Wikipedia:Village pump/Archive AM

Yaargh!
I was just experimenting with My Preferences and something's gone horribly wrong. I've lost the link that's usually on the left of each page to My talk, plus those links have all moved around and it seems the page is a different colour, and some of the links at the bottom of each page seem all bunched up now, and I don't know what else. The only two things I changed were I unchecked Underline links and checked Show edit toolbar. I've changed both back, but nothing. Any suggestions? Exploding Boy 14:15, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * I've just realized that the search box has also moved from the left to the top right. It almost looks as if I'm not logged in, but I am.  Exploding Boy 14:29, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * Go to Preferences and to the "Skins" section. Set your skin to "MonoBook". This is an annoying bug I encountered too, but I figured it out on my own. Johnleemk | Talk 14:53, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

YESSSSSSSSSSS! But just so anyone else having problems knows, the Monobook skin turns everything into something resembling the blue screen of doom. It's the Cologne Blue skin that you want. Thanks Johnleemk. Exploding Boy 14:58, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)

AFL dot com spaming
http://www.conigliofamily.com/AFLdotcom.htm

I think people who are associatied this website are using Wikipedia to promote their group. I just removed a para from the NFL which seems to be continously put back into the article. That para appears on this group website as a quote of what others are saying about the AFL. Basically implying that some neutral 3rd party thinks the AFL was so much better than the NFL.

Now I realize we are only talking about a couple of football leagues and not some hugely more important issue but spam is spam Smith03 13:56, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I made the above link into a text only link. The VP does not need to advertise them, either -- Chris 73 | Talk 15:20, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * The paragraph in question seems to be:
 * The official scoreboard clock, two-point conversion, player names on jerseys, network-televised games, gate and television revenue sharing, and imaginative offenses were all elements of pro football that the NFL adopted from the American Football League. Even its first modern expansion, into Minnesota and Dallas, would likely have taken years longer if it had not been precipitated by the emergence of the AFL as a serious competitor to the NFL.
 * The first sentence would appear to be an assertion of fact. Is it true, or not? It's a little tendentious but it seems to me to be OK if factual. The second sentence is a little iffier.
 * The website in question, AFLdotcom, looks like a reasonably rich and interesting resource, clearly an AFL fan site and clearly "pro-AFL." The site's counter contains only 10,000 hits, not an awful lot. However, the site doesn't seem to be selling anything, and the generally amateurish presentation (e.g. they haven't bothered to shell out $9 to one of the GoDaddies of the world for a real domain name) looks to me a like an authentic labor-of-love production.
 * It doesn't appear to me that anything at all is being sold on the AFLdotcom site. Spam is usually defined as unsolicited commercial email. To me, this is not an issue of spam, it's an issue of whether this is a vanity site and whether it is notable. Personally, I'd leave the link in, because the site looks as if it could be moderately enjoyable for an AFL fan.
 * As for the paragraph it looks to me like a case for editing, rather than removal. When faced with POV material, one of the best ways to avoid edit wars is to try to edit it so that it still presents the factual point that the contributor was trying to make, while toning down the interpretation. I don't know enough about the AFL or NFL to do this myself. What is the paragraph really trying to say? Something like this?
 * Fans of the AFL credit the league with pioneering important elements of American football, and complain that the NFL has done little more than copy what the AFL has done. For example, the official official scoreboard clock, two-point conversion, player names on jerseys, network-televised games, gate and television revenue sharing, and imaginative offenses were all elements of pro football that the NFL adopted from the AFL.
 * Just my $0.02. Dpbsmith 15:23, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I agree that the link and site are information filled but if you check all additions that these users add not only to the NFL page but other football related articles, they have an agenda  that sadly I believe because it is related to a sport  is not being challenged by wikipedias. this comes from there website: It gives the appearence that some other source has come up with this conculsion instead they just wrote, regardless if they are selling something or not they are using wikipedia to further their cause.

Below are excerpts from several sources on the influence that the American Football League has had on modern professional football. From Wikipedia, on-line encyclopedia: Some innovative rules changes were also put into place, such as the two-point conversion (later adopted by the NFL in the 1990s); the use of the scoreboard clock as the official game clock (adopted by the NFL when the leagues merged--prior to this time, the official game clock was maintained by an official on the sidelines, and often did not match the scoreboard clock very closely); the use of player names on jerseys, (also adopted by the NFL); and the sharing of gate and television revenues between home and visiting teams (also adopted by the NFL). In short, the NFL adopted virtually every pioneering aspect of the American Football League, except its name.

By the way college football had adopted the two point conversion in the late 1950s, so the AFL "borrowed" that idea from them. One could argue that the talent level in the early years of the AFL was so poor that it lead to point a minute offensives because the defenses was so poor, Someone could write on the AFL page that they borrowed from the NFL the idea of divisions and a championship game, the idea of a college draft, a post season all star game, harsh marks, and seperate offensive and defense units, but that would be silly and pointless. I do believe that these users have provided a great deal of information but they have also slip in their agenda that gee the NFL really stoled everything from the AFL. I agree the AFL added a lot to modern day football but don't overstate it. Smith03 18:00, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

On requiring users to sign in
Has there been any discussion of this anywhere? Specifically I'm wondering whether it's ever been suggested or debated whether we should require all editors to have a user name before editing? I ask because it would make recognising, tracking, and blocking vandals a lot easier. A quick look at the Block log shows that nearly all the accounts blocked for vandalism and other bad behaviour are anonymous. I think it would be fairly easy to implement such a change. Any thoughts? Exploding Boy 10:57, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * IIRC there have been such discussions before (can't provide much help tracking them down, though), and in short, the answer is: This is a Wiki. Wikis are built with the idea that anyone can contribute. I dobut we'd have as many good editors as we do now if we made logging in mandatory. A scoutmaster who copyedited Persekutuan Pengakap Malaysia anonymously was reluctant at first because he thought registration was required, until I pointed out that it's not necessary. Making registration mandatory will only turn away helpful editors and not stop determined vandals/trolls. Johnleemk | Talk 12:01, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * See Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles. Angela. 12:06, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I see what you mean. I do like one of the suggestions (linked to the above) that anonymous users would be limited to a certain number of edits per day until registered (but not the bit about web-based email addresses).

How about coming up with some more ways to encourage people to sign up for user names? What about creating a {message} to place on anonymous users' pages? Perhaps something like:


 * Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. You don't have to log in to read or edit articles on Wikipedia, but creating an account is quick, free and non-intrusive, and gives you many benefits, including:


 * The use of a username of your choice
 * The ability to view all your contributions via a "My contributions" link
 * Your own user page
 * Your own talk page which, if you choose, also allows users to send you emails without knowing your e-mail address
 * The use of your own personal watchlist to which you can add articles that interest you
 * The ability to rename pages
 * The ability to upload images
 * The ability to edit specific sections of a page
 * The ability to cusomize the appearance and behaviour of the website
 * The eligibility to become an Administrator or Sysop (can delete and undelete pages, protect them from being edited, edit protected pages, and block users for violation of our policies)
 * The right to be heard in formal votes and elections, and on pages like votes for deletion


 * We encourage you to create an account!

What do you think? Exploding Boy 12:35, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * An excellent idea, I first thought, until I realised it continued after the first sentence. :p Personally I think that "many benefits" should be a wikilink to another page describing them, similar to your bulletpoint list. Sounds like a good idea as long as it's unobtrusive (Something Awful's notice for registration is simply horrid), especially since users will be alerted to the fact that they don't have to login to edit articles. Seems win-win to me. Johnleemk | Talk 12:48, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There actually is a page that lists the benefits already, but in very long form. Since the idea is to encourage people to create an account rather than remain anonymous, I thought it would be good to make a short(ish!), easy to read list of the benefits of signing up, in an effort to lure people into doing so. And since most anonymous users don't use their user/talk pages (maybe because they don't know they have them?) this will also draw their attention to that. And if it's too long, they can always delete it! Exploding Boy 12:56, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * Well, yeah, but then having this message on every page would be quite obtrusive and disturbing. Or perhaps I misunderstood you? Johnleemk | Talk 13:12, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

No, not on every page, just on anonymous users' talk pages. Exploding Boy 13:25, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * Ah, that makes sense I suppose. Johnleemk | Talk 13:29, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * I likewise heartily endorse this idea. -- Stevietheman 18:04, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Well, I'm going to go ahead and give it a try Template messages. Exploding Boy 13:41, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)

External links to H2G2 entries
Recently an anon edited Homeopathy by adding an external link to the H2G2 Edited Guide Entry on the subject. A quick search showed several other places where H2G2 is in the external links. We should certainly keep the ones in the H2G2 article itself; there might be a reason to keep some other particular link (e.g. we might link to an entry on a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy topic if it was written by someone who had a unique personal connection with the subject). Despite these exceptions, I think most of the links should be removed. They don't meet the general standard for external links. Before I remove any of them, though, do people think we should apply a different standard to H2G2, e.g. as a courtesy to a somewhat similar project? JamesMLane 09:23, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Seeing as it is a similar project in which anyone can write anything, that makes it all the less credible to link to. Unless you want to link to a sepcific revision of the document (if I understand how H2G2 works). Ilyanep (Talk) 12:52, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I would take it strictly on an article-by-article basis. Is that H2G2 article particularly good and relevant? That sort of thing - David Gerard 13:21, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I agree. --bodnotbod 18:25, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)

using content in discusion forum
I run a UK Discussion forum/online community. Within my forum I have subforums for each and every city/town in the UK. The forum is designed to be an interactive resource for the UK. However, I am in need of basic content to kick start these regional boards.

My question is: Can I use the content available here in my forum by posting it? If I can, what steps do I need to take?

Thanks


 * Sure. See Copyrights. Johnleemk | Talk 06:43, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Notice of poll opening for managing disruptive or antisocial editors
Polling opens on the proposed new policy for managing disruptive or antisocial editors at midday (UTC) today.

A number of us have been thrashing out the details for the policy for the last two weeks and I previously invited everybody at the troll polls and here at the pump to participate. There has been some healthy debate and the policy is now locked for two weeks to allow us to vote.

There are still some points that will need a bit more discussion and these may produce secondary poll questions or we may put them off until after the policy has been tried for a while.

Please come and vote! (from midday UTC)

Be warned this is a relatively complex proposal for a difficult problem. So if your initial reaction is to vote against the proposal then I urge you pause before voting. There is no rush. Voting is open for two weeks. Take the time to read the frequently raised objections on the talk page and re-read the policy. If the FROs dont deal with your concern then please raise it again on the poll or policy talk pages. Hopefully one of us can then explain the rationale for why policy is as it is and we can work through alternatives. We may also be able to frame a secondary poll question if needed. Best wishes to all and see you at the poll! Erich 04:38, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

where are the images?
I tried to add Image:HAtomOrbitals.png to the quantum mechanics article, but images don't seem to be showing up right now; not even the VP picture in this page is showing up for me. Ancheta Wis 00:38, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * The picture is showing up for me; so it must be a problem with your browser of CSS settings. Have you been messing around with your user CSS lately? [[User:Mike Storm|Mike Storm (Talk) ]] 01:33, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * The picture is showing up for me, too. I added it to the quantum mechanics page, and the picture is showing fine. Please check the caption. --Chris 73 | Talk 01:34, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Thank you both for your information. The VP image is showing up now, with no actions on my part. I will look at the QM article. Ancheta Wis 07:59, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * The caption is good. No acceleration of the electron is implied, so we don't have to explain away any radiation from the charge, etc. Ancheta Wis 08:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * The caption is not good. It uses terms not explained in the accompanying article. Please rephrase and link to the hydrogen atom article which explains the notation and the image. Gdr 23:23, 2004 Jul 27 (UTC)

Child Safety and Wikipedia
Is there a policy in Wikipedia to deal with the inclusion of material that may be considered unsuitable for children?

Obviously Wikipedia is about open sharing of information. However there are entrie that will inflame some parents and terrify school administrators. (see Oral sex) What will inflame some parents will not cause a stir among others. Wikipedia and censorship to not go together, however it will be a tragedy if Widipedia is blocked in its entirity from schools.

Yes. The policy is that this is an encyclopedia, and it's up to parents to monitor what their children read, not us. RickK 23:38, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)

So, for example, does a list of which movies Drew Barrymore appears nude suitable for inclusion in an encyclopeadia? Paul Beardsell 23:41, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

No, because the information is sub-trivial. That she has appeared nude, and even a semi-nude photo of her, would be of value to the encyclopedia, but a list of someone's opinion as to whether she was or was not nude is not. And besides, you've only given half the information. Was it full frontal nudity, rear nudity, side, partial, see, your trivia could get even more trivial, so why stop there? RickK 23:53, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)


 * It seems to me that Wikipedia relies on self-censorship. That is an ethic that I subscribe to. I don't believe that formalising the system will make any difference.  On the other issue, all I can say to Paul Beardsell is "Grow up". Noisy 23:59, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

If resorting to bowdlerism is being grown up then I want none of it. Presumably Noisy actually knows what side of the argument I am on. Paul Beardsell 00:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, why stop there? Paul Beardsell 00:07, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There is so much useless sub-trivia on Wikipedia. Why are we discussing only nudity references? Paul Beardsell 00:09, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There are two legitimate concerns here - protecting Wikipedia from being blocked by censorware vs keeping our content as accurate as possible. Our ad-hoc policy is one of common sense - if you go to penis, don't be surprised if you see an explicit photo - it's assumed that you knew what you were getting into by going to that article. By and large, it's generally understood that clinical anatomical pictures are OK, but that's about as far as we're willing to go.

Also, we only put that kind of content in places you would "expect it". By the same token, there's a concern that we shouldn't "push" that kind of content onto people, which is why it is unlikely that such a picture will ever make it to the main page.

As far as a list of nude pictures that Drew Barrymore has appeared in - a text list isn't even close to something we'd need to censor. &rarr;Raul654 00:16, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
 * Besides, thats a hypothetical example of the problem of unecyclopedicness and superficiality - not of decency. ;) -SV

Well, where in Wikipedia would one expect to find a list of the pictures that Drew Barrymore appears nude in? I too am not entirely sure that the list is important enough to be included, but somebody thought so. What I was objecting to was the removal of that information, the Wikipedia default being that info is not removed. It is accurate info, presumably. That there is som much seemingly useless trivia in Wikipedia does not lead RickK to delete that. When he does the nudity but leaves the rest then that is nothing less than Bowdlerism. Paul Beardsell 00:30, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Ah. Good point. (Sorry about the edit conflict - things can be hard to post here on the pump.) About keeping info versus deleting it, I tend to lean toward keeping, but in the context of a useless trivia article, triviality is fine. In the context of a biographical article about an actress, a separate list of where that actress appears nude is rather trivial. I agree theres a lot of trivial stuff on wikipedia - Pruning the category list ought to be a top priority, but there needs to be better ways to visualise it in order to get to it. -SV

This is a very topical subject these days on Wikipedia. In the general sense, the extreme ease by which materials are avaliable on the web will have a reconciling effect on the extreme interpretations of decency. On the practical side, the battle is between what should be done (according to common sensical, moderate, and agreeable standards) and what can actually be done about it. Artificial control means are completely antithetical to WP, and everything done here has to be done in the name of NPOV and openness, or it just doenst have resonance. If Wikipedia is to appeal to parents for their children's use, the basics should be considered; even vulgar topics are not to be treated profanely here, and articles that are problematic could be categorized as (adult) of (mature) in nature, and not included on certain DVD distributions of WP. If kids are online, they have access to any number of possibly profane things, and WP is the least of those. IMHO "A child-safe internet" is an oxymoron, wo then how much is Wikipedia expected to be like Netnanny or AOL, rather than what it is? -SV 00:34, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I agree with that wholeheartedly. But that very good point does not apply. We are not talking about porn or even the use of swear words. There is no way that I wish a first time user of an encyclopedia (a very advanced 6 year old, say, or an average 10 year old on their first independent school project) to be protected to the extent that (s)he is not allowed to know that sometimes people appear nude in movies. And that Drew Barrymore actually has a vagina! (Although that point does not yet appear in the article.) Paul Beardsell 00:48, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * No, I disagree - its not about that at all. Your talking about defending superficial use of a list - which is a methodology intrinsic to categorization; categorization must be encyclopedic. Sorry if I misunderstod the topic.SV


 * RickK is not removing a list but simply removing (censoring!) half a dozen occurrences of the word "nude" from the list. That lists are or are not desirable really is not the issue here.  Paul Beardsell 01:01, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think the consensus of opinion is that there is no good reason to censor the article. Who disagrees? Paul Beardsell 02:25, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think it trivializes an article on a legitimate actress to highlight, in the list of her movies, which ones she appears nude in. This is not something we normally include in profiles of actors and actresses, nor shoudl we. It's one thing to discuss nude appearances, in the text of the article, where they are relevant to a person's career, and another to turn the list of what films someone has appeared into a "hey, if you want to see her naked, rent this movie." -- Jmabel 04:29, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * What would be wrong with that? It is (by definition) prudish to object to what you are objecting to.  But, by your own measure, this issue is pertinent to her career and thereby acceptable.  Paul Beardsell 13:35, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps a generic article of Nude scenes of famous actresses would be somewhat appropriate; it *is* somewhat, vaguely, in a certain dimension and when you're looking at it with one eye closed, encyclopedic. At least for a perv like me. On a side note, every time I see "Drew Barrymore's nudity" in my Watchlist, I come here thinking someone's finally posted an example. Meanies. --Golbez 09:31, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Maybe we should have a PICS label [www.w3.org/PICS/labels.html], or do we already? Kokiri 16:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The people here on this website do not care for children or about morality. As I have stated earlier, this is an adult playground and it has much filthy content that no child should read that many libraries and schools should censor this website but the great amount of contributors and the owners do not care about this. It is about them having fun. Another sign of the sickness of this society. I do not know why they think this ought to be a *source* for highschoolers. This is an anarchistic website.WHEELER 15:48, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure anarchy is known for its desire to create a large population of Administrators. --bodnotbod 18:16, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)


 * More to the point, the people on this website do not care to write exclusively for children or decide what is "moral" to show tro other people's children, and realize that an encyclopedia intended for adults will -- must -- contain content not suitable for children.


 * The "filthy content" might briefly shock a child (assuming she even understood it), but I wager she'd be wakened by screaming nightmares for a month if she read Holocaust and saw this picture, or this one, or this one.


 * Should we remove those pictures from Wikipedia to "protect children"? Turn the Holocaust survivors' "never again" into "never again seen"?


 * Or what about Khmer Rouge and this picture of victims, some of them children like those you want to protect? Will throwing that picture down the memory hole make Wikipedia more "moral"?


 * What about sanitizing inconvenient pictures of American and Iraqi Casualties in the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Are children too young for those pictures of their country's "accomplishments"? Shall we censor those pages too?


 * Or maybe it's a better idea for parents to sit with young children while they browse wikipedia or any site?


 * Truth, which is what Wikipedia aims to present, is incompatible with censorship; a Wikipedia "suitable" for children is not a Wikipedia that is useful for adults. And who decides what is suitable? You? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? The Wiccans? Fred Phelps? The Human Rights Campaign? The Republican Party? The Democratic Party?


 * Better to let each parent decide for his own children, rather than attempt to decide what is "moral" or "suitable" for others' children by censoring Wikipedia. -- orthogonal 16:53, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * The children will be entirely safe once freedom is entirely destroyed. -- Stevietheman 17:59, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

While you're making wikipedia safe for children to read, why not also simplify the language the articles are written in? Oh wait, that's already been done. (Thanks Orthangonal for the excellent essay above!!!!) --ssd 05:21, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Firstly, protecting children from TV, books, magazines etc. is their parents' job, not ours. "Children safety" should not be a concern. This is not a "family" encyclopaedia.

Secondly, use common sense. Listing all films where Drew appears nude on Drew Barrymore is like listing all films where her hair is blond. Non-encyclopedic, sub-trivial and entirely off-topic. I can understand it being mentioned in articles on individual films, if they deserve articles.

Thirdly, avoid bad taste. "Wow! She's nude, dude! nudge-nudge-wink-wink." Zocky 07:35, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Do you want this resource to be used? What parent wants their children exposed to "penetration this" or "penetration that"? What libraries are going to link to this website with fist fucking and gerbil insertion techniques? Is this a playground for perverts or for the general community at large? While our site is going to remain de-linked, other online encyclopaedias are copying our work, posting it on their website and getting credit. How about establishing a family wikipedia?? a child-safe wikipedia? or a Christian wikipedia? That libraries and families can safely link too. Otherwise I feel, this site is going to be taken advantage of others and be sidelined. Has Wikipedia been turned into an adult playground for academic perverts and homosexual propagandists?WHEELER 15:11, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * As often, I think that WHEELER has gone over the edge. Hear that, "academic perverts" and "homosexual propagandists"? In my humble opinion, those who obsess about "perverts" (and, worse, "academic perverts") and homosexuals are probably those who have a skewed view of reality.
 * If you wish to create a Christian Wikipedia, feel free to do so. The material is available under the GFDL; just find servers to host you.
 * I also differ with your opinions that "libraries and families can safely link" a "Christian Wikipedia". I suspect that in countries such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, a "Christian Wikipedia" would be considered inappropriate for children. This is an international web site, not just a conservative US Christian site. May I remind you that in certain locales, merely showing a photograph of a bare-headed woman is already considered indecent? David.Monniaux 06:50, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Wheeler, while being quite emotional, has a legitimate point. We are striving to be an encyclopedia; that in mind, an encyclopedia is something that a child will wish to use.  There is no way to mark something as unsuitable for children in this encyclopedia.  Yes, what one person considers unsuitable for children may be different than what another person considers unsuitable for children.  Yes, we should have all the content available, even objectionable content.  However, I feel it would be a good idea to label certain pages as being unsuitable for children. Samboy 00:53, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I suggest that we add categories for classifying material that are considered potentially harmful to children in some locales: explicit description of sexual techniques, explicit anatomic photographs, discussion of religious and political propaganda. There would be different categories, so that filtering systems could make fine-grained decisions. David.Monniaux 06:50, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Whatever the ultimate solution, transparency is always better than censorship. Give people the tools to filter out "indecent" content, but beyond that, we have to keep this content FREE (as in freedom). -- Stevietheman 19:36, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Censorship sucks. And this is an international encyclopedia.  In Europe, showing breasts is not considered porn. Salasks 22:06, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

CSS problem
I've been creating a new custom user CSS which I call "Neptune". The background code is:

/* Main body */ margin: 2.8em 0 0 12.2em; padding: 0em 1em 1.5em 1em; background: #0099ff; border: 1px solid #00ffff; border-right: none; line-height: 1.5em; position: relative; z-index: 2; }
 * 1) content {

This is supposed to make the background blue. The weird part is, on the main (or article) namespace, the background is white. On every other namespace (Wikipedia, Template, User, etc.) the background is blue (which is correct). All the other CSS code works correctly in all namespaces. How do I fix this? The entire code can be found here. [[User:Mike Storm|Mike Storm (Talk) ]] 21:31, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Any suggestions? I'm having this problem too porge 11:32, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * I guess it's just the specifity of the selector,  or a more specific selector should work. -- Gabriel Wicke 00:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that fixed it porge 06:25, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

how to pick a piece of the wikipedia
i've been searching this on the faqs. i'm writing a open software and want that in a certain moment it picks displyas information from pages in the wikipedia. i want to control it's appearance, and also add one image if there's one. so three questions:

1-where do i learn how to do it? is it a crawl? shall i use a simple bot or what?

2-well some images are copyrighted. i'm not making money of this soft, how do i know if i can use them?

3-in the end i want to link back to wikipedia. what precautions should i have to avoid bringing a horde of barbarians (i don't know who is using my soft but could be a bunch of crazy teens) who don't know anything about wiki?

thanks. i promise to move everything to the right section after. --Alexandre Van de Sande 16:44, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I personally can't help you with the technical side, but I can tell you that image use shouldn't be a problem. The vast majority of our images are under the GFDL licence.  Some are used with the concept of "fair use", and if we can get away with it, so should you.  If you want to play it safe and not have fair-use images at all, then don't use them; they are clearly marked.  If you know how to write bots, it should be easy to automate their exclusion.


 * I wouldn't worry about barbarian hordes. We get huge amounts of traffic from Google already.  This isn't an lite thing.  If people commit vandalism, we'll just revert it.    &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 17:08, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

External link s vs External link
I started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (headings) about using the singular vs plural form of the ext lk section heading in articles with one link only, where I make a case for the latter. Please comment. --Wernher 13:54, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

User persists in re-publishing squicky clothing material
I've been working on the clothing page intermittently and running into problems with Pedant17, who is extremely attached to his original article -- which strikes me as the work of someone sexually aroused by smelly torn clothing. Whatever I do to address his concerns, he retaliates by re-publishing his original work. Now it's up as "Sociology of Clothing" -- which it isn't. I'm editing out the link to his page from the Clothing page, but leaving his page up. I could use a mediator! Advice! Anything!

Zora 07:59, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * I've reviewed the (recent) changes on the clothing page, and the Sociology of Clothing page (You might have provided the links!) and I think that you are blowing this out of proportion. I have minimal interest in the subject, but the contributions by User:Pedant17 look very useful, and the sociology of clothing is a massive subject with vital implications in some societies. Consider Punk and Goth: the adoption of clothing styles that separate these groups from mainstream society is a major part of their lifestyle choice, and thus intensely relevant to any discussion of clothing.  My opinion (for what it's worth) is that you revert your changes and include the link back in (and the stubs to all the other potential regional clothing style pages). Both items look encyclopedic to me! (I don't think much of the content of Sociology of Clothing at the moment, but over time I'm sure it will develop.)  Noisy 08:31, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Had a quick look at this; article is deficient, and needs much more work but is a beginning. Should probably be marked stub in terms of content since it doesn't really have a proper introduction, a context, or anything else much other than a list of conditions which clothing can be. Sjc 08:39, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * But it's NOT sociology of clothing -- the persistently re-published article is about current youth culture markers for "deviant" clothing. "Sociology of clothing" would have to be about clothing as communicator for all cultures and times, and is probably better handled in history of clothing and also regional styles. I put in a section on "Western counter-culture" clothing which repeated a lot of Pedant17s points and put them in historical perspective -- but it seems that nothing but his wording will do.


 * I would give way *instantly* to someone who sewed and/or had valid anthropological/sociological/historical knowledge of the subject, but I having problems deferring to more parochial visions, which are at best "native informant". Zora 11:04, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

OK, I've slept on the issue and figured out what's bothering me so much about all this: the lack of any community of knowledgeable people on clothing/sewing topics. The more knowledgeable people involved and contributing, the greater the chance that the article is going to be state-of-the-art. But Wikipedia is still heavily biased towards a Slashdot demographic (not my observation -- it was someone on Usenet who'd used Wikipedia for this and that), which means that the geeky topics are well-done but others may be sketchy. I've noticed this not just with the "fashion" articles, but also with literature and the arts. IF there were others besides just me and Pedant17 working on the Clothing article, the Clothing: Talk page would be the venue for discussion and we'd probably hammer out something acceptable. But when there's just the two of us, we're stalemated. He thinks I'm a snob and I suppose I am; I'm not deferring to someone who can't tell a peplum from a toga virilis. But there are many thousands of people out there in the real world who know a heck of a lot MORE than I do -- how to get them involved in Wikipedia? Zora 21:55, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Two suggestions:


 * 1) Somewhere on the web there are message boards that are dedicated just to the subject of clothing: hunt them out (it may be hard, and you may have to learn new skills just to find them) and invite them to help. (e.g. newsgroups)
 * 2) Look at Village pump, above. Is there any way that you can help?
 * Otherwise, raising the issue here is a good place to start. Just seeing the issue here may cause some people to contribute. Good luck.  Noisy 23:27, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Summarised sections

 * todo list for articles --> Todo list
 * Standardising article names --> Wikipedia talk:Lists (stand-alone lists)
 * Wikipedians in Wikipedia --> Wikipedia talk:Auto-biography
 * We MUST Americani[s/z]e Wikipedia. Archived in page history. See [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style] for spelling guidance.
 * Old features removed in new skin; Categorizing: No more [edit] link for the first section. Type to mark an image PD. Request features at SourceForge.
 * Range blocks: Don't block AOL (or not for too long? Guanaco is experimenting with one hour blocks)
 * Hiding Text --> User talk:Dainamo
 * Are Congressional Archives Copyvios? --> Wikipedia talk:Copyrights/Can I use...
 * II, III --> User talk:Golbez
 * How? Regarding template. See Template messages or use a category instead.
 * Other encyclopedias copying from Wikipedia. They're allowed to. See Copyrights.
 * Countermeasures --> External search engines
 * NOTICE: New type of stub. See substub. Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Substub
 * Issue on Isle of Sheppey. See Talk:Isle of Sheppey
 * Page disappeared. Question mark bug. Should now be fixed.
 * http://www.wikibooks.org gives GoDaddy holding page (fixed!). Wikibooks is now on split domains. It was inaccessible for a few days whilst the DNS changed. Should be ok now.
 * From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. See MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css. To add edit links at the end of a page, see User styles/bottom tabs
 * Mediation Committee: New members needed.
 * Should we ban JPEG images? --> Wikipedia talk:Image use policy
 * New language sister project. Wikisource is on one domain, so just create a page in a new language to start your new Wikisource. For other projects, see How to start a new Wikipedia.
 * How to revert a page after vandalism. See How to revert a page to an earlier version
 * Etiquette for Dealing with Troublemakers. See Dealing with vandalism or list them on list it on Vandalism in progress
 * Alexa --> User talk:Ilyanep
 * Headbutting. Is there an article? See Scottish kiss
 * Why are the Wikistats pages so far behind? The statistics are generated from the most recent dump. This may be up to a week old. They cannot be done in real time, and running the stat scripts loads the server quite a bit. There may also be errors in the stats.
 * What links here (Abced) --> Wikipedia talk:What links here
 * Arbitration Committee elections coming soon. See Arbitration Committee Elections July 2004
 * Can image files be renamed after they are uploaded? No. Re-upload it and list the old one at Images for deletion

Secret societies
Surreal. Isn't there a Silliest comments on talk pages yet?

Summarised sections

 * Summarised sections --> [[
 * User persists in re-publishing squicky clothing material --> User talk:Zora
 * External links vs External link --> Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (headings)
 * how to pick a piece of the wikipedia --> User talk:Avsa
 * CSS problem --> User talk:Mike Storm
 * Child Safety and Wikipedia --> Wikipedia talk:Content disclaimer
 * where are the images? --> Picture missing. Now returned. Try Ctrl F5. Caption needs improving.
 * Notice of poll opening for managing disruptive or antisocial editors --> Dealing with *disruptive or antisocial editors/poll
 * using content in discusion forum --> See Copyrights
 * External links to H2G2 entries --> Wikipedia talk:External links
 * On requiring users to sign in --> Wikipedia talk:Why create an account?
 * AFL dot com spaming --> Talk:American Football League
 * Yaargh! --> Skin looks funny? Try changing it to Monobook in Special:Preferences
 * Political Color Coding? --> Talk:United States Senate
 * List of XXX necessary? --> Categories complement lists, not replace them.
 * What links here wierdness --> Known bug in the links table.
 * Remove top whitespace, mv category+interwiki links to bottom --> Wikipedia talk:Categorization
 * Common sense on MainPage, please. --> Wikipedia talk:Editing the main page
 * Add references, please --> A reminder to cite your sources
 * New project: WikiProject Irish literature
 * Wikipedia Publicity Committee --> PR department
 * Categories --> User talk:Nichalp
 * Weird templates --> User talk:Grin
 * Americocentrism --> Wikipedia talk:USPOV
 * Modern Library --> Category talk:Modern Library 100 best novels
 * Britain = United Kingdom ? --> See User talk:KF

Categories broken
Is it just me or are categories broken? I just went to Category:Political divisions of the United States and the list was empty and saw the same thing with a quick sampling of several other categories. older ≠ wiser 14:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Not just you, all categories I checked are broken. The breakage occured less than an hour ago. Anárion 14:41, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I thought it was me too. They're still broken now.  Is anyone looking it or should we post something about it somewhere? Guess I'll wait before adding List of supercars to Category:Supercars now anyway. akaDruid ([[User talk:Akadruid|Talk)]] 15:26, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * There's at least one developer on the job at the moment. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 18:56, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * The bug has been found, we're working on a fix. -- JeLuF 19:22, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * Gabriel has fixed the bug. Should be fine now. -- JeLuF 20:22, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * Still not fixed, Category:Athletes for example show all the athletes in alphabetical order but just in one long sentence instead of under sections A, B, C etc Scraggy4 20:38, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * All categories I found that were broken have been fixed, and I can't find any new ones. However, there are so many that there may well be more out there and I'm not going to be able to find them all. So assistance is welcomed/needed. Also, if they really are all fixed, could Tech support give me a confirmation?


 * Ones that have been fixed since I mentioned them = (Category:Films by year), (Category:Celebrities), (Category:Feminists), (Category:Ballet), (Category:Antenna teminology), (Category:Clear Channel radio stations), (Category:Clear Channel Communications), (Category:Mosques), (Category:Sportspeople), (Category: Fictional Jews), (Category:Fictional gays and lesbians), (Category:Islamic mythology), (Category:Christian music), (Category:Aliens), (Category:English athletes), (Category:Environmental law), (Category:English actors), and (Category:Campaign settings). -Erolos 12:55, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

###note:### the following part of the thread, about category sorting, will be moved to a thread below which primarily discusses that part of the "bug complex" ###

Is this bug also responsible for the stuff I've been seeing the last couple of days, which is that several categories have more than one section for a given alphabetical letter? For example, Category:Software has two separate occurrences of "F", with some subcats living under one section and the rest under the other. Same trouble with several other categories above/below/"to-the-side-of" the Software one (the part of the category tree where I've been working lately). I really, really, really hope that this bug (or maybe bug complex) is generally fixable ¹ -- i.e. that one doesn't have to redo stuff ad aeternum...? --Wernher 02:15, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

( ¹ not at all having studied the wiki-software, I would nevertheless strongly assume that the category pages are regenerated regularly -- and that, if the wiki was a small one, they could in fact be regenerated on demand, i.e. per visit )


 * If you mean when one letter is shown at the bottom of one column, and again at the top of the next column along, that isn't a bug - it is just about fitting the articles in alphabetically. -Erolos 12:55, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * No there are actually two "F" sections in the sub-category list: one in the normal place and another at the end. --Phil | Talk 13:20, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I didn't follow the link before. I don't think it's part of the same problem, but it is a problem. Do you have links to the others? -Erolos 13:37, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I notice the misplaced sub-categories both use the "piped" syntax: . I wonder if that's something to do with it? --rbrwr&circ; 13:56, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Good point. I removed the piped File formats, and the two subcategories went into "C" without creating a new "C". Putting them under "F" was illogical, anyway. But, still, they shouldn't have done that; even piped they should have gone under the first "F". -Erolos 15:33, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Putting them under "F" was illogical, anyway. Nope, it was in fact very logical -- the word "computer" in those cases, and inside that category, is of no informational value whatsoever, so 'pipe-sorting' the subcats was the only sensible thing to do. I will therefore put it back. However, we agree of course on the main thing here: such alphabetical category sorting is most probably meant to work! :-) --Wernher 21:45, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Categories with sort keys are not sorted properly
The Category:todo have articles with sort keys (i.e. or piped format), but it does not look correct to me. For example, "Talk:One-time pad" has a "T5" sort key, but comes before "Talk:Train station" that has a "T1" sort key. (these codes are meant to sort the articles by priority). Strangely, others are sorted correctly though, so that it is not a repeatable problem.

Has this problem been seen before ? Is someone working on it ? Should I report it somewhere else ? Pcarbonn 20:07, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

(OT "linguistic" subthread moved into subsub "Todo is not a word" at the end of this thread)


 * "Categories broken", above, has drifted onto this topic. --rbrwr&circ; 20:33, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Great! Category:todo works now. However, Category:todo of popular articles still does not work...  Could anybody help ? Pcarbonn 19:39, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Todo is not a word
"Todo" is not a word. &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 13:43, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=todo&r=67. It is a word. Even the computer jargon meaning of the word is widely used (5m+ English language google hits for todo). Pcb21| Pete 09:22, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * yes, it's a word, but with another meaning... I guess we should use "to-do" Pcarbonn 19:39, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Some brainstorming...
First off, I want to say that I discoverd wikipedia yesterday and am estatic over it. I think the principals of "community cooperation" found within wikipedia, open-source software, creative commons and everything GNU are going to revolutionize the future in a HUGE way and will save all of us from ourselves....

But anyway, a couple of quick questions popped in my head about wikipedia that I couldn't really find an answer to:

1) As we've all seen in history (and no I can't really find a good example), it has been possible for a large group of people to, over a period of time, slowly believe something as true which very well may not be. Now I understand that fact is fact is fact. And I got the vibe that things like religion and such are explained in a very unbiased manner, as they should be. But my only concern is that I feel it IS possible for an entire population to believe something as true that isn't if its very slowly introduced to them. Like a very slow public "numbing to truth brought on by thier ability to believe whatever they read." Now I can't even begin to think of a scenario where that might happen, even if it's possible. But I just wanted to throw that out there.


 * That's an interesting point. Are you saying that, given enough time, Wikipedia might develop its own set of myths that it will defend against reasonable argument?  I hope that doesn't happen, but it's a possibility. -- Heron 08:33, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * There's been some discussion about whether this might already be happening with the issue of Vampire watermelons. --ALargeElk | Talk 08:54, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * I checked that article out and can't see how its "bending truth" or creating myths (maybe I've fallen victim to exactly that condition which I introduced, who woulda thunk it). The first line even says its a myth. The only way I can see a problem with it is if the actual existence of that particular myth is in dispute. If so, could another example of this potential problem be if someone decided to add thier little two cents to history and really just create it on the spot? Maybe they talk about a small tribe in Norway around 200 A.D.that was the 3rd tribe to create fire in that region. Chances are, no one is going to really care about that fact enough to really challenge it. So those reading take it to be true. It's basically the adding of pointless, possibly untrue, and definetly undisputed facts. (not registered yet) --68.170.38.222 07:34, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Vandalism such as that will most commonly be done by anon. IPs, and most of the time, there are people checking anon. IPs' edits as they happen, or at least have the pages on their Watchlist, so they see the anon. IP edit next time they log on. If it is done by a registered user, it might be a little tougher to catch, but watchlists help protect still.  Ideally, every wikipedian should add all the articles they create to their watchlist, so that every article is monitored by at least someone.  &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  11:35, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * Ideally, Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia. Perhaps it will become (is?) the broadest and most detailed encyclopedia, but it should still be an encyclopedia.  Meaning newspaper articles, books, letters, and journals will probably always contain more detailed specific, and true information than Wikipedia.  If we have a dedicated army of wikipedians checky facts that seem off, this creation of myth will hopefully be uncommon.  &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  09:11, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

2.)Advertising. What if someone writes up a pizza page and explains how to make it and such, then talk about history and blah blah blah. Then at the end put a http://www.dominos.com. Eventually someone will take it off because it's biased and advertising. Pretty simple. But what if everyone likes dominos? (just using it as an example, replace dominos with anything widely excepted). Then that opens up a way for people to advertise. Again, I can't really see that happening because there is nothing that everyone agrees on, even God, or god, or gods or allah or no god or aliens or etc,.

I'm just trying to find ways to scrutinize the system because I like it so much. I'M TRYING TO FIND FAULT AND CAN'T. By its very design, it WILL become the most in-depth, complete, and unbiased source of information on the planet. Good job guys.


 * You are of course preaching to the converted, so we certainly agree with your final point. :) As an example of (2), Dominos is indeed listed in the Pizza article, which links to its own article and only in there is a Web link. But it is sufficiently removed from the general pizza page such that it cannot be construed as gratuitous advertising for that company. This is the convention that has evolved, and has become quite accepted in the community. It balances the goals of expressing what is commonly accepted as "the truth" and resisting commercial tendencies. Fuzheado | Talk 07:51, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Blantant advertising is consistently removed by users. If User:A wrote an article on how to make pizza and then only added a link to Dominos, it is likely User:B would come along and delete just the link to Dominos, not the whole article (assuming the article was of good quality).  Blatant advertising does happen here, but editors (like you) are pretty swift to delete it.    &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 15:31, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

Where is my Purple GBC?
I can't find my Game Boy Color! If you find it, send it by E-mail.

Proposed disclaimer
I propose that all pages describing a potentially harmful activity that the reader may like to try (chemistry experiment, sport etc...) should carry a disclaimer linking to a long version such as this proposal. In the past, there has been a number of people, generally older teenagers, who have harmed themselves or others trying to do stuff they had read about in a book (like making explosives). Even if Wikipedia is not legally liable for this (and this even remains to be seen, depending on the jurisdiction and how courts rule), there's a definite risk of adverse publicity. The media can well blow such incidents out of proportion: "Online encyclopedia a cookbook for explosives", "Youngster experiments as described in online site, loses both arms", etc... David.Monniaux 07:46, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * There's already a general disclaimer on every page. Isn't that adequate? - Nunh-huh 08:22, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC) (click link at bottom of page to read it) -- Nunh-huh 08:22, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I know, but we already have specific disclaimers for medical and legal issues. You will tell me that any person with common sense would not do a dangerous chemistry experiment based on some vague Web encyclopedia content, but the same applies to medical and legal advice. David.Monniaux 13:14, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * It's my impression that the specific disclaimers were/are not to be used. Though I suppose they keep getting re-added because they seem like a good idea to people. - Nunh-huh 21:14, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I suspect that anyone who wants to make explosives will try to do so regardless of any warnings. A specific disclaimer would probably be more aimed at protecting Wikipedia than its readers - a question of legal liability, and of publicity. From a publicity point of view, I could see a short notice being more useful than the proposed long screed: obvious and easy to understand. On the other hand, the boundaries of "dangerous activities" are rather ill-defined, so it's not clear how many pages might end up with disclaimers. If sports are to be tagged, then almost anything can be. --AlexG 17:01, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Request for bot permission
Since i requested permission to run a warnfile on en three days ago and have not yet recived any reply i would like to draw some attention to the requst here so people wont go all postal when/if i actually run it.

Here goes. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason   03:59, 2004 Jul 31 (UTC)

"substubs"
It seems to be the utility of "stub" and "substub" messages is...limited, and that the recently developed "substub" message was rude and reflected poorly on Wikipedia. I have discussed this at more length at template talk:substub and ask that others voice their opinions. I'm going to have a go at making it less off-putting. - Nunh-huh 02:51, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I personally find your message rude and off-putting. There has been a lot of discussion about substubs recently. Stub messages have had a long lifetime on Wikipedia, and your description of their utility is purely your opinion, and should not be purported as the consensus of Wikipedians at large. Furthermore, all discussion about substubs themselves should be on Wikipedia talk:substub. The template talk page is reserved for discussion of the template message. [[User:Mike Storm|Mike &infin; Storm]] 01:03, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia as a press source
For a good laugh, see my latest addition to the Wikipedia_as_a_press_source :))) Nikola 00:47, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Categories with sort keys are not sorted properly
###Note:### OT "linguistic" subthread moved into subsub "Todo is not a word" at the end of this thread.

The Category:todo have articles with sort keys (i.e. or piped format), but it does not look correct to me. For example, "Talk:One-time pad" has a "T5" sort key, but comes before "Talk:Train station" that has a "T1" sort key. (these codes are meant to sort the articles by priority). Strangely, others are sorted correctly though, so that it is not a repeatable problem.

Has this problem been seen before ? Is someone working on it ? Should I report it somewhere else ? Pcarbonn 20:07, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * "Categories broken", above, has drifted onto this topic. --rbrwr&circ; 20:33, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * ###Note:### The relevant subthread of "Categories broken" has now been moved here, see below.


 * Great! Category:todo works now. However, Category:to-do of popular articles still does not work...  Could anybody help ? Pcarbonn 19:39, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Moved from "Categories broken":

Is this bug also responsible for the stuff I've been seeing the last couple of days, which is that several categories have more than one section for a given alphabetical letter? For example, Category:Software has two separate occurrences of "F", with some subcats living under one section and the rest under the other. Same trouble with several other categories above/below/"to-the-side-of" the Software one (the part of the category tree where I've been working lately). I really, really, really hope that this bug (or maybe bug complex) is generally fixable ¹ -- i.e. that one doesn't have to redo stuff ad aeternum...? --Wernher 02:15, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

( ¹ not at all having studied the wiki-software, I would nevertheless strongly assume that the category pages are regenerated regularly -- and that, if the wiki was a small one, they could in fact be regenerated on demand, i.e. per visit )


 * If you mean when one letter is shown at the bottom of one column, and again at the top of the next column along, that isn't a bug - it is just about fitting the articles in alphabetically. -Erolos 12:55, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * No there are actually two "F" sections in the sub-category list: one in the normal place and another at the end. --Phil | Talk 13:20, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I didn't follow the link before. I don't think it's part of the same problem, but it is a problem. Do you have links to the others? -Erolos 13:37, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I notice the misplaced sub-categories both use the "piped" syntax: . I wonder if that's something to do with it? --rbrwr&circ; 13:56, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Good point. I removed the piped File formats, and the two subcategories went into "C" without creating a new "C". Putting them under "F" was illogical, anyway. But, still, they shouldn't have done that; even piped they should have gone under the first "F". -Erolos 15:33, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Putting them under "F" was illogical, anyway. Nope, it was in fact very logical -- the word "computer" in those cases, and inside that category, is of no informational value whatsoever, so 'pipe-sorting' the subcats was the only sensible thing to do. I will therefore put it back. However, we agree of course on the main thing here: such alphabetical category sorting is most probably meant to work! :-) --Wernher 21:45, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I tried to put "Computer file formats" back into cat Software in the -eh- sorted mode, i.e. I put the 'pipe-sort'-inclusive code " " into the "Computer file formats" category page. But, alas, it still doesn't work, instead spawning a separate "F" at the end of the list and filing the item there. Argh. I do hope someone is working to fix this. Does somebody here know the correct way of raising such an issue to the developers/maintainers? (or is so already done, but not gotten to the head of the "needs fixing soon" queue? :-) --Wernher 23:04, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Todo is not a word
"Todo" is not a word. &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 13:43, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=todo&r=67. It is a word. Even the computer jargon meaning of the word is widely used (5m+ English language google hits for todo). Pcb21| Pete 09:22, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * yes, it's a word, but with another meaning... I guess we should use "to-do" Pcarbonn 19:39, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Even that page presents it as just a variant of "to-do". And it's not the same meaning.  You might as well say that todo is a word meaning "all".  Also be wary of what Google says is in a certain language.  Yes, you get over five million results allegedly in English, but a quick look at the first page reveals that they are mostly pages in Spanish and Portuguese.  Some of the remainder are mispellings of the English expression "to do", but that doesn't mean we have to do the same.  I can also find a quarter of a million instances of "tongue" spelt "tounge", five million of "lol" which is netspeak and not standard English, as well as 218 million of "sex" versus only 17 million for "education", which is not evidence of a spelling error but an indication that it is wise not to lend most credibility to what happens to be common online.    &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 20:18, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

IMHO, if people use it regularly, and widely agree upon its spelling and intended meaning, it's a word. Sort of like the words "today", "email", "handwritten", and "newspaper". "LOL" is an abbreviation. The phrase "todo list" is unlikely to be misunderstood by any native English speaker to mean "list of commotion."-- Wapcaplet 23:36, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Captions in non-thumb photos
Hi - could someone take a look at Intercontinental ballistic missile and let me know what I did wrong trying to put a caption under the photo? I can't seem to get non-thumbnail photos to display captions. Thanks - Tempshill 19:26, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * It's fiddly. Basically you have to put it in a table I think. Easy captions are one of the best things about thumbnails. Mark Richards 19:30, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Or you could make it framed.  I.E. framed|captiion]] -- DropDeadGorgias (talk) 19:40, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * Category:Slashdot - "This category contains 14 articles"
 * Category:Shakespeare - "This category contains 0 articles"

Pcb21| Pete 11:26, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * (This example admittedly works better if you don't look at Category:William Shakespeare!)
 * There are 24 articles in the category William Shakespeare, giving it a Slashdot Ratio of 2:1 with category Slashdot. I don't know about the article length, but it would be nice to think that we had even more than twice as much to say about Shakespeare than Slashdot... Mark Richards 16:46, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Uh....a little too pessimistic, I think. :-) Mark, you forgot that the category has four subcategories, so all the articles in those didn't count towards your ratio.  We in fact have 67 articles under the umbrella of Category:William Shakespeare, for a Slashdot ratio of almost 5:1.  I think we can relax just a little bit -- in the year I've been here, we've made huge strides away from being narrowly focused on "geek topics", and I think we should be congratulated more than derided.  We've a ways more to go, but as it stands I think we have achieved a relatively sound balance. Jwrosenzweig 17:39, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Chewbacca defense - 1,073 words
 * Insanity defense - 1,591 words &rarr;Raul654 20:22, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)

The "Encyclopedia that Slashdot Built" Awards
I will be making occasional awards to pairs of articles that typify this accusation, in the hope that it will motivate some (including me) to overcome our tech and pop biases and invest in some of the (apparently) less appealing articles. The first award goes to: I make that a 1.69 Slashdot ratio, and will leave folks to draw their own conclusions about the relative significance of these two erstwhile organizations. Yours, hoping to meet you on the pages of some articles that traditionally don't get our focus, Mark Richards 15:28, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * 1) the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ("one of the oldest civil rights organizations in the United States"), which I clock at 249 words (not including external links) and;
 * 2) the GNAA ("a self-aggrandizing troll organization originating from the popular news website Slashdot."). I count our article at 422 words.


 * What, only 1.69? Take a look at MIT:Harvard, or Heinlein:Steinbeck. (OK, I was originally going to suggest Heinlein:Hemingway but that's about 1:1... and anyway I don't like Hemingway). The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:A Farewell to Arms has a good Slashdot ratio, though. Dpbsmith 16:21, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Or consider "Fluble", a now-defunct comic that appeared in the Brown University student newspaper while its writer was a student there. Described as "at times a re-casting of the Job story, at times a meditation on depression and insanity, and often simply an aggregation of (loosely) popular cultural references, concept humor, and endless asides," one can't help thinking that this description really boils down to the same kvetching heard at any late night college bull-session of "misunderstood" and self-absorbed kids taking Philosophy 101.
 * Of interest only to nostalgic Brown alumni, it clocks in at 3303 words, 2.15 times the length of "Doonesbury", a comic that, while it began as a student's work in a student paper, is now seen in 1400 newspapers and which has been making incisive political commentary and causing controversy since 1970.


 * But the pioneering "editorial comic on the comic page", considered by many the precursor of both "Doonesbury" and "Calvin And Hobbes", "Pogo", a comic that arguably hastened the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy, clocks in at less than one-eighth the length of "Fluble", at a mere 410 words. The actual ratio is 8.01:1.


 * Technologically prescient, too... I remember Albert watching Pogo at a typewriter and saying to the effect that it's no wonder his writing is so good, he "has a little spellin' machine." And remember the Loan Arranger? But it always seemed to me that the political commentary, if any, was so very, very subtle as to have no sting at all and present virtually no challenge to the establishment. Dpbsmith 18:27, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * "Simple Joe Malarky", the pole-cat (?) with the perpetual five o'clock shadow who brought his mobile inquisition to the swamp was certainly Joe McCarthy. (Indeed, my life-long revulsion for state suppression of dissent probably originated in the Pogo comics I read at six or seven.) And according to this page, "[a] disagreeable Senator named Wiley appeared as Wiley Cat. The ultra-right-wing John Birch Society became 'The Jack Acid Society,' the Ku Klux Klan was 'Kluck Klams.'" Of course, much of Pogo was light-hearted: "Deck us all with Boston Charlie/ Walla Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo!" -- orthogonal 19:23, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * But "Fluble" takes up even more space in Wikipedia: it includes five example comics as images, totaling another 281446 bytes of bandwidth.


 * Presumably there would be copyright issues with reproducing Pogo or Doonesbury strips, and they'd be fairly serious as both of those strips still have a lot of commercial value left in them. I'm not sure why there aren't copyright issues with Fluble? Dpbsmith 18:27, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Presumably there are copyright issues -- although I haven't looked closely enough at the page to be sure. -- orthogonal 19:23, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Taking into account the images and comparing bytes, not words, the Fluble:Doonesbury ratio is approximately 31:1; Flubble:Pogo ratio is approximately 117:1. -- orthogonal 18:08, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Not any more; I hacked out some of the most obvious excess. The ratio is still way excessive, though. - DavidWBrooks 18:52, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Gee it seems to me that adding to Pogo or Doonesbury would be better than subtracting form Fluble, no? ;-) Paul August 06:13, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)


 * Bravo! Let's have a regular WikiProject and feature it on the Community portal so these articles get the deserved attention! -- ke4roh 20:54, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * FYI, I have nominated National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for Article of the week. &mdash;Stormie 02:01, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

How to include places of birth/death briefly?
I recently created a stub about Ruth Krauss. I wanted to include her places of birth and death as well as the dates, without saying anything more about them. (biographies) recommends the standard format


 * Ruth Krauss (July 25, 1901-July 10, 1993)

but if you open like that, it is hard to think of a way of including the places succinctly. It's not as if it were a full biography, in which you could have a paragraph beginning "Krauss was born in a red-brick Mongolian yurt in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a poor but honest woodchopper and screenwriter Anita Loos. The influence of Baltimore's red-brick architecture can be seen every aspect of her work..." (or whatever the actual facts might be).

I settled for:

Ruth Krauss (b. July 25, 1901, Baltimore, Maryland; d. July 10, 1993, Westport, Connecticut)

Thoughts? Are there any experienced sages who have a recommendation (and might consider adding it to (biographies)?)


 * It's hard to work in the birthplace where there is nothing about youth or upbringing. If there were, it would be easy to start with, "Born in Baltimore, Maryland...". Even a short article like this would not do poorly to end by reiterating death date (and that's where place of death can go): "Krauss died July 10, 1993 in Westport, Connecticut." -- Jmabel 21:01, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * I recommend "born" and "died" instead of "b." and "d.". Much more readable at the cost of only 4 bytes! Gdr 18:26, 2004 Aug 1 (UTC)


 * I don't put in born or died. It is quite obvious that the first date is the birth date and so on.  The introductory paragraph states why the person is important.  It is in the Bio section, the next section, where I put in the birth place and places the person been to. WHEELER 23:34, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

How to sort list of articles by popularity in collaborative-edition mechanisms
Increasingly, collaborative-edition mechanisms are using categories in templates to automatically generate the list of the concerned articles: todo list, disputed statement, Cleanup, ... Those lists are sorted in alphabetical orders. Other popular collaboration mechanisms show the most-recently-posted first: peer review, Cleanup, ...

Sorting articles by popularity would bring the major benefit of focusing the editing effort where it is most useful, i.e. where many people will actually view it. The popularity could be measured by the number of links to that page (like Google does).

The category feature allows the entry of a sort key, e.g. (see m:Help:Category.  This could be used for our purpose if we enter the popularity in the sort key.  To have a descending order, we could use 999998 for an article referred once, 999997 for an article refered twice...  (This sort key is not shown in the list of articles of the category).

As far as I know this is currently not possible in Wiki, because there is no "popularity" variable that we can automatically insert in a text, so we'll probably have to enter a request for new feature. Any other idea ?? Pcarbonn 06:05, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * What is popularity? Is it a weight assigned by an outside source?  Is it the number of links to the article? ("most requested"...) Is it the number of article viewings?  Is there a popularity contest where we can vote for it within wikipedia?  (these are all ideas for you to take or leave) --ssd 21:56, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Redirect should work, doesn't
Take a look at Marauder's Map. The page redirects to an article that exists. It redirects to an article that isn't a redirect. Yet the redirect doesn't take you to the article.

It doesn't appear to be because of the anchor in the link; I checked another anchor redirect (Sorting Hat), and even though anchor redirects don't take you to the anchor, they do take you to the right page. What's going on?

As a sidenote, I found the brokenness jarring enough that it took me a minute to remember why I was interested in reading the article. Lucky Wizard 02:09, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * You can't redirect to sections yet, so it will only take you the right page, not the right section. For some reason, replacing the %28 and %29 with real brackets helped as the redirect seems to work now. Angela. 02:36, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)

Caching of text used in edit summary
How do I clear out the cache that retains the text I have used for edit summary? The cache is a useful feature but after a while, it contains so many similar text strings that the value decreases. I deleted the browser cookies but that didn't clear it. I also looked in the help but could not see anything about it. Thanks in advance. --Bobblewik 15:56, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * This depends on what browser you're using, but if you're using IE, when the list pops up, highlight the entry you want to get rid of and hit the Delete key and it won't show up again (unless you use the same text again). Also, Internet Option | Delete Files should get rid of all the entries, but as you start using the summary box again, it will fill up again.  There is a way to turn off this feature, but it sounds like you didn't want to turn it off, just get rid of redundant entries. HTH    &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 16:01, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)


 * And, in IE, to get a list of *all* the entries in the cache, just go to the summary and hit alt-down. This brings up the total list. Also, Frecklefoot, why does your sig contain "[User:Frecklefoot|(nowiki)(/nowiki)]"? (offending characters removed so it all properly shows up) Why have a blank User:Frecklefoot link before the mdash? --Golbez 16:55, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * It's in there because of the way signatures work. The signature automatically prefaces your signature nickname with  .  But I want the mdash; before any of my signature and that junk gets rid of all that initial signature stuff.  I added the link to my user page and talk page afterwards.  I hope that's clear. :-) [[User:Frecklefoot|  &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 17:36, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

Excellent. I have IE6. I can now delete offending entries one by one. As you guessed, I don't want to turn it off, just remove a few. I tried to see if I could delete them all at once by following your second suggestion. I went to Tools, Internet Options..., Delete Files..., Delete all offline content, clicked OK then rebooted. Unfortunately that did get rid of any entries. However, deleting them one by one is a great advance and suits me fine. Thank you very much. Bobblewik 20:54, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Rebooting probably does not make a difference. What you want to clear is not files but automatic form filling stuff.  I forget exactly where in IE that is, but look for "clear form data" or something like that. --ssd 05:28, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Using your clue, I found it. Tools, Internet Options..., Content tab, Autocomplete..., Clear Forms. That deleted them all. Many thanks! Bobblewik 16:46, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Personal articles and solution thereof
Among the votes for deletion, the most commonly encountered category is personal articles. These articles are usually by some flaky person of no true interest to a Wiki-xxx. Though seldom encountered in votes for deletion, there also exist people who are of some minor interest, but who would not always justify an article. I propose a solution for both categories.

The idea is to create a separate Wiki with unlimited (except for size) personal articles. The idea is that if you can't easily deal with them, at least categorize them into a heap where they would be harmless. The existing Wikipedia would simply redirect via creator selection option, or by speedy VfD to the personalWIKI. The personal articles would not be searchable by Wikipedia, but would available through a different Wiki name.

A variation on this is to also require personal articles to have an selectable "open date" e.g. 50 years in the future, when the article would finally be posted to the public, but held confidential to Wiki (via password) prior to that date. The idea here is that some people actually are noteworthy, and that often such people would be reluctant to publish personal information prior to their death. I recently encountered an example of this. The lady was a former professor of French, had lead an interesting life, but was otherwise little known publically. She is also very old and probably near death. An article about her would be highly appropriate, and, it would be best done with her assistance. What do you do with such an article?

I think that such future open date personal articles would tend to attract the less flaky members of society, and, would be a useful content. Perhaps such articles could be automatically forwarded to Wikipedia after the open date. Posted by User:66.44.3.205


 * It's ironic that this was posted by an anonymous user and that this was that user's first edit. Anyway, personally I don't think this is a great idea.  Exploding Boy 15:00, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)


 * I don't think its a good idea either "Create a separate Wiki with unlimited (except for size) personal articles." Am I reading this right: so everyone could write an article about themselves? The other part doesn't sound like a horrible idea, but too complex to implement effectively.    &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 15:19, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm in the same camp. It sounds more like a blog to me, and it has nothing to do with Wikipedia. Just use one of the blog services out there, and license the content under the GFDL. Dori | Talk 16:12, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

And the beauty of it is, people can just create an account under their real name (provides searchability!), and then link to their blog from their user page. Exploding Boy 16:42, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

We need more sounds
I've posted this before, but I haven't gotten much of a response. Everyone can speak a language natively, so if you have a mic, how about adding some sounds to these pages (note that English hasn't been done either):


 * Your alphabet
 * Common phrases in different languages
 * List of tongue-twisters (if there aren't any phrases in your language, add some first)
 * Numbers in various languages
 * Any other page you think could use some sound

I suggest using Audacity to record and export the files to Ogg Vorbis format (See also Ogg Vorbis help). Dori | Talk 12:45, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
 * I just uploaded a file with russian numbers 1-10. :D Ilyanep (Talk) 19:44, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Linking to Wikisource
I was just wondering if there was any effort to encourage linking to Wikisource for any sorts of documents/sources that might be mentioned in an article here on Wikipedia. It came to my attention after browsing through Wikisource and reading 'Civil Disobedience' by Thoreau, then coming over to Wikipedia for more info about him and the essay. There was an external link to the essay from the Civil Disobedience page to a college site or something, which I changed to link to the Wikisource document. I just think it would be a great idea to help out the sister projects and encourage people to add stuff to Wikisource, and hopefully it would strengthen both projects. So is there any policy/project to help these two projects help each other out?

p.s. Hope this is an appropriate place for this discussion since it concerns two different Wikimedia projects, but I didnt see anywhere on the MetaWiki to put it...

thanks, biggins 10:14, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Linking between the sisters, especially from wikipedia to the others is generally encouraged. The United States Constitution contains a link to wikisource, I think.  I'm sure many other such links exist.  &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  11:18, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

Some brainstorming...
First off, I want to say that I discoverd wikipedia yesterday and am ecstatic over it. I think the principals of "community cooperation" found within wikipedia, open-source software, creative commons and everything GNU are going to revolutionize the future in a HUGE way and will save all of us from ourselves....

But anyway, a couple of quick questions popped in my head about wikipedia that I couldn't really find an answer to:

1) As we've all seen in history (and no I can't really find a good example), it has been possible for a large group of people to, over a period of time, slowly believe something as true which very well may not be. Now I understand that fact is fact is fact. And I got the vibe that things like religion and such are explained in a very unbiased manner, as they should be. But my only concern is that I feel it IS possible for an entire population to believe something as true that isn't if its very slowly introduced to them. Like a very slow public "numbing to truth brought on by thier ability to believe whatever they read." Now I can't even begin to think of a scenario where that might happen, even if it's possible. But I just wanted to throw that out there.


 * That's an interesting point. Are you saying that, given enough time, Wikipedia might develop its own set of myths that it will defend against reasonable argument?  I hope that doesn't happen, but it's a possibility. -- Heron 08:33, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * There's been some discussion about whether this might already be happening with the issue of Vampire watermelons. --ALargeElk | Talk 08:54, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * I checked that article out and can't see how its "bending truth" or creating myths (maybe I've fallen victim to exactly that condition which I introduced, who woulda thunk it). The first line even says its a myth. The only way I can see a problem with it is if the actual existence of that particular myth is in dispute. If so, could another example of this potential problem be if someone decided to add thier little two cents to history and really just create it on the spot? Maybe they talk about a small tribe in Norway around 200 A.D.that was the 3rd tribe to create fire in that region. Chances are, no one is going to really care about that fact enough to really challenge it. So those reading take it to be true. It's basically the adding of pointless, possibly untrue, and definetly undisputed facts. (not registered yet) --68.170.38.222 07:34, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Vandalism such as that will most commonly be done by anon. IPs, and most of the time, there are people checking anon. IPs' edits as they happen, or at least have the pages on their Watchlist, so they see the anon. IP edit next time they log on. If it is done by a registered user, it might be a little tougher to catch, but watchlists help protect still.  Ideally, every wikipedian should add all the articles they create to their watchlist, so that every article is monitored by at least someone.  &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  11:35, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * Ideally, Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia. Perhaps it will become (is?) the broadest and most detailed encyclopedia, but it should still be an encyclopedia.  Meaning newspaper articles, books, letters, and journals will probably always contain more detailed specific, and true information than Wikipedia.  If we have a dedicated army of wikipedians checky facts that seem off, this creation of myth will hopefully be uncommon.  &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  09:11, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

2.)Advertising. What if someone writes up a pizza page and explains how to make it and such, then talk about history and blah blah blah. Then at the end put a http://www.dominos.com. Eventually someone will take it off because it's biased and advertising. Pretty simple. But what if everyone likes dominos? (just using it as an example, replace dominos with anything widely excepted). Then that opens up a way for people to advertise. Again, I can't really see that happening because there is nothing that everyone agrees on, even God, or god, or gods or allah or no god or aliens or etc,.

I'm just trying to find ways to scrutinize the system because I like it so much. I'M TRYING TO FIND FAULT AND CAN'T. By its very design, it WILL become the most in-depth, complete, and unbiased source of information on the planet. Good job guys.


 * You are of course preaching to the converted, so we certainly agree with your final point. :) As an example of (2), Dominos is indeed listed in the Pizza article, which links to its own article and only in there is a Web link. But it is sufficiently removed from the general pizza page such that it cannot be construed as gratuitous advertising for that company. This is the convention that has evolved, and has become quite accepted in the community. It balances the goals of expressing what is commonly accepted as "the truth" and resisting commercial tendencies. Fuzheado | Talk 07:51, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Blantant advertising is consistently removed by users. If User:A wrote an article on how to make pizza and then only added a link to Dominos, it is likely User:B would come along and delete just the link to Dominos, not the whole article (assuming the article was of good quality).  Blatant advertising does happen here, but editors (like you) are pretty swift to delete it.    &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 15:31, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

User Talk Page Prob
Before I created my second archive on my talk page, the TOC for the talk showed up fine, however it doesn't now, can somebody tell me why? Ilyanep (Talk) 03:15, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * You need more than three headers for an automatic TOC. To force a TOC when you don't have four headers type . Angela. 03:34, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)


 * Alright, thanks :D/ Ilyanep (Talk) 19:02, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Public domain for state govt pages?
Are items and pics on state government official pages public domain, or are states allowed to copyright? RickK 00:00, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
 * No. As Copyright FAQ (which Jamesday and I wrote) says: All work produced by employees of the US federal government as part of their work is public domain&#8212;thus, almost all content found on US government websites (.gov and .mil) is public domain. Note, however, that this applies only to the US Federal government. State governments retain the copyright on their work. Also note that some US Federal websites can include works which are not in the public domain--check the copyright status before assuming something is public domain. Works produced by the UK government are not public domain; they are covered by Crown copyright. &rarr;Raul654 00:08, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
 * According to Image copyright tags, images created by the State of California may be ineligible for copyright. I don't know the details, however. -- Chris 73 | Talk 00:19, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * And don't forget that other countries have different rules entirely. See Crown copyright for a case in point. -- ChrisO 18:21, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Pi x 10^5 pages!
For all those zealots and anarchists who claim that the decimal number system, and so our usual milestones, have no real significance, let them witness that Wikipedia has exceeded Pi x 10^5, or about 314159, pages! Definitely deserves a press release. Derrick Coetzee 22:09, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I can't help but point out that &pi;&times;105 is only special because of your decimal-chauvinistic bias towards the number 105. Personally I can't believe that we passed 262,144 without anyone noticing. -- Tim Starling 04:45, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)


 * Is this a riddle? Can you give a hint?--Patrick 10:03, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Ah, 2^18.--Patrick 10:06, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Or to put it more impressively, we have 1,001,100,111,101,100,111 articles! Pcb21| Pete 14:35, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Gee, by my reckoning, we have 0100,1100,1111,0110,0111 articles. You must prefer octal to hex. *grins* - UtherSRG 14:40, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The real milestone is that Wikipedia now contains over 19,683 (39) good articles. AsbestoSuit 355:113, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

External link policy?
I'm looking for some clarification of the policy about external links. What makes a link acceptable on a page? Should new links be posted at the top, or the bottom, of the existing list of links? How does one determine if a link is spam or astroturfing, or a valid submission?

Frequently I've seen users putting in links that are relevant, but not the most important sites in relation to an article. E.g. a user linked photomigrations.com from Digital photography, which is relevant but it's not a very well-known site, and it's not a general digital photo site.

Even though they're just trying to increase traffic to their site, it's possible that the link should stay. Tips? Rhobite 18:42, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * There is probably a Wikipedia policy link on this, but here is my opinion: Most relevant links should go first, then less relevant ones. For example, for an article on General Motors, their official website should be listed first.  For an article on Michael Douglas, his official personal website should go first.  All other links are secondary.  I'd say "most relevant" links should go in next, followed by the least relevant.  What is relevant and what isn't gets murky, however.  Use your best judgement.  If it looks like an ad, it probably is. HTH    &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 18:56, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * On external links do we have a policy of periodically checking if they are still valid? Links die and so do editors, and in time Wikipedia might well have an unacceptable number of dead links. Not guaranteed to instil confidence among our users. Apwoolrich 19:03, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Do we need an actual policy? Shouldn't it be common sense? -- Cyrius|&#9998; 19:33, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * One user, Lady Lysine Ikinsile, is well-known for her efforts in standardization of style and format of External links sections. You may want to talk to her. Derrick Coetzee 22:05, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * You might also be interested in my personal manifesto for what should and shouldn't be included. --ALargeElk | Talk 08:46, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

And why does it feel right that it should be "external links" with an s, even when there is only one link? (Admittedly not everyone feels this, but plenty do). Pcb21| Pete


 * There are a few reasons. The practical one is that when people exapand the external links section, they shouldn't have to remember to update the section title. The more subtle one is that it makes sense for a section titled Blahs to contain only one Blah, just as the Plumbers section of your phone book could very well have only one plumber in it. It is a list of all of them, of which there happens to be only one. Derrick Coetzee 23:08, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

See External links and When should I link externally. For link v. links, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Angela. 14:13, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

Duke University
The "Duke University" entry is not displaying properly.


 * It looks fine to me. Could you be more specific? [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 17:29, 2004 Jul 28 (UTC)


 * There, how's that?   &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 18:51, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)

Boston meetup
There will be a Wikipedian meetup in Boston this Saturday. Sign up at User:Jimbo_Wales/Boston if you plan to attend. Dori | Talk 16:52, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC) (Who unfortunately cannot)

Categories broken
###Note:### See the thread Village pump for discussion of related alphasort issues.

Is it just me or are categories broken? I just went to Category:Political divisions of the United States and the list was empty and saw the same thing with a quick sampling of several other categories. older ≠ wiser 14:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Not just you, all categories I checked are broken. The breakage occured less than an hour ago. Anárion 14:41, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I thought it was me too. They're still broken now.  Is anyone looking it or should we post something about it somewhere? Guess I'll wait before adding List of supercars to Category:Supercars now anyway. akaDruid ([[User talk:Akadruid|Talk)]] 15:26, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * There's at least one developer on the job at the moment. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 18:56, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * The bug has been found, we're working on a fix. -- JeLuF 19:22, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * Gabriel has fixed the bug. Should be fine now. -- JeLuF 20:22, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * Still not fixed, Category:Athletes for example show all the athletes in alphabetical order but just in one long sentence instead of under sections A, B, C etc Scraggy4 20:38, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * All categories I found that were broken have been fixed, and I can't find any new ones. However, there are so many that there may well be more out there and I'm not going to be able to find them all. So assistance is welcomed/needed. Also, if they really are all fixed, could Tech support give me a confirmation?


 * Ones that have been fixed since I mentioned them = (Category:Films by year), (Category:Celebrities), (Category:Feminists), (Category:Ballet), (Category:Antenna teminology), (Category:Clear Channel radio stations), (Category:Clear Channel Communications), (Category:Mosques), (Category:Sportspeople), (Category: Fictional Jews), (Category:Fictional gays and lesbians), (Category:Islamic mythology), (Category:Christian music), (Category:Aliens), (Category:English athletes), (Category:Environmental law), (Category:English actors), and (Category:Campaign settings). -Erolos 12:55, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Image Markup/ New Preferences (suggestion)
I've just come up with a new item in the preferences: preferred size of the default thumbnail box. I've noticed that a couple of contributors define the width of the thumbnail when there is no reasons. I think most of the time, they do this, so the page looks nice. Now, what looks nice on a small screen might look rather weird on a big one, and vice versa.

My suggestion is to let users choose. Of course, there are cases when we want exactly 237px width (e.g. if the picture is that size). So, I suggest we have a preference to set the default size of thumbnails. Next, we of course encourage all Wikipedians not to add fixed size unless needed.

Can I at this stage also mention, that thumb should be used, because it includes the given description as a caption... many contributors seem to to know that thumb, right etc. are not exclusive statements... Kokiri 13:35, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I second this call. I've had disputes over image size before, and there's no right answer; this would provide one. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 14:36, 2004 Jul 28 (UTC)


 * For caching reasons, it would need to be selectable and not arbitrary. That is, you'd have small/medium/large (with pixel values specified) instead of a text field you could put any number into. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 19:01, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Oh, no problem... Kokiri 20:24, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * So how many values should there be? Three is probably fine, but if it'll change your mind, I'll point out that the computer next to me has six possible screen resolutions, ranging from 640x480 to 1600x1200. Lucky Wizard 02:09, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Controversial cat issues
Would some helpful veteran please take a look at the discussions of indoor/outdoor cats and declawing in How to choose your pet and take care of it? These are both controversial topics where the majority opinion is different in the US and the UK (where I come from). I have done my best to include a balanced discussion of indoor/outdoor cats, but I'm not qualified to sort out the discussion of declawing, since in the UK it is illegal and generally regarded as cruel. As I said on the talk page, I think it deserves an article of its own. 131.111.8.103 13:09, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

That was me (Ekaterin) by the way! Ekaterin 13:13, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I moved some extern links to the External link section, as they should be, and added some wikilinks, but, to be honest, some of the article seems very POV. Especially the section on naming the dog: "Dog names tend to extend from names of countries such as Kenya."  How in the world did the author come up with that?  I read an article once that suggested giving dogs names with one or two syllables and gave the scientific reasoning behind it.  But the article seems to have a great deal of opinion in it, which is impossible to make NPOV without just removing it.  But, the paragraph on declawing seems very NPOV and gives views on both sides of the argument.  Anyway, peace. :-)    &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 14:38, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * Thank you, it's looking much better now. It's hard to think of good reasons for declawing a cat, but someone on the rec.pets.cats newsgroup once suggested the possibility of the owner developing a severe allergy so that even an accidental scratch would be serious.  (Some declawing advocates say that it is no worse than neutering the cat, but neutering has health benefits for the cat itself, which declawing doesn't.)  Anyway, all that would belong in a declawing article rather than in How to choose your pet and take care of it.

Ekaterin 15:29, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

FAQ for users who think Wikipedia is biased against their country
I have written a draft FAQ for users who think that Wikipedia is biased against their country at User:Zocky/Country bias. Any improvements and suggestions are highly welcome. Zocky 12:43, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Here's an excerpt:
 * Wikipedia is an international encyclopaedia and should be equally readable and understandable for all readers, regardless of where they come from, and it should not take sides. Where popular beliefs in two countries differ, both should be presented fairly.


 * If you think that your country/nation is represented unfairly or that an article is offensive to your country, please read these explanations of commonly raised issues.

I've contributed a few things, but I think that it should be both a FAQ for people who think Wikipedia is biased on their country, and also a guideline for people writing on other countries. David.Monniaux 06:43, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Evil wiki magic
Can anyone explain to me why the following, from Reign of Terror, shows a period (".") rather than a colon (":") after the italicized word Terror?

Source: On September 5, the Convention, pressured by the people of Paris, institutionalized The Terror: systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.

Result: On September 5, the Convention, pressured by the people of Paris, institutionalized The Terror: systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.

Jmabel 05:52, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * Actually, I think it is showing a colon - it's just that when the r in Terror is italicised, it touches the colon's upper dot, making it look like the dot is part of the r. I can't think of any solution to the problem, though, except to add in a space (giving Reign of Terror : instead of Reign of Terror:). -- Vardion 06:21, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * An alternate solution is to italicise the colon as well. Reign of Terror: The typography police are probably going to write me up for suggesting it. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 06:24, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Most of my clients' style guides call for applying italic to ending punctuation after italic text--including periods and commas because they can show up oddly, too, if not italicized. Elf | Talk 04:39, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Donald Knuth's TeXBook also calls for typesetting the punctuation mark following bold/italic text as bold/italic. BACbKA 21:16, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * It looks fine in Mozilla 1.7/Cologne Blue. You could try changing your browser/skin.


 * chocolateboy 16:01, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * The fact that there is a browser/skin in which the article looks right is not the issue. We should be striving for copy that will look right to all viewers. The suggestion of italicizing the punctuation is probably a good one. -- Jmabel 06:27, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)


 * We should be striving for standards that are supported by all sane browsers, and not implementing hacks that annoy users who don't happen to experience your viewing idiosyncrasies. What browser/platform/skin are you using?


 * chocolateboy 08:08, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * This is a well-known IE rendering limitation/bug, unlikely to get fixed in the next four years or so... -- Gabriel Wicke 23:25, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

We should not be ignoring a browser used by a larger number of people than any other browser on the Internet. It's one thing to have a policy like that for tools used by our active participants, but we want our content to look good to people who are turning to us as an encyclopedia, not as a hobby. -- Jmabel 00:55, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)

Despite all the browser bashing (it looks bad in netscape too, btw), the correct solution is to italicize the : so that it does not run into the r. Italic punctuation was created specifically to fix that problem. --ssd 05:13, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I do not think that articles should try to account for ephemeral font and browser issues, even of popular browsers. At most, the Wikipedia software could be tweaked to render such cases for buggy browsers, the underlying code staying the same (the tweaking could simply be removed once the browser improves). Many unicode entities used in existing articles are not rendered properly by any browser yet. But Wikipedia is here 'for ever', and unicode is here to stay too, so it is reasonable to expect them to render correctly in the near future. (in firefox, btw, the colon looks fine). Italic punctuation exists for whole italicized paragraphs. I don't think it's good practice to italicize punctuation after a single word in italics (but I am not Donald Knuth); Btw, is there any sort of punctuation-standards-enforcing wikipedia-bot/script? Dbachmann 08:15, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Pulling in FCC list of radio stations
The lists of radio stations in the US are a little jumbled, e.g. List of radio stations in Massachusetts, List of radio stations in Ohio, List of radio stations in Oregon. Each state's page is formatted differently and contains different kinds of information. There are thousands of licensed stations in the US.

One of the few things the FCC's done right is publishing downloadable data. You can get a list of all the stations in the US. Thoughts on importing this data into Wikipedia? There are something like 8500 FM stations listed, so I'm not sure if that list includes defunct or trivial stations. Anyway we could filter by certain criteria like wattage, I'd have to do more research to find out possible filters. I could write the bot to do this but it might take a while given my schedule. Rhobite 04:26, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)

Extending markup syntax to allow easy creation of references
I think it would be useful to extend the wikitext markup syntax to facilitate easy creation and especially maintenance of a list of external documents cited/referenced in a wikipedia article. The full proposal including syntax, an example, and anticipated problems can be found at User:Sperling/References.

Any comments would be appreciated. --K. Sperling 01:51, 2004 Jul 28 (UTC)


 * That's a nice idea you got there. And I also didn't know that frogs could move back in time :D Ilyanep (Talk) 03:31, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Looks great to me, but I couldn't retreive your rendered document.   &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 15:00, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * Looks great. Exploding Boy 15:06, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)

Sysop Help
The article on Effeminacy was changed in title to Effeminacy (classical vice). The person doing the changing did not bring over the history nor the old talk page. Since then the article has now been reverted back to the original. None of this my doing but I originated the article and would like the old history to come back.

Can a Sysop restore the old history and talk page elements? I now it has been done before.WHEELER 23:44, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Done. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 04:01, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks.WHEELER 14:56, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Arbitration Committee election update
The timeline for the arbitration committee election has been finalized. Candidates should present their candidate statements before midnight UTC on Monday, August 2, 2004. The election will start on Wednesday, August 4, and run through Friday, August 13. Anyone who has been a registered user for 3 months is eligible to vote. --Michael Snow 23:15, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Editing Weekend
On wikipedia-l, Jimbo proposed editing weekends be held as a part of the drive towards 1.0. This involves groups of Wikipedians meeting in libraries to finalise articles.

I have created a page to arrange smaller meet-ups prior to the final print drive next summer. I suggest the first of these be held this September and be only one day rather than a whole weekend as a trial run. Please see Editing Weekend for details. Angela. 18:38, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia in DICT format: wik2dict.py
I finally wrote something to convert the Wikipedia into the DICT format: wik2dict.py. It tries to create reasonably layouted dict articles. It can also automatically fetch the database dumps. There are some requirements though (running mysql server, dictzip, Python modules for MySQL and dict stuff). And currently it is only version 0.2. So beware.

I would appreciate it if someone (possibly someone at Wikimedia?) could run the script regularly and put the dict files available for everyone to download. Too bad they can't be included in Debian though ("GFDL is non-free"). However, the script itself could probably be included in contrib :)

Hope it can also be useful to other people. G-u-a-k-@ 18:00, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Bug: Image thumbnails have artifacts
(I submitted this to SourceForge but I'm reporting it here in case anyone has any thoughts on how to fix this.)

Compare Image:Sidereal day (prograde).png with the thumbnail of the same image at Sidereal day. The latter image has artifacts (pixels of the wrong colour) around the yellow circle at the left representing the sun. These artifacts are not present in the original image. The artifacts are not just caused by aliasing because the wrong pixels are in a colour unrelated to the colour of neighbouring pixels. It is possible that the error has something to do with the alpha map on the original image: the artifacts are in places where pixels in the original image are partly transparent. Gdr 14:17, 2004 Jul 27 (UTC)

Sock puppets
Knowing full well that I am probably going to suggest something that has been suggested and debated a million times before, but not knowing at least where to look for such a debate, I would like to propose that anonymous users and registered users with fewer than 50 edits be blocked from editing such pages as VfD, CfD, and VfU. These discussions get senselessly bogged down by the flocks and armies of sockpuppets (though it is at times amusing), and often after a flurry of them has passed through, a legitimate new user may get "sockpuppet!" yelled at him simply because we can't tell the difference. Having a per se block on those articles would prevent the easy proliferation of sockpuppets, and guarantee that anyone who contributes to the more esoteric debates on wikipedia about keeping articles and categories will have actually been here for a little while. We tend to think that no one will wander to VfD unless they are somewhat familiar with wikipedia, but this would help guarantee that.

a) what does everyone think? and b) is there somewhere that I can see a preexisting discussion of this kind of proposal? I know I've seen similar suggestions arise in VfD comments from time to time... Oh, and c) how would we make something like this official policy and have it built into the system?  Is it something that can be done?  I initially thought we could do it by namespace, but then I realized that there are pages just for newbies set up within the wikipedia namespace (like the sandbox...duh).  Postdlf 07:52, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Doesn't work. The kind of user who creates borderline articles that need to be discussed on XfD are generally new users. How can they defend themselves if you make it impossible to do so at a technical level? (And new users DO end up at VfD, as someone will have just slapped a link to it on the crappy new article. Anyhow, sock puppets can generally be spotted a mile off, and their votes weighted accordingly. Pcb21| Pete 08:30, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * A modification could work. Specially mark anonymous users and registered users with fewer than 50 edits on VfD, Cfd, and VfU. Such marking could be most easily done universally as part of the normal tilde-tilde-tilde-tilde display with some rather neutral phrase such as "Under 50 edits" or "Anon" for anonymous. Votes from "Under 50 edits" and "Anons" would simply not count on those queues and possibly in other circumstances (though those editors could still discuss). But making newness and anonymity very obvious along with such votes not being counted would make this kind of disruption less likely to occur. Jallan 14:36, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Full transparency is the answer, just as it may also be to campaign finance.  While I still support limiting the degree of edits from anonymous users, I think the prescribed limitation by Postdif goes too far. -- Stevietheman 18:25, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Shades. Display them with a little sunglass icon, like eBay. eBay users who have been registered for less than a month have their usernames displayed with "shades" (a little pair of sun glasses) warning you that their identity might be shady. They don't tell you in so many words what they're warning you about, but what they're warning you about is that a new user might be a reincarnation of someone who's been kicked off for abuse (NARU-ed, in eBay-speak). It's very analogous to sockpuppets here. Don't restrict what new users can do, but I see no harm in making their status evident at a glance. Dpbsmith 16:38, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Anyone wanna make an icon of a dirty sock? 8-P --ssd 04:44, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Could even be a happy sprinkling "new" star -- looks nice to the true newbie, and annoying to the sock puppet. -- till we &#9788; &#9789; | Talk 16:30, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of tagging them as newbies&mdash;that would avoid the problems with blocking them while allowing us to identify who to disregard easily. Postdlf 04:51, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

How does someone correct a false definition and inaccurate article content/
(Moved from Reference Desk)

Dear Wikipedia Administrators and Editors,

It is with great dismay and sadness that when I looked up the definition of the Hawaiian word Hapa, I found that it was not defined truthfully. Please advise. I would like to know how one can be sure that the true meaning and definition of a word will be present on an article site that has redefined a word as a usage. I tried a few times to edit the article "Hapa" to present all the facts and the true meaning of this Hawaiian word, but someone kept puting the incorrect definiton back before I could finish. (PikiPik and Pez?)

Hapa is a Hawaiian (kanaka maoli) word of Hawaiian (ethnicity, blood ancestry) origin. Hapa began as a word by Hawaiians (like my great grandmother) for Hawaiians of part Hawaiian ancestry. Hawaiian dictionaries define "hapa" as "part, fragment., portion" or "an indefinite part of a thing, a few, a small part". Later it was further defined to include "of mixed blood, person of mixed blood". Hapa does not mean "part or partial Asian".

To take a word which is a part of an indigenous language and then redefine it as a word used for part-Japanese people who came from Hawai'i and then further redefine it as "people of part Asian and European ancestry" is ethnocultural theft. At the very least, the article site on wikipedia that defines and explains the word "hapa" should give credit where credit is due-to the Hawaiian (kanaka maoli) people of Hawai'i. The word hapa was in use long before any of the foreign Asian, Portuguese and Filipino immigrants came to Hawai'i.  Hawaiians and (the first foreigners) Europeans (like my grandfather) created the first hapa people of Hawai'i.  An example is Princess Victoria Ka'iulani Cleghorn. Later, Hawaiians intermarried with the Chinese (like my great grandfather) who were the first non-European immigrants to Hawai'i. This then created many people of Hawaiian, European and Chinese ancestry. Hapa is a Hawaiian word, it is not a "Hawai'i Creole" or Hawai'i Pidgin English" word.

How can anyone just take a word that has original meaning, definition and usage of a native peoples and just redefine it to suit someone and something else? Why has no one looked up the word in the dictionaries that would be the authority as to the definiton of a Hawaiian word? People of Hawaiian language authority. Please look in the dictionaries of Hawaiian language. It is a terrible thing to present something wrong and false as being the "truth".

By the way, I am Hawai'i born and raised, and am hapa because I am part Hawaiian- I am of mixed ethnic/racial ancestry-Hawaiian, Chinese, French, Welsh, Dutch, Irish, Scottish, Mohawk, Prussian, Austrian, English and Seneca. Two of my nephews are all of this and part Japanese and Okinawan too; they are hapa. Please make sure the truth is presented. Please do not allow someone to put forth a false definition. It is hurtful to those of us who are hapa and grew up with this word as a part of our heritage. People of Hawaiian ancestry have always been known to share and give in a most generous way, easily mixing and intermarrying with all ethnicities and races, and the word hapa can evolve to include anyone of mixed ethnic and racial ancestry, but please do not state that the definition of hapa is part Asian mixed ancestry. It is defined as "part, partial or fragment; one of mixed blood". Kelly Hu is hapa. Kelly Preston is hapa. Keanu Reeeves is hapa, and so forth. I have seen many sites on the web where the defition of hapa has been redefined. Please do not be such a site, be fair and just. (This was posted on the Reference Desk by User:Ilikea)


 * OK, so, in summary, you dispute:


 * The origin of hapa &mdash; Hawai&lsquo;ian rather than pidgin.
 * Usage of hapa &mdash; any mixed race, not just Asian.


 * On the first point, I think you need to discuss your sources for your beliefs on the etymology of the word with your co-contributors. I see that the talk page for the article is blank.  It is best to talk to people there before resorting to consulting the entire community.


 * On the second point, I see that the article does not say hapa means part-Asian. It just says they more often than not are.  Isn't this true?  Again, it is best to talk about this on the article's talk page.


 * I also see the article is very badly named. Hapa seems to have been moved to HAPA-Mainland U.S.A. redefinition of Hawaiian word, which is not in line with Wikipedia naming conventions.  I am going to move it back to Hapa.


 * Finally, welcome to Wikipedia &mdash; I hope you will become a regular and valuable contributor. Please make sure you sign your comments by putting ~ after them.  It would also be handy if you could divide them up into paragraphs for legibility (I had to do that for you.)  Thanks.  &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 05:27, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Welcome to Wikipedia where redefinition is rampant and a struggle to maintain historical consistency is difficult. My best wishes from a veteran wikipedian.WHEELER 15:02, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Need to know Tongan words translated to English
(Moved to Reference desk)

A challenge to all you designers out there - I need somebody to create a new barnstar.
Anyone interested in creating a barnstar of reconciliation to honor those who excel at patching things up between users? Neutrality 03:54, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * You could just tell them how much you appreciated it... Dysprosia 07:58, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Do you ever make significant changes to an article?
I'm just curious, what do any of you do when you come across an article which you believe needs significant changes to its structure? Like if it restates facts, scatters facts under irrelevant sections, uses 'critics believe that...' too often, rambles, includes lots of citations which aren't relevant or noteworthy, or just generally has poor formatting - do you ever go in and rework an article significantly? If you do, how do you deal with previous editors who may get their nose bent out of shape that you redid their stuff? Or do you just leave well enough alone, limit your changes to specific details within the existing structure of the article, and trust that the people who edited before you knew what they were doing and your own opinion might be wrong? - Brian Kendig 00:49, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Be bold, and explain your changes on the Talk pages, but be prepared to get involved in pointless controversies, or to get abused if a long standing one already exists for that article, or to get all your work reverted. -- Simonides 00:57, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Most of the time if you do a good reorg of the info, and structure a good encyclopedia article, you won't get wrapped up in arguments. Sloppy articles need to be fixed, and most people actually apprecaite a helpful touch on pages they frequent.  &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  01:13, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)


 * What's the article in question? -- Cyrius|&#9998; 02:13, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Windows XP. Before I started editing it, I felt like it read like a high school essay. It rambled and repeated words. I reworked it; someone reverted it (possibly by mistake?); someone else (in Talk:Windows_XP) said he was glad it was reverted. The version that's up there right now is based on my own edits, and I'm comfortable in my reasoning behind what I changed (but, of course, I don't mind someone else editing me). I guess I was just rattled a bit at first at having been reverted, and wanted to know what to do in case I was reverted again - especially as the complaints given about my article were fairly subjective and could have gone either way. Who's to say whether or not I deserved to be reverted? (Today I also reworked Windows Me and Mac OS. Is there any sort of "request for peer review" list around here, where I can ask people for opinions on my edits?) - Brian Kendig 02:36, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Brian, there is a place to request peer review at Peer review &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  04:57, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
 * I've reworked a couple of articles. Sometimes I just start rewriting it one paragraph at a time, adding a paragraph, and then later deleting the redundant parts in the rest of the article.  Sometimes I just add all the missing pieces first, so grossly expanding the article that the previous text is in the minority.  Then, later, the previous bits can be reworded, worked in, or just deleted. Either way, if your text is high quality, and no factual data is actually lost in the process, it'll probably stick, and hopefully fewer noses will be bent. --ssd 03:42, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I have also reworked a couple of articles. I think the following steps can be taken to minimise the risk of dispute -


 * Check the article's history. If there is a frequent contributor or the article is clearly largely the work of one or two users, explain your plans on their talk page(s) - not to ask "permission", but just to keep them informed.
 * Explain your plans on the article's talk page and invite comments. Anyone watching the article will see this.
 * Re-write in stages. If a re-structuring is necessary, do this first, with minimal changes to existing text. Leave it for a day or two. Then tidy up existing text (spelling, grammar, style etc.) but keep the same content. Leave it for a day or two again. Then add all that new content that you have been itching to put in.
 * Try not to remove stuff - this is what often causes disputes. Clear factual errors should be removed, but other material can usually be incorporated in one way or another. POV stuff can be re-written as NPOV; bias can be balanced etc.


 * Just my few thoughts ... Gandalf61 10:41, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)


 * Gandalf61, this is great advice (is this written up anywhere in a Wikipedia: space article?). Anecdote: one of my earliest contributions was an overly enthusiastic refactoring of cryptography &mdash; I think I ticked off a couple of editors because they were already working on a new version (although it was under construction as a user subpage, quite easy to overlook...). If I'd followed these guidelines, it would gone much smoother. &mdash; Matt 18:49, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

That IBM research suggested that initial text is rarely taken away. With the exception of short stubs, the first edit tends to define an article. There of course plenty of exceptions (even 1% would be 3,000 articles). Pcb21| Pete 10:51, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * What's this IBM research you mention? Was it all about Wikipedia? [[User:Bodnotbod| b o d not b o d      ......TALK Q uietly ) ]] 07:14, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
 * Blimey Bod you have a very long sig when you view it in wikitext! The IBM paper is . (Read the PDF). See also Wikipedia_in_academic_studies Pcb21| Pete 08:40, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I've seen the direct results of what the IBM study found, it isn't pretty. Some articles that started with text with factual errors continue to support those errors many edits later.  I think people are afraid to edit it out.  Frequently if the original text was disorganized, people just keep adding bits and pieces without ever actually restructuring it, leaving it a rambling mess.  I've found myself doing this.  It is much harder to rearrange and restructure a text than just add a few pieces.  The original text will color the tone of the article long afterwards, even if it does not deserve to. --ssd 04:41, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

To facilitate the building of a consensus around what edits an article need, you can use the new Todo lists. Any comments on it are welcome. Pcarbonn 17:04, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Summarised sections

 * User persists in re-publishing squicky clothing material --> User talk:Zora
 * External links vs External link --> Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (headings)
 * how to pick a piece of the wikipedia --> User talk:Avsa
 * CSS problem --> User talk:Mike Storm
 * Child Safety and Wikipedia --> Wikipedia talk:Content disclaimer
 * where are the images? --> Picture missing. Now returned. Try Ctrl F5. Caption needs improving.
 * Notice of poll opening for managing disruptive or antisocial editors --> Dealing with disruptive or antisocial editors/poll
 * using content in discusion forum --> See Copyrights
 * External links to H2G2 entries --> Wikipedia talk:External links
 * On requiring users to sign in --> Wikipedia talk:Why create an account?
 * AFL dot com spaming --> Talk:American Football League
 * Yaargh! --> Skin looks funny? Try changing it to Monobook in Special:Preferences
 * Political Color Coding? --> Talk:United States Senate
 * List of XXX necessary? --> Categories complement lists, not replace them.
 * What links here wierdness --> Known bug in the links table.
 * Remove top whitespace, mv category+interwiki links to bottom --> Wikipedia talk:Categorization
 * Common sense on MainPage, please. --> Wikipedia talk:Editing the main page
 * Add references, please --> A reminder to cite your sources
 * New project: WikiProject Irish literature
 * Wikipedia Publicity Committee --> PR department
 * Categories --> User talk:Nichalp
 * Weird templates --> User talk:Grin
 * Americocentrism --> Template_talk:In_the_news
 * Modern Library --> Talk:Modern_Library
 * Britain = United Kingdom ? --> See User talk:KF

Another request to German speakers
Could you help out with the Geheimrat page. Thanks --Jondel 01:03, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Categorization weirdness.
While I was working with Catgeory:Rivers, some interesting things happened:

I creating two new subcategories (Category:Hawaiian rivers and Category:Middle Eastern rivers) and labeled articles in the new subcategories, as appropriate. But for some reason they still remain in the larger Category:Rivers. Anyone know why this is happening or how I can fix it?--Neutrality 01:28, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Categorization weirdness.
While I was working with Category:Rivers, some interesting things happened:

I creating two new subcategories (Category:Hawaiian rivers and Category:Middle Eastern rivers) and labeled articles in the new subcategories, as appropriate. But for some reason they still remain in the larger Category:Rivers. Anyone know why this is happening or how I can fix it?--Neutrality 01:28, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Is there any Free Good Html Desiging Software other than Frontpage
I hope there is a good html designing software other than frontpage

Redirects and links to empty pages
Following on from the comments above, I am quite surprised that there are so many redirects and links to empty pages. These are not on the list of good things and may even be on the list of bad things. Is it possible to reduce their numbers using some form of search and replace mechanism? Bobblewik 19:52, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

please block 217.132.176.75 he is deleting this article over and over again
he is deleting the article Avigad Berman for no reason

Taoism, in Klingon
Can someone help me out? I am looking at Taoism, but would really like to read the article in Klingon. I notice that the Klingon Wikipedia has an article about Taoism, but, although it is in the source, it does not appear in the language bar, but rather, at the bottom of the article: Daw_lalDan. What is wrong? Apart from the obvious, of course. Mark Richards 23:25, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Klingon interlanguage links are not displayed. This is part of a compromise between the people that wanted a Klingon Wikipedia, and the people that wanted it deleted. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 23:32, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I can understand that, but the link does appear at the bottom of the article, it looks odd, and is confusing, since it is not apparent what it links too, it not being in the language bar, and links to a page that is uninteligible. Can we fix it in any way? My browser renders:

External links

* Taoism Information Page (http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/) * Resources for East Asian Language and Thought (http://www.acmuller.net) with Translation of the Daodejing * Lao Tse & Daoism (http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/laotse.htm) * Taoist Restoration Society (http://www.taorestore.org) * Taoist Culture & Information Centre (http://www.eng.taoism.org.hk)

tlh:Daw lalDan

Mark Richards 18:30, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 *   Perhaps people might like to learn Irish instead and help out at ga:! It even sounds similar :o) Eara, níl mé i ndairíre! Zoney 23:50, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Can someone point me to where this discussion is had? The current 'compromise' is kind of kookey! Mark Richards 22:22, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Apparently "languages" like Toki Pona (with maybe as much as 12 "speakers", if you&#8217;re generous) are allowed to link, but fun languages like Klingon with a relatively large speaker base (rivalling or exceeding Esperanto, iirc) are not. Purely arbitrary because some people dislike tlhIngan Hol. Never mind the fact that Klingon has an ISO language code apparently! Anárion 06:21, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * * yawn* Artificial languages equal rights. -- Tim Starling 06:27, Aug 4, 2004 (UTC)


 * Eh, who uses meta? And how long has that "poll" (if that what it is) been going on now? Anárion 07:51, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * The orignal compromise was made on the mailing list. Angela. 08:23, Aug 4, 2004 (UTC)

When interlanguage links are ambiguous
It had occured to me that this problem might be possible, but I had never come across it in practice before. So... Is there any established way to get around the problem that occures when a word in one language translates as two (or more) in the other? I wanted to link the Irish wiki article Cnáimhseachas to the English wiki, but the word translates either as midwifery or obstetrics. I can't find any synonyms (or near-synonyms) for the word in Irish that could be used to make two different titles, and I wouldn't dare suggest merge the two English articles. I know that there are other examples in other languages. Should altlang links be put in for both articles, or is there some technical trick I'm unaware of? -- Kwekubo 23:21, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I can only think of two less than ideal methods:


 * put both and rely on users looking at the hover box or status bar to distinguish the two
 * put them in the page body, where they can be explained
 * --Patrick 06:43, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Also you can split the Irish article, but that is rather drastic if it is just for this purpose.--Patrick 06:57, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

A quick Poll
What monitor size and resolution do you use? Also what OS and Browser?(I use 17" and 1152x768x24, WinXP, Moz 1.7 BTW) I'm just wondering what the community uses. &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  22:19, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * right now it's 23" 1600x1200 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8 The lowest I occasionally use is text 80x24 and lynx 2.8.5 BACbKA 22:38, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Oh my god. A 23" monitor! 16x12! That would be heaven for me (particularly with a graphics card that supports that). &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  23:27, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * I didn't intend to engage in comparative penilometry, just gave the honest specs :-) Right now I am surfing off a laptop, same browser/OS (the distro is Debian sarge BTW), but the resolution is 1024x768x24 at 15". Occn'ly I'm using Konqueror/3.2 (when I encounter a Firefox bug, mostly, or if I have a stupid site that is too much IE-optimized), but it is too heavy to use it as a default. Other than that, Konqueror is great. BACbKA 13:06, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 19" 1600x1200x24, Gentoo Linux, Mozilla Firefox with a browser window usually around 1000x1000. -- Wapcaplet 23:13, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * At work, 17" LCD monitor @ 1280x1024, Windows XP, Firefox; At home, 17" CRT monitor @ 1024x768, Windows 2000, Mozilla. Browser window always maximised. &mdash;Stormie 23:32, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
 * Dual monitors of different sizes and resolutions. Browser windows stay near 750 px wide, which makes overly large fixed-width tables on Wikipedia jump out. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 23:40, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 17" TFT monitor, 1280 x 1024, Windows 2000, MSIE. -- Arwel 00:57, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 15" TFT (laptop), 1024x768, WinXP Pro and Firefox --AlexG 01:48, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 19" 1600x1200x24, a personal variant of Linux, Firefox. -- Grunt (talk) 01:56, 2004 Aug 3 (UTC)
 * 17" CRT 1280 x 1024, Firefox/Opera7 (and IE and Amaya when I feel like pain) all on XP. Also 800x600 on laptop LCD, konqueror on linux (man, konqueror kicks ass) Links and Lynx occasionally.-- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 02:17, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 15" TFT, 1400x1050, WinXP, MSIE. - UtherSRG 02:31, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * All over the map, I routinely work from 4 different places. -- Jmabel 03:12, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
 * 15" CRT 800x600 24 bit, Win98Se, IE6 now but IE5.5 or maybe even IE5.0 shortly. Andrewa 04:36, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Home: 15" LCD 1024&times;768, Gentoo, Firefox; Work: 17" CRT 1024&times;768, Win2k Pro, IE6. I don't edit much at work. --rbrwr&circ; 06:23, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 19" CRT, 1152x864, Opera 7 (maximised), XP Apwoolrich 06:32, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 19" CRT, 1600x1200 (should probably go higher), IE6 in Windows 2000 or Firefox in Fedora Core 2, depending on mood... --Golbez 06:50, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 17" Flatscreen 128- x 1024, Opera 7, Windows XP. ALose use IE or Netscape if I'm fiddling with how things look, but I forget the versions. Lyellin 08:21, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
 * @home: 19" CRT, 1280x1024, Opera 7 (latest build), WinXP SP2 P2 Anárion 08:29, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * @work: 17" CRT, 1024x768, MSIE 6 (I have to alas :, Win2000 SP4 Anárion 08:29, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 17" Flatscreen 1280x1024, Win XP Home, Opera 7.20 (seldom IE or Mozilla). Jao 08:57, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
 * 14" laptop 1024x768, Win2k Pro SP4, Opera 7.23 (w/ Firefox 0.8, Netscape 4.79 & 7.1, Mozilla 1.5, & [ugh!] MSIE 6.0sp1 for testing) &mdash; Jeff Q 09:42, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 19" CRT 1600x1200, Gentoo linux, Mozilla Firefox. &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  09:43, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
 * 15" CRT 1280x1024, Slackware Linux, Mozilla Firefox. Johnleemk | Talk 10:40, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 19" Viewsonic G90fPlus CRT (superb quality) at 1024px by 768px, Windows XP Home, IE Version 6 - Adrian Pingstone 14:07, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 35 cm; 1024&times;768; Mac OS X; Safari, Opera, iCab. Gdr 16:25, 2004 Aug 3 (UTC)
 * 17" CRT 1600x1200, Gentoo Linux, Opera 7.53 aljandy 17:56, 2004 Aug 3 (UTC)
 * 17" flatscreen, 1280x1024 (maximum, although I have it set at 1024x768), Windows XP Professional, Netscape 7.2 (or sometimes Mozilla). (I don't know the specifics of the Mac at work.) Adam Bishop 17:14, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 15" monitor (unknown type) 1152x864, Windows XP, IE 6 |Rhymeless 19:39, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * 19" 1600x1200 with Firefox on my Linux computer, else 17" 1024x768 on my brother's Win XP computer with Firefox.
 * 21" CRT 1024x768, though I used to run it at 800x600. FreeBSD 4.10 with Phoenixfox 0.9 as my main browser. Darrien 21:33, 2004 Aug 4 (UTC)

Around 85% of visits to WP are via IE. I expect this self-selecting poll will show a much lower number. What conclusions can we draw? Pcb21| Pete 11:20, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * That where people have no choice of browser (work, library etc.) they will use IE, and otherwise they install a modern browser? Anárion 13:22, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Not true. I'm a die-hard, build it yourself computer nerd. Or at least I was until I bought a laptop. (Ain't so easy to build something highly portable...) I've given up on trying to keep up with the latest and greatest hardware and software. When Netscape stopped coming out with updates way back when, I switched to MSIE, kicking and screaming all the way. When I bought my laptop with XP (finally an OS from MS that's reasonably worthy of being called an OS...) I continued with MSIE. I don't want to learn where all the tweak buttons are for yet another piece of software. I'm used to MSIE now. Can I do better? Sure. Will there be down-sides? Perhaps. Will they be small compared to the benefits? Probably. - UtherSRG 19:02, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * You should try Firefox. At only 4.7MB and simple interface designed for the average user, its good to go, there is even a guide written about switching from IE. It is also extendable, there is even Wikipedia specific extensions. Firefox is the browser of choice for all my family. So I recommend everybody who voted IE to try Firefox.  User:Krik 21:58, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Firefox is okay, Opera is a great browser also. A full internet suite in less than half the size of Firefox (less than a fifth if you want FF to be comparable and install Thunderbird + all those necessary extensions). As for IE being sufficient, I know people that were using Netscape 4 until 2003 so I can understand the reluctance to chance even though the browser is technically a generation or two behind... Anárion 07:53, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Protocol for deleting finished topics
The Village Pump/Help Desk/Ref Desk/VfD pages are all hella long, leading to crazy load times or even sometimes time outs. Is it ok to delete topics that are no longer active? For example, some pages have been listed in VfD and then speedy deleted. Can I delete the page entry? Another example is that I asked a question earlier today on this page about Baroque/Baroque art redirects that was answered and that would not be of any use to anyone else. Can I delete the question/answer?
 * I don't know the policy, but why not? &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  22:16, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

VfD policy is that, once a page is listed, it stays for 5 days. RickK 22:32, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * Pages don't always have to stay on VfD 5 days. If they were wrongly listed in the first place, they can be removed, and if they are CSDs they can be deleted early. The village pump etc can be shortened through Refactoring or by following the suggestions at Maintenance. Angela. 23:21, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * I thought the policy on CSDs and other early resolutions was that the VfD entry could be removed 24 hours after resolution if nobody objected, but I don't know where I got that from. It's a good idea to put a notice on the entry saying removal is pending IMO. Andrewa 05:16, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * In practice, you don't even have to wait 24 hours or leave message if the early resolution is an obvious "keep". Pcb21| Pete 11:27, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * That really is not policy. RickK 21:40, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)


 * I would seriously suggest that people do not remove items from VfD early - that page suffers badly enough from the dreaded page duping bug as it is, and I'm positive that people removing sections while other people are adding sections is in some way implicated. So I would recommend leaving them there - where's the harm? - until they reach the end of their 5 days and get cleaned up in a mass swoop by whichever admin is implementing the votes that day. &mdash;Stormie 04:05, Aug 4, 2004 (UTC)

Interwiki links
I just had an idea and I thought I'd spit it out here because it might work well. Why not have links at the top of articles to the relevant Wiki pages like the interlingua links used to be? (So if I go to the 'surfboard' article at the top there'll be a link to the Wiktionary surfboard entry and if I go to the 'John Kerry' page at the top there'll be a link to the relevant WitiQuote article). Sorry if this has come up before - I've been away for ages because at first my internet crashed and didn't get fixed and by the time it was back I was really busy... and so on. Sorry for rambling. L UDRAMAN | T 21:46, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Good idea. Also we should be able to search all the Wikis at once. This might be one of those things to put in SourceForge feature requests. Salasks 22:12, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Editing a page above the first TOC entry
There used to be an "[edit]" link at the top of every page which allowed you to edit the section of the page above the first Header. That link is gone. There now seems to be no way to edit a page if the part you want to edit is above the first header, except to edit the entire page. Are we going to have to put "Introduction" headers on every page so we can get to the unlabeled section? RickK 20:09, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
 * wasn't there something about editing the first header and then changing the URL to section=0? &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  20:14, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Yes. This was discussed not too long ago. It is a known bug.  If you like, you can still edit just the first section by replacing the section=1 at the end of the URL with section=0.  That way you can select a shorter section to edit, but get the first section by replacing the section number.  It isn't perfect, but it's a work-around until the bug is fixed.  I use it a great deal and it's always worked for me. HTH.   &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 20:17, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Database error
I've been trying to correct an editing error for several minutes now in the Current Events page, but every time I click "Save", I get:

Database error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software.

RickK 19:38, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

And now I just got it editing George W. Bush. RickK 20:09, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * Yep, I get it too when trying to edit my user page.  &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 20:12, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * Here's where I got it. While editing User:Ilyanep (2x), while editing User talk: Texture, while editing Village pump (2x), and while editing another of my User subpages. This has been within the last hour or so &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  20:17, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * If I read the IRC chat correctly a vandal moved around a user talk page - which due to its many internal links makes the database server too busy to allow any other transactions. Now it seems to be back to normal. andy 20:26, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Let's hope &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  20:31, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

2004 IAAF World Indoor Championships
I have started an rtcl on the 2004 IAAF World Indoor Championships but cannot find any useful general information regarding which other countries bid for it or any problems the Hungarians had in staging it etc. to fill the introduction out. If anyone happened to be there?? a couple of photos of the stadium or something would be handy. Any help gratefully received.Scraggy4 18:29, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Baroque art redirects to Baroque, not Baroque Art
This seems wrong, but Baroque seems like a better article. One sure problem is that Baroque links to Baroque art which redirects back to itself. Baroque is a featured article, so I'm a little weary of busting something up. Salasks 17:34, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * Well, it seems pretty clear to me that Baroque Art should redirect to Baroque art, so I've fixed it so that it does. Don't be put off by the fact that Baroque is a featured article--it's good to edit those boldly too! --Camembert

Was i irresponsible?
I'm guessing that my horror of the Worm Ouroboros is irrelevant, and that none of the tech wizards will object to my edit at Talk:Priscilla Davis. But i just couldn't resist, and i hope that someone cautious (and perhaps a few irony-lovers) will follow the link from Talk:Priscilla Davis, and revert me if appropriate. --Jerzy(t) 16:58, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)

Wikipedia's headline stats for July 2004
The July stats are in (see http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/usage_200407.html ) and they make some interesting reading...

July was the English Wikipedia's busiest month ever (I think), with:


 * 9,439,508 hits
 * 8,208,960 files were downloaded
 * 5,672,051 pages were served
 * 316,295 visits (not clear if this refers to unique visitors or just page impressions)
 * 2,083,869,414 Kb of data was downloaded

Excluding project and special pages (and the Main Page), the 10 most requested articles were:


 * 1) Nick Berg (Iraq hostage)
 * 2) John Kerry (new entry)
 * 3) Kim Sun-il (Iraq hostage)
 * 4) OS-tan (deeply bizarre; a must-read) (new entry)
 * 5) List of sex positions
 * 6) United States
 * 7) Crushing by elephant (yay, go elephants! ;-)
 * 8) Bobby Fischer (former chess champion) (new entry)
 * 9) Wikipedia
 * 10) Wiki

For comparison, the 10 most requested for June were:


 * 1) Paul Johnson (hostage)
 * 2) Kim Sun-il
 * 3) Paul Marshall Johnson, Jr.
 * 4) Beheading
 * 5) Decapitation
 * 6) Redmond, Washington
 * 7) Goatse.cx
 * 8) SpaceShipOne
 * 9) Wikipedia
 * 10) United States

The top 10 search terms for July were:


 * 1) wikipedia
 * 2) wiki
 * 3) nick berg
 * 4) cristiano ronaldo
 * 5) teresa heinz kerry
 * 6) encyclopedia
 * 7) beheading
 * 8) harry potter and the half blood prince
 * 9) marlon brando
 * 10) ken jennings

From this, it looks pretty clear that Wikipedia is being heavily used as a resource for major ongoing news events, particularly Iraq. -- ChrisO 16:37, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * cool. &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  20:33, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * It's also pretty clear that we've been wasting our time with our encyclopedic coverage of kings, battles, politicians, rivers, and elementary particles. We obviously have to radically retask our efforts to expand our coverage of sex positions and macabre modes of death (or ideally articles combining both). -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 21:17, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I have a feeling that kings, battle, rivers, and all that will become more popular again once school is back in session. Samboy 10:57, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * List of bondage positions could use some work ;) &rarr;Raul654 21:20, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia clones and search engine ratings
I've started a page at Send in the clones to discuss this. Any comments? -- The Anome 14:06, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Say what you will, but two wrongs don't make a right. Much of what passes as SEO is really just plain Googlebombing. If you're talking about real SEO, that'd involve things like correct page structure, etc. which I believe we already have. Besides, if we play dirty, there's a chance Google will later demote us in search rankings. Overall, optimise only if its legal, and doesn't involve some dirty trick. Johnleemk | Talk 14:13, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I wonder if there are any problems for the google crawler going through our site. I usually check for the google rating of some of the articles I have created. For example monthon it recently had the article in the top 10 of google hits, before it had the link only without a cached version (and much below top 10), and now it seems to have disappeared again. But the mirrors are all present. Does the google bot run into any traffic throttleling, or the measures to block mirroring by sucking all pages? It's of course impossible to guess what is really going on at google... andy 18:25, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

We've had this problem ever since Google redid its PageRank criteria in order, according to them, cut down on Googlebombing. If anything the opposite seems to have happened. But I would not push Google on this issue until we have a good handle on our finances/server situation. --mav 07:53, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia logo
Is there any reason that the Wikipedia logo in the upper left corner "flashes" whenever I place my mouse pointer on it? This is really annoying.

Acegikmo1 13:59, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * You must be using MSIE. I guess it&#8217;s

/* show the hand */ cursor: pointer; }
 * 1) p-logo a,
 * 2) p-logo a:hover {
 * in IE60Fixes.css: MSIE doesn&#8217;t really understand hovers in combination with pointers. Forcing a default pointer for the entire #p-logo class will probably solve it if I remember the bugwards compatibility rules. Anárion 14:43, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I had this same problem. I tried using cursor: default but it still did that. I ended up putting the background on the div instead of the a, with this:

background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 35% 50% !important; background-image: url(/upload/b/bc/Wiki.png); }    background-image: none !important; }
 * 1) p-logo {
 * 1) p-logo a {
 * That seems to fix the problem. Goplat 04:47, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Actually, no it doesn't. That stops it from reloading when the mouse moves over it, but it still reloads on every new page, because of the underlying problem: IE just isn't caching it. None of this happens on the logos of other Wikimedia projects, only Wikipedia. Goplat 17:22, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Main page, skins and login
Can anyone explain why my persistent login works on all (AFAIK) pages except for the main page where it displays Login at top right not SGBailey(Talk) and is in the defualt skin. If I move to another page, my loggedin-ness and skin (Classic) return. Puzzled. -- SGBailey 11:02, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)

Maybe you're looking at a cached Main Page? Try reload. Salasks 15:19, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Template:Protected
There is currently a poll at Template talk:Protected regarding whether it should have an image or not. This affects enough high-profile articles that I think it's worth noting here. &mdash;Kate | Talk 08:49, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)

Article series boxes/succession boxes
I was fiddling around with the article series boxes and the political succession boxes to see if I could come up with a good mixture of the two...I'm not sure where the best place to discuss this would be, so I thought I would post it here where lots of people would see it (as opposed to the Wikipedia:Article series page where hardly anyone will see it). If anyone would like to comment on/discuss/improve what I've been doing, it is at User:Adam Bishop/sandbox. (If I should post examples here as well, just let me know.) Adam Bishop 06:16, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I really like the second possibility listed. &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  06:21, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Looks quite good, especially the third version, which doesn't have the silly repetition of the title. (Co-rulers are uncommon anyway, so that problem could be treated separately.) How would you handle boxes like that in William III of the Netherlands? One box for each title? -- Jao 06:33, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * That is what I was going to work on next - there are even more complicated examples, see Charles I of Sicily for example. Adam Bishop 06:37, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm quite partial to the ones The Tom has been adding for Canadian cabinet ministers. See for instance Mauril Bélanger. I've never been too fond of blue backgrounds for boxes. - SimonP 06:49, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * I dunno, I like the simpler tables used for things like the US Presidents (Bill Clinton is a good example). I dunno about colors. Is the main point of this exercise to create a template? --Golbez 08:42, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * If you don't mind, I'll add a little variation on one of your tables to your sandbox page. &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  16:30, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Golbez - some of the succession boxes are already templates (the Byzantine emperors box, and some of the British peerage boxes, for example), but they don't all necessarily have to be templates. By the way, another possibility I have seen is some of the Roman emperors on fr: - such as fr:Auguste. Adam Bishop 17:14, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

After further attempts to make this work, I have noticed they aren't very useful for more complicated boxes like Charles of Anjou. So I guess the boxes should stay the way they are, or something else should be done. Ah well. Adam Bishop 19:19, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Unified Login
Perhaps this was discussed before but I don't know. It would be useful to have a part of the signup screen to say which wikis you want to sign up on, and then you have the same account for all of them and when you login, you login to all, and your userpage is automatically interlinked or redirected, etc. Also, when you sign up for another wiki you can have the option to add that to your existing unified account. This way, you can see the contribs for a user in one screen (with options to filter out depending on which wiki). This could have many benefits. &mdash; Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  06:13, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * It has been brought up before. The major issue is that nobody has volunteered to write the code and sort out the issues of existing duplicate usernames. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 16:52, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Categories issues
I'm putting this here because I couldn't figure out one logical place among all the categorization/category pages to put this request. Thoughts? Elf | Talk 05:40, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * First, every page that is a member of a category has a link at the bottom of the form Categories:categoryName. One would expect that clicking on Categories would give you something useful--but NOooo, it takes you to Special:Categories, which gives you the first 50 alphabetically of all existing categories and subcategories, which is useless in almost all cases.  This link needs to go either to a page that explains what categories are and gives some options on where to go (such as  Category) or else simply to the top-level hierarchical category, either  Category:Categories or Category:Fundamental.
 * Second, the top of Special:Categories needs to display text that helps you to get someplace useful from there--first, tells you what it's a list of ("all existing categories and subcategories") and, next, tells you how to get someplace useful (see first point).
 * You are quite correct. The Categories link is pretty useless for the average user in this context. older &ne; wiser 15:48, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Most Edits Lists
I know I've been postin a lot here lately. Shouldn't the wikipedians by number of edits be updated more often? One is updated July 1st and the other one was May 7th. Ilyanep (Talk) 05:28, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I think once every few months is often enough. My problem is that the information from July 1 is wrong! (see the talk page)


 * Acegikmo1 05:55, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Helping people keep score should not be a priority. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 16:50, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Actually the talk page shows that the stats problem is much wider than just the number of edits lists. Given that the stats scripts are basically useless at the moment for an unknown reason, I think it *should* be a priority. Pcb21| Pete 16:56, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Siggy
Is there any way to have all my signatures prefaced with the mdash (without manually havine to add it all the time)? I've already learned how to change what's after the signature (as you can see...I added a link to my talk page), but not before. I don't want to make everything cluttered by making my name ' ]] &mdash: Ilyanep (Talk) ' because that would show up in every signature as '   &mdash: Ilyanep (Talk) '. Thanks in advance &mdash; Ilyanep (Talk) 05:21, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)-->


 * I use Proxomitron as an ad-blocker, but it can do much more than that, basically it can perform any search-and-replace on a web page that you can specify with a regular expression. So I set one up to change the Javascript code of the "signature" button above the wikipedia text edit box to insert "&amp;mdash;~", instead of "--~" . The expression is:


 * Matching Expression

\'Your signature with timestamp\',\'--~\'


 * Replacement Text

\'Your signature with timestamp\',\'&amp;amp;mdash;~\'


 * Geeky enough? :-) &mdash;Stormie 06:37, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * I've successfully done this with my signature. I actually found the code somewhere here on Wikipedia.  It looks like this:
 * &lt;nowiki&gt;&lt;/nowiki&gt;]]&mdash; Frecklefoot | [[User talk:Frecklefoot|Talk


 * The only drawback to this approach is that you'll get a blank link right before the mdash. It doesn't render, but it shows up in the wikimarkup if you edit an entry.  Look at the code for this post to see what I mean.  But it doesn't affect your rendered signature like I said, so it is only a minor drawback. HTH.   &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 16:11, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * See, that's what I don't like...that it shows up on the wikimarkup. And what does proximitron do? &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  16:28, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Yes, it shows up ugly in wikimarkup, but this is just a side effect from the way the signature works. The only way to get it NOT to show up in wikimarkup would be to get the developer's to change the way signatures work (perhaps by providing a standard signature or allowing a completely custom one).  Sorry, I have no idea what Proximitron does.   &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 18:57, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * I use Proxomitron as an ad-blocker, but it can do much more than that &mdash;Stormie 06:37, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)
 * I guess that's what it does, then ;) Dysprosia 02:09, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Old Eastern Bloc C'Rights?
I am just wondering out of curoristy...Whatever happened to copyrights that were held by the USSR, SFRY, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR? Thanks! - iHoshie 04:12, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * First of all, I think this belongs on the Reference Desk. Second of all, they all probably went to heck (who would seriously care about taking over the records -- esepcially if you're a communist), but don't take me as an expert. Ilyanep (Talk) 05:10, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Your right. I posted this in the wrong place. Mea Culpa. - iHoshie 06:18, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I don't believe they had copyright laws, actually. Intellectual property wasn't protected. That's one of the reasons why the ex-communist countries were and are such a hotbed of piracy - the culture all along the line was one of free copying by the state or citizens. -- ChrisO 15:33, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * They had copyright laws, but they were a different set, which was why many English songs were pirated. &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  16:28, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * We have an empty section copyright and communism in the history of copyright article, care to add your knowledge there? Andrewa 06:14, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Talk:Greatbigtwit
I found this "talk" page, Talk:Greatbigtwit, but apparently there's never been a Greatbigtwit article. Can I just speedy it, or do I have to VfD it? Seems like it has to qualify under one (or more) of the first four speedy cases, just not sure which one(s). Or maybe case 11 should be amended to cover cases like this. Niteowlneils 01:23, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I read the page; it's blatant vandalism. Speedy it, and quickly. [[User:Mike Storm|Mike &infin; Storm]] 02:12, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Deleted it -- Chris 73 | Talk 02:35, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Time zone offset keeps getting reset
I have set my time zone offset in preferences to "-04:00". However, every few weeks, it changes to "-4:00" and goes back to displaying timestamps as UTC. This is rather frustrating. Does anyone know how to fix it?

Acegikmo1 00:44, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * So it changes from -4 to -4? I don't understand...maybe I'm just that stupid. It also depends which timestamps you're talking about. The signature timestamp, for example, is always UTC. Ilyanep (Talk) 00:56, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I think he meant that the leading zero disappears. But the leading zero is automatically removed whenever you save your preferences, so that couldn't be the problem. If you don't believe me, save it with a leading zero and then immediately click the preferences link to reload the settings from the database. Perhaps this is one of those annoying transient bugs that goes away when you look at it. The obvious thing that comes to mind is that timestamps are in UTC when you are logged out, or when for some unknown reason some part of the software is treating you as logged out. -- Tim Starling 01:15, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Counting Edits
Perhaps this has already been discusseed, but is there an easy way (aside from counting and using fancy offsets on my contribs) to count my contributions? Does this involve running a Perl/Python script? Ilyanep (Talk) 00:36, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Copy and paste your contributions into a file, and do a simple line count. Otherwise there is no other way other than running a database query, AFAIK. Dysprosia 01:17, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * The other way is to ask on the pump when a developer is in a good mood. 1195. -- Tim Starling 01:19, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * Haha, thanks a lot, any way for me to do my own check and find which edit was the xth contrib? Ilyanep (Talk) 05:08, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * There is a weekly updated CSV file with number of edits for Wikipedias of all languages, or if you have a lot of contributions check Wikipedians by number of edits for the top 1000 contributors, distinguishing mainspace and all edits -- Chris 73 | Talk 02:39, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Fine, but what does "en,161,0,527,9,1751,1691,Ilyanep" mean? And what if I want to find the xth contrib (say, the 1250th). Ilyanep (Talk) 05:08, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits: Chris 73 | Talk 05:41, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * First column: Language code: English
 * Second column: Main namespace edits: 161
 * Third column: Number of main namespace edits in the last thirty days: 0
 * Fourth column: Non-main namespace edits: 527 (that would make your total to 688)
 * Fifth column: Number of non-mainspace edits in the last thirty days: 9
 * Sixth column: This week's ranking: 1751
 * Seventh column: Last week's ranking: 1691
 * Eight column: User name: Ilyanep


 * First my edit number is over 1000, which got dumped in the wiki transfer thing. Second, gotta get some more namespace edits :D. Third, thanks for the help. Ilyanep (Talk) 05:45, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Here's what I do: I download all my contribs, by changing the number in the URL line so it is higher than 500 (example:  Special:Contributions&hideminor=0&target=Antandrus&limit=1000&offset=0 ); then I copy and paste the whole thing into a text editor, and turn on line numbers.  You could drop it into Excel or a database program and then query to your heart's desire.  While the .csv download gives you your totals, the method I describe gives you a way to get a specific edit number on anything you have done.  Antandrus 05:51, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I could script it in VBA. Awesome! &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  06:06, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Perhaps a good feature would be to allow the generation of a CSV file of all your edits so it's easier to organize. With one column for all of the following: Minor/Not, New/Not, Date, Article (I seem to be having more ideas at 1:15 AM than I do usually in regular time). &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  06:15, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * I think that's a great idea! Unfortunately it's a Monday morning for me so I can't improve on it now :-\  Antandrus 16:26, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Yay! Well, if you ever have time to do that, please post a note on my talk or somewhere notable so I know I have that power :D. &mdash;  Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;)  20:13, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

DST
Can someone tell the server about a phenomenon called Daylight Savings Time, so I don't have so switch between GMT-5 and GMT-6 every time we have DST?


 * The specific date, direction, and amount of shift to "correct" for the changing light levels is very much location-specific; indeed, some places don't have any need of it at all. The server is in GMT (well, an approximation of UTC-1, AIUI); the clocks change but twice a year, and I'm sure that you can cope. In fact, I don't have it change, and use my head to do the offset instead (well, 'tis only an hour for me, so...).
 * James F. (talk)


 * It would be simple. There could be a check box that says "Please auto-correct my time shift for daylight savings time", so it would only do it if you wanted it to.   If there are different types of daylight savings times around the globe, it could have an option to select which type. Worth submitting a feature request for, I might do it soon if nobody else has.  &mdash; siro  &chi;  o  04:26, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * Over here in Israel, there is a vote taking place every year, that determines the DST shift in/shift out. Computer modelling of our politicians to predict what they are going to vote on would be mostly welcome. :-) Seriously, a common practice is using NTP to feed off a trusted server, and once it jumps, you know that the daylight savings jumped. The server is manually updated. Some systems just have some hardwired approximate default dates, so around the shift they give wrong time for about a month in the worst case. BACbKA 20:58, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * You use NTP to transmit local times and not UTC? Oh, the horror, the horror... David.Monniaux 14:07, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Most open source Unix systems use a library produced by NIH that knows about virtually every set of timezone rules on earth and is capable of translating things like US/Eastern + an offset in GMT into the local time and date. This library is extremely well maintained, the timezone files cover almost all jurisdictions on the planet, and updates come out several times a year. The code is all open source. There is no reason not to use it. --Pmetzger 21:03, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hordaland picture
Does anyone know about the picture on Hordaland? One picture that's supposed to be there isn't, and the other isn't on Wikipedia so it doesn't show up. I'd upload it and add it, but I'm not sure if it's fair use. Salasks 00:33, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * The first one doesn't show up because it doesn't exist. Are you sure you have the name right? The second doesn't show up because we don't allow external images on en. It's too open to abuse and plain old breakage. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 08:10, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

tag poll
I've reopened Span tags poll, in case there are users who were unaware of it the first time or who were ineligible to vote. --Eequor 21:12, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Default skin
Chosen an arbitrary skin, how do I change back to the default skin, which I see when I'm not logged in? --PuzzletChung


 * Go to "preferences", there will be a "skins" option. Check "Monobook", or try the others if I'm remembering that wrong. Best, [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 18:27, 2004 Aug 1 (UTC)

Help! Am I colorblind?
Is it just me or is the background color (#F8FCFF) for non-article namespaces prescribed at MediaWiki:Monobook.css basically the same as white? It says "light blue" but all I see it white. --Jiang 01:45, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * It's not white, but it's pretty close. Moreover, as it's not a netsafe colour, your browser may be aliasing it to what it considers to be an acceptable netsafe colour (which may indeed be #ffffff, i.e. white).  Naturally browsers are most likely to do this in 256 colour mode, but some do it for text (etc) regardless of colour mode. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 01:55, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. I was scared for a second there. Can we change it to a netsafe color, either #CCFFCC or #CCFFFF then? I don't think I'm alone, because Im not using particularly outdated or rare technology. --Jiang 02:07, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * If "Am I colorblind" is a serious question... ask your eye doctor to test you the next time you're in. Or look for one of the many color-blindness tests on the web. The two commonest kinds of color-blindness, deuteranopia and protanopia, involve problems discriminating along the red/green axis, not the blue/yellow axis. Not only can a color-blind person tell the difference between white and light blue, in many cases they might even have heightened sensitivity to such differences than someone with normal color vision. Protanopes will see the red light on a traffic light as rather dim. Deuteranopes will see all lights on a traffic light as bright (and of different colors) but will find that even bright green colors look similar to shades of brown.


 * Well, you asked.


 * The color I see as the text background on this very page is indeed a very light blue. It is a tossup whether I could call it a "very light blue" or a "cool white." I might not notice that it was not white if it were not for the fact that there are patches of actual white on the same page. But it's there, (and personally, I find it annoying). [[User:dpbsmith|dpbsmith (talk)]] 02:22, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The "web-safe" palette is not all it's cracked up to be. See "Death of the Websafe Color Palette?" Also, if you find the background color annoying, or would prefer it to be a different color, simply edit User:YourUserName/monobook.css and add:

background: #FFFFFF; /* Or whatever color you like */ }
 * 1) content {

-- Wapcaplet 02:39, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I think if people can barely see the background color, then the purpose of having such a background color is defeated. It helps prevent newbies/anons from getting too hyped up (e.g. at Talk:dictator) at what they see on talk pages and to not confuse them with articles. --Jiang 06:26, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I am colorblind and a happy user of the WhatColor freeware. -- Pjacobi 18:40, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I always wondered too. It looks white to me. Johnleemk | Talk 10:44, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

visited links i havent visited
third post in a row, wow. i see links all over the place on this site that are red and not blue, which typically means i have visited the site; however there are many i know i havent touched that show up as visited. anyone get this too and know why it happens?

thanks JoeSmack (talk) 22:57, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
 * Red links are ones with empty pages at the other end (which you are welcome to populate!) Depending on the sort of browser you are using, and also the preferences that you have selected, links that you have and haven't visited show up as something like purple and blue, respectively.  (Well, they do for me using Netscape.) Noisy 23:36, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Also Joe, you can go to your preferences panel at the top of the page, click on "Misc Settings" and uncheck the box labeled "Format broken links like this (alternative: like this?)." This will cause links to empty pages to show up as normal text but with a red underlined ? at the end of the words. Some people might not like it, I do. - Ocon | Talk 17:36, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

redirects pointing at each other
is it possible to make an article that redirects to another that redirects back? wouldn't that make an infinite loop? wouldn't that make my computer and the server explode? wouldn't the world as we know it explode? ok, i got carried away there, but still, im curious. JoeSmack (talk) 21:43, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)


 * I believe redirects stop after the first redirect. That is why it is important to check for and fix any such double-redirects after moving a page. older &ne; wiser 21:47, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Exactly right. Andrewa 02:58, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * This is one of the main reasons off-site redirects are frowned upon. The software can't detect these cycles if the other half is on Wiktionary, meta, or elsewhere. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 20:22, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

pause/delay during navigation
i have been plowing through this site a lot lately - it's a fabulous idea. however, i notice now when poking around there is a small 2-5 second pause when moving anywhere on the site. what gives? is it a hardware issue? i myself am on the UCSC campus t1. if it is a hardware issue, what would the solution be?

thanks all. JoeSmack 20:38, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)

I think it's a hardware issue - that's why they're doing the fundraising. Also, Cleanup and Offline reports/Nothing links to this article are good places to check out if you're poking around looking for stuff to improve. Salasks 21:37, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Indexed PNG thumbnails
Forgive me if there's already some discussion about this somewhere: are there any plans to improve the image auto-thumbnail process to account for PNGs with indexed color? I'd much rather upload a high-resolution image and let the thumbnail be generated automatically, but since they're converted to true-color, the thumbnail often ends up larger (in bytes) than the original (for instance, the six images on Four-stroke cycle), or almost as large (the rotor breakdown on Enigma machine). Seems to me it should be a fairly simple matter to have the thumbnailing script (or whatever it is) look at the color depth in the original image, and convert appropriately (using true-color only for the intermediate resizing). I've noticed some rather heated disagreements over this issue that would be neatly solved if thumbnailing worked better for indexed PNGs. -- Wapcaplet 16:53, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC) To the developers: why not try  and   (with the appropriate nice value) when generating thumbnails of indexed-color PNG files? --Ardonik 20:06, 2004 Aug 4 (UTC)
 * I've noticed this, too; see Dopefish. It makes attempts at painstakingly optimizing PNGs before upload sort of moot, doesn't it?

Summarised sections

 * Do you ever make significant changes to an article? --> Wikipedia talk:Be bold in updating pages
 * A challenge to all you designers out there. Neutrality suggests a barnstar of reconciliation is needed
 * Need to know Tongan words translated to English. Moved to Reference desk
 * How does someone correct a false definition and inaccurate article content --> Talk:Hapa
 * Sock puppets --> Wikipedia talk:Sock puppet
 * Wikipedia in DICT format: wik2dict.py. See m:User:Guaka/wik2dict.py
 * Editing Weekend. Article checking meetings. Sign up now!
 * Arbitration Committee Elections July 2004 start on Wednesday, August 4, and run through Friday, August 13.
 * Extending markup syntax to allow easy creation of references --> See User:Sperling/References.
 * Pulling in FCC list of radio stations. See wikipedia talk:bots
 * Evil wiki magic --> Wikipedia talk:Browser notes
 * FAQ for users who think Wikipedia is biased against their country. See User:Zocky/Country bias.
 * Controversial cat issues --> Talk:How to choose your pet and take care of it
 * Image Markup/ New Preferences (suggestion) --> Wikipedia talk:Extended image syntax
 * Categories broken --> Wikipedia talk:Categorization
 * Duke University --> not displaying properly? Now fixed.
 * External link policy? See User:ALargeElk/External links, Wikipedia talk:External links, When should I link externally, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style
 * Public domain for state govt pages? See Copyright FAQ and Image copyright tags
 * Some brainstorming... --> Wikipedia talk:Replies to common objections
 * Linking to Wikisource. Cross project linking is encouraged. See United States Constitution for example.
 * We need more sounds at alphabet, Common phrases in different languages, List of tongue-twisters, Numbers in various languages etc.
 * Personal articles and solution thereof --> Wikipedia talk:Auto-biography
 * Caching of text used in edit summary. Can be deleted in IE by highlighting the entry you want to get rid of and hitting the Delete key or go to Tools, Internet Options..., Content tab, Autocomplete..., Clear Forms.
 * Redirect should work, doesn't. Redirect fixed. You can't redirect to sections yet.
 * How to sort list of articles by popularity in collaborative-edition mechanisms --> Template talk:List of collaborative edition mechanisms
 * How to include places of birth/death briefly --> Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (biographies)
 * The "Encyclopedia that Slashdot Built" Awards --> User talk:Mark Richards
 * Captions in non-thumb photos. Use "frame". framed|captiion]]
 * Categories with sort keys are not sorted properly --> Wikipedia talk:Categorization
 * Todo is not a word. Yes it is. If people use it regularly, and widely agree upon its spelling and intended meaning, it's a word.
 * Wikipedia as a press source. See Wikipedia as a press source
 * "Substubs". See template talk:substub
 * Request for bot permission --> See requested permission to run a warnfile on en
 * Proposed disclaimer --> Wikipedia talk:General disclaimer

Creating a category
How do I create a new category? --Auximines 14:18, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Java applets
Is it possible to upload a Java applet into Wikipedia?

ToC in "Out of the Silent Planet"
Recently I added headings to Out of the Silent Planet. Why don't I see a Table of Contents in that article? I do in other articles, and this appears to be independent of computer and browser (at least between MSIE and Mozilla).

It would even be kind of nice to have the ToC there, since I moved the old articles Hrossa, Seroni, and Pfifltriggi to the OotSP page. In the unlikely event that someone searches for "Hrossa" etc., that person might like to see "Hrossa" in the ToC of Out of the Silent Planet and be able to jump there directly.

I hope this is the right place to ask what is undoubtedly a newbie question.

(By the, I apologize if this is a can or worms or a frequently rejected suggestion, but I think the Table of Contents should say just "Contents". We can see it's a table.)

--JerryFriedman 16:48, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Is This In The Public Domain?
Is the information on House of Reps site in the public domain? I'm wondering because from what I've read, the federal government material is, but not state government. What is this considered? I just want to be sure before I use anything. Thanks.
 * There's no copyright message on the site, and it's federal government anyway. You should be okay to copy, especially if you want information on a certain matter that the House has discussed. [[User:Mike Storm|Mike &infin; Storm]] 13:52, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Still make sure to cite your sources. --mav 07:25, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Why are the multilingual contents NOT encoded in uniform UTF-8?
I am sorry if I am wrong, but I notice the entry page of WikiPedia.org, which is automatically forwarded to en.WikiPedia.org, is encoded in ISO-8859-1. Though for pure English character set, ISO-8859-1 is as same as UTF-8, it would encode wide-character differently, as far as I see. For the multilingual purpose of WikiPedia.org, I would rather recommend to use UTF-8 as the uniform encoding scheme for all languages. Using UTF-8 commonly in all content of WikiPedia.org would avoid any possible conflict between different native encodings, since it is processed in unicode internally.


 * Hi. It's best if you sign your messages with ~ so we can see who said that.  As for the encoding, many of us want UTF-8, and we've been waiting for developers to implement this for some time.    &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 11:25, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Quite recently the German wikipedia (which is the second-largest one) was switched to UTF8, and as far as I notice the only major problem was the 8 hour downtime. So now only the english wikipedia remains non-utf8. andy 15:08, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Extra spaces in template
The template (and no doubt others) has empty lines at the bottom, which annoyingly get inserted into the page when it is used. I would correct it myself, but it's protected. &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 08:27, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Has Template:Opentask grown too large ?
Has Template:Opentask grown too large ? Please comment on this "hypertrophy" at Template talk:Opentask. Thanks. -- PFHLai 03:23, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

Zeitgeist
I've pinched an idea from Google and created a Zeitgeist page to keep a ready-to-hand record of the most popular articles and search terms. Ideally I'd like to be able to update it weekly but since Webalizer currently seems to be set up for monthly reporting periods that probably isn't practical... Anyway, comments are welcomed. -- ChrisO 23:11, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)