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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Rdb78 (talk | contribs) at 13:38, 18 August 2004 (→Bad Idea Inc.?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This page is for discussion related to the Main Page. See also the Wikipedia FAQ for general questions about Wikipedia. You can also ask questions at the Village pump.

Comment on a new topic

How to edit the main page. If you see a mistake in any of these sections, be bold and fix them.

NOTE: Any bolded item that on the Main Page must be updated and listed on its corresponding subject area page before being listed on the Main Page. For example, a news item should first be listed on current events, then the article on the subject of that news item should be updated to reflect a current event. Then that item can be placed on Template:In the news.

Main Page cache purge - click this link whenever a change has been made to any of the templates displayed on the Main Page. This will clear the Main Page's cache (located on the Wikimedia servers) so that non-logged-in users can see the update. This may or may not force your browser's cache to expire. See Wikipedia:Reload to learn how to deal with that.

Please post screenshots of the current Main Page to Main Page/Screenshots to assist in debugging design issues, especially when you notice that it looks different from the screenshots which are there.

See the talk page on the Wikipedia table of contents and the category schemes talk page for general discussion of the category scheme on Wikipedia's Main Page.



Archived talk

Archives of older material from this talk page: Archives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

The layout of the Main Page underwent a significant redesign, implemented on 23 Feb 2004. Talk archives 1-13 relate to the old design. Archives after this date: 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23.

See Main Page/Old for the old Main Page design.

Talk pages specifically dealing with layout and design, or alternative designs for the Main Page:

In "Sister Projects", shouldnt there be a link to sep11.wikipedia.org? kidburla2002 23:04 GMT

I'd suggest not at this time for three reasons. It doesn't have a logo, so it wouldn't look right next to the ones that do, it's basically an abandoned project that does not show Wikimedia in its best light, and it is soon going to be replaced with wikipeople so we don't want to confuse people by putting it on the main page only to swap it for something else in a couple of week's time. Angela. 22:08, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)

Athens Olympics

How are we going to deal with the Athens Olympics? Will we have a separate news page for the olympics news? Or will all Olympics news go on the 2004 Summer Olympics page? I think we could get a lot of rub-off traffic by covering the olympics well. Have a look at User:Mark/temp to see an example temporary main page layout to put it on the main page. - Mark 08:00, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The page looks nice. I don't see why not. -- Taku 22:35, Aug 1, 2004 (UTC)
I think the current version is a bit too much. I like the summaries, but not the table. That part desn't seem right for the main page and takes up a lot of room. Angela. 21:09, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
While I am comfortable with the current one, if it is too large, we can stop in the news or featured article section temporary during Olympics. -- Taku 00:13, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
We need to make some choices, if we are going to go ahead and have Olympics news on the Main Page. We should choose one of the following strategies:
  • Use the page as it is, complete with the medal tally, and with the Did You Know section moved down below Selected Anniversaries;
  • Drop the Medal Tally from the template, and alter the lengths of the sections accordingly (i.e. for the two weeks, shorten Featured Articles, Selected Anniversaries and Did You Know, and lengthen In The News and the Olympics News) to ensure no blank spaces;
  • Drop the Medal Tally and drop another section, such as Did You Know, Featured Article or Selected Anniversaries; and
  • Integrate the Olympics News into In The News, and just shorten Did You Know a bit.
  • (feel free to add options which I have not thought of)
What is your opinion on all this? - Mark 00:47, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The selected anniversaries should be size-invariant - they should not be changed. The featured article cannot be shortened easily - at most, you could shave maybe 1 sentence before it starts getting riduclously small. I would suggest:
  • Put just small news summaries of the top 2 or 3 Olympics events on the right
  • Cut In-The-News to 3 articles, Did you know to 2
  • Lengthen the FA (so as to balance the sides) →Raul654 00:57, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
Sounds fine to me. The main idea behind this 'proposal' of mine was to stimulate talk about it, because I couldn't find anyone anywhere discussing such a thing. More progress has been made than I expected. - Mark 01:05, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I have made a page of my own. See User:Raul654/Olympics →Raul654 01:22, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
I like Raul's proposal a bit better, but Mark's looks good too. I'm just worried about load times for Mark's proposed page. In any case, I think having the Olympics on the main page as a special section is a wonderful idea. Sayeth
I would personally prefer a separate page for the 2004 Olympics as it's happening, then transfer it to the main page when the games are done. - EastNile

I happen to really like Mark's version. The medal tally is an especially nice touch. --mav 04:17, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Raul's compacted version is good [[User:Sverdrup|User:Sverdrup]] 15:34, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I share Sayeth's opinion. Either one is good. Mark's version should have a link to the main 2004 Olympics article besides the one linking to the medal tally section, though. Johnleemk | Talk 09:48, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Could someone with The Power add this to the main page? MikeX 02:09, Aug 15, 2004 (UTC)

Done. You can edit the Main Page section at Template:Olympic news.

Too many fonts used on Main Page -- loads *very* slowly

Hello,

the fact that so many different fonts (many of them 16 bit character fonts) are used on the Main Page means that, at least here with Mozilla 1.7/1.8 on Linux 2.6.7/XFree86 4.4.0/KDE 3.2, it takes almost two Minutes to load it and causes X to take 260MB of RAM, while Mozilla needs another 250MB. I know it looks cute to write all the names of the different Wikipedia languages in their own scripts, but is this really worth it? (Comment: Posted by Anonymous user 82.83.144.120)

Where is this Mozilla 1.8? The newest version is 1.7.1. I really wouldn't know why a few different fonts would take up 500 MB of ram. Works fine for me (of course I don't use Linux for Internet, I use win for that) Ilyanep (Talk) 19:16, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Two alpha releases of Mozilla 1.8 have been made see http://www.mozilla.org/releases/ -- Popsracer 03:32, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
While I'm not familiar with how Linux handles fonts, I think you'll find the main cause of slowness to be server loading. Here on Windows, only one font is needed to show all those scripts - either Arial Unicode MS or Code2000, depending on user preference or licensing.
You presumably have the option (if you can't read those languages anyway) to specify not to load a font that can handle them and see boxes instead.dramatic 19:51, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Roman Empire or Roman Republic

Did not Rome first become an empire during the reign of Caesar Augustus (around 23 BC)? This is well after the date of the Battle of Cannae during which time Rome is generally considered to be a republic.

Roman empire should be changed to Roman republic in selected anniversaries. davidzuccaro 05:10, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. And yes, Octavian Caesar set up the empire and gave himself the name Augustus. Ilyanep (Talk) 05:15, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The Black Thumbnail

The thumbnail picture (supply-demand-p.png) used to illustrate today's featured article (economics) appears black on my browser (IE6/Win2k). If I go to economics, the same picture appears, but two or three times larger, and still mostly black, but I can make out red and blue lines against the blackness. If I click on the image to go to the image:Supply-demand-P.png page, the image that appears there is normal, with a white background. There is a comment in the history about transparency. Could it be that full-sized images with transparent backgrounds display properly, but thumbnails sometimes get displayed with the wrong background colour? Or is it just my computer?

I tried two different skins - Classic and Monobook - and got the same effect with each. -- Heron 20:08, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

This is a known big with Internet Explorer that we need to tackle. IE doesn't always display PNGs correctly because of difficulty with transparency. Often, the full image is fine, but the transparent parts of automatically-produced thumbnails appear black under IE. This often goes unnoticed because those of us most likely to fix it don't realise there is a problem since we are using the obviously superior Mozilla browser ;)
The only fix I know of is downloading the pic, opening it, turning off the transparency, saving it, re-uploading it to Wikipedia. — Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 21:17, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Hmm, I've had a look in IE. I can see no problem. That comment about transparency does seem to be by someone who previously corrected the problem. I don't see why you should still have problems. Perhaps this is to do with that bizarre problem we noticed a while ago whereby old content was somehow getting served up to IE. You may be getting the old, uncorrected file. — Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 21:23, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for investigating, Chameleon. I notice that user:Guanaco has changed the image again (perhaps by removing the transparency), so the problem has gone away: thanks, Guanaco! I apologise for using IE, but I'm stuck with it. -- Heron 08:44, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I think this is a problem with the thumbnailer. Sure, we all know that IE is weak with PNG transparency, but from my experience, the transparent PNGs display fine at full resolution on the Image page. It's only when they are scaled down in size (in my experience) that they get the black transparent regions. - Mark 05:12, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Typo

Just a small typo: under the Wikipedia’s Sister Projects section of the Main Page, the following code is used:

[http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising donation.]

The period should appear outside of the link. – [[User:Mxn|Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog)]] 03:03, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think there might be a bug here. Putting the '.' outside of the link makes it jump the gap and appear adjacent to the first letter of the next sentence. Mintguy (T) 03:44, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I think the method used to hide the external link arrow icon after an external link is faulty - it hides the icon, but leaves blank the space in which it would otherwise appear. - Mark 05:07, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I logged a bug on this the other day [1], and the response was that it's already been fixed in CVS. So I guess that means the problem will go away when the fixed code makes it to the Wikipedia site, though I don't know how often that happens. - Brian Kendig 16:38, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Gay pride flag

Why's there a rainbow "gay pride" flag beside the "In the news" item about Missouri banning same-sex marriages? It seems a little POV, and feels a bit like putting a Nazi flag next to a story about Jewish events. I think a Missouri state flag would be much more appropriate here. - Brian Kendig 16:36, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Are you equating Nazism with the gay rights movement? --mav
I knew somebody would say that. ;) Yes, I am, in the sense that (and only in the sense that) there's a group of religious people who feel threatened by another group of people. The religious people just scored a victory in the courts - it seems counterintuitive that the story would have been marked with a graphic representing the people they felt threatened by. - Brian Kendig 03:57, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)
OK, so Brian Kendig just shot himself in the foot with both barrels of Godwin's Law, but he still has a point, which is that a symbol associated with a political campaign, however benign some of us might consider it, is inherently POV, so we shouldn't use it to illustrate an article where we could use a more neutral symbol. Unless, that is, we have a picture of someone actually waving a rainbow flag outside the relevant Missouri court-house, in which case we would be justified in showing it. :-) -- Heron 10:35, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I very much agree with Brian Kendig, and would point out that equating homosexuality and nazism is not a new nor utterly uncommon idea (altho it is largely an irrelevant one here). There was a large pink swastika rally at a church within a block of my mothers house just a few years ago. Sam [Spade] 08:03, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Other "Main Pages"

How does one add other languages' main pages to this main page? Granted, not all seem worth linking in...

Here are the first few ones: [[af:Tuisblad]] [[als:Main Page]] [[ar:%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%AD%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D8%A6%D9%8A%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9]] [[az:Main Page]] [[ba:Main Page]] [[eu:Azal]] [[hy:Main Page]] [[nds:Hoofdsiet]] [[simple:Main Page]] [[sq:Faqja Kryesore]]

Urhixidur 23:03, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

We link to a handful of the few biggest ones. We will *not* link to them all. →Raul654 23:14, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)

Which was the winning goal?

An In the news entry today says At the Asian Cup 2004 soccer finals, Japan defeats China 3–1 with a game-winning goal. Doesn't make sense. When it was 2-1 to Japan they had obviously scored their game winning goal (because China never scored another} Japan's third goal was icing on the cake, but not the game winner. Moriori 23:49, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)

OK, figured how to amend template, so changed it...Moriori

"Retrieved from" part of page

Regarding the new "Retrieved from" section at the bottom of the page, could we please have it in a different font or box it or something in order to distinguish it from the body text? Perhaps it should be in the "This page was modified..." section? Also at the moment, it renders above any category boxes, and it would make more sense if it went under them. Enochlau 07:56, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I was wondering the same thing myself. Frankly, I'm having great difficulty understanding the reason why we have this seemingly superfluous "Retrieved from" section at all. Could anyone please explain what it is for? David Cannon 11:13, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I don't know either, but it is annoying. It seems to serve no purpose at all on Watchlist and What links here pages.
SimonMayer 16:45, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Press reload in your browser. It shouldn't be there anymore. It was just a temporary glitch that got into the cache. Angela. 21:00, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)

What category for request?

What's the most appropriate category to request an article about a small automobile manufacturer?

Sections

[Main Page]] is a protected page. I have created a page to suggest news to include in the Main Page-In the news Section: Main Page News. Have appeared a lot of important news about human cloning and nothing in Main Page News.Mac 06:51, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You can actually edit that yourself. See Wikipedia:Editing the main page and Template:In the news. I'm moving Main Page News to Template talk:In the news [[User:Sverdrup|User:Sverdrup]] 11:21, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Article of the week

Shouldn't the Wikipedia:Article of the week be mentioned on the main page? Sam [Spade] 06:05, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

It already appears on the community main page, which was felt to be enough when it was discussed before. See Wikipedia talk:Article of the week/Archive 1 for example, and I think it has come up on this talk page before as well. Angela. 07:07, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)


Main Page (In The News)

Isn't three domestic United States stories on the front page a bit much?! Mintguy (T) 21:27, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Right. Now we have 4/5 domestic US stories on the front page. Mintguy (T)

Capitalisation

Why is this page called "Main Page" and not "Main page"? It does not seem to follow MoS style for page naming. — Kate | Talk 23:09, 2004 Aug 15 (UTC)

"Main page" is a description; "Main Page" is a title. -- Emsworth 00:56, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)
There was a recent discussion of this in the archive: [2]. Nothing really came of it though. Emsworth's explanation is probably as satisfying an answer as your gonna get. - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 19:46, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)

US Bias

We seem to have five articles on the US on the main page (note, especially, the Selected Anniversaries section). -- Emsworth 02:38, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You can edit the main page sections, you know. If you see a bias in the numbers of articles linked to, then edit it to remove such bias. - Mark 06:50, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)
And this on a day when the power in Liechtenstein was passed from Hans-Adam II to his son Alois! I'm shocked! - Nunh-huh 06:55, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Who? :) -- Cyrius|✎ 07:20, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Yawn. Boring. So do something about it instead of complain. RickK 06:56, Aug 16, 2004 (UTC)

--156.153.255.195 15:16, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Was that vandalism on the Main Page image?

Hi, I just saw, for a couple of minutes, the Wikipedia title image changed to "BAD IDEA INC." with an "x" through the picture. Was that vandalism or do people do that a lot here for a purpose?

As you can guess, I'm a newbie.

Jonathan Jmenon 15:51, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I see the Bad Idea Inc. thing too. Surely that's not right?!

Bad Idea Inc.?

Guys, someone vandalized the Wikipedia logo!

http://en.wikipedia.org/upload/b/bc/Wiki.png

-- Toytoy 15:54, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)

Image:Wiki.PNG has been reverted and protected now, with the vandalized revisions deleted. Angela. 19:05, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)

--The In the news section has been vandalized, but it seems to be protected and not in the versions.  ???

1 Browse Wikipedia by topic

I tried searching for a #Browse Wikipedia by topic in the source. No luck. Any reason for the "1" in this heading on the Main Page? Ancheta Wis 01:54, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I don't see any "1" before the title there on the main page. Could you give us a screenshot, or tell us which browser you are using? - Mark 02:23, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Good news, the "1" is not there any more. Maybe a Main Page cache purge worked to clear out the "1" . Ancheta Wis 03:46, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Other Languages - Simple English

What about adding Simple English to the shorter languages bar (as well as the larger one) for the main page? I think it'd be logical to have that on the main English page along with the other widespread languages. [[User:Brettz9|Brettz9 (talk)]] 05:19, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The other languages there have 10000+ articles, simple: has only 1743. Goplat 05:26, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

No mater which major candidate wins in Illinois, an African American will win

Not only is B. Obama running, A. Keys, also African American has entered as a Republican. User:Leonard G. 12:38, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

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