Wikipedia:Village pump/April 2003 archive 2

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Here's one for the group. I'd like to discuss the effect printing (of Bibles in venacular tongues) had on the impact of nation states. ie: Those areas that got a bible in their own tongue, retained identity even though subsumed to the larger coalescing nations surrounding them, enough so that some of them eventually attained their own nationhood (and others are still fighting for theirs). Looked at publishing, looked at gutenberg, betting bible is gonna be a literal holy war. Nation State? Well, not really. And it's not much more than that gussied up, and a few examples. So where should it go? ~ender 2003-04-14 03:21 MST

The only general article I could think of would be nationalism. However, if you have a lot to contribute, you could start an article specifically devoted to the topic, something like The effect of Bible publication on nations, with brief paragraphs linking to it from publishing, Bible and/or nationalism. -- Stephen Gilbert 15:04 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

Christoffer Carstanjen should be in the september 11 wiki, but I don't know how to move it there. LittleDan

Another request for the developers, I think... can we get it set so the "Editing help" link at the bottom of the editing page goes directly to Wikipedia:How to edit a page, and skips the redirect at Wikipedia:How does one edit a page? That might save a bit of wear & tear on the database. -- John Owens 10:49 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

What's up with the Wiki? Links to non-existant articles (eg floobar) now look the same as links to real articles, and the "minor edit" checkbox is gone from the bottom of the edit page. Looked in a few Wiki info pages, but didn't see any mention of a major software change. Dachshund 14:15 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

Apologies, scratch that. I wasn't logged in when I noticed those "problems", and apparently non-logged-in users get different treatment. I understand the lack of a "minor edit" box, but why do the links work differently? Dachshund 14:18 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)
I'm logged out at the moment, but see links to non-existant articles as usual (i.e. a different colour from those to existing articles.) -- sannse

I just received a database error while searching for wikipedia is not [1]. Here's the message (even though I think the error can be reproduced):

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text FROM cur,searchindex WHERE cur_id=si_page AND ( (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST ('wikipedia')) NOT ) AND cur_namespace IN (0) LIMIT 0, 50
from within function "SearchEngine::showResults". MySQL returned error "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ') AND cur_namespace IN (0) LIMIT 0, 50' at line 1".

-- Notheruser 20:58 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

It seems that error occurs with all boolean keywords (which were disabled). I'm not sure if it should dump that error though. -- Notheruser 21:36 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

I would like to have sysop status, so I don't have to keep asking all you nice people to do little things for me. Kingturtle 02:58 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

What sort of sick idiot uses the name of a recently dead person as a user nickname? I'm talking about the repulsive User:RachelCorrie nickname. We didn't say when picking names you could not use the name of a dead person because no-one could have imagined anyone would have been sick enough to do such a thing. I only hope none of her family do a google search and find that some idiot used their dead daughter or family member's name as a user nick. ÉÍREman 03:14 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

I past-tensed that: user:RachelCorrie last edited on 18 March. Martin

At least two recent writers of bird articles have ended up with lots of red links because they have used correct standard capitalisation for species, eg Horned Grebe, rather than the wiki practice, which is never found in field guides or most bird books, which is what most people will get at least some of their info from. I know dictionaries don't capitalise, but this isn't a dictionary, and you wouldn't write a bird article from a dictionary anyway. Proper names are capitalised because that is standard usage, so why not species?

Alternatively why not warn on the main page that "Go" using standard names will miss the target. Life's to short for me to keep changing names to fit the wiki way. jimfbleak 07:37 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

The best solution would be case-insensitive titles, thus circumventing the whole tedious debate. Yes, I know we sometimes use case to disambiguate (eg tasmanian devil), but it shouldn't be impossible to work around such things by disambiguating differently. Martin

I'm posting this here instead of the village pump page because my browser won't let me edit it because of size. As far as species names go, it's most certainly correct botanical usage to NEVER capitalize any part of the common name unless it's a proper name. Thus, it's "white oak", but "New York fern". I always thought that the same standard applied to animals. However, I recognize that the nomenclatural codes are different for plants and animals. So my previous statement on this may have been wrong (in re: Tasmanian Devil), since I see that both "Birds to Watch" and "Birds in Jeopardy" capitalize bird names. jaknouse 01:17 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)

Yes. I think it applies to other animals too, but so far as birds go, the common names are always capitalised. I (and other users) have posted extensive documentary evidence to demonstrate that this is the case beyond all doubt. Tannin

I tried to mail intlwiki-l about getting hu.wikipedia.com upgraded to .org but so far no response. Are the gods on vacation, or they're dead again and Nietzsche won? :-) grin

See my recent response to a similar request. Basically, there's some grunt work that needs to be done before any more conversion. The ones that were converted a few months ago were done with a patchwork of four conversion scripts between three different formats, which produced databases with some bad entries, and meanwhile the database schema has changed further... I hope to get it done, but haven't yet, and I'm swamped right now.
If someone would like to take over and finish it up, they're welcome (get in-progress draft from CVS), but it may be tricky for someone not already familiar with both UseMod and Wikipedia internals. --Brion 23:52 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)
Just out of curiosity, not that I think I'd be able to help much or anything (per the mailing list), but is the conversion you speak of a matter of converting the existing script into the appropriate language, or is it converting the old version database info to the new schema? -- John Owens 23:56 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)
That's the database. The user interface translations are a separate matter; we've got more or less complete submitted translations for a number of languages, and if need be can do a conversion first and add in the translation later. --Brion 00:03 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)

English, German and Dutch Wikipedia are now available in TomeRaider format for offline browsing on handheld device (Pocket PC, Palm, EPOC) or Windows PC. See Wikipedia:TomeRaider database. It this the proper place to announce this? Or could it maybe be listed on the frontpage, for instance (temporarily) as current event? Erik Zachte 22:19 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

I would suggest front page, with a permanent place under "Sister Projects", with perhaps a more prominent temporary announcement. -- John Owens 22:21 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)


Or place under "About the project", since "DB download" is there as well Erik Zachte 22:30 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)
Announcements to wikipedia:announcements...

Wikipedia:List of articles in the Wikipedia namespace - I don't know who/how this is generated, but could it be changed to not list redirects? Thanks! :)

In my article Just William I link to a man called Henry Ford who did some of the illustrations. This was not Henry Ford the car manafacturer, but that _is_ his name and that is what Wikipedia has under Henry Ford - so what do I do? Cgs

You have to disambiguate: see Wikipedia:Disambiguation. Basically, you have two choices: in the current Henry Ford article you could add a discreet link to Henry Ford (disambiguation) or Henry Ford (illustrator) (primary topic disambiguation); or you can move Henry Ford to Henry Ford (car maker) and make Henry Ford the disambiguation page (equal disambiguation). -- Tim Starling 11:07 Apr 19, 2003 (UTC)

I do not find it easy to interpret a Difference-between-revisions-page such as http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Talk_page&diff=844417&oldid=844410

Sometimes combining lines to one gives red text, sometimes not. It would be easier if just combining gives no red text. On the other hand, when a whole line is added or deleted there is no red, so between all the combining and perhaps splitting, real additions and deletions can be overlooked. It may be better to make added and deleted lines of text also completely red.

By the way, do we have no more description of these things than diff? - Patrick 21:27 Apr 19, 2003 (UTC)

Should User:Daniel C. Boyer and his works be allowed in the main namespace? See User talk:Daniel C. Boyer. -- Tim Starling 04:46 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry to be dumb - but I don't see anything wrong. What is your complaint? Cgs
I'm not complaining, I'm trying to inspire comments. I got into trouble about a month ago trying to get a user into the main namespace (everyone was against it), so now I'm asking the Wikipedia community, "what about this one"? -- Tim Starling 00:55 Apr 21, 2003 (UTC)
Ah! Sorry - I thought you wanted to ban him (not allow him in the main namespace. Noob. Cgs

I know that someone dropped by Daniel's page a while back and asked if he was the Daniel C. Boyer, so at least one person has heard of him outside of Wikipedia. Also, his articles are quite neutral. Another Wikipedian with articles about himself and his work is User:Sheldon Rampton (see Sheldon Rampton, PR Watch, Disinfopedia). I don't think there's any problem with Wikipedians having their own articles if they are noteworthy outside of Wikipedia; such articles simply have to be edited carefully for NPOV. -- Stephen Gilbert 02:52 Apr 21, 2003 (UTC)

I just had a lengthy weird problem where the changes I tried to make to Alien: Resurrection got blanked sometime between pasting them in and clicking "save page." I tried several times to put in the changes but it saved blank each time, and didn't show up in Recent Changes. (it did this in both IE 5.0 and Mozilla 1.3 for OS X, logged in under each browser. I tried 4 times in IE and twice in Mozilla). Finally I had to revert myself and make the changes again. The second clue that something was amiss was when it showed the page in the "edit text" box as 5{Alien Resurrection'''''. The first clue, of course, was when the page saved blank. Any clues as to what's going on? Koyaanis Qatsi 16:42 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

No clue; there's nothing obviously amiss in the logs, and the above sounds strange, but I'm not sure how it could come up with such a thing offhand. --Brion

I don't but similar incident happened several time recently it happened to 172 who was really unlucky (he lost a part of an article referring to the Holocaust) and to me (taht was lesss severe). Ericd 16:54 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

Can a proxy/cache have something to do with it ?

In a word, no. At least not at this end. It happened on two different browsers, trying repeatedly to paste in text that *did* show up until parsing. Koyaanis Qatsi

Y happened to 172 which is on AOL and AOL use a proxy, I also have a proxy for my home network.... Wikipedia is often slow maybe we missed some warning due to proxy timeout ? Ericd 20:15 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

Hm. Well, a developer would know much more about it than I do. Koyaanis Qatsi
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