Wikipedia talk:FAQ

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See Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia FAQ for older discussion and questions and answers that need to be polished up.

Contents

[edit] Older discussion

I want to expand and re-organize the FAQ into subsections.One reason is to make it easier to incorporate questions and answers from Wikipedia:Village pump. Here are the categories to begin with:

  • General: general questions about wikis and Wikipedia
  • Using Wikipedia: directed at our readers
  • Contributing to Wikipedia: questions of interest to current or potential Wikipedians
  • Administration: who decides policy, what are sysops, etc.
  • Technical: software, server, etc.
  • Problems, criticisms and suspicions: forks, how do I know you won't do some evil things with my work, etc.
  • Misc: everything else

Many of the questions will already have entire pages devoted to the answer; in these cases, it's simply a matter of writing a short answer and a link to the appropriate page.

Comments, suggestions and (especially) help are requested. --Stephen Gilbert 02:35 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

I like your suggestion. This is something that needs to be done - the FAQ is unusably long. --mav


Excellent idea! I suggest you be bold, put those categories in and we'll start rearranging the questions to fit! Perhaps "Newcomers" or "Basics" or "Overview" instead of "General"? -- Tarquin


There's a 2nd FAQ page at Wikipedia:Other frequent questions. We should perhaps reorganize these two pages to be (1) General FAQ for newcomers, and (2) FAQ for people who have decided to join the project. -- Tarquin

Toby, I notice that over on Wikipedia:FAQ you changed the "Using Wikipedia" link to "Reading", noting that you get something out of contributing, too. I called it "Using" to cover questions a little broader than simply looking up topics; I was thinking about how people could use material from Wikipedia in their own projects, etc. Are you terribly opposed to the word "Using"? :) --Stephen Gilbert

I see your point as to why "Reading" is not the best term either. So now I don't like either of them ^_^. I guess that "Using" is probably the better one, but I'll still try to think of something better still before you get around to creating that page. — Toby 05:14 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Wait, how about this?:

Since it's only natural that the readers of an encyclopædia do more than just reading — they use its material in their projects, etc. The downside is that it implies a division between readers and contributors, but we just have to remember that all of us wear different hats at different times. — Toby 05:19 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Good idea, Toby. And I'm not sure what else we can call "people who browse but don't edit" other than "readers". "browsers" seems a bit rude; implies they're either casual or related to Internet Explorer. Besides, the "readers' FAQ" can emphasise that readers can become contributors... at the drop of a hat, as it were ;-) -- Tarquin
I take offense at the notion that "browser" and Internet Explorer are somehow synonymous. There are many browsers other than IE. BTW, "reader" gets my vote too. --mav (on Konqueror 2.2.2)
Internet Explorer is a browser. A person who browses is a browser. Thus, they are in the "browser" family and are related. In other words, it was a joke. Lighten up, mav. :) --Stephen Gilbert (on Galeon 1.25)
It was a joke, and I use Mozilla & encourage people to switch from IE to anything at every turn. :-) -- Tarquin
It sounds good to me. I don't think it draws too hard a line between reading and contributing; it's just a division of convenience. If we want to get pedantic, the Technical FAQ could go under contributing, since doing software work is contributing to the project too. :) --Stephen Gilbert 01:18 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)


Great job so far! I've moved all the "Other Frequent Questions" into "Miscellaneous", so everything falls under a common scheme of pages. The "Miscellaneous" page will need sorting; plenty of those can fit under one of the categories. -- Tarquin 23:17 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)
I've been sorting through them and moving them to the appropriate categories. This is going to take some time; I've been checking all the pages that the FAQ(s) link to, and most of them need some heavy refactoring. It's turning into a complete Wikipedia documentation upgrade :) --Stephen Gilbert 01:28 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)


It's been needed for some time! I'm treating Wikipedia:Utilities as a hub of sorts; I gave that a clean a few weeks ago. -- Tarquin

Here are other pages that need to be incorporated (for my own reference, mostly):

--Stephen Gilbert 12:00 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

Personally, I think having one large index of FAQs that points to various pages would be more useful than the current set of different FAQs, where it's often difficult to guess in which FAQ a particular information is placed, and where you have to search different ones to see if a question is already covered before adding it. It only gets too long if we put the answers on the same page, which we shouldn't do anyway (just a max. two-sentence answer with a link). --Eloquence 03:40 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

"These documents refer primarily to the English Wikipedia; the Wikipedias in other languages may have their own specific FAQs."

Well why should it be any different between the English Wikipedia and other Wikipedias? The FAQ would need to be translated but shouldn't the content be the same?

Brianjd 09:43, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, this is quite pointless, but I just have to ask... do you really say "two hundred and ten thousand" in English (as opposed to "ten thousand and two hundred")?

LjL 22:13, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] How to pronounce Wikipedia?

I think that this is an unanswered FAQ. -- ChongDae 07:07, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

  • I have a possible answer; according to American English rendering of the word, it may be pronounced "wi-ki-pee-di-uh". --SuperDude 22:13, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] popularity

Is Wikipedia the most popular Wiki? --SuperDude 22:14, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

I think so. Everyone uses it.  — Invisible Robot Fish! 18:48, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent negative publicity of Wikipedia

What has been the impact of the recent bad press that wikipedia has had, or is having, on popularity, usefulness etc here?

[edit] Length

Is there a max length to a page??? -—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.109.206.88 (talk • contribs).

answered at user page. -Quiddity 23:37, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Image

How do you change the image in the top-left corner? Tampo 00:42, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I got it to work but the part that says,

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is double and it looks messy. If you want to see for yourself, paste this:

#p-logo a { background: url(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Gold-Wikipedia.png/146px-Gold-Wikipedia.png) 35% 50% no-repeat !important; }


into your monobook.css. Tampo 00:50, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Permanent content

Is there a way to add permanent content at the top? Because everybody keeps removing that line and on HRWiki they have permanent content at the top. — Invisible Robot Fish! 01:41, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Taking Back a Barnstar Awarded

I awarded a user a Barnstar but his behavior shortly after receiving the Barnstar completely contradicted the reason for the award. Can I take back the Barnstar? Ptmccain 15:10, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:Help desk may be a better place to ask. Zarniwoot 17:25, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] taylor gries

taylor gries believes in god but she dosent know anything about him. like i ask her how did christina spread she said "i dont know i think god spread it" i also ask her do u believe in sex before marriage she said "no but i did it already and god frogave me" so as you can see she really is brain washed by the church... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Hauppauge1988 (talk • contribs) 14:02, 12 December 2006 (UTC).

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