Wikipedia:Village pump/March 2004 archive 1

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I don't think this is related to the bolded server problem at the top of this page, but it might be. I am having a lot of trouble updating an image I made. There are three versions. The second wouldn't show up until I uploaded the third, and now the third won't show up, even though it is in the server because I can access it by clicking previous versions. With some reversion I have been able to make versions 1 and 2 show up, but not 3. I thought maybe I needed to wait a while but that's not it. I left it up overnight and it still won't update. The image is here and the image I actually want is here. The 1009 byte one. Please teach me how to fix it. - Omegatron

I've had the same issue. It's a caching problem in your browser - it tries to use the old image even when you hit reload/refresh. Try hitting control-F5 to force a clean reload, and that should fix the problem. →Raul654 17:10, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

That was probably the problem. Regardless, it has been fixed now. Thank you. - Omegatron

Contents 1 to troll or not to troll, and sock puppets too 2 Edit count 3 Congress, in general 4 Time Zone 5 Placenames - use traditional or modern versions? 6 Proposed new fair use guidelines 7 Random human-authored page? 8 Visualising article hierarchies and interdependences? 9 Errors in What links here ? 10 Page footers, revisited 11 When should I remove Stub Messages? 12 Symbols for Chemical Equilibrium 13 Talk Pages for IP (not logged-in) users on "New pages" 14 Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry and heading style 15 Main Page replacement 16 Image Replacement non-Functional 17 Any need for links in printable version? 18 How can I see user contributions for users that aren't logged in? 19 Plain Vanilla Main Page 20 Moving/renaming images 21 Wikipedia user pages on Wikinfo 22 Article count 23 Layout change for Votes for deletion? 24 Navigating back and forth through differences between revisions 25 Computer screenshot guidelines 26 Wikipedia button image for links 27 Guidelines for Indexing Articles 28 Whats wrong with Wikisource?? 29 Copyright question/most linked dab page question 30 Can I use images (and other materials) that are crown copyright? 31 "view source" link on 'go' guess 32 images u/l'ed before new FU guidelines 33 acl stayaway browser ^Mozilla/3.0 34 Who decide what is encyclopedic and what is not ? 35 How to get a heart attack from a typo, or www.wikpedia.org is for sale 36 Wikipedia as TEFL Project 37 "Xxxx (disambiguation)" pages and msg:disambig 38 Looking for "Food libel" article 39 Michael Landon (moved to Reference Desk) 40 New Main Page 41 How-to 42 Log in/log out mystery 43 WikiProject Schools 44 You say it's your birthday? 45 phonetics, request for feature 46 trees, request for feature 47 Buddhist symbolisms 48 Wikilottery 49 Why does this keep happening? Is it true or a bug? 50 Requests for article removal by their protagonists: Richard Genovese, etc. 51 British or American English? 52 Red link will not go away 53 Using MediaWiki namespace 54 Disk caching on 55 German TV news 56 Rosa Parks 57 Display of accented Russian characters 58 Personal attacks, legal threats 59 Press release hits jackpot in Germany 59.1 Transcript 60 NES vs. Famicom 61 flags and arms: asking for permission to use images from FOTW and others 62 National Capital territory 63 Can I Count Readers of an Article? 64 Please Rephrase the Explanatory text for the Watchlist 65 Fun little project : International names for Village pump 66 US Speaker of the House - email address? 67 Unable to rename article 68 spring cleaning (watchlists) 69 Neutral term for Movement of a Group of People 70 Press release 71 Print Edition 72 graph/chart/raw number request 73 Computer game / Video game 74 Vandalism 75 Imperial units convention 76 Messages/Templates: Quick link to them needed 77 Meeting other Wikipedians 78 Sea of Japan/East Sea 79 EoT 80 Can images alone be licensed under GNU Free Documentation License? 81 Painting of the black Madonna 82 Complaint against the edit box toolbar 83 Transliterations from Russian 84 Cleanup and edit doubling 85 Sandbox header replacement text 86 Displaying recently uploaded image 87 Steinbeck Short Story Interview 88 Design competition for Thumbnail Boxes 89 On Avoiding a Wikipedia Catastrophic Event (population) 90 Stats updated 91 Anyone else see the irony in this? 92 Boilerplate text for current event/often-updated articles? 93 Main Pages Gallery 94 Image formatting 95 Towns and villages articles in Japan 96 Recent changes 97 Question for the interlanguage wiki users

[edit] to troll or not to troll, and sock puppets too

Hello all, this is just a friendly reminder about trolls (and sock puppets too). As Wikipedia increases in coverage, so too increases the meddling of trolls. There are times when it seems like trolls are everywhere, and it becomes a game (of sorts) to catch, nab or name the little buggers (and sock puppets too). It is in such moments that people begin to be overly suspicious of the actions of newcomers. Our trust in newcomers diminishes. Once distrust supersedes trust in a community, it is difficult to reverse the change. Let's not let that happen to Wikipedia. The project depends on a strong, friendly community. Build the database and build the community, too.

I realize you are all working hard at building our community. This messages is not to insult you or scold you. It is just a reminder. Welcome newcomers. Don't be overly suspicious of the actions of newcomers. Speak softly.

But carry a big stick, Kingturtle 04:20, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sounds good advice, I'll try. Andrewa 11:34, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm concerned at the tendency to use the label 'troll' to describe people with whom we disagree. What is trolling in this context? What is the difference between trolling and vandalism / abuse? 209.102.127.145 20:02, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

From the Jargon file http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/troll.html:

troll v.,n.

1. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. [...]

2. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion.

Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.

[...]

Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.

The use of "troll" in either sense is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.

--Ruhrjung 02:42, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

So a troll is someone whose arguments I find specious or annoying, or if I think that they are not interested in learning (agreeing with me?) "Ignore him, he disagrees with us"? Or worse, "Ban him - he disagrees with us, and shows no signs of learning (agreeing with us)"? See also [1] for an alternate view. Aside from vandalism and abuse, how can we ever distinguish someone who holds views we don't like from someone who is deliberately trying to provoke by adopting views we don't like? 209.102.127.120 05:36, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

That's not the way I understand it ... a troll is not just specious, but an attempt to provoke and inflame without really caring what the argument is. It's argument for the sake of making people angry, or at least that's what I infer. -Leo Okonski 10:08, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See wikipedia:sock puppets

(And then see, Wikipedia:Meet the Feebles :) →Raul654)

Tell me about this - not sure I can comprehend it. Thanks 209.102.125.157 02:20, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Edit count

Is it possible to quickly find out the number of edits made by myself or any other user (not which specific ones, just a total number)? If so, can this be filtered by date, etc - e.g. can I find out how many edits I made in December 2003, or in the last 3 weeks, and so on. Would find this handy. Graham 04:29, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

As far as I know there is no quick way, and no quick way will be implemented. To find out the number of edits you/someone has made, go to "user contributions" then click "next 50" (or change this to 250/500, whatever) until you reach the end of the user's contributions, count the last batch and add to the number at the top. This is boring and kind of stupid. I think it is to discourage any status being attached to how many edits a user has made, so people in arguments and edit wars don't say "I've made 4,657 edits, you've only made 76, I outrank you...". Well you get the idea.  :) fabiform | talk 09:39, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You can also wait until Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits is updated again (last update was in August last year, so it should very much overdue), or search in those nifty Wikipedia statistics. Both of course only work if you look for a user which already have made it into the Top50 or Top100. andy 11:53, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Congress, in general

I've noticed that Wikipedia's articles on the United States Congress are a bit lacking--for instance, we don't even have articles on most of the current members, let alone past ones. As I've been slogging through the List of House Committees, I've realized there's a number of separate WikiProjects I could start here. Where are good places I could advertise for help with these various things? I'm no good at starting new articles (prefer to edit) and I'm not a congressional scholar. Meelar 05:57, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC) P.S. Please reply at my talk page

There's a Wikipedia:WikiProject US Congress that's quite dead and need reviving. The Congressional Biographical Directory and the large amt of commentary on the house and senate websites are almost all public domain. --Jiang 06:00, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Adam Carr has done extensive work on U.S. Congress, such as List of United States Senators, List of members of the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. House election, 2004, U.S. Senate election, 2004 and United States Senators from 1789. Adam would be a great person to talk to about your ideas. Kingturtle 06:04, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Time Zone

I am confused about the time zone of the date stamps. It appears to be one hour ahead of California time, or MST - Mountain Standard Time. Shouldn't it be Coordinated Universal Time in order to be neutral? --pstudier 06:07, 2004 Feb 20 (UTC)

Timestamps are in UTC, though if you've set your preferences to display differently they will do so in most places. --Brion 06:15, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, I just noticed this as I posted my question. Why are there different timezones? "Because the earth is round and it keeps spinning" by Radar, a character on Mash. ;-) --pstudier 06:21, 2004 Feb 20 (UTC)

[edit] Placenames - use traditional or modern versions?

Having recently expanded an article on Nishapur in Iran following the recent rail disaster there, I've found that the place appears to be referred to more often as Neyshabur these days. Nishapur is the "traditional" English transliteration, Neyshabur is the current version (much like Peking/Beijing in China). However, Google reports that Nishapur is more often used (5640 results) than Neyshabur (2970 results). Which version would I be better off using in the article? -- ChrisO 13:11, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think the way it is now, with a redirect at Neyshabur, is fine. As that usage becomes more common (referring to your Google results and number of Wikipedia links), we could flip the position of the article and redirect. Lou I 16:27, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

We'll use whatever most English speakers use. That means we'll often switch long after those in the local area have switched, because we need to allow time for others to learn about the change and most people don't get all of the official reminders and notices seen by the locals. We should indicate the new name in the article as soon as practical, so people who come here will learn of it and we should redirect from the new name to the old, while we use the old, then from the old to the new when we switch. When it comes to historical articles, the name at the time is the one most often used, with some disputes in cases where each side in a war used different names. Jamesday 09:40, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed new fair use guidelines

In accordance with the recent discussion on the wikipedia-l mailing list and Jimbo's pronouncements (edit: this was not a decision - this was an opinion and discussion is ongoing Jamesday) on the matter I have created

Wikipedia:Fair use

This page serves as a discussion page for debating whether an image or other file can legitmately be considered fair use, and whether all alternatives have been exhausted. Images and other files that may be eligible should not be used until there is consensus on the page to do so; on the other hand, they should not be deleted until there is consensus that they are not eligible for fair use.

Image pages that have undergone due process should be tagged with {{msg:verifieduse}} (Template:verifieduse).

All pages which are currently tagged with {{msg:fairuse}} (many older ones link to fair use instead) should undergo due process on this page to determine whether their status as fair use is justifiable. If so, they should be tagged with {{msg:verifieduse}} instead, if not, they should be deleted and efforts should be made to seek free alternatives.

Whenever a previously fair use image is deleted, a link should be added to Wikipedia:Requested pictures. Images without any copyright information should either be deleted or undergo the fair use process.

No newly uploaded images should be tagged with {{msg:fairuse}}.

This post is also cross-posted to the wikien-l mailing list. [2]

—Eloquence 17:01, Feb 20, 2004 (UTC)

You should establish that there is community consensus before suggesting deleting such images. The mailing list is a tiny portion of the whole community and we already have an established process for replacing images: finding a more free one and uploading it. Did Jimbo announce an official decision of the Wikimedia Foundation Board on this question or is he acting as an influential individual who is advocating his own personal view, one I think amounts to advocating forking the project. Jamesday 09:49, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Note that it is contrary to current policy to delete an image without listing it on either Wikipedia:Images for deletion or Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements. Not recommended for a sysop who wants to retain the deletion capability to delete without using due process. Jamesday 12:19, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Random human-authored page?

I'd enjoy a "random human-authored page" feature that excludes the robot-written descriptions of U. S. towns, which currently seem to constitute about 50% of the "random page" hits. Thoughts? Dpbsmith 17:14, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See User_talk:Rambot/Random_page - and you will see many thoughts, but few decisions. - IMSoP 17:56, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There about 30-35,000 rambot articles and 210,000 articles total. Thus only about 1 in 6 or 7 random articles should be a rambot one. And remember, if you get a rambot page, google for some fact about the place, and add it to the article, then it is a rambot article no more! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 18:02, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Try it. The percentage is far, far higher than 1 in 6. I just tried ten random pages and got four rambot articles on U. S. towns. Using a binomial test, if we assume the expected percentage is 15%, then getting 40% in ten tries is statistically significant at the 5% level. Dpbsmith 21:38, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ten tests was not enough. I've just done 50 tests and the result is 1 in 6.25 i.e 8 rambots in 50 trials. Curiously I also got 4 rambots in the first 10 trials.

Adrian Pingstone 08:54, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

(Shrug) I tried again and got zero rambots in 25 tries. Oh, well. I guess that's what sustains Las Vegas. I don't feel dragging out my old statistics textbooks to try to figure out whether the rambot hits really come in bunches. Maybe the algorithm needs to be changed from "random" to "stratefied random" or something. I did read User_talk:Rambot/Random_page and conclude that there was little point in my bringing the topic up. Dpbsmith 14:48, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

All a statistical signifficance of 5% means is that if you did 20 trials, 19 would show the correct result and the last would be incorrect. So you managed to do the 1 in 20 trial that failed. Like Adrian said, you need more tests to be more confident. Jrincayc 16:52, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Visualising article hierarchies and interdependences?

A problem that has sometimes bothered me: when contributing to a field of knowledge in which there is not a well organised hierarchy of articles, it can be difficult to find out what has already been written. To get an overview, it is often necessary to follow many, many links and additionally search for individual words or phrases (further complicated by the current absence of direct database searching). I wonder if there are more effective means of understanding how articles are related to each other. It would help a lot if one could get a graphical representation of links between pages. Are there any tools to do this, or are there other ideas how to make it easier to understand the increasingly complex structure of our article namespace? Kosebamse 19:47, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I looked around and found TouchGraph - enter a URL and a neat Java applet pops up showing a network-like map to whatever depth you like. -- Wapcaplet 20:04, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Edit: Does not appear to work within the article namespace though; looks like it works only with entire sites. Darn :-) -- Wapcaplet 20:08, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

A rudimentary non-graphical solution is for someone to dedicate a large percentage of his or her Wiki time to compiling or maintaining an alphabetized or hierarchical list of articles on the desired field of knowledge. The list is formed by manually chasing down links between germane articles, and also watching for recent contributions by editors who are known to edit on the topic. Of course, the compiler of the list often encounters the same fundamental problem--figuring out what is already out there, and trying to find unfindable articles that aren't linked to anything else, or only linked to their own small subset of related articles, usually all edited by the same person. Nevertheless, other contributors (who know the list exists and aren't too lazy to consult it) can save some time by exploring the list before doing their editing.... I know it's not at all what Kosebamse had in mind, but if one person is focussing most of his or her mental energy chasing down articles on a particular topic--rather than editing or creating articles--it can, I think, be fairly efficient. An example of a hierarchical list is List of United Kingdom-related topics. An excellent example of a well-maintained alphabetical list is List of Japan-related topics, which I have tried to emulate with less success with List of Korea-related topics. --Sewing 22:08, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

One problem I can see with such a visualization is that it'd be difficult to make it hierarchical - since any article can link to any other (or even be directly related in some way to another), a graphical view of such a thing would be a great big messy network of nodes. I don't doubt that someone could come up with a little utility that would crawl around on Wikipedia checking out "what links here" and similar things, and build a graphical (or even non-graphical) diagram of the structure. It could be a useful thing to have - if only to help contributors figure out what specific parts of a broader topic need to be added, merged, deleted, or otherwise reworked. -- Wapcaplet 01:50, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

A well known limitation of a wiki is that wikis were really made for ease of writing and not for ease of reading. Unfortunate for an encyclopedia! I think it will unfortunately continue to require a lot of human effort to show a well organized overview of any subject. Tempshill 20:07, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

We have to convince writers and editors to add their articles to these lists. If we distribute the chore, it is manageable. mydogategodshat 05:30, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Whatever happened to the [[Category:...]] feature which reared its head a few months back and then hid away again? I tried it out over on the Test Wikipedia and it seemed fine but never managed to make it over here AFAICT. --Phil 10:03, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Errors in What links here ?

If I go to the "What links here" for Pelé I find Pele listed 3 times, but if I go to Pele, I find just 1 link to Pelé. Why's this so ? Jay 21:56, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's a bug. ;-) -- Timwi 22:52, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

When will it get fixed? Try http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Safety_valve which has dozens of links to "Orphaned articles". -- SGBailey 22:14, 2004 Feb 25 (UTC)

Special:Whatlinkshere/National_capital_territory and Special:Whatlinkshere/Talk:National_capital_territory give scores of Village pump links. What's up? -- Paddu 10:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I noticed the same thing on Special:Whatlinkshere/Delaware, which gives tons of hits to Current events. →Raul654 10:23, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

I was about to add this to meta:MediaWiki_feature_request_and_bug_report_discussion but hey, it seems to have gone away! Was the bug fixed or was it just a transient thing that went away, probably to surface again? -- Paddu 07:45, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Page footers, revisited

It seems that the discussion at meta:Page footers is pretty much over. It seems that there is no consensus between alternatives #1 and #3, but a clear opposition to suggestions #2 and #4. How would I proceed further now? What would be the next step in attempting to reach consensus? Thanks for any help. -- Timwi 22:52, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Please see Mediawiki talk:East Asia. The discussion is not over, and certain assumptions about the implementation cannot be made. --Jiang 01:21, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This discussion is just starting. I object to these "clutter objects" on principle. If the content of these "footers" is valid then create an article for that content and link to it. --Gaz 08:35, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See my reply to you on the meta page. — Timwi 12:56, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Page footers is available for commenting and discussion. --Jiang

[edit] When should I remove Stub Messages?

Hi, this is a great place!

I have just expanded a page containing a stub message Malvern Hills.

Is it cool to delete the stub message myself, or is that decision better left to someone else?

Thanks,

Chris B

20/2/04

If you feel it's crossed that threshold, feel free. Also, feel more than free to create an account: there are several good features here that only work if you are a registered user. -- Jmabel 23:40, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Symbols for Chemical Equilibrium

There is no symbol for chemical equilibrium (the <-> thing is chemical resonance) Bensaccount

↔ or ⇔? Dysprosia 08:42, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

↔ is resonance, ⇔ is a box. Equilibrium is two half arrows like --\ over \-- . Someone needs to make a Wikipedia symbol for Equilibrium. Bensaccount 18:03, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's not really a wikipedia issue, it's a font issue. Here are three more arrows defined in Unicode, maybe the right one is among them: ⇋⇆⇄. However those may display as simple question marks if your font doesn't support them. andy 21:11, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You probably want the first one. I get you know. If ⇔ doesn't show up properly for you, you probably won't have much luck with the Unicode symbol. Dysprosia 04:06, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If you don't want to wait till most users have the character in their font you can also do it with the TeX syntax - <math>\rightleftharpoons</math> should show it, but strangely the TeX engine used here currently gives a parsing error. andy 11:55, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

How do you put the characters in your font? Bensaccount 22:03, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I did not put it there - Microsoft did :-) Actually it is a special font MS had for download some time ago which contains almost every Unicode character, including thousands of japanese and chinese characters. But it isn't available anymore, and I have no idea which product they include it now.

However even if you find a font which contains that character it won't help much - as most of the readers of this site won't have such a font. And if all those will only see a question mark or a box instead of the arrow they will not understand the meaning - if it is a native name of a city which displays wrongly it doesn't hurt, but the arrow is more essential. I tried to read the above with a Win2000-IE6 standard installation and it gave only boxes - only my Mozilla with that special font shows it correct. Maybe you better ask for ideas how to continue at Wikipedia talk:Chemistry, as there the chemistry people might have a solution. TeX would be a solution, but the fact that rightleftharpoons don't work is already listed on Wikipedia:TeX requests for quite some time (since October actually). andy 14:51, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Talk Pages for IP (not logged-in) users on "New pages"

I really like the New pages feature. But I've noticed that the IP addresses are not links to the associated user page. Is this intended or an oversight? -Rholton (aka Anthropos) 02:52, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Although you could probably create a page named User:24.117.220.117, we discourage this because IP addresses are not tightly bound to specific users. Most dial-up services assign you new IPs every time you log in, and a different user may get that same IP later. Users should thus create a named account so their contributions can be conglomerated into one list, people can remember them by their name, and they can have a user page always at the same place. -- Timwi 13:00, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, Timwi. Actually, I was confused. What I was (and still am) missing is a link to the user's Talk page. This is included on the Recent Changes page, but is missing from the New Pages page, for all users, logged-in or not.

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry and heading style

I just noticed that Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry and associated articles like Poetry and English poetry don't follow Wikipedia section heading style in regards to capitalization found in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings). Is there some reason we should not edit these to be conformant to the standard section heading style? Bevo 16:28, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

As one of the few members of that Wikiproject, I think it's safe to say that (a) we didn't know/remember the style guideline and (b) we thought it looked good capitalized so that's what we did. Obviously if we're in violation of style, switch us, but I do like the caps myself. :) Also, it should be remembered that a lot of the headings at English poetry, for example, make extensive use of proper nouns that remain capitalized. Thanks for bringing it to our attention....I'll do my best to stay away from the Shift key in future. :-) Jwrosenzweig 16:36, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The level of subject matter expertise needed (as you say) is one reason that I have not just gone in boldly chopping capitals down to size. It's always better for one who is lending content to an article to achieve a little standards conformance at the same time. I'll do some obvious ones, and leave any ones I'm in doubt about as they are. Bevo 02:38, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Main Page replacement

A discussion to replace the Main Page --> Wikipedia talk:Main Page

[edit] Image Replacement non-Functional

This has been a problem for several monthas, but I do it so seldom that I'm unsure if it a transient problem or one that is always been here since the servers became overloaded. It is not possible to change an image by loading it on top of an old image. Sometimes one might want to clean up an old image, or adjust its size, or even replace it with an improved version (better cropping, etc.) The present system does not allow images to be altered and then reloaded. Loading any image on top of an old image lays down all the proper "paperwork", but the actual image does not change. It does not change for several days. I'm unsure if it ever changes. Both the new and the old versions exist on the document page, but only the original image is used by an article. I've been forced to just abandon old images, rename the improved version, and load it as a new image, which is terribly inefficient and must be leaving orphans behind, but what other option is there? Is this just part of the silly behavior of the present server setup? - Marshman 00:03, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It has always seemed to work fine for me. Are you sure it's just not a matter of your browser cache not being refreshed? -- Wapcaplet 00:30, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've done it before, some while back, so it has worked fine for me; but not since about November. But this last time I waited overnight with no change. What was particularly odd was that the photo doc page showed the old image at the new image dimensions. Because I had uploaded a larger version of the first picture, when it enlarged the old image, the picture went fuzzy - unable to fill in all the new pixels required. Meanwhile, the article page continued displaying the undersized image. I'll check, but because I have a broadband connection I set the browser to always renew all pages. Do not know if that setting affects images. - Marshman 02:20, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Marshman is 100% correct. I've experience similiar problems. I overwrite an old image with a new one, and when I load the picture, I get a distorted version of the old one. It's definetely not a (local) caching problem - I switched browsers and got the same thing. →Raul654 02:30, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

You have to force the cache to update. This is now complicated slightly by having server-side caches... See Wikipedia:Clear your cache for some tips. usually shift+reload or ctrl+reload in IE or Mozilla will do the job.

Thumbnail images also probably don't update properly. If you could point to a particular image, we could check it out. --Brion 02:31, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yep, I experience exactly what you're talking about - old image at the new dimensions. Hitting "refresh" fixes it. -- Wapcaplet 02:33, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Image purging is enabled since yesterday, this problem should be solved mostly. -- Gabriel Wicke 17:00, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Any need for links in printable version?

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but is there any need to have links to other articles in the printable version of an article? It seems unnecessary when its only purpose is for printing.

—chopchopwhitey 00:46, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Doesn't really hurt anything, and it's probably easier to generate than one that removes the links :-) Also, it might be at least useful to know which phrases are linked in the printed version, in case someone wants to look them up. -- Wapcaplet 01:41, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Could go into an automatically created "See also:" section at the end, that lists all in-text in-wiki links alphabetical for the print version, maybe naming only existing links. For example:

Déi Lénk

The Left (Luxembourgish: Déi Lénk, French: La Gauche, German: Die Linken) is a socialist political party in Luxembourg.

It is associated with the European United Left - Nordic Green Left in the European Parliament. It does not currently have any members in the parliament, however.

External Link

• Web site in Luxembourgish, French and German

... could become the following print article:

Déi Lénk

The Left (Luxembourgish: Déi Lénk, French: La Gauche, German: Die Linken) is a socialist political party in Luxembourg.

It is associated with the European United Left - Nordic Green Left in the European Parliament. It does not currently have any members in the parliament, however.

External Link

• Web site in Luxembourgish, French and German: http://www.dei-lenk.lu

See also

European Parliament, European United Left - Nordic Green Left, French language, German language, Luxembourg, Luxembourgish language, Political party, Socialist

Pros: Looks more like an print encyclopedia, Contra: See also: German Language is a bit silly.

Maybe am even better solution would be to introduce small arrows into the print version instead of wikilinks. Looks even more like an encyclopedic article. Like:

The Left (->Luxembourgish: Déi Lénk, ->French: La Gauche, ->German: Die Linken) is a ->socialist ->political party in ->Luxembourg.

It is associated with the ->European United Left - Nordic Green Left in the ->European Parliament. It does not currently have any members in the parliament, however.

External Link

• Web site in Luxembourgish, French and German: http://www.dei-lenk.lu

What do you think (example is choosen rather randomly)? -- till we *) 11:04, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Links are useful in the printable versions. Some third party users use the printable versions of our pages since the printable versions already have all the copyright info and links needed to be legal. Somebody also made a CD version of Wikipedia based on the printable versions of pages. Links also highlight relevant terms even on hardcopy. --mav 04:13, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] How can I see user contributions for users that aren't logged in?

Is there a reason why that from an anonymous IP address's user page, there is no link to "User Contributions"? ugen64 01:01, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

For me, an anon IP address is automatically linked to the contributions - there is no user page (at least, from Recent changes and article histories) - does that not work for you? -- Wapcaplet 01:43, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Me too. Anon users link goes straight to the contributions list - Marshman 02:24, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/<IP or username>

—Noldoaran (Talk) 17:11, Feb 27, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Plain Vanilla Main Page

See Wikipedia:Plain vanilla main page. Optim 02:55, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Moving/renaming images

Is it possible to move/rename uploaded images? When looking at the Image: namespace page for the image, there's a Move link, but does that move the image itself, or merely the page that describes the image? I can't seem to find any mention of images on Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page. (The image in question is Image:YabokoLogo.png, the logo of Russia's Yabloko political party - it needs to be changed to "YablokoLogo" rather than "YabokoLogo".) Thanks. -- Vardion 03:23, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

No. Rename the image and upload it with the new name. --Brion 03:47, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia user pages on Wikinfo

--> Wikipedia talk:User page

[edit] Article count

Only 1487 articles to go! A live count is available at http://wikimedia.org/count -- Tim Starling 09:43, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

Seems to be down.—Eloquence

Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics Ronabop 04:44, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Layout change for Votes for deletion?

See Wikipedia_talk:Votes for deletion#VOTE:_NEW_LAYOUT_FOR_VFD! -- BL 11:29, 22 Feb, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Navigating back and forth through differences between revisions

How hard would it be to add (possibly) two new links to the Difference Between Revisions page that is displayed when you click on "Last" in the page history. The links would be "Prev" and "Next" and would link to the Difference Between Revisions for the Previous and Next Revisions (if either or both existed). I recently wanted to skip though the revisions of a page to find when a recent change occurred and who changed it, and found it a very difficult thing to do. - Gaz 13:44, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I tried constructing a history traversal query once before and found it to be very slow for large histories. Brion thinks it should be possible to do in logarithmic time but I'm inclined to think that such features should be left until after the schema redesign. -- Tim Starling 13:52, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

I think I'd better pre-empt queries of "what's all that mean?" by explaining that a schema is the way data is organised in a database, and that a complete restructuring of the MediaWiki database structure is (as I understand it) imminent. See also Denormalization. - IMSoP 14:17, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Currently the history ('old') table doesn't contain pointers to next/previous revisions. Recentchanges has a limited summary table which does include a previous link in order to generate the 'last' diff links; the history list grabs a bunch in order so can construct the pointers from what it needs.

However I suspect we don't actually need that information at the time a link is generated; it should be possible to make a link that'll say "diff revision X with whatever comes immediately before/after it", and when we load the page we check in old for something > or < than that timestamp, with appropriate ordering, limit 1. That ought to work for most cases and be reasonably snappy... however the timestamps only have second resolution and there are cases in the database where timestamps are not unique in an article's history. These are mostly due to bugs that didn't record edits properly (a lot of edits in Jan/Feb 2002 got their timestamps reset accidentally, and there used to be a bug that affected some near-simultaneous edit conflicts by recorded one save twice and throwing the other away). I'm not sure how to handle those properly. --Brion 10:00, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thank you both, I'll wait. As a Database Consultant, I know exactly what they are about to go through. Its amazing that you spend ages creating a schema, think it is great, and come back (usually much) later and think it more closely resembles doggy-doo. So you start all over again. Have fun ;-) - Gaz 16:31, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Computer screenshot guidelines

This may seem like a trivial issue, but after half a dozen variations were uploaded to Mozilla Firefox, I decided we needed an agreed policy on the form of screenshots used to illustrate software articles. Since image copyright issues are currently a hot topic, and screenshots have specific issues in that regard too, I've created Wikipedia:Software screenshots as a central point for discussion of both. I'm pretty sure this isn't duplicated elsewhere, and would appreciate comments and refinements so that this can be linked into the hierarchy of "official" policy pages in due course. - IMSoP 15:46, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[Comment by Perl moved to the page in question.] Sorry, I should have said: please comment there, not here, to avoid this page becoming too large. - IMSoP 16:48, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia button image for links

Is there an image that could be used to link to Wikipedia (button size — 88x31)? alerante 17:06, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There is Wikipedia:Banners and buttons but they're rather outdated. Someone who's good at these things needs to make some new ones. Dori | Talk 17:13, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

I made too new buttons. I think they might be what you need. Perl 17:42, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Image:Wikperlban.png and

Perl 17:48, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Perfect, although you might want to consider making those transparent as well. alerante 23:56, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

How's this

Image:Wikperlban.gif -- Davodd 15:05, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)

That's great, but shouldn't it be "WikipediA: ThE FreE EncyclopediA" ;^)

[edit] Guidelines for Indexing Articles

Are there indexing guidelines or advice for Wikipedia?

Having contributed to the pages on Hyperthyroidism, and Graves-Basedow disease, it is disappointing that the search does not pick up on the name "Graves", "Graves'", nor the errant apostrophe version "Grave's". I created a "redirect" page for Graves' disease, which is the common name in the English speaking world, but this appears not to be indexed, which seems wrong to me.

Since on-site full-text search is still disabled, we are reliant on Google doing the indexing for us. One disadvantage of this is that the copy being searched is doomed to being out of date, as it is only updated when Google's crawler comes our way. So it may be that the page(s) in question simply haven't been indexed yet. - IMSoP 17:35, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See wikipedia:searching?

Any idea of when on-site searching will be re-enabled?? WormRunner 17:46, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If all goes well we should get our old database server back (fixed, allegedly) in a couple of weeks; search should be up then if we're not able to get it running on the current system. We've had some trouble getting all memory on the current machine used, and search runs too slow to be usable so far. --Brion 10:05, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Whats wrong with Wikisource??

Somethings amiss with Wikisource. When I try to submit something i've edited i get:

"The requested URL //wiki/Wikisource:Historical_documents was not found on this server."

and when i type wikisource.org into my browser i get:

"The requested URL //wiki/Main_Page was not found on this server."

The server seems to be adding an extra /:

http://sources.wikipedia.org//wiki/Main_Page

Perl 21:04, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Fixed now -- Tim Starling 05:44, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Copyright question/most linked dab page question

I have a copyright question. I cut a few small sprites out of screenshots of a game taken from an emulator to use on the Rupee (Legend of Zelda) page. Is this a violation?

Also, I'd like to know when the "most linked disambiguation pages" will be updated again. I like to go through and disambiguate them. Thanks. Derrick Coetzee 02:07, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You could probably argue fair use. Perl 03:24, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Can I use images (and other materials) that are crown copyright?

Can I use this image [3] even though it is "crown copyright"? Is it fair use? Perl 04:01, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Fair use. IMO, a thumbnail of that image would be fair use. --mav

armedforces.co.uk is not the RAF or the MOD, so don't assume that because they have a crown copyright notice on their website that they have permission to reproduce the image. (They may well do, but it's not obvious.) You should email the RAF webmaster via the page at http://www.raf.mod.uk/info/contact.html to ask permission. I'm pretty sure this would apply to a thumbnail version as well (the image is copyrighted at any scale, thumbnail or otherwise). -- ChrisO 11:57, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If you are physically in the UK you would need to check that it is fair dealing, becuase those in the UK can't use fair use. If it is not fair dealing, you would need a license. The HMSO click-license may cover that image. Or not - I haven't checked. The lack of fair use is one reason why it is moderately common to see fair use images uploaded by UK people with a license - they may need that license to avoid infringing copyright, even if it is fair use in the US. Note that for those in the UK, a licensed image is often more free to use than a fair use image. Even a Wikipedia only license is more free in the UK than a fair use image which isn't also fair dealing. Jamesday 13:22, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] "view source" link on 'go' guess

When I 'go' (button) to a non-existent page and the server guesses at the page (for example "Greek koffee"), there is a "view source" link for the Main Page in the sidebar and top, along with that entire sidebar section. There are some similar links in the header. Is this a known bug? Also, is there a better place I should have posted this? --Spikey 04:56, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've no idea if it's a known problem, but bugs are best posted at sourceforge (instructions at Wikipedia:Bug reports), or at m:Bugs if you want to discuss it. Angela. 20:01, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] images u/l'ed before new FU guidelines

There were four images I uploaded in in the summer and fall of last year before the new fair use guidelines came into effect. They are:

• [4]:
• SCO Group Chief Darl McBride.
• Photo is from http://www.thescogroup.com/company/execs/dmcbride.html
• Date Uploaded: 1 Oct 03

• [5]:
• Cast photo of Suddenly Susan cast (Season 4)
• Photo is from http://www.tvtome.com/SuddenlySusan/
• Date Uploaded: 10 July 2003

• [6]:
• Photo of Late NYC Councilman James Davis
• Photo was from http://www.council.nyc.ny.us/committees/details.cfm?con_id=63

(Councilman Davis's Details have since been removed from the site since his death)

• Date Uploaded: 11 Aug 2003

• [7]:
• Scan of animals entering Noah's Ark
• The photo was scanned with a scanner from the 1976 edition of the Good News Bible which I have owned since Christmas 1994.
• Date Uploaded: 15 November 2003

What page should I go to to get these images deleted? -- iHoshie 06:20, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The new fair use guidelines aren't policy. They are one person making a proposal on the mailing list and another person on the mailing list saying that they liked it, but announced here by the proposer as though it was policy. It isn't. Both of the people involved are very strongly in favor of GFDL only. There are also people saying that they don't like it. If you want fair use images, say that you want fair use images. It's clear from the number of people uploading them that most people do want them. Most of the discussion has been on the mailing lists so far and the people there are, on average, far more enthusiastic about GFDL only than the community as a whole. The discussion on the mailing list continues, with no sign of a decision yet. If you do want to delete the images, Wikipedia:Images for deletion is the place current policy says you should use. If you like the new proposal and want to use it, you could list the images at Wikipedia:Fair use. Personally, I'll stick to arguing that it's silly, because it doesn't really solve the legal problem it's supposed to be helping to solve, and has the effect of pushing the project to fork. Jamesday 12:30, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] acl stayaway browser ^Mozilla/3.0

I've been getting a very annoying and long error message that ends with "acl stayaway browser ^Mozilla/3.0" off and on for the last couple hours while using Konqueror 3.1.3. I'm using Galeon 1.3.8 right now. Anybody have any idea what is going on? --mav 08:19, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm getting it, on and off, with Opera 6.0x; Opera 7.x, Mozilla 1.6b, and Internet Explorer 5.0. (All under Win2K.) Clearly, it's a server-side problem, Mav. Tannin 08:23, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This has nothing whatsoever to do with your browser or user-agent. Nothing at all. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

The error message placed undue emphasis on the user-agent check list. If you get the message again, it will tell you:

We may be having an intermittent server problem; please wait a few minutes and reload.

Another possibility is that your User-Agent is blocked, which is done to block e-mail harvesting bots used by spammers and some abusive download spiders:

Let me say again: this has NOTHING to do with your user-agent or your browser. Squid throws this error occasionally for about a minute for unknown reasons. --Brion 08:24, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Brion. Tannin

---

[edit] Who decide what is encyclopedic and what is not ?

Discussion about whether recipes belong in Wikipedia. (Moved to List_of_recipes/delete Talk:List of recipes/Delete as per Gentgeen's suggestion)

This was moved to the wrong place. I've added it to the existing discussion now. - IMSoP 19:57, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

or...how to ensure a discussion be buried really deep. I'll come back to it if necessary :-) Anthère0

There is no beginning of an evidence of consensus on the topic. While moved, whole articles are sometimes deleted, international links broken, information lost (because links are not always left between both projects), cultural background lost, examples of techniques lost, and to end it...since many articles are just deleted, it is very likely that someone will recreate them. This is very bad. Anthère0

Agree. While I don't subscribe to the whole inclusionist agenda, I do notice that VfD is often used as a first reaction to something that a user just hasn't heard of before. IMO we need to do something about this. Dunno what. The policies documents to which VfD already refers emphatically are already explicit that this isn't the way to go, but many still do it, and IMO we lose both content and users as a result. I'm personally spending far too much time replying "Keep" to things that IMO don't meet the VfD listing guidelines at all. Perhaps we should have a "KALU" response on VfD... "keep (and lighten up)". Andrewa 20:27, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Especially as in Finnish "KALU" translates to "TOOL" as used as a reference to the "male member". -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick 02:34, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)

The history of this is that there was a new wiki cookbook started up and some people started using the transwiki system to copy the recipes to that other project, then delete the recipes from the Wikipedia and list them as deleted in the transwiki log after the fact. I objected in part because we need due process prior to deleting from the wikipedia and these deletions weren't getting it. So, VfD, since they are being deleted from the wikipedia. FWIW,I've never written a recipe entry, though I've slightly reworked one. Not my type of article... but still interesting to their audience, IMO. Jamesday 23:37, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

True, but both the heading and my comment apply to an issue much bigger and more complex than just recipes. I've only voted to keep one recipe article that I can think of, and that was after refactoring to remove the actual recipe and just keep the cultural stuff that was mixed in (;->. Andrewa 02:19, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] How to get a heart attack from a typo, or www.wikpedia.org is for sale

Anyone with heart problems should be careful when typing in the wikipedia address. i spent five minutes looking at various wikipedia pages (so i thought) and was told that the domain name is for sale. Even worse, the site is without content!! Had wikipedia people sold out??

www.wikpedia.org

Details of the Offer

Offer comprises: Domain Name wikpedia.org without content. Make Offer

The domain name is for sale by its owner. If you would like to buy the domain name please make your offer below:

It took me several minutes to realise i was missing an i in wikpedia.

This is just a comment, idle chit-chat - i'm not sure if village pump is the right place for it. Sorry if it's not...

Boud 14:55, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Offer it to Wik, he can set up his own 'pedia. ;-) -- ChrisO 16:07, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hmm. I wonder if www.pron.com and www.pron.org have already been snagged... -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick 16:54, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)

Yes. →Raul654 03:34, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)

This looks like an example of a case where the uniform domain dispute policy would get the domain handed over to the Wikipedia. It looks like a bad faith attempt to capitalise on the good name of the Wikipedia. Jamesday 23:45, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

---

[edit] Wikipedia as TEFL Project

Hey there, I'm an American teacher living in China andt I'm interested in using Wikipedia with my second-year college English students. Since they come from all over China (though they all go to school in Zhengzhou, Henan province) I figure they can add information about their hometowns and other topics in China, since in general it seems that info is lacking. Any suggestions on how to have my students write articles and not frustrate everybody in the process? Mjklin 11:22, 23 Feb 2004 (Beijing Time)

Maybe Wikipedia:School and university projects already answers most of your questions. andy 15:36, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] "Xxxx (disambiguation)" pages and msg:disambig

I suggest you to explicitely (in the manual) decide whether pages with this kind of title require msg:disambig. I started the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation. My position: msg:disambig for these pages is misleading, since links to these pages can only be intentional. I understand that these pages do need a message, because of slangish "disambiguation" word, but it must be customized for this page. Mikkalai 17:39, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Looking for "Food libel" article

Once upon a time, there was an article about food libel, but I can't find it anymore. Was it deleted? Moved? jengod 19:03, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)

Did you mean Food libel laws? Angela. 19:55, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)

Sounds like a redirect is in order. I'll add it. -- Jmabel 20:40, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Michael Landon (moved to Reference Desk)

Please follow the link above

[edit] New Main Page

The new main page looks awesome. I have one suggestion which I'd like a little feedback on: should the navigation bar on the left list Community Information Page or Wikipedia:Main Page or whatever right below Main Page? That way we can jump straight to either main page....we'd have to name them so that new users wouldn't get too confused, but I think it would be helpful. I assume this is a low-difficulty change for developers to make? Jwrosenzweig 21:52, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Oops, apparently this is already being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Main Page -- for the record, Angela beat me to this suggestion. :) I still think it a good one! Jwrosenzweig 21:54, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] How-to

(Which How-to articles to include? Where do How-to articles belong?) Moved to Wikipedia talk:How-to

[edit] Log in/log out mystery

I don't know whether this is a bug; I haven't noticed it before but maybe I was asleep. 1. I was logged in. 2. I started editing a page and didn't save it for quite a while. 3. Apparently I timed out, because it saved it as an anonymous user, not as me. 4. I logged in. 5. I realized that, to request a change to the edit history, I had to log out. So I did. Then I sat there for about 5 seconds, doing nothing. 6. It redrew my screen, with my username at the top, as if I were logged in! 7. I clicked on a link to another page, whereupon it claimed I was logged out. (I repeated steps 4-7 3 times to be sure I wasn't imagining things.) Any ideas what's going on? Is it a bug? Is it my brower? Elf 03:21, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Clear your cache. When you log out, pages that you've visited while logged in aren't necessarily cleared out of your cache, and will display again as you last saw them if they haven't been changed. --Brion 04:49, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Schools

Anyone want to help me create guidelines for Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools? There seem to be many schools on WP, but no guidelenes on how to add information or how to make them encyclopedic. Davodd 07:17, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] You say it's your birthday?

I got a proposition for ya--adopt your birthday! :) In the interests of keeping all the date pages updated March 15, August 22, December 3, etc., I'd like to suggest (beg, implore) that you toddle on over to whereever your birthday is, and click on "what links here" and use it to check to make sure that everything is up to date, spelled right, and so on, and add anything that's been updated recently. This will be a great blessing to those who want to update Wikipedia:Events in history. Thank you for reading. jengod 07:28, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)

Also, please note that the standard is to use (d. yyyy) and (b. yyyy) to mark births and deaths on these pages, rather than († yyyy), (+ yyyy) and (* yyyy) etc. fabiform | talk 12:23, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I thought it was standard to use (birthdate - deathdate)? Dysprosia 13:10, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Just for the anniversary pages I mean. There's a list of births for each day of the year (e.g. February 24). fabiform | talk 13:53, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

1927 - Freg Bloggs (d. 1985), rather than

1927 - Freg Bloggs († 1985)

On a related topic, it'd be nice if we had a Wikipedia:Wikipedians by birthday kind of categorization. Jay 13:20, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

But now we do! See Wikipedia:Wikipedians by birthday and add yourself! -- Seth Ilys 15:00, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

So now will Wikipedia say "hello" to me on my birthday? Now that would be user-friendly :-) --Phil 15:15, Feb 27, 2004 (UTC)

Not 23 peple, and already two of them share. Do I separate my name from his with a comma? Put it on a new line? --Charles A. L. 18:54, Mar 1, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] phonetics, request for feature

It would be really nice to have a better way of inputing and editing phonetic notation. I've worked out a little example, whose conventions are loosely based on Tipa, a phonetics package for LaTeX:

Example sentence: "Dubbs asked his brother what it was like in the other world, and his brother said it was not unlike Cleveland."

Editing form of phonetic transcription: <ipa> [d2bz #askt hIz br2Dr#& w2t It w2z layk In Di 2Dr#& wr#&ld n#&d Iz br2Dr#& sEd It w2z nat @nlayk klivln#&d]</ipa>

Display form: [dʌbz æskt hɪz brʌðr̩ wʌt ɪt wʌz layk ɪn ði ʌðr̩ wr̩ld n̩d ɪz brʌðr̩ sɛd ɪt wʌz nat ənlayk klivln̩d]

(Character 809 is supposed to be a non-spacing diacritic, but my browser gets it wrong.)

GregLee 13:03, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think support is coming. Check out http://www.wikisophia.org :) Dysprosia 13:08, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Aha, very nice. And there's parsetree also, for doing trees. Thanks, GregLee 14:22, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] trees, request for feature

Whoops. I should have put this in the feature request area. Sorry. GregLee 15:03, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yes you should. wikipedia:feature requests. Martin 00:20, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Take a look at the Wikisophia Sandbox. --Phil 17:06, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)

Wow! Trees like that would be very useful in Wikimorial. --mav

[edit] Buddhist symbolisms

moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk

[edit] Wikilottery

I have created the first Wikimoney lottery at User:Silsor/lottery. silsor 23:33, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Why does this keep happening? Is it true or a bug?

On certain pages I get the following error..

"Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper text ..."

but it happens with the most minute edit, when practically nothing has actually been modified. Is there a trick to not losing your work? I have tried the Preview page but it has not come up. Besides intelligence, what am I missing?

Thanks

It's annoying, but you have not actually lost your work; you need to look more closely at the Edit Conflict page. Your work is in a second edit box at the bottom of the page, and if you keep a cool head you can locate it in that box, copy it from there, paste it into the top box, and continue.

Here are two things I do. First, before pressing the "save page" button, I select all the text in the text box (or the block of it I've just written) and hit "copy." Then if anything untoward happens I can try again, or paste it into a text editor, and not lose it.

However... when an edit conflict occurs, it's often because many people are working actively on the same page, and it's not unusual for the result of the above to be a fresh edit conflict. Particularly since the edit conflict box presents the whole page, and it sometimes takes a while to find the place in which the new material should go.Here is my technique for dealing with this.

If I am editing a SECTION on a popular page, and I get an edit conflict... rather than correcting it on the edit conflict page, I copy the text I wish to paste into the clipboard, take a deep breach, think about where on the page it goes, CANCEL from the edit conflict page, and QUICKLY hit the section edit link, find my place, paste my new stuff in, don't waste any time with silly previews (!), and Save Page. I don't recommend this exactly, I just say it's what I do. Dpbsmith 13:27, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

That's called an edit conflict, and it is undeniably annoying. See Wikipedia:Edit conflicts. -- Tim Starling 04:32, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)

I keep adding Sarah Polley to vfd because the entire article is copied from here but it seems to keep disappearing. What is going on? SD6-Agent 05:13, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It looks like Texture moved it to Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements. I've added the copyright violation boilerplate text to make that more clear. Angela. 07:07, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Requests for article removal by their protagonists: Richard Genovese, etc.

Question: What happens when a contentious article, which is regularly VfD'ed or argued heatedly on its talk page -- what happens when such a page is about a person or group, and that person or group contacts WP to ask that the page be removed? Does this carry weight in VfD and similar discussions? Is there a proper procedure for politely getting a page about one's own life or affairs removed? Of course nothing can be done about mirrors or copies of the 'pedia elsewhere, but is there a way of asking (and receiving permission for) future versions of WP to leave out such a page? Often the reasons for wanting a controversial page to be actively left out include unhappiness that the primary content associated with one's name/group are ANGRY TALK-PAGE RANTS about the content, or reversion thereof, rather than the content itself; perhaps reflecting poorly on the subject of the article because of the pettiness of its adopted protectors.

Case I: Brianism. Lots of people wanted the page to go away, accused the page authors of trying to promote a small sect; the sect itself found out about the whole mess and wrote a public letter asking that its page be removed. Upshot: Brianism is still here; many W'pedians want the page to go away, while others want it to stay; the open letter is still up on the official Brianist website.

The Brianist open letter was written when the page was in many ways an attack on that religion. That's no longer the case. It's a shame that there are people who lack religious tolerance but that's hardly a reason for us to stop covering religions which some people dislike. Jamesday 19:46, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Csae II: Richard Genovese. Modern-day artist has resume-like bio pasted-in and wikified by a sequence of both anon users and old-timers; it is put on VfD multiple times without reaching consensus; emotions run high due to connections with older related 'is this important enough to be here' issues [cf. DCB]; W'pedians variously claim it is self-promotion or non-encyclopedic. An anonymous user claiming to be RG himself tries to blank out the page, replacing it with a LONG ALL-CAPS NOTE ABOUT HOW HE DOESN'T WANT A PAGE ABOUT HIS LIFE OR WORK ON WIKIPEDIA and would W'pedia kindly stop trying to maintain such a page. Currently: RG is still here, and still on VfD; Morwen recently protected it to keep the recent user from engaging in a reversion-war; no verification that the angry user is the subject of the article; no verification that the subject of the article is important or famous enough to be included in W'pedia. +sj+ 08:16, 2004 Feb 25 (UTC)

• This last clause is an egregious misrepresentation. Did you ever bother to even look at the cites? Only if you have done so should you be making this statement. --Daniel C. Boyer 17:17, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See also Robert Taylor, Hank Eskin and Patrick Jennings. Angela. 17:20, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)

Thank you, Angela. The Taylor discussion was particularly helpful, and I think I feel good about the result there (removal of partly-npov commentary; preservation of verifiable article).

[edit] British or American English?

Right now I am seeing a mix of American and British English all over the place in Wikipedia. Is there a standard for this? If not, I think there should be one. It's kind of disconcerting to see "honor" on one page and "honour" on another. Not to mention that this generally affects page titles as well. --Johnleemk 12:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Manual of style, and especially this section thereof.

In brief: we use whatever is appropriate to a specific theme, or keep with what the original author chose to use when both are appropriate.

In theory, of course, we could split en.wiki into en-us.wiki, en-gb.wiki, and so on, but for now...

James F. (talk) 13:07, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, continue to be disconcerted, because to have spellings mixed in proportion to the population of internet users using each spelling is the True and Proper situation, although maintaining this ratio precisely may require some deliberate activity. -- Tim Starling 13:31, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)

Celebrate diversity! We might as well, because by its nature that's the way Wikipedia is going to be. If you want to read and/or contribute to a tightly copy-edited encyclopedia with a uniform writing style, you are not going to like Wikipedia much. Personally, some of the books on my bookshelves at home spell "colour" with a "u" and some spell it "color" without a "u" and I don't find that disconcerting. Indeed, there are some books by Lewis Carroll on my shelves that spell ca'n't with two apostrophes, and, IIRC, some by George Bernard Shaw that spell it cant with no apostrophe, and somehow I manage to get through the day. We shouldn't need to violate that stuffy stale old British sense of honour, and we certainly don't want dilute the raw, rugged, pioneering, euphonious, democratic, economical, sensible, Noah-Webster-inspired linguistic flavor—do we? Dpbsmith 16:08, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yes, really, this isn't a big deal. Some articles suggest one spelling over another (ie US articles should probably have US spellings) but I don't think anyone will take offense / misunderstand (with the possible exception of pants and suspenders! Mark Richards 19:50, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Or rubber. :-) Elf 20:52, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Red link will not go away

In the article SkyTrain, we had a Wiki link to an article Vancouver SkyTrain. No matter what I did to modify--or delete and reinsert--the link, it always stayed in red; clicking on it opened up an edit window with all the article text in the window! If I changed the URL to go directly to the article (not via the link from SkyTrain), I could view the article properly. If I put an external link to the article on the SkyTrain page, I could link to the article properly. As you can see, the link to Vancouver SkyTrain works just fine from this page, and also from Wikipedia:Sandbox. Another editor changed the link to Vancouver Skytrain (which redirects to Vancouver SkyTrain, and that worked. After all of these experiments, I tried adding the original Vancouver SkyTrain link once again to the SkyTrain article, and once again it didn't work! What the heck is going on!? --Sewing 15:19, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

When the a similar thing happened last time, editing the page which was linked did help to update the link table. However this "hack" doesn't work anymore - I tried the same as Sewing some hours earlier with the same negative results. Interestingly on the "What links here" of Vancouver Skytrain the link shows (even though it isn't there currently). I know there is this long-time bug which causes the link table to be broken - but if that can't be found can we have a way to enforce the link table update manually? andy 15:23, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The link looks blue to me theresa knott 15:28, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Because right now it's actually written as: [[Vancouver Skytrain|Vancouver SkyTrain]]. --Sewing 15:39, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Look at the what links here list to see many non-existing (or better no-longer-existing) links listed. andy 15:54, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

These kind of errors tend to go away once the link tables get updated in the db. Just ignore it for now I say. Dori | Talk 16:14, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Using MediaWiki namespace

Hi,
we have in the German Wikipedia just a discussion going on about the use of the MediaWiki namespace for articles like an extra navigation list. Main argument against it is currently that this is mixing up text elements that were only meant for describing the software (e.g. "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.") with real content.
The idea was at the end of last week just copied from the English Wikipedia. So my question is: was there a discussion going on that finally led to the decision to use this namespace or did it just happen? And how is your experience in using these new text blocks? How many do already exist and did they cause any technical problems so far?
Thanks in advance, Triebtäter

There are quite a lot in Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages already. AFAIK no problems yet - and the fact that a self-link is converted into a bolded non-link seems to indicate that the navigation bar was an intended use of it. If navigation bars are wanted (and it seems like they are even though I could live without them) then the mediawiki gives an elegant way without "spamming" the articles with the same table code, which gets tedious when a change in the table needs to be done. It's the same as with code-copy, better one place for all then n copies of it. andy 16:58, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The fact that internal messages and custom messages are mixed together was a bad idea in hindsight. Eventually I will separate the two. For now, continue to use them, and don't worry too much about technical problems. -- Tim Starling 23:14, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Disk caching on

Squid disk caching has been turned on again, after a week with only RAM caching. This is in response to signs earlier today that the Apache web servers were starting to become overloaded and it's hoped that this will relieve them of enough load that things stay fast. If you see any sign of unusually slow response times on page requests (more than 30 seconds or a timeout) please post about it here. This time the cache is using asynchronous disk requests (the aufs filesystem instead of ufs) and the timeout problems which were experienced last time shouldn't happen. The previous ufs system is reported to have known problems abve 30 requests per second and we're seeing about 60 requests per second even at quiet times, so it's not surprising that there were delay problems with ufs. Jamesday 19:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] German TV news

German TV coverage is expected this evening about one hour and 50 minutes after the timestamp of this post (at 22:45 CET, 21:45 UTC, 4:45PM Eastern). The show normally has about two million viewers. Don't be surprised if response times increase just after the broadcast. The broadcast is available via Real Player at [8]. Jamesday 19:57, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

On the HTTP access chart (green line) there's a spike exactly at 21:45 UTC (!) Alfio 22:41, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I got timeouts at that time - seems like that spike was too high even for our better hardware. At [9] is the online edition (not a transcript, but an article on its own), with the link to the video at the right - however both in german only. This great presentation will give the german wikipedia a boost for sure. andy 23:19, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Not sure how exact "exactly" is, but the coverage was approx. 21:55-21:58 UTC, so it couldn't be this peak. Good thing, still. DrZ 23:44, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Unless it was an attempted Denial of Service attack. Mr. Jones 14:06, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Rosa Parks

I'm just trying to draw some attention here to Rosa Parks. I found what I think is a pretty bad error, and I am hoping someone will look into it. See: Talk:Rosa Parks Katahon 22:16, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've adjusted the article to make this more clear. Jamesday 00:10, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Display of accented Russian characters

Some pages relating to Russia (e.g. describing Russian personalities or Russian geography) have Cyrillic spelling added after the head word. It is very useful to show the place of accent in Russian words (it matters!). The only correct way to add accents to Russian text is to use the character U+0301 ("combining acute accent") after the stressed vowel. (The HTML codes for it are &#769; or &#x301;). This complies with the Unicode standard. There are also some non-standard ad hoc ways of showing the place of Russian accent — e.g. making the stressed vowel bold. Such non-standard things must be avoided. If someone's browser cannot show the standard Russian accents, it is the browser's problem, not the Wikipedia's — Monedula 00:05, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Cyrillic text with accents won't show up on Google results if you search for the cyrillic text without the accent. I suggest marking the accented letter in bold instead. However, if you are going to use accents in cyrillic text, please don't bold or italicize the word, because if you do, the accent will be shown separately from the letter in most (if not all) Mac browsers. And Modedula, where does it say that adding accents to cyrillic text is a "standard"? I've seen many sites using bold letters instead, ie. http://www.rambler.ru/dict/. -- Cantus

Genuine Russian texts have no accents at all, although these may be added for the convenience of foreign speakers. It would probably be typographically correct to leave all accents out; the exact pronunciation of Russian words could (and should) however be added parenthetically in the article. At least article titles should not have any accents for the reason given above. Kosebamse 12:33, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

In fact, there is sometimes accent in native Russian texts, when resolving an ambiguity or making non-standart accent due to ryhme structure. They are always marked as: прим́ер. The http://www.rambler.ru/dict/ uses color instead (and not bold). I think, adding the full pronuncation whenever possible is the best solution. ilya 21:24, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Personal attacks, legal threats

Please read through the all new wikipedia:no personal attacks and wikipedia:no legal threats and edit them mercilessly. Thanks. Martin 00:07, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Press release hits jackpot in Germany

Kurt Jansson wrote on wikipedia-l: "Yesterday there was an article about Wikipedia in Spiegel-Online, the biggest German online news-magazine (30 million visits/month), and I'm sure we got more new German Wikipedians yesterday than ever before.

Through this article the TV took notice of us, and so there will be a feature about us in the "Tagesthemen" at 22:30 (ARD)."

For those who speak German, the Spiegel-Online article is at[10]

Image:Wikipedia ARD TagesSchau.jpg

The ARD newsitem can be seen at ARD site, click video above right. Erik Zachte 00:09, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You don't need to speak German to enjoy the video. Kurt, you have a great beard.  :) fabiform | talk 01:30, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I block adserv.quality-channel.de so I see broken links at spiegel.de, and when I unblock, Spybot warns me about an attempted Mediaplex download. The WMV movie below was Ok (no spies) and very interesting. Wikibob 09:31, 2004 Feb 28 (UTC)

Saw the video but didn't get the last part. Was that wissen.de guy with two shelves of print encyclopedia saying that books that they sell will be assimilated by the Borg? I mean, the Wikipedia? --Menchi

No, if I remember correctly he noted that they, with their articles created by professional editors, are a much more reliable source in the jungle that is the internet. ;-) DrZ

Maybe we need a new slogan: "Wikipedia: World Famous in Germany" MK 20:12, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

WMV movie of this (9Mb): http://freecache.org/http://eza.gemm.nl/Wikipedia/Wikipedia_ARD_hi.wmv -- Gabriel Wicke 13:53, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Is the hit from these German users the reason the 'pedia is so darn slow (and kinda flakey) today? —Frecklefoot 17:12, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Transcript

A translated transcript can be found at meta:German TV coverage of Wikipedia

[edit] NES vs. Famicom

→ Wikipedia:Reference desk

[edit] flags and arms: asking for permission to use images from FOTW and others

I'm wondering whether anyone has approached Flags of the World ([11] and many mirrors) for permission to reproduce flags (with attribution and links)-- in particular, local flags rather than the flags of countries, which we're already well placed for. For example, I'd like to ask them whether I could use their copy of the flag of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania on its Wikipedia page rather than redrawing it. There are dozens of similar examples.

I'd also like to do something similar with city, county and district arms in England and Wales; [12] has lots of good stuff and I'd like to ask them whether we could use any of it.

Has anyone done either of these things before? Should I? Any thoughts? Marnanel 01:28, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I say go for it. Contact them and tell us how it goes. However, the copyright is held by the original contributors so we might need to contact each individually. But how? There doesn't seem to be contact info. --Jiang 22:05, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The FOTW website is generated by participants in the FOTW mailing list, so it's possible that you could contact people through that (although not all contributors are still active). I'd recommend contacting the Director first, though. However, it may not be necessary to contact the individual copyright holders at all - the FOTW copyright page says "You can freely use any material copyrighted by the contributors of the website" provided you obey certain conditions, which implies that FOTW is able to give permission on behalf of its contributors. (Unfortunately, the conditions on the Copyright page include a requirement not to use more than 5% of the site, which would be difficult to monitor for Wikipedia). -- Vardion 05:40, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I was wondering whether FOTW might licence things differently for us, perhaps. I'll ask. Marnanel 05:58, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] National Capital territory

The article on National capital territory implies India is the only country to have it, but there are other countries which have it, some from even before India. Anyone who knows what other countries have it, please fix it. Thanks. -- Paddu 06:15, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Paddu presumably means the article on National capital territory. -- Jmabel 07:49, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, thanks. -- Paddu 08:19, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Added one link, more would be good. However of more concern to me is a seeming inconsistency between this article and the one on New Delhi, see Talk:National capital territory. Andrewa 15:42, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Can I Count Readers of an Article?

How can I know how many people viewed a page? It could be nice to know the impact a page had.

Earlier each page used to display the no. of hits at the bottom. This feature was disabled as it made the servers too slow. -- Paddu 10:09, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

So there is no possibilty to know the exposure? Is this feature enabled from time to time?

Permanently disabled with no view to re-enabling it, ever.

James F. (talk) 11:52, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I hope to enable the webalizer stats soon, the scripts are ready, but the old logs need to be processed before the new ones because webalizer chokes otherwise. Hope to find those soon. -- Gabriel Wicke 14:39, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I believe there was a new list of all the articles that gained over 1000 hits posted somewhere on metawiki this morning. Ambivalenthysteria 04:39, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Please Rephrase the Explanatory text for the Watchlist

Can someone rephrase the text at the top of the watchlist page? Isam was asking for help translating it, and I've realised just how confusing it is, I've never understood what the mysterious cutoff was until today. And there's at least one user who thinks that the number of edits listed is the number of edits he's made (a count of his user contributions).

I suggest that something like this would be clearer: (you have x pages on your watchlist not counting talk pages; users have made a total of y edits to articles on the English language wikipedia during the time-frame you have selected to view below; checking watched pages for recent edits... show and edit complete list of articles you are watching.) fabiform | talk 12:36, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I don't know if it's possible to find something a little less verbose than that, but certainly the current text is a bit opaque. For reference, the text in question is MediaWiki:Watchdetails - IMSoP 13:22, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I made a suggestion & asked a question on its talk page (which is probably where this discussion shd continue?). Elf 17:37, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Fun little project : International names for Village pump

over at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_names_for_Village_Pump. If you are a cross-border contributor, please add your localised name. Some of us find this stuff oddly interesting! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:23, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] US Speaker of the House - email address?

Does anyone have an email address for the current US Speaker of the House (of Representatives), or a way to directly contact him? Even the newspapers say he is the hardest person to try and contact and have termed him "elusive".

Please respond to: mortmaat@netzero.com

Thank you.

His address, phone number and web contact form are on his website, which took about 1 minute to find, and I didn't know his name: http://www.house.gov/hastert/contact.shtml. Please do not demand that we reply to your email address only. The information may be of interest to more than just you. Please direct any future enquiries to the correct place - which is either Wikipedia:Reference desk, if the answer is liable to be of interest to the encyclopedia, or Google, if not. Thanks. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:54, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Unable to rename article

I want to rename Evaluation of ζ(2) to "Basel problem", but it keeps giving me an error message "could not submit form". There is no content at "Basel problem", and I have renamed articles before, so I know the process. Any idea? Revolver 18:38, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It has trouble with the special character and thinks you want to move "Evaluation of &" This might be similar to the way the diff js feature had problems with the & character in titles. Perl 19:13, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wow, such a great name — please, don't move it! I'm sure many people, like me, know what is ζ(2) but never heard about Basel. The current title is clear and self-explanatory. ilya 21:35, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] spring cleaning (watchlists)

Hello all, springtime soon approaches (for those of us north the equator) and with it comes the tradition of spring cleaning. This provides a clear opportunity to remind yourself to edit your watchlist. Remove the excess. Remove items that were once important and now you don't care about. Remove things you haven't a clue why they are even there. Tidy up.

It is important to all of us that we all parse down our watchlists. Smaller watchlists means less demands on servers. In a recent survey of regular users, the number of watchlist items ranged from 3 to 3393 (that is NOT a typo, and I am sure there are those out there with higher counts). I am at 876.

I believe the system is designed so that watchlists under 1000 retrieve info from the past three days, while watchlists over 1000 retrieve info from the past 12 hours.

The more tidy your whities are.....er......the more tidy your watchlist is, the more efficient your work here will be :)

Sincerely, Kingturtle 19:45, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hmm, apart from the server-load issue, I'm not sure it is desirable to "remove things you haven't a clue why they are even there". I leave the "Watch this page" box ticked on every edit I make, even trivial copyedits, and find that having completely irrelevant pages on my watchlist is a great way of spotting vandalism. Load watchlist, see an anon edit with no summary, check the diff. If every article was on a few user's watchlists, we'd be more or less guaranteed to spot nefarious edits - and, indeed, general copyediting needs.

I can't speak for what it does to the server, though, and maybe this isn't the best approach; but it does seem to work.

(Aside:Funnily enough, a lot of the time recently I've just been seeing self-corrected vandalism! They discover just how easy it is, and realise they're being childish, I guess...) - IMSoP 22:48, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

No I think they are just experimenting. When they vandalise they do so with every intention of correcting strait away. This is why we should be very careful about calling newbies vandals. theresa knott 23:06, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Neutral term for Movement of a Group of People

What is the most neutral term for describing moving of a group of people from one place to another? "Displacement", "relocation", or perhaps something third? Nikola 21:32, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

• Immigration can describe it. For example, there was an immigration wave to the U.S. of Irish peoples in the 19th century. Kingturtle 22:50, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Under consideration is the forced deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo at gunpoint and under threat of death by the Yugoslav army, I don't think emmigration would be an accurate term in this case. Nikola of course doesn't believe any of this, so he's trying to find the term that least describes what really happened. Dori | Talk 22:58, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)

No it isn't, but displacement of residents of one village. Perhaps forced, perhaps not, if forced then perhaps legitimately, perhaps not. Nikola 23:23, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Diaspora is very neutral, and often used in both voluntary, semi-voluntary, and involuntary cases. It is just a noun, not a gerund: "There were centuries of stability, during which across the region the Kurds laid down roots and settled in small villages, followed by a great diaspora, during which they scattered across the continent."

• Migration might be better, though I suppose it does infer that the movement is voluntary rather than forced, when deportation might be better. Arwel 23:02, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

• I think Nikola means "forced relocation" as in the Trail of Tears. Forced relocation would be appropriate in that case. Perl 23:19, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Press release

I haven't found any news agnecies running the story! google search finds no mention of the press release. Has anyone found any newspapers with the story? Perl 22:13, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Two: Kuro5hin and Spiegel-Online Jrincayc 15:40, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Print Edition

On a personal level, I can't imagine wanting to own a print version. A hard copy would be a like a blurred snapshot. Wikipedia is a living and breathing document. Wikipedia is not paper. We don't write like it is paper. We don't think like it is paper. I hate the idea of a print edition.

On a practical level, I am not going to stand in the way of anyone working to create a print edition. Also....if there are people interested in owning such a thing, could we make a profit and put that money into the upkeep fund? Or are we non-for-profit? Or does that matter? Kingturtle 23:26, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think the license allows anyone to produce any version they like, for profit or not, in whatever medium they like, subject to a couple of fairly trivial conditions about copyright notices. Mark Richards 00:55, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] graph/chart/raw number request

i'd like to see a graph (2001-present) showing the number of users/month who made 500+ edits. Is anything like that possible? Kingturtle 00:34, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Computer game / Video game

It is proposed that a general article on Computer and video games be created to give an overview of the topic for the novice, and provide links to other, more specific articles for the passionate. This article is being drafted at Talk:Computer game/Computer and video games. It is proposed that the articles on Computer game, Video game, Adventure, Interactive fiction and Arcade game would remain, but focus on elements that are unique to those subcategories. Please edit, and discuss! Mark Richards 00:53, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This has already been discussed on both Talk:Video_game and Talk:Computer_game. Mark Richards is the one who "proposed" to draft the new combined article, but has been rebuffed by ever other editor. Other Wikipedians who have given input voted to keep them seperate (for reasons, see talk pages). So, please do give input, but note that, so far, no one else supports merging the articles. Not only would it obfuscate both topics, it would require fixing links in 100's of articles. If you have justifications in support of (or against) merging the two, please voice them. —Frecklefoot 16:14, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Frecklefoot - it looks from the discussion pages that there have been frequent discussions about merging them - Computer game in particular has virtually no content about computer games, and only links to articles about both computer and video games. My proposal is to try to build concensus around an article structure that is both clear and easy to navigate, and also preserves the important differences between the genres - please have a crack at producing something we can all agree on - if we still hate it, there's no harm done and we can keep the old version - I'm asking you to hold off judgement until people have had a go ;) Mark Richards 17:53, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism

Do we still have a page to report vandalism? If so, where is it? If not, do we report it here? If so, User 198.7.225.35 has been persistently vandalising Winged Victory of Samothrace. Can someone do something about this? Adam 01:33, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress -- The Anome 01:38, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Imperial units convention

Could someone up to speed with Imperial (English) units please take a look at the conversation on Wikipedia:WikiProject_Aircraft/Table#Table_Size? Specifically, if the weight of an aircraft is being provided in a data table, should it conventionally be written "8,000-lbs" or "8,000 lbs"? --Rlandmann 06:22, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The latter is certainly more common in the US. We'd also more often write "lbs." than just "lbs" (unlike with "kg" for "kilograms"). --Jmabel 08:33, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Messages/Templates: Quick link to them needed

A convenient link to a) the set of messages and templates, or b) a place to discuss them, should be included with each message, like the section-edit links that are included with each section for long pages... These shortcuts are becoming more and more common, as the need for modular/scalable messaging grows and the elegance of article types increases through the creation of lovely mesg-based templates [cf, say, "calendar for February 2003"]. The annoyance factor in having to look at the "edit this page" source to find the mesg name, and then to remember to type in Mediawiki:{msg name} by hand to get the proper page, is significant.

For example, just now, I noticed that the month calendars should include links to the other months of the year, perhaps something like

J F March 23 A M J J A S O N D
<calendar body, w/ the 23d selected>.

Well, the [edit] links are ugly enough as it is, and I say that as the person who created them. (I'm looking at ways to integrate them more smoothly into the layout. In the meantime I suggest enabling right-click editing in the prefs.) This would also be much more difficult with MediaWiki pages as these can contain all kinds of layout elements, so you don't know where an [edit] link would wind up. What might work here is a dropdown box added at the bottom of a page.—Eloquence 15:53, Feb 27, 2004 (UTC)

Well, A drop-down/list sounds like a great idea. "Elements used in this page"; selecting one would take you to its description/page, whatever form *that* takes (some of these elements might be very non-textual). and the list elements could perhaps be identified by their color as editable or non-editable, and as static or dynamic... +sj+ 08:23, 2004 Feb 28 (UTC)

Personally, I think the [edit] links are reasonably discrete and helpful as they are, but that's just my opinion. A way of listing "MediaWiki messages used in this page" (or "...section") when editing a page is probably the best idea though - the fact that text has been transcluded has no visible effect until you look in the source, so it would be very confusing to have them accessible from the page itself.

On a not entirely unrelated note, I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to have a "description" associated with MediaWiki messages - a space to explain where it is used, and how. Of course, the attached Talk pages could be used for this - in which case there should be a set policy to do so, and software messages (such as MediaWiki:Watchdetails, discussed above) should also be labelled in this way. - IMSoP 18:37, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Meeting other Wikipedians

Hi all,

I just wanted to let you know, that we have Wikipedians-meetings in Berlin and Munich every one or two months and it is really interresting/helpful/nice/... it's worth it.

So I just started the page Wikipedia:meetup, mybe some English speakers also want to meet or join one of the other meetings that are already happening.

See you :-) Fantasy 18:17, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

As a side note to the above, is there a list of Wikipedians by location somewhere? →Raul654 22:52, Feb 27, 2004 (UTC)

Yep, there's by country and by U.S. state... don't know if it gets as specific as city, though. -- Wapcaplet 22:56, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

And don't forget there's the Wikipedia group at Meetup.com... +sj+ 08:24, 2004 Feb 28 (UTC)

We made really good experiences with Wikipedia as the Meetup-tool, we (at least in Germany) don't use external tools. You can contact all the Wikipedians in Wikipedia, you put the "meetup" on your watchlist, you don't have to register again somewhere... I think there are many advantages.

In short: Wikipedia is better then meetup.com :-) Fantasy 09:18, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Sea of Japan/East Sea

Dispute over the name Sea of Japan needs urgent attention! The article is far from NPOV and there needs to be Wikipedia Naming Convention on this the name (to stop further unilateral changes). I suggest we use East Sea/Sea of Japan at least in the Korean context. Maybe someone neutral can look into this (please!). Kokiri 22:19, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] EoT

Does anyone know EoT's full username? I'm trying to remember and block the last few PHP/SQL/Proclamation only blocks, and I don't want to have to do a DB search for them. Thanks. Pakaran. 22:47, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It was User:EntmootsOfTrolls. --Delirium 22:57, Feb 27, 2004 (UTC)

Ok thanks. I think I should leave at least one for other sysops, out of fairness, and I wonder if moving away from PHP blocks is something we really want to do (even though it could be done now, and is being done for ranges) Pakaran. 23:50, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Can images alone be licensed under GNU Free Documentation License?

From the license:

"The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other

functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom"

As I read it an image is not a document so it can be licensed.

Under which license should you release your pictures if not GNU Free Documentation License so they can be used under GNU Free Documentation License?

Chbs 00:25, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

RMS thinks the FDL can be used for images without problems, see [13].—Eloquence 06:35, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Painting of the black Madonna

Does anybody know the whereabout of the artist Wanda Zagorska who painted the Black Madonna in approximately 1954? This painting was accepted by the Vatican in Rome.

This is an urgent matter

Please contact her sister's husband in Canada at e-mail address: morfw@shaw,ca

[edit] Complaint against the edit box toolbar

Would the edit box toolbar please stop inserting a space under headings? First, the MoS states that there should be no heading. Second, if I were to defy the MoS like everyone else, I would be adding the space myself. --Jiang 01:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Transliterations from Russian

Ladies and gentlemen, it came to my attention that transliterations in articles about Russia became ridiculously fat (I don't know a better word). The most recent example:

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also called Soviet Union (Russian: Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик (СССР)

note the accents! ilya

or Сове́тский Сою́з, transliteration: Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) or Sovetsky Soyuz, ISO transliteration: Soûz Sovetskih Socialističeskih Respublik (SSSR) or Sovetskij Soûz), a state in northern Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1991.

I understand that all of them are of certain use, but the first sentence of the article becomes unreadable, not to say about a series of microedit wars. I am urging to find a better solution. Mikkalai 02:26, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Привет! (Privyet transliteration, Privet ISO transliteration) I completely agree -- it's gotten out of control! I must admit my part in this fiasco -- in part I've been frustrated with Cantus for starting this mini-campaign that I occasional reinsert things like that above example (and for others reading this, his/her version was only marginally shorter [14]. Also, there is clearly no standard in English for transliterating Cyrillic. However, I think there should be a standard -- and that a number of us can work on that and come to agreement -- we can even post a poll if necessary. I propose that we do so at Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(places) -- I have created a new section for transliteration of Russian place names here: Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(places)#Transliteration_of_Russian_place_names. And we should invite User:Monedula, User:Cantus, and User:Morwen as well as any other interested parties. How does that sound? BCorr ¤ Брайен 02:47, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup and edit doubling

Today, I received the following note on my talk page.

Each of the following two edit-history lines on page history of cleanup appears twice in a row with the same time:

. . 18:30, 2004 Feb 15 . . Meelar (added "Editorial Televisa")

. . 23:00, 2004 Feb 27 . . Meelar (removed "Poster Child")

Each was associated with doubling the content of the page, by embedding a second copy within a copy. (I.e., the head appeared twice, then the tail appeared twice.) As i know really nothing else about you, i consider it good sense and not just WP practice, to assume good intent on your part; i conjecture that there is something about your browser (and probably how that browswer interacts w/ the WP server at present), or, less likely, something about the way you edit, that makes this likely. It may or not have anything to do with edit conflicts or saving twice when the server seems balky,or editing using "Edit this page" instead of the "[edit]" section-edit link.

I'm using IE 6.0, if that helps any. What should I do, and how can I fix this? Thanks very much, Meelar 06:31, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Sandbox header replacement text

For convenience, Sandbox maintainers can now replace headers with one "{{subst:sandboxpaste}}" message, instead of having to type "{{msg:sandbox}}" and the comment manually. HTH Dysprosia 07:57, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Displaying recently uploaded image

Probably a newbie question, but I've just uploaded an image and am having trouble displaying it in an article. I think the code I'm using is OK, because if I change the image name in the code to another one that exists in the image list, it displays that image just fine. Any suggestions? --Gary Jones 08:08, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

Gary, welcome to Wikipedia. I live near Bristol as well (in Yate). It's difficult to comment without knowing the filename and perhaps the code itself (and the name of the article would be interesting). To stop code being interpreted, if you want to put it into text like this, surround it by <wiki> and </nowiki>.

Adrian Pingstone 10:29, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hello Gary. Adrian is correct, an article name or some code would help a great deal in solving your problem. If it helps, you can look at User:Raul654/favpics for examples of how to display images using thumbnail or non-thumbnail styles. →Raul654 10:39, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick replies. I'd originally included the code, but it was being interpreted by this page and looked out-of-place. Now I know about the and tags, I can show you what I'm doing. (Still can't see what's wrong with it.)

<div style="float:right;width:350px;margin:0 0 1em 1em;text-align:center"> [[Image:PetraMonastery.jpg|The "Monastery" at Petra]]<br> <small>'''The "Monastery" at Petra.'''</small> </div>

Any ideas? Gary Jones 11:17, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

You got the name wrong - Wikipedia is case sensitive. Try this: [[Image:PetraMonastery.JPG|thumbnail|350px|right|The "Monastery" at Petra]]

→Raul654 11:22, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the astonishingly quick reply. I thought I'd tried fixing the case, but hadn't thought of fixing the "JPG" part of the filename. Sheesh.

Gary Jones 11:38, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Steinbeck Short Story Interview

I thought the following article/interview might interest you.

               Sincerely,
               Byron Merritt
               Grandson of Frank Herbert

http://www.fwomp.com/Int_steinbeck.htm

• I've added the link to the bottom of John Steinbeck. Kingturtle 22:16, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Design competition for Thumbnail Boxes

JeLuF has launched a design competition at meta:Image Box for people interested in changing the way thumbnails are displayed using the extended image syntax.

Note, this is for people who want to change the CSS which creates the (currently grey) boarder around the image, and what icon to use, if any – not for discussing the ins and outs of how the images are resized and compressed on the fly. Voting is expected to begin on March 15, so all suggestions should be made by then.  :) fabiform | talk 19:12, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] On Avoiding a Wikipedia Catastrophic Event (population)

(Note: I have no scientific basis for the hypothesis I am about to put forth. All numbers are invented with the intention of striking your imagination.)

In light of the recent press release and Jimbo's conversations with "The Economist" and Yahoo, some concerns come to my mind. Are we really ready for the next spurt of growth? I mean, REALLY READY for a MAJOR, UNPRECEDENTED spurt?

Let's say Yahoo begins to use our content. After a month's time, the number of hits on our servers increases 12-fold. The number of editors increases 9-fold. The number of vandals triples. A growth spurt unparalleled in Wikipedia history. One of such size, it could collapse or paralyze Wikipedia.

I don't think such a scenario is far-fetched. We need to examine our experiences with previous growth spurts and the experiences of other websites (Friendster, Craigslist, Slashdot, etc.) and put together a plan of action to protect Wikipedia from such a population explosion.

Issues to consider:

1. Servers. Rather than add new servers only when we outgrow the current ones, we should stay one step ahead, and have enough servers to protect ourselves from known or unknown population advances. Of course this means money.
2. Help information. New user help pages need to be checked and re-checked for easy-of-use, user-friendliness, etc.
3. Volunteer Fire Department. Organization and planning.
4. Population. What do we imagine the population peak to be? What population should we hope to maintain?

Food for thought, Kingturtle 20:07, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Very interesting thoughts. I do have one true fear - after recent experiences with Plautus (see User:Raul654/Plautus for a timeline) I really, sincerely fear what would happen if a large number of persistent trolls were to attack wikipedia. They would have to be just smart enough so as not to look like a vandal - all they would really have to do is make a few trivial contributions. They wouldn't deface pages, but just go around POVing them or adding disputeable facts.

In Plautus' case, the system broke down after Ed unblocked him following his third ban (Feb 18). Nobody wanted to block him a fourth time, for fear of being accused of vigilantism, so the community had very little protection. Getting to arbitration took a LONG time (over a week), during which he was free to run amock. He very nearly cost us Evercat, Finlay, and a third (to-be-unnamed) contributor who emailed me in exhasperation.

Even after he was temp-banned pending the arbitration committee's decision, yet more time had to be wasted compiling the above timeline to make sure he is kept banned. In short, I think: O(repelling trolls) >>> O (creating trolls) →Raul654 20:20, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

I hope wikipedia doesn't turn into slashdot. Perl 20:35, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If it becomes a problem, we can block the googlebot. That'll slow down our growth. Martin 22:21, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

What are Wikipedia's (nascent?) connections with Yahoo! and The Economist? Can I read about on the website somewhere? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 00:14, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If I have heard correctly, Jimbo recently did an interview with the economist. As far as yahoo, I think they're considering about using Wikipedia in their news section to define keywords. (Posting hyperlinks to either of these would be most welcome ;) →Raul654 00:16, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

• PCB21, i am referring to this email. Kingturtle 00:24, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It would be nice to have some channel for transferring Jimbo's interesting/important announcements from the mailing lists to meta or the Wikipedia: namespace. It is my belief that his preference for using the mailing list is what keeps them going! (I know the standard response is that I should subscribe... but the noise to signal ratio there is too high)

(cutting in) That's a good idea. I'll mirror them to user:Jimbo Wales if I remember. Martin 02:25, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have a subscription to the Economist and would be delighted to hear what they have to say about a bunch of commies like us Wikipedians :)

I did some reverse engineering of the Alexa stats recently. I think a 12-fold increase in traffic would make us something like 60-70th most popular website in the world... and given what server-side demands we make - because outside users have write access (unlike most websites which just allow read access) to the underlying database - Wikipedia would probably require one of the largest/sophisticated (replication etc) set up out there.. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 00:31, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This is a very good point. Recently I really hope that the growth were a bit slower than now. It is really hard for me to keeping up with debates. There are so (too) many articles I want to fix, conflicts about point of views with other people, tiny problems like factual errors made by anonymous users. The sudden increase on traffic and, more significantly, contributors might case a devastating effect. And Jimbo, as a dictator, has no obligation to discuss this matter but is free to make any publicity. Sigh. Need revolution? -- Taku 02:55, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Stats updated

The stats pages are now built from the logs between 5 Feb - now. They are at http://wikimedia.org/stats/{DOMAIN}/, for example http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/. -- Gabriel Wicke 20:38, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Great to have them back. I noticed something I cannot explain: I checked the day by day figures for February. en: fr: de: nl: even zh: have a large peak at February 7, as large as the peak around Feb 25. The latter of course is the result of the press release. What was so special on Feb 7 ? Erik Zachte 00:19, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have grepped the logs- there's nothing suspicious apart from a lot of requests. We don't have referrer logs for that day so it's not that easy to figure out where the traffic came from.

The stats are now also available at their old address- it doesn't matter which one you use. -- Gabriel Wicke 11:55, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I've got a hunch. Possibly this is the Google indexing bot. I checked previous months, but they don't have a significant peak around the 7th, but they do have some peaks that like Feb 7 show many extra page requests but no extra visitors. Erik Zachte 12:12, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Anyone else see the irony in this?

I visited Lemon meringue pie after noting that someone edited it. It's a basic stub (and how) but clearly deserves its place in wikipedia. BUT. If someone embellishes it with a little history and adds informative content about how it's made, it will be removed from wikipedia. Moriori 22:15, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

Ironic it is. Although I cannot see why adding history — or some informative content &mdash. will cause its deletion. If an actual recipe is included, it will be, I gather, moved to an appropriate wikibook. Possibly it will also be used by various people answering to the term ?hungry?, to which all answer sooner or later. -Itai 22:47, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Take it to Talk:List of recipes/Delete. Martin

Where is the removal of recipes, how-to's, and "instructional" articles set forth as policy? I've asked this question a number of times and am frustrated by the lack of an answer. I'm a relative newcomer, and I see that the removal of such articles is constantly discussed as a given, as if a consensus had been arrived at, but nobody can point me to a relevant policy page and nobody can be bothered to set forth a good rationale. Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not is silent on this point, and Wikipedia:How_to appears to positively encourage contributions of instructional articles. Traditionally, encyclopedias have been repositories of instructional material; in fact from the derivation of the word it literally means something like "comprehensive course of study." Wikipedia is not paper. Why shouldn't it contain recipes? Dpbsmith 01:24, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

What Wikipedia entries are not #10, Primary research. Either a recipe is published somewhere else, and covered by copyright, or else a wikipedia contributer developed it, and it's primary research. Either way, it should go. However, wikibooks has no qualms about primary research, so origional recipes by our contributers can go to the Wikimedia Cookbook. Gentgeen

Traditional recipes have a cultural importance and can often be found in old books which are way past copyright date. WormRunner 08:42, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

On How-tos, see also Wikipedia:Village pump#How-to above and on the mailing list. -- User:Docu

Where you will see that I posted a similar question and it was not answered. The existence of a policy seems to be taken for granted, but nobody can be bothered to point me to the statement of the policy or its rationale. Dpbsmith 15:47, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not primary research. Also, in regards to old traditional recipes no longer under copyright, Wikipedia:Don't include copies of primary sources. For traditional dishes, write ABOUT them, why they are significant. Assume I know nothing about the culture the dish is important to and tell me why it's so. Just giving the recipe does nothing to tell me why I should know this recipe. Gentgeen 00:24, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Boilerplate text for current event/often-updated articles?

I think it would be cool if we had a standard statement to go at the top of articles (along the lines of the Featured Article statement, Nominated for Deletion statement, etc) that, due to their presence in current events, will be often updated as new developments occur. Examples for the present would be 2004 Haiti Rebellion, U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, 76th Academy Awards (which, BTW, is very stubbish right now), Same-sex marriage in the United States, etc. Something maybe like This is an article for a currently-occurring event and will be updated as new developments occur, or something more eloquently-phrased. Garrett Albright 01:03, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Main Pages Gallery

I have collected screenshots of all Main Pages of 53 Wikipedias at [15]. Complete pages are shown (I used a virtual screen of 1000*3000 pixels, some really fill all that space). Images were reduced to 40% size, so texts are barely readable, but the overall layout can be easily compared this way. Erik Zachte 00:28, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Interesting. Question: What is Elzassian? I can't find any info on it on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Does it go by another name in English? A conlang, perhaps?Garrett Albright 01:13, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's Alsatian. See Alsatian language. -- Jake 01:31, 2004 Feb 29 (UTC)

Is this for real? An Alsatian-dialect Wiki? --Dieter Simon 00:34, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Why not? If people are willing to run it, who are we to say their language isn't good enough? - IMSoP 00:47, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I agree with IMSoP. If there can be Interlingua, Latin and Esperanto versions, I don't see what's wrong with one in a language people actually speak. :P Garrett Albright 02:23, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Image formatting

Has image formatting been changed recently? I have seen a few pages that look messed up now where previously they didn't. See for example: Vlorë (although you obviously can't see what it looked like previously). Dori | Talk 03:49, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

It looks fine to me. RickK 04:13, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

In my case (Mozilla 1.6, Win XP), there is a bunch of extra white space, see image:Vlore_img_fmt_dori.jpg. I should mention that it looks fine under Firefox 0.8 and IE 6. Dori | Talk 04:45, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Towns and villages articles in Japan

As you may notice, I am adding dozens of towns and villages articles. Given its number of articles added at a time, you may have some opinion about the format, naming or anything. Please come to Wikipedia:Wikiproject Japanese districts and municipalites to discuss this matter. Thanks. -- Taku 04:10, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

The only comment I had on these was that there should be a stub notice added to them. See for example: Shingū, Ehime. Dori | Talk 04:14, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

From my talkpage

Hi Taku, would you mind adding {{msg:stub}} at the end of those small articles you're adding? thanks, Dori | Talk 03:43, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

Are they really stub? They are short but I think they have adequate information. -- Taku 03:43, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

If there is no more encyclopedic information about those towns, then maybe they should not be separate articles. I think some of them could always (theoretically) be expanded. As they are, they look like stubs to me. You might want to ask on the Village pump too, to see what others think. Dori | Talk 03:47, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

They are very similar to articles of tonws or cities in the US. Is't encyclopedic to tell what it is, a town or city located in somewhere and how many people live in there and such? If not sounds a prose. I don't think a village pump is a best place to discuss this kind of matters. There is a wiki project for this, and I think it's much better. -- Taku 03:53, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I'm not saying that the info shouldn't be there. I'm just saying that unless there is more info, it's considered a stub. And if you think there is way they could ever be expanded any more, then maybe they should be grouped into one larger article. That would be a matter of discussion as this is just my opinion. That's why I suggested the pump (it can be later moved to the appropriate place, but it gets more attention). Dori | Talk 03:57, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

You mean more raw data like demography or economical data by more info? I think this is a difference in perception of what article should be labeled as a stub. Many articles that can be expanded have no stub notice, not by accident but they are not stub articles. Stub articles are, in my opinion, articles that are not incomplete, lacking of essential data like essential movies articles without a plot summary. Those towns and cities I am adding are not stub in this definition.

Well, of course, the problem is perhaps the absence of strict definition of stubbness. Because of this, I tend to regard a stub notice as an explicit mark of articles that writers think they didn't put enough information yet and can be helped by others.

Also, I don't think having one article about dozens of towns or cities makes sense. It is not a common practice like combing short biography articles into one.

By the way, I am sorry about deletion of Funaba redirects above. I couldn't respond. It is fine for me to delete them. -- Taku 04:06, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Dori that the articles like Shingū, Ehime are stubs. Besides, I feel that the transcriptions of Japanese forms should be full: not -mura but Shingū-mura. Andres 09:53, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Shingū, Ehime is a stub, but IMHO it's not imperative to add the stub msg, afterall all the US ones don't have one either and the article size allows to identify them as stubs (see: "Threshold for stub display" on Special:Preferences). -- User:Docu

[edit] Recent changes

I can't access the Recent changes page. It keeps killing my browser. Anybody else having this problem? RickK 04:39, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Aha, my turn to say WFM (works for me :). Dori | Talk 04:41, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

Well, it seems to have come back. Wish I knew what happened. RickK 05:07, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

What browser? — Timwi 06:22, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

IE 6.0. RickK 22:55, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Imagine there's no MSIE... it's easy if you try... -- Wapcaplet 04:46, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Imagine all the hackers, living life in peace... →Raul654 04:49, Mar 1, 2004 (UTC)

Oo-oo, oooooh' ... Dysprosia

Well, I used to use Netscape till they did a major revision (was it 5.0?) which I absolutely hated, so I switched to IE. RickK 03:17, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Get Mozilla Firebird, you may like it more than IE. Many do :) Dysprosia 03:52, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You mean Mozilla Firefox, they did another name change due to trademark issues. But yes, it's a great browser, I use it, it's a lot faster and less bloated than Netscape. And it's purty :-D -- Skyfaller 04:03, 2004 Mar 2 (UTC)

I know, gr, this'll be like when they say you end up writing "2003" on your cheques and things on January 2 or whatever! ;) Dysprosia 08:22, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Question for the interlanguage wiki users

I have a question here for people who contribute to Wikis in other languages. On the English wikipedia, I very, very rarely run across articles translated from other languages. In all the time I've been here, I've run across *maybe* 2. My question is - how common are translated articles on the Wikis? Do they tend to be one area (like science), or are they well distributed? What is the quality of a translated article? →Raul654 08:51, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

So far as i know, a lot of articles in Chinese WP are translated from English WP, rarely reverse. Like all the homosexual related topics are from English even though there are no such expressions in Chinese(I translate that literarily). The quality of the translated articles depends on the ability of the translator. I am not a good translator, so i need help all the time. ;) --Yacht 08:58, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

The only straight translation I have done, is the NPOV statement by Jimbo. Since it was signed, I didn't feel comfortable in putting it in my own words. Otherwise, even when importing text and doing a paragraph by paragraph transcriptiion, I tend to be very loose, and even deliberately discriminative in what of the original text I incorporate. In my view, proceeding in this manner there is an additional level of protection against copyvios propagating from one wiki to another.

Most typically my M.O. is to write a stub on the Finnish Wiki, check what facts I have missed from the one in EN, and incorporate the most salient, and maybe come back later for more. In at least one case (William Safire my original stub in Finnish contained IMO salient information not yet in the EN article, which I then added. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick 09:47, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

A lot of the articles on Welsh Wikipedia started out from English. On the other hand, when the Welsh footballer John Charles died last week I wrote an article on him in en: which was translated word-for-word in the Italian and Polish Wikis within 36 hours (the Italian I can understand since he played there, but I was surprised he was picked up in pl: !). However the version on Welsh Wiki is considerably different because I included more local info. Arwel 13:37, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've translated 6 or 7 articles from French and German, and translated more than that into French, German, and Latin. If I'm translating into another language I'll almost always leave something out (like really minor details from English that I don't know how to translate anyway), but when translating into English I tend to keep everything, and possibly add more info if I know any. I think all the articles I have translated have been history articles of some sort. Adam Bishop 18:28, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've probably done about two dozen translated articles (into English) myself, mostly on cultural topics; usually when I do this, I find that I need to add a little more, because there are often cultural references that cannot be presumed clear to English-speakers. I've also done at least one on a scientific topic, adipose tissue, and I've often brought in material from other languages for an existing article, including expanding a stub to a full article. Some of the wikis (e.g. Romanian, Catalan) probably contain more translated content than not, at least on topics that don't specifically relate to the region where that language is spoken. Also, in this context, can I plug Wikipedia:Translation into English where you can request a translation of a foreign-language article into English (or sign up to help with that sort of work). -- Jmabel 23:27, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)