Talk:English Wikipedia

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the English Wikipedia article.
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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on April 18, 2005. The result of the discussion was keep.

This article was nominated for deletion on September 24, 2006. The result of the discussion was keep.

This article was nominated for deletion on February 18, 2007. The result of the discussion was keep.

This article was a former COTW candidate. -- AllyUnion (talk) 13:15, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] New article total

I added the new article total Mjal 01:47, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] US Wikipedia or global site in English language?

I really dont know if this is the right place to post my question. And I guess that what I will raise - the very nature of the English Wikipedia - has been discussed somewhere. However, I have not been able to find it.

What makes English Wikipedia fantastic for me is, aknowledging that English is the dominating international language, that I find on this page contributers with huge insight in any subjects from around the globe - whereby we get a real global encyclopedia. I have though been involved in several debates where it has been argued that this is a US /Anglosaxon site. For instance some comments on the debate about Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy

Of course we're only counting votes in English, this is the english language wikipedia. Why would non-english speakers/readers surf it? Please see the archives for more arguments related to your pleading to not be insulted. Thanks. Kyaa the Catlord 13:31, 8 February 2006 (UTC) and If you are mortally offended by wikipedia and western values then there is simply no reason for you to visit the english wikipedia, or indeed, any western site.

Why do almost all the other major Wikipedias refuse to publish the cartoons? --Lotsofissues 22:36, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

They're all un-American and so they don't have our same ideals of freedom of speech. --Cyde Weys 22:43, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Please accept the fact that en.wikipedia.org is a server that follows the laws of the U.S. and the U.K. The Muslims who live in countries where it is not legal to publish pictures, like alqaeda.wikipedia.org, may succeed in erasing the picture. Here it does not work. It is not enough if Mohammed disagrees with being pictured here; Jimbo Wales and the Wikieditors would have to disagree, too.

Well, these are only some examples. I hope someone here can provide me with information abouth wether this discussion has been taken. As a non US or UK citizen defining the nature of English Wikipedia is decisive for wether I should contribute here. Bertilvidet 13:02, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Anybody in here, who has an idea where I could raise these questions??? Bertilvidet 09:08, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Of course, the English Wikipedia is a global encyclopaedia written in English. It is surely not intended to be an encyclopaedia of the English-speaking world, promoting the prevalent worldviews of the countries that make it up, but inevitably, because most of the contributors come from those countries, an unintended bias results. One of the biggest problems of the English Wikipedia is its domination by editors from the USA, a worrying proportion of whom don't really know anything about the rest of the world and have no intention of learning, as exemplified by the appalling piece of trolling by Cyde Weys above (it may well have been a joke of course, but there are many people who actually hold those attitudes). It's worth remembering that the English Wikipedia has a very large number of contributors for whom English is not their first langauge, mainly from mainland Europe, who have contributed a huge amount. The problems of the English Wikipedia can be addressed by encouraging greater participation of editors from outside the English-speaking world, so please help us and contribute your time and skill!

[edit] Problems with the sources buissiness

Is alot of the sources for the claims would be other Wikipedia pages, which I think is frowned upon (IE. Don't use Wikipedia as a reference for Wikipedia articels). 68.39.174.238 07:36, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

A diff to a Wikipedia project page should be fine, as this work is basically a self-reference, as long as you treat it as an external link and use the permalink from the page you're referencing. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 20:47, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Statistics

We need a "milestones" section, similar to the one on Spanish Wikipedia. How do you find dates of milestones?

[edit] Weasel words

This article uses weasel words. For example:

The English Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias resulting from most of its editors being technologically-competent English-speaking people living in developed countries.

By whom? Let's not hide behind the passive tense. To help the reader form an opinion of the veracity of such accusations, we need to state the origin, nature, and prevalence of such supposed accusations. In its current state, the sentence is semantically void.

Sometimes, editors whose native language is not English have been criticized by editors whose native language is English for making edits with poor grammar or other language mistakes.

Sometimes? How often is sometimes? Are there any statistics to show whether or not there is a basis for the criticism; in other words, do editors with English as their first language really inject fewer linguistic errors than others?

—LX (talk, contribs) 16:17, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Use of {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}

I've removed the use of {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} in the line

It currently has {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} articles.

I think such usage is against WP:SELF, or should be. Any third-party redistributor of Wikipedia will be using a database dump that's slightly out of date. Therefore, in each of their copies of the English Wikipedia article, the statement about the current number of articles in the English Wikipedia will be wrong. —Saforrest 21:42, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

And furthermore, it does not work right with article history. It will display the current number of articles in any revision, even when Wikipedia gets 10 times as many articles as it had in the day when the article had the template. Georgia guy 01:09, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
Could you please clarify your statement? I do not understand. :-( --WPholic [ talk ] 04:49, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
He's saying that if you view an old revision with that template, it will show the current number, instead of the number at that moment. --Thinboy00 @159, i.e. 02:48, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Creation date?

Alexa say "Online Since: 13-Jan-2001". This article says: created on Jan 15. Which correct? `'mikka (t) 07:19, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

My guess is the wiki has been open to editing since 15 January 2001, but the domain (originally wikipedia.com) has been registered since 13 January 2001 – Qxz 08:55, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Metric versus US measurements

Was there really such a huge dispute about it? I do not remember it and cannot find it. Practical compromises like writing other units in brackets seem easy. Andries

Many things that seemed "huge disputes" at the time have been reduced to obscure bits of forgotten discussion buried away in archives. None of these things are significant enough to be contained in an article; someone removed this particular incident a while back – Qxz 08:56, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ha

"fiercest and most prolonged edit wars" lol. so many good wikipedians lost im sure... (hand to heart): They gave their lives for all mankind!

Indeed, stupid phrase. I've reworded it – Qxz 08:52, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Please reconsider your vote re Simple English Wikipedia

Please reconsider your vote re Simple English Wikiquote. Your comment with your vote suggests you don't understand what SE Wikiquote is for. It is not about collecting quotes in Simple English. See my user page, for example, for a discussion of the aim of SE Wikiquote. The vote is at meta:Proposals for closing projects Thanks. --Coppertwig 03:52, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Diacritical dispute

The Diacritical dispute, between presumeably English-speaking & Non-English (mainley European) speaking Wikipedians (which has been ongoing for about a year Jan 2006 to Jan 2007), should be mentioned on this article. GoodDay 23:18, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Systemic bias

Who wrote this information about the systemic bias, and what is the exact meaning? If the English wikipedia is contributed by well-educated non-native English speakers, this possibly suggests that the English Wikipedia will be with better content than for example some other language wikipedias. In the article of systemic bias there was some example of unconscious biasing of white poets, some racist issues, etc. I don't see why all this is relevant. Indeed I think that all well-educated people must contribute solely to the English wikipedia, not because I like or adore the English, but because there must be some process for globalization of human race on Earth. Irrelevant patriotism, chauvinism, racism must be overcome because they don't lead to anything good, and since the current language in which all top rated scientific articles are published is English, the globalization and science must go hand by hand. I don't see why the English wikipedia is biased, the fact that a lot of well-educated editors contribute to the English Wikipedia, should be notable feature, not something that the English Wikipedia should be accused for. And few more comments on the language issue: English comes from England and if spelling should be preferred I think the British one better be preferred. As I said above, nationalism and misunderstood patriotism is never of help. I don't want to offend Americans, but to truncate the English wikipedia into two just because of spelling issues is ridiculous. Humans are equal, there are no better nations, there are only good people vs. bad people Danko Georgiev MD 05:39, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal to undo merge

Content was merged here from Wikipedia community, which became a redirect to thsi article. I find no place where this was dicussed and a consensus was arrived at. i think this was a bad idea -- the community exists on more than the english wikipedia, and a significant section of it crosses language bounderies. This was discussed at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2007 July 25#Wikipedia community → English Wikipedia in the context of a proposal to delete the redirect, and several editors also felt that the merge was a poor idea. I therefore propose to undo it unless there is significant opposition. See Talk:Wikipedia community#Proposing un-merge for further discussion. DES (talk) 19:18, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Its stub!!!

no graphs, no statistic table about wikipedia content (articles about Years , about persons(biography), and so on)--Berserkerus 21:50, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I see this article and other individual language Wikipedia articles, essentially, as content forks

Also, they're hard to accomodate by WP:ASR. All the information on these should be merged.-h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 15:53, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The top of this page says the article has been nominated for deletion 3 times and the result was keep each time. Some of the small Wikipedia language versions have been deleted. PrimeHunter 21:03, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 2 million GET

Why can't I find the two millionth article? There was a link for 1,000,000 GET. --Demonesque 09:07, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

It appears to have been El Hormiguero. There may still be some final confirmation.--Chaser - T 09:15, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

¡Ay, caramba! Gracias! --Demonesque 20:19, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Controversy section

I agree completely with the tagging of the section as needing reliable 3rd-party sources, and when working on it, some mention of the Seigenthaler controversy would be nice (it's covered elsewhere so a summary mention would be sufficient, but it took place here). Also, I'd really rather not cite Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars as a source if there's something - anything - else we can link to. Its a WP project page (which can't be avoided sometimes when writing about Wikipedia I suppose) whose contents are entirely subjective and flagged with {{humor}} at the top, so... yeah. Narco 12:03, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Removing that and the info it is citing. That's just plain embarassing. I hope it hasn't been here long. Picaroon (t) 02:44, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Removed. Picaroon (t) 02:51, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Primary sources

I've tagged this article with {{primarysources|article}} because it has an overreliance Wikipedia pages as sources. Citing ourself is not bad when done in moderation and to supplement existing reliable sources, but encyclopedic integrity is comprised when we rely so heavily on our own pages to cite so much of the article to. Picaroon (t) 02:39, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spelling conventions

I recently did a search for 'colour' on wikipedia and ended up at 'color'. I would expect that as this version is English Wikipedia and not American Wikipedia, surely the default language should be International English. I feel that as American English is based on the English language, which came first, then surely that alone is argument enough for it's usage as default. Basically I can't understand why one local varient of the language is more dominant that the orginal and more widely used version. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.211.18.253 (talk) 18:44, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Considering the word was already spelled color in Latin, you can hardly claim that colour is the older spelling. Be that as it may, English Wikipedia permits both American and British spelling conventions, but expects individual articles to be internally consistent. —Angr 19:16, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Language

Does the english Wikipedia always have to use US English? Kitkatcrazy 17:25, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

No. See WP:ENGVAR. —Angr 17:32, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Keep this article

Just in case there is any doubt, in my view this is a totally valid article and should be kept. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:32, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge?

There's a mergeto tag been on this article for a while to propose merging it with Wikipedia, but I can't find any discussion or reference on it on the talk page of either article. If the discussion's been buried somewhere now with no consensus (or if it never existed) shouldn't the messy mergeto tag be removed now? (Just for the record I don't feel it should be merged - there's English Wikipedia-specific info and stats here that couldn't be included if it had to be merged into the article on the other 236 Wikipedias.) • Anakin (contribs • complaints) 13:11, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] iw

{{editprotected}}

You can now add [[no:Engelsk Wikipedia]] (: --80.202.187.178 (talk) 19:08, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Done. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:25, 20 January 2008 (UTC)