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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous).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

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Naming conventions across multiple articles

Is there any policy/guideline for how to deal with names that vary from different pieces of media across multiple articles. The issue that brought this up at WP:WikiProject Anime and Manga was the naming of Roronoa Zoro from One Piece who also goes by the name Roronoa Zolo in several pieces of media. It was decided for the main article and the character list to use Zoro as the more widely recognized English name after an exhaustive debate. However One Piece: Grand Adventure uses Zolo as the game when it was released in the US uses Zolo.陣内Jinnai 22:55, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Do you all mangas use the same colour for their characters- or use a different color(sic). You need to treat this with a degree of licence. (That was humour!) --ClemRutter (talk) 21:53, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
They use different ones, but one of them has precedence by reliable source commentary and for one character, creative concept info. However, as each piece is licensed individually and over different periods of time, they use different names depending upon who licensed them.
This isn't the same as a dialogue differences because in Japan they all have the same spelling. There is also reliable source commentary that often favors one over the other, even when they review different forms of media. Ocassionally they'll make mention of the other name in such a way that its obvious that they don't agree with the translation.陣内Jinnai 22:02, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

WP:MUSIC

WP:MUSIC is apparently well-embedded (if that's the right expression), but the shortcut doesn't point to WikiProject Music. It points to Wikipedia:Notability (music). This is obviously confusing. Is there a technically-adroit way of fixing this? --Kleinzach 05:21, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

I was just going to say "fix it", but I see Nihonjoe already reverted you for some strange reason. Not much you can do if people are willing to ignore your input. *shrug*
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 06:51, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
There's nothing strange about it and no one is ignoring any input. Kleinzach changed the shortcut without any discussion, thereby breaking over 30,000 links (I stopped counting at that point) which were trying to point at the notability guideline. That's a problem. I'm fine if the community decides to change it so WP:MUSIC points to WikiProject Music, and a new shortcut such as WP:N-MUSIC is created to take its place. Someone will need to fix all the current redirects and mentions of it, however, before making the switch. ···日本穣? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 14:31, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
In the majority case, shortcuts point to policies, guidelines and essays. Shortcuts to WikiProjects start with WP. Therefore WP:MUSIC redirects to guideline about music, and WP:WPMUSIC redirects to Wikipedia:WikiProject Music. Changing the target of a widely-used redirect is not going to be allowed without prior discussion and a solution for fixing all the links it will break. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 13:31, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
OK, but surely shortcuts should be (and normally are) named appropriately? They won't be used much if they point in unpredictable (unintuitive) directions. No-one could guess that WP:MUSIC would point to a notability guideline. --Kleinzach 03:40, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
Well it's not WPMUSIC so you should expect it to go to some music-related policy/guideline/essay, which it does. Shortcuts aren't designed to have ituitive names anyway; how would you know where WP:5P, WP:VPP, WP:BEANS, WP:AFD, WP:A, WP:B, etc. lead without having seen any of those pages before? OrangeDog (τ • ε)
Indeed, I've never seen WP:B and figured it might go to WP:BOLD (which it doesn't). ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:54, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
If WP:MUSIC is expected to end up anywhere it would be the MOS (MOS:MUSIC), in my opinion, though I can see how Notability is more important. Surely WP:A would go to WP:ADMIN if intuition is the rule? But it doesn't, so obviously intuition is irrelevent! OTOH, WP:CM, WP:SCIENCE and WP:TRAIN all point to something other than "policies, guidelines and essays", in fact the first two point to Wikiprojects... If consistency were to be had then WP:BOOK should point to Wikipedia:Notability (books). Just a thought. --Jubilee♫clipman 10:34, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
Changing it now would break the frequent mentions of it (without linkage) in deletion discussions... --Cybercobra (talk) 10:56, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
Irony? --Kleinzach 13:21, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
No. Curse the nature of online communication. --Cybercobra (talk) 13:27, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Consistency needn't be had. The point of short-cuts is to cut short the time (and characters) it takes to type a frequently used link. It wouldn't matter if WP:Q went to Wikipedia:Arbitration committee. The only person who needs to know where it goes is the person who types it. For those who don't, they can click it, hover over it or look it up in WP:Alphabet soup. In any case, the nature of the system means we can't change any of them without careful bot assistance, even if it did matter. (c.f. Tiny URL) OrangeDog (τ • ε) 18:53, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Fixed it vs. Don't fix it. A fundamental choice between culture (I like WP the way it is) and progress. There are lots of small mistakes in the encyclopedia and we agree (probably because it's easy) that they should be corrected, but there are also some big, systemic failures out there (particularly Wikipedia space). If these are not addressed because of bureaucratic inertia then WP simply won't be here in 10 or 20 years time. --Kleinzach 02:21, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

My deep apologies if this is in the wrong place but I have no idea where else to put it...

This is a small note to draw attention to the massive overuse of the opinions of film critic Roger Ebert in talking about the reception of films. He pops up in pretty much every article and one gets the opinion that he is some sort of demi god within the film industry whose opinions on every picture are somehow particularly important. This is not a troll post, I love Wiki and am extremly gratefull to have it around, I am simply trying to draw this massive inbalance to SOMEONES attention....we shall see. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.97.250.112 (talk) 23:11, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

I've noticed this too; might be worth pointing out to the members of WikiProject Films.  Skomorokh  23:15, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
He is a national film critic and one of the few who has reviewed almost every film. As such, his reviews are likely to be found in many articles (not every, not by a long shot). -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 23:17, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
What do you really expect to be done, though? As a tertiary source we're completely reliant on what reliable sources publish. Since Ebert is so widely published it should hardly be surprising that he is often sourced here. Don't blame us, blame all the newspapers, televisions networks, magazines, and other publishers...
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 23:18, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
The point is that there may be undue weight to this source, something which would both be our fault and something that we could fix.  Skomorokh  23:21, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
...I'd be really careful with such a view. If it's OK to be selective of sources in such a manner, then that's just begging to start POV warfare. If a source is reliable I don't see how it helps to then say that using it more then some subjective amount is problematic. The New York Times is cited all over the place as well after all, are we giving them undue weight as well?
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 23:44, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
Not saying I agree with the undue argument, but the NYT isn't 1 indivisual.陣内Jinnai 00:13, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
Heh... neither is Ebert. Do you really believe that he personally writes all of his reviews all on his own, without editorial oversite? Do you think that so many other publishers would use his opinion if it wasn't backed up by editorial support?
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 00:30, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
Yes. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 18:31, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
[1] signed "Jim Emerson, Editor" —Mike Allen 19:06, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
Still doesn't prove that he doesn't write every review himself. An editor doesn't have to agree with the views expressed. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 12:48, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
Ignoring the conspiracy theorist here, Ebert is one of the most wide-read and most best-known film critics so it's hard to avoid him. For all the article I focus on, I do toss him in on occasion, but no more then any other critic. For example, to get notable critics who appear in major press, I use Rotten Tomatoes' links for "Top Critics" usually. (example). Ebert also sometimes goes far and away from the general concensus of other critics views on films. (his review for Knowing for example). It's up to editors to decide when to use what critics to display a view that is not WP:NPOV. Andrzejbanas (talk) 20:35, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
Roger Ebert is a major film critic. Presenting his opinion, when available, in a NPOV manner is appropriate in an article on a film. Even though I don't always agree with Ebert, I believe that intentionally suppressing his opinions would violate NPOV. Dekkappai (talk) 20:41, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

When citing reviews of film critics in an article's "Critical response" or "Reception" section, WP:MOSFILM asks that we use reliable sources to show how the film was received and it goes on to state that "sources that are regarded as reliable are professional film critics"; Roger Ebert most certainly is a professional film critic. WP:RS separately goes on to state that a reliable source would be either "published materials with a reliable publication process" (Chicago Sun-Times certainly meets this criterion) or "authors who are regarded as authoritative in relation to the subject in question" (Ebert certainly meets this criterion when the subject in question is a film). Being a nationally known film critic whose expertise is not usually questioned, Roger Ebert's reviews are normally listed at the very top of the "External reviews" section for every film on IMDb and he is also included in the "Top Critics" list on the aggregate review website Rotten Tomatoes. WP:UNDUE does not apply when using Ebert's reviews to show how any individual film was received because the determination (if there is one) of whether the film was received well or poorly will usually be made based on the percentage of positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, not based on Ebert's opinion of the film. Ie, Synecdoche, New York was named by Roger Ebert as the best film of the decade yet the Wikipedia article clearly shows a 67% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 67/100 on Metacritic while selectively citing both positive and negative reviews. The issue of WP:UNDUE would only be a problem if we decided to use Ebert's opinion as the ultimate authority on how well the film is received which we certainly do not as per the previous example. Please also keep in mind that we never attempt to even suggest to a reader that a film was good or that it was cinematic drivel, we simply quote others who have done so and we make sure that the ones we quote are authoritative, reliable and well-known to readers (WP:NF, among other things, presumes a film notable if it receives multiple reviews from "nationally known critics") and Ebert meets all of this criteria. His opinion should not be used to skew an otherwise neutral article, it's should not be used out of context and should not be used to deliver a statement of fact. It should only ever be used as an undisguised personal opinion and that's the exact purpose and usage of his reviews. If used in such context, there should be absolutely no reason to discontinue or reduce the amount of film articles where his opinion is used because such usage is encouraged by WP:RS and WP:MOSFILM and does not in any way violate WP:NPOV or any other policy or guideline that might be concerned with Ebert as a source. Big Bird (talk • contribs) 21:09, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about other people, but I find long paragraphs to make for tiresome reading. Paragraph breaks can be made using a hard return. Grins. – RJH (talk) 21:16, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
As Collectonian stated on the film project, I concur that reviews should be listed in chronological order. That should solve all potential issues. Hopefully. —Mike Allen 23:58, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Users are advised that His Grace the Duke of Waltham has announced the Silliest wikilink of the month awards at WT:LINK. There are five monthly winners (August–December 2009) and an overall winner for 2009. The Duke's private secretary, Harold Cartwright, has emphasised that no correspondence will be entered into regarding the awards: His Grace's decision is final. Tony (talk) 10:29, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

How's this for a silly wikilink? ;) -- œ™ 11:21, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
Ah the old "you can't click me no matter how you try" "link"... problem is: it isn't a link and so can't even be a silly link... :P --Jubilee♫clipman 15:42, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Help reading the artist's name on a drawing

Hello. I wonder if anyone can tell me what the artist's name on File:Head drawinga.gif is? To me it looks like H. A. Cronit, but I'm not finding anyone of that name. Angus McLellan (Talk) 14:24, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

I know this is not what you asked, but, do you believe we can use this image under WP:NFCC? The "purpose of use" stated on the rationale doesn't seem convincing to me. --Damiens.rf 14:57, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
I think it reads "Hal Ronk." Bus stop (talk) 15:06, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
"H A Cronk" with a C or a G under that?

New sockpuppet investigations clerks needed

Hi folks. We have a need for some new clerks at WP:SPI, the sockpuppet investigations process. At SPI, clerks help the checkusers maintain the page by keeping cases organized, archiving them, tagging confirmed socks, endorsing checkuser requests and occasionally declining them. All final decisions, of course, rest with the checkusers. Both administrators and non-administrators can be trainees and full clerks. For example, Nathan, one of the clerks who has been there the longest, is not an administrator.

A few things to keep in mind if you think you might like to help us keep the sock menace down: (a) we generally don't take trainees with a recent block log or history of disruptive editing, (b) we would prefer trainees who can be regularly active and (c) we often use the IRC channel #wikipedia-en-spi on Freenode, which can be accessed using one of these tools or links, for coordination purposes. Please e-mail myself, Nathan, MuZemike or PeterSymonds if you're interested.

On behalf of the SPI clerk team, NW (Talk) 03:53, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

British-Pathé news clips archive

I recently discovered the British-Pathé website/archive of thousands of news clips and stock video footage from the 1890s to the 1970s, and want to ask here where it would be best to post to draw people's attention to what looks like an under-used resource (about 130 pages link to that website at the moment), especially for the clips from the first half of the 20th century, where there is lots of historical stuff likely not available elsewhere. The website is here. As they are a proprietary site, selling access to the high-resolution versions of the clips (the free previews are low-resolution), what I propose to do is:

  • (1) Post to Wikipedia talk:External links/Noticeboard about when linking to these clips is appropriate (done here).
  • (2) Post to several WikiProjects that might be interested in searching for clips to add to the external links of some articles (here and here).
  • (3) Add some links to clips myself for some articles I've been working on (three diffs).
  • (4) Add the British-Pathé Film Archive to Wikipedia pages that list similar resources (not quite right, but tried here and here).

What I wanted to ask here was whether anyone knows what the page on Wikipedia is that lists similar news/video archives? And can anyone think of which WikiProjects would be interested in knowing about this? And are there other places on Wikipedia where I could tell more people about this resource? Carcharoth (talk) 06:27, 14 January 2010 (UTC) Updated with diffs and links. 08:12, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Third opinion on the use of large quotations in some lists

Hi, I don't know if this is the right place to ask for opinions on this, or even if there is really a right place for that. In any case, it can't hurt....

Quickly put, I would like some third part opinions about the use of large (complete) citations of Medal of Honors as used in:

Generally speaking, I believe the articles would look more encyclopedic without them. Maybe Wikisource is a better place for this amount of primary-source material.

Thanks, --Damiens.rf 12:19, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Looking at the examples that you've provided here, I don't see any problem. Those look like excellent articles, actually. If the text from the citations were the only text in the article, or even if it were the predominant text in the article, then I might be troubled by it, but I don't see an issue with these examples. My only real quibble is that the footnoting for the citations should probably not use the ref/cite system, but that's an unrelated formatting issue.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 12:33, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
But the quotations are the predominant text in the article! The first article is 44kb long with the quotations, but just 12kb without them (72% of quotations). The second one is 44kb long with the quotations, and also just 12kb without them (also 72% made of quotations). The third is 20kb with the quotations and 8kb without them (60% of quotations). --Damiens.rf 12:54, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
I don't share your view (obviously). I don't see the size of the text with or without the quotes as being meaningful of anything, other then the simple fact that the quotes contain a certain amount of text. The quoted text itself is visually distinct, making it easy enough to see the difference between the actual article content vs. the quoted citations. I don't see how removing the quoted text would make those articles better, and I actually think that removing it would make them worse due to the fact that it would be more difficult to understand what was being discussed.
Do you have a personal aversion to this text, or something? I'm scratching my head here slightly, wondering what your motivation in attacking the text of these award citations is.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 15:31, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
  • I would like to express my opinion to this regard. The articles are excellent and the text from the citations are well sourced and imperative to the article. They tell us exactly why the people mentioned are mentioned or included in the article in the first place. I would like to note that these questions may not be as innocent as they seem and that it is believed by some that User: Damiens has problems with Puerto Rican related articles, see: [2] and [3]. Antonio Martin (talk) 15:42, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
  • I think the quotes are too much, not necessarily in the context of being non-free content, but that we are not a memorial. It is certainly important to note who received these awards and for why, but the full quote of the "why" is so pontificating as to lose its encyclopedic value in this regard. --MASEM (t) 20:51, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
    FYI: the text for US military medal citations are PD, as documents of the US Federal Government.
    — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 22:25, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
    If they are PD, then move the quotes to a nice table over at Wikisource, and only include enough here to understand the merits, with sister links to the Wikisource information. --MASEM (t) 14:05, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
  • It seems to me a lot of the quoted material could be paraphrased without damaging the integrity of the article. The article as-is does seem to carry a lot of flavor of a WP:MEMORIAL rather than a typical encyclopedia entry. Shereth 22:42, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
    Well, I guess if you guys are really concerned about this then one of you should move this discussion to the talk page there and get the attention of the contributors to that page. I don't share the same concerns obviously, but I'm also not particularly interested in the article.
    — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 14:38, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
    • The point is to raise the issue to a larger audience, since the audience of those articles' talk pages is just the users that wrote the article themselves (whose opinions understandably favor the status quo). Also, the issue appears as a pattern in many articles, and not just one. --Damiens.rf 17:13, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
Why not move the quotes to Wikisource and link to them? Woogee (talk) 20:09, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
That's what I believe is the right thing to do. --Damiens.rf 20:26, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
  • The articles would be best served by leaving the citation intact. Were these not lists, your argument might carry more weight (though not enough, in my opinion). However, worrying about the size of the article is meaningless, and there really aren't any concerns as far as I can tell in regards to MOS or copyright. Simply put, removing them makes the articles worse. Moving them to Wikisource might also set a bad precedent... there are many thousands (possibly even five digits) of articles, mostly biographies, that contain the text of citation for awards given by the United States military... would we want to move them all? In any case, this is best in the turf of WP:MILHIST. I also have to point out that there is some discussion at Wikipedia:An#Damiens.rf_block_review regarding whether or not this issue is simply the latest in a pattern of harassment by User:Damiens.rf; while it doesn't have a direct impact on the issue, we should keep in mind the possibility of bad faith. bahamut0013wordsdeeds 20:17, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
  • Just how many articles on Wikipedia need to be improved- couldn't we attempt that instead? These lists read well- so let sleeping dogs lie. It is inventing an issue that does exist. I wouldn't want to pen such an article- but if I did I would really resent them being destroyed by wiki-meddling. Just how many prolific editors have we lost due to wiki harrassment? I keep on thinking of putting together a todo list of more important tasks that talented wiki wonks could do that don't involve pointless destruction.--ClemRutter (talk) 21:41, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
  • Just because there are other articles that need to be improved, it doesn't mean we shouldn't address this one now.
    I do believe there IS an issue with these articles are they are now, as User:Masem and User:Shereth expresses above, what goes inline with what is said on the guideline Wikipedia:Quotations. To "quote" the relevant passages:
    1. "...while quotations are an indispensable part of Wikipedia, try not to overuse them. Too many quotes take away from the encyclopedic feel of Wikipedia. Also, editors should avoid long quotations if they can keep them short."
    2. "...they also crowd the actual article and remove attention from other information."
    3. "Quotations should generally be worked into the article text, so as not to inhibit the pace, flow and organization of the article."
    4. "When not to use quotations: ": "the article is beginning to look like Wikiquote. (...) Wikipedia is, at its core, an encyclopedia, and not an opportunity to list the best and worst quotations pertaining to an article's subject."
    5. "If there are many quotations, please move them to Wikiquote and place a Wikiquote template on the article to inform readers that there are relevant quotations regarding the subject."
    6. "When not to use quotations": "the quotation is being used to substitute rhetorical language in place of more neutral, dispassionate tone preferred for encyclopedias. This can be a backdoor method of inserting a non-neutral treatment"
    Is this essay generally agreed or mostly ignored? --Damiens.rf 14:34, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Please, opinions based on the policy cited are welcome (conjectures about editor's intentions are not). I'll be doing the Wikisource thing within some days... any concrete objection? --Damiens.rf 14:51, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, there are very concrete objections, all mentioned above. There is even some discussion of appropriate changes to make discussed above.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 20:13, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
Before mentioning Wikipedia:Quotations, the discussion was mostly based on personal taste (on both sides), and salted with some opinions about editors and not about the content. I wish I could hear objections that take in account what is said on Wikipedia:Quotations.
What are the "appropriate changes" you mention? The move to Wikisource? --Damiens.rf 03:40, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

It's unfortunate the issue seems so poisoned that we can't really discuss it on arguments grounded on policies, guidelines, etc.. --Damiens.rf 13:37, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Language help

Alconétar Bridge currently applies for GA status and being the main contributor, I am looking for some help with how to put one sentence (lead, 2nd paragraph). Which version sounds best?

  1. The Alconétar Bridge carried the Roman road Via de la Plata, the most important north-south connection in western Hispania, on a length of almost 300 m across the largest river of the Iberian peninsula.
  2. The ca. 300 m long Alconétar Bridge lay at the junction of the Roman road Via de la Plata, the most important north-south connection in western Hispania, with the Tajo, the largest river of the Iberian peninsula.
  3. The ca. 300 m long Alconétar Bridge served as a crossing point for the Roman road Via de la Plata, the most important north-south connection in western Hispania, over the Tajo, the largest river of the Iberian peninsula.

Well, all a bit awkward, not? Gun Powder Ma (talk) 19:01, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I prefer a slightly modified version of 3) : "The almost 300 m long Alconétar Bridge served as a crossing point for the Roman Via de la Plata, the most important north-south connection in western Hispania, over the Tajo, the largest river of the Iberian peninsula." Can't put my finger on why I like it like that, but hey, I do. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 19:30, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
Take the 300 meter length out of the sentence and put it later in the introduction - it's one fact too many. Then I think the first sentence is best. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 19:31, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
"The Alconétar Bridge carried the Roman road Via de la Plata, the most important north-south connection in western Hispania across the largest river of the Iberian peninsula." is the one. Darrell_Greenwood (talk) 19:21, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

MedCab backlog

Just dropping a note here that the Mediation Cabal is backlogged, so we need help. Please see Wikipedia talk:Mediation Cabal#Backlog for details about the cases we have available. Thanks, The WordsmithCommunicate 17:52, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Editing from a DS

From the Wikpediholic test, I've gotten to thinking that this is possible. I'd like to do so. Any help? Buggie111 (talk) 01:18, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I think I remember that fr:User:Poulpy has edited with a DS (but I'm not sure, ask to him). Cdlt, VIGNERON * discut. 10:33, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Category problem (& mystery)

Hello: I've added a category to IExpress. But when I go to it (Category:Installation software) there is no link to the stated article. But if I log in Wikipedia it appears. If I log out Wikipedia it disappears again. Strange, isn't it? Thanks, --Edupedro (talk) 21:40, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Try bypassing your cache. Svick (talk) 21:43, 15 January 2010 (UTC
And/or a a server purge.  – ukexpat (talk) 21:46, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
I had tried bypassing the cache. The server purge has solved it. Thank you. --Edupedro (talk) 22:54, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Bot Approvals Group

Hey Wikipedians, I am here to advertise my nomination to be on the Bot Approvals Group. Take a look if you have some time. Tim1357 (talk) 02:22, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Major project possibly coming down the pike.

I have been speaking with one of the principals of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, an online-only collection of about 2,200 professionally written and well-sourced articles relating to the state of Georgia, and about 5,000 corresponding images, about potentially migrating their entire collection to Wikipedia. My rough estimate is that this would include at least a thousand new articles, and the remainder would need to be maintained in Wikipedia:WikiProject Georgia (U.S. state) project space until they could be fully merged in to the appropriate existing articles. In each case, proper attribution to both the origin project and the original authors would need to be maintained in the article, along with a link to the original article. Three to four of the authors who have worked on those articles would also likely be joining Wikipedia, and that WikiProject specifically, in order to watch these articles as they are transitioned into our system (I have already cautioned them not to expect to be able to assert ownership of the content once the articles are here, and that objections to changes will have to be addressed by discussion and generating a consensus). If the remaining principles of the New Georgia Encyclopedia are agreeable to our incorporation of their work, this could provide substantial new opportunities for Wikipedia to incorporate similar works, and could generate some good publicity regarding the reliability and utility of Wikipedia. They may wish to begin by allowing us to import a small number of articles as test cases, to see how they fare in terms of vandalism and other issues that may arise in this process. Please let me know if you have any particular concerns or thoughts about this, as I will hopefully be having a conference call with all of the principles within the next week. Cheers! bd2412 T 02:01, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Ace! @harej 02:05, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
Hopefully, but if they agree to this, we have to be able to pull this off in a professional manner - a clean, smooth transition, and a quick response to any vandalism (including, really especially, sneaky vandalism) to a set of articles the inclusion of which may garner some publicity. bd2412 T 02:12, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
Presumably the images would go to Commons? Is someone co-ordinating that side of things? Carcharoth (talk) 07:17, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
I may have jumped the gun on the images - they come with different licensing issues, so right now we're only looking at the articles themselves. bd2412 T 23:48, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
Here is a bit of a status update as well. The party with whom I have been speaking is circulating a memorandum of understanding among his colleagues spelling out the situation, particularly the attribution to which the NGE and its individual article authors would be entitled, and the treatment those articles would receive here on Wikipedia. I've been asked to recommend a handful of articles to be imported to Wikipedia or merged into existing Wikipedia articles, as a test of how this transition will work. I plan on picking about a dozen and proposing them to my counterpart this evening. bd2412 T 00:51, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
I had a conference call this afternoon with two parties to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and gave them a bit more insight into how things work here. This may be a process that takes a few days or a few weeks to iron out, but I feel that it is definitely moving in the direction of inclusiveness for the time being. bd2412 T 02:42, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
Regarding images for this project, according to the parties with whom I have spoken, there are a number of images on the NGE which are in the public domain, and which we are therefore free to copy. Clicking on any image in their system should bring up a page on that image including attribution information at the bottom. If that information indicates that the image was produced by the state of Georgia, it is free for us to copy. If not, we should leave it alone for now. bd2412 T 15:31, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Which Encyclopedia Britannica editions are in the public domain and available for inclusion into Wikipedia?

As most of us already know, much of the public domain Encyclopedia Britannica 11the Edition (1910-1911) has already been incorporated into Wikipedia (as noted in this discussion topic). However, looking at this Britannica article's edition listing shows us that all others editions up its 14th, which was published from 1929–1933, are already over 77 years of age, and may also be in the public domain in the U.S. Are any copyright experts able to elaborate on this? If the 12th thru 14th editions are available for inclusion into Wikipedia, that could become the basis for another important WP project. Best: HarryZilber (talk) 17:20, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Just because it is public domain, is that any reason really go make it a project to just grab the content and put it Wikipedia? Far better, to me, to have a well-crafted article using reliable sources, rather than juts copying old, and possibly outdated, content. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 17:35, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Only pre-1923 works are clear cut, if that's what you mean. Claims of any subsequent editions being PD in the US would rely on the EB not complying with the necessary copyright procedure, which seems unlikely. And remember, we only used the old EB because it was better than nothing, now where at 3 million they have a lot less to contribute. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 17:37, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
I wanted to kind of throw my hat into the same ring as Collectonian here. I think that we're fairly far past the point where mass migrations of materiel are helpful to Wikipedia. There was a time when doing that was a boon, but with 3,000,000+ articles now, and 1,000+ and climbing "featured articles" (setting aside, for the moment, the argument regarding whether that actually reflects quality or not), we just don't have much need for PD text based stub/start class articles any longer.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 18:26, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Are pre-1923 EBs out-of-date and useless? Excuse me.... I think not, especially for classical subject matters. Those articles may still have outdated views and perspectives, but for the most part the EB articles were assembled and written by top-notch researchers. Considering that now, even if you're a SME, it takes a good 10–20 hours to put together a half decent new article properly documented with cites and images –that is on something with a bit of complexity to it, not just drafting a few lines of text out of some other compendium. Now take the method of grafting text from a pre-1923 Britannica: Cut and paste: 5 mins., plus review and edit for language, style and current views, perhaps half an hour to two hours, with perhaps a total average of an hour per piece. My guess is that for an hour's work we're able to upgrade Wikipedia with a new article that Britannica likely spent at least 10-15 hours assembling and editing, so there's obviously a great time savings advantage to using a quality product like Britannica when its available as PD.
The whole point to Wikipedia is to offer the world the sum of all [legitimate] knowledge. Let's not reinvent the wheel if we don't have to, which would be indicative of an outmoded not invented here style of thinking. For your consideration.... Best: HarryZilber (talk) 21:16, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
I agree with that mentality, but do you have any specific examples? From a copyright POV, you're still looking at 11th and 12th editions, so you're a bit limited in scope. Most "timeless" topics will already have been integrated at a guess. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 21:34, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Its also easier to just copy/paste an ED article into a Word doc, throw on your name, edit the language and bit and call it a term paper. It doesn't make it a good idea, and I see absolutely no reason why Wikipedia should build itself by basically stealing content from old issues of ED on the claim that "well its public domain now, so why not!" -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 21:57, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

But of coarse its much easier to cut-and-paste! That's the whole point! -but remember that Wikipedia forbids original research, while in college our profs want somewhat the opposite (depending on your level and assignment) in order to actually make you work at thinking. That doesn't make articles copied into Wikipedia any less valid, because accurate, verifiable knowledge is Wikipedia's end product, not the fashion it was produced in.

As for examples, here are two 12th edition quick picks pulled at random out of Google; however I don't have any idea whether or not they're representative of that edition as I've never seen the three volumes involved:

I would guess that the latter article would fall into the 10-15 hour research time estimated earlier, while the former would probably easily exceed that. So again, why reinvent the wheel if you don't need to? Our 'salable' product to the lay public is accurate knowledge, not originality. Best: HarryZilber (talk) 23:01, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I had a look at the US dollar one. Now, while I am no expert, economics is an interest of mine. Essentially, it is an essay (I'm not even sure it ever included its own citations). Now, I thought as an experiment, I thought I'd have a go at getting it be the "history" section of a related article (ultimately the sort of thing EB could be useful for). And I just couldn't get a grasp on it at all. So much is temporal and speculative that even if I knew how many of the "facts" were still true - or, to put it better, represented present-day mainstream thought - I doubt I'd be able to find much that (dare I say it) I wouldn't have been better off writing myself to fit present-day references. I'd be interested to know if anyone could do better. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 13:43, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Haiti

I started a wikicommunity help action at the Dutch wiki, and imagine that we can help on all wiki's as humans helping humans. We can support all victims in Haiti by placing a small 'banner' on our User and Talk pages. I used this one:

I'd like to express my support, my compassion and my humanity to the victims of the human catastrophe in Haiti.
Please, donate to your local Aid Agency or the RED CROSS

Code:
<div style="margin:1; background:#074074; font-family: sans-serif; font-size:100%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #cef2e0; text-align:center; color:#FFFFFF; padding-left:0.4em; padding-top: 0.2em; padding-bottom: 0.2em;"><Big>I'd like to express my support, my compassion and my humanity to the victims of the human catastrophe in Haiti.<br/>'''''Please, donate to your local Aid Agency or the RED CROSS'''''</BIG></div>

I think from the humanitarian perspective we now need to support all those there suffering from this horrible catastroph. Let's step a bit over the 'wiki-only' horizon, and let's do a bit of support where we can! I hope this initiative will get noticed and followed by all other users! (You also might use other places like Facebook, Myspace etc for this!)

Yours Sincerely, Tjako (talk) 22:25, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for donating this banner. Ottawahitech (talk) 17:19, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Western sahara and Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic

Hello, i m sorry, i have some problems to speak english. I noticed that in Wikipédia people mixing between Western sahara (a territory) and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic‎ (proclaimed by the Polisario) which is an entity. But in the encyclopedia, is used both as if they were the same. According to the UN, In 1990, the General Assembly reaffirmed that the question of Western Sahara was under the decolonization process that the people of Western Sahara had not yet completed. And SADR is an entity not recognized by the UN and only by a number of countries that vary from year to year. The encyclopedia do the flag of the SADR in articles concerning the Western Sahara, which isn't neutral position.--Kafka1 (d) 04:37, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

You just tell us where, and we'll get it sorted like a shot. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 17:59, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
This flag must to be name File:Flag of SADR.svg or . Remove the flag in The Wikipedia:WikiProject Western Sahara and replaced a map of the territory and we can create a Wikipedia:WikiProject Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and appose it the flag. In the Wikipedia:WikiProject Western Sahara, the title is WikiProject Western Sahara - A collaboration about the region Western Sahara, the government the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and the native population of the Sahara, the Sahrawis. but in this region, there are two protagonists, Morocco, which controls and administers so (not recognized by the UN) and SADR,led by Polisario who is exiled to Tindouf in Algeria.
And we had the flag in western sahara until remove it by Reisio. I don't read all the articles about the subject in the english wiki. But i'll search and send you the articles or passages that pose a problem of neutrality.--Kafka1 (d) 22:05, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
POV warning: the territory of Western Sahara is currently the subject of a dispute, with both Morocco and SADR claiming sovereignty. The UN does not have a clear position, and so uses the neutral term Western Sahara. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 23:47, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
Indeed, the UN use the term of western sahara as a territory and not recognize the SADR though many tries of Algeria or South africa. But the flag belongs to SADR not Western sahara.--Kafka1 (d) 00:18, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
Yea, anyone jumping in here should be really careful to do some homework on the whole situation ahead of time. OrangeDog's "POV warning" is well heeded.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 23:51, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

NY Times content

The New York Magazine is reporting that the New York Times is going to cease providing free content and will install a "metered" payment system. Please see Wikipedia:Using WebCite for information on how to archive NY Times articles in Wikipedia before they disappear behind a paywall.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Blargh29 (talk • contribs) 23:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

WebCiteBOT operator notified. --Cybercobra (talk) 23:51, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Observation - quality enlargement of wikipedia in 2010 is much more polarised than the past

Lately I have been wondering that quality enlargement of wikipedia in 2010 is much more polarised than the past - namely that many many articles more or less stagnate unless there is a sudden concerted effort by one of a small percentage of editors - i.e more than ever we need dedicated content contributors (feel free to include this in any missive). I only base this on my impressions of the edits on my 6000-odd article watchlist. (might post at village pump about this...). Has anyone else felt this to be close to the mark or am I way off? Feel free to argue....Casliber (talk · contribs) 08:54, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't disagree, Cas. I've observed much the same on my watchlists. But I'm not sure how to cure it, or if indeed a cure is really needed. Firsfron of Ronchester 08:58, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, not sure either, but I was wondering whether others who edited found the same - admittedly we have a bunch of esoteric articles on our watchlist - but I also noted it in common/general articles too. Casliber (talk · contribs) 09:50, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
I've seen some content stagnation too. I'd say the project, in its wide market success, is beginning to rub up against its own de facto standard, wherein a very widely known and used product is often not nearly the best it could be, but rather has settled into being taken for the time being by most users, wisely or not, as a fit enough mix of "easy to get" and "yielding much of what's needed." There is risk in both gliding along with this and in trying to break out of it. Gwen Gale (talk) 14:16, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
Maybe they "more or less stagnate" because they're already pretty good and it's hard to improve them - in other words, maybe this is a good thing? Whereas a couple of years ago, there were still plenty of missing/stub/crap articles about reasonably important topics, so more of them kept improving? (Hey, my glass - it's half full!) - DavidWBrooks (talk) 14:23, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I'd say it is a "glass half full" kind of thing. Gwen Gale (talk) 14:30, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
It would be interesting to study this, if we could come up with a methodology.
One thing I've observed (but I don't have data to back it up) is that single-author articles, in low traffic areas, tend to remain almost unchanged for years, except for accretions of categories, interwikis, bot-added knick-knacks and so forth. If they are coherent and well-written to begin with. If they go unwatched, they may degrade over time; if watched, they remain stable. High-traffic articles are another thing entirely.
Speaking about my own core area, I rarely see large content edits to improve existing articles, although new articles appear from time to time (and some are very good). Most of the never-been-a-single-author crappy articles are just as crappy as they were four years ago. Ideally we could recruit a new batch of expert editors from somewhere, but they haven't been coming. Failing in that, and perpetually the optimist, maybe the way is to recruit interested people at Wikiprojects to identify those needy articles and have at them, one at a time. I've found that the most difficult articles to un-crappify are those that are riddled with citations -- you never know when you will collide with someone who will defend them: "hey! you removed cited information!" This sort of experience has made me personally more hesitant to rewrite existing crummy stuff, while filling in redlinks, however obscure, remains easy and fun. Antandrus (talk) 16:15, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
Yep. You never known when someone's going to come along and kick down your sandcastle -- or whether that lump of sand you spotted turns out to be someone else's sandcastle.--Father Goose (talk) 19:11, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

It was always like this, but a year or two ago one could still just about beleve that sooner or later someone would come along & improve the text, whereas by now one has realized they probably won't except on a glacial timescale. There's nothing more depressing than doing a diff over a couple of years, and a couple of screens, worth of changes, and seeing that the actual crappy text has barely been touched, & there's just MOS, format, categories, interwikis & the other peripheral stuff. But this is now the case for the majority of articles. Johnbod (talk) 19:37, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

This is where I at least see FA and increasingly GA as a solution of sorts - they act as a stable revision point one can refer to in time after articles degrade, or prospectively something to aim for to get an article to that point. i.e. so one can facilitate reversing of article erosion. Fascinating watching high traffic FAs erode over time though....Casliber (talk · contribs) 20:38, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
When I've asked Wikipedia readers why they've never edited (because almost everyone has not), a common response is that they don't have anything to add to what they read. I suspect that's because they don't start with good source material and see if it is included - but then, why would they take this approach?
More constructively, a suggestion: consider (say) a thousand randomly selected edits - of them, how many would involve (a) text and (b) a source, being added to (c) an article that has existed for more than 30 days?
Let's say, so I can do some calculations, just ten edits in a thousand meet the criteria of (a), (b), and (c). Then about 2000 older articles per day are being expanded in this "quality" way. (There are about 200,000 edits per day.) That means roughly 350,000 articles are being expanded (in a quality way) per year, assuming the improvements are spread equally (a heroic assumption), which means (again, assuming equal distribution) that older articles (3 million) are improved about once per 8 years. [If you play with the numbers yourself, remember that there are two assumptions - "quality expansion" edits per hundred total edits, and how clustered these are. If I'm too low on the first, I'm certainly too low on the second. And also remember that edits to relatively new articles - for example, the Haiti 2010 earthquake - should not be counted.] -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:31, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Indeed. But remember that in my experience most low-volume editors edits that do meet those criteria are very short - usually less than a sentence in what may be a article of several thousand sub-standard words. A single improved point does not go very far. Johnbod (talk) 14:50, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikimedia UK, the UK chapter, is organising an event called Britan Loves Wikipedia. Britain Loves Wikipedia is a cultural event bring organised in partnership between Wikimedia UK, the Collections Trust and the MLA (Museums, Libraries, Archives Partnership) starting on January 31 which will encourage members of the public to visit certain participating museums around the UK and photograph certain exhibits and make those photos available for use on Wikipedia, and other projects, through Wikimedia Commons. There will then be various prizes given out based on the pictures people produce. For this event, we need a logo. While we are getting quotes to have a professionally produced logo made, we would much prefer one produced by a member of the community. The community has produced excellent logos in the past and we are sure it will be able to provide us with one that is just as professional looking as what we could get by paying an enormous amount for it. If you would like to have a go, the brief is as follows:

  • The logo must include the words ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’
  • The logo does not necessarily need to feature the Wikipedia globe
  • The logo must work in black and white and colour
  • The logo must not be year-specific

Unfortunately we have very limited time so deadlines for this project are as follows:

  • Expression of Interest (and, ideally, a first draft of your idea or ideas) - 12:00 midday UTC Thursday, January 21 2010
  • Final Logo 23:59 UTC Sunday, January 24 2010

We understand that that doesn't give you much time, and we're sorry we didn't organise this sooner. Hopefully a few people can knock something up in that time! If you want to have a go, please let us know here. Thanks!

-- The Wikimedia UK Board

Posted by Seddon talk|WikimediaUK (WMUK Director) @ 15:51, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

hi

hi I am new here and don't know what I am doing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lion131996 (talk • contribs) 21:03, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi! Welcome to Wikipedia. I suggest you start with Help:Getting started. The most important page to read, though, is WP:BOLD. --Tango (talk) 22:16, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Can someone explain how Wikipedia has the results of a whole TV competition without being aired yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You_Think_You_Can_Dance_%28UK%29#Elimination_chart Apparently, wikipedia knows the results of this show without being over yet. How is that possible? --Leladax (talk) 21:08, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Magic meerkats bring us the information from the future. --Golbez (talk) 21:21, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
LOL Leladax, you do realize that they record those shows and air them later, right?
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 21:23, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Either that, or it's strange vandalism. It's all added here, by an IP with no reference given. The shows are live - they even feature phone-in votes. I'm going to revert. --Tango (talk) 21:47, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, I think it's far more likely to be someone just making up a list, rather than it being pre-taped. It's difficult to pre-tape a show that, I believe, involves viewer voting. :P --Golbez (talk) 21:50, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Yes, it being pre-taped is clearly wrong, but the meerkats are still in the running! ;) --Tango (talk) 22:14, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Symbolism article could use some help

I don't know much about symbolism, but it seems to be a rather important topic and the article has more than 800 links to it. I just cut some fat from the article (belonged in Symbol, if anywhere), and now there is hardly anything left. Anyone want to take a whack at expanding it? Perhaps a specific project should address it, but I am not really sure what it falls under... psychology, anthropology, philosophy, evolutionary biology? It is a pretty wide-ranging topic. It's even listed as a literary technique. — Epastore (talk) 23:05, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Some Stats about Wikipedia BLPs

I read these at On Wikipedia and thought I'd share them with folks here as they're pretty interesitng.

80.7% of BLPs are of men (and thus 19.3% are of women). 48.5% of BLPs are about subjects from Canada, the United States, or the UK. (see Who's On Wikpedia: Part 2). Personally, I think this is shocking and Wikipedia needs to diversify its coverage a little more.

Furthermore, 36.7% of all BLPs are of athletes (and out these 39% are of soccer players). There are more BLPs of soccer players than of politicians, and more soccer BLPs than BLPs of all businessmen, lawyers, government officials, and scholars (see Who's on Wikipedia: Part 3). What can we do to address these issues and help Wikipedia diversify? HH Nobody (talk) 18:06, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

What this tells me is that we've far too many articles on soccer players, but that's nothing new... –xenotalk 18:08, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
No, quite the reverse, we don't have enough BLPs of businessmen, lawyers, government officials, and scholars etc. And let's not forget that soccer is the most popular and most widely played sport in the world, so the statistics are not that surprising. – ukexpat (talk) 18:11, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Indeed, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have so many soccer biographies, but it's unfortunate that there aren't as many biographies of other sorts of people (politicians, businessmen, etc.). HH Nobody (talk) 18:16, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
I'm with Ukexpat and HH Nobody here. Even if a bio article is a stub that simply says "this person is a graduate of <whatever school>, and did/worked for/wrote/sung/whatever" that's better then nothing. Not that Wikipedia should turn into the white pages, or "Who's who", but if someone is legitamately mentioned (or mentionable) in a non-biographical article here, then they should at least have a stub here as well. Those types of articles are especially helpful in answering "who the heck is that?" type of questions, particularly when it comes to things such as fringe theories. As a bit of an editorial aside to this issue though, I firmly believe that there is a genuine fear of BLP's among many editors. There is a certain (*ahem*) block of editors/commentators on or associated with Wikipedia who have, in my opinion, used Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt/propaganda tactics in order to create a chilling effect on Wikipedia. The damage this has caused to the encyclopedia is born out by the stats here and similar ones elsewhere. It's really unfortunate, but... what can you do, you know?
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 18:40, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
The information about a person does not need to be in a stand alone entry to be available to readers, so placing the content in a different article works just as well with out introducing the additional problems with up keep that come from having thousands of articles not on anyone's watchlist. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 19:23, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
I think that this attitude is a mistake, from an organizational perspective. I understand where it comes from, and I appreciate the fact that it's offered as a compromise, but there are significant side effects to it which I think outweigh any added benefit. The largest issue is that the same people could easily be mentioned in several places, even if their notability is minor and limited to a certain subject area. Articles tend to grow, split, merge, etc..., and even if a person is only ever mentioned in a handful of articles it's still better to have their various personal details in one central location (even if it only makes up 10k or less). Something that may be more persuasive to those of you concerned with the harm aspects of BLP's is that integrating biographical information on minor people into a larger article makes identifying subtle inaccuracies and attacks much more difficult. There's nothing inherently wrong with a "stub" article, other then that it's nice for them to expand when they can legitimately do so.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:42, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
No, it is no more of a problem to see problematic content since changes to an article can be noted by looking at diffs one at a time. The chance of copyright violations, hoax content, and stale material being seen is greater if the material in placed in an article that people actually edit and have on their watchlist because they are interested in working on them. Once the article is not being edited by anyone then the chance that vandalism or poor quality content will not be noticed promptly by anyone is greater regardless of the size of the article. Since many of the BLP articles are abandoned by their creator if they were created from a list, then no one is looking at them. If you look at the article stats then you see that many of these are of little to no interest to anyone. So while their existence allows for stale, inaccurate information, or even defamation, there is little gain from having them on as stand alone entries. The burden of monitoring then has overwhelmed the community is the reason for their poor state. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 10:33, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
Ah, I see what you mean. I guess, in the end, I'm just not convinced that the problem is any better or worse one way or the other. There are plenty of non-biographical articles which receive minimal attention as well, for one thing... we just have slightly different perspectives here, is all. Even assuming that some statistics or something would show that your view that keeping biographical elements in non-biographical articles is "more correct" (barring the possibility that there is some extreme difference, which I doubt based on anecdotal evidence), that still creates a significant organizational workload on all of us, in that we need constantly need to determine where that biographical information is located for links, verification and maintenance, and in order to watch over it. I think that the costs of the "fold it into subject articles" approach simply outweighs the benefits, in most cases (likely not all).
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:29, 16 January 2010 (UTC)


It is a misnomer to characterize these BLPs as articles or biographies. Way too many of the entries are short stubs without any sources that were made from a sports roster. Many of these BLPs are desperate need of sourcing and updating. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 18:45, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
But is that any worse than the hundreds of one or two-line article stubs about communities in France and elsewhere? My view is no, they are all legitimate stubs. – ukexpat (talk) 18:58, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Every BLP on Wikipedia is an opportunity to cause harm to the subject, either unwittingly or deliberately. The (potential) consequences of this are more (potentially) harmful to an individual than to a community in France. This is not an attempt to incite "fear, doubt, and uncertainty", it is simply a recognition that those BLPs ultimately represent a real, live person whose reputation, livelihood, family relations, self-image, etc may be affected by the existence and content of a biography on one of the most-accessed websites on the internet. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 15:41, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
See, this is where you guys loose me on this issue. I think that the gist of the BLP policy is important (vital, even), but this viewpoint takes that issue and radicalizes it into a political ideology which... well, it's lead up to the current state of affairs where even people like me, who support some sort of control when it comes to BLP's, and seen as "the enemy". You're not alone, but those of you who hold this radicalized viewpoint are definitely in an extremist group.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 18:48, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
I'm going to suggest that you are the one using polarizing language here, not me and whoever "those guys" are. I don't think there is anything radical about recognizing that every BLP is the representation of a real live human being and that what is written here has the potential to have harmful and lasting effects in the real world. What is extreme about that? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 19:00, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
It is important to keep in mind that articles on Wikipedia should be about people in the public eye already. Articles about myself or yourself (assuming that neither one of us is a politician or anything like that), containing our resume for example, shouldn't be here on Wikiepdia, and for more reasons then the BLP concerns. An article about a person involved in legal issues, moderately high profile academics, etc... they should have some sort of entry here however. I understand and even agree with the point that "no information is better then inaccurate information", but where there is accurate information (albeit minimal), then we should have that.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:20, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
I'm not sure it makes a difference who the article is about, famous or not, and I don't think that is what we were discussing. I'm trying to establish what you think is radical about the statements I've made here. Do you agree with the simple statement that "every BLP is the representation of a real live human being and that what is written here has the potential to have harmful and lasting effects in the real world"? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 19:30, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
You're right, I sort of sidestepped/changed the topic. To answer the direct question: Yes... and no. The manner in which that statement itself is written is polemic, in that it seems designed to be inflammatory, and it conveys a certain invective. Your pointed question about my belief in the statement is a perfect example of the radicalization of this issue. The implication is that if I don't agree then there must be something wrong with me personally, and simply asking the question creates a sense of alarm along the lines of "here's someone to watch". To be blunt about it, working on anything related to BLP's scare the living shit out of me, including discussions such as this one. There's a poisoned atmosphere surrounding the whole issue, and I'm all but certain that I'm not the only one to sense it. This sort of situation is not conducive to either collegial collaboration, or finding a good solution to the actual issue(s).
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 23:34, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
Ohm's law, thanks for your candour, but I am a loss to understand why you have taken the stance that you have. You labelled me and my comments as "extremist" and "radicalized" - I'm just trying to determine why you said this and what you mean by it. I'm not trying to trick you or vilify you, just understand you. It is a bit difficult to have a discussion if you are going to describe my statements as "polemic", "inflammatory", "invective", and "pointed", especially when there is absolutely no basis for that in what I have written. I don't know where you are getting your ideas from, but it isn't my words. Reasonable discussion and the ability to respectfully disagree is the basis for collegial collaboration and finding solutions, not the destroyer of it.
I think that "every BLP is the representation of a real live human being and that what is written here has the potential to have harmful and lasting effects in the real world" is an unbiased statement and very similar to what is contained in WP:BLP. It might be helpful if you could just say what you think is wrong with it instead of labelling it. I'm not trying to "trick" you here - I'm interested to know what you are thinking. If we can't discuss something this basic, let alone how or if we address this issue, there's something really wrong here. Feel free to respond on my talk page if you prefer. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:37, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
I appreciate that. I should make it clear that I'm not trying to make personal statements about yourself, or anyone else in particular. There's a group effect that's occurring here, essentially a political movement, which unfortunately has extended it's reach far beyond the confines of Wikipedia itself. It's tough to really make statements on this topic because of everything surrounding the whole issue, which has been building up for quite some time now. See, I largely agree with what your view appears to be, but there's quite a bit of unwanted baggage that comes along with that view. This really shouldn't be such a problematic area, but there is a vocal minority to whom it seems are unwilling to be satisfied, and we collectively seem to have reached a polarized state where collegiality is near impossible due to those bad actors (in my view). I don't feel burnt, or slighted, or anything like that, it's just that when the "other side" refuses to even have a two sided discussion there's nowhere really left to go.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:50, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
I think I get what Ohm's Law is referring to. I sometimes get the feeling there is a squad of Gestapo watching BLPs like hawks, ready to pounce and beat the daylights out of anyone who has the audacity to put a comma in the wrong place in one of their super-sacred BLP articles. Editing a BLP is scary. Roger (talk) 18:01, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Maybe if we had an stricter notability criteria for areas like athletes (and other popular famous people), we would be wasting more time writing and maintaining articles about politicians, business people and non-anglo-saxon folks.

The mentality of WP:NOTPAPER is usually broken in that, from the fact that we're not limited by the availability of paper, it infers that we have infinite resources for writing articles, reviewing, fixing, tagging, categorizing, discussing... --Damiens.rf 18:53, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Not sure I follow that; it's not like the crappy articles block us from doing good work, is it?
The fact that other folks make a zillion articles about people/topics that you (or I) regard as piffle doesn't stop you (or I) from creating and maintaining articles that we think WP needs. Just ignore the crap and work on the worthwhile.
("Stricter notability criteria" translates into "lots more time arguing about deleting, instead of creating and improving articles", I think.) - DavidWBrooks (talk) 19:00, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Not really true in that the subjects of articles do raise a fuss if their articles are inaccurate or vandalized, so people need to watchlist them, and keep them free of problematic edits. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 19:07, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Exactly. My point was that it "stops" them from contributing or improving relevant material. For instance, instead of collecting and posting stats for every second-class Saudi-Arabia soccer player, an user could be improving the quality of the article on Saudi-Arabia national team. There's also those editors who really prefer to work on categorizing, tagging, sourcing, and generally cleaning up existing articles, an they work would have a greater net impact if they didn't have to waste their time with minor semi-relevant topics. --Damiens.rf 19:11, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Yes. I feel an ethical obligation to assist in keeping our content accurate and written from a neutral point of view. And to make sure that we hare not using copyrighted material. When Wikipedia creates more articles than we can maintain, then we let more and more poor content fall through the cracks. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 19:23, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
You know, it's always struck me as a particularly arrogant form of presumption to espouse viewpoints expressing an opinion which at least suggests that you know what's best for other editors to work on, think about, or pay attention to; and that it's OK to have an "I personally need to protect the site!" mentality. If it's not obvious, I support DavidWBrooks post above completely. The subject of vandalism is important, but we shouldn't allow that to overwhelm our contributions here. For one thing, it's important to realize that there are many others here with us, who are perfectly capable of seeing and correcting even subtle vandalism. It's also important to realize that quite often vandalism survives for long periods of time because it's simply unseen, and people should realize that if it hasn't been noticed for a long period of time then no real harm is possible (I'd like to point out the caveat that off-wiki notice, or lack thereof, is an important consideration as well with regards to this point). I'm not arguing that we should be insensitive towards the issue either, just that we shouldn't allow "the BLP problem" to (continue to) take over Wikipedia and create such a polarized polemic amongst us.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:34, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
It is my view that someone needs to speak up for the subject of articles that are not editors and who have their articles vandalized, or are in a poor state. I didn't start the thread, but think that it is important to frame the issue accurately. And I do find it worrying when vandalism, hoax articles, or attack articles are found by people outside of Wikipedia instead of by us because it means that our quality control is lacking. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 19:46, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
"if it hasn't been noticed for a long period of time then no real harm is possible" - That is the silliest thing that I've heard in a while. Why would the harm have to happen immediately? Often we don't notice until the harm happens and its pointed out (usually by the person harmed). By continuing to act as we are now, the BLP problem will still take over Wikipedia, in the form of the project being so overwhelmed with so many unmaintained, poor quality bios that we have to take more drastic action than we would even consider now. It doesn't cease to be a problem just because we stop talking about it. Mr.Z-man 01:55, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
Those are the ones that you notice, and since you're sensitive to the issue those instances have an inordinate influence on your perceptions (this is basic armchair psychology which isn't at all unusual). People tend to make a big deal out of unnoticed instances as well, in that they actively attempt to raise the profile of instances which stood for long periods of time ("look at what I found!") ...which, incidentally, could easily create "harm" where none was going to happen. Things like this also create honey-pots for vandals. We've amped up bio articles so much over the years now, that even minor stub articles are valid vandalism targets because the vandals know that they'll receive the attention that their seeking. Part of the problem here is also technical, in that we don't really know what is being watched and what isn't. That's the main reason that I was recently suggesting that some sort of tracking should be instituted which could "turn off" the watchlists of inactive users. That way the tools which show unwatched pages would contain meaningful data. The point being, there are plenty of solutions to the concerns raised which fall far short of changing some of the fundamental aspects of en.wikipedia, and there seems to be plenty of interest in helping to mitigate the problems (myself included, incidentally). I can see how this was turned into such an issue early on, but we shouldn't let ourselves fall into (or continue to remain within) a dogmatic trap here.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:13, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
Well we do have WP:ATHLETE which has some more detailed inclusion criteria. – ukexpat (talk) 18:58, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Stale, inaccurate articles are a too frequent result of the current guidelines in this area. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 19:03, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Sure. Every single professional athlete is notable!, which is not the case for Actors, Teachers, musicians, diplomats, outlaws or porsntars. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Damiens.rf (talk • contribs)
"we don't have enough BLPs of businessmen, lawyers, government officials, and scholars etc." - I would disagree with that statement. I would much rather have fewer BLPs on marginally notable athletes than more BLPs on marginally notable lawyers. Mr.Z-man 19:25, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
You might prefer that, but surely there is room for both? As far as I know server space is not a problem. – ukexpat (talk) 21:50, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps that wasn't especially clear. I'd rather have fewer BLPs for marginally notable people regardless of occupation. The issue is not server space, its maintainability. Most such articles are poorly watched, often poorly sourced, and a disaster waiting to happen. Mr.Z-man 01:55, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
I entirely agree about the maintainability issue. If the need for maintenance increases faster than editors' appetites for doing it, the issue will get worse, so we need to think about ways to limit the maintenance burden. If a BLP article isn't adequately watchlisted, maybe it ought to be semi-protected automatically? - Pointillist (talk) 03:27, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

I see - I had missed the point. Your concern is not that there are lots of crappy articles, as I had thought, but that there are lots of crappy articles about living people that might cause them to sue WP or get their country to pass laws limiting it, or get so upset they do something bad to themselves or others. I hadn't thought of that, but I'm also not sure what to do about it. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 16:32, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

It's not clear what "adequately watchlisted" means; an article could be watchlisted by a dozen people, all of whom are inactive, or by three people who are active, so simply counting editors isn't enough. In any case, assuming some sort of consensus criteria, one option would be have the software automatically put the page into Flagged Revision status, so that any change would need to be approved by an authorized reviewer. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:46, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
The principle is that if a WP page is not frequently viewed, adequate watch-listing is the main defense against inaccuracy; but I was trying to leave the definition of "adequate" open for discussion. IMO your "three people who are active" is a great starting point (I assume "people" excludes anonymous IP addresses). For non-BLP pages that are descended from Category:Lists of people, the minimum count of watchers should be higher (because it is relatively easier to insert vandalism into those articles without detection). - Pointillist (talk) 23:21, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Easy tool to help

I've been meaning to post this here for days now, but keep forgetting. I'm fairly certain that there are many of you who are involved in the "BLP problem" who already know about this, but there are probably many who are not (and several who may not have thought of this methodology). Since most BLP's are categorized into the Living people category, it's easy enough to use Special:RelatedChanges to keep track of what's up without cluttering your watchlist with 400,000+ articles. Feel free to copy the link to your userpage, or bookmark it, or whatever else would be convenient for you (the URL is all you really need, but I provided a beautified plainlnks presentation for those who might want it). The url encoded query travels really well, so you should be able to do what you want with it. Enjoy!
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 21:17, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Only 19.3% of Biographies of Living Persons are of women?

Here is an example of a Wikipedia article about a female subject which is in danger of being removed for lack of citations at Wikipedia: Ethel deNagy Gabriel (born November 16, 1921) is one of America's first female record producers in American music business... Ottawahitech (talk) 14:41, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

It has been flagged as unreferenced for nearly three years but no-one has proposed deletion, so it is probably not in immediate danger. But now you've spotted it, why not "be bold" and fit it? - Pointillist (talk) 15:13, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
Given historical reality, I'm not sure that this imbalance is ever going to be redressed so that the balance is exactly 50:50. One thing that can be done is improve the biographical articles of notable but perhaps overlooked women. I also know there are some books dedicated to short but concise biographies about notable women (like a who's who book), many of whom aren't in wikipedia yet. Perhaps a list of those could be assembled under the Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles?—RJH (talk)
Here's a good place to start: Wikipedia:WikiProject Gender Studies/Feminism Task Force/Projects/NWHP biographies. Kaldari (talk) 22:50, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Ghostworld rebecca.jpg

I ran into this image: File:Ghostworld rebecca.jpg and checked the article. Now, while the use may well fall under fair use, it's not well handled on the image description page. For it doesn't display information on the author, the source (an url to a file found on the net is not a proper source attribution), etc.

I don't know much about it, but perhaps someone could take a look and fix the missing details. The uploader was blocked on 2007 for copyright violations (thus perhaps another look at his uploads may be in order). -- m:drini 18:04, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Every playmate is notable

Some recent afd discussion have raised attention to a notability guideline that says that every Playboy playmate is indisputably notable. This is item 3 of Wikipedia:PORNBIO.

I believe this is arbitrary and problematic in that in many cases it goes directly against WP:BLP1E and the overall spirit on WP:N. --Damiens.rf 04:59, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Then you should take up the issue @ WT:Notability_(people) --Cybercobra (talk) 05:58, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

data.gov.uk launches, has wikipedia compatible license (cc-by-3.0)

Lots of yummy UK data is now released on http://data.gov.uk/ Much to my amazement the terms and conditions say:,

"We have aligned these terms so that they are interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. This means that you may mix the information with other Creative Commons licensed content to create a derivative work that can be distributed under any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence."

Wowzers! --h2g2bob (talk) 01:38, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

The usefulness of this is limited by the fact that data.gov.uk doesn't seem to hold a lot of the data itself but links to other sites. For example, health map Wales links to www.infoandstats.wales.nhs.uk, the terms of which are clearly not CC-BY compatible. Still, it's nice of them to make a gesture. - BanyanTree 07:03, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

PD image question

Does anyone know the answer to this? Do images claimed as PD on Wikipedia have to be PD in the U.S., or is it enough that they be PD in their country of origin? I'm not talking about the Commons, which is discussed here. I'm asking only about Wikipedia. SlimVirgin TALK contribs 03:30, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Found the answer, thanks to Jappalang, which is yes, they have to be PD in the U.S., per WP:IUP#Public domain. SlimVirgin TALK contribs 04:49, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Should images uploaded before 2004 have disclaimers?

I left a note on that topic at Wikipedia_talk:GFDL_standardization#Images_uploaded_before_2004 but maybe it is not a place others look very often so just wanted to leave a note here.

My thought is basicly that if disclaimers was first introduced in February 2004 then an image uploaded before could NOT have disclaimers. Example File:Ac.adamattemple.jpg. --MGA73 (talk) 12:46, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Problems with citation templates

They seem to have become part of the landscape. The problems associated with their use are being discussed here. Tony (talk) 11:09, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

More general, already somewhat advanced discussion already in progress at Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Wikipedia Citation Style --Cybercobra (talk) 12:08, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

userpage for selfpromotion?

Resolved
 – User page deleted as spam. – ukexpat (talk) 01:51, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Is it accepted, that User:Crystal Phuong uses his userpage for advertisement? - as far as I see she is active in several electronis platforms to become known, and she has no other contributions. Some of her picture are qualified as "unsourced" in the commons Plehn (talk) 21:50, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Clearly an unacceptable use of a user page, now tagged for speedy deletion. – ukexpat (talk) 21:58, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
WP:NOTMYSPACE seems like it could definitely apply here. --Cybercobra (talk) 21:57, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Article in French

I have a pdf article in French that I would like to use as a source for a dermatology-related article. Is there anyone that could help me translate it? ---kilbad (talk) 22:44, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Some of the Wikipedians listed at Wikipedia:Translation/French/Translators should be willing to translate French Wikipedia articles into English. I guess you could ask some of them, even when you want to translate non-Wikipedia article. Svick (talk) 23:01, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

RFBAG

I am currently standing for BAG membership. Your input is appreciated. ⇌ Jake Wartenberg 02:52, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Coach Station or coach station?

I don't pretend to know enough about this really to go and start making reverts and changes, but an editor is changing many many bus and coach stations to lower case titles. The biggest coach station I know is Victoria in London - this though, has managed to remain Victoria Coach Station.

As this is the name of the station, capital C and S for Coach Station seems justified in the title. Newcastle coach station, Bristol bus station, Birmingham coach station to name a few, have all been changed recently. A quick search of google would suggest that most sources, newspapers included, use capital letters to denote coach stations. National Express website also uses capitals for their coach stations, ie. "Bristol Bus Station".

Also, is it a tad controversial moving all these pages without any mention or discussion on the articles talk pages - I know that in cases of train stations, ie. Talk:Birmingham New Street railway station, where "railway" has been added against consensus, and Station changed to station, it has kicked up a bit of a storm as the actual name of the station is "Birmingham New Street Station"... "If it ain't broke don't fix it" or "fixing something for the sake of fixing it" comes to mind.

Any thoughts? Willdow (Talk) 17:22, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

With regard to railway stations there is a long established naming convention for these articles that a few users complain about with regard to a few specific stations. None of them ever seem to want to discuss the naming convention, let alone to build a consensus to change it. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (UK stations).
I am not aware of a similar convention for bus stations, but certainly for Bristol, Victoria and Nottingham (the only ones I'm familiar with) usage is consistently capitalised. Thryduulf (talk) 18:52, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

File:Venezuela (orthographic projection).svg

The Venezuelan-only POV that parts of Guyana belong to Venezuela is being used in this map as if it is an established fact. The Venezuela article needs a more NPOV map. Am I wrong here? Woogee (talk) 00:49, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

The same problem occurs in the map being used for Argentina re the Falklands. Shouldn't these maps at a minimum be labeled that claims to the areas mapped are disagreed with? Woogee (talk) 00:51, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
I thought it was pretty clear from the lighter green color for disputed areas. Is that not enough? Ntsimp (talk) 14:18, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
It seems problematic to me to be including disputed territorial claims in the "main map" used on these articles. In the case of Guayana Esequiba, the territory is occupied and governed by Guyana and the Venezuelan claim is not recognized by the international community. The same can be said with regards to the Argentina/Falklands situation. I find the Argentina map further problematic, what with the inclusion of the Antarctic territorial claim; the United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Norway, Australia and Chile all have territorial claims in Antartcica but these claims are not displayed on the map used in their respective articles. Only Argentina's article has the map including this territory, and in doing so smacks of a nationalist POV/boosterism. It would be my preference that disputed territorial claims not be displayed on a country's main map (the one used in the infobox/at the top of the article) at all. Shereth 14:49, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

top rolling papers

im older user of top and its papers my eyesight suffers just a sugestion how about making the glue side easier to see mayby a color change? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.114.120.213 (talk) 03:52, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Um, we don't make rolling papers, we're an encyclopedia. You would seem to be in the wrong place. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 13:22, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Problem with "quintuple"'s origin

I've asked a question at the bottom of Talk:Tuple that nobody bothered. Some expert please respond. Georgia guy (talk) 23:48, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Britain Loves Wikipedia

Britain Loves Wikipedia, a free photography competition / scavenger hunt, launches this Sunday at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and then runs in 21 museums across the UK throughout February! Full details are on the WMUK blog, and http://www.britainloveswikipedia.org/ . If you're around the UK this next month, then please come along and join in. :-) Any questions, please let me know. Mike Peel (talk) 23:20, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Naming of the Cantonese (Yue) article

We're just doing the runaround at Talk:Cantonese (Yue) and desperately need outside editors, since the article wildly gets renamed every which way every other month.

70.29.210.242 (talk) 04:49, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Ethics of using long-abandoned userspace drafts

I recently created the redirect Cecil Godfrey Rawling to point at Cecil Rawling, and while checking "what links here" for the redirect, I came across User:David Kernow/List of Royal Geographical Society Gold Medal recipients (20th century). I went to that user's talk page to tell them that a redlink on their list had turned blue, but they have not edited since June 2007. At some point, I might be interested in taking the list that he started and finishing it and moving it into article space. I would leave a note on his talk page first, and also try e-mailing him, but if I get no response to either of those attempts, what should I do? Carcharoth (talk) 01:33, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Nobody truly owns anything on Wikipedia, not even user space pages. You can take the page and move it into article space. It is not a nice thing to do if somebody is working on the draft, but for a user who left years ago I see no problem. --Apoc2400 (talk) 14:43, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
Maybe you could credit him/her in the edit summary or Talk page when you incorporate it. Anthony (talk) 09:00, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
In fact you must credit the user in the edit summary if you incorporate creative content (such as prose) to legally comply with our licensing. If its just adding list items, then it's only polite to do so. :) – Toon 16:36, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Ideally, the page itself should just be moved into mainspace with the prior edit history serving as attribution. –xenotalk 16:38, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Failing that, copy, and put a link to the original attribution on the talk page. --Kim Bruning (talk) 16:51, 29 January 2010 (UTC) +imho, userspace drafts should be banned, and deleting drafts in mainspace should be banned for the first 7 days of the draft... unless obvious vandalism. This would improve the wiki-effect considerably
Kim, all mainspace articles are drafts. WP:NOTFINISHED. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 16:43, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Charlotte High School (Punta Gorda, Florida)

Many seemingly POV editors (most coming from Punta Gorda, Florida based IP addresses) seem to object to the "Criticisms" section at Charlotte High School (Punta Gorda, Florida), which basically just points out, with references, what Charlotte High School is commonly known for. It's been on the article for quite some time, and has never been contested by an experienced editor. I've even seen it mentioned by members of Tarpon related Facebook groups (some actually agreeing with it). The problem is I'm POV myself, so perhaps a neutral party could provide an opinion in this matter, or make suggestions? PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 20:46, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

  • I'm not suprised there are objections. It's a section filled with weasel words, with vague sweeping statements attached to references that don't even come close to being reliable sources. For example, much of the statements are referenced to "Greatschools Inc.", a website anybody can contribute to (making it unsuitable as a source). The link lists 20 "Parent Reviews", some a few years old. Even if it were a reliable source, twenty views is not representative to an institution for nearly two thousand students. On top of that, many of them state "Submitted by a student". This review gives you an idea of the value of the source: "Posted April 26, 2008: I'd give this one a much lower rating, but since I've never attended this school directly, and it is indeed the rival school, I'm gonna be fair and rate this one as average. If you're wondering how I can rate this, it's because I know people that go there and ..." Quite.
    It violates at least two core content policies WP:NPOV Tooltip Wikipedia:Neutral point of view and WP:V Tooltip Wikipedia:Verifiability. It doesn't surprise me for a moment some online forums contain people chatting about a high school with some thinking it "sucks" and some that it's "peachy"; neither particularly belongs in the school's article. I'm sorry to be so blunt. Really, the section has nothing salvageable. My only suggestion is to make sure it doesn't make its way back into the article. I see no reason for any standalone Criticism section. What's needed is for the article to accurately reflect reputable third-party sources as well as primary ones, such as the State Dept. of Education, without undue weight, giving a balanced treatment of the topic. –Whitehorse1 22:46, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
    • The problem with school articles in general is that we tend to sugar coat them with a wall of achievements, and Wikipedia becomes sort of a free advertising service for educational facilities. Both this article and Port Charlotte High School included something negative about the institutions at one point, and now neither of them do. PCHS made GA status with the criticisms in place without contest until a POV editor from Charlotte County insisted on its removal. The same is now occuring on CHS's article. If you don't mind a bit of WP:OR, I can tell you from experience that CHS has long been criticized by students and parents of that school for their academics as seen at Greatschools AND Urban Dictionary. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 20:03, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
      • Yea, well, "Opinions are like..." I have to agree with Whitehorse1, based on a breif glimpse at the article history. Wikipedia:Criticism sections contains generally good advice, which is directly applicable here, as well. Criticism sections are not "against the rules" or anything, but any opportunity to integrate their content into the other content should be taken, and some should just be removed. Besides that, in this specific case, the assertions in the criticism section in that article ought to be easily sourcable to local news, if they are indeed legitimate concerns.
        — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 21:09, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
        • I'm beginning to agree that integration would be a better option, but the likely WP:COI user that first removed the section without discussion has now removed the brief mention in the academics section. I'll look for a news source (I think I remember it being mentioned in the Sun, don't remember which edition). PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 23:40, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Extra participants requested

I've posted a requested move at Talk:List of mass murderers and spree killers by number of victims: Mass murders#Requested move; requested moves tend to get very few participants, so I'm asking for a few extra commentators on this one. Thanks.--Father Goose (talk) 20:02, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Former contributors survey: interim results

The Community Health task force (formed as part of Foundation's strategic planning process) proposed that a survey be given to former contributors to fill out in order to better understand why they are no longer editing.

Philippe notified us that very preliminary interim results are available.

Former contributors survey:preliminary interim results.

Information from this survey can help us better understand user editing experiences and might be useful for developing a better experience for new editors so they get off to a good start, and stick around and improve their articles. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 19:51, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Not too many surprises. I am pleased to see that the majority did not leave because of difficulties with users or usability, but simply because of external factors or Wikipedoholism. Maybe those afflicted by the latter could stand additional help, like an odometer warning them at configurable edit count/session length thresholds. Also, many will return, if I read the tables correctly. :) Paradoctor (talk) 23:53, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

New tool to generate citations from Google Books

Reftag

I have made a web tool that automatically makes a citation based on a Google Books url. Input a URL for a book, and the tool will pull information such as title, authors, publisher and isbn from Google Books. It will also produce a {{cite book}} template that can be copied and pasted right into an article. As a web tool, no installation required.

The tool is here: http://reftag.appspot.com/

The tool will also check if the authors have articles on Wikipedia, which can be put in the authorlink= parameter. For convenience, there is a preview area that shows what the citation will look like in an article.

It probably has bugs and may not be compatible with all browsers. Comments bugs and ideas are welcome here or on my talk page. For example, is the big table of text fields too overwhelming? --Apoc2400 (talk) 22:11, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

It's rather too small, but I'm anal about references. ;) If you're worried about usability, just make two interfaces: plain for mere mortals, and the real one for me. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 23:01, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
Any specific field you especially miss? --Apoc2400 (talk) 13:30, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
Replied at User_talk:Apoc2400#Missing_fields. Paradoctor (talk) 14:41, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Instruction creep discourages newbies

As a new editor, and one probably not as versed in wikitools/scripting/etc. as others, I find that the process for adding Redirects for Comment, Articles for Deletion, and other basic tasks on Wikipedia is not user-friendly and discourages new editors from participating in improving the encyclopedia.

  1. Even the simplified 3 steps for AFD is not actually three steps as each step contains three actions within each step. Nine steps to simply say "Maybe the community should look to see if this article is legitimate" seems too burdensome and likely from instruction creep. (Surely, at one time, to nominate an article only required a step or two or maybe really only three.)
  2. Secondly, Redirects seem to be an area of high abuse - at least to my limited experience. I went through the process to remove the redirect of Fossils to Fossils (band) - a relatively obsure Australian rock band, assuming that most people who search Fossils are looking for an article related to paleontology. Also, Galactic map redirected to Homeworld. Now, VINCI (referenced in computational linguistics computational_humor) redirects to VINCI (French construction company). I am not interested in going through the process again of editing both the redirect page, the RfC page, notifying interested parties, and other requirements to SIMPLY bring this redirect up for community discussion. Furthermore, it seems illogical to have both a DISAMBIG and REDIRECT page for the same topic - as in the case with VINCI.
  3. I know that a Deletion bot has been proposed and rejected - although I could not follow the discussion as to why to reject due to jargon in the proposal's discussion. Again, new users only want an easy way to start a discussion on an article/redirect, not an easy way to directly delete content.
  4. I suspect there may be some type of script which already automates the process, but there isn't enough information on using scripts on wikipedia for the average user to make this a viable solution to the issue.

I wasn't sure how or where to post to get the community to look again at addressing the problem of getting new editors more involved the encyclopedia by making it easier for them to do simply tasks like RfC. If anyone can help me understand the community consensus on not wanting to make this task easier, please provide input or links to relative previous discussions. If this posting was put in the wrong area, please move to appropriate page. Thanks! 172.130.48.125 (talk) 20:44, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

You know, 172.130.48.125, I am a very old editor, having been editing since 2001, and I completely agree with you. Instruction creep has been awful over Wikipedia's lifetime. But the good news is that you don't need to pay too much attention to it. I have never read 3 steps for AFD and as a result have no idea of the "correct" method of deleting an article. However I have always gone by the policy that if I do something and get it wrong, someone else will fix it or tell me how I should fix it. This has stood me in good stead when it comes to the more arcane bits of wikiprocess. Of course it's a good idea to have a vague idea of how the process works but as long as you use commonsense, be polite to others, know what Wikipedia is -- and what it is not -- and understand the general idea of NPOV, you can leave most of the rest of it to people who care about "getting the details right". At least that's what I have found. True you may get sarcastic comments about it, but "water off a duck's back", I say. Keep your understanding high-level. Don't sweat the small stuff. Editing should be fun, so stick to doing stuff you enjoy and avoid stuff you don't. Then you'll get on Just Fine. -- Derek Ross | Talk 21:03, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Ad 4. There is Twinkle that makes nominating articles (and redirects, and other stuff) for deletion easier (among other things).
Ad 2. If you think a redirect is incorrect, you can be bold and just fix it. You don't have to ask the community for input. It certainly makes perfect sense to have disambig page and redirect for very similar topics. I guess that using VINCI with all caps for something other than the construction company is unusual, so the redirect makes sense. Also, I did not find any mention of the word “Vinci” or similar on computational linguistics.
Svick (talk) 21:12, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict)x2 The basic problem is that MediaWiki, the software running Wikipedia, has few features besides those strictly necessary/useful to run a general-purpose wiki when Wikipedia is also an encyclopedia wiki with community processes; through the clever use of templates, we've been able to jury-rig process and community features onto the wiki structure. On the positive side, this means these arose quickly and organically without requiring developer intervention. On the negative side, this means usability of these is less than stellar since they're jury-rigged and the software has no special support for them to simplify their use. With regard to your specific difficulties, you might want to try the WP:Friendly script which automates AfD filing. --Cybercobra (talk) 21:12, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Speaking only about AfD, I think the mild technical barrier at least slows newbies down from getting into something they wouldn't, if they knew more about it. Flame away. Gwen Gale (talk) 21:19, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Ad 3. User:DeleteAsstBot wasn't approved because there were serious concerns that it could be abused (i.e. someone could easily nominate thousands of articles for deletion using it). Svick (talk) 21:24, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Also the kind of thing I was getting at. Gwen Gale (talk) 21:30, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Hi 172.130.48.125. I've left a welcome message on your talk page. Initially we encourage newcomers to improve existing articles, e.g. fixing spelling/grammar, rewriting for readability, or removing unconstructive edits. If you wish to add new facts, please provide references so they may be verified, or suggest them on the article's discussion page. Changes to controversial topics and Wikipedia's main pages should usually be discussed first. If you are a new user, I suggest you delay working on RfCs and AfDs until you have a body of properly-referenced article edits under your belt. As for redirects, if you are the contributor who previously edited from 172.162.5.137, there are some technical issues that it takes experience to learn (e.g. that List of fossils is not the same as List of Fossils) but this is not really anything to do with rule creep and wouldn't be helped by more automation. Hope you enjoy your editing here. - Pointillist (talk) 22:10, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
With all due respect, Pointillist, your comment sounds condescending. You are suggesting that newcomers can only contribute by correcting typos of the more experienced wikipedians and by helping fight vandalism. I am curious to find out at what point you feel newcomers are ready to take on other "more advanced" tasks? Ottawahitech (talk) 14:35, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Frankendiscussion at File:JD Salinger.jpg

Please be advised: there is a rational and orderly discussion at Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2010 January 28#File:JD Salinger.jpg.--Blargh29 (talk) 07:11, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Excluse me if this is not the right place for this, but someone should look at the recent edits by Bowei Huang 1 (talk · contribs), which are quite bizzare. Also sorry for not signing this properly, but the tilda on my computer does not seem to be working. jbhood —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jbhood (talk • contribs) 13:26, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

The edit toolbar has a button that inserts the signature. Paradoctor (talk) 14:06, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Spamming user

User:Madjidi has been adding spam to a bunch of pages. He's gotten a couple of warnings; I dunno if it's time to block him, but someone with more time than I should go through and revert anything still there. (I took care of code reviewand software review.) Matchups 03:51, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


The intention has never been to be spam. I added external links that are appropriate for Safety Critical Engineers to know. I have no idea why you are attacking my additions. I will review the guideline and will add the links back to be in compliant. Madjidi (talk) 10:39, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

The proper forum for this sort of thing is over there → Wikipedia:Administrators noticeboard/Incidents
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 12:35, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
Escalating this minor matter to "Administrative action" amounts to "biting the newbie". The simpler solution would be to point Madjidi to the policy page that explains the concept of linkspam and the one that explains that WP is not a "How to". The automated template warnings he recieved don't explain why the edits are unacceptable. Roger (talk) 14:21, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation. As I mentioned, I will re-read the policy page and will adjust my links to prevent such matter. Madjidi (talk) 14:49, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
You mean the three notices he got on his Talk page before this matter was brought here? Including this one, which is clearly not an automated template warning? 67.51.38.51 (talk) 19:53, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
Actually, the correct way to handle this would be for the two of them to talk about the issue amongst themselves, either on the talk page for the article in question or on each others talk page. If that doesn't work out well, for whatever reason, then you should post something like this on one of the noticeboards. Regardless of anything else, this is a completely inappropriate venue for any such discussion.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 20:01, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

BAG membership request

I have been nominated for Bot Approvals Group membership by MBisanz, and I am posting a notification here as encouraged by the bot policy. If you have time, please comment at Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/The Earwig. Thanks, — The Earwig @ 03:39, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Over-sourcing?

I've noticed a few articles that make such heavy use of inline citations that they create readability issues. One example is here, where in one case 51 citations are used in a 200 word paragraph [final paragraph]. What would be a good way to deal with it? I don't have access to most of the sources to see if they're necessary or not, and bringing it up on the talk page hasn't proved very useful. Is there a common practice to dealing with issues such as this, or is it simply not considered an issue? There's also the issue that the section relies almost entirely on primary sources, which seems to be the reason there are so many of them, primary sources backing-up primary.. Rehevkor ✉ 05:50, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Wow, you were right with that example, the section is drowned with cites and just looks ugly and unreadable. There is the option of directing editors to Wikipedia:Citation overkill, which is currently proposed Wikipedia policy.. -- Ϫ 06:38, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Sometimes that's what it takes. The number of citations is not problematic, the layout is. Give me a couple of hours to fix it. Paradoctor (talk) 07:25, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Fixed the worst offenses, want me to do more? ;) Paradoctor (talk) 08:41, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
On a more general note, the article borders on self parody as an example of geeky fanboy wikipedia overload ... it is, after all, important to know that a comic book writer "has not shied away from criticizing or disagreeing with prominent liberals and Democrats,[127] including Bill Clinton,[128] Al Gore,[110] Hillary Clinton[129] Michelle Obama[130] and Caroline Kennedy.[113]" That whole article could use a little work with delete keys, - DavidWBrooks (talk) 17:07, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Count me out on that one, I enjoyed his stint on The Incredible Hulk. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 17:51, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Excellent, cheers Paradoctor. Mucho improvo. And in response to DavidWBrooks, I agree that there are indeed issues, but would need to be dealt with very carefully. Rehevkor ✉ 18:22, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Indeed - as we have to do when adding details about Rahm Emmanuel's opinion of John Romita vs. Jack "King" Kirby. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 18:45, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
I wonder if a possible resolution to this issue is to bundle the sources together in a single footnote linked at the end of the sentence, or even paragraph. This does make for a rather long footnote, but readability is less of an issue in footnotes than in main text. Sjakkalle (Check!) 14:41, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
This would make it cumbersome to determine which part of the footnote belongs to which specific statement. I think this is mainly a layout problem. How footnotes are displayed ought to be user-stylable. E. g., if you add .reference {display:none} to your user CSS, the footnotes will not be displayed. With ECMAScript this can be toggled with a click. Hmm, just had an idea... Paradoctor (talk) 16:15, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
It's not cumbersome if you use annotations within the footnote to explain what portion of the article's sentence each cite supports. It may make for a long footnote, but that's certainly preferable to a meaningless string of footnote numbers (often out of sequence due to overreliance on the ref name feature) or a scattershot of footnotes within the middle of a sentence (often seen after single words, not even at the end of clauses, and usually without explanation). Or split the sentence into multiple sentences if feasible, each independently cited.
We should be encouraging the use of annotations in footnotes generally anyway, to explain the reliance on the source and/or provide a helpful quotation from it, and to provide specific page numbers cited. Dropping footnotes in the middle of sentences should be discouraged at the least, as should multiple ref tags after the same sentence. If the sources all support the same fact (i.e., if it's a relatively simple sentence), then use a single footnote with a "see, e.g.," signal followed by the string of cites that support that sentence. postdlf (talk) 16:31, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
No, we should not. References shouldn't need explanation nor should quotations be required for everyone. It would just clutter the references. Page numbers are already a part of any reference that has them. And as I've already noted in the other discussion on this, references should never be lumped together under one reference tag. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 17:05, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
See reply at discussion linked below. postdlf (talk) 18:22, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

This topis is also being discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive_72#Can too many references be a bad thing?. Might be good to just stick to one forum for easier discussion. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 17:05, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Indiana Department of Homeland Security Racial Profiling pdf

For anyone interested, User:Dendodge has written a Wikinews article on this.

I came across this pdf produced by the Indiana Department of Homeland Security for racial profiling and found that in it, and found that the vocabulary section on page 3/4 are copied from wikipedia, yet there is no attribution to Wikipedia or even a mention of it...

The purpose of the pdf is "To research positions related to the topic of racial profiling post September 11, 2001 with a primary focus on citizens of Middle Eastern descent, and to give an informative speech."

It uses 7 terms from Wikipedia: Racial Profiling, USA PATRIOT Act, Bigotry, Internment, Terrorism, Counter-terrorism, The War on Terrorism.
(For those who can't count)

  1. Racial Profiling
  2. USA PATRIOT Act
  3. Bigotry
  4. Internment
  5. Terrorism
  6. Counter-terrorism
  7. The War on Terrorism

The following is excerpted from the pdf.

  • Racial Profiling is the inclusion of racial or ethnic characteristics in determining whether a person is considered likely to commit a particular type of crime or an illegal act or to behave in a “predictable” manner.
  • The USA PATRIOT Act, commonly known as the “Patriot Act”, is a statute enacted by the United States Government that President George W. Bush signed into law on October 26, 2001. The contrived acronym stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (Public Law Pub.L. 107-56). The Act increases the ability of law enforcement agencies to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial, and other records; eases restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the United States; expands the Secretary of the Treasury’s authority to regulate financial transactions, particularly those involving foreign individuals and entities; and enhances the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting immigrants suspected of terrorism-related acts. The act also expands the definition of terrorism to include domestic terrorism, thus enlarging the number of activities to which the USA PATRIOT Act’s expanded law enforcement powers can be applied.
  • Bigotry- A bigot is a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially one who regards or treats members of a group (e.g. a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance. Bigotry is the corresponding mindset or action. The term bigot is often misused to pejoratively label those who merely oppose or disagree with the devotion of another. The correct use of the term, however, requires the elements of obstinacy, irrationality, and animosity toward those of differing devotion.
  • Internment is the imprisonment or confinement[1] of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) gives the meaning as: “The action of ‘interning’; confinement within the limits of a country or place”. Most modern usage is about individuals, and there is a distinction between internment, which is being confined usually for preventive or political reasons, and imprisonment, which is being closely confined as a punishment for crime.
  • Terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion. One form is the use of violence against noncombatants for the purpose of gaining publicity for a group, cause, or individual.[citation needed] At present, there is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism. Common definitions of terrorism refer only to those violent acts that are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for an ideological goal (as opposed to a lone attack), and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants.
  • Counter-terrorism (also spelled counterterrorism) refers to the practices, tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, militaries, police departments and corporations adopt in response to terrorist threats and/or acts, both real and imputed.
  • The War on Terrorism (also referred to as the Global War on Terror is the common term for the military, political, legal and ideological conflict against what the effort’s leaders describe as Islamic terrorism and Islamic militants, and was specifically used in reference to operations by the United States and its allies since the September 11, 2001 attacks. The stated objectives of the war in the US are to protect the citizens of the US and allies, to protect the business interests of the US and allies at home and abroad, break up terrorist cells in the US, and disrupt the activities of the international network of terrorist organizations made up of a number of groups under the umbrella of al-Qaeda.

It should be noted that some government documents use wikipedia as a source, and thus should not be used as a reference.

Should the pdf attribute wikipedia as per the Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License? Anybody have any thoughts on this?Smallman12q (talk) 18:10, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Clear copyvio. You should contact them and ask them to cease and desist kindly update the brochure to comply with the license, lest we read them the RIOT act would feel compelled to insist that they do. Paradoctor (talk) 18:38, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps the WMF should kindly send them a Standard CC-BY-SA violation letter?Smallman12q (talk) 19:33, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
Per Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks#Non-compliance_process, any editor of the plagiarized pages can send the letter. The "WMF" will not -- the foundation's staff is quite small and doesn't have time for policing copyrights.--Father Goose (talk) 23:29, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps the best thing is just to inform the local press. Johnbod (talk) 14:04, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
For anyone interested, User:Dendodge has written a wikinews article about this at n:Indiana Department of Homeland Security violates Wikipedia copyright.Smallman12q (talk) 19:25, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
I completely fail to muster any outrage about this. --Apoc2400 (talk) 01:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps they should acknowledge the source, but I am not offended by their failure to do so, unless they assert copyright to the text, which would be a whole different story. --DThomsen8 (talk) 13:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

The content organization, graphics, design, compilation and other materials on or related to the Portal are protected under applicable copyright, trademark and other proprietary and intellectual property rights. In most cases, the content is owned by the state agency choosing to make its information available through the aI service. The copying, redistribution, use or publication by you of any such materials or any part of the Portal, except as allowed for in the Limited Right to Use section below, is strictly prohibited. You do not acquire ownership rights to any content, document or other materials viewed through the Portal. The posting of information or materials on the Portal does not constitute a waiver of any right in such information and materials.

the portal's terms of use, section "Copyright"
Considering the power the DHS wields, any disregard for rules and regulations they display should worry you. Not to mention the crass incompetence in preparing a document destined for public release. Paradoctor (talk) 14:14, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
Note, however, that this is the Indiana DHS, an agency within the government of that state, and not the DHS. This is also why they can claim to assert copyright, where the federal government would be barred from so doing. I agree, however, that their use of this material under those terms is very troublesome, and should be curtailed. bd2412 T 00:20, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
"not the DHS": I have no qualms about finding them guilty by association. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 14:07, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Seems the document has been removed. Now we can start checking the other brochures. Paradoctor (talk) 07:46, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

The imminence of The Great Paywall

The New York Times is moving to a restricted model where access will be paywalled after a certain point. This follows similar moves by the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, and in the current advertising climate we can expect this practice to become more prevalent.

This presents a serious issue to accessing reliable sources in the future, which we may not be able to do much about (WP:REX-type initiatives notwithstanding). It also threatens our reader's access to existing hyperlinks we use as references and external links. The question arises, how do we steal their content while we have the chance pre-emptively protect the references to guarantee their future use? Is mass-archiving through WebCite for instance a feasible or even legal course of action? Thoughts, comments, suggestions welcome.  Skomorokh  21:39, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

It's not meant to happen until 2011 and I wouldn't hold my breath. Gwen Gale (talk) 21:43, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Nevertheless, this is a model that is extremely likely to be adopted by some major content providers, and we need to formulate a response to mitigate damage to the infosphere our articles feed upon.  Skomorokh  22:22, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Fortunately, most libraries still offer complete archives of major and local newspapers for free. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:43, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Mass archiving isn't feasible: New York Times pages are already protected with <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE">, and so are other major news websites like http://www.ft.com, http://www.economist.com, http://www.timesonline.co.uk and http://www.telegraph.co.uk. I pointed this out ages (well, months) ago and AFAIK no-one cared.... Pointillist (talk) 22:59, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Personally I don't see a big problem with it. Anything that drills it into people that a source can legitimately take effort to track down - buying or borrowing a book or periodical, or subscribing to a website - is a good thing. Too many pages have an over-reliance on pages a quick Google turns up. I've seen definitive sources replaced by amateur sites simply because they were easy to "verify", and seen challenges to the validity of sources where one side has not even consulted the source in question. You can go the other way of course: a long out-of-print book may not be a good sole reference for a controversial point, but people need to realise they are expected to put some effort in and that the best references may well not be freely available. CrispMuncher (talk) 22:47, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes this is a serious drawback. In Canada it is quite common for the media to remove articles from the web within hours/ days of publishing. This makes it very difficult to hold any subjects of articles accountable, and is a serious threat to democracy. Just my $.02 Ottawahitech (talk) 22:49, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

It would all still be verifiable, so I don't see overwhelming worries. As for shutting off free access to the content of a privately owned website, let them have a go, it's their website. Gwen Gale (talk) 22:57, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
100% agree that reliable sources don't need to be available online for free. Nevertheless, a reduction in the breadth of sources is not good for article creation or maintenance. Contributors who don't have access to free online reliable sources will (a) use unreliable sources instead, (b) use no references and expect other editors to find sources, or (c) cease contributing. - Pointillist (talk) 23:09, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
NYT is going broke. They might not even make it to 2011. Either way, markets have a way of filling such gaps. Gwen Gale (talk) 23:14, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
AFAICS the market is moving back to a paid-access model. In the UK only three incontrovertibly reliable news sources still allow archiving (BBC, Guardian and Independent). From what I am hearing, the growing trend for Wikipedia to report on breaking news stories is not winning us media friends, either, which is a shame as it isn't a core part of the encyclopedia's mission anyway. - Pointillist (talk) 23:23, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
They're not "incontrovertibly reliable" but I know what you mean (they can be taken as such, more or less, for a general reference encyclopedia). The whole news market is shifting and will carry on doing so. Gwen Gale (talk) 23:36, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Much ado about nothing, really. This should actually prompt a bit better, or at least more deliberate and reasoned, research. Besides that, paywalls becoming widespread should finally return much needed profitability to some of these companies.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 23:48, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
It likely won't, but I agree this isn't much of a worry. Gwen Gale (talk) 23:50, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
Yes, the library card is your friend. Wikipedia is way too dependent on lazy research. AgneCheese/Wine 23:52, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
We're too dependent on newspapers in particular. It's good practice for historians to use newspapers to get accounts from a particular period of history. But we should be citing the historians, not the newspapers. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:10, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
That's also true. Most newspapers are even more unreliable than some historians. Gwen Gale (talk) 00:13, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
The NYT will be using a metered approach. i.e., the articles will be available but one can only read a limited number of NYT articles free per month. If NYT follow the FT.com approach and still allow access to archives with the metered approach, there isn't really much difference to today. Darrell_Greenwood (talk) 00:29, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
Newsday's go at a paywall was an utter bust, 35 subscriptions. Gwen Gale (talk) 01:00, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
We had the same problem on the french Wikipedia and we are now providing an archived version of external references through the Wikiwix website. Those extra links are not saved in articles, but are generated by a script. Those archives are generated when links are added and are never updated to match the content of the reference when it was added. Addition of those links was result of a community decision. For example [4] the four link. Pmartin (talk) 17:33, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
Sorry, you have lost me. How does the use of this technology do away with the necessity to provide supporting documentation? How does it help Wikipedians find those sources of information? Ottawahitech (talk) 05:31, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
Concretely, when you add a new (web) reference in an article, the archive system take a snapshot of the corresponding web page and store it. ::::Then, on the wiki, along with the original URL, you have an additonal link that point to the archived version.
Thus, if the linked web page change, you can still consult the one that was used as a reference. Nojhan (talk) 10:14, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
Basically like siccing a bot on new external links with the order to WebCite them. I want that! Paradoctor (talk) 10:31, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
I like that idea, but (repeating myself here) many desirable sources are already protected with <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE">, e.g. http://http://www.nytimes.com, http://www.ft.com, http://www.economist.com, http://www.timesonline.co.uk and http://www.telegraph.co.uk. Are you suggesting we should ignore NOARCHIVE and go ahead and archive individual stories on these sites anyway? - Pointillist (talk) 12:04, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
Such things are only technical rather than legal measures... --Cybercobra (talk) 12:23, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
But the WebCite Consortium FAQ says "WebCite honors robot exclusion standards, as well as no-cache and no-archive tags." Likewise, the cache page description at Pmartin's Wikiwix example says "Si vous souhaitez bloquer la mise en cache de cette url, mettez à jour le fichier robots.txt" (If you want to block caching of this url, update the file robots.txt). So in practice NOARCHIVE is an issue, isn't it? - Pointillist (talk) 12:57, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
I tend to think that it would be an issue, but not really for Wikipedia, since we don't host any archival material here. Let's leave these issues to the archivists, eh?
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 16:17, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
Many academic journals have had a similar paywall in place for most of their online existence. Some have loosened their policy a little to allow older articles to be viewed for free, and I wish other would follow suit. Maybe we could encourage news provider to put a time out on their payment scheme so that story access becomes free of change after a certain number of years has passed? That way they would at least get advertising revenue from accesses to older articles. Shrug.—RJH (talk) 21:09, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
Actually, the opposite model has been prevalent for decades. Recent news is relatively cheap, but if you want access to archives, that will likely cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars, if you can even find access. This is one area where Google News is acting as a real game changer (helping us, the general public, and disrupting the newspaper business model), which is what's really driving the downfall of many newspapers.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 21:28, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Are there policies for companies, analogous to BLP?

I know that there are guidelines for WP:BLP. I was wondering if there are comparable guidelines for what can be said about corporate entities.

User:Playmobilonhishorse has placed an unsourced statement on the VDM Publishing House‎ page that seems to accuse them of behavior that is arguably unethical, and perhaps even illegal. Here is the edit. I added a fact tag, but I was wondering if things like this should be reverted rather than just tagged. (That's what would be done in the case of BLP.) — Lawrence King (talk) 04:27, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Well there is nothing illegal in cloning Wikipedia content and selling it for anything I can get for it. It's not unethical to copy Wikipedia as long as the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license is followed.Ttiotsw (talk) 07:55, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-08-17/News_and_notes#Alphascript_Publishing_sells_free_articles_as_expensive_books. Fences&Windows 12:50, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Notwithstanding this is like Bottled water the problem I see is that the source is misrepresented when they list a title is "By John McBrewster, Frederic P. Miller, and Agnes F. Vandome" etc. It's not by them but by a zillion Wikipedia editors. It does sound immoral. Ttiotsw (talk) 15:16, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
In this case, someone provided a citation for the assertion. I'm still curious about the original question, though. The person who posted this material was a newbie. Normally, I would add a fact tag to an unsourced statement by a newbie rather than reverting it, because it's rude to eliminate a new editor's sole contribution to Wikipedia. If, however, their contribution was an unflattering unsourced statement about a living person, it must be removed. Does that same policy apply to unflattering unsourced statement about corporate entities? — Lawrence King (talk) 01:14, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
No, corporations are not people, and BLP is about people. Of course, an article about "John Smiths corner shop" is essentially about John Smith, so BLP applies. --Apoc2400 (talk) 13:53, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
However, in most jurisdictions corporate entities are a type of "person" and have some of the same rights as "natural persons' such as the right to sue for defamation etc. This is a potentially serious hole in WP's rules. Roger (talk) 14:29, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
It's only a "hole" from an instruction-creep perspective. Follow the spirit of the rule rather than the written code (or the policy title). Even if we are not talking about a living person, if there is living people that may be harmed, BLP still applies. If there's a problematic edit at an article that may be in contravention with it, remove it for the time being and discuss it at the talk page: there are no strong reasons to do otherwise just because of policy name MBelgrano (talk) 14:35, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
Legally, corporations may have those rights (in certain jurisdictions). Whether they're "people" philosophically speaking (and thus merit BLP-ish treatment)...it's rather questionable IMO. --Cybercobra (talk) 14:45, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
It is also a "hole" from the perspective that WP can be sued for defamation by a company because the rules against potentially libelous material are weaker in the case of companies compared to BLPs. For the purposes of preventing libel lawsuits a company should be treated as a "living person". Its not merely a philosophical issue. One such case could destroy WP. Roger (talk) 21:50, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
How about this: we leave consideration of legal concerns to the lawyers and the WMF. As long as the Wikipedia structure is not set up to doing anything intentionally harmful, which as far as I'm aware of it isn't, then there's really nothing that we as editors should be concerned about. If you as a person are concerned, I'd personally suggest trying to talk to the WMF or Mike Godwin about it, rather then us, your fellow editors. (ps.: don't mistake the tone here. Reading over this I realize that it sounds slightly belligerent, but the truth is that I don't really care about this issue it just sort of bugs me to see editors playing armchair lawyers here, which unfortunately seems to have turned into a bit of a meme in this community. FYI: Actual lawyers realize that their not lawyers while they're editors here, anyway.)
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 22:21, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

A Case Timeline

I could not find anybody to ask this question. I wanted to ask if i created timeline (WP:Timeline) of events in Aafia Siddiqui, then will it be ok according to WP policies? This is due to the fact that her case has many intricate details and all of which should not be put of article since they may make the article more complex. But a timeline will be very helpful in getting a good chronology of events. —  Hamza  [ talk ] 05:47, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

I think it would be better if you discuss this on the article's talk page. Roger (talk) 17:20, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
The matter is not whether it will be appropriate or not. I just want to confirm that the article's existence won't go against any WP guidelines regarding creation of new timeline article.—  Hamza  [ talk ] 21:09, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

New Georgia Encyclopedia project is underway!

The New Georgia Encyclopedia ("NGE") has authorized Wikipedia to import and/or merge the following ten articles, which I have copied to project space:

Our goal is to get these articles in top shape and merge or move them into mainspace as quickly as possible. If this turns out well (as I am confident it will), the NGE will permit us to import their remaining body of over 2,000 well-researched and well-written articles, which could pioneer a trend for other private owners of encyclopedic content to release their materials into our corpus. I would deeply appreciate any help that we can muster in accomplishing this. Please note that the original NGE articles (now linked in the required attribution section of each of the above articles in project space) have images, but NGE is unable to convey those to us at this time, as they are individually licensed by NGE. Finding equivalent images would, of course, be helpful. Also, please note that the NGE would like for us to parallel their selection of internal links (where they link to an internal NGE article, they would like for us to also link to our equivalent Wikipedia article). The first import, Wikipedia:WikiProject Georgia (U.S. state)/New Georgia Encyclopedia/Jesse Hill, is substantially finished in this respect. Cheers! bd2412 T 19:09, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Good good :) Could you point me in the direction of their copyright release? I'd like to have a look, since I'm interested in making similar projects work. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 19:15, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
I just forwarded their email to the permissions department.
The full text of it was:
This message should serve as notice that the NGE, a project of the Georgia Humanities Council, releases the following NGE articles under the terms of Wikipedia's GNU Free Documentation License:
Jesse Hill
Jimmy Carter
Anne Cox Chambers
Nancy Hart
Charles Lindbergh
Piano Red Perryman
Georgia Dept. of Labor
Trustee Georgia
Revolutionary War
Sumter County
Per our previous discussions, these articles will be attributed to the New Georgia Encyclopedia as the source of original publication, and a link will be provided to the original article.
Thank you, and I look forward to the next steps.
Sincerely,
...
Kelly Caudle
Managing Editor & Project Manager
NEW GEORGIA ENCYCLOPEDIA
Well done on arranging this transfer, and hopefully it will lead to more. Just a question on licensing: Are GFDL-only text imports permitted following the transition to CC-BY-SA? Wikipedia:Licensing update#Content restrictions would indicate not. Could anyone clarify this? mattbr 20:37, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
It's a definite No. From Meta: "after this update [...] GFDL-only submissions will no longer be accepted" --Cybercobra (talk) 20:42, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I see that. I just got off the phone with Ms. Caudle, who is going to consult with a colleague and hopefully will send the corrected release directly to Permissions within the hour, or by Monday at the latest. My apologies - I did not keep up on the transition from GFDL to CC-by-SA. However, the NGE people are excited about the possibility of having their material hosted here with attribution to the original authors maintained, and they were prepared to release under the GFDL (which is virtually identical to the CC-by-SA for their purposes) so I think this will be no more than a hiccup. bd2412 T 21:26, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
Okay, I just received the cc of Kelly Caudle's email to our Permissions department releasing the listed articles under the terms of Wikipedia's Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. bd2412 T 21:36, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
Excellent! This is very magnanimous of them. I hope that they have a good experience with releasing this material to us. -- Derek Ross | Talk 01:17, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Congrats for your hard work! Thelmadatter (talk) 23:04, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks - but the work is just beginning. We have ten articles to fix up or merge in a professional and efficient manner, and we'll likely be following that with 2,000 more! bd2412 T 23:51, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
Still looking for some help with these. Three are moved/merged over, seven remain. Cheers! bd2412 T 22:03, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

'kingdom'

please can someone enlighten me -"does kingdom drive an Alvis and if so what model?" —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ewahewah (talk • contribs) 21:57, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

According to our article Kingdom (TV series), he drives an Alvis TE 21. For future reference, questions like this are best asked at the Reference Desks. DuncanHill (talk) 22:01, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Stormtroops

Hello,was reading your explanation of Stormtroops,and thought i could add something that may be helpful.Where you did mention Canada it wasent that the Canadian Corp had a stormtroop,it was more that after the German army ran into the canadians they started calling THEM the stormtroops.I will say again THE GEARMANS called the Canadian Corp STORMTROOPS.If you know the details of the Canadians under General Currie that is explanation enough —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.54.22.203 (talk) 01:52, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what article are you talking about (the article Stormtrooper doesn't say anything about Canada, the article Shock troops only shortly mentions it), but you should discuss this on the talk page of the article you have problem with, not here. Svick (talk) 02:47, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Tool needed

Is there a tool, the equivalent of Wikistalk or Overlapping Contributions, which will allow you to input a number of articles and return with the users who have editing those pages in common? Thanks. Beyond My Ken (talk) 23:14, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Also, is there a better place to ask this question? Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:56, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
The closest thing I found to what you want is a tool on toolserver that can list contributors that edited certain article. Better place for this question is WP:Village pump (technical). Svick (talk) 01:32, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:20, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Template to translate from other language wiki's

Does anyone know the name of a template to go in an article to encourage edits to translate from other language wiki's. I've seen them on the french wiki's but I can't recall an exact french article or work out what the template might be called. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 16:15, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I found something similar in Template:Expand language. SunCreator (talk) 16:35, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

2010 US Census

May I bring to everyone's attention Wikipedia:2010 US Census and it's associated talk page, where comment is needed as to how to handle updating demographics data in articles after this upcoming census. Ks0stm (T•C•G) 21:57, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Template:Currency available

I just created {{Currency}} in order to do currency formatting values inline with the MOS guidelines at WP:MOSNUM. The template is currently functional for a decent selection of the largest currencies, but it's nowhere near 100% complete yet. Value ranges need to be added as well, along with conversions from one currency to another (which I think that I'll use {{Currency value}} to provide). Feel free to jump in and change things though, if you'd like, as I generally dislike working alone anyway. Regards,
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 03:46, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Acronyms

I have considered this for years.

New Editors complain a lot about abbreviations, and it is really annoying to have to look up what editors are talking about.

I have a simple solution. Simply create a template and add a 1 to most of the common abbreviations. The template would have the full name.

Instead of typing:

[[WP:AGF]]
you type:
{{WP:AGF1}}

....1 extra character, and : WP:Assume Good Faith would be on the page.

If necessary we could have a bot scour wikipedia to change the acronym templates to full titles.

Of course, no would be required to use this. Ikip 10:18, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Go for it. I don't see the need in adding "1" to the title, but that's a side issue.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 10:27, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Good idea. I think the "1" is necessary because {{WP:AGF}} would transclude the whole WP:Assume Good Faith page. --Apoc2400 (talk) 11:10, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
How about, instead of having to look up the abbreviation, they click on the link to actually see what the policy/guideline/essay says. Too many people make arguments based on the title of a policy, rather than what its content actually is. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 12:39, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Let me ask you this though: Is that really a bad thing? After all, our policies and procedures are not supposed to be a Tome of Rules. If some people utilize their own viewpoints when a policy concept arises it seems to me that should be descriptive to the rest of us.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 14:44, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
So then why are they quoting (and linking to) policy and guideline pages, if they're trying to express something different to what they say? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 00:21, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
There's been a longstanding frame of thought that what policy and guideline documents actually say verbatim is fairly irrelevent, because it's the ideas they espouse which are important, not formal rules which they could be used to establish. I generally agree with that thinking myself, and WP:IAR basically embodies it in policy. On the other hand, this community is a bit chaotic and schizophrenic, due largely to an over-reliance on such ideology in my opinion. There should be some hard and fast "law like" rules here, but we need to be careful at the same time not to allow that sort of thing to spread everywhere. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that many members of this community are ready for such nuanced approaches.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 18:27, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
(*insert ZOMG people should stop quoting pages int he first place! Never use them on my talk page! Blah blah blah! Rawr! here*)...ahem, anyway, not a bad idea. Certainly, I imagine you're free to make such templates, it's more a matter of getting people to use them, I think. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:48, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
An index would be nice. I did this for {{cite xxx}} some time back since I used it so much. You should probably bring this up at Wikipedia:Help Project. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 18:46, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Is WP:Alphabet soup what you mean by index? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 13:20, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
Orangedog, the problem for new users when reading acronyms (more than for experienced users, who may not even notice) is that when they see something like "WP:AGF", they don't see the title of a policy or rule, they see an akward and ilegible mixture or characters with unclear meaning. Forget for a moment everything you know about wikipedia, and think what would you think if someone told you "you must assume good faith from other users", and what if they tell you "you must WP:AGF" --MBelgrano (talk) 17:08, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
Well I'd click on it. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 12:52, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
I saw that someone, somewhere, recently used an active tooltip link (you know, the ones which use a dotted underline and turn your cursor into a question mark) to link an abbreviated Wikipedia document to the actual page. I thought that was an excellent idea. I can't seem to find the instance now, though.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 18:30, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

User:Ikip/alphabet shows that of all the rules on WP:Alphabet soup templates with the exact same acronyms there are:

  1. Red link 216 (free pages) and
  2. Blue link 135 (existing pages)

I think something like a 1 like {{AGF1}} or some other way would be best, to make things standard. Ideas? Okip (the new and improved Ikip) 10:54, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

There's already a template or two to do this. And @Ohms, it was probably me. :) Here's an earlier post of mine detailing the templates. –Whitehorse1 18:21, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Just for fun, the official site of the Afghan National Army links to Wikipedia biographies for all its Senior Officers (scroll to bottom (of page). This might be the first government endorsement of our BLPs! Joshdboz (talk) 13:29, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Most of the officers don't have an article but the link is to edit them. Rather crazy if you ask me. SunCreator (talk) 23:08, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
Are you kidding? This is fantastic: a government site contributes to Wikipedia by providing redlinks. We need more of that! :) Paradoctor (talk) 08:00, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Vandalism at Skype

For the attention of the Administrator

Please clean up the vandalism at the Skype page. The first sentence in the second paragraph and the first phrase in the 'Features' sub-section should clearly be removed; there may be other vandalism I have not seen. Suggest semi-protection and punishing the perpetrator. ~~

It's been fixed, but you could have done it yourself. – ukexpat (talk) 20:48, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
It was a few revisions back and they might be too new to know how to identify and find it. –xenotalk 20:50, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
Fixed, thank you for your report. –xenotalk 20:50, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Application for BAG membership

I have accepted MBisanz's nomination of myself for membership of the Bot Approvals Group, and invite interested parties to participate in the discussion and voting. Josh Parris 03:02, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

BLPs

Why is the hullaballoo WP:BLPs about sources instead of being about libel or harmful material?

  • An article with sources can be libelous, etc.
  • An article without sources might have no other problems.

Is there any way this energy can be redirected toward larger problems? Or at least that people would realize that this is whitewashing the situation? Maurreen (talk) 10:21, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem so. You're not the first person to point this out. The difficulty is that too many editors think sources are a panacea. Or that doing "something" is worthwhile, even even if that "something" doesn't actually address the problem at hand. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:11, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
Try banging your head against the nearest wall to gain a similar experience to trying to communicate this view to BLP deletionists. Fences&Windows 17:42, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Need help with a 3O request

I'm trying to fill out a 3O request, but the request for a second dispute keeps getting removed from the noticeboard and the article's Talk page. See here. The volunteers think it is simply a duplicate of the first, when there are really two issues at stake. Would appreciate some help in making this clear on the 3O discussion page. Or, should I just skip this step and move on to the next avenue? SharkD  Talk  16:44, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I just noticed that there has been a quite number of changes in film titles from "name (film)" to "name (year film)". this has led to to uncorrect language links in other Wikipedias (I only speak now of fi.wiki). For example the fi.wiki article about Speed (1994 film) led to "Speed (disambiguation)" because the original page was moved to a new page and the old one was changed to a redirect page. And worse is still to come: "Seventh Heaven (film)" was moved to "Seventh Heaven (1927 film)" and a bot changed automatically (!) the language link in fi.wiki to the incorrect "Seventh Heaven#Film, television, and theatre". For that film there are now seven wrong links in other Wikis. It appears to me that you are doing a lot of these changes. Has anyone thought of the consequencies across all Wiki languages?--Nedergard (talk) 14:36, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

No offense, but so? The English Wikipedia does not name its articles based on other language wikis nor do we have to run around and get all their permissions before doing so. All of our articles that were renamed have redirects from those old names to the corrected ones. If the FR wiki now has incorrect links from proper film titles to disambig pages, I'd suggest fixing the links in those articles instead. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 14:41, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
Every language has their own naming standards, as it should be. There's no reason to even think of catering to any others. WP:SOFIXIT if it's a problem. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 15:11, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
I have nothing against you naming convention - sorry if you got that impression from my posting. But - as a fairly new user - I would have thought that it would be automated to have the name changes also in the language links in other wikis (as well as - of course - also for internal links inside your wiki)? If this is not so, then you can forget this posting - then I don't know who - or where - to address this kind of an inter-wiki issue (but let me know if you do).--Nedergard (talk) 15:37, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
No, there is no automated renaming in other wikis, because each wiki has its own naming schema. The best place would probably be to post a note at the French wiki's film project's talk page to point it out to them that several articles were renamed here and that some of the FR article now have broken interwiki links. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 15:53, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
That's a pity. We'll just have to manage it manually somehow. And again, this has nothing to do with the naming conventions or schemas (in any language). For example in the FI page (not FR) the text itself is "en:Speed (film)" but after the name change it should be "en:Speed (1994 film)". --Nedergard (talk) 04:08, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
I think Nedergard means we should make sure to change the interwiki links to enwp from other other language Wikiepedias when we rename articles, especially when there is no redirect from the old title to the new one. That seems like a very reasonable suggestion. --Apoc2400 (talk) 15:33, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
When one renames an article, it is good WP:Wikiquette, ie good manners, to fix any double redirects that one has created and by extension to fix any cross-wiki links that one may have broken. Nedergard is quite right to have reminded us of that. The people who are in the wrong are those who change page titles, willy-nilly, without considering the consequences or cleaning up behind themselves. -- Derek Ross | Talk 01:59, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
"people who are in the wrong": Sorry, but no. We are the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and I'm not aware of any policy requiring updating of interwiki links. If people are not aware of problems caused by their edits, we have to inform them, politely, nicely if possible. As far as the specific problem is concerned, I suggest adding information about the issue to the text of Special:MovePage. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Paradoctor (talk • contribs) 09:27, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
People can be in the wrong without actually violating policy, morally wrong without being legally wrong so-to-speak, and I only see it as an issue if experienced editors are doing it. What you suggest about informing people is eminently sensible though. As is your suggestion about adding text. In fact earlier today I added text addressing this issue to Help:Moving a page which is referenced from Special:MovePage.-- Derek Ross | Talk 19:22, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
I'll consider that our good deed for the day. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 19:34, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Interesting case of plagiarism

Compare

http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=American_Liberty_League&direction=next&oldid=156894417

with the later-published

http://books.google.com/books?id=T1_tElpa2x0C&pg=PR23&dq=prescott+bush+%22liberty+league%22

I discovered this by accident when I was looking for sourcing for the claim that Prescott Bush was a leader of the Liberty League. As best I can tell, the Wikipedia article that was plagiarized was apparently wildly inaccurate: there's no evidence that Prescott Bush ever had anything to do with the Liberty League; it was uncited information added into the article without an edit summary. I emailed Professor Barrow multiple times about this, and never got a response; a reporter I spoke to shrugged, saying that Wikipedia plagiarism stories have been done before. I do have a concern about the possibility of future bootstrapping, when inaccurate Wikipedia information ends up getting copied by a "reliable source," and then fed back into Wikipedia at a later date. Anyway, not sure where else to take this, so thought I'd raise it with the community. (Update: Yes, this is a 1944 book by Beard. I'm referring to the introductory essay published in the 2008 edition by Barrow. This should be obvious by the passage's reference to "George W. Bush, Jr." [sic], but some people have trouble understanding these things apparently.) THF (talk) 04:25, 14 February 2010 (UTC), updated 09:22, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

WHOAH! Count - your - blessings. Professor Barrow did you a favor by ignoring your mails. If you check the book's publication history, you'll see a 1944 edition. The WorldCat entry for the edition cited by you states "Originally published: New York : Viking press,1943". Even the overview page at Google Books lists the original 1943 edition! Furthermore, checking the edit history of the article, you'll find that the first version of the Business Plot paragraph was inserted in 2006, simultaneously adding two sources. The first version with inline citations credits three different authors.
You may feel deeply embarrassed any time now. Sheesh! checking... Paradoctor (talk) 09:14, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Did you read the passage? The plagiarism took place in Barrow's 2008 introduction to the republication of the 1944 book by Beard. I'm quite confident that it was not Beard writing about "George W. Bush, Jr. [sic]" in 1944. You may now apologize to me. THF (talk) 09:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
I'll apologize for trusting my instincts so much that I let an invalid argument escape from my fingers. Upon further scutiny, I also have to retract the modifier "deeply", it is not appropriate. But you still have got no good reason to accuse Barrow of plagiarism.
  • He cites Rudolph 1950 and Wolfskil 1962, the same sources as in the Wikipedia article.
  • I don't see substantial plagiarism. Some formulations are the same, but I found no revision sufficiently similar to support the plagiarism theory. Compare this to the IDHS case.
  • Finally, though this is speculation, people reuse their own material, and print publication is a slow process. Can you prove that the offending footnote was actually produced after the Wikipedia article? The burden of proof would be on Barrow here, but I'd prefer to learn on my own that I was wrong, rather than risk being told by someone I wrongly accused.
What a way to start the day! Paradoctor (talk) 10:24, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
When one uses the same language as the Wikipedia article, in the same sentence order, and repeats inaccurate information that is found only in the Wikipedia article, the fact that someone "cited" the same sources as the Wikipedia article seems to me further evidence of plagiarism rather than a refutation of it. THF (talk) 18:40, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Unfortunately, its not the only recent one. Wikipedia Films has been dealing with The Empire having copied an entire film article, as its own, including unsourced bits and they too have remained silent to requests that the give attribution. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 04:31, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Are you sure that both Wikipedia and the book introduction do not take their wording from the earlier sources that they both cite? So both would have lifted text, but at least the source is provided. What we see here is probably a failure to paraphrase sufficiently, not unattributed use of material. Fences&Windows 14:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Given that both contain the same inaccurate information, and the underlying cite is to a 15-page article about the subject of the Wikipedia article, I don't think so: the odds that both would independently choose to paraphrase the same snippets in the same sentence order are astronomical. THF (talk) 18:40, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Maybe the " key was broken? ;) Paradoctor (talk) 14:31, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Vandalism reporting

Racquet Club of Philadelphia has been the victim of vandalism, but I am unsure how to fix it. There does not seem to be any place to report the vandalism for others to fix, unlike the vandals themselves, who can be reported. Should I plunge in with undos, or try to edit out several problems? Yes, I am reluctant. --DThomsen8 (talk) 14:28, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Go for it. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 14:46, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Dthomsen you can usually find where vandalism happened by looking through the article history (or in my case by using a fancy piece of software). It was an anonymous editor on 06Feb who made the changes, I've reverted the article to your version of 03Feb, please look it over. It was kind-of chuckly vandalism at least... :) Franamax (talk) 19:37, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Georgia (U.S. state)/New Georgia Encyclopedia/Delta Air Lines

The New Georgia Encyclopedia has released an eleventh article to Wikipedia under the CC-by-SA license (I think this is a good sign for the project). They expressed to me their interest in seeing how we are able to merge their more thorough materials into our existing articles relating to Delta Air Lines. bd2412 T 16:51, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Userpage of User:Angchonglai

Angchonglai is a "selftaught multimedia-artist" - he uses his userpage for selfpromotion and has no other edits - even his discussion page is a copy of his user page.... I have just found his art in the commons. I doubt that his userpage and - in parts - his art in the commons is in scope of the wikimedia projects ?! (despite his art has some aesthecial values) Plehn (talk) 09:20, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Left him a note. Let's try not to bite the noobies. Who knows, he may yet become a major artist of the 21st century. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 15:47, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
He's not edited since creating his userpage in December 2008, so that note is probably futile. I've nominated it for deletion. Fences&Windows 17:40, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
Arrgh, forgot to check. Paradoctor (talk) 18:01, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
Thanks! - next time I will try to write that clearer. (though not a native speaker in English) Plehn (talk) 13:04, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

I posted a request to MediaWiki talk:Statistics-footer#Change one link in Other Statistics, but I'm posting a notice here because nobody watches that page. Feel free to jump in an comment (or even make that change. That would be nice!).
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 19:33, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Hello? anyone home? echo, echo, echo...
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 03:57, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
I think you should announce it on Wikipedia:MediaWiki messages and/or use {{editprotected}} to bring the request to attention of admins. Svick (talk) 20:23, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
I thought about using {{editprotected}}, but you're supposed to be able to show support for the edit prior to using it, so... I didn't know about Wikipedia:MediaWiki messages though, thanks.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 20:52, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
The need to get consensus first usually applies in cases were things are protected because of warring or vandalism. Generally, most admins are happy to update templates or interface messages if it's a trivial change or something that's clearly a good idea and you've tested it as far as appropriate. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 18:53, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

The Richard Jewell example and covering claims waterboarding was used as a child disciplining technique

How responsibly would the wikipedia cover another Richard Jewell incident?

For those too young to remember a bomb was exploded during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Richard Jewell, An alert security guard was reported to have had his suspicions triggered by the apparently abandoned package that turned out to be a bomb. He was reported to have started to clear the area, helping to prevent the casualty count being larger. On the day or so following the incident Richard Jewell was described as a hero. But then the FBI Director revealed that Jewell was the prime suspect, based on the notion that he fit some kind of profile of a cop-wanna-be, who would plant a bomb himself, so he could set himself up to be the hero who saved the day. Jewell's home was beseiged by reporters, who wanted a reaction. The press reporting included some extremely irresponsible elements.

Five or six years later the actual bomber confessed -- an anti-Abortion kook with zero ties to Jewell.

In a recent {{afd}} another contributor cited the Jewell incident as a cautionary example, and wrote that thinking about how the wikipedia would have covered the Richard Jewell incident, if it had existed in 1996, made him or her "shudder". In other {{afd}}s I have written that I think the wikipedia has higher standards than the mainstream media, and that I think our coverage of the Richard Jewell incident would have been an island of responsibility and neutrality in the sea of irresponsible speculation.

I bring this up because of the coverage of a recent incident where an American GI has been charged with child abuse for repeatedly immersing his four year old daughter's head in water. This disciplining technique is being widely described as instances of the use of the controversial "waterboarding" technique. I recently added a section to Waterboarding in the 21st century#Use of waterboarding to discipline children about this incident.

Since then I came across this article in Salon magazine from Dahlia Lithwick, who is a lawyer as well as a journalist. She comments on the nature of other reporting of the incident -- noting how newspapers that had not been prepared to describe waterboarding as torture when it was used against terrorist suspects had not hesitated to call the technique torture when practiced on an innocent person, like a four year old girl.

The reporting on this incident reminds me of the reporting on the Richard Jewell allegations. In this instance it might be worse -- different accounts report details that are inconsistent. I suspect this is due to professional reporters allowing unprofessional editorializing slipping into reports written as if they were straight factual reporting, and possibily the simple human inability to fully face all the horrific details.

We don't normally cover child abuse incidents. We wouldn't normally cover child abuse, just because the alleged abuser is a GI who has recently served in Iraq and Afghanistan. In my judgment call is that the commentary that the GI is alleged to have used techniques that GIs are now specifically proscribed from using against the USA's enemies lifts this incident out of the ordinary. In my judgment commentary like Lithwick's makes the GI's behavior worthy of greater coverage.

In my user space I have started working on a draft -- User:Geo Swan/Yelm, Washington 'water-boarding' incident. I invite comments.

I put 'water-boarding' in quotes in the title of my draft in the interests of neutrality. Among the controversial aspects of this incident are what the GI actually did, and whether what he actually did is close enough to the CIA waterboarding that it should be called waterboarding.

How detailed should our coverage of the incident be?

  • Some press reports state, or imply, that the GI never immersed his daughter's nose and mouth, or otherwise triggered her gag reflex, so she wouldn't have experienced the first stages of drowning that the CIA's captives did. Some press accounts say that there were a total of only three or four immersions, on the single day of his arrest. Others quoting neighbors, imply that this was one of the abusive techniques he had used on a routine basis. Some commentators have written, as if it were already established, that the GI must have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in order to have failed to realize that his treatment of his daughter was (1) horrific; (2) a wildly disproportionate reaction to the justification he claimed triggered the disciplining.
  • How important is it for our coverage to reflect how extreme his treatment of his daughter was. Some reports said when the police arrived the girl had locked herself in a closet. Others that he had locked herself in the bathroom Some reports say her back was very bruised and scratched. Others that she was bruised and scratched all the way down to her ankles.
  • All reports that comment on it say the GI had only recently gotten joint custody of the girl. That he had custody of her for a month, or over a month, or almost two months.
  • All reports that comment on it say she was immersed face up. Some reports say he used hot water. Reports differ on whether he used the bathroom sink or kitchen sink. Reports differ on whether his current girl-friend helped hold her down.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 20:26, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

There are several questions you raise. If I may play devil's advocate, let me address a couple. One, the issue of WP:NOTNEWS, that 'most newsworthy events do not qualify for inclusion'. Yes, this is a developing story, but the draft's staccato of references, all within a 5 day period, suggest such a predicament. It may be suitable to refer to this incident from within the Waterboarding article, but does it merit its own page? To lift another quote, 'Wikipedia considers the enduring notability of persons and events' — so, a year down the road, how relevant will this be? Two, the double standard the media appears to be using with respect to the term itself: a compelling proposition, but one which involves editorial opinion, difficult to reconcile vis-a-vis NPOV. Food for thought. — VoxLuna ☾ orbitland   22:44, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
I agree with User:VoxLuna. I doubt this is notable enough now, and I don't see it as appropriate for us to try to keep up with quickly conflicting reports. Maurreen (talk) 06:17, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
OK. Thanks for the feedback. I'll leave Waterboarding in the 21st century#Use of waterboarding to discipline children. The article in my user space is marked with {{noindex}}. If further developments change the situation I'll reconsider the incident's notability.
I remain interested in other contributors' opinions as to whether our coverage of an incident similar to the Richard Jewell incident would be a disaster, or in the over-all interest of a guy like him, because we would be more responsible than the MSM turned out to be in that incident.
Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 21:25, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Mission of Honor

Mission of Honor is suffering from plotdump syndrome. I tagged the article as a excessive plot but the primary author of the article removed the tag with the reasoning that IP users shouldn't tag the problem, even though it is a problem (see Talk:Mission of Honor).

So, should I just go ahead and delete the plotdump?

70.29.210.242 (talk) 07:41, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

If you have a disagreement with another editor, you should discuss it on the talkpage. Just reverting without addressing the concerns raised is editwarring. Having said that, IPs have the same right to edit as everyone else, that's a fundamental principle here (can't find the right link right now). If the other editor does not address this objection, drop me a line, I'll gladly chip in. BTW, getting an account is free and easy. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 08:57, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Please help with formatting of sentencing table

The sentencing table is supposed to reflect the presence of four zones (A, B, C and D), as seen at U.S.S.G. § 5A (scroll down a little ways to see the table). It's possible to color-code the cells by zone, but I would prefer to reproduce the staircase-resembling borders. Can anyone help? Thanks, Tisane (talk) 00:45, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

 Done Let it be known that Bility officially rocks. Tisane (talk) 20:50, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

How to include PDFs

My adoptee is writing an article, and she wants to add an external link to a pdf file she has saved on her computer. She asked me how to do this, and my best guess was to use one of the many pdf hosting sites (that show up on Google), but she wants to know if there's a different way to host them. So, anyone have any idea what a good way to host a pdf file online is? I suspect your only option is to either 'use your own site or find a site to host it', but I figured I'd ask around. Swarm(Talk) 23:11, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

I would first ask, is the PDF file she wants to link to appropriate for linking? -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 23:20, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
If it is appropriate, your adoptee can upload it directly to Wikipedia, the same way images are uploaded. Svick (talk) 23:23, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
What's the content? Is she the author? How is it licensed? If it's free, it's probably should go to either of Commons or Wikisource. For scans, DjVu is preferred over PDF. Details, we need details! ;) Paradoctor (talk) 23:37, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
Heh, sorry, sorry! It's a scan of Australian Supreme Court documents (transcripts, I guess) from the '60s. Documents that old aren't kept electronically, so she scanned the hard copy she possessed. So it's a scan of Australian government documents. Swarm(Talk) 23:48, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
Okay, in that case I'd say, ask for copyright status at Commons:Village Pump. Commons:Licensing#Government-produced_works may or may nor be applicable, I can't really tell. If ok, convert to DjVu and upload there. For extra points, go to Wikisource, and ask how to OCR and upload at WS for proofreading. HTH, Paradoctor (talk) 01:19, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
Why not just upload the PDF to Wikisource (copyright status permitting) and use an appropriate linking template in the external links section of the article? It is not necessary to upload source documents to Wikipedia. – ukexpat (talk) 01:48, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
Alright, this is very helpful. I'll upload it to Wikisource after I check out the copyright status. Thanks. Swarm(Talk) 05:12, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Sprucing up Template:WelcomeBack

Anyone have a good picture to add to Template:WelcomeBack? Be bold and add one, I can't think of one. Thanks a million in advance. Okip BLP Contest 12:41, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Too many advert-like articles written for fad self-help books

Including the huge number of verbose American books written in the same gushing style but supposedly relating to business. Such as this one for example: Growth leadership.

My question is, would Wikipedia be able to detect if someone has been paid to write articles like this, to promote the books? I recall seeing many similar articles about obscure fadish business-self-help books on Wikipedia all written in the same infomercial style. 89.242.89.218 (talk) 14:49, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Although paid promotional article writing is frowned upon because the COI is so overwhelming, it doesn't so much matter if the writing was paid, it's whether the topic is encyclopedic and has been handled in an encyclopedic way. I've seem some way gushing articles (and that one is gushy) which looked more or less hopeless at first glance but when stripped down and reliably sourced were quite encyclopedic and helpful. I've also seen such articles needlessly but understandably deleted when the COI-blinded editor came back and loaded them up again, having wound up doing much more harm than help to their own narrow goal. Gwen Gale (talk) 15:05, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Inside Jobs?

If an established Wikipedia editor with "connections" were to request that a certain piece of information be mentioned in an interview by a relevant person, and if this piece of information were published in a reliable secondary source, that editor weaves the information into an article "legally". No policy is knowingly violated. Has this ever happened before? Or not to anyone's "knowledge"? – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 06:41, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

(It took me a minute to parse your question, but now that I have...) It happens. The obvious question of whether or not it's an actual problem is an entirely different thing, and the answer depends extensively on the circumstances. If it can be shown that the author approved publication of the work him/herself then that's a real issue (additionally, that would likely be an issue larger then Wikipedia, since that is professionally unethical). If the author was required to go through the normal editorial process, and the publication that printed the work was otherwise considered a reliable source, then I wouldn't think there would generally be an issue for us to worry about. ie.: if you're talking about some blog, then there's no issue since their all self-published and unreliable anyway. If you're talking about the head editor of, for example, the San Francisco Chronicle sticking his own article on page 30, then that's a real issue not only for Wikipedia but also for the Chronicle. If you're talking about a reporter for the NYT, who receives permission and editorial review in order to run a piece in the Sunday Lifestyle section if The New York Times, well then that's (usually) great for us!
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 09:04, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
I'm constantly wishing I could get someone to print something -- facts or opinion -- in a reliable source in cases where some piece of information that is desperately needed in an article can't be included because there's no good source for it yet. (Where an opinion is concerned, it's enough to be able to cite that someone of note expressed the opinion.)--Father Goose (talk) 09:30, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
Heh indeed. You could almost make a journal of "Things wikipedia needs a citation for".©Geni 10:40, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the answers so far! (And apologies Ohms law for not being clear.) I was asking because I'll read these incredible stories by actual band members about some crazy fact regarding the making of an album (that could be extremely relevant to the outcome of that album), but because they only share the story in online forums, I find myself being tempted to ask them to repeat their stories to the press. I have no doubt that I'm the only one to think this, especially with matters (and therefore, articles) far more important to the casual Wikipedia peruser. – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 09:40, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

It's happpened Donkey_punch#Medical_and_legal_risks.©Geni 09:57, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
Bands are in showbusiness, where fictional publicity and heavy spin are often taken as harmless sales tools, another slice of the product, the thrill. Beware tales of bands on blogs. Gwen Gale (talk) 11:01, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
Very true, thank you for the advice. – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 11:09, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Inline template wikitext formatting

Please take a look at Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Citation discussion#Inline template wikitext formatting and comment, when you have a chance to do so. Thank you. 08:54, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Living Persons task force IRC meeting

Hi everyone,

The Living Persons task force is having a meeting on IRC in about 28 hours, in the channel #wikimedia-strategy connect on the server freenode. If you need help accessing this channel, please see Wikipedia:IRC#Accessing IRC. The time of the meeting is at 0:00 UTC on Monday, 22 February, which you will notice if you have been in previous meetings is several hours earlier than usual. The meeting will be publicly logged (see past chats) and will generally follow the structure laid out at the agendas page. strategy:Task force/Living people has more information if you're interested. Be sure to read our current project, a set of recommendations to the WMF Board of Trustees, if you plan to come.

Please do email myself or Keegan if you have questions on how to participate!

Yours sincerely,

NW (Talk) 19:53, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Health care

I’m not sure who would be the appropriate person to address with this question – I would greatly appreciate any suggestion as to who this should be sent to?

I have been working on the health care reform issue as a volunteer with Organizing for America and have been amazed and horrified at the power of pro-industry forces to conduct a campaign of disinformation so effective that it has derailed meaningful health care reform at a time when 45,000 Americans die each year from lack of access to health care.

At the same time, I have found it difficult to get really balanced and truthful accounts of what is happening, and end up relying on progressive news sources which makes me uneasy because I don’t know how much bias there might be in their coverage.

For a democracy to thrive, there needs to be ways for citizens to become easily informed in what is really going on, along with easily available mechanisms to dialogue with others and participate in the political process.

I am wondering if there is not a way for Wikipedia to play a role, beyond being the wonderful source of basic knowledge that it is. Might it be possible for Wikipedia to launch a venture aimed at ‘civic knowledge’, with panels of people on all sides contributing to a truthful, factual array of sociopolitical realities, with divergent opinions noted in a concise way that is easy for readers to follow and understand.

For example, there could be a description of key provisions of the Senate health care proposal, with a panel of volunteers making sure that all the objective facts were correct, and panels of volunteers from different political orientations summarizing a succinct interpretation of those facts, in a few paragraphs. A split screen could be employed with the key objective facts on one side and a list of links to brief interpretation summaries on the other side.

Perhaps in providing something like this, Wikipedia could become a central institution in the democratic process, which so needs renewal at this point, especially in light of the Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance.

I would very much like to know if this is something Wikipedia could explore, or if it is something that has already been considered.

I would be very grateful for any response you can provide to this request.

Thank you!

Judy Morgan Austin, Texas —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.174.66.178 (talk) 22:13, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Translation... you want us to shill for Obamacare. Sounds like astroturfing to me!Thelmadatter (talk) 23:59, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
Hi Judy. Welcome to Wikipedia. There is an article entitled Health care in the United States. I haven't read it, but if you think it needs more detail or lacks balance, discuss it in the talk page - and maybe try your hand at editing the article. It is serious fun, and really hones your rhetoric, diplomacy and logic, especially on controversial political topics. Check out the discussion behind anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict! Anthony (talk) 09:32, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
We're an encyclopedia, not a political lobby group. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 15:19, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
Actually, I just noticed Health care reform in the United States. That's what you're looking for. Anthony (talk) 16:46, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
But please read WP:COI before you edit. Woogee (talk) 23:28, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Judy about the danger to democracy in general (not specifically about Health reform which is more of interest to Americans). The media is getting too concentrated in too few hands. Corporations with other agendas are taking over manufacturing/stifling of news; Organizations such as MSN in the USA, or BCE in Canada.

I am not sure how Wikipedia can solve this problem, but I didn't like the way Judy was being patronized in this discussion, so decided to speak out. This discussion is related to the one that precedes it here imo. Ottawahitech (talk) 05:24, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

And what do you want Wikipedia to do about this "danger to democracy"? Woogee (talk) 00:07, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
Are you implying that Wikipedia is not committed to a "truthful, factual array of sociopolitical realities, with divergent opinions noted in a concise way that is easy for readers to follow and understand"? For anything beyond, I refer you to WP:GREATWRONGS, OrangeDog nailed it. Paradoctor (talk) 01:15, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

I think that Wikipedia could be one vehicle for a "truthful, factual array of sociopolitical realities, with divergent opinions noted in a concise way" on health care, but that this would also take a great deal of work. Consider Health care reform in the United States: this article is a terrible mess. Not surprisingly it's rated C-Class by its WikiProjects. Why? I would guess because there are so many editors with strongly-held and conflicting opinions working at the same time that it produces chaos. You cannot create a featured article on such a contentious topic because someone will immediately insert misleading sentences that detract from the main issues at hand, which you will then have to spend time fighting, and when you are done, another person will soon come along, and the cycle will repeat. Would I read this article? Heck no. It's terribly written. If my own experience is any guide, this article is relatively highly ranked (7232) only because so many wandering souls are looking for guidance on the issue. They find the Wikipedia article because it is Wikipedia, then realize how terribly written it is and leave to find better sources.

By the way, Organizing for America is simply the Barack Obama political machine. Though it does have differences with "pro-industry forces," including the insurance industry, I would argue that it is more sympathetic to the health care industries, including insurance, pharmaceuticals, doctors, and hospitals, than opposed to them. Actual opposition organizations like Healthcare-NOW and PDA are much smaller than OFA and HCAN. (See this link for more information.) —Khin2718 (talk) 17:47, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

One of my favorite quotes from policy is out of Wikipedia:Verifiability: The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—what counts is whether readers can verify that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source (see below), not whether we think it is true.
The reason that I find that quote so useful is because it perfectly embodies just about everything anyone needs to know about content here on Wikipedia. As much as is humanly possible, I don't think that we should care what our own views, on whatever the subject happens to be, are. Obviously, completely divorcing yourself from the subject matter is probably too extreme, but if you honestly try to keep your own opinions out of the content then you'll generally fall into compliance with both WP:NPOV and WP:V (along with WP:RS, most likely) without even really trying. Finally, Wikipedia should never speak with "it's own voice" regardless of anything else, so things should generally be presented in the third person anyway (he said, she said, they said, etc..., not always, but usually). Just some food for thought, hopefully.
— V = I * R (Talk • Contribs) 19:22, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
Certainly all information needs to be verifiable, but any organization presenting information (either Wikipedia or other media) also has to make decisions about which information is most central. Here this tells us what to put in the lede. That is a judgment call and depends--must depend--implicitly on editor perception of which views are most significant. So while our views about the subject itself can be separated, our views about which other views are significant cannot.
—Khin2718 21:09, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps you should read WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE. We're supposed to follow published sources to determine which views are more significant. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 20:58, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
On an issue like health care different published sources will differ widely in such assessments.
—Khin2718 02:50, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

What went wrong?

I was wondering if anyone would like to share their opinion on what the hell went wrong with this RFA that drove Dr Dec (talk · contribs) off of Wikipedia. Look at the opposes. Dec said he wanted the tools for vandalism fighting, yet there were opposes because: "Vandal-fighting is stated as candidate's primary need for the tool, but only 70 reports to AIV." They had over 2200 edits with Huggle alone, and there were multiple instances of opposes based on that. Okay, maybe not the biggest of deals in the world, but other comments in the oppose section were much worse.

  • "lack of common sense"
  • "sorry dude, but I don't trust you with the tools" (no explanation)
  • "I strenuously oppose per what I consider a complete lack of common sense...Absolutely not; not ever."
  • "You will never be an admin on this project."

Dec made what appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek that said "Imagine a project without my anti-vandal edits: Barack Obama would be 307 year old Chinese farmer with 29 children, born in Sydney Australia." He was then pretty much lambasted for being arrogant, despite his attempts to clarify what he meant. Some responses were:

  • "Going by ... the sheer without-me-you're-nothing arrogance of "imagine a project without my anti-vandal edits" – there is no earthly way I'd trust you-as-admin not to block people for daring to disagree with you."
  • "To me, this candidate comes across as arrogant, immature, and inexperienced."

Dr Dec also requested that the discussion not be SNOW closed so they could "get feedback" from the process. Response?

  • "Strong oppose per request that WP:SNOW not come into play without Dr Dec's say-so. Why do we have the SNOW policy if hopeless editors like this can overrule it for no good reason?" (There were multiple instances of this being brought up.)

In case you're curious, Dr Dec's responses to this included "Let's call it a day, could someone please close this RfA. I hadn't realised that I was such an arsehole. Thanks for pointing out how much you all hate me." and "Don't these people realise that there's a living, breathing person behind the user name; some one that laughs and someone that cries? I've not felt this low for a long time, and for what — a bloody website!" (on [this revision] of their talk page) They then retired. I suspected they would return, but it's been a month so this is obviously not an "I'm pissed off so I'm retiring for a week to be dramatic" situation.

Everyone knows all RFAs can be brutal, but this just seemed ridiculously extreme. I mean, is it common practice to criticize someone so harshly that they leave the project? Honestly, what went wrong here? Am I crazy for seeing this as a problem? Polite and constructive discussions usually don't have this effect, so I'm assuming I'm not. Swarm(Talk) 06:56, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, the assessment of that user was surprisingly harsh. But short of making it easier to revoke admin permissions, I don't see a solution forthcoming. The community is understandably skittish about permanently giving the tools to someone who shows any chance of being a bully or an idiot with them. The most successful candidates are those who have cultivated an aura of industrious blandness.
I suppose we could urge people to undergo editor review before putting up an RfA, to let them get a sense of where they stand before they go through the gauntlet proper. Or maybe, I dunno, create an "admin vetting" page so people can get a foretaste without being on the main stage? No supports, no opposes, just general comments on suitability or areas of improvement.--Father Goose (talk) 00:59, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
Not to say that I'm not guilty of the same thing (I have certainly taken a hard line in a couple of my "opposes" especially with those who have obviously been around for a while), but I usually have tried make my "opposes" constructive to those whom we don't see around often and who are getting there. It's kind of like the approach I take when I review GAs – try and get something good out of it. –MuZemike 15:24, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
Right. RFA's should be constructive, but polite as well. RfAs are stressful enough as it is (one current RFA has 23 questions), and rude or hostile comments do absolutely nothing to help. Anywhere else on Wikipedia, telling someone they lack common sense is considered uncivil. Calling someone arrogant, immature or hopeless usually is too. I don't know why there's not more emphasis on the fact that RFA discussions need to be just as civil as the rest of the site. Perhaps that fact should go without saying. It obviously doesn't. These are editors with thousands of edits who have dedicated who-knows-how-many hours to the project, yet when they decide to request administrator privileges, editors whom they have never interacted with before do nothing less than insult them for their shortcomings so severely that they decide to leave. Some behavior is just inexcusable. Swarm(Talk) 06:42, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
I get the sense that RfA discussions are as civil as the rest of the site. You get enough people together, especially regarding something contentious (like a controversial admin candidate), and at least some of them will pull out knives. It ain't right, but we're severely limited in our ability to enforce civility.--Father Goose (talk) 02:42, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Template:Rahul Sankrityayan

An editor of this template keeps insisting on adding "link=" elements to two images being used on this template, but is doing so without supplying any actual link (example). The result is the template prevents editor from clicking through to the source images with no apparent justification for doing so. I've asked him not to do so [5], and his response on justification was that all Indian writer templates are constructed this way [6]. I've checked a bunch of Indian writer pages, finding none with templates constructed as he suggests.

Thoughts? --Hammersoft (talk) 21:29, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Is there any policy or guideline saying something about this? If there is, you have your answer. If not, why insist? Paradoctor (talk) 17:58, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
  • Because not everything is codified in policy nor can it be. Adding a "Link=" to something when there is no link is silly in the extreme, and in the very least counter-productive. That's my opinion. I'm looking for other opinions. --Hammersoft (talk) 19:38, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
  • "not everything is codified in policy": In which case we're obliged to seek consensus.
'Adding a "Link=" to something when there is no link': Makes perfect sense in some situations. Anoop8725 wants to maintain consistency across a range of templates. You were not satisfied by his reply. Instead of making your case with him, you came here. Now you're not satisfied with my reply. Where do you go next?
"silly in the extreme": WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT
"counter-productive": Why don't you explain that to Anoop8725, maybe he will agree with you. Stranger things have happened. Paradoctor (talk) 21:07, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
  • A drawing of the head of a crying panda bear
It seems to me that an empty link= parameter should be ignored at the software level, frankly. I can't see that an option to make attribution harder without any other effect has any place on this project. — Gavia immer (talk) 01:36, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
Huh? What has the image link to do with attribution? And what has attribution to do with a navigation template? Paradoctor (talk) 02:06, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
The default behavior when clicking on an image is for it is to show the file page with the details needed for attribution; most of our images require attribution, so we must not interfere with this. The expected behavior for images with a link= parameter is for clicking on the image to load some specified page; this should only be done if there is not any need for attribution (but usually there is), or if the file page is prominently linked near the image for attribution already. If an image needs attribution, and it's placed in a navigation template, it still needs attribution. If an image is placed in a navigation template, and there's no reason to link it to anything other than the file page, it should link to the file page. There is nothing useful about making images not link. — Gavia immer (talk) 03:50, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
If attribution is satisfied by a link, then it is implicitly satisfied by making the wikisource of our pages available. This makes the explicit link back to the file description page is a convenience link. Not linking could avoid accidental clicks, which might be deemed useful in a navigation template. So far I see no legitimate reason to deny Anoop8725 without any discussion. Paradoctor (talk) 04:37, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
No. Attribution is satisfied by a link. It is not satisfied merely by the ghost of a suggestion of a link that can be found if you look hard enough and posess the wisdom to understand it, but only by a link that you do not have to look for or think about. The actual link is not a convenience, but the entire attribution. — Gavia immer (talk) 05:04, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
"link" doesn't mean "clickable hyperlink", but something you can follow to somewhere else, like the name of the page the attribution is on viewable in the public source. How do you suppose printed versions of Wikipedia are legal if you can't click the history tabs or the pictures? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 12:38, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

File:Darren.jpg

Take a look at the history for File:Darren.jpg. There are four different images in that file's history, four different people have put four different people's faces into the file's history. This needs to be sorted out. Any ideas how? Woogee (talk) 00:09, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

The users who uploaded the first three versions back in 2007 look particularly inactive. Let sleeping dogs lie, imo. –xenotalk 00:11, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
I can't even find where in the linked article the picture is, but I have a feeling it doesn't belong there. Woogee (talk) 00:13, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
I think that's a bug in GlobalUsage, so I submitted T24631. Svick (talk) 07:18, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

WildBot interfering with hangon tag

User:WildBot comes in and sticks a notice on an article's Talk page, even if there's a speedy deletion tag on it. If the creator of the article comes along after that and adds a hangon tag, the bright red warning that they haven't explained on the article's Talk page what notability they're claiming with their hangon tag won't show up, because WildBot has already created a Talk page. Any way that the hangon tag can check to see if the person who adds the hangon tag has commented on the Talk page, or else ignore any Talk pages created by WildBot, and add the warning anyway? Woogee (talk) 00:43, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

WildBot isn't meant to shove anything on a CSD's talk page, and Really Soon Now will mark the talk page {{db-g7}} if it becomes a CSD (under certain circumstances). When did it add a note after a CSD tag? Josh Parris 00:56, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
It looks like the WildBot tagging occurred before my CSD tag. Woogee (talk) 01:00, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
In a couple of days Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/7SeriesBOT ought to be live, at which point you'll see this problem evaporate. Josh Parris 01:03, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
OK, cheers. Woogee (talk) 01:05, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
It may be possible to use {{PAGESIZE:pagename}} if we can expect a semi-consistent text size from WildBot. — Dispenser 03:16, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
That's probably not likely, as we can't assume how many links WildBot will want to report. Woogee (talk) 21:20, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Why does the hangon tag depend on the fact that there is no talk page? I'm sure there are many reasons that a speedied article will have a talk page, not just because of WildBot. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 23:09, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Google executives convicted in Italy - meaning for Wikipedia?

I read that three Google executives were convicted by an Italian court for invasion of privacy due to Google Video hosting a video of an Italian schoolboy with autism being bullied.[7] The video was taken down when Google was contacted by the Italian police, but the execs were still prosecuted in absentia and convicted. Those found guilty include Google's Global Privacy Counsel, Peter Fleischer, whose response is that "The judge has decided I am criminally responsible for the actions of some Italian teenagers who uploaded a reprehensible video to Google Video. I knew nothing about the video until after it was removed by Google in compliance with European and Italian law."

Does this ruling now mean that executives of the Wikimedia Foundation could be liable in Italy for content posted on Wikipedia? (I know you're not lawyers, before anyone chimes in). Fences&Windows 19:19, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

I think if you asked Mike Godwin he'd probably say that he's not too concerned about random foreign nations in which the WMF has no assets prosecuting WMF in absentia. The trick is enforcing any such ruling in the US. Dcoetzee 20:09, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
It's not nearly that easy to blow off a criminal conviction in the EU. Gwen Gale (talk) 20:14, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
Indeed. The WMF doesn't worry much about civil suits against itself outside the US, but criminal suits against individuals could be more worrying. It would mean the relevant people could never again travel to Europe, unless they wanted to submit to whatever the sentence was. --Tango (talk) 23:11, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
That's assuming none of the relevant people is resident in Europe. Even if sentence wasn't being actively pursued in Europe, I suspect any European WMF trustee convicted in absentia of Moral turpitude by an Italian court would find it pretty difficult to get a US visa—even if they would not have been convicted had their case been heard under US jurisdiction. - Pointillist (talk) 00:25, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
The whole Italy question has come up before in connection with Wikipedia; Wikimedia Italia (with an even more remote connection to the actual content involved) was frivously sued a while back. That was slightly different though, as I recall, because the fear was not that the plaintiff might win, but that the cost of defending such a lawsuit was prohibitive, and in that sense, I guess this situation is probably more worrying. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 20:37, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Page view statistics stopped working on Wikipedia

Statistics on all Wikipedia articles are not available for the last two days. Anyone know what to do? Ottawahitech (talk) 11:28, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

You mean stats.grok.se? Per here, User:Henrik is the person to contact. I don't know what happens behind the scene but the stats appear to be available. On the other hand, the stats.grok.se regularly missed days (example) so I don't expect this is anything serious. -- RA (talk) 11:33, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Yes it is Henrik's stats I am referring to. I have not "seen" Henrik at Wikipedia since Feb 9 Ottawahitech (talk) 12:49, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Chile video

I see some video popping up on YouTube of course, but If anyone has personal video of the earthquake, the after effects, or the tsunami and it's after effects available, it would be great if you could upload a version here (well, to Commons:Upload would be best). We can't use YouTube videos directly on 2010 Chile earthquake, and EL's to YouTube cause problems. Commons has Commons:Category:2010 Chile earthquake to add anything uploaded to, FYI. Thanks!
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 00:40, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

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