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From Wikipedia:Reference desk:

The topic e-business is redirected to electronic commerce. I am writing a separate article about electronic business because I think it is something different. Can someone change the redirection of e-business to electronic business? TIA Rudolph 9:25 10 juli 2003 (CET)

It's not hard to do: when you click on a link to e-business, it takes you to electronic commerce, but with a link near the top saying "redirected from E-business." Click on that link, and you will be taken to the redirect page, which you can edit. BTW this question should have been asked on Wikipedia:Village pump, and it will probably be moved there shortly. -- Tim Starling 07:48 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I have a copyright question that, as of yet, no one has answered (I hope this is the right place for it). Is it permissable to use a screen shot from a computer program? Is this considered fair use or copyright infringement? I know this is a tricky question, but since the 'pedia has so many articles about 1000's of peices of software, it could really benefit from some images of them running.

Before someone answers right away, "No! It's copyright infringement! Go away!" I remember a case several years ago regarding Electronic Arts and their program Deluxe Paint. EA claimed that they had a copyright on every image created with DP since they owned the copyright for DP. The courts struck them down saying that they did have the copyright for DP, but not for content created by the tool. Couldn't the same reasoning be applied to screens of software running? For example, if I author a letter with MS Word, I've used it create an image of my letter, so is taking a screen shot of it a copyright violation?

I really do want a definitive answer to this, as I'd like to enhance a lot of articles with pertinent (quality) screen shots. But I also don't want to violate any copyright laws or put the 'pedia in jeopardy. Can anyone give me (or point me to) a qualified answer to this? —Frecklefoot 16:13 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I am not a lawyer, but this has got to be fair use. Hopefully someone has a solid legal answer. -- Wapcaplet 16:27 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Found Microsoft's policy on screenshots (towards the bottom), which seems pretty restrictive, but could probably work with Wikipedia's purposes. Apparently Duke Nukem has restrictions on what can be screenshot. It could get tricky. -- Wapcaplet 16:39 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Thanks, Wapcaplet. That covers Microsoft products! I'd love to hear a definitive answer which covers all software products. Anyone else? —Frecklefoot 16:50 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Not a lawyer either, but had to consider the issue several times, being an open source developer myself. And I say that's definitely fair use. Take a look here: Using Screen Shots Without Permission: A Risk Worth Taking. If you're in a hurry, here's an excerpt worth considering:
The limitation [to the copyright law] we hear most about is fair use; anyone is allowed to use a work in a limited manner, "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." -- Gutza 0:34 12 Jul 2003

I am not entirely sure what you mean by "use a screen shot from a computer program", but I understand that you want to create a screenshot of some software running on your machine. That's just fine: copyright protects works. Now, if you create a screenshot of Microsoft Word, you're not even making a copy of the work "Microsoft Word" because the work is the software which is, itself, not copied. (This would be like saying Microsoft owns all documents that you wrote with Word.) It's not even a question of "fair use" because that would only kick in when a work has been copied. – Of couse, if you steal a screenshot from a Microsoft web page, you are making a copy of a picture, which is something that might be a work of authorship, and that's a different issue.

That's not always the case, though; it may depend what is on the screen when the screenshot is taken. Microsoft, for example, prohibits the use of screen captures of any boot-up screens or other splash screens unless you're writing documentation about Microsoft technology. Company logos, copyrighted icons, or other copyrighted material (words or pictures) may be on the screen at the time. It may also depend on what you do with the screen capture - modifying it may have repercussions; again, the Microsoft agreement states that you aren't allowed to modify the screen image after capturing it. You also can't use screenshots in a way that disparages Microsoft. So you may not be able to, say, take a screenshot of Microsoft Word and add a caption saying "Look how crappy their interface is!" (which seems dubious to me, but that's how their agreement reads). Once again, IANAL... it'd probably be a good idea to look into the software manufacturer's license agreements on the subject before using any screenshots. -- Wapcaplet 15:44 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You are correct that things become more complicated if the screenshot itself contains a work of authorship like artwork – of which the user would make a copy then. However, then I'd say fair use applies, especially if the shot is scaled down. – The other issues you bring up need some clarification. 1) The question was about copyright; when logos or the "Microsoft" name are involved, we may run into trademark issues. That's a different can of worms. 2) As you mention license agreements, Microsoft only has the right to impose restrictions on you with these if you need a license in the first place, because the law protects something: a license gives you rights you would otherwise not have. If there is no work of authorship copied, or no trademark (or even patent) infringed, you don't have to give a rat's ass about license agreements. Microsoft cannot define when copyright or trademark law are in effect, as much as they'd like to. Now, how they think they can prohibit screenshots of the boot process, I'd think, would be a trademark issue because their logos are prominently exhibited, but again, that's not a copyright issue in my view. 3) Disparaging Microsoft is yet another thing regulated by competition law. Of course you, as a Wikipedia contributor, may write a review of a piece of Microsoft software and say that it sucks. Whether IBM may do it is something different. – So yes it's complex, but what I was saying is copyright only kicks in when you make a copy of a work of authorship, and you usually don't.

IANAL. The situation is further complicated by the presence of end user license agreements (EULAs) - you typically are meant to agree to such a license before using a software product, and it might be possible for a software company to seek to impose additional constraints in that manner. Indeed, I heard of a company whose EULA prohibited webpages created by a certain software tool from being critical of the company, though they subsequently backed down, IIRC.
My suggestion would be - upload the image, note clearly on the image description page where it came from, and if Wikipedia gets paid legal advice at some point then it can be kept or removed as appropriate. Martin
IANAL either, but I'm unsure whether a EULA would be binding on the Wikipedia. Yes, the contributor could get themselves into trouble, but I don't quit see how Wikipedia could...after all, Wikipedia did not agree to it. - Cafemusique 19:59 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Avada Kedavra

Could someone verify this: Avada Kedavra? It seems fishy to me. I think it's made up by Rowling and the article is some sort of fanfic retconning, but I'm happy to be proved wrong. Can anyone provide references? -- Tarquin 22:14 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It's partly true, but I'm going to reword it slightly. In a book called The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter (ISBN: 0141314818), David Colbert explains the real meanings for things used in the Harry Potter books, and what he writes about Avada Kedavra does suggest that it is based on an ancient phrase. Angela

Take a look at the Harry Potter Lexicon:
http://www.hp-lexicon.org/spells_a.html which seems to have the gen on this. Dieter Simon 23:08 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Suppose copyright is ok on this? --User:Dieter Simon

Do we have a page for non auto-generated page (I know about Special:Unusedimages) for listing orphaned images that might be titled something like Wikipedia:Images in need of Wikipedia articles? Mintguy 16:48 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

An anonymous user (217.85.222.249) has just moved The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by cutting and pasting, thus leaving the article's contribution history behind. Can someone with the appropriate elite skills fix, please? —Paul A 07:52 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Does this site have a privacy policy? If so, where is it? If not, why not?

Mistakes in Summary

On a recent edit, I made a stupid mistake in the Summary. Is there any way to correct it? -- User:Tb

Nope. I've done this many times myself. --mav
I'm just happy that you do it at all. Summary really helps, even if it's just 1 or 2 words. But don't worry about mistakes in summary. We just don't want people to lie using the summary, like saying "Typo" in summary, but deleted an entire paragraph. --Menchi 23:59 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Regarding the User:Rambot municipality entries

I came upon an interesting disambiguation suffix in one of these entries, namely Plymouth (CDP), Massachusetts, as opposed to Plymouth (town), Massachusetts. A search on AcronymFinder revealed that this most likely stands for Census-designated place. This poses some interesting questions. First of all, would it be good to rename all of the CDP entries to be titled explicitly Census-designated place? Second, would anyone be willing to research and create a stub at Census-designated place? -Smack 19:35 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Just did this, mostly quoting http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/cenind3.html --till we *) 21:04 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I found this interesting site today while searching for GFDL infringing sites. MB 19:19 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

GFDL notice inconsistency

I have noticed that when I look at this older version of the Palestine, there is no GFDL notice at the bottom of the page. This may be (although I doubt it) a way for someone to bypass the GFDL when releasing thier own version. MB 18:41 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

US Counties: Request for comments

We need some opinions on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties/mockups. In making maps of all the U.S. counties, we wanted to keep all the states at the same width, but it led to some problems of some states getting too big. A reduced-size version has problems of its own. Suggestions are welcome! -- Wapcaplet 13:11 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

...and that's why no-one has updated Special:Lonelypages. Sorry for that brief loss of service, everyone. And I didn't even manage to get the job done. -- Tim Starling 02:39 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Who, what, why? MB 04:01 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
[1] -- Tim Starling 04:10 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I disagree with your claim that the special pages are "useless." In particular, Special:Shortpages and Special:Wantedpages are very useful in helping to improve the wikipedia. These both have been disabled, with Short pages last updated May 13th, and Wanted Pages last updated June 15th. You are right in saying they are useless, b/c when not updated on a regular basis, they are useless. I purpose that someone (maybe Timwi since he offered) create a script to update these pages on off peak hours (There is a page somewhere with in depth site statistics). MB 14:30 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Shutting the wiki down for a half hour every day during the period when only 2/3 as many people visit Wikipedia as during peak hours isn't very appetizing. While these features would be useful, I submit that they are much less useful than the site being up and running. That's why someone who wants them badly should rewrite the functions to be efficient so they will actually get enabled again. --Brion 22:06 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Yes, but since the database is backed up daily anyway, wouldn't it be pretty easy to generate the specialpages from a copy of the backup on a different machine? Mkweise 22:24 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Are you volunteering to donate a third machine which can hold a replicated database and deal with slow things like these index regenerations, searches, and sysops' manual queries? (Backups are weekly, not daily. However a live replicated database could be easier to work with.) --Brion 22:46 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Not quite...I was thinking of downloading a backup and a bunch of scripts to run overnight, then posting the updated specialpages the next morning. Mkweise 23:19 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

this really escape me. I moved Wikicide to Wikipedia:Wikicide since in any case, this has *nothing* to do in the encyclopedia space. Article was moved, but in the encyc space, it still appears to be there, as an article, not as a redirect. If one edit that encyc article (or its talk page), one can see the redirect though. What is this ? User:anthere

Probably a caching problem. I think there's a bug in the move page code, this seems to happen all the time. Try reloading with shift- or ctrl- reload, several times. -- Tim Starling 01:57 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)
did not work. But, after I emptied my cache in my prefs, it did. Yup, must be a bug. Thanks ant

On the recent changes page, "Exchequer" is listed as a requested article...but there is an article under Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shouldn't Exchequer just redirect there? Adam Bishop 19:57 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

A "Chancellor of the Exchequer" is a minister in charge of the Treasury, and the "Exchequer" is its accounting department, responsible for funds coming in and going out in Britain. I don't think it is one and the same thing. --Dieter Simon 21:00 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Stealing tables

I have just found some very nice tables on the web with lots of info. Is it ok to add them to the pages i'm working on or is that like "quoting to much" - copyright infringement? --BL

I remember seeing a US court rule against copyrighting list/directory of data. Remember having came across it twice, here. --Menchi 07:12 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So the Americans thinks its OK to copy tables? --BL
Probably not a good idea. It may depend on what's in the tables. IANAL; information itself cannot really be copyrighted, but the presentation of that information (such as in a table form) can receive copyright protection. If you're planning on just using some of the information from another source, that's probably okay; if you're thinking of copying the whole table wholesale, that might not be a good idea, unless the original source has declared it public-domain or GFDL. -- Wapcaplet 12:56 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Long quotation markup

Have we a special Wiki markup, like <quoteblock>, for quotes over three sentences? Like in Islamic banking?

You're almost right. <blockquote>...</blockquote> is the HTML markup for longish quotes. There's no wiki-markup for this that I'm aware of, though. Using blockquote is fine though. -- Wapcaplet 12:56 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Redirected page watchlisted

The Lines of Action talk page is currently a redirect, which is bad becuase when the real talk page changes it doesn't show up in my watch list. Is there an automated way to undo a redirect, and suck the contents back into the proper page? Thanks. --Fritzlein 01:51 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Do you see the "(Redirected from Talk:Lines of Action)" at the top? Ctrl+F if you can't. Then, click on the link, and stop watch there. --Menchi 05:53 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
You can use the "Move this page" link in the sidebar to rename pages; I've just renamed the Lines of Action talk page to Talk:Lines of Action, which should fix the problem. —Paul A 06:03 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Unequal page load speed

Is it just me or are some articles getting to be more equal than others? I have now for several days had the experience that some pages tend to appear to load for ever, but if you stop it loading and choose another, it will load in nanoseconds. That I recall, I had this with Annie Lennox (which had just been edited) but later (half hour) was able to get to it fine. There were many more, but not any can name off the bat. But now the same phenomenon hit me with MacOs/(Do you know what, I forgot what goes here) Anyways it was an "article" just created, and containing a full whopping 5 bytes. (check the deletion archive for what the precise name was, I think). I was loading it simultaneusly with another page which i had time to check the history of, decide delete-worthy and delete. And still it would not load! 5 bytes for chrissakes! Respectfully. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 21:53 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

For me, when one slows, all slows. But yes, some long pages do take longer to load, but not to the extreme you describe. --Menchi 21:56 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I've had the same problem as Cimon and it seems unrelated to page size. Sometimes a huge page like requested articles loads faster than something relatively small. Angela

Maybe it was mozilla that was the culprit. I changed into Links and it seems to work at lightspeed. From Now on I will only use Mozilla if I need to cut and paste. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 23:12 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Scratch that interpretation. I just had the exact same phenomenon with Links. (I was trying to load the article on Wikipedia power structure, so I could have inserted Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers but it balked, and when I chose another page (I think it was the one on guidelines. I inserted the "dont bite newcomers" there) it loaded without complaint. Coming back after editing it, the powestructure article still wouldn't load nicely! Can some developer please take a look and see what is going on. I have a hard time believing this is something to do with my ISP-provider. It seems to me this would be something in your end. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 14:47 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Response times will vary widely depending on general system load. It has nothing to do with your browser or ISP and little to do with the page you happen to be looking at (unless you're editing it, which will cause varying amounts of load depending on the number of incoming and outgoing links that have to be rechecked). --Brion 22:06 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

move to wikipedia talk:redirect

Whenever we encounter a redirect Wikilink, we should (but don't have to) change it to say, [[rectangle|rectangular]] instead of [[rectangular]]? (Such as here)

Doesn't indirect-direct ([[rectangle|rectangular]]) impede readability for (copy)editors?

--Menchi 20:49 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It's also bad for sub-topic redirects - when we finally get an article on the sub-topic, we have to manually fix all the old links.
There are some benefits to [[rectangle|rectangular]], but they're (arguably) the result of imperfect software, rather than being fundamental. Martin

See Image talk:Soviet Union, Khrushchev (1).jpg. --Menchi 20:30 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Newbie reporting in, having just contemplated general policies, NPOV policy, and couple of articles I didn't like.

To begin with, NPOV looked a little dubious and certainly contrary to my inclinations, till I read the arguments against it in its Talk page; they convinced me of its rightness.

Now then, I'm looking at a couple of pages that have been defaced (need I be polite about this?) by people who came and posted junk and went away: History of Physics and History of Europe. On the one hand, we are urged to edit boldly and not be afraid to replace large chunks of text. On the other, NPOV requires us not to just delete what the other guy "knows" and replace it with what we "know".

In one case (Europe) I have followed what's almost a policy of malicious compliance with NPOV by leaving in most of the stuff but balancing it with an alternate view. The result, alas, is something that's less coherent than if the old text were merely reverted, and disproportionately long; and I don't think it's especially useful to the reader who walks into the article cold.

This very small sampling has made me wonder: I know that everyone has a right to enter material and sign it or not; but should anonymous one-shot propagandists (when not actual vandals) have their material treated with some minimal respect, as if their material were attempts at honest contributions?

Having asked in that way, I assume that the answer has to be Yes; anything else would be even worse. But I still wonder.
Dandrake 07:00 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I still wonder those same things, Dandrake, and I've been here quite a while now. But in the end, the Wiki Way is (if I may misquote Disralei): "The worst possible way to create an encyclopedia - except for all the other ways to create an encyclopedia." Welcome aboard, by the way. Tannin
The views of individual contributors on a subject (e.g. Europe) shouldn't count for much. We're supposed to report on human knowledge in general. As a rough guide, the proportion of material in an article devoted to a particular view should be comparable with the proportion of discourse in the real world devoted to that view. So if someone is adding a lot of stuff relating to a minority point of view, you should feel free to cut it down a bit - perhaps moving it to an article specifically on the subject of that point of view. For example, theories of a flat Earth are taken seriously by almost nobody these days, so the idea should only be mentioned in passing (if at all) at Earth. But the theories can be discussed at length at Flat Earth. I hope that helps. -- Oliver P. 07:56 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Spelling announcement

Today, I expunged the encyclopedia of any and all links to Czar, changing them instead to say Tsar. I consider the former spelling to be incorrect, for reasons that are explained in the article (not contributed by me, mind you), and I'm going to do my bit to kill it once and for all. So, I just thought I'd make that clear, so that the people who write things like [[tsar|czar]] can come forth and settle this once and for all.
Sheesh, I sound like I'm attempting a coup d'etat. -Smack 06:34 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Why, all of a sudden, is my floating quickbar appearing halfway down the page, on certain pages? Mintguy 20:10 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Which pages, in which browser? Does reloading change it? Shift+reload? Ctrl+reload? Cmd+reload? Clearing your cache? Restarting your browser? Using a different browser? Which versions? Which operating system? --Brion 20:55 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Ok. Win 2000 Pro , IE6. It happens when I edit a page. Like this one now. The floating quickbar has decided to place itself below "Main Page | About Wikipedia | Recent changes" giving me a big blank area to the right of it. Hitting refresh isn't changing anything, and I'm not caching or using a proxy so shift-refresh etc.. has no effect. Mintguy 21:04 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I don't have a Windows box to test on at the moment, but I suspect the problem is this: <body bgcolor='#FFFFDD' onLoad='document.editform.wpTextbox1.focus()' onload='setup("quickbar")'>
Two attempts at installing an onLoad event handler. I'll see if I can get it to merge them into one...
Okay, should be installed. Let me know if that fixes it. --Brion 21:41 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Nope. sozMintguy 21:45 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm getting a runtime error, when I double click on the page (using the special "edit this page javascript"). The error is as follows "Line 17: Error: 'document.editform.wpTextbox1.form1' is not an object.
Line 17 is as follows:
<body bgcolor='#FFFFDD' onload='document.editform.wpTextbox1.form1.focus()'>
I'm guessing this is being caused by the recent change you made to the onload script. MB 01:33 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Er, oops. :) Fixed. --Brion 01:47 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It seems to be fixed now. Mintguy 07:41 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hey folks, I think I may have found some weird bug? Either that or somebody is making oddly consistent typos. Go to Wikipedia talk:User page and observe that the moved dates have a "0" before their "2003". Why? I remember fixing this on some other page without comment, but this is getting ridiculous. --Nelson 16:21 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Odd... Doesn't seem to be any point writing 02003, because in 7997 years we (probably) won't be using that date system, anyway... كسيپ Cyp 17:20 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
They were written deliberately by user:Ellmist. Sie presumably agrees with the Long Now Foundation that we should use five figure dates to avoid the Y10K problem. Martin
This would just exacerbate the Y100K problem. ;) The LNF promotes 5-digit zero-padded years as a gimmick: you're supposed to think about long time periods and expand your mind. Which is fine as it goes, but the correct solution is to use arbitrary-length numbers. After all, we don't write that Charlemagne was born in 0814... --Brion 00:53 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Well, we don't because he was born in 0742. djmutex 13:44 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I would like to annotate a list- ideally using different bullet shapes. This can be done in HTML, but * always produces the same bullet. Any way of making a wiki bulleted list use alternate images as bullets? (The reason is I want to mark the two letter english words which are valid in Scrabble and then scrap the scrabble list page. -- SGBailey 12:43 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I just manually type in the different bullet: ·．．‧ . --Menchi 20:06 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I don't see three different bullets, I see three empty square boxes. And anyway, this wouldn't change the LIST bullet, just add another character to the text - which might well be a good solution to this problem. -- SGBailey 23:38 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
How about these alternatives: · ? ¨ ° · * ? --Menchi 23:46 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm surprised to see the Two letter words acceptable in Scrabble page. Clearly the page creator is unaware of two things.

  1. There 3 different standards for acceptable scrabble words OSPD and OSW, and the combined one which I forget the name of for the moment.
  2. There are hundreds of websites with a list of these words and it's not hard to locate one. Mintguy 12:52 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)


I would like to add comments in the wiki source to explain why something is included which is only relevant when a page is being edited. You can use HTML comments as long as they are on a new line, but that breaks lists. Is there a wiki markup for "This is a comment, do not display it?" -- SGBailey 12:43 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'd be quite surprised if such a thing existed; it's quite redundant. Just put the comment at the beginning of the list. -Smack 15:58 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I've now done that to List of people by name: St -- SGBailey 23:21 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Vote for Deletion

Gentlefolk, I hope I am no longer a complete newbie here, but I still have lots of questions.

I note that the entry for Red Dawn is something like a review of the movie, and not a very good one at that. I propose we eliminate it.

However I have no idea how to get to the Votes for Deletion page, nor do I have a clear understanding of how it works.

Little help? Now, with three tildies … PaulinSaudi

It's at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. (Also a link to it on recent changes.) كسيپ Cyp 10:11 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Please make it four tildes, Paulin, to include date (like RickK & Cyp above). It's just one more press. --Menchi 10:14 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Four? OK, done. Now, with four tildies … PaulinSaudi

Sorry, Paulin, don't think you have. :) Do it like this: ~ four times. Sorry I got it mixed myself.Dieter Simon 20:49 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Lemme try this again... Now, with four tildies * PaulinSaudi 12:37 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I've discovered that Wikipedia is inconsistant on how it disambiguates plays. Some musical plays are given the form play (musical), but some have play (play). RickK 02:48 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There's a similar problem with films. Some are film (movie) and some are film (film). - Efghij 00:46 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Empty page

How can and why would a person make an entirely empty page on WP? (Not as a result of deletion, but "addition") I mean, zero character whatsoever! I discovered this anomaly. --Menchi

I am pretty sure it was a noob visiting a dead link, saw there was nothing there, and to exit the page they clicked "save". The software shoulnd't create the page if there is not text. CGS 23:31 10 Jul 2003 (UTC).

It probably contained only whitespace. The software rejects zero length articles, and then after that it strips trailing whitespace, and it doesn't check the length again before save. -- Tim Starling 01:13 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Well, that's a simple problem to fix. If you point me to a link to that piece of code, I would be more than happy (an interested) in fixing it. MB 14:05 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Go for your life: [2]. It's in editForm(). -- Tim Starling 06:19 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Moved from Talk:Main Page

hello elefantfriends I LIKE to create a peace wiki if you like to help ? mailto:Ernstgruber1@gmx.at thanks ernest.

Elephant friends?
See Wikipedia:Technical FAQ.
--Menchi 20:06 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Found a huge source of public domain information that hasn't been wikified

http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html

I always thought some country stuff came fr. there. Maybe not. Macau obviously isn't...yet. --Menchi 20:06 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

I know someone out there likes archiving and cleaning the pump.. it's time.. --Dante Alighieri 00:36 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Tsk, tsk. You're obviously one of those people who finds ordering about easier than doing. Hang on, I'll do it. -- Tim Starling 02:07 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm one of those people who knows that as soon as I start archiving things, something that is "active" will get archived and people will yell at me for trying to hide things. ;) --Dante Alighieri 02:27 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Does this site have a privacy policy? If so, where is it? If not, why not?

And a good day to you too. We don't have an offical privacy policy, but you might want to take a look at Feature requests/Cookies, logins, and privacy. CGS 22:12 16 Jul 2003 (UTC).

False server down

I couldn’t access the website (like it was down) for 2 or 3 hours until just now. I thought it’s just another server thing until I tried another public computer (all in the same room), and it worked fine. Then I closed my broswers (I tried in both IE & NE), and it worked, but pages appear quite slowly when I log in, and very fast when I’m Anon. This false down is really annoying, as I was in the middle of typing something when it suddenly occurred, but I couldn’t go anywhere because I’m using a public comp, so I needed to hog the comp instead of going elsewhere.

  • Q: What caused this false “personalized” down?
  • Q2: Why the slow-fast regi-Anon difference?

--Menchi 20:36 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the "false down", but Q2 is easy -- caching. Because all anon. users see the same HTML, it can easily be cached. If another anon. user has viewed the page recently, no DB access is required. The cached HTML is also compressed, whereas the HTML generated for logged in users is not. -- Tim Starling 00:25 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Protection log

I think it’s a good idea that the admins give a reason when they protect the page and have a log. Does such a thing exist already? If so, it's really hard to find. --Menchi 20:36 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Protected pages and the reason for the protection are supposed to be listed at Wikipedia:Protected page. And yes, it is hard to find. A more prominent link would be nice. For example, protecting a page could involve automatically putting a link to the Protected Page article. --Dante Alighieri 00:36 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I saw that a while ago once. I've forgotten about it. I'm thinking of an auto-list, parallel to the Deletion log, so we can avoid things like "List of phobias (no reason given)". I mean, I don't even know how people ever knew that that page was protected, unless they follow that page closely -- which I suspect less than 1% of the Wikipedia ever did have that on their Watchlist. So auto-list could force admin to explain their actions and don't just do it for no reason. It's nothing major since admins are trustworthy (should be!), so it's of low priority. --Menchi 00:53 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It seems that this could be simply accomplished. Considering that the link in the sidebar that says "Edit this page" is replaced with plaintext "Protected page", it must be possible to have "Edit this page" be replaced with a link Protected page. --Ed Cormany 04:38 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It would be better to have a separate page, with a box where sysops can type a reason, exactly like the current deletion page. Then you could have an automatically generated protection log. At the moment it's very easy to protect pages accidentally. So far, all the pages I've protected accidentally, I noticed and unprotected them immediately, but there's been plenty of cases where the sysop in question didn't realise.
The other thing that needs a log but hasn't got one is undeletion. -- Tim Starling 04:49 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Main Page browser title

Could the developer change the broswer title of the index from "Main Page - Wikipedia" to something like "Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia"? Because every time I bookmark it to a public computer (my subliminal way of promotion), I have to manually change it to that, because most ppl dunno what WP is, and saying that it's the "Main Page" seems pretty useless.

I'm just talking about the main page/index, the broswer titles of the other article pages are probably fine as is.

--Menchi 17:44 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The Anomebot's edits are currently visible in Recent Changes, even though Markus has set it to be a registered bot. Currently, there do not seem to be any complaints, so I am letting it run. Is there any chance of a developer checking the current codebase to see if the bot registration is working ok? -- User:The Anome posting as The Anomebot

Something just struck me. Why when we write ~~~~ does it link to the user page and not the user talk page? When we hit someone's usernic we usually want to leave them a message, not read their main page. I've been leaving a message on some pages in visiting four people, it involved eight journeys, to a user page, then talk page, next user page, then talk page, etc etc. Can that be changed? After all, if we want to see their user page, we can always go to it from the talk page, but as 9 times out of 10 we want the talk page, it would make sense to make it the default, with the longer route reserved for the rare occasions when we actually want to go to their main page. Any observations? FearÉIREANN 01:35 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This has come up before and there are arguments for and against it. One major problem with that approach is that we will end up with mixed signature types unless we do a massive conversion, which might be confusing. Also, I think links should reflect the content of their pages -- when I click on a user name, I expect to see something about that user.
On the other hand, it is clearly very inconvenient to post comments with our current system. Brion has written a quick hack to put at least a shortcut to the edit page on the user page ("Leave a comment for this user"); this would mean that you effectively have to click the same number of times as with your solution. Eventually what I would love to see are some nice tiny icons that appear next to each username, one, maybe like the blue (i) logo, shows the user page, one, maybe a speech bubble, shows the talk page, one, a speech bubble with an exclamation mark in it, opens the talk page in edit mode. Because that would be much different from the sigs we have now, it should be reasonably non-confusing. In the meantime, I think Brion's solution should work fine. --Eloquence 02:16 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
agreed -Smack

This comment was the first reply to Jtdirl, but clearly he didn't like it: Maybe a dual link would be better. -- Tim Starling (Talk) 01:37 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Oh sugar! Sorry Tim it must have got erased in the edit conflict I found myself in. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. (Or as we supposed Irish speakers would say Tá brón orm!) FearÉIREANN 05:22 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It's alright, it was just an honest mistake, and easily corrected. Save the multilingual apologies for when you burn down my house or shoot me or something. -- Tim Starling 05:38 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Opps, Brion, sorry I forgot to come back and tell you about the problem with Camino not recognising the <small></small. command. Quite simply it never ever recognises it. For example Papal Tiara, James I of England. Also the top of the Recent Changes page. FearÉIREANN 02:00 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

wearing the 1834 Triple Tiara
of Pope Gregory XVI

(running a test here!)

The above for example, irrespective of whether the <div> commands are in or simply the middle line is used here, appears as large italics on Camino 0.7 but small italics on IE. (Good God. I knew if I wated long enough I'd find something good to say about Explorer. So it isn't 100% crap, merely 95%! FearÉIREANN 02:00 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

That might explain why Camino's not yet up to version 1.0. ;) - Hephaestos 02:07 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Looks fine to me... OS X 10.2.6, Camino 0.7. --Brion 05:15 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
File:Camino-showing-small-tags.jpg

I've discovered a bit of the problem. Camino + Cologne Blue together don't show small!!! I was using Cologne Blue. :-( So I guess that leaves me with the problem of which do I chose - nice skin + IE (aaaaaagh!) or yuch skin + camino (aaaaagh!) Maybe I'll sleep on it. BTW, re the floating quickbar, does it ever actually float??? :-) FearÉIREANN 05:51 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Reload the page and you should find the <small> tags operating as expected under Cologne Blue. Apparently for reasons unclear, using an absolute point size for the text (eg, font-size: 10pt) causes the smallish effect of the <small> tag to become very very slight in Camino (and hence unnoticable at 10pt). Putting an explicit small { font-size: 75%; } into the style sheet declaration makes it work more as expected:
File:Camino-showing-smaller-tags.jpg
As far as the floating quickbar; Cologne Blue really isn't set up for that, so you just get the boring one that's stuck at the top of the page when you scroll. Sorry. --Brion 06:19 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I am not a font expert, but isn't this a simple case of not having the appropriately-sized bitmap font? If Camino defines "small" to mean "80%-size", and your bitmapped font has, say, 16 pixel and 10 pixel sets, and your normal font is 16 pixels, 80% would come out to 12.8 pixels, which might just be rounded up to 16 pixels again (purely hypothetical, of course, but you see my point). Does the lack-of-small problem occur with all font sizes? What happens if you zoom in/out, or choose a different "default" font in your preferences? (if Camino has such capabilities - I haven't used it). -- Wapcaplet 11:24 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Bit map fonts? MacOS X does not understand your strange terminology, it's all magic vector truetype display PDF smoothy anti-aliased crud. ;) Defining 80% also works fine, while pumping the font zoom up to HUGE shows only the tiniest of visible changes without the explicit percentage definition. --Brion 16:24 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Clearly I am no Mac expert either ;-) I suppose my next question would be, has anyone actually measured the height of the "small" font in pixels? Could just be a quirk of human visual perception that 80% looks too similar to 100% for some fonts. -- Wapcaplet 23:56 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
No, the trouble is the way that it handles the 'smaller' font size keyword, which is specified for the <small> tag in Mozilla's default style sheets. It's not a percentage value (which works fine if we force it, be it 75% or 80% or whatever), rather it ratchets down to the next-smaller value in a fixed list. Certain values are particularly bad: 10pt translates to something like 13.33 pixels, and so it picks the next-smaller size of... 13 pixels! If you zoom the text size way up in Camino, the 0.33 difference turns into a couple of whole pixels and is visible, but at normal size the font scaling rounds the 10pt text to 13px, the same as the "smaller" text. See bugs 72164 and 201811 in bugzilla. This may be fixed in more recent versions; but Camino hasn't updated (at least not in release versions) and I haven't tested the just-released Mozilla 1.4 (nor will I have a chance to for a while). --Brion 01:41 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

School and uni projects

I remember that several people have launched small school and university projects, showing their students Wikipedia. In these cases there was usually a brief flurry of edits from the students of the class/group, and then it stopped. It would be nice to have some actual evaluation of these projects, with further analysis and description of the methodology. Unfortunately the only one I can still associate with an identity is the one User:KF told me about. There were also a couple of projects on the German Wikipedia, but these probably don't belong here. Could any of you who still remember, or even have participated in, some of the past projects on the English Wikipedia add the respective information to the newly created Wikipedia:School and university projects page? Thanks! --Eloquence 06:21 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Me and a few of my friends who were studying for our advanced level (pre-university) exams here in Britain this summer used Wikipedia as a revision tool, writing articles from our notes. For example, Tell England was one of the novels I studied for my English literature exam. This should be promoted. CGS 13:02 16 Jul 2003 (UTC).
I'm currently having 80 students contribute to HK entries and will be polling them at the end to get their feedback. I would love to write it up not only as a summary for Wikipedians, but for other journalism and online educators as well. Please see my talk page and leave me advice on what questions to put on the survey. (Fuzheado 13:25 16 Jul 2003 (UTC))

Moving and merging

How does one go about moving pages to Wikiquote or Wiktionary? Manual cut and paste?

How are edit histories merged if a temp article is started?

--Jiang 12:03 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Happy Birthday announcements on Main page

Ive been trying to push this idea for a long time, for example, say that Walter Mercado and Hilary Duff, who are still alive, share the same birthday, we can go like: Happy Birthday to: Walter Mercado - Hilary Duff -

What do you guys think? -- Antonio Happy Birthday to youu!! Happy Birthday to youuuu!! Happy Birthday Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday toooo youuu!! Martin

Privacy policy

move to wikipedia:privacy policy

Does this site have a privacy policy? If so, where is it? If not, why not?

And a good day to you too. We don't have an offical privacy policy, but you might want to take a look at Feature requests/Cookies, logins, and privacy. CGS 22:12 16 Jul 2003 (UTC).
No, we don't. It's been suggested in the past (by, for example, user:BigFatBuddha), but nobody managed to get round to it. Martin 09:56 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Anomebot

move to User talk:The Anomebot

The Anomebot's edits are currently visible in Recent Changes, even though Markus has set it to be a registered bot. Currently, there do not seem to be any complaints, so I am letting it run. Is there any chance of a developer checking the current codebase to see if the bot registration is working ok? -- User:The Anome posting as The Anomebot

sounds like a bug. Follow links on Wikipedia:Bug reports? Martin 10:18 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Privacy policy

moved to wikipedia:privacy policy

Does this site have a privacy policy? If so, where is it? If not, why not?

And a good day to you too. We don't have an offical privacy policy, but you might want to take a look at Feature requests/Cookies, logins, and privacy. CGS 22:12 16 Jul 2003 (UTC).
No, we don't. It's been suggested in the past (by, for example, user:BigFatBuddha), but nobody managed to get round to it. Martin 09:56 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Please see m:Draft privacy policy.

OneLook.com

I came across [http:www.onelook.com OneLook] when checking an article Denial that looked like it was copied from that page (see VfD under July 17). Taking another look or two, I found that they link to many Wikipedia articles from their results pages (search for "Earth" for an example). That looks like a good thing. However, there does not seem to be any further explanation about Wikipedia, they just give you a box "Encyclopedia article" with the article's opening sentences and the link. I've got no clue whether this has any GFDL implications. Has anybody been in contact with OneLook? Kosebamse 10:51 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OneLook.com

I came across http://www.onelook.com when checking an article Denial that looked like it was copied from that page (see VfD under July 17). Taking another look or two, I found that they link to many Wikipedia articles from their results pages (search for "Earth" for an example). That looks like a good thing. However, there does not seem to be any further explanation about Wikipedia, they just give you a box "Encyclopedia article" with the article's opening sentences and the link. I've got no clue whether this has any GFDL implications. Has anybody been in contact with OneLook? Kosebamse 10:51 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

IANAL, but it looks to me like a case of fair use. I think that anything which brings extra traffic to Wikipedia is a good thing! It would be nice if they at least said "Article from Wikipedia" instead of "Encyclopedia article", though. They give a source for all the other hits; they should give one for Wiki as well. -- Wapcaplet 11:30 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Auto Loading (Batch) to Wiki

I am looking for a program to load a mass of articles (batch load) to Wiki.
I try to add new articles to the newly born Hebrew Wikipedia.
Can U pl. give me some directions? -- Dod1 12:17 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Auto Loading (Batch) to Wiki

move to wikipedia:bots

I am looking for a program to load a mass of articles (batch load) to Wiki.
I try to add new articles to the newly born Hebrew Wikipedia.
Can U pl. give me some directions? -- Dod1 12:17 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

read wikipedia:bots.

OneLook.com

move to Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia as a source

I came across http://www.onelook.com when checking an article Denial that looked like it was copied from that page (see VfD under July 17). Taking another look or two, I found that they link to many Wikipedia articles from their results pages (search for "Earth" for an example). That looks like a good thing. However, there does not seem to be any further explanation about Wikipedia, they just give you a box "Encyclopedia article" with the article's opening sentences and the link. I've got no clue whether this has any GFDL implications. Has anybody been in contact with OneLook? Kosebamse 10:51 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

IANAL, but it looks to me like a case of fair use. I think that anything which brings extra traffic to Wikipedia is a good thing! It would be nice if they at least said "Article from Wikipedia" instead of "Encyclopedia article", though. They give a source for all the other hits; they should give one for Wiki as well. -- Wapcaplet 11:30 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Already answered at Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia as a source.
Thanks Martin, I didn't know that page. Kosebamse 11:42 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Privacy Policy

Does the Wikipedia have a privacy policy?

212.239.162.32 19:15 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Images/multimedia

Plus, how can we possibly make this WikiPic multilingual? We'd have to double the entire Wikipedias form 20 in # to 40.
--Menchi 18:12 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Since this may become a lengthy discussion, I have copied the above to User:Wapcaplet/WikiPiki. Please feel free to contribute comments there. -- Wapcaplet 18:14 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Illustrated Wikipedia

I've been scouting around for Wikipedia articles that could use illustrations or photographs, and supplying a few by snapping shots with my crappy digital camera (such as Capo, Sharp Zaurus, Cooking pan). It occurs to me that many, many articles could be helped by photos, illustrations, and the like - often, several different illustrations would be nice.

Then again, however, such imagery would very likely clutter the articles, and would be hard to lay out in a way that wouldn't dominate the text content (which is really the most important part). My thought is, why not create a new "language" Wikipedia predominantly for illustrations, photos, etc.? The Illustrated Wikipedia could be more or less stand-alone; captions, brief descriptions, and links to related topics would of course be there, but it would be built primarily around the notion of communicating through pictures. This strikes me as having several advantages:

  • It'd be like having an "illustration page" for each article. Any inter-language Wikipedia could link to the associated article in the Illustrated Wikipedia, for a larger (and hopefully more diverse) collection of illustrations and photos.
  • It would be a great medium for contributors whose primary interest in Wikipedia is adding photographs. Also for anyone with an artistic inclination towards sketching, painting, digital illustration, or other techniques.
  • It'd keep image clutter out of the main articles. One or two good illustrations could be placed on the main articles; the rest can be part of the inter-language link.

Of course, some of the problems that we already have related to images would be exacerbated:

  • Possible copyright issues. It'd be tricky trying to police the image contributions for violations.
  • Space on the server. I don't know how much of an issue this is, but obviously an article full of images takes up a lot more bits than an article of text.
  • Server load, handling requests for lots of large images (both uploading and downloading). Again, I don't know how much of an issue this is.

Comments? Criticisms? Has this already been suggested? (and where is a more appropriate place to discuss this?) -- Wapcaplet 16:06 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

We could call it Pikipedia :) CGS 17:03 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Or WikiPiki :) I think it sounds like a good idea, but the problems you mention are formidable. Plus creating a whole new Wiki would be a big task. But I've felt that Wikipedia, while incredibly cool, is a bit lacking in graphics. A Wiki just for graphics would be really useful for the Wikipedia. —Frecklefoot 17:14 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Sorry, I don't think this is a good idea. It would simply decrease the effort going into Wikipedia. I have added hundreds of pics and would not have the energy or time to restart with another encyclopedia. The idea would not catch on and isn't even necessary, all the pics should go into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an illustrated encyclopedia, we don't need two!
I have had no problems mixing pics and text so long as the pics are no more than 300 pixels wide.
Finally, would the creation of WikiPiki produce greater numbers of illustrators than we have now? So the work done on WikiPici would be work not done to Wikipedia.
Adrian Pingstone 17:57 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Separation of images and text is an archaic practice when people place those image plates arbitrarily in the middle of a thick book. What distinguishes established CD-ROM encyclopedias, like Encarta, from Britannica the most is probably their extensive use of multimedia. Textbooks, for all levels, including university-level, also feature more and more colourful appearance. We have the capability to illustrate words with visual aids, and we should do that. Images are way too undervalued.
If the images became too many (over one per paragraph or something), we can just link it to a section:
== Images/multimedia ==
Plus, how can we possibly make this WikiPic multilingual? We'd have to double the entire Wikipedias form 20 in # to 40.
--Menchi 18:12 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Since this may become a lengthy discussion, I have copied the above to User:Wapcaplet/WikiPiki. Please feel free to contribute comments there. -- Wapcaplet 18:14 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Is it the User:The_Anomebot that is slowing down the server? -- User:Docu

Database error

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A database query syntax error has occurred. The last attempted database query was: "UPDATE cur SET cur_timestamp='20030719174604', cur_user=7586, cur_user_text='Cyp', cur_text='Below is a list of the most recent file uploads. See also: [[Wikipedia:Upload log archive|Upload log archive]] <br> All times shown are server time ([[UTC]]). Current server time is: {{CURRENTTIME}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTDAY}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}. <ul><li>17:46 19 Jul 2003 [[User:Cyp|Cyp]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Erf.png|Erf.png]]\" <em>(Error function, with higher E, made by me.)</em></li> <li>17:45 19 Jul 2003 [[User:Jstanley01|Jstanley01]] uploaded \"[[:Image:G_and_b.JPG|G_and_b.JPG]]\"</li> <li>17:34 19 Jul 2003 [[User:Infrogmation|Infrogmation]] uploaded \"[[:Image:ZocaloMexicoCity1900.jpg|ZocaloMexicoCity1900.jpg]]\" <em>(Zocalo and Cathedral, Mexico City. From stereocard c 1900)</em></li> <li>17:24 19 Jul 2003 [[User:Jstanley01|Jstanley01]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Guns_and_butter.JPG|Guns_and_butter.JPG]]\" <em>(I produced this image)</em></li> <li>17:03 19 Jul 2003 [[User:The Anomebot|The Anomebot]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Map_of_Washington_highlighting_Cowlitz_County.png|Map_of_Washington_highlighting_Cowlitz_County.png]]\" <em>(Public domain map courtesy of [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/ The General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin], modified to show counties. Released under GFDL. See [[Wikipedia:U.S. county map]]s.)</em></li> <li>17:02 19 Jul 2003 [[User:The Anomebot|The Anomebot]] uploaded

<Omitted about a megabyte of text here>

<em>(Picture of John Pilger, taken from Mr. Pilger\'s site, http://pilger.carlton.com/home/biography)</em></li> <li>04:53 1 Jul 2003 [[User:Seav|Seav]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Ph_seal_camarines_sur.png|Ph_seal_camarines_sur.png]]\" <em>(Provincial Seal of [[Camarines Sur]])</em></li> <li>04:47 1 Jul 2003 [[User:Hike395|Hike395]] uploaded \"[[:Image:TreeKill.jpg|TreeKill.jpg]]\" <em>(Mammoth Mountain tree kill area)</em></li> <li>01:05 1 Jul 2003 [[User:Mydogategodshat|Mydogategodshat]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Elastic_demand.png|Elastic_demand.png]]\" <em>(elastic demand)</em></li> <li>01:04 1 Jul 2003 [[User:Mydogategodshat|Mydogategodshat]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Price_skimming_small.png|Price_skimming_small.png]]\" <em>(price skimming)</em></li>', cur_comment='uploaded \"Erf.png\": Error function, with higher E, made by me.', cur_restrictions='sysop', inverse_timestamp='79969280825395' WHERE cur_id=62938" from within function "LogPage::saveContent". MySQL returned error "1153: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet'".

From the start to the end, including the omitted text, is 1047870 bytes, surprisingly close to 220. Thought the error message was a bit too long to post all of it here. Haven't seen this error before. 15:45 November 9, 2024 is interesting to know, at least. כסיף Cyp 18:05 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL ON TALK PAGES

Is it a violation of copywrite law to copy two paragraphs from an external web page and put it on a Wikipedia talk page. The purpose is to explain a word.

Thanks,..Norm2 05:50 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Coverage

So, this is kind of a weird question, but I've been thinking about ways to model Wikipedia coverage. By this I mean, if you consider the range of possible subjects we consider worth including in Wikipedia, how many of those subjects already have articles? I know that that's a really abstract idea, but I think it's probably a better measure of how "good" Wikipedia is than just raw number of articles.

One way to think of it is to imagine some kind of endpoint in the future where we've got all the information we think Wikipedia-worthy in the system. Then, we all get to sit back, and just add new articles as new people, events, countries, awards ceremonies, species, albums, books, and planets come into being. How close are we to getting there? How many of the articles in that imagined encyclopedia do we already have?

Some ways I've been thinking of measuring this:

  • Of the entries in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, how many have corresponding Wikipedia articles? (Totally crude, but if we were back in 1911, wouldn't we want to have at least as much knowledge as the EB? Close to it?)
  • What percentage of Wikipedia searches come up empty? (This would measure what percentage of things Wikipedia readers think should be in the system are already there.)
  • Of the internal links inside Wikipedia, what percentage point nowhere? How many have non-stub articles at the endpoint? (This would measure what percentage of things Wikipedia authors think should be in the system are already there.)

Yes, it's probably kind of silly to think of the range of Wikipedia-worthy subjects as a finite set, and even if we had an article for every one of those subjects, the individual facts, figures, interpretations, explanations and opinions worth putting in each article is also close to infinite. But I'd like to think we're closing in on the goal of being a good, reliable encyclopedia, and I think coverage is one way to measure that. I'm just wondering if it can be modeled in any reasonable way. -- ESP 05:03 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

First some data: The number of links to non-existent pages is currently 527137. The number of links to existent pages is 2583574. That only about 17% of all links point to non-existent pages may be surprising, but note that this includes the signatures on talk pages and similar stuff (not the navigational links, though). It's possible to exclude these from the count, but that would tax the database server substantially.
As for comparing Wikipedia, I'm not sure the 1911 encyclopedia is such a good idea. A lot has changed in the last 92 years, making many articles obsolete, and many others would now be considered irrelevant by all but the most specialized readers. Wikipedia by now probably reflects better what most people care about than other encyclopedias -- we have very detailed articles about music festivals and groups, about actors and actresses, about fictional characters, about sex positions; stuff that you will, for the most part, not find in traditional encyclopedias, but that is nevertheless searched for a lot.
We do lack articles about specialized knowledge areas that are nevertheless of cultural importance. A good indication to see where we do not have enough motivated Wikipedians is to check out Special:Ancientpages. Mostly it's stuff about "obscure" countries that get neglected -- but if you lived in such a country, you would be very disappointed not to find that information.
A systematic comparison would take a reasonably large random sample (say, 500 articles) from modern encyclopedias and compare their articles with the respective Wikipedia articles, if any; and to do the same in the other direction as well. That way you could develop a quality rating: Wikipedia's coverage of Encarta's sample is xyz better/worse than Encarta's coverage; Encarta's coverage of Wikipedia's sample is xyz better/worse than Wikipedia's coverage (where xyz would be some points/rating system).
This is a big project, but it can be done collaboratively. I would definitely be willing to review a few Britannica/Encarta (German) articles. To assure non-bias, these should be assigned by the person running the project. Feel free to start Wikipedia:State of Wikipedia. --Eloquence 06:28 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Can anyone please identify this bird, photographed by myself about a week ago in the tropical house at Paignton Zoo, southern England. I have no information, not even the continent.
File:Bird.paigntonzoo.250pix.jpg
Thanks,
Adrian Pingstone 09:58 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

No problem, Adrian, I can help you there. Paignton Zoo, southern England is usually considered part of Europe (though it's actually an island just of the coast of that continent). And, to save you asking, today is Wednesday. Or possibly Monday. :) Tannin 11:52 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Tony, thanks for your helpful information. I'm sure the Blue-crowned Motmot will be pleased to know its location. I will now put it into the taxobox where it can contemplate what day of the week it is.
Adrian Pingstone 12:10 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Wikifying?

Do I have to put blabla on the See also list when I have wikified the blabla already in the text? --webkid 05:45 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I never do Theresa knott 07:10 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I just realized something regarding the consistent wikipedia slowdowns. The features that we have turned off to keep the english wikipedia from slowing down, are on on the other pedias. Could this be contributing to the slow downs? MB 14:33 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Fair use and album covers

Is uploading an album cover "fair use"? My understanding of fair use is that it's not. Can someone enlighten me? -- ESP 00:10 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Some people seem to think it is. Some people seem to think "fair use" are just two words you put on an upload page when you can't get permission. Personally I can't see how it could be fair use. See my user page for an IANAL statement. -- Tim Starling 02:46 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'd like to see a counterargument. I don't normally think any "fair use" inclusions are good for Wikipedia -- they make the work Discrinate Against Fields of Endeavor, and put us in a dubious state as to being "Open Content." -- ESP 04:23 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
For the album covers I've uploaded at least, you can just search for [[fair use]] in the image pages, and simply remove them. It doesn't impact on the use of any original work. -- Jim Regan 04:37 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hmm. Looks like I'm to blame for this discussion. Fair use seems to be OK, going by US law. Wikipedia/Wikimedia is/are non-profit, the images are 200px x 200px, and so not a substantial reproduction, and we're not going to have a negative impact on the market value of the album by using the cover art in an article about the album.
Would this discussion be here if I hadn't bothered putting in the details in the upload log? There are quite a few album covers on Wikipedia which don't have any copyright information, which is a breach of copyright law. -- Jim Regan 04:34 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Bird identification

move to wikipedia:reference desk

Can anyone please identify this bird, photographed by myself about a week ago in the tropical house at Paignton Zoo, southern England. I have no information, not even the continent.
File:Bird.paigntonzoo.250pix.jpg
Thanks,
Adrian Pingstone 09:58 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)


No problem, Adrian, I can help you there. Paignton Zoo, southern England is usually considered part of Europe (though it's actually an island just of the coast of that continent). And, to save you asking, today is Wednesday. Or possibly Monday. :) Tannin 11:52 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Tony, thanks for your helpful information. I'm sure the Blue-crowned Motmot will be pleased to know its location. I will now put it into the taxobox where it can contemplate what day of the week it is.
Adrian Pingstone 12:10 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
please ask these kind of questions at wikipedia:reference desk

Translator needed

Can anyone translate that? I'm not even sure which language it is (something arabian I would presume). CGS 19:50 17 Jul 2003 (UTC).

ermmm... it looks like english to me: "the sword also ... ... ... death" -- Tarquin 19:56 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Perhaps.... but that character in the middle of the penultimate line (a sort of dropped t) doesn't look latin to me. CGS 20:06 17 Jul 2003 (UTC).
It's just sloppy (or "artistic") handwriting in English, that dropped t is "+" as an abbreviation for "and". It seems to be "The sword also means clean-ness + death", which is something T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) wrote in a letter to Eric Kennington, who incorporated it into the crossed-daggers design on the cover of the first public edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1935, and since the picture is titled "Seven pillars tooling", it's probably a picture of the cover in question. -- Someone else 20:23 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Yeah - I scanned it from my 1st edition of Pillars. CGS 21:02 17 Jul 2003 (UTC).
Doesn't look like arabic, or any related alphabet, although I see the similarity. Looks to me like "itu sword also medus dearq-uess death". (Which doesn't make any sense to me...) כסיף Cyp 20:32 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
After edit conflict: Ok, "The sword also means clean-ness + death" seems more likely than what I read... כסיף Cyp 20:32 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Thanks. CGS 21:00 17 Jul 2003 (UTC).

The third word looks much more like "alas" than "also". --Fritzlein 18:18 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

False server down

move to wikipedia:lag

I couldn’t access the website (like it was down) for 2 or 3 hours until just now. I thought it’s just another server thing until I tried another public computer (all in the same room), and it worked fine. Then I closed my broswers (I tried in both IE & NE), and it worked, but pages appear quite slowly when I log in, and very fast when I’m Anon. This false down is really annoying, as I was in the middle of typing something when it suddenly occurred, but I couldn’t go anywhere because I’m using a public comp, so I needed to hog the comp instead of going elsewhere.

  • Q: What caused this false "personalized" down?
  • Q2: Why the slow-fast regi-Anon difference?

--Menchi 20:36 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the "false down", but Q2 is easy -- caching. Because all anon. users see the same HTML, it can easily be cached. If another anon. user has viewed the page recently, no DB access is required. The cached HTML is also compressed, whereas the HTML generated for logged in users is not. -- Tim Starling 00:25 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Can I set my preferences so as to get the cached HTML, if my settings are identical to those of an anon user? Martin 09:59 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
No, but you can just log out. :) It stores the entire page, including the sidebar and bits in the corner, so you wouldn't get things like the 'move page' link, ability to watch pages, etc.

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

Happy Birthday announcements on Main page

move to talk:Main Page

Ive been trying to push this idea for a long time, for example, say that Walter Mercado and Hilary Duff, who are still alive, share the same birthday, we can go like: Happy Birthday to: Walter Mercado - Hilary Duff -

What do you guys think? -- AntonioMartin

I like it. Though I'd obviously prefer a Main Page/Temp4 style - "Happy Birthday to Walter Mercado, inventor of sliced bread, who is 100 today". Martin 12:39 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm not sure about the "Happy" bit - "Happy birthday, Osama Bin Laden", for example, doesn't sound right. Can't it just be "People born today" or something? CGS 12:49 17 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Main Page browser title

move to talk:Main Page

Could the developer change the broswer title of the index from "Main Page - Wikipedia" to something like "Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia"? Because every time I bookmark it to a public computer (my subliminal way of promotion), I have to manually change it to that, because most ppl dunno what WP is, and saying that it's the "Main Page" seems pretty useless.


I'm just talking about the main page/index, the broswer titles of the other article pages are probably fine as is.

--Menchi 17:44 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

sounds like a feature request. Follow links on Wikipedia:Bug reports? Martin 10:18 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The catch is that Main Page is, as far as the system is concerned, just another article. Getting it to display a non-standard browser title would probably involve programming a specific exception in the wiki software, or some such thing.

Good work with the bookmarking, by the way. —Paul A 01:19 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

End of moved material Enchanter 23:54 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Nonono!!!! This doesn't belong here. Why put it on a utility page? Plus, you redirect should be #REDIRECTWikipedia:Bulletin Board for it to work. Please move the contents of this page (minus the discussion) there and this one will be deleted. --Jiang 23:47 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm archiving the pump. Please don't edit this page for a few minutes. Thanks, Merphant 04:41 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ordered lists. Does anyone else think it would be a good idea to modify the default stylesheet to add space between ordered list items (see User:Merphant/sandbox)? It would make paragraphs in ordered lists much easier to read. For simple bulleted lists we don't have that problem, since we can just insert a space between bullets. -- Merphant 04:38 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Wikifying?

move to wikipeedia talk:Manual of Style

Do I have to put blabla on the See also list when I have wikified the blabla already in the text? --webkid 05:45 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I never do Theresa knott 07:10 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
You don't have to. If it's a really important link, you may wish to.
I tend to think we shouldn't, because it's already linked to, and often remove those from see also lists. Vicki Rosenzweig 02:53 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Military Science or Space Exploration?

I'm considering making an entry, but I'm not sure which category to put it in. The exploration of space is a multi-category field - trying to pin it down to one science is impossible. Between electronics, astro-physics, life support, etc. etc. etc.; forget it. However, let's assume for a moment that we're actually going to send people to the stars. Add to that assumption the slight possibility of our brave explorers voyaging to a planet, and find themselves as the main course of an alien family... Enter Military Science (or military applications of pre-existing science, in most cases.) While I'm not in favor of the military leading our little expedition, I'm leary about not having any kind of protection from unknown species. Now, the entry(ies??) would be sound, scientifically-based, although I would link to (and probably add) some non-inertial theories of faster-than-light transport. Obvious question is, where do I put this? Draconis

Can't tell, without actually reading it, but if it's put a strange place, it can at least be moved later. כסיף Cyp 08:53 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Slowdowns - blame the foreigners!

move to wikipedia:lag

I just realized something regarding the consistent wikipedia slowdowns. The features that we have turned off to keep the english wikipedia from slowing down, are on on the other pedias. Could this be contributing to the slow downs? MB 14:33 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Auto Loading (Batch) to Wiki

move to wikipedia talk:bots

I am looking for a program to load a mass of articles (batch load) to Wiki.
I try to add new articles to the newly born Hebrew Wikipedia.
Can U pl. give me some directions? -- Dod1 12:17 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

read wikipedia:bots.

OneLook.com

move to Wikipedia talk:Sites that use Wikipedia as a source

I came across http://www.onelook.com when checking an article Denial that looked like it was copied from that page (see VfD under July 17). Taking another look or two, I found that they link to many Wikipedia articles from their results pages (search for "Earth" for an example). That looks like a good thing. However, there does not seem to be any further explanation about Wikipedia, they just give you a box "Encyclopedia article" with the article's opening sentences and the link. I've got no clue whether this has any GFDL implications. Has anybody been in contact with OneLook? Kosebamse 10:51 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

IANAL, but it looks to me like a case of fair use. I think that anything which brings extra traffic to Wikipedia is a good thing! It would be nice if they at least said "Article from Wikipedia" instead of "Encyclopedia article", though. They give a source for all the other hits; they should give one for Wiki as well. -- Wapcaplet 11:30 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Already answered at Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia as a source.
Thanks Martin, I didn't know that page. Kosebamse 11:42 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Moving and merging

move to Wikipedia talk:Things to be moved to Wiktionary

How does one go about moving pages to Wikiquote or Wiktionary? Manual cut and paste?

How are edit histories merged if a temp article is started?

--Jiang 12:03 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Archiving

move to wikipedia talk:village pump

I know someone out there likes archiving and cleaning the pump.. it's time.. --Dante Alighieri 00:36 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Tsk, tsk. You're obviously one of those people who finds ordering about easier than doing. Hang on, I'll do it. -- Tim Starling 02:07 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm one of those people who knows that as soon as I start archiving things, something that is "active" will get archived and people will yell at me for trying to hide things. ;) --Dante Alighieri 02:27 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Don't archive the page then - just move bits of the conversation to the relevant talk pages. You're allowed to do that even for active conversations. Plus, it's better (if more work). Martin 09:56 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Protection log

move to wikipedia talk:protected page

I think it’s a good idea that the admins give a reason when they protect the page and have a log. Does such a thing exist already? If so, it's really hard to find. --Menchi 20:36 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Protected pages and the reason for the protection are supposed to be listed at Wikipedia:Protected page. And yes, it is hard to find. A more prominent link would be nice. For example, protecting a page could involve automatically putting a link to the Protected Page article. --Dante Alighieri 00:36 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I saw that a while ago once. I've forgotten about it. I'm thinking of an auto-list, parallel to the Deletion log, so we can avoid things like "List of phobias (no reason given)". I mean, I don't even know how people ever knew that that page was protected, unless they follow that page closely -- which I suspect less than 1% of the Wikipedia ever did have that on their Watchlist. So auto-list could force admin to explain their actions and don't just do it for no reason. It's nothing major since admins are trustworthy (should be!), so it's of low priority. --Menchi 00:53 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It seems that this could be simply accomplished. Considering that the link in the sidebar that says "Edit this page" is replaced with plaintext "Protected page", it must be possible to have "Edit this page" be replaced with a link Protected page. --Ed Cormany 04:38 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It would be better to have a separate page, with a box where sysops can type a reason, exactly like the current deletion page. Then you could have an automatically generated protection log. At the moment it's very easy to protect pages accidentally. So far, all the pages I've protected accidentally, I noticed and unprotected them immediately, but there's been plenty of cases where the sysop in question didn't realise.
The other thing that needs a log but hasn't got one is undeletion. -- Tim Starling 04:49 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Also, unblocking IPs. Martin 10:18 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ordered lists

Does anyone else think it would be a good idea to modify the default stylesheet to add space between ordered list items (see User:Merphant/sandbox)? It would make paragraphs in ordered lists much easier to read. For simple bulleted lists we don't have that problem, since we can just insert a space between bullets. -- Merphant 04:38 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Cleaning the pump

move to Wikipedia talk:Village pump in a few days

To whoever put the 'move to {{page x}} when done' above discussions, that was a great idea. Let's all do this in the future, if you can think of where to put it. It makes cleaning the pump a lot easier. -- Merphant 05:08 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ordered lists

Does anyone else think it would be a good idea to modify the default stylesheet to add space between ordered list items (see User:Merphant/sandbox)? It would make paragraphs in ordered lists much easier to read. For simple bulleted lists we don't have that problem, since we can just insert a space between bullets. -- Merphant 04:38 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It does look much better and more readable, certainly.
James F. 07:04 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Wikifying?

move to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Do I have to put blabla on the See also list when I have wikified the blabla already in the text? --webkid 05:45 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I never do Theresa knott 07:10 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
You don't have to. If it's a really important link, you may wish to.
I tend to think we shouldn't, because it's already linked to, and often remove those from see also lists. Vicki Rosenzweig 02:53 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Military Science or Space Exploration?

I'm considering making an entry, but I'm not sure which category to put it in. The exploration of space is a multi-category field - trying to pin it down to one science is impossible. Between electronics, astro-physics, life support, etc. etc. etc.; forget it. However, let's assume for a moment that we're actually going to send people to the stars. Add to that assumption the slight possibility of our brave explorers voyaging to a planet, and find themselves as the main course of an alien family... Enter Military Science (or military applications of pre-existing science, in most cases.) While I'm not in favor of the military leading our little expedition, I'm leary about not having any kind of protection from unknown species. Now, the entry(ies??) would be sound, scientifically-based, although I would link to (and probably add) some non-inertial theories of faster-than-light transport. Obvious question is, where do I put this? Draconis

Can't tell, without actually reading it, but if it's put a strange place, it can at least be moved later. כסיף Cyp 08:53 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Meetup

FYI, I found this neat weikipedia enthuseists website at http://wikipedia.meetup.com/ MB 21:02 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

read meta:meetup
I tried doing as suggested, and "read meta:meetup" but there is nothing there. I will put a link there, but I really don't see the point in pointing people to a non-existent page. MB 22:39 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comments has been created. Please list your requests for comments there. Comments please to Wikipedia talk:Requests for comments. -- Wapcaplet 13:11 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Decipher the Code

)> () ))) )') _ ))) ) )- )-( _ )- )-( (- _ )') (- ))) _ ))) () )' ), )> _ () )' )> (- )'

Yoism evangelism

User:68.162.218.43 added Yoism and Yo, apparently an "opensource religion", and is now inserting "see also" references to it in numerous places, from Atheism to Deism to Agnosticism and Humanism. These edits are factually correct, insofar as "Yoism" appears to be considered a religion at least by some, and some of its tenets are indeed similar to some of those other "isms", but it still seems out of place, because it's so obscure as to not really merit a mention in the articles on more well-known topics (IMO). Do we have a policy on removing factually correct but obscure/irrelevant information (especially when that information appears to be added by an overzealous fan of the topic in question)? I could go through and revert all the edits, but wanted to ask what others though first. --Delirium 18:45 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Well, just MHO, but yeah, I think reverting is the right thing to do unless the reference is highly relavent. But you might want to wait for other's input first. —Frecklefoot 18:57 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Oops, didn't see this. I've already done most of the reversion (one by one, not sysop-fast-revert :-) Evercat 19:01 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

Meetup

move to meta:Wikipedia meetup's talk page

FYI, I found this neat weikipedia enthuseists website at http://wikipedia.meetup.com/ MB 21:02 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

read meta:meetup
I tried doing as suggested, and "read meta:meetup" but there is nothing there. I will put a link there, but I really don't see the point in pointing people to a non-existent page. MB 22:39 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It think it was supposed to be meta:Wikipedia meetup. I've made the other into a redirect. -- Merphant 07:19 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

U.S. State articles

Comments please to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. States/mockups. (I seem to be making a lot of requests for comments - perhaps we need Wikipedia:Requests for comments? :-) -- Wapcaplet 12:55 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comments has been created. Please list your requests for comments there. Comments please to Wikipedia talk:Requests for comments. -- Wapcaplet 13:11 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

Is it the User:The_Anomebot that is slowing down the server? -- User:Docu

I doubt it - it's only uploading one image every four minutes. The server is just slow sometimes. --Camembert
Why can't we hide its edits? -- Tarquin 17:36 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Apparently it's not registered as a bot yet. I suppose it needs a developer to fiddle with something (sounds like the sort of thing Brion would usually do, but he's away, I think). --Camembert
From User talk:The Anome it seems that the bot has indeed been given bot status, but image uploads aren't hidden, even when done by bots. Evercat 17:52 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Ah yes, I was going on the bot's user page. Hopefully somebody can fix that. --Camembert
Read somewhere else, can't remember where, or who from, that it is set as a bot, but the code for hiding bot edits doesn't hide picture uploads yet. כסיף Cyp 18:05 19 Jul 2003 (UTC) (Damn edit conflict... This reply would have sounded more intelligent if the couple of posts above weren't there...)

For most of the day (19 Jul 2003), it ran much faster: one image per minute [3] -- User_Docu

Even one edit a minute is no faster than a human could go (though admittedly, you'd have to be really committed to keep it up for that long). But I admit, I don't know for sure whether it's slowing the server down. It's not doing anything really remarkable if it is, though (User:Rambot went much much faster at its peak, though it was just uploading articles, not images). --Camembert 17:46 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Image uploads are probably more complex, possibly the length of Wikipedia:Upload_log slows down things as well. Maybe an administrator can archive it? -- User:Docu

Wikipedia:Upload_log is very slow to load, and currently just a blank page:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv=Content-Type></HEAD> <BODY></BODY></HTML>
Might still be possible move it to an archive, by creating a suitable page-renaming url, but I'm not sure that's a good idea... כסיף Cyp 18:46 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The problem persisted after User:The_Anomebot stopped, thus it's likely that it was something else. In the meantime, the bot had just been more efficient getting to the site. -- User:Docu

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

Decipher the Code

archive to Wikipedia:Even more bad jokes and other deleted nonsense in a few days???


)> () ))) )') _ ))) ) )- )-( _ )- )-( (- _ )') (- ))) _ ))) () )' ), )> _ () )' )> (- )'

- (according to page history: User:209.78.16.178 04:06 17 Jul 2003 (UTC))

Does it say "All hail the new world order"? כסיף Cyp 12:46 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Cleaning the pump

archive to Wikipedia talk:Village pump in a few days

To whoever put the 'move to {{page x}} when done' above discussions, that was a great idea. Let's all do this in the future, if you can think of where to put it. It makes cleaning the pump a lot easier. -- Merphant 05:08 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yoism evangelism

User:68.162.218.43 (Contributions) added Yoism and Yo, apparently an "opensource religion", and is now inserting "see also" references to it in numerous places, from Atheism to Deism to Agnosticism and Humanism. These edits are factually correct, insofar as "Yoism" appears to be considered a religion at least by some, and some of its tenets are indeed similar to some of those other "isms", but it still seems out of place, because it's so obscure as to not really merit a mention in the articles on more well-known topics (IMO). Do we have a policy on removing factually correct but obscure/irrelevant information (especially when that information appears to be added by an overzealous fan of the topic in question)? I could go through and revert all the edits, but wanted to ask what others though first. --Delirium 18:45 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Well, just MHO, but yeah, I think reverting is the right thing to do unless the reference is highly relavent. But you might want to wait for other's input first. —Frecklefoot 18:57 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Oops, didn't see this. I've already done most of the reversion (one by one, not sysop-fast-revert :-) Evercat 19:01 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
A quick google search find that this is idiosyncratic nonsense "open+source+religion"%20yo and should be deleted Mintguy 19:04 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm not sure how this link demonstrates that it is idiosyncratic nonsense. A better search would be to look for Yoism, since Yo is such a common word
"open source religion yoism" brings up 13 hits. Yoism itself brings up little over a hundred. Evercat 19:13 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Well I'm the over zealous fan. He he. I only put the links in where I they where relevant, and I thought people would indeed be interested in them. Perhaps instead of removing them, it would make more sense to move them to a less prominent point on the page. Someone who is interested in Humanism, Atheism, Deism, seems like there is a high likely hood that they would be interested in reading a little bit more about a Religious philosophy based on these things. I think what we want to avoid is the implication that Yoism is more important than it is. On the other hand it seems to maintain some (less prominent) link on each page is called for because it is relevant, people may want to find it.
Well I see the Yoism page has been deleted without any real conversation. This seems unfortunate because it was an honest attempt to provide information about an inovative religious community that really does pertain to the topics linked to it. If there is a little known scientific theory, does that mean the theory is invalid, or does not deserve a mention in appropriate ways. Little things are not by their very nature irrelevant. They are just little.

¡HELP!

How can I get rid of the bloody Nostalgia skin? I just tried it on but now I can't find a Preferences button anywhere! Help will be immensely appreciated. - Piolinfax 21:59 18 Jul 2003 (UTC) You can leave me a message in User talk:Piolinfax. Ta! - Piolinfax 22:12 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Illustrated Wikipedia

Discussion moved to User:Wapcaplet/WikiPiki. Please see WikiProject Illustration for an alternative idea. Comments welcome! -- Wapcaplet 02:52 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Single database

I can see limitations to wikipedia.org, and also current problems; They have to do with the wikipedian design, and maybe someone could just see if my arguments are valid. Would it benefit wikipedia.org, wiktionary.org, any other wikis on the planet, to instead have one "wiki", that instead of just a website, it is a database, with different reports/interfaces to it? So the ONE wiki holds ALL the data for everything, it would centralize edits, create more content faster, create more quality content faster, and people could come up with all sorts of neet reports: Dictionary, Encyclopedia, Thesaurus, they'd all be queries to the database. I think this interoperability would be great...

BTW: wiktionary.org appears to be far less developed than wikipedia. Perhaps this "merging" of technologies would cause the wiktionary idea to become more of a success.

Then again, I could be nuts. --Daijoubu

It's not obvious that having a single database would make anything faster, but besides that, it would require a lot of work. There's no serious software development going on of any kind at the moment, due to a lack of interested programmers.


Wikipedia is 5 times older than Wiktionary. Plus Wikipedia is more interesting, so it attracts more contributors. -- Tim Starling 15:03 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I think this is addressed on meta somewhere. Martin

I recently had cause to insert a link to a film/movie/motion picture entitled "Butterfly". I realize that links to movie titles may be fruitless and may remove it, but in the meantime what is the convention for namespaces? I assume it is something along the lines of: MOVIE-NAME (film). &#151; sugarfish 19:40 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

That's an much debated issue. Some people use movie, some film. I see movie more often, though. CGS 19:52 17 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Orphan images

Do we have a non auto-generated page (I know about Special:Unusedimages) for listing orphaned images that might be titled something like Wikipedia:Images in need of Wikipedia articles? Mintguy 16:48 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I just had a look at Special:Unusedimages, and saw that it's full of images with text in foreign languages. Supposedly, some of them are actually used by the other languages. We should get the ambassadors to resolve that situation. -Smack 21:44 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hidden blocked IP address?

I believe my IP address has been banned because I swamped the server with a script. (It was retrieving and not updating, but being automated I suppose it qualifies as a bot. I thought it was slow enough, but apparently not.) Strangely, though, my IP address does not show up in Special:Ipblocklist. How do I go about verifying that is what happened, and perform appropriate apologies and grovelling to get re-instated? Thanks for any advice. -- Amillar 19:16 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

As far as I know, it's only possible to block an ip from changing articles, not from reading them, although I could be wrong, probably better for someone else to answer that. (As for retrieving, it should be possible to download the whole (slightly outdated) database from Wikipedia:Database_download, if you have a few gigabytes to spare. 149mb without article history, compressed. Don't know how much, uncompressed.) כסיף Cyp 07:18 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Yes, it is possible to block a user from reading articles. The rest of my reply is on User talk:Amillar. -- Tim Starling 11:29 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
BTW the cur table is 640MB uncompressed. Old is 8.2 GB. If you're a sysop you can find this out by running the SQL query "SHOW TABLE STATUS". -- Tim Starling 11:53 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for the tips on the database. As to the blocked IP address, I still have no answers. Who should I contact next? -- Amillar 16:27 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

standalone software

Is there stand-alone software (i.e. not browser-based) available for creating/editing Wikipedia entries? For example, that expedites the link-creation process, is WYSIWYG? I've scoured the 'pedia and haven't found a reference to any. —Frecklefoot 18:06 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It'd be very useful. When I'm not using public 'puter, I use Microsoft FrontPage, which is not ideal because HTML and stuff. --Menchi 18:12 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
To append the earlier question: Is there any interest in such a (free) program? —Frecklefoot 19:52 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
A GUI tool would be useful in that it would generate correct markup, but can't it be browser based? Users could either choose to use the current text box source editor, or a graphic editor using DHTML. CGS 20:16 18 Jul 2003 (UTC).
A syntax file for a text editor is all you need. I've been meaning to do one for EditPlus for a while but haven't got around to it yet. I think User:Tim Starling already did one for ... er ... Vi. Tannin
I don't understand: a syntax file only dictates how the source should be colour highlighted in the editor - it doesn't provide a GUI editor. Editors like Vi can only deal with the text source. You could write some macros for Emacs that did things like made the selected text a link - but you would still be looking at the source, and how useful is a macro that just inserts [[..]] around your selection? CGS 10:15 19 Jul 2003 (UTC).
Lots of good, CGS. You can see at a glance if you have got your syntax right. For example, how many times have you had to re-edit a page because you wrote [[Wikipedia:Village pump] when you meant to write Village pump? With a good text editor and a syntax file, your mistake is highlighted in colour and you can spot it right away. Tannin
What you want is a m:Wikipedia Client. It's been proposed but no-one's written one. There's an HTML→Wiki convertor, so you could write the text in an HTML editor and convert it. Unfortunately that doesn't do what I think is most sorely needed: a wikification aid allowing you to quickly determine whether a given page exists, what it redirects to if anything, and whether or not it's a disambiguation page. See Wikipedia:Syntax highlighting for my Vim (not Vi) highlighting file. -- Tim Starling 10:27 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I, and 4 others are currently working on a Python API which could be used by anyone to make software which interacts with wikipedia. If you are interested please send me an e-mail.

Is the source code for the protected pages, particularly the main page, available? By 'source code' I mean the wiki markup, not html code. Thanks. IntMan

It is at Main Page/Temp. --Eloquence 00:36 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hello, a relative newbie here. Could I get some advice on Robert M. Parker, Jr., please? The page that is there is an excellent biography, but there's quite a bit of other material that I would like to add. Are there copyright or other issues with rewriting what's there, since it was taken from the Parker website? Thanks in advance, Wnissen 19:11 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)


No - when it gets put into Wikipedia (with permission) the text becomes licensed under the GNU FDL. You can edit it freely. CGS 19:15 19 Jul 2003 (UTC).


Thanks very much for the help. I'll be putting some new content in soon. Wnissen 19:28 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I successfully uploaded , but it didn't show on recent changes, and instead of getting the "Image successfully uploaded" response to uploading, I got a page saying:


=Database error= From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A database query syntax error has occurred. The last attempted database query was: "UPDATE cur SET cur_timestamp='20030719174604', cur_user=7586, cur_user_text='Cyp', cur_text='Below is a list of the most recent file uploads. See also: [[Wikipedia:Upload log archive|Upload log archive]] <br> All times shown are server time ([[UTC]]). Current server time is: {{CURRENTTIME}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTDAY}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}. <ul><li>17:46 19 Jul 2003 [[User:Cyp|Cyp]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Erf.png|Erf.png]]\" <em>(Error function, with higher E, made by me.)</em></li> <li>17:45 19 Jul 2003 [[User:Jstanley01|Jstanley01]] uploaded \"[[:Image:G_and_b.JPG|G_and_b.JPG]]\"</li> <li>17:34 19 Jul 2003 [[User:Infrogmation|Infrogmation]] uploaded \"[[:Image:ZocaloMexicoCity1900.jpg|ZocaloMexicoCity1900.jpg]]\" <em>(Zocalo and Cathedral, Mexico City. From stereocard c 1900)</em></li> <li>17:24 19 Jul 2003 [[User:Jstanley01|Jstanley01]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Guns_and_butter.JPG|Guns_and_butter.JPG]]\" <em>(I produced this image)</em></li> <li>17:03 19 Jul 2003 [[User:The Anomebot|The Anomebot]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Map_of_Washington_highlighting_Cowlitz_County.png|Map_of_Washington_highlighting_Cowlitz_County.png]]\" <em>(Public domain map courtesy of [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/ The General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin], modified to show counties. Released under GFDL. See [[Wikipedia:U.S. county map]]s.)</em></li> <li>17:02 19 Jul 2003 [[User:The Anomebot|The Anomebot]] uploaded

<Omitted about a megabyte of text here>

<em>(Picture of John Pilger, taken from Mr. Pilger\'s site, http://pilger.carlton.com/home/biography)</em></li> <li>04:53 1 Jul 2003 [[User:Seav|Seav]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Ph_seal_camarines_sur.png|Ph_seal_camarines_sur.png]]\" <em>(Provincial Seal of [[Camarines Sur]])</em></li> <li>04:47 1 Jul 2003 [[User:Hike395|Hike395]] uploaded \"[[:Image:TreeKill.jpg|TreeKill.jpg]]\" <em>(Mammoth Mountain tree kill area)</em></li> <li>01:05 1 Jul 2003 [[User:Mydogategodshat|Mydogategodshat]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Elastic_demand.png|Elastic_demand.png]]\" <em>(elastic demand)</em></li> <li>01:04 1 Jul 2003 [[User:Mydogategodshat|Mydogategodshat]] uploaded \"[[:Image:Price_skimming_small.png|Price_skimming_small.png]]\" <em>(price skimming)</em></li>', cur_comment='uploaded \"Erf.png\": Error function, with higher E, made by me.', cur_restrictions='sysop', inverse_timestamp='79969280825395' WHERE cur_id=62938" from within function "LogPage::saveContent". MySQL returned error "1153: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet'".

From the start to the end, including the omitted text, is 1047870 bytes, surprisingly close to 220. Thought the error message was a bit too long to post all of it here. Haven't seen this error before. 15:45 November 9, 2024 is interesting to know, at least. כסיף Cyp 18:05 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, I've flushed the current revision.--Eloquence 19:14 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I was just wondering, is it OK to copy photos from other language wikipedias and use them on the English one, I cant see why it would be a problem but I was just making sure. G-Man 11:59 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, it's fine. -- Tim Starling 12:01 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Military Science or Space Exploration?

I'm considering making an entry, but I'm not sure which category to put it in. The exploration of space is a multi-category field - trying to pin it down to one science is impossible. Between electronics, astro-physics, life support, etc. etc. etc.; forget it. However, let's assume for a moment that we're actually going to send people to the stars. Add to that assumption the slight possibility of our brave explorers voyaging to a planet, and find themselves as the main course of an alien family... Enter Military Science (or military applications of pre-existing science, in most cases.) While I'm not in favor of the military leading our little expedition, I'm leary about not having any kind of protection from unknown species. Now, the entry(ies??) would be sound, scientifically-based, although I would link to (and probably add) some non-inertial theories of faster-than-light transport. Obvious question is, where do I put this? Draconis

Can't tell, without actually reading it, but if it's put a strange place, it can at least be moved later. כסיף Cyp 08:53 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

United States Government publications and the public domain

Are government publications in the public domain by default? Does this cover postage stamps? I've seen lots of postage stamps around for older stuff. I just added this image, which is from 2003. Is this kosher? -- ESP 00:10 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

What I've heard regarding postage stamps is the following:
The USPS hasn't been a government system for a while. I'm not sure about other postal services, but I suggest you do some research before posting any images. MB 01:26 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Yes, that's apparently so. Postage stamps produced since 1970 are under copyright of the USPS, and not in the public domain. Dang! Well, guess I better put it on the votes to delete page. -- ESP 02:41 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
This is a tricky point, and I've never seen a good legal opinion. In practice, the world's postal admins are perfectly happy to see images of stamps reproduced a lot, because that means increased visibility and more stamp sales. Pictures of stamps are in fact extremely widespread in print and online publications, and I've never heard of a postal admin making a copyvio complaint. On the other hand, the USPS does license the artwork to outfits that make tshirts, coffee mugs, one of the ornaments on my Xmas tree :-), etc. So my IANAL belief is that post-1970 images are completely defensible fair use if they are obviously photos/scans of physical stamps, but that it's not kosher to crop/scrub the image so as to obscure its stamply origin. Stamp images are often altered anyway (some jazz musician recently got the ciggy taken out of his mouth for instance), so it's better to present a stamp image as "this is how country X depicted Y politically correctly" :-) not "this is a archival-quality image". Stan 04:56 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Alright, I'm getting tired of reading it and not understanding it. what does IANAL mean? MB 14:13 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I think it means "I am not a lawyer." —Frecklefoot 15:03 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I think for fair use you have to be discussing the copyrighted work in and of itself, as part of the scholarship and criticism, not just using it as a decoration. I was using Image:John_cassavetes.jpg as a portrait, not discussing the stamp, so I think I still need to get it off the Wikipedia site.
Personally, I think fair use of works -- especially in their complete form -- is asking for trouble. And it makes Wikipedia less free, since our downstream users don't have the same rights under fair use that we have. But that's just me. -- ESP 20:37 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
see IANAL.

How do I search the mailing list archives? -- Tarquin 12:38 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

A link to Matt Jefferies may be worth listing among the recent deaths on the front page.

-- StAkAr Karnak

We only put articles on the front page if they are longer than this. It's not a good advert for Wiki otherwise - very stubbish articles where new comers might find them right away and judge us. CGS 13:01 23 Jul 2003 (UTC).

I've managed to flesh out the article a bit. Hopefully it will qualify now.

-- StAkAr Karnak

Fix redirect references

I looked around for an answer to this, so I hope I didn't miss it somewhere...my question is about redirects. Is it more of a policy to create redirects for various possible spellings/terms, or is it better to just find all the links and fix them so they go to the right place? Usually I do the latter, but then it seems half the stuff on recent changes is people making redirects, so I don't know. Adam Bishop 18:47 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't think people usually aim to create redirects on purpose. What happens is that they move a page to a more appropriate name, which automatically creates a redirect. When redirects are created (automatically or on purpose, the links should still be fixed. Angela 19:03 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I do create them on purpose. Mandarin Chinese has several Romanizations still in use, despite the slow taking over by Pinyin. --Menchi 19:07 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
"Fix" them if they are misspelling or typo. Otherwise, it's fine. Leave uniformity to the bot, if WP ever decides that all "Governor General" should be "Governor-General". Many people have the habit of typing alternative and correct variant due to habit or convenience. --Menchi 19:07 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It would be really helpful if we could protect the village pump during archiving and just one person archives it. Otherwise the edit conflicts make it nigh on impossible. Good idea? CGS 22:41 21 Jul 2003 (UTC). [[Wikipedia:Village pump

It might be good to put a note with a timestamp at the bottom saying it's being archived and please don't edit for a few minutes, then remove it when you're done. I'm kind of against protecting it, since invariably someone will forget to un-protect it. Edit conflicts are annoying, but they aren't really that hard to work around if you're just deleting stuff that no one's editing. -- Merphant 04:29 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Speaking of which... -- Merphant 04:41 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

What was the purpose of the conversion script that ran in Feb 2002? For example, this edit on Nancy Sinatra. You can't that tell me that someone wrote a bot to replace all instances of "lounge crooner" with "singer". CGS 22:29 21 Jul 2003 (UTC).

importing all articles from the UseModWiki script. We're past 32k. I thought this question was FAQed. If not, could you make it so? :-) -- Tarquin 22:32 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The closest thing we seem to have at the moment is User:Ryguasu/conversion script AI, a copy of an earlier Pump conversation on this subject. (It also goes into why the conversion script has been credited with non-conversion edits like changing "lounge crooner" to "singer", by the way.)
—Paul A 01:38 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL ON TALK PAGES

Is it a violation of copyright law to copy two paragraphs from an external web page and put it on a Wikipedia article talk page. The purpose is to explain a word.

Thanks,..Norm2 05:50 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Smells like fair use to me. CGS 10:58 20 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

Blame

Has anyone ever tried to implment an equivalent of CVS blame for the revision history page? If you don't know what I mean, it's like a diff, but shows the current revision and who added what to it when (sections of text are highlighted with a user and date). Do people think this would be a goode idea? I could have a stab at it myself, perhaps. CGS 15:40 22 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Searching questions

Maybe I'm missing something (highly likely), but it seems to me that searches in Wikipedia are still primitive in some ways. One thing I noticed recently is that searching seems to change if a new node is created.

For example, suppose I do a search for "yyxxxzzz" in Wikipedia. If there is no node for "yxxxzzz", then I will probably see a list of entries which contain this string. However, if I now create a node for "yyxxxzzz", and do the search again, the search will find the new node, and short-circuit all the other entries. While this is often useful, it is not always ideal, and makes it harder to find entries which should cross-refer to each other. Perhaps there are features of the search facility which I don't know about, but this behaviour does seem unhelpful. -- David Martland 10:39 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)


There is a difference between the behavior of the search button and the go button. See Wikipedia:Go button for details. --Eloquence 12:29 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
That's helpful, thank you. However, it doesn't solve all problems. I've been experimenting, and discovered this, for example. Try typing in "Theobald Boehm"

and then hit either Search or Go. Neither should find any page. Firstly, Theobald Boehm does not yet exist as a node in WP. However, it does exist as a proto-link on the page flutist. Surely this should be picked up? Perhaps the problem here is that the search term makes use of two words linked together? (There's some odd formatting here, not sure why!) -- David Martland 12:52 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The reason for that is that the fulltext search is currently disabled on the English Wikipedia for performance reasons. It's still dog slow, though ..--Eloquence 13:00 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Anon user 64.119.193.140 is adding links to http://www.maintour.com pages for every Southern California town. They seem borderline to me, because the pages contain a tiny bit of encyclopedia info and massive advertising. Are these worth keeping, or are we just being used to generate traffic? Stan 19:24 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It looks like the IP address belongs to Grand Pacifc Resorts. So it would seem they are trying to use the 'pedia to beef up business? I'd revert the edits--they don't add any useful information. —Frecklefoot 19:44 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Alright, I have put a temporary block on the IP address. Feel free to unblock it at anytime. MB 19:55 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

User:127 protected Talk:New Imperialism, apparently to prevent me from discussing the page with other users. He also moved a huge section of text written yesterday (and today) to an "archive", the entire page he moved was nothing but discussion regarding potentional changes to "his" page; something he apparently doesnt want happening. Pizza Puzzle

Now he just protected New Imperialism because I moved a "see also" out of the middle of nowhere and put it somewhere visible. Is this guy the owner of the site or something, I don't think he likes me. Pizza Puzzle

Wikipedia_talk:Protected_page might be a better place to discuss this. The page history makes it look like there's an edit war going on. If this is the case, and 172 is involved in this, then he should not be protecting the page anyway. <quote>If you are an admin and you want a page in an edit war in which you are involved to be protected, it is recommended that you contact another admin and ask them to protect the page for you. (from :Wikipedia:Protected_page)</quote> Angela 23:08 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
For the record, I just unprotected both pages. I am, frankly, at a loss as to why they were protected in the first place (especially the talk page). --Camembert

I suggest we create a formal mechanism to declare an edit war and rules to control it. We ban those who disregard the rules. When there is an edit war, each side should create its version like New Imperialism/temp1 and New Imperialism/temp2 and let others to choose which one is better-through a voting system maybe. No matter what the voting result is, the ones involving in the edit war should not start the war again unless they get new ideas. During the edit war, the article may be protected--not because we want to ban somebody from modify it, but because we don't want the edit war affecting the general public. Of course, we have to choose a mediator acceptable to both sides to oversee the edit war. Wshun

Its a good idea except that one user will leave his article at New Imperialism and the other will be forced to the temp page where they will feel marginalized and left out. Pizza Puzzle

We have Wikipedia:Current disputes over articles to report "edit wars". I'm not sure if a set of formalised rules on how to handle them would be possible, but feel free to have a go (you could start with a note on Wikipedia talk:Current disputes over articles, perhaps) - everyone would be grateful to you, I'm sure, if you could come up with a workable system. --Camembert
Each side should create its own version? That's an awful system. To suggest that we create two POV articles and vote on which one is the best seems quite bizarre to me. Each side should work together to produce an acceptable compromise. Lengthy discussion, not voting, is the best way to acheive a well-informed and intelligent result. (posted via edit conflict, twice)-- Tim Starling 00:11 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, but what do u do when people refuse to discuss? Or when they insist that discussion must continue indefinitely? Pizza Puzzle

You need a good mediator to help out. User:Stephen Gilbert is doing a great job at sorting out a long running edit war on the Open Directory Project page. A temp page has been created when all concerned parties put forward their suggestions for and against various things being included. Angela

Each side with its own version is an awful system, but it is better than an ongoing edit war which may change into nonsense hatre. To win an edit war, one may need continuously modifying its own version to be plausible to most wikipedians. I believe naively that the winning version would be as NPOV as possible. Do not underestimate the power of voting. Wshun

Both sides doing alternative versions is the worst possible solution. The problem here is that we have an article that is far too big (50K!!!!) and with a bad history of edit wars, some of whom involved both protagonists and which got one banned the last time. Each side sees not merely what is happening now but is influenced by the past, seeing edits now as part of an ungoing war. 172 was wrong to protect the page, but Pizza Puzzle is hardly contributing to a good working environment by plonking large chunks of text onto 172's talk page and by provocatively implying a simple archiving of a talk page was censorship. It is in PP own interest to avoid a rerun of past battles that caused so much bad blood last time. FearÉIREANN 01:35 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)


... Pizza Puzzle

A page was created some months ago called theories of imperialism. As there was a discussion at Talk:New Imperialism I looked through the history and discovered the earlier page which was apparently part of an attempt to shorten New Imperialism; upon mentioning it I was attacked by User:172 who then attempted to hide the entire conversation (claiming he was "archiving" the conversation) and then, without using the votes for deletion page he deleted theories of imperialism. Its a bit ridiculous. Pizza Puzzle

Would it be possible to have a convention on references where we site them within the text like so: [4] Pizza Puzzle

The convention (unwritten as far as I know) is to have naked wikirefs within the text that are then numbered. All other external links go in the External link section. --mav

But how do we number them? If somebody adds one, its easy for all the numbers to get changed up. Also, it might be useful to have a link to an article on the source.

Don't they automatically number themselves? Lemme try... [5] [6] [7]... yep, they sure do. -- Wapcaplet 22:50 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

But mav says not to do it that way... Pizza Puzzle or are those naked wikirefs? Pizza Puzzle

Which reminds me: Is there any way of inserting an anchor <a name="foo">bar</a> in Wiki text? I've looked in obvious places like Manual of Style and Cite Your Sources, but it doesn't seem to be there.


What I'm thinking of is the difficulty of citing specific material from a long printed source, meaning a book. If you have several references, you don't want to repeat the whole gory bibliographic listing in each place. If you put that in a Bibliography, there's the problem of putting a page reference in each place while linking it to the proper item in the bibliography. I see that the Cite entry suggests a Wiki entry for the book itself; but is that really what you want for every work cited? What I'd rather see is something like
...not putting him to torture (NEL, pp. 400, 406). On the other hand,...
Bibliography
<a name="NEL">NEL</a>: Orio Giacchia, Nel Terzo centenario..., Università Cattolica etc etc


where a click on the NEL link would take you to the biblio item to find the publication data. One could use this reference style without the hyperlink, as is done in many books, but that seems so twentieth-century. Any comments?
Dandrake 23:02 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I personally like the [1] [2] citation style (the standard in many journals), with a bibliographic listing at the end. Auto-hyperlinks and auto-numbering would be helpful, but would require code changes. See Depleted uranium for an example of doing this manually, which has the problem of re-numbering your references when you add another one anywhere other than the end of the list. --Delirium 23:13 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Manual renumbering would be a major problem, absolutely. That sort of thing was behind my proposal to use abbreviations of the document name in place of numbers. But I'm not proposing that somebody make code changes to support the anchor capability; just checking that it wasn't already there, obscurely.
Naturally, when the footnote is one of several to pages in a book, I can write a full footnote with biblio data and page numbers in the first one, then use good old loc. cit. and op. cit. in the rest. A pity, though, about having the numbering of footnotes set in stone as the order in which you created them and appended them to the numbered list. Makes the auto-numbering of the list a dubious advantage: arguably, if you're manually numbering the [nnn] references, you should do the same to the footnote bodies, to reduce the chance of crossing them up. Just rambling here, but it seems there might be reason to discuss a more automatic design for footnotes. Should I be on some list or watching some page in order to keep up with any discussion that might arise?
Dandrake 01:17 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Actually the naming sounds okay too, and that also is fairly common in journals. Something like [Smith], or [Smith 1998] if disambiguating is necessary (the latter is sometimes used even when disambiguating isn't necessary if it's in a context where the date of the reference might be of particular importance). That avoids the renumbering problem, without having to put full unwieldy citations in parentheticals. Of course, I personally still prefer a standard footnote method (with superscript footnotes instead of [1]), but that would require the auto-numbering changes just like the [1] method would. --Delirium 02:22 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Deaths of non-human animals

I added a famous dead animal to July 14. Anybody objects? Or has the "Death" section an inherent anthropocentrism? --Menchi 17:45 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

"Longest living Chinese river dolphin"? Well, I guess it makes sense -- doesn't seem to be on the same fame scale as the other entities listed -- but I'm putting my foot down at the death of Vaudeville. -- ESP 17:53 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Vaudeville is not dead. It's just resting. -- Someone else 22:09 23 Jul 2003 (UTC) (ba-dum-bum).
If the animals are relatively famous it seems to make sense to me. For example, when Koko dies, I think it'd be appropriate to note in that section. --Delirium 20:00 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

How do I search the mailing list archives? -- Tarquin 12:38 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Can at least search some of it, with [9]. Don't know if there is a better way. כסיף Cyp 12:49 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
There is. MARC has searchable archives of Wikipedia-l, wikien-l, wikitech-l and intlwiki-l. --Eloquence 16:34 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Could we add those links to the page about the mailing list? Why doesn't our mailing list archiving system offer a search facility itself? -- Tarquin 16:59 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm at lost with Jennifer Lopez, a presumably young enthusiast is adding POV material under anonymous IPs 67.39.46.8 and 68.78.49.170, and my interest in J.Lo. is too low for be to bother correcting this for too long. --FvdP 19:37 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Fix redirect references?

move to wikipedia talk:redirect

I looked around for an answer to this, so I hope I didn't miss it somewhere...my question is about redirects. Is it more of a policy to create redirects for various possible spellings/terms, or is it better to just find all the links and fix them so they go to the right place? Usually I do the latter, but then it seems half the stuff on recent changes is people making redirects, so I don't know. Adam Bishop 18:47 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't think people usually aim to create redirects on purpose. What happens is that they move a page to a more appropriate name, which automatically creates a redirect. When redirects are created (automatically or on purpose, the links should still be fixed. Angela 19:03 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I do create them on purpose. Mandarin Chinese has several Romanizations still in use, despite the slow taking over by Pinyin. --Menchi 19:07 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
"Fix" them if they are misspelling or typo. Otherwise, it's fine. Leave uniformity to the bot, if WP ever decides that all "Governor General" should be "Governor-General". Many people have the habit of typing alternative and correct variant due to habit or convenience. --Menchi 19:07 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
If I see a red link, and I know that an article exists on the topic under a different name, I create a redirect. Almost always. If the red link is the result of a typo, then I create a redirect and fix the typo.
Wikipedia is so large that we can't expect people to remember the "correct" name for every single article - redirects are our solution to that problem, and should be used with abandon. Martin 19:37 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Some of us have good memories ;-) -- Tarquin 20:28 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Birthplaces

I think it'd informative to, in a place-article (e.g., Shiraz, Iran), list the people born there. For example, who actually have heard of Shiraz because they bought those exotic carpets from there? I think the place has became quasi-famous recently only because the recently deceased Bijani twins and Zahra Kazemi were born there.

It probably isn't gonna work on London, since so many people were born there and proportionally many gained fame. But for small cities and towns, and non-European, non-American cities, it'd give the reader a chance to read more life of, say, Shirazi people as case studies.

What are your thoughts?

--Menchi 19:29 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Absolutely - for many small towns it's the most notable thing about them. :-) Note that many big cities also have lists of native notables attached to their articles, so there's precedent for that. Think of a potential visitor to the city wondering what famous persons are from there - a good list would also mention existence of plaques, memorials, statues, etc. Stan 20:49 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Thx. --Menchi 21:20 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
For big cities it might make sense to break it out into a separate article with information about notable natives of the city and any statues/plaques/memories/etc. to honor them. --Delirium 22:05 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Added. --Menchi 21:20 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

User:Lee M has moved The Adventures of Robin Hood to The Adventures of Robin Hood (movie) by copying-and-pasting instead of using the "Move this page" link, leaving the edit history behind. Can someone with the appropriate elite skills sort it out? —Paul A 02:29 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

(PS. Is there a dedicated page for requests like this?)

Unfortunately he has actually put something at The Adventures of Robin Hood, so this is going to take a little more work than I am willing to do quite this second. If someone beats me to it, please also put the disambiguation boiler text at The Adventures of Robin Hood. MB 04:03 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Fixed. Although I hosed the old disambiguation text by mistake. Can you check I got all the entries right? CGS 09:51 26 Jul 2003 (UTC).
The old disambiguation text is still in the page history. Looks to me like you got them right. —Paul A 14:40 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ordered lists

archive to Wikipedia:Feature requests in a few days


Does anyone else think it would be a good idea to modify the default stylesheet to add space between ordered list items (see User:Merphant/sandbox)? It would make paragraphs in ordered lists much easier to read. For simple bulleted lists we don't have that problem, since we can just insert a space between bullets. -- Merphant 04:38 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It does look much better and more readable, certainly.
James F. 07:04 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I agree. I definitely think it should apply to bulleted lists also. Inserting a space (in the wiki-code) between bullet points actually causes the software to generate multiple lists of one item, which is silly. -- Wapcaplet 10:27 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I like the 0.4 em spacing option over 0 (hard to read) and 1 (ugly and a space hog). --mav
I've mentioned it on Wikitech-l. -- Merphant 22:34 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Just a short note. I have been timid and posted Wikipedia:Waitingroom (draft version) because I didn't have the boldness to post it as a off the shelf functional page. You may want to polish it or discuss it on its talkpage. (Just don't delete it as patent nonsense :) -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 08:26 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't get it. What does this page do over "requested artciles" and "pages needing attention"? CGS 09:44 23 Jul 2003 (UTC).


It is intended to facilitate triage of new articles. A short page to which one could swiftly add those pages which one is unable to figure a useful modus operandi for, but which definitely need something done for them. And stop newbie tests cluttering VfD. Quite a few of new articles spend only a few moments on VfD. Section editing will address the file-lenght problem with VfD, but it would help if there were a separate page for those that one did not feel need to be debated at length. Oneword comments, quick in, quick comments, quick out and then to "pages needing attention", Vfd, or whatever. I know the concept probably needs to be clarified a lot. While many of the current problems will be palliated by the section editing facility any moment now, still when in the future the flow of new articles truly explodes, we will still need a lightweight and fleet of foot mechanism to provide first aid and triage to new articles. At least that is what I think. Any opposing points of view welcome. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 10:07 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Waiting room isn't very descriptive (although I still don't get it). How about Wikipedia:Sorting Room, Wikipedia:In Pile or something? CGS 11:29 23 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Well, I guess I was trying to be pc in a funny sort of way. My first idea was to call it Wikipedia:Purgatory or Wikipedia:Limbo. The "waitingroom" metaphor was intended to evoke the idea of a kind wiki-doctor coming and examining the patient (problematic new article); maybe with a second opinion or few. And then the patient would be sent to the right ward, declared D.O.A. or given a clean bill of health. My idea was also that someone who put the article on the list, would have done the samaritan equivalent of making sure a stranger gets to the waiting room of a Emergency Room type institution. I.E. a laudable taking of responsibility. But it is true that conseptually that image doesn't really meaningfully distinguish it from many other pages... Probably it does need a better title. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 11:54 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'd say do it the other way round:
  • VFD - suspected copyright violation
  • VFD - pure junk
  • VFD - general

-- Tarquin 12:11 23 Jul 2003 (UTC) (why does it take on average 6 months for my ideas to filter through to people? arg!)

I have commented on Cimon's proposal on the talk page. In reply to Tarquin: Eloquence has said he doesn't like the idea of splitting VFD, on Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. -- Tim Starling 12:42 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
wikipedia:deleted test was my attempt at a solution for "pure junk" and similar pages. However, it hasn't caught on, so I've been thinking of moving it to meta. Martin 16:16 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I remember thinking that a page like Wikipedia:Deleted test would be a good idea (didn't do anything, though), but it probably didn't work, because almost everyone was made an admin, just after the Wikipedia:Delete test and welcome page was created, so almost noone needed it any more. כסיף Cyp 17:09 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hmm. Maybe I should expound a bit more on my intentions. The page is not meant to supplant any other page, every facility currently active should continue as before. It is meant merely as a way of avoiding duplication of effort. Currently I think there are probably many people who read through all the new articles that appear. But if there were a page that only listed the problematic ones, maybe some would concentrate their effort at fixing or axing those, rather than trawling through the whole log of new articles.

It is a fact that at some point we are going to be at the position viz a viz new articles that we shall be trying to drink from a fire hose. There will be a greater plethora of new articles than it would be practical for every diligent weeder to go through himself to separate the ones needing help from those which are a-okay.

BTW. about the name. Would Wikipedia:ER, or Wikipedia:First -Aid be better? -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 16:44 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Oh Oh! An American english versus British english problem there. What Americans call the ER (Emergency Room) is called in Britain and Ireland A&E (Accident & Emergency). And I know other countries use other names. So ER is out, as much of the world don't use that. Anyway in Britain, ER means Elizabeth Regina, or Queen Elizabeth in latin! (ER appears on every policeman's helmet, every ministerial box, government department, every letterbox erected since 1952, etc) People might think that wiki had a page dedicated to Her Majesty! :-)

Wikipedia does have a page dedicated to Her Majesty. We're not completely backward...  ;) —Paul A 14:48 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I am trying to archive the pump. Please let me have a few minutes to do this, and don't post anything new. I'll remove this post when I'm done. CGS 15:42 26 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Michael Cunningham article

Yesterday I created an article for "The Hours" novelist Michael Cunningham. As I would have expected there are a number of extant articles that already link to this page. But, there's also a link to it from what's obviously different Michael Cunningham in the article: September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/City of New York casualties which is now erroneously linked to the new article. I'm not sure how to proceed. Can someone help? Thanks. Bill 07:51 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Normally, as 'your' Michael Cunningham is the more famous, the thing to do would be to rename the other one to something like Michael Cunningham (bond broker), and have a brief note at the bottom of Michael Cunningham noting his existence; however, as there's not mention of his profession, I suppose one should move him to Michael Cunningham (author), and at Michael Cunningham put a disambiguation page.
HTH.
James F. 08:23 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Liking my idea too much, I went ahead and did it.
James F. 08:33 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Please restore as it was. The solution is to unlink the name of "Michael Cunningham, who died in the 11th of September 2001 terrorist attacks", who is not encyclopedia material -- Tarquin 08:55 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
This was my first instinct, but I wasn't sure it was proper. Thanks. But since the namespace Michael Cunningham is now occupied by a disambiguation page won't this require administrator intervention? Bill 09:00 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
No, disambiguation pages are just normal pages with some special code in them. You can edit them in the normal way. CGS 11:48 24 Jul 2003 (UTC).
yes.... but i think Bill means an admin needs to delete the disamb to then move back the origianl page. -- Tarquin 12:10 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Indeed, Tarquin is correct; if some kind admin will delete the disambiguation page, I'll patch things up from there. Please? Bill 16:10 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
To unlink one name out of thousands appearing on the page seems at best arbitrary, surely? I don't think the Michael Cunningham should be on the Wikipedia either, but I haven't the time to re-edit the source page to strip out all the persons' links from that page. This way is, if not good, possible.
Perhaps I was and am being overly cautious and lazy, though.
If people want me to undo the 'damage' I have done, I'm happy to. Sorry about this.
James F. 16:18 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It's not really arbitrary. It's the one instance (AFAIK) of an unpopulated link on the page that's inhibiting rational use of the Wikipedia namespace. I do agree that theoretically all the unpopulated links should be removed. Most of them will never have articles. If someone wants to create an article for any of these people, they can create the link when they create the article. Bill 16:54 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I found 4 by cursory random glancing at sucessful links (no, I don't remember which ones, as I was just checking), so I'd guess there are quite a few of these. Some of them (very few) are sucessful links and also point to what they were meant to; working out which ones are which is only do-able by a human, and stripping off all of the links would be a step in the wrong direction.
Maybe it's just me, but I find stop-gap measures undesirable.
James F. 19:10 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
You're missing my point, I think. It's the unpopulated links (those that are displayed in red) that I'm addressing. I have no problem with the links that point to real articles. However, it's not worth the struggle. I had some more work to do with the Cunningham article and links thereto and my main concern is that the article name remain stable. Bill 20:37 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Transitory information in entries

I was looking at the entry for Urban tribe which includes the following statement:

Urban Tribes are the rapidly growing groups of never-married's between the ages of 25 and 39 who gather in common-interest groups and enjoy the urban lifestyle.

My inclination is to remove the "rapidly growing" assertion. Even if Urban Tribes are or recently have been rapidly growing (probably subject to debate anyway), such a trend would have to be quite ephemeral. As such, I wonder if it is appropriate for an encyclopedia article. I'm curious how others feel about this. Bill 10:40 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Maybe it means that the groups grow rapidly, not the trend. :-) Seriously, I agree that it's not a good idea to have that kind of assertion in there. -- ESP 00:15 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Rather than deleting the "rapidly growing" claim, it would be interesting to know who claimed that the trend is growing, and when. AxelBoldt 17:57 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)


The author of the externally linked article makes this claim. I felt that urban tribes are missing as a wikipedia node and quickly inserted this definition. Maybe I should have quoted the article more properly. Apologies. jsilence

Well now that I've calmed down a bit about what made me quit - I want to not let a couple of people ruin my participation in this interesting project. I want to make a suggestion to fidgety busy-bodies. It won't hurt the project to wait more than 2 minutes before you start stepping all over something someone else is in the current process of working on. In my case as a newer user, it may take me an hour, but it is satisfying when I can accomplish it and then "set it free to the wolves". During the process helpful hints are welcome, but constantly having a tug-of-war of working on something, edit conflict, reverts, repeat... is tiresome. Have a bit of patience. Let me quote the helpful hints I got before I threw up my hands and said, "this isn't worth it.": Dmsar 01:05 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You've created an article at Wikipedia:Bulletin Board. This is in the Wikipedia namespace, which meas it's for utility pages. There was an article for bulleten board already at Bulletin Board, which you have redirected. Why is this? Mintguy
Material moved from incorrectly named page:
---
1. album by The Partridge Family
2. Hacker jargon
3. Standar usage of bulletin board
This is a disambiguation page. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link.
What is this for? Mintguy 23:13 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
---
Are you trying to start an article? You've put it in the wrong place. Meta pages are not for articles, but for information relating the the operation of this site. Put you article at Bulletin board. and sign your name with 4 "~". --Jiang 23:27 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
---
Nonono!!!! This doesn't belong here. Why put it on a utility page? Plus, you redirect should be #REDIRECT[[Wikipedia:Bulletin Board]] for it to work. Please move the contents of this page (minus the discussion) there and this one will be deleted. --Jiang 23:47 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
---
End of moved material Enchanter 23:54 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
---

Could a mathematician take a look at 1 E21. Doesn't the number actually belong at 1 E22? Or maybe Order of magnitude (numbers)? Evercat 21:06 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm almost certain that 7*1022 is bigger than 1022, I'll change the range to from 1021 to 1024... כסיף Cyp 21:47 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)~

I came across this site a couple of days back and was amazed! It's a fantastic example of the exercise of freedom with responsibility and what is possible in future societies- a functioning anarchy in the positive sense where knowledge is free and not elitist. Actually I discovered how little I knew in concrete, black and white terms in my own areas of interest when I thought of attempting a written equivalent of verbal extempore - I didn't want to commit myself to information that could be wrong. I feel that many more people should be made aware of this site so that the level of contributions could become much better with more participation. I discovered it through a search for a topic in Google. I am now telling many people about this site. Is there any way the site can feature better in page rank orders of search engines- ofcourse without resorting to unethical practices.

Hi anon, thanks for your comments. You may want to create a user account to sign your comments (type three tildes, ~~~, when logged in to insert a signature). The search engine ranking depends on a lot of factors; in Google's case mainly on the number of pages that link to a page. A good way to increase a page's ranking is therefore both to link to it from more pages inside Wikipedia and outside of it. An incomplete list of pages that are ranked highly on Google can be found on Wikipedia:Top 10 Google hits, A-K and Wikipedia:Top 10 Google hits, L-Z respectively. By the way, Wikipedia is not entirely anarchistic -- see Power structure on the Meta-Wikipedia for details. --Eloquence 12:22 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Why does this top 10 list have 600 entries? CGS 17:47 24 Jul 2003 (UTC).
Firstly, there are 604 entires as of right now; secondly, the 'top ten'-ness is of the ranking of the required search, not a 'top ten' listing itself.
James F. 19:18 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Is the title of Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data ok? 46 is not a subpage of directive 95, but the forward slashes make it look like it is. I realise subpages are not meant to be used, but what should happen with a title that has a / in it? Would Data protection be a better title? Angela 14:38 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There's nothing inherently wrong with slashes in article titles. In the User: namspace they behave in a special way (you get a backlink to the parent page, as with User:Camembert/Sandbox, for example), but in articles they're treated just like any other character, so it's fine to use them if warranted. Whether that article title is the best possible is another matter, of course, but it seems OK to me (I don't think data protection would be good, since the article is about a specific directive, not about data protection in general). --Camembert
European directives are officially numbered in this fashion yy/no/EC, that's why I used it in the title. Giving the article a general name like data protection would be misleading, in my opinion. There is already an article about Data privacy, which covers the same topic.
Omitting the number would be a possibility, if it's mentionned immediately in the article. Law's change, and it's important to know what law is being discussed. --Hdk 16:50 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Horary! We're back! CGS 13:05 28 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

The New Imperialism problem is just spinning with no hope of a conclusion. I am going to start a vote as to whether or not the link to the temp version should be in the current version. CGS 14:42 28 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Link to the temp version in the current version:

Don't link to the temp version in the current version:

VOTE HERE

Jtdirl has protected New Imperialism, as part of an "edit war" in which he was part. This is an abuse of his sysop powers. 172 has also previously protected this page (and the talk page) unilaterally. Pizza Puzzle

For heaven's sake, Pizza Puzzel. You ask "please PROTECT this page -- This link was agreed to when I was ordered to quit editing this page, instead editing an alternate page", and then when it is protected, you cry about it. What's the problem now? CGS 14:03 28 Jul 2003 (UTC).
I asked that the article be protected FROM JTDIRL not by Jtdirl. Pizza Puzzle

I have temporarily protected the page to ask other users for an adjudication. I am not a participant in the editing of the text in any way and I have made it clear that I respect both 172's and PP's efforts. The question is simple:

Should a temp page that is not a communally edited text but a rival to the main article be advertised as a rival on the main page? If we were saying that everyone was re-writing the temp and the main page was going to be replaced by the rewrite such a mention might be warranted. In this case, it is in effect two rival articles. I question in the circumstances whether it is correct to advertise both rivals on the one page. I have asked PP to desist for a while while this was explored. He has refused and continually reinserted the link to his draft. Pending a resolution of this problem, which I expect will be shift, I protected the page to allow a decision to be made. The issue is not the rival merits of both articles; that is a different article. The issue is simply how to deal with the existence of two rival articles and should the temp be put on the main page as a link?

In the meantime I also redesigned the top of the talk page to increase the visibility of the link to PP's temp page. FearÉIREANN 14:07 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Jtdirl has protected New Imperialism, as part of an "edit war" in which he was part. This is an abuse of his sysop powers. 172 has also previously protected this page (and the talk page) unilaterally.

It is absurd to argue that the temp link is, in any reasonable manner, visible from a talk page. talk pages are only occasionally viewed by some editors. 172 and Jtdirl are intent on censoring my work, going so far as to repeatedly abuse their sysop powers. Jtdirl is most definitely a participator in the debate here.

They are elitist snobs who believe that they are "world experts" and that anyone who disagrees with their views is some kind of vandal. They consistently harass and abuse other users, feeling free to hurl tirades of vulgar insults at will.

The temp page was created, at the request of 172 and Jtdirl; who, now that I have demonstrated how to improve the article, are intent on doing what they can to hide the article and let it die in some obscure unlinked-to portion of the wiki. Pizza Puzzle

How is capitalising, bolding and double-linking a link on the talk page "let[ting] it die in some obscure unlinked-to portion of the wiki"? All you were asked to do was let wiki agree on a policy. You decided "by God I'm putting it on that page whatever anyone thinks." Having appealed and appealed and appealed to you to let it wait a while until a policy has been agreed by everyone, I was forced to protect the page to stop you unilaterally trying to set wiki policy and to let the community decide. It is their decision. I will stand by and support whatever they decide. Will you? FearÉIREANN 14:56 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You are a hypocrite Jtdirl. You and your friend abused your sysop powers to prevent me from editing the page, and forced me to make a temp page. Now that I have made the temp page, you refuse to allow me to create a visible link to it. You can lie all day and pretend your tokenism is fair - but a link from a talk page is not a visible link. Pizza Puzzle 15:01 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

None of this changes the fact that Jtdirl abused his sysop powers, to protect a page in which he was engaged in an edit war. Pizza Puzzle

I request that New Imperialism be protected so that my contributions are not censored. Pizza Puzzle

What PP wants is to be allowed to put a link to his personal unique version drafted as a temp, on the community-drafted page. We don't put rival articles on the same page. The temp page is not the live version right now. It could theoretically become so, but it isn't as of this minute. It is clearly linked on the talk page as a rival draft. But PP want to insist that a link to his alternative draft appear on the article page. FearÉIREANN 13:23 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Jtdirl and 172 systematically and continuously attack me. 172 has protected both the primary article, and its talk page. They have not only attacked me, they have attacked other users. They are not willing to accept the overwhelming community consensus that the page be edited -- they demanded that I not edit the page (using their sysop powers to ensure that I could not) and "suggested" that I create a temp page. Now that I took their suggestion - they are intent on suppressing New Imperialism (temp) which shows, very plainly, how much work their page needs. Pizza Puzzle

Im getting pretty tired of User:172s constant disparaging remarks against me, and his threats to ban me. I also would like to know why nothing has been done with regards to his attitude. Several users jumped all over me last month for making too many edits in recent changes -- why is it that such actions are considered so offensive, yet 172 is allowed to act the way he does? Pizza Puzzle

I request that New Imperialism be protected so that the link to New Imperialism (temp) is visible and prominent. I do not think it is fair that I went out of my way, bending over backwards to agree to 172s demands, that I not edit his page; and yet, Im not even allowed to link my version so that anybody can read it. Pizza Puzzle

I don't like this solution -- there should be one page on New Imperialism, and it should be located there. If there are disagreements over what to put there, perhaps someone other than you or 172, but knowledgeable about the subject (which excludes me) could mediate. --Delirium 03:55 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)
That would also be a good solution, although it looks like Pizza Puzzle's version has been summarily rejected. Even if the alternate page path is taken, another person will ultimately be needed to mediate. Daniel Quinlan 04:18 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Great - in the meantime where would u like me to demonstrate my alternative? I certainly can't do it at New Imperialism because 172 protects the page to keep me from editing it. Pizza Puzzle

I normally put them in my user space (eg user:MyRedDice/jewish ethnocentrism, some time ago). YMMV. Martin 15:05 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I think alternate versions of articles are best avoided, but sometimes articles are so broken that it's necessary to get a new article written to the point, especially when the current page is being so actively protected. Daniel Quinlan 04:18 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Anyway, I don't know how serious 172 was, but I'm not in favor of banning Pizza Puzzle. In my limited interaction thus far with 172 (limited because his primary form of communication was reverting article edits), I think 172 could use much more restraint. I've had NPOV disagreements with other people, but have always been able to resolve them through discussion and joint-editing until a recent (near?) edit-war with 172. I'm not sure what to say about New Imperialism vs. New Imperialism (temp), but a short-term link while a new page is worked on seems reasonable to me. The article is so lengthy and hard to read (and the temp one has too many bloody links, I think) that it's hard to say which is better. Perhaps the link off of the current article would go over better if Pizza Puzzle used a more neutral phrasing for the link and the note at top of the temp version. For the appearance of Wikipedia, it might be better to limit the link to the Talk: page and perhaps the relevant meta pages. Daniel Quinlan 04:18 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It is not fair to move the New Imperialism discussion back to Talk:New Imperialism. 172 and Jtdirl are abusing their sysop powers by protecting pages in which they are engaged in edit wars. This is a topic of importance to the overall wiki -- not merely to the one article. Pizza Puzzle

Possible Wikipedia in Nahuatl

I am from Wikipedia in Spanish. I contacted somebody called Citlalin Xochime' from a web Nahuatl-speaking a few days ago and told him about Wikipedia. This is whta he answered me to the suggestion of beginning a wikiversion in Nahuatl (a native American language with more than 1 million speakers):

Niltze! (Hello!) Papalotochtzin (Dear Rabbit Butterfly),
Tlazohkamati (Thank-You) for your email message! I am somewhat familar with

the wiki-system and wikipedia sounds like something that stirs my interest. I won't have time to start the Nahuatl wiki-project until September at the earliest. Yet, I may pass along this valuable information to the NAHUAT-LIST : http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/nahuat-l.html

I agree, more Nahuatl speaking people will be attracted to the project, once

established. I don't know if you got my email address from my Nahuatl Tlahtolkalli project, but I will surely pass along the information to the people at the Nahuatl Tlahtolkalli as well. My project is located at:

http://www.nahuatl.info/nahuatl.htm
So, once again, I am very interested, and I will pursue this project as time

permits. Tlazohkamati for contacting me. (...)

I look forward to sharing Nahuatl with you!
Citlalin Xochime' (from, Nahuatl Citlalxochimeh = star flowers)
Nahuatl Tlahtolkalli
http://www.nahuatl.info/nahuatl.htm

I haven't heard of him/her since but he or other Nahuatl-speaking people may try to contact you. I will not be on Wikipedia for an indetermined period but I mentioned a cople of basics about the system as well as Youssefsan and Brion. I'd really like seeing a Wikiwikinahuatl around! -- Piolinfax 19:17 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

PEN/Faulkner Award Award for Fiction

Yesterday while working on the new PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction article, I accidently created: PEN/Faulkner Award Award for Fiction (The word "Award" is doubled). I move the "double Award" version to the correct name, but, of course this left a redirect under the above-linked version. I added "Award Award" the the votes for deletion page along with an explanation and a request that it be deleted. So far, that has happened. Did I follow the wrong procedure? TIA Bill 15:50 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, Angela! Bill 19:11 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Move to Talk:Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data

Is the title of Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data ok? 46 is not a subpage of directive 95, but the forward slashes make it look like it is. I realise subpages are not meant to be used, but what should happen with a title that has a / in it? Would Data protection be a better title? Angela 14:38 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There's nothing inherently wrong with slashes in article titles. In the User: namspace they behave in a special way (you get a backlink to the parent page, as with User:Camembert/Sandbox, for example), but in articles they're treated just like any other character, so it's fine to use them if warranted. Whether that article title is the best possible is another matter, of course, but it seems OK to me (I don't think data protection would be good, since the article is about a specific directive, not about data protection in general). --Camembert


European directives are officially numbered in this fashion yy/no/EC, that's why I used it in the title. Giving the article a general name like data protection would be misleading, in my opinion. There is already an article about Data privacy, which covers the same topic.
Omitting the number would be a possibility, if it's mentionned immediately in the article. Law's change, and it's important to know what law is being discussed. --Hdk 16:50 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Ok, if there's no problem with forward slashes in titles, it may be best to leave it as it is. Angela 19:26 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

About the new skin: will there be/is there already some way to hide the little "edit" links at the top of each section of an article/page? And is there some discussion about this new layout somewhere? --Camembert

Login broken?

Did someone change the login code? I can't seem to login. When I try I get spit back to this page [8]

Is there something wrong with my account? Mbecker

Also, I wasn't able to edit this page until I canhed the url from http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump&action=edit to http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump&action=submit. There was an error preventing me from submitting before I did that.
Mbecker
Nevermind, everything seems to work fine now. MB 21:34 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Everything was seriously whacked for about half an hour. Think (from IRC) that Eloquence has fixed it up now. Evercat 21:38 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Login's still broken for me. I get invalid password. I even had it mail me a new password, and the new password mailed to me doesn't work either. --Delirium 00:28, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC) (aka Delirium)

Someone changed the MD5 code. I changed it back, it should work now.—Eloquence 00:31, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I can log in now, though oddly it's my old password that works, not the random one that was just mailed to me. Is the reset-your-password code broken? --Delirium 00:34, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Nope, the old password must always continue to work so random users cannot reset your password. The new password does not work because it was generated with the new code, and I just changed the code back.—Eloquence 00:42, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)~

I was thinking, in regard to pages like Yoism, Idealist Press International, Ltd., and so on, that in cases of pages on (really) minor subjects, the pages themselves can be perfectly fine but links to them from major articles are what's really irritating.

I was wondering if this was enshrined in policy somewhere - by all means, create pages on minor subjects (though really, really minor ones may be deleted anyway) but avoid the temptation to link to them in such a way that they seem very important.

If it's not an official policy, it should be. :-) How about Wikipedia:Links to minor subjects? Evercat 01:01 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)


This was kind of implied by the extended discussion of the wikipedia:neutral point of view policy that we nailed down (so long ago, it seems). However, making the point explicit can't hurt.
On this topic, there's been some mention of the "1000-person" or "5000-person" guideline for article inclusion (on the idea that if it's of relevance to less than that many people, we can't really write an article about it). Is this mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia yet? It's an interesting idea, and it would be nice to have guidelines for "too obscure to be on Wikipedia.". Some refinement would obviously be in order though... --Robert Merkel 04:46 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I threw out the idea a while back to see if it would stick, apparently it has. :-) I think I've pondered enough to write up a page now, I just hate to use up my precious article-writing time on meta-pages, and been putting it off. Stan 14:55 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm not sure I like this idea -- I think there are plenty of encyclopedic things known by fewer than 1000 people. For example, a lot of historical information in relatively obscure fields might fall into this category, or even some of the math pages on more specialized topics of which perhaps only 500 or so researchers in that particular field would be aware. I don't see any reason these sorts of things shouldn't go in an encyclopedia though. --Delirium 00:48 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Wasn't it 1000 people affected rather than know about it? That would cover the obscure historical facts, most of which (I assume) affected at least that number. Where it leaves pure maths though is a problem. :-) Evercat 00:52 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

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Welcome, newcomers and baffled oldtimers! If you have a question about Wikipedia and how it works, please place it at the bottom of the list, with an appropriate title, and someone will attempt to answer it for you. (If you have a question about life, the universe and everything, go to the reference desk instead.)

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A few questions...

Is there a bug in the software that adds a newline to large lists?

What's the correct format of the "See also"? When is it a good idea to use it? And should it come before or after the "External links" listing?



If you know that some article might be mispelled, is it a good idea to create a new article and redirect it to the correct one pre-emptively?

thanks

Dori 23:27 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Don't know about non bug with long lists... About "See also:" I suppose you should use it every time that you haven't figured out a way to include all the relevant links within the text of tha article itself. I would put it before the "External links". As to format, If I thought there were only going to be a few links, I would go for just plain "See also:" and the links following it on the same line. If I thought that there were going to be a huge list of other links that have something to do with it, then I would do:

== See also: ==

  • link
  • another link
  • third link
  • fourth link

...

and so forth.

About making redirects for misspellings, only advise is to use good sense, do if the misspelling is common, and the subject of the article popular. I would tend to create them pretty liberally, but others might disagree. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 23:51 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

If they're only one or two links on the "see also" list, I prefer not making a new subheading:

See also: [[first link]], [[second link]]

--Jiang 23:54 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[[da:Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden]]

File:Village pump.JPG

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Section Editing feature request

I've mentioned this before on the test wiki but can we have section editing be able to edit the whole section? It makes no sense not to be able to edit the subsections of a section. I think the software should get the text to be edited up to the next same or higher-level heading (or end of text, if there's no matching heading)—not just simply to the next heading.

I disagree. Each section should have a reasonable amount of text. If you don't want to add text to a section, don't create a new section.—Eloquence 02:49, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Maybe I didn't express myself well. What I meant was, supposing we have the following stuff:
Header3
Some Text in section 3. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Header3.1
Some Text in section 3.1. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
Header3.2
Some Text in section 3.2. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
I should be able to also edit sections 3.1 and 3.2 when I edit section 3. -- seav 03:56, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I don't think so. That defeats the whole purpose of the feature, which is to edit about one screenful of text -- that should also be the average length of a section. You should not create a second level section and then just add one or two paragraphs below it.—Eloquence 04:00, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Also, can a developer modify the Cologne Blue stylesheet so that all headings and not just H1 have font-size definitions? (So we can finally address the problem of ==this level heading== appearing too large (I think in IE browsers)) :) —seav 02:35, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Bug with new edit links?

Is there some problem created by the new edit links? Twice now somebody has edited this page and duplicated a whole lot of text in the process (see this diff and this one). I don't know what's causing it, but it's not happened before that I can remember. --Camembert

Can't reproduce. Could be an edit conflict thing. Let me know if you can verify this somehow.—Eloquence

Something's just gone weird with the edit links. They no longer edit the right section. When I tried to edit this section, it took me to the man-boy love thing instead. Angela 01:43, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I got a message from Eloquence. My edit seemed to have caused some text duplication. What I did was: selected editing a section (which gave me the right section to edit), got edit conflicts few times, and had to copy-n-paste the part I wrote to the new window. I don't think I copied other parts, but not perfectly sure. Hope it helps. Tomos 01:56, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps we should turn off these edit section links temporarily. -- Tim Starling 01:57, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

OK, if it just happens with edit conflicts I should have that fixed soon. I'll get right on it.—Eloquence
After reviewing the diff, etc., I have an idea about what happened.
When I get an edit conflict, I get the whole text, instead of the section that I was editing, on one of the edit boxes. I pasted my text into that window (with all sections) and saved, believing that the text will become the latest version. What happened instead was perhaps that the long multi-section text was saved as the new text for the section I initially choose to edit. Am I making sense? Tomos 02:02, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
You are correct -- the upper window was still treated as a section even though it contains the entire text. I just fixed it -- it should no longer happen.—Eloquence 02:06, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

When I click a link from the TOC, it dutifully brings me to that section, but the preceding edit link (that is the edit link for the section I chose from the TOC) is not visible, so I have to scroll back one screenful. A small matter, but illogical nonetheless. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 01:28, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. The edit link should be to the right of the section title. Can you create a screenshot?—Eloquence
Ah, now I see what you mean. I recommend using right click editing if your browser allows it.—Eloquence

New formating on the non-English wikis

Can we get the new formating on the non-English wikis? I wouldn't want anyone to accuse wikipedia of anglocentrism or cultural imperialism or anything. -- AdamRaizen 01:14, 2003 Jul 29 (UTC)

See the mailing list. Erik says "I will update the English wiki to that version ASAP, where it will run for a few days. If it works fine, the other wikis will be updated as well.". Angela 01:19, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Table of contents - how to create

I've clearly missed something: how do I create a table of contents? I've tried going through the FAQs, without success. Vicki Rosenzweig

They're auto-generated from the section headings. --Delirium 00:47, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Judging from the prefs page, they only appear when an article has more than three headings. --Camembert
Unless you turn them off with __NOTOC__

Login Problems

What is going on now? I've just been logged out and can't log in (it won't recognise my password). Another person a while ago on AIM said they couldn't save an article. I got You have new messages sent to me telling me about non-existent messages. (It was hours since the last message and at least half an hour before my next one!) Wiki is doing strange strange things! User:FearÉIREANN

Can you login now? The new message should be the one from Camembert.—Eloquence 00:42, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Yup. Am back (yippee!) [trying desparately to avoid edit conflicts] and got the message from the "Arch-communist". FearÉIREANN 00:54, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Try logging in a few times, then try the wrong password a few times, and then the right one again. (No idea if that would help, can't hurt, anyway.) I kept getting a wrong password message, don't know why, managed to log in... כסיף Cyp 00:42, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC) (Posted after a few edit conflicts.)
I for one can't log in, tried everything I thought of for the last 15 minutes. -- Gutza 217.156.116.130 00:45, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
In any case, it took a while for me to log in, don't know if it was just because of trying a lot, or if I actually did something... Worked, after typing my password in Notepad, and copy/pasting it into the password box. Can imagine how the server would know that I did that, though... כסיף Cyp 00:48, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Oh well, that seems to have done it after all, I've logged in successfully using the twisted method above. Thanks! -- Gutza 00:49, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Table of contents - preferences

About the new skin/layout/appearance/whateveryouwanttocallit: will there be/is there already some way to hide the little "edit" links at the top of each section of an article/page? And is there some discussion about this new layout somewhere? --Camembert

Check your prefs. If you use IE or Mozilla, you can use right click section editing instead of the [edit] links. Yes, the layout was discussed a lot on the mailing list, on Meta and on test.wiki.—Eloquence 00:29, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I feel like a fool - I'd checked my prefs and somehow missed that option. Could you point me to a specific meta page about this (I don't read Wikipedia-L anymore, which would explain how I missed it all on there). Just curious. I think the changes are pretty good on the whole, by the way (though I expect I'll be turning most of the new features off, cos I'm a Luddite at heart). --Camembert
There was some discussion at m:Layout vote and on Wikipedia-L.—Eloquence 00:42, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Thanks. --Camembert

TOC Table Cell Heading Centering

How about removing the align="center" of the Table of Contents header cell? When the TOC is in show mode, the heading doesn't look centered--it looks like it had a bad case of mistaken indentation. All other headers ==like this== aren't centered, so why should this be? --seav 04:33, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

Not sure what exactly you mean with "doesn't look centered". It looks centered here. I added the "center" property exactly because of some ugliness regarding the show/hide display (although I don't recall the exact details). Could you give me a screenshot of what you mean?—Eloquence 04:48, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Can the new edit links on protected pages be disabled? It will just confuse newcomers who click on the links on the main page and are taken a subsection of the page, unable to edit. This may make them think that pages can't be edited at all.

Some of pages are just one liners. It seems awkward sometimes to have so many edit links cluttered on the right side of the page. Is this new system here for good?

--Jiang 04:05, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I think sysops are the only ones who see edit links on protected pages. Also, you can turn off the feature in Special:Preferences. -- Notheruser 04:07, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
No, I signed off and the edit links were still there. When I tried to click on them, I was shown that particlar subsection of the page but in protected mode. --Jiang 04:17, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hmm, maybe the pages are cached? -- Notheruser 04:21, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm not a sysop (unless nominated without my knowledge) and I suddenly see little [edit] marks all over the right hand side. I thought I'd done something wrong or it was a bug. What are hey? Marshman 04:14, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Announcements for information about the recent changes to the software (that page will explain it better than I can). About the sysop comment, I was referring to protected pages (mainly the front page). -- Notheruser 04:21, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Jiang, I cannot reproduce this. Logging out produces no [edit] links on the Main Page as expected. Please be sure to clear your cache before viewing the page after logging out.—Eloquence 04:46, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Ok, my bad. --Jiang

Confusing TOC with Date

TOC # system is confusing, as in "27 July 25, 2003" (see Current events). --Menchi 03:36, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

That page shouldn't have a TOC. Disabled.—Eloquence 03:40, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Login broken?

Did someone change the login code? I can't seem to login. When I try I get spit back to this page [9]

Is there something wrong with my account? Mbecker

Also, I wasn't able to edit this page until I canhed the url from http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump&action=edit to http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump&action=submit. There was an error preventing me from submitting before I did that.
Mbecker
Nevermind, everything seems to work fine now. MB 21:34 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Everything was seriously whacked for about half an hour. Think (from IRC) that Eloquence has fixed it up now. Evercat 21:38 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Login's still broken for me. I get invalid password. I even had it mail me a new password, and the new password mailed to me doesn't work either. --Delirium 00:28, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC) (aka Delirium)

Someone changed the MD5 code. I changed it back, it should work now.—Eloquence 00:31, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I can log in now, though oddly it's my old password that works, not the random one that was just mailed to me. Is the reset-your-password code broken? --Delirium 00:34, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Nope, the old password must always continue to work so random users cannot reset your password. The new password does not work because it was generated with the new code, and I just changed the code back.—Eloquence 00:42, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)~

Why can I not see a "Search" button? Tiles 08:15, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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