Wikipedia:Village pump/Archive A

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Help! I seem to have munged up the Crosswords page I just created; the page displays fine but (at least under Konqueror) when I try to edit it something messes things up before it finishes displaying the textarea. Can someone help? I think it may have happened when I added an HTML comment. (Is this a known problem?) Thanks. -- Bth

Juuitchan wants to convert some BMP images to PNG for an article. Anyone willing to help out here?

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Are you guys aware that "village pump" is rural Quebec slang for the local loose woman? - montr&eacute;alais


 * Well, in that case it's a good thing we spun this out as a separate page instead of leaving it at Maveric's talk page. ;) --Brion


 * What! My talk page used to be (and to some extent still is) the local loose woman? Yikes! --mav

Mailto broken:How come my [mailto:tompar@world.std.com Tom Parmenter] that worked with the old software no longer does? It used to be "hot", now it just sits there. See bottom of my user page.Ortolan88
 * Because you had an extra space -- [mailto: tompar@world.std.com Tom Parmenter] instead of [mailto:tompar@world.std.com Tom Parmenter] . --Ed Poor

Editing talk pages: Is there an easier way to contribute to ths talk page than editing it directly? --User:jacobgreenbaum
 * Yes, use an off-line editor like NotePad to compose your contribution first. Then copy and paste into the talk page (there is no append function). --Ed Poor

Hell- how do I remove an entry after discovering that a very similar one aleardy exists? breatharian is very similar to breatharianism, which I just created, how do I get rid of the latter??

Thanks quercus robur

Gutenberg link looks awful: How do I link to the uncopyrighted ASCII text maintained by the Project Gutenberg? I copied a link and it just looks awful?
 * Text copied from Talk:Robert Louis Stevenson to make it more accessible and to promote this village pump page).


 * You can't just look up something in Project Gutenberg and cut and paste the link. If you do, you end up with a dog's dinner like something this (broken into two lines for "readability"):


 * http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120&full=yes

&ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/


 * The wiki software can use it to link, but apparently wiki can't get rid of all the excess characters no matter how much you try to mark it up. However, if you edit the link down to this


 * http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120


 * wiki takes you to the same place but is clean.


 * There are several forms available, use "edit this page" to look at the coding:
 * Enclose the bare URL in single brackets:
 * Treasure Island Project Gutenberg text:


 * Enclose URL in single brackets, but after the URL leave a space and add explanatory text before the closing bracket:
 * Project Gutenberg text: Treasure Island


 * Simply run the URL in text without any brackets:
 * Treasure Island from Project Gutenberg -- http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120


 * The last form is less desirable, but since you see that kind of URL in the wikipedia all the time, I thought I should show it too.

The advantage of the last url is that if somebody prints out the wikipedia entry, they get a usable URL that they can type into their browser later, rather than just seeing the name of the link. KJ 21:08 Aug 5, 2002 (PDT)

Please note this on bug report 583234. A workaround until it gets fixed someday is to manually change the colon that appears in the compound link to %3A, like this:


 * Gutenberg text


 * becomes Gutenberg text

Uhhh, okay that doesn't work either. Time for more bug reports. :) --Brion VIBBER

-

Logging in trouble:
When I log in, and return to whatever page I was on, I'm not shown as having logged in. This happens no matter how many times I do it. Sort of defeats the point of joining, really. -Egoinos


 * It sounds like you have cookies disabled, what browser and version are you using? --mav


 * Special:Userlogin could stand to have a sentence pointing out that cookies are required. I often surf with them turned off; and even though I know to check these when I have trouble loggin in or such, still it can be annoying when sites have expectations of my surfing habits that I don't meet. &mdash; Toby 23:10 Aug 12, 2002 (PDT)


 * On a sidenote, what's the expiry on the cookies set to? --Bth

Cookies shouldn't be required; if you have them turned off, your session will just go away quicker, requiring you to relogin. Cookie expiration is 30 days. --LDC


 * I think I've figured out why I can't get it to say I've logged in all of the time (sometimes, it works). I think it must be my slightly weird connection to the net. Stupid university connections! --Egoinos

I added an HTML comment to a page I was working on (for a semi-good reason) and it munged up the editing process in Konqueror - the existence of the comment caused it give up before finishing the textarea. I assume it doesn't affect (at least some) other browsers, since someone else went in and removed the comment and it was fine after that. Is this a known bug? -- Bth


 * This sounds like it's probably a bug in Konqueror. All "<" and ">" characters are turned into &amp;&lt; and &amp;amp;&gt; before they're put into the textarea, so they can't possibly be interpreted as actual tags or comments. (By the way, you'll find a link to our bug-tracking system at Bug reports; if you find what seems to be a bug, please report it there and we'll be able to keep track of it better.) --Brion VIBBER

What's the convention for movie titles? See the Manual of Style for answers to many questions like this.

Should we kill Oops I Did It Again? I mean, one of these is not bad, but we don't want to set a precedent!! --Juuitchan


 * As much as I think the world would be a better place if the subject of that article didn't exist, it does. And since the subject exists (and has a certain popularity), it's not entirely unreasonable for there to be an article about it. It would not be entirely unreasonable for said article to include more than just a track listing and publisher, though. A review which places it in historical perspective, perhaps? (Shudder) --Brion


 * FWIW, the parent page Britney Spears is quite good. Ortolan88

You greatly misunderstand my point. I mean, if we start giving a discography of every pop artist with 15 minutes of fame, where are we going to stop?? THAT in itself could get its own wiki!! --Juuitchan


 * Any particular reason we should stop at any particular point? Remember, Wikipedia is not paper. --Brion 15:35 Aug 20, 2002 (PDT)


 * I can imagine quite an interesting series of articles on Britney albums as she marks her progress, both real and in image, through her career. Her version of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction)" ... I can't go on, but someone else could make this article into a very useful piece of pop history.  As it stands, the article is weak, however, but, indeed, why stop?  Britney is lagging far behind Led Zeppelin, and when I do my fabulous series on the albums and singles of Wreckless Eric, well, wow!  Ortolan88 18:22 Aug 20, 2002 (PDT)


 * Juuitchan is considering writing one of those about a China Dolls album.


 * Any particular reason we should stop at any particular point? Well, if as the entry for Simon and Garfunkel suggests, we need the yet unwritten individual entries for their songs "The Sound of Silence" and its B-side, "We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'," doubtless we need an entry for their song "America," which, unlike the aforementioned B-side, was included on Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits.  In creating this entry, we should probably follow the precedent set by Simon and Garfunkel/The Sounds of Silence being a redirect to The Sounds of Silence, so the title is absent the name of the artist.  The present entry for America is long overdue for being made into a disambiguation page for all the songs of that title anyhow. --TC


 * Anything wrong with eg America (Simon and Garfunkel)? --Brion


 * Perhaps a bit could be added to the What Wikipedia is Not page saying that Wikipedia is not CDDB (or FreeDB, or Musicbrainz, or {your favourite music database here}), and encouraging people who want to add entries for musical albums not (just) to list the tracks but to *say* something about the album too? (Does anyone actually own that Britney Spears album? More to the point, is anyone willing to confess to it? :>) --AW

I think the general rule here is that an article for something should be created if and only if there's enough interesting to be said about it. For some musical group, the level of group is probably all that's interesting. For many others. clearly there's something to be said for individual albums. But I can't imagine many individual songs about which there is enough to say in an encyclopedia article, with a few exceptions like "Stairway to Heaven" or "Revolution 1". For Britney, I think the album level is quite sufficient. --LDC

- I still am not sure about the conventions about images and copyrights. I had an interchange with user:isis in Talk:Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and I'm still not sure that a note shouldn't be posted in the talk of the page that the image is used under fair use doctrine. Isis thinks that a better explanation should be given, for people not to be "afraid" of using images. So do I. If this was already discussed and decided, please point me to the proper place AstroNomer 22:38 Sep 6, 2002 (UCT)

I think the best place for such a notice is the image description page. Just something simple, like "Cover of videotape of XXX, used under fair use." or something along those lines. But it should definitely be attached to the image, not the article, so that people who might want to use the image in ways that wouldn't qualify for fair use can see that we specifically aren't claiming that it is GFDL'd.

There's not a specific policy to do this, but I think you're right that there should be. --LDC


 * The desire to disclose what is and is not public domain, GFDL, and/or copyrighted material used under fair use is laudable, but (IMHO) totally unnecessary and counterproductive. If someone wants to use Wikipedia content in some way that is not consistent with the terms of the GFDL, it should be left up to them to determine whether that other use is permissible. Our primary concern should be determining whether the items we use on Wikipdedia can be licensed under the GFDL: Nothing more; nothing less. And by limiting our disclosure as to what is not restricted by the terms of the GFDL, we can encourage compliance with the exact terms of the GFDL.--NetEsq


 * GFDL includes the right of charge money or even make a profit with the information, fair use, i think, not (correct me if I'm wrong) So we can use audio samples, images under fair use, but they will be NOT licensable by GFDL so people must know that.AstroNomer


 * ''This poses an interesting legal question, but I am not aware of any legal restriction on fair use which might kick in by virtue of charging for content distributed under the GFDL. To wit:


 * "[T]he more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use." Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 579, 114 S. Ct. 1164, 1171 (1994).


 * In other words, if Wikipedia's use of copyrighted content is fair use, it should remain fair use when it is distributed for profit under the GFDL. If not, we shouldn't be using that content in the first place.--NetEsq''


 * That's right. Please say it again to make sure everybody heard you. -- isis 6 Sep 2002


 * Okay. Please see my thoughts at Wikipedia talk:Copyrights.--NetEsq 2:58pm Sep 7, 2002 (PDT)

I'm going to make a few observations here, and then I have to concentrate on my paying work until 17 September, so I'm not going to be able to participate actively in any discussion in the meantime. When you think about the issue of using pictures of created objects (including book and videotape covers) in the 'pedia, ask yourself why you think it's any different from making and using pictures of Campbell soup cans. Then ask yourself what the difference is between PathMark's using those pictures in its ads and Andy Warhol's using the cans in his paintings: Why can't Campbell's complain about either use? Why don't those users have to get Campbell's permission first? Are they making money out of their use of the pictures? The reasons NetEsq is right that there's no reason to put a "fair use" disclaimer in the image descriptions (and my reasons for thinking it's inadvisable) are: If it's fair use of the image, it's fair use whether we say so or not; if it were not fair use, saying it was wouldn't make it so. We can know only that it's fair use for us, not for anyone who takes it from us and uses it for something else down the line, and they may think our saying it's fair use makes it fair use for them, too, and they might be wrong. Asking contributors to recite (in the image description) the legal opinion that it's fair use is like asking a kindergartner to sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury -- he'll do it, but he won't understand what it means, and it might make him uncomfortable about the situation, so he won't want to do it ever again. -- isis 7 Sep 2002

Multiple subjects - same name: A newcomers question - what's the convention for a page that refers to several subjects. I was looking for Blackberry and found the page has details of a radio wireless link called Blackberry. I have data for the fruit/plant Blackberry to link from Bramble fruit and Rubus and would like to know the convention (if there is one) on Wikipedia. TerrapinDundee


 * You're in luck, we've got a whole page on the subject! See Disambiguation. --Brion


 * Read that page, then the changed Blackberry page, now I get it, ta. --TerrapinDundee

converting images

Juuitchan wants to convert some BMP images to PNG for an article. Anyone willing to help out here?


 * For easily manipulating images in pre-determined ways (changing attributes, converting to other formats, resizing, etc.) my favourite toolset is ImageMagick. It's free software and runs on most common operating systems.  -- Bignose

Most modern raster graphics tools understand PNG (those that don't aren't worth using), but some understand the format better than others. Also, people sometimes forget that PNG has got 8bpp and 16bpp modes, which are complete overkill for most maps and flags and such. PNG Tips for Cartoonists is an introduction to PNG for comics artists, but most of the article contains pretty useful information for Wikipedians too. The tool mentioned in the article, pngcrush, really does squeeze the last bits out of your PNG files and comes recommended.--user:Branko

If he can put them somewhere I can access them (like FTPing them to ftp.piclab.com:/incoming), I'll do the job. If he wants to do it himself, I recommend Paint Shop Pro from http://www.jasc.com. --LDC

What's the convention for movie titles?


 * Use italics for the title or name of books, movies, albums, TV series, magazines, and ships. See the Manual of Style for answers to many questions like this.

What's the easiest way to communicate with other users- I've had a message from maverick and don't know how to re ply... quercusrobur
 * All you have to do is follow the link to the person's user page then click on the link to their talk page. --mav

Is it possible to change ones username? I remistered as roybadami (my name), but Roy Badami (or at least RoyBadami) would have been better&mdash;I notice other people with spaces in their names. If not, perhaps I should just reregister; it's not like I've made many edits (and most of the ones I have made I wasn't logged in for anyway...)


 * ''<< What qualifies as a "excerpt" of an image? Or could most images be themselves interpreted as excerpts of a larger work? Or could perhaps low-resolution images be seen as excerpts of the high-resolution original?>>

My gut feeling is that a copyrighted image would be construed as an inherently discrete piece of work and that any significant change to an image would constitute a derivative work, but this is not a legal opinion.


 * << Or, alternately, do you think we're on such a strong foundation on the other three prongs that using a whole image presents no problem? >>

Based upon my "gut feeling analysis," I think the relevant inquiry here would be whether the whole image is part of a larger work. In any event, I think that "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" would remain a key ingredient in any determination of fair use.--NetEsq 2:34pm Sep 12, 2002 (PDT)''

In OLD pictures and painting, is there any copyright restriction in favor of the one who digitalized it? It doesnt, right? Can I just get them? Yes, I am lame concerning copyright issues... :-/ Yves 01:55 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure that I understand your question, but both visual images and sound recordings are protected by copyright, and if you download an image from the Internet, it's a pretty safe bet that someone has a copyright for it.--NetEsq 7:51pm Sep 11, 2002 (PDT)


 * I don't know the answer, but I think Yves is asking about copyright on old pictures, like photos of Buffalo Bill, Queen Victoria and so on. In this case the original copyright would probably have lapsed (>75 years after death of owner), but would the person who digitized the picture and uploaded it have any copyright?


 * ''This is a very complex question. Works originally created before January 1, 1978, but not published or registered by that date, have been given automatic federal copyright protection.  The duration of copyright in these works is computed in the same way as for works created on or after January 1, 1978 -- i.e., the life-plus-70 or 95/120-year terms will apply. In no case will the term of copyright for works in this category expire before December 31, 2002.


 * Under the law in effect before 1978, copyright was secured either on the date a work was published with a copyright notice or on the date of registration if the work was registered in unpublished form. In either case, the copyright endured for a first term of 28 years from the date it was secured. During the last (28th) year of the first term, the copyright was eligible for renewal. The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the renewal term from 28 to 47 years for copyrights that were subsisting on January 1, 1978, or for pre-1978 copyrights restored under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), making these works eligible for a total term of protection of 75 years.


 * http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d105:SN00505:|TOM:/bss/d105query.html| Public Law 105-298, enacted on October 27, 1998, further extended the renewal term of copyrights still subsisting on that date by an additional 20 years, providing for a renewal term of 67 years and a total term of protection of 95 years.


 * http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d102:SN00756:|TOM:/bss/d102query.html| Public Law 102-307, enacted on June 26, 1992, amended the 1976 Copyright Act to provide for automatic renewal of the term of copyrights secured between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977. Although the renewal term is automatically provided, the Copyright Office does not issue a renewal certificate for these works unless a renewal application and fee are received and registered in the Copyright Office.


 * http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d102:SN00756:|TOM:/bss/d102query.html| Public Law 102-307 makes renewal registration optional. Thus, filing for renewal registration is no longer required in order to extend the original 28-year copyright term to the full 95 years. However, some benefits accrue from making a renewal registration during the 28th year of the original term.


 * << would the person who digitized the picture and uploaded it have any copyright? >>


 * LDC has provided an excellent overview of this issue, infra.--NetEsq 12:24pm Sep 12, 2002 (PDT)''
 * ("Infra" is lawyer-speak for "below":-)


 * You're safer with old pictures, because it's less likely that there will be a valid copyright on the original photograph or painting or woodcut or whatever. Also, just an ordinary scan isn't "creative expression" subject to copyright, so an exact scan of the Mona Lisa is safe, as is a plain scan of an old photo. But even something as simple as a cropped photo can be creative, or a certain photo composition such as a picture of an old statue taken under certain lighting conditions; also, the act of restoring or retouching an old photo is expressive and therefore copyrightable. Finally, there can even be copyrightable expression in a particular selection or arrangement of images.  So the short answer is probably this: you generally can't go around grabbing photos on the net and uploading them here.  If you think some particular photo might be safe (for example, because it looks like a simple scan of an old painting), then go ahead and upload it, and make sure you include an accurate description of where it came from so those of us who follow the law more closely can give more specific advice. If you did the photo yourself, of course, just upload it and don't worry about it.  --LDC


 * What you said is right, but for some reason it leaves me shaking my head. It has something to do with the distinction you seemed (to me) to draw between being under copyright and being safe to use in Wikipedia.  The whole point of "fair use" is that it's okay to use copyrighted images, and I respectfully suggest your explanation blurred that concept.  (If you meant to, for policy reasons, that's okay, of course.) -- isis 12 Sep 2002

You're right, it isn't very clear (Gee, an attempt to explain copyright law that isn't simple and lucid? Imagine!). I'm a little unclear myself on fair use issues with images (I'm on pretty firm ground with text I think). I understand the four-prong test, and that we generally pass all of them well, except, in the case of images, the "extent of the portion of the work" test. What qualifies as a "excerpt" of an image? Or could most images be themselves interpreted as excerpts of a larger work? Or could perhaps low-resolution images be seen as excerpts of the high-resolution original? Or, alternately, do you think we're on such a strong foundation on the other three prongs that using a whole image presents no problem?

Certainly there are a lot of cases where a whole image is likely to be no problem--your videotape covers, for example, or a small album cover. Even if movie promoters sell classic posters as artworks, their market shouldn't be threatened by a tiny low-res reproduction used to illustrate an article about the movie. But let's take some more iffy examples: drawings from an online tutorial, AP photos of celebrities, paintings from a recent art exhibit (post-Berne)? I'm not sure "fair use" would cover our using such materials, but maybe I'm wrong.


 * Yes, I do think you may be doing 95% of your worrying about the 5% of actually questionable situations -- why don't you spend some of that effort worrying about leaving yourself liable for the unauthorized practice of law (by saying you're going to give legal opinions about copyrights) instead -- but I don't want to downplay the importance of the issues, either.


 * For one thing, nothing would make me happier than to be arrested for the unauthorized practice of law, because it would give me a chance to vent my utter hatred of that morally repugnant law and what I think of those who take it seriously; alas, since I don't charge any money for my opinions, I'm an unlikely target, so the legal momopolists will have to settle for suing Nolo Press like they did in Texas. I cannot express the degree of my contempt for those involved in that case--talk about stifling free expression. Requiring a license to express opinions about public laws we paid to create is nothing but strangling free expression for purpose of protecting a market.  I view those folks who sued Nolo Press as forms of life even lower than publishers who copyright building codes and technical standards, and perhaps a rung above West publishing. But I digress...


 * << Yes, I do think you may be doing 95% of your worrying about the 5% of actually questionable situations -- why don't you spend some of that effort worrying about leaving yourself liable for the unauthorized practice of law (by saying you're going to give legal opinions about copyrights) instead -- but I don't want to downplay the importance of the issues, either. >>


 * As set forth by LDC, what constitutes the unlicensed practice of law is a First Amendment issue of the utmost importance, much more so than the issue of what is or is not "fair use" of copyright. And in the unlikely eventuality wherein LDC finds himself indicted or sued for the unlicensed practice of law by virtue of his offering a quasi-legal opinion in the course of his work as a Wikipedian, there would no doubt be a host of real attorneys who would rush to his defense.


 * A number of professionals (i.e., accountants, real estate agents, insurance agents, and journalists) provide quasi-legal advice in the course of their work every day without running afoul of the law, and I'd be very surprised to see any lay person get into any real trouble for the unlicensed practice of law unless said lay person openly and falsely averred to being an attorney, accepted money from consumers for his or her services, and/or caused actual harm to said consumers by being reckless. This is not to say that people (including lawyers) should not take care to avoid expressing an opinion in a manner which others might construe as legal advice, but one is more likely to encounter serious legal liability by removing mattress tags. (BTW, please note that nothing which I have stated in this post should be construed as legal advice or as constituting a legal opinion.)--NetEsq 4:03am Sep 13, 2002 (PDT)

In Delaware UPL is not a crime but, rather, one of those sui generis offenses policed by a board of the state supreme court just like the Board on Professional Responsibility that polices lawyers. They've been on a witch hunt for several years now, ever since some citizens here starting banding together to help each other with proceedings in the family court, where there are serious problems (of constitutional magnitude) in many areas -- the first citizens' groups I am aware of were of persons who had been treated unfairly in the areas of orders for protection from domestic abuse and of property settlements in divorces. You would not believe how innocuous some of the statements were that the UPL Board successfully prosecuted.

The authorities' feeding frenzy didn't attract national attention until they went after Marilyn Arons, a special-ed advocate in New Jersey who represented a Delaware family in a proceeding here, because no one in Delaware would/does. The Del.Sup.Ct. opinion affirming the judgment against her in 2000 is at [ http://www.copaa.net/decisions/state/de_supct_arons.html ]. I won't try to describe to you the magnitude of the chilling effect that case has had here.

So, believe me, you are no more outraged about it than I am, but in Delaware these days LDC's statement, ?so those of us who follow the law more closely can give more specific advice", is actionable as UPL, and it scared me. I had hoped to slip my comment in where it could be taken as facetious but would alert him to an issue he had probably never realized existed, without making a big deal out of it.  Obviously, I didn't do it right, and for that I sincerely apologize.  -- isis 13 Sep 2002


 * Oh, no, that was no problem at all--your remark was entirely appropriate. It's just that you discovered that I was aware of the issue and that it's one of my hot buttons, so I took the opportunity to vent a little.  I'm sorry you got caught in the crossfire. California's a little bit better--paralegals are given some lattitude and can handle things like routine wills, adoptions and divorces, but still can't represent criminal defendants or sign civil pleadings (or course they write all the pleadings, which are then signed by the licensed attorney they work for, who may or may not have read them). And there's still the equally idiotic rule that you can't own a piece of a law firm either.  I try to make it clear when I give opinions here that they are just that--the opinions of a layman who follows the laws I paid for closely.  Maybe I'll make a clearer statement to that effect on my user page, so people can follow my sig and find that out.  --LDC


 * A cursory reading of In the Matter of Marilyn Arons leads me to the conclusion that this woman was tempting fate. Right or wrong, an objective observer would conclude that Ms. Arons was in fact engaged in the unlicensed practice of law, albeit for all the right reasons and notwithstanding the obvious conflict between Delaware state law and federal law.  The fact that the United States Supreme Court denied certiorari is not surprising to me at all.  The law is full of unambiguous statements of rights for which the law does not provide any actual remedy.  Some people have a hard time understanding this. -- NetEsq 4:23pm Sep 14, 2002 (PDT)


 * Among the people who had a hard time understanding it were the U.S. Dept. of Justice, which appeared as amicus curiae for her, and several public-interest groups that either did or tried to. Her group had been representing families in New Jersey (and a few in Delaware) for years with no problem and, as far as I know, is still doing so outside of Delaware.  But, as I said, that was just the case that got national attention out of the many.  And the Supreme Court's denying cert doesn't mean anything, since the chief justice has said publicly that they don't take every case that has legal merit but only the ones where they want to make a point -- like we hadn't realized THAT years ago.  Now that they have essentially declared the 1st Amendment a local option, Delaware has opted out of it. -- isis 14 Sep 2002


 * << And the Supreme Court's denying cert doesn't mean anything, since the chief justice has said publicly that they don't take every case that has legal merit but only the ones where they want to make a point >>


 * Denial of cert may not have any precedential value, but it most certainly does mean something to the people who have a very hard time understanding the fact that the law routinely denies the remedies that it purports to offer. It means that the law is capricious and indifferent, and that judges can pretty much ignore the law and rule whatever way they want, as they generally do. -- NetEsq 03:49 Sep 15, 2002 (UTC)


 * And every time you walk into the Supreme Court building and see that big "Equal Justice Under Law" over the door, and realize it means they're going to use the law to fuck us all over, equally, don't you just want to sit down there on the steps and cry? -- isis 15 Sep 2002


 * I'm not as concerned as you are about photos of paintings in art shows, because that's a core 1st-Amendment area. (There's going to be a label next to the picture giving us the info to disclose about the source, and if it's used to illustrate an article about that picture, or its subject, or its artist, or that show, or that school of painting, etc., it's going to be "fair use.")  I'm more concerned (but still less than you) about drawings: A genealogical chart or drawing of a benzene ring would seem to me to be pretty much fair game as nearly 100% info and 0% creativity, but I'll give you some leeway for color scheme and typeface.  More creative drawings could still be used "fairly," but that may be a slipperier slope.  What does concern me as much as it does you, I suspect, is copyrighted photos, and there, the issue is not so much where they came from as how we're using them -- if we're using them fairly and giving whatever credit we have for them, then there's no problem.  If we don't know they're copyrighted and don't know the source to give credit, there may be a problem, but I think it's more with our discomfort than with the law.


 * I have come to the conclusion that you should keep trying to warn contributors about using text that is or may be copyrighted but settle for telling them images are okay as long as they document where they came from. If somebody pops up and claims we're violating their copyright by using a particular image, we're going to stop doing that, but if we make a rule of not using appropriate images because we're afraid once in a while we might step on someone's toes, that's precisely the kind of chilling effect on the free expression of ideas that the 1st Amendment is supposed to protect us from.  Isn't it? -- isis 12 Sep 2002


 * You're preaching to the choir about the effect of copyright on free expression, but I personally try to bend over backwards to scrupulously comply with the letter of present law, because that gives me more personal credibility for my arguments on abolishing it. But I suppose you're right that I shouldn't expect others to have the same paranoia.

I understand, and agree. Thank you very much for clarifying this! I would only like to note that I said "lazy" because it's very difficult for me to write things in english. I know I don't need to worry very much with mistakes, but it's not easy for me to copyedit pages and pages of text - that is, formulate new text. Anyway, I am decided to do it, whatever how many (much?) time it takes. So, I hope you don't get me wrong. I just wanted to economize efforts, so I could work in something else. Yves 00:20 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

- When a site does not express any copyright notice, is it ok to use not edited content from its pages? In other words, is a resource considered public if there aren't anything stating the opposite? Please see http://www.fas.org/index.html. There are many definitions there I want to use, but i am quite lazy copyediting everything. Must I mail the webmaster? Or leaving the credits in the end of the term is ok? Thanks in advance. Yves 22:22 Sep 11, 2002 (UTC)


 * No, copyright holds whether you assert it or not. Unless you have explicit permission, you cannot use the exact text on the page, whether edited or not.Andre Engels 22:30 Sep 11, 2002 (UTC)


 * ''Notice was required under the 1976 Copyright Act. However, this requirement was eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention, effective March 1, 1989.


 * A cursory examination of http://www.fas.org/index.html would lead any reasonably prudent person to conclude that the content there is protected by copyright. Even so, copyright protection is not unlimited in scope, and there are specified exemptions from copyright liability. One major limitation is the doctrine of "fair use," which is given a statutory basis in section 107 of the 1976 Copyright Act.


 * Section 107 reads (in pertinent part): "In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include . . . the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole."  Accordingly, copying a substantial amount of copyrighted content because you are too "lazy copyediting everything" would probably weigh very heavily against a finding of fair use.  However, this is not a legal opinion.--NetEsq 4:50pm Sep 11, 2002 (PDT)''

- A discussion about copyright was moved to Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights

- Various entries of German cities in City Listing show &uuml; etc. Should these be corrected to use the appropriate character - example


 * 1)  D&uuml;sseldorf

-- Chris Q 11:25 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC)

Editing individual year entries I stumbled across Tarquin's style guide for the layout of contents of these pages, but I wondered whether there was any particular commonly agreed restriction on content for these. For example, can one just check on pages which link to a year article and slap the events in (with discretion over omitting particularly boring events!) Mazzy
 * In the absence of some robot spider doing the same thing with limited intelligence, I have been adding to the various "day" and "year" pages as I go along. Very few of them are thickly populated, and if the only thing that happened in 864 was "Khan Boris of the Bulgarians is baptized an Orthodox Christian", then that tells you something, either about 864 or about the state of the Wikipedia.


 * So, it seems to me you should go ahead and add to the "day" and "year" pages.  Wiki on.  Ortolan88
 * I've added an item to 864. It's easy if you look!
 * Now Boris doesn't need to feel lonely. :-) Eclecticology 11:58 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)

Wrap text around pictures: How do I get text to wrap around a picture? (Copied from Talk:Dwight Eisenhower to promote the idea of this village pump page.)


 * Easy way: [[image:Eisenhower.jpg]]
 * Hard way: use a table (shudder). --Brion VIBBER

Of course, the table works in older non-CSS browsers, too.
 * So does ASCII art.

-

Hello, can someone help a newbie, please? 1) How can I get an uploaded picture onto a page? 2) What makes a page into an orphaned page? Thanks Renata

Hello, to get an uploaded picture onto a page you would put a link in like this: (if it's a PNG, you'll obviously have .png there instead). If you want to show something and display ALT TEXT, you would put. What makes a page an orphaned page is that no other pages link to it, which means that no one will find it except through "random page" or a search. To resolve that, just find a page that's relevant and work in a link to the orphan. --KQ

--

All I want to do is make a small user page! I go to User:DrRetard and edit the page like I've edited every page since I starting editing here, and it looks fine. And then I click on a link like this one, User:DrRetard, or the one at Talk:Free_will_and_the_problem_of_evil, and I get a page with no text. Waaagh! I want to die!

Thanks for your help! -- Dr. Retard


 * Have you tried refreshing the "blank page"? Sometimes my browser gives me the old version of a page.  -- isis 14 Sep 2002


 * It must be something like that - I checked and your user page does exist, with text and all. Andre Engels 19:35 Sep 14, 2002 (UTC)


 * Yes, I kept refreshing and refreshing. Even logging out and back in. Now it appears to work! I don't know why! Waagh! I still want to die! Thanks again for your help! -- Dr. Retard


 * In Internet Explorer, if you sit behind a proxy cache, sometimes you have to hold down Shift while clicking on the refresh icon, to really convince the program to refresh. http://freespace.virgin.net/john.cletheroe/pc_int/ieoe/shift.htm


 * I have no idea what that means, but I found out the hard way it's true -- I've had trouble several times on Wikipedia when an image in an article had been updated, and I kept getting the old one even when I refreshed the article page. I'm using IE 5.5.   -- isis 14 Sep 2002


 * A proxy server sits between you and the rest of the internet and (invisibly to you) stores ("caches") web pages so that they load faster the second time around. Internet Service Providers often run caching proxys. If these proxy servers are not configured correctly, the above problem occurs. AxelBoldt

I'm not VikThor, but I have Konqueror 2.2.2 on Linux Mandrake 8.2 with cookies enabled for .org and I have "Remember my password across sessions" check. But I still am logged-out from time to time as if I do not have the "Remember my password across sessions" box checked. This used to be as bad as VikThor described but when Lee "fixed" the problem it was then as I describe above - just real annoying, but workable. --mav

I'm using moz 1.2a with no session problems and loving it :)

--

How do I stay logged in?? I have set up account ( VikThor ) and I can log in, but when I click a link when logged in, I get logged out. And even when I do nothing for about 30secs, the page refreshes, and I'm logged off. Thanks! VikThor 04:39 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)


 * 1) What browser do you use? (And what version specifically, and on what operating system?) Internet Explorer seems particularly problematic.
 * 2) Did you check the "Remember my password across sessions" box? That may help.
 * 3) Are cookies enabled in your browser?
 * 4) Is there a cookie saved for www.wikipedia.org? What does it contain?
 * --Brion 04:52 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

(I was thinking maybe the - in Vik-Thor was messing it up, so I am now Vik-thor and VikThor... any way to get rid of one of them?) Was using IE6. on WinXP Home. Had the Remember passwords set, cookies enabled, and there was something in the cookie. Decided to D/L and install Mozilla 1.1, and now able to stay logged in. :) There's been a few other sites IE has given me problems with, so I may be sticking w/ Mozilla... Vik-Thor 06:25 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

- There are examples of a wiki draw tool that I believe you will find interesting... it's over at twiki.org and it's called TwikiDraw http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/TWikiDrawPlugin it's written in java and it's vector. the base code is a bit dated, not using any of the newer bells and whistles of xml handling in JRE 1.4x... BUT it is very cool and I believe it would be a very nice addition to the wikipedia suite... in fact it would be nice for a lot of the php wiki sites...

--

Wiki drawing tool
do you know of any wiki drawing tool? something for drawing maps or diagrams? similar to the twiki draw environment? thanks again--dennis daniels
 * Sorry, we don't have this right now. Create an image on your local computer and upload it, this is the only available workaround in the moment. But discussion raises from time to time whether this is needed. -- JeLuF 11:39 Sep 21, 2002 (UTC)

It should let you upload a BMP and automatically convert it, or something. Maybe a drawing tool, like on any Japanese oekaki BBS, would be good. --Juuitchan

- Another newbie topic! I was messing with the cichlid article and it's got a link to oscar - except, it's not the academy award but a rather massive fish... so, can someone guide me through (or point me to the tutorial) for setting up an article with that same name (the fish really is called oscar and it's very well known) and ... so on? I can create the new article, no problem there. TIA, -- OlofE


 * I just created the page Oscar (fish), and made Oscar point to it, you you can put some text there now (please do!).


 * Done - but now I'll never learn that thing you did with splitting the two articles ;-) Many thanks! -- OlofE


 * When disambiguating pages, please please PLEASE don't forgot to click on "what links here" and fix all the links! There are a few dozen pages linking to Oscar on the assumption that it's a redirect to Academy Award, which it isn't anymore. --Brion 00:24 Sep 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * Dang I knew there was something more to do:-) I'll get to it -- OlofE
 * Ugh. I don't want to do that again. Not tonight at least. --OlofE

-

Hi. I am a new user and I was editing my User info and decided to turn my user info into an article. About 5 minutes later, a request for the deletion of my article was added and the info was returned to user status. Now, my personal opinion is that *everyone*, famous or not, is deserving of article status. However, I am willing to go with the majority here, but I would like some feedback. Please give reasons why "regular" people should or should not be given article status. Now my reasoning says that an encyclopedia should have as much information as possible. The Wikipedia says "An encyclopedia(alternatively "encyclopaedia") is a written compendium of human knowledge." Is my autobiography not "human knowledge"? Who would know more about Stephen Mills than me? What's wrong with the Wikipedia serving as a collection of articles, stories and biographies of "regular" people as well as "famous" ones? If I am willing to share my personal details and accomplishments with the rest of the world, what better place than an encyclopedia by the masses? --Stephen Mills

An answer is already on your user talk page. --mav


 * Just the fact that we have more space than a paper encyclopedia doesn't mean articles shouldn't be encyclopedic in nature. If we can add a list of your hobbies, we might just as well add your views on World Peace, euthanasia, George W. Bush or buddhism. But that kind of information is totally uninteresting to virtually everyone in the world. If they want to know you, they'll visit your personal website. An encyclopedia is for people that hear or read a name and think: "who was he?", or "what was he famous for again?" or "what else did he do?" or "when was he born?" or "why is his work in this area so important?" etc. Unless you've done something that has people ask such questions, your article is not encyclopedia material IMO. Jeronimo

-

Is there a way to rename images? Just spotted Image:Parliament3.jpg in the uploads. I'm sure we'll have images of parliaments of than Canada, it would be nice to give it a less generic name. -- Tarquin

Well trying to move the image description page didn't work. I would call this an exexpected behavior of the software. There should be an easy way to rename images. --mav


 * Presumably the kludge (if necessary) would be to re-save the image under the new name and alter the page to refer to the new name. Yes? No? (Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. :-) )


 * Yes, that's the way to do it. As with pages, the downside is that you lose the history (previously uploaded versions of the same file; date/time, username of the uploader) unless you manually copy it in as a note. An extension to the page move/rename function (as there is for deletion) to cover uploaded files better would be a good thing. Please head over to Bug reports and file a feature request to bug the programmers about it. --Brion

Is there a gallery of style somewhere? I (a newbie) happened to check the entry for my home city Uppsala and ... well, it's there at least. Then I happened to see Cologne. Then I thought, maybe I should do something for my hometown, eh. So, is there - or could there be - a collection of well made articles of various types, serving as a convenient way to see how to do things? (and how not to?) There should be a lot of categories that could benefit? -- OlofE

EEEK! Cologne is an HTML disaster please do not copy that style. See Manual of Style for some pointers. --mav


 * We're working on it at Manual of Style, but nothing yet as specific as how to lay out articles for cities. The layout for Cologne is a bit heavy on tabular data IMO -- Tarquin


 * I always thought that the page for Frederick looked nice. It works in tourist information well. Michael Becker 14:54 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

copy and paste from User talk:Maveric149

All of the old user pages that just redirect to new user pages should be deleted. Sure things link to them, but they are taking up space in the main namespace, rather than where they should be, which is in the User namespace. I tried to prepair some of them for deletion, however you (Maveric149) didn't seem to agree with my motives. What if one of those old user pages is the same name as something that could make a useful entry? Why should they take up space in the 'pedia so that they can just redirect to their user page? I find it quite annoying when I am looking for something relovant in the 'pedia, by using the Random page link, and I get some outdated user page redirect! -- Mbecker

The_Cunctator Kpjas Matt Stoker Eob Taw PaulDrye MMGB SJK Simon J Kissane


 * I agree it would probably be better to just delete them rather than having redirects; but the best way to "prepare" for that is to fix the pages that link to them. Then they can be deleted with little objection.  But until then, they should remain redirects.  --LDC


 * Should not it be the responsibility of the users who lay claim to these misplaced pages to change all of the links to said pages? If they really want all of those pointless links to talk pages to point to their user pages then they should find all of the links and fix them.  The pages should just be deleted, and redirect of improper links should be the users responsibility. --  Mbecker


 * Since you're the one all fired up about it, why don't you fix the links? That's the traditional wiki way. --Brion


 * You have got me there. I started doing that exact thing, then I ran into someone's old user page that had at least 100 links, and realized it was not really worth my time.  I am just trying to take out the trash, but it is not something I am willing to spend all of my time on.  If the user's who originally created these old user pages, cherish them so much, then they should do the job of taking out the trash.  Or, maybe the progarmmers could create a page, that allows people to submit old user pages, and then some script will change all of the links to those pages, before deleting it? -- Mbecker

Mbecker what you are trying to fix is a bug. If you don't like the fact that the random page function brings you to redirects then file a bug report. If and when something else comes up that has the same name as an old user name then we can worry about fixing ancient talk links. I don't think we would ever have an encyclopedia article named The Cunctator or kpjas or maveric149 and I don't know of anybody of encyclopedia interest that shares the real names you list (except maybe Lee Daniel Crocker and Larry Sanger but those two are Wikipedians). As LDC says, at the very least each old user page link must be fixed before the pages are deleted. --mav


 * It is not that I don't like the fact that the random page function brings me to a redirects, it is the fact that these pages exist at all. I don't see anyway of flaging these pages so that they are not used by the random page function, so I think they should just be removed, since they are not needed anyhow. -- Mbecker


 * But they are needed to make sure old talk sigs still work. If and when those links are edited to point directly to the target then and only then there would they not be needed. --mav


 * Even then, they may still be needed. There may be links from outside Wikipedia. People might have them in their bookmark files. We shouldn't break links without good reason. --Matthew Woodcraft

I think that the best solution to this problem would be to make a function that could be used by users to flag the culprit pages. Then another function could automatically fix all of the outdated links, and remove the flagged page. There are many ways to go about doing this. It could be made a request page that would require actions by the administrators to actually go through, or it could be a Special User function. I don't know what would be the best way to go about adding this functionality. -- Mbecker


 * That sounds like a feature request. If you want it to have any chance of being implemented then you should file it at sourceforge. --mav


 * Just want to say I never thought of it as a problem, but I certainly see Mbecker's point. Upon checking, I just discovered that I'm probably one of the chief culprits. For what it's worth, I'll try to take time to take out my own trash, at least. Then Wesley can point somewhere more useful, like to John or Charles Wesley. Perhaps a polite request to some of the more egregious offenders like myself would lead to some more of them being cleaned up. Wesley 21:19 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC) (btw, I like the tilde sig. feature)

FWIW, the random page function does not select redirects; however, it does for efficiency pre-select 1000 random pages at a time, and then refreshes that set every 1000 requests or so. So if it pre-selects a page with content that is then changed into a redirect, that redirect may be selected by the function until the next refresh. Also, MBecker, you might not be aware that the existence of these old user pages is not because of any mistake on the part of their creators--they exist because the first version of the software we used here made no distinction between user pages and content pages. So it isn't a matter of them "cleaning up their own mess" (Although I'm probably one of the bad cases too, and I can clean that up). Many of these users are no longer active, and so aren't around to clean up the mess even if they wanted to. If I or some other developer comes up with a way to clean up those with too many links to clean manually, that will be great; until then, clean up the ones that are reasonably easy to do, and leave the redirects to the others. --LDC

I honestly think that it would be easier to automate this process. I have submitted a few clean-up suggestions to sourceforge. I hope they will be considered for implementation. (btw, how can one participate in development of the wiki code?) -- Mbecker


 * The wiki code is the project "wikipedia" on SourceForge. See http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net .  You'll have to go through the usual Sourceforge process of getting an account, downloading the code via CVS, etc.  You'll have to be familiar with PHP and MySQL.


 * (an aside) perhaps such details as the pre-namespace state of wikipedai could go on a meta-article about the history of wikipedia ... not that I want to encourage navel-gazing at this early stage in the project! (or is there such an article already? -- Tarquin


 * There's a section about the history of Wikipedia at Wikipedia. The namespace issue is not covered yet. AxelBoldt

- Various entries of German cities in City Listing show &amp;uuml; etc. Should these be corrected to use the appropriate character - example


 * 1)  D&amp;uuml;sseldorf

I would do it myself, but not knowing German I would probably make mistakes

-- Chris Q 11:25 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC)

Hello, I just fixed the problem. The characters are now correct.

Cordyph

Lengthy discussion on Image copyright and use of copyrighted materials moved to copyright issues KJ 01:05 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * Another copyright discussion was moved to Wikipedia talk:Copyrights. These two should probably be integrated at some point. -Stephen Gilbert 03:06 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

Just a comment:

Of the 43,000 or so Wikipedia pages, about 27,500 are less than one KB in size.

user:renata

The lost password e-mails are being sent with an invalid envelope sender, namely  (or at least they were last week). This means that any well configured mail system will not accept them. There doesn't appear to be any working webmaster or postmaster address that I can find (in fact wikipedia.org doesn't seem to accept e-mail). Can someone pass this on to the appropriate people, please, or point me at the appropriate mechanisms for contacting the administrators? Thanks Roy Badami
 * user:Lee Daniel Crocker is the person to talk to about this. --KQ

Thanks, I've e-mailed him. Roy Badami


 * I noticed a misconfig in the network settings which caused the hostname to get reset to "localhost.localdomain"; I've changed it to "www.wikipedia.org". Should be better now. Not so sure about incoming e-mail though, that may be going to a nice pretty black hole. --Brion 06:02 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

Yep, that's fixed it, I tested reseting my password and I received the e-mail without problems.

You would appear to be right about incoming e-mail, you have no MX records (which isn't an error in itself), and you don't appear to be running an SMTP listener. (Though technically it's not a black hole, because the mail will eventually time out and generate a bounce message.) Roy Badami 22:26 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * Sendmail is accepting connections on loopback, but either it's configured to refuse connections via the real network or the port is firewalled off. I still have nightmares from the last time I tried to configure sendmail, so I haven't looked at it too closely. :) I'll bug the tech list about it. --Brion 04:59 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC)

Is it possible to change ones username? I registered as roybadami (my name), but Roy Badami (or at least RoyBadami) would have been better&mdash;I notice other people with spaces in their names. If not, perhaps I should just reregister; it's not like I've made many edits (and most of the ones I have made I wasn't logged in for anyway...)


 * You could set your nickname in preferences -- then that will show up whenever you sign with 3 "~" characters, and point to the roybadami user page. I don't know about changing the user nme itself. -- Tarquin


 * Thanks, that's all I was after. Roy Badami

---

I've asked this question a couple of times, but no one seems to be answering. Every time I look at an article containing an image - and that includes "Village pump" itself - the image, if it is right justified, overwrites the text of the article. If it is left justified, there is no problem. I still don't believe that I'm the only person experiencing this problem. -- Deb


 * Which browser do you use? It's fine in Mozilla, and even with clunky old dinosaur Netscape 4.7 -- Tarquin

I'm just using Internet Explorer, and I haven't had a problem with any other website. -- Deb


 * user:Lee Daniel Crocker is technologically savvy and in a position to see what's going on and figure out how to solve it. --KQ

Looks OK to me using IE 5.5 SP2 under Windows 2000 SP2 Roy Badami

I've had this same problem on some computers at school - but nowhere else. I do beleive that the offending browsers were IE 5.5 SP1 or w/o service packs. So it is probably a broken browser and the only way to fix it is to upgrade. --mav

In any case, if you're running 5.5 (original) or 5.5 SP1, then you need to upgrade to 5.5 SP2 immediately to protect yourself from the Nimda virus. Roy Badami


 * (hoarse stage whisper) mo ... zi ... lla ... o ... pen ... source ... ;-)


 * I just noticed that it only happens when I'm logged in - so does that mean that it's something to do with my user profile? Any suggestions?

--Deb


 * In your preferences, try changing the quickbar settings. I think "floating left" has problems. Is that what you have? AxelBoldt


 * Tried that and it didn't work. However, I have now overcome the problem by changing the skin - to "Nostalgia". Deb

I'm thinking of adding some fairly lengthy articles about specific pieces of classical music (long enough that they'd unbalance an article about the composer in question). Does anybody have any ideas how I might name them? .... ....


 * In the interest of keeping the village pump page at a usable length, I've moved this to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (pieces of music). -- Tarquin

Is it appropriate to put planned or anticipated events into future "year" articles? Khendon 10:40 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)


 * Yes, sure. Can't imagine anything else in these articles (they are now mostly filled with vague predictions I think). Jeronimo

Okay. I tried to fix some of the formatting on the Japanese language page but I can't! How do I do this??

I have also seen other pages with a similar problem. --Juuitchan


 * It would help if you explained what the problem was. :) Since your fix appears to have been changing &lt;pre> tags into &lt;tt> tags, I'm guessing the preformatted text is too wide for your browser window, either overlapping the sidebar or pushing the page wider than the screen. The sample dialogues are particularly egrerious, with two columns of text side-by-side. If you want to make those prettier, you'll probably want to reformat them entirely, to not be so darn wide. For instance, the translations and notes could go under instead of to the side. (By the way, help with the nascent Japanese wikipedia would be greatly appreciated. I have only a minor smattering of the language myself and can't do much more than set the software up and be enthusiastic.) --Brion 20:03 Sep 11, 2002 (UTC)


 * I can't do it. I am not much more than a beginner at Japanese myself. --Juuitchan

-

Abuse? How do you report abuse? The page September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Zionist conspiracy theories has had an abusive sentence added. I have deleted it but should we report the user who added it (64.229.129.155)?


 * Chris, deleting the abusive or offensive material is indeed always the first step you should take. If you put "revert vandalism" or something in the edit summary box, this will also attract the attention of other Wikipedians.


 * Next, you can do a number of things. One of them is to check whether there are any other pages the offender has vandalised, using this page. If there are more offensive acts, you can clean them up and put or at least put a notice at VANDALISM IN PROGRESS and explain what the user is doing or has been doing. One of the 40 Wikipedia administrators will check updates to that page and block the person if necessary.

However, most vandals leave after only one act, or are discouraged when their vandalism is removed by others, so that is usually sufficient action. Hope this is clear enough, Jeronimo

I notice many ppl, like AstroNomer in the last message, use a sort o automatic current date/time insertion. How do I do this? Yves


 * To add it to your signature, use four tildes in a row ( ~ ) which produces a signature like this: -- April 00:38 Sep 10, 2002 (UTC)
 * And three tildes in a row produces a signature without the time stamp, like this:Ortolan88

-

External links to documents
I added links to the two pieces of legislation mentioned in European Company Statute, which I assume is appropriate. I'm not sure if I've done it in the most appropriate way, though. I'm simply put the links at the end of the article, but I wasn't sure if there was a better way of doing this. Is there any standard approach to linking to external documents that are cited in an article? Perhaps in this case the formal citations to the documents (which appear in the main text) should be external links themselves? Then again, is it really appropriate for the citation to be in the body of the text to start with?

-roy


 * Looks like the common practice. In general, external links are left at the end of the page. There are some among us that even prefer external links without the [ ], so that the URL is visible in case someone prints the article. But I think that has not been decided. --AstroNomer 19:32 Sep 9, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks. I just though it would seem more natural if there was some way of linking to the source inline -- but it doesn't seem to be the Wikipedia way...
 * It can be done. See Manual of Style.  It is looked down upon, but useful in some circumstances, and not apparently outlawed.  Ortolan88

-

Changes etiquette
When is it a good idea to mention or discuss an edit on the corresponding Talk page? Does size of edit matter? Potential controversy? Apparent other activity? -- Khendon


 * If you're removing or contradicting existing material, it's probably a good idea to explain in the talk page (or if it's brief, at least in the summary box in the edit form). In general try to be pre-emptive; if you think someone else is likely to question what you're doing, you can save a step by clarifying your intentions first. (The talk page is also a good place to cite sources for possibly controversial material.) --Brion

I had a possibly related question... If I believe that information on a page is suspect, but aren't (yet) in a position to confidently refute it, what is the appropriate way to flag the issue? Most articles I have looked at don't have anything at all on the talk page, so the chances of anyone seeing a comment I might put there seem remote... -roy
 * You should raise your concerns on the talk page - there are always lots of people looking at Recent changes who may see your comment, and other people who read and edit the article are also likely to look at the talk page. So the chances of someone seeing it are actually pretty good! Enchanter

- A discussion about copyright was moved to Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights


 * It looks like it was accidentally deleted. Where did you put it? -- NetEsq 02:57 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * Update -- Nevermind. My bad.  I was confusing this with the move noted below.  copyright issues -- NetEsq 03:02 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

-

Special characters
From: Talk:Connective Anybody knows how to get the correct symbols for conjunction/disjunction? ( only rotated 90 degrees) -- Anon

The chars that are okay in all (well behaved) browsers are on How does one edit a page. Link to outlandish ones there too. It's &and; and &or; BTW -- Tarquin

Somewhere I saw a page listing all pages in the namespace. Does anyone know where to find that? --KQ 20:49 Sep 6, 2002 (UCT)


 * I don't recall, but that's a pretty simple and efficient SQL query: SELECT cur_title FROM cur WHERE cur_namespace=4 ORDER BY cur_title
 * user:AstroNomer knew it: it's Wikipedia:List of articles in Wikipedia: namespace. And you're right, that is a very quick query.  --KQ 21:20 Sep 6, 2002 (UCT)

I find myself somewhat annoyed at the amateurish contributions of one particular Wikipedian who is ignoring valid criticism of his work. After an extended discussion and rewrite of one particular article, he simply restored portions of his own work, placing them at the front of the new article. Most of the information in the restored portions has been incorporated into the new article, but some of the information is just plain wrong. My solution to this quandary has been to state my objections (which have been casually dismissed by the Wikipedian in question) and abandon ship, working on other portions of Wikipedia while I wait for someone else to come along who has more patience than I do, but I am not happy about it. Does anyone have any advice or suggestions on how one might handle such petty confrontations without coming across as a control freak?--NetEsq 8:40am Sep 6, 2002 (PDT)
 * I've commented on the substantive issues at Talk:Law. I ended up there in response to a similar appeal by the other party on the mailing list.  Edit Wars are seldom solved by two determined Wikipedians clashing head-on when both believe that they are right.  Even though my views on the issue appear to be closer to yours, I have so far avoided putting them anywhere other than the talk page for fear of fanning the flames of war.  Two things that can help are the involvement of more Wikepedians, and even more importantly the lapse of time to allow for reflection.
 * Definitions are especially tough, because everything that follows in the article will depend on the definition. I was recently involved in an edit war over the definition of Biblical canon, and can sympathize with your frustration.  It all does make me feel that we may need a definition of definition.  I'll have to think about that one, and maybe even do something.  Eclecticology 17:29 Sep 6, 2002 (UCT)


 * I truly appreciate your attention to this matter, and I share your concerns about Edit Wars. What concerned me most was not the content of the article, but the fact that forward movement of the editing process was thwarted by one contributor reinstating portions of a previous article which were written by him without any attempt to address the concerns raised by me and by other contributors.  There is no doubt in my mind that criticizing the contributions of other Wikipedians will create contentious situations, but I also believe that criticism is a necessary part of the editing process, as is responding to criticism, whereas simply restoring a previous version of an article without responding to criticism is counterproductive.  In any event, I will heed your considered response and await the involvement of more Wikipedians and the lapse of time to allow for reflection.--NetEsq 11:12am Sep 6, 2002 (PDT)

Hi- how do I remove an entry after discovering that a very similar one aleardy exists? breatharian is very similar to breatharianism, which I just created, how do I get rid of the latter??

Thanks quercus robur


 * The easiest thing is usually to redirect it to the existing page, so when someone goes to the new page they get shunted automatically over to the old page; see How to use redirect pages. I went ahead and redirected that one. --Brion 11:20 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)


 * The convention so far seems to be to have the main page as the "ism", for example "surrealist" -> "surrealism", etc. It doesn't really matter though. :-) -- Tarquin 12:05 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

I would like to make suggestions for eliminating some hassles in using one's Watch List. On what page should I do this? Also, why has my TOC comment on Wikipedia:Chat not been answered? David 09:02 Aug 27, 2002 (PDT)


 * bug reports has a link to the feature request tracker on sourceforge. (It's kind of a pain to use, but it's easier to keep track of things there.) If you think it bears discussion, you might also post a note about your idea to the Wikipedia-L mailing list. Chat doesn't seem to be used much these days; probably nobody answered it because nobody saw it, or because the few who did weren't particularly interested. (A child of the computer age, I never use the main page / table of contents -- I find things by search or via a link on another page I've already found; or of course on special:Recentchanges!) --Brion 11:36 Aug 27, 2002 (PDT)

What is a good format for writing large numbers? Should we use the American format? --Juuitchan


 * See orders of magnitude. The exact format is still being debated on the talk page. There are long chains of pages you can link to from large numbers. -- Tarquin


 * No. I mean, should a pinball score, for example, be written as 3 486 147 040, or as 3,486,147,040, or what? -- Juuitchan


 * Ah, I see. 3,486,147,040 is preferred, I should think. I'll mention it in Manual of Style.

Is there any reason not to bypass redirects?

Every time I click on a link in an article and discover that I have been redirected, I am tempted to return to the original article and fix the link. Is there any reason not to do this? Do people refrain from doing this because it is purely mechanical and a waste of time? Come to think of it, if bypassing redirects is purely mechanical, couldn't we write a script to bypass all redirects everywhere, and leave the redirects in place only for the sake of future misspellings? ---Karl Juhnke 23:39 Aug 25, 2002 (PDT)


 * Yeah, mainly it's a purely mechanical waste of time. Additionally, for forms that are equally correct (ex, British vs American spellings, short/long form of a country name, etc) adding a big old bla bla bla bla| to the link code clutters up the edit box. Clean, easily readable and editable code is paramount to what's supposed to be a community-edited project, and piped links are harder, not easier, to work with. An automatic redirect "fixer" might be nice (if it can be trusted), but it shouldn't be blindly thrown at everything. (All the above is IMHO.) --Brion 23:47 Aug 25, 2002 (PDT)


 * The usefullness of the redirect depends. If it is really a spelling error, then you should fix the link in the article, since it's a spelling error there as well. Many other redirects are for renamed pages because of naming conventions or the like (for example /subpages that have been moved), and there's no harm in fixing these (though no harm in leaving them either). However, sometimes the author of an article intends to use a slightly different term than the name of the article, but wants to link it anyway. For example, he may want to talk about the Kingdom of the Netherlands to specifically indicate he's talking about the Antilles and Aruba as well. Although the Kingdom of the Netherlands redirects to Netherlands, the use of a different name makes sense. Of course, the author could have written Kingdom of the Netherlands, but this is much easier. That would be one reason not to mechanically change all links to redirects.


 * I must agree with the above point. For instance, I linked up telepathic in one of my articles because of grammatical considerations, and the link got a question mark.  I intended to write the article but checked telepathy first and found that it already existed, so I made a redirect page.  This way all NEW links of telepathic will find a target, and the linking person doesn't have to go searching for related words/concepts.  This makes it easier for new people who might not necessarily know about the pipe trick. Also, if you make a new link that you intend to be distinct from some related concept that has a redirect, you have a page to work from and won't have your new concept link autochanged to something else if you procrastinate a bit.  --Stephen

are Umlauts allowed in article titles?

It should not be :Ludwig Maximilians Universitat, Munchen, but Ludwig Maximilians Universit&auml;t, M&uuml;nchen, may I change the link, or will occur any errors with "äöü" in titles? --chd


 * They work just fine (as long as you only need stuff in ISO 8859-1). However, for those whiners who can't or won't type them (and in cases when a form with accents stripped is commonly used in English), make a redirect from the unaccented title to the article or vice versa. Ability to link cleanly is key. --Brion


 * Shouldn't it be either "München" or "Muenchen"? That is, the customary way to express the umlaut if not available is by putting an "e" after the altered vowel. I suppose you'd still want a redirect from "Munchen" and "Munich" for that matter.  Ortolan88


 * Yes, the German language is special in this way, in that it has a standard 7bit version of its alphabet, and we shouldn't forget this in our redirects. To judge from Wikitech-L, in fact, the "ue" version is quite common on de:. &mdash; Toby 23:05 Aug 25, 2002 (PDT)

On a recent visit to Austria, I was quite surprized (probably shouldn't have been) that this is applied even to URLs. ÖBB, the Austrian Railway (presumably Österreichische Bundesbahn?) has the web site www.oebb.at (and www.obb.at most definitely doesn't work) -roy

Deleting articles

Can someone tell me how to delete an article? I wrote Sound Card and realized that Sound card exists (and is the correct spelling?). I moved the contents of Sound Card to Sound card and made Sound Card empty, but can't delete it. -- User:Volker

Hi, Volker. I'm here to help (hold on to yer wallet!): --Ed Poor
 * 1) You could put #REDIRECT sound card (note second word "card" is lower-case) in the Sound Card article. That way, if anyone vists the Sound Card page, they will be whisked automagically to the real sound card article.
 * 2) Only Administrators can delete pages, and we do so only rarely. Usually a REDIRECT does the trick.


 * Also, for future reference; if the name you realize your article should have had doesn't already exist as a page, you can click the "Move page" link in the sidebar to move/rename the article to the new name. This will automatically keep the old name as a redirect for consistency's sake. Moving this way is the "cleanest" way to rename an article, because the edit history stays with the article, instead of being broken across the old page and the new page. (Note that the "move page" only appears if you're logged in.) --Brion

Your questions answered here
Question: I love the Wikipedia! - Where can I find more projects like this? I'm familiar with one other - the group proofreading project To me, this is what the net is all about. JBrave


 * I dropped a few pointers on your talk page (User talk:Jbrave). --Stephen Gilbert 16:18 Sep 25, 2002 (UTC)

-  <> 

The original query was:


 * Seriously, though, is there any reason as to why the Asia Giovanni article should not be taken out? This website is not a referring service for porn, is it?

And your response was:


 * We are not a porn referral service and if you see another pointless link to a porn site in the future then feel free to delete it.

And using your opinion as carte blanche, an anonymous contributor deleted the official Web site of Aria Giovanni from the Aria Giovanni article.

 <> 

And should we edit the link to Playboy from the Playboy article to make it non-clickable? In other words, exactly where are the boundaries of your "no linking to smut" criteria? Have you really thought this through? -- NetEsq 21:13 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)


 * Boy, you seem to like to argue over non-important things. I don't. However, I would keep Playboy.com clickable becuase both the magazine and the website are far more than pure smut. There is sports info, corporate info, an about page telling the reader about Playboy ect. That doesn't compare to a mere smut portal. Again, this is about link relevance; if there ain't info on the other end, then there is no reason to link to it no matter what it is. And there is no reason to have a clear set of guidelines on this, human judgement is all that is needed. If you think that making a direct link to the website makes the article a better article, then by all means link away. But if somebody else doesn't think that the link serves an encyclopedic purpose then they should delink to the link. Thus is the wiki way. And yes, I have thought this through.


 * If you don't mind, I have more important things to do. --mav


 *  << Boy, you seem to like to argue over non-important things. I don't. >> 

I suppose it's all a matter of perspective, but it's very clear that you do like to argue; you just don't like to be proven wrong. To wit, you stated that you did not want to argue, then you went on to state your own contrary opinion. What did you hope to prove?

I consider censorship to be a very important issue, and I think that your patronizing dismissal of this issue (along with me and my opinions) speaks volumes to your lack of consideration and judgment. You offered an opinion; now it's time to defend it. Alternatively, you can admit that you are wrong. What will not pass for defending your opinion is dismissing me as a troll while offering your own opinion as though it were Biblical canon, which is *exactly* what you just did.


 *  << I would keep Playboy.com clickable becuase both the magazine and the website are far more than pure smut. >> 

In other words, "I don't look at the pictures; I just read the articles." Well, you'll be saddened to know that the model whose Web site you seek to censor was hired by Wikipedia's sponsor Bomis for a fashion shoot that was used to promote the "Win a Ferrari" contest, and none other than Jimbo Wales himself uploaded a publicity photo of Aria Giovanni to Wikipedia. Should we now create a "no linking to smut except when it's used to promote Wikipedia" criteria? Or, alternatively, should we simply link to whatever Web sites are relevant to Wikipedia articles and lose the judgmental label of "smut" altogether? -- NetEsq 22:11 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)


 * "We are not a porn referral service" -- we're not? Aw crap. I want my money back!

I will let everybody else decide just who is patronizing here (which you stated as fact BTW). People are free to add or remove links as they see fit so long as those actions furhter our number one policy; that we are an encyclopedia. But, since you are obviously dancing around the central issue of relevance, I see no point in continuing this discussion. --mav


 * I'm with NetEsq on this one. If a person is worthy of an article and they happen to have their own website, then a single, relevant link to their website isn't objectionable.  If that person happens to be a porn star, then you should recognize that the linked site will probably be pornographic.  If your reason for deleting it is at all arguable-- and somebody else really thinks it should be there-- then let it be (and don't encourage others to mess with it). Dachshund


 * As I already said, if you think it is relevant and helps to make a better article then link away. However, anybody else can disagree. --mav


 * My point being that too much disagreement can be detrimental to the site. In order to keep Wiki working, it's better to settle on a policy that everybody can abide by, rather than leaving it open as a source of contention.  There is obviously a deep rift between people who just don't want certain links in the Wikipedia because they're "smut" (and NPOV is not the only issue here), and others who think that a relevant link even to a porn site is acceptable given certain specific conditions.  It would be far more productive to work this out than to leave it hanging.  Where's Larry when you need him? Dachshund

I wasn't trying to either state or make a policy in this regard and I don't think it would be a good idea to do so. Everybody should be able to link or delink based on their own ideas on what is of encyclopedic relevance. Perhaps this thread began because I oftentimes don't qualify my opinions and some people are not able to tell an opinion from a statement of fact unless there is an obvious qualification. If you would like to have a hand in policy, then please join the Wikipedia mailing list. This thread should be moved elsewhere. --mav


 * Almost all improper web sites have a warning page (at worst R-rated) and require another click before you get to the good stuff. Ortolan88


 * Again, sigh, "good stuff" is not the issue. Whether or not a link has encyclopedic relevance is the issue. If a link doesn't add value to an article then it isn't needed. --mav


 * It is disingenuous to pretend that at least part of the question here is not whether a link from the Wikipedia will, in and of itself, cause offense to an unsuspecting clicker. The existence of warning pages means that, otherwise legitimate links are not, in and of themselves, likely to cause offense without further voluntary action on the part of the reader.  That's good, and it supports your point of view, mav, and undermines the underlying objection to these links by those who disagree with you.  Ortolan88


 * OK that did go over my head. I thought you were arguing for links here to outside porn because those sites have disclaimers. But I still think encyclopedic relevance is the main issue here with "offense to an unsuspecting clicker" being a related issue. Both of these must be weighed against the value of having the link. Again, there is little reason not to have information such as the URL of a related website, but we don't have to make that link active if it doesn't really add to the article. --mav


 * In other words, "It's okay to light up. Just don't inhale!" -- NetEsq 04:27 Sep 28, 2002 (UTC)

--

I appear to have sparked off something bigger than Ben Hur. I just reentered this area and read the above entries.

I'll just settle for one or two points. I agree that if a 'soft' webpage or website can illustrate a point involving some adult industry identity like Hugh Hefner then it is OK to include it. That is indeed the case with Hefner's page.

Nor do I have too much of a problem about such pages on the Wikipedia to begin with - Hefner has left a mark on periodical culture.

But there has to be line drawn somewhere on this. I must maintain that the idea of writing ad inifinitum about( or even worse, promoting) specific nudie models on the grounds that they are "an important part of popular culture" and giving them more attention than Walter Burley Griffin or Aage Niels Bohr is bizarre.

Arno


 * Well, Arno, the problem with the line that you hope to draw is that it is based entirely upon your own Victorian sense of morality. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your original position was that the Aria Giovanni article should be deleted, and your justification for wanting to delete that article revolves around the fact that the source of Aria Giovanni's international fame is the fact that she is a Penthouse Pet.  However, the fact remains that Aria Giovanni is a famous international model,  one featured by Wikipedia's sponsor Bomis .  So, whatever your  personal '' views are on the value of articles on "nudie models," Aria Giovanni deserves an article in Wikipedia, and that article should feature a link to her official Web site.  (On this note, the URL for Aria Giovanni's official Web site has -- once again -- been removed from the Wikipedia article about Aria Giovanni by an anonymous contributor.)


 * Simply put, if  you think that Walter Burley Griffin and Aage Niels Bohr deserve more attention than Aria Giovanni, then you should spend your time researching the former rather than advocating censorship of the latter. -- NetEsq 14:50 Sep 28, 2002 (UTC)''

Look, mate, a few things.

1. Victorian England saw prostitution flourishing. It wasn't exactly smut-free. Get your facts right in future.

2. I have been contributing to Burley Griffin's article ; again, get your facts right. If you truly cannot contribute anything much to this site except besides nudie models, then I feel for you. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

3. Once again, this wikipedia is not meant to be a link for porno websites, regardless of whether or nor they come with a cover page and regardless of whether their subject is backed by a wikipedia sponsor. The Giovanni page, and in particular the webpage link that you have such an obsessive insistence on, is setting a precedent that this site needs the way you need another nose.

4. Finally, your tactic of highlighting words such as 'you' in an ill-advised attempt to dominate me is noted, and rejected with the contempt that it well deserves.

Arno

---

Hello debating Wikipedians. This Playboy debate is getting extremely long. Any ideas on where it can be relocated? --Stephen Gilbert 13:27 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Birth and death format
Guys,

Several issues.

A recent bit of expanding of Olivia Newton-John had me adding her date of birth at the start of her name in this style: (September 26, 1948- )

A certain astronomer then proceeded to change this to read (b September 26, 1948)

Which format is correct - and is there a correct format? I has a look in FAQ but found no help there.

Whilst we're at it, let's expand some more and ask : are there any standards as regards displaying peoples' dates of birth and death? There do not appear to be any. Some biographies start with just the years, often not in tag form (eg Fred VII (1654-1700) was a merry old soul); others do not start with a date of birth and/or death at all ( eg Luke VIII was a king of England who hated termites ...) ; others still use tags at the start ( Rodney II (June 15, 1936- October 31, 2001). Which format, if any, is standard? I prefer the lattermost myself.

One other thing. Whilst going through lists of the most popular pages, I was surprised to see one dedicated to someone called Aria Giovanni - some 4800 or so hits. When I investigated it, I was initially amused and then annoyed to discover that she is a Penthouse Pet.

I suspect that some of those 4800 hits were due to people looking for grubby pictures. Thanks to the tag at the bottom, that links to a site that, according to its own disclaimer, "contains explicit sexually oriented material", they have access to them. (Oh, I should add, I did not look at this material...)

Seriously, though, is there any reason as to why the Asia Giovanni article should not be taken out? This website is not a referring service for porn, is it?

I should also point out that there is something patently ridiculous about a Penthouse Pet having a page that has a length compatible with, say Walter Burley Griffin, or is longer than, say, Aage Niels Bohr, two far more historically important individuals.

Arno

Yes, there are standards. They are outlined on the Manual of Style, and yes, you guessed it, some are still being thrashed out, in typical wikipedia style ;) The correct style for dates, however, is decided on. YOu'll be pleased to know that your preffered style is the standard: ( Rodney II (June 15, 1936- October 31, 2001). For the not-dead-yet, we use (born June 15, 1936). -- Tarquin

To answer your other question; We are not a porn referral service and if you see another pointless link to a porn site in the future then feel free to delete it. However, there are soft porn sites that can add to the value of certain articles. For example, in our surprisingly good article nude celebrities on the Internet there is a link to "The Case Files of the Fake Detective" which is a website that analyzes more than 300 faked nude photos of celebrities. It has side-by-side images of the fake, the original of the clothed celebrity, and the original of the nude model. But at one time there was a link to the Lair of Lux Lucre which only has the fakes. I removed the pointless Lux link. --mav

Additional talk on this issue has been moved to Talk:Aria Giovanni.

Mathematical wiki syntax
This has probably come up before, so if I'm repeating tired old arguments, or worse still inadvertently walking into a minefield, apologies, but I think it would be nice to have a simpler, more wiki-ish markup for subscripts and superscripts, rather than relying on raw HTML (it was really starting to piss me off while doing the notation example in electron configuration). Something a bit TeXy, perhaps, like ^ and _ (though that leads to ambiguity over exactly what wants sub/superscripting so it might be best to use paired symbols ^2^ and _2_, or perhaps even ^2_ _2^, so that ^ meant go up a level and _ meant go down a level) --Bth

It has come up before, but it's well worth mentioning again! Something like ^^2^^ might be safer. It's also been suggested that we could use TeX itself to generate PNG images, thus: math:some TeX expression in here. I like this idea a lot, even though I'm of the age of WYSIWYG and I fear TeX -- Tarquin 22:10 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

The problem with the suggested syntaxes is that (one way or another) they don't allow scripts within scripts. My suggestion in the past has been "^{...}" and "_{...}" (which follows TeX even more closely) on the assumption that "^{" and "_{" will rarely or never occur naturally together. We could still double the "^" and "_" if that assumption proves mistaken, but we'll still need some sort of asymmetric bracketing; unlike other wiki syntax, scripts don't simply toggle. &mdash; Toby 10:32 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

(But TeX is lovely ...) The thing is, nice though it would be to have some sort of swish automagic mathematics-generator, I think this is a slightly separate (though related) issue: sub/superscripts are possible within HTML and they occur frequently enough (and not always in mathematical contexts) that it'd be nice to be able to do them wiki-style. --Bth

Yes, TeX is quite lovely; I use it all the time, even for writing letters to friends. After discussing possibilities for implementing it ad nauseam on the mailing list, I eventually decided that it would only make editing harder for the uninitiated and thus shouldn't be done. But y'all may have fresh ideas that we didn't have before, so feel free to bring it up there again. &mdash; Toby 10:32 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I think we should bring it up again. TeX would only be used for fairly complex equations; so most people who will come face to face with it will be mathematicians of some sort. Those (like me) who don't know tex already can probably handle the learning curve. -- Tarquin 10:45 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I just uploaded http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:6thchord.png - the first image I've had a go at. It's for the chord article once I've written the words to go with it - for the time being it's living on User:Camembert/Sandbox. In Internet Explorer it looks fine, but I cannot see it at all in Opera 6.05. Most .pngs both in the wikipedia and elsewhere look fine in either browser. I tried reuploading the file, and still things were the same. Am I missing something, or is it just some weird error? --Camembert
 * OK, I've decided it must be some problem with the program I was using to convert the original bitmap into a png. I'm going to try a different program. --Camembert 01:39 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Is there an automated system that offers visitors to download backups of the entire encyclopedia? Backups or images... whatever you wish to call them. First, to ensure that data can always be recovered with someone's backup, and second, to allow us to keep local copies of information. -- Cluster

The EU map
Does anyone have the source file / know who has the source file for ? I'd like to update it to reflect the countries that may be joining in 2004 -- Tarquin 22:00 Oct 13, 2002 (UTC)


 * The maps of the EU and the continents were made by User:Brion VIBBER. You can find the source files on his external page here. Scipius 22:15 Oct 13, 2002 (UTC)


 * If I understand correctly, all the ones marked on the map as 'requesting admission' are currently recommended for 2004 except for Bulgaria and Romania (for 2007) and Turkey (no date set, official negotiations not started). Should be a simple matter to reflect that in the maps. I'll go adjust it... (Note that the files I have up for download there don't have the text labels in them, as they're meant as basis for adaptation to other languages I haven't covered yet.) --Brion 22:46 Oct 13, 2002 (UTC)

Randompage error
Special:Randompage seems to be no longer working, I get:

Warning: open(/tmp/sess_e3b9b5e8f5afa9cce2aa0066fca4a143, 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: open(/tmp/sess_e3b9b5e8f5afa9cce2aa0066fca4a143, 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

Jeronimo 18:50 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

This has been happening on any page lately. Maybe a FAQ entry from one of the technically-minded wikipedians would help?

I've bumped the open files limit on the server from 8192 to 65536, so it oughtn't to be hitting this limit so often now. --Brion 22:55 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Could someone please delete the page User:Throbbing Monster Cock? Freedom is fine, but we should realize that small children will increasingly use Wikipedia. Let's use some common sense. David 21:25 Oct 15, 2002 (UTC)

The "neutrality" of articles in Wikipedia is intellectually dishonest. For the proscription of overtly partisan content is itself a violation of neutrality. If Wikipedia were truly neutral such partisanship would be welcomed, rather than rabidly deleted. One user diffused an edit war by moving my article to "meta" and that cooled my ire. What is not acceptable is outright arbitrary deletion. Whether this encyclopedia is truly open not just to minority opinion, but minority races (in the United States) is open to question, inasmuch as the dominant culture, which is white, carries its inescapable baggage. An honest acknowledgement of that baggage through openness to interpretations and criticisms of its contents ought to be a vigorous challenge, not anathema.


 * This is an encyclopedia, not a forum for political debate. I was the person who repeatedly removed your NPOV remarks. You can find another forum for your comments, and I find your rather bold statement that minority races are unwelcome here to be offensive.  -- Zoe


 * We accomplish this by stating opinions as opinions, like this:


 * Foo is a kind of bar.
 * Some people, the pro-fooists, think that foo is good. Here's why.
 * Other people, the anti-fooists, think that foo is bad. Here's why.
 * Still other people, the nullibarists, deny the existence of bars altogether. Here's why.


 * The following is not a Wikipedia article:


 * Foo is a very good kind of bar. or Foo is a very bad kind of bar. or Foo is a spurious concept since bars don't exist.


 * What we don't do is publish unattributed screed. This is an encyclopedia, not a soapbox. A thorough and thoughtful discussion may be found at NPOV. I wasn't involved in your case, so I won't make any more specific comments - perhaps someone closer to the issue would like to. - Montr&eacute;alais

"What we don't do is publish unattributed screed." Screed runneth over nonetheless, some attributed, much unconscious. As for the pump, it would operate much better without the haughtiness (we shall strive for the Holy Grail of Knowledge in Wikipedia, but the pump shall remain the same tired repository of flaming crap all opinion boards are). As I asked elsewhere in this page, do you have room for humor as you pick the fly feces from the pepper, or is this apparent state of misery a Village constant? mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net

Who are the "we?" The Wikipedia has ingeniously solved the problem of attribution, and may ultimately contribute to the evolutionary demise of that questionably useful species of human need. However, the problems of distinguishing absolute truth, which is abstract, from knowable fact, and of ever trending toward truth as better evidence brings more solid facts, should be recognized. The problem of objectively determining what is neutral and what is not should also be recognized, for it is a deep one. If I have to edit the final product only second-hand, by influence, I like to know that the Uber Arbiters are subtle enough to make these recognitions. {8:52 P.M. -- preliminary addendum based on partial reading of NPOV: I admonish Montrealais that we the unelect would hold your feet to the fire by stating that Wikipedian rigor would say "One man's screed is another's truth, so be very careful what you characterize as screed."}


 * No, one man's screed is another man's opinion. You are correct to distinguish truth from fact. The job of Wikipedia is not to lay out the truth, but to mention what facts are available for a situation. "X is good" is not a fact; it is an opinion. "Group Y believes that X is good" is a fact. - Montr&eacute;alais

"No, one man's screed is another man's opinion." -- Strictly your opinion, of course. mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net


 * If you don't sign your name, then we won't be able to judge the worth of your assertions, not to mention the worth, if any, of your articles. As it is, this is the only article linked to your name.  For my money, what you have written here is content-free. ("I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!")  I've written a lot of articles in the past few months, but I haven't found the uberarbiters yet.  On the other hand, any number of people have added to, extended, and, yes, changed, what I have written, usually for the better, and I've done the same to any number of other people.  You should read Wikipedia is the dopiest thing I've ever heard of.  Ortolan88 04:12 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

btw, what's the Monopoly(TM)/Wikipedia:Village pump currency exchange rate these days? -- mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net -- Frederick George Wilson -- attribution as worth...let me run that through the Computer of Truth, I'll let you know what it crunches out...btw2, is humor outlawed here?

One last rant --er-- opinion, before I pack it in for the night: the move of my "genocide denial" article from metapedia to redirect was a net entropic increase, i.e., stupid. mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net -- Michel Foucault --

- Something is deeply screwy. Whenever I browse to any article I get served a random page. I go to and I get served the Main Page, and then when I hit reload I get the OpenStep page, and then when I hit reload again I get "Recent Changes", where I see that people are happily adding until at least twenty minutes ago. Is nobody else experiencing this? This is not a cache issue on my side, I'm getting pages I know I've never seen before. I can duplicate this bug on both Konqueror and Mozilla for Linux. --k.lee


 * Deeply screwy, agreed. It's happened before; the current workaround (as I understand it) is to use the format http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump

Page Loading Error
I have recently been noticing a repeating error. Sometimes when I choose the back button on my web browser to go back to a previous wikipedia page I was at, instead of refreshing the page it loads a totally new one. I've gotten interesting pages such as the World Trade Center and others. They are totally unrelated. I hit the reload button and the correct page loads, but nevertheless the server is handing out "random" pages to me. -- Ram-Man

I find it rather amusing that when I clicked on Bug Reports it loaded the History of Belgium page. -- Ram-Man

I just uploaded http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:6thchord.png...
 * Forget this everybody - I've worked out the problem myself. --Camembert

Sidebar of phpwiki
hi, been playing over the new phpwiki site and found their sidebar very useful...http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/demo/en/RecentChanges?days=3 any one know where i could find thesame for moz 1.2a for wikipedia? thanks

oh, and for evangelistic purposes .ideas. I'm sending pages to friends that I know have an interest in the material and inviting them to edit/update the materials...If we 'all did that' I think we'd get a lot of page churning, especially if we target those academic types. --Denny

It may be the browser I'm using, but I don't see a sidebar on that page. Unless you call their logo at the side of the page a 'sidebar', but then Wikipedia has it too, just somewhat more extensive. Andre Engels

Japanese flag replaced with Montana flag
I'm not sure how the images are linked/stored but the Japanese flag is either mislabeled or just plain missing.... Japan Vik-Thor 05:04 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

White rectangle with a big red circle in the middle? Looks fine to me, both in Mozilla 1.2a and IE 5.5 (Win2000). --Brion 05:13 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

OK, I'm going to be quiet now... I swear, it was coming up with the Montana state flag, even after refreshing... Vik-Thor 05:31 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

PHP errors
Umm.... sorry, erasing the past so my browser will let my type in here. See history for old questions.

is anyone else getting php errors? Is there a story on this? Graft

I'm starting to hear more reports of congestion problems lately. I suspect that some server settings need to be expanded to accommodate greater traffic on the foreign-language wikis. --LDC

I've been seeing PHP errors that don't immediately suggest congestion. It looked to me like somebody temporarily mislaid a PHP document used for config. - Khendon 15:59 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

The error reported to me most recently was "can't load include file" because the system limit on number of open files was maxed out. That happens specifically when people access many of the foreign wikis at once, even if total congestion on the server is otherwise low. --LDC

Ah, okay. I retract my naive comment then :-) - Khendon 16:18 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

BTW Lee, last night I noticed the German, etc wikis weren't having the php files cached (no *_apc files), as the directory permissions didn't allow apache to write to them. I've chowned the 'w' directories to apache, and they all seem to be caching now. That may help, or hinder. Who knows. :) --Brion 21:02 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

Birth and death format
(entry now in FAQ. This section to be deleted shortly)

Guys,

Several issues.

A recent bit of expanding of Olivia Newton-John had me adding her date of birth at the start of her name in this style: (September 26, 1948- )

A certain astronomer then proceeded to change this to read (b September 26, 1948)

Which format is correct - and is there a correct format? I has a look in FAQ but found no help there.

Whilst we're at it, let's expand some more and ask : are there any standards as regards displaying peoples' dates of birth and death? There do not appear to be any. Some biographies start with just the years, often not in tag form (eg Fred VII (1654-1700) was a merry old soul); others do not start with a date of birth and/or death at all ( eg Luke VIII was a king of England who hated termites ...) ; others still use tags at the start ( Rodney II (June 15, 1936- October 31, 2001). Which format, if any, is standard? I prefer the lattermost myself.

One other thing. Whilst going through lists of the most popular pages, I was surprised to see one dedicated to someone called Aria Giovanni - some 4800 or so hits. When I investigated it, I was initially amused and then annoyed to discover that she is a Penthouse Pet.

I suspect that some of those 4800 hits were due to people looking for grubby pictures. Thanks to the tag at the bottom, that links to a site that, according to its own disclaimer, "contains explicit sexually oriented material", they have access to them. (Oh, I should add, I did not look at this material...)

Seriously, though, is there any reason as to why the Asia Giovanni article should not be taken out? This website is not a referring service for porn, is it?

I should also point out that there is something patently ridiculous about a Penthouse Pet having a page that has a length compatible with, say Walter Burley Griffin, or is longer than, say, Aage Niels Bohr, two far more historically important individuals.

Arno

Yes, there are standards. They are outlined on the Manual of Style, and yes, you guessed it, some are still being thrashed out, in typical wikipedia style ;) The correct style for dates, however, is decided on. YOu'll be pleased to know that your preffered style is the standard: ( Rodney II (June 15, 1936- October 31, 2001). For the not-dead-yet, we use (born June 15, 1936). -- Tarquin

To answer your other question; We are not a porn referral service and if you see another pointless link to a porn site in the future then feel free to delete it. However, there are soft porn sites that can add to the value of certain articles. For example, in our surprisingly good article nude celebrities on the Internet there is a link to "The Case Files of the Fake Detective" which is a website that analyzes more than 300 faked nude photos of celebrities. It has side-by-side images of the fake, the original of the clothed celebrity, and the original of the nude model. But at one time there was a link to the Lair of Lux Lucre which only has the fakes. I removed the pointless Lux link. --mav

Additional talk on this issue has been moved to Talk:Aria Giovanni.

book links
I looked around a bit but didn't find any examples of linking book titles to the gutenberg project...I believe it could be a fine way to encourage readers to pursue and peruse the works of the people so oft cited i.e. descartes, plato, aristotle, which are readily available in full text on line.--dgd


 * It has been done - see for instance Wilfred Owen. I agree, a link to Gutenburg under "external links" is a good thing. --Camembert

Disambiguation pages not linked to
What is the thing to do when all links to a previous disambiguation page has been resolved? Is the disambiguation page just left there for future links to the page, or removed?

The former. --Brion 00:43 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

Great, thanks Brion. Carl

Mathematical wiki syntax
See Math Markup

Translation Question
(Please let me know on my talk page if there is a better forum for this question and/or move it yourself).

Is there any regular policy for translating entries from other language wikipedia, or for keeping track of what information is duplicated, etc.? I ask this because it occurred to me that a useful thing I could do would be to translate pages which exist in other languages I speak (in my case, Spanish) to our wikipedia. It might be interesting to be able to have some kind of diff-like page showing what pages existed in other language encyclopedias that hadn't been translated (perhaps organized in some useful manner -- the most visited or lengthiest foreign language entries that don't have equivalents in the English wikipedia?). Okay, perhaps this idea is something of a pipedream.

On a more realistic note: is translating pages from other wikipedias that have more information than ours a good way to add to the project in general? Let me know... --Tom


 * Yes, it's a good idea to cross-pollinate. We try and build links between different language pages too -- that's one way of seeing if an article exists elsewhere. If you don't see the language links at the top of a page, go looking for the foreign-language articles. If you find them, make a link both ways; if not, you can translate. It would be hard for a script to do a diff, because how would it know "Espagne" corresponds to "Spain"? -- Tarquin (PS: yup, this is the right place to ask this sort of thing. Leave a note when you see this & I'll summarize this on the Contributing FAQ)


 * Thanks Tarquin. I knew my "diff" idea was a bit crazy, but you can dream.  Feel free to move this off this page now.  -- Tom

I have a feeling this has been asked and answered before, but I can't find it, so... If I want to scan and upload an out-of-copyright image (say a photo taken in 1913) reproduced in an in-copyright book (say one published in 1985), is that legal or illegal? Or, put it another way: should I do it, or not? I think I'll be OK with it, but I want to make sure. --Camembert


 * IANAL but if they haven't altered the image then they can't claim a copyright on it. --mav


 * Well, I am a lawyer, and I'll second that opinion: If it was in the public domain before they used it, it's still in the public domain afterward. -- isis 01:44 Oct 19, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks - I'll dust off my scanner and get uploading (well, my friend's scanner - I don't have one...) --Camembert

I'm off to merge this into Contributing FAQ. (what's the etiquette for pump cleaning at this point? do I delete because I move, or does Cam delete once he sees this?) -- Tarquin

could someone look at grammar please? the source shows alpha but the output is not! (unless I'm going blind, though I've cked at least 3 times. thanks---dgd

Hmm, "alpha" what? I see neither the word nor the letter in the article, either displayed or in source. I notice another note in the history about "article", which is certainly in the source and displayed: * expletive --> * article <-- * aspect -- Brion 22:38 Oct 25, 2002 (UTC)

50,000th article
We passed the 50000 article barrier yesterday. Does anyone know which article was the 50000th? (Not that it really matters, just idle curiosity on my part.) --Bth

I wouldn't put too much stock in that headline figuew. There are more than 15,000 "articles" with less than 500 characters. --mav 01:21 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

I think I saw Ram-man putting a comment in the little update box that he was 50000th for some county or another. I have no idea how he'd know that, and I may have been hallucinating, but I think I saw it. Tokerboy 22:09 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Yeah it was some county, but I don't remember which one. I knew it was coming up because I saw something like "49,950" and I was adding more than 50 new county entries to some state. So I just watched to see which one would be 50,000 and added a little message. No biggy. 50,000 is only a partial landmark. Just wait till we have 50,000 *full* articles. That will be something impressive. Of course I don't know of any way to tell how many full articles there are, at least not easily. -- Ram-Man

Randompage error
Special:Randompage seems to be no longer working, I get:

Warning: new Object                                             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: new Object                                             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

Jeronimo 18:50 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

This has been happening on any page lately. Maybe a FAQ entry from one of the technically-minded wikipedians would help?

I've bumped the open files limit on the server from 8192 to 65536, so it oughtn't to be hitting this limit so often now. --Brion 22:55 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Recent Changes showing too few edits
Today, if I choose 'show last 50' on Recent changes, it shows me 43 edits. Looking on the normal Recent Changes page, these are selected from the last 110 or so edits. I have 'show minor changes' turned off. Matthew Woodcraft

I tested that and came up with the same result. Sounds something for a Bug report. --KQ 21:21 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

I filed a bug report about it. --KQ 00:53 Oct 4, 2002 (UTC)

What is the Wikipedia policy on automated page creation? I notice that Ram-Man is currently entering statistics for every town in the US using some sort of script (unless he's a very fast typer.) I'm not sure that this is a particularly great idea. In the more general sense, I think that script-generation could get us into a lot of trouble (how do you revert vandalism when it's spread across five thousand pages?) Is there a page that would be more suitable for this discussion? Dachshund


 * I think it is fine. There have been a couple bumps in the road, but his bot's entries now appear to be correctly named, wikified, NPOVed and also have good and factual information. The only real policy on auto page creation is that you need to be very careful when you are doing it. For example somebody started importing hundred year old Eastman Bible Dictionary entries via bot and that caused an uproar: The entries were highly POV, incorrectly named, written in a pedantic Victorian prose and were incorrectly wikified (self links, multiple links, incorrectly named edit links...). The bot's IP was temporarily blocked and we worked everything out with the bot's creator on the Wikipedia mailing list. The city entries don't have these problems and also have the bare essentials that are needed for any city article; population and geography. And on top of this there is also demographic information. When complete this will be a unique resource on the net. What is better is that whenever somebody in the US looks

up their town they will find an entry in Wikipedia (and hopefully they will add some historical info to the article after finding it). If an actual vandal uses a bot then we will block that bot's IP. --mav


 * Three thoughts on batch page creation:


 * 1) Special:Recentchanges is presently useless due to the town & county bot. This is the source of the irritation which led me to notice that:


 * 2) The main page's count of Wikipedia articles is increasingly inflated -- we've gone from 60k to 70k awfully quickly, but:


 * 3) These thousands of town and county pages are not encyclopedia articles, nor are the bulk of them ever likely to become same. They are atlas or gazetteer entries that have been converted to useless paragraphs rather than useful tables.  The data are potentially valuable as such -- perhaps there should be a WikiAtlas? -- but they are no more encyclopedic than would be batch-added dictionary entries. --FOo


 * They are a bit telephone-directory-ish. I hope in future people will add colour and detail to them. It would be good though if bots like this went a little slower -- that was discussed before with the Eason's bot: only 100 every hour or less, please! Otherwise, as said above, RC is unusable, even with number of edits set to 1,000. We may have added 10k articles, but we haven't really added any value. Hundreds of core topics are still uncovered or amateurishly-written, and here we have a page for every one-horse town across the US. It won't project a terribly good image of wikipedia; that concerns me. -- Tarquin 20:20 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * I disagree that these entries are harmful. I just came across Auburn, California which is a small city near where I live. I've been meaning to write an article about Auburn ever sine I started the project in January but never did so because finding boring yet vital to have up-to-date population and geographic information isn't fun at all -- this is a perfect thing for a bot to do. So since all the boring to find info was already there I simply added a few external links, a history section and a short line in the intro on why this city is interesting. Granted many small towns won't ever be updated with more than what is there now, but most towns don't have much of any historical significance outside their own counties. So what if they exist in our database? They have correct info, are correctly wikified and named. Having every town, city and village in our database ensures that anybody in the US who is looking up information on their hometown via an external search engine will find that info here -

which makes these entries an important reader/contributor recruitment tool. Many of the same people will then update the articles with historical and other information. Yes, the US Census has this info but it isn't very readable or accessible and it can't be added to or its presentation improved. Can you think of another resource like this on the net (with 2000 data)? With that said, I also agree that Recent Changes is useless while Ram-Man's bot is at work. I wish there were a back-end way to import the 20,000 remaining cities/towns/villages/places. --mav


 * they are not bad pages -- but it's the Mithril argument again: newcomers clicking Random Page, finding pages and pages of middle-earth may think "encyclopedia! tolkienopedia, more like!"; finding hundreds of jargon file pages may think it's just a ton of hacker slang; finding these thousands of pages may think it's largely an encyclopedia of US towns. I am probably overreacting a bit, but we seem to be leaning every which way but toward serious core encyclopedic subjects: Arts, literature, science. There are plenty of minor novelists of the past centuries we don't say anything about, who are more important that these towns. I'm not against these town pages, but we must balance them! -- Tarquin


 * Obviously I agree with having the articles since I am the one making them. One thing I could do would be to make all the changes minor and then those changes could be filtered out by those who set up the option in their preferences.  They are not minor, but maybe no one cares.


 * Since starting to add the information I have gotten comments from a number of people. One common idea is that without the articles in some form, people don't bother to add one line descriptions about a town because they want to avoid stub articles.  I have had a number of people say that now they can add some information because the articles exist.  In fact the RC's shows that people have been modifying their own town articles and adding some misc information.  Unlike Maverick, I think that with an influx of users if many of them update their own home cities, then we can add quite a bit of new information.  Also there is the possibility of adding other information automatically such as latitude and longitude, county seat information, etc.


 * I would vote to modify the "random" option to give city, state articles a lower priority. -- Ram-Man


 * You mean "like maveric" right? I was arguing for keeping the entries and allowing you to finish. --mav


 * Well you think that most of these entries will never be filled up with data. You once thought that these entries would never even be created.  I think I did this just because you said it couldn't be done.  So while I agree with you one everyone else, I don't believe that this wikipedia cannot grow to have those entries become much more complete entries. -- Ram-Man


 * There's nothing precisely wrong with the articles. In the future, perhaps automated pages could be saved on some other website as a static page, and only a link added from the Wiki page? Dachshund


 * I certainly don't think we should wipe them. -- Tarquin

Although I have been (and continue to be) a vocal opponent of automatic content creation and editing processes on Wikipedia, I think creating these articles is on balance a good thing. As Ram-Man suggests, they make good "seed" articles for people to add a sentence or two about their own town, and as long as they don't interfere with existing articles, that's good. However, I'd like to see the bot slowed down for two reasons: one, there is a strong presumption against bots here in general; the burden of proof is on the bot-maker to demonstrate that the bot is (1) useful, (2) harmless, and (3) not a server hog. If there's any doubt about any of these, the bot should be slow enough that humans have time to find problems, report them, and get them fixed. Secondly, the "Recent Changes" page is an important part of the Wikipedia user experience, and the fact that it is essentially useless while the bot is running is very annoying. Slowing down to, say, a page a minute would greatly improve the usability

of the system.

At any rate, I think it meets the "useful" test, and as far as I can tell from server logs, the bot isn't a major factor in server load, so that's good, but I think "harmless" should include not hogging the recent changes list, so let's keep it running, but at a leisurely pace. --LDC

It should be noted that I made a mistake of invalid data in some 2,000 articles. The bot repaired all of these. That is to say that if I make a stupid mistake, I will do my best to fix it. However going slowly has an important disadvantage, as pointed out by Maverick. The orphans page, which a lot of people apparently use, is full of lots of cities and townships. To fix these, I have to use the bot to update all the entries. At 1 modification per minute, this will mean that the orphan page is going to be unusable for possibly weeks or months. As I have suggested, I can make my changes minor and people can filter some of them out (partial solution). Going slow severly limits the progress I can make at fixing the various quirks that are introduced in all these entries because I simply wait for it to finish. This should be noted!

Let's say for instance that I use one modification every 30 seconds. That would be about 3,000 modifications per day. Essentially it would take me about 2 weeks for any change I decide to make to all the entries, such as adding latitude and longitude or fixing mistakes. -- Ram-Man


 * Theoretically speaking, we could set something up where the bot's modification times are fudged back a bit, so they wouldn't cover up the actual most recent changes. I don't know if that's a good idea, it's just a though. Bring it up on the mailing list. --Brion


 * Hm. Perhaps there should be another option in our prefs where we can turn off anything submited by a registered bot? Just give the bot's IP to the developers and then perhaps they could make each entry you sumbit marked with a B for bot. Displaying bot edits would be turned off by defualt in user preferences. But it is important that bots get registered somehow before this is allowed. --mav


 * I like the idea of registering bots, however, when could such a feature be implemented? When might *any* solution be accomplished? -- Ram-Man


 * Please keep tables as tables, instead of converting them to prose.

Anyway, it would seem that Wikipedia was never designed to handle bots.

And while you're at it, why limit it to the USA? Why not do England, Canada, Australia... why limit it to English-speaking countries? Why not do the wole world?? Clearly there is something absurd about this!

Besides, if you want to know about a town, do you really want just a bunch of numbers? Or do you want to know what is actually IN the town, such as malls, arcades, parks, etc.? Juuitchan


 * I would assume that Ram-Man is doing the US because that's what he's got census data for and that's what he's interested in. As far as additional data, yes, we want all that. But we can't have everything at once, now can we? --Brion 12:03 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * If I were to post every baseball score of every Major League baseball game ever played, with all the statistics and all that, it would be roughly analogous to what Ram-Man is doing. --Juuitchan


 * Not at all. Any encyclopedia would have the census information about the population,  etc.  The "problem" with the rambot is that it doesn't distinguish between the major leagues and the low minor leagues (and it doesn't fill in county seats), but just as I have beefed up his form letter for Newton, Massachusetts, you can do the same for wherever you live and eventually we'll have them all, and, if you don't, we'll still have the basic information about your town.


 * County seats are on the agenda, along with latitude and longitude. And I agree, if I were the only one to ever work on these articles, *maybe* it would be a terrible idea.  But I am naive and hope that other people beef up articles!  -- Ram-Man


 * Speaking of baseball statistics, what is so terrible about adding them? I can understand if the only thing you added was the so-called unimportant ones, but this is supposed to be an all-encompassing (read: never-ending process) encyclopedia. -- Ram-Man

The "neutrality" of articles in Wikipedia is intellectually dishonest. For the proscription of overtly partisan content is itself a violation of neutrality. If Wikipedia were truly neutral such partisanship would be welcomed, rather than

rabidly deleted. One user diffused an edit war by moving my article to "meta"

and that cooled my ire. What is not acceptable is outright arbitrary deletion.

Whether this encyclopedia is truly open not just to minority opinion, but minority races (in the United States) is open to question, inasmuch as the dominant culture, which is white, carries its inescapable baggage. An honest acknowledgement of that baggage through openness to interpretations and criticisms of its contents ought to be a vigorous challenge, not anathema.


 * This is an encyclopedia, not a forum for political debate. I was the person who repeatedly removed your NPOV remarks. You can find another forum for your comments, and I find your rather bold statement that minority races are unwelcome here to be offensive.  -- Zoe


 * We accomplish this by stating opinions as opinions, like this:


 * Foo is a kind of bar.


 * Some people, the pro-fooists, think that foo is good. Here's why.


 * Other people, the anti-fooists, think that foo is bad. Here's why.


 * Still other people, the nullibarists, deny the existence of bars altogether. Here's why.


 * The following is not a Wikipedia article:


 * Foo is a very good kind of bar. or Foo is a very bad kind of bar. or Foo is a spurious concept since bars don't exist.


 * What we don't do is publish unattributed screed. This is an encyclopedia, not a soapbox. A thorough and thoughtful discussion may be found at NPOV. I wasn't involved in your case, so I won't make any more specific comments - perhaps someone closer to the issue would like to. - Montr&eacute;alais

"What we don't do is publish unattributed screed." Screed runneth over nonetheless, some attributed, much unconscious. As for the pump, it would operate much better without the haughtiness (we shall strive for the Holy Grail of Knowledge in Wikipedia, but the pump shall remain the same tired repository of flaming crap all opinion boards are). As I asked elsewhere in this page, do you have room for humor as you pick the fly feces from the pepper, or is this apparent state of misery a Village constant? mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net

Who are the "we?" The Wikipedia has ingeniously solved the problem of attribution, and may ultimately contribute to the evolutionary demise of that questionably useful species of human need. However, the problems of distinguishing absolute truth, which is abstract, from knowable fact, and of ever trending toward truth as better evidence brings more solid facts, should be recognized. The problem of objectively determining what is neutral and what is not should also be recognized, for it is a deep one. If I have to edit the final product only second-hand, by influence, I like to know that the Uber Arbiters are subtle enough to make these recognitions. {8:52 P.M. -- preliminary addendum based on partial reading of NPOV: I admonish Montrealais that we the unelect would hold your feet to the fire by stating that Wikipedian rigor would say "One man's screed is another's truth, so be very careful what you characterize as screed."}


 * No, one man's screed is another man's opinion. You are correct to distinguish truth from fact. The job of Wikipedia is not to lay out the truth, but to mention what facts are available for a situation. "X is good" is not a fact; it is an opinion. "Group Y believes that X is good" is a fact. - Montr&eacute;alais

"No, one man's screed is another man's opinion." -- Strictly your opinion, of course. mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net


 * If you don't sign your name, then we won't be able to judge the worth of your assertions, not to mention the worth, if any, of your articles. As it is, this is the only article linked to your name.  For my money, what you have written here is content-free. ("I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!")  I've written a lot of articles in the past few months, but I haven't found the uberarbiters yet.  On the other hand, any number of people have added to, extended, and, yes, changed, what I have written, usually for the better, and I've done the same to any number of other people.  You should read Wikipedia is the dopiest thing I've ever heard of.  Ortolan88 04:12 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

btw, what's the Monopoly(TM)/Wikipedia:Village pump currency exchange rate these days? -- mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net -- Frederick George Wilson -- attribution as worth...let me run that through the Computer of Truth, I'll let you know what it crunches out...btw2, is humor outlawed here?

One last rant --er-- opinion, before I pack it in for the night: the move of my "genocide denial" article from metapedia to redirect was a net entropic increase, i.e., stupid. mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net -- Michel Foucault --

Would it be possible to add a rating system to Wikipedia. It has been mentioned before that Wikipedia is used in schools etc. There are a number of pages that may not be suitable for school use. Maybe a checkbox on the edit form could be used to generate a SurfSafe header (http://www.safesurf.com/ssplan.htm) or other PICS header. I would suggest keeping it simple and having just "suitable for all" or "suitable for adults". Some schools can only see suitably rated pages. I know that some people would say that children should be able to see all facts, but in practice a school is likely to have complaints from a number of parents if it turns out that the kids are looking up Handballing, Autoeroticism etc. -- Chris Q 06:13 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * Oh oh, can we have special markup to save the children from dangerous political ideas and information about crime and violence, too? --Brion 06:37 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * Hm. That sounds like both a feature request and a policy change. A much better venue for that is the Wikipedia mailing list. Any mention of SufeSafe or its ilk gives me the creeps and I'm not sure we should feed those demons (and if we get black listed by them then shame on them, not us). This is a Free as in Speech webstie. But go ahead and give it a whirl on the list. ---mav


 * '' This issue was a very divisive one at the Open Directory Project, where adult content was eventually cordoned off into a separate hierarchy that was labeled with PICS tags. This compromise did not please anyone, as coverage of legitimate topics was obscured from view and unabashedly blue content was still readily available to children.


 * No doubt there will be Wikipedia licensees who will filter and censor Wikipedia content to suit their needs and wants. However, our focus should be on generating Wikipedia content and making it freely available.'' -- NetEsq 07:49 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * OK, I can see that the concensus is against this. I guess NetEsq is right, anyone that wants to copy a subset of Wikipedia for open use will probably do so. -- Chris Q 08:07 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)

Reloading cached pages
I am unable to access the following areas:
 * Clermont County, Ohio
 * List of Montana counties
 * The main page of www.wikipedia.org

I get various errors, all php related. Some are missing files, others are too many files open, and the like. The Clermont County one has been like this for days. What is happening here? -- Ram-Man

This is probably due to general heavy traffic loads from readers and very heavy edit load from me and especially you. ;) --mav

Shouldn't this clear out? Why has it been hours or days (in the case of Ohio) like this? -- Ram-Man

Clear your browser cache, hit reload, try again. Especially if you're using Internet Explorer, which seems to jealously preserve failed page loads. --Brion 03:18 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I concur. Although I am using a Netscape version rather than Explorer, I too find that the error messages comes back if I go to the same page again, but then disappears when I hit 'Reload'. Andre Engels

Clearing the cache fixed my problem. Thanks! -- Ram-Man

''Incidentally, one way to force Infernal Exploder to refresh is to hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the refresh icon. Which reminds me of a joke: "Only women refresh; men reload." -- NetEsq 20:10 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)''

If 'reload' also doesn't work, try to manually change the URL from www.wikipedia.org to www.wikipedia.com; rest unchanged. That should get around any caches that just keep acting on reload.Andre Engels 23:25 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Perhaps the problem here is that, although we normally send pages set to expire immediately, so that there will be no caching, perhaps no such expiration is set when we send errors.

Well, we generate the errors here on our server, so surely we can send such expiration commands then too?

Programmers: Am I right?

&mdash; Toby 05:26 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

If you're getting one of the errors described above, our script probably isn't even getting a chance to run; if it does, the error messages usually come up before we have a chance to output the custom headers, and you can't output headers after content has started. So, um, prolly not. --Brion 05:31 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Wikipedia weirdness
Weirdness is afoot. I can't save changes in Konqueror at all and Mozilla tries, seems to fail, displays an error message saying there is no data in the page but then I see the saved edit in RC. --mav


 * same here. Chimera mac os. -- Tarquin


 * Same with me with IE. It gives me an error saying it can't find the page, but the editing is done anyway, according to Recent Changes.  -- Zoe


 * same here with NC4.6 changes are added, but with message no data in page. User:TeunSpaans

Better now? I was about to restart the web & database servers when it suddenly started working smoothly a few minutes ago. (Lee, did you do something?) --Brion 22:59 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * Hmm, well I can read pages but I do get the error on saving. Weird. --Brion 23:00 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * I think I got it; when it doubt, clear the PHP script cache. --Brion

Brion, I just installed your patch and upgraded PHP to 4.2.3 while I was there. The process may have been a bit bumpy... --66.216.68.43

In the CIA country articles "/People" is being broken out into "Demographics of...". Is this correct? Would not "Demography of..." be more correct as in "Geography of..." not "Geographics of...". 62.253.64.7


 * Check Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries for how this was decided. It was originally "Demography", but was changed to "Demographics" as "Demography" was felt to refer more to the science of Demography rather than a description of a nation's inhabitants and customs. Scipius 15:23 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

Logging in errors
Help! I'm having trouble logging onto many pages as quercus robur, including the main page, recent changes and my own watch list, pluys other random pages including some I've created- when I click the link I just get a load of gobbledegook- I thought maybe it was to do with IE on my PC, so tried logging on using my laptop, and another computer in the house, same problem, so guess I've either been blocked (surely somebody would have told me???) or theres a bug inthe wiki.... If anybody can advise please reply on my user talk page, which hopefully I'll be able to access... Cheers quercus robur 22:32 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

No, if you were blocked, it would tell you that you've been blocked, by whom, and why when you tried to edit (but wouldn't bug you on loading pages up). As far as "gobbledegook", that's the stuff that tells us what's wrong -- please cite it exactly in future. We've been having occasional "too many files open" kinds of errors lately; if you get one, just reload and you should be fine. (Some browsers may be a pain in the ass to reload properly, such as IE.) --Brion 22:38 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Brion- the messages (there are 2 I think) I get are;

"Warning: new Object                                             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: new Object                                             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"

The other message is;

"Warning: Host 'localhost.localdomain' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 17

Could not connect to DB on 127.0.0.1"

I've had to create a new user name to be able to get to this page as well!! Please can you reply on my (Quercus robur) user page as that seems to bew one of the few pages I can still access!!

Ta!

''re above- as explained on my user talk page, I've solved the problem now, involved deleting all temporary files from my IE settings folder... bloody windoze.... quercus robur''

Encyclopedia Mythica hieroglyphs copyright
Copyright query: On Encyclopedia Mythica ( http://www.pantheon.org), hieroglyphs for certain gods are given as image files. Are these okay to use? Obviously, they're not copyrighted by the people who etched them on the walls of the Pyramids or whatever, but the images appear to be computer-generated, not photos or anything. I know letters can't be copyrighted, and I'm assuming that, since they couldn't copyright Chinese characters for example, they can't do the same for hieroglyphics. Is that right?

For an example, go to http://www.pantheon.org/articles/s/saa .html

My first attempt at saving this question failed with an error box saying simply that the load failed. I'm using an iMac with IE 5.1 Tokerboy 22:09 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Downloading Wikipedia's data
I've been attempting to setup a copy of wikipedia on one of my servers for experimenting and testing. I want to use the real data to experiment with the wikipedia code and be able to more closely examine the data structure. I have in mind potentially altering the code to use in another project that is something of a "People Data Store" Example: "Quotes" are made by people, people have biography that relates them to other people, places, and events in time. This could also apply to many other works of people such as "Lyrics", "Books", "Articles", "Film", "Programming code". Lots of possibilities. In many ways it it much like an encyclopedia, just more (for lack of a better way of expressing it) factual and concrete. 8-)

My problem, For a couple of days now I've been attempting to download the datadump of the encyclopedia and history from the download page. Unfortunately all I get instead of a gzip, tar, or zip file is the text data dump to my browser. Is there some way that I can get the current data and history files some other way? I don't care about the size, but a file is much more useful than a text data list of many mb. Also is there some method of data replication that is used to keep other copies current? Any help with this would be much appreciated, Thanks (albrown AT chook DOT com or al AT thetinfoilhat DOT com)

Your browser appears to be helpfully un-gzipping the data for you. If this is a problem (ie, you don't want to take up that much hard disk space just for the dump), try a less intelligent program. ;) "wget" is a nice command-line web/ftp file fetcher; I think there's a version compiled for windows. (Google it.) Keep in mind that the SQL dump will be equally effective zipped or unzipped; you have to read it back into the database or write your own program to suck the data out of the SQL commands. --Brion 19:01 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

There are times when I actively hate the latest IE. Is ftp an option then? I tried to connect to ftp.wikipedia.com and didn't get very far as "anon".

Get Mozilla!

Try this instead: make a link to the file you want to download by putting it in brackets, e.g. The Internet Movie Database ( The Internet Movie Database ), then right click on the link and "save target as."

IE for me has been particularly contrary and addlebrained; I can only assume that that's what you're using too. Best, --KQ 22:20 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

I was able to get the files by using wget. Thanks for all the help. I wil remember the trick about making a link in brackets. This is odd though as this is the first and only time that I have ever had IE (and netscape 4.7 even tried to download with that brain dead clunky ......) both were unzipping the file into the page, normally I can click on any download link and then get a message asking me if I want to save or not. Oh well, got the files and thanks much again for the help. Al Brown 23:21 CST Oct 2, 2002.

Subpages
I've been struggling a bit with how to set off entries that can be very broad in application like [Education] but have many sub categories like [assessment] or [history] but I don't want the sub categories to get too wrapped up in the generalities... phpwiki 1.3 offers an interesting solution allowing users to create sub categories by adding a slash/ at the end like this Enlish / History. Has such a system been discussed before? ck out the demo version of |phpwiki_demo], make sure create a subject. save it. then add a slash to it at the end. it's pretty easy.- dgd

We have done this in the past, but it has been deprecated. It was felt that the disadvantages were probably greater than the advantages. See Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons. For cases such as you mention, you can either use sub-headings (Type ==History== on a line of itself), or create a page with a title like History of education. Andre Engels 15:22 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

Character encoding in Mozilla 1.1
I'm having trouble with the character encoding on my brower - it's mozilla 1.1 and the default encoding is iso8859-1. It makes any accents or unusual characters turn into rubb!sh and make a mess of the edit. Anyone know about this? User:andrewthorne

I never had problems with Mozilla 1.1a, and have no problems now with Mozilla 1.2a (on Windows 2000). Could you give examples of particular pages and particular actions which produce problems, and describe precisely what happens, and tell us which operating system you're running on? --Brion 04:15 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

Quotes in titles
Following my earlier query about how to name articles about pieces of classical music (the responses to which I'm very grateful for, and still chewing over), I've got another problem in that area: I want to write an article about the John Cage piece 4'33", but it looks like article titles cannot have quotes in them, so 4'33" doesn't work. Is there any way round this? There are alternative names for the piece (it could be spelled out in words, for example), but this form is by far the most common, and I'd like to use it if at all possible. --Camembert 18:22 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

How does 4'43" (coded as 4'43" ) strike you? Ortolan88 18:44 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, I know I can use a pipe, and if it comes to that, I will (though I'll probably point it to Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds rather than 4 33). But what I was really trying to ask, in a round about way, was: is there any way to use a " in an article title? --Camembert 23:20 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

How about 4'33'' as a quick cheat, with two ' for a " -- Tarquin 23:29 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

It might just work that, it might just work. Rather amusingly, however, if you try to surround the link with two 's to italicize it (as those tyrants at the Manual of Style will say you should, hem hem), it breaks the link, and italicizes one set of brackets instead. And I would be a bit worried about people trying to link to the article but not being able to work out that it's two 's rather than one ". But I can use html tags to italicize, and I don't see anybody else round here writing about John Cage, so... --Camembert 00:23 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

Capitalizing the first letter of article titles
I just made an article titled I'noGo tied but the link is from a lower-case "i" at the beginning, and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be, at least according to my source (even at the beginning of a sentence, so I assume it's a pronunciation thing in Inuit). The system automatically switched it. Is there anyway around that? Not really a huge deal, I guess; it's still in lowercase in the article itself.--User: Tokerboy

You can link to it with leading lowercase, but you should talk to LDC about whether there's anyway to make it display the title with leading lowercase. --KQ

There isn't one, but you could talk with him about making one. --Brion

Is it considered detrimental to the Wikipedia for people to include links to WikiProjects at the bottom of article pages? I, for one, never would have considered the WikiProject U.S. States if I hadn't seen a link at the bottom of the State articles.

Mav is of the opinion that these notes aren't appropriate for Wiki pages, and he may be right. This is the comment he posted to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject French departements, along with some responses I've inserted:


 * When potential readers see it, they may feel obligated to visit and agree to the WikiProject in order to contribute.


 * You have to balance that against the harm of potential users who see a new page and have no idea how to contribute. Some articles are already well laid out, and people will feel uncomfortable adding to them without some idea of their structure.


 * Talk is a page for comments about how to improve the article. The article namespace is not a good place for this.


 * In theory, Talk is the best place for all meta info. However, we tend to include important info in the article (disambiguation notes, for instance), because people don't immediately go to the Talk page for this stuff.  This is particularly true of inexperienced users.


 * Whenever we make articles we should try to make it as useful to readers as possible. Ugly tags detract from the article and are not intended for mere readers anyway; WikiProject tags are for contributors who want to majorly add to a set of articles. These people will visit talk anyway.


 * On the contrary. I've been here for a while so I know all about the WikiProjects.  New users are the people who need the WikiProject tags.  The worst you can say about them is that they give an impression that the article is a work-in-progress; this is hardly objectionable when the article is in fact very incomplete.  The tags can be removed once the article reaches a certain level of maturity.  They can be removed automatically if they follow a certain format.


 * These tags are self-conscience and considerations on how Wikipedia articles will look in print form are important (these tags will have to be removed before a print version is made, so it is best to limit their use).


 * This is another "Wikipedia should look great now" at the expense of its future development. Who cares how an article looks in print, if it's incomplete and useless?  The tags can be removed once the article has been made worth printing.


 * WikiProjects are for a set of users to agree on a set of guidelines. Nobody else is bound by those guidelines. However the tag implies that those guidelines should be followed in order to contribute. This is very unwiki.


 * It seems that your objection is with WikiProjects themselves rather than simply the idea of adding links. WikiProjects clearly state that they're just a set of guidelines.  If this is unclear, then it should be made so in the link.


 * The major WikiProjects (Countries, Elements and Sports) do not have these type of tags in articles (the talk pages od converted element articles mention who did the conversion and that the conversion was based on WikiProject Elements).


 * Complete pages don't need these tags anymore. Just incomplete ones like the auto-generated U.S. towns articles Ram-Man is currently adding.  A lot of people are going to hit these carefully laid out, but woefully incomplete articles and be intimidated into not contributing.  WikiProjects might give them a way forward.  So long as the WikiProjects are clearly marked as being suggestions and not requirements.

Reaction: I have the feeling that these will give a way backward rather than forward. Imagining myself as a beginning Wikipedia-user, I don't see what's intimidating about having a page with some subheadings already put in that I would not contribute to it. However, if a page says "This page is part of Wiki-project so-and-so", I assume that there are some people working on these things, who will probably rather not be disturbed by my changes as they do a lot of more work on all these cities. And I (still as a new Wikipedian) don't have the courage or don't have the knowledge to really do a lot on this project, so I just leave this page to those WikipediaProject people too for the time being. Besides, I'd have to go through those project-rules first too. If that is not enough to intimidate someone, then a bit of text and some subheaders should also cause no problems. Andre Engels 16:33 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * I envisioned something along the lines of "This page was generated by a computer program and probably needs a lot of work. If you need suggestions, visit WikiProject U.S. Cities".  I was hoping that wouldn't be intimidating. Dachshund

While I was originally of the idea to put these boilerplates in the articles themselves (In fact I put hundreds and maybe thousands of them in), I changed my view when confronted about it. In essence, they do not belong in an encyclopedia article. Nevertheless, I am still somewhat split. I am all about articles having a similar look so that they are consistant. That is always a good thing. Those users who are new will come in and add a line here or there. If someone wants to write a whole article, let them do so. Someone else can later bring it into a format consistant with the wikiproject. If someone is that motivated, there is a good chance that they already know about the wikiprojects anyway. And we can always *tell* them. Leave them in the talk pages. They can still be found. Oh, having the boilerplates artificially increases the byte count of articles (For what its worth). -- Ram-Man

Wikipedia Evangelism

Hi, I've mentioned this before and thought I'd mention it again. As I'm browsing the pedia I find articles that might interest friends/coworkers. I pop them a link in a quick hello message and ask them if they confirm the accuracy of the content...the response so far has been first one of wonder, then awe, then enthusiasm! And it's been a nice way to relate to some folks I'm not often in contact with. Anyway, I searched for evangelism and came up with nada around the 'pedia. Is there a place for sharing an evangelical/ 'help us' message of wikipedia? --dgd


 * There's some stuff at Building Wikipedia membership. (Hint which wouldn't help here but may in general: after searching, go to the "Power search" box at the bottom of the screen and check the box for the 'Wikipedia' namespace. You'll get various about, help, documentation, etc pages that aren't supposed to show up when you're searching for encyclopedia articles.) Also check the Meta-wikipedia where we keep general project discussion and misc stuff. --Brion 20:42 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * How about doing what a lot of news web pages do? They have a box at the bottom, "Send this article to a friend" with some kind of java mailer to ship it off and a box for you to add a signed message. Ortolan88
 * I like that idea too. Especially, and I know this would require more overhead, but a way to keep my list of folks in memory so I don't have to open my email client (which may not be available esp, as I'm a student and working on diff. machines).

Boilerplates
Moved discussion to Wikipedia talk:Boilerplate text

When I look at Microsoft ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft ), I get these error messages:

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

I don't get these errors for other pages. David 00:42 Oct 17, 2002 (UTC)


 * The error message is stuck in your cache (maybe your browser's cache; maybe your ISP runs an intermediate web cache); try reload, ctrl+reload, shift+reload, alt+reload, clear the cache, reintstall Windows, whatever. --Brion 00:59 Oct 17, 2002 (UTC)

I am making this visible again because I found out how to fix it, and others may benefit from this knowledge. If you encounter such a problem, view the folder containing your temporary Internet files (in IE this can be found by selecting Tools->Internet Options...->General->Settings->View Files...). Near the end of this list of files will be one named for the page that has the problem. In my case it was called "Microsoft". Then, just delete that file. Poof! The problem disappears. David 21:17 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

Technical help
Where is the appropriate place to address "technical support" questions? I'm having a few problems (can't log in under my user name, chas_zzz_brown; as well as some other details) that are probably system dependent, but I don't see a "tech" FAQ for this kind of issue. TIA - Chas

user:Lee_Daniel_Crocker is a good person to talk to about that. --KQ

see also Technical FAQ. Do we have a technical help page? -- Tarquin 22:04 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

I don't know. There are far too many pages in the wikipedia: namespace for me to keep track of. :-/ Please let me know if you find one. :-) --KQ

The Technical FAQ seems like more of a FAQ about technical aspects of Wikipedia, rather than a place to solve techincal questions. I haven't run across a "troubleshooting page" yet; an it seems like one wuld be a good idea; since I'm a newbie, I haven't a clue how one would make one in the Wikipedia: namespace, so for now I'll put it under Troubleshooting Wikipedia. Perhaps someone could move it to a better location? Cheers - User:chas_zzz_brown 4 Oct 02 20:12 PST

Mozilla 1.2b bug note
Just a note for Mozilla early adopters: the 1.2 beta contains a bug that causes image description pages for uploaded .png images to display as error messages. This is fixed in the latest nightly builds.

Bots
Moved discussion to Wikipedia talk:Bots.

Wikipedia Page Loading Errors
Moved to Troubleshooting

Book links
I looked around a bit but didn't find any examples of linking book titles to the gutenberg project...I believe it could be a fine way to encourage readers to pursue and peruse the works of the people so oft cited i.e. descartes, plato, aristotle, which are readily available in full text on line.--dgd

It has been done - see for instance Wilfred Owen. I agree, a link to Gutenburg under "external links" is a good thing. --Camembert

Requesting copyleft permission
I sometimes find myself requesting that people re-license their documents under the GFDL and giving a description of the Wikipedia and the consequences of releasing under the GFDL. Is there any boilerplate text for this request? DanKeshet


 * I am sure I've seen this. But the best I can come up with is Building Wikipedia membership. Maybe it's on Meta. Maybe I'm picking the wrong words to search for. -- Tarquin 19:55 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)


 * Very good question. I'm pretty sure there isn't one yet but I could probably whip one up over the weekend (I've explained this and seen it explained more times in more ways than I would like to count). --mav

Markup Language
I'd like to suggest a large change to the markup used for the 'pedia. Currently, markup codes are used to format the text in an article and add wiki-text. My suggestion is that the markup language should instead be used to format the layout of the article itself. For example, to create a section, instead of using the equal-sign codes to create a header, perhaps use a Begin Section code followed by an identifier for the section, the section's text and finally an End Section code. I won't suggest a syntax formally but as an example:


 * {Markup Language|
 * Put section text here...}

And the wikipedia can interpret this to mean any number of things. The most obvious interpretation would be to insert the header Markup Language into the article. A not-so-obvious interpretation would be to insert an A html tag into the document with a NAME attribute set to Markup_Language. This way, the section itself can be the target of a wiki-link. If sections are nested within one-another, the wikipedia can create the headings for subsections one size smaller then for the headings of its parents. IE: 2 equal-signs for main sections and 3 equal-signs for sub-sections. I'd suggest that the codes for bold and italics also be removed and replaced with codes which suggest the meaning of the text itself (which can then be interpretted for formatting by current appearance standards).

Preferences can then be given to the user regarding how to deal with things like images, sections and code. For example, a user can opt to have the 'pedia add Header Link to the top of an article which point to that articles main sections. The user might also be given the option to expand/collapse sections by clicking a +/- symbol next to each heading. The user could perhaps be able to turn on or off horizonal rules between sections. If given the preference, a user might opt to have code snippets longer then 5 lines be truncated and a link be inserted to view the rest of the code in a seperate window.

It would give articles a more unified appearance, especially if applied to tables and other rich content which currently have to be written in HTML. And it opens up new preferences for readers of the 'pedia. New scripts can be made available for users of bots as well. For example, instead of just being able to "edit" an article, an "add section" page could be created which takes an Identifier, Parent Section and section text as arguments. This would make it easier to (for example) add the demographics data to cities via bot by simply creating a new section.

Also, non-content data like links to non-english version of articles and article type should be set via a seperate form (also for auto-manipulation by bots). If the pedia knew that a given article were an entry for a City, for example, it would know that properties such as "population", "Area", "State/Country" and so on should be included. Now, the author only need supply a value for this property in a seperate form to update the article. Within the article text, the variable %Population% could be inserted to tell the 'pedia to insert the articles Population variable. Now future contributors or bots can update the population property without directly editing the file (practically impossible for bots and hard for humans). I'd suggest that articles for years, dates, people, places, languages, chemical elements and musical instruments (to name a few) be formal "Article Types" with associated format "Property Lists". In fact, I'm suggesting that contributors be able to create thier own article types by creating an article under (for example) a 'Classes' namespace and setting the content of that article equal to an XML document (or something).

Just some ideas. But I'm ranting now. Rlee0001 05:54 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)

I do not know if this is a case of vandalism, or an edit that went wrong -- but a considerable amount of the Karl Marx article has been deleted without explanation. Can someone revert to the previous version (I do not know how to do this easily). Thanks, Slrubenstein


 * I think what you want is How to revert a page to an earlier version. DanKeshet

Thanks!


 * Perhaps Marx, like alternative views of genocide, is not sufficiently neutral.

Is there anyplace designated to list duplicative articles? If not, shouldn't there be?

I'm talking about ones like Abgar and Abgarus of Edessa that I have no doubt need to be combined (with the other title becoming a redirect), but I don't have enough knowledge of the subject to do it (and am not willing to learn enough about it).

I'm also talking about ones like Acid and Strong acid, where I do have expertise, and my expertise tells me they should be combined, but I'm not sure the majority of the community would agree.

What I'm suggesting (if it doesn't exist) is a page of "Votes for combination" like "Votes for deletion" is. -- isis 18:38 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

A list of duplicate articles already exists: Duplicate articles -olivier 18:40 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)


 * Cool. Now, could we please put that one and 'votes for deletion' on one of the special pages linked at the top of the screen, to make them easier (for me) to find and to encourage people to work on the ones on the list of  duplicates? -- isis 18:52 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)


 * It's not a "special page" because it's a human-written list, rather than some magically-generated thing. The place to go for all these sorts of pages is Utilities. I'll go check this is mentioned in the FAQ. At some point I plan to put a few links at the top if the "editing help" page that's linked to at the foot of every edit box. -- Tarquin


 * (goes away... comes back) yup, it's here: Contributing FAQ: What do I do if I find two articles on the same subject in the Wikipedia?  Please could someone check the FAQ entry is good enough & then clean the pump? -- Tarquin 19:53 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

Archiving talk
This is a two-parter for anyone who's willing to field either or both:

1) How do I archive most of what's on my user talk page, please? I'd like for the old material to be where it can still be read, but the page is getting too long for comfortable editing in current discussions.

2) How/Where was I supposed to find the answer to this question in the existing "how to" materials, please? As is true of many of the articles themselves, I have found the instructional pages consistently useless for explaining anything I didn't already know, and frequently confusing about the stuff I did know, and so fragmented that it's hard to track thru enough pages to find what I'm looking for if it does turn out to be there at all.  (And I mean that in the nicest possible way.) -- isis 05:35 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Here goes:


 * 1) Cut the text from your talk page and paste it into a new page, which you link from the main talk page.


 * 1) *Alternately, just cut it out entirely, then include a URL-link to an older revision from the page history.


 * 1) Probably nobody thought of documenting such a thing. If you wish to do so, please go where you would have looked and add it!

--Brion

Thanks for your reply, but I don't understand enough of it to implement it, so let me try again, please: I'm ignoring the sentence that starts with "Alternately" (because it's so far beyond my understanding that it scared me) and focusing on the one before it that I could follow much of: I'm good with the cut and paste part and "main talk page," but "new page" and "link" raised more questions for me -- would you (or someone) please elaborate on that? (I'm not stupid, but I haven't taken a computer science course in 30+ years, and they didn't teach me any of this stuff, so I'm incredibly ignorant.) -- isis 06:11 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Look at the top of user talk:maveric149 and user talk:Brion VIBBER, for instance. You will notice links to pages which contain archived old talk. These pages at one point did not exist, so they were new pages when they were first created by making and following a link to them, putting text into them, and saving them. If need be, How to start a page may help. --Brion 06:18 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

table of contents
Hi, any way of creating TOCs for wikipedia? is there a tag set that allows for relative anchors in a page? That way we could have longer articles and less fragmentation and fluidity of the prose...--dgd


 * Nope. We are debating this exact issue over at Consolidating v/s breaking up which is on our discussion site Metapedia. I don't like the idea though since it would make it practical to have very long articles which in itself isn't so bad but in a wiki large articles are intimidating to edit and read. IMO it is far better to summarize and then link to detailed articles (See United States and Naming conventions for good examples). --mav

Does the Metapedia site have talk pages as well? I'm thinking maybe at that purported discussion site one might actually have something vaguely resembling free speech at, say, the Metapedia genocide:talk:talk:talk level?--Anon


 * Go look for yourself. Metapedia uses the same software as is used here except for some minor differences (such as charsets and interlanuage link behavior and background fill). Metapedia is not an encyclopedia and does not have an NPOV policy or really any policy other than maybe net-etiquette. --mav

Okay, dumb question time. Either I can't find the answer, or (& I hope this is not the case), no one has addressed this problem.


 * How do recover a password I have forgotten?

I took a quick look thru my email archives, & I never received a welcoming email from wikipedia, so I don't have it recorded there. And I forgot to write it down when I registered.

Many forums (e.g. Slashdot), have a process for emailling your password to your own email address, which provides for a secure way of recovering it. I don't know if Wikipedia has anything like this ... or if I have to email someone to get this information. -- llywrch 18:13 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)

There is such a process on the log-in page at the bottom Fredbauder 18:34 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)

I just wrote an answer to your question on the Technical FAQ. llywrch, when you see this message, please archive the comments related to this and delete them from this page. (See the recent addition to Talk page). --Ellmist Sunday, November 10th, 2002.

Periodic table is protected for no obvious reason, and it needs to be edited. I would unprotect it myself, but it appears that my request for sysop status has still not been fullfilled. Someone unprotect it? --TMC


 * Done. TMC, have you considered the database-level name-change to alter your full name in history lists? I'd like to invite Isis back to the 'pedia at some point. Brion and Jimbo have indicated they could go ahead and do it, but I imagine they would rather the request came from you than impose it. -- Tarquin 17:06 Nov 20, 2002 (UTC)

Should medical articles carry some form of boilerplate disclaimer? 62.253.64.7

What happens when two users edit a page at the same time? Is there a diff/merge procedure or does the latest change overwrite the previous ones? Arvindn


 * You'll get a conflict screen that displays both versions in separate windows and instructions on how you should proceed. It's virtually impossible to lose any data. -- NetEsq 15:07 Nov 23, 2002 (UTC)


 * Copying to Contributing FAQ. Arvindn, please delete this section once you've seen it. -- Tarquin 15:10 Nov 23, 2002 (UTC)

is it just me or is wikipedia 'down' alot lately? I'm having lots of trouble logging onto wiki pages, and often after just doing an edit I'm getting 404 error messages when I click 'save page'- when I then refresh all of the text on the page is accidentally deleted... Are others having these problems as well? quercus robur 19:03 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * Yep. Wikipedia is just too darn popular. The developers are working on optimizing the code. --mav


 * Jimbo just granted me developer access, but I'm not promising a quick fix: I'm not a god or a miracle worker. "I am just a poor boy, and my story's seldom told..." --Ed Poor

- I've been getting tons of error messages today, saying that there was a connection error. It only just now started working again, and since Recent Changes looks much the same as last time I saw it, I'm guessing I'm not the only one with problems today. Does anybody know what is causing this? Tokerboy 23:11 Nov 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * Something on the server was leaking memory fierce; a lot of swapping, and the whole system ran like molasses for a while. I restarted mysql & apache and they seem to be playing nicely again. --Brion 23:30 Nov 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * Yes, thanks. It's actually running fast as all geddup now, better than it has for weeks. Tokerboy 00:12 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)

Should medical articles carry some form of boilerplate disclaimer? 62.253.64.7


 * Probably. I've already mentioned the idea for havin a disclaimer boilerplate linked from each page on the Wikipedia mailing list. There was some support for the idea but not a great deal (nobody came out against it, which seems like a good sign). Chim in if you think it is needed.See my post on this here --mav


 * I don't know if you call it an objection, but I don't like the idea of having boilerplate disclaimers *in* the articles. I don't mind a separate page on Wikipedia which lists the various disclaimers, but that is hardly a good reason to fill perfectly good articles with non-encyclopedic material.  People should know that this is a general knowledge encyclopedia that is not necessarily authored  by a professional source.  But we should not have to fill articles with boilerplates because people don't know that.  Put it on a disclaimer page like every other web site has. -- Ram-Man


 * Yup. That is why my idea calls for just one disclaimer page linked from the uneditable part of each page's footer area. --mav


 * I guess I should have read the idea first ;-) -- Ram-Man

We have a disclaimer on Medicine standards. Though I doubt it represents consensus since most people don't know about it. --Ellmist Thursday, November 21st, 2002

Could we take all the "list of topics" pages like List of Conservation topics and list of mathematical topics, etc. and move them into the wikipedia namespace? They are not articles; they are tools in helping us build an encylopedia, no? DanKeshet 21:56 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)
 * As boring as lots of the lists are, they are an aid to navigation as well as an aid to authorship. I never think it's a good idea to remove information from the Wikipedia.  Besides, no one would understand and there would be a new list outside that namespace tomorrow.  When people take the trouble to annotate the lists with something that indicates why the person or event is on the list, they're even more useful.  Ortolan88

cut and paste works very well for moving pages...Lir 03:13 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

There's reams of research on this very topic. For versioning it's very important to preserve who did what when, but on the other hand you do hit conflicts like this where what you want to do fails because it deletes other versioning information.

In this case you need to merge the two, most systems, seemingly like wikipedia will preserve one set while expecting you to hand merge the other changes in.

In a perfect world there would be a seperate merge option that would preserve the history of both entities when you merge two pages but this doesn't seem to be the case here, and without it there's no easy way around your problem.

If someone will point me at the development information for wikipedia I can tell you how feasible it would be to have that kind of feature.

We're fairly lucky here. Most versioning systems are very heavy weight and arcane. Wikipedia does very well in comparison without missing too many features. For example, wikipedia just caught a conflict between my edit and Brions just then and I had to merge the changes I made into his updated article.

--v


 * That is, cut and paste doesn't preserve history or page count. Ortolan88

-

Is there a page somewhere where we can list articles we think not neutral at all ? Does it happen that some people write comments directly on a page that they think is very oriented, so strongly deserve being refactored (sort of a warning for potential readers) or is the only option (when the original writer clearly doesn't want to give it a try) to do it ourselves ? user:anthere

You can link these pages to NPOV dispute.

See also: Votes for NPOVing, Neutral point of view. olivier 12:59 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

See also Pages needing attention

thanks --ant

How do I turn a .ram file into a .ogg file on a Mac? Tokerboy 06:50 Nov 11, 2002 (UTC)

You'll need a recorder that saves to the OGG format or to a format another program can convert to OGG. Then you'll need to buy an audio cable from a store like Radio Shack and plug one end into the audio out and the other into the audio in. Start playing the RealPlayer file. Then start recording. Alternatively, you can use Snapz Pro from Ambrosia Software to record without the extra digital to analog to digital step. Both have the disadvantage of quality loss and requiring you to play through the entire sound and stop at the end without playing any other sounds on your computer. If you had a different source format than RealPlayer, we could simplify the process considerably. Unfortunately, RealPlayer makes any conversion to a different format hard. Programs have existed for various platforms that have done this from time to time but I have heard the programs and the companies worked unreliably and cost money. --Ellmist Monday, November 11th, 2002

---

dumb question: how does one unban an IP? -- Tarquin

---

dumb question: how does one unban an IP? -- Tarquin


 * One selects "List of blocked IP addresses" from the drop-down box at the top of each page ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist ), and clicks on "unblock" as required. There might be another way, but I don't know it. --Camembert

---

dumb question: how does one unban an IP? -- Tarquin


 * One selects "Blocked IP addresses" from the drop-down box at the top of each page ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist ), and clicks on "unblock" as required. There might be another way, but I don't know it. --Camembert


 * Thanks Camembert. I'll add this to the FAQ and clean up in a bit. -- Tarquin


 * It's the only way available to sysops. Devolopers, of course, could unblock multiple IPs at once. I've been thinking of writing a "unblock all IPs banned more than 30 days ago" script. And running it once a week. Any takers? --Ed Poor//noosphere.cc]. A fascinating thrill went through me when I discovered the Wikipedia Website and the Wiki Websites System in general.

The similarity in the purpose of this site and Wikipedia is striking: both sites aim at constructing, by open Internet cooperation, a thesaurus of integrative knowledge. Still, there are two differences: (1) the Wikipedia site uses an automated software, allowing visitors to edit existing pages online, while this site is manually edited, and (2) the Integration site features an advanced concept of integrative editing, while the Wiki system is described as "a collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia", and uses the "open content" paradigm. Although the Open Content approach is completely compatible with the Integration approach, the latter goes further because (1) it proposes a series of explicit editing rules (while the Wiki context is much more permissive, and its rules are more intuitive and inspired by common sense), and because (2) this Integration concept assumes that by respecting these rules, if adequately applied, a degree of plausibility probably comparable to scientific certitude can be reached.

As I describe in the Future of this Site page, integration with such an integrative site as Wikipedia will be sought. In a first stage I'll try to add progressively our contents to the Wikipedia site. If, for some reasons yet to discover, this kind of integration proves impossible, we'll try to start up a new Wiki-like site, or introduce the Wiki software into this site.

Any comments? Kris Roose 10 Nov 2002, 14.30 CET


 * Sounds interesting. This type of question should be put forwared to the Wikipedia mailing list. However I can tell you right now that some people will be concerned with your websites POV of "scientifically based spirituality". But if your text can be made to adhere our NPOV poilicy then it would be great to have it. --mav

---

//noosphere.cc]. A fascinating thrill went through me when I discovered the Wikipedia Website and the Wiki Websites System in general.

The similarity in the purpose of this site and Wikipedia is striking: both sites aim at constructing, by open Internet cooperation, a thesaurus of integrative knowledge. Still, there are two differences: (1) the Wikipedia site uses an automated software, allowing visitors to edit existing pages online, while this site is manually edited, and (2) the Integration site features an advanced concept of integrative editing, while the Wiki system is described as "a collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia", and uses the "open content" paradigm. Although the Open Content approach is completely compatible with the Integration approach, the latter goes further because (1) it proposes a series of explicit editing rules (while the Wiki context is much more permissive, and its rules are more intuitive and inspired by common sense), and because (2) this Integration concept assumes that by respecting these rules, if adequately applied, a degree of plausibility probably comparable to scientific certitude can be reached.

As I describe in the Future of this Site page, integration with such an integrative site as Wikipedia will be sought. In a first stage I'll try to add progressively our contents to the Wikipedia site. If, for some reasons yet to discover, this kind of integration proves impossible, we'll try to start up a new Wiki-like site, or introduce the Wiki software into this site.

Any comments? Kris Roose 10 Nov 2002, 14.30 CET


 * Sounds interesting. This type of question should be put forwared to the Wikipedia mailing list. However I can tell you right now that some people will be concerned with your websites POV of "scientifically based spirituality". But if your text can be made to adhere our NPOV poilicy then it would be great to have it. --mav

Hit Counters Disabled
What's with the hit counters? They seem to have frozen, ever since that database lock yesterday. Tim Starling 23:29 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)


 * The hit counters have been temporarily disabled. --Brion 01:05 Nov 13, 2002 (UTC)


 * Brion forgot to mention why they were disabled. The reason is to improve site performance. Read his post to Wikitech-L here. --mav 02:47 Nov 13, 2002 (UTC)


 * Since that feature isn't working, 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"?  And are there plans to get that feature  working again? Wondering simply, -- Infrogmation 01:55 Nov 16, 2002 (UTC)

Bug Report I could put this on source forge, but then we would not be able to comment without registering with a 3rd party. Anyways: Portland, Maine displays super-wide on Win2k/IE6 sometimes. I have to refresh a bunch of times to get the page to bounce back to normal width. There is nothing that should ever be wide on that page. And other articles do this (like some chess pages). Does anyone know why? Is this IE6 or Wikipedia? I assume its just IE6, but its quite annoying and most internet users use IE6 (appox 97% of netizens use Internet Explorer 6.0). Robert Lee


 * If it only does it sometimes, it sounds like an IE6 bug. I haven't seen such behavior on IE5.5, nor Mozilla. (However the obscenely large images need to be made smaller, or it's going to be always too wide for a lot of people.) Also note that articles with tables that are set to "width=100%" are guaranteed to be too wide in Internet Explorer. Workaround: don't do that. --Brion 02:13 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)

This town ain't big enough for both of us

The user name "Throbbing Monster Cock" is overtly offensive, and I am ashamed to be part of Wikipedia whenever it crops up on 'recent changes.' I know only one remedy, so I'm taking it. If that user name ever goes away, I'd appreciate it if someone would e-mail me thru my user page and let me know, so I can come back. Thanks, y'all -- it's been fun. -- isis 02:03 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)


 * Enjoy your newfound free time. :) --Brion 02:13 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)


 * Great. Not only is TMC trolling about, he's driven a valued contributor away. -- Tarquin 09:18 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)

Who was that masked man ? 

It has been brought to my attention that the username "Throbbing Monster Cock" has been converted to "TMC" and that my name has been bandied about in the discussions about how that came about. I'm posting the following to set the record straight and not for the purpose of starting a discussion:

I am back, and if I am not participating as actively as I did before, please attribute it to the computer problems: I simply don't have the time (or the patience) to work on the 'pedia when navigation takes 3 to 5 minutes per link and it can't find the server at all 1 time out of 4, which is the situation nearly all the time now.

NetEsq made some comments about me on http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:TMC on 22 November that are so far from true that they make me wonder whether he could honestly have been so mistaken:


 * I wrote the following . . . -- NetEsq 21:12 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)~

''And while I do not pretend to speak for User:Isis, I know her to be a strong advocate of free speech. I sincerely doubt that she would approve of the decision which Jimbo has apparently taken on her behalf.


 * I did *NOT* write the following . . . -- NetEsq 21:12 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)

we know that Isis chose to leave because she was offended by TMC's username''


 * Let me get this straight: It's in the paragraph under the other quote and signed with your username, and you didn't write it?  Then who did, please? -- isis 21:27 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * Ah, yes. I did write that. -- NetEsq 22:44 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * I will respond to the following in short order . . . -- NetEsq 21:12 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * My response to the following will be found on my Talk page -- NetEsq 22:44 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)

I am, indeed, a strong advocate of 1st Amendment freedom of speech, but that has nothing to do with this situation. Wikipedia is not a public forum, and there is no "right" of free speech (or anything else) here. This is Jimbo's private website, and he has invited us all to use it with very few (too few, as far as I'm concerned) guidelines for what is acceptable conduct here. If you were a guest in his home, would you think it was okay to shit in the middle of the floor or to burn the house down or to steal his stereo equipment? When you trash this website, you insult him (and the rest of us guests) but, more importantly, you show the world you have no respect for yourself, so you deserve no respect from anyone else (and don't worry about getting any from me -- you won't, and I'm not too shy to tell you so).

So (1) I am enthusiastically in favor of Jimbo's getting rid of anyone whose behavior he doesn't like, although I can't claim the credit for getting him to do it, and (2) I did not leave because I was offended by TMC's username but, rather, because I was offended by the Wikipedians who pretend to see some social importance in TMC's misconduct. I say "pretend" because if you really believed all that shit you were shoveling about his right to free speech, you would have upheld my right to put animated gifs in the articles. That you won't tolerate a waving American flag in an article on American history but get your knickers in a knot over removing an obscene username shows you for what you are, and that's what I was ashamed to be associated with. And that's why I resent NetEsq's using my name to bolster credibility for his pro-TMC ravings about "censorship," although I am flattered that he would think my credibility in this community could be enough to outweigh his notions' obvious lack of merit. -- isis 21:01 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)


 * [When someone removes this part of the page as having been here long enough, I suggest that the Talk:Rhetoric page would be a good place to put it, because it's a good example of what rhetoric is today and why it "is a very important topic for understanding a lot of Western culture" (altho it may be immodest of me to say so). -- isis 19:57 Nov 23, 2002 (UTC)]


 * The entirety of your post can be found on my Talk page, along with my response, where it will remain for as long as Jimbo Wales is willing to suffer my presence here at Wikipedia; if the content is removed from my Talk page, I will find a home for it in a guest column or on one of my own Web sites, where it will be published pursuant to the terms of the GFDL, along with other Wikipedia content that I am compiling. -- NetEsq 22:44 Nov 23, 2002 (UTC)

I have many many questions about some nifty new images that I'm able to generate for every county in the state. Rather than ask those questions here, I'm asking them on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties page. Any input would be appreciated. -- Thanks, RobLa 02:26 Nov 10, 2002 (UTC)

All day today, typing in wikipedia.org has brought me straight to the Dutch Wikipedia. English is the one and only language in my browser's (IE5.1Mac) preferences. It's really kinda jarring, though I'm starting to learn dutch (starting with hoofdpagina). Netscape 4.75 does the same thing, and google and yahoo both show me English. Is anybody else having this problem? Tokerboy 09:28 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)


 * I messed up the apache configuration; that mod_rewrite's a canine female to confiure just so. Should be fixed now. --Brion 09:44 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)


 * It does. Thanks, Brion Tokerboy 09:50 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)