. Wales with that of another person (probably Sue, or any typical editor, though preferably a woman with a pretty face) and presenting a joint essay. Such a display would reduce the creepiness of this lone staring head popping up and would underscore the fact that Wikipedia is a diverse and collaborative enterprise. Cheers! bd2412 T 15:34, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

A most mundane issue

I've been archiving my user talk approximately every 32K (the old article size recommendation). I know this number has been out of use for some time and my archive list has grown to 29 sub-pages. Can anyone offer an opinion whether it would be more helpful to have many short archived pages or fewer long archived pages? If my concern is overly pedantic, please be gentle in pointing that out :-\ Thanks Tiderolls 00:22, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Personally, being an awkward old bleeder, I've arranged to archive my talk page by month, on the basis that it may be easier to find stuff. This will probably bite me at some point (not least because at the moment I have to remember to set each month up in advance on the talk page: this needs fixing, but I haven't got a clue how). I wonder if in the long term, this may be a more rational approach, as ease of access becomes more important than technical considerations? Just a thought... AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:45, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

I've always archived mine by year, article size be damned. Maybe I'm not too chatty, but that hasn't been an issue. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 14:18, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Advertising banner

Nobody likes being squeezed for a few more dimes more than me, but can we have a new banner please and not the jimmy wales one.

eg [7] [8] [9] , I've confined myself to the ones containing humour.

Noticed how the eyes seem to follow you around the room.

Please can we have a message from proper celebrity or something, I heard william shatner works for peanuts.

Cheers. (but seriously please change it soon) I'm not the only one http://www.google.co.uk/search?=UTF-8&q=make+jimmy+wales+go+away Sf5xeplus (talk) 16:33, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

You have a user account so head over to the Gadgets tab of your preferences and check the box to permanently disable the banner, the you need not worry about which one is displayed. Job done. – ukexpat (talk) 18:41, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

While no doubt many individuals are clever enough to expunge the banner, I guess it would be beyond the technical ability of most Wikipedia users to do that. I think it's fair to ask for how long the face of Mr Wales will stare out onto the world from all of our pages? I should imagine most people feel (as I do) that the banner is egotistical. May I ask, has there been any report on its increasing or declining effectiveness, or any analysis of the public reaction to it? Frankly, I should actually rather see some discreet paid-for advertising on the site, but if a long begging campaign like this is to continue then surely it would be far more successful if a wide variety of more appealing people could be used to front it? Moonraker2 (talk) 22:48, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Two months, just like always. You can go ahead and mark your calendar: On or about November 1st of every single year between now and when you die, the foundation will probably request donations to buy computers, hire staff, and keep the electricity on, so that you and others are able to read and edit Wikipedia. As always, the campaign ends on or about January 1st, also every single year between now and when you die.

I really am going to have to write a FAQ. Anyone have any suggestions for page titles? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:05, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

How about "Wikipedia:Why is that staring man demanding my money at the most financially stressful time of the year?". DuncanHill (talk) 01:10, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Banner Appeal FAQ ? 83.100.225.242 (talk) 02:34, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, "Two months" answers my first question, although it seems much longer than that already. If there are going to be some FAQs, could my other questions please receive answers, too? Moonraker2 (talk) 01:49, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

The ads are extensively tested. See m:Fundraising 2010/Banner testing for the details. I don't know what the latest word is, but earlier in the season, the ads with Jimmy Wales' picture were bringing in ten times as much as other graphical ads, and graphical ads were bringing in twice what text-based ads did.

In general, the Foundation runs a very impressive, efficient, and extremely data-driven fundraising program. They wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't working. "Working", by the way, is measured solely by the number of dollars appearing in the bank account, not the number or nature of words appearing on the web.

As to your other questions, you will probably find the answers at User:WhatamIdoing/Fundraising. If someone wants to pull the informative bits out and put them into a serious FAQ, then I'd be happy to let them do that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:02, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

As you seem to have some insight - can I suggest a black banner with white text (no "catchy caption") - as a try out - don't know if this has been tried. Seems like a potential good idea .. eg like this [10] but no picture. just black (amateur psychology behind it is ...) 83.100.225.242 (talk) 16:55, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Announcement: Fundraising banners

Just posting this here so that regulars here, who may be asked, are aware: Today, I had the fundraising banners disabled for logged in users. This was a data-driven decision: it became clear that those logged in users who wished to contribute already had, and those that hadn't yet probably knew how to. With that in mind, the banners are now running to anonymous users only. This state will continue until around January 1, when we'll turn them back on for everyone for the final push of the campaign. As always, more information is available at m:FR2010 or by emailing me directly (philippewikimedia.org). Thanks for your work, everyone.

Note: this decision only applies to users who are not in an area that is running chapter selected banners. Chapters control messaging within their areas, and some of them are continuing to use banners, as is their privilege. I know that they're all making smart decisions based on their financial needs. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 11:03, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Wonderful. They were a TOTAL bother in editing work! Arlen22 (talk) 13:09, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Has Jimbo Wales developed pancreatic cancer?

Seriously, on the latest fundraising banner with the animated arrow, Jimbo looks like he has a pretty bad case of jaundice. Stalwart90 (talk) 20:51, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Is this an attempt at slander?—RJH (talk) 23:22, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I think it's an attempt at humor. A failed attempt. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:55, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia Consulting vs. Actual Paid Editing?

(Please see this archived thread for context)
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 19:53, 18 December 2010 (UTC) Summary:One of my staff brought up the idea of Wikipedia consulting as opposed to paid editing

As you may know, we have ceased all our previous paid editing practices of our firm. We see the intrinsic COI problem that invariably exists. However, one of my staff brought up the idea of Wikipedia consulting as opposed to paid editing. The idea was to do webinars, consultations, et al, to help people learn how to compose wikipedia articles, but not do any actual editing, posting, dispute resolution, etc., on behalf of the client. The client would have to do all writing, editing, publishing, h/erself. I want to ask the Wikipedia community what it thinks about this. This is an honest question; whatever the community thinks, we'll go with. And we have no intention of violating Wikipedia policy again. Thank you.

Sunflowergal34 (talk) 20:01, 14 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts Multimedia Communications LLC

• This is not really the appropriate place for an RfC, but asking the clients to write about themselves is still a COI. However, simply showing people how to use Wikipedia/start articles/etc. is a good thing, and COI doesn't mean someone is banned from writing about their company, but it would be pretty difficult still to get the whole NPOV idea and whatnot into shape and avoid promotion, accidental or intentional. It might be worth thinking about consulting a company to write about things they may know about but something that is less likely to be seen as promotional (like a zoo writing about some species of animal or a computer company writing about some sort of technical innovation). /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 23:15, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

• Where is the appropriate place to ask for comment on an issue like this? Also, what about an online training course, with a series of modules, that walks people through, step by step, on how to conceive, write, edit, compose and publish a quality Wikipedia article? We would sell the course. It would be like self-paced, online course. We would do no editing, no writing, no publishing, no arbitrating - just purely, "This is how you add an image; this is how you make a citation; this is where you go to ask for help; etc." Is that still a COI?
• Also, one of my staff brought up what I thought was a good point today in a staff meeting. They said, in effect, "Doesn't really everyone have some sort of conflict of interest in editing/writing an article, in the way Wikipedia defines it?" Their point was if someone is going to write about, say, the Beatles, or edit the Beatles articles, they would most likely be either a fan, or a supporter, or a rep of a PR firm, or a friend, i.e, it is likely going to be somebody who cares about the Beatles. Caring about a subject creates, in one sense, a COI - doesn't it? How is this different than a paid editor? A paid editor cares too, only, for a different reason. This is also a COI, when you think about it, was her point. Admittedly, it is not as egregious as an outright paid editor, but still, you can see the point.

• Ignore this argument, for the moment. As I reread it, it isn't convincing. I think that the COI is sort of on a continuum where way over on the left is outright is paid editing, an obvious COI. Way over on the right is some hypothetical person editing an article on a subject s/he doesn't even care anything about or have any relation to whatsoever; then, the majority of cases, somewhere in the middle grey area. No? Sunflowergal34 (talk) 19:37, 18 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts

• So, her question, was: In what circumstances is an article written by someone devoid of a COI? It would seem to me to be relatively few. It would have to be edited/written by someone with no personal affinity or contempt, no special relationship to the subject, no monetary interest ... They would have to be just, basically, editing it for the fun of it, for the enjoyment of it, which I suppose is possible, but how would you know the difference in the majority of cases?
• Anyway, I'm not leaning in the wiki education direction, either, just so you know. I don't even want to be bothered with all this nonsense, truth be told. It's just my staff is worried as heck about their jobs and they're putting a lot of pressure on me to do something.

Sunflowergal34 (talk) 19:16, 18 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts 19:25, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

It certainly does happen. It isn't even unusual. WikiGnomes just copyedit every article that comes up when you hit the Random Article button or check for wikilinking on every Did you know... article or just help out someone else's article because they ask for help or admit poor command of English. New page patrollers may check every new article and might edit quite a few. I sometimes translate articles just to keep my language skills up with no interest in the article subject at all. Rmhermen (talk) 01:36, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't think it's unusual, but it's also not particularly common. Musicians write articles about music, health professional write about medicine, coders write about software—sharing your expertise is the backbone of the project.

On the other hand, the opposite also happens: I've done a lot of work because I read an interesting source and wondered if Wikipedia happened to cover the subject. See, e.g., my recent work at Pine Manor College, which I hadn't heard of until a few days ago, and everything I've ever written about transsexuality, triggered by reading this article and discovering that the Wikipedia article was pushing an anti-academic, pro-activist POV—the point of view, as it happens, of a long-time Wikipedia editor who is disparaged by multiple sources for having posted pictures of a researcher's children with sexually explicit captions on the web. (All of our articles on transsexuality, BTW, are almost entirely written by transwomen, another sign that sharing what you know is the backbone of the project.)

On balance, I'd say that far more people contribute to an article because they have some personal connection to it than the other way around. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:38, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

You're probably right, WhatamIdoing. However, although I edit in a field I am entering, I also edit extensively in a couple of areas outside of my field, where a lot of misinofmation abounds on the web. I don't contribute any more, though, in my primary areas of expertise, because wikipedia is not into experts. But, yes, people write wikipedia articles, generally, because they have an interest in the article. Also, many wikipedia editors misinterpret WP:COI to mean the article must be deleted. I see this at WP:AFD (a place where many editors don't follow and don't know policy and are advocating their pet side of the coin rather than writing an encyclopedia).

Sunflowergal, you brag that we only caught 10% of what you paid people to write. But the little I've seen attached to paid editing outings on wikipedia has been schlock. Badly written, poorly sourced press releases look exactly like what they are. When wikipedia readers click on those links from the top of a google search they will get that: a badly written, poorly sourced, second-rate press release. And, they will know that's what it is. Companies are paying for that? Companies will pay to learn to do that? Probably most good articles on companies are maintained by employees of that firm. --Kleopatra (talk) 15:53, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

@WhatAmIDoing That's my point. If most articles on transsexuals are written by women transsexuals, and some new research comes out that indicates that "transsexuality is really the cause of xyz disease," or "transsexuality is the cause of abc social ill", etc - do you think the "transwomen" (is that even a PC term?) who do most of the editing of these articles, are going to include it? (There is no research out there like this, to my knowledge; please, no one take this as any contempt toward transsexuals; it is ONLY an example). Of course not, is the answer. That supposedly "objective" information, will likely not be included by any transwomen. That's the point: to have a strong interest in a subject based on identifying in some meaningful way with the class of that subj, I don't see how COI can ever be avoided. So, I am a business owner; I identify with other (small) business owners. In the exact same way, the transwoman identifies with transwomen.

And @Kleopatra First of all, I wasn't bragging. If you read my entire confession, and the subsequent editing and participation since you'll see that 1) I'm very humbled by this whole thing and 2) I'm the only one in my firm (and I have ppl working for me all over the place) who is "for" this. You are mistaking "humility" with "groveling". I don't grovel before anyone, and I refuse to let anyone in Wikipedia treat me or my staff like a criminal. That is not bragging. I only mentioned that we've done a lot of articles to show just how much shutting this operation down hurts us financially. Not to brag.

I didn't see any "humility" or "groveling" that caused me to make my comment about braggin. What I saw was this:

"We've written lots of articles on here, for pay. I am not going to tell you which ones they are, but suffice it to say that the ones you "discovered" only make up make, maybe, 10% of all the ones we've published."

You're bragging that we only caught 10% of your paid articles. Kind-of throwing it in our faces, to me. --Kleopatra (talk) 18:18, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

I know the statement you're referring to. And, again, you're reading something into it that wasn't intended because you're taking it out of context. That statement was made in response to User:Berean_Hunter who asked us to "turn over" all articles we had written for pay. It was not bragging. It was to show that, we're already hurting as a business, and to do what BereanHunter suggest would be equivalent to business suicide. And I apologize for yelling. You have to understand how devastating this is. We've been editing articles for years, for pay. And all of sudden, in literally one day, because I just couldn't take all this FBI-like interrogation, I called a cease fire, so to speak. Everyone of my staff is demoralized, bewildered, upset, unsure. So, pardon me for being a little sensitive about this, but we've been in this ridiculous "fight" for quite some time. You came in on the tail end; you didn't see the Wikipedia Twitter patrollers, threatening us; you didn't see the Wikipediareview.com people, coming to our blog and badmouthing us every few months; the admins coming to our wikidot site and criticizing us; coming to our userpages and calling us criminals. You didn't see all this, Kleopatra, or if you did, you were conveniently silent. But I don't see you criticizing the Wikipedians who were at times just as uncivil as we admittedly were. So, don't just criticize us for our wrongs; we're trying to do the right thing here. Also take a look in your own backyard. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 21:37, 19 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts

(Cont'd @Kleopatra) Secondly, I would agree with you that some of the articles were schlock. But they are no more schlock than a stub of two sentences that sits there for 3 years. Also, some clients only paid for "schlock" (you get what you pay for). All clients didn't contract long term, month to month, editing and revision to get the article to the point where it wasn't schlock. And yes, companies will pay to do that. Just before we shut down our business, a staff member was speaking with a prospect who said that both he and his sister - despite the fact that he had an MA in lit. and she had a PH.D in something - after a couple hours on Wikipedia trying to figure out how to edit something - they both gave up in irritation. You get the point? People want to be in, they don't know how to be in, and they will pay for it. Maybe instead of a big faceplant of Jimbo asking for money, you know what would be an easy way for you to raise money? DO WHAT WE'RE DOING AND SHUT ALL THE PAID EDITING HOUSES DOWN! You won't need to have Jim's face all over Wikipedia asking for money, trust me.Sunflowergal34 (talk) 17:46, 19 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts

Not much I can say in response to your agreement that you wrote and contribute schlock. No need to yell about it, though. --Kleopatra (talk) 18:20, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

As I understand it you're asking what "we" think of your business offering classes in how to edit wikipedia, lectures on wikipedia guidelines etc - so the ultimate aim is to make better editors, similar to an "introduction to computers course". I can't see anyone having any real issue with that. Not sure how commercially viable that would be but it's not my business (literally). I suppose the only problem would be if people are learning to use wikipedia to promote their own interests, and you are aware of that you would need to make them aware that what they would be doing would be a COI issue (and ultimately counterproductive) - since POV and promotional articles always look like spam shit to anyone with an ounce of sense...83.100.225.242 (talk) 18:09, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

What sort of client base were you aiming at?83.100.225.242 (talk) 18:13, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Not any clientele in particular. Like I said, everyone wants to either be in Wikipedia, or if their article is already up, they want it cleaned up. We've done articles for doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, professors, writers - and, yes, businesses. We've done bios, as well as pure information entries. We wouldn't be targeting any one market. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 21:37, 19 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts

I, for one, am happy to edit articles written about verifiably notable poeple and companies when there is a conflict of interest. If the article belongs on wikipedia, it belongs whoever does the writing. Send your MA and PhD to my talk page, and I will be glad to help. For free. --Kleopatra (talk) 18:21, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

@Kleopatra You're missing the point. You think it is easy for people to just "go to your userpage and request help" because you understand how to do this. The average person is quite technically illiterate. I work with people, believe it or not, who still don't know how to copy and paste things on a PC! Who don't know how to create an email signature in Outlook, for example. Who don't know what an address bar or a URL is. I'm not exaggerating. The average person, who could be more notable than Jesus Christ, does not know how to go to a talkpage and ask question unless it is made as clear as day. I think what we Wikipedians (notice I said "we") don't want to deal with is this fact: we really don't want anyone editing Wikipedia (though we say we do). Because if we really did, we would have made this site a lot easier, a lot more user-friendly, a long time ago. But we weren't really concerned with that, now were we? Perhaps we would have put all the rules and guidelines in one place, and not with cryptic URL syntaxes like /WP:COI so that no one but someone who frequented the site on a regular basis would even know where to look. But we weren't so concerned with that, were we? So, we are partly to blame for the emergence of the paid editing market, too. That's all I'm saying. But we don't seem to want to take any responsibility for this, because really it's just easier to place all the blame on the paid editors and castigate them, rather than see our part in it. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 21:50, 19 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts

No, Eric, I don't think it is easy to do this, just because I understand how to do this. First of all, I don't understand how to do most of this, and I use adapative devices with strict technological limitations to do my editing. So, how I do it is not applicable to how others do it. I do know, however, that many technically illiterate people get on wikipedia and try to create lasting articles. I know this because I help a lot of people get their articles to stay on wikipedia. As an IP editor, I've hung out around new articles, afc, and afd for years, helping people who just want an article on wikipedia. An article about themselves, or their grandmother, or their friend's company, or some minor singer they took a fancy to. If the topic is notable, and if it has verifiable references, then I'm all for it being on wikipedia, from diseases to buildings to South Asian villages and roads, from companies to minor opera singers. I help because I know people get terribly frustrated by the impossible chaos of wikipedia's rules and their arbitrary enforcement.

And, in spite of your contention that there's schlock in my back yard, there's none at the level I saw in the paid-writing articles. And I didn't take someone else's hard earned money in return for putting it on wikipedia. I don't read wikipedia review. I don't twitter. I haven't read your blog. You uploaded schlock for money. You admitted it. And you want us to know that we only caught 10% of the schlock. Nanner nanner nanner on us. There's not much else to say. --Kleopatra (talk) 00:32, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I admit that I'm coming into the middle of a conversation I wish I could read more of. However, my gut response to anyone who asks if it's okay to make money being a Wikipedia consultant is to ask, "Probably not -- if you intend to hire Wikipedians who have real experience with this project." A lot of us have opinions about the best way to write articles or handle policy issues, & I'm sure few of us would mind being paid to share those opinions -- especially since AFAIK no currently active editor makes a living writing Wikipedia articles. -- llywrch (talk) 07:47, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Wow. Why is it so difficult for you people to answer a question with a straight answer? I just ... don't get it. Maybe I never will. @Kleopatra @LLwrch, ok so you will edit for free. Great. Good for you. But why does that mean an editor who is paid for her knowledge/expertise, is in the wrong? (Not talking about paid editing, now; I'm talking about someone paying for you to teach or instruct them on how to do Wikipedia). I don't get it? We know that COI editing is strongly discouraged. But this wouldn't be COI editing. Where is the policy, the guideline, the set of essays on this? Surely, we've encountered this before? Surely, I'm not the only person who's asked these sorts of questions? Wikipedians are so wishy-washy when we ask you a simple question of what is acceptable use and what is not. But you are downright ready to crucify when someone just does something that is in a grey area, without consulting the community. That's just ... scary, if you ask me. Do you folks not see the suspect groupthink happening here? Or is it just me? Maybe it's me? What is it I'm not seeing? As a businessman, it seems to me a simple question: Is it a violation of policy to offer a Wikipedia class, webinar, or training - for pay - to teach a person how to edit an article, or not? If it's not, then let's keep it movin'. If it is, then this conversation can end here without taking up a single byte more. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 23:17, 20 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts

Maybe more a matter of ethos?

Maybe this is also a matter of Wikipedia ethos? Where are the essays on the Wikipedia ethos? Are there any? If not, I may have to write one. In all my years in association with Wikipedia, here are what I see as a few essential aspects of the Wikipedia ethos:

1. An article should develop in a granular way, bit by bit, one little piece at a time
2. Ideally, an article should develop over a long period of time, by many different editors contributing to it
3. An article really should not be either created in its entirety, or consider a finished product, if produced by only one editor
4. As a result of 3, single purpose accounts are viewed with suspicion and more thorough scrutiny
5. We obviously don't want a monied interest influencing an article in any way
6. We really believe that, if people want to contribute to Wikipedia, they should work hard, as the rest of us did, to learn the code, mores, rules, etc.
7. People who are unwilling to go through this process, it's not that they shouldn't be allowed to contribute, it's just that their contributions should be reviewed more harshly, for lack of a better word
8. Q.E.D. If somebody comes in here not understanding or respecting this ethos, then we will assume the content he contributes is in violation of either COI, NPOV, WP:NOT, WP:SPA, or what have you?

Does this get us closer? If so, I'll write an essay on this and post it somewhere and you guys can come in and add to, substract, revise, and we can post it somewhere at least as a poor start to something that may be lacking here. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 23:40, 20 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts

Wait!Wait! Lightbulb Coming On!

Wait a minute. I think I might be starting to see something in a different way here. Bear with me.

1. We offer a Wikipedia training course. That means,
2. Either the person we're teaching is wanting the knowledge to edit an article for himself or his business, etc.

Q.E.D. COI Violation

OR

2. The person, after getting the knowlegde, would have to find or hire someone else he knows to write his Wikipedia article for him.

Q.E.D., A meatpuppet/sockpuppet violation (or at best still a COI)

OR

2. The person would have to come to Wikipedia and find an impartial editor and ask h/er to help him get the article up, anyway

Q.E.D., in which case, our service is unnecessary to begin with.

Q.E.D., the only way to offer a class like this would basically be to say: "Go to a Wikipedia userpage of an editor and just ask them for help.

Or, create a userspace, write the first few sentences of your article, and then just put the {{help}} tag up top, and wait.

Q.E.D., this would be a shitty class . LOL

Q.E.D., The defense rests, your honor.

Sunflowergal34 (talk) 00:04, 21 December 2010 (UTC) Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts

Listen buddy - you already know the rules on wikipedia. Your business ethics are your concern not ours.83.100.225.242 (talk) 13:23, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not talking about business ethics. I was talking about rules and ethos of Wikipedia. And your rules say nothing about a company offering Wikipedia training courses for pay. That's what I'm asking about. Can you contribute something meaningful to the discussion, or do you just want to bark at me? Sunflowergal34 (talk) 15:02, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Eric, would you mind changing your sig so that you're not promoting your company with every edit you sign? Thanks. Also, why has no one blocked you for evading the blocks on your other accounts? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 13:59, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

You see, this is why people can't stand you folks. I put my name here, not to promote my company, but so everyone here will know it is me. We've had so many accounts banned as socks or meatpuppets, that I'm trying to do the right thing and make sure you know it's me you're talking to, and not someone else using this account. Because, this account was orig. created by a staff member, not me. This account wasn't banned because BereanHunter is assuming good faith - which is more than I can say for the rest of you. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 15:02, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

And you obviously didn't read this part of my confession which is on my userpage:

• In all likelihood I will create a new account (or simply use this one [sunflowergal34] should you decide to let it stay, which something tells me you wont :) and become a real (i.e., acceptable) Wikipedia editor. I enjoy editing articles. Always did. Even from the very beginning. I haven't done much editing lately (save for the Solve Media article you'll see in my contribs; that was only uploaded, not written and coded, by me; so yes that makes this account technically a sock, I know, have at it ;), since building a business and hiring other editors, but I still very much enjoy it. I also enjoy the lively debates that happen here. It will be nice to participate in these debates without any monied interests or ulterior motives. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 15:12, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I have, as it happens, participated in teaching an interested group how to edit Wikipedia. In my case, it was with a seminar for the archivists at the Smithsonian Institution, under the auspices of our D.C. group, but the same principal could apply commercially. I would not hesitate if asked by the project to teach a group of corporate hacks how to use the tools and follow our guidelines for style and inclusion in exchange for a sizable donation being made to WMF. bd2412 T 15:53, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I've reported you to WP:ANI for block evasion. Also it seems clear to me that you know what the rules are on wikipedia regarding WP:COI, and that giving lessons in wikipedia is not a problem - if your problem is whether or not to give lessons to people who you know or suspect will break wp:coi etc then that is a business ethics problem, not ours. There doesn't seem to be anything else wikipedia needs to tell you. I really don't think you are in a position to troll us here on the Village pump so please stop. If your business has a problem then don't take it out on wikipedians because it's not our fault it's yours. Thank you very much.83.100.225.242 (talk) 16:32, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I am not trolling the Village Pump. I didn't even originally put this RfC here, it was on my talkpage, for your information. Furthermore, it was suggested to me to bring up the RfC here by user:Berean_Hunter . I am not trolling anything.

Let me tell you the honest truth. When we first started editing Wikipedia for pay, we didn't know it was a COI. That's the honest truth. It was only way later, after we had built up a client base, that we found this out. I have never told my staff to just blatantly, knowingly, violate any of Wikipedia's rules. Where we got tripped up and started acting less than honorably, was mostly in reaction to the hypocrisy, biting, harsh criticism of Wikipedians. All I'm saying is: take responsibility for your part. We're taking responsibility for our part.

Furthemore, you know more about me than I do you. You don't even use name, you don't even have a talk page set up. No one knows anything about you. Are you an admin? Why are you even here? Meanwhile you know a whole lot about me. You know my name, my business name, many of the articles we've done. You know a whole lot about me; I know nothing about you. Does that look like someone who's purposefully trying to "break the rules?" Does it look like someone who is acting in bad faith? Does it look like I'm trying to evade a block? Your argument doesn't even make any sense?? If I were trying to evade a block, would I have told you who I was? My goodness! Can you make a logical, rational argument - one that takes into account the facts? Or, did you just report me for block evasion, just out of spite? Berean Hunter , RHaworth, either one of these admins could have blocked me already. They chose not to - after my telling them who I am and confessing. So, what sense does it make for you to report me for ban evasion? See, it's behavior like this - on your part - that you don't want to take any responsibility for, and which leads people to just say "screw them, we're gonna do what we want." Why can't you see that you're not helping the issue? Sunflowergal34 (talk) 17:03, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

(I don't know you real name etc - I haven't looked - maybe you've posted it somewhere don't know)- what I do know is that what you've done since you started editing wikipedia under the new editor name is discuss yourself, and your company, and not make any real contributions to wikipedia. It's easy to create a new editor name, and start working. You could be the worst vandal in wikipedia's history, but provided you make a fresh start and don't go around telling people what you used to do nobody will ever know...

Not true. I looked at a bunch of new pages, I added the newpage patroller on my userpage, even added a sentence to an article on Ed Pinnance whom i couldn't care less about. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 17:36, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Regarding making it easier to edit wikipedia - you can write a guide to that if you want to, and if you want to publish it online (here) for free. Please don't blame it on other wikipedians that such an "how to get started made easy guide" doesn't exist - make it yourself - that is the ethos of wikipedia.

We have no problem making it, but we are a for-profit firm. We (unlike you) don't just make stuff for free. That's what I'm asking.

If you want to make contributions please do, but if you want to waste time on matters that primarily concern you and your company don't be suprised that I've assumed that your not actually interested in helping wikipedia. As an uninvolved outsider I can tell you that your post here looks like you are seeking some sort of tacit permission to continue the same behaviour that got you and your company blocked in the first place.83.100.225.242 (talk) 17:16, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not primarily interested in helping Wikipedia! Are you ... have you not been listening?! I'm primarily interested in keeping my business from going down the tubes, from having to fire everybody, and for keeping a roof over my head. But I don't see how that is the point. Show me in your policies or guidelines where it says "an editor must care about helping Wikipedia in order to edit here."??? Sunflowergal34 (talk) 17:36, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Alright. Fair enough. It is not what you say, but I see how you could see that. It's because you haven't looked at the entire history of this. But no matter.

Whoever you are, I want you to know, I'm not scurred. (That's ebonics for, I don't know who you think you are, but you need to get off your high horse). I could report you for SPA. Who are you? I don't see any edit history. Are you a newbie? If so, how do you know about Villahe Pump and how this goes here? How do you even know how to edit this page? Maybe I should suspect you as a sockpuppet? Maybe I should report you in violation of WP:CIV?

I'm only being rhetorical here, before you decide to report me for something else. I'm just saying, you don't run the show; I'm here asking an honest set of questions; trying to get clear on the whats and whys of your policies. I have a right to be here, to speak, to express my opinions, and to ask for guidance and help. I am not being uncivil, I am not breaking any rules by being here. I've seen RfCs go over for hundreds of pages here full of what I might call nonsense. That isn't a grounds for reporting anybody for anything. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 17:28, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Actually editing wikipedia in a beneficial way would help convince me. Not interested in rhetoric sorry.83.100.225.242 (talk) 17:34, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Just to state it explicitly again "training people for money or for free to use wikipedia is not a problem".

Thank you! A clear, concise answer. But I want to know what the many think, not just you. That's why I posted this here to begin with!! jeez! Sunflowergal34 (talk) 17:36, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

We already have an article on it Wikipedia:Ethics. (hahahahaha) ethics is your problem, seriously, you really need to think about it. 83.100.225.242 (talk) 17:41, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

What is a problem is when Wikipedia:Conflict of interest issues arise, please read that article. There is a sentence in the first paragraph of that page that is bolded which appears it could relate directly to you. You have the best knowledge about your aims, so please decide for yourself whether you can operate within wikipedia guidlines. 83.100.225.242 (talk) 17:24, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

This was very helpful. Thanks. I never saw that set of essays on Ethics. Basically, as I read them, if an editor's primary objective is to benefit the encyclopedia, to make it better, then that's good editing. But if his objective is to advance an interest other than the integrity of the encyclopedia, then he stands in COI. Is that correct? Sunflowergal34 (talk) 17:58, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Bingo. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 14:48, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm going to rest now. On behalf of me and Gnosis Arts, we will not offer any type of training course. We will not do anything that even gets anywhere near the grey area of COI. I want to be a regular, normal old editor. I didn't even want to bring this up here; only did because my staff keeps bothering me about it. But I guess I'll just have to put my foot down with them and say, "Sorry, folks, our reign of terror on Wikipedia - is over." LOL.

But seriously, I will probably patrol pages now for COI violations. I think there is a lot more of this going on than just somebody getting paid to write an article, after this discussion. A New Page Patroller on the lookout for COI violations. I'm coming after Chauvinists, political operatives, SPAs, agenda-pushers, people with an axe to grind. Here I come, baby! Ha! If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? 68.192.169.177 (talk) 20:18, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Oops! Forgot to log in. Don't worry, it's still me. Sunflowergal34 (talk) 20:21, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Artificial Section Break for Quick Reference

Oh, one last thing. that Wikipedia Experts site - we are in no way affiliated with them. Let's bust them, too, while we're at it. :) Sunflowergal34 (talk) 20:26, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Might I suggest that the link above be changed to something a bit more neutral, like "that company mentioned in the 2010-12-20 issue of the Wikipedia Signpost". This would give less undue promotion to a specific outside commercial entity, and allow discussions about the general issue. Disclosure: I work for the company mentioned in the 2010-12-20 issue of the Wikipedia Signpost. No other comment at this time.     Eclipsed   (talk)   (code of ethics)     17:40, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

"Financial performance" sections.

Following a post at the help desk, I noticed that the page Sainsbury's has an extensive "financial performance" section, which struck me as too detailed. I deleted it with a similar rationale, but was reverted. I'd made the post below to the talk page when I realised that a good deal of pages - at least British Airways and M&S, and probably more - have similar sections:

I removed the Financial performance section and was reverted. I consider this statistical detail too, well, detailed for an encyclopaedia, which attempts to maintain a general interest. Wikipedia is not a complete exposition of all possible details; it doesn't list, for example, the league table finishes in each year for football teams. Such detail would be contained in specialist works on the subject, similarly, this financial details must have a place somewhere in literature, just not here. I'd think a graph would be a suitable compromise, since any change in figures might be suitable for an encyclopaedia. Clearly, my view is not universal. What do others think?

And so I ask. I also note that eps is specifically one thing unlikely to be relevant to the vast majority of readers.- Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 21:00, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I've seen both done - including the removal of all financial info except the current year - actually I prefer to have the data going back many years rather than a current snapshot.(so I'm sort of in favour of it). I note the info seems unreferenced which isn't good.

What I'd say is that it doesn't kill the article - it's not actually a bad addition, so maybe just live and let live - not perfect - but a recipy for a less stressfull editing experience on wikipedia.

I've never seen this issue nailed to any guidelines.

Have you tried Wikipedia:WikiProject Finance or Wikipedia:WikiProject Business for guidance or advice on the topic in general. I bet they could give you some info on how much finance info is considered normal or acceptable.Sf5xeplus (talk) 02:28, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Note this might be something editors have been doing on British articles - companies such as Siemens, General Electric, Samsung Group, Sony etc don't have such detail in general.Sf5xeplus (talk) 02:31, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

I tend to agree that, as tabular data, its probably too technical. It would be better if this was presented as a prose description of the financial performance of the company - e.g. Sales decreased X% between 2008 and 2010, etc. Mr.Z-man 21:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Happy holidays everybody!

I'd like to wish everybody at Wikipedia a happy holidays. It's been another interesting, enlightening, and all too squirrelly year here. Good luck in the next one! Cheers.—RJH (talk) 18:22, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Happy holidays to you as well RJH, and best wishes to all. - BanyanTree 08:10, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

where can i request edit-protected when a talk page is protected as well?

both water fluoridation and water fluoridation controversy are protected :(

i am trying to suggest an addition: "Serum Fluoride Level and Children's Intelligence Quotient in Two Villages in China", Quanyong Xiang, Youxin Liang, Bingheng Chen in Environmental Health Perspectives

188.2.166.104 (talk) 17:28, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

You could also ask one of the regular editors of the pages to add it for you. User talk:Gwen Gale protected the talk page, so you can ask her to do the edit. Or an issue for Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:10, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I really doubt it will happen because this IP happens to be from the range of IPs that has been attacking those articles, and is thus the very reason for the semi-protection. Now if the IP would register they'd have better conditions. -- Brangifer (talk) 21:28, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Suspected sock of indef blocked User:Freedom5000. -- Brangifer (talk) 22:23, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

please be careful with accusations BullRangifer. 188.2.166.104 (talk) 02:31, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Small edit request

Please help I think that {{Infobox war faction}} is adding extra line breaks, e.g. 19th of April Movement. Can someone fix this? Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:28, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Whoops I figured it out. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:29, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

What's that (sourcing-related) template?

Resolved

 – Found it.

Does anyone know the name of that verification related template that would highlight a text segment as needing verification? I forget exactly how it highlighted (color, selection?) exactly. It was kinda a niche tool. It isn't the current {{citation needed}} or {{verify source}}. I wonder if it might've been changed to redirect to another template. Does anyone know the one I mean? –Whitehorse1 15:24, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

• Think I found it by looking through WP:V talk archives. Looks like it's {{reference necessary}} or one its see alsos {{cn-span}}. –Whitehorse1 16:26, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

BBC World Service

The BBC's international radio station will be broadcasting a one-hour documentary on the history and evolution of Wikipedia, six times between Friday 14th and Saturday 15th January. Click here for the times. From Sunday 16th, you should be able to listen online here Anthony (talk) 15:47, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Automatic taxoboxes

Your input is requested in a final round of testing at Template talk:Automatic taxobox/Archive 8#Ready to release?. We are looking for volunteers to check for problems with the code before it is released. Thanks! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 10:40, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

About {{Recent changes article requests}} (again!)

Now again there're some blue links on the template (not redirects): Post-Kantian philosophy, Hirter, Constitutive ablation, Mean-shift algorithm, King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell, Maladi Olaad, 500-channel universe,Xenodiagnosis. Please replace them with Agriculture in Ukraine, Agriculture in Hungary, Agriculture in Switzerland,Agriculture in Finland, Agriculture in Norway, Agriculture in Denmark, Agriculture in the Netherlands,Agriculture in Italy.--RekishiEJ (talk) 10:16, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

And OlEnglish, please restore the blue links you removed which you do not make any substitutions and replace them with red links on disambiguation pages, lists, navigational templates and subpages of WP:RA and WP:MEA, as there are still many notable topics which do not have independent articles here, such as experimental sociology and experimental animation.--RekishiEJ (talk) 10:30, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Inflation calculator function - reliable?

Not being willing to squander an hour of my life searching for the template page itself, and concerned about putting out bad information to readers, wish somebody would take a look at the article Class I railroad. I was about to delete all the totally unsourced references to "$x equals $y today" because who the heck knows what "today" is - whenever this article was first written? Last week?

But when I went to the edit page, I discovered that all those values are generated by a function that looks like this: ". . . at least $1 million (equal to ${formatnum:{Inflation|US|1000000|1935} today)."

Does anyone know if this number generator is continuously updating the numbers displayed on the article page year by year to keep up with the pace of inflation? Or is it based on a one-time calculation, say from 2006 maybe, that is out of date now? It's not really worth my time to track all this down, but I thought maybe somebody more mathematically minded would want to investigate. Textorus (talk) 00:50, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

The number generator is the template {{Inflation}}, the USD data for which comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The source seems pretty reliable, and the Consumer Price Index is updated every year. Although I'm no economist, the variation between months of the same year seem negligible for the most part. Intelligentsium 01:16, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I see from the template that it does change the values displayed in article pages each year as the source figures are updated. Cool, that answers my question, thanks bud. Textorus (talk) 02:43, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Suggestions

I am a software professional and i would like to give one advice as i spend almost 8-10 hours daily on wikipedia reading various articles and sometimes when i read an article i feel that i should thanks to the guy who edited it or provided that info ...so can u add a Tab where we can give Kudos to the Editor or we can rate the page according to the Content provided in it ...that will also make us arrange the articles according to their Ratings ...

Second Opinion : i would like to say that we should do something to increase the User participation /interaction with the website

Why Dont we create a Website like "Wikigames " ..where user can play interactive games which will enhance his knowledge as well like Fun trivia games .....etc etc ..i think that will help to increase the penetration among the Users as wikipedia can become a Fun place to learn ....and sometimes people can learn more by playing games or any interactive application ....

i will really appreciate if u can go through the Suggestion if possible and feasible ....

thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Anuragsiddhu (talk • contribs) 06:45, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

About your second suggestion: Wikipedia is a project to create an encyclopedia, not a project to create games. Games on user pages have been tried in the past, but the Wikipedia community has decided that these are not appropriate. See WP:UP#GAMES and WP:NOTGAMEHOST for more information. Now, having said that, there is a Category:Wikipedia games that you might be interested in. —Bkell (talk) 15:30, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Seems like something that might work at some Wikia, maybe; you can look into that if you're interested. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 06:15, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

About your first suggestion, I believe the gods that be are working on (trialling, indeed) such a thing as part (at the moment) of the public policy initiative. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 11:27, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Pittsburgh banner

I have a banner at the top of my watchlist right now informing me about the next Pittsburgh meetup, and I think I've gotten a similar message before. This is interesting to me, because as far as I know I've never explicitly tagged myself as a "Wikipedian in Pittsburgh" or anything like that, although I do note on my user page that I'm a student at Carnegie Mellon University. So is it just a coincidence, or does Wikipedia somehow know that I live in Pittsburgh? If so, how? Does it go by IP address? I was under the impression that, for privacy reasons, logged-in users are not normally associated with IP addresses by the MediaWiki software, except for purposes of CheckUser and things like that. —Bkell (talk) 16:56, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

I believe it's by IP address, and in this case, it's not like your location is being shared; the system obviously knows your IP address and is advertising to you based on that, but the only way someone else would know you had received that banner would be for you to share it. So if that's the case, no privacy is being lost. --Golbez (talk) 17:04, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

The server has to know your IP address, or it couldn't get the page to your computer. It appears that the server is also using that information to adjust the page contents. Similar things are done with the fundraiser: different ads run in different countries. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:53, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

style: dates and date-ranges

Is there a good reason to prefer

from the 17th to the 19th century	over	from 1630 to 1815
before the end of the 19th century		before 1900
in the late 1960s and early 1970s		circa 1970

? This isn't a policy question, but it bugs me to go out of one's way to increase verbiage and vagueness, and I'm wondering whether it's merely the first phrase that came to the writer's mind, or has some value that I'm not seeing. —Tamfang (talk) 23:04, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

The right is better on the first two, assuming the years are correct. The first makes no sense; a set of solid values is being replaced with a two hundred year range. The second is way too verbose to portray the same info. The only one I'm possibly with the left is the last one; "circa 1970" implies it started on or around 1970, but the start date is unknown, whereas "in the late 1960s to..." states that the start date is known at least to be prior to 1970. So, depending on the actual content, either one may be more correct, but they are not synonyms. --Golbez (talk) 14:33, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I am reminded of the MOS when it suggests that there is a subtle difference between saying that a city has a population of 1,000,000 and a population of one million (or whatever the example is). - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 11:51, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

I'll merrily lead the pack against false precision – and against false imprecision. —Tamfang (talk) 05:50, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I wish there were a generally-recognized wild digit (rather than 0). I sometimes write 197x but that won't do for Wikipedia. —Tamfang (talk) 07:39, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Keep Wiki free

What does "Keep Wiki(pedia)/Meta free mean? It is at the top of Wiki pages, along with requests for donations. Yes, yes, I know that this might not not be the right place to ask, but I have created a user account, looked at FAQ, checked so many Wiki pages that my browser history is full of Wiki. I do not know where to send this question. No options I've seen for feedback are appropriate. I love Wiki, but right now I'm so wiped I can barely type, and I am not going to waste any more time attempting to get my "free from what?" question answered. For what, to what - whatever.

A bit more ranting before I close... this experience reminds me of changes in the Wall Street Journal. An example: page D1 of the 12/28/10 issue has an article headline which reads "Long Finger Linked To Cancer Risk, Study Finds." The article's first sentence informs us that the longer finger referred to is linked to a lower prostate cancer risk. Is that what you would conclude from skimming the headline? Where have the proofreaders/editors gone? (No, I am not a proofreader; I just don't want to pause and re-read in an attempt to clarify ambiguous information.)

Maneuvering through your webpages is giving me the same kind of feeling, of going in circles and getting nowhere.

Mocklair — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mocklair (talk • contribs) 10:59, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Firstly, it's Wikipedia, not Wiki. As for "keep Wikipedia free", it means "please donate so that we don't have to charge subscriptions for maintaining the servers". Both that, and your WSJ example, seem pretty self-explainatory. Anyhoo, the main purpose of a headline is to attract attention quickly, not convey information. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 18:27, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

To sum it up, free means accessible without charge and void of external advertisements. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 18:37, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

2011 WikiCup

The WikiCup competition will be closing to new participants shortly. Click here to sign up today! ~AH1^(TCU) 19:20, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Public Domain Day 2011

It is now January 1st in North America, which makes it Public Domain Day! Today all published works by artists who died in 1940 enter the public domain, so feel free to upload any media by these artists directly to Commons and use them in articles. We're making a list of them at: commons:Commons:Village_pump#Public_Domain_Day_2011. Thanks for any help! Dcoetzee 22:40, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't think these works automatically fall into the public domain in the United States—see my reply at the Commons thread. —Bkell (talk) 00:47, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I think you're right, unfortunately - although misuse of PD-old-70 and PD-old tags is as rampant here on En as it is on Commons, and I think a review will have to be conducted at some point. Dcoetzee 01:22, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Fledgling Jason Steed

"Why does Wikipedia carry articles on seemingly non-notable books such as Whispering to Witches, yet repeatedly deletes an article on Fledging Jason Steed - a book which has been named as a favourite by stars such as Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift on the Ellen show, and by Malia Obama on the Teen Zone show?[11] Steed seems to meet at least the minimum Wikipedia book notability guidlines, including reviews by Wikipedia-approved "reliable sources" such as Kirkus,[12] and being stocked at more than 70 libraries across America,[13]. Yet, however, it is repeatedly deleted by Wikipedia within minutes of articles being created. --80.176.190.43"

This comment was placed at the Wikipedia help desk a couple of days ago. I was very interested to see what replies might be given, but very little so far. Does anyone else have any comments?--BullLane (talk) 15:54, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure that if the article on Whispering to Witches was sent to AfD, it would have the same fate as the article on the book the IP is complaining about. It simply a matter of no one noticing and nominating it yet. —Farix (t | c) 17:55, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

The status of Whispering to Witches is really irrelevant to whether Fledgling Jason Steed is retained or not. The latter article apparently failed to establish notability per WP standards. See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fledgling Jason Steed (2nd nomination). Sounds like if suitable sources are provided, it may re-created.—RJH (talk) 17:57, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

How do you insert text which is visible only in the edit mode?

I've seen it done, but I don't remember what the software codes are to designate something as a hidden remark. HowardMorland (talk) 14:43, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

See WP:COMMENT. You can also use an Editnotice. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:47, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Many thanks. That's what I was looking for. HowardMorland (talk) 14:53, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

<!-- insert hidden comment here--> is the simple answer for those of you watching at home. Beeblebrox (talk)

Need help welcoming newbies

Our List of common misconceptions has been mentioned on XKCD,[14] a high-traffic web site. The number of edits to this article have increased by many orders of magnitude. If you have the time (and patience!) to welcome the newbies and explain our policies and guidelines to them, your assistance is appreciated. Thanks. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 00:49, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

About {{Recent changes article requests}} (again!)

Now again there're some blue links on the template (not redirects): Post-Kantian philosophy, Hirter, Constitutive ablation, Mean-shift algorithm, King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell, Maladi Olaad, 500-channel universe, Xenodiagnosis. Please replace them with Agriculture in Ukraine, Agriculture in Hungary, Agriculture in Switzerland, Agriculture in Finland, Agriculture in Norway, Agriculture in Denmark, Agriculture in the Netherlands, Agriculture in Italy.--RekishiEJ (talk) 10:16, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

And OlEnglish, please restore the blue links you removed which you do not make any substitutions and replace them with red links on disambiguation pages, lists, navigational templates and subpages of WP:RA and WP:MEA, as there are still many notable topics which do not have independent articles here, such as experimental sociology and experimental animation.--RekishiEJ (talk) 10:30, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

If you do not know which red links can be used to replace the blue links you removed before, you may use red links on Wikipedia:Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences/Computer science, computing, and Internet, especially the software section, as there are many notable software which do not have independent articles in English Wikipedia, such as Advanced BKF Repair, Advanced Exchange Recovery, Advanced Outlook Express Repair, Copywhiz, Driver Genius Professional Edition, MainType, PE Explorer and SpAsm.--RekishiEJ (talk) 07:55, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

FFS. The {{Recent changes article requests}} temlate has been updated for the past many years without need for this ridiculously prescriptive advice on the village pump. Red links turn blue, and are replaced by more red links. The process does not need your input in this forum, RekishiEJ. Indeed, from the looks of it, the selection of links is based on a script acting on the corpus of links at {{Recent changes article requests/full}}. If you want to do something useful, you could monitor that list and delete blue links from it; and refill it with redlinks from the sources indicated in {{Recent changes article requests}}--Tagishsimon (talk) 15:18, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

But to alter the links inside the template I must be an administrator or bureaucrat, but I'm now just an autoconfirmed user (I just want to be a Wikipedian, not an administrator!).--RekishiEJ (talk) 10:24, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

{{Recent changes article requests/list}} - which as I understand it is the place to change the list of article titles from which selections are made by the template - is not protected and you (or an IP) can edit it. I would ask you, in view of your contributions here to date, to make very sure that you know what you're doing before you do it, since you're not showing a very great deal of understanding of the the process right now. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:30, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I truly wanted to edit the template, but a message box showed up saying :

This page is currently protected from editing because it is transcluded in the following page, which is protected with the "cascading" option:

Template:Recent changes article requests

--RekishiEJ (talk) 18:49, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Okay; apologies. Seems it's me who hasn't a clue. You're right; it's locked. Which is a pest. So my best suggestion is to find something else to do. It may be worth suggesting on the template talk that the protection level for the /list page seems a bit high, and might be better as "Pending-changes level 2 with Semi-protection", and not cascaded from the template's "Full protection". It does not seem right that someone who has been here since 2006 should not be able to edit it. See also Template_talk:Recent_changes_article_requests#Protection_change_request. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:41, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

biography of a living person

Please see "the knot in my handkerchief" under User:Crowsnest/Work list. A living person's name is referenced. Shouldn't that name be protected from defamation of character in a manner similar to the warning banner placed on the discussion page of all biographies? Does anyone really believe that the evidence used in a "sock" case at WP even starts to approach the evidence rules in a court of law? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.82.64.32 (talk) 04:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

I can't see any "living person's name" being referenced, but in any case, in answer to your question, no, a 'sock' case may very well not "approach the evidence rules in a court of law". It doesn't have to. (or if it does, this is the wrong place to ask, we can't give legal advice). AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:19, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Please make your allegation more explicit. —Tamfang (talk) 06:41, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Agreed; I fail to see any serious issues with this subpage. Kansan (talk) 20:50, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

You could also try, you now, talking to the person whose subpage it is. I have now notified them of this discussion. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:51, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

I removed the discussed info regarding the sock case from my work page, since there exist objections. Which I would also have done if asked. It was a __NOINDEX__ page anyhow. -- Crowsnest (talk) 21:06, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

You are clearly one of the most brilliant people on here which our biophysicist friend essentially shows in his reference to u at www.gewp.org . IDK what the namespace is for tags, but why add something like "not as famous as George Washington" as u seem to be expunging his name around WP? Why not add to the encyclopedia instead of starting another monkey trial in Kansas? Look at his litigation record. Why provoke him? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.82.64.18 (talk) 21:31, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

I do not take your legal threats seriously. -- Crowsnest (talk) 08:54, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

No threat is intended. Let me restate: Why make this George Washington remark on a Biography of a Living Person? And, as both of you have ocean wave power interests, why not let someone else do this editing? GEWP is PD. So with out ur real name how can u clear urself of patent interests? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.82.64.16 (talk) 23:37, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Let it go. Or go and have your discussion somewhere else. This is no longer a matter for the village pump. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:58, 6 January 2011 (UTC)