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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump.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

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Polish-German issues

Hi, everyone!

For some time I'm monitoring some articles that are bone of contention between Polish and German (and sometimes even Australian - hi Adam!) wikipedians. What worries me is the fact that people that could contribute heavily to other areas instead engage in petty edit wars, fighting on every word.

Perharps we need some general policies on factual accuracy of articles? Even if this won't discourage parties involved, the others would be albe to point them out the policy breach.

So this is what I propose:

• speak of facts, if they are contested - provide your sources - stick to what is now, not in future or past, if you are referring facts like: territorial membership, naming of places and objects and especially current state of events. This is NPOV encyclopedia and so there is no place for wikipedian comments, personal future predictions, questioning the past et cetera. This is journalists', experts' and historians' job respectively and even then not in Wikipedia. Of course all of above could be mentioned if reliable sources are specified or if you are specifically writing on, say, history. If these confroversies are fringe - mark them as such.
  • this address number of things: Adam's remarks on stupidity of Polish heroes, naming edits wars on city and river names and knowing ahead of German government what topics in its politics are not closed.
• resolve conflict through adding information - if you do not like some article don't engage in pointless wars. Instead insist on providing more broad context to disputed article (should make it more NPOV-ish) or start your own article on some corresponding issue and then overview article.
  • this is for Poles engaging in expellees topics mainly. Please take distance and reconsider: if you represent fears of Poles living on Regained Territories - mention them, if you feel that Polish are themselves expellees - write an article on Russian expulsion and then on 'Polish-German issues after IIWW' for example.

Forseti 10:46, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Popularity of American Football

can somebody answer this question? why is American Football so popular that nearly everybody watch the superbowl? i mean i like Football very much and i just wanna figure out what is so special about it?!

You might want to start at National sport. →Raul654 09:22, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

re-interprets as 'popular in America and selected other countries' given that 'Football' (aka Soccer) is arguably far more popular world-wide.

VampWillow 14:28, 2004 Mar 28 (UTC)

"Delete my articles"

User:Yaohua2000 at Chinese WP got pissed off after people objected to his user page (like this), so he requested about 9 pages started by him and afterwards exclusively edited by him to be deleted. Should we fufill that request? One admin already did. My understanding is that giving to WP is a one-way no-return charity street, but I'm not sure the legality behind it. So I asked on WP IRC, but only Adam replied, saying "I believe that is the gist of the message at the bottom of the editing page".

This couldn't have been the first incident like this? The request sounds logical, but is it compliant to the GNU Wiki "save page" click? I'd surprised if requests of this type doesn't spring up again, and again. Perhaps we should develop a meta or WP namespace page, clear and loud, just for newbies on this topic. --Menchi 04:57, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

User:Bird said basically the same thing - he wanted everything he contributed to be deleted. On principle, I find this very objectionable - it sets a very dangarous precedent. →Raul654 04:59, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

Bird finds Raul654's continued misrepresentations to be very objectionable. USER:Bird asked nobody to do anything. USER:Bird began reverting edits created by USER bird. The former contributor took aggressive action to undermine any confidence in the articles based on trust for USER:bird rather than on verification of the content. UserBirds concerns were specifically about validity of content, and reached critical mass when evidence arose that self-styled experts were not reviewing content but were aggressive in battles over layout. If a user wishes to revert edits for any reason, then Wikipedia would do much better to ignore overfed aggressors who consider it more important to impose their sense of control than to reach a CONCENSUS about content of articles. Bird now actively opposes Wikipedia as a reliable resource, and has spent much time after the incidents publicizing the dangerous intellectual and emotional environment present in this project. Users interested in salvaging the credibility of this project would do well to ignore the advice of aggressors such as Raul, and to listen more attentively to those who chose to revert their own edits for whatever reason. My advice to Yaohua2000 would be to treat acts to preserve edits on no basis other than possessiveness to be acts of assault and to reply in kind with whatever technical and psychological skills Yaohua2000 may have to deploy. The attack on Bird, on Bird's contributions, and Birds' response to the aggression have not been resolved and will not be until Bird is allowed to make whatever changes Bird wants to work Bird early created.

Users are strongly urged to ignore Raul's advice and to respectfully consider that users who are recruited to contribute content might as well chose to contribute reductions, or pruning, of content they contributed, for whatever reason. Continued disprespect for writers can only further damage the claim that this collectivity comprises a community. Bird 20:53, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No, sorry, if he wants to list them on VfD, then they can be discussed on their own merits, but he no longer owns them. RickK | Talk 05:00, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

To clarify: "The articles will be deleted only if they are bad (encyclopedia-wise), as determined by consensus at VfD. But will not be deleted just because he personally gave (submitted) them to WP at the first place willingly, but later changed his mind for whatever reason" -- Is that your meaning? --Menchi 05:05, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

There is an argument known to Meatball denizens which says that people should be allowed to dissociate themselves from what they wrote: the right to vanish. One of the reasons given for maintaining this policy is that it allows people to leave quietly and gracefully, rather than harbouring hate and turning to vandalism. -- Tim Starling 05:18, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

I believe once they submit the articles, they can no longer call the articles "my articles" since the articles are released under GNU (be they starting the pages or editing the pages exclusively): they have given up the copyright! Am I right? --Samuel 05:20, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I would say that legally we can keep them up, but the right to vanish sounds like a good idea, and it wouldn't hurt the Wikipedia too much to delete them. So let's do that, as a general rule: If you are the only contributor to an article, you can request its deletion. If somelse edits it at all, though, it has to stay. Meelar 05:23, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'm agree with Meelar. First, I like the project. But I don't like the administrators in the Chinese board. They are absolutist. Yaohua2000 05:33, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think u r a bit radical. I don't think many people here like ur user page too. maybe u can notice that the people here modified ur user page as well, not just shizhao. and, i think Meelar means that "If you are the only contributor to an article, you can request its deletion", but not request the copyright back. --Yacht 05:39, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

I should say, in defence of the "absolutist" Chinese board, that when we've faced this issue in the past, we've refused to delete the articles. Instead, the person who is leaving often requests a name change. So it would be a bit hypocritical to say to the Chinese administrators that they definitely should remove the articles. This decision should be up to them. The law has nothing to say on this: either option is legal. Note that the Meatball article gave name-changing as one possible way to vanish from a community. -- Tim Starling 05:45, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

A sock-puppet would be one option. On a slightly unrelated note, can I ask what's up with Yaohua2002's user page? Meelar 05:48, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

not a big deal, he just used tag div to override the navigation and site skin of WP. I am okay with that, not like it though. (here) --Yacht 05:53, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

User page is my page, it's my own business. I can write whatever I want within the law. Shizhao destroyed my design again and again -- not only the Chinese one. So finally I could not bear him/her. - Yaohua2000

Yauhuam, anyone who calls innappropriate or out-of-bounds your continued comments or major changes to work you inintiated is committing acts of personal aggression against you. This collectivity would do well to consider the advice of Tim Sperling culled from Meatball Wiki. Cow-towing to aggressors sets a poor precedent for human rights and any aggressive, disruptive in-kind-plus response you can muster would be absolutely appropriate. Bear in mind, if you are not from an Western culture, that the belief systems of the West are based on taking and holding property, not on reaching accord between individuals. Bird 20:53, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

When you start interfering with the operation of Wikipedia, that's when it's no longer only your own business. — Timwi 06:09, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a personal homepage provider. User pages exist to facilitate communication on Wikipedia, to strengthen community bonds, and to help users keep track of their activities. What goes beyond these goals must meet community standards, or it can be removed. Deliberately breaking the Wikipedia layout is confusing and frustrating, and thereby counter to the goal of a user page. Other users were completely within their rights to restore the standard layout. I hope your contributions are more important to you than your user page design.—Eloquence 06:11, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

Well, you tell me these things now. But why nobody told me the same in the past? They (Shizhao and etc) always delete, delete and delete. So I got very angry with them. Yaohua2000

I must say, except for the div tag (don't ask me), his user page didn't look much different from most user pages. As for the "not fitting community standards", how is this any worse than catinpint.jpg (which, incidentally, I had no problem with) on Raul564's page? Meelar 06:19, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

When Erik said he 'broke community standards, he means it in a literal sense. Yaohua broke the formatting for Wikipedia by creating (as best I can tell) a table that sits on top of everything else, thus blocking everything else out. →Raul654 07:01, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

PS - the catinapint pic is gone pending a determination of its copyright status.

USER:Bird declared war after uncovering evidence that the only standard of this so-called community is based on subjective preferences of page layout and not on coherence with stated policies, or even on coherence of content with subjects described herein. The just war continues. Bird 20:53, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

(Re: But why nobody told me the same in the past?) — It should have been evident to you when it was removed the first time. — Timwi 06:51, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It should have been evident to Timwi that humans assimilate information in a variety of manners, and that Timwi's views of what should be are nothing but Timwi's personal opinion. Nobody asked you, Yaohua2000, to read any set of policies before editing the page Wikipedia offered for your personal use after recruiting you as a contributor. It is evident that compliance is more important than accuracy. This is a dangerous trend coming largely from citizens of a nation that recently conducted an illegal war and that is about to vote out the war criminal who initiated the act. What I'm saying, Yaohua2000, is that Wikipedia is largely a rogue project of citizens of rogue nations. Don't expect justice from a society with no laws. Bird 20:53, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Who's Raul564? I can't find his user page. Btw, to Yaohua2000, if they didn't tell u the reason, y not ask them urself? (but i guess IMSoP has already explained that to u on ur talk page.) --Yacht 06:57, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry. It's at User:Raul654. The image in question is no longer there, though. Meelar 06:59, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That would be me ;) →Raul654 07:01, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

I am not judging, nor willing to get involved into an arguement. but i would like to say that i hate that pic, which reminds me of a GD Japanese businessman providing such products. disgusting... poor kitty. :'( --Yacht 07:08, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

Abstract

Abstract currently redirects to abstraction, which is about the concept of abstractness and has see alsos for a number of other uses of the word. (1) What would be the appropriate name for an article about "abstract" as used in the context of peer reviewed articles: a summary paragraph placed prior to the introduction, often with different line justification (blockquote?) from the rest of the article, used to help readers determine the purpose of the paper. (2) Would it be more appropriate for abstract to be a disambig page for the many other meanings of the word? Replies might be best on the Talk:Abstraction page. --zandperl 04:16, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

MediaWiki

Is there a tutorial where I can learn how to write those little messages, like {{msg:tolkein}} or whatever? Thanks very much, Meelar 03:30, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

All you need to do is edit [[MediaWiki:yourmessagename]] and add your HTML. As to the special formatting - you will need to learn the HTML seperately... Dysprosia 03:34, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Or rather, learn how to write the wiki syntax. I think it's a good idea to avoid using raw HTML wherever possible. - IMSoP 21:22, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You could also look at meta:MediaWiki namespace, but be warned that it's all going to change dramatically in about a month. Hopefully people will find it easier to use after that. -- Tim Starling 03:39, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

Re; Please Help

Chemistry question moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk. moink 17:12, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

To Secretlondon-Rudolf Vost - Munichen

Not quite sure how to answer you but appreciate your question on the Munichen question regarding artist Robert Vost - Munichen was the former name of the city you mention and was the city of Monks at that time so yes to your question. Since it is titled Munichen and I have only one reference on the internet to this under found papers of someone, I am would love to find out more. If you can help, thank you very much.

Best regards, Marilyn Newcomb

Date and time format

Why can't the four tildes display date and UTC time in the ISO 8601 international standard format, which is the best choice for a worldwide audience? Colloquial variations on date/time format vary widely from country to country. Why push any particular, arbitrary colloquialism, instead of simply using the ISO international standard date and time format? W3C uses the ISO international standard format. In other words, why doesn't the four-tilde string display "username 2004-03-21, 19:22 (UTC)"? That's all we need for the signature string. It's universal. As is now, even if we select the ISO 8601 standard in our preferences, the four-tilde string still displays in an arbitrary, nonstandard format. Can Wikipedia be upgraded to the international standard date and time format (for the automatic signature string)? Thanks. -- Simian 01:36, 2004 Mar 22 (UTC)

Because it's not universal. It will confuse Americans, who wouldn't be able to figure out if 03-12 is March 12th or December 3rd. RickK | Talk 01:38, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That confusion works of course both ways, but since it's logical, even Americans would catch up the meaning quickly from the context. And Americans I know are not at all badly educated, they recognize that style as the "Army style" - and dislike it for that. :-) As this wikipedia doesn't aspire on being a localized American wikipedia, I second User:Simian's call for using international conventions and standards when possible.--Ruhrjung 16:00, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

ISO 8601 is a good machine-readable date format, but it's not particularly nice-looking. You don't see the Chicago Manual of Style recommending it, do you? Also, our audience is English-speaking, not worldwide. Each language can choose their own date format. For example, on ja, dates look like "02:24 2004年3月22日 (UTC)" -- Tim Starling 02:28, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, it's the international standard, so it applies to the international English-speaking community also, not just a subgroup within the English-speaking community. The international standard has been used for years on usenet and various other computer-related applications, and is very easily understood internationally. This encyclopedia project is for an international English-speaking community, not just one particular subgroup, so I recommend consistently using the international standard format for the signature time stamps, rather than arbitrary, colloquial, inconsistently-formatted time stamps listed even within the same page. It would actually make it more readable, not less. -- Simian 2004-03-22, 03:35 (UTC)

The inconsistency in signatures is just a bug that I haven't quite got around to fixing yet. Everyone should have signatures that look like RickK's above, regardless of their preferences. -- Tim Starling 03:53, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

A strange and arbitrary format to standardize on. Time always goes after the date, followed by time zone designator, not separated from the time zone designator. Check any e-mail message. Nonetheless, I hope you'll consider standardizing on the international standard. It would be much more logical and the best choice. Thanks. -- Simian 2004-03-22, 04:16 (UTC)

That's the format that was used before I messed it up, and it's still by far the most common one. So it's not like I'm arbitrarily picking a format to "standardise on". -- Tim Starling 04:21, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

My thoughts--in Wikipedia, the info I'd guess that most are interested in when looking at edits is the time, as in "what has changed since I logged on this morning?". So in WP, time before date would seem to make sense. Yes, we handicapped Americans recognize 24-hr as military time and understand it. Dates are so much easier to understand when the month name is used; I don't know why it would be "better" to use any representation that includes only numbers when it's people (not databases) that are reading the information. Elf | Talk 17:44, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Votes for Deletion is uneditable

Can someone please fix Wikipedia:Votes for deletion? Right now it's impossible to edit because section editing is unusable. It seems some section header has been covered by a comment, and as of now, you can't get to the proper section when you try to edit. RickK | Talk 01:32, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hm. It works now.  :) RickK | Talk 01:32, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I get that about very often on long pages, including the village pimp. Most often the numbers are off by one, sometimes by two. — Jor (Talk) 01:57, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It's a known bug - commented out or nowiki'd sections confuse the counter.—Eloquence

IMSoP wonders who the "village pimp" is ;-)

Section editing

I don't understand how to use section editing yet. Could someone explain, keeping in mind that many people use image-, javascript-, and CSS-disabled browsing for portability across platforms worldwide? In this case, can I not use section editing, or does it not show up on the screen? Or, does it show up and work only on Windows OS but not others? Thanks. -- 66.90.171.93 00:53, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

If you create an account, you can edit section by either clicking on an edit link next to each section name, or you can enable editing via right-clicking on the section name (through javascript). As an anonymous user, I believe you have to click on Edit this page, and you cannot use section editing (well you probably can by entering something like http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump&action=edit&section=117 on your browser window, but that's not fun). Dori | Talk 01:00, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

This link works but shows up as

http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump&action=edit§ion=117

in my browser; alternative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump&action=edit&section=117

using

[http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump&action=edit&section=117 http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump&action=edit&amp;section=117]

Patrick 13:31, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Just so's you know, that's your browser trying to double guess where a character entity ends - it spots &sect and looks no further, even though &sectarianism; would be just as valid as §. IE does this, and I consider it a bug: particularly annoying when you see something&ampsomething else, which breaks on everything else. - IMSoP 19:33, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Getting a complete "what links here" listing

A few hours back I added 487 links to Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages by doing a little automatic sorting and culling of "what links here" from both Wikipedia:Disambiguation and MediaWiki:Disambig (I also hand-cleaned those lists to remove stuff that obviously shouldn't be there, never fear :). I've noticed, however, that these lists are both far from complete - I assume the Wiki software stops the query after a certain number of links have been found. I want to get them all, but SQL querying is currently disabled because it's so dangerous. Who should I talk to to get a full listing of these links? Bryan 00:22, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You could try asking at Wikipedia:SQL requests. Angela. 09:22, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)

---

On a related note - a lot of our music pages are lacking. Now, I googled for "public domain music" and I found a lot of sites. The preferred format for sheet music is pdf, and the most common format for public domain music is midi. Are there objections to these formats? I know PDF is an open standard. →Raul654 05:56, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

In the future there's going to be support for that like there is for TeX. In the intermediate time I would say use PNG instead of PDF. PDF's are annoying sometimes because of how browsers handle them. Dori | Talk 06:05, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

What about midi files? Is there a particular objections to those? →Raul654 18:00, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

I don't have any general objections to them. Dori | Talk 18:03, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

Ok, if anyone has an objection to midi files, speak now or forever hold your peace. →Raul654 20:54, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

Due to MIDI's nature, it's possible for a MIDI file to sound quite different on different computer systems. A MIDI file is like computer-readable sheet music; just as sheet music can sound different depending on the musician who plays it and the quality of their instruments, so can a MIDI file differ depending on the setup and quality of the computer that plays it. Therefore, in my opinion, audio formats based on actual sound recordings (like Ogg) are by far preferable, but a MIDI will do the job where a digitized recording may not be available. Garrett Albright 01:46, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That much I was aware of, but (1) don't most computers use a standard set of instruments for the first 128 instruments or so, and (2) do you know of a good way of converting midi to ogg/mp3? Short of wiring my sound card input/output together, I don't. →Raul654 01:53, Mar 23, 2004 (UTC)

There are various 'converters' applications that will use a MIDI file to generate a .wav, .ogg or what not. on GNU/Linux KMidi is one such utility, it basically generates the sounds from the MIDI file and saves the output to a file, instead of just to the audio out jack on the soundcard, a google/freshmeat search for MIDI converter would probably reveal more applications as well, for various platforms. The advantage to having .ogg files instead of MIDIs is we could have it generated by a system with a good MIDI instrument setup, so everyone would have access to the best quality possible, instead of whatever there sound card is capable of. Thunderbolt16 22:54, Mar 23, 2004 (UTC)

Well I have the wav<->ogg encoder now, so all I need is something that will convert the midi into the wav. If you can recommend something, I'd be happy. Right now, my sound card card inputs and outputs are wired together, and converting is a pain in the ass. →Raul654 22:59, Mar 23, 2004 (UTC)

Apple's QuickTime Pro can convert MIDI to WAV/AIFF (theoretically; I've never tried it but I don't see why it wouldn't work), which can then be Ogg'd with another program. (Unfortunately, QuickTime does not support Ogg natively at this point.) Plus, with QuickTime, you have one of the best software-based MIDI players on the market, supposedly [1]. QuickTime Pro is not free (but still a steal at $30), but I have it, and could volunteer my time and machine to do such conversions... Leave a note on my Talk page. Garrett Albright 23:10, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Audio files

I have an mp3 of Enrico Caruso singing La Donna E Mobile (1908). It would definitely be a beneficial addition to the Rigoletto and Enrico Caruso articles. However, I have a gripe to make. Why is .ogg the preferred format for sound files? Next to wav, mp3 is the universal format for sound files. (I think I heard somewhere that some specific mp3 formats are patented, while ogg is totally open). Second, if we do have to use ogg, can someone recommend a good (no strings attached, no registration, etc) mp3<->ogg converter? →Raul654 20:18, Mar 21, 2004 (UTC)

All MPEG audio formats are troubled with patents. Ogg is completely free (gratis and libre). That is one reason to prefer .ogg. The other reason is that Ogg is a better format: the same filesize gives better quality than an MP3. — Jor (Talk) 20:40, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OggDrop is the 'official' Windows Ogg Vorbis encoder, and oggtools in general for a POSIX platform. However, transcoding from MP3 (or any other lossy format) to Ogg Vorbis is in general a Bad Thing, as there will be a considerable level of encoding artifacts.

BTW, are you sure that the recording that you've sourced hasn't been 'remastered', 'retouched', or in any other way improved in a (legally) copyright-worthy way? It might be something to consider...

James F. (talk) 20:57, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The quality is pretty low. The radio static in the background makes me think it was recorded right out of the airwaves. →Raul654 21:17, Mar 21, 2004 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Sound help. Dori | Talk 22:14, Mar 21, 2004 (UTC)

If anyone is interested, I got the software working. The sound file is here.

Joke or serious? Doc Martens league in Dover

I'm following the contributions of a certain anonymous user because I have reason to believe many of hir edits are not serious and/or accurate. To Dover Athletic s/he has added the sentence "They were relegated from the Conference division in the 2001/2002 season to the Dr Martens league." I know nothing about British soccer, could someone check this page and its accuracy? Thanks. moink 19:23, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

S/he also added reference to a programming language called "DarkBasic" to AMOS BASIC programming language. Does this exist? moink 19:28, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yes, it does exist. Stewart Adcock 19:50, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This all seems at least plausible. The conference division is, AFAIK, the lowest of the main Football (soccer) leagues. I wasn't aware that you could get relegated from the conference division, but I don't know much about the conference. Anyway, dover athletic's website: [[2]] lists games played or due to be played in the "DR. MARTENS LEAGUE PREMIER DIVISION", so it looks like they are now in the DR Martens League, although I don't know whether the date of relegation is accurate.

Sure you can get relegated from the Conference -- it's only the 5th level of the English football pyramid (counting down from the Premiership); there are plenty of lower, regionalised, levels! Arwel 00:42, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Also, DarkBasic does exist (as Stewart says):[[3]], and it seems plausible that it is related to AMOS, as according to the entry you reference, this is related to STOS, which is a programming language for creating games (that came with the Atari ST, I think), as DarkBasic seems to be.

Thanks all. Seems I'm starting to think the worst of people. moink 20:20, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

HELP NEEDED!!! Need Basica Command List Of Some Sort...

I Have Looked EVERYWHERE For A Good Sized COmmand List With Descriptions Of Usage For BasicA. If You Can Help Me, E-Mail: sythe2112@yahoo.com

Export idea

Would it be possible to export Did you know... in some form as a widget for people's webpages? It would be a nice promotional tool, as well as just a neat thing. --Spikey 05:54, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Special:Export/MediaWiki:Dyk - just write a tool that parses that.—Eloquence

Removing old versions of images?

I uploaded Wachovia_logo.gif, then realized that I could in fact convert it. So I uploaded Wachovia_logo.png. But this had been resized, and after reading Wikipedia:logos, I learned I wasn't supposed to resize logos, so I reuploaded Wachovia_logo.png at the original size. So now there's two versions of Wachovia_logo.png. I know Wachovia_logo.gif belongs in vfd, but what about the OLD version of Wachovia_logo.png? If I put a vfd in Image:Wachovia_logo.png, will that automatically apply to the current image, or how can I specify the older image? --Golbez 06:29, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

what does 'avanie mir mornie' mean?

I really really really want to know what this means, as I haven't been able to look it up anywhere else...in Elvish dictionaries and all.Thank you. "Avanie mir mornie"

I read Avanië mir mornië, which alas does not make sense to me "Go (to) jewel darkness" or possibly "Leave, jewel of darkness". What is the context? — Jor (Talk) 11:33, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Mediawiki:biology

Would someone (anyone) with any ability to properly do so, please sort this list to some basic general subcategories, so that its not four pages long? Thanks in advance. -SV(talk) 04:33, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)~

'Film' vs. 'Movie'?

Why are some movie articles designated with '(movie)' while others use '(film)'? For example, Tron (film) or The Haunted Mansion (movie). Is there a reason for the use of either word, or does it depend on the whim of whoever creates the article? Is there a standard to stick by? Brian Kendig 04:21, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It is up to the whim of the article creator, but Wikipedia:Naming conventions (movies) specifies (movie). -- Cyrius 06:53, Mar 21, 2004 (UTC)

And specifically, I'd imagine that articles ending (film) were created by British wikipedians, and those with (movie) by American ones. *waits to be lynched by Australian, Kiwi, non-native English-speaking, etc wikipedians* - IMSoP 12:34, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

As a non-native English speaker, I use "movie" in general and reserve "film" for art. (Hollywood makes movies, some indie projects, documentaries, "foreign" (non-US) films etc., create films). The distinction is not exactly clear, but is there. — Jor (Talk) 12:56, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

As a native English speaker, I agree with Jor. --zandperl 15:42, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yes, this discussion has been gone through a few times. That is the American movie/film distinction. A British person is much more likely to call it a film, regardless of its cultural standing. (movie) is more common than (film) though neither is required if disambiguation is not necessary (though some seem to put it in anyway which has led to duplicate articles in the past. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:19, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Two people with the same name

The article List of Disney people includes a link to Frank Thomas -- but the article is about Frank Thomas the baseball player, not Frank Thomas the Disney animator. How should this be resolved? Should I create a new page named 'Frank Thomas (animator)', should I rename the existing one to 'Frank Thomas (baseball player)', should I name them 'Frank Thomas (1)' and 'Frank Thomas (2)', or what? Brian Kendig 04:16, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

If one is more important or recognized than the other, use that as the article title and anyone else who shares the name becomes First Last (XXXX). For example, John Adams and John Adams (composer). If they are more or less equal in notoriety (and I assume this situation qualifies), both get separate articles and a disambiguation page goes at the main name page. For example, Steve Harris disambiguates between Steve Harris (musician) and Steve Harris (actor). Just make sure to go through the "What links here" page and point other articles to the correct "Frank Thomas". RadicalBender 04:29, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Entry disappeared

There was an entry about Jesselyn Radack, but it vanished. I restored it but the deletion does not show up in the history. Nor does it appear in the deletion log as far as I can see. With google it still cannot be found. How can I find out who deleted it?

Jesselyn Radack seems to be intact. . . --67.69.188.80 20:46, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

. . . and isn't in the last few months of deletion log archives either. --same anon.

Yes, I restored it, but before it was not accessible and it still does not show up when using google.

Google may not have indexed it yet. The current article was created on March 12; do you know when the previous version was first created? If so you should be able to look through the deletion archives to find out who deleted it and when. --anon

The entry was not accessible today before I restored it.

VfD change

See Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. silsor 19:00, Mar 20, 2004 (UTC)

If nobody has any objection I'm going to remove the vfd notice from all the lists that User: 141 had nominated for deletion, because he was trolling and nobody wants these things deleted. Mintguy (T) 20:39, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup

Should Wikipedia:Cleanup be archived every week no matter what has been done to the entries? Give your opinion Wikipedia talk:Cleanup#Archiving. Thanks, Dori | Talk 18:22, Mar 20, 2004 (UTC)

Arabic help

I'd be grateful for any 'pedian fluent in Arabic to take a look at the list of air forces. I have Roman alphabet transliterations for many of the Arab air forces listed there, but not the original language versions. Cheers --Rlandmann 11:07, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Webster's online dictionary

Is it really appropriate to let Wikipedia express preference for particular www-sites, as in this case Webster's online dictionary, see contributions by anon user 24.94.24.107?
--Ruhrjung 09:45, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

IMO, I really don't think so. Especially not sites which attempt to use copyright law to stop their users using the "view source" option on their browsers, as WOL does: (Looking at the source code for even one page... is strictly forbidden and violate[s] international copyright laws [4].) Marnanel 01:18, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Should the "Vernal equinox" really be "2004"?

I'm referring to the "selected anniversaries" for March 20th on the front page.

Well, you're right that it's not really an anniversary as it is happening every year on (nearly) the same date. But maybe it was added into that list in that format just to make it look consistent with the other anniversaries. andy 15:40, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Adjectives

There should be a rule that adjectives are redirects to nouns. (If there isn't one already).

For example: Renal should redirect to kindey. Happy should redirect to happyness.

I can't think of many cases where this should not occur (perhaps only if the adjective is ambiguous). Bensaccount 16:33, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Suggested changes to wikipedia:Copyrights

Pursuant to a related discussion on #wp (b/t sethIlys & imran), here is a suggestion for improving compliance of well-meaning parties with our copright reqs:

• Move the following bits from the 'Example notice section up to the top, above the TOC and after the first introductory sentence:

Here is an example notice which complies with the GFDL, for an article that uses the Wikipedia article Foo. Note that it links directly to a copy of both the GFDL and the article:

This article is licensed under the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html">GNU Free Documentation License</a>. It uses material from the <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo">Wikipedia article "Foo"</a>.

("Foo" and the Wikipedia URL must of course be changed to match the article you are using.)

For other acceptable notice formats, and more information on your rights and responsibilities under our copyright license, read on.

• Then change the Example notice header to say "Copyright Notices and Citations" and include a couple lines referring back to the intro and mentioning alternate notice formats in general, also merging in some info about how to cite sections taken from WP articles.

+sj+ 18:03, 2004 Mar 29 (UTC)

Greeneye error

Hi there, there seems to be an error made by ?my browser?, anyway, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/wiki.phtml?title=Greeneye&diff=0&oldid=2985654 , i didn't put in all those blank lines, sorry for that, i just aligned the image. Regards 134.2.226.113 21:45, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC) (from de:)

Error on "Ibuprofen" stub

Hello The structure on the ibuprofen stub article is entirely incorrect - the branches extend from the wrong place on the benzene ring and one of the groups themselves is wrong - it should feature an OH group, not a single bonded oxygen mid-branch.

I cannot discuss the article as it does not exist yet. I would be more than happy to write the article when I have finished my current paper, however I wondered whether it was in some way possible to correct or remove the erroneous information before then.

Many thanks

~Deborah~ ~31 March 2004~

Anti-Poland vandal

JOR is anti-Poland vandal! Why he is not blocked?!!? WARNING: MAXIMUS REX is JOR sockpuppet.

Also HEPHESTOS. JOR is violation of NPOV and HOSTILE

I add new QUCIKPOLL for JOR POV Pusher. Please vote!!

Vandal warning

USER:JOR is anti-Poland VANDAL. ==THIS IS REMOVED BY JOR SUPPORTER SO IF DELETED PLEASE ADD BACK==

This seems to be Wikipedia?

I'm sure I will like the place and be a Wikipedian! Wik Lir 20:49, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

VfD

I was just trying to clean up some of the links on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and suddenly the page went haywire. (I hope it wasn't something I did.) Who can we notify to fix it? Rossami 23:04, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Looks alright to me. What did it actually look like? -- Tim Starling 05:29, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Copyright question (2)

I got an Almanac here from Germany, 1980. The publishing house can't be found on the Internet; No idea what's happened to them. Anyway, my question:

The book consists mostly of tables and short descriptions/explanations of words. I don't think the content is reproducible in any other way, as the tables are usually made up of only few words. Can I quote stuff from there? One example would be Nobility, where I just expanded the list of nobility titles. Even if I wouldn't have used the book as reference, I doubt the table would have looked much different... so, what's the answer to this? The book is full of information that I could obtain otherwise (e.g. by compiling tables myself out of several other books or websites), so I don't really have an idea on what copyright says for this...

Oh, and it's only about text. I wouldn't dare to scan any image and put it on Wikipedia. :) -- Tomcat 11:32, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Under US law, lists of objective information are not subject to copyright. The matter was extensively considered in court some time ago, when the phone company tried to claim copyright on its telephone directories. Mkweise 17:04, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

See Feist v. Rural →Raul654 17:19, Mar 28, 2004 (UTC)

However, the case you cite is a little more complicated than that. It is generally acknowledged that objective history and lists of facts are not subject to copyright. The issue in that case ievolved, as many such cases do, on the question of what "art" (so to speak)--that is, what (if anything) did the phone company add to the information that was not simply a compilation of fact. We need to be aware that in that case, the party defending against the phone company used the phone company's book as a jumping off point for their own research. Publishers of lists, maps, and such often put in harmless but bogus information to catch copiers. The defendant here laboriously affirmed each name, address and telephone number as accurate before including them in its own book. The phone company unsuccessfully alleged that even using their book as source material was a violation of copyright. So I would be cautious about cribbing a published list unless I also was certain that it was either public domain material or fair use. Cecropia 17:18, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

User:666

User:666 says on his User page, My edits are licensed under the BSD license.. Can someone tell us if this is compatible with the GFDL? RickK | Talk 21:02, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

As a matter of policy, it doesn't seem to me that a user can separately license his edits, as it would destroy the licensing integrity of any article the user made even a small edit to. If the is has any potential at all for legal conflict perhaps the boilerplate should read

All contributions to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free Documentation License and no other conflicting license may be claimed. Cecropia 21:12, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

He's just messing with you—when editing a page, a user accepts Wikipedia's license terms. But see fsf.org for their view of the BSD license if you're interested. Mkweise 21:14, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

A writer retains rights to whatever they submit to Wikipedia, but they cannot then impose a more stringent copyright. If the writer submits the work to another site with a more stringent license, republishers of the second site with the savy to find the more lenient prior copyright can avoid the more stringent terms of the second restriction. However, if a writer decides to declare all of their contributions to Wikipedia to be public domain, the work can then be republished with no GNU restrictions. A writer may also resell their work, even though it is already published under GNU. If a naive publisher does not know the work is already available under a GNU license, the writer may earn income from the work, but the publisher may not then claim copyrights to the GNU work, except in so far as the publisher has formatted the writers original UNCOPYRIGHTED work. So Wikipedia puts a GNU stamp on whatever they get from a writer, but a writer may use that same work to seed whatever other copyrighted versions they care to create, if they can find a market for material very similar to something already available under GNU license. I hope this clarifies matters somewhat.

Not really. You claim that a publisher would be "naive" to pay for something already available under the GFDL, and I guess by extension under the GPL. I don't think that's true at all. The whole idea of the GFDL and GPL and copyleft in general is that these licences are viral, in that whenever you publish material under copyleft, your publication of it must be copyleft too (and there are additional restrictions as to the form this copyleft may take, this is why we say it must be under a compatible license, it doesn't need to be the same license in theory although in practice it nearly always is). As most publishers (not all) don't want to copyleft what they publish, they must either break the law or apply for copyright release in the normal way, including paying for it if the author asks. Andrewa 20:08, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I believe there is a word to describe their behaviour, however it escapes me at the momement. Maximus Rex 21:15, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia Copyright System and Cut'n'Paste

Umm, above Anthony says that copying and pasting an article rather than moving results in a copyright infringement. I know that there are different views -- but if we take his position serious, most translations from one language wikipedia to another would be as un-lawful as mergers of articles. We should clarify our interpretation that this doesn't violate GNU FDL somewhere quite visible. -- till we *) 01:42, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure it is our interpretation that this doesn't violated GNU FDL. If you make a translation from another language wikipedia you should be crediting the authors in some way. If someone is seen doing this, it should be fixed. One of the solutions, as was done in this case, is to copy the history onto the talk page. While technically perhaps in violation, that at least is compliant with the spirit of the GFDL. anthony (this comment is a work in progress and may change without prior notice) 01:48, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:Submission Standards#Section 4B. Angela. 02:23, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)

What does this have to do with Section 4B? This is about 4I. Yes, wikipedia might also be in violation of section 4B, however there is also an argument that Wikipedians agree to release Wikipedia of that requirement. anthony (this comment is a work in progress and may change without prior notice) 02:26, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think the issue is about attributing authorship, so 4B is relevant. We don't have a history section, so 4I is irrelevant. There's nothing in wikipedia:copyrights which says the page history is equivalent to a history section. Angela. 02:44, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)

By not having a history section, Wikipedia is in technical violation of the GFDL. At least with the page history Wikipedia is in compliance with the spirit of section 4I, if not the letter of it (the only minor problems are that the section isn't entitled "History", but is entitled "Page History", and that the publisher is not listed, and the fact that the publisher is not listed is problably moot anyway because Wikipedia is the publisher, and they're not going to sue themselves). 4B is about attributing authorship, but Wikipedia is already in violation in letter and in spirit with it, so that's not relevant. anthony (this comment is a work in progress and may change without prior notice) 02:51, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Just for your information - this is hardly a new question, but it seems that some on English wikipedia say making clear where the text is from in summary comment area is enough.

There has been discussion on virtually the same question at Japanese Wikipedia over these three months. We may come to a concensus on one particular interpretation of GFDL so that there is enough clarity about what is okay and what is not.

Currently, it seems to me that we are going to say simple cut-n-pasting from one page to another is in violation. Some more details are in meta:User:Tomos/Legal discussion on Japanese Wikipedia#GFDL and Wikipedia in general.

If there is going to be any similar solution, I hope you can announce it at wikilegal-l so that we (en. and ja.) do not end up with having two incompatible interpretations.

We are also talking about the possibility to introduce within-site public domain license so that every edits after the introduction could become dual licensed and they can be archived, copied, translated, integrated, etc. without worrying strict compliance in GFDL. The gist of license is that the contributors allow any modification or reproduction of their contributions within wikipedia of any languages and possibly to other projects supported by Wikimedia Foundation.

Another solution is to introduce a new function by which a user can copy an entire page (text + history). See, meta:MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion#Copy this page.

Tomos 03:34, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Is it just me, or is the watchlist feature broken?

For the last half hour or so, when trying to access my watchlist I get:

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

 SELECT cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_comment, cur_id,   
 cur_user,cur_user_text,cur_timestamp,cur_minor_edit,cur_is_new FROM watchlist,cur USE INDEX  
(name_title_timestamp) WHERE wl_user=7534 AND (wl_namespace=cur_namespace OR 
 wl_namespace+1=cur_namespace) AND wl_title=cur_title AND cur_timestamp > '20040328001448' ORDER 
 BY cur_timestamp DESC

from within function "wfSpecialWatchlist". MySQL returned error "1030: Got error 28 from table handler". Mkweise 12:19, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Possible problem with Opera browser and ”

I have observed the following on the danish wikipedia.

If a person is using Opera (7.23), the following is happening on a page when Save page is pushed:

Text as the following ”åben by” is changed to ?åben by?.

BrianHansen 21:07, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC) (http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruger:BrianHansen)

Brian, there seem to be numerous problems with Opera 7.2x browsers (not, I believe, earlier ones). It seems to differ from other browsers with regard to some details of float css, it has some undoubted bugs calculating box widths where the box contains R-L languages like Hebrew and Arabic, and it's known to perform character-translations while doing form submissions (indeed, some subsequent poster on this page has inadvertently changed your original posting, likely because they did so with a late model Opera browser). All in all, fond though I am of Opera, I'd say 7.2x is broken and wikipedians use it here at their own risk. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 02:44, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

7.5 has no such problems fortunately. — Jor (Talk) 12:34, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Meta pages

Should meta pages (wikipedia:) be used for discussion? Bensaccount 23:03, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Listing user subpages

Is there an easy way to list all subpages of a particular user page? Is using what links here from the user page reliable? In particular I'd like to list all subpages of User:Information-Ecologist and User:Information-Habitat (who may be the same person). The reason is that I've listed some of them for deletion but I seem to have missed at least one that should have been included, so the next step seems to be to get a list of them all. TIA Andrewa 00:50, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I might have answered this myself, or rather it was answered in the discussion at #Getting_a_complete_what_links_here_listing, see Wikipedia:SQL query requests. Andrewa 14:01, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yes, indeed. Results returned and are being actioned. This pump entry can IMO be deleted (not worth archiving) as soon as people have had the chance to look at it, maybe in a day or so. Andrewa 01:51, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Watchlist broken?

Something weird--clicking My watchlis in left menu bar gives:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
SELECT cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_comment, cur_id, cur_user,cur_user_text,cur_timestamp,cur_minor_edit,cur_is_new FROM watchlist,cur USE INDEX (name_title_timestamp) WHERE wl_user=40082 AND (wl_namespace=cur_namespace OR wl_namespace+1=cur_namespace) AND wl_title=cur_title AND cur_timestamp > '20040329180705' ORDER BY cur_timestamp DESC from within function "wfSpecialWatchlist". MySQL returned error "1030: Got error 28 from table handler". 

Elf | Talk 18:08, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

list of {msg:}s?

Is there a list anywhere of the various {msg:} codes? --User Talk:Lukobe

WikiExperiment

Hello. We are a research group and we are doing a social experiment: We choose articles that may be controversial or frequently vandalized. We submit a small useful edit but we use user names and edit summaries which may make the administrators think we vandalized the article. In this case we chose the name of a hard-banned user (Michael) hoping to make you believe Michael3 was his sock puppet. We thought the user name and the edit summary (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha !!!!!!!!!!) would deceive an administrator to revert the article without checking our useful contributions. We have performed many similar experiments in Wikipedia and other online communities. In this way we can understand how much respect a community has for democracy and personal freedom, whether a community is healthy, whether its administrators are doing their job well, and how paranoid they turn when they face strange vandalism-like edits (that aren't vandalism). We are a large group and our online experiments are part of a major psychological and sociological research. We are very concerned with freedom over the Internet and we have faced many unreasonable and paranoid reverts and blockings by the administrators of the Wikipedia community. Dante Alighieri was successfully deceived and blocked Michael3 noting "probably Michael" (a hard-banned user). But Michael3 was just adding useful links (for example, wikifying dates, i.e. turning dates in active blue links) and his only "sins" were his user name (similar to Michael) and his mysterious edit summaries (ha ha ha !!!). Michael3 is not Michael, he is a member of our research group. You didn't know that, because this knowledge could destroy our experiment. Michael3 could be just an innocent new user. Now we have shown that the Wikipedia community has turned paranoid over possible vandalism and unreasonably restricts the individual liberties. This has to stop. We also ask the community to take care of Dante Alighieri since he blocked Michael3 too easily, probably without checking his edits. We'll continue our experiments and we hope that your community will understand that freedom is more important than security. All yours, Michael33.

Also take care of Dysprosia. Michael33

Anyone pretending to be Michael deserves to be banned. Michael's MO, for anyone who doesn't know, consists of adding reasonable-looking facts to articles, many of which are incorrect. It sounds like Dante and Dysprosia acted appropriately. -- Tim Starling 00:06, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Well, it sounds that way because I did act appropriately. ;) Of course, that's just my opinion. Heh. Michael3/33's complaint about Dysprosia (I believe) stems from Dys' removal of Michael33's comment from my talk page, which User:Eloquence (imho, properly) restored. I then removed it myself. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 00:30, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

If that was wrong, I apologize. I did originally think this was Michael, and was going by "revert all edits". Dysprosia 00:40, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Eh, I wouldn't call it "wrong", it's just that talk pages tend to get more leeway than articles. I think that your actions were appropriate, but I also think that El's were as well. In the end the point was moot since I used my perogative as the User associated with said talk page to remove the comment entirely. :) --Dante Alighieri | Talk 00:45, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

See also my comments on User talk:Michael33. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 00:31, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

We only have your word for it that you are are a research group and not another incarnation of Michael, whose style you mimic very well. If you are genuine, please tell us who you are, and which academic institution you are affiliated to so that your bona fides can be checked. In the meantime I remain unconvinced of your good faith. -- Arwel 00:57, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

That's not Michael's style.—Eloquence

Please let us know how you managed to obtain ethics board agreement to a psychological experminent where the subjects (wikipedia contributors as a whole) did not consent. I don't believe your claim. Jamesday 01:59, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

My roommate (a criminal psych major) was just explaining the boards to me last night, and it sounds like Jamesday hit the nail on the head - I seriously doubt (from what I was told) that any board would sanction this. →Raul654 02:14, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:No original research - Does this cover using Wikipedia AS research as well as using Wikipedia to POST research? --Dante Alighieri | Talk 02:16, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Absolutely not. WIkipedia has inspired several research papers. →Raul654 02:22, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

No, no, I mean actually PERFORMING the experiment on Wikipedia, not using it conceptually or observing it as a model... I mean making edits to the 'pedia with the sole intention of those edits being research... not legitimate edits. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 02:23, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Getting back to the original topic of peformaing experiments on unsuspecting wikipedians - it rang a bell that this had already been outlawed. It's the first point of the Nuremberg Code - The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential →Raul654 02:37, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

This is a gross misprepresentation of the Nuremberg Code, and advances a myth that has no basis in US law. Research funded by the US DHHS must comply with guidelines that require the consent of an Institutional Review Board. Most academic institutions have guidelines that bar research on unsuspecting subjects. Research procedures likely to harm subjects otherwise requires the consent of subjects because harm to research subjects is also prohibited by common laws barring assault, battery, mayhem and murder. Otherwise, individuals and companies are free to conduct whatever research they care to conduct with no barriers from the (!) Nuremberg Code. Companies conduct research on unsuspecting human subjects every day of the week. This is another case of an unreliable source apparently guessing about a subject to advance positions that have no basis in accepted literature. Wikipedia contributors should be aware every keystroke they enter, including user histories and talk page information, may become the subject of research, fair use media coverage and other secondary uses not readily apparent in the GFDL license disclaimer.

p.s. attempts to use the Nuremberg Code or any other device to bar politically oriented research would run up hard against the First Ammendment. And of course, the US Central Intellegence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other tradecraft agencies worldwide routinely conduct covert research.Filibuster 04:24, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC) ~o~

Are you suggesting that Michael3 and/or Michael33 could/should be banned for Crimes against humanity? --Dante Alighieri | Talk 02:40, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

I think the question is: Do we regard this as helpful to the task of building the encyclopedia?

My reaction, I'm afraid, is no. The story does have a couple of credibility problems, but more important, this unsought advice from outside is best ignored anyway. We don't want to encourage this sort of thing. We do want to encourage our fellow-workers who, whether their actions were perfect or not (and they did well IMO) were unpaid volunteers doing their best to build the encyclopedia.

So to the conductors of this experiment, thanks but no thanks. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, if you do want to conduct this sort of thing there are ways to do it properly. Contact me if you like, I used to write internationally-published papers on Audit Methodology and I think I can give you some pointers. You've broken more rules than just ethics. If you're under any sort of supervision, that's a bit sad. They've let you down badly.

If you want to help Wikipedia, there's lots to do. The first thing to do is to become contributors. Andrewa 04:37, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

WikiResistance

Nearly one in four humans alive in 2004 who are incarcerated in prisons are incarcerated in United States prisons. The United States has been identified throughout Asia, Africa, parts of Europe and in South America as the most egregious human rights violator operating in the world today. Because of the United States' economic and political structure, the individual citizens of the United States are deemed the perpetrators of these human rights violations, with culpability roughly correlated to economic status and ambition for social prestige.

Resisting government targets has proven an ineffectual means of confronting the psychological environment that fosters human rights violations, so resistance activists have turned to strategies that target the psychological source of human rights violations. These psychological forums include, especially, electronic communications forums because such forums are proportionally used by classes most likely to be involved in oppression of other humans. Wikipedia has been identified as a communication node frequented by Americans and other Western capitalists who enjoy casual repetition of both oppressive mythology and of punitive administrative styles. Specifically, resistance cells reviewing Wikipedia have identified quintessential examples of administrative climates whereby attacks against persons have been preferred over fair and consistent enforcement of codified laws or rules.

This discovery has led to development of tactics that identify and target individual members of Wikipedia who most often deploy the tactics that, when mirrored in legal settings, comprise the basis of methodological human rights violations. In plain language, administrators who ban Wikipedia contributors for trolling are now considered to be the equivalent of US police officers who use profiling techniques to target members of ethnic or economic minorities. Tactics for exposing and opposing these oppressive administrative approaches in this and other Wikis have been developed, tested and published. This is one of many notices intended to advise visitors to this site that they are being scrutinized, that oppressive administrators are being targeted, that resistance to oppression is accepted as an affective tactic in this environment, and that those who engage in resistance can enjoy the mutual support of loosely organized world-wide resistance who intend to mitigate circumstances that has a small portion of the worlds population incarcerating a far disproportionate portion of the worlds citizens. Resisting a growing trend toward concentration camps is far more important than accomplishing the putative goals of a recreational project such as Wikipedia. Apt Repsonse 18:38, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

WikiResistance

-->User talk:Apt Repsonse The supression of this dialogue from this page evidences the substance of complaints detailed in the now-censored notice. Apt Response

Unfinished Dreyfus Affair

Has the page The resolution of the Dreyfus Affair ever been written? Or has it become lost due to restructuring? David.Monniaux 16:06, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

WikiResistance

-->User talk:Apt Repsonse

MEL GIBSON’S MOVIE

"THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST"

Because “The Passion of the Christ” movie adds a lot of material that is not included in the Bible, it adds man’s lies to the crucifixion account. From what I have read about it, the movie is focused on Christ’s physical death – and thereby misses the spiritual point about Christ’s suffering the equivalent of eternal wrath of God for the sins of His chosen people.

Since Jesus Christ is Eternal God, it is blasphemy to make any kind of an “image” of Christ in ANY form. Although it does not do much good to cite Scriptures to people who are not saved and who do not place themselves under the authority of God’s Word, these are the words of God to the whole human race:

Exodus 20:4-5 “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: {5} Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;” (This is repeated in Deuteronomy 5:8-9)

Romans 1:22-25 “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, {23} And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. {24} Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: {25} Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.”

Revelation 22:18-19 "For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book [the Bible], If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: {19} And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book."

The movie places a great emphasis on Christ’s PHYSICAL punishment and death. However, if given the opportunity, we true believers should be prepared to talk about the SPIRITUAL aspects of the Atonement. We should stress that Christ in His SOUL EXISTENCE endured the equivalent of ETERNITY IN HELL for those who were CHOSEN to be saved from BEFORE the foundation of the world. That is why Christ’s SOUL (or Spirit) is mentioned in the following verses:

Isaiah 53:10 “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make HIS SOUL an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.”

Psalms 16:10 “For thou wilt not leave MY SOUL in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.”

The secular world is concerned about whom to BLAME for Christ’s death on the cross. However, we need to remember that Christ became man in order to pay for the sins of His people. It was predetermined by the COUNSEL OF THE GODHEAD BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD that Jesus would be “made sin”, “lifted up” and become a “curse” for us. In that sense, we are ALL to blame for Christ’s death:

2 Corinthians 5:21 “FOR HE [GOD THE FATHER] HATH MADE HIM [GOD THE SON] TO BE SIN FOR US, WHO KNEW NO SIN; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

John 3:13-15 “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven. {14} And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, EVEN SO [IN THIS MANNER] MUST THE SON OF MAN BE LIFTED UP: {15} That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

Galatians 3:13 “CHRIST HATH REDEEMED US FROM THE CURSE OF THE LAW, BEING MADE A CURSE FOR US: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree:”

John 10:17-18 “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I LAY DOWN MY LIFE, that I might take it again. {18} NO MAN TAKETH IT FROM ME, BUT I LAY IT DOWN OF MYSELF. I HAVE POWER TO LAY IT DOWN, AND I HAVE POWER TO TAKE IT AGAIN. This commandment have I received of my Father.”

Acts 2:22-24 “Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: {23} HIM, BEING DELIVERED BY THE DETERMINATE COUNSEL AND FOREKNOWLEDGE OF GOD, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: {24} Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.”

Philippians 2:5-11 “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: {6} Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: {7} But made himself of no reputation, and TOOK UPON HIM THE FORM OF A SERVANT, and was made in the likeness of men: {8} And being found in fashion as a man, HE HUMBLED HIMSELF, AND BECAME OBEDIENT UNTO DEATH, EVEN THE DEATH OF THE CROSS. {9} Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: {10} That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; {11} And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Our responsibility as true believers is to present the TRUTH of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world, and God will do the saving by the power of the Gospel and the working of His Spirit in the hearts of all those for whom Christ died.

Romans 10:17 “So then FAITH cometh by hearing, and hearing by the WORD OF GOD.”

Romans 1:16 “For I am not ashamed of the GOSPEL OF CHRIST: for it is the POWER of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”

John 3:7-8 “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. {8} The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is BORN OF THE SPIRIT.”

God does not need the blasphemous lies of men to accomplish His salvation program.

About Mel Gibson's Movie "THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST". Please, visit this Website, thank you.

http://www.banneroftruth.org/pages/articles/article_detail.php?567

C.J. Droog

The church age is over; but fellowship continues:

Join us for live fellowship over the Internet: www.ebiblefellowship.com/

For more information on the end of the church age: www.familyradio.com/

__________________________

U kunt deze e-mail doorsturen, kopiëren en of verstrekken aan andere personen. Indien u deze e-mail abusievelijk hebt ontvangen,

wordt u verzocht de afzender daarvan op de hoogte te brengen.

Polak Posse

As a good German contributor, who do I contact to get the Polak Posse (Wik, Cautious, and other scum) blocked? — Jor (Talk)]] 23:18, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

sex after period

Can you become pregnat (I know there is a chance of it happening) during the time after your period - is that safer than before the time of period. I heard something to that effect, but wasnt sure if it was before or after. I hope you can help.

the 10 most active Wikipedians of the day

Someone sugguests to create a the 10 most active Wikipedians of the day and update everyday in Chinese WP. what do u guys think? --Yacht 09:25, Apr 6, 2004 (UTC)

hello world

hello world (Buddha)

Help! Mediawiki boilerplate

See MediaWiki:National_Parks_of_England_and_Wales I've made stubs for the proposed ones, etc but it still want to edit them. Will this sort itself out or do I need to do something? Duncharris 15:14, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Image Cache Problem?

I uploaded a new, larger version, of a file, Vassar_Logo.png, but it keeps displaying the old version.

The image page, has the updated image size, because the rectangle to show the image has expanded. but it fills in the old version. I see that the file size of the upload file matches the size of the original on my machine, so I know I uploaded the proper image.

18 hours have gone by and it is still using the old image. Is there a way to tell tell wikipedia to use the new image? NickP 11:41, Mar 28, 2004 (UTC)

It worked for me once I cleared the cache with the Shift-Reload forced reload. andy 12:18, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Alfred hunt engineer in nigeria

I have recently recieved a e-mail about a cousin of mine and I don't know what to do it is from a attorney that is representing my cousin it seems that he and his whole family died over their in a car accident. he is looking for information to deal with the estate. is their any way you can check old records? we had no idea he died... can you help up Ron Hunt

I think this is a Nigerian scam (Nigeria seems to be the current capital of internet and telephone scams, I'm afraid). It's very unlikely that an attorney would email you without writing first. Be very aware that any confidential information you may give out may be used to defraud you or to obtain credit in your name. If you think there's any chance that this might be genuine, contact the Nigerian Embassy or Consulate nearest to you. They can verify the details of the persons death, and can confirm that the lawyer is who he says he is. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:14, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Details on this can be found at Nigerian scam. Jgm 17:17, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

English Versions

There are two main recognised ways of spelling English. British and American. I was wondering, is there any way of customising the spelling on the page so that a reader can automatically get his spelling as the case in date variations? Wiki programmers should take up this issue. Probably an array of words could be cross referenced. Nichalp

Automatic procedures and language don't go well together at present, and I don't think there is a simple find-and-replace that can shift between AE and BE; there is more to language than spelling, even though the difference between AE and BE is small. This subject is partly dealt with in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, esp the section Usage and spelling. The convention seems to be consistent within articles. — Sverdrup 14:33, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

If the authors of word processors can find an acceptible solution to language translation, there's no reason why Wikipedia shouldn't incorporate the same. Although I agree that there is more than spelling to language variations, spelling differences are the most visible. Nichalp 18:55, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)

While it sounds relatively easy to convert color to colour or to delete an L in travelled, thinking the proposal through further reveals major problems: would you convert a textual quote from Shakespeare or the title of a U.S. tv program? I'd certainly hope not, so we'd need a <noUsUkconvert> tag. And the next request would be automatic conversion of punctuation rules, or of the which/that distinction that USians are so quick to stomp on but that UKians largely don't care about. I think our programmers' time could be more usefully spent pursuing other enhancements to the software. The use of different styles of English here isn't really a problem, so long as everyone – on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the Irish Sea, on the soft underbelly of Asia, and right round down under – learns to rejoice in diversity and respect the different ways of saying, and punctuating, the same thing.–Hajor 19:22, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Still it would be nicer to read articles in English more familiar terms. Nichalp 18:56, Apr 5, 2004 (UTC)

May I just compliment you on the truly beautiful way in which you spelled and punctuated that statement. :D - IMSoP 23:17, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

HTML Tags

I wish the authors of wiki software do add some more HTML tags & attributes. eg SPAN, and attributes: eg 'title'.

What's more is that it doesn't qualify as a "clean" page when I tried validating the main page in w3c.org page validation.

Nichalp

More important missing tags (to me) are <del> & <ins> for talk pages, and <acronym> & <abbr> for articles. — Jor (Talk) 20:51, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

HTML is un-wiki and should be avoided, I think. Markup should be easy and non-complex, creating more uniform look. We could add wikimarkup corresponding to the more wanted HTML tags, if they are very useful. — Sverdrup 18:14, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

To get special effects on text, I'm sure HTML markup can be included. Even a 6yr old can understand HTML! It should be optional like wikipedia tables currently.

There are some very good reasons not to use "special effects on text", mostly relating to accessibility, but also to do with the difference between semantic and presentational markup. If there are specific items of markup that seem they would be very useful, we could certainly add wiki markup for them - which may or not be similar to HTML. They should not be thought of as HTML, however; IMHO, we should have a disclaimer on such markup saying "any resemblance to HTML is purely coincidental" (disclaimer: I may be joking; partly) See also MeatBall:FormOverContent. - IMSoP 19:18, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Im looking fo an athelte

During the games there was a negro athelte in the 400 meters that when he got half way around pulled a muscle. He didnt stop he got up and limped to the finish. I was wandering if you had his name or any information for me where i could please find more out about this moving experince.

I really would like to hear anything you had or know please. I rember there was a commercial with Robin willams that featured this guy.

Thanks for your time

Matthew Scott

Matthewscott1@hotmail.com

• This seems to match your description[5]. Niteowlneils 23:02, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Image Authorization

How can you get the right to use these images Boeing X-43 on Wikipedia in such a short notice? I am new at Wikipedia and would like to know how you get in touch with the owners, in this case NASA, and get their authorization so fast. Am I totally lost or what, please help me?

As I understand it, images on USA government sites (TLD .gov as in nasa.gov) are free for use. A note of course should be given where it is from on the image page. — Jor (Talk) 16:22, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

One should be careful though; all images which credit only NASA are PD. NASA may however include pics from individual astronomers/space agencies in their articles, and they are not free, just like our 'fair use' images are not GFDL — Sverdrup 19:29, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The products of US federal government employees produced in the course of their work is in the public domain. Federal sites are generally pretty good at indicating when this does not apply, as is done for things like NASA/ESA projects, where an image credit is requested. That's compatible with the GFDL license authorship requirements, so it's not problematic to accept that request. US state government works are not included in this. In other cases, fair use can be used to respond quickly and news-type items are a well-accepted fair use situation. That can be followed with a GFDL permission request as time allows. Jamesday 05:57, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

If you do find that permission is needed, check out Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission. -- Wapcaplet 23:32, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia jabber chat room.

After setting up a chatroom for the Italian Wikipedia comunity on Jabber (Free and Open Source Instant Messenger) I noticed that the majority of the people that enter the room asking for information are English speakers. So here we are: I made another chatroom en.wiki@muc.jabber.org with the purpose to host the English Comunity chats. You are all welcome to give discuss the concerns and problems of wikipedia and give advise to the chat voyageurs that enter the room. I think it is a good way to find new adepts, what do you think about it?

Schopenhauer 17:21, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think this might fragment the #wikipedia IRC room, but hey some people hate IRC, so it might be a good idea. Dori | Talk 17:35, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)

I've found Jabber chatrooms to be wanting. Jabber has the possibility of being even better than IRC in terms of features, but I've yet to find a client that implements chat perfectly. Even so, this is a great idea, so I'll be sure to check out the room. Ashibaka ✎ 20:38, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The best part of the IRC chat is that it has ~= 62 people on it normally. Here... not so. =( Fennec 04:42, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Who can nominate for deletion?

I'm sure I've seen something written about who can nominate for deletion, and who can vote on VfD, but I can't actually find the reference to it, if it exists. Anyone? DJ Clayworth 22:51, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

There is no rule. In practice the sysop who "actions" a VfD day has a degree of latitude with regard to which votes they choose to count as valid (a latitude mitigated by the inevitable recriminations should they be felt to misstep). Obvious sockpuppets tend to be discarded out of hand, and in general most other votes seem to count. An imperfect scheme for an imperfect world. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:00, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Finlay. Obvious sock puppets and anonymous votes are not counted. Unsigned votes are almost never counted (unless the admin decides to check the page history and try and find out who it was -- a rare thing, usually not done, I think, unless the vote might tip a page one way or the other). In general, any account that has not edited beyond voting on VFD is ignored (even if it can't be traced as a sock puppet to a particular user) under the reasonable (I think) assumption that it's either a sock puppet we haven't identified, or a banned user wreaking minor havoc. Jwrosenzweig 23:09, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Sort of like the US election system. Votes are muddled by unanswered questions of who can vote, vote counters are selected from among those with interest in outcome of the votes, and final outcome is determined by judges with partisan interests. User:not

I shouldn't have, but I snickered. Feel free to invent a better system for us to use, though; you can propose it on Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. Yours, Meelar 06:12, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

How about anons? DJ Clayworth 21:22, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I can't recall a time when this issue has come up; there's never been more than one anon vote on a given page, really. Meelar 21:26, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

(Maybe I should start making all my points at once) I asked because I in fact saw an anon add a VfD notice to an article (though they didn't actually list it on the page). I think they were just messing around, but it strikes me as a good way of creating a little chaos - just add twenty random articles to VfD and we have to go though the whole process for them. As for anons voting, I think we should forbid it. It's just asking for a whole lot of sock puppetry. I suspect that the only reason some people haven't done it is they think anon votes will be ignored. However maybe we should make it explicit. I'll take this to another page. DJ Clayworth 03:38, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This has been discussed lot at Wikipedia talk:deletion policy. Currently, the policy states "any votes or comments relating to a listed page must be made in good faith", which implies sockpuppets may not vote. Earlier suggestions that voters must have a certain number of edits did not reach consensus. Angela. 20:56, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Calling all Junta members

Junta Oath
Out here in the wiki
I fight for my edits
I get my back into my reverting
I don’t need to quickpoll
To prove I’m right
I don’t need to be forgiven

All right members. Let's congregate at the usual place and time. We've got business to discuss, don't forget to switch codes every once in a while; we were almost found out last month.

IMSoP scratches head, and notes that Dori either forgot to sign, or was trying to be anonymous but forgot to log out[6].

And is obviously not a member of the Junta, because it doesn't know the top secret chorous:

Internet wasteland

It's only Internet wasteland.

Yate article

I am having a discussion with Dunk concerning my opinion that his Yate article is not NPOV and is written in a nonencyclopedic style. I would appreciate any comments, please put them on the article’s Talk Page. Thanks
Adrian Pingstone 16:00, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Looks ok to me --80.177.214.204 16:21, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Looks a bit arch, but entirely valid. I take it you don't like the fact that it makes the place look rather a shithole? I'd suggest that the remedy for that would be to come up with further facts that mitigate the picture. -- Jmabel 23:34, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Well, I rewrote it a bunch after 1st comments. Arch, huh?  :-) See its talk page. Elf | Talk 00:49, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

What's arch? --80.177.214.204 01:00, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Per M. Webster: "marked by a deliberate and often forced irony, brashness, or impudence". I'll give credit for that to the material rather than to my (probably incomplete) edits. Elf | Talk 01:12, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

April Fools' jokes

I think someone ought to put up a message somewhere popular, such as the front page, to warn people not to write up April Fools' articles. Ashibaka ✎ 19:13, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That would just give 'em ideas. It didn't occur to me, until right now. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:15, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Rather than attempting to control the behavior of others, it might be a better strategy for concerned editors to control their own behavior by watching what is submitted on that day and using the occassion to improve fact checking skills. This gives me a little idea.... (anon)

Geez, this caused more trouble than it was worth. (That anon's contributions are here) Ashibaka ✎ 01:10, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I thought this one was pretty funny. Marnanel 02:17, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Agree. I reckoned that those listing the Main page on VfD and voting for it did well too. Community building helps us to write and edit articles. Let's be focussed, but let's not be dead boring. Andrewa 10:17, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Unicode question

This may be the wrong place to ask this, or it may be answered elsewhere, but can anyone tell me if and when the English Wiki will be changed over to UTF-8? I ask becuase it's hugely inconvenient to work with text that's full of &#347;'s, but for some topics (Sanskrit and associated languages and subjects, in my case), there is no adequate alternative to using unicode characters. This is true even if I eschew Devanagari and work in roman, because standardized roman transliteration requires characters with diacritics that aren't available in latin-1. कुक्कुरोवाच 20:51, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'm assuming that moniker is in Tamil, because my Mozilla 1.6 is totally fazed by it. -Phil | Talk 14:, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

No, regular everyday Sanskrit, in Devanagari.

As I understand it: Until recently, the general prognosis was "never", but the French Wikipedia recently converted, and I believe it was mostly successful. So if the remaining problems highlighted by that conversion get ironed out, there may be a possibility that the English 'pedia could make the switch as well if the desire is there. - IMSoP 22:08, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

What are the pros and cons? (I am sure this conversation has been had before, so a pointer will plenty). Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 22:30, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The pros are that people who edit pages using special characters or non-Roman alphabets can just enter the characters as normal, and it'll just "work," instead of them having to encode the characters using a somewhat random numerical code. For example, the characters in Kukkurovaca's name above must be encoded as &#2325;&#2369;&#2325;&#2381;&#2325;&#2369;&#2352;&#2379;&#2357;&#2366;&#2330;

I'm not sure of all of the cons, but one is that some older browsers don't support Unicode, in input if not in output; the database back end that Wikipedia uses may not support it either, in which case there would have to be a layer of code that would convert the Unicode-encoding text into something the database can handle when it is stored, and convert that text back into Unicode when it is retrieved. Also, special characters which are already on many pages currently in Wikipedia could go glitchy due to the change. Garrett Albright 22:41, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Those older browsers are not able to browser half the WWW by now. — Jor (Talk) 12:21, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The masses clamor for Unicode! I'm surprised something so standards-oriented as Wikipedia isn't using it already... Garrett Albright 22:23, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The main reason it isn't Unicode is because the original version of the software didn't support it, and conversion is difficult. It'll require some downtime. There were worries about corruption of the database in various ways, but we have a fairly good handle on that problem now thanks to the recent conversion of the French Wikipedia. I think conversion of the English Wikipedia would be a good idea, some time during the next few months. -- Tim Starling 00:04, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

The only Mac browsers able to use Unicode are Safari, Opera etc. on MacOS X, as far as I know, while it is not possible to edit unicode pages with IE. A switch to unicode would be very problematic for many Mac users. Ertz 00:12, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

OS 9 has Unicode support; not quite as slick as OS X, no, but it's there. Either way, the number of people still using OS 9 is dwindling rapidly, and will continue to do so. Garrett Albright 02:43, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Which masses have you polled? Unicode would be largely impossible to edit. RickK | Talk 02:45, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Howso? I mean, what are the specific drawbacks, other than for the users of older macs?कुक्कुरोवाच 03:10, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

If I were trying to edit a page, and came across something looking like |कुक्कुरोवाच, I would have NO idea what to do with it. RickK | Talk 03:35, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

RickK: Just work around it and don't touch it. :)

Judging by your <nowiki> tags, do you mean "something looking like &#2325;&#2369;&#2325;&#2381;&#2325;&#2369;&#2352;&#2379;&#2357;&#2366;&#2330;"? In which case, I'm not sure I see your point. We already use such character entities extensively in articles. The idea of UTF-8 is to allow unicode characters to be inserted without resorting to such ugly constructions. Also, switching en to UTF-8 will make it easier to implement some proposed interwiki features, such as merging the meta recent changes (which is UTF-8) with the local wiki recent changes. -- Tim Starling 03:49, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

Doesn't work in Safari, at least not whatever particular language that is. I see the same character (a box surrounding a char I don't recognize) repeated for each character in your sig. Other languages work fine: Japanese, Chinese, Greek, some Cyrillic, but there's one Cyrillic-alphabet-based language that also doesn't work (not sure which it is). That's the problem: support is spotty. If user A enters in text in Japanese natively, what happens when user B who doesn't have Unicode support saves the page? I'm pretty sure the characters would change to little boxes (or whatever the browser displays when it doesn't understand a character) in the textarea, the user would save the page and then everybody would see the "little boxes." I think it could be a problem waiting to happen. RADICALBENDER★ 05:02, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The web browser does *not* rewrite the characters to "little boxes" when editing -- they are simply shown that way by whatever display mechanism the browser uses. silsor 05:29, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

RB: Next time you (re)install OS X, make sure to let it install every language file it can. I'm running Safari on OS X, and I see the characters just fine. Garrett Albright 05:34, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I have no idea how to do that. And how many other random Wikipedia editors would? RickK | Talk 04:14, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The whole point is that if the software were switched over to UTF, you wouldn't need to interact with these strings or know anything about them at all. They would just work as regular characters.

I'm at an utter loss. How would I possibly be able to insert a character that isn't on my keyboard? RickK | Talk 04:56, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Rick, if you're using Windows, then the Character Map applet is your friend. Find the character you want and it will either tell you how to enter it from the keyboard or allow you to copy+paste it. You'll need some nice Unicode fonts, like Junicode, but newer versions of Windows come with Lucida Sans Unicode anyway. --Phil | Talk 14:, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

In most Windows applications, Left alt + numeric keyboard types (dec) Unicode. alt+0549 is ȥ for example. — Jor (Talk) 12:21, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The prefixing 0 is important by the way: otherwise the Windows encoding is used instead, which wraps around (alt+256 = alt+0) — Jor (Talk) 12:25, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

With a compose key, maybe, or with copy-and-paste. I keep a set of characters I need which I don't have on my keyboard on my userpage on cy:, and c+p them when I need them in articles. Marnanel 05:01, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

People who use the languages in question know how to type in them. Someone who studies Sanskrit needs to be aware of how to produce the relevant unicode characters. Similarly, someone who writes mathematical articles may need to learn TeX, and someone who works in science may need to produce diagrams. You contribute what you know, it's not necessary to be an encyclopedia to contribute to an encyclopedia. That said, there's a good resource at http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ . If you go to the test pages, you'll see a list of characters which can be copied and pasted into an edit box. -- ɫɪɱ ʂɫɒɼʅɪɳɠ 05:10, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

If you were going to work with Sanskrit (or other languages in its family) I would suggest http://www.aczone.com/itrans/online/. Other tools would apply for other languages (there's also http://www.emeld.org/tools/charwrite.cfm for IPA in Unicode, which would offer pan-linguistic functionality of a certain kind.) Of course, it's entirely possible you'll never need to deal with nonstandard characters (in which case it shouldn't make the least differnece to you which encoding the site uses, as your keyboard will suffice in either), but those who contribute to articles that necessarily involve terms from languages that aren't representable with the characters that go into English, there's a basic need, here.कुक्कुरोवाच 05:42, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Switching the entire project over to UTF-8 or leaving things in ISO-8859-1 are not the only two choices. It would be straightforward to add a user option for "Edit in UTF-8". When a logged-in user with this option set requests to edit a page, the server translates HTML character references to their UTF-8. When the users submits their edit, the server translates non-ASCII (or non-ISO-8859-1) characters back to the HTML character references for storage in the database. Users who don't set this option would see no differences. See my Editing in UTF-8 feature request. — Gdr 12:33 2004-04-01.

For complex scripts, this is a nontrivial operation. This would require the server to change all entities over #255 in Unicode to numeric entities when converting to ISO-8859-1, and likewise to convert all entities back to direct characters when converting to UTF-8. Let alone the problem of combining diacritics and RTL/LTR! — Jor (Talk) 12:41, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't see the difficulty. Numeric character references are trivial to translate since HTML &#x1234; turns into Unicode U+1234 and vice versa. Named character references like &ouml; and &rarr; can be looked up in a table. There's no need to do anything with diacritics and bidirectional text. Just store and transmit the text as it was written and leave it up to the browser to render it. — Gdr 13:52 2004-04-01 (UTC)

I agree with the last part. But that, if anything, is an argument for UTF-8 only rather than for a server-side ISO-8859-1/UTF-8 conversion. Just for argument's sake, browsers that can't handle Unicode won't be affected as UTF-8 is identical to ISO-8859-1 in the first 256 characters. Any chars above that probably will not display correctly for people using archaic browsers anyway. — Jor (Talk) 17:43, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand. The point of having an "edit in UTF-8" option has nothing to do with display. Pages display just fine with the current system. The point is to make it easy to enter international text in browsers other than Mozilla. If the editing page is transmitted in UTF-8, I can type international characters directly into the edit box in many browsers, including Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer. With the current system (editing page transmitted in ISO-8859-1), I have to convert international characters into the corresponding HTML character entity references. This is tedious. — Gdr, 11:44 2004-04-02.

Hehe- even early versions of moz are more advanced than IE, not only when it comes to utf-8. IE4 has patchy support, NS4 as well. Nobody editing pages in languages where utf-8 is important uses these browsers though. A check if the posted text validates as utf-8 makes sense imo, throw error otherwise. Just somebody has to write it. Volunteers? -- Gabriel Wicke 13:24, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I guess using Opera made me lazy. I just type non–West European chars like Ł or 匥, and Opera does the conversion to the HTML entity for me if the page is in a non-Unicode charset :). Thanks for clarifying! — Jor (Talk) 19:55, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hi! I am a user from the french wikipédia. I know that some of you were interested by the conversion to utf-8. As you perhaps want to test on your personal wiki before considering the switch, here is the software to convert the MySQL dump : http://mboquien.free.fr/wikiconvert.tar.gz . It converts :

• html entities, for instance &szlig; => ß, excluding on purpose &gt;, &lt;, &nbsp; and &amp;
• unicode entities (decimal or hexadecimal), for instance &#223; => ß
• all other caracters valid in your encoding are converted properly

What it doesn't do :

• bad formatted entities are not converted, typically an entity that doesn't finish with ;
• windows-1252 characters are also not converted. To have them corrected before the conversion, you can ask Looxix on the french wiki. He has a very good bot to perform this kind of task, if you don't already have one.

This version is the rewritten version of the one we used (which was really dirty) to convert the french wiki. I rewrote it this afternoon and i tested it on an old cur dump of the french wiki, everything seems to work as expected. For the details, it depends on Qt (no troll on the toolkit used please) and i ran it on Mandrake 10.0. I was reported that it also compiles out of the box on Slackware. If you use another distribution, you may perhaps need to tweak the Makefile to have the correct path for Qt (you should set QTDIR correctly before trying to compile). No need to say that you need the Qt development packages installed. Using it is quite easy. The Makefile produces a wikiconvert executable. To convert you just need to write : ./wikiconvert < dump > converteddump (if you don't use iso8859-1, there is one line to change in wikiconvert.cpp, as explained in the source). On my computer (an athlonXP 2000+ underclocked at 1,5 GHz), converting a 90 Mb dump of cur lasts about 100 seconds. You should ask for a non compressed dump of cur for your test since converting compressed dumps available at http://download.wikipedia.org/ are not suitable for conversion since, once converted, MySQL can't load the dump completely (a problem of lines too long apparently, last time i tried).

I'd be very happy to get some feedback, and i would gladly accept patches to make the program faster/better. :) If you have any question, you can reach me on #fr.wikipedia on Freenode or on my discussion page (french or english only please). Med 09:41, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Current time?

I once saw someone use some wiki code to insert the current time; however, I've completely forgotten how to do it! I know it's not {{HOUR}}, {{CURRENT_HOUR}}, or anything like that ... so, what is it? [ alerante 21:27, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC) ]

Taken from Current Events code:

'''Time''': {{CURRENTTIME}} [[Coordinated Universal Time|UTC]]   |  

'''Date''': {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}, {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTDAY}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}

Hope it helps! --Vikingstad 21:55, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Oh, good. Thanks! [ alerante 21:03, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC) ]

Admin needed

Can an admin please merge edit history of Request for comment with Request for Comments? An anon is doing good edits to the article, but alas performed a copy & paste move. — Jor (Talk) 00:21, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I merged the history, but now there are a ton of double redirects, and I don't have the time to fix them (a bot would be best if they need to be fixed). Dori | Talk 00:26, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Actually the many RFC links are all orphans (now), and probably should go to Rfd. I'll prepare a listing. — Jor (Talk) 00:32, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Done. — Jor (Talk) 00:46, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Can/Should Links to Redirects be cleaned up?

I'm still a bit new, and I have tried to research this subject, but can't seem to find a definitive answer. I'm probably looking in the wrong place, but maybe there isn't one. Or with my luck, I found it, and simply didn't realize that's what it was talking about.

In any case, I was recently looking at the "What Links Here" page of a topic that I like. I noticed that many of the links were through redirects from pages with less than optimal spellings of the topic. Should/May I fix these links so that they point directly to the topic rather than to a redirect topic? Is there a policy about this?

Yes, you can/should avoid redirects. But in general, since they (theoritcally) still get the user to the right article, it's not a big deal. →Raul654 01:52, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Thank you. I'll start cleaning those up then.

Its not a bad idea, but it is a waste of one's time that could be used more valuably. If you like fixing redirects see Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links for many hundreds of links that do need to be changed. - SimonP 05:06, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

There's nothing theoretical about it - a redirect always gets you to the right article. "Fixing redirects" is more or less a complete waste of time (but then again so is contributing to Wikipedia, one could argue :-), as the only use is if the target page is moved, creating double redirects, which do need to be fixed. However that can be done at the time of the move. All else is wasted effort. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 07:14, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I second that, but with one caveat - some redirects are created for common spelling errors, so links to these redirects should be fixed simply because spelling errors should be fixed (n.b. not to be confused with redirects for other other valid spellings - British v. American English). fabiform | talk 07:30, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

As PCB says. There is nothing wrong with redirects. Tannin

I can think of a more general caveat (which includes fabiform's): if a page was moved (one of the most common reasons for the existence of redirects) because the old title was deemed in some way "inappropriate" or "wrong", then there's a possibility that using that title as the text of a link is also inappropriate/wrong. - IMSoP 12:39, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

BTW Links that lead through Redirects with possibilities should not be "fixed" to point directly to the target page. -- User:Docu

Wikipedia Bookmarklets

I've done up two quick Wikipedia bookmarklets, one for Mozilla/Firefox/Opera and the other for Internet Explorer — put them on your bookmarks or links toolbar, and you have a button which will prompt you for the name of a Wikipedia node and then take you there. It's just like using the "Go" button at the top/bottom of a page, except you don't have to start off in Wikipedia.

Get the bookmarklets here. If you run into any problems, let me know on my talk page.

Niftyकुक्कुरोवाच

Users of Safari can get similar functionality by downloading Sogudi. Once installed, you can search for a Wikipedia page by typing "wikip whatever" into the standard URL bar. (Sogudi also works with lots of other different search services, too; "img whatever" searches Google Images, "dmoz whatever" searches the Open Directory Project... very handy tool.) Garrett Albright 09:21, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I do something similar to that, but far less complex, using Mozilla's bookmark keywords - make a bookmark whose location is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s and set the keyword to (for instance) wg, and then you can just type wg foo into the location bar and go straight to foo. You can make one for searches, too, using http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/wiki.phtml?search=%s (which will be more useful if/when internal site search gets re-enabled). - IMSoP 11:52, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes, that's pretty much exactly what Sogudi does. :) As for searching Wikipedia, I made one that searches Wikipedia via Google. I set "gw" to http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wikipedia.org+@@@&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 -- I suppose for Moz, it woud be http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wikipedia.org+%s&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Garrett Albright 22:23, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

WikiSex

Hello guys and girls! If you like to have virtual sex over the net, please click here: WikiSex. I need sexy virtual partners, preferably women! I am sexy 20:01, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

WikiSex

Hello guys and girls! I am a bisexual (mostly lesbian) feminist open-minded WikiWoman. If you like to have virtual sex over the net, please click here: WikiSex. I need sexy virtual partners, preferably women! I am sexy 20:01, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a chat room, so this isn't approbiate here. But I would say, we shouldn't censor the announcement, only the content, so I reversed the deletion of the announcement. -- till we *) 20:46, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

As long as you allow WikiChess, you should also allow WikiSex. Either ban or allow both. Your fellows are playing chess on the wiki and this is clearly not encyclopedic, but you allow it. I can't understand this. Both chess and sex are ways to socialize with people, but now you censored my socialization attempts. I am sexy 20:50, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

WikiSex

Discussion moved to User talk:I am sexy

WikiSex

Discussion moved to User talk:I am sexy

I've blocked this user. No clearer case of a reincarnation of a account-for-vandalism-or-trolling-only can surely exist (oh, I'll be proved wrong on that one in about ten minutes, I guess). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:05, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I unblocked hir. Clearer cases exist. Martin 22:07, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Martin, you should be blocked for using such horrible pronouns.--Eloquence* 22:13, Apr 6, 2004 (UTC)

I think zie's doing a fine job! Marnanel 22:20, Apr 6, 2004 (UTC)

And for being multiple people [7] - you're really confusing me now. Seriously, though, I disagree with your assumption of good faith on this one - look over the history of that account carefully; also, note that it appears to be acting as some kind of magnet for borderline trolls/problem users. But then, perhaps being called a jerk on the User_Talk page has made me a little biased, I dunno. - IMSoP 22:31, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hey, if she's a troll magnet, maybe we can send her over to Wikinfo and all the trolls will follow her!--Eloquence* 22:32, Apr 6, 2004 (UTC)

Seconded. And there are way too many feeding this troll. [8]. andy 22:38, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I've (re)read the past contribs. I still don't feel a block was warranted. Catch me in IRC if you want a fuller explanation (bearing andy's advice in mind ;-)). Martin 00:08, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Industrial Age Still Causing Health Problems

My name is MIke Cushman.I have written and spoken to many people and organizations about my family and many others that have recieved and suffered from illnesses.These illnesses are caused by the constant exposure to emissions from burning coal (coke).

My grandmother died of breast cancer,my mother died of pancreatic cancer,my aunt died of breast cancer, my sister had breast cancer and a masectomy,I had chronic bronchitis,allergies, and a low immunity system.my other sister has reproductive problems(endometriosis).

I grew curious when my mother,sister and aunt were all effected by cancers within a three and one half year period.We all grew up and lived in the same area.Glennveiw/silvertown,where the prevailing west winds blew over the emissions from a chemical factory called the Cyanamid.The Cyanamid had 7 carbide furnaces and,7 air-blast furnaces which burned coal in their processes.I have been trying to get a complete list of the emissions that were given off from the cyanamid.It would cost me allot of money to get a list from the ministry of environment.imagine that ,in order to find out what is killing my family and making others sick I have to pay for information that my tax dollars already paid for.

My sisters volunteered for a gene study to help the cause and it was found that one sister (with breast cancer) had the mutated gene BRCA1and the other sister did not.I phoned The Center for Research in Womens Health and asked them some questions.I was informed that 30,000 genes come from your mother 30,000 genes come from you father,if your mother carried the mutated gene then there is a fifty,fifty chance her eggs will contain the mutated gene.Based on that if you carry the mutated gene you have a fifty fifty chance that your offspring will carry the gene. So I asked,"I can accept that it is heireditary but at some point in time it had to be environmental. Her studies don't cover that.Then I asked have you ever taken the studies you have done and plotted the areas these people lived to see if there if there is a common factor?"Again her studies did not cover that.It seems to me if I wanted to find a cure I would take these studies and find out everything to crush the desease.

I have spoken with the ministry of the environment.They took twenty years of air emission tests.Here is the opening statement of the man that took these tests TD3: Routine air monitoring has been conducted in the Regional Municipality of Niagara since the early 1970s to identify sources of pollution, evaluate their emissions, and institute appropriate control measures. In addition to monitoring specific industrial sources,monitoring of general air quality is conducted in various localities to determine if air quality objectives are being met and to observe trends in air pollution. This report summarizes the results of air monitoring in the region for the year. Detailed information is given for Niagara Falls, Chippawa, Port Colborne, St. Catharines, Thorold, and Welland. Annual publication.

These tests were done on the suspended particulate.They showed that the factories tested were all way over the acceptable limits.The ministry of environment never charged any of the companies by using the results of these tests.From 1974-1993the ministry of environment new that the suspended particulate released from the Norton,General Abrassives,The Fourth Ave,Cyanamid Plant,and The Welland,Gartner road Plant were polluting through air ground and water enough to consider that there would most likely be health problems caused by this. Not once did the ministry of environment tell the ministry of health that there could be reason for concern that over exposure to these toxic pollutants most likely will result from people's exposure to them .

When speaking with the epodemiologist from the Niagara regional health Office I was told they never saw any outstanding cancer or any other illness in the Niagara Region.I asked, "did they ever do a study on the specific regions of Niagara"?Like Silvertown,Chippawa, Thorold,Stamford...She said "no,they only have data on the Niagara Region as a whole,from Fort Erie to Niagara on the Lake,Niagara Falls to Grimsby.How can you determine if there is health problems in a specific area when you don't take your statistic a little farther? These are people we intrust to tell us if everything is in check!That our children can swim there,they can play in that feild,that it is OKto drink the water,that it is OK to breathe those emissions for twenty four/seven!

I have done a study,a study on how our system works,You judge for yourself.

From 1907-1993 a factory called the Cyanamide was allowed to produce calcium cyanide,calcium cyanmide,and many other products.At the time they were the biggest employers in the Niagara area.They used this power to do what ever they wanted in terms of pollution by:air,water,ground,and burrying.They got off on many charges and were given many extensions and freedoms by our governments because of the jobs at stake.This type of blackmailing was allowed to continue till tourism became the main attraction

There were countless complaints and studies done that prove the knowledge was there to prevent cancers,heart desease,brain tumors,chronic bronchitis,low immunity system,allergies, reproductive problems,cell displacia,endometriosis,furans and dioxins,lung desease,from the heavy metals and other chemicals and dusts given off from the Cyanamid processes both emissions and productive processes.

It is proven that fly ash (which is the suspended particulate)given off from the burning of coal(coke) is a major health concern because of the cancers and illnesses that are associated with it.

There are many news paper articles that describe accidents,complaints,concerns, environmental disasters, charges all concerning the Cyanamid corporations.I copied a described the cyanamid processes to a chemist in England.England is one of the highest authorities on the effects of burning coal.He confirmed the illnesses that could be caused by the Cyanamid processes.When searching the inter-net for information,I found information on fly ash that was an almost identical match to the information I recieved from England.

I have a list of people that grew up in Glennview silvertown with many sicknesses. breast cancer,pancreatic cancers,brain cancer(tumors),chronic bronchitis,thyroid problems, endometriosis,cell displacia,fertility problems,allergies,learning disorders,many people that went to Lord Elgin and had learning problems as children...This is not a highly populated area.

I was guided to the Environmental protection act and The Environmental Bill of Rights. Major break through legislation that was encouraging the public to get involved with these policies and regulations on the environment.When I start to use this there is a statute of limitations on air emissions.This statute is only covered for two years.It protects the government and the companies from past mistakes because new studies done by the government have shown that suspended particulate is the number one cause of ;heart desease,cancers,lung desease,and many other illnesses.

There have been studies done on the landfill sight left behind by the Cyanamid Fourth ave facility that stated there was reason for concern that the chemicals there will cause health effects to humans .Yet the land fill sight has had nothing done to it to clean up the land.It is known that there is cyanide ,ammonia,and many other toxic substances left there that are seeping into the Niagara River and the great lakes even though the Cyanamid (cytec)were suppose to cap the entire area with a thick layer of clay and vegitation.From 1907-present the Cyanamid corporation has been allowed to effect our health from generation to generation and the plant closed in 1993!The City is going to call this sight a brown field and reuse the land.New legislation has slackened the laws and permitted this to happen.

So despite all the studies and all the illness and all the pollution,Our tax paying dollars are going to go into redeveloping known contaminated land,never making the company responsable for leaving it behind.and people will continue to pass cancer,heart desease,and many other illnesses on.

Now the New York State is confirming what I am saying about the slack attitude towards Human health from our governments and their environmental regulations.There were many studies done on the factories of the Niagara region and four factories kept coming up. The Norton,General Abrassives,Cyanamid Fourth Ave Facility,Cyanamid Welland Facility. Out of the air emissions tests down town thorold was by far the worst for suspended particulate. The Cyanamid fourth ave ,was over the limits by 100% in some instances and Thorold was way worse than that.Our governments ,Federal,PROVINCIAL,and Municipal are all guilty of negligence.

Our right to a healthy lifestyle has been jeopardized,generations to come still posess the cancer genes,and no-one is accountable for it.

How many people have died pemature deaths?How many more?How many people have had learning disorders,asthmas,allergies,heart and lung desease,cancers?What can be done to get the Cyanamid sights cleaned up?One draining into the Welland River and One The Niagara.

Finally there is a scientist that is doing a study that shows that cancer is caused from emissions first then passed through gene transfer.I find it truly skocking how the almighty dollar comes before humanity. I do not know what can be done but in reading the news paper article on Great Lakes Pollution they seemed to care about where the pollution comes from and how to stop it.The Cyanamid fourth ave Landfill sight has gone untouched for decades while in 1986-87 it was deemed the most worrisome for health hazards.In 1986 This dump waslisted as having the potential to endanger human health. In 1987 there was a report that listed the sight operated between 1896-1920,as one of the 46 in the province which might have burried coal tar wastes.

In a hydrogeological report ,done by Gartner and Lee,it was said 192,000 cubic meters.In 1979 a portion of the waste was removed for desposal sent to the Cyanamid Welland facility.

It was decided that the removal of the waste would out cost the redevelopment of the land hence they were to cap it with clay and plant vegitation.They were never held to even that.

The City of Niagara Falls wants to spend thousands of dollars of tax payers money to do another study on the Cyanimid (cytec)property.Why waste more money on this?why not make the company clean up their mess?They call this a risk assesment,the tests they want to do.The risk has already been taken and the results are quite obvious.How about we get the news paper to write this story and ask the public;How many people that grew up around the Cyanamid have Breast cancer,pancreatic cancer,brain cancer(tomors and anurisms included),learning and behavural problems as children,low immunity systems,heart desease,reproduclive problems...I just recently have been reading about love canal and as a child I remamber this happening,but I never thought so much about it till I noticed the similarities in what I have been studying.I saw a documentary on Love Canal and cannot believe the government's reactions.

The Canadian government has been all but ignoring me and I would like to know how I could go public?The amount of money the government wants for freedom of informations is too much for me.I cannot believe that they will charge me for the information on what they allowed me to breath.If you could guide me to anything that might help me accomplish justice please email me.Thank you for your time. Sincerly Mike Cushman.cusherman@msn.com

If I got it correctly, you want to know about pollution in Canada, is that right? Maybe Google helps. -- chris_73 00:04, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Wislawa Szymborska

It's me complaining again. I'm a big fan of this poet, but this page is very NPOV. The POV happens to be my own, as far as I know about it, but I don't think this gushing tribute is not an enclycopedia article. Anyone wanna take a look? Ensiform 02:15, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I see what you mean. Perhaps everything below the list of her works should be deleted. I'm not sure one could rewrite it to be neutral.uncutsaniflush 02:23, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I tried to do a little cleaning, but you may be right about a mass delete. What I left is both jarringly bare-bones and still uncyclopedic in tone with respect to subject. Ensiform 02:39, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

You have cleaned it up a bit. But I agree with you on your assessment. The more I read the article the less I like it. I think it needs to be completely rewritten. I think I could do an effective rewrite but I don't have the time tonight. Plus, as a newbie here, I'm not sure how comfortable I am doing a complete rewrite of an existing article. uncutsaniflush 02:53, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. The stuff below the work list sounds like some fan chatting about her over the phone. --Menchi 02:55, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It took me about 30 seconds to do a small edit to make it WP-style!

Adrian Pingstone 06:49, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It's much better now, yes, though a bit sparse for a full article on a major poet. and, for example, are these factoids true? her collections of poems regularly reach the circulation of some popular novels. or that she writes limericks? Ensiform 22:21, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I've done a somewhat major rewrite of the Szymborska article. But I am a bit afraid to replace the existing version without getting some input. So I invite comments and suggestions. As to Ensiform's questions, I believe one of her books is a book of limericks. uncutsaniflush 01:14, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Ships Built in Singapore in the 1854-1870

I am trying to find information on my great grandfather's ship building in Singapore around 1854-1870. His name was Daniel Robb originally from Forfar, Scotland.

He had built "Heart's Ease" and "Rainbow" with Mr. Buyers, his partner. In an old newspaper article from Singapore, these ships were called "Sarawack Steamers".

So, I entered "Lloyd's of London" for my search and entered up with your site which is great but I can't seem to get into any sites that will give me any information about ships built outside of the UK and especially in the mid 1800's.

Can you give me any more suggestions for my research? Thanks so much.

Alfred hunt engineer in nigeria

See Nigerian scam.

Im looking for an athelte

Question answered at http://www.prayb4uplay.com/sd_tf1.htm

English Versions

-->Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

synonyms and british vs. american english

Do I fill and article with phrases like also known as? Do I make a translation table? I'm concerned about the spectacles article in general but I'm sure this applies to many other pages as well Gbleem 03:43, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I would make a joke about British vs American english, but it's just too easy. Anyway, our policy is that you can use one, or the another, as long as each given article is consistent. →Raul654 03:45, Apr 3, 2004 (UTC)

Note that if an article topic is deomonstrably British, e.g. Tony Blair, then British spelling is used, and likewise for American topics. Meelar 03:46, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Too much overhead!

This page is too long! Seriously - why do we have 109 open discussions? Are they active? No. At the same time, important ones tend to get buried pretty quickly.

It's all part of a larger trend I've noticed on wikipedia - we have way too much overhead. We log everything! We have a log for protected pages, unprotected pages, failed featured article nominations, featured articles that make it onto the main page, did you know, the village pump, announcements, etc etc ad infinitum. Just to grant someone's request to protect/unprotect, I have to

1. Remove it from the requests protection
2. Unprotect the article
3. Remove the protection notice
4. Add the note into the list (un)protected pages.

And guess what? When you have so many steps just to do this kind of stuff, very few people actually do it all - so someone else has to come along later and spring clean them. Last night I removed 80% of the Featured article candidates - it hadn't been cleaned in that long. I'd like to suggest that we stop this ridiculous habit of logging everything and encourage people to be bold in cleaning up pages like this. →Raul654 19:35, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with you completely. Dori | Talk 19:38, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

Does wikipedia scale? I'm beginning to fear not, and this is an example. DavidWBrooks 20:27, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

If you look at this talk page it's full of complaints from when people (myself included) have boldly (radically) trimmed this page. That's discouraging, especially if you've spent an hour or two doing it (searching out all the relevant talk pages to archive discussions on). But, what's the answer? Just stick all VP content in an archive where no one will read it, so questions get asked over and over again? fabiform | talk 20:54, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

A suggestion - first, pages like this should be maintained often enough that the job doesn't become insurmountable (as it is now). Second, 95% of the stuff that gets asked here can be flatly deleted - no logging, just the axe. What little is important can be logged to a collective archive (the VP archive) or individual archives. Third, a lot of the traffic that gets posted here should not be here in the first place. To be blunt - we need to discourage people from posting here, and encourage them to do it elsewhere.

• If you want to publicize a poll, use goings on.
• If you want to ask what should happen on the chinese pedia, use Meta.
• If you want a new feature, go to sourceforge.

Right now, just about the only thing I see that belongs here is the discussion of the takedown request. These issues are covered at the top of the page, but no one reads that. I'm tempted to rewrite it myself to discourage it. →Raul654 21:02, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

IMHOP there should be a specific format for these sections.

Ie. there should be say three brief summary sentences such as:

1. Problem
2. Comments
3. Solution

The solution can be put into practice or formally added to a Wikipedia namespace for future reference.

By Wikipedia namespace I mean Wikipedia:meta page (as per the problem above). Bensaccount 21:04, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Enforcing a format on the village pump will only make things worse as newbies won't know they have to do it, so others will need to come and change it for them; meaning twice as many edits, an even more useless page history, and twice as many edit conflicts.

There are discussions on the talk page for splitting the village pump up into different topic areas, or for ensuring that all talk occurs on existing talk pages. I suggest people comment there so that some sort of consensus can be arrived at before any major change is made. Angela. 22:08, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

Hungarian Counties

There is a new WikiProject called Wikipedia:WikiProject Historical Hungarian counties. This is similar to the historical Swedish provinces project. Anyone who wants to join may do so.

--Dagestan

Okay, here's the first one so far: Bihar

Uhhhhhh.....anyone?

Don't be disheartened. After all, one would reasonably expect many (most?) of the folks interested in Hungarian Counties to be Hungarians, and thus (generally) located in Hungaria (sic), and consequently tucked up, warm and snug, in bed. I'd give it a day or two (oh, and you should probably crosspost on the hungarian wikipedia's village pump too). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:44, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

There is the chance that you may be the only contributor for that project for some time. I have experienced the same when I started a project on the provinces of Thailand, where I finally had to create all the articles myself - that was no problem, it only took longer to finish them. But you will experience at least one part of the wiki principle - spelling or grammar errors will be fixed, even if it's a more exotic topic. But don't let this stop you from pursuing with that project, quite the contrary - and maybe the already finished articles may attract new contributors later. andy 11:46, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I do not really get why do they need a "project", since they already have got an article? --grin

Skins

Hope Wiki guys can provide us more skins

Nichalp

It is rumored that there are people testing out new skins at the wikipedia test platform — Sverdrup 14:24, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Try http://wiki.aulinx.de/ for example. The skin itself is xhtml/css based, the output of the content area wiki->html parser isn't validationg though. This skin is in the wikimedia cvs, needs more testing and (browser)bug fixing. -- Gabriel Wicke 16:23, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia on CD-rom

Is there a way to get a (snapshot of) Wikipedia on CD-rom? I know this is against the interactive nature of Wikipedia, but I would like to have it for my students without internet access. Anybody knows how it can be done? -- Kjetil Halvorsen

Kjetil, we don't have a great solution, but there are two schemes for static dumps, both described at Wikipedia:Database download. You might like to try the "terodump" thing, although I can't personally vouch for it. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:51, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Kobe Bryant's Accuser

There is now a page entitled Kobe Bryant's accuser. It does not currently include a name. I hope that we can have a debate about whether or not to include the woman's name at Talk:Kobe Bryant's accuser. moink 01:15, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

By copying and pasting rather than moving the page you have removed the history information and infringed the copyright of the contributors. Update: I see the history has been copied to the discussion page. Good enough. anthony (this comment is a work in progress and may change without prior notice) 01:19, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

FWIW, I found the name of the accuser in a matter of seconds through Google. Her name is already in the open, so why continue to hide it? — Jor (Talk) 12:32, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Possibly due to legal reasons in the US, but IANAL and I am not sure. Pfortuny 13:44, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

There was much discussion on VfD on this issue. - IMSoP 14:59, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

And there is currently much discussion on Talk:Kobe Bryant's accuser. If you have an opinion, please come post it there. moink 17:36, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wiki as Language Learning

I might have asked this before, but I don't remember receiving an answer--is there any special program for using Wikipedia as a way of learning foreign languages? (I am thinking specifically as a way of learning several languages simultaneously). Mjklin 15:04, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No, but there are several language textbooks in progress at Wikibooks. Tuf-Kat 17:27, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)

Log-in problems?

A couple times already today I found I was logged-out for no apparent reason. Did anything change on the Wikipedia end (in other words, is this affecting more people)? — Jor (Talk) 16:49, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

• It was happening (often) to me, so I finally used the 'remember across sessions' checkbox so it's not happening any more. Niteowlneils 23:09, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

no

Searching

Is the text search of Wikipedia permeanently disabled? Every single time I go to use it, it says:

"Sorry! Full text search has been disabled temporarily, for performance reasons. In the meantime, you can use the Google or Yahoo! searches below. Note that their copies of Wikipedia content may be out of date."

Or am I doing something wrong? LUDRAMAN | T 17:31, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It was disabled prior to the arrival of the new (fast) servers, but has not been re-enabled. — Jor (Talk) 17:37, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

More specifically, (as I understand it) the search was intended to use the one server which wasn't replaced, and is still awaiting return from repairs. - IMSoP 01:19, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Rumour has it the old server is repaired and will be installed on Saturday. I don't think this guarantees the search will be back on though. Angela. 21:03, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Update: that server still has problems. See the Geoffrin woes thread on Wikitech-l. Angela. 18:11, Apr 6, 2004 (UTC)

Table tutorial

Recently, someone came up with the brilliant idea of the Wikipedia:Picture_tutorial. Could someone do the same for tables? I'm totally confused here, and I'm sure there are many other Wikipedians who would appreciate one as well. LUDRAMAN | T 20:03, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

see m:Wiki markup tables. IMHO the image tutorial should be moved to meta too. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:09, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

oops, m:MediaWiki User's Guide: Using tables -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:58, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Well, it' good to hear that someone liked my picture tutorial :) →Raul654 20:47, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)

IMO all the tutorials inc. the picture and table tutorials should be put on the Wikipedia:Tutorial so you have one main tutorial instead of lots of scattered ones. What do other users think? LUDRAMAN | T 21:13, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That's Isomorphic's baby - I know from talking to him (in the flesh) that he's the tutorial master. But I made sure he is aware of the picture tutorial. →Raul654 06:18, Mar 30, 2004 (UTC)

BTW there is a tutorial at How_to_use_tables. -- User:Docu

Adjectives

There should be an official guideline that adjectives redirect to nouns. (If there isn't one already).

For example: Renal should redirect to kidney. Happy should redirect to happiness.

I can't think of many cases where this should not occur (perhaps only if the adjective is ambiguous). Bensaccount 16:33, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This was actually supposed to be a question. Bensaccount 04:03, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes. - IMSoP 22:35, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

(Oh, alright then, I'll put a proper answer rather than just a joke - I think this is a good idea, and would fit in well with our existing policy on plural vs singular nouns (and no, I can't be bothered to link the page, you'll have to find it yourself :-D))

Delete history page?

New - and hense foolishly edited the entry in window with repeated "saves". Ugh. Is there any way to erase the history page? Alex obladida@adelphia.net

Not readily, and no big problem, happens all the time. A sysop could, in theory, fix it, but they've generally got better things to do. Don't sweat it, just know about it for the future. -- Jmabel 23:36, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Sysops can not (currently) delete individual revisions of an article. Developers can if it's really necessary, but for something like this, just don't worry as Jmabel says. The show preview button is useful for ensuring this doesn't happen. Angela. 21:00, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Delete history page?

There is currently no way for sysops to erase individual revisions of an article so if you have made too many saves, don't worry about it, but try not to do it in future.

Adjectives

-->Wikipedia talk:Redirect

Yate article

-->Talk:Yate

Who can nominate for deletion?

-->Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy

Table tutorial

See m:MediaWiki User's Guide: Using tables and How_to_use_tables.

Searching

-->Wikipedia talk:Searching

Wikipedia jabber chat room.

New chatroom at en.wiki@muc.jabber.org. See Wikipedia talk:IRC channels.

Wiki as Language Learning

There is no program for using Wikipedia as a way of learning foreign languages but there are several language textbooks in progress at Wikibooks.

Kobe Bryant's Accuser

See Talk:Kobe Bryant's accuser

Wikipedia on CD-rom

There is no Wikipedia on CD-rom but you can download the database at Wikipedia:Database download

Hungarian Counties

New Wikiproject at Wikipedia:WikiProject Historical Hungarian counties

User:666

-->User talk:666

Skins

New skins at http://wiki.aulinx.de/

Image Cache Problem?

Clear your cache

Copyright question

-->Wikipedia talk:Copyrights

I've also posted a question in the above talk page. -- Jrdioko 05:46, Apr 4, 2004 (UTC)

Error on "Ibuprofen" stub

Hello The structure on the ibuprofen stub article is entirely incorrect - the branches extend from the wrong place on the benzene ring and one of the groups themselves is wrong - it should feature an OH group, not a single bonded oxygen mid-branch.

I cannot discuss the article as it does not exist yet. I would be more than happy to write the article when I have finished my current paper, however I wondered whether it was in some way possible to correct or remove the erroneous information before then.

Many thanks strych 16:28, 31 Mar 2004

You can discuss the article by clicking on the "Discuss this page" link. Though it doesn't exist yet, as you note, just by inserting some text you will create the page. There is no stigma attached to creating a page—it is one of the best things about wiki-ing! You can also edit the Ibuprofen article yourself. I hope this helped. :-) —Frecklefoot 15:32, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Fixed Rick Boatright 05:52, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedians by age

Because it came up elsewhere (and I was already curious), I have created m:Wikipedians by age - yet another social organization grouping ;) →Raul654 17:59, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Um, I hope it doesn't became a harvesting ground for pedophiles. —Frecklefoot 18:06, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Curiousity killed the cat. (anon)

speak and type?

does anyone know a good program that will type into a text program the words you speak into a mic? Kingturtle 02:09, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)~

I've heard that IBM's ViaVoice is supposed to be good. There's a Speech Recognition HOWTO if you happen to use Linux. -- Wapcaplet 02:29, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

What should i do with images i dont want to write an article about?

i have lots of images i've taken recently , like Picture of lillebælt , this would apply to this article: Small_Belt however i have lots more that i couldnt possibly be bothered to write an article about this, What is the proper way to handle this? i've seen some people put them on their User: pages saying anyone can use them under the GFDL, should i do this? --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:34, 2004 Mar 31 (UTC)

Upload the pics, display them on your user page (or better a subpage of your user page) and link to that page from Wikipedia:Images with missing articles. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 11:00, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

P.S. forgot to mention before: THanks! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 11:02, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You may want to add a few descriptive and wikified words to the image's description page. This way it's more likely someone will find the image with "What links here". The names for the Plants and animals of Belize were added by other Wikipedians after they were uploaded. -- User:Docu

Petitions in Wikipedia

I found a couple of pages with external links to an online petition. I deleted the links, as I didn't think them appropriate for Wikipedia. Any comments? --Auximines 10:53, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Very unlikely to be relevant to the article page. Possibly ok on the talk page depending on the context. Note it is common for dubious external links to get added to articles (probably by the external site webmaster seeking traffic) and equally common for them to get removed pretty quick. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 11:00, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Totally agree, except in very unusual circumstances. (Trying to think of any that would be appropriate. Umm, maybe if there were an article specifically about the effect that a particular online petition had had. But I'm stretching here). --ALargeElk 11:03, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I'm pretty new here, and the advice is very welcome. --Auximines 11:46, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Leopold II quote in French? "Un pays que ouvre..."...

The beginning of the quote is "Un pays que[qui] ouvre sur la mer..." -- and goes on from there. [could also be "Un pays qu'ouvre sur la mer..."

I do research for a living, and have googled the entire web on this phrase, portions of the phrase, "leopold II" -- and come up with NOTHING. I need the full original quote IN FRENCH and am asking for help from any of your wizards.

Many thanks! Merci beaucoup et gros bisous!

Avril

“Un pays baigné par la mer n’est jamais petit” ? or ask it in fr:wikipédia:le bistro. Greudin

Meta pages

Should meta pages (wikipedia:) be used for discussion?

ie. Wikipedia:Unencyclopedic Bensaccount 23:03, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It depends, but for the most part no. One should use the Wikipedia talk: pages instead, unless the Wikipedia: page was designed for some specific discussion such as Wikipedia:Requests for adminship or Wikipedia:Quickpolls. That page does not seem to have been well designed. I have no idea what's supposed to take place in there. Dori | Talk 23:07, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

I think this page should be a redirect to Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. The discussion content would have to be moved to Wikipedia talk: What Wikipedia is not.

The reasons for this move seem obvious to me so I left them out but if you want me to state them I will.

I wont copy and paste the content, and therefore am powerless. Help? Bensaccount 23:52, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

For the most part, meta (i.e. Wikipedia:) pages seem to act as polished pages, in the same way as articles do, with their corresponding discussion pages. Contrast this, however, to pages on meta (that is, the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki) which function in a more wiki-like way, with discussion simply being refactored into content as appropriate. This is mainly because the meta-wiki isn't really big enough to require the full features (discussion pages, watch-lists...) that the software provides.

Sorry, this is drifting towards a different topic. It's also rather hard to follow all this meta:meta:meta at this time of night, so I'm going to bed. - IMSoP 23:54, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Ahh, just seen this. See my prior discussion with Ben on this point at user talk:MyRedDice. Cheers. Martin 19:32, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia: Wikipedia-namespace Bensaccount 00:29, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Which would be better called Wikipedia:Wikipedia namespace, without the hyphen; so I moved it. Oh, and I'm not keen on having redirects from the article namespace to the Wikipedia: one, but I guess that's another discussion. - IMSoP 00:42, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

...and then spent 5 minutes following you around fixing all your redirects, accidentally spamming my own watchlist in the process! D'oh! - IMSoP 00:48, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia: Namespace is not a redirect. Bensaccount 00:52, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Huh? Who said it was? - IMSoP 00:58, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

You said "I'm not keen on having redirects from the article namespace to the Wikipedia: one"

This namespace stuff is confusing. I think maybe namespace should be reserved to the definition on the page Wikipedia:namespace and the definition for Wikipedia-namespace on that page should be changed to Meta page (and ditch the Wikipedia-namespace term. Bensaccount 01:06, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Done. (I could have tried to explain what a namespace was for hours with the old version). Bensaccount 01:14, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't follow you; those two usages of the word are identical. There are several namespaces, one of which is the Wikipedia namespace. The article namespace is the one with no identifier (a synonym for main namespace) and some of the redirects you created went from one to the other - e.g. Wikipedia-namespace. This is not a very good idea, since the main namespace should ideally consist entirely of encyclopedia articles, and be copyable directly by any of our numerous mirrors and forks.

As for "meta page", I think my earlier comments in this section (and on meta:meta:meta) demonstrate why we should avoid that term wherever possible. Oh, and now you've broken all your redirects again, but I'm not going to fix them this time, because I prefer the old name :-p IMSoP 01:20, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC) (via edit conflict!)

I dont follow the meta:meta:meta phenomenon. Is it similar to the Wikipedia namespace:Wikipedia:namespace:Wikipedia: Wikipedia namespace phenomenon? (A wikipedia namespace page on wikipedia namespace that defines the wikipedia namespace and the wikipedia wikipedia namespace)Bensaccount 01:27, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The term "meta" is used for multiple purposes - a "meta page" is different from a "page on meta". The latter is a page on a completely different project (kind of a non-language language); the former is the pages beginning Wikipedia: that we're discussing here. More specifically, the software defines a project-specific prefix (namespace) to such "meta pages", which on Wikipedia is Wikipedia:, but on meta is Meta:. With the result that a "meta page" on meta has a name beginning meta:.

Confused? Good, because that's my whole point. Can I have my "Wikipedia namespace" back now ;-) - IMSoP 01:38, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I follow,

Heres are the relevant pages: Wikipedia:Glossary, Wikipedia:Namespace, Wikipedia:Meta page, Wikipedia: Wikipedia namespace.

The way I see it, namespace defines things such as the Main-namespace, the talk-namespace, etc. Meta pages have their own namespace (not to be conbfused with Meta-Wikimedia.) Meta page namespace is used to provide information on wikipedia. I think this is clear, agreed? Bensaccount 01:42, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes; but since "meta pages" (on Wikipedia) begin with Wikipedia:, whereas meta:foo will create a link to Meta-Wikimedia, it seems to me that it would be less confusing if we referred to it as the "Wikipedia namespace", and tried to cut down on our use of the word "meta" in this context; this also matches the "talk namespace" (not the "discussion page namespace"), the "image namespace" (not the "image description page namespace") etc. - IMSoP 01:54, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I see what you mean, but using Wikipedia namespace is just as bad. The wikipedia term is also overused. Any namespace on wikipedia could be referred to as a wikipedia namespace (as opposed to a namespace).

I propose we create a new term for meta page namespace aka wikipedia wikipedia namespace. Bensaccount 02:01, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hmm, now I see what you mean! My head hurts. Is anyone else actually awake who might fancy having an opinion on this? - IMSoP 02:07, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I see no reason to stop calling it the Wikipedia namespace. Angela. 18:24, Apr 6, 2004 (UTC)

I do. See Wikipedia: namespace. Bensaccount 17:02, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

You can not unilaterally change the name of a namespace. Moving the page doesn't change anything. Namespace 4 is still the Wikipedia namespace. Angela. 21:54, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

Just a thought: we needn't ever refer to that page by that name - just put "[[Wikipedia:Namespace|]]" to create Namespace rather than namespace. (See Piped link) - IMSoP 17:10, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I think you mean wikipedia users should refer to all wikipedia namespaces as just namespaces and the "Wikipedia:" pages as Wikipedia namespaces. I will settle for this I guess. I wonder if anyone else even cares what this means let alone knows what it means. Bensaccount 18:46, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes, or to be more precise, "Wikipedia: pages are pages in the Wikipedia namespace". And FWIW, I think most people would know what a "Wikipedia page" was more readily than they'd know what a namespace of any description was. - IMSoP 19:18, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I haven't read carefully enough to be sure someone didn't already say this: at least some of the confusion is between "article namespace" in the sense of

• "null-named namespace that contains articles" and
• "article on the subject of namespaces"

--Jerzy(t) 17:44, 2004 Apr 7 (UTC)

Hey! I just noticed somebody (in fact two people: first Timwi, then Eloquence) has changed MediaWiki:Wikipediapage, which is displayed when you're editing, e.g. here, or are on a Wikipedia talk: page, so that it now says "view project page" instead of "view meta page". Good edit in my opinion; much less ambiguous. - IMSoP 22:40, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Vote Announcement at Talk:Fascism

Hello all. In the interest of getting the article unprotected, I've called for a vote/poll at Talk:Fascism on the question of whether the Soviet Union and other communist regimes should be listed as fascist states on that page. Please come and express your opinion. john 04:54, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Regarding the Milosevic entry & killing of Stambolic'

The addition of some substantiation or at least a reference to the agency or entity, or literature which proves the allegation that Milosevic' had Stambolic' murdered would improve the article. Can anyone add to this aspect of the history/biography? I think it's probably true, but what I'm asking is for some more rigorous historical writing.

Thank you, and best wishes to all, John-Peter Creighton, Tattnall County, Georgia, USA

John-Peter: Try adding your request to the Talk page of the entry you are speaking of. To do this, go to the article, then click on the link that says "Discuss this page" in the list on the left. Then post your request on that discussion page instead. Garrett Albright 02:40, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Lists and photos

I got two concerns, number one a couple of lists have been rounding my mind: Look at Women's boxing and see the small list of female boxers we have there. Should we change the name of List of boxers to List of male boxers, take out the list of female boxers in the article about women's boxing and make a List of female boxers?. There are about 100 more or less known women boxers, and we already have a precedent anyways, look at List of actors and List of actresses. On that same line I was also thinking about a list of teen-idols.

Second concern: I have obtained many, many copyright guarantees for photos t be used in airline articles. While most photographers have accepted our policy of not giving credit under the photo itself, a couple of them lately have expressed as a requisite that I do credit them under the photo. Can I do this? I know that many wikipedians dont like that, and that its basically a rule not to credit the photographer under the photo, But I was wondering if I could put a note under the photo, a note that would look integrated to the article.

Thanks and God bless!

Antonio Cannabilistic Martin

your opinion on the matter here (hehe!):

Some Wikipedians may not like it but moral rights outside the US makes that unimportant, since it may be a legal right the photographers have, independent of copyright status. In any case, it's polite to give credit. Please do, though in a reduced size font so it isn't unduly prominent. If there's any actual policy on this, please let me know. If there's not, we might as well create one and say that it's polite and should normally be done, though as a courtesy. Jamesday 07:25, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but - since Wikipedia is wholly located in the US (which, as I understand it, does not recognize moral rights) - what legal weight do those moral rights carry? →Raul654 07:31, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

Non-US jurisdictions may choose to say that a work published in their language is intended for their people and may apply their law. Since the contributors in many languages are within those jurisdictions, it's also helpful to those contributors to make their life easy by accepting attribution requests. Say we print a German edition for distribution in Germany, or ship an English version for deliberate distribution in Germany. How would we be able to avoid following German law and moral rights requirements for that German publication? It helps contributors to stay nice and safe according to their local laws. Still, politeness is perhaps a greater reason for doing it, though we don't actually want to encourage Wikipedia contributors themselves to do this for their own contributions, just third parties. Jamesday 07:50, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Call me paranoid but - let's say we go the whole 9 yards, put it in our manual of style that photographs should be attributed, etc. When we (inevitably) forget to attribute one, and should wikipedia (or one of our contributors) be brought into court as a result, couldn't our desire to attribute photos be used as an implicit admission of culpability for infringement on their moral rights? →Raul654 08:03, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

We probably don't want to make it a requirement - many of our contributors don't requre it, some may not even want it for their own contributions. We just need to accept it and suggest how it should be done so that someone in a moral rights jurisdiction can follow the laws they are subject to. There are also good arguments in favor of the view that moral rights to attribution are morally good - they are certainly well accepted academically worldwide, including in the US. If someone objects, there's nothing to prevent them from trying to find an image with fewer requirements and then replacing the existing image with that more free version; remembering that with moral rights, that means an image from a non-moral rights jurisdiction, which in turn effectively requires a US image, since it's the only really significant jurisdiction without many moral rights. I don't think that this increases risk. We can't really dodge the vicarious liability in print anyway - print isn't covered by the really nice protection of the CDA and its online equivalents elsewhere. For print, we might end up setting a precedent for this type of work having the same protection. Might. It is what happened online in some US online decisions before the CDA was passed but it's currently unknowable whether it applies to the Wikipedia in print, even if it is likely to be part of any Wikipedia argument in court. Jamesday 01:32, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia is meant to be a free encyclopedia, but 95% of the world's population can't legally copy it. That's starting to annoy me. -- Tim Starling 07:53, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

Intellectual property law is nothing if not inconsistent.:) We don't even have versions of the GFDL which are vetted to be legally valid in most jurisdictions. We need filtering for things like selecting print articles and other subset editions and that also helps tremendously with IP issues, so if you'd like to try to think of some really neat tagging and filtering solutions so we can easily produce custom subsets on demand based on individual user profiles...:) Jamesday 01:32, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Antonio, you asked if a credit notice could go in with the caption. In my opinion this would be regrettable as WP policy because

- it looks ugly

- it distracts the readers attention away from the caption itself

- it makes the caption one line longer

- and I'm fairly sure the print encyclopedias do not have credit notices attached to their pics

I will upload the next set of your airliner pics real soon (do I have a list?), Best Wishes, Adrian.

Adrian Pingstone 08:17, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I think it is fine to credit a photographer if they wish, certainly it is much better than having no photo at all. Your first three points are about ugliness. I disagree - see e.g. Sperm Whale where the artist asked for a credit, and we give it in a subtle but effective way. At least some print encyclopedias give credits next to the photo itself - for instance the Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals certainly does this. All of this does not conflict with the GDFL. Thus Antonio, if you think the article would look good, go for it. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:03, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't think it looks ugly, when done in suitably subdued text, such as the small which I think has been agreed on for captions, perhaps modified to be of lower contrast for attributions. Such things are very well accepted, appearing in most print publications. Of course, we don't want them to be unduly prominent. Seeking permission to use without attribution is good, but it's not worth refusing to use an image because of it. IMO. When you're the one seeking the permissions, it's up to you whether you do want to choose not to accept them - you're the one doing the work and deciding what you're after. Jamesday 01:32, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Many print books list photo credits separately. The info page on the photo could be a place to put it, along with any other information about the image. Mark Richards 20:06, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Test to try to help Google

Several people are trying a test which may help Google to find new articles quickly. User and user talk pages are very highly ranked by Google because they have lots of links to them. The test is to include {{msg:newpagelinks}} at the top of your user and/or talk page. As the test progresses we'll possibly tweak the message to see if we can find a combination which helps Google the most. This came about after Dori noticed that articles linked from his sandbox appeared in the Google index very quickly. Jamesday 07:37, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Sweet. So we're googlebombing our own database. →Raul654 07:42, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

I'm in. Meelar 21:09, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Talk:Fundamentalism

The link Talk:Fundamentalism is broken. It was too large and I archieved a lot. The archive is at Talk:Fundamentalism/Archive1 and functions well.

I would appreciate it if someone was able to make the talk page function again and, explain what went wrong. GerardM 07:53, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It has fixed itself after 5 minutes. I am puzzled. GerardM 08:02, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Seconds in RC

In response to a request by Seth Ilys, I've put seconds in the timestamps on RC. What do you think? -- Tim Starling 14:42, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

I think it looks a bit cluttered (but I expect I'll get used to it) and I don't quite see the point (but if others do, that's fine). --Camembert

I don't see it? Dysprosia 12:20, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It appears to have been turned off again. fabiform | talk 12:26, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Preference, maybe? (I know the developers seem to hate adding prefs) — Sverdrup 20:47, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia in March: a month in stats

I've been perusing the en.wikipedia stats for the last month's trends. Here's the headline figures:

• 115,080,901 hits
• 952,395,093 Kb transferred
• Daily average: 3,712,287 hits/day

10 most popular items (excluding Main Page, Current Events, Special pages, admin pages):

1. 100px-Beowulf.firstpage.jpeg - does anyone know why??
   • appears to be empty, or am I missing something? --Phil | Talk 16:42, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

   I think that was a conflation of a URL and an image link; I've corrected it, but the actual image page is Image:Beowulf.firstpage.jpeg. Marnanel 17:04, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

   • My suspicion is that somebody has been leeching this - including it inline in something other than a Wikipedia article (a manuscript as a forum avatar?). A hunt through the logs for the referer on requests for it would soon confirm that, and tell us who the culprit is. Either that, or its a pretty weird bug in the log analyser. - IMSoP 12:06, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC) (oh dear, must resist the urge to tidy up leeching and disambig avatar properly: too much work to do...)
     • In fact, looking at the most popular referer stats, I'd say it was someone on this messageboard here - IMSoP 12:13, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
       • Hmm. That site really doesn't have anything to do with Beowulf. I'm guessing few if any of the people featured are spear-danes (although I believe I did see Grendel's Mother) -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:38, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
         • Um, I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but given that I haven't time to put any decent info on avatar, I'll explain briefly for anyone who is confused. People will put any image that they think looks cool into their preferences for a messageboard, just to make them stand out from the crowd. I notice one member there has a (badly squashed) image of a bank-note, for instance. You'll note that the image in question is a thumbnail, not the original - perfect size for such a use. This kind of leeching can actually be a real nuisance for smaller websites, because of the huge amount of bandwidth it eats - a friend of mine almost had to pay his host for excess use because someone liked his b3ta submission, but didn't even scale it down! It's perhaps not such a big deal for Wikipedia, but if its still happening, it might be worth tracking down the user responsible (through, as I say, the referer logs) and politely asking them to host the image themselves.
         • If, on the other hand, you were making a subtle comment about the somwhat adult content of that messageboard, I apologise - I meant to warn readers when I realised, but became ensnared in other matters. - IMSoP 22:10, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
           • Yes, I was trying to be a smart-alec, but only those who've followed the link (which hopefully is no-one) will get it. I have to go wash my eyeballs out now... -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:24, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
             • Oh, come on, it's not that bad - it's not like it's some kind of goatse fan forum or something (if you don't know, you don't want to, trust me). In fact I glanced at their FAQ or whatever, and they seemed to have pretty decent rules, considering. - IMSoP 22:29, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
               • Seriously, that's pretty damn tame. I was expecting a whole lot worse ;) →Raul654 22:33, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

1. Seven dirty words
2. United States
3. World War II
4. Goatse.cx
5. March 11, 2004 Madrid attacks
6. List of sex positions
7. Wiki
8. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
9. Mathematics

10 most popular search terms:

1. wikipedia
2. wiki
3. the answer to life the universe and everything
4. encyclopedia
5. penthouse
6. saddam hussein
7. ahmed yassin
8. sheikh ahmed yassin
9. sexual intercourse
10. free encyclopedia

More at http://en.wikipedia.org/stats/usage_200403.html .

I'd just like to give the obligatory plug for the autoupdating web links I wrote:

• [http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/url_{{CURRENTYEAR}}{{CURRENTMONTH}}.html Current month's hits]
• [http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/usage_{{CURRENTYEAR}}{{CURRENTMONTH}}.html Current month's webalizer]
• [http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}/date.html Autoupdating link to the mailing list]

→Raul654 16:21, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

It would be really good if we could change the header of each page so that it says $PAGENAME - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - BROWSER SPECIFIC TAG at the top toolbar instead of just $PAGENAME - Wikipedia - BROWSER SPECIFIC TAG... it would be nice not to have such a low google rank for "encyclopedia" - and this might help a notch. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 16:27, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't think this would be an improvement, i expect the opposite. Using just the title as the html title (without wikipedia) should increase our relevance for the searches mathching the title. No need to get a higher ranking for the search phrase 'wikipedia', there's nothing better than #1. Including 'Encyclopedia' in the title of the main page and/or in default keywords in the header of each page could help to improve the ranking for that search term though. A small skin hack could do this. -- Gabriel Wicke 13:33, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Your more refined approach sounds good. A specialized hack for the main page sounds like really good because "Main Page - Wikipedia" is awful. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 13:52, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/141

Is there some arcane place to list this information of which I am not aware? My understanding was that the place to list ban requests was Rfc... I've done that, but there have been precious few comments thus far, and the 24 hour emergency ban is going to be over sooner or later and User:141 is likely going to continue his/her/its rampage. Anyone care to point me to the place where this can get more publicity... other than here of course. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 16:41, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Commented-out sub-headings

Just came across a weird one. If you go to the article Age of Apocalypse, you will see that it is broken up into a number of subections: "Storyline", "Characters and affiliations", and "External Links". But if you click on the individual Edit button to edit the "Characters and affiliations", you get a funny little subsection entitled "Comics". A quick check of the entire article edit reveals that this whole subsection is commented out using HTML <!-- --> comments - but the individual Edit links are missing this fact, so the &Section=number part of the edit link is pointing to the wrong place. So, is the Village Pump the right place for a bug report like this? --Stormie 04:23, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

No, check the intro:

• To report bugs or suggest features, submit them to Sourceforge or MediaWiki.

However, I think this is a known bug, so no harm done. Dysprosia 05:55, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for that.. although I couldn't see anything like it in the buglist on Sourceforge, so I logged it there. --Stormie 07:10, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

The trick to make it work is to make sure the heading does not start the line anymore, as that seems to be what the wiki engine is parsing. Thus if the commented area starts like the following (without any linebreak in between) it works again. And I fixed the article accordingly already.andy 07:32, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

<!--===Disabled subsection-->

Note that even just a space is enough, so if a whole block is commented, you can put " ==Dis'd Hdr==" within that block and it won't break. - IMSoP 16:17, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Known bug, "section edit bug when headings are within comment brackets": [9]

-- Cyrius|&#9998 12:41, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

Too much overhead!

Problem

This page is too long.

Comments

This page is too long! Seriously - why do we have 109 open discussions? Are they active? No. At the same time, important ones tend to get buried pretty quickly.

It's all part of a larger trend I've noticed on wikipedia - we have way too much overhead. We log everything! We have a log for protected pages, unprotected pages, failed featured article nominations, featured articles that make it onto the main page, did you know, the village pump, announcements, etc etc ad infinitum. Just to grant someone's request to protect/unprotect, I have to

1. Remove it from the requests protection
2. Unprotect the article
3. Remove the protection notice
4. Add the note into the list (un)protected pages.

And guess what? When you have so many steps just to do this kind of stuff, very few people actually do it all - so someone else has to come along later and spring clean them. Last night I removed 80% of the Featured article candidates - it hadn't been cleaned in that long. I'd like to suggest that we stop this ridiculous habit of logging everything and encourage people to be bold in cleaning up pages like this. →Raul654 19:35, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with you completely. Dori | Talk 19:38, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

Does wikipedia scale? I'm beginning to fear not, and this is an example. DavidWBrooks 20:27, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

If you look at this talk page it's full of complaints from when people (myself included) have boldly (radically) trimmed this page. That's discouraging, especially if you've spent an hour or two doing it (searching out all the relevant talk pages to archive discussions on). But, what's the answer? Just stick all VP content in an archive where no one will read it, so questions get asked over and over again? fabiform | talk 20:54, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

A suggestion - first, pages like this should be maintained often enough that the job doesn't become insurmountable (as it is now). Second, 95% of the stuff that gets asked here can be flatly deleted - no logging, just the axe. What little is important can be logged to a collective archive (the VP archive) or individual archives. Third, a lot of the traffic that gets posted here should not be here in the first place. To be blunt - we need to discourage people from posting here, and encourage them to do it elsewhere.

• If you want to publicize a poll, use goings on.
• If you want to ask what should happen on the chinese pedia, use Meta.
• If you want a new feature, go to sourceforge.

Right now, just about the only thing I see that belongs here is the discussion of the takedown request. These issues are covered at the top of the page, but no one reads that. I'm tempted to rewrite it myself to discourage it. →Raul654 21:02, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

IMHOP there should be a specific format for these sections.

Ie. there should be say three brief summary sentences such as:

1. Problem
2. Comments
3. Solution

The solution can be put into practice or formally added to a Wikipedia namespace for future reference.

By Wikipedia namespace I mean Wikipedia:meta page (as per the problem above). Bensaccount 21:04, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Enforcing a format on the village pump will only make things worse as newbies won't know they have to do it, so others will need to come and change it for them; meaning twice as many edits, an even more useless page history, and twice as many edit conflicts.

There are discussions on the talk page for splitting the village pump up into different topic areas, or for ensuring that all talk occurs on existing talk pages. I suggest people comment there so that some sort of consensus can be arrived at before any major change is made. Angela. 22:08, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

If you look towards the end of the talk page, you'll see that I proposed a few weeks ago that the Pump could become a place to draw attention to discussions elsewhere (one paragraph summary and link per section). Which is to say, it would permanently be in the state that it reaches after a particularly thorough archiving now. Rather than discouraging use of this page, we would be discouraging content on this page. See my last comment in the discussion mentioned for a first stab at a boilerplate for such a page. We might also want to encourage ReplaceQuestionWithAnswer for simple queries; even simpler ones could simply be answered on the appropriate User_talk: page and deleted outright from here.

I would put this into a "formal" proposal, but I'm just getting ready to go on holiday for the Easter weekend; however, if nobody else does so within the next week, I'll do it when I get back, because I think this is a workable system which will scale better than the current one without sacrificing the usefulness of having a central point of discussion. - IMSoP 22:19, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC) [arsebiscuits! edit conflict with Angela]

Solutions

1. Emphasize intro to make people post in correct place
2. Reformat this page
   1. Use this page to link to discussions in correct place
3. Split this page into topic areas

Wikipedia featured in print media

The Hindu, one of India's leading English daily newspapers had around a half a page feature today [10] on wikis from The Guardian( I think). There was a one para write-up on Wikipedia which was referred to as the impressive Wikipedia:-).KRS 08:47, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

An erstwhile newspaper. This should be added to Wikipedia:Press coverage. -- Itai 15:24, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It's an erstwhile newspaper? I thought it was still publishing. Marnanel 22:06, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

I copiously randomize my adjectives. Mostly, people don't notice. -- Itai 17:22, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

And your adverbs, too, by the looks of it ;-) - IMSoP 19:40, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Moved discussion

Questions and answers, after a period of inactivity, will be moved to other relevant sections of the wikipedia (such as the FAQ pages), placed in the Wikipedia:Village pump archive (if it is of general interest), or deleted (if it has no long-term value).

• January 30 - February 17
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/February 2004 archive 1
• February 21 - February 22
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/February 2004 archive 2
• More recent:
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/February 2004 archive 3
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/March 2004 archive 1
• February 26 - March 2
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/March 2004 archive 2
• March
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/March 2004 archive 3
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/March 2004 archive 4
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/March 2004 archive 5
  • Wikipedia:Village pump/March 2004 archive 6

Abuse of sysop powers

• 21:51, 6 Apr 2004 Timwi deleted "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" (content was: '#REDIRECT List_of_T-shirt_slogans')
• 21:51, 6 Apr 2004 Timwi deleted "List of T-shirt slogans" (content was: ''I'm with stupid →← I'm with stupid'I'm with stupid

This is what I found in the Wikipedia:Deletion log. It seems nothing can be taken for granted these days, not even the seven day period and of course the discussion on VfD. All our sophisticated rules won't work if sysops abuse their power in that way. I'm going to post that message on Timwi's user page, too. <KF> 20:12, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Those both seem like reasonable speedy-deletions to me. Note the discussion two levels up, about excessive overhead in wikipedia. Sometimes VfD seems like excessive overhead; some obvious bull**** articles listed there never actually get deleted because the process is so long. - DavidWBrooks 20:27, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, it's tough, isn't it, obeying one's own rules. Still that's exactly what has traditionally been referred to as democracy, and the other form of government as absolutism. Well, never mind. At User talk:Timwi people interested in Timwi's answer will find more. <KF> 20:45, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I think the best strategy here, rather than labelling this "abuse" (which is a bit like labelling newbie tests "vandalism", a mistake I keep making) would have been to leave a polite note on Timwi's talk page asking for clarification of why he deleted it, and requesting undeletion to give it a chance to improve. If necessary, timwi could then have pointed you to Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion, and/or undeleted it but immediately listed it at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. This is not so much "abuse of sysop powers" as a minor difference in opinion between two users, which could probably have been sorted out within 10 minutes. - IMSoP 22:31, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Ships Built in Singapore in the 1854-1870

->reference desk

Watchlist broken?

Something weird--clicking My watchlis in left menu bar gives:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was: SELECT cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_comment, cur_id, cur_user,cur_user_text,cur_timestamp,cur_minor_edit,cur_is_new FROM watchlist,cur USE INDEX (name_title_timestamp) WHERE wl_user=40082 AND (wl_namespace=cur_namespace OR wl_namespace+1=cur_namespace) AND wl_title=cur_title AND cur_timestamp > '20040329180705' ORDER BY cur_timestamp DESC from within function "wfSpecialWatchlist". MySQL returned error "1030: Got error 28 from table handler". Elf | Talk 18:08, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I also had that, but it's just been fixed. — Jor (Talk) 18:11, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Disk on suda was full once more. -- Gabriel Wicke 01:11, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Seconds in RC

-->m:MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion

Meta Pages

-->Wikipedia talk:Namespace

Current time?

See m:Variables

Unicode question

Should the English Wikipedia use Unicode? Continued at Wikipedia:Unicode.

Brazilian Portuguese

Hi,

I've been surfing the site and found that the Portuguese version of Wikipedia is on Portugal's Portuguese. This is most inconvenient for Brazilian users, for, even though we speak Portuguese, it's different enough to prevent integration on the same site-version. Can this be changed? Can a "Brazilian Portuguese" version be created? Help!

Thanks,

Helen

You can create a Brazilian Wikipedia (I'm surprised there isn't one already). Go to Wikipedia:Create a new language in Wikipedia as a place to start. LUDRAMAN | T 20:02, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

From what I understand of w:pt's policy, both spelling systems are perfectly acceptable, in the same way that we allow both US and UK spellings here. Don't you think it'd be terribly sad to start a new version over minor differences such as "correto" vs. "correcto"? Are the two versions really "different enough to prevent integration"? Wouldn't it be better to start lots and lots of new articles in Brazilian Portuguese and redress the balance? –Hajor 20:09, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Just a comment: Some language learning courses (such as Linguaphone) offer both Brazilian and Portuguese. Wouldn't this signify a reasonable difference. LUDRAMAN | T 20:19, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC) (PS I am indifferent to the creation of a Brazilian Wikipedia)

We've got an article on it. I would hope that the differences are not insurmountable, but isn't this really a matter for the Portuguese speakers on their Village Pump? –Hajor 20:44, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

April Fools' jokes

See examples at Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense

Wikipedians by age

See m:Wikipedians by age

Petitions in Wikipedia

Online petitions are unlikely to be relevant to article pages.

Accessibility

I ran the wikipedia main page in [Bobby] which checks web pages for accessiblity issues.

• It failed!!

I strongly feel that Wikipedia software writers should help make pages more accesibility friendly so that 'challenged people' should not have a problem. What do you think? Nichalp

Try the text-only version. Mkweise 20:40, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

For the record, I checked our main page for w3c compliance, and it failed. see here →Raul654 19:32, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)

i need your help

hello sir , compliment of the season to you sir ,my main reason mailing you is just because i want to study in abroad just to stsndardise my education ilook up all over the world and i believe you the only person that can help me.

                                                             THANKS SIR.

I am sorry to inform you that this is an encyclopedia project, in no way connected to any scholarship program. We are all volunteers here, and have no funds to help you with (which is what I think you are asking for), but we hope the Wikipedia will be a source of information for your education. I wish you good fortune in working on educating yourself, and would suggest you type "scholarship" or other education-related search terms at http://www.google.com to find organizations that can help you. Jwrosenzweig 23:50, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Recommendations for good UK broadband ISP?

I'm currently looking around for a reliable and not-too-expensive UK broadband ISP, and thought I'd ask fellow Wikipedians what they would recommend. Support for Linux would be advantageous but not wholly essential (I'm running a dual boot Red Hat 9 / Win 98 environment). Anyone got any suggestions? -- ChrisO 23:16, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

(this should probably be on Reference Desk) Don't get cable (well, don't get NTL). They give you an ethernet based modem (good, surely, aber nein) but it needs a (windows only) dialup program to make it work, and it inhibits any other network ports under NT/XP so you can't use your PC as a router. I'm guessing their linux support is consequently zero. For DSL, BT seems fine, as does Pipex. Let's face it, whoever sells you the DSL is only partly important - it's still BT's copperloop, BT's DSLAM, BT's SS7/ATM backbone. I'm a firm believer in an external firewall/router for anyone techie enough to set one up. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:38, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

At risk of encouraging wikipedia to turn into a general chat-site: ADSL Guide should be your first stop. As for "Linux support", unless you go with a cable provider (only really worth it if you're going to get other services in the same package, e.g. cable TV) this shouldn't be an issue. Either get a modem that acts as a stand-alone router (connected via ethernet) or source your own USB modem with good Linux support, such as the latest incarnation of the Speedtouch. Personally, I've used Zen (bit odd with the billing) and now freedom2surf (not nearly as dodgy as the name makes them sound; no problems so far).

As for how this can be turned into something that "will benefit Wikipedia as a project": maybe you could write some articles, like ADSL Guide and Speedtouch; and I wonder how much info we have on ADSL in general... And, of course, you having a decent Internet connection will allow you to make lots and lots of good contributions to the site, I 'm sure! :-D - IMSoP 23:48, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC) (via edit conflict; and yes, I've heard nothing but bad experiences with NTL in any form)

Edit toolbar should fully work in Mozilla now

If you're using Mozilla or one of its derivatives (Netscape 6+, Firefox, Galeon, Kmeleon ..), you may want to try the option "Show edit toolbar" in your user preferences. While it previously would only show an infobox for Mozilla, you can now also use it in the way it is intended: select text, click one of the toolbar buttons, and it is formatted accordingly. If you do not select text, you will still get an example text.--Eloquence* 09:24, Apr 3, 2004 (UTC) (signed using toolbar)

Haven't tried it but congrats, anyway and thanks for your work. Pfortuny 13:54, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Ooh, it really does work this time, too! (Once I'd force-reloaded to get an ancient version out of my cache...) Excellent!

The one thought that occurred to me seeing the old and new ones in quick succession like that, is that perhaps the example-in-a-box (like the old version had) could be used when nothing is selected, rather than inserting stuff like Italic text and Link title directly. We might end up with fewer bits of nonsense lying around - especially since undo seems to have no effect after using the toolbar. Please consider this a suggestion rather than a criticism, though, and I've no idea whether it's even possible - I wouldn't know where to begin to get it doing what it does do. (ooh, that's funky, it trims the trailing space when you select a word!)

In short, well done and thanks indeed for your hard work! --IMSoP 14:21, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'm on Netscape 7.02 and it still doesn't do anything for me. Is there some preference that I need to set other than displaying the toolbar? Or something in the browser or plug-in that's needed? Elf | Talk 22:16, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Well, I had to do a hard-refresh because I'd once tried the old version (Ctrl-R should do it I think); the blue box that the examples appear in should disappear. Other than that, I can only say that it works for me under both Mozilla 1.7b and Firefox 0.8. - IMSoP 22:27, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Gdansk vs. Danzig

Hey, I haven't been following the Gdansk vs. Danzig debate all that closely, so I don't know if there is still any debate over what to call the current city, but I did some research that might be of some interest to the community. I looked at all the Sun Media newspapers that I am able to search electronically for instances of both words...so this isn't a definitive survey, it just shows what has been printed in a few Canadian newspapers, going back to 1989 at the earliest.

(To save space, I've moved it to User:Adam Bishop/Gdansk vs. Danzig) Adam Bishop 18:14, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I certainly haven't been following the Gdansk vs. Danzig debate either, but while browsing the Recent Changes the other day, I saw the funniest Gdansk vs. Danzig edit EVAR! Stormie 02:27, Apr 5, 2004 (UTC)

Think we should tell Glenn his name is being disputed by the Poles? -- Jmabel 04:47, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)