Wikipedia:Village pump/November 2003 archive 3

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[edit] Compass on Canadian Cities, can it be made dynamic

Does anybody know how I can use a generic flash file on pages and load links off the page. Check out Caledon, Ontario to see the textual one, but what I wan't is to make that into a flash movie that can be placed on every page, and then place the 4+ links on each page that flash will load. This will help clean the mess of html code so people can more easily copy and past it and change the names of the north, east, west, south, and city name texts Fizscy46


I thought people already generally agreed that the "compasses" were not really helpful and that they did not add encyclopedic value beyond the hassle, size, and ugliness. I really don't like them myself. Daniel Quinlan 18:15, Nov 13, 2003 (UTC)
Flash is big no-no in my book. I stay away from pages with flash and I have it disabled in my browsers. Although I am sure Flash could be put to good use, currently it is used for ads most of the time and you can't turn it off. It's funny, if you right click on a flash page it often has the options to disable the play and/or the loop, but those options never work. I really hate flash and it usually turns me off to sites that won't work without it. I would hate for Wikipedia to become like that and I am sure other people feel the same. That's just my opinion. Dori 18:34, Nov 13, 2003 (UTC)
Agreed. As an off-topic aside, I didn't enable flash until I found the Mozilla "click to play Flash animation" extension. Basically, it supresses the flash unless you click on the flash animation to start it. Prior to getting that, I just avoided flash pages. orthogonal 22:37, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I didn't even know such an extension was available. I was waiting for bug 94035 to get fixed. Thanks for the tip. Is it this one? Dori 23:45, Nov 13, 2003 (UTC)
Yup. orthogonal 00:00, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Is there a policy for Flash content in Wikipedia? I personally think the articles should just contain text and images, but I've never encountered this before. If there isn't a policy, it seems like there should be one. —Frecklefoot 19:21, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I would second that (for the most part), as flash editing is not available to me [and probably some others]. If it's not "editedable" by the vast majority of editors/readers ... should it be included as a navigation element? what if the structure of the pages change? I could see where static content where things like flash would be good [demonstrations of a pendulum, mabey] ... but not as a nav element ... but that is only IMO ... sincerely, reddi

I didn't think it was all that difficult to fix those tables, when I made them smaller a couple of days ago (actually, that was Vancouverguy's idea, I just implemented them). You can just copy the whole thing and replace the city names, they are pretty obvious within all the HTML. I'm not sure how that would work with Flash because I don't know how Flash works in the first place, and whether or not the tables are really necessary is another story, I suppose. Adam Bishop 07:09, 15 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Man, you guys must be old classics,sticking to the BBS and stuff. Flash adds interactivity and simplicity. Its annoying to go through the html. Much easier to just type out the 4+ links and have flash automatically do the rest... And who disabled flash... Cause you don't know what you are missing. Fizscy46
It's not about being old or classical, it's about maintiaining a level of backwards compatibility. As an encyclopedia, we have to be as open as possible to all, and thus with all browsers. Dysprosia 02:27, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Not to mention the fact that flash is not an open standard and only has proprietary software implementations. --Lexor 02:41, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)
You actually think there are people with Internet explorer 1 and 2?Fizscy46
No Flash is my view. I have to have it installed but it's usually disabled via a registry block an I strongly dislike having to check the source code of the page I'm viewing to see just what ActiveX control the page is trying to get me to grant permission to run. And no, not checking is not an option - ActiveX controls are inherently unsafe. I'm also not keen on encouraging people to install something which is most often used as an ad engine to cicumvent browser restrictions on animation. JamesDay 12:06, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Automatically generated logs

I just stumbled upon the Wikipedia:Protection log and I was wondering if there is a list of all the automatically generated logs somewhere. I am asking about this because I couldn't figure out where/if such a log exists in the other language 'pedias (specifially http://sq.wikipedia.org that I translated). I know of Wikipedia:List_of_articles_in_the_Wikipedia_namespace but it does not seem to be complete. thanks, Dori 00:17, Nov 14, 2003 (UTC)

That should be it that's log pages. --Brion 00:39, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Oh, OK. For some reason I thought there'd be more. thanks Dori 03:16, Nov 14, 2003 (UTC)
Not quite the same thing, but there's also the Blocked users log. Angela


[edit] Authors

I thought that it might be a good idea to have a special page for each articles titled "Authors" or similar. All it would do is give a simple list of users/IPs that had ever contributed to said article. Firstly it would give contributors the credit that they are due. A similar thing is already being done in "page history", but is not present anymore when an article is moved, for example. Also, the "authors" page would be much simpler than having to wade through "page history". WDYT? --snoyes 17:09, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Plus it could be ordered by % contribution? (but that may cause over verboss articles Archivist 18:29, Nov 14, 2003 (UTC)
I'd like that feature. % contribution would be cool too, but what if someone deleted a whole huge segment of an article? Would that + or - his percentage? —Frecklefoot 19:31, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
It's an interesting idea, but probably not trivial to implement. Most of all the diff needs to be smarter to notice moving of text inside the article without loosing the credit for that text. BTW: If an article is moved the edit history is moved together with the article, it is only lost when the article is moved by copying the contents. But the credit will be lost for sure if articles are merged or split. andy 20:20, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Suppose instead the page history gave a number of lines added/deleted/edited. That would give a fair idea of who had made significant contributions. DJ Clayworth 20:59, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I don't see how it would work. If someone vandalises an article by blanking it and I revert them, thereby adding 1000 words, it's going to look like I've made a huge contribution, when all I've done is pressed the rollback button. Angela 21:03, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
IBM had technology to solve that problem. I can't remember the link. Martin 21:20, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I guess you mean IBM History flow but I'm still not sure that would solve it. Angela 21:32, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
They're not going to share the technology with us, are they... --Menchi 00:12, 15 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Not all articles are the target of vandalism. It seems that most of articles are primaly written by one or a few authors and many other people copyedit it. Givning credits is always a good way to recognize hard-work. The one of wikipedia's harsness is that good works are rather not given good attention while only heated debate receives public attention. This I believe make contributors feel as if they were not valuable or their works were not welcomed. The most of cases is that one or a very few of your works are controversial but the hudernreds of rest are completely welcomed. I mean so I strongly support this idea. -- Taku 23:53, Nov 14, 2003 (UTC)

Brevity is the soul of wit; let's order the list by the amount of text removed by editors. orthogonal 22:27, 15 Nov 2003 (UTC)


I don't think it would work out too well. There are many issues with how the authors' works will be cited/listed and in the end it will probably end up something like the history page. This might also attract more trolls and vandals, or simply people who want their name in the list and simply make unnecessary changes. I would think most of us edit on the Wikipedia because it's fun and because it's something that will be useful to others, and not for getting our names in a list. Still, no one wants their work to be credited to someone else and we like to be recognized, but that is what the history page is for (well, among other things :). Some people list their major contributions on their own pages, so that's another outlet. That's my opinion anyway. Dori 00:02, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC)

I like credit for my work as much as the next person. But I see potential trouble in giving authorship credit for articles. The current relative anonymity minimizes the temptations for egotism to arise. If enacted, some people would be running around doing pointless edits on articles just to get their name listed. Others would be targeting authors they dislike. And all of us would become involved in endless disputes of whether or not someone had contributed enough to get a credit. MK 01:36 (EST) 16 November 2003

Umm, actually I don't think troubles pointed out above would materialize. Simply listing primary authors is not a big deal. You can think it is very similar to a THANKS file in open source programs. I don't see why the same trivial thing in open source doesn't work with wikipedia. You don't have to worry about that people started to make a trivial edit to have their name listed. We probably appoint someone who maintains such a list of contributors. There would be no debate who should be given credit or not. I mean have you ever seen a heated debate regarding a THANKS file? You may claim that the maintainer is not fair enough, then you don't have to stick to him. Go to other places. -- Taku 19:14, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC)


A similar thing is already being done in "page history", but is not present anymore when an article is moved, for example. Actualy, it is. The whole point of the page move function is that ir preserves history. -- Tarquin 19:48, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Meta might be a better place for such discussions. Angela 00:12, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Chemistry

I know it's fun editing articles about Macedonia, the Catholic and Mormon churches, and maybe tomorrow we can have some fun arguing over spelling Mother Teresa's name... but, I think it's time to resurrect Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry. I only spend about 10% of my time on classic sciences (originally I was a biochemistry/cell biology major), but I know you real scientists (and I don't mean computer, I'm one of those) are out there.

To start, I've added some information about the hard-to-find Inorganic table information to the project page. Is there a similar Organic table information somewhere? If not, we need to get one created and rationalize the two tables.

Once we get that done, maybe we can prioritize a list of compounds to be fixed up, etc. Daniel Quinlan 04:56, Nov 15, 2003 (UTC)

No, there are no organic tables that I'm aware of. See Talk:Inorganic table information. The excel spreadsheet and template used to create the inorganic tables can be found here. -- Tim Starling 05:58, Nov 15, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Nupedia

What's up with Nupedia? Google has the text: "Unfortunately, Nupedia is unavailable due to some server problems" shown when you search for "nupedia", which means it must have beend own for a while. On Nupedia, the external link says "temporarily offline due to server troubles". According to the page history that change was made on September 26th! There is some talk on Talk:Nupedia but nothing current. I'm inclined to believe that it is truly dead. I mean how can they keep web traffic and editors if the site has been down for almost 2 months? dave 05:59, 15 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Nupedia had been fairly inactive for some time, but putting it back online is solely a matter of restoring things from database backups. I'm assuming these exist, but I've never been directly involved in Nupedia so I don't know the details. --Brion 02:45, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)


I e-mailed Jason at the e-mail listed on the current Nupedia page about this, but heard nothing. Can somebody else ping him as well? At the very least it would be nice to pull out the old text from the database so we can reuse, particularly the articles-in-progress section which had much good stuff that I was in the process of porting, (see Wikipedia talk:Nupedia and Wikipedia). It could be just static HTML and graphics for all I care, so long as we don't lose the work done to date. I tried using Google and archive.org to pull the old cached text, but neither of them archives the a-i-p section. --Lexor 02:47, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)




[edit] Google/Wikipedia search engine problems

moved to Wikipedia:External search engines

[edit] Google Indexing Update

Moved to Wikipedia:External search engines

[edit] Short stories

I am writing an article on Hackers (short stories) and I was wondering if short stories should each have their own article. There isn't much to say on a short story, but they might deserve their own article nonetheless. Opinions? Dori 17:49, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC)

  • When an article about a short story becomes complex enough to warrant its own page, re-factor and give it its own page. Were I reading it, I'd want at least blurbs about each story on one page, and an "In-depth analysis" link where required; then I could use it easily both as a casual browser ("What are those short stories about") and as a more serious student ("I need to know more about 'The Greatest Short Story Ever Told: Jesus the Scrivner'"). orthogonal 18:05, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
It's fine, knowing that there are people who want to include every CD albums on this planet. --Menchi 18:07, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I would oppose an article on each short story - it would make more sense to cover them all in the same page. Martin 19:38, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I think it largely depends on a story. Some short stories have remarkable influence or context while many other just are parts of collection books. For example, Minority Report is actually very short but one of well-known stories of Philip K. Dick. -- Taku 00:30, Nov 17, 2003 (UTC)
I guess I will write an overview of each story on the page itself otherwise that page would be nothing more than a list. If someone decides that one or more of the stories deserves an article on its own, they can move it. thanks, Dori 01:11, Nov 17, 2003 (UTC)

This fits into the one longish article/lots of shortish articles decision. My personal preference is the former. The "wiki way" is probably the latter. (cf the completely disorganised but totally absorbing wikis such as the MeatballWiki). Pete 12:28, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion policy?

I am a little confused about the deletion policy of Wikipedia. I am not an admin or a sysop; can I list things on the Wikipedia:Votes for deletion page? If not, what can I do when I see a page that should be deleted (like BlogLines)?

(Err.. disregard that BlogLines example--that was deleted quickly! But my confusion about my deletion powers remains.)

Anyone can list things on VfD, and after 5 days, if there is a rough consensus to delete it, a sysop will delete it. Angela
And you can vote! *Blinking-teeth smile* Exercise your democratic power! --Menchi 01:27, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)
However you don't necessarily have to list every bad article on VfD - if the new article has potential to be converted into a valid stub, then list it on Wikipedia:Cleanup instead. And most of the time the obvious nonsense articles are deleted by admin quickly, only those which survive more then lets say 10 minutes would be worth to list to make sure they don't get forgotten. andy 09:16, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I have real problems with the deletion policy. It is not democratic in the slightest! I would like to propose that instead new pages are put on 'Probation' for a month. There is an attached -VoteToKeep page linked to it and at the end of the month if there is a clear democratic majority then goodbye. But at present the time-period is too short, too unclear and hidden and opaque... ABC

Not undemocratic, hidden, nor opaque. Voting is just that -- democratic. Not hidden, since a blurb is put at the top of the page to indicate that it has been proposed for deletion and where to go to discuss it. And not opaque, since the Votes for Deletion page explains what is going on. RickK 16:37, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Don't feed the trolls. Angela
  • Not so sure about that. It seems to me that if a listed page is in the least controversial, the votes get lost in a welter of arguments. It might help in these cases if, at the end of the five days, all interested users came back and did a simple Yes/No vote having considered all the pro and con points raised. Bmills 16:54, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Or separate a VfD entry into two parts, argument and vote, e.g.:
  • Foo Bar Baz.
    • Discussion: (Initial reason for listing:) This is page is a vanity page authored by Mr. Baz. orthogonal 16:57, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
      • I disagree, Mr. Baz is world famous in Japan! !orthogonal 16:57, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Votes:



[edit] Access to /w/wiki.phtml is denied?

I have a confession to make... now and then I count how my contributions I have made to Wikipedia. I used to do this at the click of a button - I ran a Python script that grabbed my user contributions page and then counted the number of relevant lines. However I have just tried to do this and the page returned says "You don't have permission to access /w/wiki.phtml on this server"... however I can access my contributions page perfectly happily in Internet Explorer. Has there been a software change in the last couple of months that has restricted to me only being able to access via IE? Any ideas? THanks. Pete 23:41, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Yes, there's been a software change. You have to set the user-agent string to something identifying your bot. Sorry, I don't know how to do this in Python. -- Tim Starling 23:48, Nov 17, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks Tim. It's bound to be possible to check the user-agent id. I will find out. Given that the script would formally qualify as a bot should I do anything other than make a promise that I don't use it very often honest, gov?
Any pythonistas out there may like to know that to do this you need to subclass the URLOpener class in the built-in standard module urllib such that the attribute 'version' is overwritten with whatever user-agent string you fancy. Less difficult than it might sound! Pete 00:44, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)
As long as you don't use it to edit or create pages in large numbers, and don't use it to an amount that much exceeds normal browsing speed, it should not be a problem. By the way, if you're interested in Python-based Wikipedia bots, take a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot/ and http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/pywikipediabot/pywikipedia/. Andre Engels 11:57, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)
On a bright note: what the developers taketh away the developers giveth too... it seems like the "offset" bug on the contributions page has been fixed since I last tried. Thus when I have sorted the user-agent string my script will hit the server even less as I can give it an estimate of the minimum number of edits I have done to avoid counting them over again... Thanks ever so much for whoever took the time to fix that. Pete 00:15, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)


[edit] Scouring for (ab)use of wikipedia content

I'd like to just stand on this here Village Pump Soapbox quickly: Can anyone who has got a minute to spare (and if you're editing WP, then you do ;-)) just paste some bit from any Wikipedia article into Google. Then check Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content to see whether the search returns any usage that is not already listed on Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content. Quick hint: choose a continuous block of words which seems somewhat unique and enclose it in quotes. Like so (from Stephen King): "wealth itself: his earliest works (Carrie, The Shining,". Here are some links to improper usage of Wikipedia content that I found in doing a few such searches (Some of them not just improper, but downright criminal): [1], [2], [3], [4]
Cheers, snoyes 08:12, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

ezResults.com Uses wikipedia articles as encyclopedia. Added an entry to Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content hope that's appropriate : ChrisG 13:46, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)
The japan-101.com page mentions the text is from Wikipedia way down at the bottom, so I guess it is compliant. I didn't ad the site to Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content though. —Frecklefoot 15:46, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Well it doesn't mention the GFDL or link to the page it is taking content from... so its not really compliant at all... perhaps it'd be best if you did list it on Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content.
Interesting work, Snoyes. One thing that intrigues me is that all the sites that use our content claim all rights reserved copyright on all non-wikipedia elements. I thought the licence was supposed to be viral in the sense that if people take free content then derived works are similarly free. This doesn't seem to be happening at this embryonic stage in Wikipedia development, in contrast to similar software projects. Pete 17:41, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

See wikipedia:verbatim copying. Martin 02:39, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Image attribution / sig

Can image artists sign names on their works when they agreed to let WP use their images? --Menchi 09:39, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Menchi, I don't know what you are asking. Can you be clearer?
Adrian Pingstone 09:45, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
When an artist draws a map/diagram/illustration and contributes it to WP, can s/he sign his/her name on it? Most artists like to sign their names on their work, and it may take some persuasion to make them not do that. Or they may just don't contribute their work to WP at all because a sense of authorship -- which is saddening. --Menchi 09:48, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
AFAIK (IANAL) there is no legal reason why they can't sign their work, and there's no legal reason we could just airbrush it out and resubmit it. GFDL requires that we credit the authors, but I don't think the authors can dictate the particular form of that credit. Since we generally frown on overt displays of authorship, I think we should discourage artists from signing work, crop or airbrush it out if possible, or look for another equivalent image if it is not possible. -- Tim Starling 10:28, Nov 20, 2003 (UTC)
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