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The miscellaneous section of the village pump is used to post messages that do not fit into any other category. Please try to post within policy, technical, proposals or assistance rather than here. For general knowledge questions, please use the reference desk.

« Archives, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80

Unique Visitors Per Month / Unique Editors per Month?

I'm trying to figure out who Contribution percentage for Wikipedia. I'm wondering how many unique visitors Wikipedia gets each month? And of those how many are actually edit something? Is there a good place where I can start looking for this information? Kayur (talk)

Official Election Notice

The 2008 Board election committee announces the 2008 election process. Wikimedians will have the opportunity to elect one candidate from the Wikimedia community to serve as a representative on the Board of Trustees. The successful candidate will serve a one-year term, ending in July 2009.

Candidates may nominate themselves for election between May 8 and May 22, and the voting will occur between 1 June and 21 June. For more information on the voting and candidate requirements, see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008>.

The voting system to be used in this election has not yet been confirmed, however voting will be by secret ballot, and confidentiality will be strictly maintained.

Votes will again be cast and counted on a server owned by an independent, neutral third party, Software in the Public Interest (SPI). SPI will hold cryptographic keys and be responsible for tallying the votes and providing final vote counts to the Election Committee. SPI provided excellent help during the 2007 elections.

Further information can be found at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>. Questions may be directed to the Election Committee at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2008/en>. If you are interested in translating official election pages into your own language, please see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Translation>.

For the election committee,
Philippe Beaudette

RBAG Spam

	Chris is currently being considered for BAG membership. To view the discussion and voice your opinion, please visit click here.

So and so is a fictional character

Why do so many articles on televsion characters begin with the line, "so and so is a fictional character in so and so series"? Why fictional? Shouldn't that be obvious from context? An encyclopedia would never refer to a real person as a "character". Indeed, "so and so is a fictional character" is actively misleading in many cases. It makes it sound like a character is fictional within that show's universe, like Itchy and Scratchy in The Simpsons.

I see similar patterns in articles on comic book characters. Look at the first line at Captain Marvel (DC Comics): "Captain Marvel is a fictional comic book superhero..." As opposed to a real comic book superhero?

I've started a discussion about this here. It would be great if people could stop by. Awbizkomeydownstar (talk) 08:13, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This was discussed and agreed on some time ago. It may be obvious to you that David Copperfield is a fictional character (or that he is not a fictional character) but that does not mean that it is obvious to someone who has never heard of him. Particularly when it comes to minor characters from minor novels, experience proved that it was necessary to establish context for fictional characters to prevent confusion. Hence the standard wording that WP now uses for them. -- Derek Ross | Talk 19:56, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a link to a past discussion? Awbizkomeydownstar (talk) 23:26, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You want a link to a discussion that took place five or six years ago ? That could be tricky. -- Derek Ross | Talk 03:11, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (writing about fiction). I'm sure plenty of discussion has happened on the talk page and its archives. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 18:35, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The lead for Doctor Doom is probably better written: "Doctor Doom is a fictional character that appears in the comic books published by Marvel Comics." --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 20:59, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Double Spaced?

Maybe Wikipedia as a whole should be either 1.5 our double spaced to make reading easier. There should also be a button to increase or decrease the size of the font on each page. What do you guys think? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.178.240.81 (talk) 01:58, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Most browsers can change the text size for you. Ctrl+ and Ctrl- work in FireFox and IE. Algebraist 11:18, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comparative politics articles

This morning a group of new users posted a series of new comparative politics articles. My guess is that they are part of a school project. For the most part they are fairly good, though they unquestionably need some style and formatting revisions. They are pretty bulky articles, and it would be could if some users could give them some care and attention. The ones I've found are:

- SimonP (talk) 18:08, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Are this kind of things really encyclopedic? They would also appear to have NPOV issues.Geni 01:25, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The American British one blithely assumes that there is only one legal system throughout the UK too. In actuality there are three: a common law system for England and Wales; a second common law system for Northern Ireland; and a hybrid civil/common law system for Scotland. That error alone would suggest that these articles need checking. -- Derek Ross | Talk 04:19, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For one thing, an encyclopedic article shouldn't have the conclusion section; that's just not the style. They might be better put in Wikibooks, I would say. I can easily imagine a textbook comparing various governments in the world. -- Taku (talk) 08:27, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Questionnaire on translating for Wikimania 2008

Hello, everyone. :)

You don't know me (I'm most active on fr:wp), so I apologize for intruding a bit on your wiki. But I do need your help!

I will be giving a talk at Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria on translation in Wikimedia projects (along with User:Aphaia), and to that end I need some statistics upon which to base my work. I have prepared a questionnaire in several languages, including English, and am looking for some kind souls who would take 5 minutes of their time to answer it. ;) It is very short and the questions aren't hard to answer. I aim to get at least 100 answers, and have gotten around 35 so far. Please help if you can.

English: fr:Utilisateur:Arria Belli/Questionnaire en (yes, it's on fr:wp but in English)
Deutsch: de:Benutzer:Arria Belli/Fragebogen
Français: fr:Utilisateur:Arria Belli/Questionnaire
Italiano: it:Utente:Arria Belli/Questionario
Español: es:Usuario:Arria Belli/Cuestionario

Please reply in whichever language you feel most comfortable with. I'm not looking for just the most active translators, either, so if you translate very little I'd still be grateful for your participation. Please don't hesitate to share these links with anyone you think would be interested!

Thank you,
Arria Belli | parlami 15:06, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia Commons announces launch of new Valued images project

The project goes live for nominations on 1 June, 2008 at 0:00 UTC

This Commons Valued images project sets out to identify and encourage users' efforts in providing valuable images of high diversity and usability, and to build up a resource for editors from other Wikimedia projects seeking such images for use online. The project also provides recognition to contributors who have made an effort to contribute images of difficult subjects which are very hard or impossible to obtain in featured picture or quality image technical quality. The project will run alongside the existing Commons Featured pictures and Quality images projects.

Please visit Valued images candidates to nominate an image, or to help review the nominations. Anyone with an account on Commons is welcome to nominate images, and also to take part in the open review process. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:02, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Gonna Fly Now" has false info

This article lists Gonna Fly Now as the theme song for Rocky. This is not true. Each movie has a different song played during the title sequence, which I think should be considered the "theme song". The song played is not Gonna Fly Now, it is a similar song called "Fanfare for Rocky" on the Rocky soundtrack. I could be wrong, just wanted to get this out here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.29.65.87 (talk) 00:14, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note that the one reference on that article is to a page called "Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky)", so I think you have a hard argument to make. You are welcome to find a reference proving your point and either introduce it to Talk:Gonna Fly Now or simply edit the article yourself. - Banyan Tree 04:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

straw poll

When you think of Washington State (with a capital S), do you mean:

Washington State University, or

University. But maybe that's just me. Fleetflame 22:53, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think the university. Bartholomew Finley (talk) 06:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've always thought of the university... Matt Yeager ♫ (Talk?) 00:43, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

the State of Washington, or

either one?

Disambiguate. 69.140.152.55 (talk) 05:10, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Neither. Anytime it is possible for the title to have more than one meaning it must be a disambiguation page. To be redirected to the university article would particularly irritate users who are unfamiliar with the US practice of using this format as a "shorthand" form of university names. Roger (talk) 09:37, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Disambiguate. Not everyone is familiar with the US-centric practice of shorthanding university names. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 03:19, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(Please sign *~~~~ in the appropriate section, and add any comments you deem useful.)

69.140.152.55 (talk) 05:10, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note that this is an inappropriate forum for this discussion. There is an ongoing discussion at Talk:Washington State. There is already a note pointing people to that discussion at Talk:Washington State University, though another at Talk:Washington is probably merited. In any case, please have this discussion somewhere localized to the users who frequent the relevant pages. - Banyan Tree 04:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can't vote for Wikimedia Board of Trustees election

I've got no idea where to put this but I'll post it here.

You are not qualified to vote in this election. You need to have made at least 600 contributions before 00:00, 1 March 2008, and have made at least 50 contributions between 00:00, 1 January 2008 and 00:00, 29 May 2008.

Why can't I vote? I've made over 5000 edits since being here. So I don't count? Bidgee (talk) 17:09, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know... According to the quote, you should be fine, as you made well over 50 edits since January and a lot more than 600 edits before March. Perhaps it only likes edits in a certain namespace? Rahk E✘[[ my disscussions | Who Is ]] 23:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You didn't go to the vote page from some other wikimedia project using unified login, did you? I just did that (from simple.wikipedia) and it only counts edits in the project you come from. Algebraist 13:50, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I can tell, Bidgee does meet the criteria. Try again, making sure that you come from en.wikipedia, not from another project, and that you are logged in. If that fails, it might be a bug. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:39, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Divorce

Its true the men after a Divorce in USA need to suport fincellt the women?Wolfmann (talk) 19:53, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No. This question should be on the reference desk, but in general a court will establish whether or not one person will pay alimony or child support to the other after divorce. It is not uncommon for the woman to end up being the one paying one or both of these. Dcoetzee 20:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia background image(the book thing)

What is the licensing information? thanks. Rahk E✘[[ my disscussions | Who Is ]] 21:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You mean the background behind the logo and all of the frames? That's not part of Wikipedia, that's part of MediaWiki, which is released under the GPL. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 23:46, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Earnest question

Does anyone know what the political biases are of the Trustees Board members at Wikimedia. For that matter, is there any real power granted to the Wikimedia user who wins the board election? Can they shape policy at all?

I just want to be clear on how important that office really is, and if it can effect things like, whose views are accepted as "consensus". Tcaudilllg (talk) 02:52, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In the context of acting as a point of contact with external agencies such as the tax authorities, the courts, the media, etc., the Board of Trustees are important. In the context of the internal operation of the encyclopedia, they choose not to be. Hence things like whose views are accepted as "consensus" have been decided by anyone who has been interested in discussing that sort of thing. Check the Wikipedia mailing list archives and meta.wikipedia.org for past essays and discussions on this and many other matter of Wikipedia governance (including the creation of the Board). While the Board probably has the legal authority to decide such a matter as who is eligible to form consensus, its past behaviour suggests (to me at any rate) that it would only do such a thing under duress from external agencies. The only things that the Board mandates (as a result of agreement among those editors who were involved in the early days prior to the Board's formation) are core policies such as that "Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia and not various other things", the Neutral Point Of View, etc. -- the Five Pillars basically. Since the Board raises funds, pays for the servers, etc. it seems not unreasonable that it should set Wikipedia's high-level goals. If anything it seems quite surprising that it should leave so much of the detail to be defined by the General Public (or that segment of it which wants to volunteer for Wikipedia anyway).

So to specifically answer your questions. Some people may know the political biases but I don't. I would hope that they belong to the Encyclopedia Party though. They have as much power as any other Board member and rather more than the average editor. They can attempt to shape policy via discussion with other editors (as we all can) or impose it via a Board fiat (which they have only done to maintain Wikipedia's core values or to protect the encyclopedia from legal issues). -- Derek Ross | Talk 15:41, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New MOS for TV

The television community currently has an MOS guideline under proposal, and would appreciate all comments at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Television/Style guidelines#MOS proposal in order to have the best possible guide for television related articles. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 12:04, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How much info on embarassing associates should be in a presidential candidate's biography?

Some editors here think that when a U.S. presidential candidate is embarassed by someone associated with that candidate, no information about it should be mentioned in the WP biography article, even if the campaign (and therefore the person who is the subject of the article) was affected. Others think WP should only mention that this person was controversial and leave a link in the article to the WP article on that controversial associate. Still others (including me), think we should briefly explain just why that person was controversial in the candidate's life, which can be done in a phrase or at most a sentence or two. Examples:

Hillary Clinton and Norman Hsu
Barack Obama and Bill Ayers (and Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko)
John McCain and John C. Hagee
Rudy Giuliani and Bernard Kerik

Whatever we do, we should have equal treatment, so anyone interested in NPOV-, WP:BLP-compliant articles should look at and participate in the discussion at Talk:Barack Obama#Attempt to build consensus on the details. We've started the discussion on how much to say about former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers in the Barack Obama article, but this will likely affect many other articles. Noroton (talk) 15:26, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't respond here! Please respond at the Talk:Barack Obama#Attempt to build consensus on the details where your comments will actually affect the consensus!!! Noroton (talk) 17:53, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that edits should be evenhanded and come from a NPOV, but to me the most important issues should be notability (within the context of that article) and verifiablity of the information in question. No doubt the people listed above should be included in the respective articles, but they shouldn't take up a majority of the article (and some of them are more notable than others within the context of each person - i.e. Wright > Rezko within the Obama artice). My $0.02. - Masonpatriot (talk) 15:56, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Six Degrees of Wikipedia?

Do you reckon it's possible to get from any Wikipedia article to any other Wikipedia article just by clicking the hyperlinks in the text in less than six moves? Savager (talk) 18:28, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is not. You can't get to a page with no incoming links, for example, such as Al 'Uyaynah up till a minute ago. But see Wikipedia:Six degrees of Wikipedia. Algebraist 18:52, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I tried a dozen or more combinations of two articles in Wikipedia:Six degrees of Wikipedia, getting as obscure as I could, and every single one took exactly four "jumps" between articles - no more, no less. Is this reflective of some deep truth about reality?!?! - DavidWBrooks (talk) 18:59, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. You have taken the first step towards complete omniscience. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 19:53, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

here is the answer GameKeeper (talk) 07:39, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Alexa traffic rankings for Wikipedia

Any reason for Wikipedia jumping in traffic in the last 2 weeks: [1]? Samw (talk) 22:05, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

According to a Signpost article from May 2nd, it's a result of Alexa expanding their dataset in mid-April. - Banyan Tree 07:06, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Date parameter for split templates

It has been suggested that I get a consensus on my proposal to add a date parameter to the split templates. I feel that the change is minor and therefore consensus does not need to be sought. There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Requested templates#Date parameter for split templates. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 22:40, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Cleanup listings for WikiProjects

About 16% of all Wikipedia articles are flagged for cleanup of some sort, although this number varies largely by subject area. Any help in cleaning these massive backlogs is appreciated.

In order to help editors in finding articles of interest that need cleanup, I started to offer per-WikiProject and per-workgroup listings of flagged articles across all maintenance categories. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for more information. The system has stabilized somewhat, and user feedback was quite positive, so I would invite more WikiProjects to join (i.e. to request listings).

By the way, the Urgent Maintenance Award of the Month is shared by the articles Legality of cannabis and Meme, each of which had 16 (sixteen) cleanup categories assigned as of May 24. --B. Wolterding (talk) 12:11, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Problems with wiktionary transwiki

CopyToWiktionaryBot has not been functioning for some time. The category includes articles tagged for transfer from at least as far back as May 10, here. (There may be older; I only looked at a couple.) I wrote to the bot's operator, User:Connel MacKenzie, about it on May 24th and got a prompt reply, but it wasn't really encouraging that the bot would be up and running again any time soon as there is evidently an issue with "false positives" in Special:Import. (Note: I am technologically pretty clueless. I am reporting it, but I don't know what he meant by it. :)) He suggested that an admin may be found on Wiktionary in the event of an emergency transfer; I don't know that there are any emergencies in this list, but am concerned that they are stacking up; currently there are 52 pages in the category. I asked two days ago at AN to see if there were any administrators here who might also be admins there, who could help clear this up, but got no takers. Anybody here have any idea how we can handle this "in house"? If not, I may wander over to find some AN noticeboard on Wiktionary and ask for ideas there. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 16:48, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How do I delete a disambiguation page?

I want to delete this page -> Wacol and link it straight to the Wacol, Queensland page 203.206.10.229 (talk) 15:39, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If you're sure that that meets the requirements for disambiguation pages (here) i.e., that this particular Wacol is going to be the one wanted by most readers, then you should move (using the "move" tab) the content of Wacol to Wacol (disambiguation), and then edit the redirect that should be made on Wacol to point to Wacol, Queensland. You should finally add {{otherusesof|Wacol}} to the top of the Wacol, Queensland page so that the disambiguation page doesn't get lost. --_{tiny plastic} Grey Knight ⊖ 16:19, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Apple mention of Wikipedia

Dunno where stuff like this gets posted, but Apple just posted something about connecting directly to Wikipedia via its various programs.[2] EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:13, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hello

I was just trying this :)

@@ Line 222: / Line 222: @@
 Dunno where stuff like this gets posted, but Apple just posted something about connecting directly to Wikipedia via its various programs.[http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/wiki.html] [[User:EVula|EVula]] <span style="color: #999;">// [[User talk:EVula|talk]] // [[User:EVula/admin|<span style="color: #366;">&#9775;</span>]] //</span> 18:13, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
+== Hello ==
+I was just trying this :)