Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2012 January 30

= January 30 =

editiing citation number sequencing
i want to edit the article at: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereopsis" i've noticed an omission in this WIKI article that i would like to correct.

in essence my editing task would require minor changes to the existing text, adding a few lines of additional text in the midst of what is there already, adding a reference citation to a journal article (the existing WIKI article already has some citations--i'm afraid of disrupting the sequencing numbers), and adding a graphic.

if you could steer me to any solutions or sources of enlightenment or help i'd be very grateful. thanks much, Tharring (talk) 00:29, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Try Referencing for Beginners. The footnotes should get numbered automatically.  If you insert one, the numbering will reflow.  Go ahead and edit (Be bold).  You can use preview to look at your changes, or the undo button if something doesn't look right.  RudolfRed (talk) 00:35, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Making a Page for Occupy San Antonio
I need help making a page for Occupy San Antonio. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Loveyk (talk • contribs) 04:50, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Start with WP:YFA. RudolfRed (talk) 05:53, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * But read WP:CORP and WP:PROMO first, and make sure any article you write is neutral and not promotional, and demonstrates in its text why the subject is notable. Also, if you are associated with the organisation, you should read WP:COI very carefully and make sure you follow its guidance. --ColinFine (talk) 12:34, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep in mind that we certainly by now have a defined article structure for the Occupy movement. The information you seek to add may already be there.  Look around a bit, use our search function.--Wehwalt (talk) 12:47, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Population of Pashtun
Population of Pashtun as given in references is 35% while the article says 27%.

We are being made minority coming from 60% to 35% and still people are not happy with 35%. Correct it please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.28.11.180 (talk) 08:13, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Could you give us an indication of what article this is about? Roger (talk) 08:56, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks for pointing out this apparent old vandalism of Afghanistan. Fixed here. —teb728 t c 01:27, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Prospectus
Sir \madam, canyou please send me a prospectus of your studies to saveni phillip mbhiza. (Redacted) thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.31.169.252 (talk) 09:16, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I suspect, based on your question, that you found one of our over 6 million articles and thought we were affiliated in some way with that subject. Please note that you are at Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and this page is for asking questions related to using or contributing to Wikipedia itself. Thus, we have no special knowledge about the subject of your question. You can, however, search our vast catalogue of articles by typing a subject into the search field on the upper right side of your screen. If you cannot find what you are looking for, we have a reference desk, divided into various subject areas, where asking knowledge questions is welcome. Best of luck.-- Hallows  AG  09:22, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Howto unwatch talkpge of articles + Howto watch specific section in Help Desk + Addon not working?

 * 1) Howto unwatch talkpge of articles, they are cluttering up my watchpage that has almost nothing in it Thingstofollow (talk) 10:28, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * 1) Howto watch specific section in Help Desk, what addon can you add? if you cannot, what is wrong with wikipedia, why hasnt it progressed anything??  Thingstofollow (talk) 10:28, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * 1) One of the addons (no idea which, have too many) I have is supposed to autosign my name. Does addons not work on this page?? Thingstofollow (talk) 10:28, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid you can't, see WP:PEREN for the reasoning.
 * As for #1.
 * Your sig has appeared correctly, and it hasn't been autosigned by Sinebot, so I'm assuming your addon works. Yunshui 雲&zwj;水 10:35, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I fixed the formatting of your post, Never start a new line of text with a space, don't use odd characters at the start of lines; "~" has no function at the start of a line, "#" creates a numbered list and "*" makes it a bulleted list. Ok now to try to answer your questions:
 * You unwatch an article and it's talk page by clicking on the blue star near the top right, when it turns white the page is no longer on your watchlist. You cannot watch/unwatch a talk page separately from the article page, as far as the watchlist is concerned they are a single item.
 * AFAIK it is not possible to watch individual sections, only entire pages.
 * It worked too well! It autosigned every line of your post separately. I don't know why it did that. Roger (talk) 10:41, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Handling a potential edit war
An article I have watched had a section blanked by an IP address editor with no reason given. The section in question had been present for many months. I reverted the edit. (S)He blanked it again with a short explanation. There didn't seem to be a particularly good explanation so I reverted again, explaining why the entry was there. Once again the IP editor blanked the section. I then reverted and created a section on the talk page to get further opinions. A week later the IP editor again blanks the section, adds in the comment 'take it to the talk page if you really want to argue' and creates a new section in the talk page immediately below the one I had created. I reverted adding the comment that he should await a consensus before deleting again. The next day he once again blanks the section with the comment "nice try. Wait for a consensus that this belongs before putting it back in".

Now, it seems to me that if someone wants to remove well established text and someone else feels that it should be discussed (assuming there is no urgent reason for removal), then the text should remain until there is a consensus for removal - otherwise, anyone could delete anything on a whim and it would have to remain deleted until a consensus had been obtained to replace it. I'm not particularly attached to the text in question; I simply don't feel established text that is not in some way faulty should be deleted because one editor does not approve of it and it should remain deleted while discussion take place. i.e. the status quo should be maintained during discussion. Any thoughts on how to handle this would be welcome. PRL42 (talk) 11:11, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Start by reading Dispute resolution. And consider whether it's really worth the trouble.
 * I'm not aware of any Wikipedia policy that text shouldn't be removed without consensus; that would seem to conflict with WP:BRD. But there are a lot of policies here, so maybe you can identify one that supports your case. --Colapeninsula (talk) 11:45, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * It's certainly not worth the effort in this case as someone has pointed out the the information should be elsewhere in the article anyway. I was more interested in the general concept of what happens if there is well established information (i.e. it has been there for some months) in an article and then there is a dispute over whether or not it should be there - should it remain until consensus is reached. It would seem to be sensible to have a specific policy on that to avoid potential edit wars. PRL42 (talk) 11:57, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Normally, one would add the information back again with a good reference. This principle hardly applies to a "see also" section, so don't revert, but follow up the suggestion to add good information to the article.    D b f i r s   18:05, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Shanks Group plc format error
I was editing the text box on the right hand side of the Shanks Group plc page and now something has gone wrong with the formatting of the page which needs rectifying. There is now no text box and the logo is in the centre of the page.

Any help very welcome. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hkemp (talk • contribs) 11:20, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * You hadn't closed one of your named . I think you'd forgotten to add this on the first reference in the infobox. --Colapeninsula (talk) 11:52, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

False edit
There is an edit on my contributions page (14:45, 2012 January 29) which I did not make, and a previous editor of that file is upset with me that I would accuse him of vandalism, which I did not. I cannot figure how this happened, and I wonder if there is any way to explain this. → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ 13:50, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * The edit is . "TW" shows it was made with Twinkle. It only takes one click to make that edit with Twinkle which automatically makes the edit summary and saves. See Twinkle/doc. I guess you accidentally hit that link. You certainly wouldn't be the first to make an accidental rollback. I and many others have done it. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:01, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you. I never even heard of Twinkle, so it must have been accidental.   → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ 05:52, 31 January 2012 (UTC)


 * That's curious. At My Preferences > Gadgets tab > Browsing, do you have a tick in the Twinkle box? -- John of Reading (talk) 07:51, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The Twinkle box was indeed checked. I was not aware of that. I have unchecked it. Thank you, John of Reading.   → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ 02:15, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

CSD for Unneeded Topics
As a newpage patroller, I often come across articles that cover a topic in an unencyclopedic manner, but do not technically duplicate an existing article, as they cover slightly different scope. For instance, if a user made an article that covered the dangers of computer viruses, which is slightly different than the scope of the Computer Virus article, would I be able to tag it as CSD, and if so, what criteria? If not, would I tag it with WP:PROD? Thanks for the help.-- Yutsi Talk/  Contributions  14:35, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Nope, no CSD category that covers that. The range of CSD-eligible categories is deliberately kept quite small. A PROD would be a good way to go. -- Orange Mike &#x007C;  Talk  14:48, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Hieronymous Bosch article: what are “autonomous sketches”?
The article on Hieronymous Bosch contains the term, “autonomous sketches,” which i don’t remember hearing in the many art history classes that I took years ago. Perhaps it came into use after iI graduated.

Googling gave me a few other examples of its usage, in context, but nothing that explains its meaning. I do know the general definition of autonomous, of course, but this term has me stumped.

It seems to me that if a person who’s aced as many art history classes as I have doesn’t know the term, then it needs to be explained in the article.

Disclaimer and plea for help: Although I use Wikipedia several times each day, I’ve just now set up this account. I don’t think this is the best place to post my question, and I’m trying to figure out how to enter the discussion page for that, or any, particular article. This might not be the correct venue for my question, so feel free to set me straight, ok? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Got.Book.Learnin (talk • contribs) 17:42, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * You might have better luck at one of the Reference Desks, but I'm not sure which one. UltraExactZZ Said~ Did 19:56, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Reference desk/Humanities would be my guess. – ukexpat (talk) 20:11, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

pipe link not working
Any idea what I'm doing wrong here? The piped link in the fn displays as if it were nowiki'd. — kwami (talk) 20:22, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * You've forgotten to put anything after the pipe! Mjroots (talk) 20:24, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I've fixed it. Linking to something in the article namespace needs the right side of the pipe to have something in it. Linking to other namespaces with nothing after the pipe just removes the namespace. I assumed you only wanted the word "tone" to show up. - Purplewowies (talk) 20:28, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * But here's the weird part ... when I posted tone (linguistics) here it came out like this: tone. So while your solution does indeed fix the problem, apparently including nothing after the pipe has the post remove any disambiguation info within parentheses (which apparently is by design). This suggests that the OP knows this is how it works but was surprised it didn't when appearing within tags. -- McDoob  AU  93  20:36, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Well... I didn't know it did that with the disambiguation info! Learn something new every day. :) - Purplewowies (talk) 20:54, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * This is the "pipe trick". It usually saves typing but, sadly, doesn't work inside edit summaries or within tags. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:09, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * It never occurred to me the behaviour might be different between ref tags. (I thought maybe I'd typed s.t. that looked like a pipe but had a different Unicode value.) Well, now I know. Thanks! — kwami (talk) 00:42, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Severe layout problem on article!
Hi, I just recently found out about a severe layout problem on the page of the Treaty of Lisbon. Scroll down and you'll notice immediately. I have checked it using the latest Firefox and the latest Chrome, both show the same problem. 109.132.145.141 (talk) 21:56, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * ✅ - someone broke the formatting when making changes, I reverted to the last good version. Thanks for the heads up! CharlieEchoTango  ( contact ) 22:03, 30 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Specifically, the edit removed a table end   at line 351. The rest of the page was then interpreted as part of the table. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:27, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Page corrupted?
The article on Mahatma Gandhi in Sinhala (http://si.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%84%E0%B6%AD%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%8F_%E0%B6%9C%E0%B7%8F%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%B0%E0%B7%92) has apparently been corrupted with a pornographic french text. Who can look into that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.215.178.214 (talk) 22:09, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
 * ✅, removed the vandalism. In the future you can do so yourself by clicking on the 'edit' tab, in this case the 'සංස්කරණය' tab. Cheers, CharlieEchoTango  ( contact ) 23:05, 30 January 2012 (UTC)