Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2010 March 21

= March 21 =

Adding an Artist
Hello I am a new user.

I have a two part question.

I was just looking for my father (Alfredo Da Silva, Bolivian Artist) on the Guggenheim Fellowship [Guggenheim Fellowship] under "Lists of Guggenheim Fellows" and noticed that the year 1963 was deleted. I read the notes and it did not seem like it was a big page. My father was awarded a fellowship in 1963 and we were contacted by the Guggenheim in November of 2009 to sign release waivers for art and photos for their site [Alfredo Da Silva, Fellow]. Am i allowed to create this page and place my father on there? I am asking because it was already deleted once and I do not want to waste my time if it will get deleted again.

Question two: I am currently working on organizing all references for my fathers Page on wiki [Alfredo Da Silva. Would any of you administrators out there take me under their wing? I want to do a good job. What you are seeing is what I was able to put together in the past 4 days. The references in the edit column with the forward slashes "/////" is just my way of keeping notes they will get deleted in the final.

FYI: I will be away from my computer from the 22-25 of march so if i do not reply that is why/ --Lorenzo Da Silva 00:34, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Thank you —Preceding unsigned comment added by AlfredoDaSilva (talk • contribs) 00:27, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Sorry i dont know how to make a signature yet but the link is my fathers page [user talk i can be reached here. —Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures|unsigned]] comment added by AlfredoDaSilva (talk • contribs) 00:36, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * You might try the WP:Article Wizard. That way, you can write a great article without help from others. Take care that your father should fit our notability guidelines, and you must have a neutral point of view.  Kayau  Voting  IS   evil 00:48, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * For ease of reference, your draft is at User:AlfredoDaSilva/Enter your new article name here. You do in fact have a conflct of interest, so please read our guidance for editing with a COI. If you want to be "adopted", place the code on your talk page and wait for a response from an adopter. I will take a look at your draft as soon as time permits. – ukexpat (talk) 00:54, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Ok i did it thank you Lorenzo Da Silva 01:14, 21 March 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by AlfredoDaSilva (talk • contribs) 01:14, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Some more observations: --Teratornis (talk) 03:39, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * See WP:REFPUNCT; reference tags go after punctuation, not before it. You have a reference tag before punctuation in your lead section.
 * You appear to be editing under User:AlfredoDaSilva, which is a real name, but not your real name. That violates WP:REALNAME. Note that on Wikipedia only one person should use a given account. Usernames do not have to be real names, but if you choose a real name for your username, it must be your real name. If you were borrowing your father's account, you should make your own account.
 * Your draft uses Infobox actor when a better choice would be Infobox artist.
 * You could look at WikiProject Arts and the sub-project specific to the article, perhaps WikiProject Visual arts, to find specific guidance.
 * Also see WikiProject Bolivia and WikiProject Argentina where you might find users to collaborate on the article.
 * These sections in your article draft: Grants and Public Collections give detailed information but cite no reliable sources. On Wikipedia we do not merely write what we know, but what we can provide reliable published sources for. In general, many if not most new articles do not cite enough sources, and this is a leading reason why they get deleted. The more sources you can provide, the more likely the article is to "stick".
 * Furthermore, "Public Collections" violates WP:LOWERCASE; it should be "Public collections".
 * For general guidance also read WP:RS, WP:V, WP:FOOT, WP:CITE, WP:CITET, WP:LAYOUT, WP:TALK, WP:OWN, and WP:YFA.
 * If you are bilingual you may also want to edit a draft on the Spanish Wikipedia. See Help:Interlanguage links. The corresponding article there would (someday) be es:Alfreda Da Silva. The rules on the Spanish Wikipedia may differ from the English Wikipedia. I have no idea how that might affect your ability to write an article there. Maybe an article on a Spanish-speaking artist would be less likely to get deleted there. When you have made a valid account on the English Wikipedia, you can use Special:MergeAccount to create a unified login which will let you edit on the Spanish Wikipedia under the same name.
 * It's good that you are using citation templates.
 * Thank you Teratornis for all the great input and taking your time to look at the work I had. I will try to get as much of it squared away tomorrow and do the rest when I return after the 25th. Lorenzo Da Silva 06:31, 21 March 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by AlfredoDaSilva (talk • contribs)

A question that had no heading and is hard to decode
if on ssd what happens if you get inheritants —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.18.53.173 (talk) 02:17, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Try asking on the Reference desk, perhaps in recognizably grammatical English. We have an SSD disambiguation page - by "ssd" do you mean Social Security Disability Insurance? (Your IP address is from New York, so that is plausible.) And by "get inheritants" do you mean "get an inheritance"? If yes to both questions, call your Social Security office or an attorney and ask about the rules in this situation. Note that Wikipedia does not give legal advice. --Teratornis (talk) 02:47, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Please also google. For example, on the first page of results you'll find this article from the Aids Action Committee, this article from the Chicago-Sum-Times and this article from the Exceptional Parent all of which point in one direction.--05:13, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Philippine political party propaganda
I came across this obvious bit of propaganda for some Philippine political party. What is done with this sort of thing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagumbayan-VNP —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dalampasigan (talk • contribs) 06:08, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Looks like someone has already removed the offending material to leave a more neutral tone.  Ka renjc 11:06, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Section with only a float:right mbox.
Here is an problem I have run into a few times. If you have an article with a "See also" section, but the section contains only a or  template, the layout gets kind of messed up. The template generates an mbox (table) with the float:right attribute set, and there is no text to put on the left, so the box extends into the following section, which is often Notes/References. The result is that the references are given less horizontal space, and the layout looks pretty bad. An example can be seen here.

The best way I have found of fixing this is to use    to push things down (see here). Probably the more "correct" way is to use  , although that tends to leave quite a bit of space. In the above case, I added two   s, which looks better, but depends somewhat on font size, so that is not great.

Any suggestions on the best way to deal with this?

-- JPMcGrath (talk) 06:31, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Wikisource, wikiquote, and wikimedia commons templates should be placed in the External Links section&mdash;which should solve the Rod Sterling problem&mdash;but, if the problem concerned a picture or other file running into the next section you might try the clear template. Cheers, liquidluck ✽ talk  06:42, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I did not notice that the link was misplaced.  Indeed, that solves the problem for that article.

uses a  with a "clear" attribute and works a little better than, since it uses a little less vertical space. But I just found I what I think is a better solution in these cases; there are inline versions of the interwiki link templates. Using produces a link to wikiquote without any of the float issues. -- JPMcGrath (talk) 17:32, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Date each article
At the top of each article, please given the date of submission or the date of last update so that the readers will have some idea how current the article is. This is especially important for Wikipedia because it covers so many current topics. Thank you for listening. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.200.25.55 (talk) 07:43, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Click the history tab at the top, and you can get the info there. –Turian  ( talk )  07:48, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * You can easily find the editing history of every article (and any other page too, except special pages) by clicking on the "history" tab at the top of the page. ≈ Chamal talk ¤ 07:48, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Also at the bottom of the page of each article is a portion of text that states This page was last modified on .... Calmer   Waters  08:22, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately it is not easy to determine the age of each individual sentence in an article. You can work this out from the article history, but that would be quite tedious. Even if an article was edited recently, it may contain sections that are out of date, because the recent editor may have only focused on part of the article. See WP:DATED for instructions on how to keep articles current. See Template messages/General for messagebox templates you can add to articles that are out of date. That will call the attention of editors to come and update them, and warn other readers in the meantime. You can also check the dates on the references in the footnotes. Since everything on Wikipedia is supposed to come from reliable published sources, the dates of those sources matter more than the date of our article edits. If someone writes an article today using only sources from the 1950s, then effectively the content of the article dates from then, although it might be informed by the editor's modern perspective. --Teratornis (talk) 20:03, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Report a possible copyright infringement?
Where should I go to report a suspected copyright infringement? The picture here looks very similar to File:Kirpan small.JPG. I can't use Standard license violation letter because I am not the copyright holder. F (talk) 08:13, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't rush ahead and assume the user committed the copyvio. The news story was from today and does not provide a source for the picture, while the picture has been on Wikimedia Commons since 2006. I think this is another disgusting case of a media organization taking advantage of a Wikimedia project -- similar situations have happened in the past, although it usually involved Wikipedia text -- and the best first step would be to notify the newspaper's website editor. Certainly if it turned out to be true it would be quite embarassing for them, so you would probably never get them to admit it, but it's worth a shot anyway. Xenon54 / talk / 13:04, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The post and the link to Standard license violation letter shows that F does suspect the newspaper and not the user of copyright infringement. The user can be contacted at commons:User talk:Hari Singh (has not edited for a year but page displays an email address) or commons:Special:EmailUser/Hari Singh (requires unified login or a Commons account). PrimeHunter (talk) 13:48, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Renaming backlinks of articles that were moved
Is there any way to rename all the backlinks of articles that were renamed by using a script/bot or some other automation? --JokerXtreme (talk) 11:38, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Attractive on the face of it, but I'm not sure it would be a good idea. Moves are often made to enable the creation of a dab page, and incoming links to the original title should be checked to see what the correct target is. DuncanHill (talk) 11:42, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * AutoWikiBrowser is often used for this sort of thing, since it is semi-automated and can be used with editor discretion, edit by edit. You can either apply for use of the tool yourself or post at the request page. &mdash;Akrabbimtalk 11:54, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Aha. Ok, thanx! --JokerXtreme (talk) 12:04, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Definition of sole proprietor/sole trader
I would like to add the sentence "A sole proprietor is able to employ staff." Over the last few years, during my membership of the Federation of Small Businesses, and when responding to surveys, including government surveys, it has been apparent on a number of occasions that business entities believe that a sole trader/sole proprietor never has staff.

Can I make this addition without a source?

I cannot quote a source,as I am only speaking from my knowledge of being a sole proprietor employing staff for the last 22 years.Castlefield (talk) 12:22, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * No, but I don't think it will be difficult to find a ref.  Kayau  Voting  IS   evil 12:37, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * It may also depend on what country you are in. --ColinFine (talk) 19:03, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Not auto confirmed yet!!!
My account on wiki is four days old and I have made about 50 edits, but I am still not autoconfirmed! Please help.

Gemmifer13 (talk) 12:52, 21 March 2010 (UTC) Gemmifer13
 * It's not yet been four full days. Your first edit was 13:21, it is now 12:53. You just need to wait half an hour or so, and you should get the userright.  (talk) 12:54, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * It's about account creation: . The account will be 4 days old at 13:06. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:57, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, of course. My bad.  (talk) 09:40, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

correction
The last line of your article on post-fordism currently reads:

"we are too much in the midst to just whether or not there really is a new system of production"

suggested correction:

"we are too much in the midst to judge whether or not there really is a new system of production"

Thanks,

jm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.78.123.226 (talk) 13:55, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * This is the encyclopaedia anyone can edit: be bold and fix it yourself! Xenon54 / talk / 14:04, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

UBX
I can't find a userbox that says what day of the year a user was born on. Not year, just month and day. Is there one?  that "2D so-and-so" guy  talk, sign 14:18, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't believe I've ever seen one personally but if you really can't find one you could always make one yourself? Jeffrey Mall (talk • contribs) - 14:23, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Now, I've made the box, and it turned out fine, but I need help with two things. ONE: How do you add variable text in the info box? Such as changing the default x to your birthday and having it display that. TWO: How do I successfully convert it into a subst template?  that "2D so-and-so" guy  talk, sign 14:43, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I imagine you previewed some code but have not saved it yet as looking at your contributions does not show you saving any such code for the box you made anywhere after your original question above. If you post the code you used, I'm sure we could help with your follow-up questions in a non-hypothetical fashion. Note that there is an existing userbox that displays birth month and day, but I don't know that there's a way to turn off the year display as you want. See &#123;{User:Bennelliott/UBX/age}}. Cheers.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:33, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * There are also existing userboxes in Category:Age and maturity user templates that can be used to display the month and day of your birthday. --Mysdaao talk 17:46, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Why does the spellchecker reject British spellings?
Since Wikipedia is officially neutral on this issue, why does the spellchecker take a side? How can this be fixed? Factsontheground (talk) 14:55, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * This is probably the spellchecker provided by your browser. See Spellchecking about changing the settings. As far as I know Wikipedia has never enabled any spellchecker.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:43, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * What exactly are you referring to? Wikipedia doesn't have a spellchecker but some editors make bot or tool assisted work to correct common spelling errors. Do you have a problem with a particular edit or with entries on Lists of common misspellings/For machines? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:45, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Ah, I see. Thanks for the help. Factsontheground (talk) 13:42, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Tom Eakin
Tom Eakin —Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.1.94.17 (talk) 16:10, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Do you have a question about Wikipedia? PrimeHunter (talk) 16:16, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * With all due respect, is this even a question at all? Rock drum (talk·contribs·guestbook) 17:39, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * We have an article about Thomas Eakins the artist. A google search finds mention of a Tom Eakin who founded TG Eakin Limited and had a listed wealth of £92m in 2008. If you want a Wikipedia article about that Tom Eakin, see WP:BIO for our notability requirements. If you don't want to learn how to write Wikipedia articles that "stick" (and this is not particularly easy to learn), you could request an article at Requested articles and someone else will eventually write it if Tom Eakin is sufficiently notable. If you want to have a go yourself, additionally read WP:YFA, WP:LAYOUT, WP:RS, WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:CORP, WP:BFAQ, WP:CITE, and WP:FOOT. Those should be just about enough to get you started, and to dispel any notion that writing an encyclopedia was simple. --Teratornis (talk) 20:14, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Edit adding "Cost Overruns" to F-35 Lightning II page removed...Why?
Today I edited the page for the "F-35 Lightning II" - and my edit was removed. First, referneces were changed, then the new text and topic were completely removed.

My addition was in the Operational history section. In a addition to 3.1 Testing and 3.2 Environmental concerns, I added section 3.3 titled "Project cost Overruns". My added section was pertinent, accurate, and concise. I included a quality defense industry reference. Also, The category Operational history seemed appropriate for the subject.

Why was this removed?

Celtwheel (talk) 16:48, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Please check, your contribution was repositioned. The editor who revised the section noted: "Move out of place cost overrun part and put with unit cost increase in Development section. Remove redundant info and wording." FWiW, the reference notation was simply reformatted as a repeat of an earlier source. Bzuk (talk) 17:24, 21 March 2010 (UTC).
 * Also see WP:LOWERCASE, for future reference. We don't capitalize the first letter of second and subsequent words in a title, unless they would normally be capitalized. See Help:History for how to find out what changed in an article and why. You may like WikiProject Aviation. --Teratornis (talk) 19:49, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

PDF download option
Hello,

I have noticed that the Dutch and German versions of Wikipedia often support a PDF download of a document. This enables the reader to download (and print) a Wikipedia article without any inconvenient change in lay out or browser buttons.

Could you perhaps tell me when (or if) this very useful option will be available for the English version of Wikipedia?

Regards,

Constantine

86.91.89.104 (talk) 19:01, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, I can see a link "Download as PDF" in the "print/export" box on the left as I look at this page. Can't you? --ColinFine (talk) 19:07, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Colin, but no, the link is not visible. The print/export box does show when I access Dutch or German pages.
 * I am in The Netherlands: maybe this affects the options which are shown.

86.91.89.104 (talk) 19:58, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I do not believe the Book feature, which includes an option to download to PDF, is available to unregistered users. Do you get an error message when you try to access Special:Book? Xenon54 / talk / 20:31, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * When I logged on, the feature appeared. Thanks guys, for helping me out. SanderGee (talk) 07:43, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

UBX cont.
I've made a satisfactory box (I know there are already a couple like it):

Now, how can I convert it to subst and have x be changeable?  that "2D so-and-so" guy  talk, sign 20:09, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * To make the birthdate a parameter simply replace it with . You don't "convert it to subst". All you do is move it to, for example, User:2D Backfire Master/Birthday userbox. When someone wants to add it to their page, they would type February 30 . Xenon54 / talk / 20:27, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * See User:JaredInsanity/Userboxes/Birthday for some advanced markup. You will find more at Userboxes/Life. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 20:41, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Photos of People Used to Demonstrate a Topic
I recently discovered that a photo uploaded to Wikimedia commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TwoMenHugging2.jpg), which I am in, had been used in the Wikipedia article for Chaser (gay slang). While this photo was uploaded by the copyright holder with every intention of allowing people to use it for any reason they wanted, I removed it from this article. If using the photo for the purpose of demonstrating something, I feel like whatever is being demonstrated must be verifiable just by viewing in the photo. What I mean is - if someone were to post it in a page titled, I don't know, "Black and White People Touching", this would be verifiable by looking at the photo. But just because this photo depicts two men, one of whom is larger than the other, embracing does not mean that the subjects in the photo are a "chub" and a "chaser". I can, in fact, quite definitively state that this is NOT the case.

To clarify - my concern is not that my image was being presented with misinformation categorizing me as something that I'm not. In point of fact I was more concerned about the other man in the image, whom I haven't spoken to in probably 8 years, and his rights to not be identified as something that *he* is not. More to the point, though, my actual question is: is uploading a photo of actual living persons into an article such as this without having references proving that the image in question is applicable a violation of BOLP? Using a more clear example - I could easily upload a photograph of any man on the street with the caption "A gay man" and put it in the article "gay", and visually the average person would have no reason not to think the image was appropriate...but is it acceptable to do something like that without citation proving the statement? And even without the statement, is the photo acceptable - again, without proof that it is applicable to the article?

I hope I haven't rambled so much here that I'm not making sense... CouplandForever (talk) 20:20, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Arguably, this would come under "images of living persons should not be used out of context to present a person in a false or disparaging light", quoting the images section of the BLP policy you linked. Regardless of whether that express language covers this, the situation is certainly within the spirit of the BLP policy, and I would fight for your right to keep that photograph outside the article on BLP grounds. However, there's a more direct route. The description is disputed by you here, in your edit summary upon the removal, and on the article's talk page. Accordingly, a reliable source MUST be provided verifying the caption text in order for the image to be kept in, per WP:BURDEN. I don't agree with you though that every picture must be verifiable from the content of the picture itself in order to be kept. The places where this would be problematic or result in an absurdity if followed are legion.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:19, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

How long before an article "goes live"?
Hi:

I am new and have created an article a few weeks ago ("Open Fist Theatre Company"). I notice some wikipedia articles show up in search engines like Google, and others do not. I'd like to create more articles about 99-seat theatre in LA and want to make sure I know your procedure. Is there something else I need to do to get search engines to recognize the article?

Thanks! Timlabor (talk) 21:20, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Didn't I just respond to this question? Wikipedia does not have any control over Google or any other search engine. The article will appear in Google results eventually, once their robots can get over here and "index" your article. Xenon54 / talk / 21:18, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Google would normally have indexed it long ago and indeed it is the 6th hit for me on the Google search . Does it not appear in your Google searches? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:07, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Uploading/ Searching/ Adding(to articles) Pictures
Hi!

Umm...

Yaaah...

Well I need to ask 3 different questions about Pictures:
 * How do you search to see if a picture is on Wikipedia, to add to your article?
 * If the picture I need is not on Wikipedia (or Wiki Commons) then how do you Upload one on to Wiki?
 * And 3, after you've done the first 2 questions, How do you put it in an Article?
 * Thank you!,
 * GaGalover13 (talk) 21:56, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

1) You can search for images on Wikipedia by using the search bar on the right, preceding a keyword with a "File:" prefix. On Commons, the process is the same.

2-3) To upload an image or add a file to a page, see below:
 * If you want to add an existing image to an article, add  to the area of the article where you want the image to appear – replacing   with the actual file name of the image, and   with a short description of the image. See our picture tutorial for more information.
 * If you want to upload an image from your computer for use in an article, you must find out what the proper license of the image is. If you know the image is licensed under a free-license, upload it to the Wikimedia Commons instead of here, so that all projects have access to the image (sign up). If you are unsure what license the image takes, see the file upload wizard for more information. Please also read Wikipedia's image use policy. I hope this helps.

 Intelligent  sium  23:53, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

article implications
Hi, I want to write an article entitled "missing [guitar brand] guitar serial number [serial number] model [model number] " with links to a blog that describes this process of finding the guitar. It was stolen many many years ago. I know the serial number, model #, year of purchase and original retail store. I've spoken with the manufacturer and they have confirmed these facts.

The reason I am writing is that I do not fully understand the implications of posting an article like this while trying to maintain a reasonable amount of anonymity. The person that now has the guitar may not know that is was stolen. In addition, I do not have a police report or a sales receipt. My intentions are to locate the guitar and make the current owner an offer.

What could possibly go wrong here in posting an article like this? What sort of complications am I setting myself up for? I suppose anyone could dispute the validity of the article's claims and then i would have to provide my real name and circumstances and make myself vulnerable in that regard. Someone might contact me with false information to extract money from me. Considering these issues, how should I do this, or maybe I shouldn't submit this article to wikipedia if I'm not willing to live with the consequences? What are are the other consequences you can think of? I would like some help identifying possible outcomes before I take the plunge!

Thanks for your help.

Wikifoo2u$9c (talk) 23:47, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Such an article would quickly be deleted and creating it would be a waste of time. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a webhost. The case sounds completely non-notable as the topic of an encyclopedia article. There would probably be no published verifiable sources to support the content. And you have a strong conflict of interest. Please look for another website for this purpose. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:29, 22 March 2010 (UTC)