Wikipedia talk:Village pump/Archive 1

'''This talk page is about keeping the village pump flowing. Even topics that are appropriate on the village pump itself may be irrelevant here.''' Unless there is a serious outcry to the contrary in the next couple days, I propose to severely excise anything from this page that does not serve this purpose. Eclecticology 18:57 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)


 * seconded! I may even beat you to it! -- Tarquin 19:22 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

I have no problem with the Village pump concept. Be that as it may, there is a difficulty which arises, and which has arisen before with other similarly motivated pages. There is no mechanism for cleaning them up! Because of that the articles just keep getting longer and longer with series of unrelated topics until a frustrated somebody starts a new page with a new title, but the same old questions.

Moving discussion from a topic talk page to the Village pump to promote the use of the Village pump is probably not a good idea. Once the pump is primed those transfers should be removed lest they become like weeds that clog the pipe connecting the pump with its aquifer.

This is a sanitation problem. There needs to be a mechanism for keeping the pump clean. EVERY entry should be dated. (Can it be done automatically without the four tildes?) Then after an agreed period of time it should be unceremoniously dumped. I suggest one week from the last edit for textual material, and one month when a response is nothing more than a link to another article. The limits would be separately applied to each subject in the pump. The week would be enoough time for any old hand to create a link to a more appropriate page, and to make the changes he feels are needed at that page.

If a deletion policy is clearly put at the head of the page and applied strictly nobody can complain that their views were censored out. If no old hand creates links, it can be assumed that they weren't worth making. Eclecticology 12:45 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)


 * Yes, it is getting muddy around the old pump. Anything useful here ought to be moved into the proper page, such as the forthcoming Manual of Style or somewhere appropriate in the Public domain resources or whatever.  Some of these things may just be bug reports to be filed.  It's up to the attentive to keep the pump moving along.  If there's something useful, it could be moved to its own page with just a link left behind.  Ortolan88 13:46 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)


 * Great idea. How about writing up the cleanup polciy for permanent inclusion at the top of the page, and then doing an initial cleanup?  This can work, but it takes an experienced regular to know where good info should be moved, and what can be deleted.  The pump could then start pumping information into stable articles like the FAQ, Manual of Style, etc. --Karl Juhnke


 * I made a Village pump archive page for temporary storage of old discussions, but it's going to need cleaning up too, otherwise it'll still end up a colossal mess... KJ

How about putting Village pump questions at the top of the list? That way, new questions are easier to find. Ortolan88
 * The convention for talk pages (see Talk page) is that new questions/comments should go at the bottom of the page. I think we should follow that convention for this page too, to avoid confusion.

As with talk pages, there are arguments for putting new comments at the top (as you rightly point out, new questions are a bit more obvious) and there are also good arguments for adding new comments at the bottom (it is easier to follow what is going on in chronological order). At the end of the day it is like deciding which side of the road to drive on - it doesn't matter too much what the convention is, as long as everyone sticks to the same convention. The established convention for talk pages is new comments go at the bottom, so we should use that here too to avoid confusion and get new users used to the convention. Enchanter


 * If so, we should be quicker to edit Village pump, eliminating stale questions, placing useful material in a better place (I will be moving the Gutenberg thing to a new section about using Gutenberg linked from Public domain resources, and basically keeping it lively and useful. If there isn't an obvious place to put a useful but aging answer, why not just give it its own article and link from the Village pump? Ortolan88
 * How about putting new topics at the top but answers in any topic should be added at the bottom of the topic. Eclecticology 13:06 Aug 31, 2002 (PDT)


 * Is there still no policy on this? - it would be really helpful if someone just decided, and put a note at the top of the pump saying what policy is. At the moment things sometimes till get added both ends, which is daft. And no, I'm not going to do it, despite the "be bold in editing" or whatever it is adage, because I do think it requires an Old Hand to give it some thought and do something, not a relative newbie like wot I am. :) Nevilley 09:59 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)
 * Doh! It's there but not bold, so I missed it, I'm too old for this! I'm going to bold it. Sue me! Sorry about the above para which is now of course garbage. Nevilley 10:03 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)

(image added)


 * So are you trying to say that Wikipedians are like sheep??? (Cute and fluffy, that is...) --Brion

How would I go about putting an article in the Wikipedia on Electron Gun's? An Electron Gun is used to produce electron streams in Accelerating Wave Guides, for producing High Energy Radiation? michael_feaster@hotmail.com.


 * See How to start a page, which you'll find listed in the documentation. Basically, find an article where electron guns should be or are mentioned, edit it and make a link, like this one: electron gun (type electron gun with double brackets around it). Click the link, and write your article there.

---

I'm pasting this from the Village Pump main page because when I click Edit Page it won't let me modify and only displays the first half of the page or so.

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


 * same here. Chimera mac os. -- Tarquin


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


 * I'm having the same problem as you three. Could it be a Mac thing?  Me and Tarquin are using Macs--I''ve got IE 5.1 Tokerboy 21:50 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * Not a Mac thing - I'm using KDE on Linux. What's the point of using IE on a Mac anyway? ;) --mav


 * inertia Tokerboy 22:00 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * I'm on a PC, using Windows Me. -- Zoe


 * I'm having it on a PC with Windows 95 & IE 5.5. -- isis 21:55 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)


 * Okay, nevermind Tokerboy 22:00 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

I am also posting this message here because the Village Pump page has become too long to edit. I have two completely unrelated questions.


 * When editing a page and posting an image, how do I align the image to the right and have the text flow beside it on the left? Right now, if I try to insert the photo into the text, it doesn't flow next to the photo, it breaks above the photo and resumes below it.


 * To make an image float on the right, surround the IMAGE TAG like this (adjust the parameters as you like):


 * IMAGE TAG


 * David 22:24 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)


 * Why do we use BC and AD when referring to years on Wikipedia? I thought BCE and CE were the accepted standard in the scientific/academic community now.

Pandora, 16:08 Dec 11, 2002 EST

I remember reading something on this discussion a week or so ago in some place I can't remember. It is generally viewed that both are perfectly fine. In fact some athiests prefer B.C. and A.D.


 * (See various arguments at Talk:Common Era and elsewhere. I can only speak for myself, but IMHO the use of CE/BCE is at best a placebo, and at worst an explicit legitimization of Christian domination by defining the "Common Era" (or is it "Christian Era"?) as the Jesus/Easter-based Christian calendar. As such I find CE/BCE highly offensive, while AD/BC are honest admissions that one is using a biased system. --Brion)

Both systems date to the same time (Jesus's traditional birth day) and "B.C." is quite neutral because it simply acknowledges that we arbitrarily measure time "before Christ". If in some situations C.E. and B.C.E. are the standard, we would probably tend to use those. However, I think that choosing one over the other would be implicitly biased unless it is the *most common* usage in that situation. -- RM

I disagree with Brion, but I think a good solution would be to have the software support some kind of unit tag, like [:100 CE:] which would be dynamically converted according to the user's preferences. Then we wouldn't have to worry about inches, CE vs. AD, Celsius vs. Fahrenheit etc. (we would still have to agree on the defaults). --Eloquence

A problem with changing to CE/BCE is that all of our year pages use BC. If we changed now, it would require the moving of thousands of pages. I do like the idea of a unit tag. (For the record, though I'm a Christian, I couldn't care less which one we actually use). -- Stephen Gilbert 14:26 Dec 12, 2002 (UTC)


 * Another problem with CE/BCE is that a LOT of folk (including me) will never have heard of it and be confused! SGBailey 08:49 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)

Is the Village pump (and this talk page too) getting a bit too long to handle comfortably? Should it be pruned / split up or what? -- SGBailey 18:51 Dec 22, 2002 (UTC)

The Village pump should always be pruned. Useful material should be spun off into appropriate places, such the the FAQs. A couple of us try to keep the pump clean, but a few more hands are needed. -- Stephen Gilbert 02:07 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)


 * Speaking only for myself, I've adopted the view that if I feel tempted to add to the Village pump, I should be prepared to do a little housekeeping there while I'm at it. I would recommend that to other experienced Wikipedians. Eclecticology 18:57 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

Just a note: the Village pump really needs some cleanup; there are many people (especially Mac users) who cannot edit a page longer than about 32k without breaking it, and that's not an environment that's good for newbies and others looking for help. If you see the long page warning when you edit the pump, and your browser can handle it, it's your responsibility to refactor things. Please pump considerately. --Brion 00:53 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)