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Wikipedia:Village pump/Archive B

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump. Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Copyrighted sound files

Another copyright question: is it definitely OK to use short (about 15 seconds) sound samples from copyrighted recordings in articles? I want to add illustrative noises to articles like string quartet, flute and Piano Phase. Looking at The Beatles (album) and A Hard Day's Night, it seems to be OK, and I know it was discussed on the White album talk page, but I want to be certain before I start uploading. If it is OK, should I fully credit the recordings on the image page (performers, conductor, etc) or not? --Camembert

Well, as nobody has said "No, don't do it," I'm going to do it. 19 seconds of a copyrighted recording of Borodin's best known piece will shortly be appearing at Alexander Borodin. And I will be giving full credits on the media page, because it says to include any information you know about the recording when you upload (and it's interesting info in any case). --Camembert 17:22 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

PLEASE CLEAN THE PUMP -- people's edits are starting to mangle the text above, and the page is becoming unusable. If discussion is old & no longer relevant, delete it. Move information to the FAQ pages. Create new pages for lengthy ongoing discussions & leave a link at the top.

can we move or wipe all the discussion on the rambot entries?

There was a leap from 40000 articles to 90000 articles. This is a little bit strange. Perhaps I missed something.

User:Ram-Man created a bot that generated 30,000 US place articles in the same format and wording as Union, Mississippi. --mav
This means that now virtually every other article is about a place in the US. Would it be possible have a moratorium on these entires for a while less Wikipedia becomes little more than a US gazeteer?
Additional content is a good thing. Why impose a moratorium? It would make much more sense for concerned individuals to focus their efforts on creating additional content in neglected areas. -- NetEsq 16:23 Nov 24, 2002 (UTC)
That depends on the granularity and usefulness of the additional content. If we soon have say... 1,000,000 articles and 920,000 of them were about every one horse town and truck stop in Russia how much use would it be?
Indeed, I've dressed up a dozen or more of these into more complete articles and the Ram-Man says that more than 500 have been so extended. I, for one, would like to know why a town in Mississippi ended up being named Union. Was it named that before the American Civil War or after? Was it named after the federal union or labor unions? How people building an encyclopedia can complain about factual articles on subjects that people might actually look up is beyond me. See my user page for my list, Ortolan88 16:39 Nov 24, 2002 (UTC)
Additional content is not a priori a good thing. I'm not sure why you asserted such an extreme position so baldly. See Wikipedia talk:Bots for how I believe imported data dumps should be handled. --The Cunctator
You, of all people, should understand the uses of stating an extreme position baldly. The Ram-Man has provided a needed foundation for the expansion of the Wikipedia. I like the idea that the Wikipedia has an article on my home town Valdosta, Georgia and that I can dress that article up with some interesting information. Likewise, Newton, Massachusetts, where I now live, and Macon, Georgia and West Memphis, Arkansas, where some musicians I admire came from, and a bunch of others of varying degrees of interest, and not a word, Mr. Quite! Anonymous (below), about hamburger joints. Ortolan88 17:53 Nov 24, 2002 (UTC)
Quite! I thought this was an International project. Knowing how many burger bars are in some mid-western town is of little use to people in the rest of the world.
Bah! Listings for any city, town, or village I might wish to find some information on is part of what I'd want in an ideal encyclopedia, whether that town is in the USA, UK, Guatemala, Cambodia or anywhere else. It seems to me that the problem is not that there are too many enteries concerning the USA, but that there are thus far too few for other places. Let's get to work on that! -- Infrogmation
Indeed listings for everywhere in the world would be ideal. I like the fact that Wikipedia has an article on my home town too. I wrote it. It's not in the US. It doesn't mention what percentage of the population are green and what percentage are blue. It does tell you where you can get a decent meal because the town gets a lot of tourists, so the article is pretty useful and it's not just a cut-and paste job from a census article located somewhere else on the web.. Ok so some 500+ Ram-bot articles have been edited by real users, that means some 29,000+ haven't. My point is that if Wikipedia becomes literally swamped with these articles derived from the US census it turns this site into a mere US gazeteer and mirror of the census site. I'm suggesting that maybe the balance of articles is getting a little out of hand. If I hit Radom page I'm getting getting some small US towns most the time. I'm just suggesting that we paused the progress of the bot for a while so that the balance can be brought back into line. Now shoot me down in flames. It was just an innocent suggestion. This is my last word. Ohh and I'm less anonymous than some random handle and a hotmail address. Bye bye.
My real name and my real e-mail address (which is at the oldest ISP on the Internet and which I have had since 1990) are given on my user page, which is a lot more than your nothing. Ortolan88
80.46.160.59 is much less anonymous than mickey.mouse@disney.com
Maybe that's an issue with the "Random" function. When I get a town entry at random, I edit it. I search the web for related sites and other information. And I search the "What links here" and I do a site-wide search for the name of the city so that all articles mentioning it are linked to it. I am grad that Random page links to these articles. And I'm glad they are included. If we don't create the stub articles, nobody would think to improve them. Stubs ARE good. They are not perfect however. They have problems. One of the problems is that links to stub articles are blue (they should be violet in my opinion with more red tone the smaller the article is or the less times it has been edited). This is a software issue however. The articles are fine. PS: Maybe I can import a complete discography of every artist that ever lived complete with lyrics, won't that be fun??? There have got to be at least a half a billion songs out there! :o). Robert Lee
Firstly, sorry I know I said that was my last word, but the discussion got expunged before it had come to a natural close I think, so I'm back. Well I know my view isn't shared by you guys. But I do want to make the point that I think the bot importing all of this information in bulk is unbalancing this project. As indeed Robert Lee's tongue in cheek suggesting about importing a discography makes the same point or my point earlier a gazeteer of Russia.
I think the only reason it feels unbalanced is because of the "Random Page" feature. If we didn't have that feature, who would know it felt unbalanced? -- Ram-Man

This is probably the 5th or 6th time (at least) that people have started a discussion on the merits of the city articles. It gets old! I think everyone agrees that having ones own hometown is cool. No other encyclopedia has that (well and I guess neither do we... yet). I've added to many city articles that I hit on "Random Page". In fact somewhere under Wikipedia:Utilities I think it says something about the random page feature being used to fix stubs, which is what these (and most other articles) are. I think the answer to this entire discussion is that if you don't like what you see now, stop complaining and start adding more material! -- Ram-Man

5th or 6th time eh? hm... I wonder why that is. Well unfortunately I don't have a bot able to wikify up a detailed entry on every issue of the Superman and Spider-man comics ever produced, so I won't be able to catch you up.
See also the suggestion that the city articles might well be eventually part of a Wikiteer.

Try as I might, I cannot see the merits of an argument which states that Wikipedia has too many geographical stubs in relation to other articles. The fact that different people continue to bring up the same argument does not make it any more meritorious, nor does the fact that these geographical stubs are for towns in the United States. It's very clear that people see value to these stubs and are working hard to supplement them; it's also very clear that the people complaining about these stubs could put their time to better use by supplementing the areas that they feel are being neglected.-- NetEsq 01:15 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Does anybody have an explanation for:

They all have a population of zero. If nobody lives there, is there any reason to keep these articles? They seem kinda silly, all this talk about what is apparently a piece of wilderness arbitrarily designated a "community" (I'm referring to Oklahoma here). Thoughts? Tokerboy 07:44 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)

They're harmless and not worth the effort for removal. One in fact was a census mistake; Belleair Shore, Florida was listed by the US census as having a population of 0 which was a shock to the local residents (51 households). A couple more are probably also census mistakes; Supai, Arizona went from 423 to 0 in 10 years and Sportsmen Acres Community, Oklahoma went from 181 to 0. If these are mistakes then we should find out and if they are true then it would be interesting to find out why these places lost their populations.
Also, whether or not somebody lives at a place shouldn't be a reason for deciding whether we should keep or delete an entry. In fact many central city/downtown areas in the US don't have anybody officially living in them and yet these areas are very important. I'm sure many of these places have interesting history associated with them. Most look like they actually have people and even industries working in them (just like the US downtowns). --mav
http://www.fryeisland.com/
Funny, for a town with no population, you wouldn't expect them to have a domain name, 2 ferries, a 9-hole golf course and I bet those town meetings are a REAL snore. Actually, Frye Island is not only a real town, but it is a world famous vacation hotspot drawing in tourists by the hundreds each year from all over the world. In my opinion, not only should Frye Island have an article, that article should be a whole lot better then the one which exists now. Maybe instead of complaining about it you should do some research and give these towns the credit they deserve! Just my $0.02. Robert Lee 09:48 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)
I agree - these entries need to be improved not removed. --mav
Just for the information, all these entries had the population data (and other data) marked by the census bureau as "Not Applicable" for whatever reason. I don't know if the census bureau changed the way it counts population or if it is an error. The census bureau publishes a large "errata" so it might be in there (I have not looked). If they are wrong, alas, people who know about the places are going to have to update them. -- Ram-Man
Why is the information (which seems to be from tables) not in tabular form? --Juuitchan

What's the right thing to do when one wants to move an article to a title that has some substance in its history? Should we be very careful to preserve the old edits, or is it OK to just delete them and move the page as we want? For example, I wanted to move Visual Basic programming language to Visual Basic (to fit in with the new naming convention) but the latter has quite a bit in its history. If it was just a couple of redirects, I wouldn't hesitate to delete the page to make the move possible, but there's quite a bit more than that, and even though none of the history has survived into the present Visual Basic programming language article, I'm still wary about deleting it. SNOBOL, Objective C and C Plus Plus provide other examples (there are probably many more, I've given up looking for them). I really want to move these pages so that common practice and the stated convention are the same thing. If they're not, the convention isn't a lot of use; if they are, then it should avoid dupliacted articles like these in the future. --Camembert 00:53 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

That is exactly what you DON'T want to do. The naming convention for programming language is "NNNN programming language". Visual Basic and all the others are absolutely fine where they are. Extensive conversations have gone on about this for more then a year. And myself and many others have invested literally hundreds of hours into moving those languages to the CORRECT name of "NNNN programming language". -Robert Lee
Ahem. I think you mean the conventional name. Presumably, the correct name for a programming language is whatever its inventor decided to call it at the time, unless it has been renamed since then. Calling them "[something] programming language" is, of course, just a Wikipedia convention. Is there an article somewhere explaining why this convention was established in the first place? It seems to be a general rule that whenever anyone challenges a convention, the Old Ones dismiss the challenge by saying, "We had long and tedious discussions about this years before you came here, and everything was settled back then. We don't want to go over the same arguments again. The discussion is over!" Or something along those lines. I paraphrase, of course. :) Why don't we keep records of the conclusions of these discussions, with the reasons behind them explained in detail, as articles (in the Meta thingy, I suppose it would be), and then point people to them when they question the conventions, instead of just getting angry with them? That would be much more constructive, and if people still wanted to challenge the conventions after having absorbed the earlier conclusions, at least they would be doing so in a new way, and not just going through all the same arguments again and again. -- Oliver Pereira 06:33 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)
In general, the old discussions either are or should be in or linked to from the talk pages of the pages describing the conventions. (Wikipedia:Naming conventions & friends.) If they are not linked, this should be corrected if the discussions A) were done on the wiki B) were made at all! and C) are still on the wiki. Unfortunately, the old old software used to periodically wipe out old revisions of articles, so some material may have been vanished. In this particular case, see Talk:Programming language, where the only suggestion seems to be for the convetion as now expressed -- that is, the "X programming language" convention is intended for ambiguous names. Whoever copied it into the naming conventions page probably mistakenly overgeneralized it. --Brion 06:56 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, I looked for old discussion of the matter, found none, couldn't think of a reason not to change the convention (still can't), so asked on the talk page if there were any objections to my proposed change; there weren't, so I changed it. All that aside: I still don't know whether it is OK for me to delete C Plus Plus and similar articles (which has a fair number of edits in their history) so I can move C Plus Plus programming language there to fit in with the new improved naming convention. In short: how reluctant should I be to delete pages and lose old edits when I want to move a page to that title? --Camembert 19:30 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

Little known fact: if you delete a page, you or another sysop can restore it via Special:Undelete. If a new page of the same title has been since created, the old revisions will drop onto the end of the new page. So, you can combine the histories back into one: delete C Plus Plus, rename C Plus Plus programming language to C Plus Plus, and undelete the old C Plus Plus. Be very sure this is what you want to do, though! (I've done it in this case -- if need be it can be re-renamed willy-nilly, but now the history will be intact.) --Brion 19:42 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)
Thanks Brion - I knew one could undelete pages, but didn't know it was possible to combine histories. That solves all (well, nearly all) my problems. --Camembert 19:55 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)
talk:programming language, you obviously didn't look too hard. Now about half way down the page I asked people what they thought of me going though and making the requested changes for the sake of consistency. I got support and an offer for help. Further many people spent MONTHS making the changes you are nowing f**king with. Quite frankly, its a little upsetting to have just completed a major change after a long discussion (not just on that page, but on others as well) and having someone turn around and without adding anything to the existing discussion revert hundreds of changes. If this is how I can expect my work here to be appreciated, I'm leaving. This is nuts. There is no way in hell I'm going to tolerate having months of work reverted for no reason other then "Well, I felt like it". That said, if you guys want to go through hundreds of articles and move them on your own fine. But I'm outta here. This site is a huge waste of time. -Robert Lee
Can you tell the rest of us where to find this long discussion, or do we have to guess? (Furthermore, I reread Talk:Programming language; the single offer of help from Jeronimo makes no mention of naming conventions, nor does your proposal to which it is a response -- rather it's about the organization of topics into articles and lists of articles. I'm left utterly perplexed at your reaction to the present discussion.) --Brion 22:30 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

Well I do have to agree with Lee here on the process issue: Several people, myself included, have spent the better part of a month discussing a change to the Anglicization convention. Only after that was an actual change made to the convention (a small change at that). In a few minutes I will create a talk page for the language convention so that discussion can exist for posterity. --mav

Getting DB errors on my watchlist as follows:

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

SELECT DISTINCT wl_page,talk.cur_id AS id,talk.cur_namespace AS namespace,talk.cur_title AS title, talk.cur_user AS user,talk.cur_comment AS comment,talk.cur_user_text AS user_text, talk.cur_timestamp AS timestamp,talk.cur_minor_edit AS minor_edit,talk.cur_is_new AS is_new FROM cur as page, cur as talk, watchlist WHERE wl_user=5862 AND wl_page=page.cur_id AND page.cur_title=talk.cur_title AND talk.cur_namespace | 1=page.cur_namespace | 1 ORDER BY talk.cur_timestamp DESC LIMIT 50

from within function "wfSpecialWatchlist". MySQL returned error "1030: Got error 127 from table handler".

Help! -Martin

Integrating Two Integrative Sites

Hi, I'm the webmaster and principal author of the Integration Website http://noosphere.cc. A fascinating thrill went through me when I discovered the Wikipedia Website and the Wiki Websites System in general.


The similarity in the purpose of this site and Wikipedia is striking: both sites aim at constructing, by open Internet cooperation, a thesaurus of integrative knowledge. Still, there are two differences: (1) the Wikipedia site uses an automated software, allowing visitors to edit existing pages online, while this site is manually edited, and (2) the Integration site features an advanced concept of integrative editing, while the Wiki system is described as "a collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia", and uses the "open content" paradigm. Although the Open Content approach is completely compatible with the Integration approach, the latter goes further because (1) it proposes a series of explicit editing rules (while the Wiki context is much more permissive, and its rules are more intuitive and inspired by common sense), and because (2) this Integration concept assumes that by respecting these rules, if adequately applied, a degree of plausibility probably comparable to scientific certitude can be reached.

As I describe in the Future of this Site page, integration with such an integrative site as Wikipedia will be sought. In a first stage I'll try to add progressively our contents to the Wikipedia site. If, for some reasons yet to discover, this kind of integration proves impossible, we'll try to start up a new Wiki-like site, or introduce the Wiki software into this site.

Any comments? Kris Roose 10 Nov 2002, 14.30 CET

Sounds interesting. This type of question should be put forwared to the Wikipedia mailing list. However I can tell you right now that some people will be concerned with your websites POV of "scientifically based spirituality". But if your text can be made to adhere our NPOV poilicy then it would be great to have it. --mav

I have many many questions about some nifty new images that I'm able to generate for every county in the state. Rather than ask those questions here, I'm asking them on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties page. Any input would be appreciated. -- Thanks, RobLa 02:26 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)

When I uploaded the copyrighted Borodin sound sample I wrote about above (under "Copyrighted sound files") I had to check a box that said "I affirm that the copyright holder of this file agrees to license it under the terms of the Wikipedia copyright." Unless I'm wrong, and samples this size are not copyrightable (which I don't think is the case), then I was lying when I checked this box, and so was everybody else when they uploaded sound samples that are probably perfectly OK under fair use. Shouldn't the message on the checkbox be changed? --Camembert 17:37 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

I don't know what your talking about with the checkbox, but sound samples of any size are copywritable. [1] makes for good reading. And as for "Fair Use", [2] is also good reading. There is no easy way to calculate the amount of a work you can distribute without violating the law. By distributing any of the work, you open yourself up for a lawsuit. A judge then decides whether or not you were in violation. Robert Lee

One also needs to avoid copyright paranoia. Common sense goes a long way when dealing with fair use. There are also a lot of steps to be taken before it gets to a judge. Eclecticology 22:10 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

The recent flurry of editing on articles such as The Simpsons/Episode List, list of fictional cats, and felching has made me wonder: is there a "Most ridiculous articles" or similar page? Someplace that lists articles that have encyclopedic value, but at the same time make you wonder, "Why did someone make a page on this?" I looked briefly but didn't find one. I am very happy that we have articles like these; there should be a page celebrating their existence. -- Merphant 08:41 Oct 27, 2002 (UTC)

Just commenting the opnly reason I put The Simpsons/Episode List on a seprate page is that its a very long list. If it was shorter I would haev pt it on The Simpsons.


I understand completely; I recently did the same thing with List of musical instruments and the musical instrument article. It's still funny, though. -- Merphant

This town ain't big enough for both of us

The user name "Throbbing Monster Cock" is overtly offensive, and I am ashamed to be part of Wikipedia whenever it crops up on 'recent changes.' I know only one remedy, so I'm taking it. If that user name ever goes away, I'd appreciate it if someone would e-mail me thru my user page and let me know, so I can come back. Thanks, y'all -- it's been fun. -- isis 02:03 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)

Enjoy your newfound free time. :) --Brion 02:13 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)
Great. Not only is TMC trolling about, he's driven a valued contributor away. -- Tarquin 09:18 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)

Who was that masked man ?

It has been brought to my attention that the username "Throbbing Monster Cock" has been converted to "TMC" and that my name has been bandied about in the discussions about how that came about. I'm posting the following to set the record straight and not for the purpose of starting a discussion:

I am back, and if I am not participating as actively as I did before, please attribute it to the computer problems: I simply don't have the time (or the patience) to work on the 'pedia when navigation takes 3 to 5 minutes per link and it can't find the server at all 1 time out of 4, which is the situation nearly all the time now.

NetEsq made some comments about me on http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:TMC on 22 November that are so far from true that they make me wonder whether he could honestly have been so mistaken:

I wrote the following . . . -- NetEsq 21:12 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)~

And while I do not pretend to speak for User:Isis, I know her to be a strong advocate of free speech. I sincerely doubt that she would approve of the decision which Jimbo has apparently taken on her behalf.

I did *NOT* write the following . . . -- NetEsq 21:12 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)

we know that Isis chose to leave because she was offended by TMC's username

Let me get this straight: It's in the paragraph under the other quote and signed with your username, and you didn't write it? Then who did, please? -- isis 21:27 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)
Ah, yes. I did write that. -- NetEsq 22:44 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)
I will respond to the following in short order . . . -- NetEsq 21:12 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)
My response to the following will be found on my Talk page -- NetEsq 22:44 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)

I am, indeed, a strong advocate of 1st Amendment freedom of speech, but that has nothing to do with this situation. Wikipedia is not a public forum, and there is no "right" of free speech (or anything else) here. This is Jimbo's private website, and he has invited us all to use it with very few (too few, as far as I'm concerned) guidelines for what is acceptable conduct here. If you were a guest in his home, would you think it was okay to shit in the middle of the floor or to burn the house down or to steal his stereo equipment? When you trash this website, you insult him (and the rest of us guests) but, more importantly, you show the world you have no respect for yourself, so you deserve no respect from anyone else (and don't worry about getting any from me -- you won't, and I'm not too shy to tell you so).

So (1) I am enthusiastically in favor of Jimbo's getting rid of anyone whose behavior he doesn't like, although I can't claim the credit for getting him to do it, and (2) I did not leave because I was offended by TMC's username but, rather, because I was offended by the Wikipedians who pretend to see some social importance in TMC's misconduct. I say "pretend" because if you really believed all that shit you were shoveling about his right to free speech, you would have upheld my right to put animated gifs in the articles. That you won't tolerate a waving American flag in an article on American history but get your knickers in a knot over removing an obscene username shows you for what you are, and that's what I was ashamed to be associated with. And that's why I resent NetEsq's using my name to bolster credibility for his pro-TMC ravings about "censorship," although I am flattered that he would think my credibility in this community could be enough to outweigh his notions' obvious lack of merit. -- isis 21:01 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)

[When someone removes this part of the page as having been here long enough, I suggest that the Talk:Rhetoric page would be a good place to put it, because it's a good example of what rhetoric is today and why it "is a very important topic for understanding a lot of Western culture" (altho it may be immodest of me to say so). -- isis 19:57 Nov 23, 2002 (UTC)]
The entirety of your post can be found on my Talk page, along with my response, where it will remain for as long as Jimbo Wales is willing to suffer my presence here at Wikipedia; if the content is removed from my Talk page, I will find a home for it in a guest column or on one of my own Web sites, where it will be published pursuant to the terms of the GFDL, along with other Wikipedia content that I am compiling. -- NetEsq 22:44 Nov 23, 2002 (UTC)

I'd like to remove this conversation. It is archived at NetEsq's Talk page; is that acceptable, or would the involved parties prefer a page on Meta-Wikipedia? -- Stephen Gilbert 15:47 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)

Definitely Meta-Wikipedia, please, and please take this note with it. NetEsq's version is misleading, both in its editing and the implication of having it there. I was talking to all Wikipedians, and NetEsq should not be able to hijack my postings to his own page. Thanks for asking. You might want to include some of the related remarks from NetEsq's and TMC's talk pages, too. -- isis 08:19 Dec 5, 2002 (UTC)

Someone added a spurious link to February 21. I've removed it, but he also created Russell_Goffe's_Birthday. How does one delete a page like this? User:SGBailey

It's an admin function. There's a page called something like Wikipedia:Votes for deletion to alert admins to pages which need to be zapped. user:sjc

See Wikipedia:Editing FAQ.

The Cologne Blue skin seems to have lost all it's "blueness", among other things. Is anyone else having this problem? -- Stephen Gilbert 14:33 Dec 9, 2002 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. Could you be more specific, please? What *does* it look like? Have you reloaded, cleared the cache? What operating system? What browser are you using? What settings in the browser? If Netscape 4.x, is JavaScript enabled? (Disabling it breaks style sheets, if I recall.) If you can't describe it, can you at least send a screen capture? --Brion 21:26 Dec 9, 2002 (UTC)
It's fine for me now. I was just checking to see if anyone else had weirdness going on, or if it was something I had to fix on my end. For the record, the blue bar at the top was gone, and the fonts were all the same size and style, looked like a CSS problem; Win95, Opera 5.11; I reloaded and cleared the cache, no effect. I did nothing and it was back to normal when I came back a few hours latter. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:38 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

lost my password, if I ever had one to begin with. When I click "mail my password" it shows no email address listed for my handle. This shows there were no email addies associated with users before the Wiki changes. Please email a temporary password to bethany2o@hotmail.com. I am a registered wikipedian and have a user page and several articles. I want the same handle, otherwise I would just make a new account. Thanks. BF

Hi, BF. I suspect your only option is to email Jimbo (jwales@bomis.com) and convince him that it really is you. The system administrators can't email new passwords out to random email addresses, as this would allow anyone to grab anyone else's password. -- Stephen Gilbert 20:05 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Wikipedia seemed to be down for a few hours. Anyone know what happened?

Today (11:50 AM PST) the Wikipedia is running so slow over our T1 that I might as well be at home on a modem, I would be less impatient! Is this a function of an overtaxed server, the bandwidth of the ISP, or is it something else? Other web sites seem fine, so... jbrave

I'm getting the following message at the bottom of my wiki pages;

Notice: Couldn't find text for message "subjectpage". in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/GlobalFunctions.php on line 141

Notice: Couldn't find text for message "subjectpage". in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/GlobalFunctions.php on line 141

Is it just me? quercus robur

No - I see them as well. --Camembert
Me too -- but there's no delay in accessing the pages, and that's the main thing. KF 00:45 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)
Minor version mixmatch between files, sorry. Should be fixed now. --Brion 00:47 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)

Hi, I am a newcomer (just discovered Wikipedia yesterday). I think this is a great idea. I notice that you have headings on the main page for mathematics, physics, statistics, and the like, but none for engineering. Speaking for the engineers, I think this would be extremely useful. Is engineering currently grouped with another field, and if it is, does anyone think it should merit its own heading? I did not see any contiguous body of information for engineering when I searched. If there is agreement that this is a good idea, I would be willing to make a few entries for electrical engineering...

M Raj

It's there under "Applied Arts and Sciences", between Education and Family and consumer science. --Brion

Language conveniton discussion moved to: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (languages)

Today (11:50 AM PST Dec 11th 2002) the Wikipedia is running so slow over our T1 that I might as well be at home on a modem, I would be less impatient! Is this a function of an overtaxed server, the bandwidth of the ISP, or is it something else? Other web sites seem fine, so... jbrave

Anyway to control line spacing of a paragrah? -- kt2

Anyway to control line spacing of a paragraph? -- kt2

Attributed articles now ?

What's the story on the external links in PUCCAMP, please? The images and info are great, although I don't like having pictures before any text, and it needs to be put into complete sentences, but I'm a little dubious of having a foreign-language link without mentioning that it is on the article page, and I'm a lot dubious about the link to the contributor's résumé -- since when are our articles signed? -- isis 01:30 Nov 8, 2002 (UTC)

I've removed the signature to the talk page, and mentioned that the site is in Portugeuse. --Camembert

Why keep it on the talk page? It's already on that user's user page, and we can get there from the history. Do we all get to put our links on the talk pages of articles now? Is that only for the new ones we start, or is that for ones we edit, too? Only major edits, or minor ones, too, like the ones I only put an image in? And am I restricted to linking it to my résumé, or can I link it to my entry in Who's Who in America, too? -- isis 07:15 Nov 8, 2002 (UTC)

Well look, if you want to remove it from the talk page, then do so, it won't bother me. And if you want to try adding links to the talk page of everything you edit, then try it and see what happens (my guess is they'll be removed if it's done en masse rather than just on one ocassion by a newcomer who doesn't know better). --Camembert

I wasn't going by the newbie's putting it there: I was going by User:Chris mahan's ratifying it and your keeping it on the 'talk' page, and now we have mav saying it's okay to have attributions on the 'talk' page. I am surprised at that (as you must be, given your prediction such postings would be removed), because I thought the 'talk' page was for discussions about the subject of the article and 'user' pages were for claiming credit for articles, but the only way I'm going to learn is by asking. -- isis 15:01 Nov 8, 2002 (UTC)

No, you can also "observe a lot by watching" as Yogi Berra might say (see Yogiisms). --Ed Poor
Normally, I would just remove the credit altogether rather than put it on talk (in fact I have done this a couple of times just now) - what can I say, I'm fickle. Personally, I probably wouldn't move article credits from the talk page (there are better things to be doing), but others might. I think there are some cases where we have copyright clearance to use something, and that goes on the talk page - such credits shouldn't be removed, of course. Otherwise, I don't think it's a very big deal - I can't speak for others. --Camembert

Could someone with a fast connection zip through the chains pages on Orders of magnitude/Temp, to check they each connect to their neighbours? These need checking before we replace the old OofM page. -- Tarquin 11:52 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)

What's up with "Move Page"? It seems it is either broken or too hard to use for a simple soul like me. I moved Scholastic Achievement Test to SAT college entrance test using "Move page". The explanatory text stated "The talk page, if any, will not be moved." Just below that, however, was a box I checked saying "Move 'talk' page as well, if applicable." What happened? Nothing. The talk page Talk:Scholastic Achievement Test wasn't moved and when I tried to move it separately to Talk:SAT college entrance test I got an error saying the page already exists. So, I am dropping my quest and will simply put something on the new talk page so if anyone wants to know why I made the move they can find the old talk page. Awaiting your sarcasm, I remain, that cranky guy, Ortolan88 02:58 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

Since there was an existing talk page of that name, it can't move the talk page over it and, sensibly, refuses to do so when asked. Everything sounds in order. --Brion 03:03 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

You know, Brion, I almost wrote "Awaiting Brion Vibber's sarcastic answer", but I decided that would be too sarcastic. I guess not.


There is nothing sensible or in good order about the conflicting statements on the "Move Page" instructions. One says I can't move the talk page and one says I can.

Nor is there anything sensible or in good order about the behavior implied by your reply. If "Move Page" created the talk page along with the new page, just exactly when is it possible to move a talk page under any conditions? If I was supposed to move the talk page and then the article, where would I find that out? Awaiting a supportive and helpful reply, I remain, that optimistic guy, Ortolan88 03:11 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)


I couldn't let you down. ;) Now the real reply: as far as I can tell, Talk:SAT college entrance test was an existing page at the time you moved Scholastic Achievement Test to SAT college entrance test. Perhaps this latter page did not exist, perhaps it was a redirect with no history; in either of these two cases, Move Page will happily replace nothingness with a page.
If there is a page, and it's not a redirect with no history, it will not ever under any circumstances replace that page with something you've asked it to move. If you ask it to do that, it will notify you.
Now, the notification is kinda lame. If the main page you've asked it to move over already exists, it gives you a big, rude, unmistakeable message. If just the talk page has a conflict, but the main page went through fine, it just tells you that "the associated talk page was not moved." I'm assuming your complaint is derived from the subtleness of the message; it doesn't tell you in giant letters why it didn't move it.
There are a couple possible ways to improve the situation:
  • Say in big ugly letters that can't be misread: "Page successfully moved! But talk page was not moved, because there's already a page there! Go fix it, human, for I am but a lowly computer and unable to read your mind and tell which of the pages you prefer."
  • Refuse to move either page, explain "I could move this page, but I won't be able to move the talk page because there's already a talk page under the destination title and I can't overwrite it without intervention from a sysop. If you still want to move the page and leave its talk page alone, click here."
Which would you prefer? --Brion 03:21 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)


An answer I can work with! The reason the page already existed, I think, is that the initial "Move Page" seemed to hang, so I cancelled it (I thought) and tried to resubmit the request. The second time, I got a message that the page already existed, so, obviously (to you but not to me), the talk page existed too.

What I would prefer, and what I think makes most sense, is to automatically move the talk page at the same time as the article. I don't know why the talk page should ever be left behind.

I can't draw a flow chart, but if I were specing "Move Page" anew, I would have the following behavior:

  1. By default Move page creates both new page and talk page.
  2. If article page already exists, move only if it contains no text (or only "edit this page".
  3. If talk page already exists, ask if user wants to overwrite it or append to it.

Obviously I haven't thought this completely through, but I do think the present system is counter-intuitive. Ortolan88 03:34 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)


Ahh, that's a horse of a different color! Saying "the initial "Move Page" seemed to hang, so I cancelled it (I thought) and tried to resubmit the request" in the first place would have saved a lot of time dealing with sarcastic responses. It may have, indeed, somehow crapped out halfway through, moving only the article and failing to get to the talk page. If you didn't try the second move until an hour later, when the new talk page was created, then it would indeed have failed due to the existence of that page.
Transaction rollback would help prevent that kind of glitch, but that's not something we can easily do with the version of MySQL we're using. Better explanatory text on the move page, however, I can do. --Brion 05:07 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

I didn't say so because I was lost in a maze of confusing directions and confusing behavior and came here seeking aid.

The text on the "Move Page" instructions should not say you can't and can move the talk page. Yours for more subtle sarcasm, Ortolan88 14:44 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

You didn't describe what you did because the text on screen was confusing? I'll chalk it up to mental anguish. I replaced the instructions last night, let me know if they suit you. --Brion 19:46 Nov 1

Ok I can understand the change to Discuss this page as I guess it might prompt discussion, but why Older Versions?. History was better I think.

Wikipedia seemed to be down for a few hours. Anyone know what happened?

See discussion at Wikipedia:lag

Wikipedia Implementation and performance

During the last few weeks I have been thrilled to discover Wikipedia. However, it is not perfect, and there appear to be very significant performance issues with the software/hardware.

Is there information about how WP is implemented, and is there any form of discussion going on about how to improve it?

What sort of loading does WP server out - 10 page requests/second, 100?, 1000?

Also, what proportion of the load is due to edits - it should be quite low - but maybe it's not. Is it possible to prioritise edits over searches? This would be useful, as quite often these days waiting for an edit to Load takes so long - it really is quite a nuisance.

Would performance be enhanced if WP were distributed over several servers? Is this feasible? If not, why not?

Who is looking at these issues? --User:David Martland

David--
Wikipedia is open source software. See the SourceForge page for details. See Wikipedia:Statistics for detailed access statistics.
The performance issues are discussed on the wikitech-l mailing list. The server is reasonably huge and not suffering from the load. The main problem appear to be locking issues (we use MySQL's MyISAM tables, which only support table-level locking) and unoptimized queries (some columns do not have indexes where they should have etc.). These issues are slowly being worked on by Wikipedia developers, feel free to participate. See m:How to become a Wikipedia hacker for a growing tutorial on the code. --Eloquence 12:22 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)
Regarding the number of page views per second: On Special:Statistics. In the past 4 1/2 months (since 20 July) there have been about 20,000,000 page views and 400,000 to 450,000 edits. This is equal to slightly under 2 page views per second. As we are still growing dayly, the number will be higher at the moment, put it will probably be well under 10 per second. Andre Engels 14:29 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick answers. I suppose it's possible the poor performance I get sometimes is due to network problems - besides the locking problems. Another possibility is that a mean rate of 2 queries/second still permits a much higher peak rate. It quite often takes a minute or so to have an update during editing from my locations in the UK - maybe that's the locking problem? David Martland 20:19 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)

Places named Durham

I would like to move the page Durham, County Durham, England to Durham but can't because Durham (whose previsou contents I have now moved to Durham, (disambiguation) in preparation for this) had previously been edited, thus no move is allowed. I'd be grateful if some nice sysop type person could please help with this move, which I believe to be broadly in accord with the discussions that have been had about this kind of topic. I am aware that I could just C&P but I am told that moving it "properly" is better for technical reasons - right? If you do try to do it you'll find a redirect there at the moment, to avoid broken links. Once it's moved I will sort out the links and other issues of wording. Thanks. Nevilley 17:02 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

I think Durham should be the disambig page, and Durham City, England used for info on Durham City in England, and Durham County, England for info on Durham County. "primary topic" disambiguation isn't appropriate because Durham in North Carolina comes in #3 on a Google search... -Martin
Durham is an ancient and historic city and should be at Durham. Just the same as London and Paris. Mintguy
I agree that Durham should be the disambiguation page. Durham City doesn't even have the largest population in Durham County. Derwentside, Easington and Sedgefield are all bigger. Durham City is less than half the size of Durham, NC. I don't dispute its historicity, but it just doesn't have the international stature of a Paris or London. I believe that for city A to favour one specific usage that usage must be overwhelming. Eclecticology 18:34 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
See Talk:Durham
Whatever else is decided, the place in North England is NOT Durham City! At a pinch it could be 'The City of Durham'. It is really just 'Durham, England'. I believe the county is 'County Durham, England' -- SGBailey 17:32 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
This has already been discussed quite a lot and I thought we had a consensus to move it. With all due respect, the points about Durham's size don't really work and I do not believe that most people looking up Durham or adding it to an article are expecting to get Durham, NC, and if they were they would probably have specified this. To leave Durham as it is needing to specify which county (which is sort-of-wrong anyway) and country it is in is wrong, it seems to me. I don't accept the arguments about it being relatively unimportant - it's a World Heritage Site which I think puts it a little out of line with the other Durhams. In summary I agree with Mintguy. You may not have heard of Durham but it is a LOT more like Paris or London, both in reality and in terms of what is sensible when constructing an encyclopedia, than is Durham NC. I would still like to move it and I will still be asking for sysop help in doing so. Nevilley 20:00 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
On a slightly different slant, SGBAiley is absolutely correct: some formula like Durham City would not make sense. Oh and County Durham is already there, as I moved it. Nevilley 20:00 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
Durham (disambiguation) existed, so I erased Durham and moved the city article in that place. If someone cares so much as to undo it, I won't move it again.

--AN 22:56 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks to AN and Mav for help with this and to everyone for a very interesting debate. I have fixed all the links I could find and will check a few more. Regards to all, Nevilley 00:25 Dec 24, 2002 (UTC)

I don't like all the city and town entries in wikipedia. Click "Random page" and see the percentage of city entries--it is very high. Is this an Atlas or an encyclopedia?

You probably won't do anything about it, but I just wanted to state my opinion for the record. David 18:48 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

This view has been stated many times here but few actually feel that the articles should not be added. (Un?)officially, the "Random Page" feature was designed to help people find stubs to add to. If not for that feature, no one would know or care about the percentage of city entries, so in essence it is not the articles themselves that are the problem, but a single feature which is biased towards them. But it is true that there is a lack of balance, but that only implies that we need more people to add on a variety of topics. But we will always need that. The best thing to do is work harder. See Deaf Smith County, Texas and its talk page for an example of this in action. Also see the unofficial Bot FAQ. -- Ram-Man
I agree. Wikipedia went through a growth spurt in just one area - the other areas just need to catch-up. This will take time (although using a bot to create tens of thousands of organism articles with taxonomy tables would be neat). --mav
I'm not biased towards geographic articles. I am *always* looking for large data sources to generate articles. Give me a source for the stuff, and I'll work on it. -- RM
I'll look but the only nearly complete source I know of is based on the outdated 4 kingdom taxonomic system (5 is currently the most widely accepted, but 6 and 8 kingdom systems are becoming more and more popular). --mav
I've collected the data from the U.S. Geological Survey, but that's nearly 2 million features in the database. I am not brave enough yet to add anything from that database for fear that people will (figuratively) kill me, considering it has information on everything from names of states to names of parks, mountains, post offices, etc. -- RM
I can see parks and mountains, but I doubt if anybody cares about post offices. -- Zoe
If I ever did do something crazy like that, it wouldn't be anytime soon! But don't worry, I don't want to make stupid articles. -- RM

It would also be good if there was some way of getting a warning that Summary was empty. I feel this should always be filled in - I just forget! -- SGBailey 17:03 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Summaries are useful, but I don't think they should be enforced. Besides, what is to stop me from being in a rush and putting lots of "did stuff" in the comment section? -- RM

Hi, BF. I suspect your only option is to email Jimbo (jwales@bomis.com) and convince him that it really is you. The system administrators can't email new passwords out to random email addresses, as this would allow anyone to grab anyone else's password. -- Stephen Gilbert 20:05 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Hey Steven... I already had emailed Jimmy with no reply over the past 2 months. Just tried again. I'm sure nobody else has tried to grab my username, so that's at least one good thing =) I'm deleting the message above so I don't get spam from here. Help would be good. BF

Ok, try emailing User:Brion VIBBER. He's one of the more active developers at the moment. You should be able to drop him a line using this link. -- Stephen Gilbert 01:34 Dec 12, 2002 (UTC)

Question (well, actually questions about Copyright violation . . .

Take a look at the article consul as it now stands. On 15:35 Nov 25, 2002, the user at 200.149.95.121 added a list of consuls with commentary. At first glance, my only thought was, "Well, this needs formatting, and eventually moving to its own article." And I would vote for an article with a list of consuls from the beginning to the end of this post. It would a useful resource -- & does not appear to exist elsewhere on the Web.

However, as I looked more closely at the commentary, I grew concerned: much of it appears to be scholarly commentary that would be found in a classical prospography or a scholarly article. In short, I suspect that we have a copyright violation based on someone scanning printed material & adding by cut-n-paste to the Wiki. I appreciate the effort, but a copyright violation is a copyright violation, nonetheless.

Someone may want to look at 200.149.95.121's other contributions. I took a quick look at his contributions to Ab urbe condita, & the text seems suspiciously too well-written. (Then again, maybe some of my submissions read too polished -- but I can attest that with certain, clearly-marked exceptions, they are all the work of my own ten fingers.)

That being said, can we consider the list of names alone also under copyright? IANAL, but I think the mere listing of words or names in itself does not fall under copyright. I'm more than sure that a list of consuls exists that was compiled before 1920, but it would be nice to take more accessible lists that have been compiled since then to create our master list. (And what 200.149.95.121 has added would make for a good start.)

I'm posting here because I couldn't easily find a "Talk:" page where I could discuss this issue. -- llywrch 19:47 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)


Llywrch, you came to the right place. I know the author, his name is Zoltan Simon. He contacted wikiEN-l a couple of weeks ago about changes he wanted made to the Penelope article. I replied and explained how Wikipedia worked, and we engaged in a longer conversation. I convinced him to give Wikipedia a try. He says he has been editor and proofreader for the Encyclopaedia Hungarica (he wants to work on the Hungarian WP as well, which doesn't exist yet), and he has done a lot of historical research. He wants to add his own work to Wikipedia where appropriate, and I presume stuff like the list of consuls is his own.
I also explained to him that he should create a user account, but he doesn't seem to have managed to do so yet. I'm sure he will get to it eventually. I also hope he will provide citations to published articles when referencing his own research (Wikipedia is not intended for original research). --Eloquence
Well. The articles did have a definite scholarly feel to them, which truly stands out in Wikipedia: it's nice to know that it was because the articles were contributed by a scholar, and not borrowed from one. Heckuva welcome I'm providing Zoltan Simon, but maybe this will help convince him to create an account. (The articles I've seen from his IP number cover a valuable topic that is also very unappetizing to many people: how we determine dates & chronology.) -- llywrch 04:07 Nov 30, 2002 (UTC)
Thanks Eloquence for solving that one. Regarding the more general question: A list of consuls would, as far as I can see, not be possible to copyright. I remember having read about this type of case in a court case regarding a phonebook or some such. Basically, the information is not and cannot be copyrighted, only the way in which it is presented. And it is not work that is protected by copyright, but creativity. As such, the names of the senators and the information regarding them cannot be copyrighted. A certain selection or a certain order in which they appear, can, but only if this selection or order contains some creativity. A selection of all consuls by chronological order would certainly not fall under that criterion. Andre Engels 22:11 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)

Technical moving help please !!

Somebody has been moving pages from the encyclopedic namespace to the wikipedia space, the talk page was not moved with the subject page. I tried to move the discussion page from the encyclo to the wikipedia space. It was moved, and the talk page appear linked to the subject page. But when I go to the subject page, it shows an empty discussion page, and does not link to the discussion page moved. Hope I am clear...

So, what do I do to link the subject page to the talk page properly ? I can't figure it, and the only option I currently see is to copy paste all, but then history will be lost... Can somebody help me here ???

user:anthere

The equivalent of "Wikipedia talk:" namespace on fr.wiki is "Discussion Wikipédia:" -- if you put it in exactly, the move will work properly. It's a known problem/feature/bug/mysterious behavior that talk pages aren't automatically carried over when a page from one namespace to another. But there's no good reason why not; it could be changed. --Brion 13:22 Nov 27, 2002 (UTC)
ahhhh Discussion pas Discuter...yes, got it. Thanks Brion --anthere

Hey all --

It seems that my watchlist has been blanked. There's nothing there now. Has anyone else had this happen? Is it part of a general housecleaning effort? Thanks, Stormwriter

Mine is fine. I think the Watchlist only goes back a week now so if your watched pages haven't been edited in that time then a blank watch list would the the expected behavior. I'm pretty sure this limit on watchlists was done to reuduce server load. I, for example, am watching a couple thousand pages and it used to take 3-5 minutes to generate my watch list. --mav 20:01 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
I find that I get logged out of Wikipedia if I don't make any edits for a while. (Not sure how long it takes, though.) Since users who aren't logged in can do most of the same stuff that logged-in users can, my watchlist going blank is usually the sign that alerts me to the fact that this has happened. Could this be it?
By the way, why does the watchlist now only go back a week? There were things further down mine that I had there because I was eventually going to get round to doing something about them, but now I can't remember what they were. :( -- Oliver Pereira 20:15 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Hey guys -- thanks for the info. I figured it out. It seems I needed to click "Show changes for the last 7 days" in order for it to open the list. It defaults to 1 day now. Stormwriter

Oh, you can change it! That's all right, then. :) Mine seems to be set to "3 days" by default, though... -- Oliver Pereira 20:33 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Note that I'm actively working on streamlining the watchlist function to balance performance and usability, so it may change frequently over the next few hours as I put the latest goodies online. --Brion 20:40 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

thanks very much for this, Brion :-) user:anthere
I'm grateful for any changes for the better, but is there a list of "latest goodies" anywhere or does everyone have to find out by chance, luck and intuition? KF 20:57 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

I have read many a comment posted particularly by newbies saying that Wikipedia is doomed because anyone can edit a page and create or add all kind of nonsense. I don't think this is a major problem. Rather, I believe this is one of Wikipedia's assets. KF 20:47 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

I've been thinking of writing a "unblock all IPs banned more than 30 days ago" script. And running it once a week. Any takers? --Ed Poor

Well, I was just going to add an automatic timeout to the banning system; the length of ban would be set when banning (default 30 days, options to less?), and when the timeout came up, they fall off the list. Sound good? (Also, there should be a log page listing bans, manual unbans, and automatic unbans.) --Brion 21:03 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Does the "Conversion Script" have artificial intelligence?

I was browsing the "older versions" of Tragedy of the commons, when I discovered that a "Conversion script" inserted the following sentence into the article at 18:51 Feb 25, 2002:

Another commonly proposed solution is to convert the commons into private property, giving its owner an incentive to enforce its sustainability.

Is there some mundane explanation for this, or does the conversion script perhaps have AI of some kind? =)

--Ryguasu 02:34 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)

The "conversion script" entries are the munged versions of the last edit of the article on the old UseMod wiki. Any earlier entries were from _before_ that version and were imported by another script months later; so a diff from the last pre-conversion revision to the conversion will show both actual conversion changes (subpage links etc) and the last human revision if any. --Brion 03:07 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)
Does this mean that the credit to whoever did the last human revision has been dropped? Is it possible to put it back in? It seems a shame to lose the information on who made the last change. -- Oliver Pereira 20:33 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
Yes, it could be done, but it's way's down on my list at the moment. If somebody else wants to give a try at munging the script, drop me a line. --Brion 21:03 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Weirdness--I just made a brand-new article for two kinda obscure 60s bands. First, I did the 13th Floor Elevators and everything worked fine except for interminable slowness. Then, I did ? & the Mysterians and once again, everything worked fine except for slowness. Then, since I knew I had seen a few references to the Mysterians that didn't show up on "what links here", I did a search and found two alternate methods of writing the band's name, and I redirected them. Going to recent changes, I saw the two redirects but not ? & the Mysterians. 13th Floor Elevators was listed, and then the redirects a few minutes later but not the article itself (which does exist; the redirects work perfectly). Did anybody see the actual article appear on recent changes?

Explanatory text

What's the policy on articles containing explanatory text, e.g. "This article will detail how one goes about proving that all cows are green." Is it bad? Good? Uncertain? Graft

It's useful in certain articles, such as anarchism -- the explaination helps people find what they're looking for much quicker. -- Sam
I agree it's useful, but we don't always operate based on what's most useful... I am wondering more if people think (or have thought) that this violates some sort of encyclopedia etiquette, or if it munges with the "voice" of the encyclopedia in some taboo way... Graft

Question/suggestion about http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Booksources

This page only comes up when you click on an ISBN and then it goes from this page directly to a link for the ISBN you clicked on. Mega-handy, but not explained on the page. It would also be mega-handy, to me, anyway, if going to the page directly allowed going to one of the book sources and searching directly. It works on everything but the Barnes and Noble link. Ortolan88

Attributed articles now ?

What's the story on the external links in PUCCAMP, please? The images and info are great, although I don't like having pictures before any text, and it needs to be put into complete sentences, but I'm a little dubious of having a foreign-language link without mentioning that it is on the article page, and I'm a lot dubious about the link to the contributor's résumé -- since when are our articles signed? -- isis 01:30 Nov 8, 2002 (UTC)

I've removed the signature to the talk page, and mentioned that the site is in Portugeuse. --Camembert

Why keep it on the talk page? It's already on that user's user page, and we can get there from the history. Do we all get to put our links on the talk pages of articles now? Is that only for the new ones we start, or is that for ones we edit, too? Only major edits, or minor ones, too, like the ones I only put an image in? And am I restricted to linking it to my résumé, or can I link it to my entry in Who's Who in America, too? -- isis 07:15 Nov 8, 2002 (UTC)

Well look, if you want to remove it from the talk page, then do so, it won't bother me. And if you want to try adding links to the talk page of everything you edit, then try it and see what happens (my guess is they'll be removed if it's done en masse rather than just on one ocassion by a newcomer who doesn't know better). --Camembert

I wasn't going by the newbie's putting it there: I was going by User:Chris mahan's ratifying it and your keeping it on the 'talk' page, and now we have mav saying it's okay to have attributions on the 'talk' page. I am surprised at that (as you must be, given your prediction such postings would be removed), because I thought the 'talk' page was for discussions about the subject of the article and 'user' pages were for claiming credit for articles, but the only way I'm going to learn is by asking. -- isis 15:01 Nov 8, 2002 (UTC)

No, you can also "observe a lot by watching" as Yogi Berra might say (see Yogiisms). --Ed Poor
Normally, I would just remove the credit altogether rather than put it on talk (in fact I have done this a couple of times just now) - what can I say, I'm fickle. Personally, I probably wouldn't move article credits from the talk page (there are better things to be doing), but others might. I think there are some cases where we have copyright clearance to use something, and that goes on the talk page - such credits shouldn't be removed, of course. Otherwise, I don't think it's a very big deal - I can't speak for others. --Camembert

"Watch links"

I can't find "Watch links" anymore: Go to list of philosophical topics and it will talk about "Watch links", but to no avail. It's nowhere to be found. What happened? DrRetard

It's been changed to the equally dubious name of "Related changes" to avoid confusion with the "Watchlist". --Brion 18:10 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)

Places named Durham

Moved to talk:Durham

For the last few days, I've been getting lots of article titles repeated in my watchlist. The first entry is bolded; the second entry for the same article follows immediately afterwards, and is identical except that it is not bolded. Does anyone know why this is? -- Oliver PEREIRA 23:05 Dec 5, 2002 (UTC)

This is a known bug and is being worked on. --mav 23:08 Dec 5, 2002 (UTC)
AFAIK it happens when you watch both the article and the Talk page. --Eloquence
Minor version mixmatch between files, sorry. Should be fixed now. --Brion 00:47 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)

Hi, I am a newcomer (just discovered Wikipedia yesterday). I think this is a great idea. I notice that you have headings on the main page for mathematics, physics, statistics, and the like, but none for engineering. Speaking for the engineers, I think this would be extremely useful. Is engineering currently grouped with another field, and if it is, does anyone think it should merit its own heading? I did not see any contiguous body of information for engineering when I searched. If there is agreement that this is a good idea, I would be willing to make a few entries for electrical engineering...

M Raj

It's there under "Applied Arts and Sciences", between Education and Family and consumer science. --Brion

Wikipedia Implementation and performance

During the last few weeks I have been thrilled to discover Wikipedia. However, it is not perfect, and there appear to be very significant performance issues with the software/hardware.

Is there information about how WP is implemented, and is there any form of discussion going on about how to improve it?

What sort of loading does WP server out - 10 page requests/second, 100?, 1000?

Also, what proportion of the load is due to edits - it should be quite low - but maybe it's not. Is it possible to prioritise edits over searches? This would be useful, as quite often these days waiting for an edit to Load takes so long - it really is quite a nuisance.

Would performance be enhanced if WP were distributed over several servers? Is this feasible? If not, why not?

Who is looking at these issues? --User:David Martland

David--
Wikipedia is open source software. See the SourceForge page for details. See Wikipedia:Statistics for detailed access statistics.
The performance issues are discussed on the wikitech-l mailing list. The server is reasonably huge and not suffering from the load. The main problem appear to be locking issues (we use MySQL's MyISAM tables, which only support table-level locking) and unoptimized queries (some columns do not have indexes where they should have etc.). These issues are slowly being worked on by Wikipedia developers, feel free to participate. See m:How to become a Wikipedia hacker for a growing tutorial on the code. --Eloquence 12:22 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)
Regarding the number of page views per second: On Special:Statistics. In the past 4 1/2 months (since 20 July) there have been about 20,000,000 page views and 400,000 to 450,000 edits. This is equal to slightly under 2 page views per second. As we are still growing dayly, the number will be higher at the moment, put it will probably be well under 10 per second. Andre Engels 14:29 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick answers. I suppose it's possible the poor performance I get sometimes is due to network problems - besides the locking problems. Another possibility is that a mean rate of 2 queries/second still permits a much higher peak rate. It quite often takes a minute or so to have an update during editing from my locations in the UK - maybe that's the locking problem? David Martland 20:19 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)

New user here. Sorry if this has been covered before but I can't find it anywhere. I'd like to set up a user profile and so forth, but the impression I get is that during the login process passwords are sent over the Internet unencrypted. Is this true? This makes me very uncomfortable. Plain text sent over the Internet can be read by any man-in-the-middle. Are there any plans to have passwords encrypted during the login process?

In general, identity theft is not an issue that has worried us up until now. Don't use the password you give for Wikipedia for anything important! --Robert Merkel 01:15 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)
What like having a sysop account isn't important? Just think of the damage a bot using a hijacked sysop, or worse developer, account could do in a very, and I mean very, short amount of time. This really should be encrypted. Also, the vast majority of net users have a limited set of passwords that they use for almost everything. I'm certain many of our users do in fact use sensitive passwords for Wikipedia. --mav
I'll see about setting up https... --Brion 04:38 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)
You're on a roll tonight Brion. Thank you! --mav
Hmm, going through the mod_ssl docs, it seems that it won't work with our virtual server configuration. I'll see if I can work something out though. --Brion

Is there a way of opening wikipedia such that I'm already logged in? It would be nice if (for example) http://www.wikipedia.org?user=SGBailey&password=abcdef worked so I could use this as my bookmark. -- SGBailey 17:01 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

You can set this in your preferences(Special:Preferences). Mintguy 17:54 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

What's the most edited article on Wikipedia? Richard Wagner is certainly heading that way. BTW why is there no link to this page on the main page?(or am I being dumb?)

See Wikipedia:most edited article, which I just created. --Uncle Ed 00:01 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)

Hi, I am a newcomer (just discovered Wikipedia yesterday). I think this is a great idea. I notice that you have headings on the main page for mathematics, physics, statistics, and the like, but none for engineering. Speaking for the engineers, I think this would be extremely useful. Is engineering currently grouped with another field, and if it is, does anyone think it should merit its own heading? I did not see any contiguous body of information for engineering when I searched. If there is agreement that this is a good idea, I would be willing to make a few entries for electrical engineering...

M Raj

It's there under "Applied Arts and Sciences", between Education and Family and consumer science. --Brion

Is it possible to automatically include the talk page when you watch a page? This would be very handy when a page is created. There will be nothing on the talk page at that moment, but it would be nice to know what's on it when it gets created. Dhum Dhum 23:24 Dec 5, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, in fact that is what you get. Whenever you "watch" a page, any changes to that page or its talk page automatically show up on your watchlist. --Uncle Ed 23:29 Dec 5, 2002 (UTC)
It should already work this way. (watched pages are bold and their corresponding talk/regular page shows-up as unbolded text in your watchlist). --mav
I believe if you click on "watch this page" when you're looking at the talk page, it doesn't watch the subject page though. I think I remember noticing that once. Confirmation? Tokerboy 23:35 Dec 5, 2002 (UTC)
Confirmed. I believe it's a feature, though, not a bug. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:11 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)
Well, then I vote to remove that feature. Tokerboy 00:14 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)
The way it probably ought to work is that subject and talk pages are considered equivalent for the purposes of the watchlist. How exactly to handle this I'm less sure about, particularly when dealing with the nonexistence or renaming of one or the other of a pair. --Brion 00:40 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)
Do us all a favor, oh great public servant (sysop Tokerboy), and create a Wikipedia:Feature wishlist page. Then, volunteer to coordinate between the various mailing lists, source forge and that new page. You can hold votes and report results. What's stopping you? ;-) --Uncle Ed
I'm much too busy trying to smoke pot out of a toilet. (see Talk:Water pipe) Tokerboy 00:25 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)
Speaking of Source Forge, I've tried to sign up twice (so that I can put in a feature request) and it won't work. I didn't even get a response to my query as to why I couldn't sign up. --Dante Alighieri 00:27 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)
Check out the second to last line of undocumented feature. --Dante Alighieri 00:18 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)

Sourceforge is rather a pain to work with these days. We could set up our own copy of GForge, a stripped down and updated version of the original open-source Sourceforge code, or perhaps Bugzilla. Since they're all pretty and open source, we could integrate the user accounts with the wiki, which would save a lot of trouble. (If someone is interested in setting this up, please drop by Wikitech-L. I'm up to my ears in general maintenance and i18n and probably won't get to it for some time.) --Brion 00:40 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)

May I recommend BerliOS? It's a government sponsored project that offers the same services as SourceForge (plus a MySQL DB, so we might set up a demo WP). No banners, free of charge, and there's the added benefit that I currently work for them, so I can personally make sure that everything's running. Shared user accounts would be tricky, but perhaps I could import the existing user database (there may be a few duplicates). --Eloquence

Looks like a nice site, but I'd be very leery of importing the user database; I think that would violate our implied privacy policy (ie, that we won't hand out your e-mail address to third parties). --Brion 22:33 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)

I haven't been active here for a while, because grad school is way hectic, but yesterday in the shower I had what may have been a cool idea, one I wanted to share.

With Wikipedia traffic going up and up, it is becoming increasingly impossible to stay on top of the Recent Changes page. So what if there were a time-independent version of it? Specifically, what if the recentness of a change were measured not in terms of how long ago the change was made, but in terms of how many times the page has been viewed since then?

The point is that we don't want really bad changes to fall through the cracks just because nobody noticed them fly by on the Recent Changes list. But if an alternate version, say Unexamined Changes were implemented, then I could see even a week later that only two people have checked out such-and-such an edit.

Well, just a thought. I don't know what it would involve server-side.

Peace, --Fritzlein

That sounds like a great idea! --Dan
I agree. It's an interesting and potentially useful concept. --Dante Alighieri 07:46 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)
As a footnote let me add that I'm not worried about machine edits (such as the bot import of cities) being really bad edits, so I wouldn't want it to show up at the top of the list that Podunk, Wisconsin has never been viewed since the last edit. What I want to see is the number of views since the last human edit. Peace, --Fritzlein

Do us all a favor, oh great public servant (sysop Tokerboy), and create a Wikipedia:Feature wishlist page. Then, volunteer to coordinate between the various mailing lists, source forge and that new page. You can hold votes and report results. What's stopping you? ;-) --Uncle Ed

I'm much too busy trying to smoke pot out of a toilet. (see Talk:Water pipe) Tokerboy 00:25 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)
Speaking of Source Forge, I've tried to sign up twice (so that I can put in a feature request) and it won't work. I didn't even get a response to my query as to why I couldn't sign up. --Dante Alighieri 00:27 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)

Check out the second to last line of undocumented feature. --Dante Alighieri 00:18 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)

Sourceforge is rather a pain to work with these days. We could set up our own copy of GForge, a stripped down and updated version of the original open-source Sourceforge code, or perhaps Bugzilla. Since they're all pretty and open source, we could integrate the user accounts with the wiki, which would save a lot of trouble. (If someone is interested in setting this up, please drop by Wikitech-L. I'm up to my ears in general maintenance and i18n and probably won't get to it for some time.) --Brion 00:40 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)

May I recommend BerliOS? It's a government sponsored project that offers the same services as SourceForge (plus a MySQL DB, so we might set up a demo WP). No banners, free of charge, and there's the added benefit that I currently work for them, so I can personally make sure that everything's running. Shared user accounts would be tricky, but perhaps I could import the existing user database (there may be a few duplicates). --Eloquence

Looks like a nice site, but I'd be very leery of importing the user database; I think that would violate our implied privacy policy (ie, that we won't hand out your e-mail address to third parties). --Brion 22:33 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)

I think a dispute on terminology has reached a conclusion. Can someone with sysop abilities please check and delete pincer movement and move pincer maneuver back to pincer movement , so that edit history can be retain, please? TYVM Mintguy

You should be able to move the page yourself (using the "move this page" link) - the software will (or should) let you move a page to an already existing title so long as that title is only a redirect to the page you're moving from, if you see what I mean (I'm not sure I do, but it should work, anyway). --Camembert


Hey. Thanks for that. I had no idea. I thought you could only move to an empty page. I had previously seen things in the deletion log like deleted to make room for move of .... Mintguy
Yes, deletion is necessary if there's anything other than a redirect there, or if the redirect is to a page other than the one you are moving from, or if there's anything in its history. Otherwise, not. --Camembert

I've noticed once of twice large deletes have gone unnoticed for a while(particularly on talk pages), because someone has accidentally edited an earlier version of a page and not realised it. Can I suggest that it might be an idea to pop up a confirmation box if a person tries to save a page after editing a version other than the current one? Mintguy 14:13 Dec 9, 2002 (UTC)

I wouldn't like that, because it would make reverting vandalism more troublesome in some cases. There's already a message in bold type at the top of the screen if somebody tries to edit an old version - that should be enough. By the way, are you sure these deletions are as a result of people editing old versions of the page? Some browsers (Opera 5, I think) can't seem to handle pages of more than a certain length, and truncate them - maybe that's the problem. --Camembert 14:18 Dec 9, 2002 (UTC)

Anyone know if there are any article which have Ogg Vorbis sound with them? I haven't come across one yet. Mintguy

Try ones for albums by the Beatles. --KQ

Quickbar settings

As things stand we can use our "Preferences" to have the quickbar on either the left or the right, but only the left one can be floating. Floating quickbars are a great convenience when dealing with long articles, and I would really appreciate having that option available on the right. Currently, since the introduction of Wiktionary, I use the left quickbar for Wiktionary and the right quickbar for Wikipedia; it's my own dumb way of knowing where I am. Eclecticology 19:07 Dec 19, 2002 (UTC)

Talking to IPs

Apologies in advance if this has been discussed before (I couldn't find anything on it.) Would it be possible to implement a system where you could have a "Talk" page for IPs - unregistered users, like 123.45.67.8 or whatever; I know that IPs can be dynamically allocated, so you might get people "sharing" messages, but there could be some kind of timeout on them - say, 20 minutes after the last edit by that IP address, the Talk page is cleared. --taras 22:20 Dec 20th 02 (UTC)

Funny you should ask. This is being discussed right now on Wikitech-L (which is the developers mailing list). See the thread at the end called "User/Talk pages for anons". --mav

I don't know if it's just my perception or not, but deliberate acts of vandalism seem to be occurring more and more frequently. Just now one IP vandalised a few pages and another IP vandalised the Vandalism in Progress report. This makes me a bit concerned that Wikipedia could end up the victim of a concerted attack by a number of people acting in concert from different locations, and thus widely variant IP addresses. Has any thought been given to this possibility and counter-measures, other than pulling the plug? Mintguy 12:21 Dec 16, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, several counter-measures have been discussed, some implemented, although not all of them should be repeated here openly so as not to give vandals any ideas. In my opinion, what we need is a basic trust metric, a way to distinguish in Recent Changes etc. between an anonymous, unknown user and a well established Wikipedian with a good reputation. Also, being able to talk to anons would make it possible to explain to them why vandalism on Wikipedia is futile (do we have a "Why vandalism doesn't work" page we could direct these people to?).
Don't be too scared. Even large scale attacks can't do any permanent damage and could be rollbacked using a few SQL queries. If you want to do something to help, how about keeping a log of the number of vandalism cases we notice per day day, perhaps by using the data from the ViP page -- that would help us to assess if we have a growing problem. If you want to create such a page, make sure to link it from Wikipedia:Statistics.--Eloquence

Hi there! Not sure how to addreess this question but here goes... Recently posted an entry on the much-disputed notion of "African Renaissance" as it applies in my part of the world ie Southern Africa. But Maveric149 (haha BTW greetz to maveric149) saw fit to removing it on the grounds that it falls into the category "See What Wikipedia is not". My concern is this. The speech posted was an official statement of fact setting a deeply controversial policy statement in a documented place (South Africa) and time (1998). If Wikipedia is an information resource "par excellence" is this not a valuable contribution?

The official edit on recent changes reads: (diff) (hist) . . African Renaissance; 10:51 . . Maveric149 (removing speech; external link is fine; See What Wikipedia is not)

As much as I endorse the democratic decisions of the Wikipedia Militia, is there not a possibility that a Western-biased and possibly less-informed Militia-Man (see Maveric149:[as of Wednesday December 11, 2002]: NOTE to The Wikipedia Militia: I'm working 40 hours a week now and going to school full time...) may have erred. Just a little. Comment? Thank you mudthang

It is well-established around here that we are an encyclopedia and not a repository of source texts. Now if you had taken notable passages from the the speech and went on to add encyclopedic content such as background information or explanations of political nuisances, then the quoted passages would be most definitely acceptable. There is also the fact that we are a wiki, and as such we edit text to improve it. A long quoted speech is not editable since this would be changing what the person actually said. There is also our NPOV policy. A speech is inherently POV and therefore can't be the only real content in an article. There is also a copyright problem. As soon as the speech was written down it automatically gets protection under international copyright law. Fair use lets us take passages from it but taking the whole thing without permission is a possible violation of copyright. See What Wikipedia is not number 13 --mav
I can't comment on the factual basis (or otherwise) of your entry, but it is certainly possible that a single editor erred. I would suggest that you post the text again, with a request for discussion before it is removed. If the democratic decision is that it is not suitable for WikiPedia I am sure it would be most welcome on Meta WikiPedia, which allows personal articles and opinions.
Also, could you phrase it as an NPOV article about the controversy? -- Chris Q 09:30 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

I've traditionally supported the 'wikipedia is not a source text repository' rule, but it occurs to me: an external URL will be unfriendly to future offline Wikipedia readers with unreliable, expensive, or no internet connection. (Though an uploaded text file would be fine, as it could be included with physical media distributions or automatically synched with the articles that reference it.) Thoughts? --Brion 09:49 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

A revived http://ps.wikipedia.com with special neat features and integration with the encyclopedias would be a great place to start. --mav
I scribbled some musing on sources on m:Project Sourceberg. My idea was to markup texts so that they linked to relevant Wikipedia articles, then have an auto-downloading feature that would allow people to get the text and the articles it linked to. I supose the reverse could be attempted along the same lines: download an article, and automatically retrieve the texts linked in the article. -- Stephen Gilbert 20:05 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)
Great feedback Stephen Gilbert and Mav169. OK people now tell me how to post the sanitised POV or NPOV entry on a primary source space. Will look at Meta WikiPedia Keep well.

-- mud 0910 Dec 12, 2002 (GMT)

Can some clever person please sort out the silly b*lls up over pictures of Wallace - two of 'em, William and Alfred, where they were both just called "Wallace.jpg" like this: Image:Wallace.jpg ... and guess what, poor Alfred has been overwritten by Bill's memorial plaque! I would love to sort this out but have not a clue how to even start. Do please enlighten me, if you feel like it. I am sure that somewhere in an FAQ I have seen the dangers of this imprecise naming mentioned ... thanks. Nevilley 18:44 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC) oh and I'm sorry if this is the wrong file for this, just call me a stupid newbie. :)

First, never upload files with overshort names like that! Give them nice, long, descriptive names that will never be accidentally overwritten; or at least not by something completely unrelated. Second, when encountering such: you can revert an image to a previously uploaded version by clicking the 'rev' link in the image description page (click the image to get the image description page; you must be logged in for the revert link to work). Clicking on the date of a previous version let you look at the older revision; you can save it and re-upload it under another name. I've moved these two out to image:William Wallace memorial plaque.jpg and image:Alfred Russel Wallace.jpg and deleted the useless ambiguous title. --Brion 23:44 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)
aha! That's the bit I didn't understand - I thought there might have been a way within the wikipedia software to sort it out - I didn't realise you'd need to save it and upload it again. And this, btw: "First, never upload files with overshort names like that!" is preaching to the converted, (unles it's closing the stable door after the horse has bolted ... I'm having a metaphor supply crisis) insofar as I was trying to sort out the mess but was not the one who caused it! Thanks very much for the advice. Nevilley 00:02 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)
Not aimed at you, just advice for the general reader. :) --Brion 01:13 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)
Thank you so much - clealry I was being oversensitive, sorry. :) Nevilley 08:21 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

BTW, the software shouldn't let somebody upload a file with the same name as a file already on the server without obviously warning the person that they are going to overwrite the active version of a previously uploaded file. --mav

Yes, I was thinking that - of course for the c*ckup to happen it requires the user to not choose a sensible name (and/or not check that the name has not been used), but it would certainly help them to realise the oncoming booboo if it warned them. :) Nevilley 00:27 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)
I'll see if I can hack that in. The upload subsystem is dark and scary and may have monsters lurking in it... --Brion 01:13 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

I've contributed a couple of images (Baritonesax.jpg and Xiangqiboard.png). The page on the image use policy says to describe them on their description pages. How do I get to their description pages? Could someone point me to the description page of an image that's been done correctly?

Simply click on the image to get to the description page. Also, when you upload the file everything you put in the upload summary is placed into the image's description page. See Image:Great Horned Owl.USFWS-thumb.jpg for an example of what goes onto one of these pages. --mav

Eventually, we should come up with some nice format for articles about chemical compounds. Right now, I like caffeine: a picture of the 3-d structure, a picture of the chemical structure, the chemical formula and the correct name. Maybe the CAS number should be added for completeness. I know that 3-d structure images can be produced with the program rasmol. Does anyone know a nice program for producing the 2-d structure formulas? Right now, I use JChemPaint and I don't like it. AxelBoldt 03:36 Dec 17, 2002 (UTC)

One site that I like for chemical models is http://people.ouc.bc.ca/woodcock/molecule/molecule.html . It has links to Chemscape Chime at http://www.mdli.com/ and "Rasmol", but that link does not currently work. Rasmol has something to do with the University of Massachusetts, so it's likely that the link is only broken. Eclecticology

In a spanish web forum a user asked about the copyright situation of notes taken in a class. Any comments? --AN

Well, if the person doesn't feel qualified to organize the information herself and express it herself, maybe it isn't a good idea to do that particular article. The legalistic answer is that copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. It would certainly be illegal to write down the professor's words verbatim and then put them on wikipedia. There's also the issue of plagiarism, which can be addressed by properly crediting the source, but again, it just raises the question of whether the idea was appropriate in the first place. --User:Bcrowell

Anyway to control line spacing of a paragraph? -- kt2


Sure: <p style="line-height: 200%">Bla bla bla</p> Use sparingly. :) --Brion

A bit of background then a question...

There was a page 'Surrey' which was moved to 'Surrey, England'. 'Surrey' itself became a disambiguation page. It turned out that there were many links to Surrey that wanted Surrey, England, none (or VERY few wanting other Surreys).


Thus I decided to move 'Surrey' to 'Surrey, (disambiguation)' and 'Surrey, England' to 'Surrey'. All except the latter worked. The latter should have worked as at that point 'Surrey' was a redirect with no history. Why was the move rejected?

The workround was to leave 'Surrey, England' and change the 'Surrey' redirect to point to 'Surrey, England'. It works but is clunky and unclean. -- SGBailey 23:16 Dec 16, 2002 (UTC)

Because Surrey was not a redirect to the page you were trying to move over it (Surrey, England). --Brion 23:42 Dec 16, 2002 (UTC)
Maybe I'm hallucinating, but today I see that 'Surrey' is the article and 'Surrey, England' the redirect. I assume that someone did the chaneg somehow, but there is no sign in the older versions log of "Surrey". Can you explain How/Why/When etc please. -- SGBailey 16:59 Dec 17, 2002 (UTC)
I deleted Surrey and moved Surrey, England to Surrey. --mav

If another editor adds a unreferenced statement to an article I dont think is true, should it be there or should it be removed? I.e: Him: Most people think Coke tastes better than Pepsi Me: No Him: Yes Me: No

Get my point? --BL

What is the evidence? If there is some sort of market research study that says this, we should quote it. If it's just a straw poll of friends, or a general hunch, it doesn't belong here. -- Tarquin
I think that was meant to be an example rather than 'the real thing'(pun unintentional). Mintguy
LOL. Yes it was an example. A statement which I cant prove the opposite and the other editor cant prove. Who has the burden of proof? And is there any exceptions like "but everybody knows that!" for example. --BL
ah. I see. Oops. we could move this discussion to Wikipedia:Avoid blanket statements. -- Tarquin

Why did Stephen Gilbert block my address when I tried to make a minor correction to the Arthur Machen bio? The fact that The Hill of Dreams is semi-autobiographical is well known, there's no "perhaps" about it. This is hardly "vandalizing."

You apparently had the unfortunate distinction of being behind the same AOL proxy server as a blocked vandal ([3], [4]). --Brion 20:24 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)

Orphan articles doesn't seem to have a "discuss this page" option - so you get the discuss here :-)

Some of the orphan articles are disambiguation pages eg Alton (which I haven't linked to since that would unorphan it). Some are almost certainly 'alternative' spellings - probably where some original link to the wrong spelling has been corrected but the redirect from the wrong spelling remains.

I assume that Orphans are generally considered poor. Would it be sensible to do links from the talk:good-spelling-article page to bad-spelling-redirects, or even from talk:orphan-article to orphan-article to cause them to be removed from the orphan list? -- SGBailey 09:41 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)

There is a page with one purpose in life: to de-orphan disambiguation pages. See Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages. -- Stephen Gilbert 13:56 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)
Disambiguation pages should be placed on Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages - one of its functions is exactly to remove these pages from the 'orphans' page. Bad spellings should normally not appear on the orphans page because redirect pages do not (at least last time I checked). Any incorrect spelling that does occur is probably an unwanted duplicate article. Andre Engels 13:59 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)

If anyone has a view about UK counties and place names, I've added discussion of a problem to Talk:County (England) that I would love to get resolved. -- SGBailey 18:47 Dec 22, 2002 (UTC)

Moved discussion

Feature Requests, Enhancements and Suggestions

  • Time-Independent version of Recent Changes: Possibly viewed in terms of number of page views since. Alternatively, Unexamined Changes, those pages which have changed but no one has checked.
  • Consider moving from sourceforge to something such as Bugzilla or a stripped down version of the sourceforge code. Also considered moving Wikipedia to BerliOS, but it would mean moving the implied private user database to a third party.
  • Confirmation box for editing an earlier version: Disliked because it makes reverting more troublesome. There is already a bold alert which should be sufficient.
  • Add a floating quickbar on the right.
  • Add the ability to talk to non-logged in users (IPs).
  • What we need is a basic trust metric, a way to distinguish in Recent Changes etc. between an anonymous, unknown user and a well established Wikipedian with a good reputation. Also, being able to talk to anons would make it possible to explain to them why vandalism on Wikipedia is futile (w/ a "Why vandalism doesn't work" page)

While working in Wiktionary I tried to combine the IPA character (593) ɑ with the combining tilde (771) ̃ but this gives me ɑ̃ where the tilde does not go over top of the other character. What am I doing wrong? Eclecticology

Behavior of combining diacritics seems to be highly dependent on the output system. I can't get them to combine on Linux (tried Mozilla 1.0.1, 1.3 alpha and Opera 6.1), but on Win98 it works like a charm in Mozilla; the IPA character doesn't show up in IE6, but there is a tilde on top of the little box. ;) I would recommend against trying to use these unless you really have to, it's just not widely supported. --Brion 02:32 Dec 17, 2002 (UTC)
OK and thanks. I guess I'll just have to live with it, and the ugly overhanging tilde when I try to represent the French nasalized vowels. BTW the problem does not seem to be there when I don't need to use a UTF code for the underlying letter thus x̃ and ÿ̃ seem to work fine. Eclecticology 07:27 Dec 17, 2002 (UTC)

I'm a newbie in need of advice. After happily working on some articles about physics and other noncontroversial subjects, I did some editing on these articles: astrology, horoscope, and Walter Mercado (an astrologer). Now I seem to be getting into "edit wars." Any suggestions on how to handle this? I felt that the original articles were completely credulous about astrology, and lacked any pretense of a neutral point of view. The Walter Mercado article is particularly goofy; if you look at its history, it started out with an anonymous user sticking in a fluffy, adulatory fan piece. Then someone edited it to try to restore a neutal point of view. Then a user came along and changed it back, and then I edited it again. How long does this go on? -- User:Bcrowell

Well, it depends on the dispute in question. I looked at astrology and Walter Mercado. For the latter, it seems you are the only person who has edited it since November, so there's no conflict there. Generally, when two Wikipedians disagree on edits or article content, they take it to the discussion page of the article in question, which I see you've done. I usually find it helpful to stop editing until some sort of agreement is reached in discussion; this tends to keep the other party from getting defensive and avoids edit wars. The vast majority of Wikipedians are reasonable people, and agreements are often reached quickly, as longas both parties recognize that they are working on the article in good faith. Oh, and welcome to Wikipedia! We're glad to have you here. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:48 Dec 20, 2002 (UTC)
Well, it's pretty discouraging if you look at the history of how the zodiac and Walter Mercado articles have been edited. People who don't believe in astrology have repeatedly tried to introduce a neutral point of view, but over and over again the true believers have deleted their text and reverted to a completely credulous, one-sided view. -- User:Bcrowell
I think we're making some progress now, because some new people have gotten involved in working on the articles, and it's no longer just a back-and-forth between me and User:Eclecticology. Right now, I think it would be helpful if someone without an agenda could go over some of the most controversial articles such as horoscope and just edit them for style, so they don't read so much like "one person says this, and another person says this." -- User:Bcrowell
In my own defense, I know nothing about Mercado so I have said nothing there at all. User:Bcrowell can apply whatever POV material he wants, and I won't interfere with it. In the other articles he has insistead on his POV that astrology is pseudoscience should dominate all ithers, and insists on a one-sided idiosyncratic interpretation of scientific method. He fails to understand that his true believer syndrome can afflict the orthodox scientific view just as much as its opponents. There are dogmatic Points of View on both sides of that divide, and I feel quite content to revert that kind of bullshit from either side. Eclecticology 02:38 Dec 22, 2002 (UTC)

Here's another new user question: How does one indicate pronunciation in an entry. Is it acceptable/desirable to do so? I haven't find any information about this. The example I have in mind is the Arkansas River and the city of Arkansas City, Kansas. The common pronunciation of Arkansas is like AR-kan-saw, but we Kansans do things a bit differently. The river starts in Colorado with the above mentioned pronunciation, but as it crosses into Kansas, the pronunciation becomes like ar-KAN-zus. The city name is also pronounced the latter way. The river reverts to the "normal" pronunciation when it enters Oklahoma. Thanks for any advice. Zeaner 00:03 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)

Even if that's a somewhat vague answer: I think the criterion should be the relevance of the pronunciation. A Frenchman with only a basic knowledge of English asking a Londoner how to get to Beauchamp Place (near Harrods) will never be able to make himself understood, so it may be important to point that out. Also, in a bookshop it can be quite embarrassing if you have no idea how to pronounce names like Carl Hiaasen or Chuck Palahniuk. I don't know if similar misunderstandings could crop up if a tourist said AR-kan-saw instead of ar-KAN-zus. --KF 00:19 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)

How to represent pronunciation is one of those issues that keeps getting discussed but never resolved. Take a look at Talk:Language and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (under the "Pronunciation" section) for some previous discussions. In your particular case, I think your information is very interesting, so I would include it just as you have here, with a homemade pronunciation guide. If the issue of how to represent pronunciation ever gets sorted out, someone can go back and change it. If not, it communicates what you want to say perfectly well. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:38 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)

The absolute best way to represent pronunciation, of course, is to record a sound file (preferably encode as Ogg Vorbis) and upload it. --Brion

Is pronunciation of a printed proper name or words on Wiki a real issue? If you're from Oklahoma, you might pronounce "oil": all, or from New Zealand Oy-el. Dictionaries do help. Dialects vary all over the world. BF

I just wanted to thank some of the nice people who welcomed me to wikipedia and took the trouble to give me positive feedback on work I'd done on some physics articles. Thanks, maveric149 and Tarquin! I've decided to stop working on wikipedia. When I first heard about wikipedia, I was skeptical, because it seemed like there would be no way to make sure that the articles were of high quality. When I checked out the project recently, I was pleasantly surprised at the high quality of many of the physics articles I looked at, and it inspired me to start contributing. However, I then got interested in trying to restore NPOV to some of the articles like horoscope and zodiac, and what I learned from that experience has brought me back to my original impression; it's clear to me that wikipedia's social structure cannot stand up to abusive behavior by someone, like User:Eclecticology, who is determined to squelch any point of view that doesn't agree with his/her own, and wants to set up certain articles as his/her own petty fiefdom. I just don't have the energy to keep up an edit war when my text keeps on getting deleted over and over and over. It also gets old fast when I have to keep on responding to stuff by users who don't even bother to log in or sign their comments. I feel strongly that wikipedia is deeply flawed, and I no longer wish to lend my name to the project. Is there a way to delete my account? --User:Bcrowell

Hi! Sorry to hear that you think Wikipedia is doomed. It's easy to get that impression after your first edit war ;-). Eclecticology indeed tends to violate NPOV when writing about his pet subjects, parapsychology, astrology etc. However, I've found it possible to work with him on improving these articles. I followed the early discussions on the Horoscope article and I think there's another side to this story, too: When we correct NPOV violations, we often make the mistake to use phrases like "foo point out that ..", "xy explains ..". These phrases themselves can be seen as non-NPOV, as they imply a certain agreement by Wikipedia. The original author then often sees this as non-NPOV and deletes the changes, and eventually, an edit war results.
It's better to use the following procedure:
  1. Inquire politely on the article's Talk pages about aspects of the article you consider non-NPOV (unless they are really egregious), and suggest replacements.
  2. If no reply comes, make the substitutions. (use your watchlist to keep track of what you want to do)
  3. If a reply comes, try to agree about the different phrases you want to use.
That way, when an agreement is reached, an edit war is very unlikely. The disadvantage is that the article stays in an unsatisfying state for a longer period of time, but an article that changes every 5 seconds hardly leaves a better impression with other Wikipedians.
Now there are cases where this strategy doesn't work. There are users who simply cannot and do not want to write NPOV articles, users who want to delete relevant information, users who are notoriously anti-social etc. I think this is the type of users we don't really want on Wikipedia, and we have banned three (Lir, 24, Helga) of them. But in my experience, while many Wikipedians tend to write slightly POV articles about subjects that are near and dear to their hearts, most of them can be worked with.
I don't know if you would consider the result of such a process satisfying -- after all, we would then present in great detail the views of, say, astrologers (including their pseudoscientific studies on how star signs correlate with certain behavioral traits -- yes, these studies actually exist) together with the replies of skeptics, instead of just saying "this is bogus". I'm not sure if traditional encyclopedias are really any better -- they are often very biased one way or another, and ignore relevant facts.
I think you should give it another try. If you want me to, I'll try to help in cases of conflicts -- I'm a secular humanist, so my stance on these subjects should be easy to deduce, but I do try to write articles that respect NPOV and that are not biased towards by own views. Leave me a note on my Talk page in case you're interested.
Other than that, we can delete your account (email Jimbo, he will then probably forward the request to Brion ;-), but it would be harder to remove your contributions -- if you want that, you should revert the articles you worked on yourself (be careful not to break later edits). But I'd hate to see that happen. -Eloquence
Yes, please stay. If you don't like to get in edit wars then simply stick to less controversial subjects - like physics. Wikipedia articles on controversial subjects do tend go through periods where they are POV dross but our general science, math and most of our biography sections are great. Even though POV zealots camp on on some articles in the short term, Wikipedia is self-healing in the long term (as Eloquence states we have had to ban these type of people before and will do so again in the future) - please stick with it. :) --mav
Alas, the cranks win once again :( Sorry to see you go, BCrowell -- if you decide to come back in a while, remember that Wiki operates in an eternal now (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiNow). There's plenty of time to fix articles. I've only vaguely followed this recent astrology edit was -- I'll take a look at those articles when I next have time. crackpots beware. -- Tarquin 11:44 Dec 22, 2002 (UTC)

How to Solve an Edit War (Needs to be moved)

When we correct NPOV violations, we often make the mistake to use phrases like "foo point out that ..", "xy explains ..". These phrases themselves can be seen as non-NPOV, as they imply a certain agreement by Wikipedia. The original author then often sees this as non-NPOV and deletes the changes, and eventually, an edit war results. It's better to use the following procedure:
  1. Inquire politely on the article's Talk pages about aspects of the article you consider non-NPOV (unless they are really egregious), and suggest replacements.
  2. If no reply comes, make the substitutions. (use your watchlist to keep track of what you want to do)
  3. If a reply comes, try to agree about the different phrases you want to use.
That way, when an agreement is reached, an edit war is very unlikely. The disadvantage is that the article stays in an unsatisfying state for a longer period of time, but an article that changes every 5 seconds hardly leaves a better impression with other Wikipedians.
Now there are cases where this strategy doesn't work. There are users who simply cannot and do not want to write NPOV articles, users who want to delete relevant information, users who are notoriously anti-social etc. I think this is the type of users we don't really want on Wikipedia, and we have banned three (Lir, 24, Helga) of them. But in my experience, while many Wikipedians tend to write slightly POV articles about subjects that are near and dear to their hearts, most of them can be worked with.
I don't know if you would consider the result of such a process satisfying -- after all, we would then present in great detail the views of, say, astrologers (including their pseudoscientific studies on how star signs correlate with certain behavioral traits -- yes, these studies actually exist) together with the replies of skeptics, instead of just saying "this is bogus". I'm not sure if traditional encyclopedias are really any better -- they are often very biased one way or another, and ignore relevant facts.
move & refactor to Wikipedia:Staying cool when the editing gets hot, maybe? -- Tarquin 11:14 Dec 24, 2002 (UTC)

Ideal length of an article

Has there been some discussion about the ideal length of an article? or a "maximum" length over which is better to split it in smaller pieces? --AN 11:42 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

I did raise this point a while back in response to the proliferation of separate stub articles for each of the separate characters in Milne's Winnie the Pooh books. It strikes me as very inconvenient for the reader to be chasing stubs that don't say very much. The mass of stub articles concerning The Fountainhead are probably the worst offenders.
Articles seem to have clearly diminished technical performance when they exceed 32K in length. My rule of thumb: >30K must be divided; 20K-30K probably should be divided; 10K-20K consider dividing if the subject conveniently warrants; <10K don't bother. Size is only one factor; a 30K article with no likelihood for increased size is probably fine the way it is. In "Tree of life" articles size is secondary to the structures imposed by taxonomic hierarchies. Eclecticology
Don't forget tables! For example the empty elements template weighs in at 6K+ and after I'm done with an element the article is usually in excess of 10K. So about 5K of text is HTML and shouldn't really be counted. I therefore trim and spin-off text to keep the articles at less than 15K. IMO anything above 10K of actual readable text is probably getting into the realm of diminishing returns for most subjects. --mav
Move & refactor to Wikipedia:Editing FAQ, probably. -- Tarquin

Merry Christmas one an all. Mintguy

Why are the Background of some pages Light Yello and others White? 

User:Phoe6

Another one on searches: Try searcging for the four colour theorem: The following are rejected by SQL:

  • "four color ( theory or theorem )"
  • "( theory or theorem ) four color"
  • "( theory or theorem ) and four and color"

yet the follwoing work:

  • "( theory or theorem ) four and color"

Why? -- SGBailey 22:37 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Why are the Background of some pages Light Yellow and others White? 

User:Phoe6
Encyclopedia article pages have white backgrounds, while dynamically generated 'special' pages, talk pages, user pages, and about-wikipedia pages have yellow backgrounds. This is intended as a visual cue that you're not in the encyclopedia per se. --Brion

Merry Christmas one an all. Mintguy

God bless us, every one! User:Tiny Tim

Moved discussion

How to add an other language link? Marc Girod

See Wikipedia:Interlanguage links. --Brion

Self links are listed on the maintenance page as if they were a Bad Thing which generally I guess they are. The relevant maintenance page simply says: The following pages contain a link to themselves, which they should not. However a number of pages contain deliberate self-links, for example List of group theory topics and List of musical topics. In these cases an author has left a note (on the page itself in the case of the former, and on the latter's Talk page) asking that the self-link not be removed, as it is needed to help with page or topic maintenance.

I feel that the current situation is a bit messy in that someone wanting to help by tidying up can accidentally thwart the plans of people who are trying to maintain a page or topic area. This happened just now at List of musical topics. Could we please have a clear policy on this? I would have thought it either needs to be that self-links are just not allowed, in which case maybe a clearer note on the maintenance page could clarify this (plus maybe something in the style manual etc somewhere??) or, if they are allowed (where they are a deliberate action of page maintainers and not just a mistake), this should be made clear on the maintenance page, in the same way that the spelling page tried to make it clear that not every apparent misspelling needs to be corrected - that there are in effect false positives too. Maybe there could even be a standard statement that people woudl be encouraged to use in that case - the List of group theory topics has a nice clear statement: Since the page is a maintenance page, the interested parties also want to know when changes are made to this list as well; so please do not remove the self-link.

Apologies if all this has already been covered 93 times in here or in an FAQ or something. Thanks, Nevilley 11:50 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Normally a self-link is unconvenient for the user: a link promises related info, but all you get is the same again. However, I understand that it can be useful in connection with the use of Related changes (no need to check the history of the page itself additionally) and then the statement above is a good solution, especially because the self-link occurs in this statement itself only. It is clearer than in List of musical topics. - Patrick 12:23 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

A clear short version of the statement, best put at the end of the article, is also:

This [[...|self-link]] is for technical reasons (use of Related changes), please do not remove.

Patrick 12:58 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be better to change "Related Changes" so that it includes changes of the current page (and maybe also pages that link to the current page)? -Martin
Yes, I think that would be better. Patrick 13:26 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

I'm the guy who removed the self link on list of musical topics. I see why they wanted it now, and I very much agree that Related Changes should include changes made to the current page. Maybe if for some crazy reason people didn't like this, it could be an option in their preferences so that related changes doesn't include the current page. Then, surely we could just automatically strip out self links, as they would then be rendered completely useless, and there would be no possibility of a false positive. Just an idea for the automatically stripping out self-links, there may be some reason against it, but I definitely think related changes should include the current page Smelialichu 17:28 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Who's setting up the Hebrew Wiki and do they need help?

How does one go about finding them and what can one do to help once he does :-) aarrrggghhh

Try talking to User:Brion VIBBER. He's the point man when it comes to setting up the non-English wikis. -- Stephen Gilbert 17:48 Dec 24, 2002 (UTC)

See Talk:London (disambiguation) for question about data in disambiguation pages. -- SGBailey 10:59 Dec 24, 2002 (UTC)

On the decline of the quality of writing in Wikipedia

Is it just my imagination or is the general standard of this project turning into a Drexleresque grey goo scenario? Notwithstanding the contributions of non-native English speakers who have a more than valid excuse for a certain amount of lexical and grammatical inexactitude, the standard of writing seems to have dropped as dramatically as a barometer in the eye of a hurricane. Previously I and a few others who care not only about content but about mode of expression were able to keep on top of the orcish hordes with their horrible tautologies, oxymorons, grocer's apostrophes, split infinitives, inability to distinguish between there and their, etcetera, etcetera.

I can only stomach editing so much of this admittedly well-researched but ineffably poorly written nonsense a day. user:sjc (23/12/02 04:36)

I believe it should be grocers' apostrophes instead of grocer's apostrophes. :-)
One grocer's apostrophe is a grocer's apostrophe too far in my book... user:sjc
I sympathize with your plight Unfortunately, I don't think this battle is winable. Eclecticology 06:56 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
I've not noticed an increase in "it's" & the like. I'm more concerned with POV stuff, crank theories, articles for minor porn stars, fetishes and every single word in LOTR. -- Tarquin 11:28 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
What's wrong about every single word in LOTR? :) Talking about fetishes and LOTR is a redundancy :):)--AN
What's LOTR? Wikipedians quickly learn what the initials "POV" stand for, but apart from that, a common criticism of the presentation in articles is the introduction of undefined or unexplained abbreviations and acronyms. Eclecticology
LOTR is the Sad Person's Book also known as The Lord of the Rings. An all too common acronym for a deeply regrettable pile of piffle. user:sjc

Another one on searches: Try searching for the four colour theorem: The following are rejected by SQL:

  • "four color ( theory or theorem )"
  • "( theory or theorem ) four color"
  • "( theory or theorem ) and four and color"

yet the follwoing work:

  • "( theory or theorem ) four and color"

Why? -- SGBailey 22:37 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

SQL requires each boolean word (and, or, (), not) separated by words being searched (non-boolean words). The format is boolean your words boolean your words boolean ....
ALL your first 3 failed searches didn't meet the criteria:
  • "four a boolean here color ( theory or theorem )"
  • "( theory or theorem ) four a boolean here color"
  • "( theory or theorem ) another word here and four and color"

Can the search engine developers confirm this? And for SGBailey, Try Wikipedia:Searching -- kt2

Short answer: the boolean magic in our search engine is very fragile; one of these days we're going to throw it out and replace it (possibly by upgrading to MySQL 4.0, which has built-in boolean magic in its fulltext search). Until then, boolean searching is more of an art than a science.
In this particular case, the "four" is causing trouble, as it's in MySQL's "stopword" list: it's one of a number of common words that it assumes won't bring useful search results, so they aren't indexed. The way our fragile search works does separate matches on each word and then ands/ors them together; searching a stopword thus gives _no_ results for that word's match, and for the 'and' common case gives a non-intuitive total result (ie, nothing!). So, we silently strip stopwords from your query before parsing it: thus "four color ( theory or theorem )" becomes "color (theory or theorem)". Note that 'and's are implicitly added most of the time, but parentheses muck up the works: search explicitly for "color and (theory or theorem)" and you'll get your man. --Brion 08:21 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)

In order to make searching work reasonably, we have to be aware of American / British spelling differences. For example, if you search for "electronic colour code", you fail to find the article electronic color code, which was presumably originally written by a USAite. As the text is written, there is no conventient way to slip the word "colour" into the body of the text so that it gets found in a search.

I've tried adding text in html comments <!-- electronic colour code --> which seem to work as comments if on a line by themselves. but not if embedded mid paragraph. Search doesn't find them. Is there a way of adding "keywords" for searching to an article? Is there a way (like misspelling) of automatically making a search for either color or for colour actually search for "(color or colour)"? -- SGBailey 22:26 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Just make a redirect (as I just did) and mention the alternate spelling on the first line. Then searches will work. --mav
What you actually appear to have done is to create a new article electronic colour code which is a redirect to the US spelling and then have linked to the redirect from Talk:electronic color code to prevent it being an orphan. -- Fine. Which FAQ should this tit-bit of information go in? (I'm happy to put it there. -- SGBailey 22:57 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ (do a find on "American"). This FAQ does need help. Your other questions will have to be answered by a developer. --mav

What do we do for "significant" search keywords which are not in the article name? As an *example* if there was an articel 'Famous actors', we might have text "theater" in the article but want "theatre" to also work in searches. -- SGBailey 22:57 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Moved discussion

How do I figure out how big an article is? See, the advice on when an article should be split is in term of megabytes (I meant kilobytes, obviously), so I'd like to be able to check so that I'm not leaving articles too long and too stubby. In particular I don't know how many pages are needed for info being written on knot theory. Bagpuss 14:45 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)

Search results give the size, for example Knot theory (3220 bytes). - Patrick 15:02 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)
Ah. Thanks.

The preference that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not some sort of neural net was made observable in Talk:Autodidact. While it may not have been expressed concretely anywhere else, We may wish to express Ourselves not to the detriment of Others. Might We please have license at least to converse about what may become some sort of encyclopedia and some sort of neural network (by whichever name); such as perhaps the Wikibriq in WikiProject Encyclopedic Network concept? Anyone who recognizes this wish as their own, please instruct Us as well.

Thank you very much. Frank W ~@) R, Jan. 7th, 19:27 (PST).

Fwappler, please don't add nonsense to articles -- I've just removed "Wikibriq" from concept as I have no idea what it is. I don't think I can explain to you what I meant by Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not some sort of neural net, short of more examples such as your desire to clarify in the article Education that "baby" does not mean "bush baby". I am forced to conclude that either your manner of thinking is often incompatible with what we are trying to do here, or that you are deliberately antagonizing people here. -- Tarquin 11:46 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)

Tarquin, I think I cannot yet use the encyclopedia We're working on in order to explain (to You, as well as anyone else) that, yes, of course: should We not want that the articles come out structurally unambiguous concerning just what is conceptually same, or not same?

As for: your manner of thinking is often incompatible with what we are trying to do here

Well, admittedly, I'm not primarily interested in Wikipedia for its ever so extensive List of dog breeds, for instance; but in the Encyclopedia as one inspiring whole. I was under the impression that the marvellous framework available so far (except: I ... strongly dislike that editor!) should Us to coexist Here. Perhaps it might be useful to have a more direct reference to WikiProjects ... took me only a week to stumble upon that concept ...


Best regards, Frank W ~@) R, Jan 8th, 6:41 (PST).

Wikipedia is not the place for original research, including words you yourself created. Thank you very much. KQ 14:50 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)

As for: Wikipedia is not the place for original research.

Once again, it might perhaps be useful to have this (statement) researched. Some Wikipedians might not prefer Wikipedia to be a place to the exclusion of original research in the field of Lexicography.

As for: Thank you very much.

Thank You, just the same. At least We may gather Your preference ...

Regards, Frank W ~@) R, Jan 8th, 7:08 (PST).


Yes. And You Shall Know Our Velocity -- Tarquin

How is wikipedia backed up? Is it possible that one fire or asteroid or earthquake or tornado or flood or hurricane or volcano or emp shockwave could destroy all this data? Vera Cruz

Database dumps are made periodically; off-site storage is do-it-yourself. --Brion 02:53 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)

I think I'm a victim of accidental protection... User:Mswake is a protected page for some reason. Mswake 12:05 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

Unprotected. --Brion 12:10 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

What is this? It appears immediately when I click on my watchlist:

Parse error: parse error in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/Skin.php on line 403

Fatal error: Undefined class name 'skin' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/User.php on line 305

KF 11:14 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

I'm getting exactly the same thing. -Martin
Did you clear your cache, alt+reload, etc? --Brion 19:51 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)
I was just going to when suddenly everything was all right again. Thanks a lot for your advice. KF 20:05 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

Why is User Talk:Gabbe a protected page? KF 12:51 Jan 6, 2003 (UTC)

I just unprotected it. I really don't see why somebody would protect that page. It must have been a mistake - the "Protect this page" link is right below "Watch the page" for standard-skin admin accounts. Because of this, I accidentally protect at least one page a week just to unprotected it the next second. Some other Admin must have done this and didn't notice that they protected the page instead of watched it. --mav

Contacting IP users

We NEED a way to do this, otehr than banning:

Deleting "Graham GREENE": Hello! 195.3.113.85! I have no means to contxt you except to ban you (which I'm not doing). Don't create a second article for the same subject,. You will have to MERGE your new text into what is already here.

I don't want to ban this person, as they seem to be TRYING to be helpful. But they are forcing me to follow them around cleaning up, and there's no telling how long they're going to need watching. Moreover, they may see my cleanup & merely think that they are unwated here -- which is NTO the case.

I suggest (again...) that text on a "User talk:xx.x..x..x" type page be displayed above every edit box that user sees. Yes, I know this may catch several users who use the same IP ... -- Tarquin 18:15 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)

Improving on the idea:
if the IP-usertalk page has content, display the following text above all edit boxes that IP sees:
There is a message waiting at {page link} for your IP number. Because several users may share one IP, this may not be addressed to you, nonethelless, you are requested to go and read it (or something simiular)

This has already been discussed on wikitech. The correct solution is to change the talk page change indicator from the asterisk to something more meaningful ("You have new messages"), and to allow talk pages for anons. I'll implement this as soon as I find the time. --Eloquence

I don't think they will see that, because they won't be looking for it. Between the edit box and the save button might be better. -- t
"You have new messages" in dark red? Believe me, they will see it. --Eloquence

Question/suggestion: It's a good idea to turn off resource-gobbling things like generation of the lists of orphans and short files when wiki is busy. But would it be possible to convert the last-generated pages each day into static pages so that people could still work on deorphanization and destubbification during the day? Maybe have a note in red at the top that the list may be up to xx hours out of date. -- Marj 22:21 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)

That sounds like a great idea. --mav
Better yet, a lot of that stuff could be incrementally adjusted; rather then checking the entire database for orphans, we can keep a summary table and on each page save/delete/rename we recheck just the pages affected. Loading the list from the summary table will be nice and fast. (This is roughly how we do the total article count.) --Brion 22:46 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)

After clicking on "block", the page with confirm button has a typo that irks me.

This should be done only only to prevent valndalism

Just wanted to let the people who have the power to fix it know. Tokerboy

Done; no more nasty valndals. --Brion

Hello, all. Can anyone tell me why I haven't got the option to move pages (as opposed to doing a cut and paste)? It's not because I'm not logged in, because I am. They tell me this option should be on the "sidebar", but I don't have one of those. Deb

Go to Special:Specialpages and set it up in your preferences. Mintguy
It should also be at the bottom of every movable page, just above the search box. --Camembert
It is not. It would be better, then we do not have to have the side bar if we don't want it. Patrick 13:46 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)
Ah! - I've worked it out - it's only at the bottom of each page for admins (next to "Delete this page" and "Protect this page"). Apologies, I thought it was there for everybody. I suspect this is a leftover from the days when only admins could move pages. I agree, it should certainly be at the bottom of the page as well as on the quickbar for all. Hopefully a friendly developer will make it so. --Camembert

Thank you kindly for all the advice. The only way I could get the sidebar, in the end, was to change skins. I had changed to "Nostalgia" a few months ago because it was the only one that wasn't giving me a problem with viewing images. But that seems to have been cured now. Maybe the software's been subtly changed. (Or maybe it's because I've changed PCs in the meantime.) --Deb

Suggestions:

  • Add several java chatrooms or the like
  • Modify the minor/major edit system so that it records bytes modified and users can choose to look at or exclude size ranges
  • Allow one clicking on diff on recent changes to see the diff between that version of the article and the previous version, rather than between the cur version and the second most cur version

That's about it. Vera Cruz

bytecounting edits is no good -- a single "not" can make a huge difference to POV .... -- Tarquin 14:06 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)

By that argument Tarquin, minor/major edit markers are no good either. We should get rid of them since they don't tell us whether somebody added a not or not. Vera Cruz

1) Java is evil, and should never be used for anything. We already have an IRC channel, talk pages, and more-or-less general forums like this, what's wrong with that? 2) Byte counting edits is not very useful for the reason tarquin gives - a single "not" can be a very major edit, but a thousand spelling corrections can be very minor. Voluntary marking of minor/major edits is useful so long as people are honest with it. That means not marking major changes as minor (a minor edit, by the way, is one that nobody could possibly find interesting - a spelling correction, simple formatting fixes, some user page edits, that sort of thing). On the whole, the system works, but there are some users (ahem) who don't use it properly. 3) I agree with you about changing the way diff works from recent changes. You could become a developer and write the code yourself if you like. --Camembert 15:36 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)

What is wrong with Java? Nobody is ever in the IRC room that I see, because it is a different place than wikipedia, and the talk pages are not sufficient for discussion, which is why we are having so many problems. We need to be able to communicate a little more effectively. Yes, a single not can be a very major edit, and a thousand corrections can be minor. But people are complaining about the major/minor system and suggesting that a computer decide that a major edit is anything greater than 4 bytes, so I think my suggestion is a little bitter, dont you? Vera Cruz 15:41 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)

As for developing code, I doubt that is needed to make the abovenoted change to recent changes. Is it not more difficult to update each and every link on recent changes whenever a page is updated? My way simply inolves a lone html link, it doesnt require a developer, it requires simply the decision to do it. Vera Cruz

Well, I guess my dislike of Java is a personal thing (it used to sieze up my old computer), but I also think that given the other forums we have for disucssion, it's not something developers ought to be too worried about implementing. I don't see anything wrong with the talk pages, and as well as the IRC channel there is Meta Wikipedia and the mailing lists. All of these seem better than chatrooms to me, because they don't need people to be in the same place at the same time. Additionally, not everybody can use Java, so some users would be excluded from discussions that went on there. And I'm afraid you've not convinced me that byte counting is better than trusting users to be honest about marking minor edits. I suppose getting a computer to check all edits marked as minor, and mark them as major if more than, say, 100 bytes have changed, that might be useful, but even very large edits can be minor (reverting from vandalistic article deletion, for example). Others may disagree with me here, of course. Coding I don't know about, but it seems clear that somebody would have to change something somewhere in the code before any change becomes apparent to users. --Camembert

It's a very simple change Im sure. You could probably do it. As for chat rooms, I assure you that those are the best way to solve edit wars, people need to be able to talk to each other, instead of writing emails back and forth, which is what we are basically doing right now.

Furthermore, Im not stating that we should get rid of major and minor edits, Im simply saying that there should be another way of sorting them, what u think of the importance of your changes means little to me, the amount of data u modified does mean something. You dont have to use the feature, but Id like to use it, and Im sure somebody else will want to as well.

Also this provides a npov way of determing an articles modifications. If I think you are a fine editor, I dont even look at what u change, so minor/major, what's the difference? However, if I could see that u made 10,000 GB of changes, well then I just might be curious what u are doing.

Vera Cruz


But it really doesn't provide a neutral way of determining article modifications (as you put it), because, as already stated, small edits can be major and large edits minor. If the changes to major/minor are to be an alternative rather than a replacement, well, that might be OK I suppose, but I'll stick with the present system, thankyou. I still don't think chatrooms are better than what we have now for the reasons I've already stated (the idea of automatically excluding people based on them not being able to use Java is alone enough to switch me off the idea). By the way, discussions about these things would normally take place on the Wikipedia:Mailing lists (and indeed there is a disucssion on these subjects as this very moment), so you might want to join up and join in there. --Camembert

Obscene user names

I see that with the advent of Cumguzzler we are probably in for a rerun of the TMC nonsense. Is there clear policy on this? There should be. It should be that obscene user names are not allowed and that accounts using them will be deleted. This should be made clear when people are signing up for accounts. Cumguzzler should be deleted immediately. Iam sorry to sound both angry and prescriptive about this but I think we have been through this debate before and we are, or should be, too busy building an encyclopedia to mess around with the feeble arguments about civil liberties which will now undountedly ensue. The funny thing is that when discussing this, some people are always very hot on the freedoms of those who want to offend, and rather less concerned about the freedoms of those who might be offended. I don't want to bring up Isis and TMC again (well, OK, I just did), but you have to ask yourself, what's it worth? 138.37.188.109 09:02 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

Yes there is a policy on this: No offensive user names. I'll forward your complaint to the Wikipedia mailing list. You are right in that this needs to be made clear when people sign-up. --mav
Thanks! Oh and (trivially but hey) btw try setting up a new account with an existing name. The error message in red needs a space between "Choose" and "A" in "please choosea different name" (or whatever the exact wording is.). Thanks again, Anonymous disgruntled user :)
Message sent - including the last part about the bug. --mav
Thank you - ADG :)

_______________________________

Seems that the banned 142.177.97.215 had a partner in crime. Maybe 24.42.43.3 rings a bell. He wrote through my userpage. I'm going to go through every contribution in their histories to rectify every single thing they mukked with. Two16 will then get back to writing encyclopedias.

Please only remove vandalism and nonsense. --mav

Pronunciation Guides

Is there a standard format for explaining pronunciation of a word? It occured to me that an international audience might need help with the word Ngaio in an entry I just wrote for Ngaio Marsh. Dramatic 03:23 Dec 30, 2002 (UTC)

See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump/December_2002_archive for a short discussion on this subject between Zeaner, Stephen Gilbert and myself. I don't think a final word has been said yet. --KF 03:29 Dec 30, 2002 (UTC)
SAMPA or IPA. It seems we can use IPA characters, but I don't know if they show on all browsers. SAMPA is a safe bet. -- Tarquin

On the watchlist, for every edited page that I watch I get only the last edit, with the indication whether this last edit was minor or not. I can not see whether there have also been non-minor changes recently, except by checking the history of the article. It would be better if I could set my preferences to ignore minor edits, for the purpose of the watchlist, just like for Recent Changes. - Patrick 00:36 Dec 29, 2002 (UTC)

I don't believe in minor edits. If you want to be sure you know what's been done to the article, check the history. --Brion 04:47 Dec 30, 2002 (UTC)
Wikipedia serves us very well regarding minor edits. We can turn off listing of minor edits for Recent Changes, which spares us seeing lots of spelling changes, link fixing, and so forth. In the Watchlist, we are given all the tools we need to watch the articles we are interested in. The most recent change, major or minor, appears in the text part of the list. If there has been a major change and then a minor, you will see only the minor, but right next to the listing you have the opportunity to click on "diff" to see what is different from the last edit, which should tell you something, and also "hist" which tells you all the changes recorded for the article. This is the maximum amount of information available for all articles you have chosen for your watchlist, and also a more bearable summary for all other articles in Recent Changes, which also lists all your watched articles, including their talk pages, in bold. All in all, the watchlist and the way it is handled and presented is one of the best worked out and most useful and user-friendly features of the Wikipedia interface. And, as Brion said, someone who will delete your fine article on turnbuckles and replace it with ranting about his girlfriend will not be afraid to mark his changes MINOR in hopes of avoiding detection. The way the watchlist is set up makes it almost impossible for that to happen to a watched article, if you check. And, if you don't check, then you're not really watching the article. Ortolan88 05:20 Dec 30, 2002 (UTC)
Diff has a function on the Recent Changes list (and on history lists, where it is labeled 'last'), but hardly on the watchlist, because only the last change is in the watchlist and diff refers to that one only. If one is interested in major changes only, of the articles one watches, it may be better to use Recent Changes (without minor edits) instead of the watchlist, unless one watches relatively few articles, then the watchlist is more convenient. - Patrick 10:04 Dec 30, 2002 (UTC)

the pipe trick

I propose a second kind of pipe trick (if you don't know the first, see the FAQ or the Editing help page) --

[[namespace|:pagename]] produces [[namespace|pagename|pagename]]

when "namespace" is one of the namespaces such as Wikipedia -- Tarquin 20:15 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

isn't that covered with the pipetrick [[namespace:pagename|]]? Koyaanis Qatsi
...one visit to the sandbox later... egad! so it is! It's not mentioedn int hte ocumentation though -- Tarquin 20:28 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)
I didn't even remember it until your post above. Where should it go in the documentation? Koyaanis Qatsi

Todo lists

How do you all feel about me rearranging all the "to do" lists we have? I was thinking somehting like the following -- Tarquin 14:06 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)

  • Articles in need of attention (parent page)
    • Votes for Deletion
    • Copyright infringement (split from VfD -- because we give these longer grace than nonsense entries, and VfD is getting too long to handle)
    • articles in need of NPOVing
    • factual questions (where someone with knowledge of the subject is needed)
    • copyediting / rewrites for clarity (ie work that someone can do with no knowledge of the subject other than what they read in the article itself)
    • duplicate articles
    • renaming (where people request opinions on a suggested rename)
    • Find or fix a stub (of course...)
    • Requested Articles
    • & maybe others
Sounds like a good idea to me. Good luck. --Camembert 15:36 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)
Yep, that looks pretty good. -- Sam 17:52 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)
Any further opinions before I go ahead? -- t
How does "factual questions" relate to Wikipedia:Help Desk? Do we really need so many different lists? It's hard to keep an eye on all of them. Perhaps copyediting/clarity/duplicate/rename could be merged -- these are all "assistant" type tasks in that they do not usually require in depth knowledge. factual questions/fix a stub/requested articles on the other hand require deeper knowledge.
the rename thing could just be at wikipedia talk:naming conventions Martin
I also think the "Votes on Deletion" page could stay one page (i.e. no split up) if we change the rules to move deleted articles to a separate page immediately. The only reason we don't do this is that we don't want people to be "confused", but if we put a clear explanation on top -- "if you are missing an article from this list, see .." -- this should not be necessary. --Eloquence 21:19 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)
IMO VfD is too long to work with. It also runs at two speeds -- copyright violations are given a weeks' grace or more; but nonsense articles get deleted sooner. -- Tarquin 17:53 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

Not so much a question as a comment that I couldn't figure out where else to make - has anyone else noticed that the top bar on the page is totally fouled up and overlapping the wikipedia logo? It seems to be okay on metapages, but not in the main namespace. KJ 10:04 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

What browser, what operating system, what version? --Brion 19:01 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
sorry! I'm using Netscape 4.77. This wasn't happening before the other day - someone's apparantly changed the display. The dropdown bar appears beneath the other links, and the wikipedia logo is sitting right over the top of the 'main page' link if that makes sense. KJ 00:43 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

Can anybody help me with center on a image. Can get it right and left, but not in the middle. Tryed the FAQ, but couldn't find any explanation there. I have tried putting the picture into a tabel, but no luck there. Tried also to find a allready centered picture, but no luck there.

Thanks in advance BrianHansen. (Danish wikipedia).

I think "

Centered image.

" should work, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone made a supposedly better way in the latest version of HTML. --Ellmist Sunday, January 19th, 02003

I'd like to find a place to discuss the pro-ultra-liberal stance of the Economy section of each country pages, I'd rather discuss first than do a quite inpolite IMHO massive edit (I'm new here :). Either there's a liberal government in place and all is well in the best possible world eg:Spain, or


the government is not liberal and it's horrible eg:France. Obvious problem The Unemployment rate evolution is not in accordance with the article "predictions". I checked and it's general for all countries. According to the charter, I would suggest to discuss this in the general Economy section instead of polluting each country page with an obviously biased paragraph. Any suggestion? Thanks in advance. -- Guerby 22:02 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

Glad to see someone new has an interest in the economy pages -- many of them are somewhat outdated -- we need more resident economists! So what exactly do you think needs doing? Obviously, much of the factual information needs updating, employment figures, etc, and we can account for predictions on these, and note that they were wrong where this is the case... But we need to be more careful in suggesting or implying reasons, because we want to write from the neutral point of view (if you haven't read about that, best to do so now!). --Sam 22:20 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
Yes I read it and this was my inspiration, here is the quote "2. An encyclopedia article should not argue that laissez-faire capitalism is the best social system. (I happen to believe this, by the way.) It should instead present the arguments of the advocates of that point of view, and the arguments of the people who disagree with that point of view. ". Time to apply this one :). For data, the OCDE provides a lot of it on its web site (and in france the INSEE with quite encyclopedic content :) -- Guerby 22:31 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
The sections are usually taken from the CIA factbook, so, while the data is probably correct, the implications may be from the point of view of that agency.--AN 22:24 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
I'm not talking to the factbook page (which is quite neutral) but of the little Economy paragraph in each country page. My proposed action would be to just suppress the biased sentences. -- Guerby 22:31 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
That should definately always be done, by default. So yeah. Go ahead! Be bold! That is actually the best advice we can give right now: just go ahead and make the changes; if someone disagrees, they will tell you. But removing bias is something few will disagree with -- if they do, it's only because they don't think it's bias.
Just do it TM. -- Sam
Don't forget to also take a look at the larger "Economy of..." page. The 'little paragraph' is just a part taken from that page, there will probably be more pro-capitalist/anti-socialist statements there. To show people what Guerby means, the French page now says "France has shied away from cutting exceptionally generous social welfare benefits or the enormous state bureaucracy, preferring to pare defense spending and raise taxes to keep the deficit down."

I commited my crime :). Is it ok to move the discussion above to my personal page? -- Guerby 19:37 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)

Hi! Is there an error in the following quote from the Overview FAQ? "You can learn who is responsible for the most recent versions of any given page by clicking on the History link. But remember, if you spot an error in the latest revision and you don't correct it, then you share responsibility for the error. So be bold in updating pages!"
I don't find a History link on the encyclopaedia pages, should the word History be changed to Older Versions?
Sorry if I've got it all wrong. Arpingstone 21:03 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

Yup, that was renamed to make it slightly more obvious. Feel free to change the text. --Eloquence 21:12 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

I am working on the Lindy Hop articles, which are about 20 different ones at this point. The question is how should I link them together for someone who wants to find all of the articles on a given subject. I have been putting links to most of them at the bottom of all pages, but that is irritating. Is there some some way (or preferred way) (or future preferred way) to link them together, like chapters in a book, or slides in a presentation? -- xxx


is there a "parent" article? -- Tarquin 17:53 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
The main parent currently is (dance move). This is not a real problem for dance, but linking together articles for food would be very difficult.

Could someone explain how the edit conflict system works, ie what the wpEdittime variable is all about? I ask as I'm playing with a script I'm writing, which conceivably could create a nice gui interface for wikipedia editing (but at the moment I'm just playing). Thanks Smelialichu 18:41 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

When the edit form is generated, the wpEdittime field contains the timestamp of the last edit of the article (if it exists). When saving, it's compared with the current timestamp of the page, and if it's different, the edit conflict screen is given. --Brion 19:01 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks, so to stop coming up with the edit conflict I just need to submit the current value of wpEdittime with the rest? Smelialichu 19:09 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
Yup; you can grab it out of the edit form. Also, have you taken a look at m:Wikipedia Client & related pages? A more machine-friendly wiki interface would help things like this. --Brion 19:14 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
I have had a look through there. The machine friendly interface seems like a good idea (it isn't too hard to grab the needed info from the edit pages, but search, edit histories etc seems a bit more complex, and susceptible to breakage in the case of users using different themes, or a minor html change), but I'm certainly not up to writing anything to answer all the needs listedat m:Wikipedia Client. I'm just mucking about really, trying to hone my Python skills. But I guess due to python's reusable, and object oriented nature anything I did write could be useful, for the basic login, logout, post article functions anyway. Thankyou for your quick and helpful replies! Smelialichu 19:29 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

The result of <math> tags is ugly. The pictures are too big, and the ALT text shows the awful-looking raw markup when people move their mouse over it in most browsers. Any hope of some more user preferences in this area, hopefully with sensible defaults? -- Tim Starling

I tend to agree on the size; font sizes can be manually bumped up on equations that really need it. (But the PNGs are limited to fixed pixel sizes, which does not have a guaranteed relation to a readable font size for any given user.) What other improvements would you suggest? I'm afraid "not ugly" and "more sensible" aren't things we can code. ;) Eventually output as inline MathML is hoped for, but few browsers currently support it and we would need to beef up our wiki->HTML translator to produce proper XHTML. --Brion 06:42 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Why is google not referencing wikipedia now? -- xxx

Our robots.txt file had a missing slash, causing googlebot to ignore all articles instead of just dynamically generated pages (diffs and 'see next 20' and crap like that). It's been fixed, and the site should be re-indexed soon. --Brion 21:49 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)
From what I've heard, a) Google reloads its database once a month or so b) however it's possible to remove pages from the database almost immediately by modifying the robots file. So it may take a month or so for the missing references to reappear.
Um, huh? --Brion

hey mav maybe the nile blue you see is the nile green i see ;-} I'm using a Mac with os9 and microsoft and netscape 4.7

The bits of red represent the map colour of the worldaround British Empire. As each new country gained independance, the red was slowly diminished and was offset by the new colours of worldaround British Commonwealth of Nations.

Two16

Taku

The colour I get for external links is soothing green. The purple I see when I web my tracks makes me feel vast. The blue I see to another article fills me with trepidation. But the red I see when there is no article, fills me with fire. Hope you're seeing in technicolur soon. Two16 16:31 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

Oh, I see. Because I am using a laptop, I can't recognize the slight difference in color at all. -- Taku 18:03 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

"web my tracks" = make web log? - Patrick 18:28 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)


When I am reading and editing the encyclopedia I surf down differnt paths leaving my tracks as I read and write, which show up as a beautiful purple when people are bold in other articles that I visit. Not knowing wiki words for the phenomenon I made my own: "web my tracks". I was trying to convey the experiance of colour wikipedia to a plasma screen wikipedian. I explained all the different high lights. The red really does fire me up. Soon I will know enough to strip red from the wikipedia like bits of red from my atlas. Two16

Ah, then blue are internal links not yet visited, and it fills you with fear of not yet knowing the precious knowledge behind them. I don't get what stripping bits of red from your atlas means. - Patrick 23:03 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

I am just wondering is there any way to diplay external links differently than internal links. The list of links at Open content look so confusing. I guess there is none thought -- Taku 00:40 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)


They do actually display in slightly different colours, I think. We could, of course, have an icon for them -- many wikis have a little "planet" icon that goes in front of external links. That's a question for the mailing list. -- Tarquin 00:43 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
Well, I don't think there should be mixed lists of internal and external links like that at all - the list in question should have "ghost" links to unwritten 'pedia articles (on Openlaw and so on), and the external links should be in the "External links" section. Then there's no problem. --Camembert 00:46 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
With Internet Explorer I get external links in blue, links to articles that do not yet exist in brown and internal links (visited and not visited) in the two colors I have specified in the IE options, so I made sure they are different. I understand that the first two are specified in http://www.wikipedia.org/style/wikistandard.css and not the other two, they are left to the user to choose and are the same as for surfing elsewhere. - Patrick 14:25 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
I should mention that this is with Standard skin, with Cologne Blue I get external links in green, links to articles that do not yet exist in brown and internal links (visited and not visited) both in blue, all different from the two colors I have specified in the IE options; apparently you can not choose any colors with this skin. - Patrick 17:26 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)


I agree with Camembert. And what do you mean by a question for mailing list Tarquin?

If you meant a fancy icon -- implementing that would be a question for wikipedia-L -- Tarquin

foo web browser

Who's been moving pages on web browsers to pages like Opera web browser and Chimera web browser? That is not standard page naming convention. Use the simple name, and disambiguation parentheses if required. The current form requires users to type "...[[Opera web browser|Opera]]. Most of these should be at "foo (browser)". -- Tarquin 00:12 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

And these can be simply linked to like this: [[Opera (browser)|]] (no space between the bar and the last brackets) in order to look like this: Opera (cute trick).
Indeed. That's the "pipe trick", fully documented on the FAQ & elsewhere. I'll be moving these back in a few days. -- Tarquin 10:39 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

OpenCourseWare

I have a question. I found MIT OpenCourseWare, the site providing a course materials from MIT's faculty. (I found that site from the list at [5]). I read the term of use [6] and it looks like the materials in there can be adapted to here, wikipedia. What do you think? -- Taku 22:54 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

My answer is a bit late, but I think that we are not free to use OpenCourseWare materials. I have read their license and it seems to restrict uses to non-commercial purposes. This is an "additional restriction" that is conflict with the GFDL. DanKeshet 19:26 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Moved discussion

Trailing "/" in URLs?

Someone editing an article complained that people need to put a trailing "/" after domain names in URLs. Thus www.city.ac.uk/ would be correct and www.city.ac.uk would not be. Unfortunately the person didn't say why, and didn't leave a reference to where it might be explained to dimwits like me. Clearly it is non-straightforward in that whatever the problem is with missing the "/", it does not affect everyone all the time. Can someone please tell me what the scope and effect of this problem is, and whether it is already documented here somewhere? It is not mentioned in Wikipedia:How to edit a page as far as I can see. It sounds like if it is not explained, it perhaps should be, if it affects the usefulness of articles to readers? Thanks Nevilley 16:05 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

Reference - it was this - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - Revision history - 11:52 Jan 26, 2003 . . 66.167.129.231 (/ after hostname in URLs, dammit) - and the change they made, as you might expect, was http://www.peta.org to http://www.peta.org/. Nevilley
It really doesn't matter; if the trailing slash is missing, your browser will spend an extra few bytes being chastized by the server and be automatically given the full URL with slash to visit. --Brion 16:27 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)
I'm not fully sure, but I think the difference is like this: The URL http://www.host.domain/foo/bar refers to the file /foo/bar (as in the Unix directory tree) on the machine www.host.domain . But http://www.host.domain/foo/ refers to the folder /foo/ on www.host.domain (and by implication, the file /foo/index.html). Therefore, www.city.ac.uk/ would refer to the file /index.html on www.city.ac.uk while www.city.ac.uk wouldn't really refer to anything at all. Of course, most webservers are probably clever enough to deal with the request correctly anyway, but still leaving out the trailing / is incorrect. -- Arvindn 16:33 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

Mistake in "E-mail this user" wording from User page

If you are on a User page and click "E-mail this user", the next page contains this:

"If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in is user preferences".

- I'd like to point out that this contains a mistake. Presumably what was meant was either in his or her user preferences (or some equivalent) or in their user preferences. If this is not the right forum in which to get this fixed, please point out what is. Thanks. Nevilley 12:09 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

A small question that leads to a bigger question: what happened to the article on the Phaistos Disk? I came across it by chance, linked to it from Archaeology, and the next time I looked it had completely disappeared. I know I've been spending a lot of time here recently, but I don't think I'm so far gone that I imagined it. Okay, maybe the content was plagiarised or just plain wrong, but I don't understand how it was possible to remove the article completely without leaving any trace of it. I've tried everything I can think of: Deletion log, Orphaned images, alternative spellings, and I'm flummoxed. Anyone else the wiser? Deb 10:20 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

It was a copyright violation (it is in Wikipedia:Deletion log) and the user admitted it on the Talk page, which still exists. See Talk:Phaistos Disk.--Eloquence 11:34 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks, Eloquence. I must have just missed it amongst all the other deletions. The content was very dodgy, anyway. I assume the image was copyright as well--that's a pity. Deb 17:16 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

I cannot agree with the person who says articles in the "Catholic Encyclopedia"; are of poor quality; Wikipedia should envy that work. I am an atheist, and I know that George Smith, author of Atheism: The Case Against God has a similar opinion of the Catholic Encyclopdia. Obviously if we copy their statement that all Christians are obliged to obey the pope, that violates NPOV. But many of their articles on philosophy, geography, history, comparative religion, and, in a few cases, science, are good. Michael Hardy 01:40 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

Page size and browser issues

Lots of people have been having difficulty editing large pages lately. Ideally we should try to keep entries to a reasonable size, but there are very easy ways to fix this on the browser side. Simply update to a reasonably modern browser. This does not require that you throw away your beloved Netscape 4.x and sell your soul to the Beast of Redmond. It does not mean you have to buy an expensive new computer just so that it can run Microsoft's latest Internet Explorer and all the associated bloatware that comes with it, and it does not require you to expose yourself to any particular security or privacy risks.

The maximum page size problem is specific to certain older browsers, in particular, Netscape 4.76 and below, and old versions of Opera.

  • Advice for Netscape users Do yourself a favour and upgrade to a fast, memory-efficienty modern browser. Mozilla is completely free, has no ties to any commercial interests, is (like Wikipedia) an open and collaborative project, is generally regarded as the most stable of all web browsers, and it runs on just about any operating system you care to mention, including everything that you can run Netscape 4.x on. If your system can run Netscape, it can run Mozilla. Mozilla can keep your old bookmarks, is highly customisable, retains the look and feel you are familiar with, and does not contain any spyware, secret reporting mechanisims, or advertising. Mozilla complies with established Internet standards more completely than any other current browser, and can do a host of things that Netscape 4.x can't do, such as correctly display pages that use Cascading Style Sheets for layout. (Such as Wikipedia page you are reading now.) If you are using Netscape 4.x, Mozilla is a no-brainer. (But you might also consider Opera - see below.) Download Mozilla from http://www.mozilla.org/
  • Advice for Opera users Simply upgrade to Opera 6.05. Download it from http://www.opera.com/download/ It will keep all your old settings. If you you are an Opera owner, you can use the same registration number. Or, if you prefer, you can spend US$15 to upgrade your licence to the new Opera 7.0. Of course, you don't have to be an existing Opera user to switch. Opera is the smallest and fastest browser on the market today (which makes it a great choice if you have an old, slow computer) and, just like Mozilla, offers a host of features. Opera does not invade your privacy and is not tied to any multi-media business empire, so installing Opera will not clutter up your desktop and clog your system with unwanted commercial junk. The free version of Opera places a small ad in the upper right corner of your screen. If you like Opera but don't like the ad, you can buy an ad-free version for US$39. Opera is available for most major operating systems.
  • Advice for other users There is no known page-edit size problem with Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, or with Netscape 6.0 or higher, and you don't need to upgrade if you don't want to. Be aware that current versions of Netscape are simply modified older versions of Mozilla with a great deal of advertising material added and are appreciably slower and less stable. Running Netscape 7.x offers no known advantage over Mozilla. (Or, for that matter, over Opera.) Be aware that installing newer versions of Internet Explorer involves major hidden changes to your system and may also have privacy implications. In particular, note that because Internet Explorer overwrites certain Windows system files, it is usually not possible to reinstall Windows after upgrading Internet Explorer. (As an example, if you have Windows 98 Second Edition (which comes with IE 5.0) and you install IE 6, then you cannot reinstall Windows 98 unless you completely remove both Internet Explorer and Windows itself first. Most people will need the help of a technician to do this, and then to reinstall all their other programs.)

Please excuse the bolding. This seems to be becoming a significant issue, and Wikipedia people with older browsers need to know this stuff. There may be a more prominent and appropriate place to put this information. If someone wants to put it somewhere where it will be easier to find instead of here, go right ahead. Tannin 01:24 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC))

How about Wikipedia:Browser notes? Ortolan88
Seems reasonable to me. Me simple working computer techo. Me provide advice make computer work, sometime bolt new bits in box. I'll leave it to other Wikipedians who know this place better to figure out the best place to put the advice, and move it to there. Main thing is to get the info to the ones still using Netscape 4.x Tannin
Me simple Tonto, can move, but can't make Wikipedia:Browser notes have big prominent place where all even simpler contributors can find. Me leave this here day or two, go to town find out what going on, mebbe big smart wiki Lone Ranger give lowly Browser notes a publicity boost. Ortolan88


tagadum tagadum tagadumdada tagadum tagadum tagadumdada tagadum tagadum tagadumdada tagadaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh (song interrupted by pythonesque arrow) Link to Browser notes added to Wikipedia:Editing FAQ

Hi! As a contributor of only one weeks experience, would someone comment on my method of inserting JPG pics in entries. For example, please look at the Tillandsia entry I have written, where I provide a 250 pixel-wide view and a link to the same pic at 800 pixels wide. This means the entry downloads at a reasonable speed but a big pic is available if wanted.
Another example of my method is at the top of the Paris entry. The snag is that your database has to hold an 800 pixel pic for every pic I upload to you (as well as the 250 pixel, of course). Is this acceptable practice?
Thanks Arpingstone 22:15 Jan 25, 2003 (UTC)

Articles with an apostrophe in the title seem to be broken, e.g., Moore's law, Durin's Bane, Cox's theorem -(

Fixed. --Brion 22:36 Jan 25, 2003 (UTC)

I've written an IP Masquerading howto, http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Masquerading-Simple-HOWTO/index.html which has been around a few years know and is pretty bug free. Would this be suitable to put up here? Anyway - I put it under the GFDL so I shouldn't have to prove that I'm not the copyright holder to you right? -- 11:32 Jan 23, 2003 (GMT)

Hi, this may be more suitable for the OpenFacts wiki, a new open source centric wikipedia-based wiki, one of the purposes of which is the collaborative editing and writing of HOWTOs, FAQs etc. We're still working on the finishing touches before launching it officially (the English version is still less complete than the German one in terms of documentation etc.). We will also import existing HOWTOs where the license allows it (I've written a very hackish SGML/Docbook-wikitext converter for that purpose).
This is not to say that is necessarily unacceptable around here. You might want to rewrite some of the more jovial explanations and change section titles like "Frequently Asked Compla^H^H^H^H^H^H Questions" for Wikipedia. If you, however, would like to help with OpenFacts, drop me a mail. --Eloquence 23:47 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks. I remember seeing emails about the OpenFacts thing on discuss@en.tldp.org . Anyway I'm bored of that ^H^H joke thing - it has been 2 years, and I never liked it much in the first place... oh well.

-- JohnFlux(as anon) 06:35 Jan 24, 2003 (GMT)

What is the policy about images generated from some vector graphics program? Should I upload the source file as well? (For examples see: supply and demand) Is there any plan to say allow someone to upload a SVG file and then the software could automatically convert it to a raster image? --jrincayc

Yes, please do; include a link to the source from the image description page of the raster file if possible. Direct SVG image support is planned but not yet put in place. --Brion 15:35 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Formatting question: Why can't I get the following link to display properly as a clickable external link, and is there any way to save it?

[7]

Sure: [8] --Brion 16:43 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)

Ah, so ^ has to be written %5E (to be looked up in ASCII). Which other symbols have to be converted? - Patrick 17:17 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)
At present, anything that's not among: A-Za-z0-9_\/~%\-+&#?!=()@\x80-\xFF . Our parser should probably be more forgiving; URLs can technically contain all kinds of shocking things you'd never expect. --Brion 17:25 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks, I have put this in Wikipedia:How to edit a page. I added the period and removed a duplicate \. - Patrick 03:56 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Has the Slashdot traffic subsided? Did the server hold itself together the whole day? -- Stephen Gilbert 21:14 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

I have a question ..... what is the meaning of copyright? Obviously very few of us actually "know" the person or object we are writing about. For example, when writing about Mary Queen of Scots I assume no one has actually met her to get a report on her life (!) so everything about her on this site must have been taken from an existing text.
So most of this encyclopaedia is copyright!!
My last statement is obviously nonsense so where does copyright end? Is it OK to rephrase an existing text in such a way that it cannot be recognised in the encyclopaedia? How different must it be?
I'm really puzzled. Help!!
Arpingstone 20:51 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

check out Wikipedia Copyright for some info. The links at the bottom of that page will take you to a bunch of other pages on copyright in the wiki, and some discussion. Dachshund
facts are not copyright, but the expression of them is. So rephrasing text, basically, is fine (it's got to be rephrased enough to be original -- same as essays at school) -- Tarquin 20:54 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
Tarquin is right. I'd like to add that if you want to write really good Wikipedia articles, you scour multiple sources -- books, papers, websites, mailing lists, newspaper articles ... -- and try to develop a coherent picture from that. By doing so, you are creating a new work that presents all points of view. However, if someone has already done so, you should just summarize that source.
But copyright is an idiotic concept that should be abolished. One way to get there is to create lots of open content -- so go for it! --Eloquence 21:12 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies to my three questions. I've found the Pipe symbol (to the left of the Z, in upper case) on my UK keyboard. I'd like to leave the 600 pixel pic on my Tillandsia entry unless I get any objections. Arpingstone 09:10 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

A few questions:

(1) Is there any chance that Mary I of Scotland could be retitled Mary, Queen of Scots? It is a title that this monarch is far better known by.

(2) What is the wikipedia policy on quotes? Should they precede an article or not?

I am thinking in particular of the Madeline Amy Sweeney article which started its existance as an anonymous note by someone who had obviously been a friend of Ms Sweeney. The page gradually became an article. It seemed respectful to leave the note there at the top of the page as an annymous quote. Someone else decided otherwise.

Arno

Regarding (2), no, quotes on top are generally not acceptable, because such prominent placement of a single opinion violates NPOV, and because it is not encyclopedia-style. In the case in question, the quote is also anonymous, which makes it unverifiable and therefore worthless, however touching it may be. Sorry. --Eloquence 09:00 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
Maybe the quote should be removed, as it is unencyclopaedic, but it the fact that it is attributed to "Anon." means that there is nothing to verify. Or, to be more accurate, it is verifiably anonymous. :) There was another problem, in that the quote was tampered with after it was originally posted, but I have now reverted it to its original state. -- Oliver PEREIRA 22:58 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
I fixed the quote in what I think is a nice, okay way. Please see if you agree. Ortolan88
Regarding (1), I don't think so. The current title is I think dictated by some sort of Wiki policy which aims to make names of monarchs consistent. I also don't think it's necessary - we could either (a) just put in a redirect at the Mary, Queen of Scots place, and shift all the stuff about films and books into the main Mary I of Scotland article (where it is already in part duplicated already), or (b) just leave things how they are, on the grounds that it is very quick and easy to find her on a search anyway - if you find the MQoS page you are only one click away from the M1oS article. But I will leave it to you or others to worry about this. And I suppose you could equally well argue that the same process in the other direction would work just as well - merge the historical stuff into the MQoS page and make the M1oS a redirect. I dunno! :)
... and While you are at it, you might want to take a look at Scotland: Mary Queen of Scots which worries me much more - a completely unedited and near-orphaned (one link in) page which has been sitting there since 6th November. This page should certainly not exist, as it is just another version of Mary I of Scotland, but what I'm not clear about is how much of its content should be rescued and merged into the latter. Nevilley 10:14 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

I've noticed that each year now has a link to 'XXXX in sports'. As a British English speaker it grates, and just looks wrong. Most of the rest of the world would refer to 'sport' rather than 'sports' in this context. Would 'XXXX in sport' be any less acceptable to American English speakers? Mintguy

It works for me. But then again, Wikipedia has so brainwashed me that I now spell meter metre and spelled spelt. ;-) --mav


They mean different things. "Sport" is the singular (baseball is a team sport); "sports" is the plural (cricket and baseball are my favourite sports); "sport" is the generic singular: (on Saturdays, many people play sport). "Sports" is used to indicate a particular number, even when the exact number is not known or not stated (the French people play many different sports); "sport" is used to indicate the generic activity (the French people play a lot of sport) - notice that this example says that they spend a lot of time playing sport, where the French people play a lot of sports indicates that they play many different ones, perhaps baseball, rugby, golf, & so on. Unless the intention is to indicate a variety of different sports, rather than sporting activity in general, "year XXXX in sports" is (to the best of my knowledge) not variant usage, it's simply illiterate.
It's not illiterate it's simply American usage. Would you say History of Film or History of Films? Mintguy
A subtle distinction is possible, but I would tend to accept either as correct in the general case. In this topic we would also tend to use movies only in the plural, and cinema only in the singular. Eclecticology 20:06 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
I agree with Mintguy. "It's simply illiterate" is sometimes fighting talk wrt differences of language usage, and perhaps better avoided. :) Nevilley 11:11 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
Would you write "Year XXXX in works" about employment? Or "Year XXXX in loves" about romance? Tannin 10:51 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
This is a silly argument. Year in Sports is correct usage for Americans, and Year in Sport would sound silly. Vice Versa for the British side. This is one situation in which there's no "right answer" and appeals to grammatic correctness won't help. Dachshund
Very simple solution. Take the 's' off the end of "sports", carry it across and stick it on the end of "math". :-) And mav.... do you have cravings for upward of a dozen cups of tea a day? Are you complaining about the weather? Are you convinced cricket is dead? ;-) are you turning English on us, mav? ;-) -- Tarquin 19:27 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
I think you may be on to someting there. ;) --mav
How about this: Since a long time ago a Brit was the first to create an article on sports he called it sport. Therefore it can be said that we have standardized on sport for page titles about sports. But Americans link to that article via [[sport]]s. So why don't we have the articles at [[XXXX in sport]] (to satisfy everyone outside the US) but within each of the year articles we link to the year in sport articles via [[XXX in sport]]s (to satisfy the Americans). What say you? --mav 20:45 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
What about something neutral like. "Sporting events of XXXX" or similar. I'm not entirely happy with that particular sugestion, but maybe someone can think of something similar. Mintguy

There is, indeed, a policy on what sized images to use -- it's at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy . (Frankly, I've never seen any reason for a thumbnail and a bigger picture, but I've been here only six months and still have much to learn.) On all my keyboards, the "pipe" that lets you use a different name for a link is the capital of the backslash, to the right of the right bracket key at the right end of the second row, under the backspace key. -- isis 08:38 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

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