Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 15

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous).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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Ex Students of Saint Mary High School, Gulberg, Lahore. Matric (1970 class)

I am an ex student of Saint Marys Gulberg Lahore. I am looking for my class fellows who did Matric in March, 1970 from this school. Some of my class fellows were Asif Qazi, Edwin, Haseeb, Afzal, Arif Moeen, Khwaja Naveed. From: Ejaz Hussain Minhas. E-mail address ejaz7075@hotmail.com —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.27.161.125 (talk) 19:18, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Meetup in DC on aug 9th

It will take place at union station at 5PM. Please see WP:Meetup/DC 5 for more details. ffm 23:33, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

A week's notice by someone who just went on wikibreak isn't going to cut it - I'm converting this to an open-ended page - particularly since no one has said that they are going. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:43, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

WTF?

Why is Talk:Barack Obama protected? You've cut off anyone except admins from posting comments. It may just be me, but that looks like Wikipedia is taking a side in this election...but I might be paranoid. 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 19:33, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

You're paranoid. --Golbez (talk) 07:55, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

WP itself is not taking sides. I don't even think that would be possible. However there does seem to be a strong pro-Obama faction. Steve Dufour (talk) 01:42, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

It isn't, it's semi-protected. Algebraist 19:39, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

It is temporarily semi-protected due to "racist vandalism and personal attacks." Dcoetzee 21:06, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

OMFG I am such a n00b. Sorry to all. And it's good to be Paranoid sometimes. But not here. Sorry. 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 00:57, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

the big page thingy

What kind of criteria are you using now to organize the wikis at [1]. You're defintely not using no. of articles anymore. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.131.105.46 (talk) 08:13, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

See above: New arrangement on Wikipedia start-page. It was changed so that the wikis with the most traffic would be higher up the list. - Sorf^ane 08:24, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Most featured article on wikipedia...what is it?

I'm wondering which article is a featured article in more languages than any other article on Wikipedia. The highest I've seen so far is William Shakespeare with 10 featured articles in different languages. Can anyone find anything higher? Wrad (talk) 23:39, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Looks like Augustus also has 10. Byzantine Empire has 9. WWII has 16. Chess = 13. Star = 10. Anyway, if you find higher, let me know. Wrad (talk) 23:44, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Is there any reason to allow free images on WP, as opposed to Commons?

I have been doing a whole lot of moving free images to the Commons, and I am wondering why we even continue to allow free images to uploaded here as opposed to the Commons. Ideally, Wikipedia should only contain fair-use copyrighted images. A free image should be in the Commons where it is more accessible for everyone, but just as accessible for Wikipedia as if it were here in the first place. And now with a unified login, it's very easy to upload to the Commons. Is there any reason that uploading here might be more desirable? Ideally, I am thinking that any image that is uploaded to WP under a free license is redirected to an upload at Commons. The Commons is set up much better to handle the different sorts of licenses. As it is, moving images like Category:User-created public domain images is an uphill battle, as it is still being added to. Thoughts? ~ JohnnyMrNinja 01:46, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Ideally, Wikipedia should contain no media at all ;-) Anyways, back on topic, we would only be moving the backlog to Commons, which has a much limited task force. Copyvios uploaded here would be uploaded to Commons directly. From my experience with Commons, and noticing their backlog in copyvios and deletion requests, I think it is better to filter the images here than upload them directly there. -- ReyBrujo (talk) 03:31, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Good idea. Perhaps, though, the uploading screen should suggest Commons? People adding copyvio garbage just to have it usable for their definitive article on Gerardo would likely ignore this message, but people interested in making a genuine contribution may just not have realized that was an option. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 04:07, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

I can think of two reasons why uploading to en instead of Commons is preferable. One is that if you have an account here but not on Commons, it'll take you four days to get autoconfirmed after registering over there. I had to wait four days to update an image I had uploaded myself to Commons after I first registered there. I'm not sure if the new "unified login" changes things.

The more important reason is that some "free license" images turn out to be in a gray area, copyright-wise, and Commons treats gray as black. For instance, they consider photos of sculptures "derivative works", and will delete them. I uploaded a picture for inflatable rat (license: CC-BY), which they deleted. Had I uploaded it to en, it'd still be in the article. (But if someone had subsequently transferred it to Commons, it'd be gone as well.) They deleted an image from Bristol Brabazon as well, for reasons I never understood (now we're stuck with a crappy picture of a model airplane). And unless you log into Commons regularly, you'll never see the deletion notice until it's too late.

Due to the lack of communication between Commons and the actual encyclopedias that use the images they host, you're better off uploading your images to the local encyclopedia. And if you're helping out with the image transfers, be sure you know their deletion practices inside out first.--Father Goose (talk) 07:33, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

An example of a gray-area image Father Goose refers to is the Italian public domain license, {{PD-Italy}}. I uploaded the 1918 Image:F.6 Forlanini Airship.jpg from the Italian wikipedia to here because it will get deleted in Commons. There PD-Italy is a redirect to Template:Copyvio. I'm sure there are other gray area PD licenses like that.-84user (talk) 08:11, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

On Father Goose's second point, those are certainly valid concerns but the vast majority of freely licensed images on en.wiki will be free on Commons. Also, while individual users want images for their articles, I'm not convinced that treating grey as white, as en.wiki does, for borderline cases is in the best interests of the project.

The third point only holds if one assumes that uploaded images will never be used by anyone outside of your home wiki. If you think that the images you upload are good enough to be useful to other languages and projects, the balance quickly starts shifting towards uploading to Commons as your first step, rather than uploading locally and waiting for someone to transfer to Commons and delete locally. In a worst case scenario that I've seen, images are transfered laterally to another language (e.g. a user copies an image from ja.wiki and uploads it to en.wiki) or three, so the image still isn't in one central location and it eventually requires admins on more than one project to clean up what one non-admin could have avoided by an initial choice about where to upload. - BanyanTree 23:58, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

It's not a question of the images being "good enough", it's a question of being unexpectedly bitten by more restrictive copyright rules, resulting in image deletion. I've seen it happen on Commons a lot, enough to dissuade me from uploading any more images there until the copyright "gotchas" and communications problems are smoothed out. If not for those problems, Commons would be the right place to upload all free-license images.--Father Goose (talk) 04:49, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Photos of sculptures are derivative works, and can only be used on Wikipedia under a fair use claim. See {{Non-free 3D art}}. --Kjetil r (talk) 13:09, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

I think it may be a good idea, but it should wait until unified login is enabled by default for new users. Telling people that they have to register another account on another site to upload an image for this site is bound to be confusing. Mr.Z-man 23:54, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Unified login didn't go very far in solving the biggest problems of Commons being a different wiki: (1) Commons free-image policies are different than those of en.wiki, and for editors who only care about en.wiki it's inconvenient to have to learn someone else's rules; (2) there's been no unification of watchlists so if editors want to watch images they upload it generally has to be on en.wiki. The transfer of images to Commons and their deletion here is problematic in that images are effectively removed from the supervision of the only people who are likely to be watching them, and like anything that is not being watched the chances of them degrading are vastly increased. Christopher Parham (talk) 00:43, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

So perhaps Special:Upload should have a mention that A) if the image is image is free by Commons standards and B) the user has a Commons login that they should upload there. A brief line about what isn't free at Commons, and if you aren't sure then play-it-safe and upload it here. Then a link should be provided to the upload for the same title at Commons. It might help, and it couldn't hurt. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 06:45, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

That sounds about right. First thing to do is to put a thread on Commons asking what all the "not-actually-free" pitfalls are.--Father Goose (talk) 07:22, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

BTW, there is currently a discussion and straw poll on whether or not to bring the Commons' PD-Art policy into agreement with the English wikipedia's PD-Art policy. If enacted, this means we will no longer have the problem of photos of historic paintings (which are public domain in the U.S.) being moved to Commons and then deleted. If you support this (or don't), please visit the straw poll and add your opinion. Kaldari (talk) 15:16, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

I think there's a useful middle-of-the-road solution here: Commons and the Wikipedias may never agree on how strictly to interpret some licenses, but most uploads fall under a very small number of free licenses: any image licensed GFDL, cc-by, cc-by-sa, or PD-author ought to be sent straight to Commons. I believe few enough cases will be left that the overhead of transferring them to Commons, if possible, will be much smaller. Dcoetzee 01:38, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

You would think so, but as I noted above, a surprising number of freely licensed pics will be deleted from Commons due to unexpected limitations or interpretations of copyright law. I'm all for the idea of a common repository of images for all the wikipedias, but right now there is poor enough coordination between Commons and the other projects that Commons just should not be the default target for media uploads. You should only upload there if you know where all the mines are buried -- free licensing is not sufficient.

The best approach, for now, is to allow people to upload to local Wikipedias and let people well-versed in Commons policies do the transwikis.--Father Goose (talk) 05:22, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I have brought the issue of incongruities up at Commons. Hopefully this can be fixed so that there is no more confusion. I've had a few errors moving things when the tag just didn't work over there. As mentioned, some of our "free" tags either don't exist there or are redirects to other tags. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 09:46, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Father Goose's "allow people to upload to local Wikipedias ...". Commons has a different user interface, different rules, different sets of tags (as JohnnyMrNinja points out), etc. If the various sets of policy-makers can't get their act together, editors should not be the victims. -- Philcha (talk) 12:58, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

A call to arms for the free peoples of the internet:

On the internet, we are under attack.

CAPTCHA is broken. SPAM is growing. CRIME is rampant.

We have few defenses, and our respective nations lack the jurisdiction and the will to protect us.

Therefore, we must, with no delay, create an INTERNET MILITIA to deal with these crimes and protect the innocent, and

We must form the FIRST INTERNET CONSTITUTIONAL CONGRESS and pass the first CONSTITUTION OF THE INTERNET in order to guarantee our rights in this digital era.

The first step is to create a forum where everyone can read and contribute.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

“We the people of the Internet, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure online tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Internet.” —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ironcoconut (talk • contribs) 07:45, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Good luck with that. --Golbez (talk) 07:51, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Metagovernment, which is a wiki more in line with what you're thinking, is three doors down on the left. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 07:54, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Why would you want to ruin our Utopian Anarchy? Switch off your computer for a while, have a couple of stiff drinks and chill. Roger (talk) 11:32, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Don't mind if I do. Oh, were you talking to Celarnor? Darn. I have this bottle of Spudka I've been meaning to quaff. It's probably particularly good when mixed with orange juice. You know what's strange to me, is that they note that it has a certain % of alcohol, but they don't say what else is in there. Well, what is the rest? If it's just water, I could have taken some grain alcohol, watered it down, and achieved the same result. Anyway, Celarnor, have you heard of Encyclopedia Dramatica? You might like it. Aldrich Hanssen (talk) 20:22, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

I was actually replying to Ironcoconut - note the indents. The dude's gotta try chilling, its not healthy to get so excited about matters that one can't do anything constructive about. Forming a militia might just lead to serious trouble. LOL! Some ethanol diluted with a suitable flavourant would go down quite nicely right now, I'm off to bed shortly. (Is Spudka a relative of Vodka? Roger (talk) 20:41, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Don't ban me!

I am a regular user of WP at work, and it appears that a few of my colleagues have been vandalising WP. The last time I visited WP I was threatened with being barred. I guess this is because I share the IP address with my colleagues. Anyone else had this problem? I don't want my sign in name to become assocaited with a hooky IP address and ultimately end up banned from a very helpful resource. Any top-tips?Jimpoolio (talk) 16:36, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

You wont be banned if you log in when at work - my school is banned from Wikipedia, but I can still log on because I have an account. Usernames are never usually associated with IP addresses, I think this my be a privacy thing, but also a huge amount of them are shared so no edits can realy be traced back to on person. Just always stay logged on, and you'll be fine ;) - Sorf^ane 17:16, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Don't stay signed in if others use your computer, though, or else they'll edit under your username.--Father Goose (talk) 23:01, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Protection Patrol

I am pleased to announce the establishment of Wikipedia:Protection patrol, which will seek to combat page protection abuse. Aldrich Hanssen (talk) 02:26, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Will this serve a purpose not already served by WP:RFPP (for lifting forgotten-about protection) and WP:ANI (for discussion of contentious protections)? Algebraist 02:32, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

WP:RFPP is "not the place to dispute a protection" and WP:ANI is mostly a place for people to tattle to the teacher about someone's misbehavior, while crowds of busybodies gather around jeering. Not the most conducive environment for serious, sustained discussion of important specialty issues such as page protection. Aldrich Hanssen (talk) 02:49, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

I have to say that beginning the first review with "In my opinion, it's pretty gay that.." is probably not going to encourage people seeking a more sober venue to discuss this topic. - BanyanTree 06:26, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, you may have a point there. Aldrich Hanssen (talk) 15:55, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

List of phones that can be used to edit Wikipedia

Hello, I would like to know if there is such an article? I also searched but did not find one. Basically I would like to know what phone to buy, and this would be one of the criteria. Any help or guidance on this would be much appreciated. Thank You! PS: sorry if this is the wrong place to put this question. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 13:05, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

I think WP:Mobile access is the closest thing we've got to what you want. Algebraist 13:09, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! this is an excellent starting point. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 14:08, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

See also WP:EIW#Mobile. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:34, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

What has happened to the www.wikipedia.org page?

Whereas it used to be that the top ten language wikipedias were listed in size order around the Wikipedia logo on the www.wikipedia.org page, they have now been jumbled up, and, moreover, the Dutch wikipedia is not included there, even though it is the seventh largest wikipedia. The Chinese wikipedia has been placed adjacent to the logo instead, even though its only the twelfth largest Wikipedia. Does anybody know why this is? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Matisia (talk • contribs) 08:48, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

They are now listed in order of hits, after this poll on meta. - Sorf^ane 08:54, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Plain English needed

Please take a look at this name change request and the bot's response to it. The user who made the request found the response -- and the fact that the request was moved to another page -- baffling and incomprehensible, as you can see from these remarks that he posted.

Now this is not the Simple English Wikipedia, but it's not the Insider Jargon Wikipedia either. To start with, "usurpation" is not a familiar word to everyone. If you compare what the bot posted to other boilerplate wording like "Once you click the Save button, your changes will be visible immediately. For testing, please use the sandbox instead", I think it's obvious that there's considerable room for improvement.

I also wonder what happened to the original request. As far as I can tell, it should have been moved under one of the "archived usurpation request" links from WP:Changing username#Archives, but I can't see it there. I do see that the user has submitted a new variation of it, assuming that the original request was rejected, when as far as I can tell it may well be going to be approved as a usurpation. I've added a link there pointing to this posting, and that is the end of my involvement regarding this.

--208.76.104.133 (talk) 04:55, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

... If you've left middle school and "usurpation" is jargon to you, then there are some bigger problems with whatever education system you've been using that should probably be addressed before going any further. But that's beside the point; the use of the word there is the most efficient way to get that point across in a concise manner while maintaining accuracy. If you can't understand entry-level secondary school vocabulary, then you probably really should be at Simple. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 15:40, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Nope, the anon is exactly right: "usurpation" is a pointless bit of jargon and bad writing. Perhaps you should review those English classes you remember so fondly. And you could skip the gratuitous insults - that would be good, too. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 17:30, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

How would you describe it without actually presenting an example of a usurpation scenario? Every writing workshop, course, or seminar I've ever been involved in has always emphasized conciseness and accuracy as major components of a well-written piece, whether it be technical writing for documentation, literary criticism, or professional communications. If the price of accuracy is that someone with a less developed knowledge of the English language has to look up a word every now and then, I don't have a problem with it. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 01:59, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Pick a number, any (whole, positive) number

There's been a minor disagreement as to whether to include a link in an article, and some of its editors have agreed to "flip a coin" so to speak. Would somebody please pick a random whole positive number? The first one to post will decide the fate of the world! – 129.49.7.150 (talk) 15:29, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

OK, I pick Graham's number. Algebraist 15:40, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Lol @ Graham's number! Anyhoo, a decision (however minor) shouldn't be based on a "flip of a coin". Specifically, what link is being fought over? Deamon138 (talk) 15:58, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

393 :-) Northwestgnome (talk) 17:15, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Googolplex. Corvus cornix_talk 18:04, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

There is no probability distribution over the positive integers that assigns > ε probability to each integer, $0<\epsilon \in \mathbb {R}$, since the sum of the probabilities of the first ceiling(1/ε) integers would exceed 1. You would have to specify what distribution you have in mind, or restrict the range. Dcoetzee 22:36, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Maybe they are trying to see who gets the closest to the number? Deamon138 (talk) 22:46, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I was assuming it was pick-your-own distribution. I used a Dirac measure. Algebraist 22:47, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I pick i. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 12:45, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

C'mon, please keep to the rules! A positive number is requested, and $\mathbb {C}$ is not an ordered field. --B. Wolterding (talk) 12:54, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Wakey, Wakey! Northwestgnome already gave you 393. Roger (talk) 13:05, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and me and Corvus Cornix also gave answers. The only question is what the OP's doing with all this. Algebraist 13:09, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

I noticed, and it's not me who asked the original question. Sorry, not everybody has the same kind of humor... --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:23, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Motto of the day

We need your help! MOTD has been running for over two years, as an informal project publishing a daily unofficial Wikipedia motto each day through the {{MOTD}} templates. It's intended to be a way to gather the Wikipedia community together to a common purpose and help portray our mission through a often clever or witty phrase. Unfortunately, activity in the project has started to drop of late, and we only have mottos scheduled for the next week. For this project to run smoothly, we need plenty of original suggestions from editors like you, as well as people to comment on existing suggestions, close old discussions, and schedule approved mottos. It's a great way to take a break from your run-of-the-mill editing, and you may learn something about Wikipedia in the process. Please stop by WP:MOTD and take a look around. If you have any questions, please post below, on our project's talk page, or drop me a line. Thanks for your time, and happy editing as always. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 23:03, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

You could always quote from Deteriorata; that's usually good for a grin.—RJH (talk) 01:10, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Why is editing wikipedia so very overcomplicated?

Why is editing wikipedia so overcomplicated and inaccessible? I've edited a fair few articles, but the more I try and do anything beyond fixing spelling mistakes, the more I get frustrated at how overcomplicated everything is. Want to add a photo to an article? Once you've found the relevent help page (no easy task) you're faced with the joy of searching through reams of policy to figure out the difference between a wikimedia commons friendly {{cc-by-sa-2.5-in}} lisence, and the wikimedia commons unfriendly Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. Why isn't there a big button in the sidebar taking you to an easy "How to edit wikipedia" guide? Why not a collection of video tutorials to help people get to grips with {{ref}} tags and file uploads? Why not a tool that automatically lets you know whether a Flikr photo is wikipedia-friendly or not, and imports it from Flikr if it is? If wikipedia editing was that bit more user friendly, perhaps more people would get involved and articles would start to improve. Does anyone else think there's room for improvement here? Saluton (talk) 22:24, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, it's complicated because it's a vast sprawling site that tries to accomplish everything in the world. Have you checked out the editor's index? Lots of things could be made more simple but this is a site run by volunteers. No-one has gotten yet to your particular areas of concern. Feel free to pitch in with programming help, I'm sure you'll be welcomed with open arms. :) Franamax (talk) 22:52, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

There is a help button in the sidebar: Help:Contents. Deamon138 (talk) 00:12, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Saluton, to be honest with you, my advice with images is to just upload it and let the copyright boffins figure it out for you — unless of course you own the rights, in which case it's easy and you're safe. At least with images, there's a solid reason for the difficulty - moronic copyright law. The area where we really need to clean things up is refs and footnotes. Considering the importance we place on them, we really, really, really, really, really, really, really need to simplify, standardize, and automate the system. Mr. IP 《Defender of Open Editing》 00:01, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

refToolbar and some of the resources in WP:EIW#Source may help. Mr.Z-man 00:08, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Wow, had never seen that tool before - good stuff. Personally, I always use templates, so that will be nice. I think we should add something like that as a basic feature, standardize the formatting completely, and set things up so that even the newest user can create a largely-proper inline citation without having to read much or anything about WP protocols. Mr. IP 《Defender of Open Editing》 01:09, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

• Regarding Flickr uploads--the world's coolest toy does exist that makes uploading Flickr images a snap. You have to have a Commons account but all you need to do is input the URL of the Flickr photo and the tool does the rest. It will let you know if there is any issues with licenses and, best of all, if the original author later changes the Flickr license to a wiki-unfriendly license the image is less likely to be deleted because the bot verified the original license. Bryan's tool couldn't make uploading photos any easier. Agne^Cheese/^Wine 00:25, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Motto of the day

We need your help! MOTD has been running for over two years, as an informal project publishing a daily unofficial Wikipedia motto each day through the {{MOTD}} templates. It's intended to be a way to gather the Wikipedia community together to a common purpose and help portray our mission through a often clever or witty phrase. Unfortunately, activity in the project has started to drop of late, and we only have mottos scheduled for the next week. For this project to run smoothly, we need plenty of original suggestions from editors like you, as well as people to comment on existing suggestions, close old discussions, and schedule approved mottos. It's a great way to take a break from your run-of-the-mill editing, and you may learn something about Wikipedia in the process. Please stop by WP:MOTD and take a look around. If you have any questions, please post below, on our project's talk page, or drop me a line. Thanks for your time, and happy editing as always. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 23:03, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

You could always quote from Deteriorata; that's usually good for a grin.—RJH (talk) 01:10, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Why is editing wikipedia so very overcomplicated?

Why is editing wikipedia so overcomplicated and inaccessible? I've edited a fair few articles, but the more I try and do anything beyond fixing spelling mistakes, the more I get frustrated at how overcomplicated everything is. Want to add a photo to an article? Once you've found the relevent help page (no easy task) you're faced with the joy of searching through reams of policy to figure out the difference between a wikimedia commons friendly {{cc-by-sa-2.5-in}} lisence, and the wikimedia commons unfriendly Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. Why isn't there a big button in the sidebar taking you to an easy "How to edit wikipedia" guide? Why not a collection of video tutorials to help people get to grips with {{ref}} tags and file uploads? Why not a tool that automatically lets you know whether a Flikr photo is wikipedia-friendly or not, and imports it from Flikr if it is? If wikipedia editing was that bit more user friendly, perhaps more people would get involved and articles would start to improve. Does anyone else think there's room for improvement here? Saluton (talk) 22:24, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, it's complicated because it's a vast sprawling site that tries to accomplish everything in the world. Have you checked out the editor's index? Lots of things could be made more simple but this is a site run by volunteers. No-one has gotten yet to your particular areas of concern. Feel free to pitch in with programming help, I'm sure you'll be welcomed with open arms. :) Franamax (talk) 22:52, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

There is a help button in the sidebar: Help:Contents. Deamon138 (talk) 00:12, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Saluton, to be honest with you, my advice with images is to just upload it and let the copyright boffins figure it out for you — unless of course you own the rights, in which case it's easy and you're safe. At least with images, there's a solid reason for the difficulty - moronic copyright law. The area where we really need to clean things up is refs and footnotes. Considering the importance we place on them, we really, really, really, really, really, really, really need to simplify, standardize, and automate the system. Mr. IP 《Defender of Open Editing》 00:01, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

refToolbar and some of the resources in WP:EIW#Source may help. Mr.Z-man 00:08, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Wow, had never seen that tool before - good stuff. Personally, I always use templates, so that will be nice. I think we should add something like that as a basic feature, standardize the formatting completely, and set things up so that even the newest user can create a largely-proper inline citation without having to read much or anything about WP protocols. Mr. IP 《Defender of Open Editing》 01:09, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

• Regarding Flickr uploads--the world's coolest toy does exist that makes uploading Flickr images a snap. You have to have a Commons account but all you need to do is input the URL of the Flickr photo and the tool does the rest. It will let you know if there is any issues with licenses and, best of all, if the original author later changes the Flickr license to a wiki-unfriendly license the image is less likely to be deleted because the bot verified the original license. Bryan's tool couldn't make uploading photos any easier. Agne^Cheese/^Wine 00:25, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

articles milestone

I bet we hit 2,500,000 articles in less than 24 hours! - Icewedge (talk) 19:11, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think anyone here's crazy enough to take that. Algebraist 19:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

2.5M articles

I remember hearing that at about 2.5M articles, Wikipedia will stop growing and start looking so developed. Now that Wikipedia has reached 2.5M, what do you think its status will be within the next few years?? Georgia guy (talk) 23:00, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Partly different and partly the same.--Father Goose (talk) 00:53, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I believe in the future, we will all have Wikipedia chips in our brains. All humans will be omniscient! Either that or a wheel war will descend into a total Nuclear Armageddon. I'd hate to see the ArbCom after that... Deamon138 (talk) 01:07, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I believe that Wikipedia will become increasingly distrusted as a source of accurate information.Annette46 (talk) 03:35, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I think we're going to continue to come up with arbitrary policies for inclusion not based on coverage in secondary sources and lose a good portion of those articles. :P Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 16:49, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

how many cases of mediation and arbitration?

Hello Wikipedians! I can't reach data for a dissertation I'm writing on wikipedia: Do you know how many cases are respectively taken by the mediation committee and the Arbcom each year or month? Another one: how many blocks are made by sysops every day? Thanks!! :) --Karibou 16:00, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Regarding the second question, I suggest you simply do some sampling of the block log, which you'll find at Special:Log. For the first, I'm not sure that anyone keeps track, partly because such things as the meaning of "take a case" are not as clear as you might think. (If the mediation committee asks involved editors whether they want to participate, and some refuse, so there is no further work, does that count? If the process gets halfway, and then some involved editors drop out, does that count?) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:43, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

notability

I have a problem to appreciate en.WPs hyper-inclusionist policies on notability. Take Category:Sheriffs' departments of the United States. To me, this seems like a joke. I don't see any encyclopedical value in such a plethora of redundant information. All Sheriffs' departments do the same thing, whether you consider it to be "to serve and protect" or someting different. There certainly are not many noteworthy facts that makes one department different from another. I admit that the concept of elected Sheriffs may give them some relevance, but they could be easily named in the article about the respective community. Another example are the myriads of fictional characters like e.g. in Category:Anime_and_manga_characters_by_series. It's like a cultural shock for me, as on the german language Wikipedia 99% of both examples would be considered as not noteworthy and be deleted. Could someone please point me to the rationale, the policies or the discussions behind all of that? -- 790 ♫ 19:35, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Not everybody agrees with a narrow limitation of what should be included in wikipedia, and what you find of little interest can be considered much more worthy to others. Likewise, some subjects you enjoy may be considered unworthy trash by another. My understanding is that the notability criteria is an attempt at a compromise that allows flexibility while keeping out articles of inconsequential trivia. Some would argue that it is not always successful, however. Besides, WP:NOTPAPER.—RJH (talk) 22:41, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that this is about WP:NOTPAPER. I do not claim there is some wasting of server space going on, but I see an inherent lack of content quality. Actually, I consider most of the articles in the above named categories to be in violation of Wikipedia:Notability, to be more precise: Sources, defined on Wikipedia as secondary sources, provide the most objective evidence of notability.

Like 90% of the articles on sheriff's departments do not name any source besides the departments own webpage. Some even take it one step further, like e.g. Office of the Sheriff, Monterey County, where under Sources there is merely the sentence "Office of the Sheriff, Monterey County, and this information was confirmed?". Now this is a clear violation of WP:NOR and WP:V, and I believe that this problem is inherent to describing this very topic in such detail.

Likewise in violation of WP:NOR are many, many pages on ficitional characters. I randomly picked 10 articles from the above mentioned categorie, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and 10. Only #8 is well sourced, #1, #5 and #6 contain some sources, but not to an extent to cover all claims made in the article; the other 6 out of 10 articles do not name a single source at all.

On top of all that, the notion seems to be wide-spread on en.WP that sourcing is not that important. In this case, I removed a passage from an article which was unsourced, plus which I regard as minuscule; only to have my removal reverted by another editor, who claimed that "There's a tag for requesting citation, there's no need to start deleting sections." I mean, please? What kind of an overall approach is that? Do we really want an encyclopedia filled with hints that this section may be made up, but please don't touch it, as it well may be true, too? -- 790 ♫ 06:58, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Communities are served by the Wikipedia. Not every Wikipedia article is globally significant. Every sheriff's department is serving some community of significant size. I think the verifiability as a reason for deletion is being pushed far too often. In this case, one would have to ask why would a sheriff's department deceive the public by posting incorrect information about itself and where would one go to independently verify a basic fact such as the number of deputies in the department? Assume good faith applies here to editors that insert descriptive data about government agencies. patsw (talk) 14:48, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

As far as the articles on fictional characters are concern, what you pointed out are articles that need to be cleaned up and/or merged into a list, per WP:FICTION. However, there is only so much manpower within WP:Anime to dedicate to over 8,500 anime and manga articles. Also, they are contently battling with rabid fans who prefer the heavily plot laden individual articles. And finally, these articles don't need to be immediately cleaned up because there are no deadlines. Sooner or later, editors will get to these articles. But there is nothing wrong with leaving them be until then. --Farix (Talk) 16:41, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

But I think to some extent your missing the point. While you're right that we have no deadlines, on the other hand having too much crap isn't good. For starters, it does a disservice to our readers some oe who may not be smart enough to realise wikipedia is full of crap and they should not trust any unreferenced crap. It also gives off the impression of wikipedia as being full of crap to readers (like 790 above). Perhaps most importantly, and this ties nicely into your "rabid fan's" comment, it gives the impression to other editors that the existance of this crap is justified or worse there is consensus for this crap. Yes WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS is a poor argument in a deletion/merge debate and should rightfully be ignored by the closing admin but it isn't always. More importantly a lot of editors don't get the idea meaning they are going to be adding more crap which will eventually be cleaned up, i.e. a big amount of the work will go to waste. Other then potentially pissing off these editors which is not something we want to do, it means a lot of editor work which could have been used more productively is wasted (both the original contributors and those who cleaned up the crap). In other words, if we found a way to fix up all the crap, there is a good chance more editors are going to realise we have standards and don't just want any crap and a more likely to contribute in a more productive manner (of course some will just leave/never join which is unfortunate but as I've already pointed out it's likely to be worse when an editors hard work is reduce to nothing because it was always mostly crap). You will note I'm not suggesting a solution, indeed I don't think there is an easy solution. I'm just pointing out that the idea having a lot of crap is not harmful because we have no deadline is not IMHO correct. Nil Einne (talk) 17:21, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

But anyone who takes action on a wide range of articles at once gets labeled as being disruptive. (i.e. TTN (talk · contribs)) In many ways, it's a catch-22 situation if one of your goals is to avoid upsetting editors who contributed to these articles. But of the two approach, the slower approach is much more likely to produce the most success and prevents the editors doing the cleanup/merging from having to engage in multiple battles at once. --Farix (Talk) 18:57, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

(ec)In this case, one would have to ask why would a sheriff's department deceive the public by posting incorrect information about itself and where would one go to independently verify a basic fact such as the number of deputies in the department. First, per our user policy, it's improper for an organization to have a user account - only individuals can (this is important for liability purposes, and for GFDL copyright issues), so there should be no such thing as a department posting information. Second, we have no way of verifying that an individual - even an IP address - is authorized to post information regarding an organization (yes, the editor may post a phone number, but Wikipedia has no "official" person who can call to confirm things - and individual editors doing so are guilty of a WP:NOR violation if they cite the phone call, subsequently. Third, the policy of WP:V doesn't have to do with what is true, it has to do with what is verifiable, using reliable sources. It's perfectly appropriate to use a budget document on a government website as a source for (say) the number of members of a sheriff's department, but wrong to use that document to prove notability; for the purposes of demonstrating notability, we don't count an organization's website.

(ec)Personally, I think the size of a organizational entity is important. A sheriff's department of (say) a dozen folks - which might be the case in a rural county - probably isn't notable unless it has been embroiled in a number of lawsuits. A sheriff's department in a large urban county - almost certainly there have been news stories over the years, if nothing else about each new sheriff that has been hired. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:01, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for all your statements, specifically for pointing me to WP:DEADLINE and WP:FICTION. To Patsw, I'd like to emphasize what John Broughton pointed out above: that WP:AGF is probably not meant to "override" WP:V, especially in a case of WP:Conflict of interest (an organization describing itself) - and I can't refrain from remarking that it is a little naïve to assume that there could not possibly be a reason for false claims here. With John Broughton I would fully agree also in that size does matter here, and to have an article e.g. on the LAPD seems perfectly reasonable to me. So this may come down to ask Wikipedia:WikiProject Law Enforcement for a more stringent application of WP:N to the articles in their focus - I wonder how they would react on such a request. -- 790 ♫ 20:59, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

If we are discussing an encyclopedic compilation of facts about sheriff's departments into articles, I think it is a little paranoid and assuming bad faith that a sheriff's office web site contains false basic information on its budget, the number of deputies, other employees, etc. Controversial information of interest to the Wikipedia reader could be included from any source with the usual verifiability criteria. As for what the threshold size is for inclusion in the Wikipedia, I will echo that is one of the functions a Wikipedia project: to help determine by consensus what the objective inclusion criteria are. patsw (talk) 23:09, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I apologize if I misread "posting" as meaning posting to Wikipedia, as opposed to posting to a website. Of course we should assume that basic facts posted to a government website are correct; there is no reason to do otherwise. But regarding doing an encyclopedic compilation of facts about sheriff's departments into articles, I point to WP:NOT - Wikipedia isn't an indiscriminate collection of information. Our goal is not to capture all the information in the world; our goal is to provide overview information so that interested readers can understand a topic and can follow links if they want more information. One reason to avoid data collection is that when articles contain large amounts of current information, then editors have a choice of (a) spending time, year after year, updating the information, or (b) letting it go out of date. Far better to simply do an approximation ("the department has about 100 employees [footnote link]"), and let the reader follow the link - if they really care about the details - to see if the actual number is 92 employees or 105 employees, the number of deputies and detectives and office workers, etc. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 12:45, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Early audio files on main page?

and

...were just promoted to featured sound. Tomorrow, August 14, 2008, marks the 120th anniversary of the press conference that introduced the phonograph to London, and for which all the earliest surviving recordings of music, including these two were made.

Now, I for one think that the historic 120th anniversary is an excellent reason to put these two sounds on the main page. We could put it under the Featured picture, perhaps. What does everyone think? Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 04:05, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Surely this idea is a little last minute? Deamon138 (talk) 23:45, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Mergin discussion of Self-hating Jew and Auto-Anti-Semitism

eveyone is invited:

1. merge discussion here:
   Talk:Self-hating Jew
2. Category delete here:
   Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 August 14#Category:Auto-Anti-Semitism

--Shevashalosh (talk) 22:39, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The Red Sox and Manny being Manny

Once upon a time, there was a baseball team.

They were a pretty good baseball team, collecting together lots of really talented baseball players, so they could win the World Series. But one of their players, he started to think he could do what he liked, because he was a really good player, so he shot his mouth off, walked when he should have run, and wanted his say in how the team did things.

Now, in the past, the team just shruged it off as "Manny being Manny", and things continued. And Manny got worse, till he started sitting out games and pushed an old man to the ground... And the Red Sox had a big slump, and lost a string of games and were even bested by the Yankees. So the Red Sox traded Manny off to the Dodgers with the offer that they'd pay his wages and the Dodgers didn't even have to keep him if they didn't want to.

And in exchange, Jason Bay came in to replace him, and he was a pretty good hitter, and he played well with others too, and then the Red Sox started wining games again!

Now, what can we learn from this?

How about, "Lets stop treating 'Hard Working Admin' as if they're gods amongst men, make them follow the rules. And if they don't, we should trade them to Slashdot for a sandwich."

--Barberio (talk) 03:11, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

May contain nuts

No where near as funny as The Truth, but does it deserve to be deleted? -HarryAlffa (talk) 21:41, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

For those interested, the deletion discussion is here: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:May contain nuts.

As for does it deserve to be deleted?, if you think it doesn't, you should be posting at WP:DRV. That assumes, of course, that you think that there was a mistake in the process. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:47, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Michael Phelps Wiki

Seems it's been hacked/changed relating the Zodiac Killer —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.63.124.51 (talk) 04:24, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Template vandalism, fixed. Algebraist 10:04, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Latest News on Wikipedia Article View Stats

If anyone is interested, I have the latest information on the status of the Wikimedia Foundation's page view stats, with a response from the person in charge of it Erik Zachte. --David Shankbone 22:21, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Odd effect of double inclusion of coordinates

At Fort Nisqually, the double inclusion of latitude and longitude information (in two different infoboxes) makes for a very weird overprinting in my (Firefox) browser. Are others seeing a similar problem? Is there a recommended solution? - Jmabel | Talk 06:53, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

At present, {{infobox nrhp}}, when calling {{coord}}, sets the 'display' parameter to 'inline,title', meaning that the co-ordinates are displayed in the infobox and also at the top of the page (at least in monobook). You could edit {{infobox nrhp}} to have an optional 'display' parameter, defaulting to 'inline,title', which it would pass to {{coord}}. Then just decide which infobox on Fort Nisqually deserves to have its coords at page top and change the other to 'display=inline'. You could probably do things differently so that both coord links displayed without overlapping, but I don't think there's much point in having two such links in one article anyway (since there's no explanation of which is which without scrolling down to the infoboxes). Algebraist 15:36, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

New York City: Copy vio at knol.

This Knol enty is a very close copy of our article New York City without respecting GFDL, indeed the knol author claims copyright and "all rights reserved". Please could one who knwos what to do post this note to the correct place. Thanks. --Matthiasb (talk) 15:18, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Add it to Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks/Knol.--Father Goose (talk) 19:06, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

English wikipedia use far too difficult language on many articles, this should STOP

I mostly reads articles about political science and history, but I often find the use of "academic words" too overwhelming. It makes the text hard to understand and I must often guess what that word means by setting it in a context.

Who is the receiver for what you write here on wikipedia ? The Public or academics with an PhD? --Ezzex (talk) 14:25, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Try: Simple Wikipedia & for the big words Wiktionary.--Aspro (talk) 15:48, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

That's not a very fair response, Aspro, because it's not just the obscure words that may be confusing to a layperson but the style of the writing that's used. Certainly, within reason, an effort should be made to make an article accessible to the kind of person who might be accessing it. – ClockworkSoul 04:05, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't think Aspro was being dismissive. Simple Wikipedia's articles should be simpler in style, as well as vocabulary. As for articles on technical subjects, the "kind of person who might be accessing it" may well be someone who can understand it. On occasion I come across a technical article that's Greek to me, but I can usually get an idea of what it's about, and there should always be links to other articles (including external links) that might have what I was looking for. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 00:34, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

I do think using Simple Wikipedia would be very helpful as a quick start for any reader who stumbles a bit on the vocabulary in articles at en.Wikipedia. After one has gotten a clear notion as to what the topic's about, they can always then go back to en.Wikipedia for a deeper understanding and more thorough sources. Gwen Gale (talk) 12:43, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

It depends on the subject matter. I've found some pages are definitely much too technical, and do require an advanced degree to understand. (Especially some of the higher level math and physics topics.) Hopefully those will get addressed over time. A large number seem aimed at the college-educated, but targeted at the non-specialist. I agree with the suggestion to view Simple Wikipedia first to get the gist of the article. A somewhat comparable commercial example is Encyclopedia Britannica, who also sell a student edition.—RJH (talk) 15:36, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

WP:NOT PAPERS already says it... the text should read so it's comprehensible without following a single link. I spend a lot of edit effort dumbing down article lead sections so they make the technical less obscure. Any idiot can write Jargon. But Jargon has little place in an educational endeavor. The trick is editors have to be able to forget what they know and read it as if they were totally ignorant of the article's subject matter and give enough explanatory glue phrasing to edjumacate. It's not hardly ever easy, but that's what needs done. // FrankB 05:16, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

The statement about not needing to follow a link should really be stated in the MoS and/or Wikipedia:Explain jargon. I don't believe it is at the moment.

"Any idiot can write Jargon." Funny one that.—RJH (talk) 21:37, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

FrankB, thanks for drawing my attention to WP:NOT PAPERS, which I will use next time someone pushes for a more academic style.

RJH, thanks for prompting me to read Wikipedia:Explain jargon. I'll quote that next time someone objects (as they have!) to my have a "technical terms" section.

Anyone who has difficulty understanding these WP policies should read logorrhoea and Sokal affair. -- Philcha (talk) 01:07, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Chartjunk expands the issue into the realm of graphics and images. SharkD (talk) 00:51, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I heard an interview with a very active wikipedia user on radio in my country some days ago, and he said that wikipedia-articles would be better if amateurs wrote articles about science etc. and that those who where experts in the field checked it after wards. This person had a PhD in economics, but he never wrote any article about this subject because he felt that the article would be too difficult to read for those who weren't educated in the area. --Ezzex (talk) 11:58, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

The problem is, that by using by using simpler words, you may introduce inaccuracies by using words and phrasing that are only partially correct, though more understandable than the fully correct, but more technical, phrasing. In other cases, you really just can't simplify things that much. There's a reason that certain topics aren't taught until graduate school; it takes a strong background to be able to understand them. Mr.Z-man 13:49, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I can see the merits of the argument made by the PhD in economics (quoted by Ezzex, 11:58, 2 August 2008). I've edited some paleontology articles and most of the work is in finding ways to explain things in non-PhD terms.

I disagree with Mr.Z-man's argument that "you really just can't simplify things that much." The one case I can think of where it may be true is pure math, where the tools are the subject (or vice versa). In theoretical physics, it's known that Einstein was not a terrific mathematician and needed tuition from Minkowski before he could develop his General Theory of Relativity, which he had already conceived in visual terms.

The original post was not about the inherent difficulty of some subjects, it was about the over-use of an academic style - jargon-laden, allusive, terse, often using complex sentence structures - which raises a barrier between non-specialist readers and the ideas. I've just checked Ezzex's user page and he / she is a Swede who reads and contributes in English. If such an intelligent person finds a lot of WP articles too academic in tone, there's a real problem.

The correct response is to put readers first - use the techniques mentioned earlier in this discussion, check for assumed prior knowledge and provide non-technical explanations at an appropriate level of detail where necessary, and above all use the simplest possiblle language. -- Philcha (talk) 15:51, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree with you here, but i'm not a Swede.--Ezzex (talk) 15:58, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Yep, I misread your user sub-pages since since it's decades since I saw a Nordic language. I suspect you're either a Dane or a south-east Norwegian, since Danish and Bokmal are almost the same language (I'm assuming I can still tell the difference between Bokmal and Nynorsk, but I've already made one mistake!) -- Philcha (talk) 08:23, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

There is already a 'Plain and simple English' version of Wikipedia and I suggest that if you have problems with use of complex language to describe complex issues, you refer there instead. Otherwise, this is an attempt at being a comprehensive encyclopaedia, and complicated terms can always be wiki-linked to their explanation. --Barberio (talk) 15:59, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

How many WP articles have corresponding Simple WP articles? I suspect the only way to make Simple WP effective is for provision of and linking to a good Simple WP article to be a prerequiste for FA status. That would also raise the page rank of Simple WP so it shows up in Google results.

Wikilinking is not a great way to deal with technical terms: the reader can lose his / her place in the original article; some wikilinked articles are too technical, some are off-topic, some are stubs or otherwise unsatisfactory. For example while working on Cambrian Explosion I found that: triploblasty is a stub; coelom is far too human centric for use in plaeontoly (the medical crowd have a lot to answer for; I wouldn't want a paleo article to w-link to anus); phylum was so long that I couldn't quickly find the essential points. So I included a "technical terms" section per Wikipedia:Explain jargon. I've also used simple analogies to explain why Tyrannosaurus could not turn fast, which avoided terms like "moment of inertia". If I can do it, so can everyone else. -- Philcha (talk) 16:20, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe that making a simple article a prerequisite for FA status would ever be acceptible. Each page has to make it through FAC on its own merits, and that can be a challenging task by itself. Should the author then blow out a simple version just to pass muster? Does the simple article also need to meet FA criteria? I'd rather see a team of skilled authors dedicated to writing simple versions.—RJH (talk) 01:07, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

There is more than enough "dumbing down" in the world. If someone doesn't understand an article, the citations and reading list should provide the necessary support. In my particular areas of expertise, many editors have only a passing understanding of the subject matter, which can be quite frustrating when one tries to remove misleading information or fill out incomplete ideas. DOR (HK) (talk) 06:39, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Writing in simple English is not dumbing down, it is minimising the barriers between readers and the concepts that the article is trying to communicate. Although, having a degree in Latin and Greek, a very traditional education which included exercises in the formal parsing of English sentences, a career as a computer consultant (retired) in which I became thoroughly familiar with the nested assemblages of statements that are common in most programming languages, particularly since Edsger Dijkstra's letter Go To Statement Considered Harmful, published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM (CACM), in which he criticized the excessive use of the GOTO statement in programming languages of the day and instead advocated structured programming, not to mention a wife who delights in reading aloud passages from the novels of Angela Thirkell, each of which contains at least one sentence of over half a page in length, a device derived fron the pnigos, written πνιγος in the original Greek and meaning "asphyxiator", in the comedies of Aristophanes, I can write compound-complex sentences consisting of an arbitrarily complex hierarchy of subordinate clauses and phrases which is nevertheless syntactically and logically well-formed, since I consider that Wikipedia articles, like the contents of all non-specialist encyclopedias, are intended for non-Latinate and often fairly young readers, I try to write as simply as possible in Wikipedia articles.

Would those who object to "dumbing down" wish me to dumb down that last sentence so that they can understand it? -- Philcha (talk) 07:24, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

No problems here. But you could address the typography (hint: Wike?). And the superfluous use of "nevertheless". What was your point again? Franamax (talk) 07:49, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I'll WP:AGF that you fully understood the big sentence, including what is a subordinate of what - especially since I notice that you have a software background and therefore are not typical of editors or readers. How long did it take you, and would you have found a simpler construction easier to understand? If you respond, please do not quote Dijkstra :-)

I'd noticed the typo but thanks anyway - it's fixed now. -- Philcha (talk) 08:00, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

DOR (HK) is also not a typical editor or reader, since he's a professional economist. It's interesting that Ezzex's acquaintance who avoids writing Wikipedia articles on his own subject is also an economist.

DOR (HK)'s claim that "If someone doesn't understand an article, the citations and reading list should provide the necessary support" is false for at least 2 reasons: the material cited is usually not freely available and most readers will not spend money on it; the material cited is usually written in very academic language, and the abstracts are even worse. For example how much would DOR (HK) understand of abstract of "A critical reappraisal of the fossil record of the bilaterian phyla"? In this case I think the full text is also intelligible only to professionals and to arm-chair enthusiasts like me, since it is an overview article that assumes knowledge of a large number of previous academic articles. I would like to know how much DOR (HK) understands of the citation I've just provided. -- Philcha (talk) 09:29, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

That last point cuts both ways. If the article's sources are difficult or expensive to acquire then the reader is done a greater disservice by an imprecise and generally worded article. APL (talk) 23:07, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Adding_a_lead_section_template_to_articles. Ty 07:52, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The Bad image list

It has come to my attention that the Bad image list was created and implemented seemingly with no discussion and with no clarification of what precisely it is. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll say I never liked the list to begin with, and have said as much elsewhere. Here I'm not interested in debating whether or not the list should be kept, only in creating some kind of understanding of what it is and how it is to be used.

My understanding was that it was primarily intended to prevent people from posting sexually explicit, graphic and unpleasant images on articles and in talk spaces where they do not belong. Evidently this had become something of a problem with vandals using such images to disrupt Wikipedia and harass people. Fair enough.

Today, however, I noticed that someone has added a totally innocuous, non-sexual, non-explicit line drawing of a Celtic cross to the list, apparently, because the so-called "Zodiac vandal" has been using that particular image as a kind of signature. Now, I don't question the good faith of the person who added the image to the list, but it strikes me that this particular use doesn't qualify as image vandalism at all: it's not that an image itself is being used to vandalise pages, but that a vandal is using the image as a kind of signature. Placing the image on the bad image list won't prevent the vandal from continuing to vandalise pages, but it will make it harder for others to use the image (particularly those who aren't familiar with the list and don't know how to ask for an exception, which is probably most editors, since there are no clear instructions regarding these processes). And there's nothing stopping the vandal from simply choosing a different image to use -- there are several images of Celtic crosses to choose from.

So far the two editors (one being the user who added the image to the list) who have responded seem to feel that this is a perfectly valid way of using the list. However, again, there seems to be have been no specific discussion on the subject so far.

Here we have a case where a user has -- in completely good faith -- placed a totally non-offensive image on the list in an attempt to prevent a single vandal from using it in an incidental manner: not to shock or offend other users (as has been the case with various human genitalia and sexuality-related images), but simply as a signature. As I've already said, preventing him from using this single image will neither stop him from vandalising pages nor stop him from simply choosing a different image of the same thing or a different version of the same image. In other words, it's not preventing the vandalism, only making it harder to use the image legitimately. And where does this end? When we've protected every single image of a Celtic cross? It's easy to see how this particular way of using the list could rapidly get out of control.

Since there has yet to be any discussion and hammering out of the procedures regarding the list, it also raises the question of precisely what it is: A guideline? A policy? Something completely different? I'm posting this here because the project talk page doesn't seem to be regularly watched, and because , well, I couldn't think of anywhere else. Exploding Boy (talk) 21:22, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

One of my issues with it is its non-neutral name. "Bad images" should really be "restricted images" or perhaps even "restricted-use images". But overall, it seems like a quite reasonable means to keep penises from springing up in unwanted places. Cough.

It strikes me as reasonable to use the list to combat things like Zodiac as well, at least temporarily. If Zodiac proves to be a long-term vandal, and the image restriction starts restricting regular wiki editing (while not stopping the vandal), then a different approach should be taken.

With any luck, the proposed abuse filter will reduce our use of the restricted image list for cases like this.--Father Goose (talk) 00:46, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Not quite a World's Fair

The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition is described oxymoronically in our article as a "regional world's fair". That link redirects to Expo (exhibition), but that article is clearly only about those at the level of true world's fairs. This was something less than that, as was the Jamestown Exposition of 1905, which I see has similar problems in its lead. I suspect we need two articles, one about this sort of exposition in general, one about world's fairs as such. Either that or we need at least to rewrite Expo (exhibition) so that it covers the ground more evenly.

I'm not sure exactly how this should sort out - hence my bringing the issue here - but I don't think the current approach is workable. - Jmabel | Talk 01:33, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

using tags on stubs

This conversation on my talk page got me thinking. I understand the point that this could be interpreted as jumping a little to quick, but I'm not so sure the argument that "anyone can see it's unreferenced" holds water. Sure, I can see that and most Wikipedia editors can see that, but what about the users, the people who read Wikipedia but don't edit. They are the reason we are doing this, and shouldn't they be informed if they are reading information that is unverified? So you see my problem, I'm not interested in pissing off everyone who creates stubs, but your casual WP reader may not realize they are reading questionable information. Thoughts anyone? Beeblbrox (talk) 22:24, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

I think virtually all nag-tags are intrusive and pointless, used as an excuse to avoid actual editing. If you think an article is a potential problem for a reader, then fix it, don't just slap down an ugly billboard. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 00:34, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

To follow up on David's comments - if we had a large group of editors who monitored tags (templates) that indicated problems in articles, and immediately jumped in to fix them, then adding tags to articles would be performing a valuable service. But in fact we have no such group of editors. And given that we don't, then it's better that a specific editor (like you) actually spend time to fix a problem than to spend (say) the same amount of time marking 100 articles as having problems.

In any case, a reader who sees no footnotes and no external links can figure out by himself/herself that an article is unverified. And no, not all stubs lack sources. So please give strong consideration to spending your time doing something other than template tagging articles. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:40, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

• It's far from the only thing I do at Wikipedia guys, and I have been getting better at fixing them myself, but do you really think everyone who reads a WP article is conscientious enough to think about where the information is coming from and check for themselves? That would be nice, but it seems unlikely. Beeblbrox (talk) 00:57, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Don't worry about what everybody else does, worry about what you do. Improve articles, don't litter them with notices; that's how wikipedia has grown and improved. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 11:04, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Beeblbrox (named after Zaphod by any chance?), most readers don't take much notice where the info comes from. A lot of people don't stop to think that what they are reading might not be reliable (the same goes for when they read newspapers or have a chin-wag with a neighbour about the goings on in the world). So the citation tag provides a good means of showing the reader that it might not be reliable, showing editors what needs to be sourced, and persuading other editors to find a source. Deamon138 (talk) 01:37, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I would add that a complete lack of references is exactly as much of a problem on a stub as it is on a longer article. - Jmabel | Talk 06:55, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

• My point exactly. I think Mr. Brooks is (deliberately) missing the point that many people add tags not to "nag" other editors but to inform the readers of Wikipedia when they are reading suspect information. I personally don't get it when experienced editors create pages without citing any sources. Only publishing verified material is one of the five pillars, the most important guidelines we have for editing, and while many newbies don't realize how important citing their sources is, experienced editors should know better than to create a page of completely unverified material. But instead they often get irked if someone points it out and they cry out against the laziness of the editor who tagged their article when they were the ones who didn't do their homework. Sometimes I can't find sources either, and the other point of the tag is to encourage others who might have access to more resources (I live in a rather small town with a rather small library) to find resources perhaps not readily available on the internet. Beeblbrox (talk) 17:31, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

What I think you overlook is the way these nag boxes ruin wikipedia for many readers - they are an enormous visual distraction. I became anti-tag after hearing complaints from friends about how the site had become littered with the stupid things, to the point that they stopped checking wikipedia. Adding a nag tag makes an article worse, not better, because it makes the article harder to read.

Unless a tag informs the reader that serious questions exist and the reader should be very cautious about what they're reading, then a tag shouldn't exist (IMHO, of course). Your concerns should be raised on the article's Talk page - that's why Talk pages were created, after all.

The only article tags I think are justified are NPOV, AFD and the one that says "this is an ongoing event and subject to change". In particular, I'd get rid of all the many variations of "needs more footnotes".

Of course, many people disagree with this point of view. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 17:50, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, it is of course a good idea to discuss problems on the talk page, but once again, casual readers of Wikipedia don't really read talk pages. I'm blown away by the contradiction that tagging something as unsourced is wrong because you should fix it yourself, but tagging something as POV is ok. When I see POV problems, I don't tag them, I fix them. Beeblbrox (talk) 19:12, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I suspect that most experienced editors would agree that some tagging is useful and some is not; it depends on the circumstances. (Though I consider "request expansion" tags to be virtually pointless under all circumstances.) With regard to tagging stubs (except as such), I think this generally falls into the "don't bother" group; stubs are short enough to fix a lot of things fairly easily, and as for inform the readers of Wikipedia when they are reading suspect information, information that is truly suspect should be tagged with {{fact}} or simply removed with some sort of comment that the information needs to be sourced before being added back. As to whether readers who are reading unsourced information need to be explicitly warned that it may be wrong (or that it is more likely to be wrong than sourced information), my personal opinion is that readers are smart enough, in general, to figure this out - but certainly some percentage are not. (And yes, I too dislike POV tags; I do think they're justified, for example, when a section or article is being edit-warred, provided that the editor provides specifics about problematical wording. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:59, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

A quick explanation of my thinking: The POV tag says that an editor has found an existing problem, so reader beware; the no-sources tags say that an editor doesn't know whether there's a problem or not, but reader beware anyway. The former seems worth the visual blight, the latter doesn't. (The POV tag may be placed in error or maliciously, of course - but that's the case with any edit) - DavidWBrooks (talk) 17:44, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

"What I think you overlook is the way these nag boxes ruin wikipedia for many readers - they are an enormous visual distraction." Personally, I think that unsourced or POV articles ruin Wikipedia more than the visual distraction of tags, but each to their own. The problem is not the tags. The problem is what the tags are showing. If the POV or OR or whatever wasn't there in the first place, then there would be no need for the tags. So instead of grumbling about how someone has dumped a bunch of tags on an article, then should clean it up. Talk page comments are a must of course. But they only benefit editors who know what a talk page is. Those who aren't wiki-savvy (the readers) are the ones who suffer, because if they aren't smart enough to make sure the information they're reading is verifiable, then they will take it as fact, or cite it in their homework/essay/thesis/journal. The tag tells them otherwise. And of course, the tag does give greater impetus to editors to fix the problem, because there's nothing more annoying than seeing a tag deposited over an article you've worked damn hard on. So then you become annoyed enough to fix the problem so it gets rid of the tag. Basically, the tags may be a nuisance, but while Wikipedia isn't perfect (like forever), they are a necessary evil against the uncleanliness of articles. Deamon138 (talk) 23:16, 18 August 2008 (UTC) (And while we've all been commenting here, we could all have been fixing some problems and getting rid of some tags. Never mind lol)

As someone who tries to fix such articles when I see them, I find such tags helpful. I'd like to se them much less obtrusive---especially the less critical ones like "orphaned." Whatever we can do for smoother reading should be done. DGG (talk) 08:22, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

• Now there's an idea, I completely agree about the "orphaned" tag, maybe we could get it changed to a talk page tag like the tags requesting images, the casual reader probably doesn't really get what it means anyway. Beeblbrox (talk) 19:10, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

related discussion here Beeblbrox (talk) 16:06, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

2500000 article

Hi I've been away for a bit and I was just wondering what article number 2,500,00 was. I have searched in all the obvious places and also tried googling, but I couldn't find it. I assume there was minimal fuss made about it, considering the lack of fanfare that went with 2,000,000. Thanks .....Todd^#661 09:56, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

According to WP:Announcements, it might be Joe Connor. Algebraist 13:45, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Copyright violation Sid King and the Five Strings

The article Sid King and the Five Strings was copied from this page: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&searchlink=SID%7CKING&sql=11:jzfixqw5ld0e~T0 This is a copyright violation, isn't it? The yodeling cowboy (talk) 12:51, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

• I agree. Verbatim copy from that page; earlier versions were copyvios from other web pages. Tagged for {{db-copyvio}} now. --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:51, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I think Justin Tubb is the same case. I don't know which template I have to use... The yodeling cowboy (talk) 13:00, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, it's not exactly the same. For Justin Tubb, some early versions were without copyright violation. I've tagged it with {{copyvio}} now. Anyhow, the rules for tagging are quite simple: If the entire article text is a copyright violation, and has never before been anything else than a copyright violation (check the article history), then you should request speedy deletion using {{db-copyvio|url=...}} (inserting the URL of the web page the text was copied from). In less clear cases, follow the instructions at Template:copyvio. --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:32, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

What the heck is the Zodiac?

I was reading about Leviticus and clicked on "antinomianism" to find out what that is, when I got a strange message saying "This is the Zodiac speaking. Do you still think you can stop me?" and then a bunch of numbers, all in white letters on a black background. I tried a Google search and got five results, all to seemingly unrelated Wikipedia articles (Cookie Monster, Honduras, Space Race, Mu Online, and Saints Row). Those articles seem to be unaffected, but I'm still clueless about antinomianism. What the heck is going on? Jindřichův Smith (talk) 19:04, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

It was vandalism of a template that's transcluded in the article. This is a particularly malicious kind of vandalism, as it affects multiple pages at once and is non-obvious to the typical reader. This has been happening nearly daily for a month or two now, thanks to a group of people with nothing better to do with their lives. It would be nice if we implemented a countermeasure or two, but getting the community here to agree on anything is like turning around an ocean liner. --Slowking Man (talk) 08:19, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Get rid of some editors?

Is there any WIKI policy on removing Editors like Gwen Gale , who do not even read through nascent page postings before deleting them. I imagine they add 'Wiki Editor' to their CV, but they dont actually do anything remotely 'editorial'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sheriffspayne (talk • contribs) 15:39, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

See our dispute resolution process, and please avoid resorting to personal attacks. --Versageek 15:49, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I assume this has to do with Gwen Gale deleting your NHS End of Life Care Programme page back in early August. Frankly, I'd have deleted it too, as it was a hash and nowhere near acceptable to be left in the actual encyclopedia space. If you're going to build an article that's going to be left in a state of partial completion for any length of time, I recommend building it in your user space - just go to your user page, add /sandbox at the end of the URL, and edit that page to create a spot to work. Leaving an article that's nothing more than a couple of partial sentences with empty spaces in the live encyclopedia just doesn't work, and Gwen was right to delete it - there wasn't any substantial amount of work that couldn't be redone easily. (And I doubt there's many people who add "Wiki editor" to their resume; this is a volunteer position and not really something that an employer is likely to consider important.) Tony Fox (arf!) 16:13, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Google Knol to copy Wikipedia?

According to Digital Millennium Copyright Act, under which Google Knol is published, Infringement Notifications have to be sent in printed paper and signed to Google. This can mean Knol will most likely work like YouTube in case of copyrights.--Kozuch (talk) 21:01, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Ref OCILLA. Google Knol is unlikely to engage in widespread copyright violation, although they could do so safely (at least in their online version), because of the bad publicity it would generate. Google's "do no evil" reputation is one of its most valuable assets. Dcoetzee 01:30, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Their "Don't be evil" mantra is mostly hype and self-delusion in my view, but that's an enormous tangent. Google Books is held by a number of content owners to be copyright infringement on a massive scale. Google is perfectly willing to play it fast and loose with copyright law in their self-interest.

That said, I don't think they'll end up copying Wikipedia on any large scale. Wikipedia will have to send a notification to them every time a Knol user does copy a Wikipedia article, and I expect they'll ban users who do so. But Wikipedia copying will probably be endemic, like copyvios on YouTube.

Knol can't legally copy Wikipedia's articles since they don't give users the option to use a GFDL-compatible license. They allow CC-BY 3.0, but only CC-BY-SA 3.0 is GFDL-compatible. If they did add it as an option, they could copy all of Wikipedia with impunity, as long as they linked back to the original Wikipedia article somewhere. Answers.com does this, and it hasn't caused us any problems. A worse scenario would be if Google hosted a Wikipedia mirror and made sure its articles were posted above ours in the search results. But that would tarnish their search business (they already get plenty of revenue from people searching for Wikipedia articles via Google), so I don't expect them to do that.

Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado here on Wiki) wrote a nice article comparing Knol and Wikipedia, I recommend it: [2].--Father Goose (talk) 06:12, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

"Wikipedia will have to send a notification to them every time a Knol user does copy a Wikipedia article, and I expect they'll ban users who do so." Well, a few users have tried to report copied articles, and so far at least my report has been ignored. See the discussion bellow. --Daggerstab (talk) 09:32, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Discussion (re)moved from Talk:Knol

Moved from Talk:Knol (diff) after it was removed by Steven Walling --Daggerstab (talk) 09:32, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I would like to point out, that Knol violates Wikipedia licence - some people copy content from here to Knol, but the licences are incompatible (GFDL vs CC-by). Examples: [3], [4]. --Kozuch (talk) 09:25, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Even more important is that their terms of service gives Google publication rights that only the Wikipedia contributor (the copyright owner) can give. WAS 4.250 (talk) 10:12, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Has anyone tried to contact them? (And by "them" I mean the Knol team) --Daggerstab (talk) 11:06, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

I did only report FEW of such pages via "Flag inappropriate conteng" link. Contacting the team directly (email) would be better I guess.--Kozuch (talk) 14:26, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

I also had reported a few, but have yet to receive a response. It seems that comments to the articles have been ignored too. Mindmatrix 15:17, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, they can't monitor all the comments, but they shouldn't ignore the reports. But the section on copyright of their Content Policy links to this page, which worries me - in a nutshell, they require a written complaint by the copyright owner. It seems that free content projects like Wikipedia are screwed. I'm waiting for a response to my test report before I make a judgment.--Daggerstab (talk) 20:28, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, what are the copyright owners here on Wikipedia - the particular Wikipedia users contributing?--Kozuch (talk) 20:38, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes. :( --Daggerstab (talk) 21:07, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

We should start up a noticeboard somewhere on Wikipedia that lists the copyvios discovered, and have somebody from the WMF office periodically mail out DMCA takedown requests. It doesn't have to be the "copyright owner" only that sends out the notice -- it can also be someone who is "authorized to act on behalf of the owner". I think by any stretch of the imagination, the Foundation has such authority.--Father Goose (talk) 10:27, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Our standing recommendation is that the copyright owner must issue the complaint (ref Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks#Non-compliance_process). It would be nicer if the Foundation could act as an aggregate agent on our behalf, but this is not currently the case. Dcoetzee 10:37, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I've spotted a few copyvios of WP material in the past and asked about them at the M&F talk page to deafening silence. They weren't my own works being copyvio'd and like most pages, they were in fact aggregate works. Are we indeed meant to individually pursue copyvio complaints? Can we even do that if we haven't contributed to the work? Is there not at least a cadre of experienced editors willing to take on the task, even if not at WMF level? What happens if sites that violate GFDL ignore notice, we each go out and throw down $25,000 for a statement of claim? I'm not suggesting anything, just asking because I've run into this once or twice. Franamax (talk) 12:44, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

An ohmynews.com article points out several dozen obvious copyright infringements. - BanyanTree 14:54, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

They have got a Similar Content on the Web thing on the sidebar, which might make it pretty easy to spot copyvios. - Sorf^ane 14:58, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

(undent) I know it would be more work, but it sounds like one way to handle this, when you spot these violations, is to check the article history for editors who have made recent changes, and then post a note on their user talk page with information about the possible copyright violation of their work, and exactly how and where they should complain about it. Perhaps we need a template something like {{Knol-vio}}, including an article parameter, to make this easier to post to user talk pages? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:23, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I've created a dedicated noticeboard for Knol infringements: Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks/Knol.--Father Goose (talk) 22:52, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

The google group "KNOL Users" (requires login) has related disussion here, which seems to agree that GFDL is not compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution license. It also explores how to copy GFDL content under knol's "All Rights Reserved" by including the GFDL text and the contributor history, in an attempt to abide by both GFDL and knol's terms of service. I wonder if this is really possible, and if so, maybe a boilerplate set of instructions could be sent to the knol uploaders to show how to include GFDL content without breaking the license? -84user (talk) 15:53, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

I can't imagine how it would be possible to take an article created by a bunch of people and somehow, simply by listing that they have contributed to the article, gain possession of their authorization to copy their contributions to a totally different license. And adding GFDL boilerplate text isn't some sort of magical wand to make things legitimate, I'd guess. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:39, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

It would only be possible to reuse Wikipedia's content on Knol if Knol offered a "share-alike" license (i.e., one which specifies "all reuses of this content must be released under a similar license"). Officially, only Creative Commons-Attribution-Sharealike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 and the GFDL are compatible, but Knol does not offer Sharealike as an option.--Father Goose (talk) 09:13, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Google-Knol has a limit to create knols per day. Thats very good because some knol-user are copying the most popular wikipedia-articles one after the other to knol. Here ypu can see 75 wikipedia-copies by one user. -- schwarze feder (talk) 22:26, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Some of the theft is quite open about Wikipedia as the source:http://knol.google.com/k/kai-tsang/hong-kong/3jmesx0oovz72/2# DOR (HK) (talk) 06:46, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I just started checking out this "Knol". It's pathetic, really, that these folks are copy and pasting WP articles and trying to pass it off as their own work. I guess I don't have anything substantive to add to this conversation, I just wanted to vent about this foolishness. Beeblbrox (talk) 17:54, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I think there are more problems than just the text being copied - Knol is a good example of what happens to an unmaintained user generated content site. Have a look at their article about Paris Hilton. It's an almost verbatim copy of our article (in a previous version). They even embed the images (including fair-use images!) directly from the Wikimedia servers. But there are some small changes to the article: The links on the images now point to an adult-content website. If this is the typical quality of the "knol"s, I doubt that the website will stay in existence for long. --B. Wolterding (talk) 11:29, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

"Country" at the 2008 Summer Olympics

All the "Country" at the 2008 Summer Olympics (eg Great Britain at the 2008 Summer Olympics have a major display problem in Classic skin at least. Insufficient window space exists for the three tables that follow the heading "Medallists". Initially, when I couldn't see the daily table in full, I tried <br clear=all> and that displayed all of that table and half of a new table - "medals by discipline". I'm using a 1024 pixel wide monitor. IMO, the page ought to display properly on a screen only 640 pixels wide and have no problems at all on 1024. It can't be fixed by left/right scrolling as it isn't that sort of problem. If it helps, I could upload a screen dump to show the problem.

Is there an easy way of fixing all the national pages in one hit, or do I have to go around them all and put the top two tables above the gold/silver/bronze list?

-- SGBailey (talk) 14:02, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

For me, at 800px, the main table and the by-discipline table overlap in IE but not in FF (this applies in both Classic and Monobook). What browser are you using? Algebraist 16:24, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

MSIE7 on XP on PC. See Image:SCRNDUMP.gif -- SGBailey (talk) 20:55, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

(Using Vista) The Ukraine page appears completely overlapped in Firefox versions prior to 3.0, but is Ok with 3.0.1. It appears related to a long-term browser bug I noted at Help talk:Table#wikitables and HTML-style tables overlap each other in Firefox?. The difference is that the Great Britain page still overlaps in Opera 9.52 and in Firefox 3.0.1, only the overlap is less than with pre-3.0 browsers. I also confirm that IE 7.0.6000.16711 shows serious overlapping with both the Ukraine and Great Britain pages. I now wonder whether the mediawiki html generated code is partly at fault? -84user (talk) 14:02, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

So what to do? Fix in some central temmplate manner? Fix individually or leave alone? I think frustration means I don't like "leave alone" but I don't really want to have to edit every related page... -- SGBailey (talk) 14:18, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

One of these tables will be removed once the games are over, see Wikiproject olympics. So this will not be a problem in a few days. Basement12 (T.C) 14:20, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I think the answer is to avoid more than two tables without an intervening "clear". I made a stop-gap fix to the Ukraine page by adding {{-}} before the Medallists. I did the same with Great Britain and adjusted the tables to align left not right.

The problem is quite severe depending on browser and screen width, so I do not feel it is Ok to leave it.

If anyone wants to reproduce this problem on their browser, the revisions with the problem are: Great Britain page and Ukraine page. Meanwhile, should we raise this problem with the developers as I see it affects the Olympic pages of other countries? -84user (talk) 14:50, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Hopefully there will be no issue after tomorrow, at least as far as the olympic pages are concerned. The tables were merely left there for now as otherwise a lot of users who are just editing these pages during the games (which finish in under 24 hrs) kept replacing them. Myself and others at Wikiproject Olympics have already started to remove them. I have taken them out of Ukraine and GB now so hopefully this fixes the issue on these pages? If i've misunderstood the problem let me know. Cheers Basement12 (T.C) 15:03, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Arbitration Committee inactive?

I was looking at the arbitration cases and noticed one had been opened since *May*, without the arbitrators even having finished voting whether or not to accept the case yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/C68-FM-SV. Seriously?? Are the arbitrators inactive and need replacement, or what? TotientDragooned (talk) 17:34, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I talked to Garion privately, he pointed out that I had missed Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/C68-FM-SV/Proposed_decision where it was announced work was actively being done. Sorry to waste your time. TotientDragooned (talk) 21:04, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Cleanup Taskforce

The Cleanup Taskforce is all but dead right now, and I think it is simply to important to fail (like Fannie and Freddie). We should discuss ways to fix the project. Tcrow777 ^Talk 20:05, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, I think that with 400.000+ articles flagged for cleanup of different kinds (cf. statistics), a central taskforce dedicated to cleanup is most likely to fail. Maybe some central coordination is warranted, I'm not sure; but the cleanup tasks as such should be done (I think) by the WikiProjects in the different topics, or by specialized projects dedicated to some kind of cleanup, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Notability or Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage. --B. Wolterding (talk) 20:20, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

My proposals:

• The Cleanup Taskforce is only to be used after WikiProjects, article cleanup tags and article dispute tags (exception: devastated articles heading toward speedy deletion or AfD).
• We should no longer put articles in a cleanup desk, but put articles for cleanup on the front page sorted by topic and sub-sorted in alphabetical order where any used can contribute to any article.
• The Cleanup Taskforce membership list should be sorted only in alphabetical order and not by user interests. The membership list should be cleared every four months on February 21, June 21 and October 21, user should re-register.

Any thoughts? Tcrow777 ^Talk 22:48, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Well I think you should just start there and hopefully move on to here tomorrow, rather worry so much about this. But all kidding aside, get rid on the whole picking articles and use the categories like Wikipedia:unreferenced articles. Then focus only on cleaning up articles and tracking progress. People seem to help out more when they can see progress being achieved.--BirgitteSB 23:09, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't see why the task force dying is a huge deal. Its not like people can't clean up articles without signing their name on some page. Instead of trying to fix the task force and help reduce the biggest backlogs by throwing process and bureaucracy at them (its more steps to submit a cleanup request than it is to start an AFD), we should try to think of ways to get more people involved in cleanup and more resources (how-to guides, scripts, tools) available for the people involved. Mr.Z-man 15:20, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I am not technical enough to know if this possible for a script, but I can tell you what would be useful. With the old backlogs alot have already been cleaned but never had the tag removed. So what I generally do is when an article doesn't have obvious problem I go to the history an find the last revision from the month that the tag is dated for and select it (about two years back at this point). Then I select the diff between that and the current version to see if any significant cleanup has happened since then. That is three or more screen depending on how active the history is. If that could be scripted things would be quicker to look through. A more controversial tools would pull out all tagged articles under XKB and remove the tag or mak a list for humans to go through removing tags. I have seen two sentences and a stub template tagged with cleanup.--BirgitteSB 00:30, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I think it's even simpler: If you find an article that is flagged for cleanup, but obviously doesn't have a problem, then just remove the tag. (Whatever the history of the article was.) You may add a short comment in the edit summary. Unfortunately this applies only to few articles, in my experience. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:32, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

On the vaguer sort of tags, I need to know why an article was tagged before I will remove it. Of course if the old version doesn't appear to have any MOS issues I still remove and figure the tagger just got confused about what {{cleanup}} was for. But that is really rare.--BirgitteSB 20:57, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Screenshots of Wikipedia automatically licensed under GFDL?

Screen shots of video games and TV are copyrighted, yes? (no?) So are screenshots of Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) either licensed under the GFDL or else copyright infringement? If so, are there caveats to this? A note on my talk page would be very appreciated. Thank you. Emesee (talk) 06:27, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The text will be GFDL licensed (but don't forget the GFDL's attribution requirements). The Mediawiki software is GPL licensed; not sure how that applies here. The main thing to watch out for would be copyrighted images, such as the Wikipedia logo. Algebraist 12:10, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Screen shots of the text and interface would be free under the GFDL or GPL, images that are GFDL would also remain as such, images under other licenses, such as the globe in the upper left corner, which is copyrighted, would remain copyrighted and make the entire screen shot copyrighted. MBisanz ^talk 12:13, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

And any bits of the web browser or operating system interface may also be copyrighted. Mr.Z-man 12:33, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Does article "French Meadow Bakery" qualify for Speedy Deletion?

Having read French Meadow Bakery, it appears to be an "advertorial", i.e. a page purporting to be an article but is in fact an advert. Having read WP:CSD, I'm not clear. Could someone have a look and make the appropriate descision, and post here also? Thanks, Ian. --Ormers (talk) 12:46, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Clarififed by User:JohnCD when he marked the article CSD G11. Ian. --Ormers (talk) 13:04, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

It's also a blatant copyvio of [5], FWIW. Algebraist 13:06, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Richard Meredith, science fiction writer

Hi

I have a personal complaint and dont know quite how to do anything about this. Although i am glad the italian have this biography writeupin wikipedia .but the fact richarcd has been died so long 1979 some things are said about him or his personal life that is not correct.

I am a reliable source because I was Joy Gates Meredith and spent 16 years with richard till his death ............1979 we were married in 1963...

Little things like if appears Kira was born before one novel then he was married , Richard and i were married 18 months before kira was born. 1965 also. the bio reads that richard

thought

he could write i object to this SF This is menuteor minor point but He did write science fiction before this fact.Well there were otherthings like the accidentaly death of my oldest twin. but we wont go there.

I am the person who listed Richard 's list of books and short stories. and I appreciate you having this bio.

Does anyone have any ideas about this? signed Joy C Meredith 19:54, 25 August —Preceding unsigned comment added by 2008 68.221.193.98 (talk • contribs)

Please note that per our guideline on reliable sources, and our policy on verifiability, personal knowledge is not considered to be a reliable source. Wikipedia is supposed to be written based on information in newspapers, magazines, books, articles in peer-reviewed journals, and so on. And Wikipedia has no mechanism for verifying that you are who you claim to be - unfortunately, as you know, sometimes people claim to be who they are not.

If you see something in an article that is incorrect, and no source is cited, and you believe that thing is wrong, you are free to edit the article yourself, and change it to be (in your opinion) more correct. But other editors may disagree with your change, and may cite a source that supports what they say. In that case, unless you can provide a reliable source (again, not yourself - sorry) to support your position, it's likely that the other editor is going to get his/her way. (On the other hand, if you make the change, and no one objects, then the Wikipedia article will continue to read the way that you think it should.)

If for some reason you don't want to edit the article directly, or are having problems with other editors regarding its content, you can post on the article talk page: Talk:Richard Meredith, and explain what you think should be changed, or what the problem is. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:25, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Pollsters

Are there any rules/bureaucratic hoops/etc for contacting editors for polls or surveys that don't directly affect anything on-Wiki? If, for example, the folks that run the Gallup poll wanted to survey a random selection of Wikipedia editors, is there any sort of paperwork that needs to be done first? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:05, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The problems basically are (a) how to chose a sample; (b) how to contact editors; and (c) how to avoid getting your account blocked for spamming. Partly that's because there isn't anyone in charge here who has the authority to authorize a survey, and partly it's because unless the survey can be shown to (in some way, at least partially) be for the benefit of Wikipedia, it's going to be seen as interfering with writing an encyclopedia. For example, if the goal were to see how Presidential candidates are viewed by Wikipedia editors, it's unlikely that would be seen as really benefiting Wikipedia.

(a) and (b) aren't trivial. Should editors who did nothing but register (about 2/3rds of all acounts) be treated the same way as editors who have thousands of edits? What about someone who was an active editor but stopped editing three months ago? Will editors be contacted via email (less interference with the project, but many editors haven't enabled this) or via their user talk page (spam, in the eyes of many editors)?

To be a bit more helpful, the Wikimedia Foundation owns the place here, though they are not at all involved in running it (except to deal with legal issues that might arise). They might authorize a sampling, if the requester were more than (say) a graduate student. And I think they're doing (or planning to do) their own survey about who edits Wikipedia: This is the January 2008 press release. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:38, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe there would be any need for paperwork or permission from the Wikimedia Foundation as long as you do not disrupt the site. However as User:John Broughton explained, the logistics of it would more or less require cooperation from the Wikimedia Foundation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bvlax2005 (talk • contribs) 01:44, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

On the subject of spam, I at least would also consider it spamming (and attempt to get the perpetrator stopped) if an email about presidential candidates turned up in my inbox via Wikipedia. I enabled email to get messages about Wikipedia, not random surveys. Algebraist 01:45, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

John, your link didn't work for me, but I found the press release here.

Thanks for your responses. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:09, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, sorry for the bad link; I copied the wrong heading on the page. And you found the page I was trying to link to, so I won't bother correcting the link above. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 12:33, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

DYK could do with another regular or two

OK folks, the Template talk:Did you know page (and related pages) for updating Template:Did you know could do with one or a few new faces helping out, as the turnover has been slow occasionally. So if you are sick of negative interactions at AfD and in the chore of reverting vandals, this may be a good place to recharge, and help editors get their 15 minutes 6 hours of fame. Don't be scared..it's fun. I have been doing it a bit when it is late but prefer writing them really. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 06:38, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia in Harper's

I haven't seen it noted anywhere yet and it's mildly interesting: Harper's Magazine published in the July issue a small section called "Candid CAMERA" with copies of a few of the infamous CAMERA emails. The current issue (Sept.) now has a letter from Gilead Ini of CAMERA disagreeing with Harper's presentation and discussing the "flawed Wikipedia experiment". I can supply by email request. Franamax (talk) 19:55, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

You might want to post something at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:26, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Atlanta FM radio stations

I would like for all Atlanta FM radio station articles to have logo images that are uploaded with detail that ensures that the image meets criteria for inclusion and will not be up for deletion. Georgia guy (talk) 22:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Then you might want to post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Georgia (U.S. state), Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Radio Stations, and/or Wikipedia talk:Logos, depending on what your question or request is. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:23, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Image talk:Flag province luxembourg.png

Could somebody who speaks French please review Image talk:Flag province luxembourg.png? This seems to be copies of an email correspondence. Unless all participants in the discussion have given their permission to copy this, it's a copyright violation. Corvus cornix_talk 20:25, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Largest ever time of an article

Hi, I was wondering whether it is possible to find out when a particular article was at its largest, or maybe even be able to rearrange the edit history in size order? Are either of those things possible? Thanks in advance. Deamon138 (talk) 01:04, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't know of anything that would help on this, though there might be. Do note that the visible byte count of pages shows only for edits since (around) April 2007, so that displaying the last 500 edits and quickly scanning through the page is probably a fairly easy way of answering this sort of question for all but the most heavily edited articles. (And if an article has more than 500 edits since April 2007, it's reasonably likely that any large deletion would have been reviewed by a number of editors for possible vandalism.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:13, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh that's annoying. I'm guessing the byte count was only added back in April 07 then? Ah well, anyone else know anything else relevant to my question? Thanks. Deamon138 (talk) 20:32, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Needing some input

So I recently joined up with WikiProject Wikify and I was going through a number of articles and I tend to find a LOT of articles that fall under other WikiProjects. I had the idea of somehow trying to get other WikiProjects involved in wikifying articles. It would help with the backlog and help the other projects improve their own articles.

I would cross reference which articles need to be wikified along with what falls under certain WikiProjects, and drop a quick message with the respective WikiProjects to see if the ycan help out.

Long story short I put together this nice little template:

|} |}

1. Is something like this appropriate? Or would it be considered rude towards other projects? (i.e. looking like I am begging for help or dumping my work on others)
2. Is the wording / layout appropriate? Is it easy to understand?
3. Will anyone pay attention to it? Or am I just beating a dead horse?
4. Is there a way for the subsections within the message to not show up on the page Table of Contents? I tried __NOTOC__(seen in another template) however it removes the entire Table of Contents from the page.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Bvlax2005 (talk • contribs) 08:17, 24 August 2008

I think the following approach would be more productive: If you notice that an article falls into the scope of some WikiProject, but it's not currently assigned there, then just put the appropriate WikiProject banner on the talk page. Some WikiProject scan newly assigned articles, and they can also receive reports of articles in their scope tagged for maintenance; see User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings. Not every WikiProject has the capacity of fixing these problems, but some of them do. --B. Wolterding (talk) 15:44, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

By the way, if you need a list that shows which WikiProjects have the most "wikify" tags assigned, I can provide you with that. You may then more directly work with these projects and seek support - I think that would be much better than copy-pasting a canned message without any project-specific content, which will most likely be ignored. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:59, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm hoping with this little project of mine to mostly bring active awareness to other WikiProjects. The process of wikifying an article is fairly straight forward but with 14,000 articles backlogged it can quickly become tiresome. And just so you do know the area under "Articles" would be filled with a list of actual articles pertaining to that WikiProject. I've been using this[6] nifty tool to find out which articles need both wikification and may fall under a certain WikiProject. Although I can't specifiy WikiProject, I can at least list articles that fall under more generalized topics (Physics, Mathematics, Biology, States, Countries, Music/Genres, etc). If you have a way of searching tagged wikify articles within WikiProjects I am definitely open to that option! Bvlax2005 (talk) 17:18, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

As said, the tool exists. But let me give you an example, also to illustrate the numbers involved. One of your largest "clients" would be Wikipedia:WikiProject India, with 569 articles to be wikified as of July 14. The project already has a list of these articles, see Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Cleanup listing#Wikify; indeed, every work group of theirs has a listing like that (example). So, explaining the wikification process to them, and pointing to that list, would be worthwile. However, having done similar notifications for WP:WPNN, I'd say that the messages should be short and to the point, and adapted to the situation of the individual project if possible. Standardized messages that appear like "mass mailings" will probably reach the archives unread. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:32, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Find a nicer color. Lucas Brown 42 (talk) 03:10, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Use of Wikipedia talk:Sandbox

I rather assumed that Wikipedia talk:Sandbox should be a place for meta-discussion of the sandbox, rather than a sandbox in its own right, so I added a header accordingly. But someone has queried whether the move has consensus (see current version), so I'd like to throw this open here. What do you think? Thanks, — Alan^✉ 21:29, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I think your assumption is a reasonable one, but might there occasionally be a template that needs testing and only that is designed to only work on talk pages? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:29, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I think that the way namespaces are added as conditions in templates, they would have to be added as "Talk", "Wikipedia talk", "User talk", etc, so one could just as well use User talk:Foo/Sandbox. Not unthinkable, though. Maybe a MediaWiki editnotice on WT:SB (like what you see if you click "edit" on User:Jimbo Wales) directing anyone with discussion about the sandbox to the VP would be a good idea. WODUP 04:50, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Maybe something like this. WODUP 05:23, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't mind this discussion here now, but I am concerned that VP is not ultimately a good place for discussion about the sandbox, because stuff is briefly discussed and then archived, making it difficult to find past discussions on any particular topic.

Another possibility for separating out meta-discussion about the sandbox from tests in the Talk namespace would be to put one at Wikipedia talk:Sandbox and the other at a sub-page of the same. Does this seem reasonable?

In that case, there question is simply which should get the top-level talk page and which should get the subpage. There are pros and cons:

• If the talk-space sandbox gets the top-level page, then people will inevitably keep erasing whatever header directs people to the subpage for discussion, making it hard for people to find the subpage. (Note that this same issue also applies if the discussion is at VP or wherever.)
• If the meta-discussion page gets the top-level page, then it may not serve the occasional purpose when the talk-space testing can't be in a sub-page.

Your comments? — Alan^✉

P.S. re the mediawiki edit notice -- nice idea, but it's not very transparent, in the sense that you have to click edit before you notice it, so it's still essentially hard to find. — Alan^✉ 06:20, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Heh. I found Wikipedia:About the Sandbox and Wikipedia talk:About the Sandbox. Perhaps meta discussion about the sandbox should be sent there. Wikipedia:About the Sandbox is already linked from the sandbox and sandbox talk headers. WODUP 23:36, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Well done to you. I'd missed that. I'll put back the sandbox talk header at WT:SB, and make the link more obvious -- the link is prominent enough for the purposes of the sandbox header, but on the talk page, where people may be going to discuss the sandbox, it needs to be more explicit. Then WT:SB can (again) be a place for talk-space testing. But what we do then need is a bot to restore the sandbox talk header more frequently when it gets removed. — Alan^✉ 11:40, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Done now. — Alan^✉ 12:10, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I may be being incredibly pedantic here, but surely Wikipedia talk:Sandbox is for talking about the sandbox, Wikipedia:About the Sandbox is for information about the sandbox (i.e. not a discussion obviously), and Wikipedia talk:About the Sandbox is for talking about the page Wikipedia:About the Sandbox (yes confusingly, for talking about the "about the sandbox" page)? That seem to me to the normal use of any talk page, to talk about the page it is the talk page of. Deamon138 (talk) 19:55, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

What's Willy on Wheels?

I see "Willy on Wheels" mentioned everywhere. What exactly is it? Tutthoth-Ankhre (talk) 19:52, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

A popular vandal of Wikipedia in 2005 who liked to move pages to phrases containing "on wheels". Georgia guy (talk) 19:55, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks on wheels. Tutthoth-Ankhre (talk) 20:00, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

To be exact, he moved them to places that ended in "on wheels". I'd rather not tell you more. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 03:02, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Rancho Bernardo High School

The article about RBHS presents a very negative image of what is really a very good school. To provide a better image of what the school is, I have put a new version of the article on its talk page, seeing as the article is semi-protected and I am a new user. Could an established user replace the old version with the new (it adds a section about the band and one about the Academic League) and then remove the copy that is on the talk page? Lucas Brown 42 (talk) 03:30, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

When your account is 4 days old, and you have made more than 10 edits (latter already accomplished) you will be able to edit the page. I have never seen a talk page used for this purpose, and technically anything put there should be kept forever (but in this case an exception should be made). It would have been better to create a sandbox or sub-page of your own account, and point to that from the talk page. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 10:21, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Lucas Brown 42 (talk) 03:05, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Possible vanity article and autobiography

In the Spanish Wikipedia, the article about the german actress Berta Grosser was deleted because it was an hoax. Pay atenttion that this article it doesn't exist on German Wikipedia. Furthermore, it seems a vanity article and an autobiography.

See the search in Google: Berta Grosser

Cheers, Der Ausländer Alles klar! Und du? 30 August 2008 22:35 (UTC)

Since nobody has bothered, I've nominated it for afd. Corvus cornix_talk 04:59, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Hacking? at Sarah Palin

Someone seems to have gotten to this article so that when you go to it the screen changes to a hostile message. Steve Dufour (talk) 13:24, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Looks fine now. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 19:34, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Probably a vandalized template. Corvus cornix_talk 20:47, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Manage multiple terms in different languages

How to manage references to other languages when there is no bidirectional corrispondence in terms? Please, see my question about Helmet (talk) as an example of this problem. --Dejudicibus (talk) 07:09, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

You might want to take a look at Help talk:Interlanguage links#How to deal with multiple articles in another language. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for link. I read it ad made a proposal. How can spread the voice so that we can discuss of that? Thank you in advance.--Dejudicibus (talk) 09:53, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

The orange bar

This is quite a silly proposal. Whenever a new message is left on user's talk page, the bright orange bar comes up at the top of any page. I think the color is very unfriendly and too bright. It would be my personal preference, but the color is really bothering me ever since I joined in Wikipedia. Could this bar be changed to light green or blue or any other friendly neutral color? Or the color can be up for user preference? I also have seen other people complain about how the color is threatening. It is a minor issue, but I think trying a new thing on the bar is not that bad. --Caspian blue (talk) 17:01, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Lucas Brown 42 (talk) 03:04, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

It's that colour specifically in order to grab attention. It goes away when you click it, and only appears rarely, so I think this is okay. Dcoetzee 06:20, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes. If you want it changed just for yourself, you can do it with personal css. Algebraist 14:28, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but I'm very ignorant of such "CSS" and programming language. I don't even know how to use monobook and various tools provided by mediawiki. As I said, I'm not the only complaining about the too conspicuous orange bar.--Caspian blue (talk) 17:18, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Add the following to Special:Mypage/monobook.css:

.usermessage {
    background-color: #colour;
}

replacing 'colour' with the web colour desired. Algebraist 17:58, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the instruction. Just for a test, could you visit my talk page? :) --Caspian blue (talk) 18:25, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) OK, apparently that only changes the inside of the box, leaving a bright orange border. I'm going to test something on my monobook.css; can someone leave a message for me on my talk page so I can test it? Thanks. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 18:43, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

All right! I've found the solution:

.usermessage {
    background-color: #colour;
    border-color: #colour;
}

Again, "colour" is whatever color desired. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 18:48, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Alinnisawest and Algebraist!! Now, I'm free of the orange bar and get the friendly new green one. (in real life, I love eating orange...hehe)--Caspian blue (talk) 18:58, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Simplest way of fixing this would have been to go to "My preferences" and change the skin to "Classic". That way you get notification without any bars at all. Still if you're happy with a green bar that's fine too. -- Derek Ross | Talk 23:48, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

You must be very popular. I don't get messages often enough that the color of the bar would bother me. Steve Dufour (talk) 18:26, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Would appreciate some input - Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games

Mario and Sonic is an IOC licensed video game based on the 2008 Summer Olympics. The game revolves participating in a range of Olympic sports as characters from the Mario and Sonic series. The article is currently at FAC, but an issue of contention has arisen.

Currently, the article gives a complete list of the Olympic events represented within the game. I believe that this list of events is crucial in order for the article to be complete and comprehensive, likening the list to track lists within albums. Other editors believe that the list of events is outside the scope of Wikipedia, failing aspects of WP:NOT relating to "game guide" material.

Should the article give a list of events represented? So far, the discussion is between a handful of editors active in the video game space. I'm posting here to broaden this issue's audience, I'd appreciate comments either at the FAC or at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Video_games#List_of_Olympic_events. - hahnchen 02:39, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think the list does any harm. Why not keep it? It is not like it takes up very much room and the people who will be reading the article are probably interested in the information. Steve Dufour (talk) 13:26, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Lots of things "don't do harm". That's not a justified reason to keep things in articles. It's simply game guide/trivia content at best. RobJ1981 (talk) 19:27, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

The whole idea of an encyclopedia article about one video game (unless its very important in the history of video games) seems very stupid to me. However, since the article is there taking an extra two inches for a list doesn't seem like a problem. Steve Dufour (talk) 18:24, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Signatures

How can I make my signature have colors? Or different fonts? Or any fancyness? Lucas Brown 42 (talk) 03:04, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

There are details about customizing your signature at Wikipedia:SIG#Customizing your signature. Hope this helps. - Rjd0060 (talk) 03:09, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah... But how do I put color/fonts/fancy stuff into it? Lucas Brown 42 (talk) 03:31, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

You do it with HTML, if that helps any. And some wikimarkup, but now I'm just getting confusing. Basically, the same way you format that sort of stuff when editing pages. Like my sig is this:

--Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here)

It's created through this markup:

--[[User:Alinnisawest|Alinnisawest]],^{[[Special:Contributions/Alinnisawest|<font color="black">'''Dalek Empress'''</font>]]} ([[User talk:Alinnisawest|<font color="#cf0021">'''extermination requests here]]'''</font>)

See what I mean? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 03:40, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

If you see a user with a signature you like, do this:

1. Click the "[edit]" button to the section where the signature appears
2. Copy the signature you like
3. Go to "my preferences" (at the very top of every Wikipedia page)
4. Paste the signature into the "Signature:" field
5. Change it so it links to your user page and user talk page, not the person you copied it from!
   • For example, if the user was User:Place holder, then wherever it says "Place holder", change that to "Lucas Brown 42".
6. Modify any parts (colors, fonts, etc) to your liking
7. Check "Raw signature"
8. Click the "Save" button

Next time you sign ~~~~, it should show up with the new formatting. (Also, what is with that (commented) vandal warning at the top of this section?) — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 02:17, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Reporting an article that looks like it was written by the company

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keva_Juice

See Supplements and History.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Lumarine (talk • contribs) 23:46, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree and added some tags to prompt improvement. You can do that too! Just watch the article talk page afterward so you can outline your concerns to the involved editors. It's actually best to start a talk thread yourself, but in this case I believe the tags are pretty clear-cut. We'll give the people watching the article some time to react, then clean it up - sounds good?

Also, please remember to sign your talk page posts with four tildes (~~~~). Franamax (talk) 00:53, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, thanks. Lumarine (talk) 19:02, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Comon folks, tags are not supposed to be a substitute for editing. The problems with the article were obvious, so change them - as I just did in five minutes. If there's obvious piffle, remove it; wikipedia depends on that. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 19:19, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. Some of us are busy on our own little obsessions and just scan the boards quickly at the end of the day and come up with rapid solutions. Tagging the article was better than leaving it as is, but you are of course right that taking the shears to it is better. I can't help but notice though that you didn't add any sources. I mean, c'mon folks... :) Franamax (talk) 14:33, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikimedia Belgium local chapter creation

Hi,

I'm relaunching the process of the creation of a Belgian local chapter.

It will take in consideration the great amount of expat workers (a very large community at Brussels, as a services dedicated city and the de facto capital of the European Union), the Dutch, French and German speaking contributors. So, if you're an active contributor based on Belgium, whatever the language you speak, you're welcome.

If you're interested to invest yourself in the process or to become a member, please drop me a note or send me a mail. --Dereckson (talk) 07:39, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

GFDL violation

Some of you might be interested in knowing that there is an application for the iPhone using copied wikipedia contents without honoring the GFDL appropriately (in fact without mentioning it at all). - 91.62.251.70 (talk) 11:05, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

This seems to provide a straight copy of Wikipedia country infoboxes. The information in these boxes is uncopyrightable; I don't know whether copyright could be claimed on the exact layout of Wikipedia infoboxes, or on the wording of the footnotes (if they're included). Incidentally, are you sure there's no acknowledgement in the app? There's nothing in the screenshots, but they don't show everything. Algebraist 11:23, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I am aware that there's no copyright on the information itself, however the aggregation, layout and notes might be covered by copyright. And yes, I am pretty sure there's no further acknowledgement than what you see on that web page (like I told in my first post and which is incidentally why I posted it). – 91.62.251.70 (talk) 14:55, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Then probably the simplest solution is to send a polite email to them suggesting that they include copyright notices. They seem perfectly willing to acknowledge their debt to Wikipedia (there's even a fundraising link on the app page). Algebraist 15:04, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

New England Week in Russian Wikipedia

We are about to start the New England week on ru.wp, ru:Википедия:Проект:США/Новоанглийская неделя. The idea is that new articles on the topics related to new England states will be created and existing articles improved. The dates are Sep 5 to 15. Our experience with other "thematic weeks" shows that around 150 new articles will be created. We thought the whole of the US is too broad of a topic and have chosen to cover only New England (if the interest persists, other parts may be eventually covered). The problem we have is that it is sometimes difficult to separate New England topics. For instance if I know someone was American I may be less sure of what state he/she was from and whether he/she has been associated with New England. If any of you have ideas what articles would be good to cover (obviously these must be either articles without ru interwiki, or tiny Russian articles), these ideas will be gladly appreciated. The best place is to put these on the page I linked above or its discussion page; a link to en.wp would suffice, but may be a short comment why this article is important would be particularly helpful. Thanks in advance for your help.--Yaroslav Blanter (talk) 14:58, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Suggestions?

Can anyone tell me where the best place to post a suggestion for the wbsite esditors is? I have a good idea for them but there are so many topics on here I just don't know where to put it... Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Miss Catty23 (talk • contribs) 02:58, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) is one place. If the suggestion relates to a specific subject, you might want to look through the WikiProjects to find the WikiProject appropriate for that subject. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 04:39, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Request for wider input on discussion at WikiProject Tennis

Hi, there is an extremely long and muddled discussion going on at WP:Tennis about the tournament tables found on tennis player articles (i.e. this type of table). The dispute is over the "Tournament Name" column, with the options being to either use the "sponsored tournament name" - in other words, the name involving the sponsor, for example Internazionali BNL d'Italia - or the "non-sponsored tournament name" - in other words, Rome Masters. I appreciate that this conversation is very long and convoluted, so a brief summary can be found here, which is also where I request the discussion continues. Thanks, rst20xx (talk) 22:17, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to go on record about my edits to Patrick M. McCarthy

I'd like to go on record about my edits to Patrick M. McCarthy.

Today a new user made some questionable edits to the article about Patrick M. McCarthy, here, here and here.

When an administrator admonished them they left the following note on User:Geo Swan:

"Geoswan [sic] is a contributor on Wikepedia [sic] whose main emphasis is to endanger members of the United States military and their families by plastering their names and images on the web when they work in highly volatile situations in the War on Terror."

1. For the record it has been my intention, when writing about American GIs and American officials to strictly comply with all the wikipedia policies and to be completely fair to them. Personally, I believe I have succeeded.
2. For the record, to respond to this new contributor's stated concern -- the two sources I cited in the article about Patrick M. McCarthy are from official DoD publications. The picture of McCarthy is from an official DoD publication. I believe all the sources I cite when I write about American GIs and American officials are reputable, verifiable, authoritative sources, cited fairly, and with due respect to their lawful activities, safety and dignity.
3. I've been prolific. I have made over ten thousand edits to articles related to the war on terror. One of those articles triggered a request from an American official to amend my contributions -- the article on Patrick M. McCarthy.

A Lieutenant in the Guantanamo Public Affairs Office requested I make this change. It seemed like an insubstantial change, so I made it about fifteen minutes after I read his e-mail. FWIW I think my original wording was a good faith paraphrase of the article by the young Lieutenant's enlisted subordinate, but he said that the NPR interview was clearer that McCarthy was responding to allegations, not "singling out" a critic.

I am mystified why this article should have been blanked twice, by two separate new contributors, whose only edits in article space were to that page.

I am mystified why my edits to the Patrick M. McCarthy article, of all the over ten thousand edits I have made on the war on terror, should trigger the attention of the Guantanamo Public Affairs Office, and these two impetuous new contributors.

Candidly, Geo Swan (talk) 23:11, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

P.S. Anyone who thinks they are aware of an instance when my contributions have lapsed from policy, or fair respect, is welcome to leave me a civil specific message on the article's talk page, on my talk page, or via e-mail. I openly acknowledge when a mistake is pointed out to me. And I fix them. Geo Swan (talk) 23:11, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I think you're making more out of that than you really have to; that seems to be just your run-of-the-mill vandal. He only has four edits, three of which were the ones in the above paragraph, and the fourth being that message that he placed on your userpage. Don't worry about it. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 23:19, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Looks like you're doing a great job. Consider yourself lucky that that's the first vandal you've run into! Keep up the good work. Kaldari (talk) 15:24, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yep, don't break a sweat. Your a good editor from your history. BTW: I, personally, would have told the Lt. to get an account and go and make the edit himself! I, personally, agree with the edit as it is more in line with WP:NPOV, but don't like that you were 'asked' (read: told) to do it by a government type. Just my opinion. :-) fr33kman (talk) 00:19, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Why am I to be merged?

Riddle me this: anyone know why my talk page is being listed at Category:Articles to be merged since September 2008?

It appears when I edit any section (including section 0), so it can't be a template.

Worst yet, I tried adding a new section, and still got the "This page is a member of 1 hidden category" message.

Whisky tango foxtrot? EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:33, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Because you had a merge tag on your talk page! It's gone now. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:44, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I totally missed that, but I'm surprised that it was affecting sections that didn't feature it; the hidden categories thing is obviously something I have limited experience with. :)
Thanks! EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:49, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Categories (hidden or otherwise) are done by page, not by section. --Tango (talk) 18:24, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

If you click on the edit link for this (or any) section, you'll notice that you don't see Category:Wikipedia noticeboards at the bottom. That's the behavior I was expecting to see in regards to the template; usually it'll only show up if you're editing the section it is included in. EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:36, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Modifying the apostrophe template, Template:'

This is a request / suggestion for modifying the {{'}} template to fix a minor formatting issue.

Recently, Sswonk created {{'s}}. That template is very similar to {{'}} - but it has one distinct advantage. The new template avoids the situation where the apostraphe crashes with italicized text by using this code to surround the apostraphe in the template:

<span style="padding-left:0.1em;">'</span>

which is equivalent to:

<span style="padding-left:0.1em;">&#39;</span>

See for example:

1. ''Kroonland''{{'}}s = Kroonland's
2. ''Kroonland''{{'s}} = Kroonland's

In example #1 using the existing {{'}} template, the apostraphe crashes into the italicized "d", while in the example #2 using the new {{'s}} template, this issue does not exist. See also the discussion at WT:SHIPS#FYI problems using apostrophe after an italicized name.

Would it be acceptable to have template:' modified to use this modified snippet of code to insert a thin space prior to the apostraphe? --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 21:46, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Just to be extra clear, the code doesn't add a thin space (&thinsp;), just a CSS hack to add padding to the left of the apostrophe. I tested it on IE6, IE7 and Mac FF3 and Safari 3, and also Lynx 2.8.6. Everything works fine, and testing a screen reader also showed no issues. Sswonk (talk) 22:34, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

To be extra-extra clear, it is not a CSS hack, but a simple use of CSS for visual kerning without affecting the semantics of the underlying content as would a &thinsp;. :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:16, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I restate that here: I am a CSS hack. For fun, type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sswonk into the Web 2.0 validator. How about blinking apostrophes? Sswonk (talk) 01:31, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Sounds fine to me; I've used similar tricks with {{" '}}, {{' "}} and {{" ' "}}. This really needn't be a VP discussion, though. Something this simple is better as a Template talk:' item. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:38, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I posted this initially at Template talk:', and the only reply was to use {{editprotected}} and to post at WP:VP. So, I posted here to see what comments were received prior to adding the "editprotect" tag. As there's prior precedence on other templates, I'll proceed with submitting the "editprotect" tag now. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 00:42, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Noted. That's kind of contradictory advice; I think someone got confused. Anyway, I've already filed an editprotected there. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:47, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Oops - edit conflict at {{'}}. Thanks for posting the request! --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 00:51, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Open source governance

I just want to make this community aware of an emerging kind of governance structure, born out of the concepts developed in Wikipedia (esp. consensus and transparency). The project is called the Metagovernment. Have a look: they could use some more help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stubborrnn (talk • contribs) 02:13, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

About Wikipedia:Recent changes article requests and Template:Recent changes article requests

Please add zh:Wikipedia:最近更改條目請求 and zh:Template:Recent changes article requests to the corresponding English Wikipedia pages, administrators. I know the two pages are protected due to the vandalism by auto-confirmed users, but this does not mean the Chinese interwiki links should not be added to the two pages. By the way, I think Wikipedia editions having more than 100,000 articles should have the function showing requested articles on the recent changes Wikipedia pages, since this function can let editors there are some important topics which do not have articles. And the English edition should have more lines in the two pages since there many important topics in WP:RA and WP:MEA. --RekishiEJ (talk) 09:59, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Templates for timelines

I have created {{timeline-item}} which (with {{timeline-start}} and {{timeline-end}}) generate a definition list for a series of dated events, each being wrapped in an hCalendar microformat, with the date generated by {{Start date}}. The example on the template's documentation is taken from Iraq disarmament crisis timeline 2001–2003.

{{timeline-links}} can optionally be added to a page, to pass its hCalendar events (generated by the aforesaid templates, or others) to external timeline-generating and other hCalendar-using websites.

I'd be grateful for constructive suggestions for improvements; and as to where there templates might be best employed. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy Mabbett; Andy Mabbett's contributions 21:03, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Haas Vs. Nichols Blue water Navy Lawsuit

(removed) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.105.128.37 (talk) 01:37, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a soapbox or a place to garner support. Understand that while I agree that it is a serious issue, it shouldn't be discussed here. Thank you. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 02:22, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I have removed the soapboxing. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 03:29, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Befuddled by my old submarines article

I served on the submarine USS Topeka and have been monitoring and helping maintain that page for a few years. The problem is that a lot of what is listed on there is unreferenced and the page is tagged as such. I have looke dfor references online but there aren't many. Despite that I personally know that most of whats on there is fact.

Do I effectively have to make a website somewhere with all the info just so I can provide a reference to prevent the deletion of the info? That just seems redundant... is there a solution for this?

thanks! Webprofessor (talk) 14:06, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Website references are not required. If you have paper references (ie: training manuals, US Navy Newspaper/Magazines that list the boat, local newspaper articles etc.) then list those paper references. A valid reference is a valid reference. It's nice if we can click on it to see it online, but if not, then just list it as an old fashioned paper reference. I'm sure that you can get some stuff released from the Navy under Freedom of Information rules also. Although doing this would probably be original research, hope this helps! :-) S/Lt fr33kman (talk) 14:30, 5 September 2008 (UTC) RNR

Dude, there are online references. The Naval Ship Register for one, this Navy site, this site also, and a few others. fr33kman (talk) 14:40, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I know about those but they don't have any real info on them. If you look at those sites there is no historical info on the ship. Things like past CO's etc... thanks for pointing them out though :-) Webprofessor (talk) 16:01, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Paper sources then, 'bout the only thing you can do. It's not your fault if I can't click on the source but have to get up and go to a library. Old-school! US Library of Congress should be able to help, perhaps for a fee. Take care, good luck! :-) fr33kman (talk) 01:56, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

RBAG Spam

Per WP:BOT

	Chris is currently being considered for BAG membership. To view the discussion and voice your opinion, please visit Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/Chris G.

--Chris 12:44, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Using the Template:Unreferenced template

I think only registered Wikipedians should be allowed to put in the Template:Unreferenced template. Any opinions?? Georgia guy (talk) 13:58, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

First, why? Second, I am unaware of how we would prevent IP editors from typing {{unreferenced}} into an article. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 14:15, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Hard to explain. The best answer is that unregistered Wikipedians have to show they know what they're doing. Georgia guy (talk) 14:24, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

All that {{unreferenced}} does is says an article does not have any references. This is extremely easy to confirm, and I don't see how this can be abused by an IP editor. If they are knowledgeable enough to know about {{unreferenced}} then they can figure out when it is required. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 14:36, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Eww, makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I think this would fundamentally go against the grain of what Wikipedia is supposed to be: i.e.: an openly editable source of knowledge for everyone. Anyone must be able to challenge what is said here, it's fundamental to democracy. Free speech includes the right to ask for references and free speech shouldn't be limited to groups, dangerous! :-) fr33kman (talk) 02:06, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

XLinkBot: Worst. Bot. Ever.

• diff: I improved the Peter Doig article by adding that his big 2008 retrospective is also jointly organized and held at the Schirn in Frankfurt, and adding two links to two good and large galleries of his paintings.
• diff: User:XLinkBot just reverted it all, apparently because it doesn't like a blogspot link. (Said blogspot links displayed as much good Doig paintings as all other links combined.)

Unsupervised deletion of material: what a great way to throw the baby with the bathwater! 62.147.36.245 (talk) 21:05, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

You added a link to blogspot, those get deleted. Corvus cornix_talk 23:44, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The IP is right that a bot shouldn't be blanket reverting blindly like that, as it did in fact clobber good material in addition to the offending links. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:13, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I probably shouldn't say this, but XLinkBot won't revert again if you undo its reversion. Algebraist 13:43, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Yep, and having been reverted by this bot when it was just coming out of a final trial run many months ago, full of indignation, i must say that what i found in the WP:BAG discussions, and other discussions by Versageek and Beetstra regarding this, was one of the most careful, open-minded, patient, fair, responsive and well-researched balancing of pros and cons and concern for our core values of almost any new introduction to the wiki. 86.44.29.35 (talk) 04:31, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

The bot has options which can revert all edits by a user, or just one. Both options have their own problems (the former may revert genuine edits as well; the latter may not remove all offensive material, as editors sometimes make mistakes in their external links, which get repaired in a subsequent edit). The very best would be to filter out the offensive links; however, at a technical level that is extremely difficult & error prone. Commonly, total reversion seems to be the least problematic, so this is the option we use. If you believe the edits are proper, you can just undo the edit by the bot, it will not re-revert to a version it created. --Versageek 13:54, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Why are links to blogspot forbidden in the first place? I can see many situations where it's legitimate. --Bachrach44 (talk) 20:16, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

They aren't. Links to 'blog sites' are discouraged if they can be replaced with something better, but not if they're a relevent primary source. The "Badsites" proposal, that there should be hard rules about not linking to 'certain' sites like YouTube or Wikipedia Review, failed and by a large margin of oposition. Having a bot enforce 'rules' on external links by deleting content is a very bad idea.

However, that said, this bot only appears to run spam-check style protections on anon and newly created editors addition of links. It may need monitoring to ensure it's not producing too many false positives, and upsetting new users by it's actions. --Barberio (talk) 00:22, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

As the other 'operator' of the bot, indeed, the bot only reverts new and ip accounts, and follows quite a number of protections (refuses to revert more than 3 times in 30 hours on one page (which may consistute different editors that get reverted anyway), does not revert when the previous edit is by itself or by another antivandalism bot, tries to detect if the links are in references, templates or remarks (and does not revert those), and does not revert actions like 'rollback', 'undo', and does not revert users on a whitelist of trusted users (where new users or trusted, static IPs can be placed after discussion), etc.). On the very first reversion the bot leaves a remark (not a warning), and suggests how to respond. If an editor then switches to another page, and continues to perform edits including links, then the spam-warnings follow. If that runs up to 4, then the edits can be judged as questionable anyway ('linkspamming'). The warnings get 'forgotten' after 4 hours of not adding a revertlisted link. Only after the 6th addition of a (in that 4 hour period) link the editor gets reported to WP:AIV, where an admin will have to have a look at the edits before more drastic measures are taken.

Links like blogspot are on this list as there are often problems with them. Not only in terms of the external links guideline (which discourages blogs), but also for conflict of interest, copyright, reliability, linkfarm or internet directory reasons. Other links (sometimes for short periods) include links which are pushed by (one or more) (IP-)accounts to this wikipedia. Though the latter the links may be very appropriate (and hence can still be added by established editors) such link-additons are generally prohibited by our spam guideline (again backed up by linkfarm or internet directory reasons).

This type of bot is already active for almost 2 year on wikipedia (first as Shadowbot, later as AntiSpamBot and shortly as SquelchBot), and generally, the majority of mistakes are on the first reversions of an editor (as links then sometimes tend to be OK; of the type 'http://subject.blogspot.com' to subject) (though these 'appropriate links' are not always necessery as well (we don't need a full list of blogspot, flickr, yahoo groups, youtube channels ..); and I think that on first reversions it is still in way over 95% of the cases correct in reverting (here taking into account that this 'first addition' may not have been the first addition, other accounts may have pushed it earlier as well)). That percentage increases drastically for the next reverts (which generally consitute link-additions which better had to be discussed anyway as they may be a proceed/start of link-pushing/spamming).

I hope this clarifies the matter. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 13:13, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Fair use policy

I have seen this image Image:YouTube logo.svg and on its Non-free use media rationale Low resolution?' description it says that:The logo is a size and resolution sufficient to maintain the quality intended by the company or organization, without being unnecessarily high resolution.. Acoording to my knowledge SVG files can be used very high resolution, so is it ok to use SVG files for non-free use or not? --Manco Capac (talk) 14:50, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

SVG just scales gracefully, that image itself is low resolution, 546 by 247. What you mean is that SVG files don't lose much when you scale them to a different resolution. Other image formats can scale as well, they just don't produce very good-looking results when they do so. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 16:46, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

redirect vandalism

In the last few days, I've noticed a bit of redirect vandalism, and I just want to bring this issue to some more people's attention. Due to its nature, someone changing a redirect will almost never show up on our various anti-vandal tools, and people rarely have them on their watch lists. The most often way I see it used is when someone redirects a phrase or word they consider derogatory to point to the biography of someone they don't like in an effort to change Google ratings. I actually did a quick skim of the redirect pages to both Barack Obama and John McCain as a small sample and found at least two vandalized redirects that no one had picked up - alcoholic for Obama and bomb Iran for McCain. I honestly can't think of a better way to audit for these than to go through redirects to controversial targets, which is a horribly slow and painful process. If anyone has a better way to check for vandalized redirects en-mass, I'm all ears. --Bachrach44 (talk) 20:08, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Small changes to very short pages (smaller than 200 characters) in article space. Unfortunately, the page size is not supplied in the IRC recent changes feed (though it is available in the recent changes API) -- Gurch (talk) 12:44, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I saw this section, and decided to have a little look myself, and came across Phony Bliar, Tony the bear, Tony Whoopdeedoo Blair, Whoopdeedoo, Whoopdeedoo Blair, and Reverend Tony for Tony Blair, who is the first person I thought of to do this for. I think these could do with some speedying. Deamon138 (talk) 01:42, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Me and someone else have got em all tagged for speedy deletion. Now to wait for the sysops to do their thing! Deamon138 (talk) 01:52, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Lol, is it just me, or do speedies go faster if you list them on the Village Pump as well? :D Deamon138 (talk) 02:07, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

hi

hi may i know about infosys —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.167.140.101 (talk) 10:37, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Try Infosys! — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 10:54, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes you may, you have my permission. :P Deamon138 (talk) 01:21, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Everest University

An anon is edit warring to replace the external link at Everest University from everest.edu to everestonline.edu. The two links go to different pages. I have no clue which is correct, nor why there are two different pages, but if there is anybody out there with a clue, could they please look into this? Corvus cornix_talk 22:34, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Both websites are for Everest University, the online.edu is for their online courses, the other is for the whole shebang (and includes a link to the other one in tiny writing at the bottom). DuncanHill (talk) 22:41, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Hm. Thanks. Corvus cornix_talk 22:45, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia in the news.

Wikipedia has made the news in Australia on the News Limited site News.com.au.Wikipedia users divided over sexual material. Bidgee (talk) 22:27, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Lol go us! Anyway, that's a stupid article, and the day that Wikipedia is censored is the day that the world ends.

This person is silly: "Does that mean that when you type in 'murder', you should actually see someone murdering someone else?" she says. "Do we really need to see a woman masturbating on Wikipedia? Do we really need to see so many seconds of ejaculation?"

1. No, if you have a picture of a murder, it's called evidence! It would also violate WP:BLP, and said image would probably be illegal too.
2. Yes we do, you can filter the internet if you don't like explicit (legal) images. Why were you reading the article and playing the media anyway?
3. Same as 2. Plus, how many seconds would you like to see?

Say no to Wikipedia censorship!! Deamon138 (talk) 01:20, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

The article doesn't mention anywhere the whole concept of parents monitoring their children while they're online... it's all our fault, not that of the parents or teachers who don't know what their kids are doing, of course. =P Tony Fox (arf!) 16:00, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

I think that concept is long gone in the US; now, everyone expects the nanny state to live up to its title. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 16:45, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to disband Wikiquote

• Link: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metapub/On_disbanding_Wikiquote

There is currently a proposal on meta to disband Wikiquote projects, comments are welcome there. Mr.Z-man 21:20, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Watermarks

I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to images, and I've been wondering - does Wikipedia have a specific stance on watermarks on images? Usually this is an easy way of spotting copyvios, but I've seen at least one where it was apparently marked by the uploader. Personally, I don't think such images should be used, but don't remember ever coming across anything forbidding them. faithless (^speak) 06:07, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Image use policy#User-created images "Also, user-created images should not be watermarked, distorted, have any credits in the image itself or anything else that would hamper their free use, unless, of course, the image is intended to demonstrate watermarking, distortion etc. and is used in the related article." Bidgee (talk) 06:26, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

That image just needs to be cropped at the face waist. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 14:54, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

If the user has released it under a "free" license, it would by definition permit derivative works, including those which omit (or digitally remove) the watermark. — CharlotteWebb 21:24, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

In this case, even that isn't really necessary: there's an earlier version of the image without the watermark. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:20, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Rodger Ebert

I would like to open a debate over what I deem to be the ridiculous over referencing of Rodger Ebert when talking about film's reception. He is one (not very good) critic and yet his opinion seems to straddle almost every film article on this site. Is there any chance we could cut down on references to Rodger and maybe even remove him from some articles so as to get a wider range of voices heard. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.168.198.210 (talk) 11:52, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Examples? Algebraist 11:57, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

You could begin to implement the opinions of other critics. Including a broad range of criticism is good, so I don't think we should remove his criticisms from many places. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 14:50, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

May we assume you mean Roger Ebert? And I would agree that from an encyclopedic point of view, he would not be a terribly important critic to cite, although he is very representative of (and influential on) popular tastes in America. I think he's quite citable on a Hollywood blockbuster; I wouldn't be terribly interested in him on, say, Fassbinder or probably even Robert Altman. - Jmabel | Talk 18:48, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikiproject tags

Is there any reason wikiproject tags for images and categories shouldn't be in the main (image/category) namespace instead of talk? Those talk namespaces get little actual discussion traffic and it'd be easier to watch (via namespace recentchanges) if there weren't so much wikiproject-tag traffic. --Random832 (contribs) 21:14, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

It would require substantial hours of recoding, as most wikiproject banners incorporate namespace-sensitive switches and the like. There's also general opposition to putting meta-data in the non-talk namespaces, though for images at least that's a rather minor point. --erachima talk 22:19, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

New Wikia: Wiki of Mana! Admin: ME!!!

Link! YAY! Help wanted please! P.S.: About the Mana series, if that isn't already obvious which, IAH, it should be. Yellow Mage (talk) 10:10, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Best article

What is considered to be Wikipedia's best article? If there is no clear winner, what are considered to be the top choices? Lucas Brown 42 (talk) 03:03, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured articles is the best you are going to get.Geni 03:06, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

The one on elephants, it's the only article to have another article written about it. --erachima talk 08:31, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Nice : )

And this isn't in mainspace because..? - jc37 08:37, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

It was. It got deleted for being a generally bad idea. (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Elephant (wikipedia article) is a pretty good read as well.) --erachima talk 08:47, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I have tears in my eyes, that was so awesome : )

Besides the Saint Crispin's Day cheer near the top, my favourite comment by the user was:

The material is clearly inappropriate for the Elephant article, as the history of a wikipedia article about elephants is not information which is notable to know about elephants. It would be a clear violation of Wikipedia:Avoid self references to discuss the wikipedia article about elephants in the wikipedia article about elephants. This is why we need an article about the wikipedia article about elephants, so that we can discuss this important material. john k 01:53, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia and Wikipedians need more days like that, not less : ) - jc37 09:16, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Barometric pressure page vandalized

The english version page of barometric pressure has been vandalized. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.243.48.11 (talk) 16:05, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

PATROL!

List of unpatrolled pages

Everyone, hop on and do just 10. Come on, you can do it! --Kim Bruning (talk) 01:35, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

And do it right. DS (talk) 01:37, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

How????? 76.5.198.72 (talk) 01:49, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Anons can't participate, and neither can people who've been members for less than a week or so.(And remember, abusing the patrol feature will get you banned.) DS (talk) 02:08, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I am having trouble with the "[Mark this page as patrolled]" button sometimes appearing, sometimes not. For a highlighted yellow item I have to try opening it in multiple tabs to get a version with the button. Is anyone else having this problem?--Commander Keane (talk) 10:07, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

The only time it doesn't show up for me is if I come to the page from somewhere other than Special:NewPages, such as through search. If I go through NewPages and the message appears, then make an edit, the message will no longer appear. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 10:19, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes that was it, thank you.--Commander Keane (talk) 11:38, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Sigh. Corvus cornix_talk 19:55, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

NP patrol is permanently backlogged. Pages are removed from the list after 30 days, whether they've been patrolled or not. At the current rate, there are a good number of pages that simply "expire" in that fashion rather than being patrolled. --Bachrach44 (talk) 20:05, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I suggest extending the "expiration" past 30 days; perhaps to 60 days. I have a cynical feeling that we will just let the backlog build up to 60 days if we do that, though. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 20:12, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I suggest for everyone who reads this to just pull up the link once a day and do an "open new tab" (middle button) on -say- 10 pages at random, and see if anything interesting pops up. Hey, it's free edit-count, don't people need that for RFA these days or something? ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 00:23, 10 September 2008 (UTC) Pop quiz: Why should people click "at random"?

Ha ha. I started patrolling NewPages about a day before you posted this. I will either a) ignore things I can't quickly decide; b) genuinely attempt to fix articles that seem notable, but lack something important; or c) put up for speedy deletion. Clicking the [mark this page as patrolled] doesn't affect your edit count, though. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 00:31, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. You actually need to do something useful to the article too! O:-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 01:51, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Everyone who is currently checking the unpatrolled page, raise your hand! :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:56, 15 September 2008 (UTC)