Talk:Main Page/Archive 3

''There's an article on Wikipedia in the 22 oct. 2002 edition of the Japanese newspaper "The Daily Yomiyuri", available online at the address http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20021022wo62.htm. Can someone add it in the "Wikipedia in the press" section?''

Why are there links to "Wikipedia in other languages" on the top of the page, *and* at the bottom of it? Looks quite redundant to me. Also, not all languages are represented in the group at the top of the page ... for example Swedish. -HBW

The guidelines state: ''Make only links relevant to the context.... In particular, ... don't link to years and dates ....

Then why does the WikiPedia main page do exactly this in its second sentence? I'd fix it, but the page is protected.

NTF


 * I think it's the policy that should be updated. We generally link years and dates now, since these lead to pages where readers can find out about other events in that year. -- Tarquin

Make only links relevant to the context is presented as a Rule to Consider. Most people have considered it and rejected it. ;-) --Stephen Gilbert 01:07 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)''


 * I agree with NTF. Personally I think a link to a page about January is totally inappropriate for the main page.  Hardly anyone reading the main page will be looking for facts like 'January has 31 days' and 'January is named after the Roman god of doors and gateways'.  Linking it from here is pointless and distracts attention from the genuinely useful links, such as the FAQ. I think it should be delinked.


 * In general, irrelevant links are pointless, unhelpful and annoying. Enchanter

I agree wit both sides here; I generally see no harm in linking a year in most articles, as people may well want to get a sense of what else happened in that year. But "day" links seem harder to justify, and the January link on the front page is indeed silly and distracting. --LDC


 * Maybe it is just me, but I consider linking the year as silly as linking the day or the month. When I'm reading an article about an invention done in 1978, I am extremely unlikely to want to see a general list of other things that happened in 1978. Links should point to something that is related and significant to the article. Irrelevant links irritate the user, and make him less likely to use other links. I believe they fundamentally undermine the power of hyperlinks. NTF


 * But the more links there are the more likely it is that more people will visit possible sparsely written articles and edit them to add more information plus linking the year of an important even gives you the historical context of which it was a part.


 * I often find it useful to know more about a year or period to place somebody in a context. Unfortunately, most year pages do not (yet) list much information, but that will improve. Jeronimo

I definitely think that linking [Year] is, in general, a good idea. Maybe you don't want to know what else happened that year, but I'm rarely interested in following any of the links on a page. Every once in a while, however, I'm interested; and every once in a while, somebody will want to know what else happened that year.

I usually link [Month day] as well (although certainly not [Month] or [Weekday], since these don't have almanac information), but I could be talked out of that, at least in most cases. But I doubt that I could be talked out of linking [Year]. &mdash; Toby 23:05 Sep 19, 2002 (UTC)

At least the year link serves to give some historical context; sure, it's probably irrelevant to most articles, but it can be very valuable in articles about pop culture things, for example. If I'm reading about an album, for example, I might want to know some background about the times under which it was produced to get some idea of the artist's influences. But dates don't give me anything but anniversaries. --LDC

Attempts to access the Recent Changes pages returns an error message "Could not select database wikidb". I can search for and read individual items, I can get to the Main Page and the Current Events page, but not to the Recent Changes pages. -- Zoe 22:41 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)


 * Try again, should be fine. --Brion

We seem to be bumping into MySQL connection limits, but the load doesn't seem to be that heavy. I'm not sure what's causing it. --LDC

I suggest changing the wording in the opening paragraph to:

... We started in January 2001 and are already working on 44794 articles, with more being added and improved all the time. We want to make over 100,000 complete articles, so let's get to work! Anyone, including you, can edit any article ....

This is to make it clearer that the number of articles in the count is a number of "articles in progress", rather than a count of "finished, complete articles". Enchanter 23:44 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Guys, please stop putting "U.S. plan..." in the backgrounder list--it's not a backgrounder, it is itself a new story, and is already quite well covered on the current events page where it belongs. The intent of the front page section is to have quick links to articles about people, places, and things talked about in the news. --LDC

---

Should the link at Sodiumtheperson be deleted? I'm somewhat new, and this is probably misfiled in the least. Nonsense at worst -- User:Clintp
 * Hi Clintp, and welcome! Sodiumtheperson is actually what we call a redirect link to User:Sodium, which is a personal Wikipedian page. In the mists of Wikipedia history, personal pages were mixed in with the article pages, and a user named Sodium called his page Sodiumtheperson to distinguish it from the Sodium article. The redirect page there now simply keeps any old links functional. BTW, you have your own personal page at User:Clintp, feel free to introduce yourself! Finally, I encourage you to use the Village pump for any more questions you may have. --Stephen Gilbert
 * Actually, I put the redirect after his comment. Sodium's info was still there! It had scaped our eyes :) AN
 * Ah, well then, everything I said is right except for the redirect part. :) --Stephen Gilbert 02:16 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

Why does History of science and technology get its own link alongside History on the main page, when other subdivisions of history do not? --Khendon


 * Because we're mechanistically biased in favor of Science and Progress? :) --Brion

Hello,

I'm a newcomer. I can't access the page "Pierre Teilhard de Chardin" I was updating. I get a terrific message :


 * Warning: concat(/tmp/sess_b3efbc1c389ef5f0fa9f4fb9b9089fb2, O_RDWR) failed: Too many open files in system (23) in
 * /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 7


 * Warning: Failed opening 'Setup.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in
 * /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 12


 * Fatal error: Undefined class name 'outputpage' in
 * /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 14


 * Warning: concat(/tmp/sess_b3efbc1c389ef5f0fa9f4fb9b9089fb2, O_RDWR) failed: Too many open files in system (23) in
 * Unknown on line 0


 * Warning: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in
 * Unknown on line 0

Anything to do ? Many Thanks

143.126.201.200

The only thing you can do is try again later; it looks like we might want to tweak the server settings a bit. --LDC

I can't access RecentChanges page several days. Every time I got a message:

Warning: Too many connections in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 17 Could not connect to DB on 127.0.0.1

Can anything be done about that?

-- Vassili Nikolaev

I solved the problem deleting all IE cache files. Just refresh did not work.

-- Vassili Nikolaev

It looks like some of the "too many files open" problems are being caused by the large numbers of session files being used by PHP. Is the site maintaining a session for every anonymous visitor? This might cause the problem. (See www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php for info on custom session handlers, if you need to store so many sessions but the filesystem is not robust enough, you can move session handling into a database).

Either that, or something in the site is dependant on having a lot of concurrent files open. Good luck with wikipedia. -- octal

Suggestion on wording change
The statement "Welcome to Wikipedia" and "We started in January 2001" implies that the English Wikipedia is the Wikipedia. This is not true -- the English Wikipedia is a subproject of the Wikipedia Project. Granted the English one was first but this is an important distinction for us to make. I therefore suggest;

"Welcome to the English Wikipedia" or something else which clearly states that this Wikipedia subproject is not the Wikipedia.

-- mav

But the Wikipedia project as a whole did in fact start in January 2001. Of course, soon we will be moving the English Wikipedia over to en.wikipedia.org, so this will clear up such confusion.

--Chuck Smith

But then it states that we are working on articles which is the figure just for the English Wikipedia. --mav

In the new Search Results page, the page takes up the entire screen, meaning that it laps into the right hand margin. Can we cut it down to 75% of the screen? -- Zoe


 * Looks like the Internet Explorer funky-table-width issue again. That doesn't even need to be a table... Fixed. --Brion 21:08 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)


 * Looks good, Brion, thanks. -- Zoe 21:16 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Is there some way we can get 209.105.200.145 banned? His antagonistic approach is alienating people and, like Helga, may be driving people away. -- Zoe


 * Who is (s)he, what's (s)he done? (and could we move this discussion to, say the village pump page?)


 * No the Wikipedia mailing list is the better place for this. 209 contributes a lot but is antagonistic and also on a dynamic IP if I recall. --mav 23:47 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)


 * I left the list because all it talked about was details of programming which I wasn't interested in. If the list is the place to go to discuss this, would I be interested in anything else there?  -- Zoe


 * That is not what people get banned for.


 * Who are you? Sign your name if you want anything you say to be considered.  Do you know what 209.105.200.145 is doing in the List of famous Canadians?  If forcing people out of Wikipedia isn't worth being banned, then what is?  -- Zoe

- A proposed change to the first sentence was from
 * Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch

to
 * Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce complete encyclopedias in several languages from scratch.

I believe this presents Wikipedia in an incorrect manner (see Thoughts on Wikipedia interlanguage priorities). How about this?
 * Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch in every language

--The Cunctator


 * I like your wording. I will add it to my proposal for the portal page. It wouldn't hurt to have it here on the en.wiki too. --mav


 * I stuck it in. I'm not sure about the "from scratch" though, as we do have materials imported directly from GFDL-compatible sources (CIA factbook, 1911, jargon file, US census data, various other contributions). I'm not sure if that counts as "scratch". --Brion

I removed "from scratch". In addition to your reasons, it just looks better without it. --Stephen Gilbert 02:04 Oct 14, 2002 (UTC)

I think we should have the links to all the different language wikis--it makes it clear that they exist--otherwise, they won't be edited. And some, like the Frisian wiki, are pretty good. --The Cunctator


 * That's what the portal page is going to do. There is no reason to make the en.wiki Main Page do double-duty as the Main Page for en.wiki and as the portal for the whole project. IMO only the most active wikis should be listed via interlanguage links on any particular xx.wiki Main Page. All the others are listed at the bottom. --mav


 * Also, people who don't speak English probably won't take the time to scroll down to the bottom to find their language in the big list... --Chuck Smith

Could we add Stephen Ambrose to the front page? -- Zoe

I'd like to update the Current events section to look like this:


 * Current events
 * Ongoing events: Israeli-Palestinian conflict - U.S. plan to invade Iraq - 2002 stock market downturn - Washington sniper
 * In the news: Nobel Prize - Eldred v. Ashcroft - Jimmy Carter - Jemaah Islamiyah - Myyrmanni bombing - Bali car bombing
 * Recent deaths: Stephen Ambrose

but I know that at least LDC objects to linking to recent/ongoing events from the main page. Anyone else want to weigh in?

...and the "2002 stock market downturn" isn't even a recent event anymore. Last time I looked, the Dow was rising. That's exactly why I don't think we should have news items themselves here--we aren't equipped to cover ongoing, changing, news in a timely way, and links will grow stale and irrelevant. But we should certainly have links to things like the AR-14 rifle, Myyrmanni, Bali, etc., that link to articles that we know will still be useful articles a year from now. --LDC


 * They're not news items. They're newsworthy events. U.S. plan to invade Iraq, Washington sniper, etc. will be useful articles a year from now. Washington sniper kills 8th victim is a news item, Washington sniper is a newsworthy article.


 * Having a link to AR-14 without having any explanation why is not a good idea. There of course needs to be editorial judgment, but I think there's room for judgment outside of "nothing". --The Cunctator

I can see some of your point; yes, "Washington sniper" will be a useful article a year from now, and I wouldn't object too strongly to making a stub article now and pointing to it. But it's a good example of my main concern--accuracy and completeness. We're not a newspaper, we're an encyclopedia. People expect a newspaper to be up-to-the-minute, but to get things wrong now an then. They expect an encyclopedia to have reliable information (albeit their expectations are certainly lowered here). A year from now the sniper incident will have all played out and we'll have accurate information. Right now, it's breaking news, and half of what we hear reported is likely to be nonsense--the American press is not a reliable source of encyclopedic information. My concern is that we should not have the front page pointing to articles that we know are incomplete and likely to be inaccurate. We can point to "Bali", because what info we have here on Bali is probably good, it's interesting to people hearing about the bombings in the news, and it's not likely to be the kind of info in the newspaper. What info we have on the bombings is likely just press reports, and press reports don't belong in an encyclopedia (except, perhaps, as coverage of the press itself). But if there are other opinions on the issue, I'm happy to listen. --LDC


 * Last night I heard a local Washington-area reporter call him the "One shot sniper". We should probably wait until a steady name develops.  -- Zoe


 * Perhaps we should label articles on current stuff -- some sort of standard text at the top: "Warning: this is a topic related to current events still in development." -- Tarquin 22:05 Oct 15, 2002 (UTC)


 * In an ideal world, we'd have some automatic way to generate groupings of the type at background articles for ongoing events. The problem is that people don't really want to do that. What they actually do is write entries like Washington sniper. I agree that right now the Washington sniper entry should mainly be an entry point for related background entries--there should be a bunch of See alsos. Personally, I find having a link to Bali or Queen of Canada without explanation of what the current event is that motivates its inclusion in the Current events section really frustrating.


 * I guess I'm saying that--especially since I mainly like writing entries that have (potentially fleeting) timely relevance--I'd like some rein to include breaking events on the front page, keeping in mind all of the absolutely correct considerations LDC points out. Namely: Wikipedia should not try to compete with breaking news sources; Wikipedia should try to provide access to all the necessary background to breaking news; Wikipedia should make sure that events of historical interest are included (but not waste time and especially main-page real estate on those that are not). --The Cunctator

I understand that people are motivated to write about topical things. After all, I wrote biographies like Mortimer Adler, Ken Kesey, Walter Annenberg not just because they are men I admire--there are far more of those--but because their recent deaths brought them to public attention. I won't object to "Washington sniper" or "Bali bombing" links; they're specific enough, and I suppose there is enough information about them, and as you say they do provide some topical context to the backgrounders. But I still think most things like that are adequately covered on the Current events page itself, which is prominently linked from the front. And what I really don't like is things that aren't events at all like "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" and "U.S. plans to invade Iraq". Those are categories under which certain events might fall, and those are definitely better covered in the longer current events page, because they by definition incomplete, and they just invite editorializing. --LDC


 * I'm not personally averse to a bit of editorializing--good history needs some degree of analysis. But in such topical big issues editorializing can easily slide into ugly edit wars. The positive aspect of those articles is that they are the best catch-basins for listing related topics--Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a perfect example (and probably why you haven't nixed it from the front page?). Separate entries are much more likely to get updated, I'm finding, than the general Background articles for ongoing events. Can you think of any way (through informal/formal policy, naming convention, etc.) that would properly encourage people to create pages that list background articles for a certain breaking-news topic, while discouraging editorializing?


 * We could potentially try leading by example...can we have a trial run, where I try some things, and see what happens? If you'd like, you can set some criteria for what we should consider failure--that is, if edit wars break out, etc. Or we should also continually poll people on this, especially since right now the numebr of people who can weigh in simply by editing the main page is limited. Whatever the case, I know this isn't a something worth fighting to the death over--it's just that I really enjoy working on such entries, and I know that they're popular. But do they give the wrong impression to incoming users? They certainly could. There's a good metric--see if new editors attracted by such entries have a skewed concept of the project... --The Cunctator

Is anybody else having problems with clicking on links? It's inconsistant, but it happens frequently. When I click on "Recent Changes" or "Current Events", I SOMETIMES get sent to a "Random page". -- Zoe


 * This never happened to me until yesterday, when during a five minute period the seame thing happened to me, no matter what link I clicked on (and I traid many). I shut down my browser and when I tried again an hour or so later I had no more problems, and haven't had any since -- but I am glad (sort of) that I am not alone!  Slrubenstein


 * An interesting observation about this problem is that, the intended URL appears in the browser address, not the URL of the page that is displayed in the window. If I press "refresh", a new random page shows up in the browser window, and the URL does not change.  When the intended page finally does appear, This page has been accessed ## times will be incremented +1 for each time I tried (unsuccessfully) to reach the page.  Some kind of database problem, I guess. Mkmcconn


 * Now this has been happening to me, consistently over the whole evening. Not just RecentChanges, but every wiki link gives a random page.  I don't know how common this is, but I'll report when I notice the problem going away. JG, Oct 17 2002


 * It happens to me now, but the alternative addresses http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=... still work. Thus it is possible, but very cumbersome, to keep on using wikipedia: after clicking a link, part of the address before the title must be changed. Patrick Oct 17 2002


 * I had the same problem, then I checked in RecentChanges and noticed that the problem seems to have been fixed "...for now..." - why only "for now"? Is something fundamentally wrong with the functioning of Wikipedia? Drew Oct 17 2002

This problem has now been identified and (we hope) fixed: it was related to a change in the URL-rewriting code on the server. There is further discussion on the Wikipedia mailing list -- Anon Oct 18 2002


 * already working on 61210 articles (in the English version)

Does this really need to be in parens? IMO it would flow better without them. Merphant


 * Parens gone. --mav

nm -Sv

Hello, my nick in here is egoldwish, and I'm a newcomer of Wikipedia. I have a website called egoldwish at www.egoldwish.com. I wonder can I use frame to link wikipedia site to my site? What i meant by using frame is that the top frame of the webpage contain my website's logo and navigation bar. The rest of the page contain wikipedia's website material.

I wonder is everyone okie with my proposal. I like to have opinion from you guy. I'm respect this wikipedia's community and its culture.

My website trying to collect as much articles about Asian Lifestyle, and other Asian related material such as Music Genre, and etc... In wikipedia I can't find any topic related to Asian American and Asian Asian, I wonder if there is at least one topic on wikipedia about Asian will be much cooler.

Just want to let you guy know that I join wikipedia community for many purposes. For example, my first purpose is to read cool articles that wikipedia provided, and also to copy many articles that I can use and pasted on my website. Of-course I will not claim that's my own article, I will credited the article's origin to its author and wikipedia. Sun, October 20, 2002.


 * Hello and Welcome! You have an interesting question. I really don't see a problem with it but you might want to post the question to the Wikipedia mailing list. --mav

The article count suddently jumped by nearly 20,000. Any particular reason why? - David M


 * Ram-Man's US cities census data flood. Loooots of bare-bones articles. --Brion 18:54 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * Within certain limits, anyone can edit any article right now, without even having to log in. 

I was trying to hint at the idea that sometimes people have been banned. 95% are just vandals scrawling graffiti, but 1 or 2 signed-in folks have been banned. Should we allude to IP blocks and such on the Main Page, or what? --Ed Poor
 * I agree that we should make clear that not "anything" is accepted. But that was not the sentence to modify, as I explained in your talk. Some line telling to show some respect, or judgement, I don't know.--AN
 * Okay. --Ed

I don't see any need to dwell on the subject, other than to qualify the statement with a simeple "within reason, anyone...". I don't think anyone really expects us to allow totally unreasonable edits; we just differ a bit on our definitions of "reasonable". --LDC

I would actually qualify the next sentence: "You can copyedit, expand an article, write a little or write a lot, just do it within reason", or something like it.--AN

I can appreciate the need to be honest about blocking vandals, but I think "including you" was the most important part of that sentence, exhorting new visitors to come and join us, and I miss it. Let me know what y'all think of my version (to appear shortly). &mdash; Toby 12:41 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

Why is History of Science and Technology on this page? It seems an arbitrary choice. It is a subcategory of History. Other people might prefer other subcategories on this page.

Subcategory Critical theory under Culture looks even more strange to me. This is a tiny subject not worth mentioning on the front page. Erik Zachte

Just noted the following text at the top of the front page: "to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every language." Critical phrase to question: "every language." There are upwards of 6,500 languages in the world (reference: http://www.sil.org ), *most* of which do not have standard written scripts, let alone a computing infrastructure to allow the creation of a Wikipedia. It is a great goal, but obviously not possible. Can another way of wording this goal be found that does not strain credulity? I suspect the real goal is to get Wikipedias in "many of the world's major languages" or "many of the world's major written languages." This happens to be a live topic in the world of language study, and I am very interested in Wikipedia's commitment to multilingualism, so would like to see some more precision on this point. User:Wichitalineman


 * "a encyclopedia in every language." is not realistic. So what? I is a dream, a goal, just like a maneger sets impossibel goals. But it looks nice. I find it so good. It is sort a clear. If you change it to "many of the world's major languages" you say that small languages are not welkom. As a example, there are a lot of languages who are smaller then Esperanto, but you can not say Esperanto is "a major language" but it is a very active wikipedia. If you say "many of the world's major written languages." that also looks strange. This gives the impression that there are encyclopedia's that are not written. Mayby there are, but i have never heard of them. "to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every language." realy means "to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every language if there are people who are interested to make it." Also read this; http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,721955,00.html If you can wait there will be only "major languages". Peace. giskart 10:16 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

May I suggest the wording "to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every major language."? -- Anonymoues 10:39 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)


 * Absolutely not. Small languages are more than welcome -- building a store of knowledge and an active 'net-based community around it could be very beneficial to speakers of so-called "minor" languages. Our encyclopedia should be as accessable as is humanly possible (in goal, at least), and we must not limit our sights to just getting the big guys who already have encyclopedias up the wazoo. --Brion 10:52 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

Yeah, I did a bad job of expression my concerns in the original posting. Here's a better follow-up from the Intl list:

User:Eclecticology wrote:


 * be delighted to have a mere 1% represented. The expression deceives nobody.  It is a wishful expression of openness to any language, so if  someone out there wants to do the work needed develop a Wikipedia in Gbeya or Tlingit they're welcome to try.

Exactly the opposite of what you say is true. A Tlingit speaker, coming to Wikipedia and deciding to try to create Wikipedia in Tlingit, will find out that it is impossible. That speaker may very well find the phrase "every language" deceptive, as I do, because it sounds as if Wikipedians do not know the technical difficulties in getting Tlingit (or any of its many dialectical forms) into a standard written, let alone a computable form. So I am not delighted to have a "mere 1%" represented, as these are exactly confined to languages unlike Tlingit that are in Unicode.

This exposes my agenda, and my reason for posting this issue to the Intl list. I think Wikipedia can serve as a good lever *for* getting more languages on the web, *especially* minority and "small" languages. To me, there has got to be some kind of acknowledgment of the current difficulties of the "every language" claim. IT is a great spur to Unicode and other organizations who *want* the web to be highly multilingual. I would be satisfied with a note on the International_Wikipedia page.

Something like:


 * Wikipedia is committed to creating versions in any and all languages for which there are Wikipedians willing to do the work. We are aware that many of the world's 6,500 languages are not well-represented on computers or the web, and we are committed to working with language speakers and computing organizations to provide Wikipedias in as many languages as possible. Currently, Wikipedia relies on the Unicode standards developed by http://www.unicode.org, and the languages in which Wikipedias are available are a subset of those made available via Unicode.

(i'm willing to stand corrected on this text, but I believe it is factually accurate) --User:Wichitalineman 6:12 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

Suppose you are looking for info on the Ohio Submarine...search for Ohio...see the problem? We need more search filter options. Now you could, I guess, go back and type in Ohio submarine, but it'd be nice if every city in Ohio didn't pop up when you typed Ohio.Lir 01:03 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)


 * I sense you want a telepathic search interface. This may require users to upgrade their computers to the latest Big Brother ThoughtDetecter 3000 model. --209.162.42.215 01:08 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

It would be nice if you could search for an exact phrase, like one of the advanced search options of Google. For example, if I want to find all articles in which The Sound of Music is mentioned, I don't want to get all the 439 articles which contain the words sound and music. Patrick 02:43 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

Also, exact phrase matches should be given priority on the search list. For instance, if I type "star" I should see "star" as the first listed, not the entire Star Trek section.


 * If we're being optimistic, I'd like to see regular expression searching - Khendon 17:58 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

There should be a link to Requested pictures after the Requested articles link (under the "About the Project" heading). Also, perhaps we can try to develop a better structure for that somewhat chaotic collection of links. Eloquence 20:51 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)


 * Added the link. Good idea BTW. I can copy the entire wiki code into a Temp page for you to play with if you want. --mav

Thanks, I'd love to do that! --Eloquence 21:03 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

Here you go Main Page/Temp. NOTE there is no guarantee that your ideas will be incorporated but since the Main Page is in such bad shape right now I think that just about anything would be an improvement. One thing that should be noted is the style guide while editing (the overall style of the Main Page hasn't been updated since at least January). --mav

The link to the japanese article comes up 404 for me. DanKeshet


 * Yep, I got the same error too. I've already emailed their webmaster about the situation. I also tried finding the article via their search engine and by browsing but that failed. Google has indexed the article but sadly only at the old local. --mav


 * They seem to have a restrictive linking policy. Maybe they moved it out of spite. :P  --Brion 21:51 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

What we could use is a group of people (perhaps Tarquin, Maveric, Ed Poor, Tzartzam, PierreAbbat, some others) who would organize some kind of systematic sweep through major topics and try to clean everything a bit.

One problem I think that should be addressed is that a lot of topics that have seperate pages are addressed on multiple pages, I think it'd be a good idea to seperate the topics as much as possible. In some cases, I have found that a topic has more information on it located at some other topic, than at its proper topic page.

Also, we need the "opening" pages for major topics to be as clean and refined as possible-for instance astronomy and astrophysics is getting there as it is slowly becoming less of a discussion of astronomy and astrophysics and more a list of pages that should be visited. Lir 17:27 Nov 2, 2002 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a worthy project. I vote for you to lead it, Lir! Create a "project" page and start assigning work!! --Ed Poor 15:31 Nov 4, 2002 (UTC)

http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=wikipedia&type=1 &mdash; Lir

That is so true! &mdash; Toby 19:30 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

I think the front pape should be more like the fornt page of a real encylopedia. - fonzy




 * There's the Cologne Blue style -- try that. But it's worth asking on the mailing list about designing new skins. -- Tarquin

I think there should be a wikipedia motto: "Knowledge Should be Free!" (maybe i latin to make it more international. - fonzy

I agree there should be a motto, Not so shore on the one given above.

hmm it is abit weak i like the "KNOWLEDGE IS FRREDOM!" below.

Why no mention of any sort of background for the recent U.S. midterm elections, other than ]]Walter Mondale]]? --Larry Sanger

KNOWLEDGE IS FREEDOM!

Um, is anyone doing anything about the lag? Lir 15:59 Nov 11, 2002 (UTC)


 * There are many ongoing discussions on wikitech-l about improvements to Wikipedia to avoid high load on the database server. --Eloquence 16:02 Nov 11, 2002 (UTC)

Is it just my imagination or is the article counter stuck at 90679? --[User:Bernfarr|Bernfarr]] 16:14 Nov 14, 2002


 * You're quite right - I believe the article counters were disabled when the database was unlocked a couple of days ago in an attempt to reduce the load on the server and improve response times. --Camembert


 * Yep. See the bottom of Village pump. --mav 22:39 Nov 14, 2002 (UTC)


 * Might I suggest the text on the main page be changed to something like either "90679 articles as of 11 November 2002" or perhaps "Over 90700 articles" until that feature is working again? -- Infrogmation

I've re-enabled the counters. Weekend traffic is lighter, so I'm less paranoid about our midday peaks bringing everything to a halt. --Brion 09:47 Nov 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * "90652" ... Interesting to see that we apparently have 27 fewer articles than we did back on Novmember 11. -- Infrogmation 16:44 Nov 16, 2002 (UTC)

Heh uh, when we use sub-it creates extra space between lines. Hope that can be fixed. See?

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000a00000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000n0000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000b000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000c000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000d00000000000


 * That's what happens when you use subscripts. Don't like it? Don't use them. --Brion 09:47 Nov 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * That could be fixed by increasing the line spacing (the space between lines, surprisingly). However, that would make pages longer on screen. -- Sam

Theres a way to fix it. Its ugly. Lir 03:34 Nov 17, 2002 (UTC)

Please add Myra Hindley to recent deaths. --Anon


 * Done. Good for a few days at least. --mav

Can we have UK Firefighter strike 2002 added to current events? Ta! quercus robur


 * Can I echo this request? - Khendon 08:50 Nov 20, 2002 (UTC)