Wikipedia:Village pump/June 2003 archive

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Why don't the ''emphasis quotes'' work in the LOOM article? CGS 20:14 29 May 2003 (UTC).

Because they are "double quotes" not two single quotes. Theresa knott 21:12 29 May 2003 (UTC)
No, that's not it. This is very odd: it's currently fine, but the emphasis quotes were not working in this revision, and if you do a diff against the current, working revision, you will see that the quotes used are exactly the same (and they are two single quotes). CGS 22:42 29 May 2003 (UTC).
Oh, that was because the quotes were on different lines back then, that doesn't work. -- John Owens 22:45 29 May 2003 (UTC)
Why can't the parsing software report errors like that, instead of just ignoring them? We don't want the Wiki markup to become soup like HTML. CGS 22:52 29 May 2003 (UTC).

I advice in the article when use the Chinese characters for specifying, use simplified Chinese characters instead of traditional Chinese, since the simplified Chinese has become the international standard. Samuel 04:31 30 May 2003 (UTC)

You probably want to discuss this also at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (chinese). -- Taku
We should better include Penkyamp transliteration for Cantonese as Hong Kong grows increasingly conscious about its differing identity from Beijing.

Maybe one day Taiwanese will also be included to give a genuine multicultural feel to the Han language and culture.

Hi, could someone have a look at Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's basically a list of possible solutions and something of an analysis (from one user's opinions) of which are the best. They're currently adding links to it from lots of Israel/Palastine articles. In my opinion, this article will never cause anything but trouble, it's guaranteed to be hijacked at different times by people who are convinced that their particular 'solution' is best. I don't think we should be in the business of saying 'these ideas wouldn't work but these others would', it doesn't strike me as particularly encyclopaedic. I have to return to my much hated revision now but I couldn't bear to let this article slip by un-noticed. Happy editing -- Ams80 09:11 30 May 2003 (UTC)


The above-mentioned page looks as though it would make a great "Meta" article, but I agree that it is probably not for Wikipedia. Maybe one of the admins should consider moving it. -- Chris Q 10:20 30 May 2003 (UTC)
I think it is good for Wikipedia, because it clears up the several attempts to solve the problem and creates a good basis for discussions (outside the Wikipedia of course). To be a good basis for any debates is IMHO one major goal of Wikipedia. Therefore this article should remain. 212.137.33.208 11:28 30 May 2003 (UTC)
At the least, the title of this article needs to be changed! The title is misleading, sounds as though it is THE solution. We should add, proposed, or attempted to the title. In addition, it is not NPOV for anyone to mark which solutions are better. MB 12:48 30 May 2003 (UTC)
If the title is misleading - no problem, change it. But IMO it is still NPOV to point out which solutions are impossible or unwanted. -- 212.137.33.208 13:37 30 May 2003 (UTC)
"IMO it is still NPOV to point out which solutions are impossible or unwanted." Well, this is your opinion, and you are allowed to have one, but any attempt to determine which solutions are wanted or unwanted requires the use of opinion. Therefore, and such additions to articles would not be NPOV. It's alright though, b/c it has been moved to meta. MB 18:12 30 May 2003 (UTC)
These are all facts. Nobody challenges them. It would not be NPOV when it would be disputed. But I never heard anyone saying that the Belgium model wouldn't be a very successful idea. If there are any antithetic opinions, then it should be formulated otherwise. --212.137.33.208 08:55 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg. I've just had an absolute nightmare connecting all the Zygote articles together across en, nl, pl, da and es. Please could one of the devs implement this quick hack. It surely can't be more than a line of code or so, and it would be a GODSEND to people trying to further multilingual integration of articles. -- Tarquin 12:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)


[edit] Temp Page Problem

What exactly are Temp pages? It just has a newer and more standardized outlook. It is confusing to have two pages on the same topic. And the notice on top of the page is often overlooked, as a result, many pages with temp pages have extensive history on both the Temp and the main pages. Unpleasant mergings are therefore necessary at some point in time. Why aren't the content of Temp simply on the main page? That'd eliminate all these problems. --Menchi 14:44 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Sometimes, for really long articles that need lots of work, it's easier to start over and do the article right, using a temporary page so as not to mess up the original article in the meantime. For example, right now I'm working on Bjork/Temp to replace the long and nearly incomprehensible Björk article. If someone overlooks the notice at the top of the original article, and edits it anyway, those changes can always be included in the new (temp) article. Most people will probably see the notice at the top and not edit the original, though, so mergings shouldn't be all that unpleasant :) -- Wapcaplet 15:39 30 May 2003 (UTC)

I have set up voting for naming convention of Emperors of Japan. If you care, come to Talk:Emperor_of_Japan for voting. Cheers! -- Taku 18:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)

It seems that interlanguage redirects do work, but there is no "redirected from..." message at the top of the page when you access it through the redirect. That makes it a bit difficult to return to the redir page in order to edit it (the interlanguage redirect was really just a test, as I was curious to see whether it'd work.) Case in point: Bild. Perhaps it would be best to simply disable language prefixes in redirect statements, as that was probably never intended to work in the first place. Mkweise 21:12 30 May 2003 (UTC)

I've removed the interlanguage redirect by manually typing "redirect=no" in the URL. Now if you want to see an interlanguage redirect in action, see http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Bild&oldid=980225. Mkweise 21:22 30 May 2003 (UTC)
This was added some while back to support the (then frequently requested) ability to provide redirects for pages being moved to http://meta.wikipedia.org or http://sep11.wikipedia.org. It's just a quick hack and a little rough around the edges, but easily enough worked around & fixed if used inappropriately or mistakenly. --Brion 04:02 31 May 2003 (UTC)

to whoever is responsible: Nice background color on Wiki pages. BF 02:53 31 May 2003 (UTC)

There are 17576 possible abbreviations for TLA. Is it really in wikipedia's interest to list all 17,576 possibilities with links? Many of these links amount to nothing but dictionary entries. Kingturtle 03:38 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Wiktionary is where most, if not all, of them belong.
The lists of TLA are of bad style. It uses Wiki<pre> and doesn't even fit on my 1024 screen. Not to mention the smaller computers. --Menchi 03:45 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I agree with that wiktionary should cover words stuff. I doubt the usefulness of the list in the first place because we already have a List of abbreviations in which we cover famous ones such as FBI. So I guess we can just get rid of list of any possible abbreviations for TLA. -- Taku 15:42 31 May 2003 (UTC)
That page definitely doesn't belong on wikipedia LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I vote for keeping it, as it could prove useful to someone looking for a TLA that's not in use yet or trying to determine whether a TLA he intends to use has existing meanings. Mkweise 17:38 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Google seems a better solution for this. -- Taku

The real value of TLA pages is as disambiguators; most TLAs these days have multiple meanings, more than most encyclopedists are aware of. If Wiktionary can disambiguate Wikipedia links, then great, but I don't think it can do that. Google is often useless for this sort of thing; if a TLA has 50,000 hits, then the less-common usage with "only" 5,000 pages will likely be invisible. Wikipedia disambiguator puts the common and less-common usages on an equal footing. The list of all possible TLAs is a useful index; Wikipedia is accumulating too many poorly-indexed articles because people aren't adding them to appropriate lists, luckily for this we can have a pregenerated list, and thereby save some work. Stan 18:28 31 May 2003 (UTC)

I admit that the tables are not pretty, but I think it's useful to have them in neat columns. My excuse for creating them was so that I could see at a glance which ones existed as articles, and to make it easier to create new ones just by clicking on the red links. I noticed a flurry of new TLA disambiguation pages after I uploaded these tables, so I feel that they catalysed quite a few new articles. That's why I think they are useful, despite their shortcomings. The style issue raised by Menchi wasn't my doing: I just put a space at the beginning of each line to invoke fixed formatting, which is standard Wikipedia practice. -- Heron

[edit] Size of Wikipedia-L NNTP

I had been reading the online Wikipedia-L archives for info and for fun, but there seems to be something even easier to browse: the Wikipedia-L NNTP. But I tried it, and there are over 10,000 messages! How many bytes is it? I can't overload my Internet connection again. The last time I did, they phoned and threatened to disconnect me. :-} --Menchi 18:54 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

When, for example, a page on en: has been made a redirect to m:, and that with an afterthought on want to make a proper page on en, how can she modify the page for it not to be a redirection any more ? Same question on m: with a page redirected on en: ?

User:Anthere

For the moment you need to manually construct the url to it, such as http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=The_title&redirect=no (the &redirect=no is the key part, so it won't zip you over automatically). --Brion 21:41 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
yo ! Okay. that works. Thanks Brion.

Please see New England Patriots. Is it legal for us to include the logos of sports teams here? They're copyrighted. The NFL's website says "The team names, logos and uniform designs are registered trademarks of the teams indicated". -- Zoe

Well, just because NFL claims it doesn't make it so. I'm no attorney but I don't believe that copyright or trademark law could be construed to prohibit use of trademarks or logos for identification or news purposes, which is what we're doing.

Note: I am not a lawyer, and I might be wrong, but this is what I understand of it. Please someone correct me when/where I am wrong. You have to make a difference between copyright and trademark law here. Basically, something that falls under copyright law may not be used in an unchanged shape, unless there is permission from the owner (or some other exceptions like fair use). Trademark law is much less strict. Mostly, one gets into troubles if one is using a registered trademark in such a way that its use could create the false impression that what one is using it on would someway be connected with the trademark holder. Breaking the trademark would for example be to use the same symbol for another sports team. It would also not be allowed to sell fan stuff containing the trademark without permission. But as said above, using trademarks to identify specifically the organisation holding the trademark is certainly allowed. Most brand names are also trademarked, but that does not disallow us from using the name when we talk about "Coca Cola" or "Mercedes". Likewise we are allowed to use trademarked logos. Andre Engels 16:26 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

[edit] IMDB

I suggest that all articles about movies and tv shows be scrapped, and instead have the links point to the apropriate page on the Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com Their database is already amazingly thorough, and appears to be around to stay. No point in rewriting copious amounts of information which already exists in a well organized form elsewhere Vroman 23:12 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

  1. Descriptions at IMDB don't link back to other related articles on Wikipedia (such as interesting locations, years, film technologies, and people other than cast and crew)
  2. IMDB's license is restrictive
  3. IMDB data won't be directly available in an offline edition of Wikipedia
  4. IMDB is available in English only (and possibly partially in Italian and German, though the links don't work), so that wouldn't help the many other languages Wikipedia is available in.
It's certainly appropriate to link to IMDB for additional information, but it doesn't replace free, integrated descriptions. --Brion 23:37 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
There is never a good reason to delete perfectly good material from the Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't paper. We can create perfectly good NPOV articles, something IMDB doesn't even try to accomplish. -- Zoe
I agree with keeping those articles. If we have a britannica, why do we want a different one from scratch. -- Taku 00:10 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Agreed, no reason to delete any of them. Forever free, not tied to any commercial concern, etc. etc. One thing that could certainly be said about Wikipedia's articles on movies and TV shows, though, is that they would benefit from some standardization (especially in terms of the nice things that IMDB does, such as links on all cast and crew), but that'd be hard to implement in the Wikipedia format (since we prefer linking on commonly-used names; disambiguation would be a nightmare for larger collections). A wiki devoted just to movies and TV shows would not be a bad thing. We're probably not there yet, though. -- Wapcaplet 00:58 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Ok, I see your point. Would it be possible to write a bot that would automatically translate IMDB pages into wiki articles, like the city pages from census data? Vroman 09:51 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
No, because IMDb is copyright, and they are unlikely to license their content under GFDL any time soon. -- Tim Starling 10:17 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
we could bot-ify their filmography lists, since they are plain data and not copyright as such. But please, anyone who does this: reverse the lists into forward chronological order when you do this, ie oldest first, newest at the foot of the list, so it reads in the same order as other chronologies on Wikipedia -- Tarquin 10:34 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'm afraid not - lists are copyright too. The moment you organise data into a list (for example, in alphabetical order) the list can be copyright. What we really need is a boilerplate layout for film pages. CGS 17:56 2 Jun 2003 (UTC).
I don't think that is correct. Lists are only under copyright if there is some creative process in either selecting or ordering them. Putting things into alphabetical order is just about the least creative way to order them, and as such does not fall under copyright. Alphabetical lists, chronological lists etcetera are not under copyright, unless either the items in the list are, or the collection is. Andre Engels 16:34 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

New Topic - Accessing Wikipedia
I'm a new user and new to programming. I want to access articles on a topic (e.g Battle of Hastings)in Wikipedia automatically (using a Java program)for study purposes. I want to transfer the first 100 or so words of each article to a file.
Is this ok ?
Its been suggested I should use a web crawler for this (but they seem to cause problems and I'm not sure I caould specify a particular topic either)
I thought of using database queries, any advice please? --User:Searcher7

My advice would be to just download the articles using HTTP. You can't make database queries without special permission. You might be interested in Lee Daniel Crocker's Java test suite. It's a Wikipedia speed test which is not exactly what you want to do, but it has various handy functions to download articles from Wikipedia. -- Tim Starling 12:08 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please don't use a crawler to download large amounts of articles. You can download a database dump of the entire Wikipedia. Aggressive crawling of the server can cause a dramatic slow-down of Wikipedia. -- JeLuF
See Wikipedia:Database download.
I don't know how you would be able to limit it to only 100 words. Every java program I've ever seen that crawls grabs pages at a time.
Anyway, I'd grab from Google's cache. They have more bandwidth and money.

Some queries:

  1. Since it appears that subpages are unwelcome, can you link to halfway down a page..? Say, for example I wish to list the titles and plots of a series of books, but link to a specific title from a different page..?
  2. With the furore about pictures and whatnot, are we allowed to scan the covers of books/CDs/videos..? I presume we cannot just lift them from Amazon or wherever, but surely this would be OK?
  3. In providing book summaries or whatever, can you quote from the blurb..?
  4. ...Song lyrics?
    1. There has been talk in the news lately of record companies threatening to sue fan sites for posting song lyrics. So I would say that complete song lyrics are a no no. However a couple of lines would be fair use if some aspect of the song were being discussed. Theresa knott 13:35 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
  5. Am I correct in thinking that it is the case that you cannot post pictures with copyright details in full view unless they are owned by the person posting them..? --ntnon 13:56 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

2, 3 and 4 are all fair use... i think. CGS 18:05 2 Jun 2003 (UTC).


1. No. There is a half-implemented feature in the software to do this, called "fragments", but development has stalled in the face of opposition from editors. 2. Maybe. I'm against it, but I think I'm in the minority. 3 & 4. Yes, quoting is okay (except if you follow the "no fair use" doctrine -- see Wikipedia talk:Copyrights and Wikipedia talk:Image use policy). 5. That's correct. In most countries, it's an (often unenforceable) infringement of copyright to post a copyright image even if a notice is not displayed. The international nature of this project means that the penalties for infringing copyright are uncertain, however I think most of us consider the risk to contributors to be quite low. -- Tim Starling 08:10 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

2. Why not email the band in question, and ask them to grant permission under the GFDL? Use the wikipedia:boilerplate request for permission.
3. Why not email the author in question, and ask them to... (oh, and cover blurbs will need to be rewritten for neutrality)
4. Quoting full songs is generally not encyclopedically useful, except for short ones like Happy Birthday.
5. Why not email the photographer in question, and... Martin


"The Monkey is one of the 12-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar. It is thought that each animal is associated with certain personality traits. "

This appears for a number of other animals in the 12-year cycle. I removed the reference under Cattle, thinking it irrelevant to the topic, while performing other edits there. Now I see it is elsewhere as well. Should all 12 entries be consistent in their inclusion of this prose? And, if so, should it be removed from those where it exists, or add to those articles that lack it?

I agree with your removal. It doesn't seem appropriate. What about adding See also: [[chinese zodiac| Chinese year of the monkey]] or something similar to each of the relavent pages.Theresa knott 16:21 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

My response to meta:Wikipedians by religion can be found at meta:Wikipedians by race. MB 22:00 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Rainclouds: I see some pages are being linked to meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud - but wouldn't it be better to have this in Wikipedia instead of meta? That way, you could look at "what links here" and see all the pages. Evercat 23:22 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Absolutely, that's one of those, "Why didn't I think of it!" ideas. --Dante Alighieri 23:23 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Last I checked, meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud and meta:Raincloud were both out of service pages (IE, to-be-deleted)... Martin 14:34 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Alright, nothing points to rainclouds anymore, they point to Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute now. Now you can check here when you want to fix a page with disputed accuracy. MB 20:24 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)
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