Wikipedia:Village pump/Pre-November 2002 archive

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Gutenberg link looks awful: How do I link to the uncopyrighted ASCII text maintained by the Project Gutenberg? I copied a link and it just looks awful?

Text copied from Talk:Robert Louis Stevenson to make it more accessible and to promote this village pump page).
You can't just look up something in Project Gutenberg and cut and paste the link. If you do, you end up with a dog's dinner like something this (broken into two lines for "readability"):
http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120&full=yes
 &ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/
The wiki software can use it to link, but apparently wiki can't get rid of all the excess characters no matter how much you try to mark it up. However, if you edit the link down to this
http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120
wiki takes you to the same place but is clean.
There are several forms available, use "edit this page" to look at the coding:
The last form is less desirable, but since you see that kind of URL in the wikipedia all the time, I thought I should show it too.

The advantage of the last url is that if somebody prints out the wikipedia entry, they get a usable URL that they can type into their browser later, rather than just seeing the name of the link. KJ 21:08 Aug 5, 2002 (PDT)


Please note this on bug report 583234. A workaround until it gets fixed someday is to manually change the colon that appears in the compound link to %3A, like this:

[http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp%3A//ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/ Gutenberg text]
becomes Gutenberg text

Uhhh, okay that doesn't work either. Time for more bug reports. :) --Brion VIBBER

converting images


Juuitchan wants to convert some BMP images to PNG for an article. Anyone willing to help out here?

For easily manipulating images in pre-determined ways (changing attributes, converting to other formats, resizing, etc.) my favourite toolset is ImageMagick. It's free software and runs on most common operating systems. -- Bignose

Most modern raster graphics tools understand PNG (those that don't aren't worth using), but some understand the format better than others. Also, people sometimes forget that PNG has got 8bpp and 16bpp modes, which are complete overkill for most maps and flags and such. PNG Tips for Cartoonists is an introduction to PNG for comics artists, but most of the article contains pretty useful information for Wikipedians too. The tool mentioned in the article, pngcrush, really does squeeze the last bits out of your PNG files and comes recommended.--user:Branko

If he can put them somewhere I can access them (like FTPing them to ftp.piclab.com:/incoming), I'll do the job. If he wants to do it himself, I recommend Paint Shop Pro from http://www.jasc.com . --LDC


what's the expiry on the cookies set to? --Bth

Cookies shouldn't be required; if you have them turned off, your session will just go away quicker, requiring you to relogin. Cookie expiration is 30 days. --LDC

I added an HTML comment to a page I was working on (for a semi-good reason) and it munged up the editing process in Konqueror - the existence of the comment caused it give up before finishing the textarea. I assume it doesn't affect (at least some) other browsers, since someone else went in and removed the comment and it was fine after that. Is this a known bug? -- Bth

This sounds like it's probably a bug in Konqueror. All "<" and ">" characters are turned into &< and &amp;> before they're put into the textarea, so they can't possibly be interpreted as actual tags or comments. (By the way, you'll find a link to our bug-tracking system at Wikipedia:Bug reports; if you find what seems to be a bug, please report it there and we'll be able to keep track of it better.) --Brion VIBBER

Should we kill Oops I Did It Again? I mean, one of these is not bad, but we don't want to set a precedent!! --Juuitchan

As much as I think the world would be a better place if the subject of that article didn't exist, it does. And since the subject exists (and has a certain popularity), it's not entirely unreasonable for there to be an article about it. It would not be entirely unreasonable for said article to include more than just a track listing and publisher, though. A review which places it in historical perspective, perhaps? (Shudder) --Brion
FWIW, the parent page Britney Spears is quite good. Ortolan88

You greatly misunderstand my point. I mean, if we start giving a discography of every pop artist with 15 minutes of fame, where are we going to stop?? THAT in itself could get its own wiki!! --Juuitchan

Any particular reason we should stop at any particular point? Remember, Wikipedia is not paper. --Brion 15:35 Aug 20, 2002 (PDT)
I can imagine quite an interesting series of articles on Britney albums as she marks her progress, both real and in image, through her career. Her version of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction)" ... I can't go on, but someone else could make this article into a very useful piece of pop history. As it stands, the article is weak, however, but, indeed, why stop? Britney is lagging far behind Led Zeppelin, and when I do my fabulous series on the albums and singles of Wreckless Eric, well, wow! Ortolan88 18:22 Aug 20, 2002 (PDT)
Juuitchan is considering writing one of those about a China Dolls album.
Any particular reason we should stop at any particular point? Well, if as the entry for Simon and Garfunkel suggests, we need the yet unwritten individual entries for their songs "The Sound of Silence" and its B-side, "We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'," doubtless we need an entry for their song "America," which, unlike the aforementioned B-side, was included on Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits. In creating this entry, we should probably follow the precedent set by Simon and Garfunkel/The Sounds of Silence being a redirect to The Sounds of Silence, so the title is absent the name of the artist. The present entry for America is long overdue for being made into a disambiguation page for all the songs of that title anyhow. --TC
Anything wrong with eg America (Simon and Garfunkel)? --Brion
Perhaps a bit could be added to the What Wikipedia is Not page saying that Wikipedia is not CDDB (or FreeDB, or Musicbrainz, or {your favourite music database here}), and encouraging people who want to add entries for musical albums not (just) to list the tracks but to *say* something about the album too? (Does anyone actually own that Britney Spears album? More to the point, is anyone willing to confess to it? :>) --AW

I think the general rule here is that an article for something should be created if and only if there's enough interesting to be said about it. For some musical group, the level of group is probably all that's interesting. For many others. clearly there's something to be said for individual albums. But I can't imagine many individual songs about which there is enough to say in an encyclopedia article, with a few exceptions like "Stairway to Heaven" or "Revolution 1". For Britney, I think the album level is quite sufficient. --LDC

New problem. I've just been typing for two hours on an edit and the computer locked up. I had previewed many, many times. Are those previews available? Or is one forced to save an incomplete text in order to ensure its safety? -- Dr. Retard

I'm afraid the previews are not saved. If I'm doing any major work, I use a text editor or word processor and save copies on my local hard disk, then copy it into Wikipedia's edit box. --Stephen Gilbert 14:37 Sep 15, 2002 (UTC)

All I want to do is make a small user page! I go to User:DrRetard and edit the page like I've edited every page since I starting editing here, and it looks fine. And then I click on a link like this one, User:DrRetard, or the one at Talk:Free_will_and_the_problem_of_evil, and I get a page with no text. Waaagh! I want to die!

Thanks for your help! -- Dr. Retard

Have you tried refreshing the "blank page"? Sometimes my browser gives me the old version of a page. -- isis 14 Sep 2002
It must be something like that - I checked and your user page does exist, with text and all. Andre Engels 19:35 Sep 14, 2002 (UTC)
Yes, I kept refreshing and refreshing. Even logging out and back in. Now it appears to work! I don't know why! Waagh! I still want to die! Thanks again for your help! -- Dr. Retard
In Internet Explorer, if you sit behind a proxy cache, sometimes you have to hold down Shift while clicking on the refresh icon, to really convince the program to refresh. http://freespace.virgin.net/john.cletheroe/pc_int/ieoe/shift.htm
I have no idea what that means, but I found out the hard way it's true -- I've had trouble several times on Wikipedia when an image in an article had been updated, and I kept getting the old one even when I refreshed the article page. I'm using IE 5.5. -- isis 14 Sep 2002
A proxy server sits between you and the rest of the internet and (invisibly to you) stores ("caches") web pages so that they load faster the second time around. Internet Service Providers often run caching proxys. If these proxy servers are not configured correctly, the above problem occurs. AxelBoldt

Hello, can someone help a newbie, please? 1) How can I get an uploaded picture onto a page? 2) What makes a page into an orphaned page? Thanks Renata

Hello, to get an uploaded picture onto a page you would put a link in like this: [[image:imagename.jpg]] (if it's a PNG, you'll obviously have .png there instead). If you want to show something and display ALT TEXT, you would put [[image:imagename.jpg|ALT TEXT]]. What makes a page an orphaned page is that no other pages link to it, which means that no one will find it except through "random page" or a search. To resolve that, just find a page that's relevant and work in a link to the orphan. --KQ

Wrap text around pictures: How do I get text to wrap around a picture? (Copied from Talk:Dwight Eisenhower to promote the idea of this village pump page.)

Easy way: <div style="float: left">[[image:Eisenhower.jpg]]</div>
Hard way: use a table (shudder). --Brion VIBBER

Of course, the table works in older non-CSS browsers, too.

So does ASCII art.

Editing individual year entries I stumbled across Tarquin's style guide for the layout of contents of these pages, but I wondered whether there was any particular commonly agreed restriction on content for these. For example, can one just check on pages which link to a year article and slap the events in (with discretion over omitting particularly boring events!) Mazzy

In the absence of some robot spider doing the same thing with limited intelligence, I have been adding to the various "day" and "year" pages as I go along. Very few of them are thickly populated, and if the only thing that happened in 864 was "Khan Boris of the Bulgarians is baptized an Orthodox Christian", then that tells you something, either about 864 or about the state of the Wikipedia.
So, it seems to me you should go ahead and add to the "day" and "year" pages. Wiki on. Ortolan88
I've added an item to 864. It's easy if you look!
Now Boris doesn't need to feel lonely. :-) Eclecticology 11:58 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)

Contents

[edit] PHP errors

Umm.... sorry, erasing the past so my browser will let my type in here. See history for old questions.

is anyone else getting php errors? Is there a story on this? Graft

I'm starting to hear more reports of congestion problems lately. I suspect that some server settings need to be expanded to accommodate greater traffic on the foreign-language wikis. --LDC

I've been seeing PHP errors that don't immediately suggest congestion. It looked to me like somebody temporarily mislaid a PHP document used for config. - Khendon 15:59 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

The error reported to me most recently was "can't load include file" because the system limit on number of open files was maxed out. That happens specifically when people access many of the foreign wikis at once, even if total congestion on the server is otherwise low. --LDC

Ah, okay. I retract my naive comment then :-) - Khendon 16:18 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

BTW Lee, last night I noticed the German, etc wikis weren't having the php files cached (no *_apc files), as the directory permissions didn't allow apache to write to them. I've chowned the 'w' directories to apache, and they all seem to be caching now. That may help, or hinder. Who knows. :) --Brion 21:02 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

[edit] Sidebar of phpwiki

hi, been playing over the new phpwiki site and found their sidebar very useful...http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/demo/en/RecentChanges?days=3 any one know where i could find thesame for moz 1.2a for wikipedia? thanks

oh, and for evangelistic purposes .ideas. I'm sending pages to friends that I know have an interest in the material and inviting them to edit/update the materials...If we 'all did that' I think we'd get a lot of page churning, especially if we target those academic types. --Denny

It may be the browser I'm using, but I don't see a sidebar on that page. Unless you call their logo at the side of the page a 'sidebar', but then Wikipedia has it too, just somewhat more extensive. Andre Engels


[edit] Reloading cached pages

I am unable to access the following areas:

I get various errors, all php related. Some are missing files, others are too many files open, and the like. The Clermont County one has been like this for days. What is happening here? -- Ram-Man

This is probably due to general heavy traffic loads from readers and very heavy edit load from me and especially you. ;) --mav

Shouldn't this clear out? Why has it been hours or days (in the case of Ohio) like this? -- Ram-Man

Clear your browser cache, hit reload, try again. Especially if you're using Internet Explorer, which seems to jealously preserve failed page loads. --Brion 03:18 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I concur. Although I am using a Netscape version rather than Explorer, I too find that the error messages comes back if I go to the same page again, but then disappears when I hit 'Reload'. Andre Engels

Clearing the cache fixed my problem. Thanks! -- Ram-Man

Incidentally, one way to force Infernal Exploder to refresh is to hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the refresh icon. Which reminds me of a joke: "Only women refresh; men reload." -- NetEsq 20:10 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

If 'reload' also doesn't work, try to manually change the URL from www.wikipedia.org to www.wikipedia.com; rest unchanged. That should get around any caches that just keep acting on reload.Andre Engels 23:25 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Perhaps the problem here is that, although we normally send pages set to expire immediately, so that there will be no caching, perhaps no such expiration is set when we send errors.

Well, we generate the errors here on our server, so surely we can send such expiration commands then too?

Programmers: Am I right?

— Toby 05:26 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

If you're getting one of the errors described above, our script probably isn't even getting a chance to run; if it does, the error messages usually come up before we have a chance to output the custom headers, and you can't output headers after content has started. So, um, prolly not. --Brion 05:31 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)


Would it be possible to add a rating system to Wikipedia. It has been mentioned before that Wikipedia is used in schools etc. There are a number of pages that may not be suitable for school use. Maybe a checkbox on the edit form could be used to generate a SurfSafe header (http://www.safesurf.com/ssplan.htm) or other PICS header. I would suggest keeping it simple and having just "suitable for all" or "suitable for adults". Some schools can only see suitably rated pages. I know that some people would say that children should be able to see all facts, but in practice a school is likely to have complaints from a number of parents if it turns out that the kids are looking up Handballing, Autoeroticism etc. -- Chris Q 06:13 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)

<sarcasm>Oh oh, can we have special markup to save the children from dangerous political ideas and information about crime and violence, too?</sarcasm> --Brion 06:37 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)
Hm. That sounds like both a feature request and a policy change. A much better venue for that is the Wikipedia mailing list. Any mention of SufeSafe or its ilk gives me the creeps and I'm not sure we should feed those demons (and if we get black listed by them then shame on them, not us). This is a Free as in Speech webstie. But go ahead and give it a whirl on the list. ---mav
This issue was a very divisive one at the Open Directory Project, where adult content was eventually cordoned off into a separate hierarchy that was labeled with PICS tags. This compromise did not please anyone, as coverage of legitimate topics was obscured from view and unabashedly blue content was still readily available to children.
No doubt there will be Wikipedia licensees who will filter and censor Wikipedia content to suit their needs and wants. However, our focus should be on generating Wikipedia content and making it freely available. -- NetEsq 07:49 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)
OK, I can see that the concensus is against this. I guess NetEsq is right, anyone that wants to copy a subset of Wikipedia for open use will probably do so. -- Chris Q 08:07 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)

The "neutrality" of articles in Wikipedia is intellectually dishonest. For the proscription of overtly partisan content is itself a violation of neutrality. If Wikipedia were truly neutral such partisanship would be welcomed, rather than

rabidly deleted. One user diffused an edit war by moving my article to "meta"

and that cooled my ire. What is not acceptable is outright arbitrary deletion.

Whether this encyclopedia is truly open not just to minority opinion, but minority races (in the United States) is open to question, inasmuch as the dominant culture, which is white, carries its inescapable baggage. An honest acknowledgement of that baggage through openness to interpretations and criticisms of its contents ought to be a vigorous challenge, not anathema.

This is an encyclopedia, not a forum for political debate. I was the person who repeatedly removed your NPOV remarks. You can find another forum for your comments, and I find your rather bold statement that minority races are unwelcome here to be offensive. -- Zoe
We accomplish this by stating opinions as opinions, like this:
Foo is a kind of bar.
Some people, the pro-fooists, think that foo is good. Here's why.
Other people, the anti-fooists, think that foo is bad. Here's why.
Still other people, the nullibarists, deny the existence of bars altogether. Here's why.


The following is not a Wikipedia article:
Foo is a very good kind of bar. or Foo is a very bad kind of bar. or Foo is a spurious concept since bars don't exist.
What we don't do is publish unattributed screed. This is an encyclopedia, not a soapbox. A thorough and thoughtful discussion may be found at NPOV. I wasn't involved in your case, so I won't make any more specific comments - perhaps someone closer to the issue would like to. - Montréalais

"What we don't do is publish unattributed screed." Screed runneth over nonetheless, some attributed, much unconscious. As for the pump, it would operate much better without the haughtiness (we shall strive for the Holy Grail of Knowledge in Wikipedia, but the pump shall remain the same tired repository of flaming crap all opinion boards are). As I asked elsewhere in this page, do you have room for humor as you pick the fly feces from the pepper, or is this apparent state of misery a Village constant? mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net

Who are the "we?" The Wikipedia has ingeniously solved the problem of attribution, and may ultimately contribute to the evolutionary demise of that questionably useful species of human need. However, the problems of distinguishing absolute truth, which is abstract, from knowable fact, and of ever trending toward truth as better evidence brings more solid facts, should be recognized. The problem of objectively determining what is neutral and what is not should also be recognized, for it is a deep one. If I have to edit the final product only second-hand, by influence, I like to know that the Uber Arbiters are subtle enough to make these recognitions. {8:52 P.M. -- preliminary addendum based on partial reading of NPOV: I admonish Montrealais that we the unelect would hold your feet to the fire by stating that Wikipedian rigor would say "One man's screed is another's truth, so be very careful what you characterize as screed."}

No, one man's screed is another man's opinion. You are correct to distinguish truth from fact. The job of Wikipedia is not to lay out the truth, but to mention what facts are available for a situation. "X is good" is not a fact; it is an opinion. "Group Y believes that X is good" is a fact. - Montréalais

"No, one man's screed is another man's opinion." -- Strictly your opinion, of course. mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net

If you don't sign your name, then we won't be able to judge the worth of your assertions, not to mention the worth, if any, of your articles. As it is, this is the only article linked to your name. For my money, what you have written here is content-free. ("I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!") I've written a lot of articles in the past few months, but I haven't found the uberarbiters yet. On the other hand, any number of people have added to, extended, and, yes, changed, what I have written, usually for the better, and I've done the same to any number of other people. You should read Wikipedia is the dopiest thing I've ever heard of. Ortolan88 04:12 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

btw, what's the Monopoly(TM)/Wikipedia:Village pump currency exchange rate these days? -- mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net -- Frederick George Wilson -- attribution as worth...let me run that through the Computer of Truth, I'll let you know what it crunches out...btw2, is humor outlawed here?

One last rant --er-- opinion, before I pack it in for the night: the move of my "genocide denial" article from metapedia to redirect was a net entropic increase, i.e., stupid. mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net -- Michel Foucault ------

[edit] Capitalizing the first letter of article titles

I just made an article titled I'noGo tied but the link is from a lower-case "i" at the beginning, and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be, at least according to my source (even at the beginning of a sentence, so I assume it's a pronunciation thing in Inuit). The system automatically switched it. Is there anyway around that? Not really a huge deal, I guess; it's still in lowercase in the article itself.--User: Tokerboy

You can link to it with leading lowercase, but you should talk to LDC about whether there's anyway to make it display the title with leading lowercase. --KQ

There isn't one, but you could talk with him about making one. --Brion

[edit] Quotes in titles

Following my earlier query about how to name articles about pieces of classical music (the responses to which I'm very grateful for, and still chewing over), I've got another problem in that area: I want to write an article about the John Cage piece 4'33", but it looks like article titles cannot have quotes in them, so 4'33" doesn't work. Is there any way round this? There are alternative names for the piece (it could be spelled out in words, for example), but this form is by far the most common, and I'd like to use it if at all possible. --Camembert 18:22 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

How does 4'43" (coded as [[4 43|4'43"]]) strike you? Ortolan88 18:44 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)


Yes, I know I can use a pipe, and if it comes to that, I will (though I'll probably point it to Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds rather than 4 33). But what I was really trying to ask, in a round about way, was: is there any way to use a " in an article title? --Camembert 23:20 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

How about [[4'33'']] as a quick cheat, with two ' for a " -- Tarquin 23:29 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

It might just work that, it might just work. Rather amusingly, however, if you try to surround the link with two 's to italicize it (as those tyrants at the Manual of Style will say you should, hem hem), it breaks the link, and italicizes one set of brackets instead. And I would be a bit worried about people trying to link to the article but not being able to work out that it's two 's rather than one ". But I can use html tags to italicize, and I don't see anybody else round here writing about John Cage, so... --Camembert 00:23 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

[edit] Character encoding in Mozilla 1.1

I'm having trouble with the character encoding on my brower - it's mozilla 1.1 and the default encoding is iso8859-1. It makes any accents or unusual characters turn into rubb!sh and make a mess of the edit. Anyone know about this? User:andrewthorne

I never had problems with Mozilla 1.1a, and have no problems now with Mozilla 1.2a (on Windows 2000). Could you give examples of particular pages and particular actions which produce problems, and describe precisely what happens, and tell us which operating system you're running on? --Brion 04:15 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

[edit] Subpages

I've been struggling a bit with how to set off entries that can be very broad in application like [Education] but have many sub categories like [assessment] or [history] but I don't want the sub categories to get too wrapped up in the generalities... phpwiki 1.3 offers an interesting solution allowing users to create sub categories by adding a slash/ at the end like this Enlish / History . Has such a system been discussed before? ck out the demo version of |phpwiki_demo], make sure create a subject. save it. then add a slash to it at the end. it's pretty easy.- dgd

We have done this in the past, but it has been deprecated. It was felt that the disadvantages were probably greater than the advantages. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons. For cases such as you mention, you can either use sub-headings (Type ==History== on a line of itself), or create a page with a title like [[History of education]]. Andre Engels 15:22 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

[edit] Downloading Wikipedia's data

I've been attempting to setup a copy of wikipedia on one of my servers for experimenting and testing. I want to use the real data to experiment with the wikipedia code and be able to more closely examine the data structure. I have in mind potentially altering the code to use in another project that is something of a "People Data Store" Example: "Quotes" are made by people, people have biography that relates them to other people, places, and events in time. This could also apply to many other works of people such as "Lyrics", "Books", "Articles", "Film", "Programming code". Lots of possibilities. In many ways it it much like an encyclopedia, just more (for lack of a better way of expressing it) factual and concrete. 8-)

My problem, For a couple of days now I've been attempting to download the datadump of the encyclopedia and history from the download page. Unfortunately all I get instead of a gzip, tar, or zip file is the text data dump to my browser. Is there some way that I can get the current data and history files some other way? I don't care about the size, but a file is much more useful than a text data list of many mb. Also is there some method of data replication that is used to keep other copies current? Any help with this would be much appreciated, Thanks (albrown AT chook DOT com or al AT thetinfoilhat DOT com)

Your browser appears to be helpfully un-gzipping the data for you. If this is a problem (ie, you don't want to take up that much hard disk space just for the dump), try a less intelligent program. ;) "wget" is a nice command-line web/ftp file fetcher; I think there's a version compiled for windows. (Google it.) Keep in mind that the SQL dump will be equally effective zipped or unzipped; you have to read it back into the database or write your own program to suck the data out of the SQL commands. --Brion 19:01 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

There are times when I actively hate the latest IE. Is ftp an option then? I tried to connect to ftp.wikipedia.com and didn't get very far as "anon".

Get Mozilla!

Try this instead: make a link to the file you want to download by putting it in brackets, e.g. The Internet Movie Database ([http://www.imdb.com The Internet Movie Database]), then right click on the link and "save target as."

IE for me has been particularly contrary and addlebrained; I can only assume that that's what you're using too. Best, --KQ 22:20 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

I was able to get the files by using wget. Thanks for all the help. I wil remember the trick about making a link in brackets. This is odd though as this is the first and only time that I have ever had IE (and netscape 4.7 even tried to download with that brain dead clunky ......) both were unzipping the file into the page, normally I can click on any download link and then get a message asking me if I want to save or not. Oh well, got the files and thanks much again for the help. Al Brown 23:21 CST Oct 2, 2002.

[edit] Encyclopedia Mythica hieroglyphs copyright

Copyright query: On Encyclopedia Mythica (http://www.pantheon.org), hieroglyphs for certain gods are given as image files. Are these okay to use? Obviously, they're not copyrighted by the people who etched them on the walls of the Pyramids or whatever, but the images appear to be computer-generated, not photos or anything. I know letters can't be copyrighted, and I'm assuming that, since they couldn't copyright Chinese characters for example, they can't do the same for hieroglyphics. Is that right?

For an example, go to http://www.pantheon.org/articles/s/saa.html

My first attempt at saving this question failed with an error box saying simply that the load failed. I'm using an iMac with IE 5.1 Tokerboy 22:09 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

In the CIA country articles "/People" is being broken out into "Demographics of...". Is this correct? Would not "Demography of..." be more correct as in "Geography of..." not "Geographics of...". 62.253.64.7

Check Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries for how this was decided. It was originally "Demography", but was changed to "Demographics" as "Demography" was felt to refer more to the science of Demography rather than a description of a nation's inhabitants and customs. Scipius 15:23 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia weirdness

Weirdness is afoot. I can't save changes in Konqueror at all and Mozilla tries, seems to fail, displays an error message saying there is no data in the page but then I see the saved edit in RC. --mav

same here. Chimera mac os. -- Tarquin
Same with me with IE. It gives me an error saying it can't find the page, but the editing is done anyway, according to Recent Changes. -- Zoe
same here with NC4.6 changes are added, but with message no data in page. User:TeunSpaans

Better now? I was about to restart the web & database servers when it suddenly started working smoothly a few minutes ago. (Lee, did you do something?) --Brion 22:59 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

Hmm, well I can read pages but I do get the error on saving. Weird. --Brion 23:00 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)
I think I got it; when it doubt, clear the PHP script cache. --Brion

Brion, I just installed your patch and upgraded PHP to 4.2.3 while I was there. The process may have been a bit bumpy... --66.216.68.43

[edit] Wikipedia Evangelism

Hi, I've mentioned this before and thought I'd mention it again. As I'm browsing the pedia I find articles that might interest friends/coworkers. I pop them a link in a quick hello message and ask them if they confirm the accuracy of the content...the response so far has been first one of wonder, then awe, then enthusiasm! And it's been a nice way to relate to some folks I'm not often in contact with. Anyway, I searched for evangelism and came up with nada around the 'pedia. Is there a place for sharing an evangelical/ 'help us' message of wikipedia? --dgd

There's some stuff at Wikipedia:Building Wikipedia membership. (Hint which wouldn't help here but may in general: after searching, go to the "Power search" box at the bottom of the screen and check the box for the 'Wikipedia' namespace. You'll get various about, help, documentation, etc pages that aren't supposed to show up when you're searching for encyclopedia articles.) Also check the Meta-wikipedia where we keep general project discussion and misc stuff. --Brion 20:42 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)
How about doing what a lot of news web pages do? They have a box at the bottom, "Send this article to a friend" with some kind of java mailer to ship it off and a box for you to add a signed message. Ortolan88
I like that idea too. Especially, and I know this would require more overhead, but a way to keep my list of folks in memory so I don't have to open my email client (which may not be available esp, as I'm a student and working on diff. machines).