Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 June 20

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June 20[edit]

When I view Wikipedia in English, why are temperatures in Kelvin and Celsius. Fahrenheit is America's standard. Can something automatically convert the temps to Fahrenheit?

Collapsing a Template[edit]

How do I make template collapsed only in a particular article? --Stepusual (talk) 04:55, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You can simply put a collapsible table around it to collapse it. I left an example below. But out of interest, why would you want to collapse an infobox? Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 08:35, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Please see MOS:SCROLL. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 11:06, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I meant a template, not an Infobox. See, for instance, this template:

It is set to auto-expanded and appears as such here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell What if I wanted it to be collapsed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(film) while still having it be expanded in the previous article? --Stepusual (talk) 00:32, 21 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the following is what you're looking for
  • {{collapse top}}
  • content
  • {{collapse bottom}}

maybe the navbox function is set to autoshow? — Ched :  ?  04:33, 21 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Difficulty logging in to Wikipedia[edit]

I created an account with WikiMedia in order to upload a picture for the article on Yawgoog Scout Reservation. Are my username and password the same for Wikipedia? If so, for some reason, I cannot login. If not, I am getting a message that the username I'm using for WikiMedia (that I want to use for Wikipedia) is already in use. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.253.3.155 (talk) 05:01, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes and no. By default a Wikipedia username is not registered on every wiki when you sign up at a particular project; So if you only want to register at a particular project this is possible. You can, however, unify your account so that it will be valid for each Wiki project controlled by the wikimedia foundation. Information on this can be found Here. For using the SUL Procedure itself you should go to a wiki where you already have an account, an navigate to Special:MergeAccount. Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 08:42, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

References query[edit]

Articles are written, and historical references, in the form of current links, are given in articles. What happens when the link to a reference is subsequently broken or removed e.g. original site, from whence the reference came, closes down (web sites come and go all the time for different reasons) or itself does not archive/continue to archive the article which is being referenced in Wikipedia? How does Wikipedia ensure that the links to these references are still going to be available several years down the line? (even when original site, from whence the reference came, subsequently closes down or itself does not archive the article, or if a blogger site reference, the blogger dies and no-one maintains his articles?) Helpin Hands (talk) 07:31, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Dead external links. It's best to replace the reference if possible. And for the record, we don't usually use blogs as references since they are not usually reliable sources. Chamal talk 07:45, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

energy and environment[edit]

In April I came across the article about Energy & Environment. It was hopelessly biased. I made some changes, others replaced the original content. I put up the banner 'neutrality disputed'. There was considerable discussion on the talk page. None of my compromise points were considered. Now I find the old article is back in place, and the 'neutrality disputed' banner is gone (I put it back about 9am, by 10.20 it had disappeared again. How do we stop people using Wikipedia for their own agenda and not permitting a balanced account of a topic to be displayed? Mary 4444 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.144.206.148 (talk) 09:29, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Diffing trough the edits from respectively your IP and your username(Mary4444), i tend to agree with William and Stephen that you edits violate WP:NPOV. Edits such as this one and this one are both little more then completely unreferenced claims which only dispute the factual accuracy of added sources. Wikipedia is not a place for origional research, or for adding opinions. Any information on Wikipedia should be neutral, and must be verifiable trough reliable sources.
Similary, lines such as "Global warming enthusiasts could only squeal that M&M were not climate scientists, sneer at the journals supposed lack of peer-review (as if an outsider could possibly know), but they couldn't prove M&M wrong." are an absolute no go. These sort of lines are little more then libel and viewpoint pushing. As for how to solve this: Find Reliable sources that back your claims, and incorporate them into the article if they offer relevant information. And make sure that any text added is not a sneer towards a group of people who don't seem to agree with you - that is an absolute no go. Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 10:23, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

merge needed[edit]

Could someone sort out a merge between seedcake and seed cake please? Or at least disambiguate somehow. I find the merge instructions rather complicated and reckon someone else could fix it in a fraction of the time it would take me. Thanks.--Shantavira|feed me 09:31, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Seedcake used to redirect to Bush bread. I changed it to redirect to Seed cake. Do you think it should be a disambiguation instead? Zain Ebrahim (talk) 10:01, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure to what extent they are the same thing. I'll put a note on the talk page of each.--Shantavira|feed me 11:18, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Edit Count[edit]

How do I insert the edit count into a userbox using the MediaWiki API? Arlen22 (talk) 12:55, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There is no singular nor simple answer for this question. The mediawiki API is a shell around wikipedia that allows automated tools (EG:Bots) to simply communicate with Wikipedia. In order to edit a page trough the API you will need some programming skills to write a script that can handle API communication. The exact code for this operation depends upon the programming language, and on the matter if you use on of the several frameworks available for certain programming lnaguages.
In essence it can be summed up as:
  1. Connect to Wikipedia and log in.
  2. Fetch the page required.
  3. Change the value in the page (Probally trough a regex).
  4. Save the page again.
Note that if this task is automated, you will need to receive approval trough WP:RFBA. Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 13:32, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What links here[edit]

How do I find the articles that are linking to another article from within its contents, and not the template boxes? I wanted to get a list of articles mentioning Fathom Five National Marine Park, I clicked on the "What links here" and got plenty of entries. But I see that most of the entries have the "National Parks of Canada" template box, which has the Fathom Five link in it. I do not want results that are returned because of a template box, but only genuine references. I clicked on the "Hide transclusions" filter but that didn't help. Jay (talk) 18:18, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know of a really easy way to do this. But there are some not-so-easy ways.
  • Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:National parks of Canada shows that most of the pages transcluding this template are themselves the articles about national parks that the template links to. So, you could grep -v the list from Special:WhatLinksHere/Fathom Five National Marine Park to remove the articles you don't care about. See wget, cURL, and Pipeline (Unix) for a way to capture the output of a special page into a text file, which you could then process with the usual Unix/Linux tools such as grep, sort, and so on to do a type of poor man's query. (wget and cURL capture HTML, which could get ugly; Lynx (web browser) can capture a plain text rendering of a Web page, which is then easier to process with Unix tools.) For example, capture the two "what links here" pages to text files, sort them, and then diff them. That should show the links to Fathom Five National Marine Park from pages that do not contain the {{National parks of Canada}} template. (However, that would exclude articles that might have non-template links in addition to the template.)
    • If you are not running Unix, Linux, or a Unix-like environment such as Cygwin, the above suggestions won't make any sense.
  • Or you could read the links under WP:EIW#Query and possibly find a sophisticated way to do the query you are after.
  • One rather ugly brute-force possibility might be to create a redirect page that links to Fathom Five National Marine Park, temporarily change the link in {{National parks of Canada}} to the redirect (note that you typed the word "parks" incorrectly with a capital "P" in your question - it's important to get letter case correct when typing a page title), wait a couple of days for the change to propagate through the servers, and then Special:WhatLinksHere/Fathom Five National Marine Park might show which incoming links are going through the redirect. Users should not be too inconvenienced during the test because the template link through the redirect would still work. If you decide to try this, explain what you are doing on the template talk page, and when you finish, revert your change in the template back to the real page. If you make a legitimate redirect page (for example, from an alternative spelling that some user might conceivably type), then you would have added value when you finish your test.
--Teratornis (talk) 19:59, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]


Vandalism[edit]

I caught some vandalism on the Sean Combs article, undid it, and then happened to check the IP address (76.223.242.218) to see if there was anymore vandalism in his/her history. There was, so I reverted anything that hadn't already been reverted. I went through the FAQs and then went to the .. section to report vandalism, I forget what it's called? I'm not sure if what's on the individual's talk page counts as a warning, so I don't know if I can really add them to the vandalism thing to be reviewed, but it's obvious they're just going through random articles making nonsense edits. Would someone mind explaining to me what I should do? Or maybe someone else could take the appropriate action? I've only been here a day, so I'm a little lost.. thanks :) JerseyGirlMedia (talk) 22:06, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, JerseyGirlMedia! I've added a "next-level" warning to the IP's Talk page. While some editors take a tougher stand and jump a level, I usually prefer to go one level of warning at a time. You'll find my warning levels in this section of my "Keepsakes" page. At this point, I just keep an eye on the IP and hope the vandalism from that address stops. It often does. If the IP vandal strikes again, I go to the next higher level warning. And only if the vandalism continues to the "BLOCK" level do I request an admin to block the User. The vandalism Help page you're looking for is probably the one at this link. Hope this helps!  .`^) Paine Ellsworthdiss`cuss (^`.  22:30, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for enlightening me :) Do you mind if other people borrow your vandilism templates? And as I read it, you have 4 levels, so the fourth warning you make, do you then add the person to the list for being blocked? (I can't find the thing I initially found when searching for information on vandilism, do you have any idea what I'm talking about? lol)
And I don't know if this is relevant or not, but the same IP address just made another edit to the Jay Mohr article, but I don't think it's really vandilism, I just can't figure out if he added the information that he then removed. Maybe he's just being facetious because he was warned. Should I do anything?
Thanks again for doing that and explaining everything to me, sorry to bug you further! JerseyGirlMedia (talk) 03:00, 21 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
For future reference, a list of standard warnings is available at WP:WARN. You can use this sequence for basic vandalism: {{uw-vandalism1}}, {{uw-vandalism2}}, {{uw-vandalism3}}, then {{uw-vandalism4}}. The warning page also explains the format to use for the talk page. hmwithτ 06:25, 21 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Search Engine[edit]

Every time i log into Wikipedia, i cannot type into the search box on the task bar on the left. But when i log out i can type in it. BasilRazi (talk) 23:09, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it is a bug in Javascript. Go to preferences>Gadgets>User-interface gadgets and make sure the "Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page." is unchecked. ZooFari 03:13, 21 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  1. ^ Primavera's financial report for 2006
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