Wikipedia:Village pump/January 2004 archive 5

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Brilliant Prose refresh voting

Just a reminder that voting closes today. I hope to start implementing the changes on Monday. Bmills 09:56, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Note that a load of candidates after voting are now waiting seconding/objecting on Wikipedia:Brilliant prose candidates. Sorry for not posting this yesterday, but I just could not load this page. Bmills 09:30, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia Email - show actual sender

Apparently a vandal I just blocked thinks it's funny to send me a little mail bomb (5000 lines of garbage) and some insults as a thank you. However as he sent it via the wikipedia email it gives no hint on who actually sent it, the only IP in the email headers is the one of pliny. It would be quite helpful if the actual sending IP (or maybe even the username if it's a logged in user) would be present in the headers - not only in the case of tracing such childish revenge mails, but also in case a legitimate user gets blocked and it gets difficult to find which blocked IP needs to be unblocked. It is quite similar with what Hotmail does, they add a X-Originating-IP header line. andy 10:42, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I may be wrong, but it might be that in genuinely legitimate cases such as what you describe above, the powers that be would be only too willing to expend the effort to trace the source and request cessal of action with regards you. IMAO the broader question of privacy of sending e-mails to users may have merit in itself, but not based on a single case. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 12:30, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)
Showing current user (ID if logged in, IP if not) seems like a good idea. Not IP for logged in because someone may have a privacy reason for not wanting their IP shown and may be logging in to preserve that privacy (details of employer or school, say). Jamesday 12:20, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Tell a developer (e.g. me) exactly what time the message was sent and we'll be able to find the IP address in the server logs. -- Tim Starling 13:03, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)

Icon for PDF linkage

Is there a preset icon or something when linking references that are in PDF? I have been editing a lot of articles lately where the references used are in PDF so I have to put a note like [1] (PDF document) on the article's references. --Maio 11:02, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)

I think that it's good to note that they are PDFs, and the way you are using is as good a way as any.
I think it's also good to at least say how big the files are. This will influence the decisions of some as to whether they view the files with their browser, download them, or avoid them altogether.
Assuming that these files are stored locally on Wikipedia, you might also consider making the link a download link, rather than a simple link which defaults to view. This is particularly helpful for the larger files; Many users won't otherwise realise they can download them. How big the file should be before we do this, and what the best syntax is to achieve it, I don't think has ever been discussed, and probably should be.
If the files aren't local to Wikipedia, it's generally better to link to the web page that points to them as an external link, rather than direct to the file. This has been discussed before but I can't remember where.
Some other sites give two links, one to view and one to download, which is the best of both worlds IMO. Again, I haven't seen this discussed here that I can remember. Andrewa 20:00, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
As far as I know, there is not an easy way to "make something a download" vs a link (if there is, please, someone tell me). It is possible in IE to make a file type give you that open vs save popup, but that is not simple and is done by the end user. I also was under the impression that large pdf files at least sometimes only download pages as needed, but size would be nice to know anyway, especially for dial up users. On Google, they preced the title of a search result with [pdf] - perhaps we could use that as a standard since Google is so widely used. Nroose 18:02, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I concur, I do not believe there is anything a website author can do to specify whether a file will be downloaded or opened; this is usually something the user has to determine. There may be some nonstandard MSIE extensions or the like that could be used to accomplish a forced download, but we should definitely stay away from such things. (Andrewa, if you can provide an example of a site that provides both view and download options, please let me know, as I'm wicked curious to know how it's possible! :-) I'd also like to weigh in on the side of linking to the external site that has the PDF available, rather than directly linking to the PDF itself, whenever possible. -- Wapcaplet 01:24, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Hmmmm, good point. I've seen it done but can't remember where, and didn't check how it was done at the time. It worked for me, but that just shows it works on one version of MSIE. Agree we should stay vanilla. If I stumble across it again I'll let you know how it works. Andrewa 23:54, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Try compressing the PDF. --Ellmist 03:20, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Happy Birthday!

..so it's a day late.


This is such a trememdous undertaking, and a blessedly welcome respite from commercial 'pedias. I was dismayed when Britannica when to a subscription format. I was even more dismayed when they refused to correct a factual error. I've not gone back since.

Long may Wiki prosper!


Sid McMath biography

External links to offensive content

The article on cosmotheism currently has some <nowiki>ed links to necessary background material which is racist Neo-Nazi garbage. The anonymous user who's been working on this article insists that the links be active. What is Wikipedia policy on linking to obviously offensive content, i.e. the speeches and writings of William Pierce? — No One Jones (talk) 19:56, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I don't know of any wikipedia policy, although it has been recently discussed on the mailing lists. I would suggest a good dose of common sense. If you feel offended by Nazi writings, then don't read it. I don't see why the links should be treated differently to other links. (eg. there are people who are offended by blasphemy, but we don't de-link those links). --snoyes 19:58, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Although I must add (as an asside) that I don't like the fact that nazis have sullied the term by misappropriating it. --snoyes 20:04, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I'd think active links are fine as long as they are descriptively labeled so that people know what they're going to get when they click on them. --Delirium 20:10, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)


Wikipedia is hardly G-rated at present. It's almost as raw and uncensored as the Internet itself. This has pros and cons. Hopefully the long-discussed filter project will eventually address the cons without affecting the pros.
But these links aren't the only current problem with this article I see. Andrewa 20:25, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Let's make the links to possibly offensive sites as Preference, off by default. ilya 21:49, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)

What is the point of making it a preference if you can choose not to visit that page? Even if we could tell the developers what to do (;-)), I'd rather they not waste their time with useless stuff like this. --snoyes 22:51, 16 Jan 2004 (UTC)
The point is we can claim then that our encyclopedia is somehow safe for children, at least when they surf under supervision of parents. If we solve vandal problem (for example, if we speak about CD-version), then we can claim that by doing simple steps you won't get to the contents that is clearly destructive. And what do you mean by 'if we could tell the developers?' There are plenty of them to implement a lot of things. Technically it's simple.
If this option wouldn't be implemented, I prefer unlinking some content. I'm not sure about those from cosmotheism, but goatse.cx in my opinion should be unlinked. In my browser going to link from text is selecting text and pressing one button, so there is no inconvenience. ilya 01:11, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
So if it is so easy then it is also not safe enough for the children.
What?? If your 10 years old child knows hot to do this then I appreciate you as the teacher, but I don't think it's a common ability
I propose deleting all material from wikipedia that will lead to the moral decay of the poor children and turn them all into raving Nazis/masturbators/infidels/etc.
I haven't suggested it, but a possible alternative variant too :)
LOL
me too
I'm not sure whether you have seen the volume of *useful* feature requests, and we do not actually have many developers. --snoyes 01:17, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
As it could be understood from my text the present situation — when people by themselves nowiki possibly offensive links — is fine for me. If it were relaxed we'd talk about it.
As for whether it's important or not: forget about public schools, libraries and most other children if it's not declared to be unoffensive. ilya 06:36, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
You can make a censored version of wikipedia and hawk it to the puritans, if you so desire. I object against such censorship being integrated into wikipedia. What you obviously didn't understand from my example above is that there are many different groups of narrow-minded people. Some don't like pictures of human anatomy, some don't like the word "god" spelled out, some don't like to see women showing their skin in public, some don't like blasphemy. Wikipedia has no obligation to cater to these people. Anyway, this has been discussed on the mailing lists before, and the conclusion was that we will not exclude encyclopedic material unless it is almost universally offensive. Personally I don't fully agree with that, but I'm willing to compromise. --snoyes 07:15, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
By no means I suggest some censorship of Wikipedia. What we are talking about has nothing to do with it. Still pesonally I appreciate the fact that many link are unlinked and that no explicit images, text etc appear without notice.
To summarize, I say it's pretty nice to have article on porno star with pictures, but inappropriate to put it on the Main Page. ilya 07:29, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I have to go with Snoyes on this one. An encyclopedia is supposed to report on the world as-is, not bowdlerize or sugar coat it. "Child safe" encyclopedia is a contradiction in terms. If you don't like it, move to Utah ;) →Raul654 05:15, Jan 17, 2004 (UTC)
Once again, I can't find another thing that would be better in efficiency/cost. But if you don't like it, that's fine. ilya

Wikipedia:Most Wanted Articles REFRESH

Is there anyone out there with the power to update Wikipedia:Most Wanted Articles to about 200 articles? A whole bunch have been made and so we need fresh meat. jengod 22:23, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I am not able to do that, but I do have an idea. What about including, on that most wanted page, a list of the most viewed broken links. Currently it shows the broken links that exist in the most places. However, this results in lots of them being from those generated pages like all the cities in the US. I don't know enough to know how hard this is, but perhaps a reasonable approximation of this would be to have the broken links that exist on the most viewed pages. Nroose 16:05, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I updated it (kind of) with the data that was on Special:Wantedpages of December 22, 2003. -- User:Docu
The problem with the "most viewed broken links" idea is that it requires some way of finding out how often each broken link is viewed - the Wiki software does have that functionality, but it was disabled months ago for performance reasons and isn't likely to be back any time soon. —Paul A 02:28, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Sept. 11 attacks link table corruption

As of the posting of this comment, the September 11, 2001 attacks article shows 10 inbound links, despite the fact that there are hundreds, so I assume the various moving around has managed to corrupt the link table. Is it possible to fix this somehow? There's a bunch of dangling double-redirects that should be tracked down and fixed, but that's difficult to do without the "what links here" feature. --Delirium 23:42, Jan 16, 2004 (UTC)

The other day I was wandering through the Casualties of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks: City of New York and discovered a large number of names that link incorrectly to famous people of the same name. I pass this along in a note on the appropriate talk pages. How should we handle this? --Paul, in Saudi

The entire 9/11 casualties list should be de-wikified (Cept for victims w/ articles) since consensus seems to be to restrict non-famous victims to the 9/11 wiki. --Jiang
That's certainly not the consensus, but most of us have given up the fight. Anthony DiPierro 13:22, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Necrotizing fasciitis

Originally this was a redirect to Group A streptococcal infection#Necrotizing fasciitis, then it was changed to a copy of that information without the original text deleted from the main article. It has had a few changes since. The redirect should be restored or the main article updated to remove the copied text. RedWolf 03:59, Jan 17, 2004 (UTC)

  • If there's a reason not to have the information in both places (is there?), the information should be removed from the Group A streptococcal infection article and stay in the Necrotizing fasciitis] article, because necrotizing fasciitis is not always caused by Group A streptococcus. -- Binky 08:11, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I think it would be best to have a very short summary of it at Group A streptococcal infection with a link to the necrotizing fasciitis article. Angela. 08:16, Jan 17, 2004 (UTC)
Agreed. Jamesday 13:15, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)
The reason for not duplicating the information in both places, by the way, is the general principle that if you copy text around, it will get modified in different ways in the two different places (that is, it will "branch"). Neither of the resulting articles is likely to be as good as a single one would have been. Onebyone 12:51, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Vote on title of "September 11 attacks"

A user decided that the word "terrorist" is POV and had to be removed from the title of the article previously titled September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; he went and changed the title accordingly. Some users agree with this and some disagree. The vote is underway at Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks. Tempshill 19:52, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Edit toolbar

Eloquence has written a new feature: a JavaScript edit toolbar capable of formatting wikitext by clicking buttons. You can see a demonstration of it at test.wikipedia.org. It's a great idea but it seems to have a few minor issues at the moment:

  • Unless something is selected, the text will be inserted at the bottom, not at the cursor position
    • Fixed in Mozilla and IE, other browsers don't support the necessary JavaScript.—Eloquence
  • In Mozilla, the edit window scrolls to the top every time a button is clicked
  • Some browsers display excess space around the toolbar
    • Should be fixed now, please report if it still occurs (clear cache if you've seen the toolbar already)—Eloquence

Eloquence thinks it's good enough as it is, and it should be enabled by default. However some people think some more work should be done on it first. Does anyone else have an opinion? -- Tim Starling 04:08, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)

I haven't seen example of the "excess space" problem yet. Can anyone reproduce that? That certainly should be fixed. The other I consider minor/unfixable (JavaScript implementation reasons), it works the same way as the phpBB edit toolbar, which is enabled by default as well. I should explain that the primary use of the edit toolbar is on selected text -- clicking the button without selecting text first inserts sample text, which is mostly intended for learning purposes.—Eloquence 04:15, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)
It misbehaves rather badly on Opera 7.23, I'm afraid. DOM issue, I guess... -- Finlay McWalter 04:19, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
And NS4.8. As with opera, it seems unable to figure out what the selection is, and just stuffs things at the end. -- Finlay McWalter 04:29, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
It can be disabled in the prefs. This discussion is about whether it should be on by default, which should be based on popular browser behavior (IE, Mozilla). What do you mean with "misbehaves rather badly"? Does it produce any errors?—Eloquence
Even if it is enabled by default, it should be possible to disable it for user agents on which we either don't know it works, or know it doesn't. nb: I've also checked it with Konqueror 3.1-12 and again it can't recognise the select (I'd hazard a guess that this means it will probably also not work with Safari). (Sorry, "rather badly" means "always thinks the select is empty"). I'll look for error printfs tomorrow (it's sooo past my bedtime) -- Finlay McWalter 04:38, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Pretty nifty, but I think it needs work in order to be included by default, and it it can't be fixed it shouldn't be included by default. The selecting text thing is major in my opinion. Those that are most likely to use the toolbar are also those that will be most likely to be confused by the glitches. What text are you supposed to select when inserting a signature or HR anyway? Good work though! Dori | Talk 05:52, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)
Great work. I use Mozilla. The bug regarding the window scrolling up is serious. Needs work. Where is the source code? Can I check it? Optim 06:16, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Everyone, please clear your caches before trying again (Shift+Reload may not work with IE). I've changed the JS so that the tags are inserted at the cursor position, but the scroll-up problem might be a Mozilla bug. At least now when you press a cursor key you're in the right place again, as the cursor is now in the right position. Everything should be perfect in IE now.—Eloquence 06:44, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)

In NS7.0 it adds only at the end of the article. Anyways: I'd rather have wikimarkup simple enough so that a human being can learn it easily than having a fancy edit script. If we need such an edit script, it should be set to off in the preferences for default. -- till we *) 18:01, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
That's the default behavior in all browsers which don't support the necessary JS and still better than nothing for learning the tags. It should work in NS 7.1. In JavaScript-disabled browsers, nothing is shown at all. It will be enabled by default.—Eloquence 18:17, Jan 18, 2004 (UTC)
I mostly use konqueror, so it doesn't help me. WormRunner 02:41, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Personally, don't like the look of it, but nice work. I reckon the WP markup is easy enough without the toolbar. If it's made default (I don't care), maybe you want to add buttons for lists and bullets? Kokiri 11:15, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Nice work (IMO) ... could I ask, can these be made into bookmarklets? thanks ... [mumbels about source code =-] ... JDR

If any major feature of this doesn't work in any browser, then end users using those browsers shouldn't even see any part of it. The behavior in Konqueror is very confusing; when I select text and click the B I expect that text to be bolded (or at least the markup needed to make it bolded should be imputed). If this confused and frustrated me (a person with a great deal of computer literacy), it most certainly will confuse and frustrate rank newbies (especially ones only familiar with highly sanitized GUIs). So it should not be shown to any browser that does not fully support its functionality! Erik wants to make things easier for newbies ? that's a great goal. But any newbie not using IE on Windows (maybe a few other configs) will be more confused and frustrated with this feature than without it. They will think that Wikipedia is broken, not their browser and then go away. So if it don't work in certain browsers, then run browser detection and don't serve broken bits to newbies. They will trip over them. --mav 09:26, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I don't buy it. The input box gives the user a quick example text for each major markup function which they can copy and paste. Your reaction is simply the result of having seen previous versions of the toolbar. I fully intend to activate this inputbox for users of browsers which are not capable of handling text selections via JavaScript, as I consider it a useful feature for learning the syntax. This is important especially when following red links, where there is no example markup whatsoever.
If you do think the text "Click a button to get an example text" is not sufficiently self-explanatory, feel free to suggest a better one.—Eloquence 01:04, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
I'm afraid I'm not too keen on this whole thing, for a number of reasons:
  1. A key attribute of a wiki is that the syntax is incredibly simple, and this will just make it more tempting to complicate it ("Well, we can always have a toolbar button for it").
  2. The toolbar as it currently is has serious bugs with several browsers. Users of these browsers visiting for the first time will be confused by this. Browser sniffing is in itself a Bad Thing, because you have to arbitrarily include or disclude browsers/versions that you haven't heard of yet (or don't exist yet).
  3. As a learning aid, it suffers from a lack of explanation, and does little to show users how to use and read the actual syntax. (Eloquence, exactly where are you claiming the text "Click a button to get an example text" should appear? I don't see it anywhere...)
Maybe some people would find this useful to switch on in the prefs, but with the conciseness of wikitax even this seems unlikely. But for new users, I think it creates far more problems than solutions. Better, IMHO, would just be to change the message on every edit page to include a direct link to a quick summary of syntax - a kind of compact reference version of that in Editing help But that's just my view... [Oh, one more thing - '' and ''' aren't technically italic and bold, they are emphasize and emphasize strongly. Not that it matters very much, but...] - IMSoP 13:55, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
1) is a very weak slippery slope argument - hardly worth responding to. There are more than enough developers who believe strongly in a simplified syntax. 2) Which "serious bugs" are you talking about? The toolbar has no bugs, to my knowledge. The only bug I know about is a Mozilla bug. 3) I think you just don't understand it. The behavior of the toolbar depends on the browser - in Mozilla and IE you get a select+click formatting, and if you click without a selection, it inserts sample text at the cursor. In other browsers, clicking on the button presents an explanation for each feature in an infobox.—Eloquence 21:21, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
OK, I agree that (1) is very much a matter of opinion, and put badly at that - it just seems like a step backwards to develop a concise syntax, and then imply that a tool is needed to author it. As for "the only bug I know about is a Mozilla bug", that's all very well - but that doesn't make it any less of a bug; even once this bug has been fixed, there will continue to be users of previous builds on into the indefinite future who suffer from this rather disorienting behaviour. As for (3), you are partly right: I didn't realise your earlier message was about a different mode of operation to the one I could see. However, I'm still worried about how it is you're checking for compatibility: if you're testing the functions you want to use directly, fine; but if you're checking the User Agent string or similar, you're just asking for trouble...
I'm sorry to be so negative about this - I appreciate you've worked hard trying to make it work, but I think that the current Wikipedia interface is very clean and consistent, and adding a colourful toolbar which in some cases will simply display information that could be given in an article anyway seems an unnecessary dilution of this.
- IMSoP 22:06, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Page links explained?

I can't seem to find any explanation to how the "What links here" page works. I checked the FAQ, but I have missed it. If you put a [[ ]] link in an article, is that how thing show up in "What links here"?

-werbwerb 1/18/04

  • "What links here" tells you which articles refer to the article you clicked its "What link here" linky. So if you go to Harvey Spencer Lewis and click "what linjks here" you will see that the articles AMORC, FUDOSI, FUDOFSI and others contain links to Harvey Spencer Lewis. So when you type [[Harvey Spencer Lewis]] in the AMORC article, AMORC will be listed in "what links here" of the Lewis article. Optim 08:58, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Request for adminship

I am working on newly started Tamil Wikipedia, and have either created or translated most of the articles currently available there. I feel getting an adminship is useful to develop the Tamil Wikipedia in a more efficient way. Tamil WK does not have a Request page for this purpose, and does not have many registered users to have active discussion. can someone advise me on this issue? Mayooranathan 09:36, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Mayooranathan, the only thing is that you have to get the consensus of the other tamil wikipedians, not ours. Based on your work, I don't see why they would oppose you. Basically, you have to create a page similar to our WP:RFA in tamil and ask what contributors are there to give an opinion. If there is no opposition, then ask one of the developers to give you sysop status. Dori | Talk 00:13, Jan 19, 2004 (UTC)
Mayooranathan is basically the only active Tamil Wikipedian. So there's not really much point in him making a request there. I've made him a sysop. -- Tim Starling 02:38, Jan 19, 2004 (UTC)
Thanks, Tim. Mayooranathan 04:08, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Header sizes

It strikes me as daft that withe the standard skin (the only one I am familiar with) that an =header= is bigger than the article title at the top of the page. May I suggest that we reduce the =header= to the same size as the article title and make ==90%==, ===80%===, ====70%====. -- SGBailey 10:07, 2004 Jan 18 (UTC)

We are supposed to start with ==Header 2== and not =Header 1= I think. Optim 22:21, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Yes, use the 2nd-level header for sections, then 3rd-level for subsections, and so on. Perhaps the 1st-level header should be disabled entirely, as I can't think of anywhere it should actually be used. --Delirium 06:39, Jan 19, 2004 (UTC)
No, the 1st-level headings should not be disabled. Only discouraged. Optim 07:29, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)
See M1 (motorway) and M2 (motorway) where I used =header= rather than ==sub-header== since it could be argued that the sections could have their own articles but it didn't seem worth splitting them into two each. Should these be change to ==sub-header== ? -- 217.24.129.50 11:58, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)
M1 motorway seems to have been renamed, but you're right, it's a very good example of an article that benefits from having section headings larger than the article heading. As most articles should start with section headings about the same size as the article heading, the practice of normally starting with the second-level header does make sense to me now. It didn't before. Andrewa 22:41, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)
The reason we start with second-level and not first-level headings is that the article title is itself a first-level heading, so another first-level heading would imply the beginning of a new article. What's not to understand? —Paul A 02:32, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I also thought that the article title was a first-level heading, but when I look at M1 motorway I find that not to be the case. I'm still not certain that the M1 motorway format is one to follow. -Anthropos 04:49, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Then you weren't looking closely enough, because the article title is a first-level heading. It looks a bit different because the wikipedia stylesheet contains formatting rules that apply specifically to first-level headings that are article titles (and not to first-level headings that aren't article titles), but it is a first-level heading. —Paul A 06:05, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Sorry, Paul. I must be missing something. My assumption is/was that the distinguishing factor of a first level header is its appearance. There must be some other distinguishing factor that I'm not aware of. -Anthropos 17:23, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Delirium; I don't think there are any good reasons to use level-1 headings in any article, and think they should be disabled or at the very least strongly discouraged. How does this usage improve the M1 Motorway article? If an article includes topic names thought to be more important than the article title itself, then they shouldn't be under that article title; An article entitled "M1 Motorway" should be about the M1 Motorway; it is clearly the most important topic in the article, and hence should be the largest (and the only one marked up with h1). Using a level-1 heading puts that topic on the same hierarchical level as the article itself; it's like having an "outline" of the article that looks like this:

  • M1 Motorway
  • Great Britain
  • Northern Ireland
  • Republic of Ireland

Which, of course, is silly. -- Wapcaplet 21:32, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Nursery (horticulture)

I created a stub for this use of the term nursery. It needs a disambig page for other meanings, but I know little of children's nurseries for example, and would not even know what to title such a page (if such a page does not already exist - I could not find one...) Anyone want to tackle this? Pollinator 03:29, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Brilliant prose addition

Hi, I need a sysop to add Geyser to the Philosophy, Mathematics and Natural Sciences section of Brilliant prose. It has gone through the nomination process, and all objections have been withdrawn. Thanks, Gentgeen 06:56, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Done. →Raul654 08:17, Jan 20, 2004 (UTC)

Portugues

Porque não tem versão em português? Um abraço. Luís Teixeira. Belém-Pará-Amazônia-Brasil

If babelfish translated you correctly you search for a portugese wikipedia - take a look at http://pt.wikipedia.org andy 08:58, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Moving phonetic transcriptions from SAMPA to IPA?

The current de facto standard for phonetic transcriptions on Wikipedia is SAMPA. With the transition to UTF-8, it is now possible to use IPA symbols directly in the text. Is it a good idea to start doing this? If you have any comments or opinions, please go to [2]. arj 12:45, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)


en: and fr: are still on iso-8859-1 and will probably be for some time due to problems with old browsers. But it is generally agreed that we will eventually switch to IPA. -- Tarquin 22:47, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Literal string

Are literal string enclosed within quotation marks?

Err, I'm not sure what you mean. In wikipedia's markup, all strings are literal (I suppose) - only links'n'stuff are enclosed in special markup. -- Finlay McWalter 16:25, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Slashdotting

Our page on Lagrangian point is in the top story on http://slashdot.org right now, so expect some extra traffic and some anonyvandals. Still, an anon (almost certainly from that source) just fixed my dodgy orbital arithmetic on JWST, so long live the anons, I say. -- Finlay McWalter 16:25, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Yes, but that would require people to read the article. I think we're safe :) →Raul654 02:35, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)

Wiki is not paper?

One question that's been bugging me lately is, Where do we draw the distinction between content that belongs on the wiki and content that is too trivial to be here? Some things are definitely trivial, for example the so-called "vanity pages" created by users about themselves (with exceptions for genuinely noteworthy people like Daniel C. Boyer). I remember reading something about a "1000-people rule," according to which a topic deserves to be here if and only if one thousand people, anywhere in the world, would want to know about it. I'm sure that there is at least one meta page about this, but I've been unable to find it. --Smack 01:01, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

There is Wikipedia:Verifiability, which says all content should be verifiable - this cuts out quite a bit of trivial stuff. But there's no widely agreed upon set of criteria necessary for an article to be OK. --Camembert

Can't access the Vandalism in progress article

I was editing the Vandalism in progress page and received an error message:

Database error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

SELECT HIGH_PRIORITY length(cur_text) AS x, cur_namespace, cur_is_redirect FROM cur WHERE cur_id='286398' from within function "". MySQL returned error "2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query".

From that point, I can't get back to it. I can see it when I look at the Diff, but not when I go direct to the page. RickK 04:29, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

You need to clear your cache. We were having database problems for a few minutes. You can see this alright, can't you? -- Tim Starling 04:38, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
I was able to see it once Hadal edited the page. RickK 05:21, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Simplifying a large research task

I noticed that wikipedia had almost no information on billiards and I have been adding some articles. Even if I only add a bio on each BCA hall of fame player, that is an incredible amout of work.

Is it a reasonable thing to look for shortcuts, such as asking BCA for permission to use the small bios they have for each hall of fame inductee?

Or is that bad form, or against the ruleson of wikipedia?

I plan on doing many of the bios myself, as I am sort of an amateur pool historian, and have a background information on many, but not on all of them.

You can ask, but note that BCA has to allow their content to be licensed under GFDL, not just allow it to be used in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is free in the sense that anyone can reuse our content for any purpose, as long as they follow the license. Historically, such permission has been fairly rare. -- Tim Starling 06:02, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
However, you can use the BCA bios as reference to write your own in your own words. Facts are not copyrighted, only the creative expression of them can be. —Morven 17:13, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
If you haven't found it already, Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission may be a useful resource. It's worth a try, anyway. -- Cyan 20:06, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)


We have more than twice the articles in Encarta

I've always wistfully looked to the day when Wikipedia would be able to take established encyclopedias head-on. Just now, I looked up Encarta, and found that their biggest edition has less than 70,000 articles! In two years, we've created more than 2 and a half times the number of articles in Microsoft's encyclopedia. Well done, Wikipedians! -- Lunkwill

Note however that Encarta's articles are on average longer and more complete than ours. So we still have some work to do! :) --mav
What'd be more interesting is what percentage of Encarta articles Wikipedia has. I suspect a large percentage of the WP articles are fluff (are we counting every single city in the US as part of the total, for example). Anthony DiPierro 21:14, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Searching

How about letting the google search be directly from the main page? Instead of the frustration of entering a search and then having to accept a google search (which b.t.w. gives completely acceptable answers) -- anon

Searching is disabled because of performance reasons, but as we just yesterday moved back to the faster computer and some more new servers are scheduled to be online within the next weeks you can expect to become online soon again. The Google search was thus just an emergency workaround - having the same user interface as before, but avoid the server slowdown. Moving the google search to the main page would make the temporarily workaround more permanent then anyone wants. andy 08:40, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Seems like searching is already enabled again now. However the index seems to have some wrong entries - if I search for my favourite mispelling "generaly" it gives just two pages, and both don't contain that word anymore. andy 08:48, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

School project

There's a school project on cosmetics going on. See Mascara, Nail diseases, Manicure (existed already before), Pedicure, Eyebrows, Eyebrow makeovers, and maybe others. All are on Cleanup, the last one also on VfD. See also the page history of Manicure, where the author comments "Begining a page for a grade, do not edit"... I have the strong feeling that the other authors belong to the same class. Most of these articles are in a pretty bad shape, and anyway, others have edited some of them. I'll grant that some of these may yet become real articles, but somehow I doubt it. What to do with these? Lupo 13:00, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Briefly, keep and improve if worth having an article on. Delete if not. Just like any other contributions, in fact. Bmills 14:10, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
To clarify: my problem is not the poor quality, but the fact that these girls apparently will be graded on something others also edited. Lupo 14:12, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
That's not our problem, but something for the teacher to sort out. I think that this type of school project should be encoraged though. theresa knott 15:03, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

See User:Craigbutz for a list of them. There are more than cosmetics articles. My concerns are that we correct and improve the English and they get marked on our corrections, some have been redirected (what mark to they get then?) and some are how-tos. The premise may not understand the wiki concept - people don't own articles here, they are collaborative efforts. Secretlondon 14:17, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)

I have taken the liberty to write on his talk page and to email him. Hopefully he'll show up and can provide some reassurances and perhaps we can all gain some enlightenment. - UtherSRG 15:39, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC) ⊙

Maybe he should have his students use temporary pages before unleashing them on the unsuspecting public. Davodd 18:52, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
By using subpages off the teacher's username? No one would mess with them there I suppose, and once grades have been handed out the teacher could move them to an appropriate page on wikipedia-proper and let them sink or swim on their own merits. Fabiform 19:20, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I think this is an excellent idea. - UtherSRG 19:39, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Thank you all for your interest in this experiment. Please do not about students being graded on work they didn't do. I will be looking at page histories, user contribution lists, as well as narrative response papers in assessing. I would think that wikipedians would understand that writing has value beyond the finished product, and have faith that people can be given credit for participating in collaboration.

One of the biggest frustrations of writing teachers is finding assignments to give where the writing actually matters. I work with vocational high school students who are learning a wealth of specialized knowledge worth sharing. Some of them, obviously, struggle with writing. They are the ones who need their writing to matter the most, or they won't take it seriously.

I do now see a number of aspects of the assignment that should be reworked, which I could not have foreseen without letting students giving it a shot. I opted not to have them work up drafts in MS-Word because it would have been a nightmare to explain why formatting doesn't tranfer. Even with a demo and basic guide, many are confused by the mark-up.

In the future, I may have to save this project for more proficient writers. I do like the idea of temporary pages. Is there a protocol for doing that? Would it work to create links to obscurely named articles, then change the titles to their real names when completed? Other ideas? - Craigbutz 00:33, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)


I'll reply to Craig (on his talk page and email him a copy) on how to create sub-pages off of his own page. - UtherSRG 02:52, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Letter sent. - UtherSRG 03:16, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Messages for works in progress, low-quality articles, stub-message variants?

A lot of problem articles seem to be works in progress. Someone had an idea, got started, left things just barely started or incomplete, and you can't tell whether the project is still alive.

A related problem, which I think we may see more of, are pages started as school projects (see above, and also see Nurse assistant skills, which is currently the result of my efforts to fix grammar and language in an article of this type).

In such cases, Wikipedians are reluctant to delete the articles if a) the topic is worthy and b) the content that is there is considered to be better than nothing.

Still, it seems to me that it might be useful to have messages that are variants on the stub message. One might say something like "This page is a work in progress. You can help Wikipedia by adding to it." And it also might be useful to have a message that says something like "This page does not meet Wikipedia quality standards. You can help Wikipedia by improving it." In both cases, the message should be dated and should be handled as a sort of postpone vote for deletion. If someone notices that the page with such a notice is bad and hasn't been improved in months, that would be a prima facie case for deletion.

Thoughts? Dpbsmith 13:28, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Well, my immediate reaction is to reiterate what others have said on this subject before - the problem is that all articles on wikipedia are, by definition, works in progress. Granted, some are more polished than others, but there's no such thing as a final version of an article here, and that is surely the strength of the wikipedia approach. If a page needs attention, by all means list it on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, but would we really gain anything by going round putting notes on things that basically say "I don't think this is very good, but I'm not going to improve it at the moment so you should"? And as for deleting articles because they have remained low quality for too long, this seems to involve far too many fuzzy quantities: how long, and how low quality. And if you do delete it, you lose any information that could have been used by someone to improve it. - IMSoP 14:06, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I agree with IMSoP on this, to a point at least. It seems possible that some articles may someday say all that's needed on a subjcet and be well-written and so need no further tweaking. But most articles are wip and will be for some time to come. The problem is with really poor articles on subjects worth having, and I see no real alternative to listing on Cleanup or Pages needing attention until someone comes along to improve them. Bmills 14:14, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

migration of the apaches? --> Wikipedia:Reference Desk

Year in X

I noted some of the year (example 1988) have a box on the right to select other categories such as 1988 in sports, 1988 in film and the like. However, in 1954 (and others), this box does not appear. It is quite useful so if somebody knows how to add this, then I think it would be a good idea. Thank you. JackandJill 17:04, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

You could add this yourself, looking at the 1988 page, the code is as follows:

<div style="float:right; border:1px; border-style:solid; padding:2px"> '''See also:''' * [[1988 in aviation]] * [[1988 in film]] * [[1988 in literature]] * [[1988 in music]] * [[1988 in sports]] * [[1988 in television]] </div>

There may not be any info on those years yet though, so the links will appear in red. Dori | Talk 17:11, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
However for 1954 I did just add it :-) andy 17:13, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
The current version of the see also box is at WikiProject Years. The box is a newish idea, and hasn't been added to all year pages, yet. Gentgeen 07:05, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Case sensitivity of page names

Is there any justification for case sensitive page names?

Is there any reason to want "climate change", "Climate change", "climate Change" or indeed "ClImAte ChangE" to be different pages? In this case, obviously no, but are there in others?

If not, could wiki perhaps internalise names based on capitalising the first letter and little-ing the others (ie "Climate Change" is canonical), and (if desired) undo this in the displayed page. Ie, if you search for "ClimATE CHange" wiki would search for "Climate Change" but could (if this is desirable; it would be, say, if you had searched on IPCC or ASEAN) reconvert to whatever you had searched on, and display a page headed "ClimATE CHange". This would I think be very little extra load. (William M. Connolley 17:39, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC))

The only time it could possibly make a difference (that I've noticed) is when it comes to acronyms →Raul654 17:42, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
True. But acronyms are all uppercase, so UC'ing the first letter wouldn't affect them [WMC].
Not all acronyms are uppercase. Think of Dfs or Basic, for instance. Bmills 10:42, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I'm sure this came up before and an example was swiftly located where a two-word entry had different meaning depending upon whether the second word was capitalised or not. The answer will probably waken me sometime later tonight at which point I will have no clue as to why I thought it :-) Phil 18:18, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)
A trivial example is Meat loaf vs. Meat Loaf. Despite this example, I heartily agree that things in general would be easier if entry titles were case-insensitive, with the odd exceptions like this handled through disambiguation. Jgm 18:53, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Of course, those rare cases could be treated like any other disambiguation. Anthony DiPierro 18:37, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

OK, so, can anyone either point to the earlier discussion, or, give an example where the different meanings occur? (William M. Connolley 22:36, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC))

This did come up in the Pump recently, and I'd be interested in continuing the discussion. But I don't know offhand where or even whether it was archived.
Mind you, I have found Wikipedians to generally be very conservative about such changes even if trivial. And this is not a trivial change. Andrewa 00:18, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)
There are many good reasons to keep titles case-sensitive. For example, GNU and gnu are quite different things, as is OVA and ova. With a little time, it is not difficult to compile a long list of words where case matters. Furthermore, an addition good reason to keep page titles case-sensitive is the fact that it helps to standardize the way users write pages, so we don't have people writing pages like "comMUNity" just to be funny. --Lowellian 00:46, Jan 22, 2004 (UTC)
A long list perhaps, but are they all acronyms-vs-words? OVA and ova are different, but Ova and ova are the same thing. And indeed (I wasn't ware of this - is it new?) "ova" is actually "Ova" so my suggestion is half-done already, but only for the initial letter of the first word. GNU and Gnu/gnu are different so perhaps I have to modify my idea to just uppercase-ing the initial letter of each word, which is only a minor extension of what seems to be done already.
As to your second point, at the moment you CAN write a page called comMUNity, and it does something. (William M. Connolley 10:21, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)).
There are certainly reasons for not completely removing case-sensitivity. But there are schemes that would do this far better than we do at present. At present a link to Oyster bay is broken even if Oyster Bay exists, while a link to oyster Bay would find the article. All this has been discussed before, I wonder where it went? Andrewa 18:44, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

It looks like gnu and ova should be treated as disambiguisations. Why not gnu (acronym)? ilya 23:50, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)