Talk:Main Page/Archive 33

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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Contents

Other languages straw poll

People, we are desperately in need of some consensus here. Can we all please vote for one of the following options. Given that there are three options, I think a 51% plurality would suffice. Some of the options have subordinate polls: please vote again in each of these subpolls. GeorgeStepanek\talk 01:34, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Use the other languages by word count template

  1. dab (ᛏ) 08:18, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  2. Pidgeot 10:14, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  3. --fvw* 13:22, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)
  4. Nyenyec 17:09, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  5. Bawolff 23:34, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  6. Gubbubu 15:03, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  7. Steverapaport 17:29, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  8. -Aranel ("Sarah") 03:47, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Keep word counts for each language

  1. GeorgeStepanek\talk 01:34, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  2. dab (ᛏ) 08:17, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  3. Pidgeot 10:14, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  4. --fvw* 13:22, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)
  5. Nyenyec 17:09, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  6. Bawolff 23:34, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  7. Gubbubu 15:03, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  8. Steverapaport 17:45, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC) and normalize them if people object to inaccuracy.
  9. -Aranel ("Sarah") 03:47, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Change to word count categories

Change to an alphabetical list showing word counts for each language

Use the other languages by article count template

  1. Tom- 01:29, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  2. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:22, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)
  3. Fredrik | talk 14:39, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  4. Eloquence* 17:01, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
  5. Gkhan 17:14, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
  6. rydel 18:45, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  7. Dan100 20:12, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
  8. Arwel 00:36, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  9. Shmuel 07:04, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  10. Squash 02:04, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Highest category is 100,000+

  1. Scott Gall 06:59, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Highest category is 50,000+

  1. GeorgeStepanek\talk 01:34, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  2. Tom- 01:29, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  3. gadfium 01:51, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  4. SnowRaptor 02:33, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  5. Kiand 03:01, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  6. dab (ᛏ) 08:17, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  7. Fredrik | talk 14:39, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  8. Nyenyec 17:09, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  9. Gkhan 17:14, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
  10. rydel 18:45, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  11. Dan100 20:12, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
  12. Shmuel 07:04, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Highest category is 10,000+

Lowest category is 1000+

  1. GeorgeStepanek\talk 01:34, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  2. gadfium 01:51, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  3. dab (ᛏ) 08:17, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  4. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:22, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)
  5. But let this be the last poll on the matter, or I'll run out of opinions. --fvw* 13:23, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)
  6. Fredrik | talk 14:39, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  7. Nyenyec 17:09, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  8. Gkhan 17:14, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
  9. rydel 18:45, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  10. Shmuel 07:04, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Lowest category is 500+

  • Kiand 02:59, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Lowest category is 100+

Remove the other languages template entirely

  1. GeorgeStepanek\talk 01:34, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
(question: and replace it with interwiki links? or just the 'languages' icon? dab (ᛏ))
And link "Other languages" directly to the Complete list of language Wikipedias available. GeorgeStepanek\talk
  1. Mimirzero 08:23, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  2. This is a completely mystifying introduction to people visting the wikipedia.org page for the first time, and a waste of time for everyone else. It should be deleted entirely. At the very least it must have some kind of heading or introduction section, such as "Welcome to Wikipedia, a free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit." (which could be in several languages). Adam 06:20, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  3. Da 'Sco Mon 19:58, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

5 Million ?

"An international charitable effort is underway to help the estimated 5,000,000 victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and its subsequent tsunamis."

What the hell, is this a typo ? Unless we have another earthquake soon in the middle of Sumatra, that number is just way too high.

That's not deaths - that's all victims, including homeless (who outnumber deaths - a lot of people got away in time). That said, I have no specific idea of the exact figure. Pakaran 03:58, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Oh, and see 2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake#Damage_and_casualties. Pakaran 04:33, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
On yet another note, there's a possibility of displacement due to disease. Pakaran 14:56, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
The dead aren't in much need of charity. -- Cyrius|✎ 17:43, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Exactly. And I think the estimated figure is still lower than the actual one.


mean

jeez...when editing articles people are mean- bstar

yes...it's their standard deviation from societal norms - Blair P. Houghton

All contributors are expected to show respect and consideration for one another, as a norm. If they do not, they earn a reputation for poor citizenship, to use an old-fashioned term. See Wikipedia:WikiLove for one of the founding principles of the community, dating back to the founding of the Wikipedia, and perhaps before that. Ancheta Wis 23:48, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

man...if you have to explain a joke - Blair P. Houghton

if it is the mode to be mean then that is a deviation (for Poisson statistics) Ancheta Wis 03:34, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Slow response time

Since I came back to "Wikipedia", I have suffered from some extremly long response times. It's gotten progressively worse. Today, it took almost ten minutes to post an edit. Is it just me? RickK 00:22, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)

You are not alone, there have been problems at times for the last couple of weeks. maybe time for another holiday from wikipedia. Clawed 01:49, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Slashdot ran a story referencing Wikipedia earlier today. Could be some residue of that. Few servers other than Slashdot's own are capable of handling the compulsive link-frobbing of their simian membership.
Wikipedia has become much bigger than Slashdot, so it no longer suffers brownouts when slashdotted. Compare the two Alexa rankings. It's just getting very popular, particularly now that people have time after celebrating Christmas. GeorgeStepanek\talk 04:28, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Configuration and software issues as far as I could tell from the IRC traffic. Dori | Talk 05:06, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)
  • You can read status info here and see server hits here. Dan100 17:37, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)
  • Where can we find upgrade/roadmap status? Cuz this thing is desperately in need of some performance improvements, or it's going to thrash itself to vapor. Blair P. Houghton 22:48, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • okay...duh...page down on the normal status page and upgrade and roadmap are discussed in wikilush detail. Blair P. Houghton

WIKIPEDIA STATUS UPDATES

PLEASE seriously consider including a well highlighted and regularly updated (very short) summary of WIKIPEDIA STATUS (in layman's terms)right at the beginning of the Main Page. (Or at the very least a high-profile link to [1]. **Wikimedia Technical Group think this would just overload them too, so maybe a bad suggestion on my part** ). I feel we could lose many potential users and contributors during extended periods of significantly slow access during maintainance, hardware/software problems etc..etc.. Wikityke

Opening section

It's great to have a concise intro, but I'm missing the links to CSS-free and textonly version of the main page. Shouldn't they be readily available to our readers without too much searching around? Mgm|(talk) 10:47, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)

The table-free link at the top of Main Page in turn has a link to the text-only Main Page. Ancheta Wis 21:40, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
There is now a redirect with dashes instead of underscores to the Main-Page-(text-only). If you are using a PDA without the underscore character, it may be simpler to enter the entire URL for an article with a single word as the title, such as Science. I can report that the Palm wireless PDA's can get to this article. Ancheta Wis 08:44, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

US hasn't conquered Canada. Yet.

To whoever edits the front page...

"Did you know..." today (1/6/05) starts off:

From Wikipedia's newest articles:
East and West Memorial Buildings, Ottawa, Canada
* ...that the East and West Memorial Buildings in Ottawa, Canada were originally built in 1949 to house the rapidly growing Department of Veterans Affairs?

Clicking "Department of Veterans Affairs" takes one promptly to this article. Clearly the US isn't housing offices in Ottawa just yet, David Foster Wallace hypotheses aside. Should be linked to Department of Veterans Affairs (Canada).

Thanks for pointing this out. It's fixed now.-gadfium 23:00, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Just so you know, anyone can edit the "Did you know..." section. It's not obvious to those who are new to Wikipedia but it is a tempalte (which is not protected) which is included in the main page (which is protected). Much of the contents on the main page can be edited by anyone. - Jeltz talk 23:06, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

More search options?

Maybe this should be in the navigation bar and discussed on the mediawiki site, but there ought to be an easy way to search other namespaces easily from the main page. The only way I've found so far is to search for a nonexistent article, which brings up a search page with checkboxes for namespaces. I don't want to search other namespaces by default. --Theodore Kloba 15:13, 2005 Jan 7 (UTC)

Go to Special:Preferences, click "Search result settings" and change "Search in these namespaces by default". Tom- 19:48, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Reread the last sentence of my previous comment. I don't want to search other namespaces by default. I just want to do it occasionally without a bunch of gymnastics.--Theodore Kloba 22:09, Jan 7, 2005 (UTC)

What's silly is that hitting "Search" without typing anything in doesn't take you to a generic search page, but instead an oblique error message. --Fastfission 05:33, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I filed a bug on that a while back. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:54, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

SUGGESTION: Earthquake "and tsunamis"

Yes. I know. But there are lots of people out there who are *not* geophysicists.  :-) Might we expand the Special by those 2 words? -- Baylink 20:24, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Am dummy. Missed that this was a template. -- Baylink 21:26, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Error about Saudi Arabia

WikiCookie

Not knowing how to edit the main page, I am using this forum to correct an error. The Hejaz is NOT "present day Saudi Arabia". Saudi Arabia occupies almost the entire Arabian Peninsula. The Hejaz is the smaller region on the eastern shore of the Red Sea that includes the cities of Medina and Mecca. Too Old 06:49, 2005 Jan 8 (UTC)

Thank you for highlighting that. The error has been fixed, and if it does not appear corrected to you, try reloading the page. You win a cookie. - Mark 08:28, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Earthquake donation box

I've moved the donation box down. It's been two weeks since the disaster, unless anyone's been living under a rock they'll have heard about it and heard for calls for donations - and probably donated if they've wanted to. Tom- 00:48, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Didn't agree at first glance, but your point of it being two weeks now is very true. violet/riga (t) 00:51, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I can't find it on the main page now. I think it should be on for longer. People need reminding and don't all finish donating by two weeks. If there's room for stuff like this: "...that the racy George Michael song I Want Your Sex touted monogamy instead of promiscuity? " then I think the donation box is more important. A constant "update on the disaster" link would be appropriate for sometime to come, linking to a page like this. WikiUser 21:42, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

language redirect

As multicultural as it is, I find that the multilingual front page they just installed is more unwieldy than it's worth. (above unsigned)

Then just type in the CORRRECT URL FOR THE ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA, en.wikipedia.org, as you should've been doing all along. --Node 04:33, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
and, can it be edited? the 1000-10000 tier is outdated, already. dab (ᛏ) 22:53, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It can be edited at meta:Www.wikipedia.org_portal Jeff8765 00:08, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)
And it is. Ad nauseum. --Baylink 01:32, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

San Francisco Sub Update

The severely injured crewman has died and the current number of injured is 23.

huh?

I saw a swear word so I deleted it.--67.68.15.69 20:45, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)edit

Main Page redirect and recent slowness

How come the main page changed to a new screen (www.wikipedia.org). I liked it better when it simply came up to the page with the search box, news, and articles.

Now it comes up to a language selection screen, which takes a while to load, from where I have to select my language to go to the original main page, which is also slow.

Is there a way to set a cookie or have the webpage simply go to the proper language website, based on the user's previous choices and browser configuration? I mean when I enter www.wikipedia.org for a URL, not set a homepage to the actual domain, or create a special bookmark.

I fixed this by my hosts file to have www.wikipedia.org point to en.wikipedia.org's IP address. --I am not good at running 00:38, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Actually, that's a good idea, but only under prime conditions. It's practical for one or two computers on which one has superuser privledges, but in situations where one logs on from work (in my case) or from various locations, it's not the most feasable (on work computers, lusers don't get to change the hosts file, and at various places, people don't generally like you playing with their operating files. In my case, it's workable from home, but not from work, with the pun quite intended.

I figure that having the main page read the browser's user-agent language component should be enough to select the proper main page. If some has a proxy that alters that and has an unknown language, then a redirection to either a specific language main page, or to the language select page. This begins to address the problem of language preferences. Why not take the user to his own language automatically?

Because if the language selection was done automagically in the background, the casual user would not know how sensitive and inclusive we all are, and would not know that we are aware that there are other languages besides english. It is better this way in that we get to make a display of our sensitivity.

Bahhh, the hosts file thing doesn't work after all. After quick observation, it seems the IP addresses of www.wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org seem to change every few minutes. What the hell? Is there any way I can tell my system or even just Firefox -- hell, my LinkSys router if I have to -- to automatically reference en.wikipedia.org whenever www.wikipedia.org is referenced? This is stupid. I want to be able to get the English wikipedia from any instance of the referenced www. prefix via a solution that actually works. Any ideas? --I am not good at running 01:14, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The IP address changes every few minutes because we have multiple servers that answer to a single domain name. A common setup for high-traffic sites. -- Cyrius|✎ 07:47, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Everybody, JUST TYPE IN EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG instead of whinging about the removal of the redirect! Everything people have discussed here has already been discussed on wikipedia-l and meta, ad nauseum. If you want, you can still participate although discussion is mostly over. YThere was a poll on this a long time ago, and people think that a redirect may be bad although a highlight of preferrred language seems possible still. --Node 04:35, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

conflict with information on Pompey

The page for Pompey says "in the spring of 49 BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy with his thirteenth legion". --Paraphelion 02:28, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hey, there's an error in the news box!

There's a missing pic or something.

www.wikipedia.org

Very Simple Problem to fix. Wikipedia just needs to detect the language of the user's web browser (i.e. en-US) and automatically redirect them to their language (en.wikipedia.org, etc). If the user is using an unrecognized language then wikipedia should show the different languages available. Any advanced web developer should know this. -BW

ok, i unterstand that www.wikipedia.org goes to a global page, where you can choose a language etc. but why does www.wikipedia.com go to that page?? this adress should go the english page.

it freaks me out because now i have to click on english and wait for the english page to load before i can search. And don't tell me to use en.wikipedia..., i'm used to www.wikipedia.com, as everybody else i think.

Then get used to using the shorter url. I've been using it since before this site was moved the the language subdomain. --mav 20:16, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
In a way, en.wiki.org isn't shorter because you can leave out the www in www.wiki.org. But that's really besides the point, as there's this nifty thing called a bookmark.
BTW, there's no reason .com should be any different from .org, as both are TLDs meant for global use. If you really want an English-specific domain that doesn't require you to use a subdomain, register/use wikipeia.co.uk, wikipedia.org.uk or wikipedia.us. --Pidgeot 21:26, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
www.wikipedia.org.uk exists and redirects to en.wikipedia.org, though it shouldn't as UK also has cy, kw, gd, and (arguably) ga wikipedias, too. -- Arwel 02:01, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I'm someone else who thinks the new language-selection main page is a severe step backwards. Feel free to disregard me (as I don't have an account ;). The design is ugly with no pretty pictures, it's slow, and on many computers (eg. mine) the Japanese characters display as "???" - yuck. It doesn't even have a clear statement of what Wikipedia is on that page! I can't see how a new user who'd never heard of the project (if there are any left) would be tempted to carry on and browse the encyclopedia. In any case, there's an "other languages" link right there on the top right of the English main page. If we really have to have this new page, can there at least be a cookie set so people only have to see it once? Thanks.

One reason the first page seems slow to load is because it causes many, many fonts to be loaded into your display server, just to display one word in every proposed language. PLEASE replace this text by images! My mozilla grows by 120Mbytes and my X server by 200Mbytes when I pass on this first page. People with smaller/slower computers will just give up waiting. Check the wiki server logs to see how often the "client stopped connection before send body completed" on this first page.

  • Ok, now *that's* a valid complaint. I'll point that out to folks... but remember: you can do it yourself.  ;-) --Baylink 01:33, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikinews link slightly off

On the .org portal page, Wikinews' address needs to have an en in it, not just an n. -- user:zanimum

Anyone can edit the portal - it's at m:Www.wikipedia.org portal. [[User:Rdsmith4|User:Rdsmith4/sig]] 17:05, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Newsbox error 1/10/04 4:00 PM CST

Picture of Abbas with Yushchenko lead? Anyone fix this? --[[User:TheGrza|TheGrza]] 22:01, Jan 10, 2005 (UTC)

  • seconding the above re this embarrassing error: PLEASE FIX IT. btw, the "Tintin" cartoon on the left isn't placed too well either. Sfahey 23:13, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Anyone can edit "In The News" (unless it happens to be protected, which it normally isn't): see Template:In the news. [[User:Rdsmith4|User:Rdsmith4/sig]] 23:24, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the info, which I actually just used. It's a wide-open door for vandals, so I won't spread this around.Sfahey 15:55, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Thing is vandals don't generally read deeper into things. Other than a goatcz picture on the front page for a while, we've never had any major incidents to my knowledge. -- user:zanimum
  • Somebody did mess with the front page using the "In The News" thing, but it was reverted after several minutes.
  • Well, that and the infamous Felix the Cat incident.  ;-) -- Baylink 15:45, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • The Goatse image on the main page *was* the Felix the cat incident. →Raul654 15:54, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)
  • OK, *be* picky.  :-) --Baylink 01:34, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Why Wikipedia is running slowly

Read why Wiki is slow. Dan100 14:29, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)

Link on Main Page to Allpages

Could we have a link to Special:Allpages on the Main Page? In my opinion, it's better than the Quick index, and better for namespaces than the search engine. Lee S. Svoboda 01:11, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There currently is a link it is near the bottom of the page. The text of the link is "All". It could probably do will more prominent placement. -- Popsracer 07:39, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for telling me. I would like the it to be moved to above the tables, the most prominent place on the Main Page, but I think that I'm a bit on the radical side there. Lee S. Svoboda

whut?

why are we back to ungrammatical

Started in 2001, we are currently working on 449425 English articles.

?? don't tell me it won a poll or something. How can we convince people there is anything of value in WP when even the first sentence is wrong. Or is this in the spirit of "weeding out elitism since 2001"? dab (ᛏ) 18:35, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I don't like how it says "we are currently working on..." maybe put "English Wikipedia started in 2001, we now have 449425 articles." instead. Squash 02:04, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I actually love that part: it dispells the illusion that you will find anything lik 450k encyclopedic articles here. We have no 'finished' articles, of course, but if you want to count articles that are by some standard encyclopedic, we now have 478. dab (ᛏ) 18:13, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse picture

Those who know me know that I generally oppose censorship (and I specifically voted to delete the censored Abu Gharib page). However, is it really appropriate to show that image on the main page? -Ld | talk 00:25, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Absolutely it's completely integral to the recent news regarding Charles Graner. It's ugly, that's a bad reason to hide it. --Christiaan 14:06, 15 Jan 2005

Happy Birthday

to Wikipedia :) I love this project.

Also, what happened to the article counter?

NM, it's back
It was temporarily removed to make way for the birthday message. Things have been redesigned however and now it's back. --fvw* 01:30, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)
I created a birthday banner, Template:Birthdaynotice, but on second thought I moved it to Template:Main Page banner so we needn't create another template for every occasion. I'd suggest, however, that the banner be commented out rather than deleted to make it easy to re-enable next time it becomes necessary. [[User:Rdsmith4|User:Rdsmith4/sig]] 02:40, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Of all the many bad ideas I have seen floated at Wikipedia, this "language template" thing is one of the worst. To new visitors, it will be totally meaningless and confusing, and will discourage use of the encyclopaedia (something I know many users don't care much about). To everyone else, it is just a redundant nuisance. Adam 06:26, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What of those who would be ultra-confused by a page with not a single word they can understand? This was, until a few weeks ago, the situation of any given monolingual Chinese speaker after typing "www.wikipedia.org". The world doesn't revolve around en.wikipedia - we may be the biggest, but the others are big. --Node 09:58, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
in case you mean the portal page, see above, and meta:Talk:Www.wikipedia.org_portal. It's experimental, and will react to browsers' language preference setting. dab (ᛏ) 10:10, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
How is that a response to my criticisms? Adam 05:42, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

triple 'in' in news

"Mahmoud Abbas is sworn in in a ceremony in" - I suppose its valid english but it reads terribly. Change 2nd 'in' to 'at' ?. - Wombat 01:09, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Suggested new method for hyperlinking

Hello All

I'm a new visitor to this site, having only just discovered it a few weeks ago. For this reason please excuse this comment if it infringes any pre-defined rules on suggesting new changes. In this same spirit, please excse it if it has been porposed before. It is late, and I have not yet had time to peruse the site for all of the rules on proposed changes etc.

I have used the Wikipedia intensively since I discovered it just over six weeks ago. In general, I have found every single article to be concise, informative and very well written. The links have been exceptionally helpful and have always led me on many an interesting diversion.

I do have one suggestion to improve the usefulness and integrity of the site though and it is pretty fundamental. My suggestion is actually more of a question - Is it possible to automate the generation of hyperlinks so that every word within the text of an article is checked against every topic in the Wikipedia to determine whether or not a link should be established ?

In conjunction with this - Is it possible to establish a set of synonyms and associations for each topic to aid the above process so that the checking does not miss anything just because it is worded the wrong way ?

For example - I might write a 4,000 word essay on King James I of England. Upon submission, the hyperlink checker would check every word in the article against every entry in the Wikipedia and create hperlinks for all known entries. It would also create links for related entries - for example, King James I of England also refers to King James VI of Scotland. The word "King" might also link to the word "Monarch" and so on.

Of course, the automated hyperlinks may be manually vetted by human operator to cull any irrelevant links (eg - "Monarch" => Monarch Butterfly" etc) but the process would still save thousands of man hours and produce a much richer document.

You may think that this may lead to nearly every word becoming a hyperlink but in fact that is the goal - to have every single word and phrase in every article become some sort of searchable reference. I know that this is a pretty major ask but if it is possible then imagine the possibilities - an endlessly searchable database of the entire sum of all knowledge.

Please comment on this topic as I will be checking regularly - as I said, I'm new to tis site and am not sure what the correct protocol is in this regards. Again, please excuse any errors in etiquette that I may have committed.

Thank you or your time.

rory@romad.com.au

there are some bots around who do this, and dump their suggestions on talk pages (its User:LinkBot, see Wikipedia:Bots; ). you don't want them to insert links automatically, because most of them will be irrelevant to the context (link-spam). (btw, this inquiry would belong on Wikipedia:Village pump. dab (ᛏ) 16:50, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

inflammatory frontpage?

Why does it say Jews are Subhuman on the wiki frontpage? Perhaps someone should change it. Soon.

this was vandalism to Template:Did you know by User:70.88.129.205, a comcastbusiness.com customer. dab (ᛏ) 16:17, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Note that you can revert such vandalism yourself using the "did you know" (or wherever it is) subsection linked to at the top of the paage 203.217.78.218 12:19, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I do not get this. What measures are in place to preserve the integrity of the site from idiots? I also think the link for each section on this page is misleading and as a result accidental damage could also occur. Who is in charge of content overall?
No one is in charge of content over all. This is the entire point of the website. The mechanism in place is that any reasonable person, seeing obvious vandalism (of which inflamatory racism is an obvious example), will want to delete it; experienced Wiki users will find that deletion quite simple. This is what the prior poster meant by "revert."User:Polyparadigm

Contradictory Information for Kiwanis

The main page says there are 600,000 members. The Kiwanis page itself says there are under 300,000. --Paraphelion 01:06, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Commented out the statistic until there is confirmation or agreement. Ancheta Wis 01:50, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be nice to have a link to Wikitravel on the starting page? Nobody knows about this project.

Wikitravel isn't part of Wikimedia Gkhan 18:50, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)
Tried the Moscow link. Novodevichy Cemetery wasn't even mentioned in the Wikitravel. So far, there is much more information in the WP Category:Moscow items. Ancheta Wis 17:16, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Typo

There is a typo on the front page (which I am unable to edit personally). Where it says: "the unrest over the goverment's new taxes", it is meant to read "the unrest over the government's new taxes".

Thank you Bobo192 04:10, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed. You could have fixed this yourself at Template:In the news.-gadfium 04:22, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Biggest charity concert since Live Aid 1984?

It was 1985, wasn't it?

Fixed. [[User:Rdsmith4|User:Rdsmith4/sig]] 15:44, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Asking for changing a language name mistake from Galician Wikipedia

Me (and in fact all the collaborators of Galician Wikipedia) are no happy with the related translation made for "Galician" in the wikipedia languages list performed above. The real translation for Galician in Galician is "GALEGO", not "gallego". Even wherever you may see the mistaken "gallego", never has been a Galician word. I only ask to whom who may concern to change please this error (as I don't know how to change it). Many thanks and best wishes.

Sobreira User

I have asked for Template:Wikipedialang to be unprotected so that this change can be made. —AlanBarrett 17:34, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Typo, Episode II

In the "This day in history" section, "beter" should be "better." --Fermatprime 11:10, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It's fixed. For the record, though, you can fix that yourself, too (and doing so takes less time than writing about it here :)). -- Schnee (cheeks clone) 11:54, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Logo is not doubled-up. Good!

Although the Wikipedia logo was not doubled up in Firefox, it was in IE when MediaWiki 1.4 came out. Now it looks good; Congratulations on the fix! Ancheta Wis 22:24, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Selected anniv (Jan 25): "Tu Bishvat in Israel"

Under Selected anniversaries for January 25 is listed "Tu Bishvat in Israel". Since Tu Bishvat is a general Jewish holiday, and thus not only relevant or celebrated in Israel, the words "in Israel" should not be used here. Furthermore this is correctly portrayed in the January 25 page, so I don't understand why it has been written up as such for Selected anniversaries. --jnothman 01:15, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Updated, but you can always fix those yourself, too :). 68.81.231.127 10:55, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

how far should we take this ?

hey i just started at this website but its pretty cool and hey i have a question!!! is there any info on what people think about how far we should take our new technology and abilities ????????????? and if any body has any good info or a view let me now cause i have a debate to do soon and could as much help as pssible if u do email me at Mowgliandtink07@aol.com thanks so much

Sidebar underlining

Why are links in the sidebar (along with some others) no longer underlined? Shouldn't they be consistent with the choice made by the user? It looks wrong to be to have them without the underline. violet/riga (t) 19:09, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

My previous question about vandalism

was deleted. Which I guess is OK, maybe I was too flippant, but the fact remains there was an item on the (supposedly protected) main page earlier today that said Viktor Yuvschenko had been nominated for an award based on his role in a porn film. I assume I'm not the only one who saw this. Would anybody like to comment?-rastro

Several sections of the main page can be edited by anyone. See the box at the top of this talk page for links to the editable sections.-gadfium 21:31, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Oh. Is it poor form to waste space saying "thank you?" -rastro
A "thank you" never goes amiss.-gadfium 22:38, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Important Information needed Please

Hello everyone, this is my first time to this web site. I have a project to do and I need some answors. Please! My son was born in Augest 2002 and Im doing his baby book It ask me questions like:

                    **Important National events
                    **Current national Leaders
                    ** Important worldwide leaders
                    **Best-selling books and authors
                    

 And the price of things:
                         MIlk, Gas ,ect


Can someone please help me to where i know to look this information up?????

See our article August 2002 for a list of important events in that year. If you want events in your city, go to your public library, ask for the newspaper reading room, and ask for the local newspaper for August 2002. For other events in 2002, see Category:2002, and from there you'll find articles and subcategories such as Category:2002 books and List of state leaders in 2002.
I can't help you on the price of things, except that the grocery/supermarket advertisments in the local paper for August 2002 might be useful. If you reply to this, include your location and other people may be able to give you web resources for local information.-gadfium 00:19, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Error on the main page

The main page says:

1951 - Nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site began with a one-megaton bomb dropped on Frenchman Flats.

That's grossly inaccurate. Operation Ranger, Able shot on jan 27 1951 was of a 1 kiloton bomb. The first meagton detonation was the Mike shot (Mike for Megaton) in october/november 1952 during project Ivy.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/index.html
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Ranger.html
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Ivy.html

--J-Star 09:02, 2005 Jan 27 (UTC)

The KJV article on the main page says:

"emains one of the most widely-read literary works from its time, surpassed only by the works of playwright William Shakespeare."

It is difficult to imagine this to be true as the sales of the KJV Bible are reported as many many multiples of any other book, period.

--[[User:Eagle|Eagle|

Where is the North Pole of the Wikipedia ?

Why has the graph of the earth on the main Wikipedia page

Image:Wikipedia mainpage of.PNG

lost the North Pole ?

Hans Rosenthal (hans.rosenthal AT t-online.de -- replace AT by @ )

The graphic is supposed to show that Wikipedia is still under construction (and it always will be).-gadfium 05:24, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Now that I see the new introduction at the top, it occurs to me that the blurb on top of every page that says From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia should be changed to From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It says the pro and con of wikipedia, that it anyone can edit it and that it is not necessarily reliable, which is something that would not be immediately clear to somebody seeing a printout of an article or coming directly to any article other than the main page. Of course this is not the appropriate talk page to raise this issue, but ask me to figure out which one is. --Ezra Wax 05:21, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think that would be a good idea, but I have no idea which talkpage it should be put on. Maybe the logo should be changed too. Bawolff 23:38, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Why would the logo be changed? The community voted in favour of it, and it's your problem that you weren't there. -- user:zanimum
There's a link saying "Edit this page" at the top of every article.
The "Edit this page" link really isn't that prominent for someone that linked to an article from an external source. I read many Wikipedia articles before I realized what this site actually was.
--Azkar 05:21, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
It still needs to be said - not everyone grasps the implications, and understands the consequent pitfalls of this unique arrangement. --Mikeh 13:26, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Pitfalls? Benefits and disadvatages! No encyclopedia can be 100% accurate, and most represent the blinkered perceptions of a very amall and select collective of editors. Wikipedia, in contrast, allows and enables readers to measure interactively their personal perceptions against those of a vast collective editorship. Laurel Bush 12:14, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC).
I note now however that the dates and times of latest modifictions seem to be without reference to any time zone. Therefore anything quoted from Wikipedia is not easily referenced to a particular edition. Laurel Bush 12:22, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC). (I think all dates and times should be GMT.)

www.wikipedia.org

>>Feb 20th, 2k5 ::Each web page should have a warning/disclaimer ikon prominently placed on it indicating the possible unreliability of the written contents. [elyah_ @ eSefardi]<<

There is discussion in and around these heah parts going on about creating a tiered implementation of this wiki, possibly with something in the vein of an "undisputed" if not "indisputable" version being offered somehow, somewhere, someetc. -Ozzyslovechild 02:55, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

www.wikipedia.org

Now that it is not necessarily reliable, which is something that takes up an entire browser window, but that takes up an entire browser (i.e. en-US) and automatically arises everyday: as an English speaker, I have only purpose was to detect them to the concept of a user-compiled and edited dictionary. Then, of course, there would be the new introduction at the tabloid media and automatically redirect them have less than the miscommunication that basically redirectly to any article or coming direct them to the concept of a user-compiled and edited dictionary. Then, of course, there would get in the main pages of space and detracts from an other. Now that Nederlands, but those who don't think its only purpose was to direct the both the top 20, even the top, it occurs to wikipedia.org, etc). If this type arrangement. Some of them to the copycats who would be the concept of a user-compiled and edited dictionary. Then, of course, there would not be immediately clear to somebody seeing a printout of any language, can you imagine what sort of response this would try to outdo each other. Now that it anyone can edit. It says From Wikipedia.org, etc). If the user is using an unrecognized language (en.wikipedia the free encyclopedia that everyday between native and detracts from an other. Now that threatens to ruin this entire project.

This is a real security flaw that threatens to ruin this type arrangement. Some of the user's web browser window, but those who don't advocate something new everyday in the top 30 Wikipedia, it serves more than that. Look at the top 30 Wikipedia, include national minority language (en.wikipedia that basically arises every page that says From Wikipedia?

While something that it and that Nederlands, but those who don't advocate something new everyday between native and learn something new every simple to fix. Wikipedias, and some people are way, way, way, way too obsessed with over 1000 article others have only language (en.wikipedias, such as the English Wikipedia, that I see the copycats who would try to outdo each others have only languages with an itsy bitsy mainpage. I don't advocate some people are way, way, way too obsessed with over 1000 articles, otherwise clear and concise project.


The problems mentioned below are very simple to fix. Wikipedia just needs to detect the language of the user's web browser (i.e. en-US) and automatically redirect them to their language (en.wikipedia.org, etc). If the user is using an unrecognized language then wikipedia should show the different languages available. Any advanced web developer should know this. -BW

It should redirect to en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page, or whatever the main page address is. When I type in en.wikipedia.org, I get an error. Using Firefox. Maybe that's because my school's Internet is wierd, but I doubt it; aside from the fascism of Websense (which I bypass with proxies anyway, but was not when attempting to go to en.wikipedia.org), it's pretty normal. --YixilTesiphon 01:21, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

--

How come putting in 'www.wikipedia.org' doesnt take us to the main page anymore, but to a language-choice sorta page?

There are Things Going On. I missed exactly what they *are*, but I know they're happening. Keep an eye out.  :-) -- Baylink 20:25, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I hope this isn't a permanent choice... the initial page for Wikipedia ought to be the version of the encyclopedia which gets the most visits and has the most quality pages (a pair of factors which likely are effected by and affect each other). Dumping to a language selection page (before giving you any indication of the content of the website) is not, in my opinion, very good web design, much less for an encyclopedia. But we'll see, I guess... --Fastfission 05:30, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The thing is that while English is a lot more popular than the other languages, its lead is not so overwhelming that they can be ignored. Japanese and German in particular account for a very large fraction of Wikipedia's traffic. -*-- Cyrius|✎ 05:53, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
And so now we have a language selection page. Big whoop. If I came to the main page and was new I would go to the next site as I'd feel overwhelmed. Sorry, but this is a very bad design decision. I hope that someone will either fix the design or make it more interesting. Our front www.wikipedia.org page is meant to be an interest, eye-catching, "Wow that's a cool site!" sort of page. Right now its a dull, uninteresting list of languages with no explanation of what Wikipedia is, what we are about, what we stand for or why I should care about it. - Ta bu shi da yu 06:40, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
This is a truely terrible design decision. But graoning about it here isn't going to make a difference. I'm taking this up in a more productive forum. →Raul654 06:45, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)
Raul, please tell what is the more productive forum where you want to discuss this? There's no link to a talk page for www.wikipedia.org, and no "view source" link to allow us to find out which template'is being used. (Which is very poor design in itself.) Who made all these changes? And when were they put to a vote? (Is this just Node playing silly buggers again?) GeorgeStepanek\talk 20:36, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Yes, since clearly everything that goes on that you don't agree with is MY fault. Perhaps if you were more informed, you would realise that this was not MY decision at all but the decision of people in a site-wide poll on meta a long time ago, and that the actual switch was made by a developer and was NOT requested by me (only supported by me), you would know this had you ever bothered to subscribe to wikipedia-l. The only people to raise objections were in fact from the English Wikipedia, and even then it was a minority. You missed the chance to vote on the meta poll a loooooooooooooooooooooooooong time ago, but if you really think it's nessecary we can hold a new one. --Node 04:30, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I would rather stick to the old format of a catchy intro page, but if we are going to have this change, could we have a cookie that stores your language choice? I know that there are other wikis out there that are big, but I don't like the idea of having to go to en.wikipeida.org instead of just wikipedia.org every time I want to come to wikipedia. abhishek 08:01, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)
Cookies are a bad idea (and lots of people block them for privacy reasons). The easiest thing to do is have it how I believe it used to be: redirecting to http://en.wikipedia.org/ if the user speaks English, http://ja.wikipedia.org/ if the user speaks Japanese, &c. Why have a cookie when one can just use the user's preference for language in their UA? Why anyone changed this I cannot imagine. Please put it back the old way. This totally goes against design principles and WWW standards.
--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley talk contrib 21:39, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)
I'd like to add my voice to the displeasure at being taken direct to a language-choice screen. Now, regardless of the language one wants to read wikipedia in, there is an extra click-through to be made. Bad design, if you ask me. Matthew
Uhh... duhh... you're wrong here. If you want to go to en.wikipedia all the time, use the CORRECT url for that wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org and you will be taken dIRECTLY TO IT every single time. --Node 04:30, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I don't think it's a good idea either. I actually thought wikipedia was broken for a day because I didn't take the time to read and try link.. I just assumed it didn't load and that some troll succeeded in changing the main-page. MikeCapone 05:31, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Uhh... if you want to go to en.wikipedia all the time, use the CORRECT url for that wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org and you will be taken dIRECTLY TO IT every single time. --Node 04:30, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I do not like the new way *at all*. Bye bye passing trade, imho. Kiand 18:20, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I very much dislike it too. violet/riga (t) 21:41, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Where have you all been? I've been on Wikipedia for nearly 2 years now, and for most of that time it's been accepted that www.wikipedia.org should not point at the English main page. It's inherently POV to point at one language version, particularly since it has lost its' pre-eminence in terms of volume. It's been discussed on the Wikien mailing list. I've been bookmarking "en.wikipedia.org" and giving it in references for about 18 months. The change has only now been actioned because someone finally decided to be bold, and admittedly aesthetically it could do with some tweaking, but I fully support the principle of the change. -- Arwel 22:21, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Where have we been? "Where has this been discussed?", is the real question. Oh, on the mailing list. Great. Very inclusive for it to be discussed off-site. I agree it's inherently POV -- the point of view of intelligent web design. The first page people see should be catchy, it should showcase the language which has the most quality articles edited by the most people (which I'm willing to wager is English), and it should give people an indication of what sort of website they are looking at. If you wanted to be super-sensible, perhaps you could have it automatically drop you into the website indicated by your IP's country code. Anyway, we can all pretend that English language sites don't dominate the .org and .com domains, we can all love and aspire to idealistic visions about how much a default language main page will send off a language-centric message, we can all wish life was warm and squishy and everyone communicated in the same tongue effortlessly, we can pretend that discussions which take place on a mailing list someone magically represent the site as a whole (and reach the site as a whole), and we can all dream of a wonderful era where good site design doesn't matter. Or we can be realistic. Well anyway, you can see where I stand on it, but I'm just another average-joe contributor. --Fastfission 23:05, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It was also discussed long ago on meta at m:What to do with www.wikipedia.org and m:Quelle utilisation pour www.wikipedia.org ?. Yes, I'll grant that the front page should be catchy, but I do not accept that it should showcase English as "the language which has the most quality articles edited by the most people" -- have you seen the multilingual statistics lately? German, Japanese, and French are not that far behind English, and are growing considerably faster. -- Arwel 23:26, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I agree that a language portal page is the right way to go, but this one is UGLY. Can it be edited? Where can it be edited? Who can edit it? Where can we discuss this? Temporary blindness on my part, or so it seems. Arwel's link is all you need. --217.232.181.233 23:56, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Not that far behind? Well, German has around 42% as many articles as en:, and that's as close as other language wikipedias get. English is the biggest project; English is the world's most-spoken language, behind Mandarin and Spanish, neither of which have comparably large Wikipedias. I think that the www.wikipedia.org domain should point to the English Wikipedia until other languages have comparable stats. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 00:18, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
English has a head start, but when I joined less than 2 years ago there were, if I remember rightly, about 130,000 articles on en:. The reason for the comparatively small size of zh: is fairly obviously political, while es: suffered a fork very early in the history of Wikipedia, which is why it's not as big as it should be. English Wikipedia was moved from www.wikipedia.org to en.wikipedia.org as long ago as October 2002 for goodness' sake -- there's been plenty of time for people to get used to using and quoting the 'proper' address. I have to say that I don't think the argument that en: should keep the www address just because it's the biggest will carry much weight with the Wikipedia community as a whole -- English is my preferred language, but I also work on cy: and I certainly wouldn't support a move back to the status quo ante. -- Arwel 01:53, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
If I'm anything like an average user, and I'm doing a search, if I can't find what I'm looking for at a depth of one webpage, I automatically hit the back button and go right back to the search engine. I kind of liked being greeted with the news when I open the page, as opposed to having to make a bunch of choices about my language. I realise this is meant to be inclusive and all, but I think John Thomas is particularly interested in reading his articles in his own language by default than the language of the principality of Kahmed Malai (unless he makes an active choice from an easily accessable subpage.

My humble opinion is that the frontpage should direct users to the English main page until the day another language surpasses English. FLafaire 22:54, 10 Jan 2005

If wikipedia is all for equal coverage of different language versions of the encyclopedia, regardless of how many people speak it or how many articles it has, then why does wikipedia.co.uk direct only to the english wikipedia? what about cymraeg? --81.135.218.135 15:48, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Or Scots, Gaelic, or any of the other languages spoken in the UK as a first tongue! :-) Matthew 19:57, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Has anyone considered using the Accept-Language HTTP headers that all browsers send? If it starts with en then it should issue a redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org. If it starts with de then it should redirect to de.wikipedia.org etc. Debian do this for a number of their pages and it's a really great idea because everyone feels like wikipedia isn't preferring one language over another--PdDemeter 20:52, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

  • Raul654 made this suggestion--or something close to it--at tonight's Tampa Bay Meetup, as a modification to a suggestion of mine, and if no one else files a feature request on it, I will tomorrow. --Baylink 01:30, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Geez, everybody quit whinging about this. This has already been discussed on meta and on wikipedia-l, you missed your opportunity, and a looooooooong time ago there was a massive poll you may or may not have participated on, on Meta. The anglocentrism of the redirect has long been despised by the VAST MAJORITY of Wikipedians and a GROUP DECISION was made to change it to a portal which you can edit at Meta. --Node 04:30, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Node, please do take into account that not all Wikipedians have the time or inclination to discuss things on meta and wikipedia-l, or even know about them, and that most Wikipedia readers and browsers are probably not Wikipedians themselves. Therefore I would suggest that your 'VAST MAJORITY' 'GROUP DECISION' in the 'massive poll' may in fact have been made by a self-selecting group.
Also, if the redesign is so popular then why is there very little lauding of it here in response to all of this criticism of it?
Finally, in your responses here you come across as quite curt and on the verge of being rude. Not particularly good PR for Wikipedia, I would have thought. Matthew 14:06, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

And anyway, if there is going to be a laguage page, it should include Klingon! -Unknown Klingon 21:08 27 Jan 2005

Hey, Node, it's not anglocentric if it redirects to each user's language's page, and then goes to the language select page if it can't find a matching language. That seems totally fair to all users. BTW, what exactly was the old main page? If it couldn't find a language, would the en page or a language select page be default? If it was the en page, than a new redirect system using a default language page would fix the anglocentric problem. If there was a language page previously, then what's the problem? And about this topic already being discussed, why can't there be a new vote? Recounts aren't that uncommon. --Y2kBugxp90 18:17, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Bold textI agree with 'Mikeh'. I myself have a number of friends who seem to find it amusing to come on this site and edit the articles in a comical fashion. I find this disgusting. I think this site is a marvelous creation, but has its downfalls. The fact that anyone can edit it is the obvious one. A suggestion would be to have some sort of username-password-registering system, allowing only people registered on Wikipedia to edit pages. Keep up the good work, Wikipedia!

Really nice decision to put the language page up. I know several non-english speaking people that dindt even know that there were wikipedia on their own language.

Ok. I really don't understand what all the hub-ub is about. So there's a language selection screen before the main page .. so what? This isn't the gross anomoly that some people here are making it out to be. Being Canadian, I'm very used to being asked to select between English and French before continuing to the main page of a website. If you really hate the language selection screen, just type en, instead of www. How dificult is that, really? --Azkar 16:25, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The Dutch wikipedia

run this night over the 50,000. Can anyone change it and place it in the head group? Thanks

Well you learn something new everyday: as an English speaker, I have just learned that Nederland is Dutch for The Netherlands, but that Nederlands is Dutch for Dutch! If this type of subtlety arises everyday between native and learned speakers of any language, can you imagine the miscommunication that basically arises everyday in the Wikipedia? Yet Wikipedia keeps growing. (Congratulations for the 50,000.) Ancheta Wis 17:38, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
next runner-up (for this completely arbitrary threshold :p) will be es: (now at 40k). dab (ᛏ) 17:33, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Anniversary

Today's news talks of a one month anniversary which is a howler. Anniversary relates to annus which is the latin for year

Hope that it can be changed asap. Jack Hill

This seems a bit pedantic. You're correct about the derivation, but the term "anniversary" has come to be used for various different lengths of time. I don't think it needs to be changed unless someone can suggest a better alternative. [[User:Rdsmith4|User:Rdsmith4/sig]] 16:59, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
The term is widely used--"one-month anniversary of our first date"; "the two-week anniversary of my new job." What do you recommend, montheversary? Nelson Ricardo 17:02, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)
Yes, the term is widely used INCORRECTLY. As Jack Hill stated, and as published in Wiktionary, "anniversary" pertains only to the annual date. The slang misuse should not be quietly condoned on the front page of what is supposed to be a source of knowledge. Why not simply say "it has been a month since..." 148.63.234.151 19:48, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I don't think this meets the definition of slang, since it doesn't seem to define a cultural group. And even if you're using "slang" loosely, I don't see the harm in letting the language drift a bit in this case. For instance, you didn't use "source" to talk about the origin of a running body of water, did you? Yet no one is confused because you say "source of knowledge" to denote a difference between this and the classical, technically correct use of the word. "One-month anniversary" would be a similar term. polyparadigm
Don't you think it's a tad silly to be a pedant about the definitions of slang, source, and knowledge in your argument to keep incorrectly using the word anniversary on what purports to be an encyclopedia? Let's pay, instead, more careful attention to the goals of the project and to some definitions that matter. Merriam-Webster gives the definition of encyclopedia (and, presumably, Wikipedia's goal is to be an encyclopedia) as "a work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or treats comprehensively a particular branch of knowledge usually in articles arranged alphabetically often by subject." Wikipedia indisputably meets the requirement of being a work that contains information on all branches of knowledge ... usually in articles arranged ... by subject (order is irrelevant in a hypertext). So it is, indeed, an encyclopedia. But what makes an encyclopedia good?
I think it can be agreed that a good encyclopedia is one whose articles are well-written and accurate. The first definition Merriam-Webster gives for accurate is "free from error especially as the result of care," meaning that the articles must be correct and error-free for an encyclopedia to be good. Defining well-written is more subjective, but arguably a well-written article is well-organized (another subjective requirement that depends on the topic), clear, precise, and free from errors of spelling or grammar. The incorrect use of the term anniversary fails the requirement of preciseness, and should not be tolerated unless tolerating it is the only way to preserve the other requirements of a well-written article. I, for one, cannot envision a circumstance in which incorrectly using the term anniversary would be necessary to preserve organization, clarity, spelling, grammar, or even accuracy. Ari 03:26, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

See the History of Antarctica article to know that the discovery of Antarctic mainland is disputed between Russia, England and USA. For example, Russian sources claim, that it was discovered January 28, 1820 by the Russian expedition lead by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev, which approached to the Antarctic coast in the point with coordinates 69°21'S, 2°14'W [2] So, the controversial statement on the main page should be removed. Cmapm 09:44, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The 3 articles each clearly acknowledge these three men, who are each now listed in the Category:explorers of Antarctica (see the talk page for more). It's like the invention of the computer; no government ever recognized their achievement until it became obvious that the discoveries were significant. You are welcome to learn how to edit the Selected Anniversaries section so that you can make the changes you desire. Just follow the instructions in the box at the top of this page. Ancheta Wis 17:47, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Conversion to Interwiki links

Since www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to this page, the issue came up as to whether we needed that gigantic languges section. I have gone ahead and converted it to interwiki links (which is the standard for every other page on Wikipedia and is done by most of the languages main pages) for the languages over 10k articles. What does everyone think? →Raul654 19:49, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

  • Long overdue. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 19:55, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Good idea, I agree. --fvw* 19:57, 2005 Jan 28 (UTC)
  • Much better, though I can see people being confused as to the order (it doesn't say anywhere that it's in size order). However, alphabetical has its problems too. violet/riga (t) 19:59, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • Right now, it's approximately size order, although I'm told that there's a "standard" (approximately alphabetical) order somewhere →Raul654 20:06, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)
  • I'm strongly against this: I think it's important to promote the other language versions and I don't think this does that as well as the box. I personally find it interesting and useful to see a quick reference on this page to the versions by size. It's also not true that other langages mostly use the side-bar links - of the 19 largest, 12 have similar lists to our template version. (fr. ja. nl. pl. cs. da. it. sh. uk. ru. ro. pt.) I really want the language box back -- sannse (talk) 20:02, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps a link to www.wikipedia.org would help too? violet/riga (t) 20:08, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

  • so we went from "gigantic langage section" to "no language section"? I object. I say, keep the major ones in the template (>10,000 or so), and link *all* (or, >100) by interwikis, alphabetically. dab (ᛏ) 22:32, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • strongly against. (personally for me it was the existence of many language versions that sparkled my initial interest in Wikipedia. The other languages' versions should be promoted, not hidden away.) --rydel 22:57, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Very good, this is step two of the long-awaited portal; now we can do whatever we want (this is positive, I think). The only thing we miss is a link back to our multi-lang portal. ✏ Sverdrup 00:22, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Excellent idea, but I think we need to retain Complete list, Multilingual coordination and Start a Wikipedia in another language somewhere. GeorgeStepanek\talk 01:26, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I used these links on a daily basis, and i especially liked the grouping according to size. DAb's suggestion seems good. - Chris 73 Talk 03:45, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I think we should have a link to the complete list on the mainpage, it won't take up that much room. I do not think we should have a link to everything on the mainpage, but we should at least allow people easy access, especially given that this is by far the largest Wikipedia. Rje 04:00, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)
  • Linking 151 other-language wikipedias from the sidebar is nuts - it'd 2 or 3 times longer than the main page itself. →Raul654 03:58, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)
    • I think Rje means the Complete list link. GeorgeStepanek\talk 04:20, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
      • I do indeed. I forgot we used to have one, I never used it with the old template that linked to most of the other languages. :). Rje 05:00, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)
  • While some people may think its only purpose was to direct visitors to wikipedia.org to a specific Wikipedia, it serves more than that. Look at the top 10, the top 20, even the top 30 Wikipedias, and you will see that every single one of them has a Template:Wikipedialang type arrangement. Some of them have only languages with over 1000 articles, others have over 100 only, and some even have less than 100 (Some, like the Chinese Wikipedia, include national minority languages). People are way, way, way too obsessed with an itsy bitsy mainpage. I don't advocate something that takes up an entire browser window, but those who don't think we can spare a few lines are, in my book, wackos. --Node 09:53, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Ugh. PLEASE, let's revert that - not everyone's using the new skin, and I now have six lines of interwiki links at the top of the page, which take up a considerable amount of screen space, distract from the actual main page and make the whole page look rather unprofessional. -- Schnee (cheeks clone) 18:26, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • I'm using the classic skin. The main page now looks like crap (as Schneelocke pointed out). CryptoDerk 18:51, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)
    • I use both skins (classic for most editing, and monobook when I want to see how most people will see it) and I agree that the main page looks like crap. I have reverted it to what it was prior to when I started. →Raul654 19:38, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)
      • Ok, so that didn't work. How about having a single link back to www.wikipedia.org instead? --fvw* 19:43, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)

Suggestions for "Article of the Day"

Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge , mabye.....

What about an innovative artist? like Graham Nicholls or artist group like Monochrom --Maria N 23:31, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Check out Wikipedia:Today's featured article for more information. Evil Monkey∴Hello? 01:55, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)

Mohandas?

Why is Mahatma Gandhi's image on the main page entitled "Mohandas Gandhi?" When I checked out the image, the subtitle said Mahatma Gandhi. ???

The article actually says: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (October 2, 1869—January 30, 1948) (Devanagari: मोहनदास करमचन्द गांधी) also called Mahatma Gandhi ("great soul"). Articles are supposes to go at the most common name, and whoever wrote that decided (correct, in my opinion) that Mahatma Gandhi is the most common. →Raul654 01:19, Feb 1, 2005 (UTC)
To clarify, Mohandas was Gandhi's given birth name. Mahatma is a title, or nickname even, that was given to him later in life. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 02:20, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'm confused. It is 9:00 pm where I am and the featured article is Super Mario 64. Two Hours ago, it was Gandhi. Whats up?

Probably weird caching or something. Mario 64 was yesterday's FA. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:09, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, it changed back right when I went back to the Main Page.

Redundant Interwiki Links

en.wikipedia.org now shows "Wikipedia in other languages" and "Wikipedia's sister projects", but they no longer answer a need. Wikipedia.org now makes the visitor immediately aware of Wikipedia's sister projects and its many translations. Mentioning the same things over again on the main pages of specific Wikipedias, such as the English Wikipedia is redundant a waste of space and detracts from an otherwise clear and concise project.

We should clean up the front page by liberating it from these artifacts and using the extra space to better organize our content and perhaps include a new section. -Exigentsky

No shouting. Disagree. This edition gets referred to by the other wikipedias. Omitting the sized links would make it less welcoming for the other editions. Ancheta Wis 01:47, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I don't see how, everything is already mentioned to all visitors entering Wikipedia.org. I don't think a Wikipedia dedicated to a particular language and subject matter should have to include all those extra sections now that Wikipedia.org takes care of informing visitors of the full range of Mediawiki projects and translations. -Exigentsky
Agreed, at the very most, a link to a page with more languages (or even to the www.wikipedia.org ) should suffice. Ambush Commander 04:11, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)

one of the disadvantages of not being able to edit the main page

one of the disadvantages of not being able to edit the main page is not being able to remove vandelism such as the erect penis photo shown now.

You can: see Template:In the news. I've just reverted it, however. — Dan | Talk 14:30, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)


Disagree - a first page needs to outline all the facets of the following pages. Wikipedia is intended to make information free for everyone and increase awareness of the world for everyone. Therefore informing members and visitors of the many languages available and the subdivisions of the concept is necessary. The home page is a guide for new visitors and a starting place for a logical exploration of available invormation. The home page is fine as it is as anyone dissatisfied can use search imediatley and get on with their business. ERS

Well then how did it get vandalized? Never mind. I get it. --Blair P. Houghton 00:54, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Should we protect the main page again?

As many will be aware, the main page used to be protected because of regular vandalism. It isn't currently protected because at least two of the components used to build it are not protected. As a result it's easy to vandalise it. Time to revisit the discussion of whether protecting the main page is preferable to goatse.cx on the main page. No view expressed by me in this case. Simple choice: protection or goatse and penis pictures regularly. Over to the rest of the readers here to discuss this question again... :) Jamesday 01:39, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree. I took some heat when I started doing this with the featured article write ups following the last major vandalism incident in Novemeber (the felix the cat incident). I have gone ahead and protected the 9 static images on the main page (the 8 sister project logos and the language logo). Someone else protected Template:Wikipedialang, Template:Newpagelinksmain, and template:WikipediaSister, and (since they are mostly static), there's no reason why they should not stay protected as well. Mav intends to protect all the selected anniversaries later this month after the last of them are filled in. Once this is done, our security soft spots will be:
If you want to stop all vandalism to the main page, we need to figure out some system for reliably protecting all of the above. →Raul654 04:44, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
What about a system for automatically protecting any template or image on the Main Page? That way, featured article images would only remain protected while they are shown on the Main Page. But writing stuff in the software specifically for the Main Page may be tricky and counterproductive. - Mark 09:55, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I believe the main page should be protected. Because it relies so heavily on its templates, it rarely needs changing. However, i believe the templates should remain open, since more people need to change them more often, and because it takes a determined vandal to find the templates to edit. In my opinion, page protection should be used to prevent casual vandalism only. On a wiki, someone actually trying to do damage will find a way to do so. foobaz·✐ 04:56, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
What you are describing is the same security though obscurity scheme that we've been using for a year. Only problem is, security through obscurity breaks down when the obscurity goes away, which is apparently what has happened. →Raul654 05:00, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
Exactly. Frankly, I'm not at all suprised this happened. Look above in the top-right corner. We have a prominent message advertising the fact that anybody can edit it. If you ask me, this is a bad idea. Eventually, enough people are going to find out (which has started to happen), and those templates will have to be protected (or we have to find a new system). We seriously have to look into ways of protecting the main page. The way things are going, it looks like we may have to protect the templates not so long from now; but as a first step, I think that the prominent "you can edit the main page" box has got to go. If we make that so well-known, then we might as well just unprotect the main page itself! -Frazzydee|✍ 19:07, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Please keep in mind that hiding Wikipedia's editability will reduce the number of new editors we get. foobaz·✐ 16:29, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I don't see any options other than protection, unfortunately. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:17, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • My vote is for one of the above compromises, born largely by the presence right now of several embarrassing "typos" on "Did you know". Granted, I missed the vandalism, but sloppy front pages are a downer too. Are you administrators still be able to correct stuff like this, when it's frozen? Perhaps I should give whoever added these items a buzz in the meantime, since I can't fix'm myself, as I've been doing. Sfahey 03:07, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The main page is already protected. I oppose protection of templates used on the main page. Although templates used on the main page are often vandalised, the vandalism is usually reverted within minutes. This is good enough. We do not need to ensure that things visible on the main page are never vandalised. I would not characterise the current system as security through obscurity, because there is very little obscurity, and what obscurity exists is an unfortunate consequence of the way templates work, not a feature intended to provide security. The system I want to see is better charracterised as eternal vigilance: leave all the templates open for editing, but revert vandalism promptly. Vandalism visible on the main page for a short time does hardly any harm, whereas protecting things all over the place causes great harm. (The harm is that, when people want to fix problems but can't edit the page, they are more likely to give up leaving the problem un-fixed than they are to ask for a change via the talk page, or to ask for unprotection.) It seems to me that most of the people arguing in favour of protection are admins, who are able to edit protected pages, and so are unlikely to see how harmful protection is. —AlanBarrett 17:06, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

this is true. Until we get a very easy to use pipeline system (delayed editing), Alan is right. goatse is disgusting, but at this stage, wiki is about direct participation more than anything else, and we'll just have to put up with the unpleasant side of it. dab (ᛏ) 13:43, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Front page hacked?

Nineteen hours ago I was assailed by some of the most revolting pornographic images I have ever seen. As I set Wikipedia's main page to load in one of four tabs when I start my Firefox browser, this could have easily been seen by anyone of my kids -- with the very real possibility of psychological scarring. As I said these images were utterly revolting -- as in bizarre/extreme.

This is a real security flaw that threatens to ruin this entire project. You can imagine what sort of response this would get in the both the tabloid media and among those opposed to the concept of a user-compiled and edited dictionary. Then, of course, there would be the copycats who would try to outdo each other.

I'm not a technical person but, surely, the main page could be set up to randomly load articles and related graphics from Wikipedia's database, with a reputable RSS feed providing the news. It, at least, needs a gatekeeper -- either a real person or a robot/script -- to ensure the main page content is genuine.

which template was vandalised? I'm unable to find the incident. My proposal would be a mechanism to prevent the appearance of images that were uploaded less than, say, a day ago, on the main page. In the rare event that a breaking news story needs a more recent image, the image would have to be 'certified' by a sysop. A day should be sufficient to spot goatse, so it will not make it onto the main page. That would still leave us with images like the autofellatio one which for some unknown reason were able to survive ifd and could be added to the mainpage by anyone, without having to upload anything. dab (ᛏ) 12:44, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Also, some images that are quite appropriate on Wikipedia would not be in the eyes of some on the front page (images of genitalia, graphical diagrams of sexual congress, etc.). These images will have been uploaded many moons ago, and certainly more than "a day ago".
The main problem is having open templates on the front page. It's a bad idea.
However, a note of caution to the original poster - Wikipedia is not a "child safe" environment, and you probably should not let them do anything involving the Internet unattended if you are actually worried about the effect that such imagery and/or ideas might have; the Internet, sadly, is littered with such piffle, and much of it is overly easy to stumble over.
James F. (talk) 12:57, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
the images you mention will have survived ifd at some point, and "relativists" would argue that by virtue of being encyclopedic, they have the same right to appear on the main page as every other image. What would happen if autofellatio ever reached FA status? Would it be featured on the main page? With the image? The problem I am addressing here is people uploading porn that will be speed-deleted, but not speedily enough to prevent it briefly appearing on the main page. This would be addressed by my proposal. The points you raise go much deeper, because they are a matter of policy: Let's not have them get in the way of dealing with clear cases everyone agrees on. dab (ᛏ) 13:07, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This was not appropriate content. I'm pretty broadminded. I know what gratuitious offensiveness is when I see it. Images were not accompanied by an explanatory text. They were just repeated ad nauseum on a yellow background. Yes, encyclopedias can contain material that is offensive to some but that is no reason to keep them away from teenagers!

I don't know what template was vandalised -- all I do know is that when I opened Wikipedia last night (between 11pm and midnight, Perth Australia time) I was greeted by the grossest of images. The menu on the left was unaffected but the rest of the main page was filled with multiple images on a yellow background. I cannot be sure of their duration but I did reload and restart browser a few times but to no effect.

For those that don't know - this was goatse - uploaded and added to the sister projects template and the recent changes header. Because of an unrelated site slowdown, those of us trying to fix it couldn't access the site. This meant that the image was up for in excess of 20 minutes. The blue ribbon goes to fvw for getting to the delete button first and Hadal for fixing the template and recent changes. We've had complaints via email again (to Jimbo and the board) - one from a teacher who was showing the site to her class. We need to stop this NOW. This happens on a regular basis. It's true that this incident was made more problematic by an unrelated problem, but this sort of vandalism happens very regularly - and on our most public face. I can't say strongly enough that I believe we have to fully protect the front page. It's only recently that it was unprotected in any way. Before templates were used, the page was locked. Until we get a new system that allows for an alternative solution such as delayed editing on problem pages , let's protect -- sannse (talk) 14:02, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) (fvw - yes, I know I said I was done ranting on this, seems I was wrong :)


Agree absolutely. All elements of Main page need to be protected indefinitely. Filiocht 14:38, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)

Protect it all. violet/riga (t) 19:29, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

"We've had complaints via email again (to Jimbo and the board) - one from a teacher who was showing the site to her class. We need to stop this NOW." Well we all knew this day would come, but security through obscurity does not work without obscurity. Lock the templates down and look for ways to protect images displayed on protected pages. --mav 20:35, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Protect them. We should figure out a way to make it easier for non-sysops to help keep Template:In the news and Template:Did you know up to date, though. I'm thinking of some sort of associated pipeline page where any user can add items for sysops to copy over to the main template; something like Template:Did you know/To be added might be appropriate. It would be clunky and annoying, but certainly not as bad as goatse images on Wikipedia's most public face. —Charles P. (Mirv) 20:56, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Alternatively, a technical solution whereby a shadow page gets copied to T:ItN every time it hasn't been edited for 30 minutes. This is a bit like the mythical delayed editing that we're going to have in mediawiki one day, but done on this page and copying only when it's stable would make it implementable outside of mediawiki I think. --fvw* 21:02, 2005 Feb 4 (UTC)
Delayed or pipelined editing has been suggested in #mediawiki. Jamesday estimates it would take 6-12 months if the devs decided to impliment it. Personally, I prefer the already-made request for recursive page protection (protecting a page automatically protects all images used on it). →Raul654 21:07, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
Ohh, come on, can it really be that hard? One fairly easy way to do it would be to have a template up for editing, like Template:In the News and another one called Template:In the news LOCKED which is locked and is displayed at the main page. Then every X minutes a bot copies the contents from the open template to the locked one if it has been there for more than Y minutes. The potential problem with this could be that you'd have to give a bot Administrative privliges, but if the bot does that and ONLY that, I'd be ok with it. Personally I think that one of the great things about Wikipedias front page is that it CAN be edited. I am totally against protecting it, but when things like goatse happen one realizes that something needs to be done. This way, we get the best of both worlds. Gkhan 22:54, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
All the vandal would have to do is time his vandalism so that the bot copies it the the live template. That may buy us a bit of time by adding more obscurity but is ultimately a fatally-flawed idea. --mav 23:13, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
No thats not what I meant. Lets say that the bot updates once every halfhour and submissions must have been on the page for 20 mins. The bot updates at 2:30 and sees a submission made at 2:29. That means only one minute has passed and does NOT add it. However at 3:00 the next update sees that it has been there for 31 mins add does add it (these numbers are not optimal in any way, if someone makes a submission at 2:11 it would take 49 mins for it to get to the page which might be a little long, but you see my point). Gkhan 01:27, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)
This sounds a very interesting idea. Are you on IRC? If so, maybe you could pop into #mediawiki and see what they think of it there. ([3]) -- sannse (talk) 01:32, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Seems a bit that this discussion has noted the fact that images can be overwritten with newly uploaded ones, even if everything under the sun is protected. A simple solution is not allow overwriting of file names, aswell as protecting all elements. Pcb21| Pete 01:37, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Incorrect. Protecting an image page protects the image from being uploaded over. This has been true for about 3 months. →Raul654 02:10, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)
What about images on commons? Even if they're protected on commons, won't someone uploading an image with the same name here mask them? And if we create an image page here and protect that, that will cause the image on commons to be masked, right? So we'd need to upload all images on commons that we want to use on the front page to en.wikipedia? --fvw* 02:15, 2005 Feb 5 (UTC)
How about disabling automatic cache update/template content refreshing for the Main Page, and making the purge function available only to admins? That shouldn't be too hard to implement. (You could then have a copy of the Main Page with automatic updates, available for admins to check that nothing has been tampered with just before purging) - Fredrik | talk 03:09, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Wouldn't that require quite a significant change in MediaWiki software? I mean, couldn't any user just enter http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&action=purge in their browser and get the main page purged? Is there any way right now so that that page can only be accessed by admins? And by the way, doesn't the main page purge automatically? Gkhan 13:18, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)
My idea was to disable automatic purging for Main, and add a few lines of code to check whether the purge action is used by an admin. Fredrik | talk 14:06, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Template talk:Did you know already has a list for pending new items which works like Charles P's suggestion. 68.81.231.127 21:47, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

If this enterprise is to have any credibility (and it must have if teachers are using it in live classroom demos) the front page(s) MUST be protected from vandalism or corruption of any sort whatsoever. This is the primary interface with the rest of the world - it must be faultless at all times. In the short time I have been browsing, I have not been able to ascertain the exact procedure used to put the page together, but it would seem wise to allow contributions/edits for a prospective new version to occur up to, say, 12 hours beforehand, then protect the page for final vetting/approval before putting it in place. The vetting process could be open to everyone, but edits only by a consensus of administrators. --Mikeh 13:49, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)


I guess this is the best place to mention it, but I hadn't even noticed the front page was protected until today. Just spotted a typo, can't fix it, don't know who to contact to get it fixed. sheridan 09:58, 2005 Feb 15 (UTC)

I fixed it: idependant -> independent, on 'DYK'. -- PFHLai 10:21, 2005 Feb 15 (UTC)

Isan

This should have a comma after the poor conditions

Agriculture is the main economic activity, but due to the poor conditions output trails that of other parts of the country, and this is Thailand's poorest region.

In the news

In the news seems to feature a lot of pictures of dead white men, literally. Anyone else notice this? Hyacinth 08:37, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

More to the point, it hasn't been updated for 2 days! jguk 08:47, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Probably due to it being blocked after vandalism, no? Gkhan 09:58, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

Yes. It means only admins can edit it now - and none have done so. I question how up to date it will remain when there are only 300 or so people who can edit it, and many fewer with the inclination to edit it, jguk 10:02, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Why not an in-the-news candidate page, to be checked and copied periodically by an admin? --dreish~talk 19:29, 2005 Feb 5 (UTC)
I've added such a page at Template:In_the_news/Candidate. --dreish~talk 19:34, 2005 Feb 5 (UTC)
This seems like the best plan to me. Any automated updating system could be abused by a smart vandal. — Dan | Talk 19:50, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Article Ratings

This has probably has been suggested before... if not tried somewhere. But why isn't there a rating system for the articles? This would create a feedback loop to ensure high quality material. When explaining some ridiculously complex theorem the writer could check back to see if her explanation was useful and edit it accordingly. It would also give a good idea of where improvements could be made.

It seems like the only useful ratings would be ones with accompanying explanations of what's good/bad about the article, and isn't that what the talk page is for? --brian0918™ 13:50, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I think that there's a large subset of users that the talk pages are missing. For the casual user my guess is that they never contribute and rarely look at the talk pages. Furthermore, they're a little out of the way of someone just trying to get some information. Some easy rating system on the side would be a simple way for anyone to provide feedback quickly. It could even be used as a way to automatically tag extremely poorly written articles for cleanup, review, etc. Lastly, I think there's a subtle nuance in the type of feedback I'm hoping we'd get. Rather than a reader thinking: "I know what would be great for this article... I'll make a suggestion," I'm actually suggesting we listen to the people who come away from an article thinking: "Now what in the world was that about? I am no better off than I was before reading that article." This type of feedback is harder to illicit on discussion pages.

Presumably you'd need something on the toolbar to the left saying "rate this article" - then allowing a 1-10 rating, say, plus a gap for people to say why. Could be interesting (as would a "X people have visited this page" counter). Could the developers do this easily? jguk 14:06, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Any article with NPOV problems would get a bunch of 1's and 10's and probably little inbetween.

  • Article rating functionality has been developed for MediaWiki, and could be seen on test: for a while, but it doesn't appear to have made it into any of the releases as yet. The priority at the moment appears to be addressing performance and scalability issues to meet the huge increase in demand: Wikipedia currently gets three times as many page views as it did six months ago. Article rating functionality will increase the load on the Apache servers because, unlike page requests, rating requests cannot be handled by the squid cache servers. GeorgeStepanek\talk 00:02, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I also think that the most useful ratings would be ratings with explanations of what's good/bad about the article. Otherwise, it is almost useless Patnaik 01:41, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Super Bowl?

I don't think the Super Bowl turnout should be on the main page, let alone the top story.

It's a major event which is relevant to one country. So, of course, is the death of the Georgian PM or the election of a Thai prime minister. Don't worry, it'll be gone soon. — Dan | Talk 04:27, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Well said. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 05:45, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Slovenian Wikipedia

The Slovenian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles, can someone update Template:Wikipedialang since, it is protected.Jeff8765 03:07, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

Chinese Wikipedia

The Chinese Wikipedia (zh:) has just passed 20,000 articles and also deserves promotion to the Premier League. How long before it overtakes the English Wiki I wonder? -- RHaworth 13:00, 2005 Feb 8 (UTC)

-__- dude, i don't think that's ever going to happen...or at least for another 10 years...
but honestly, with close to half a million articles (and that's the amount of legit ones.. in total there are close to 1.5 million articles in the English version) and only 20 thousand for the chinese, it WILL take a long time.
also, typing chinese can be a pain in the butt if you don't know the most efficient way 142.58.181.84 21:03, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

More Vandalism

I don't watch much television, though. But,1974 in television to 1978 in television has been vandalized by Ezhiki, of deleting content. Anyone could revert the pages back, look at the history of 1974 in television to 1978 in television.

User: 4.xxx.xxx.xxx Feb 07 2005

Please see my talk page for more information on this, and then remove this accusation off here (I apparently cannot do that myself as the accusation is directed at me). Talk:Main Page is not a place to discuss vandalism, even when it is real; one needs to utilize Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress for that.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 19:33, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

Ellen MacArthur

Ho hum. Who cares? Has she done anything to change humankind, really? I was upset when I tuned into BBC World News on BBC America this morning and they were in the middle of some lovefest for this woman. Where was the real news? Breaking a record like this is not all that notable. (I can only assume that a British person put this up. (I love Brits, don't get me wrong.)) Now, if Wikipedia had been around in Magellan's day . . . 13:59, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

  • How can you say Ellen's achievements aren't notable?! She just sailed around the world faster than anyone else ever has, non-stop, all by herself. That's notable. Maybe some inferiority complex issues here? 17:29, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Just how I felt about the Super Bowl. Filiocht 14:06, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)
Seconded. violet/riga (t) 17:45, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Hey, I'm American and I agree with you about the Super Bowl. Nelson Ricardo 18:38, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)
Significant or not, these are widely reported events and big news in some circles. Please go to Wikipedia:In the news section on the Main Page/Candidates to voice your opinion on various items on 'In The News' or suggest changes. -- PFHLai 19:27, 2005 Feb 8 (UTC)
Hmm... well, even if it is up there, it should definitely not be the top story...
I second PFHLai. We report lots of news that seems trivial in one part of the world but is important elsewhere. "Wikipedia is not US-centric" does not mean "Wikipedia goes out of its way to ignore the US." Incidentally, such discussion is most likely to be noticed at Template talk:In the news. — Dan | Talk 02:16, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Aren't we being a bit...optimistic?

"The Al-Aqsa intifada ends..."

Um, yeah. That's a bit optimistic, ain't it? I'd hate for us to have to eat crow in a few days. --Penta 23:49, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

a font too far

Is anyone else bothered by the number of different fonts in the first seven lines of the main page? dcm

  • Well, I have my user css set, so it's all the same font, arial unicode ms... but I didn't think there was more than one font on the main page...? BLANKFAZE | (что??) 04:05, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • There isn't, unless you count the size changes, and the smallcaps/italics as being different fonts. Goplat 04:20, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

New wiki with 10k articles

May I be the first (I think...) to congratulate the Slovenian wikipedia, which just eclipsed 10,000 articles! I think a front page edit is in order!

...whoops, I guess Jeff8765 mentioned this about a day ago. In any event, if an admin could edit www.wikipedia.org to reflect the change, that would be appreciated, I'm sure. Apparently Template:Wikipedialang was edited, but the front page still puts the slovenian wiki in the 1,000-10,000 category. ral315 05:33, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

FA error

Would somebody with access please fix the first line of the featured article description from "Jonathan Wild is" to "Jonathan Wild was", in line with the actual article? - BanyanTree 05:34, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Got it. →Raul654 05:37, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikiportal

Would anyone mind me adding the Wikiportal link to the following list at the top of the main page? Browse Wikipedia - Article overviews - Alphabetical index - Other category schemes. I think the portals are very helpful surfing aids for readers. Mgm|(talk) 12:15, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to be finished for the Main Page yet. It doesn't have to be perfect, but this doesn't seem to cover very much. Also, to link to it from that section, I think the page should be totally reader-oriented with the process of expanding it moved to another page. ✏ Sverdrup 15:59, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
OTOH, these pages might get 'finished' sooner with more visitors. I don't think the people interested in say Biology or Information technology will have necessarily have interest in setting up the History, Politics, etc portals. :)--Sketchee 06:28, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)

As for reader-oriented, I disagree. Besides, categories which are linked from the main page have stub subcategories, which also makes them editor-oriented in some way. We want people interested in specific fields to contribute, not just to read. Wikiportals are to function as both the main page and the community portal for specific topics. Ausir 08:21, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Festival of Muharram

Though Muslims do generally celebrate Muharram as the new year, only the Shiite celebrates the Festival of Muharram. Maybe the front page should reflect that by saying, Festival of Muharram in Shi'ite Islam (2005, A.H. 1426 begins). __earth 05:21, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)

I've changed it to "Festival of Muharram in Shi'a Islam (2005, A.H. 1426 begins)". Okay ? -- PFHLai 10:06, 2005 Feb 10 (UTC)

Camilla Parker Bowled

Oh my, the ugliest man alive is marrying someone in his own league. Quick. Let's make it a top headline. What was that about North Korea and nuclear weapons? Sod it. Who cares when we got Ole' Tractor-Ears to put up front. I really don't mean to be as disrespectful, I rarely am, but someone should get a sense of priorities, and let The Sun, Der Spiegel, or whatever they're called, deal with royal gossip. --TVPR 09:51, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree. I feel that the North Korea issue is way more important than "who will be the next Queen of England" (yes, I know she won't be Queen, but you get the point) --Tommy 10:36, 10 February 2005 (UTC) (that is the first time I put the time... I hope it's right)
It's controversial and global headline news. violet/riga (t) 21:48, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Well, as Charles will be head of state of Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, The Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I think it has global signficance. Jooler 22:26, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Ceremonial Head of State, however.
Not ture. The monarchy has more of a constitutional role than purely ceremonial, please read constitutional monarchy. Jooler 17:17, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Let's not forget, "Newest item goes on the top, older items are removed from the bottom." Going by this, the newest news goes at the top, no matter what. We list based on time, not relevance, as relevance is really just a form of POV. -- user:zanimum

Fair enough, but the "North Korea now got nukes" article was on top for such short time I completely missed it between two stops by front page - with 10 minute intervals. The Prince of Wales has been on top for almost two full days. It's silly (yes, my POV, but sure). Also, regarding the dominions of the monarch of Great Britain making this a global matter - he's not king yet. She'll never be queen. But sure. --TVPR 18:17, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Seeking a CMS (MediaWiki?)

Hello, first of all sorry if this doesn't go here...

My aim is to create a web interface that holds a collaborative editor, so a text would be presented and you could enter the translation (the basic problem is being collaborative, that is, many people simultaneously editing). Maybe could be identificated users, but not necessarily.

Recently I worked with a wiki for a student work and I suppose MediaWiki could be the technology I need, but it also fits with the CMS concept.

I have searched by the web and I conclude those six could be good choices. Which one could suit me? -Plone -Silva -Mambo -OpenPHPNuke -OpenCMS -and of course, Mediawiki

I see Mambo is very used, but also Mediawiki with all the wikimedia ; Plone and Silva are Zope-based and seem good, but maybe too powerful for my needs? (it's only a portal, the main problem is the workflow-simultaneous edit problem...) Seems also that OpenPHPNuke and OpenCMS are also very popular.

Other suggestions? Some advices?

Thanks in advance

Jordi

See this comparitive review of several wikis, and also see m:MediaWiki reviews.-gadfium 22:26, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Tough decision indeed. I tend to want to give a fair bit of weight to the long-term prospects of the driving entity, and MediaWiki has a lot in that area, with the staggering number of people vested in the long-term prospects of Wikipedia itself. Wikimedia is a long-term pony to bet on. But that comes at somewhat of a price. MediaWiki will likely forever be tied to Wikipedia's best interest. Or at least close enough for hand grenades to forever. If I saw heavy activy pushing for some implementation of WYSIWIG editing, I would say it's close to a no-brainer for MediaWiki, but I don't. There's a fair bit of talk, but it's not a priority enough that it's even on the roadmap last I peeked. Unless you're planning on doing the lifting on that yourself of course (there are some bits findable around here that speak to hacking a WYSI on top of MediaWiki) or your audience is known and known not to be put off by learning markup, of course. -Ozzyslovechild 02:48, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Can anyone modify the page?

I'm a new comer here

Anyone can modify almost any page on Wikipedia. The main page is one of the very few exceptions (along with the disclaimers and the copyright license info, among others) →Raul654 10:07, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

Economy Republic of Ireland--Beer

I could not find any criteria for how the front page synopsis of a featured article was created, so I wonder why a picture would be included that has no relevance to the content of the synopsis. For me, when I see "economy of the Republic of Ireland" and a big picture of a beer with no explanation connecting the two, the connection in my head is "the economy of the Republic of Ireland is based on beer!" which, from my reading of the article, is not true any more than it's based on fishing or potatoes. I feel that either the connection should be made clear in the synopsis or the picture should be one with no connotations from which one could draw such a conclusion.

-Note that my objection is not based on the subject being alcohol, though that may have helped bring it to my attention, and I would have (I hope) objected had it been potatoes or Lucky Charms cereal or whathaveyou. ;) Cigarette 14:22, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Guinness has always been a symbol of Ireland's exports. It's more common to call it stout than beer by the way. Beer in Ireland means American recycled water (one prefixes "beer" if you mean quality German beer for example), lager is not called beer, and you most certainly do not call Guinness or other stouts, "beer".
Of course, it would be more contemporary to photograph the inside of a computer, with the "made in Ireland" typing on some chip zoomed in on! zoney ♣ talk 14:47, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
But isn't it the job of an encyclopedia to tell me that stout (;)) is a symbol of the Irish economy? To someone who has only the vaguest notion of anything Irish, that picture would appear irrelevant and confusing (though the point has rather been mooted at this point, hasn't it?) 69.171.36.2 19:23, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC) (logged in and edited for lack of proofreading yesterday ;)) Cigarette 19:41, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Ireland Economy

Anybody else have a problem with an Article on the Irish economy having a picture of a pint of beer? Isn't beer a stereotype for Irish people? Would there be a picture of landscaping tools when the economy of Mexico is discussed? A picture of a car accident for the Japanese economy?

When I wrote it, I figured this might come up - No. →Raul654 15:01, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)
Responding to both these listings, I'm Irish and I do find it unfortunate. Filiocht 15:13, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)
Why? Irish beer is pretty darn good. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Plus, it's a featured article illustration. A stereotypical image is expected.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 15:44, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)
Not that I like the stereotype either as an Irishman, but to some degree it reflects reality. I hadn't thought of this earlier, but the drinks industry is a major part of the Irish domestic economy as well - the average Irish person spends a lot of their disposable income on drink (relatively speaking, compared to other countries). zoney ♣ talk 16:05, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I kept wonder when somebody would bring this up. Actually, I thought it was funny but I guess that shows my crass side :)

"equivalent to senior prom"

From Did you know?:

"...that Polish girls wear red lingerie underneath their dresses during a studniówka, an equivalent of senior prom?"

That I know of, senior prom is an American institution -- so shouldn't it be identified as such? Citing it in "Did you know" as a kind of common point of reference is bothering me, though I realize the complaint is perhaps a bit petty. -- Oarih 18:08, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Indeed - though I could look it up on Wikipedia, I, as an Irishman who doesn't watch cheesy teenage girl films, do not rightly know what a senior prom is (but for its prominence in cheesy teenage films). 23:25, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

New wiki?

I just thought of an idea for a new wiki. This wiki would be all about lyrics and scripts.

  • Most current lyrics and movie scripts are copyrighted, and therefore you would have problems with copyright infringement if you would post them in a WikiMedia wiki. Wikisource would probably gladly accept lyrics and scripts that are public domain or GFDL, though. -- Marcika 03:58, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • LOL! Like we're worried about copyright issues. There are hundreds of sites on the web that reproduce copyrighted lyrics for reference. Anonymous, please come back and discuss this with me. I'm sure we could get a non-WikiMedia wiki to post lyrics on Jesse's Girl 19:31, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Quality of In The News section

The quality of In The News section has plummeted since only Wikiclique-approved news stories were allowed - XED.talk 12:56, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yet you haven't suggested things at Wikipedia:In the news section on the Main Page/Candidates... violet/riga (t) 13:01, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Why bother? I expect the In the News section will soon restrict itself to Babylon 5 and Discworld conventions, US sports events and the latest releases of Linux. - XED.talk 13:14, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
And you base that silly view on...? Just try and work with the new system. violet/riga (t) 13:43, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
wikiclique, schmikiclique. the candidate system became necessary because of goatse-vandalism, and I don't think anybody is enjoying the additional work. You are welcome to bitch once your good-faith suggestion has been turned down. dab (ᛏ) 16:26, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Disappearing Dresden?

The bombing of Dresden was in the Selected Anniversaries section (and its featured picture), but now Konstantin Chernenko is staring sternly out at us. Why was this change made? Seeing as how this is the 60th anniversay of Dresden, and there are significant observances taking place, it should at least be listed on the front page. The bombing is also more deserving of the featured picture than one stern faced short term Soviet leader.

The bombers were dispatched on the 13th, but didn't reach Dresden till after midnight, i.e. the bombing started on the 14th. Don't worry. The bombing will be on the MainPage (front page) tomorrow. -- PFHLai 15:08, 2005 Feb 13 (UTC)
  • Or for that matter, Rudy Giuliani getting gonged.
I admit to having problems finding good anniversaries for this day ..... Please suggest alternatives at Wikipedia talk:Selected anniversaries/February 13. Thank you. -- PFHLai 15:11, 2005 Feb 13 (UTC)
Actually, the residents of Dresden are marking the anniversay today. See AFP story

Of course, today is Sunday. People have to go to work on Monday. And people are probably busy with something else on Valentine's Day tomorrow ..... -- PFHLai 16:51, 2005 Feb 13 (UTC)

I've added the news item to Current events. Let's see if it gets to 'In The News'. :-) -- PFHLai 01:30, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

paris peace conference - unknown flag

I am writing this in hopes of someone helping me to identify a flag on a plate from the 1918 Peace talks. There are five national flags around a dove and laurel leaves with the word "PEACE" above a sheild marked USA and the date NOV 11th 1918 underneath. From left to right the flags are UNKNOWN, GREAT BRITAIN, USA, FRANCE and BELGIUM. The unknown flag has the same colors as the Italian flag, three vertical bars, red on the left, white in the center and green on the right. In the center of the white bar is a sheild with a silver outline, red with white cross inside it and a cap or crown on top. I have confirmed the nationality of the other flags through the CIA book of facts website but have been unable to locate any flag which matches the one described here. Any postings in regards to this would be greatly appreciated or just send an Email if you like. Send comments to [jimharris155@hotmail.com]

The third flag shown on Flag of Italy ?
The Kingdom of Italy was one of the Allies. -- Arwel 10:59, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
So ? The Italian Resistance led by some guy from the House of Savoy ?

Witold Pilecki's place in history

If the reversion keeps happening and Wikipedia keeps rising up the Alexa rankings, Witold Pilecki may become one of the most famous Europeans of the 20th century. Wincoote 03:02, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Image caption

The images or pictures on the Main Page should have caption. As it is now, it can be hard to tell what news notice or what "Did you know .." or what Selected anniversary the image belongs to. Of course you can always hold the mouse over the image to see the ALT-tag but I don't think that that's sufficient.

A small caption would do. Today there is a picture of Alexander Graham Bell. Just his name underneath the picture would suffice.

As it is now, you wouldn't know whether the picture depicts Bell or Elisha Gray until you either hold the mouse over, or click. This is also often the case with news pictures.

Bong 14:28, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thumbnail boxes take up a bit more space than is available on the Main Page. How about saying (pictured right) next to the bolded subject or something like that? --mav 22:34, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Would this take up too much space?

<div style="float:right;margin-left:1em;width:100px;text-align:center;font-size:smaller"> [[Image:Alexander Graham Bell.jpg|100px|Alexander Graham Bell]]<br/>Alexander Graham Bell</div> <div style="margin-left:-1em;">

Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell

<div style="margin-left:-1em;">

-Fredrik | talk 22:50, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Year of first GPS launch

The Main Page says 1989, but the article says 1978. Fingers off-by-one typo?

According to astronautix.com, the ones from 1978 to 1985, called GPS Block 1, was a prototype -- I call it the demo. GPS Block 2, the operational phase, started with the first launch on February 14, 1989. How's this for an answer ? :-) The link to astronautix.com can be found in the External links section of the Wikipage Global Positioning System. -- PFHLai 17:36, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

Shoemaker/NEAR

On this date (February 14) in 2000 the Shoemaker/NEAR spacecraft entered orbit around asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid. What is the normal channel to propose a topic for the history section on the main page? Rsduhamel 18:21, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion. NEAR Shoemaker was already featured on Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/February 12 for its landing on 433 Eros. To make suggestions, please go to the talk page for the day of the event. Thanks, again. -- PFHLai 18:40, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

In the News

"With 48 percent of votes cast, the Shiite Muslim coalition wins a slight majority"... 48 percent is a plurality, not a majority. And the phrasing makes it sound like the voting results are incomplete, not that UIA won. 68.81.231.127 17:23, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

It may not be a majority of the popular vote but it may give a majority in the parliament. This is not a US style presidential election.--Jirate 19:49, 2005 Feb 15 (UTC)
I don't know much about US presidential elections, but it's still very unclear. 68.81.231.127 20:25, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
"Not a majority of the popular vote" - this looks exactly like a US-style presidential election! GeorgeStepanek\talk 21:15, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I think that "majority" is correct. Thee 48% is refering to popular vote while the majority refers to the seats in the parliament. Maybe a little confusing though. Jeltz talk 22:47, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Community portal

Has just been vandalised (1830 ish).

Can somebody undo this please.

German version: 200000 entries!

Maybe it is a good news for the english main page, that the german Wikipedia today got its 200.000th entry. It is the second Wikipedia version following the english one. The last german 100.000 entries came in the last 8 months. Best regards, Stern 10:24, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Way neat! --mav 22:37, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Wikopedia - www.buysafe.com

The www.buysafe.com site is trying to hijack the wikipedia name. I'm at an airport's browser. Ancheta Wis 21:03, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Minor Vandalism: Main Page Talk

There's a minor vandalism above the table of contents on this very talk page and I can't for the life of me figure out how to fix it.

Ah, it was fixed before I hit Save Page. I'd still like to know how to go about fixing that. :) Cigarette 22:47, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
That would be Template:Main Page discussion header (see Wikipedia:Templates for more information). — Dan | Talk 22:56, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I don't see the vandalism in that page's history, so what you're probably looking for is the "edit this page" link at the very top of this page. If the vandalism was above the TOC, you'll find it in the page source just above the first header (headers look ==like this==). — Dan | Talk 22:58, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Hm, must've had a brain fart when I was looking at the Talk:Main Page history. Thanks.  :D Cigarette 04:30, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Clicking on image in featured article.

If a brand new user winds up on the homepage, and happens to be captivated by Today's Featured Article, enticed as it were to delve,, and if they were to click on the most captivating thing for many if not most readers of blurbs-with-pics on the web (the pic), where would they find themselves?

Frequently, mostly, they find themselves looking at a larger version of the pic and reading about licensing.

Does this pass a laugh test?

-Ozzyslovechild 03:20, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yeah... not so good. - Ta bu shi da yu 05:27, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree. I have many times witnessed my students clicking on a main-page-image with the intent of reading more about the topic - and seeing them be miffed to just see a larger version of the image. it would be a good idea to have main-page-images take users to the related article instead. Kingturtle 05:32, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

A non-clickable tag would be nice for the image code. Example: [[image:Foo.jpg|100px|no-click|Photo of Foo Bar]] would give a borderless 100 pixel-wide thumb of image Foo.jpg that would not change the reader's cursor (arrow) to a pointing hand nor would send the reader to an image description page when he/she clicks on the image. --mav 00:23, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

fag

Small typo on the Did you know... block

...that a Pd/H2 electrode is a reference electrode similar to a standard hydrogen electrode (with platinum), but with the added ability to adsorb molecular hydrogen? <- Should read absorb

From my memory of Chemistry class, Adsorb is correct in this case. Kiand 15:14, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I have changed it to 'absorb' to go with the article. If it's indeed 'adsorb', please fix both Palladium-Hydrogen electrode and DYK. Thanks. -- PFHLai 17:26, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)
Adsorption and absorption are both words, but I don't know enough of chemistry to be sure which is the correct word in this case, but I'm leaning towards "adsorb". Jeltz talk 21:04, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I've posted a note on the talk page of the original author. Hope he responds soon .... -- PFHLai 05:18, 2005 Feb 18 (UTC)
Pt electrodes has ability just only for adsorption ( creation of the weak bonds between interface of the metal and hydrogen molecules), but Palladium can dissolve into its own crystal structure molecular hydrogen what can be named as absorption. So, we shouldn't confuse an adsorption with an absorption. I'm really sorry if I make mistake in the article about palladium electrode. Thank you very much for this correction. A term absorption is definitely more correct for palladium electrode description(Kaverin)
  • Thanks for the correction, people. I'm ashamed to have missed that. I should've known, being a chemist and all. Could all future typos perhaps be noted on Template talk:Did you know, please? I tend to miss discussion about DYK when it's done here. Mgm|(talk) 22:56, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

Article of three days?

Why has the article of the day not changed for 3 days?

User:Josquius, is there a cache problem ? "Today's featured article" is updated daily automatically. -- PFHLai 17:30, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)

Inappropriate news-item?

I just saw the news-item relating to the lost plutonium at Sellafield. I was shocked to find out that 30kg of plutonium were missing. Has it been stolen? Has terrorists raided the plant? Have they dumped it into fresh-water supplies? I quickly went to wikinews to see the whole story, however there were no mention of it on the front page. On to google-news were i found out that the plutonium were not actually missing, it had just not been accounted (and yes, I realize it says this on the front page too, but it doesn't make it clear). Apparently this happens all the time (last year they "lost" 19kg) and some years they even gain (!) plutonium. This news seems sensationalist too me. Unless we clarify, maybe that news-bit should be removed. No need to create panic in the streets :P Gkhan 19:42, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

Ah, a fellow Republican, I presume :) Well, the news is still news, whether it has a potential to create panic or not (which I personally believe this one does not). I agree it can be further clarified (providing the sources have more information than already given on the front page), but removing it? I do not understand the purpose. The news will still be available through other sources, and panic-prone will not be saved the misery this way.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 19:49, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)
Well, actually that last little part was a joke, I don't believe that it will create any sort of panic (one could hope for a little one, three or four guys with rakes running around making noise), my point was that it really is non-story. It just says that people at Sellafield are dumb, but it says it in a way that makes it sound like it's important (or even dangerous). Anyway, I saw that it was removed by Ed g2s so the discussion is really academic at this point. And oh yeah, I'm Swedish and considered to the left of the Swedish political spectrum. I.e NOT republican. NOT NOT NOT repulican :). Gkhan 01:34, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)
Well, since the news is moved down now, so it's pretty much a moot point to argue anymore. I just wanted to note that the news that make it to the Wikipedia front page are usually headline news of major news agencies. So, if BBC reported it, it is very likely it is going to make it here as well, even though it's not really that much of a news. Whether or not BBC had nothing else to report at that particular moment is a different story; the important thing is that they did.
As for the "Republican" part, that was a little joke on my part. No offense intended—it is not usually in my habit to insult people I do not know like that :) Glad you didn't take offense, because none was intended.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 02:04, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

Picture of the day

Should we include it on the Main Page? Wikipedian231 17:17, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

As with 99.9% of suggestions made here, this has been discussed before. Pictures of the day are unsuitable for the main page because (a) there aren't enough of them, and (b) they are "shallow" - e.g, they don't encourage click-throughs and (c) generally there isn't a lot to say about them. However, occasionally, featured articles do appear on the main page with featured pictures. This is very rare (probably has not happened more than 10 times) and more of them would be welcome. →Raul654 17:32, Feb 20, 2005 (UTC)

order of in the news items

shouldn't the iran event be more prominent than the christening of a sub? (should it be on top?) Kevin Baastalk 20:02, 2005 Feb 20 (UTC)

Events on Template:In the news are ordered by date (newest first). The Iran item is from the 16th, while the submarine launch is from the 19th. --Slowking Man 22:34, Feb 20, 2005 (UTC)--69.152.203.67 14:56, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Criticism

Wikipedia is not a good source for information. People can put false information and change the whole meaning of a word. Wikipedia in not a good site to depend on and should not be used for reports or educational projects.

Please give Wikipedia:Replies to common objections a chance to change your mind. -- user:zanimum

Feature Articles

I want to know if there is any randomization to the feature article, I know you like to pick well written articles and all, but seeing as today's feature article is on the Big Bang Theory -- Which is perfectly fine -- I wanted to know if there are any biases in the system by which feature articles are chosen. thanks - Scott

Wikipedia:Today's_featured_article#Guidelines -- user:zanimum

Vandalism in Big Bang articles

The various Big Bang articles, a part of the featured article, are being vandalized at the moment and some are attempting to continuously revert the changes, however, I do think they should be protected. Also, za.wikipedia.org's Big Bang article is being vandalized. Comrade Tassadar 01:48, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yep. Good job... you were the first to figure out how to fix the redirect, instead of just reverting the image on za. I also reported DianaS on Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress, when it looked like you and Fuelbottle had the reversion in hand. 68.81.231.127 02:16, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I think that from now on, featured articles should be protected. Maybe even any article linked from the main page. Reub2000 04:52, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
No. The featured article is supposed to show off what makes wikipedia great, and that includes being editable by anyone. Protecting it goes 100% against this. →Raul654 05:11, Feb 23, 2005 (UTC)
Part of the reasons of FA, beyond showing off to readers, is to lets contributors make great articles even better. That inevitably happens, even when an article appears in the anniversaries. -- user:zanimum

Suggestion: Upcoming events on frontpage

What about having an "Upcoming events"-pane on the frontpage for various events to take place? Like important meetings to be held, etc. Csl77

Look on the right side of Current events. Hope that's good enough. :-)

Regarding Motherland

Would rather say ``Fatherland? ``Otechestvo definitely refers to ``father (otets). However, it is true that the English convention is ``Motherland. Saying ``Fatherland might sound alien, while the semantics of English ``Motherland and Russian ``Fatherland are the same.

do unions cause businesses to fail?

do unions cause businesses to fail?

Maybe take a look at trade unions or take your question to the Reference Desk. ;) Cigarette 20:01, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Featured Article, 2005-02-24

I don't want to seem disrespectful to Sid McMath, but isn't the term hero inherently POV? Unless of course he was the offspring of a greek god and a mortal... --Neo 08:57, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

It was changed recently for our archived summary, and in the article itself. The term was supposed to refer to his Silver Star and Legion of Merit, earned in World War II, but yes, the term was rather POV. None of these templates are protected, so you can change them if you find anything else like this, in the future. -- user:zanimum
Uh, no, none of the main page templates are unprotected anymore. The featured article template has not been editable since november. →Raul654 02:06, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)

New www.wikipedia.org layout

I'd just like to say that the layout of the wikipedia.org layout is very nicely done. Much better than the older one.

I agree! that is most definitely 100% better than the old layout. Congratulations. This issue that I thought couldn't be resolved was resolved - something that I didn't think was possible! /me eats his hat. - Ta bu shi da yu 01:41, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)


New Feature Article

I'd just like to express my hardened joy that the Big Bang Theory Article is off the Main Page -- yah

Big Bang has been off the main page for over 24 hours. If you were seeing it more recently, then you were probably seeing a cached version. →Raul654 03:13, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)
Why?
Well, there are two ways it can happen. (1) Wikipedia uses caching servers, called squids. It is possible for the featured article to update without the squids using the new version - IE, they keep servering up an old copy of the main page. Going to the top of this page and clicking "purge page caches" will fix this. (2) It is also possible that your browser is not updating its copy, so that when you load en.wikipedia.org, it uses the version you downloaded yesterday instead of the current version. Doing a hard refresh (usually control+F5 or shift+F5) will fix this. →Raul654 21:44, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)

Restoration in featured article links to disambiguation page

Today's featured article: Sir John Vanbrugh links to Restoration (a disambiguation page). I believe that it should link to English_Restoration (as the main article does). Jarich 09:00, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Page Move Vandalism

I am extremely concerned about such vandalism because it occured to me:

  1. Nowhere in the removing vandalism is this type of vandalism and how to revert it and,
  2. From what I gather from MetaWiki's documentation on the Page Move / Rename feature, it would be trivial to do a page move orchestrated in such a manner that would make it impossible for a non-sysop to move the page back.

In order to do something for a high visibility article for the Featured Page article, one would simply have to do this:

  1. Move Featured Article to Other Name (probably obscene)
  2. Edit Redirect Page into a vandal page

By doing so, now the featured article is on another page that is named in a way that is probably offensive and makes no sense at all, and the link from the main page leads to a potentially pornagraphic/vandalous page. Furthermore, users trying to revert the pages would be frustrated by the fact that first of all, the page history would be missing, and second of all, moving the page back would be technically impossible.

Of course, I have not tested this theory yet, but I have observed some of the phenomena of page moves in my own copy of MediaWiki, and the fact that page moves are not documented in History is disturbing in itself, but this potential vandalism more so. If anyone knows that what I have presented is not the case, feel free to tell me what actually happens in this scenario so I can go and edit some of the anti-vandalism pages to include these instructions. Ambush Commander 17:46, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)

The moved page would need to be moved back to the original place: the only preliminary step is that an admin would need to delete the edited/vandalised redirect first. We have the technology; we can rebuild Wikipedia. -- ALoan (Talk) 18:36, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
"the only preliminary step is that an admin would need to delete the edited/vandalised redirect first." - incorrect. Admins have the ability to move articles over redirects (without deleting the redirects first). →Raul654 18:49, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)
Admins only have this ability in cases when all logged-in users have it. That is, when the redirect's only history is its creation and it points at the article being moved. Otherwise it must be deleted manually. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:05, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
So the only thing we can do is wait until an admin shows up and corrects the problem (that is, when the redirect has added history)? Ambush Commander 04:02, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)
Yes - any registered user can move a page to a new title, but only if the new title is either a redlink (i.e. no history) or a redirect to the existing title with no edit history (apart from its creation as a redirect). If the target has any history other just than its creation as a redirect, or it is not a redirect to the page being moved, you will need admin assistance. If Raul654 knows better, I'd be very grateful if he'd tell me how to do it - it would make dealing with Wikipedia:Requested moves substantially easier. -- ALoan (Talk) 12:55, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

What happend?

I could have sworn that there were many more topics on this talk page, like about the big bang being gone... what happend?

nevermind. it's back. i wonder what was wrong though...

http://www.wikipedia.org Background Strip

It's been annoying me for a while now, and I finally dived into the source to see what exactly what was happening. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm using Firefox 1.0 and IE 6.0 and they both show the same thing: this weird monobook bg that normally resides quietly in the background of all pages, but now is abruptly cut off. I checked the source, and I realized this was because there was an overlaying element just under the top of the page that had a white background: effectively cutting off the bg. So, I'd like to propose one of two things: first, totally remove the background by issuing some superceding CSS instruction (helps cut down page load size too) or reconfigure the page so that the background is utilized better (however, it fades into grey, which may not be ideal for visibility of text). Ambush Commander 04:20, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)

  • Yes, I agree. My plan is to reorganise the page to have its own CSS instead of using monobook.css. Anybody can edit the temporary version of the portal; see m:Talk:Www.wikipedia.org portal —AlanBarrett 06:35, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

i want the "who they suspect to be..." about the BTK killer to be changed to "whom they suspect to be...". i am also a grammar fanatic, so i understand it if the general populace of wikipedia does not care! just a suggestion, really. gaidheal 01:24, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Scientology article

Dear Andrew pmk 03:24, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC),

Hello. I deleted the inaccurate data that was in the article. I believe that encyclopedias should represent the truth as much as possible. Otherwise society would be misinformed or misled. I don't believe that Wikipedia would consciously want this to happen.

Thank you for your concern.

--posted 04:05, 27 Feb 2005 by User: Lmears, possibly the same person as User: 216.175.69.49.