Wikipedia:Village pump/July 2003 archive 3

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Found a huge source of public domain information that hasn't been wikified

http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html

I always thought some country stuff came fr. there. Maybe not. Macau obviously isn't...yet. --Menchi 20:06 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Moved from Talk:Main Page

hello elefantfriends I LIKE to create a peace wiki if you like to help ? mailto:Ernstgruber1@gmx.at thanks ernest.

Elephant friends?
See Wikipedia:Technical FAQ.
--Menchi 20:06 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Empty page

How can and why would a person make an entirely empty page on WP? (Not as a result of deletion, but "addition") I mean, zero character whatsoever! I discovered this anomaly. --Menchi

I am pretty sure it was a noob visiting a dead link, saw there was nothing there, and to exit the page they clicked "save". The software shoulnd't create the page if there is not text. CGS 23:31 10 Jul 2003 (UTC).

It probably contained only whitespace. The software rejects zero length articles, and then after that it strips trailing whitespace, and it doesn't check the length again before save. -- Tim Starling 01:13 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Well, that's a simple problem to fix. If you point me to a link to that piece of code, I would be more than happy (an interested) in fixing it. MB 14:05 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Go for your life: [1]. It's in editForm(). -- Tim Starling 06:19 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I've discovered that Wikipedia is inconsistant on how it disambiguates plays. Some musical plays are given the form play (musical), but some have play (play). RickK 02:48 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There's a similar problem with films. Some are film (movie) and some are film (film). - Efghij 00:46 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Vote for Deletion

Gentlefolk, I hope I am no longer a complete newbie here, but I still have lots of questions.

I note that the entry for Red Dawn is something like a review of the movie, and not a very good one at that. I propose we eliminate it.

However I have no idea how to get to the Votes for Deletion page, nor do I have a clear understanding of how it works.

Little help? Now, with three tildies … PaulinSaudi

It's at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. (Also a link to it on recent changes.) كسيپ Cyp 10:11 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Please make it four tildes, Paulin, to include date (like RickK & Cyp above). It's just one more press. --Menchi 10:14 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Four? OK, done. Now, with four tildies … PaulinSaudi

Sorry, Paulin, don't think you have. :) Do it like this: ~ four times. Sorry I got it mixed myself.Dieter Simon 20:49 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Lemme try this again... Now, with four tildies * PaulinSaudi 12:37 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)


I would like to add comments in the wiki source to explain why something is included which is only relevant when a page is being edited. You can use HTML comments as long as they are on a new line, but that breaks lists. Is there a wiki markup for "This is a comment, do not display it?" -- SGBailey 12:43 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'd be quite surprised if such a thing existed; it's quite redundant. Just put the comment at the beginning of the list. -Smack 15:58 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I've now done that to List of people by name: St -- SGBailey 23:21 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I would like to annotate a list- ideally using different bullet shapes. This can be done in HTML, but * always produces the same bullet. Any way of making a wiki bulleted list use alternate images as bullets? (The reason is I want to mark the two letter english words which are valid in Scrabble and then scrap the scrabble list page. -- SGBailey 12:43 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I just manually type in the different bullet: ·．．‧ . --Menchi 20:06 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I don't see three different bullets, I see three empty square boxes. And anyway, this wouldn't change the LIST bullet, just add another character to the text - which might well be a good solution to this problem. -- SGBailey 23:38 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
How about these alternatives: · ? ¨ ° · * ? --Menchi 23:46 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm surprised to see the Two letter words acceptable in Scrabble page. Clearly the page creator is unaware of two things.

  1. There 3 different standards for acceptable scrabble words OSPD and OSW, and the combined one which I forget the name of for the moment.
  2. There are hundreds of websites with a list of these words and it's not hard to locate one. Mintguy 12:52 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Hey folks, I think I may have found some weird bug? Either that or somebody is making oddly consistent typos. Go to Wikipedia talk:User page and observe that the moved dates have a "0" before their "2003". Why? I remember fixing this on some other page without comment, but this is getting ridiculous. --Nelson 16:21 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Odd... Doesn't seem to be any point writing 02003, because in 7997 years we (probably) won't be using that date system, anyway... كسيپ Cyp 17:20 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
They were written deliberately by user:Ellmist. Sie presumably agrees with the Long Now Foundation that we should use five figure dates to avoid the Y10K problem. Martin
This would just exacerbate the Y100K problem. ;) The LNF promotes 5-digit zero-padded years as a gimmick: you're supposed to think about long time periods and expand your mind. Which is fine as it goes, but the correct solution is to use arbitrary-length numbers. After all, we don't write that Charlemagne was born in 0814... --Brion 00:53 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Well, we don't because he was born in 0742. djmutex 13:44 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Why, all of a sudden, is my floating quickbar appearing halfway down the page, on certain pages? Mintguy 20:10 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Which pages, in which browser? Does reloading change it? Shift+reload? Ctrl+reload? Cmd+reload? Clearing your cache? Restarting your browser? Using a different browser? Which versions? Which operating system? --Brion 20:55 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Ok. Win 2000 Pro , IE6. It happens when I edit a page. Like this one now. The floating quickbar has decided to place itself below "Main Page | About Wikipedia | Recent changes" giving me a big blank area to the right of it. Hitting refresh isn't changing anything, and I'm not caching or using a proxy so shift-refresh etc.. has no effect. Mintguy 21:04 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I don't have a Windows box to test on at the moment, but I suspect the problem is this: <body bgcolor='#FFFFDD' onLoad='document.editform.wpTextbox1.focus()' onload='setup("quickbar")'>
Two attempts at installing an onLoad event handler. I'll see if I can get it to merge them into one...
Okay, should be installed. Let me know if that fixes it. --Brion 21:41 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Nope. sozMintguy 21:45 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm getting a runtime error, when I double click on the page (using the special "edit this page javascript"). The error is as follows "Line 17: Error: 'document.editform.wpTextbox1.form1' is not an object.
Line 17 is as follows:
<body bgcolor='#FFFFDD' onload='document.editform.wpTextbox1.form1.focus()'>
I'm guessing this is being caused by the recent change you made to the onload script. MB 01:33 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Er, oops. :) Fixed. --Brion 01:47 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It seems to be fixed now. Mintguy 07:41 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Spelling announcement

Today, I expunged the encyclopedia of any and all links to Czar, changing them instead to say Tsar. I consider the former spelling to be incorrect, for reasons that are explained in the article (not contributed by me, mind you), and I'm going to do my bit to kill it once and for all. So, I just thought I'd make that clear, so that the people who write things like [[tsar|czar]] can come forth and settle this once and for all.
Sheesh, I sound like I'm attempting a coup d'etat. -Smack 06:34 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Newbie reporting in, having just contemplated general policies, NPOV policy, and couple of articles I didn't like.

To begin with, NPOV looked a little dubious and certainly contrary to my inclinations, till I read the arguments against it in its Talk page; they convinced me of its rightness.

Now then, I'm looking at a couple of pages that have been defaced (need I be polite about this?) by people who came and posted junk and went away: History of Physics and History of Europe. On the one hand, we are urged to edit boldly and not be afraid to replace large chunks of text. On the other, NPOV requires us not to just delete what the other guy "knows" and replace it with what we "know".

In one case (Europe) I have followed what's almost a policy of malicious compliance with NPOV by leaving in most of the stuff but balancing it with an alternate view. The result, alas, is something that's less coherent than if the old text were merely reverted, and disproportionately long; and I don't think it's especially useful to the reader who walks into the article cold.

This very small sampling has made me wonder: I know that everyone has a right to enter material and sign it or not; but should anonymous one-shot propagandists (when not actual vandals) have their material treated with some minimal respect, as if their material were attempts at honest contributions?

Having asked in that way, I assume that the answer has to be Yes; anything else would be even worse. But I still wonder.
Dandrake 07:00 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I still wonder those same things, Dandrake, and I've been here quite a while now. But in the end, the Wiki Way is (if I may misquote Disralei): "The worst possible way to create an encyclopedia - except for all the other ways to create an encyclopedia." Welcome aboard, by the way. Tannin
The views of individual contributors on a subject (e.g. Europe) shouldn't count for much. We're supposed to report on human knowledge in general. As a rough guide, the proportion of material in an article devoted to a particular view should be comparable with the proportion of discourse in the real world devoted to that view. So if someone is adding a lot of stuff relating to a minority point of view, you should feel free to cut it down a bit - perhaps moving it to an article specifically on the subject of that point of view. For example, theories of a flat Earth are taken seriously by almost nobody these days, so the idea should only be mentioned in passing (if at all) at Earth. But the theories can be discussed at length at Flat Earth. I hope that helps. -- Oliver P. 07:56 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Copyright & modification

See Image talk:Soviet Union, Khrushchev (1).jpg. --Menchi 20:30 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Unequal page load speed

Is it just me or are some articles getting to be more equal than others? I have now for several days had the experience that some pages tend to appear to load for ever, but if you stop it loading and choose another, it will load in nanoseconds. That I recall, I had this with Annie Lennox (which had just been edited) but later (half hour) was able to get to it fine. There were many more, but not any can name off the bat. But now the same phenomenon hit me with MacOs/(Do you know what, I forgot what goes here) Anyways it was an "article" just created, and containing a full whopping 5 bytes. (check the deletion archive for what the precise name was, I think). I was loading it simultaneusly with another page which i had time to check the history of, decide delete-worthy and delete. And still it would not load! 5 bytes for chrissakes! Respectfully. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 21:53 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

For me, when one slows, all slows. But yes, some long pages do take longer to load, but not to the extreme you describe. --Menchi 21:56 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I've had the same problem as Cimon and it seems unrelated to page size. Sometimes a huge page like requested articles loads faster than something relatively small. Angela

Maybe it was mozilla that was the culprit. I changed into Links and it seems to work at lightspeed. From Now on I will only use Mozilla if I need to cut and paste. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 23:12 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Scratch that interpretation. I just had the exact same phenomenon with Links. (I was trying to load the article on Wikipedia power structure, so I could have inserted Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers but it balked, and when I chose another page (I think it was the one on guidelines. I inserted the "dont bite newcomers" there) it loaded without complaint. Coming back after editing it, the powestructure article still wouldn't load nicely! Can some developer please take a look and see what is going on. I have a hard time believing this is something to do with my ISP-provider. It seems to me this would be something in your end. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 14:47 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Response times will vary widely depending on general system load. It has nothing to do with your browser or ISP and little to do with the page you happen to be looking at (unless you're editing it, which will cause varying amounts of load depending on the number of incoming and outgoing links that have to be rechecked). --Brion 22:06 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Redirected page watchlisted

The Lines of Action talk page is currently a redirect, which is bad becuase when the real talk page changes it doesn't show up in my watch list. Is there an automated way to undo a redirect, and suck the contents back into the proper page? Thanks. --Fritzlein 01:51 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Do you see the "(Redirected from Talk:Lines of Action)" at the top? Ctrl+F if you can't. Then, click on the link, and stop watch there. --Menchi 05:53 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
You can use the "Move this page" link in the sidebar to rename pages; I've just renamed the Lines of Action talk page to Talk:Lines of Action, which should fix the problem. —Paul A 06:03 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Long quotation markup

Have we a special Wiki markup, like <quoteblock>, for quotes over three sentences? Like in Islamic banking?

You're almost right. <blockquote>...</blockquote> is the HTML markup for longish quotes. There's no wiki-markup for this that I'm aware of, though. Using blockquote is fine though. -- Wapcaplet 12:56 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Stealing tables

I have just found some very nice tables on the web with lots of info. Is it ok to add them to the pages i'm working on or is that like "quoting to much" - copyright infringement? --BL

I remember seeing a US court rule against copyrighting list/directory of data. Remember having came across it twice, here. --Menchi 07:12 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So the Americans thinks its OK to copy tables? --BL
Probably not a good idea. It may depend on what's in the tables. IANAL; information itself cannot really be copyrighted, but the presentation of that information (such as in a table form) can receive copyright protection. If you're planning on just using some of the information from another source, that's probably okay; if you're thinking of copying the whole table wholesale, that might not be a good idea, unless the original source has declared it public-domain or GFDL. -- Wapcaplet 12:56 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

On the recent changes page, "Exchequer" is listed as a requested article...but there is an article under Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shouldn't Exchequer just redirect there? Adam Bishop 19:57 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

A "Chancellor of the Exchequer" is a minister in charge of the Treasury, and the "Exchequer" is its accounting department, responsible for funds coming in and going out in Britain. I don't think it is one and the same thing. --Dieter Simon 21:00 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)


this really escape me. I moved Wikicide to Wikipedia:Wikicide since in any case, this has *nothing* to do in the encyclopedia space. Article was moved, but in the encyc space, it still appears to be there, as an article, not as a redirect. If one edit that encyc article (or its talk page), one can see the redirect though. What is this ? User:anthere

Probably a caching problem. I think there's a bug in the move page code, this seems to happen all the time. Try reloading with shift- or ctrl- reload, several times. -- Tim Starling 01:57 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
did not work. But, after I emptied my cache in my prefs, it did. Yup, must be a bug. Thanks ant

...and that's why no-one has updated Special:Lonelypages. Sorry for that brief loss of service, everyone. And I didn't even manage to get the job done. -- Tim Starling 02:39 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Who, what, why? MB 04:01 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
[2] -- Tim Starling 04:10 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I disagree with your claim that the special pages are "useless." In particular, Special:Shortpages and Special:Wantedpages are very useful in helping to improve the wikipedia. These both have been disabled, with Short pages last updated May 13th, and Wanted Pages last updated June 15th. You are right in saying they are useless, b/c when not updated on a regular basis, they are useless. I purpose that someone (maybe Timwi since he offered) create a script to update these pages on off peak hours (There is a page somewhere with in depth site statistics). MB 14:30 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Shutting the wiki down for a half hour every day during the period when only 2/3 as many people visit Wikipedia as during peak hours isn't very appetizing. While these features would be useful, I submit that they are much less useful than the site being up and running. That's why someone who wants them badly should rewrite the functions to be efficient so they will actually get enabled again. --Brion 22:06 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Yes, but since the database is backed up daily anyway, wouldn't it be pretty easy to generate the specialpages from a copy of the backup on a different machine? Mkweise 22:24 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Are you volunteering to donate a third machine which can hold a replicated database and deal with slow things like these index regenerations, searches, and sysops' manual queries? (Backups are weekly, not daily. However a live replicated database could be easier to work with.) --Brion 22:46 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Not quite...I was thinking of downloading a backup and a bunch of scripts to run overnight, then posting the updated specialpages the next morning. Mkweise 23:19 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] US Counties: Request for comments

We need some opinions on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties/mockups. In making maps of all the U.S. counties, we wanted to keep all the states at the same width, but it led to some problems of some states getting too big. A reduced-size version has problems of its own. Suggestions are welcome! -- Wapcaplet 13:11 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] GFDL notice inconsistency

I have noticed that when I look at this older version of the Palestine, there is no GFDL notice at the bottom of the page. This may be (although I doubt it) a way for someone to bypass the GFDL when releasing thier own version. MB 18:41 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I found this interesting site today while searching for GFDL infringing sites. MB 19:19 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Regarding the User:Rambot municipality entries

I came upon an interesting disambiguation suffix in one of these entries, namely Plymouth (CDP), Massachusetts, as opposed to Plymouth (town), Massachusetts. A search on AcronymFinder revealed that this most likely stands for Census-designated place. This poses some interesting questions. First of all, would it be good to rename all of the CDP entries to be titled explicitly Census-designated place? Second, would anyone be willing to research and create a stub at Census-designated place? -Smack 19:35 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Just did this, mostly quoting http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/cenind3.html --till we *) 21:04 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Mistakes in Summary

On a recent edit, I made a stupid mistake in the Summary. Is there any way to correct it? -- User:Tb

Nope. I've done this many times myself. --mav
I'm just happy that you do it at all. Summary really helps, even if it's just 1 or 2 words. But don't worry about mistakes in summary. We just don't want people to lie using the summary, like saying "Typo" in summary, but deleted an entire paragraph. --Menchi 23:59 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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