Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2013 October 31

= October 31 =

Wikipedia List of oldest dogs
Why doesn't Wikipedia have a list of oldest cats? It has a list of oldest dogs. I don't understand why there is no list of the oldest cats. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Deaths in 2013 (talk • contribs) 00:35, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Hello Death....Happy Halloween. (Yeah...that wasn't weird at all) Perhaps this is a great opportunity to create such an article! --Mark Miller (talk) 01:32, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * To second that you may wish to check out WP:BOLD, happy editing!  Market St.⧏  ⧐ Diamond Way  03:59, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * You might also be interested to read Other stuff exists.--Shantavira|feed me 08:41, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Here is our List of oldest cats. Or maybe not... --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 10:51, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * That cat doesn't count, because he was only half alive. :-) StuRat (talk) 17:54, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * And here is our List of oldest Catholic bishops, though God knows why. --Shantavira|feed me 14:38, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Well this thread took a turn. LOL!--Mark Miller (talk) 20:13, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

(Getting back on-topic): The article doesn't exist because nobody decided to write it yet. Wikipedia is created entirely by people deciding that the world would benefit from having an article on such-and-such, then going and writing it. There are no obstacles to doing that - but you need to know that there is the possibility of the article getting deleted soon after if it doesn't meet two very important criteria:


 * 1) Notability: Is this article about a sufficiently important subject to be worthy of being a part of the encyclopedia.  (In this case, the existence of a similar list of dogs ought to be a reasonable argument for it being worthy).
 * 2) References: Can you find solid proof (eg in books and science journals and such) that the facts in the article are true?   If you've found a list of the world's oldest cats somewhere reasonably reputable - then this shouldn't be a problem either.

In this case, I suspect that the reason the article doesn't exist is the second one - there simply may not be a reputable source of this kind of information. SteveBaker (talk) 22:08, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Health insurance deductible increases
Hi, I've heard that some people have lost their insurance because of the new "Obamacare" and "major changes" in their policies since 2010, where an increase in deductible is considered a major change. Is there any scuttlebutt about companies intentionally eliciting customer requests for deductible increases by sudden increases in premiums? The companies have had a long time to think about this and pore thru the fine print. Thanks. Rich Peterson76.218.104.120 (talk) 03:39, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Use of Commons file
Dear Reference desk,
 * I would like to insert a graphic file from Wikimedia commons, File:Stamp Blue Alexandria.jpg into my article about the Alexandria Blue Boy stamp, which would be much improved by an illustration. I do not, however, know how to determine whether the use of this particular image is legal in the U. S. (it was clearly uploaded from Russia). Please advise me if possible.  Many thanks,

BFolkman (talk) 19:38, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi, the best place to ask this question is here. Best!
 * P.S. But maybe the guys here at the RefDesk can help you.  Miss Bono  [hello, hello!]  19:41, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * As Miss Bono has said, this isn't really the best place to ask. But anyway wikimedia commons content should generally be freely licenced or require no licence i.e. in the public domain or uncopyrightable in the US (except possibly for a small number of specific cases like Commons:Template:Not-free-US-FOP, Commons:Category:Works possibly copyrighted in the U.S., Commons:Category:Works copyrighted in the U.S.) and the country of origin if that is different (with a greater number of extant exceptions). We don't generally care about the country of upload although uploaders may want to care.
 * (We do require anyone uploading their content to freely licence it everywhere. I'm actually not 100% we'd ever accept content which is freely licenced only in some places by third parties as it's arguably not a proper free licence, the different country issue only really comes up for public domain and uncopyrightable content.)
 * Wikipedia content only has to be under a suitable licence or require no licence in the US, unless it's used under our WP:NFCC policy which allows content under US fair use law in a limited set of cases.
 * However this isn't intended to be legal advice (note I haven't even checked out what you're linking to yet) and you should bear in mind we can only do our best to ensure our content doesn't violate copyright and as we depend on volunteers, our best varies from content to content.
 * In other words, while you should usually be able to use any content on common in the US presuming you comply with any licence, you should do some checking of your own if it really matters. The description page should tell you more about the source and under what terms it's available under. E.g. if it's a free licence what licence and who's the person who claims to be licencing it so. Or if it's claimed to not require a licence, why. And particularly should specify in those small number of cases were the copyright status in the US is unclear but it's allowed on commons.
 * Note also that I'm obviously only talking about copyright restrictions. There may be other restrictions in law.
 * Nil Einne (talk) 14:39, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * It is a stamp from the 1840s - there is no copyright issue if this is a photograph. Rmhermen (talk) 16:14, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Overemphasis on the DJIA -- what's that about?
We all know that the stock market in the United States is currently way over-correlated &mdash; stocks tend to march in lockstep based on macroeconomics, with only small differences based on individual company fundamentals or performance. That's a bad thing, but that's not what I came to talk to you about today.

Why is it that, when news organizations report whether stocks are "up" or "down", they focus so much on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is a weighted average of only thirty stocks? They will say that stocks are "mixed" even if the S&P and Nasdaq are up significantly and the Dow is down a fraction; sometimes they'll say stocks are "down" when only the Dow is down, and the S&P and Nasdaq had slight upticks.

I don't see how this is rational at all. Surely the S&P is a better metric of the market as a whole? --Trovatore (talk) 19:50, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I am sure there are real experts on Wikipedia that can best answer this, however let me at least give my 2 cents on the subject. One clue is the term "Industrial Average". I believe we are talking about "indicators" that show how the economy is doing as a whole along with other such indicators. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is just one of the oldest of these devices which began in 1896. It doesn't really even have just industrial stocks anymore but did start out as exclusively industrial average. In other words, these are the main stocks that help determine how the US economy is doing and will do in the near future.--Mark Miller (talk) 01:10, 1 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Originally, the companies making up the DJIA represented a huge fraction of the industrial activity in the US -- and since the US was an industry-focused country back in 1896, it represented a large part of the economic activity at the time. Since then, the US economy has diversified and monopolies have been broken up (two of the original twelve companies were broken up by antitrust action, as were a number of later additions), but the tradition of using it has remained, and it's still a useful measure because the 30 companies on it are huge companies with a broad range of business activities. --Carnildo (talk) 02:28, 1 November 2013 (UTC)


 * The traditional answer to this question is that the DJIA is price-weighted whereas the S&P is market-weighted. Why one would prefer price-weighted seems mostly like after-the-fact excuses to me, but some prefer the hand-picking of the DJIA rather than the S&Ps more rote approach. Despite these complaints though, the indexes tend to track eachother similarly (I tried to find their correlation but didn't find anything quickly on it). "Industrial" is of course an anachronism at this point. Shadowjams (talk) 04:29, 1 November 2013 (UTC)


 * There are a couple of reasons. One is that the DJIA has been continuously calculated for longer than any other stock market index, so it gives a historical record that other indexes can't match.  Another is simply that the Dow is the best-known and most familiar index to the general public, so it's easiest for the news media to use.  Since the major domestic equity indexes tend to correlate, it usually doesn't matter that much.  However, occasionally one of the Dow components moves up or down so sharply that it causes the DJIA to seriously misrepresent the broad market for that day.  For real money management, different indexes are used as a measure, most frequently the Standard & Poor's 500.  That the DJIA is price-weighted is a bug, not a feature.  That made it easier to calculate in the old days, but it makes the weightings off.  John M Baker (talk) 15:21, 1 November 2013 (UTC)