Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 38

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Village pump (miscellaneous) archive

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous).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

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Page view stats

I've noticed that page views listed at stats.grok.se seem to report separately for multi-word article titles with spaces versus underscores, e.g. "Article title" versus "Article_title". Seems to make counting page views a little more complicated than they would seem. Can anyone elucidate? ENeville (talk) 01:03, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Still listening, if anyone can help. Main concern: how do I get an accurate count of page views? ENeville (talk) 22:17, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

I get the same when I enter "Article title" and "Article_title" at http://stats.grok.se/. 5 times in the last 30 days: 1 on April 9, 1 on April 15, 1 on April 20, and 2 on April 23. Do you see different counts? Or did you make up a false example without testing it? I also got the same counts when I tested a few existing pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:47, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Sry, I meant "Article title" as a concept (should have used italics?). The case I ran across was "Catching_Fire_(2009_novel)" (linked from discussion here). The discussion quoted 1.3 million views, but I only got (as I recall) ~800k when I looked. So I removed the underscores and got ~600k. I thought this was a normal I didn't know about. But now I'm getting different numbers (700k for both), and often "internal server error", perhaps because of the cusp fo the new month. Who knows with buggy things. I'll look for more data. Thanks. ENeville (talk) 23:21, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

"multi-word article titles" was the general description. "e.g." means "for the sake of example" and should have been an actual example when you used that term after the general description. Some people confuse "e.g." and "i.e." See wiktionary:e.g. and wiktionary:i.e. http://stats.grok.se/en/latest60/Catching_Fire_%282009_novel%29 shows far more views in late March than late April. The quoted 1.3 million views was for the last 30 days on 21 April. It's much lower for the last 30 days now on 30 April. I don't see any signs of a difference between space and underscore. I suspect all your different counts were made on different days. By the way, the reason for the many views in late March was the premiere of The Hunger Games (film), a filmatization of a book where Catching Fire (2009 novel) is the sequel. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:53, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Fair enough re "i.e.". I thought I had run into something unintuitive to me but well known to (some?) others, so I was a bit expeditious in my query. As I look at it more, I think what happened was probably that I was unwittingly thrown off by navigating in from the link, and then was inadvertently comparing stats 30-days-back-from-April-27 with those from April as a whole. Ah, well. Thanks for your consideration. :-) ENeville (talk) 00:57, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Please help me "catch" a vandal (or group of vandals)

Hello, I hope this is the right spot for my request, basically... To sum it up: Someone has edited dozens of articles in the past years to include false information about persons who, as I assume, don't exist. In the process, he has used several IPs and different fake names. I first came across those fake entries in 2009, when reading about a German player of the (defunct) American Basketball Association. Anyone possessing a little knowledge about international basketball immediately realizes this cannot be true. However, I only became aware of the hoaxes' spread some months later. In the end, I found the following names to have been added to several articles:

James Couch
Al "Oatmeal" Edwards, Al Edwards Oatmeal
Mike Geselbracht
Adams Hambüger-Hatt, Adam Hambüger-Hatt
Adams Madrid, Adam Madrid, Adam Gama-Madrid

Some of these edits had been reverted, but no one had checked the IP's other edits. In one case, a newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, had taken over the fake information, of course without mentioning their source at all. I didn't tell them, however. So today I wanted to check if the information had stayed in their article. Not surprisingly, it's still there. I routinely checked the related Wikipedia article as well, and guess what - the infomation had been restored, citing the newspaper article. So I started another reverting session. This time, however, I know the vandal won't stop adding that fake information, and it may become impossible to stop those hoaxes' spread if it's transferred to Wikipedias of different languages or to other media sources. I'm still unsure if I have found all fake names, so for now, I'm just listing all IPs involved in that vandalism, including the diff link of the last edit undoubtedly related to that editor:

So what I'm basically asking for is assistance in finding fake names I hadn't identified so far. Of cource, I'd also approve some kind of ban, but what makes this case really remarkable isn't the total number of fake entries, but the spread over a long period of time and range of topics (though it's mainly sports, especially American football, and popular culture), and the amount of proper edits (but also more obvious kind of vandalism) apparently done by the same person(s), partly within the same articles and/or within a few minutes. This may read like the description of several persons's edits being accidently mistaken for a single person's ones, but I'm sure anyone closely examining those IP's edits will come to the same conclusion.

Thanks, --Axolotl Nr.733 (talk) 16:10, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Note: I've added another two IPs. --Axolotl Nr.733 (talk) 18:12, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I've posted a note at WP:AN about this. 64.40.54.97 (talk) 12:47, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Note: I've added four more IP adresses and updated another one. Btw, the clock times are based on CEST. --Axolotl Nr.733 (talk) 13:16, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

I didn't check all of these but it appears they are from Citigroup. They should be relatively easy to trace. The three that are obviously different are from Jacksonville FL and nearby Macclenny FL. Jojalozzo 13:45, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Agree. I've been cheking the range contribs and most of the problems seem to be coming from CitiCorp IPs. Here a list if anybody wants to help.

- range contribs 192.193.0.0/16 CitiCorp
- range contribs 199.67.128.0/18 CitiCorp
- range contribs 66.177.0.0/17
- range contribs 74.178.192.0/18
- range contribs 24.129.64.0/18

Tha vandal also likes to add false information of relaives to BLPs like these; great uncle, great uncle, great uncle, first cousin These are just a few examples. 64.40.57.126 (talk) 18:40, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Unpleasant though the idea may be, this is one case where the use of cookies for tracking purposes may actually be beneficial. Regards, RJH (talk) 22:19, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Template:very long

Template:Very long (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

This template has been discussed, especially in User talk:George Ho/Mentorship discussions#Template:very long. I proposed for "deletion", but my mentor convinced me to discuss it. As you see, sometimes "very long" is confused with (mentioned or not) Template:restructure, Template:overly detailed, and Template:cleanup (proposal to mandate "reason" is discussed). I'm still analyzing the transclusion of this template. So far, I have removed this template from 100 pages, and I bet I can remove a hundred more. --George Ho (talk) 15:20, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

My message cut from Template talk:very long:

This template is becoming more abused and misused. Also, it is vague and problematic, as it may encourage bad editing. The "either split into sub-articles or subsections" thing is good for Template:very long section. However, even if there are suggestions to either split up long page, skim down long page, or restructure long page into subsections, this template is not very good to use, as there are already {{split}}, {{plot}}, {{restructure}}, and {{overly detailed}}. Also, this template is transcluded down from 400 time to 300 times.

--George Ho (talk) 19:41, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Invite to office hours about new team at WMF running experiments on Wikipedia

See: the announcement and WP:E3. Thanks! Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:01, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Logs are available to read now. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:07, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia semi-protected edit requests currently has a large backlog

As of this writing, the backlog stands at 43 pages, which is more than double its official "backlogged" count of 15. Since this is a category in which any autoconfirmed editor can assist in clearing, I figured I'd post here. I'm currently working at getting it down to a manageable count, and I'm hoping others can help out too. Thanks, everyone! elektrik SHOOS (talk) 00:27, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

I see that the Category:Wikipedia semi-protected edit requests page has Wikipedia:Edit requests#Responding to requests cited for guidance, but I find the guidance hard to follow. Perhaps you could improve the guidance there, or provide some hints here, for experienced editors who would like to help, but don't quite grasp what is to be done. Apparently, though, some requests are not at all controversial or likely to lead to problems, and could be done without much difficulty, but others are contentious. --DThomsen8 (talk) 13:20, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia mobile a/b testing?

About once a week, the mobile site seems to change slightly. The most recent makes it look like a wikia article. Are these permanent changes or a/b testing? EcheletteLopper (talk) 02:12, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

The changes made today have been in beta since March. They're not a temporary test, but they're the foundation for the next phase of the mobile navigation redesign. See mw:Mobile to keep up to date with our mobile efforts.--Eloquence * 05:33, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Dodgy archiving

WikiProject talk page moves for archiving purposes is not the done think I suspect. If so this needs to be sorted out. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:11, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Night of the Living Dead Class=?

The Talk:Night of the Living Dead says that it is a Former Featured Article, and all the templates say "class=" without any class rating. This means that the Pennsylvania articles by quality and importance table and the Pittsburgh articles by quality and importance table and several others show this article as unassessed. Is there some way to assign a quality rating for this article, and others like it? --DThomsen8 (talk) 13:09, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the same as always. If you click through on the banners, you'll find each project's scale. You may rate any page from Stub to B. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:22, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the fourth be with you. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 15:17, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Fundraising banner layout

A few minutes ago I loaded an article about a Baroque composer and was startled to see that the subject of the article appeared to be illustrated by a modern color photo of someone who looked awfully familiar. Oops! I wonder if it might be a good idea for the fundraising banner to be reconfigured so that its poster child's image doesn't loom large directly over article titles. Try logging out and then clicking on the dictator, wild animal, extraterrestrial species, abstract concept, deity, or disambiguation page of your choice, and perhaps you'll see what I mean. Rivertorch (talk) 16:36, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry this was so jarring for you and I'm glad you pointed it out -- this particular issue has been brought up before by others over the past few years. The fundraiser is all about experimentation and we're constantly testing to find the best way to engage our audience. I will definitely bring this idea to the rest of the team and see if we can experiment more the picture placement. Thanks! Jvandavier (talk) 23:43, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

No need to apologize. It wasn't jarring so much as surreal, and I ended up rather enjoying the possibilities. Rivertorch (talk) 00:04, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

The 2010 Encyclopedia Brittanica

Well, yesterday I received my copy of the 2010 edition of EB. While reviewing a few articles therein, it became quite clear to me that Wikipedia is vastly superior as an encyclopedia. As such, it occurs to me that an analysis of a well selected set of corresponding articles will be a sound mechanism for showing the superiority of Wikipedia. William R. Buckley (talk) 14:31, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but a selection bias may well suggest a superiority. To minimized that bias, we might want to take our list of independently selected level 2 "vital articles" (Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/2) and see how well they compare side-by-side with the EB articles. There are only three FA quality articles in that mix, so it would be an interesting test. Regards, RJH (talk) 16:15, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection. This is the primary point behind all those WP:1.0 article assessments. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:02, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions. I will look at the level 2 articles, and report on how they compare with the 2010 ECB. William R. Buckley (talk) 18:53, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

You are welcome to add to WP:EBE if you happen to find suitable material during your examination. Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:28, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Can somebody help me with the index of Wikipedia, and especially with the best view to take when comparing the Wikipedia index with that of EB? Also, where is best to describe the observations made during my review of WP and EB? William R. Buckley (talk) 15:08, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

For example, WP has articles Automaton and Automation, but EB has only Automation; the next EB article is about Francis Bacon. Further regarding automata, WP has Automata Theory and Automata Construction, while EB has only an Automata Theory article. William R. Buckley (talk) 15:15, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Project to commission CC-BY fantasy art

Editors working in genre fiction topics may be interested in a Kickstarter project to commission "a free library of art representing heroes of all backgrounds" from professional artists, to be made available under the Wikipedia-compatible CC-BY license. I suppose this could be useful for illustrating articles about the standard fantasy tropes. The project's URL is http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sarahdarkmagic/prismatic-art-collection. (I note in passing that the fantasy art on Commons is a rather mixed bag in terms of quality or usefulness.) Sandstein (talk) 16:43, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

.

Why not just grab the art from [[The Battle for Wesnoth]? I note our collection on commons is far from complete.©Geni 03:30, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Education program research planning

There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research and the associated talk page about what kind of data gathering should be done to determine the value of the education program. Please comment there if you are interested. My own opinion is that the education program has the ability to have a far bigger impact (positive or negative) on the encyclopedia than almost any other factor over the next few years, since we are seeing hundreds of classes and thousands of students editing Wikipedia as a part of that program. Getting this right is very high value, and getting it wrong could be a first-class mess, so I encourage everyone to contribute to that conversation. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:45, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Facebook#Impact on philanthropy

Facebook#Impact on philanthropy is about a number of companies, mainly Kiva, Wokai, and Zidisha, but not at all about Facebook. The article gets 80,000 page views per day, and seems to be permanently semiprotected. I made a request to remove the section on the talk page, but it was immediately resolved as "not done" because the request did not have consensus.

On one hand, I imagine that raising consciousness about these charities on one of the most popular articles in the encyclopedia probably does objective good. On the other hand, what the heck? 71.215.84.127 (talk) 08:19, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Well I think the response could have been better, I believe the issue is that since you wanted to remove a whole section (rather than just fix up technical errors or whatever) you need to have a discussion on the talk page first. Look at it this way -- if you have removed it, no matter your intentions, it probably been have been reverted, so it's pretty much the same thing. So just go and have a discussion about it on the talk page, and see what happens. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:27, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Anon. attempted a discussion on May 3, but received no reply. Regards, RJH (talk) 14:22, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Saw this and poked about a bit! Agree that the section is not valid, but it is salvageable. Also noted that a number of other sections need attention to address WP:WORLDVIEW - lack of! Media-Hound 'D 3rd P^) (talk) 21:14, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Article size

Must I propose turning this guideline into an essay? Seriously, with guidelines of how to verify notability of a topic, write a great article, reach of conclusion to whether split or keep content, be concise on plot abstracts, and more, must we follow this guideline for the sake of messy articles about non-notable subtopics of a topic? --George Ho (talk) 19:36, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, you must discuss and gain consensus to deescalate a guideline to an essay - but this would not be the place to do it. Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) is the place to "discuss proposed policies and guidelines and changes to existing policies and guidelines." For what its worth, if you propose any such thing, I am likely to oppose demotion. This is a good place to look for and find content on how long articles should be and why. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 18:49, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Recently, History of Social Security in the United States was split from Social Security (United States). ...Well, both may be notable, yet that leaves History section a need of expansion. Currently, one portion of Cat is proposed to be split from "Cat". Nevertheless, look at Education in Singapore, Primary School Leaving Examination, and Secondary education in Singapore; I don't know what to say about them except they are not that great. --George Ho (talk) 19:49, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

When articles are split like the SS one, the section it was split off should provide a very concise overview of the topic that was split off, repeating details and sources as necessary to make the main page still reasonably comprehensive. Having only just glanced at how it is split, for the SS article, stating when it was established, and that it has gone through many changes over the years, is sufficient for the main SS page, along with the given link. --MASEM (t) 19:56, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Must this guideline mention notability concerns and size quality (not size quantity)? --George Ho (talk) 03:25, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Article size is closely tied in with Summary Style, and from a few years back, notability. There are bad spinouts, but not all spinouts are bad, and thus SIZE provides useful and necessary advice. --MASEM (t) 18:53, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for delay reply. Anyway, how does this guideline relate to the article's quality? --George Ho (talk) 13:18, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

If you have a wide-spanning topic that far exceeds the recommended sizes listed in this, you need spinouts/sub-articles. The selection of what are spinouts from the main article is not a haphazard choice and choosing the wrong spinout can make both the main and spinout article poor quality. For example, we would never remove the core reception section from a published creative work to a spinout because that's a key part of understanding the work; a list of its awards and nominations, perhaps, but not the core prose of such sections. --MASEM (t) 13:23, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

What about List of Codename: Kids Next Door episodes? Removing intricate cleanup and proper formatting should have done the work, not splitting everything up and leaving episode in this condition without time to clean up the page. --George Ho (talk) 13:32, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

It has issues that need fixing and completeness of the tables, but it is certainly not an issue as to prevent splitting out of article. In fact for most TV shows the list of episodes is the first natural split of a larger article. In other words, the split was done right in that it has the right potential to be a good spinout, but it just needs work to get there; that shouldn't stop the spinning out in the first place. --MASEM (t) 13:51, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Ah, but now taking a look at the history: the splitting done to move the over-detailed plot summaries into season articles is improper. Spinning out should be done after other means to reduce size - in this case, trimming the plot summaries - was done, which likely would have not required that. Now, it may be the case - but doesn't seem like it - that the seasons of the show are notable, in which case a separate per-season article is fine. Here, that's not the case, and spinning out before dealing with the plot size is not appropriate. --MASEM (t) 13:54, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Regarding transclusions of Season pages, I tried. However, that resulted the exact transclusion ([1]), not the list version of it or something as you see in List of Friends episodes. --George Ho (talk) 14:00, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm not 100% sure why its not transcluding right at the moment; there's a trick used by the episode guide templates to make that happen right. --MASEM (t) 14:17, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Back on topic, it could be useful.... in many ways. However, some portions may be misleading and could lead to something worse than List of Codename: Kids Next Door episodes. --George Ho (talk) 14:20, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

It's not misleading, as it is longstanding guidance. One bad example is not sufficient to invalidate that. (And importantly, that example is fixable, so its not disrupting the work). --MASEM (t) 14:28, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

A template (similar to cleanup, refimprove, for ex.) to address use of the English language?

(Please feel free to move this if this is in the wrong section.)

Frequently while browsing Wikipedia I will come across articles about something—whether a place, person, location, or institution—outside of the English-speaking world and which has been written by somebody who has commendable knowledge of the subject but who often lacks a complete command of English. I always correct spelling, grammatical, phrasing, and flow errors in articles like these when I see them. However, sometimes they still exist in ways in which I cannot figure out how to fix.

I am all for having natives of non-English-speaking countries edit Wikipedia to help improve coverage of articles in the non-English speaking world. I believe that their contributions should be embraced and welcomed. However, to perfect the article, it is often necessary for a native English speaker to clean up the article afterward.

To make this task easier, I believe that there should be a template similar to Cleanup, Refimprove, Wikify, etc., that would alert native speakers to some errors in the article's use of English and invite them to improve it. If there is such a template, I do not know of it, and I would highly encourage the creation of such a template.

Anyone have any comments?
Thanks!

RedSoxFan274 _{(talk~contribs)} 05:41, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

A quick stroll through Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup finds {{copy edit}} or {{copy edit-section}}. Others may also apply such as {{cleanup-translation}}. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:00, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Try the copy-edit needed template. If you have Twinkle, it's quite easy to apply it and other tags to articles. dci | TALK 22:07, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Would {{Rough translation}} or {{Proofreader needed}} also cover what RedSoxFan is asking? Wesley☀Mouse 22:20, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia's Most Important Articles

I am seeking a list of Wikipedia's most important articles (the ones that are most essential to be quality). I saw WP:VA, but was wondering if there are any more updated or better lists before I get started. Thanks. Voyaging (talk) 23:20, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I would suggest looking at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team for more information and similar kinds of lists --Robert Horning (talk) 00:13, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I've been checking some lists out. I have some trouble deciding which is most valid though... for example, the editorial team uses Natural science as one of its "Elite 9" while other lists have only Science in their top 10 articles. Respectively, each list leaves out the other. It seems inconsistent. Voyaging (talk) 00:40, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

I think this is a useful task to at least attempt, although I do see problems in terms of objectivity and a strong tendency to bias any such list based upon your own cultural upbringing and geographical location. I see in particular with WP:VA a tendency to overcompensate for some biases by introducing others. It suffers from similar problems that are found with WP:NOTE, but on a larger scale because the point is trying to find the articles which are more notable than others. --Robert Horning (talk) 01:41, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

It's undoubtedly difficult to find a good balance that is acceptable to everybody. At least I'm finding the expanded (level-4) VA list has enough capacity to satisfy nearly everybody's interests. But since even the level 1 VA list only has one FA article, one could perhaps question the net benefit of this approach. Regards, RJH (talk) 17:18, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Another measure is given by Wikipedia article traffic statistics. A little out of date but I see Wikileaks, Christmas, Facebook, the TV series Glee, the film Tron, singer songwriter Justin Bieber and the psychoactive plant Salvia divinorum probably should all be included. Science now ... The Big Bang Theory, ulp no, um ah Albert Einstein phew. :) Dmcq (talk) 17:44, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Some WikiProjects include importance ratings, often directly above the article's quality ratings. This could, I suppose, be a way to see how well-done an article is and how well-done it should be. dci | TALK 22:05, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Creating category Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania

I would like help in creating the category Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania as a subcategory of Category:Pennsylvania state courts, and then the following articles can be added to the category:

Please help me by creating the subcategory. (Pardon my ignorance on not doing it myself.) I can add the three articles to the category. --DThomsen8 (talk) 16:32, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Whether it's a good idea to create this one, I leave to you. The simple process is this:

Add the cat to one of the articles exactly as if it already existed, and save the page.
Click the resulting red link to edit the (brand new) cat page.
Add [[Category:Pennsylvania state courts]] to the new cat page and save the page.

That's it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:26, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

After following your directions and creating the category, I discovered that there is a category of Judges of the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, so I added to the two judges for which there are articles to that category. What I cannot figure out is how to delete the category of Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania. Help!--DThomsen8 (talk) 13:16, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

You can just post {{db-g7}} on a page you created that you'd like deleted; an admin will handle it for you. In this case, your request here is sufficient, so I've gone ahead and deleted the category for you. UltraExactZZ ^Said~ Did 14:09, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

RFC: Deploying 'Start date' template in infoboxes

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Bot requests#RFC: Deploying 'Start date' template in infoboxes. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:18, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Green star

It's not that I don't know what a green star is in my watch-list. Its just: why cannot I find an explanation? -DePiep (talk)

(Now helpful editors will say: "just click here". Which is not an answer). -DePiep (talk) 21:45, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

strong.mw-watched a{background:none;padding-left:0;} on your /common.css page will remove them. There's a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) about the issue. --Onorem ♠Dil 21:49, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh...and the explanation is that we for some reason needed a visual aid to help us know which pages have been changed since we'd last been to them. --Onorem ♠Dil 21:50, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. Still: (repeat my op)-DePiep (talk) 21:54, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Because the feature has only been enabled for a few hours, and nobody's updated Help:Watchlist in the meantime, possibly because a couple of editors keep changing what it looks like (stars vs bold vs ???). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:58, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

New user support if editing skills doubted

Hi. Can someone please help by pointing me at any policy or projects in this area? I am assuming that we must have something on this (yes, I have read WP:COMPETENCE) but I really want to know what is supposed to happen when someone shows up and makes bad edits which may be well-meant but cause problems, even if they are not vandalism. Where do you go for help with an issue like this? Thanks and best wishes DBaK (talk) 08:53, 10 May 2012 (UTC)... PS As they say in the films, "it's not for me". I am an incompetent but old user - different kettle of fish entirely .... :)

WP:Teahouse, maybe, or WP:Adopt-a-user, I think. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:57, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the advice. Just what I was looking for. I have had a look, and passed on the links (or tried to do so) to the editor about whom I was worried. Thanks and best wishes DBaK (talk) 08:32, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Doing better than cargo cult encyclopaedia article writing

The really annoying thing is that it only took about 10 minutes of research and reading for me to come up with a reasonable article rescue plan for this article, dovetailing the subject in with Aftermath of the September 11 attacks. But I'd really like to learn the happy news that somebody else also knows how to do this. It would be really saddening to conclude that the only way that we collectively know how to write articles on jokes and humour is to make a big joke collection, call for other editors to pile on even more jokes, and sit around waiting for actual encyclopaedic analysis and knowledge to arise by magic once the critical mass of jokes has accrued. Or even not write at all. Consider this a challenge, if you need that for encouragement. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 17:47, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Since wikipedia has zillions of articles which are not mere dumping grounds or lists, I think it's fair to say that at least one other person "knows how to do this." - DavidWBrooks (talk) 18:21, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
- You haven't read properly. I did clearly say "articles on jokes and humour" and describe a construction method specific to that kind of article. Uncle G (talk) 18:33, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
  - Fair enough. Still, wikipedia has thousands (tens of thousands?) of articles about jokes and humour that aren't just a listing dump, so it's a bit overblown to imply that you're a wiki-army of one. Having said that, it's certainly true that articles about funny stuff are particularly prone to list-itis. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 18:51, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

It sounds like WP:ADAM style of writing isn't just a BLP problem. Perhaps those two pages should link to each other. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:56, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

[2] Well spotted. JN466 07:23, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Excellent essay, Uncle G. JN466 07:23, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Some websites ignoring NOINDEX tags

I've noticed that sandboxed articles that I've tagged with "NOINDEX" are being copied over to http://www.territorioscuola.com and then appearing in Google searches. Can anything be done about this? — SMUconlaw (talk) 20:44, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm - looks like someone is using a web spider to plagiarise. Same old, Same old. Is blocking the ip appropriate ( and even useful given proxys ), or is there a need for some nice metta language which says to the students using the site "Stop Copying - Do Your Own Homework - Fail!" Just a random though. Media-Hound 'D 3rd P^) (talk) 23:27, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I think there was a recent discussion about NOINDEX not working? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 23:40, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Please stop fiddling with the watchlist format

Please stop fiddling with the watchlist format. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:49, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I do want an indicator for files changed since my last reading. However it is disconcerting to find the indicator changing between bold and stars and then vanishing and reappearing in the course of a couple hours. The indicator is a great help to me in Commons where my watchlist is over 9,000 and even here in en where it's only 5,534 articles on watch. Jim.henderson (talk) 00:04, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree. Or if we want to try out different things (personally, I'm satisfied with the bold text/green highlighter approach that Meta uses, but perhaps something better might exist), could we at least limit changes to one every 8 to 24 hours, with proposed approaches being announced and reactions recorded at some sensible place? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:53, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

The bold-face approach at least was a little disconcerting, not to mention distracting. For one, there was no explanation found on the page, so the purpose was completely unclear. But the concept of highlighting articles that haven't been checked yet seems sensible. I'd like it to go even further and list the number of edits that have taken place since the article was last visited.

In terms of an indicator, why not a simple ✓ in front of the articles that have been visited? Regards, RJH (talk) 14:50, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Not being involved in this end of Wikipedia, I don't know but suspect that nobody intended to try different things. Rather, a decision was made by presumably competent authorities to implement a feature that had been long and happily used elsewhere. With hundreds of Admins having the power to adjust the configurations but who didn't participate in the decision, several of them took it upon themselves, on an emergency basis, to "fix" it. I figure they have by now decided among themselves, in a quiet forum where we lowly grunts can't or don't look, not to do that anymore. Jim.henderson (talk) 03:17, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Help needed

I am looking for an online support group. My mother died of lung cancer on March 5th of this year. I desparately need someone to talk to. My mother was my best friend. I'm 51 years old,She was 69. I slept in the room with her and cared for her,along with hospice,and watching this beautiful woman go from mom,to someone I hardly recognized,(in just 2 months after diagnosis she was gone,)well I need to talk with others who have experienced the same thing. Thank you,Kelley — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iamkelley (talk • contribs) 19:19, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear of your loss, however Wikipedia is not a support group or therapy. Doing a quick google search I came up with this list of potential palces you could go for help. Hasteur (talk) 23:46, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm so sorry to hear that. Both your local hospice organization and your local hospital will have, or know of, a grief support group (probably several, in fact). This page lists some online groups. You could also contact lung- or cancer-related charities, such as the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association, and see whether they can recommend any. Best wishes, WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:06, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Article for creation backlog

A short while ago, Wikipedia introduced a thing where whenever you tried to create a new page it pushed you to do it in your userspace first and them move it into the articlespace. Then it pushed you to do it via an AfC request. Now, predictable as anything, we have a backlog at AfC of 818 articles. The template says anything more than 120 is a "severe backlog" so I'm not sure what 818 qualifies.

Wanted to flag this up somewhere prominent as I suggest that the poor people at AfC are being overwhelmed. I suggest we need to either:

Recruit a load more people to help out
Introduce some kind of speedy approval process for AfC
Revise the template to encourage editors to sometimes move articles straight to mainspace rather than via AfC.

Or, of course:

Do nothing and piss off lots of new article writers and AfC people at the same time.

What do you think? AndrewRT(Talk) 22:11, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I think that both #2 and #3 are far more realistic than #1. It might help a bit if some of the existing AFC folks were slightly less stringent, or more focused on what's important (i.e., not being worthy of a CSD). I've seen AFCs declined over trivial things (like the formatting of citations) that should never hold up an AFC. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

2011–12 Premier League

Hi, the articel stands in the Main Page. At 2011–12 Premier League#footer-info stands QuickiWiki Look Up QuickiWiki Look Up. Do you like it? --217.246.223.188 (talk) 23:32, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I have removed it. I think it's added by some browser addon one of the editors must have used. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:04, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Can "article" please be spelt correctly? ACEOREVIVED (talk) 20:25, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Vandalism

User:201.19.98.94 has put false information into the Whatever Works article, (diff) as well as the Vicky Christina Barcelona article. He/she has made a number of edits to other articles (contribs), these articles need checking for similar vandalism. I filed this report at WP:AIV, but that page isnt working properly. -Stevertigo (t | c) 19:04, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Vandalism by 201.19.. on film-related articles

On May 15, 2012, it became apparent that a vandal, suspected to be a sockpuppet of Pé de Chinelo, has performed some 2500 edits of mostly film-related articles from hundreds of different IP addresses in the range 201.19/16, inserting generally plausible but false information in over 750 Wikipedia articles.

Your help in cleaning up this mess is appreciated. For coordinating the effort, I've set up a page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Film/Vandalism by 201.19.*.*. The progress can be recorded there. --Lambiam 21:39, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia statistics

I just finished interviewing with my local news station about Wikipedia. I want to tell them how many active contributors their are on the English Wikipedia. The only thing I found was Special:Statistics which only tells me how many editors have contributed at least once in the past thirty days. I only want the count of actual active veteran contributors. Does anybody know of a tool like that? Marcus Qwertyus 18:45, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

What's your definition of "actual active veteran"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Maybe this would help? It offers statistics for edits who make more than 100 edits a month as well. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 22:57, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Number of watchers

Does any one know why it is that if you click on the "History" of an article and click on the link that tells you how many times the article has been viewed, you get the figure for the past so many days, but if you click on "Number of watchers" there does not appear to be a time limit like that?ACEOREVIVED (talk) 20:21, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Basically, they're two different tools, made by two different people, that work very differently. I'm no expert on the workings of either tool, but I'm not sure if the number of watchers is actively logged by any database the way page views are.--Fyre2387 ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:46, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

See Dispenser's tool (example). See this recent discussion for more information and a script that can replace the default link with Dispenser's tool. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:16, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Is WP:OWN hurting us?

This news story in The Atlantic suggests that some degree of article ownership by the editing community may actually be beneficial. I do know that a certain sense of article responsibility, if only as an illusion of such, is useful for maintaining FA articles at a high level of quality. Regards, RJH (talk) 19:09, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm... well... WP:OWN actually includes a section WP:OAS on how "Stewardship" of an article is a good thing and totally different to what we mean by "Ownership". In the world outside Wikipedia, ownership doesn't have the negative connotations it does here so the author of that news story probably didn't feel the need to play our semantic game.

So arguably we should be doing more to encourage people to feel greater stewardship... if you can feel stewardship.

Or maybe we should drop the stewardship word and just say "this is good ownership" and "this is bad ownership"... but I doubt we'll ever get consensus for that one.

Yaris678 (talk) 19:21, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

It depends on how you interpret "and most users feel little ownership of the content". If he interprets "most users" as the editing community, then that is a bad thing. If he means that individual editors don't feel that they own their articles, then that is an even worse thing. In either case, straight-up ownership is against any wiki principles out there (while the same cannot be said with stewardship). --MuZemike 07:13, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

It can be difficult to distinguish "ownership" from "stewardship" when there are few active editors watching an article. -- Donald Albury 13:26, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks to whoever thought of using the green text on the watchlist

Thanks to whoever thought of using the green text on the watchlist instead of that awful bolding. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 17:16, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Occupy Wall Street needs editors to form consensus

Please take a moment to weigh in on the discussion at the talk page in regards to inclusion or exclusion of disputed material. More eyes on the page could help collaboration form a consensus in either direction. Thanks!--Amadscientist (talk) 18:20, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Checking who Patrolled a page?

Is there a way to determine the identity of the user who marked a page as patrolled?JoelWhy (talk) 14:13, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, go to Special:Log/patrol and enter the page name as the "Target". -- John of Reading (talk) 16:09, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Ahh, thanks!JoelWhy (talk) 16:16, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

You can also go to the page history -> view logs -> show patrol logs. It doesn't make sense that the marking as patrolled is hidden by default in the all public logs page, but it is. Monty ₈₄₅ 16:17, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Perfect, thanks, that's much more convenient. (I agree that it shouldn't be hidden, especially since an experienced may be prone to use sock puppets to mark pages as patrolled to reduce the risk of pages being closely inspected.)JoelWhy (talk) 16:50, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Watch

Where can i find a list the most visited articles for the month April 2012? Pass a Method talk 21:02, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, there's WP:Most viewed pages, but it's out of date. Then there's Wikipedia article traffic statistics last updated Dec 2010. There's page views for this month at Most visited on English Wikipedia this month. There's the raw compressed data at Pagecount files for 2012-04, but that'd be difficult to sort through. Maybe somebody knows of something else. 64.40.57.98 (talk) 08:38, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Error

Just noticed some sort of error in the Underwater hockey article, can't bring up the page, but can't get into to it fix whatever is happening. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.129.35.214 (talk) 10:30, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

don't worry - already fixed — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.129.35.214 (talk) 10:31, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Lost essay

What happened to the essay about the "Megalomaniac Point Of View"? I thought WP:MPOV used to link to it through a disamb. page, but now I can't find it at all. If it was deleted, could you direct me to the discussion? Thanks, Postpostmod (talk) 12:55, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

This essay? --Colapeninsula (talk) 13:10, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, isn't that a cognitive bias rather than megalomania? Amusing image though. Regards, RJH (talk) 01:06, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Terminal Event Management Policy

This is a thought experiment.

I saw this page recently. The page was originally written as a 2009 April fools, but I thought what if the case described does happen, for example like 2038 problem, or the breakdown of society? What should we do to preserve the knowledge of humans in case the whole internet network is no more? Perhaps preserving a dump in a vault like Crypt of Civilization along with the necessary equipment to retrieve it?

This is a serious discussion. Perhaps we should remove the fun template on that page.SYSS Mouse (talk) 17:47, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation endorsing Access2Research

Hey all

The Wikimedia Foundation has decided to endorse Access2Research and its petition to make research funded by the US government publicly accessible. This will be done by way of a blog post on Friday morning PST; as noted, we are not trying to speak on behalf of the community, but just the Foundation itself. You can read more in the FAQ, and leave any comments or questions you might have on its talkpage.

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Something weird about this image of depleted uranium hexafluoride cylinders...

Not sure where to bring this up; please advise if this should be asked elsewhere, or just move this question it and tell me where it went.

There is something strange going on with [ File:Corroded DUF6 cylinder.jpg ].[3]

It is used at Depleted uranium with the caption "DUF6 cylinders: painted (left) and corroded (right)"

I noticed that the file did not match the description (no painted left and corroded right) and does not match the links that show it to be sourced from a government site. So where did the image of the "skirted ends of depleted uranium hexafluoride cylinders after being painted to arrest corrosion" image come from and how do I confirm that we have permission to use it?

To try to fix this, I tried clicking the revert button next to to the 19:13, 19 January 2006 image shown in the history. No luck. The revert left me with the same image. I then reverted my revert, and suddenly I have the correct image! One revert does nothing, two reverts make a change instead of canceling?

In the end, the Depleted uranium article ended up with the correct image -- an image that I can confirm that we have permission for -- but still, that was strange. Could someone who knows the image system well please check [ File:Corroded DUF6 cylinder.jpg ] and see if there is something wonky about it? Thanks! --Guy Macon (talk) 21:41, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

The logs for the image show only one action rather than two, so I'm guessing it was a caching issue with the server or something like that. Also, it's possible to link images by putting a colon in front of file like this [[:File:Corroded DUF6 cylinder.jpg]] which looks like this File:Corroded DUF6 cylinder.jpg. Cheers. 64.40.54.216 (talk) 08:44, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I was starting to think that maybe I should wait to smoke crack until after I finish editing Wikipedia... (smile) We can mark this one as being resolved. --Guy Macon (talk) 08:55, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Certainly you should. I'd loved to be of some help for selecting the better circumstancial joke unfortunately; and I'm too absorbed watching those images from the ISS. --Askedonty (talk) 09:18, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Google's Transparency Report on Wikipedia

Editors might find it interesting to look at http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/wikipedia.org/ , which lists copy-holder requests to remove wikipedia pages from the Google Search index. WP is rarely a target; here's a BBC article about Google's new Transparency Report. 67.101.7.3 (talk) 17:43, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

AWB Requests Backlog

Does the AWB Requests page usually remain back-logged most of the time like it is right now? --Tow Trucker talk 09:04, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

According to the page history the last action was on 23 May (about a week). I'm not sure exactly how the process works over there anymore, as it looks like there is a bot that automates at least some of the tasks. I recommend browsing the history of the page and directly contact one of the admins who handles approvals. Sorry I couldn't be of more help! //Blaxthos ( t / c ) 17:15, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Funnily enough I was going to post that I wished I had some work to do. this would be right up my street. Unfortunately this is work I am not allowed to do. Rich Farmbrough, 03:37, 29 May 2012 (UTC).

Mass deletion?

The number of articles suddenly seemed to drop by some 10,000. What happened, was there a mass deletion of some sort? Lampman (talk) 15:44, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Looking at the last few thousand entries in the deletion log, nothing seems out of the ordinary as far as mainspace is concerned. There were a lot of broken redirects deleted, but they were all in the article talk space. --MuZemike 18:07, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Well something must have happened. The daily increase for 2012 simultaneously fell by about 50. Lampman (talk) 01:21, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Main Page history/2012 May 29 says 3,965,002 articles when the snapshot was made at 11:20, 29 May 2012. Wikipedia:Main Page history/2012 May 30 says 3,957,927 articles, at 11:20, 30 May 2012. That's a drop of 7075 in 24 hours. The numbers are made with {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} which produced 6,919,416 when this page was last rendered. It was deletion of problematic Chinese township articles which were apparently created by a single editor. See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/User:Jaguar. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:48, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, that clears it up! Lampman (talk) 19:44, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Notification for Commons Photo of the Year?

Maybe I've missed it, but usually en-wiki puts up a (watchlist?) notice when Commons' Picture of the Year voting is open. Now is that time. --99of9 (talk) 06:03, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Core contest discussion

Right, now to discuss how to proceed from here...figured some folks might wanna add a word or two. Casliber (talk · contribs) 10:21, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Hindi Wikipedia on Front Page

I would like to inform you that the Hindi Wikipedia has much more than 50,000 articles due to which I think that it should be included on the main page through this template --Tow Trucker talk 20:48, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

I believe this sort of issue is normally discussed at Talk:Main Page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:16, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Using available translations for non-English works

Look at Talk:Trollhunter, WT:RM, and WT:requested moves/Closure review. Shall we use available translations, which might cause eruption between editors over spelling and such? "The" is optional, yet it is used in some countries. "Troll Hunter" and "Trollhunter" may vary by sources. However, I have done the botched proposal to move it to "Trolljegeren", which is against all policies and guidelines of translations on foreign works.

I don't do translations on Dan dan you qing, bu liao qing, and zai shui yi fang. Nevertheless, even available translations are preferred over original non-English titles in favor of English readers. I don't get it.

Also, the closer of my botched proposal said that the closure of other proposal might have violated WP:consensus. I don't know, but my thoughts were on translations. What do you think it happened? What do you think I should have done? --George Ho (talk) 19:28, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

I think we should use whatever name is commonly used by English-language sources (if any), even if that means using a "foreign" title. Available translations aren't always preferable. They are only preferable when reliable sources prefer them.

If you read WP:UE and you did not come away with the impression that we follow the English-language sources, even when those sources choose non-English terms, then perhaps you'd like to weigh in at that guideline's talk page about the proposed section to make this point much clearer (currently blocked over one editor's claim that it's sometimes impossible to tell whether a word is English or not, and another editor's belief that nobody needs to be told basic stuff like this). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:15, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Get a trip to Leuven, Belgium, to write about the World War I !

Are you an experienced wikipedian from Europe and interested in the World War I? We would love to see you in Leuven, Belgium on the 13-15 of June for a Edit-a-thon organized by Wikimedia Sweden and the Europeana Foundation (www.europeana.eu). To make it possible for you to participate and contribute to English or Dutch Wikipedia articles about WWI we will pay you back for your basic costs for travel back and forth and accommodation in Leuven!

Of course you can also participate in the Edit-a-thon online, without actually being in Leuven, but we strongly encourage you to be there as we will have experts in WWI present during the Edit-a-thon and we have organized interesting side activities such as a guided tour of Leuven's historical WWI sites and you can also attend a couple of dinners - all to give you inspiration for writing excellent articles. In addition, through Europeana's portal we will have access to great digitized material about WWI that we will try to make the best use of. We will also give prizes for the best articles written by the participants in Leuven.

You are of course welcome to join us for only one or two of the days in Leuven if you so prefer. The places are limited so please sign up here as soon as possible! For more information about the event and practical details, please see the project page (a shorter summary is also available in Dutch here) or contact John Andersson on his talk page.

We look forward meeting you there!

John Andersson, a.k.a. John Andersson (WMSE), Lennart Guldbrandsson, a.k.a. Hannibal (WMSE), Anne Marie van Gerwen (Europeana) and Thijs van Exel (Europeana) —Preceding undated comment added 23:20, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Regarding the reimbursement I encourage everybody interested to have a look at this page that contain information about how it works and what the rules are. The Europeana Foundation is giving us all in the wikimedia community a pretty generous offer, if I may say so, and I hope that we will be able to make this into a great event! Cheers John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 10:10, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Essay about schoolchildren and lego and online communities?

I read an essay about schoolchildren and legos and online communities. Does anyone have an URL please? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.126.106.214 (talk) 23:37, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Try the WP:Reference desk. Good luck, WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:18, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Difference between "Sam and Diane" and "Arthur Fowler and Pauline Fowler"?

I proposed a separate article about Arthur Fowler and Pauline Fowler as a couple in Talk:Pauline Fowler. Nevertheless, many opposed my idea as a "fansite". I don't get it. Is there something notable or non-notable about Sam and Diane and "Arthur and Pauline"? I proposed it because I figure there could be critical commentary about the couple themselves. --George Ho (talk) 18:52, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

2011 Picture of the Year competition

македонски • norsk • polski

Dear Wikimedians,

Wikimedia Commons is happy to announce that the 2011 Picture of the Year competition is now open. We are interested in your opinion as to which images qualify to be the Picture of the Year 2011. Any user registered at Commons or a Wikimedia wiki SUL-related to Commons with more than 75 edits before 1 April 2012 (UTC) is welcome to vote and, of course everyone is welcome to view!

Detailed information about the contest can be found at the introductory page.

About 600 of the best of Wikimedia Common's photos, animations, movies and graphics were chosen –by the international Wikimedia Commons community– out of 12 million files during 2011 and are now called Featured Pictures.

From professional animal and plant shots to breathtaking panoramas and skylines, restorations of historically relevant images, images portraying the world's best architecture, maps, emblems, diagrams created with the most modern technology, and impressive human portraits, Commons Features Pictures of all flavors.

For your convenience, we have sorted the images into topic categories.

We regret that you receive this message in English; we intended to use banners to notify you in your native language but there was both, human and technical resistance.

See you on Commons! --Picture of the Year 2011 Committee 18:13, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Distributed via Global message delivery. (Wrong page? Fix here.)

"Picture of the Year" Watchlist Notice

I have opened a discussion/complaint at MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-details#Complaint regarding POTY notice regarding the Picture of the Year notice. Please feel free to give your thoughts on this issue. Hasteur (talk) 19:13, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

2012 CheckUser and Oversight appointments: Call for applications

The Arbitration Committee is seeking to appoint additional users to the CheckUser and Oversight teams. Experienced editors are invited to apply for either or both of the permissions, and current holders of either permission are also invited to apply for the other. There is a particular need for Oversight candidates in this round of appointments.

Successful candidates are likely to be regularly available and already familiar with local and global processes, policies, and guidelines especially those concerning CheckUser and Oversight. CheckUser candidates are expected to be technically proficient, and previous experience with OTRS is beneficial for Oversight candidates. Trusted users who frequent IRC are also encouraged to apply for either permission. All candidates must at least 18 years of age; have attained legal majority in their jurisdiction of residence; and be willing to identify to the Wikimedia Foundation prior to receiving permissions.

Current demand for users with regional knowledge: Because of the increasing activity from the South Asian, Southeast Asian, or Middle Eastern regions, CheckUser applications are particularly sought from people who not only meet our general requirements but also are familiar with the ISPs and typical editing patterns of any of these regions.

If you think you may be suitably qualified, please see the appointments page for further information. The application period is scheduled to close 15 June 2012.

For the Arbitration Committee, Risker (talk) 02:41, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Discuss this

Wikipedia initial website page for selecting your country needs to be centered further down without having to scroll it down to be able to click on the option for the United States/English. Perhaps, however, it would be better to simply change the options to be a list instead of a circular image/list of countries, but a list that is also centered further down. The circular image is innovative, but innovation is not always what is preferred or most efficient. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.216.82.8 (talk) 04:52, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

A merge discussion

The discussion has degenerated quite a bit, which is not leading to anything. Can someone take a look at comment there? Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 05:37, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Photo requests

It should be easy to figure out how to see photo requests for a particular place, but it is not. How do I see a list of photo requests for New Castle County, Delaware, for example?.--DThomsen8 (talk) 14:00, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

The main page is Wikipedia:Requested pictures with shortcut WP:RP. Wikipedia:Requested pictures#Fulfilling a request has a link to Category:Wikipedia requested images. From there you can choose Category:Wikipedia requested photographs, Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in places, and work towards Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Delaware. It isn't subcategorized by county but you can click "Map of all coordinates from Google" to see locations on a map. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:42, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Marking of inactive bots

Anybody please comment on this discussion. I think it's quite an important issue but unfortunately not much conversation is going yet. Rcsprinter (yak) 15:59, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Weird wikipeda-related email spam, about article contributions?

Anyone have a clue what this is about? I don't know what to make of it.

(Spammy email message with full headers, click to show)

Delivered-To: dmahalko@gmail.com
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DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
        d=gmail.com; s=20120113;
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         mxnwOw9JIHbCcIg0yeyTj1l43qRF9QbIASMUI9tlfZ7pMYBtsJoXbrbBJW7ZQkBr8Ym2
         Z6RM/LicU9NqWrS+VGSWr/00AxeuO8wDHnnMXggvqJK3UiLNn3pg98e9LEkjM7qxSq08
         U7kIMCjqYhsjlisw/HTgaJbX+s2vWuCCw+aRkhfURNr5EYN2NJkdqmsWDi4tNrOv/LUJ
         Ssr+BU6bH6h7IepgO4Za5H7R9xlECFgk/Qc3Eq/pJRMAsPkRq9sbTkfpp+woOTyBRPDP
         N5mg==
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.180.92.5 with SMTP id ci5mr37697803wib.19.1339592542817; Wed,
 13 Jun 2012 06:02:22 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.227.116.199 with HTTP; Wed, 13 Jun 2012 06:02:22 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 06:02:22 -0700
Message-ID: <CADC06ZHftbgsGTzJBbC5ywKNFpa0EdSqKY4btO2BR59UNqHPmw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Order
From: Jeff Anderson <jeff.anderson011@gmail.com>
To: andreas.eberhard@gmail.com
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=f46d043892b7a88d5f04c25a317d
Bcc: dmahalko@gmail.com

--f46d043892b7a88d5f04c25a317d
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Good-day Sir/Madam
              I will like to order ( Bale Handling ), Do get back to me
with  the Models and price range on the ones that you carry or customer
made so i can place an order with you or can get back to me with your web
site so  that i can make my selection and get back to you.Also do you
accept credit card?Thank You..

--f46d043892b7a88d5f04c25a317d
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<div>Good-day Sir/Madam</div><div>=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 I will like t=
o order ( Bale Handling ), Do get back to me with =A0the Models and price r=
ange on the ones that you carry or customer made so i can place an order wi=
th you or can get back to me with your web site so =A0that i can make my se=
lection and get back to you.Also do you accept credit card?Thank You..</div=
>

--f46d043892b7a88d5f04c25a317d--

It's obvious to me what relation it has to me.

Some of my past edits to baler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Baler&diff=224099293&oldid=223916774

I get lots of weird spammy email like this that refer to Wikipedia article subjects that I've contributed to.

The question is why spammers would even do this.

It is such obvious and pointless spam, and in a way I feel bad marking a message as spam from some small-time chinese marketing company asking about prices for my LED fixtures. But they never respond if I try to ask why they are sending me this request at all.

Some of my past edits to light-emitting diode:

http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Light-emitting_diode&diff=401673761&oldid=401640719

What are these spammers trying to accomplish?

DMahalko (talk) 14:21, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps they're trying to confirm your email address is valid so they can sell it to other spammers. Rivertorch (talk) 18:49, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

New template for trans women

Right now, Wikipedia articles on trans women have an HTML comment written at the top saying:

However, please notice that sometimes, even Wikipedians who see this comment edit the article to break WP:MOS, and even sometimes edit the comment. I suggest we create a template for trans women that the article should have instead, similar to the already-existent Template:BLP.

The trans woman template should parallel the BLP template with respect to the message it gives. Georgia guy (talk) 17:27, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Just to be clear, is there any reason this proposal is gender-specific or should it also apply to transmen? --Golbez (talk) 17:29, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

If you want it to apply to trans men, you'll have to create a separate template for trans men. Georgia guy (talk) 17:42, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I"ve created a draft at Template:MOS-TW, let's get started talking about the right text. (I'm also open to better names, but I'd prefer the template name include a reference to "MOS", "IDENTITY" or both to relate the template to the particular Wikipedia guideline.) I'll be happy to reflect that into a transgender male template once we've worked out the details of the wording and such. I used Template:BLP as a basic pattern, and tried to make whatever other changes I made for clarity and accuracy. --joe decker ^{talk to me} 18:28, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I've test-applied the two templates to a total of about ten articles. --joe decker ^{talk to me} 22:18, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Editing typos, spelling, word order and punctuation

Hello everyone, I'm sure you'll agree this is also important, as Wikipedia boasts masses of fantastic content that should be read by as many people as possible, and the more pristine the text is, the better! I'm currently looking at articles about Russian cities and Russian history to weed out typos, spelling, word order and punctuation errors. Hope that's greeted at Wiki. And if anyone has input or comments, I'll be happy to hear them.

EngGerm12 (talk) 09:25, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

It sounds like you want to be a Викигном! People like you are always needed. Welcome. → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 20:43, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Help convert Google groups links to proper citations

User:Sfan00_IMG/newsgroup_links

You can help by:

removing the links that have already been conveted to {{cite newsgroup}}
removing links to forums which are clearly NOT newgroups.
Converting links to {{cite newsgroup}}

Thanks Sfan00 IMG (talk) 21:21, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Possible crosswiki spam

Hi. Sorry about my english. I´m admin in es:WP. Some days ago I deleted an article, Veritas Language Solutions. Seeing contribs and iw I found what I think it´s a possible case of crosswiki spam, because:

It was written by Passionforlanguage in en:, wich almost all his contribs are about this article (SPA?).
Piccolapixxie translated it to es, sk and de, and also edited en:Version
Piccolapixxie has some others editions in en, but not in others languages (in spanish only edited es:Veritas Language Solutions)
Elfie Burgess has only one contrib in en: (in this article), but created it in pl and cy
Only contribs of Elfie Burgess in cy and pl are in these articles
All articles are translated from en:; all articles got same sources, no more, no less, and apparently there is no other sources in Google or similar.

I understand your roules are different from ours, so I give you this information to do with it what you think is best. Chears. --Andreateletrabajo (talk) 20:07, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

I think you should report it to Meta. Thanks. Dede2008 (talk) 23:54, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

As I already says, depends of every WP. In de is in DR. But apparently here no one has any interest in it. --Andreateletrabajo (talk) 16:25, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Abuse from Hullaballoo Wolfowitz

First of all I apologise if this is not the right place to put this in but Hullalloo Wolfowitz has been removing an edit I made at the Fraternity Vacation article. He keeps on disputing why it should be included and it is quite clear he does not know anything about this film otherwise he would understand why it should be included. On his last removal of my edit he was extremely abusive to me with the following comment: "drivel posted by an obsessed adolescent". In addition to me he has sent me an unwanted message to me even I made it clear on my page that I did not wish to receive any messages. Hullallo Wolfowitz is therefore harassing me and I request that he be removed as an editor of Wikipedia.

The Shadow Treasurer (talk) 05:12, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

This appears to be based on a content dispute. I checked the source, and I agree it does not come close to supporting the facts or opinions embodied in the content you add. I commented on the article-talk-page to that effect as well (I had not previously been involved or even aware of that page's existence). Your above statement suggests you think WP:V and WP:NPOV do not apply to you because you know best about the subject and/or he is not familiar with the subject--wrong and wrong. HW appears to be getting (understandably) exasperated that he thinks you are misrepresenting a source to support your piece of article content and edit-warring to insert it. The content and your attitude here do consistent with Wikipedia:Fancruft, so the only remotely problematic aspect of his message is the "adolescent". DMacks (talk) 14:48, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Speaking of civility though, I notice you did not bother to alert Hullaballoo that you were talking about him here. I have rectified this situation for you. DMacks (talk) 14:56, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Let's deal with this quickly. The Shadow Treasurer has repeatedly added various statements of a claim about a "classic nude scene" to this film's article, without any relevant sourcing. This edit (soon retracted) is probably the worst of them [4], and I think anyone who reviews it is likely to conclude that the editor who made it did not intend to edit constructively. The latest version uses a Roger Ebert review as its sole reference; that review may or may not discuss the scene involve, but it certainly does not support a claim that the scene is "classic", just that it is shallow, exploitive and misogynistic.

TST is slow-motion edit warring with a range of editors over his insistence on inserting unsourced or inadequately sourced factoids into various articles, and he's added a malformed and not terribly conspicuous comment on his talk page saying, in effect, that he doesn't intend to discuss his edits. [5] That hardly entitles him to complain about warnings about disruptive editing and about edit warring placed on his talk page, or to vandalize my user page. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 15:51, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

First of all don't call me TST. It's The Shadow Treasurer hence making the necessary correction to my name. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz has been harassing me by removing edits I have made in articles, ones I am certain he has little or no knowledge about. I mean does he really have substantial knowledge about Australian politics? (Rhetorical question) Let me make it clear I do not want him anywhere near me in Wikipedia because if he is for whatever reason it is harassment and it is a conduct that should not be acceptable. He has accuse me of vandalisation and that is hypocritical of him doing the exact same thing to me. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz is a threat to my safety at Wikipedia and I should not be the only one to be concern about it. The Shadow Treasurer

DMacks in regards to your comment about content dispute, when there is content dispute, the disputing parties should be those who actually has knowledge or interest about the articles. That is not the case with Hullaballoo Wolfowitz's tamperting with my edits because all he did was to look through my contribution history and made his removal of my edits. In case it isn't clear enough that is harassment and stalking. Do not condone this behaviour from him. The Shadow Treasurer

Needs help

Here it is...Can someone tell me which one is really Solar energy?

LOL (2012 film)

Hi. Can someone check at this article? It looks like someone copy the intro from an add or something. Include things like: "Lionsgate and Mandate Pictures present a Double Features Films production of a Lisa Azuelos film." Thanks. --Andreateletrabajo (talk) 16:23, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

It looks like an IP pasted that over the original lead, which I went ahead and restored. Chris857 (talk) 17:13, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

volunteer work?

In casual conversation, can I refer to my Wikipedia editing as "volunteer work?" I don't mean on a resume but just in casual conversation. If people try to laugh me out of the galaxy I can always explain that I spend hours and hours each day editing wikipedia and learning how to do it better, and take my activities here very seriously. How do people feel about that? Also, has this question ever come up in your life, and what happened? Guyovski (talk) 20:16, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, you are a volunteer. You, I and 99.9% of everybody that contributes is a volunteer editor and most of us take it seriously and try to improve the quality of our project here. Most people I know IRL don't understand that Wikipedia is written and maintained by volunteers like you and I, so I often show them how to edit and they think it's boring. That's just my experience. 64.40.54.83 (talk) 00:17, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

The phrase "volunteer work" has a specific meaning and specific connotations beyond someone performing an activity as a volunteer. It's normally associated with stuff such as lending a hand at a hospital or at the Humane Society. The idea is that it's a respectable, even praiseworthy, way to spend your time either in addition to your job or instead of paid work (especially the latter). In essence "volunteer work" is an unpaid job with all the social cachet of a job but no associated remuneration. So that's what my original question was getting at. Guyovski (talk) 01:13, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Sure you can! In my volunteer capacity, I've been doing it for years. I've yet to manage to persuade my peers to join me, but sooner or later somebody might. :) Most of them are familiar with Wikipedia and impressed and interested to learn more about it, anyway. Beyond that - and the reason I'm responding to this as Maggie Dennis who works for the Wikimedia Foundation and not Moonriddengirl who volunteers - the WMF frequently writes reference letters for college or universities or for scholarships. Sue Gardner recommends asking the staff member you know best (for those intrigued by the idea). If you don't know one, you can always drop me a line or write to my supervisor, Philippe Beaudette. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 02:19, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Cry me a river

I just need to whine to people who might understand; and, since nobody I know IRL edits Wikipedia, this is the only possible place I can do it. I created my very first article. It looked encyclopedic to me, even though it was just a stub and relied on only one source. Seconds later it was being proposed for deletion under "wikipedia is not for reporting news." I went to the article talk page and made a spirited argument against deletion. Then I contacted five more experienced editors who had previously helped me and begged them to join the deletion discussion on the article talk page. Then I looked at the article...and I didn't recognize it. It had been totally rewritten so that it was indeed no more than a bare news report of someone's recent death. That was the form in which it was found by the editor who proposed deletion. Given what the rewritten version looked like, I fully agreed with her that it should be deleted, and was somewhat embarrassed that I had defended a version of the article that no longer exists. Since then the article has been edited several more times so that it's starting to look encyclopedic, but it has absolutely no connection to the article I originally created. I'm forced to accept that I am no longer that article's creator, and I've made my position clear on my talk page and on the article's talk page. It frankly feels, in a minor way, like someone snuck into the hospital nursery and abducted my newborn baby and raised it as their own child, and I never saw the child again before I died of old age. Thank you for listening. Guyovski (talk) 04:19, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Well, the original does still exist of course. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 06:13, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Editing Wikipedia...

Please see this note: [6] Illia Connell (talk) 01:37, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

What about it? TOW talk 18:09, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Being a Wikignome

Hello Wikipedians, I got a really nice and welcoming response to my last post and had to look for a while before I figured out how to post again... I'd be honoured to be a WikiGnome. Would it be possile to eventually graduate to being a WikiFairy?:-) Thank you for the kind welcome, I look forward to working here! EngGerm12 (talk) 09:23, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Welcome and thank you for your contributions, EngGerm12. We look forward to your participation with our project here. Kind regards. 64.40.54.29 (talk) 21:54, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Update on India Education Program

Just wanted to inform you that we have put up a post about the India Education Program here. Please fell free to initiate, advance or follow the conversation on the same page. Thanks Nitika.t (talk) 10:11, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Four-millionth article on its way

As I'm writing this now, the English-language Wikipedia currently has 3,968,543 articles in its main namespace, growing at a rate of just under 1000 articles per day. At this rate of growth, we can expect the enwiki four-millionth article in a month and a bit. A small celebration might be in order. Perhaps with cake.

And a press release? -- The Anome (talk) 22:53, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Cake should be automatically distributed to all users upon creation of the 4,000,000th article. A press release isn't a bad idea either. :D ʝunglejill 23:14, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Personally, I'd rather issue a press release when we reach 5000 FAs (a long way off, so maybe 20,000 FA+GAs) than 4 million articles. Reso lute 23:30, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, 5,000 premium quality articles is a better cause for celebration than 4 million articles that are of somewhat lower quality. Alternatively, we could toot our horn for reaching 15,000 good articles. Regards, RJH (talk) 16:51, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

4 million steaming piles of crap is still an accomplishment, I think. You'd appreciate it if you were a farmer. Equazcion ^(talk) 16:58, 18 Jun 2012 (UTC)

Yes, 40 million flies can't all be wrong. Regards, RJH (talk) 22:13, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation plans to run a blog post about it and is hoping that the community will take lead. :) See Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost#Article 4 million approaching. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for keeping us up to date, Maggie. It is much appreciated. 64.40.54.83 (talk) 23:53, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Advertisements Within Wikipedia Articles

Is anyone else seeing advertisements within Wikipedia articles? Is there some way to make this stop? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Michael Cockrell (talk • contribs) 05:59, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

What kind of advertisements? Could you link to an example? Rivertorch (talk) 08:47, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

This is propably some kind of malware; there was an article on the Wikimedia blog about this a few weeks ago. --Tokikake (talk) 08:53, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Centered em dash?

Has Wikipedia got a template that is a centred em dash, so that the effect in the empty table cells below can be achieved?

Year	Title	Platform(s)
Year	Title	BB	Mac	PS3	Vista	Win	X360
1999	System Shock 2	–	–	–	–	Yes	–
2002	Freedom Force	–	Yes	–	–	Yes	–
2004	Tribes: Vengeance	–	–	–	–	Yes	–
2005	Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich	–	–	–	–	Yes	–
2005	SWAT 4	–	–	–	–	Yes	–
2006	SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate	–	–	–	–	Yes	–
2006	BioShock	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
2013	BioShock Infinite	–	–	Yes	–	Yes	Yes

- X201 (talk) 09:09, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't know, but the ones above look like en dashes. Rivertorch (talk) 09:30, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

They are, typo on my part. But you get the idea :) - X201 (talk) 09:45, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

An alternative is to apply a "text-align: center;" style to the entire table then left justify the title cells. Regards, RJH (talk) 22:11, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Good thinking Batman. It works well and the code is neater. - X201 (talk) 08:17, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Creating a new user-right group

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Proposal by Jc37 (talk)

New proposal. - jc37 17:08, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Study of interest about edit wars on Wikipedia

Dynamics of Conflicts in Wikipedia I ran across it by accident while trying to find a different study. That is all, carry on. - Tenebris 12:52, 24 June 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.112.29.188 (talk)

Perth requested-move notification

An earlier requested-move survey generated lots of controversy and an arbitration case.

Therefore, this one is being posted here and in many other places, to gather a very wide range of opinions outside of the Scotland and Australia WikiProjects.

A requested move survey was started at Talk:Perth_(disambiguation)#Requested_move, which proposes to move:

Background: There was a previous requested-move survey which ran from late May to mid June. There was a great deal of controversy surrounding the closure and subsequent events, which involved a number of reverts and re-reverts which are the subject of an ongoing arbitration case. There was a move review process, which was closed with a finding that the original requested-move closure was endorsed; however, the move review process is relatively new and untried. — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 03:22, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Core Contest

		2012 Core Contest
		Let it be known that the third incarnation of the Wikipedia Core Contest will take place from August 1 to 31 2012 CE/AD.....Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:31, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

U:

I've noticed User:Wavelength has added

{{shortcut|U:Wavelength}}

to their userpage. I was just wondering, is U: an accepted shortcut? Simply south...... always punctual, no matter how late for just 6 years 17:31, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't appear to be banned at Wikipedia:Shortcut, so yes, why not. She/he may start a trend. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:26, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Banned? Not explicitly, but U: doesn't actually redirect to User:, so any pages starting with U: are essentially in article space; so that wouldn't be allowed. Looks like the page has been tagged for speedy deletion already, as it should be. Equazcion ^(talk) 18:53, 26 Jun 2012 (UTC)

Here are links to All pages with titles beginning with U: (two pages) and All pages with titles beginning with UT: (one page).

—Wavelength (talk) 19:16, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

ʻOkina

This ʻOkina is a Hawaiian and Tongan languages. I think that there is a Romanised version. Should this appear in the Latin characters in the editing aids at the bottom of the editing screen? Snowman (talk) 08:41, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Please see Template talk:Okina for the problems displaying this figure in all browsers. Rmhermen (talk) 21:04, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

H. G. Wells RfC

I placed an RfC on the H. G. Wells talk page. This is the first time I have used the template. The text stated that it would be added to the Biographies list, and later that it has been added, but I don't see it on the list, nor has the talk received any attention as far as I can tell. Am I missing something? Regards, nagualdesign (talk) 00:36, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

The RfC bot came on 26 June and made a note. I am not sure what the turnaround time is beyond that. I would think that two days would be a sufficient wait but perhaps not. Everything seems okay about your use of the template. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:51, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

The problem (I believe) is that the "question" was inside the template, which (if memory serves) is how we did this once-upon-a-time, but not any longer. If I'm right, it should be correctly displaying in the next 15 minutes or so. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:24, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the assistance. Much appreciated. Kind regards, nagualdesign (talk) 02:59, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

MediaWiki 1.20wmf6 deployment on Monday instead of Wednesday

Apologies for only posting in English. The deployment team here at Wikimedia Foundation has decided to shift the deployment time of MediaWiki 1.20wmf6 from it's usual time on Wednesday, July 4 to an earlier time on Monday, July 2, due to the upcoming U.S. holiday. Full timeline and status updates are available on the MediaWiki 1.20 roadmap page. -- mw:User:RobLa-WMF (talk) 22:07, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

HEH! I thought I trimmed English off the list of VP's that I was hitting, but obviously not. For en.wikipedia.org, the deployment is happening as scheduled. -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 22:16, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Shrimp and Prawn

The articles Shrimp and Prawn do not appear to follow common usage, and I've started an RfC to address this. In particular, according to Wikipedia, Whiteleg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) is in fact not a shrimp. I think that's ridiculous; but my (overwhelming) evidence based on google hits has been rejected as original research. Due to the desire to restrict the scope of the "shrimp" article to a well-defined biological concept, across Wikipedia the term "shrimp" is now reserved for Caridea, which is much more restrictive than most of the world uses. Comments and help with the RfC would be welcome; thanks. 24.84.4.202 (talk) 23:06, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

These is no common usage of these names as they are used differently in American and British English. Phil Bridger (talk) 11:48, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Is "Guest Pic" Excessive?

Berofe reading see those diddly discussions on my talk page and Leftorium's talk page.

I've been reading many articles of the episodes of the TV series (like the Simpsons, How I Met Your Mother, the Office), and found some articles that have a guest pic of the episode, which is little bit like those Showbiz news sites (like E!, TV Guide and TMZ) to me. Some articles are not mentioning reference to another thing, or have a specific section for the references. And some said that "No Guest Pic Articles" is boring? I don't think so, cause it's more informative without the pic.

So: Is "Guest Pic" Excessive? -Mr a (talk) (contrib) 03:17, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Did you know... there is a cartoon on the main page?!?

Believe it or not, right now there is a 20 minute watchable cartoon on the main page from this article!!! Check it out! – Lionel ^(talk) 09:32, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Renaming categories of ex-Project that are now task forces

I have attempted to rename Category:WikiProject Harry Potter into Category:Harry Potter task force. Unfortunately, people just oppose renaming without "Wikipedia" included. Same thing for WP:SEINFELD and WP:HEROES. This may affect all Projects that have task forces. Also, it would be time-consuming to propose renaming of all categories of task forces, such as of Television Project and of Korea Project. --George Ho (talk) 18:27, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Why do you object to having the category plainly labeled as being part of Wikipedia's infrastructure? Is excluding the word Wikipedia really important? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:07, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

If it means discussing such as Category:Roald Dahl task force articles, then we must discuss this maybe here. Discussing the same thing in every WikiProject with task forces is time-consuming. --George Ho (talk) 02:12, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Even if this means renaming all task force categories, such as ones in Category:WikiProject Novels task forces, how do we propose it and where if I'm not objecting? --George Ho (talk) 02:19, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Why do the others need to be changed? Why do you care what other WikiProjects are doing?

Look: you proposed a name change. Someone suggested a better name. You accept that, and then you are finished. So why do we need to talk about hundreds of other groups? Why do you care what they're doing? You can leave the other groups alone and go work on the articles that interest you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:22, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Revision history statistics

For some reason, I can't seem to find the revision history stats page for an article. Last month I was on a page that showed a graph of the size of the article over time, a graph of its edits, and many other useful things. For the sake of being generic, say the history of the Wikipedia article. There used to be a link on this page, but now I can't find it. Was it removed? Jesse V. (talk) 23:39, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

There is a discussion at User talk:TParis#Articleinfo tool. The tool is/was located here. Chris857 (talk) 23:52, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the info! Glad to hear that I'm not blind. Hope they get it back. Jesse V. (talk) 04:57, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

This tool needs to be restored ASAP. Its a very valuable and informative tool. We keep hearing that storage space is not a problem at WP, so surely someone can find a server, and grant Tparis the storage space he needs. - X201 (talk) 13:20, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

English Equivalent

I have created an article in Persian Wikipedia for which I don't know the English equivalent. It refers to an educational method in which some students who have extra abilities pass two educational grades in one educational year. Do you know English equivalent?Ali Pirhayati (talk) 12:06, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

We probably cover this in our Tracking (education) article, although whether tracking, or streaming, expresses precisely the concept you decide I leave to you to judge. --Tagishsimon (talk) 12:41, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Try Grade skipping or Academic acceleration. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:18, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks a world!Ali Pirhayati (talk) 15:49, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

What Twinkle looks like from the receiving end

User talk:Blingdathersly

See what I wrote at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bart Ramsey. Uncle G (talk) 18:56, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Seems a bit discouraging, doesn't it. 64.40.54.4 (talk) 10:16, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Someone actually did a study on this, where new editors saw these sort of templates and literally thought it was a completely automatic process with no humans involved. Thus, people who use templates literally fail the Turing test. Despite the plausible value of standardised messaging, it turns out that lots of templates are worse than a few human edits, and Twinkle is worse than doing less by hand. Now I can't find the study in question ... anyone remember where it is? - David Gerard (talk) 10:10, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

This one, possibly? Apparently after they are done updating the level-1 user warnings, they might move on to updating the deletion notification templates. David1217 ^{What I've done} 16:30, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Search for TEP

> I would like to suggest the following improvement. > > When I typed "TEP" in the search button, the thing I am looking for > didn't show up. Later I found that TEP meant: Trust and Estate > Practioner. This falls under: financial/tax matters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.65.38.65 (talk) 20:03, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

The second entry at TEP says:

Letters after a name indicating membership of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, founded in 1991.

Where did you look for it? PrimeHunter (talk) 20:21, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Userbox "creator" page

OK, I already asked this question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Userboxes, but I got no response there. This Userbox creator thingy, which is linked from the main userbox navbox, is in the userspace of a permanently blocked user. I think it should it be moved elsewhere. I think it should probably be moved to the UBX (talk · contribs) userspace, which I will ask Mets501 (talk · contribs) about. I will even volunteer to put it in my own userspace if necessary. Any comments from the people here would be appreciated. Eastlaw ^talk ⁄ _contribs 08:28, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

While it's up, the tag on User:Java7837 that says the account is a sockpuppet of User:Joseph3333 is confusing because Java7837 was determined to be the sock master. Jason Quinn (talk) 03:12, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Yep, sure, feel free to move it to the User:UBX space. —METS501 (talk) 04:34, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion

I suggest to create a page about Alexander Garievich Gordon (born 20 february 1964) from russian wikipedia Scymso (talk) 16:54, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

There's a couple of approaches you could take. One approach would be to add the subject to the appropriate sub-page of Wikipedia:Requested articles. The alternative is to follow the process of requesting a translation at Wikipedia:Translation. Neither approach is guaranteed to succeed, but at least it'll be on a to-do list. Good luck. Regards, RJH (talk) 20:16, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Linking to categories

I just removed Category:Trombonists from Trombone. In a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Musical Instruments/Archive 1#Instrumentalist categories at instrument articles, it was explained that this allowed easy linking to lists of musicians when there wasn't a separate list article, such as with Category:Bass clarinetists. However, it seems to me that using cats this way breaks the categorization system. Is there a standard way to say "For a list of bass clarinet players, see Category:Bass clarinetists"? --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:21, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

A simple link to the category (like the one you made in your post) in the "See also" section..? --Martynas Patasius (talk) 20:00, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Could be that we just need the categories to be renamed. If it were called "Category:Trombone", putting all trombone-related articles in that category would make sense, yes? I made the same edit on Bass clarinet years ago - the explanation for having that article in Category:Bass clarinetists is on my talk page, FWIW. I think the "connectivity" gained by putting obviously related articles in a simple common-sense category is valuable. - Special-T (talk) 12:54, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

If that category is "Bass clarinet", that makes sense. However, putting the "Bass clarinet" article in the "Bass clarinetists" category breaks WP:Categorization, because a bass clarinet isn't a bass clarinetist.--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 19:17, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I just put this on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Musical_Instruments#The_categories-of-instrumentalists_issue also - Special-T (talk) 19:28, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree with what Martynas Patasius said. Also, put a {{Cat more}} template on the category page, pointing to the article about the instrument. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 21:06, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

ACTA reviving? Oh Canada....

It would seem that despite an overwhelming vote in the European Parliament against the provisions of ACTA the European Commission together with the Canadian government are now trying to bring the very same provisions in through the back door: a trade agreement between Canada and the EU.

See: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6580/135/

Jcwf (talk) 23:21, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Article 4 million approaching

Hi, guys. :) As you are very likely aware, we are at 3,986,676 articles and should be reaching 4 million pretty soon. (Updated tally: 6,919,416) This is a massive milestone that the Wikimedia Foundation wants to be sure is celebrated in its blog, as it did the 3 millionth ([7]). Since it's an English Wikipedia specific accomplishment, they felt like it might be appropriate to bring the community in on writing up the event. I've invited people from the Signpost, but since no specific Signpost writer raised their hands Matthew Roth has started up a very bare bones outline at meta:Wikimedia_Blog/Drafts/EnWP_4_Million_Article_Milestone. We've invited anyone at the Signpost who'd like to help out, but of course it's open to others as well. This is open for editing in the usual manner of our work, but anybody with an interest in contributing who doesn't want to edit directly is also welcome to add suggestions or comments at the talk page there. By-lines, of course, for all major contributors...unless you'd rather opt out. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the update, Maggie. I'm hoping one of our veteran editors will jump in here and write up something. I also have a question. The majority of articles that are created end up being deleted through one process or another. How do we determine which article is the 4 millionth if the actual 4 millionth article is deleted? Or do we just use the deleted article? Thanks for any input. 64.40.57.128 (talk) 23:26, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Good question. I don't know when the count is considered "stable". :) I'll ask about that one. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Okay, the 4 millionth article will be the first article to be created and not speedily deleted at a time when there are already 3,999,999 articles. The actual "4 millionth article" may vary with time, as older articles are deleted or merged into other articles or as older redirects are turned into articles, older deleted articles restored. Given that, the most important thing is celebrating the milestone of the 4 millionth article. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Where is an easy link to find the updated article tally? Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 19:46, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

There's a counter near the top left of the Main page - "3,989,883 articles in English" -- John of Reading (talk) 19:56, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

LOL! Gawd, how many have I looked at the main page and never noticed that!?!? :P Much obliged for the enlightenment. Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 20:06, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

4 million total articles, but only about 21,000 are WP:FA or WP:GA. That's a pretty poor ratio of decency to garbage. Congrats, Wikipedia! WTF? (talk) 21:57, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, FA and GA are generally the cream of the crop. Do we know how many are B class or higher? That would give an indication of how many articles have been graded as at least respectable (or at least AfD-resistant). Regards, RJH (talk) 20:22, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Per the known stats, around 100,000 are B or above, and around 225,000 C or higher, out of 3,300,000 which have an assessment. However, this should be taken with a very large grain of salt; our ratings are systemically skewed lower than is really the case, as articles tend to get improved without being regraded, and often lag by several years. We have never systematically had an article-reassessment program! Andrew Gray (talk) 21:30, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

It is a little surprising that so few are at B class; I'd have expected at least 10%. Oh well, more work for us to do then. RJH (talk) 04:24, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Comment I started writing up a draft at meta:Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/EnWP 4 Million Article Milestone#Draft article because nobody else would. 64.40.54.45 (talk) 02:13, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
- By the way: WP:4MIL was created through WP:AFC... mabdul 23:33, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Inline image sizing?

Hello,

Does anybody know if there is a Wikipedia technique for setting the height of an inline image to match the scale of the surrounding span of text? I.e. give it a proportionate size like 1em or 100%. Perhaps a template that applies some sort of CSS fiddliness? Thank you. Regards, RJH (talk) 23:58, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't know but perhaps WP:Help desk would be a better place to ask. Rmhermen (talk) 15:32, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Okay, will do. Thanks. RJH (talk) 16:44, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

5MP rules

Wikipedia has two 5M pools. Which one will be used to decide who will win the prize when Wikipedia reaches 5M articles?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:02, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

The first starfighter

Created in September 2002, nominated for deletion almost ten years later. This probably isn't the record for Proposed Deletion, but I suspect that it's close. Uncle G (talk) 20:23, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Celebrating 4 million articles with thanks

I'm celebrating the 4 million article milestone by thanking the generous people who help make Wikipedia what it is. I'd like to encourage others to join in the celebration at Wikipedia:Thanks for 4 million articles. Thanks everybody. 64.40.54.141 (talk) 23:21, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

ReferenceTooltips

Background: ReferenceTooltips is a gadget that allows users to roll over any inline citation to see reference information. A discussion on whether to enable the gadget for all users by default went on for about two months before being archived about two weeks ago. (This discussion was mentioned in the Signpost.) The discussion resulted in a some changes to the gadget, such as the addition of a delay to the tooltip, support for touchscreen devices, and an easily accessible settings menu that includes a button to disable RT, as well and options to modify/eliminate the delay, or set the tooltip to only pop up upon clicking the reference link.

The discussion seemed to show consensus in support of enabling ReferenceTooltips by default, though it was never formally "closed" as such before it was archived. Does this matter? Would further discussion be necessary for it to be enabled? Another point: During the discussion, a comment by User:R'n'B suggested users be "informed about the change (maybe by a watchlist notice) before it happens, and given instructions on how to turn it off if they wish". (Turning it off is accomplished by pressing the gear icon at the top-right corner of any tooltip and then pressing the large "Disable Reference Tooltips" button, or alternatively, deselecting the gadget in Special:Preferences.) Does anyone have opinions on whether this would be necessary, and how best to accomplish it if it is? --Yair rand (talk) 19:51, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I didn't follow that discussion, but I can tell you the general rule: 90% of users won't notice or won't care if they do notice, 5% of users will be happy, and 5% of users will be very, very, very loudly upset—but only briefly. A couple of months later, most (NB: "most" ≠ "all") of the users, including most of the noisy opposition, won't even remember what the old system was like.

How much notice you give and how many hoops you jump through to tell people about it depend primarily on how much noise you're willing to put up with in the couple of weeks after the change. No matter how much notice you give, it won't be enough for some people. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:14, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

A quick glance at the discussion shows 39 in support of the proposal, with 14 opposed. That comes out to about a 74% approval rating, which is probably good enough to enable right away. However, I think we should add a watchlist notice, so that people don't scream the way they did with the watchlist change (what ever happened to that RfC anyway?) David1217 ^{What I've done} 16:00, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

(Actually, several of those opposes were conditional all issues that have since been fixed, so it's really 39-11, 78%.) --Yair rand (talk) 03:17, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, I'd enable it then, possibly with a watchlist notice (but then you'd have to start a new discussion, and you probably don't want to do that). One thing though: for touchscreen devices, can you make it that clicking anywhere gets rid of the tooltip, instead of just the citation? I've tried it on my iPad, and it annoys me. David1217 ^{What I've done} 04:10, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

The intended behavior for touchscreen devices is that clicking anywhere outside the tooltip makes the tooltip disappear. Unfortunately, I don't have a touchscreen device to test it on. I don't understand what you mean by "just the citation" (Just the citation disappears? Only clicking on the citation makes the tooltip disappears? What does "citation" refer to, exactly?) Could you please clarify? Thanks. --Yair rand (talk) 04:16, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I am on an iPad right now, and when you tap on the citation, the tooltip appears. Unless you tap on the little blue number thingy (made with <ref></ref> tags), the tooltip won't go away. What I'd like is that if you tap anywhere other than the tooltip, the tooltip disappears. David1217 ^{What I've done} 04:21, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the bug. Apparently, in certain situations, iPads won't count touching an element as a "click" unless the user triple-taps. Hopefully changing it to also activate on "touchstart" will fix this. (I've left an editprotected request at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js. Hopefully after the sync the bug will be fixed.) --Yair rand (talk) 05:03, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Great, thanks! David1217 ^{What I've done} 05:58, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Note: ReferenceTooltips is working properly on my iPad now. David1217 ^{What I've done} 05:59, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Does anyone else have a comment on whether to enable ReferenceTooltips by default? David1217 ^{What I've done} 05:44, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Is there a readily identifiable means to turn it off? Regards, RJH (talk) 20:19, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Each tooltip contains a "gear" icon in the top-right corner, that when clicked opens a menu that contains a large "Disable Reference Tooltips" button. Does that count as "readily identifiable"? --Yair rand (talk) 20:42, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Yup, close enough. Thanks. RJH (talk) 16:43, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

So, this discussion hasn't had much participation, and the VPR discussion did result in consensus for enabling the gadget, and it was pretty well-publicized. There probably are some users who went two months without checking VPR or looking at the Centralized discussions list and also missed both Signpost articles mentioning it, and will dislike the gadget, but hopefully those users will be able to figure out how to disable it. If nobody objects within a day or so, I'm going to make an editprotected request to the gadgets-definition page, requesting that ReferenceTooltips be enabled by default. If anyone complains that they can't figure out how to disable it, I'll request that a watchlist notice be put up explaining how to disable it, but I think it's unlikely that people will have difficulty disabling it. --Yair rand (talk) 21:15, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
- Sounds good. Finally we'll have closure. David1217 ^{What I've done} 21:29, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
  - Editprotected request is here. --Yair rand (talk) 00:00, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
  - ...And it has now been enabled by default. --Yair rand (talk) 00:29, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
    - Let's see how long it takes before someone starts yelling. It didn't take long with the watchlist controversy today (see thread). BTW, it's working smoothly when I'm logged out. David1217 ^{What I've done} 00:35, 17 July 2012 (UTC) modified 00:45, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

I hope this isn't yelling, but I started seeing the reference tooltips today, and I find them quite annoying. IMO, adding a feature that causes unexpected motion (or "appearing out of the blue") adds distraction in a medium (web pages) that is already crammed with distractions. I'm sad to see this, because one of Wikipedia's great strengths has always been its text-heavy, literate and thoughtful orientation. I think making windows appear in front of text harms readability, and I don't think readers get anything of value out of these little pop-ups that mention sources they've never heard of and mostly don't care about. However, that's JMO, and I think WhatamIdoing's 90/5/5 prediction above is insightful and probably right. Nevertheless, I would like to ask: Is there some way that we can tell what effects the reference tooltips are having on readability? If I'm wrong, and the tooltips don't interfere with readability, that's fine; I'm glad my opinion did not prevail if it was mistaken. However, if the tooltips do distract readers and make articles harder to read, I hope we have some way to find this out and consequently roll back the change. —Ben Kovitz (talk) 03:07, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

I actually think they improve the reader experience by making easy to look at references without jumping away from the text—but like you, that's my POV. Short of actually talking to readers for feedback, though, which is probably not a viable option (too much trouble to get something running just to ask if a minor interface change is liked). So, we'll probably just go with what the community of editors has decided. David1217 ^{What I've done} 04:04, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Village stubs

Dr. Blofeld (talk · contribs) has been threatening to launch 15,000 articles about British settlements consisting of no more than "xxx is a village in Cumbria. ref =google maps". See user talk:RHaworth#Stubs. He seems to have modified this proposal somewhat but I would be interested to hear other editors views on how large a settlement needs to be before it qualifies for its own article here. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 21:39, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Mmm, well I don't think it was necessary to begin the message with a disparaging implication like "threatening". But yeah, that's pushing the envelope a bit. There was some similar activity in terms of auto-generating minor planet articles, which I don't think was necessarily beneficial. Perhaps it would be better if this low utility information was incorporated into lists instead? Regards, RJH (talk) 00:02, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

As a courtesy, I've left a note at Dr. Blofeld's talk page informing him of this discussion. 64.40.54.162 (talk) 00:34, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

In what way would such articles damage our mission as an encyclopedia? Phil Bridger (talk) 19:50, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm struggling to see how these are even stubs; it's one short sentence, followed by a link to a map. I don't necessarily have issues with mass-creating stubs with at least some information, but just saying "xxx is a village in Cumburia" with a Google map link doesn't give readers anything to work with at all. As to the size settlements need to be, I'll defer to people more familiar with classification of British settlements; I've seen such discussions take a couple different tacks, so I won't try to steer it myself. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 14:24, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

It is certainly useful to type the name of a place into Wikipedia and to find some information, rather than finding a red link. That could mean redirects to a list until enough information is available to create a article like the outcome of the minor planets, but there is no established minimum population or notability for settlement articles on Wikipedia. This practice goes back to the days of Rambot and the articles created from the 2000 Census data for U.S. towns. Rmhermen (talk) 15:23, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Again, I'm fine with some information, but what we're talking about above isn't even that. When I've created articles on places (c.f. Noh Poe) I include what I consider some information; a couple paragraphs about the significance of the place and what's happened there. I'd even be fine with less than that, but I need more than just "(insert name of podunk town) exists somewhere in (insert name of country)", because that doesn't really impart any substantial information. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 19:35, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

The practice we've been using at WikiProject Canada is to redirect these one-liners to an article about a county, township, town or city in which the community is located. For example, Glenville, Ontario redirects to King, Ontario#Settlements. See WP:CANSTYLE for details.I oppose the use of a direct link to Google Maps, as that circumvents the general mapping interface available through the use of coordinate data (that is, by using a direct link, you're forcing the reader to use a specific mapping service instead of choosing a mapping service).Mindmatrix 00:37, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Google maps isn't a reliable source of English place-names. If he was citing Ordnance Survey he might have a case.©Geni 13:22, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

I was patrolling new pages a day ago and I saw evidence of Dr Blofeld's work - he had created a large number of new articles about villages in Turkey. (I was puzzled because Wikipedia's notability criteria say to me that merely being a widget doesn't qualify for an article - it must be a notable widget, and that makes sense to me.) I don't have a problem with the names of all these villages appearing on Wikipedia, but the appropriate coverage is a list of villages in a region or country. When I create a new article I strive to ensure notability is comprehensively demonstrated, so I find it disappointing when I find others who see Wikipedia differently. Dolphin (t) 08:28, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

It's been discussed ad nausum before (I forget where the main large initial discussion was held). Many of us agree with you and feel that many of them could easily be redirected to a list articles. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:34, 16 July 2012 (UTC)