Wikipedia:Village pump (assistance)/Archive C

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Village pump (assistance) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (assistance). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Help, need to know what to do to fix a factual error that there is no answer to.

On the page for the new Dave Matthews Band album, Stand Up, that will be coming out in May of 2005, there is a stated track listing that is completely pulled out of the air (some the band has said won't be on the album, some are from previous recording sessions, some are just plain made up; not to mention that the order of the songs that we do know will be on there isn't finalized). But since there isn't any proper way to fix it (I don't know any better than whoever made the page), I can't exactly change it. Can someone fix this somehow? I didn't want to say anything on the talk page for it, because there are no posts there (a fairly new page, since the name of the album itself is new), so I didn't know that it'd get read.

Well, if you know it's bogus, just remove it while saying so. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:22, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Inline link to an existing image?

Hey. I was editing Windows Security Center, and decided it might be nice to have an image of the security center in there. Now obviously a big image in the way might look a little ugly, espically considering there aren't any other pictures in there.

In the Service Pack 2 section, there is a wonderful image of the security center already there. I'd like to re-use it. Problem is, like I just said - I don't think I acutally want to show the picture on this article. Is there a way to link to it using more of an inline link? I suppose I could do ([[image:image_url.jpg|screenshot]]), but I didn't know if there was a "proper" way to do this, like with external links. You know where it has that little icon of an arrow poiting up right next to the link?

Sorry if this is an obvious question. I just like to follow standards and I didn't see anything written about things like this.

Thanks.

--Oreckel 03:05, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Technically, you can make inline links to images by putting a : in front of the Image: namespace; for example, "[[:Image:F-15 vertical deploy.jpg]]" produces "Image:F-15 vertical deploy.jpg". Whether it's a good idea stylistically, I dunno. —Korath (Talk) 03:34, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

• If you want the little arrow, you could use an external link code and use the full URL to the image. Do you know you can resize images as well? - Mgm|^(talk) 11:53, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

Trying to stub (or redirect) attaché case

Hi! To fix a problem with attache being a redirect to the (then) non-existent attaché, I created a stub for the latter, relating to the political definition of that word. Since there's obviously some ambiguity with attaché case, I now wish to fill in that hole as well. I'm having two problems with this:

• Is attaché case the appropriate title for it? It's not so much a policy issue as an English issue, as I gather there is a growing movement to get rid of diacritics in such words. Not being a native speaker, I'd like some input on that.

• I can't think of anything to put in there that wouldn't be a duplicate of briefcase. Unfortunately, a redirect wouldn't be appropriate, as there will already be a previous redirect due to diacritics. (Say, attache case→attaché case→briefcase.) Having two separate redirects to briefcase (or four, if one were to cover hyphenated versions as well) would only encourage linking to either of them, and could possibly result in duplicate articles in the future.

I'd appreciate any help or suggestion on this. --Fbriere 02:34, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• You could have both the pages redirect to briefcase. If you do that you won't have troubles with any double redirects. Mgm|^(talk) 11:51, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

• An attaché case isn't exactly the same thing as a briefcase: it's more specific, necessarily a hard-shell case. No problem with accent in title (in fact, it is correct), but a redirect from attache case is certainly in order. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:00, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

• • Thanks for the precision. I'm still stuck over what I could write that wouldn't be cut/paste from briefcase with "hard shell" stuck in there. Would somebody be willing to create the attaché case stub? I already set up the redirect, and cleaned up all the links. --Fbriere 07:31, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Urgent.

Someone sent pornography to my talk page how do I get rid of it? Please help.

--Contrib 19:32, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Is there a way that someone could delete the porn from my talk page? It would really help.

--Contrib 19:34, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Removed by User:Knowledge Seeker at 19:34 UTC. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:16, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for all of your help. --Contrib 20:23, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ya that happened to my talk page as well. The culprit is probably male; teens or early 20's, and perhaps a tad insecure. — RJH 21:44, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Request for assitance on making beautiful tables

I'd be grateful if someone could beautify the tables on United Kingdom corporation tax for me, particularly the example computation one. I'm not very good at tables (I normally copy one I've seen somewhere else before), but I can't think where I've seen something like the tables I've got in this article elsewhere, jguk 11:40, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

What kind of thing do you want? If you give some kind of an idea, I'll see what I can do. Smoddy (_t^g_e^c_k) 12:12, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Made some changes to the example table. Is that what you wanted? It's just some &nbsp; (non-breaking spaces) for indents and empty cell fillers, then some align=right to right-adjust the values. Or did you really want some fancy-shmancy style sheet layouts? — RJH 22:00, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

What to do if you observe a revert war?

Slovakia (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) is experiencing a revert war that has been going on for over a month now. I don't know much about this country, but it appeas to me that Vital Component (talk · contribs) is trying to force his POV against the rest of the contributors. In one of the two reversions I checked [1], he simply reverted the page, introducing an obvious misspelling. This may hint to him/her not being thorough.

What can an outside observer like me do to help in such a situation? I don't want to revert Vital Component's change because I don't know enough about the subject to be sure, and because this is what others already have been doing for many weeks without solving the problem. I checked out pages like Wikipedia:Resolving disputes and Wikipedia:Template_messages/Disputes but none of them seems to fit to the situation. I don't think I'd be very helpful starting a discussion about a topic which I know much less than the opponents – I only would like to bring this the attention of others who know more about it.

Sebastian 08:16, 2005 Mar 26 (UTC)

• You could report it to WP:AN/3RR in case there's a 3 revert rule violation. Otherwise head over to WP:RFPP to request protection. -- Mgm|^(talk) 09:52, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)

• Thanks for your reply. (I only noticed it now because my computer crashed just when I submitted this, and so I thought I had to rewrite everything. Anyway –) I posted it both on Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts and Wikipedia:AMA Requests for Assistance – let's see which way works better! — Sebastian 10:47, 2005 Mar 26 (UTC)

Table alignment

How do I get the shuttle/special table to go under the S bullet on S (New York City Subway service)? --SPUI (talk) 15:12, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks to User:Korath. --SPUI (talk) 20:54, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

adding Wikipedia search engine link to my personal homepage

Hello,

Can someone provide me with the hmtl code to add to my personal homepage so I can search Wiki directly from there?

Thanks.

<form name="search" method="post" action="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search">

<input type="text" name="search" value="" />

<input type="submit" name="go" value="Go" /><input type="submit" name="fulltext" value="Search" />

</form>

—Korath (Talk) 20:29, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

• Do I just copy and paste this code directly onto my talk page, or do I have to modify it? Jaberwocky6669 21:15, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

  It won't work on wiki pages, since the form and input tags aren't permitted. It'll only work on outside web pages, which is what I assumed "personal homepage" to mean. It just duplicates the normal search form between the Navigation links and Toolbox on the left side anyway. —Korath (Talk) 21:39, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

Thre's an add-on for Mozilla Firefox which adds a Wikipedia toolbar to your browser. RickK 23:49, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

Shiloh books.

A request for a article on the Shiloh books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

--Contrib 18:44, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Template interwikis

Gangleri recently dropped me a note:

I made lots of efforts to identify the equivalent of Template:Disambig in many Wikipedias, see de:Bild Diskussion:Logo Begriffsklärung.png and would be happy if you could help to make something similar for the different variants of Template:Copyvio (Template:Copyvio1, Template:Copyvio2 etc.) in many languages. Normally I used links like pt:Special:Allpages/Copy (template namespace) to do this.

I'm not particularly interested in taking this on, but would someone else like to? Probably best to contact Gangleri if you have questions. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:19, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)

odd contribution

[2] contains a clearly inaccurate contribution at the bottom saying Jan 3 2003, well before either I or User:Cumbey existed here. Suggestions? --SqueakBox 03:38, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)

• One of the servers wasn't running an NTP client, so its clock was way off. One of the devs fixed it so it won't happen again. --iMb~Mw 04:24, 3 Jan 2003 (UTC)

Kate's Counter

Recently when I have tried to see my number of edits using [Kate's counter] it seems to do something - says DONE and then returns a blank screen - I am doing something wrong or is it playing up? Brookie 11:14, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It's been down since the power outage, I believe. —Korath (Talk) 11:59, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

Are there plans to make it work again, does anyone know? It was an incredibly useful function, especially for personal addiction-tracking purposes. ;-) SlimVirgin 18:16, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

I am also one of those addicted to monitoring their addiction. Could somebody pretty please make it work again? - BanyanTree 00:25, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The functioning edit counter may be found here. - BanyanTree 18:21, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Good skills! --Brookie 21:00, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Cheers, whoever brought it back. Smoddy (_t^g_e^c_k) 21:18, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Kannur

Dear Wikeans,

Can you all please assist me to build material on Kannur. I have started it crudely but it needs your assistance too. Help me , please

Linking tables

Hi,

I'm running my own Wiki site and have several contact-list tables on different pages. The format of the table is the same. Is it possible to create one master table that simply pulls the information from the various tables? I don't wish to maintain more than one set of information and this way, changing the smaller tables should automatically update the master table.

thanks 18:05, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What is it you want to do? Can you show us, and we'll see what we can do. Smoddy (_t^g_e^c_k) 19:38, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I have 13 tables like below:

Contact Name	Title	Email	Office	Mobile	Fax
name	title	email	office	mobile	fax

I would like to have one master table with all the information from each of the 8 tables by grabbing the data from the tables. I don't wish to manually type the same set of info twice. Is this possible in a Wiki??

Yes. (Please sign your contributions with four tildes ~~~~.) Create a template for the header row of your table; create a template for each row; create a template for the foot of the table. Include row templates as required. Does that help? Noisy | Talk 17:24, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

Site map

hi all,

I was wondering if it is possible to create a site map of all categories and articles on the Wiki site I've set upin my lab. I know this is kinda possible through categorizing everything but the 'root' category would only show sub-categories..not articles within in.

Any help is appreciated..thanks 18:00, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Changing the default display of numbers

I'm the sysop for the Telugu wiki and I have noticed that for the past couple of weeks all the digits are being displayed using the standard Telugu numerals instead of the Indo-Arabic Numerals. Many users have complained about this because most of us are not used to reading them. I haven't been able to figure out if there is a configuration parameter that can be set to control this, any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks, nagarjun

• You might want to move this query to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) -- Jmabel | Talk 06:19, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

Link to spam links collection

I remember having seen a meta page or something that has a list of sites that have been identified as frequent link spams. Can some one point me to that? -- Sundar (talk · contribs) 06:46, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

Got it. -- Sundar (talk · contribs) 07:17, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

U.S.-Canada relations

The page U.S.-Canada relations has seen heavy contribution from anonymous editors of late. Some edits have been blatant vandalism and have been reverted. However, I'm concerned that there doesn't seem to be anyone in particular watching over the page. I don't have the expertise to judge the edits, so I'm hoping someone with expertise in that area will take an interest. -Rholton 03:21, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

But that's true of almost all the pages on wikipedia. You could add it to your watch list (menu at top) and keep an eye on it yourself. — RJH 21:49, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Template:MYA

The flag at Template:MYA isnt showing up. I dont know why--Jiang 03:17, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Looking at it through both my IE and Firefox browsers, it looks fine to me. I'm using a PC running Windows 2000. It might help if you could tell us what your browser and operating system are. Zzyzx11 | Talk 06:53, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

IE6, Windows XP--Jiang 06:25, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Contributions

I have contributeds photographs that I have taken personally to Wikipedia but haven't seem them posted yet (over a month). When should I expect them to appear in the articles? -- User:Luis32789

You'll have to put them in articles --Alterego 06:42, Apr 17, 2005 (UTC)

Luis, you have submitted some nice photos, but as Alterego says it is up to you to add them to articles. I advise you to read Wikipedia:Images, Wikipedia:Image use policy and Wikipedia:Picture tutorial. -- FP 09:24, Apr 17, 2005 (UTC)

Is a computer language copywritten?

I have been considering writing a Wikipedia entry on the computer language of ATARI BASIC. The "goal" is to make available the reserved keywords, organized by their function(s), and how they are invoked on the computers in question Atari_8-bit_family. The reference guide made by Atari plays a major role in writing the article. Though it falls short of being a full users' manual, it contains all (but one) of the reserved keywords. There are several other sources I have, and I have read the Wiki entry on disclosing all sources. That said, I have some reservations about proceeding.

The BASIC computing language is well known, but this particular dialect may not be. Even so, multiple sources on-line have made the Atari BASIC dialect known. The problem is that the reference guide I got from Atari when I bought the computer does say (c) 1983. Does that apply to the BASIC language it is describing?

I haven't seen anything similar for other programming languages. Would this be worthwhile as a Wiki entry?

And should this be an RfC instead?

NeoAmsterdam 05:08, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC), amended 09:07, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)

• I think that if you want to write a reference guide, wikibooks is a better place to put your work. Mgm|^(talk) 11:35, Apr 17, 2005 (UTC)

• • I didn't know WikiBook existed - Thanks! But that still leaves the copyright question up in the air. NeoAmsterdam 19:07, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)

"Copywritten" means "produced by a copywriter" -- a writer of advertising copy. The word you want is "copyrighted", meaning "protected or monopolized under copyright law".

My reading of copyright law in the U.S. -- and mind you, I am not a lawyer -- is that the design of a programming language itself cannot be copyrighted, but an implementation of it, or a piece of documentation for it can. Anyone may independently document the language -- for instance, the authors of Learn Java in 21 Days do not need to obtain the permission of Sun Microsystems (creators of Java), unless of course they copy from Sun's own Java documentation.

Copyright protects expressions of ideas, not ideas themselves. So, let us imagine that the Atari BASIC manual contains the following sentence: "The PRINT command, followed by a constant string or the name of a variable, causes the string or variable to be printed to the screen." Now, you should not copy that sentence literally into your article. But the fact that it expresses (that you can print things with the PRINT command, and that the things you can print include string literals and variables) you certainly may state in your own words. --FOo 19:32, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing that up. I had no intention whatsoever to copy over the manuals verbatim - That would have been a flagrant copyright violation (and some of the entries listed are flat-out wrong, anyway). I'll keep the order of topics, use a few of its [better] examples, add implementation information, some history, and put it into WikiBooks - It seems to be the appropriate place for this topic. Again, thanks to all! NeoAmsterdam 23:56, 2005 Apr 18 (UTC)

Atheism

Atheism in Wikipedia and Atheism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy differ. Which is more reliable? Edit atheism to improve it with anything from the more reliable source. Like what. The definition perhaps. But really, anything NPOV that you think is an improvement. The result will be what? A better article or being reverted for spurious reasons? Try it and see. Do it as an anon if you want that test. I think some articles on Wikipedia demonstate the evolution of the commons into property, and atheism is an example of that. But maybe I'm wrong. Read any reliable source (I gave one). Make an edit on atheism in an honest attempt at making it better. See the results for yourself. (I hope I'm wrong) 4.250.33.72 03:05, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Force recursive reading on the way to understanding?

I mostly use Wikipedia for looking up computer science-y articles, and I've got a question on writing style.

Sometimes I see an article will basically be "explained" by a paragraph full of links to technical articles in the same field. Often, those articles will be "explained" in the same way, meaning I would have to recursively read probably dozens of articles before I got an understanding of the thing I was actually trying to learn about. It usually isn't quite that bad; I can combine snippets in the Wikipedia article with stuff from Google, but still, it can be a little frusturating.

Is there Wikipedia policy on how articles should be written? I found a few things while looking through the help, the most significant of which is the Explain jargon policy. It isn't very encouraging to me -- it actually dictates that this sort of article is the right way to write things. Where can I comment and voice my opinion against this practice? Is the talk page of Explain Jargon the best?

Other relevant pages I found are Build the web and Make only links relevant to the context. The talk page on the latter is huge, but I think a slightly different discussion than what I'm talking about.

Thanks -- Pojo 15:49, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• From what I've seen a lot of science articles should be understandable for people who are not in the field. Of course, there could still be articles that lack sufficient explaining, Wikipedia is a work in progress after all. If you've got problems with understanding a specific term, I recommend the Reference desk. Don't forget to mention you'd like the article to be more clear. Is there any article in particular you find lacking? Mgm|^(talk) 19:35, Apr 16, 2005 (UTC)

Has anyone the right to revert all my edits?

A highly technical "revert war" has been going on in the Bell's theorem and related pages. Never mind for the moment who is right, but I'd just like to know if it is within wikipedia rules for one member to revert all edits by another, regardless of content? The present situation has, in my view, resulted in a page that is worse than useless -- see the disussion. Caroline Thompson 09:25, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The appropriate place to take this is probably Requests for comment. Write a neutral account of the disagreements there and refer to the talk page.-gadfium 10:05, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Dutch privacy convention

It is an unwritten convention in the Dutch print & broadcast media to abbreviate the names of suspected criminals. There is at least one article on Wikipedia ( Johannes_O. ) that mentions the name of a Dutch criminal only in that way. I believe that the convention actually only applies to suspects, not to convicts, but once a high-profile suit has been going on for a while, people tend to think of "Jan de V." rather than "Jan de Vries".

Does that qualify as limited geographical scope? Should someone go and look up the guy's full name, and stick it in the article? Or should the local convention be followed? I'm posting this here, rather than on Talk:Johannes_O., because it is potentially of more general interest. 131.215.167.110 07:20, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• First off, since they do it for a reason, I think it's nearly impossible to verify someone's name which is a prerequisite for inclusion. Still, I think we should refrain from including someone's full name. It wouldn't make any sense for the guy to be protected if someone can simply visit Wikipedia and check for his full name. Mgm|^(talk) 08:28, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)
  • I'd imagine it wouldn't be that tough to verify someone's name, even if mainstream media aren't reporting it--remember Kobe Bryant's accuser? Meelar (talk) 08:31, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

If we can find a source full name it goes in. If not we don'tGeni 08:41, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As far as I know the names are usually in the court documents. It's really just a mass media thing. 131.215.167.110 16:08, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Help with origins beliefs page name

Recently the article creation beliefs was moved to origins beliefs. Personally I feel the new name is clumsy and somewhat redundant with the old one. Can I ask people if they think the name "origins beliefs" is a very good one? If not, what would be a better title? (There hasn't been much response on the article talk page). Thanks in advance for your advice. -- FP 06:15, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

Origins beliefs may sound clumsy, but creation beliefs is flat out biased in favor of those particular beliefs about the Origin of Things that involve creation. One could solve the grammatical awkwardness of the title by saying "beliefs about origins", but strictly speaking that still refers to beliefs about the concept of "origins" per se, as opposed to the origin(s) of the Things at hand, which I suppose are Life, The Universe and Everything ;-) I don't know if there is a way out of this, seeing as the correct description of these Things may depend on the specific beliefs. 131.215.167.110 07:19, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Voting Records of MPs

Can anyone tell me where to find voting records of MPs on various Bills. Thank you.

• What country? Canada? Great Britain? Zzyzx11 | Talk 02:23, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• In the UK, http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/ -- ALoan (Talk) 10:25, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Using GFDL information

I copied Jack Abramoff (and did some editing) from SourceWatch, and added a credit at the bottom of the page. Is this how we're supposed to credit GFDL information? RickK 00:32, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

That and saying the same thing in the edit comment that is associated with the input of the derived content (or at least an edit very close to that in the list). The closest thing we have to a 'history page' as described in the FDL is the revision history, so it is very important to make note of sources there. Note that it is not possible to follow the letter of the FDL in this regard since the FDL was written with manuals and textbooks in mind, not encyclopedia articles (for example, the concept of a 'title page' is absurd in our context). Also note that we do not allow any FDLd text with invariant sections, front cover texts, etc. But SourceWatch does not seem to have those. --mav 16:29, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Dictionary

Does Wikipedia have a dictionary ect... If not would it not be a good place to put 'definitions, which would be removed anyway '

See Wiktionary. —Korath (Talk) 16:10, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

changing navigation menu

How do I add, for example, an external link to the navigation menu?

$wgNavigationLinks = array (
	array( 'text'=>'mainpage',	'href'=>'mainpage' ),
        array( 'text'=>'portal',	'href'=>'portal-url' ),
	array( 'text'=>'currentevents', 'href'=>'currentevents-url' ),
	array( 'text'=>'recentchanges', 'href'=>'recentchanges-url' ),
	array( 'text'=>'randompage',	'href'=>'randompage-url' ),
	array( 'text'=>'help', 		'href'=>'helppage' ),
	array( 'text'=>'sitesupport',	'href'=>'sitesupport-url' ),
);

e.g. What am I supposed to do to add, for example, "BBC News" linking to "http://www.bbc.co.uk"?

certainly NOT:

	array( 'text'=>'BBC News',	'href'=>'http://www.bbc.co.uk' ),

So, what then?
Thanks for any help!

• I am assuming you want to add this hack to your version of the MediaWiki program, right? From what I understand about it, I do not think you can do it unless you modify many lines of source code. http://meta.wikimedia.org could provide you with more information since that is the official documentation of the MediaWiki program. Zzyzx11 | Talk 20:39, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Just add array( 'text'=>'newssite', 'href'=>'newssite-url' ), to your localsettings.php. Then add BBC News to MediaWiki:Newsite and http://www.bbc.co.uk to MediaWiki:Newssite-url. Angela. 01:22, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Congressional Acts

I am attempting to re-locate the 103rd. congressional act that I believe was entitled , Crime control and Domestic Violence Prevention Act of 1998. It is 238 pages long and I need to Re-print a copy. I had one and my Lawyer ate my Homework (Dog).Could you help ? I was unsucessfully Prosecuted by the Ventura County District Attorney under that act. I need a copy so that I can get Congress to Fix it. They left out an important factor that the D.A. in my county is taking advantage of and Violating the civil rights of about 600 people a year.They are doing this for Federal Grant monies. It cost me about 8000 Dollars and my sanity. - Kelly Barth

You'll need all the sanity you can muster if that's all the information you've got, because searching for 'Domestic Violence' (use single quotes to search for a phrase) at Thomas's retrieves about 141 pages. Perhaps you'll have better luck narrowing it down, but that's the place to look . - Nunh-huh 03:25, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Edit War Assistance

No, not someone to help edit back... an administrator of some kind, preferably.

On the Cat article User:216.52.110.253 is blindly reverting to a version which contains an extremely poor quality image of their own cat, apparently smiling (its not). Talk page concensous is to remove the image, which has no copyright tag of any kind, and is out of place and not consistent with the quality of the rest of the images. User doesn't respond to talk page attempts.

Help, anyone? Kiand 01:10, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This is going on Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars ever. Mike H 02:22, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)

Articles for phrases?

And another question while I'm here. When two words are combined, do we need two articles? I am thinking of management control. There is an article for each word, but not the combination. The phrase does turn up in quite a few articles. There's probably a policy that I will look for, but are there opinions out there? Spalding 18:32, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

• It depends on how the word is used. If management control is meant as a single term you should wikify the whole thing (and if you've got the time, write an article about it). :) Mgm|^(talk) 21:21, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

Free links? Wiki links? Internal links?

What is the official term for these things, and shouldn't there be an article on one, with redirects from the other? Maybe there is but I can't find it. If I wanted to create them, is it OK for normal Wikipedians to create articles in the Wikipedia namespace? Thanks. Spalding 17:32, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

• Whatever you put into the Wikipedia namespace has to pertain to the editing process and Wikipedia itself. The best place for articles you're working on is a user subpage. As for internal links or wikilinks. I think they'd better be placed in the Wikipedia namespace as well. Regular readers don't want to know about those. Hope it helps. Mgm|^(talk) 21:18, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

Error in entry name

Hi, I was wondering what to do about a spelling error. The actor Fred Ewanuick from Corner Gas has a page set up at Fred Ewanuik. It appears his name is actually spelled with the 'c' as noted above (there is conflicting evidence, but the 'c' does appear in the title credits.) What do I do to get the entry renamed properly? Thanks, --livii 02:38, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

• You should be able to just move the page using the move tab while viewing the page. Vegaswikian 02:41, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Thanks, I didn't know you could do that. Problem now is a page with the right spelling was created in between when I last looked for one; I moved to info to the new page but don't know how to erase the old page with the incorrect spelling. I made a notation that shows where the right page is, but if you're looking to clean things up, Fred Ewanuik can go. --livii 03:08, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
• You probably don't want to delete the old page—it's a likely enough misspelling—just turn it into a redirect. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:32, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
  • I did the redirect. livii should take a look at the page so that he knows how to do this. It comes up way too often. Vegaswikian 06:06, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Dealing with bad page choices

Looks like someone moved the Horseshoes page to Horseshoes (game) and then created a page about a Horseshoe with the name of Horseshoes. There was already a Horseshoe page. What probably should have been done was to just put a pointer in the Horseshoes page to the Horseshoe article. I have posted a comment on the talk page, but I suspect that if the page was moved, an admin will need to get involved to clean this up. Commnets? Vegaswikian 21:50, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requested moves might help. --cesarb 09:47, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Replacing IP address with new user name

Hey, I editing a few pages without signing up for a user name. I've now gone ahead and created a user name. I would really like my IP address replaced/linked with my user name. I don't think I like my IP address displayed like that (now I think of it).

Thanks, Rosh

You can make a request on wikipedia:Changing attribution for an edit but don't hold your breath - the dev's have much more important things to do and will likely never get around to it. →Raul654 19:41, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)

• If you don't reveal which edits they are it's unlikely people will link that IP to you. You could simply leave them unless there's an edit in there that you're really proud of. Mgm|^(talk) 20:17, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)

looking for an old friend

name : ellen nordborg last address: lonborgvej 9, 6900 skjern

recent letters that i have written have been returned.i would appreciate if i could somehow contact her.

thanks and regards. [email protected]

Helpwith a redirect

Can someone fix a redirect for me - I can't get the thing to work. I want to redirect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakefield_Regional_Council/Green_Paper

to

http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wakefield_Regional_Council_-_Green_Paper

Thanks Brookie 15:16, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You won't be able to make it work. Interwiki redirects seem to have been disabled due to abuse. Instead of creating an interwiki redirect and linking to it, link directly with the interwiki link (which will work). You can also try a soft redirect. --cesarb 16:52, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Trilobite seems to have come up with a fix that works! Brookie 19:36, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Queen consorts or Queens consort?

We seem to be using the term "queen consorts" for everything. See Category:Queen consorts and all of the articles under it. The correct term is queens consort. RickK 08:12, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)

I agree totally: queens consort are queens by fact of their consort to kings. Thus, consort is used adjectively, and the noun queens should be pluralised. This is exactly the same argument as for courts martial and sergeants major. --Gareth Hughes 11:55, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes — with the proviso that 'queen consorts' would be the correct plural if what were meant was 'consorts of a queen or queens'. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 12:06, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Which, of course, is not the case. "Queens consort" is correct. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:24, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)

What does the red coloured text mean when looking at Difference between revisions

In the history section you can compare the different versions and what was added and deleted. Often words or phrases are highlighted in red. What does this mean? Thanks for any help.

Changed material is red. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:20, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ok, thanks, but sometimes there are grey boxes for example containing a paragraph that obviously is different in different versions and there is nothing highlighted red. What do the yellow and green backgrounds mean? Is there any detailed explenation of the whole thing online? We could not find anything...

From m:Help:Diff: The old version is yellow and the new version is green. Text removed is shown in red on the old version. New text is shown in red on the new version. Zzyzx11 | Talk 19:36, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, that page does not address the grey boxes. But from what I can tell is that they list the paragraphs before and after the changes, thus providing a reference point to help you find the changes in the article itself. Zzyzx11 | Talk 19:41, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What to do with 1944 in art?

Hey, I'm relatively new, and I'm not sure what to do with the article 1944 in art. It seems like a reasonable topic, but what's there is less than a full sentence -- and I don't really know enough to expand it. Should this be listed on VfD, or for speedy deletion, or should something else be done with it? Thanks. Avocado 18:44, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)

• The criteria for speedy deletion can be found on WP:CSD. As for marking articles as VfD, editors have different opinions. Some mark articles as VfD on sight. Others prefer to mark it with one of the cleanup tags and let it sit for a week or two to see if anyone offers to expand it -- then tag it for VfD if it remains untouched. It is up to you which method you prefer. For myself, I decide on a case-by-case basis. Hope this helps. Zzyzx11 | Talk 18:59, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Two more things: First, a major reason why some editors use the cleanup tags first is to help decrease the load on WP:VFD. About 100 articles are added there each day. Second: Be bold. Zzyzx11 | Talk 19:14, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

naming of dynasties

Someone please see Talk:Nemanjic and tell me if I'm really just going off on a tangent, or is the other non-native speaker being too insistent on a correct phrase. (replies at my talk or there, please) --Joy [shallot] 10:38, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I could use some help with oggs

The list of full length songs has now exploded - it now contains well over 400 songs, all of which need to be put into (at least) one article, and most of which could go into multiple articles. Help putting them into articles (using the listen template and multi-listen template) would be appreciated. →Raul654 10:22, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)

Some help please re Votes for Deletion

Hi I have spent sometime trying tobuild up a resource for the topic Linux Tablet which is intended to be an encyclopaedic collection of all the information needed to operate a unix like OO ona Tablet PC. Thistopic is vast and undocumented anywhere. I returned to add dome more data and found that the page had been scrubbed and a notice saying there was a vote fordeletion.

I received no prior warning and do not understand what isgoing on or how to either change the contents of thepage (which is no longer accessible) or to object tothe proposed deletion.

Could someone please give me some advice astohow I should poceed fromhere.

Thankyou

Wiki newbie Vizion

• First, you might want to link to the article in question in your request and sign this post. It makes it easier to find what you're talking about.

Now, don't take it too personal. Loads of articles pass through vfd on a daily basis. The section on Installing is a How to and is better posted at Wikibooks. It also seems you could've included loads of info in other existing articles. If you want to contest the deletion, click on the link above the article and vote (don't forget to sign) and provide reasons why it should exist while taking into account the points others made. If you stay civil and friendly as you just did, I'm sure you can convince some people of your opinion. Mgm|^(talk) 08:29, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)

• Another note: It seems this article is mostly about Tablet PCs and Linux on which we've already go articles. It's probably best if you try incorporating your info in those. Mgm|^(talk) 08:32, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, preferably BOTH; put it in one, but have a link to that section (with a "#" tag) in the other. Knowing nothing about the topic, I would assume that it belongs more in the Linux section, as that is all about running it on various computers and consoles and other formats, rather than with the Pocket PC, which is about the device itself more than about huge levels of customisation for one particular OS. (Garrett, 17:33, Apr 12, 2005 (GMT)

Wikipedia dictionary

Hello. I'd like to express my gratitude for the information you have provided on "trolls" in your on-line dictionary. I am a moderator of a BB where troll-like behavior is now being exhibited. Your in-depth description and analysis is very thorough. It has saved our moderator group a tremendous amount of time discussing the issue. I have given the hyperlink to our moderator group and I know we all will visit this site.

Once again, thanks.

Greg

You're welcome! But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary! You must be thinking of Wiktionary! — Trilobite (Talk) 17:07, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Actually, I assume he does mean Wikipedia after all, as there is an article about trolling here, likely more in-depth than the dictionary equivalent. (Garrett, 17:51, Apr 12, 2005 (GMT)

3RR template missing?

I went to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR to report User:24.177.1.87 violating the three revert rule to insert insults into Mastodon (band) after he/she was warned by a number of editors on the article talk page and his own. It sys to fill out a template at the bottom of the page, but I don;t see one there. The section is empty. I looked at the history to try to see if it was removed by a vandal recently, but nothing stood out and there'd be a lot to dig though there. Am I missing something? And, if anyone wants to take a look, is this more a 3RR situation or vandalism? DreamGuy 15:15, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)

• I suggest you change that text and let it point to the example just below the lead. It probably was there a long time ago, but since we've got the example, I don't see why we'd need to put it back in. Mgm|^(talk) 18:37, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)

Ziotaki language

Recently I discovered that the article on the conlang Ziotaki was created and deleted on VfD. Could somebody who has access to deleted articles tell me when the article was created, so I know whether Ziotaki language was written before or after I added it to List of spoken and sign languages beginning with the letter Z? Wiwaxia 02:55, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It was created on May 30, 2004 by Sarge Baldy. →Raul654 03:16, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)

Verbatim Copying from Public Domain

How should this case be handled? [3] Lotsofissues 23:04, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I went ahead and added a reference, but the article might benefit from some slight updating :) --iMb~Meow 03:22, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

In general, verbatim copying from public domain is fine (as long as the material in question is NPOV and of encyclopedic notability), but you should always cite your source. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:30, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)

Which is a matter of ethics, not law, just to be clear. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:42, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Today's explanation of "on"

I'm trying to write a paper based on a simple word and what it means to people, including has-meant over time.

The word is "on".

When someone says they're "on", what do they mean exactly?

[email protected]

It depends on the context. On can be used as an adjective, adverb, or preposition. Little words like this are very difficult to pin down because they can mean so many things. (Prepositions in particular are notoriously difficult to translate.) You would probably have more luck with a different word. -Aranel ("Sarah") 18:09, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I can think of at least two meanings depending on context. If I say "I'm on penicillin" it means I'm currently taking that medication; "on cocaine" means the same. The phrase "I'm on" can also be in response to a suggestion indicating that I am ready and willing to participate in the suggested activity: Harry: "Let's go to the pub."; Tom: "I'm on"; Dick: "So am I" means all three will probably end up in the pub.

I don't mean to deviate much from the topic, but perhaps you could do a comparison between "on" and "off". I think there are a few fascinating colloquialisms using the word "off". For example, "The alarm is going off!" Well, the next step, obviously, is to turn it off. How would someone turn something off if it is already "off"? But we never hear someone say, "The alarm is going on!" But you could say, "The alarm is on". But that does not bring about the same mental picture of a loud buzzer or bell ringing. It sounds more like the alarm device is set to "ring" or "go off" whenever an event triggers it. Perhaps you should modify your request that suggests "on" is a "simple word". From what I have learned throughout my linguistic experience, the seemingly simple words are truly the most complicated. Zephlon 20:08, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

"The Oxford English Dictionary is the most comprehensive record of the English language, and its policy is to attempt to record all known uses and variants of a word in all varieties of English, worldwide, past and present." 4.250.198.226 21:20, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

—HOWEVER if someone says "What are you on?!?" then it's referring to drugs, or coffee, or... things like that with NO ambiguity, unlike the other terms with rather vague origins as detailed above. (Garrett, 5:21, 12 Apr 2005 (GMT)

I want to redraft an article, but take my time doing it

I am dissatisfied with an article. In fact, it seems to have been tagged saying that the article is not up to Wikipedia standards. I would like to draft a new article, but it may take a few weeks.

Certainly I do not want to put up a half-baked in-progress article, nor do I want to remove the existing article until my draft is ready.

Q1. Should I create an orphan article like "Potential Replacement for xxxx"

Q2. When it is ready, should I submit it for review?

I assume that if people like the article, then replacing the old with the new will not be a difficult issue.

Suggestions?

DanBos 17:20, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

You can create the article in your own User space, such as User:DanBos/Article. When it's ready, you can then move it to the main article space, and list it for Peer review. RickK 21:50, May 3, 2005 (UTC)

Another option is to use a subpage (xxxx/Temp) and add a note to the talk page of the article pointing to it. If you want other people to help, it's better to use a subpage; if you want to write it all yourself and submit the finished option, it's better to use your userspace. But don't create a top-level article ("Potential replacement for xxx"); it would only end up on VfD, or moved by someone else to one of the two places just described. --cesarb 22:19, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

I would recommend you create the article in your own User space, such as User:DanBos/Article. The chances of it being put on VFD are slightly higher if you put it on a subpage (xxxx/Temp) because some might not notice the talk page. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 22:28, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Is there much activity on the article? If there is, you should start by getting other editors in on the new version from the start. Suddenly presenting a rewritten article as a fait accompli is a good way to get other editors very annoyed with you. If no-one's touched it for a while, that should be OK. Which article is it, by the way? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:57, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the guidance. The article is "contredanse". 68.191.249.9 01:20, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

someone's resetting my password...

Three times in the last week, two IPs from toronto (142.150.137.21, 142.150.141.239) have requested a password reset be sent to me. I know that they can't get my password, but it's a bit obnoxious to have to keep changing it back. Is there any way to make the system confirm that a reset has been requested before the password is actually reset? -eric ✈ 04:10, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

I've heard that you can safely ignore those e-mails. Your old password should continue to work. Rhobite 04:24, May 3, 2005 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons Image Marked "Copyright Violation"

This image is indicated as being a file from Wikimedia Commons; the original is here, where it is marked as a copyright violation. Should this be marked as a copyright violation here in Wikipedia as well? Will the image automatically go away when Commons removes it or will specific action need to occur here? CoyneT ^talk 01:22, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Management Quantative Analysis

Could anyone please explain why it is better for society to have the market, and not governments, determine prices of the goods we buy. If the government was running the market, how would you see marketing of goods and services differ than if society has the market?

Thanks, Sugar1 2May.05

It might be more appropriate to ask this question at Wikipedia:Reference desk. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 18:07, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Replacing an image by its copy on Commons

I've changed, I hope improved, the lettering on Image:Morisnet.png. I couldn't upload that here, since it was PD, rather then GFDL. So, I updated the copy on Commons:. How do I now get the page Moresnet to use it? Simplest would appear to just have the en: version deleted, but the Commons: version explicitely states it's just a, now modified, copy of the en: original, so removing the original doesn't seems quite right. I could use some assistance in figuring out how to handle this. Aliter 16:59, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Um, you can upload PD images to en:... You can upload them to the Commons as well. On the other hand, I can't actually see that image... Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 18:46, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

He meant Image:Moresnet.png. And you're right PD is possible on en Wikipedia and commons as long as its properly tagged. 82.172.23.66 21:21, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

• Sorry for the typo.
• Uploading includes the very prominent message "By uploading a file here to which you hold the copyright, you agree to licence it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." As a consequence, you need to lose the rights before you start uploading. How do you do that, especially since the file you're uploading is actually created as part of the upload process? I leave that problem to however put that message there, and don't use uploading to en: as a means to PD something.
• But my question was not about the theory of PD on en:, but about this specific situation. What do I do here, to give the en: article the new image? Aliter 17:07, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Help with dicdefs

Okay, I'm just asking for some of you honrable Wikipedians to help me out. I've been transwiki-ing all of the marked dictionary definitions to Wiktionary. After they are transwikied they are placed on WP:TL. Several things can happen to them then. They can be expanded into a general article, merged and redirected somewhere else, or listed for deletion on WP:VfD. I'd like some help going through all of those listed on WP:TL and doing one of those. A lot of definitions get transwikied but then they stay on WP when they should be deleted just because no one bothers to go back to them and do anything about it. It's a lot of work for one person, as I transwiki them too, so any help is appreciated. Thanks. --Dmcdevit 04:15, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Community Portal for Irish Gaelic site

Hey guys. On the page of my native language, there is no community portal and no real way for people to interact. I was wondering if anyone out there good on code could make one or tell me how to make one, so I could switch it over to the Gaeilge site. Obviously, you can just do it in English and I'll translate. - Dalta 22:40(UCT) 30 April 2005

Most Wanted Pages

I've noticed that the Wikipedia:Most wanted articles is out of date and dwindling. I do not know how to update it, but it would be much more useful if someone could make it up to date. Thanks. --Dmcdevit 18:26, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It requiers a developer to run an SQL query to update it, so don't hold your breath. →Raul654 18:30, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

I was afraid of that. That should have been one of the best resources that I use to up put new requests on Open tasks. In its current state, I'm afraid the "most wanted" articles are probably so old that they could be some of the *least* wanted as new ones have most likely overtaken them. Oh well... --Dmcdevit 18:44, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC) (PS, what's an SQL query?)

Couldn't anyone do an SQL query from the database dump and update it himself? Gkhan 18:56, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

I suppose so, but (a) the list would be current only to the last sql dump (April 21) and (b) it would require someone who actually knows what he is doing ;) →Raul654 19:15, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

a) April 21 is better than mid-december, and b) i could give it a shot :P Gkhan 19:23, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

BTW, I just found Special:Wantedpages, whats up with that page? Someone should perhaps fix that one first. Gkhan 19:35, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your help. And I think Special:Wantedpages is just a raw "what links here" type of thing across all namespaces, so it's no help at all for what we need. --Dmcdevit 20:22, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I'm done, the complete list of the 500 most wanted articles is at User:Gkhan/Mostwanted (feel free to replace the list at Wikipedia:Most wanted articles with mine). Some of them are blue links since its from April 21st. If you ever need this done again, give me a holler, I've got a script for it now :D. And, oh yeah, some of the links are in strange characters, for this I apologise but I don't have the energy to fix right now. Gkhan 22:37, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

I fixed the strange characters for you. --cesarb 23:12, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Great job! Thanks, --Dmcdevit 23:31, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm curious why a link from History of anti-Semitism seems to count as 42 links. --Chris Johnson 01:47, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Bong terminilogy

Hello,

I've noticed that bong terminology can vary dramatically from one location to another and as people come along and edit the article they use their local terminology which makes the article hard to read. I've started a discussion at Talk:Bong#Terminology where I hope people will leave their local terminology. Once I've gathered enough I intend to add a new section to the article which details the terminology and update the article to use a consistent set of terms. I am hoping that anyone here who has experience with one of these devices would leave a comment at Talk:Bong#Terminology and help the article out. Don't be shy =)

Thanks! Triddle 17:34, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Anon user pretending to be admin and falsely claiming that I was banned

I really have no idea where to report this. Anon user User:66.194.40.3 is repeatedly going into Timothy McVeigh pulling the word "terrorist" out. He is also adding the word "martyr" in other similar articles describing these terrorists. OK, so, fine, myself and other editors just go ahead and change them back. But then he went on my talk page and claimed that he was going to ban me if I continued to revert his change. I told him (there and on his talk page) that I was not that stupid and he couldn't bluff me. He then went on my page and claimed that I had ben blocked for 24 hours and would no be able to make any more edits... which, obviously, is a lie. Where does one file a report of someone making false claims like that? It's not strictly vandalism, because it's done with POV warring in mind... This guy needs to be stopped. DreamGuy 10:59, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

• I'll see if I can talk to him. But if he continues, I have no problems with blocking him. Technically, it could be seen as admin impersonation. Mgm|^(talk) 11:02, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)
• Well, I've tried to talking and told him to take it to talk and he subsequently reverted me calling my reversion to the long-standing version of the article vandalism. "You have been blocked from editing for 24 hours because of POV pushing" on DreamGuy's talk page is admin impersonation. I'm too involved now to block myself, but if he reverts one more time, I recommend someone else does for admin impersonation and 3RR violation. Mgm|^(talk) 11:18, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)
  • I'd mention this at WP:AN/I rather than here. Thryduulf 11:33, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
• User:66.194.152.87 came in and took over where the blocked anon left of. They're from the same range. Mgm|^(talk) 11:53, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)
  • It's obviously the same guy... A first time user of Wikipedia knows enough to jumkp in and try to file a 3rr claim on someone else after only one edit ever? Not likely. The last change unfortunately put it at the version that the anon person wants (because an editor tried to restore but is apparently doing it by hand and mistyped, and then typos were reverted) but I bet if someone else were to change it back to the consensus version the anon will just revert again, and again, and probably reset his IP again if blocked again... DreamGuy 12:03, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)
• I edited out those spelling errors by Gabrielsimon. But I'm not going to revert a third time myself on principle. If someone else does reverts, we know there's concencus for it. Mgm|^(talk) 12:07, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)
• One worry is the possibility that the anon might - using a false name or IP address - claim on another person's talk page, or a discussion page, that DreamGuy has been blocked, and is thus an untrustworthy vandal. A neophyte, or someone who simply glances at the diff, might assume this to be true, and ignore DreamGuy's contributions. -Ashley Pomeroy 22:13, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Barrett's Lesophagus

Someone created a new article called Barrett's Lesophagus & linked it from esophagus after changing all instances of esophagus to lesophagus. I know - it's strange, I reverted the esophagus article. Anyhow, there is an article called Barrett's Esophagus, and as far as I know there isn't a Barrett's Lesophagus. Can someone delete that article then? Hfwd 22:32, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• I'll put Barrett's Lesophagus on vfd. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:39, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)
• It is part of vandalism, hence subject to WP:CSD. Mikkalai 04:58, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the speedy response guys! Hfwd 15:15, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Move to Meta-Wiki

Could someone assist with moving the page Mans search of autonomy to another Wikimedia project. I believe it belongs somewhere else according to Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a soapbox --Jtalledo (talk) 19:36, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Is there a transwiki namespace on meta? Mgm|^(talk) 09:58, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

help with a wigged page

This page:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Def

Seems to repeat itself, but also seems to have some info on one cycle that is not on the other. I'm not sure how to fix this. For all I know, I accidentally caused it. Anyway... someone with better editing skills might want to take a look. Rexruff 19:15, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• I fixed it, now go to your room...  :) —Teknic^{Talk / Mail} 21:26, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Two Spartan Kings ruling simulatenously?

Hey y'all,

I am a little confused over the apparent conflict over who ruled Sparta during the Persian War. One article says Leotychidas ruled Sparta from 490 BC-478 BC, however, another article states that Leonidas I (of Battle of Thermopylae fame) ruled Sparta from 489-480 BC.

Any clarification or help would be great.

Thanks

Hi, have you read the Kings of Sparta article? Sparta was indeed ruled by two kings simultaneously. Eugene van der Pijll 18:52, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Editing protected pages

There are a few protected pages I would like to make minor changes to. I am not an admin, so I can't do this directly, but no admin (and in particular, not whoever protected the pages in the first place) seems to be watching the Talk pages, as I have posted comments there which have seen no response at all. I don't even know why the pages are protected; a random assortment of other image copyright tags are also protected, and there seems to be no way to find a reason.

Now, maybe I'm asking in the wrong place; if so direct me to the right place. (I already tried Wikipedia talk:Protected page)

The pages are not controversial articles; they are more technical: the two of particular interest are MediaWiki:Uploadtext and {{CrownCopyright}}. In the first case I want to suggest something that is generally considered necessary anyway (see the talk page) and in the second I want to clarify that it's for UK Crown copyright and not (say) Canadian Crown copyright.

First of all, can anyone help me fix these? And second, don't admins who protect a page have a responsibility to watch it to see if anyone needs it changed? --Andrew 14:15, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

• I'll take this. Mgm|^(talk) 10:02, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

Imagery (Photography), copyrights and the Wikipedia

So...

My basic question has to do with (c) copyrght. I'm a photographer and am starting to contribute images to illustrate various articles/entries.

While I am not concerned about students or J.Q. Netizen using these images, with attribution, for 'private' purposes--I am concerned about commercial and/or publication/broadcast use. Thus, I'm not putting these images in "the public domain". I'm a little confused on the Wiki policy here, pls clarify.

It might help to read the Copyright FAQ, which explains everything in plain english. But long story short - images on wikipedia need to be available under a license that is compatible with the GNU Free Documentation License, which all the text is licensed under. (Compatible = "no more restrictive than"). The GFDL allows commerical use, so any license you choose must also allow commerical use. →Raul654 03:36, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

There are many steps between the public domain and full copyright restriction; how you license your images is up to you, and is theoretically as simple as telling people what they're allowed to do with them; anything you don't explicitly allow people to do is forbidden (within the bounds of copyright law). But I would strongly recommend choosing a pre-existing license for your work; a good start is the Creative Commons, which provides a selection of legally solid licenses explained in plain English designed for artists who want to release some rights to their work.

To belong on Wikipedia (we allow some exceptions, but strongly prefer images that follow these guidelines) we require images to allow certain things, some of which you may not be comfortable with.

In particular, we require you to allow commercial use and redistribution, including modification. You can require that you be credited, but it is important to us that (say) people be able to take twelve Wikipedia images and start selling a wall calendar (with appropriate photographer credits). It is also important to us that people can modify the images, for example cropping out pieces or incorporating them in montages. Some of this occurs on Wikipedia:Featured pictures candidates.

If you're not comfortable with this (and that's entirely understandable, especially if you're a professional photographer), perhaps you can choose a few of your images that you don't mind giving this kind of permission for, or you can upload something short of the full resolution. You can also ask that we provide links to your website (which we will happily do). --Andrew 14:02, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

Question about posting US Government data on Wikisource

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but it will probably get the most people looking at it. I have a copy of the December 2003 National Bridge Inventory data "ASCII Version (without Defense Information)". This is definitely in the public domain, as it's produced by the US Government. The question is whether there could be other problems with posting it. They removed the direct downloads from the site after 2001/9/11, and it now says "To order a CD containing all NBI Data please send an email to Ann Shemaka that includes intended use." (By the way, I said I was going to use the data to write Wikipedia articles when I requested it.) Should there be any problem with posting the full data on Wikisource?

Also, I have older data for a few states, downloaded before 2001/9/11 (which apparently includes some "sensitive denfense information"). This is useful because it includes the data for old bridges that have been replaced since then. Would there be a problem with posting this, as it has been released by the FHWA, and thus shouldn't be able to be unreleased? Or are there other laws that might take effect?

Thanks for any response. --SPUI (talk) 00:52, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• I would think you would be able to post it since it is public domain. The most likely reason that they only have it available on CD is because the agency has a limited budget and decided to cut costs there. But I think it would be wise to send an email to Ann Shemaka about this anyway. Zzyzx11 | Talk 20:15, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

ugly graph images

I created some graphs in MS Excel to be uploaded to wiki. They have to be fairly precise to illustrate the concept, which is partially why I used Excel rather than a graphing program. Unfortunately, they're huge. I haven't had any luck in reducing the size while maintaining readability. Look in Category:Graphs (images) and you'll quickly see which ones are mine. For now, I've set them as thumbnails in the article Free trade, but this is a less-than-desirable treatment. Any tips? Feco 07:55, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

nevermind... I solved my own problem. Feco 06:55, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

African cuisine

This article begins:

African Cuisines are generally colorful and bold, with very rich textures and strong spicy undertones. The continent of Africa is the second largest landmass on the earth and is home to hundreds of tribes, ethnic and social groups. This diversity is also reflected in African cuisine, in the use of basic ingredients as well as in the style of preparation and cooking techniques. African cuisines reflect indigenous traditions, as also influences of Arab merchants, European colonialists and inducted labor from Malay and the subcontinent of India.

I changed it to :

African Cuisines reflect indigenous traditions, as well as influences from Arabs, Europeans, and Asians.

The continent of Africa is the second largest landmass on the earth and is home to hundreds of tribes, ethnic and social groups. This diversity is also reflected in African cuisine, in the use of basic ingredients as well as in the style of preparation and cooking techniques.

because it is more accurate and NPOV. User:Katefan0 reverts it without addressing any issues.

I post this here because people reverting for suprious reasons and condesending comments that say "You're testing" instead of addressing actual issues is increasing and needs to be dealt with. 4.250.177.5 05:52, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC) (I'm here. I'm an anon. Get used to it)

• When removing material, one should explain either in an edit summary or on the talk page. If you didn't do that, and you edited anonymously, it was reasonable (although apparently incorrect) for someone to guess on a process basis that this bordered on vandalism. I suggest you (1) open an account and (2) summarize your edits (especially deletions) explaining your rationale, and probably this won't happen. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:18, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)

Well, the second article seems to me much better than the initial one. There is not even really removal of material but rather rephrasing to make text npov. I see no reason to revert positive and constructive changes, only upon the motive the editor is anonymous and that it *might* be vandalism. Anonymous editing is allowed. I suggest you stay anonymous if you feel like staying anon. Comment your edits. In case reversion occur again, please warn us again so that we can clarify on who is authorized to edit and who is not. I hope you proceed on cooking matters :-) Anthere

This is how the article Genghis Khan begins

The article related to this talk page is geographically limited: the general perspective and/or specific examples represent a limited number of countries. If you can give a more global perspective to this article then please consider editing it and sharing your knowledge. Please see the countering systemic bias project page for more general information.

Shouldn't comments directed to editors be on the discussion page? I think so. I've seen that opinion expressed by others here on Wikipedia. I boldly deleted them, and User:Katefan0 tells me:

"Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has now been reverted or removed. Please use Wikipedia:Sandbox for any other tests you want to do, since testing in articles will be reverted quickly. Please see the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks."

Is that condesending or polite? I've seen both opinions. 4.250.177.5 05:41, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Well, it was certainly intended politely--hope you weren't offended. It's just hard to tell the exact knowledge level of an anonymous editor. As for the notes, generally cleanup notes can in fact go on the page itself. Best wishes, Meelar (talk) 05:44, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)

I'm totally for having those notes on the article itself. It attracts more editors to fix it. But 4 tags is a bit over the top. Mgm|^(talk) 19:15, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)

That's what Template:Toomanyboxes was created for ☺. --cesarb 21:42, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Nearly all templates of that kind should probably be put on the talk page. I moved the remaining two there. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:59, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps Wikipedia:Template standardisation will be looking at these should the vote for talk page templates go through. violet/riga (t) 22:20, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Assistance with preventing harassment, please

As a revenge campaign for my editing some articles they had contributed to, a couple of editors (User: Gabrielsimon and User:24.164.211.25 routinely (as in every couple of minutes or hours) add harassing comments to my talk page, even though I have told them to stop, that I have no interest in talking with them, and constantly remove them every chance I get. I filed vandalism reports but nothing was done (other than they filed a revenge one against me, with no evidence of anything of the sort). Can some admin step in and tell them to cut it out or ban them temporarily, please? Because it's obviously not going to end anytime soon on its own. DreamGuy 02:40, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)

Poetry books by Pope John Paul II

Could someone guide me to where an American might order one of the two poetry books written by Pope John Paul II IN ITALIAN?

The books are "The Place Within - Poetry of Pope John Paul II" ISBN 0679760644 (1994) and "The Poetry of Pope John Paul II" ISBN 1574555561 (2002).

Just click on those ISBN links you magically created, and you'll be taken to a list of libraries and booksellers, and clicking on those links will search for that ISBN number in their catalog. I'd suggest one of the links in the "Searches across several booksellers" list will get you the quickest results. — Catherine\^talk 02:48, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Jana_Gana_Mana

Hello. I'm the "author" of the italian version of this article (mostly based on the english one) I translated also the lyric and inserted in the italian page two audio files (.ogg and .mid), I noticed that both in italian and english articles, the text in Bengali have disappeared. I didn't succeed in reparing. Sorry. Could some of you, please, do it? Thanks  :-) --151.37.239.249 12:22, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

VANDALIZED NEWS PAGE

Someone with more savvy than myself please immediately fix the vandalism to the 'more current events' page. There are articles about 'Britney Spears has AIDS' , 'man has sex with gorilla' , and 'man drops photocopier on penis'.

Polls about merging articles

Talk:Streetcar and Talk:Metro. I'm trying to get the word out to prevent low turnout. Basically the argument is whether to merge two regional names for the same concept. Streetcar has the additional fun of light rail being thrown into there, basically meaning any new streetcar system that the promoters want to promote as futuristic, but it is used in a serious fashion to describe systems. --SPUI (talk) 21:14, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Template for reversion comments?

Does a template exist which will make the editing comment "Reverted edits by <user A> to last version by <user B>"? I see this same format used by many different people, but I couldn't find anything in the template list.

Templates don't work in edit summaries (at least, I sure hope not!). What you're seeing is the result of the administrator rollback tool. See m:Help:Reverting. —Korath (Talk) 20:47, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

As far as I know, templates don't work in edit summaries, period. Zzyzx11 | Talk 21:27, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Bot for Ohio Townships

I created Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio townships yesterday after having gone through and manually created articles on all the townships in Butler, Warren, and Clinton counties, e.g. Oxford Township, Butler County, Ohio.
There is a wealth of data on each township in the Census data, which are also available more easily through Ohio State's site. Bots were used to create articles from this data on all of Ohio's villages and cities and I wonder if someone would be willing to create and operate a bot for me to add the Census data to the existing articles and to create new ones. I have some guidelines on the project page for how these articles should be set up. If someone's interested, please let me know on my talk page. PedanticallySpeaking 15:20, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

• Isn't this right up Rambot's alley? Mgm|^(talk) 21:26, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

How do I edit category:Florida Keys

How do I edit that table for category:Florida Keys?

The information is incorrect.

"Islamorada | Tavernier | Plantation Key | Matecumbe Key " are all considered part of the upper keys. The border is around Lower Matecumbe. Some of the info on the Keys is off in general.

First, if you link to a category in an article (even here!) could you please precede the word "category" by a colon ":"? A horrible aspect of the way in which that keyword is implemented means that if you link to a category from *anywhere* in an article, that article is included in the category. Before I did this edit, "Wikipedia:Village pump (assistance)" was included in the category "Florida Keys"! :)

To answer your question, if you go to that category and select edit, you'll see that the information is contained in a template. The template is invoked in the category text by {{Florida Keys}} and you can look at the actual template by going to Template:Florida Keys. And of course that is an editable page just like an article. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:43, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Bronze

Wikipedia lists the components of bronze as tin and zinc. Other online encyclopedias list copper and zince. Who is correct?

We do list copper; I've clarified the wording so it's more obvious. Samw 01:04, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Trying to add category "bookyr"

Hi. At Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, I'm trying to use the "bookyr" category to show it's from 1843, and it isn't coming out right. Could someone take a look? Thanks -- Tempshill 21:05, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Looks alright to me. There was something odd with the template itself, though - there seemed to be wording from the category stuck in it that made the template read strangely. I think I've fixed it suitably. -- Michael Warren | Talk 21:21, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

Much better, thank you! Tempshill 21:17, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Article (Subject) Index

For some reason Today I can't seem to get to the article index (of related article names). I always end up with the screen giving the Google/Yahoo search options. I don't know if there has been some recent change?

Its a lot more helpful to me though to see the related article names though. How do I get there now? Schlüggell | Talk 19:58, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Assuming you are talking about using search: this is what we fall back to when the servers are too overloaded to handle searches. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:30, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

• • Check out http://www.wikiwax.com/ -- I've found this a really helpful search tool. — Catherine\^talk 02:42, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Confused on some formatting

Long time reader and first time contributer. In my first contribution, The Legend of Zelda: Mystical Seed of Courage I'm trying to have links in the Contents that lead to specific sections of the article. I've read through many Help sections but, I haven't been able to find a clear and easy answer.

[[The Legend of Zelda: Mystical Seed of Courage#See also]] (or any subheader) should work. Inter\^Echo 17:00, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You could also use [[#See also|See also]] on the page as a shorthand. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 00:31, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If you're talking about adding section titles to the Table of Contents box, just create the section header using two "=" signs, like this ==See also== -- that title will be automatically added to a table of contents, if there are three or more section headers in the document. Using three "=" (===And also this===) will create an indented sub-section on the TOC. — Catherine\^talk 02:31, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Macro Economics

HI!

Can anyone help me answer the following question.

Explain how the equilibrium level of income can be raised through the fiscal policy in the Keynsian Model?

Kind Regards Jasyn

(Formatted by MacGyverMagic)

No idea sorry!Brookie 16:13, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I assume a good lubricant and a Polish tea caddy would be of some use in answering this? Dainamo 23:14, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Well, since wiki isn't quite the same as Google Answers, here's a hint: IS-LM model, especially how it differs in Keynesian and Neo-classical frameworks. Feco 07:45, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Song lists

I would like to ask a larger public to help in sorting out some of the articles listed on this page.

Songs are things and therefore naming them things like "List of songs whose title..." introduces a grammar error and a lot of bad links. "Whose" is a word which should refer to people, not things. Mgm|^(talk) 21:32, May 28, 2005 (UTC)

A call for help to all those computer scientists out there

Look at Patience sorting. The article claims to be about a comparison sort with runtime O(n log log n)! Is this some sort of joke (for all you non-cs people, deterministic comparison sorts must have a running time of O(n log n) or more)? I looked at the document that the article reffered to, and it looked correct enough and contained the proof (although i don't look rigorous enough to be true, but I am really not competent enough to judge). I have serious doubts about the veracity of this article, but could someone more competent in these matters take a look. gkhan 13:05, May 28, 2005 (UTC)

Assuming it actually is O(n log log n), then I think it's violating the O(n log n) barrier on comparison sorts by actually being a bucket sort variation. But don't take my word for it. You might want to try contacting the people that run NIST's Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. They appear to invite such questions. -- Cyrius|✎ 16:23, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, but bucket sort isn't a comparison sort, but this is. It is very strange, but thanks for the tip, I will definitly contact the NIST site. gkhan 16:35, May 28, 2005 (UTC)

Diabetis Type 1 in the Autoimmune diseases category...

Something that might be possible

Hey this is what I want to do: Add Diabetis Type 1 to the Autoimmune disease category, but only type one and it needs to say Daibetis Type 1 on the Category page, also the link on the page should take you to the daibetis type 1 section of the diabetis page. Also it would be good if the category of Atoimmune diseases did not appear at the foot of the diabetis page as not all of diabetis belongs to that category. Some of this might be possible or not, anyone?, this is User:mexaguil 219.88.206.183 11:16, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Voyager 1

I was reading the voyager 1 page and there is a line in the Mission planning and launch section that says "fuck the world." I tried to edit it out and change it but I couldn't find it on the edit page. Could someone who is good at editing remove that line I would appreciate it.

Thanks, Matt Barrett

someone probably removed it by the time you tried to edit it. Your browser may still display an older version of the page. Try to reload or refresh it. --FvdP 20:20, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Copyright question

The User who uploaded Image:26koran graphic.gif claims it's PD, but it seems to have been scanned in from the New York Times. I was going to list it on copyright problems, but wanted other opinions first. RickK 08:04, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

Oddly, the image page has a {{fairuse}} tag, not {{PD}}. Personally, I doubt that the New York Times did enough to establish a copyright on their own, and the transcripts are probably PD because they were made by the US government (my understanding is that they are from FBI interrogations). IANAL, of course. Rl 08:46, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Vesel%ED_nad_Lu%C5%BEnic%ED

[[Vesel%ED_nad_Lu%C5%BEnic%ED]]

I have come across this article with an unpronoucable name - that seem to be written in part numbers in the title but spelt differently (correctly) in the article itself - can anyone correct the spelling - I don't understand how the names here work. Thanks Brookie: A collector of little brown things 07:21, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks sorted by Aloan Brookie: A collector of little brown things 12:45, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, should have said: I moved it to Veselí nad Luznicí with a {{wrongtitle}} (although perhaps that should be {{titlelacksdiacritics}}) and wikified a little. Looks a bit like a copyvio though. -- ALoan (Talk) 13:26, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

tiny edits, okay or waste of space?

This morning I had this (bright?) idea of searching Wikipedia for typos and then editing them. In this case I searched for "teh" and avoided all the pages where the spelling was intentional, i.e. 1337-type pages, stuff relating to slang, and foreign languages. I made about 20 corrections, in as many different articles, only rearranging 2 letters on each page.

My question is, since I saw some comments on here about how changes are archived and server capacity concerns, is it more trouble than it is worth to make changes like this? Do the costs for server space or bandwidth outweight the benefits of having a few tiny typos systematically attacked?

Please, let me know what you think, or what generally accepted policy is.

Sdr 17:34, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

No, please do. Copyediting is a massively useful thing for Wikipedia. One thing that may interest you: the whole of wikipedia, including past revisions, only takes up 37Gb, from over four years of work. My hard disk could itself hold 2.5 wikipedias. Don't worry about disk space; it really isn't a problem. Grammar checking is great: don't give up! Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 17:42, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Hey Smoddy, look two sections up will ya (ie the elminate multiple edits discussion) :P Gkhan 18:01, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

And if you want to participate in an organized effort, check out Project Punctuation and the Wiki Syntax Project. --Dmcdevit 17:56, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Looking professional means people are more likely to throw money at us for more hardware. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:23, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Just in case you don't know already: a good tip for searching is to use google, restricting your hits to wikipedia by adding site:en.wikipedia.org to your search query. I'm sure you've noticed already that wikipedia's own search is rather slow and doesn't necessarily give you what you're looking for when searching for 'teh'. A disadvantage with google search is that your changes won't be visible immediately to the search engine, so you'll have to learn to ignore hits relating to mistakes that you've recently corrected.

Automatic logout problems

I seem to be logged out every time I try to edit a page. The "Remember me" box is checked, cookies are all enabled, firewall adjusted, etc. The browser remembers my username but not my login. This happens with IE, Opera, and even Lynx. Very very annoying. Any ideas? Posted on WP:VPT too but no help. Signed, (you'll just have to take my word on this) -Mashford

• Have you tried Firefox yet? Zzyzx11 (Talk) 00:03, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
  • I have not. Seems like a bit of overkill but I'll give it a shot. Thanks. -Mashford

eliminate multiple edits?

Is there a way to eliminate some of multiple edits? For instance, I created Pal Benko and then edited it 8 times over the next hour or two. Then I realized that Wikipedia must be storing every one of those versions. Is there a way to eliminate all of them except the last one?

--Bubba73 15:59, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

The only possibility is for an admin to delete the article and then undelete everything except the middle edits, but the deleted ones still remain anyway (just no longer visible) and it won't help with storage or processing. violet/riga (t) 16:09, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Don't worry, space isn't really a concern when it comes to wikipedia. The entire english wikipedia, including all old revisons is about 35 GB, which really isn't that much (this does not include images). It can easily fit on most harddrives, not to mention servers. Gkhan 16:13, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

That's compressed and not including the actual current revisions. That said, consolidating eight revisions of a single article isn't going to help things much. Which is why the developers implemented a compression system that consolidates older edits and compresses them together. When applied over the whole database, it results in a significant space savings.

The statement that "space isn't really a concern" is absolutely not true. We've had several incidents where the database servers ran out of disk space, causing downtime. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:27, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

I apologise for making such an assumption. Gkhan 22:31, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

It's not your fault, a lot of people are under the same impression. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:51, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

I was in the dev channel when 2 of those incidents happened, and I gathered that the problem was not lack of space, but bad administration of the space we had. Don't hold off constructive edits due to harddisk space arguments, at least not untill the developers tell us to. Thue | talk 18:47, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for the replies. --Bubba73 16:41, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

WikiPedia assistance needed

Hi! I'm not sure this is the right place to ask these questions, but I seem to be going round in circles in the Help and FAQ pages. If anyone can point me towards someone who can help, it'll be greatly appreciated!

We're thinking about adopting MediaWiki for a project at college (we're students looking for an interesting project, not academics, by the way!), probably setting up a WikiPedia type application on our local intranet/network. We've a load of questions about it, but haven't really found the answers from rummaging around on the FAQs - it's possibly all in there, but we're being a bit useless at the moment. The project will involve both setting up and demonstrating the WikiPedia, as well as understanding the background to the source, so there's a wide range of queries.

I'll just forge ahead with the questions...

1. Future proofing/support - if we adopted this system, how future-proof do you see it being (i.e. for newer/different platforms/OSs)? Also, what does the future hold in store for MediaWiki? 2. Technical requirements - hardware and software. Is it really as simple as running this on a local intranet, using Windows NT/2000 with PHP/Apache/MySQL (once we've worked out how to use them!) and Internet Explorer? Is there any suggested minimum specification for the server (and clients)? Can it be set up on a laptop for demonstration/presentation purposes? 3. Can the look and feel be changed (more than reskinning)? 4. Can updates/edits be limited to specific users or is it a free-for-all as far as edits are concerned? 5. Does the search look through the contents of each page, or it is just concerned with the title/summary? 6. Is there any WYSIWYG editor available, or is it limited to the editor where you can see all the "tags"? 7. Finally, where can we look to get an idea of the history and development of MediaWiki? We're also interested in its "pedigree" and how it came about/is funded. I'm sure I'd seen a page on this somewhere with some of that info, but can't find it again!

Thanks in advance, and best wishes,

Mike Clarke ([email protected])

The m:MediaWiki FAQ really does answer most of your questions. You should also try reading the Wikipedia article on MediaWiki. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:50, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply Cyrius - we'll have another rummage around in the FAQ!--MikeClarke 06:53, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Call to research

Hello, as part of my ongoing research on Wikipedia, I'd like to invite Wikipedians of all ages, beliefs, experience, nationalities etc to participate in a survey of your beliefs and experiences on Wikipedia itself. I have listed some open, discursive questions on a page in meta which you can see here. You could copy and paste them into an email and send it to me at cormaggio at gmail dot com, or alternatively help stimulate some discussion on its talk page. I'm quite open to you asking friends/colleagues on the English, and especially on other language Wikipedias to participate also. You can find some more info on my user page or its talk page too. Thanks. Cormaggio 12:50, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Licensing for images depicting copyright material

What license would be applicable for Image:Doom single-player E3M6.ogg? I'd like to put it under a free license, but I'm not sure this is right considering that it depicts copyrighted material.

This seems like something of a gray area. For example, we have many claimed copyleft photos on Wikipedia of products whose designs are clearly copyrighted, but screenshots are always deemed fair use. What's the difference? Fredrik | talk 10:11, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Huffington Post, 200 celeb-names?

I created an article for The Huffington Post, a new political blog with some 200 celebrity posters. I've been updating the lists of who's already posted and who's supposed to post someday, and I sorted these according to whether they already had Wiki articles, and alphabetized the sublists.

One poster suggested it looks better as a table, but I reverted that because it looked worse to me. Other ideas for how to make it more readable are welcome.--robotwisdom 22:19, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Link spam

For the second time in a week or so have I run into systematic efforts to push specific sites into dozens of external links section. These links tend to be on-topic, so it's not obvious vandalism.

One series of edits were done by two users who kept pushing the same domains (pspreviewed.com, dsreviewed.com, nesreviews.com, gfxvoid.com, flashvoid.com, pocketvoid.com, animeluvers.com, pkmncity.com, forums100.com, imghst.com, phpmini.com) even after being reverted:

• 68.23.45.16 (talk · contribs)
• 68.23.46.44 (talk · contribs)

Another series was/is pushing links to helpguide.org:

• 4.10.131.156 (talk · contribs) (January 30)
• 71.36.40.245 (talk · contribs) (April 10 – 22)
• 71.36.39.51 (talk · contribs) (May 12 – 18)

These edits have often gone unreverted (our search finds currently 26 hits for helpguide.org). My questions are quite simple: When is this kind of behavior considered a problem? When it is, should it be reported somewhere? Rl 21:44, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Spam has the answers for your questions. --cesarb 23:48, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

The incidents I am talking about are neither advertisements masquerading as articles, nor massive spamming with unrelated links (e.g. spam bots), nor are they internal spamming. The only answer I can gather from Wikipedia:Spam is "It's not discussed there, so it must be a non-issue", even though Wikipedia:External links and common sense suggest that this is a problem. Rl 10:22, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

It becomes hard to assume good faith in a situation like this. If a user behaves like this, I'd revert on sight. Remember that wikipedia is not link repository, the external links are not necessary for the articles, they are simply something extra. The articles should stand on their on feet, not need external links. For this reason, and wikipedia must not become an advertising board, I say revert on sight even if the links are somewhat relevant to the article. Gkhan 10:47, May 19, 2005 (UTC)

I also come across this problem regularly. The sites which I have trouble with are travel and photography sites, and one philosophy site. In most cases, the links added are to photos or travel info etc specific to the article being linked to.

I revert these, and leave a note on the page of the anon who's added them. Often the same or a different anon adds the same links again a few months later.

Sometimes an anon will engage in a debate with me, suggesting that their links are beneficial for Wikipedia users, and that there are other, more commercial links than theirs already in similar articles. See my talk page for some examples. My standard explanation goes along these lines:

Wikipedia is not a web directory. If we link to one picture site, we should link to all of them, but that would make all our articles unweildy. When I see someone adding such links to a bunch of articles, I remove them. There are undoubtedly some such links in Wikipedia which haven't yet been removed; you can remove them yourself if you'd like. If you really want to help Wikipedia, rather than to promote your own site, please consider donating some of your photos to us.

In the one case where a user wanted to take it further (he wanted to link to his programming forums), I suggested he post to the Village pump for further feedback. The feedback was not enthusiastic about his site, and although everyone was polite to him I don't believe he continued as a Wikipedia editor.

For one of the more extended discussions, see User talk:Angel12. This user started as a series of anons before getting an account.

I would like to see a clear paragraph on policy at External links, but I'm not sure if we have consensus on what to do with such links.-gadfium 00:12, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your detailed answer. I'd support such a paragraph in External links and at least a mention in Wikipedia:Spam. I suspect our perception of the scope of this issue depends on the areas where we have stumbled over it — it's hard to get a good picture that way. I've seen this in wildly different areas as psychology, accounting, anime, gaming hardware, and software, but I completely missed, for example, the incidents you mentioned related to travel. And since some of these attacks have gone unnoticed for many months, I suspect it will get worse once word gets around. Rl 08:40, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

edit a page

hi i dont know how to change a wikipedia page but the following page needs amending http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere%27s_law amperes law is the intergral over a closed loop (dl)not a closed surface (ds) if someone could change it because i dont know how too cheers wikipedia is awsome by the way

Just go to the "edit this page" tab at the top of the article, makeyour edits and then press "save this page" - all done - good luck Brookie: A collector of little brown things 19:20, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Who hard deleted Marxism?

Who hard deleted Marxism. its gone. There's no history or talk. Wiki's internal search indicates the page existed at the 18th of May: "Marxism "Relevancy: 99.6% - 0.9k (148 words) - 09:11, 18 May 2005

But it isn't there now. Help please? Fifelfoo 09:12, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

From the deletion log:

04:07, May 18, 2005 Delirium deleted "Marxism" (clearing out copy/paste move for a history-preserving move back to undo vandalism)

hope this helps. Gkhan 09:32, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

Look like Delirium forgot to restore it. There was another incident with a page move vandal moving lots of pages at that time (about 02:00 UTC). I've restored it. Lupo 09:50, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

hi i dont know how to change a wikipedia page but the following page needs amending http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere%27s_law amperes law is the intergral over a closed loop (dl)not a closed surface (ds) if someone could change it because i dont know how too cheers wikipedia is awsome by the way

Ongoing edits to (Supposedly) "Protected" Page

The page Grand College of Rites has been marked as protected since 13 Apr 2005 (except for a 14 minute gap). Despite this it is still being repeatedly edited with major changes. I can't find this page listed on the Wikipedia:Protected page or Protection log. Judging from the history it's obvious that the parties editing it have very strong and conflicting views. Quite a bit of content has been discarded by the conflicting sides. It appears the editors aren't paying any attention to the few postings on Talk:Grand College of Rites.

I suspect that this page isn't really protected (unless administrators are doing the editing). I think somebody put the {{protected}} there to chase away other people (who follow the "protected" directions) from editing it or cleaning up the content or POV. But I might be wrong so I don't know whether to request unprotection on Wikipedia:Requests for page protection, or to just "unprotect" it myself by removing the template marker. Especially since there still is a dispute in progress (and this has been discouraging), I wasn't sure of the right action (or the right place to ask).

I guess the key question is what should be done when someone enters a bogus {{protected}} entry on a page that isn't really protected? And does it make sense for an unprotected page to be marked {{protected}} (which may chase people away)? Scott 04:33, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

If it's not protected, take the protected notice off. (I've just done so). If it needs protection, request it, and maybe it'll be done the right way<g>. - Nunh-huh 04:36, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. Is there an authoritative way for a non-administrator (especially a new user) to determine if a page is really protected or not (except for trying to edit it)? Scott 05:02, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

If there's an edit link up top, it's not protected. On a protected page it becomes "view source". --SPUI (talk) 05:11, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Orchestral Bells

I am researching the development of ochestral bells. I have found references of their use in music going back to the 14th Century, and that Georg Handel apparently was the first composor to use them in a fully orchestrated piece, in 1732. Any assistance in helping me track down a more complete history would be greatly appreciated. My email is [email protected]. Many thanks for your help. -Dean

[4] may be helpful Lupin 23:59, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Consistency Between Articles

If I spot two articles that are inconsistent with each other, what should I do? This is, of course, assuming I don't know enough to just fix the one that's wrong. :) In this particular case, I'm looking at AppleTalk ("PhoneNet was considerably less expensive to install and maintain, and it is perhaps surprising that Apple did not move to this solution as well.") vs LocalTalk ("eventually Apple itself abandoned LocalTalk wiring and marketed PhoneNet as LocalTalk"), but I'm just as interested in the generic answer. --Steven Fisher 10:45, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

• If you believe that an article contains inaccurate statement(s), please follow the guidelines at Wikipedia:Disputed statement. If you think an article is significantly inaccurate, please follow the directions at Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute. 10qwerty 12:03, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

What if it's a case like this, where I know that a minor point in one of two articles is incorrect, I just don't know which it is? Is there some sort of of "conflicts with" template to use? --Steven Fisher 14:12, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it eventually occured to me that all I had to do was mention the conflict in the edit note and discussion page. So thanks for your help; the accuracy dispute page helped a lot. --Steven Fisher 14:23, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Browser home page

How do I use Wikipedia's 'RANDOM PAGE' to appear with a different article each time the page is accessed? I'd like to make it my browser's home page with a different article each time I start the browser.

I would assume setting your browser's homepage to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage . Evil Monkey∴Hello 00:23, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

Rickover bio and Chernobyl disaster - articles conflict

In the bio of Admiral Rickover, Rickover urges Carter to tone down the resulting Report; but in the entry for the TMI disaster, Rickover comments that the report was toned down by Carter - the implication being that Rickover disapproved of the toning down. Does anyone know for sure which is right?

• Have you raised this on the respective talk pages? Have you asked for citations? -- Jmabel | Talk 05:35, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

TWISS family--re: Martello Towers--Lt. Colnel Wm. TWISS

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN;

I hope this is the correct department for asking my question.  :) If it is not, I would appreciate someone sending it to the proper sources. Thank you.

I am researching my TWISS family tree throughout the world and have been, in particular, trying to find out what I can on Lt. Colnel Wm. TWISS, builder/engineer on the Matello Towers.

I do know his dates: 1745-1827 but not where he was born or who his family was.

I would appreciate it very much if someone would, please, send me some info., as to where I may begin this ardous search for the info. above, and/or, if someone might, please, send me some info. through your reference books (including their names, etc.), websites, databases, magazine/s, newspaper articles, or recommended words and search strategies for the topic with which my help me in my research.

Also, if you might, please, suggest any libraries, etc., or any SNAIL MAIL with contact names, or fax numbers, again, this would be greatly appreciated.  :)

I do hope some can assist me in my endeavours!  :)

Thank you so very much.

Shannah

Googling for "Martello" and "Twiss" indicates that he was a Brigadier General, and Commanding Engineer of the Southern District [of England]. The archives of the British Army and/or the British National Archives or ought to be able to help. Indeed, they have the will of Will of William Twiss, Lieutenant General, Colonel Commandant in the Corps of Royal Engineers (18 May 1827) available to download for £3.50. He also seems to be been a Lieutenent in General Burgoyne's army in 1777. For someone so prominent, there must be a mainstream biography that gives more details - DNB? Good luck - interesting chap. -- ALoan (Talk) 18:42, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

See Susan Holt, article Twiss, Stephen, in Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers, vol 1, 1500-1983, pp730-733, has good list of sources. Apwoolrich 12:38, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Lara Roxx

Thre are some very stong accusations against Darren James in the Lara Roxx article but no supporting documentation for them. Are we in legal difficulty if Darren James decides to sue us for slander/libel, or have these allegations been documented somewhere? RickK 23:02, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

• If there is no supporting evidence, then these accusations should be taken out. 10qwerty 23:04, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Help with Bugzilla and CSS

I submitted Bug Report 989 and I recently received an email saying it is "fixed-in-cvs". I'm not sure what that means - can someone help? If it was fixed, they mentioned implementing it in CSS. Can anyone help me with that? I'm not too web-programming savvy, but I think it means I can somehow personalize certain HTML elements. In this case, I wanted to make the Preview message bigger and flashing so that I don't miss it. They said that should be implemented in CSS since not everyone may want it that way. I pasted this example of the source for that preview from the iron article: <title>Editing Iron - Preview - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</title>

So do I apply a style to <title>? How would I do that in Firefox or IE? Thanks for any help. Spalding 14:23, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

• Um, you don't add styles to <title>. <title> is what appears in the line at the top of the screen, above the toolbar with file, edit, view, etc. If you mean the line "Note: Remember that this is only a preview, and has not yet been saved!", then it is by no means easy to edit this. You would have to use javascript, and I don't know how. CSS won't do this alone. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 14:37, 14 May 2005 (UTC) Edit: alternatively, you could get a developer to alter the MediaWiki coding. Actually, now might well be a good time to do that, as MediaWiki 1.5 is soon to be released. I'll do what I can.

Oops, that was a dumb mistake on my part - Yes, that's what I meant. From the following pasted text, maybe it could be gotten into Version 1.5. Thanks!

fixed-in-cvs This bug has been fixed in untagged CVS. This means that the fix is not live on Wikipedia, and the next release may not contain the fix either. Spalding 15:14, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

If you know CSS, you do not need to wait for 1.5. The Preview warning is:

<p><center><font color="#cc0000"><strong>Note:</strong> Remember that this is only a preview, and has not yet been saved!</font></center></p>

So, you can add some rules to your user stylesheet with a selector of p>center>font[color="#cc0000"]>strong to style that text. That should work with Mozilla Firefox; a simpler selector probably will work with Internet Explorer too. For instance:

p>center>font[color="#cc0000"]>strong { font-size: larger; text-decoration: blink; }

See User styles for more information. --cesarb 00:14, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Well, I can almost get this to work. The closest that will work is p {font-size:200%; text-decoration:blink}, which of course applies that style to every paragraph. Whenever I add the other part of the selector it doesn't work. And I remember reading that IE does not support blink, which fits with my experience of the blink part working only in Firefox. Spalding 01:15, May 20, 2005 (UTC)

I finally got this working, with center {properties}. It applies to all centered text, but that's usually ok. I think before it was choking on the font color. It doesn't blink in IE, but the bigness really helps by set it apart from the other article text. I think I'll share it in the User Style Galleries. Thanks, especially to CesarB. Spalding 11:04, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

{{subst:blahblahblah}}

Hi, could someone please tell me what subst does? I first saw it on the Kindness Campaign Wikiproject:If you do decide to use these, please use the "subst:" template option, so that the recpient can more easily modify the image to suit his or her needs.--Fito 06:48, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

What "subst" does is that it copies the text generated by the template into the article itself. For example, if you save "{{subst:welcome}}" onto your talk page, the system will actually copy the text of the template onto that page, and you'll see that text when you edit that particular page later. If you just save "{{welcome}}", you'll just see "{{welcome}}" everytime you go to edit the page.

The advantage of using "subst" is that a user can more easily modify the wiki code to suit his or her needs on just that one particular page. And plus, it helps cuts down on the web server load because the system does not have to go back and generate the template again each time a user visits that page. The disadvantage is that you don't automatically get the changes if the template is later revised. Hope this helps. 10qwerty | (Talk) 06:59, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

By the way, "subst" is strongly urged for all templates that are primarily designed to be placed on talk pages, and Template:Vfd. These templates are used the most. You can find more information on "subst" at meta:Template#subst. 10qwerty | (Talk) 07:10, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Thank you very much :) --Fito 15:55, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

Nice template mechanism but...

I recognized displaying some row of Template:Infobox CVG depends parameter, so I want to use mechanism display controll with Template:If defined call1 and Template:Template call1, but I fear copyvio because GFDL-version incompatibility(In fact, contents on ja.wp are licensed under GFDL 1.1 or later but contents on en.wp are licensed by GFDL 1.2 or later, so I think copying from en.wp to ja.wp cause copyright violation). How to solve GFDL version incompatibility? --ja:PiaCarrot 15:58, 2005 May 13 (UTC)

• I am not copyright expert, but I would think that the differences between GFDL 1.2 and GFDL 1.1 are so minor that it would not include the situation of copying Template:If defined call1 and Template:Template call1. 10qwerty | (Talk) 17:42, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
  • By the way, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.2-wdiff.txt gives the differences between the two versions. In quickly scanning that file, it appears that most of the changes were minor clarifications, and thus would not affect what you want to do. But you still may want to look at it. 10qwerty | (Talk) 17:52, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Hi, 10qwerty. Thanks to your information, but I think simply: "Permission is NOT granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any prior version published by the Free Software Foundation." (Wikipedia:Copyrights says using contents on en.wp under GFDL 1.2 or later is allowed) --ja:PiaCarrot 12:22, 2005 May 31 (UTC)

Copyright in "works of art" deriving from copyright photos

If somebody either uses gouache to copy a copyright photo or uses some "gouache" tool of Paint Shop Pro or similar to treat this photo, and ends up with something looking very similar to the original photo, is the result his or her own "work of art" that he or she is free to GFDL and use for illustrative purposes in WP articles?

For the specific pictures that I have in mind, see Image:Viv_in_Headdress.jpg and its discussion page. (And no, IANaL.) -- Hoary 04:23, 2005 May 13 (UTC)

This picture has had more of a change than just a gouache finish - see the discussion page. The picture is "new" because it is substantially different in layout, size, direction and finish and therefore different from the underlying picture on which it was based - it has been changed and a new artisitic input made to the piece and as a new (albeit derivative) work that makes it a new picture - certainly as far as copyright goes. The fact that you can recognise the stance of the person in the picture and the base work doesn't alter this.Brookie:the wind in the grass 06:57, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

But under copyright law, only the owner or their authorized agent or licensee has the right to authorize the creation of derivative works. So unless the work is so wildly altered so that the original is unrecognizable, there's always a (very slight) risk of being sued by the original copyright holder if one can recognize the new work as derivative of the first. There's always the fair use exception for parodies under Campbell v. Acuff-Rose — but that only applies if the derivative work can reasonably be construed by at least some people as funny and is clearly designed to make fun of the original work. --Coolcaesar 08:03, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

The above is I believe substantially different from the original and as such is unlikely to offend the original photographer - if not it can always have some more surgery! In any case the new picture is itself the copyright of its creator - as long as he has added enough input to put something original and/or creative into the work. There are many such derivative-type pictures on the Wiki - and as such they do add a useful set of images for articles. You can worry these things too far! Is there a boff somewhere at Wiki who decides when something is sufficiently far removed to not be an issue/risk if there is a problem? If soemeone is worried about the picture concerned refer it upwards - if not - don't! Brookie:the wind in the grass 09:04, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

See the Copyright Law of the United States of America, article 103b:

"The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material."

That is: as long as it's a derivative work, and I presume that Image:Viv_in_Headdress.jpg clearly is, as the original work is probably identifiable, the copyright holder of the original work still holds a part of the copyright of the derivative work. Even though in this case, the old and new parts cannot be separated, both creators hold the copyright.

Even though, as you correctly say, the derivative work is sufficiently different from the original to be copyrighted by the creator of the derivative work, the original creator still holds a copyright on this work as well. Which means that the creator of the original work also has to agree with the distribution of this picture via Wikipedia.

There is one more thing: it is a derivative work (as you admit), and the copyright holder of the original work has the exclusive rights to create a derivative work (or to authorize one), see article 106 of the above law. Did you have permission of the original creator to produce your "gouache"?

However, IANAL. Eugene van der Pijll 16:17, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

But - we don't all live in the US! Brookie:the wind in the grass 18:47, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Right. I don't myself. However, Wikipedia does. -- Hoary 08:58, 2005 May 16 (UTC)

Complicated history/page merge needed

Have just been peeking through my contributions list, and have noticed something. It seems that at some point between February 3 and March 10 this year, Help talk:Contents was moved to Help talk:Contents please do not just copy and paste the contents, apparently unnoticed, and the redirect deleted (since the page was recreated from scratch). The page was recreated on March 10, but the original page and its history remain adrift at the orphan location. It seems reasonable that the two should be reconciled. Since I am not an admin, this level of page move/history merge is beyond my capabilities. I wasn't sure whether to put this here or at WP:AN, but this seemed the more appropriate venue. -- Michael Warren | Talk 18:58, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requested moves is the most appropriate. -- ALoan (Talk) 20:12, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. Have made the request. -- Michael Warren | Talk 20:22, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

Done. violet/riga (t) 12:16, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

Article naming problem

I've been helping out on the neglected and somewhat buried Trial against the Bulgarian medics and a Palestinian doctor in Libya article. The article could always use improvement itself, of course, but what I'm coming here for is some guidance on the article name, which is long and awkward, even taking into account the three countries concerned. I would prefer the more natural-sounding Trial of (trial against appears in English, but much less often), for starters, and the word medics is less common in the US at least than nurses (so someone searching for bulgarian nurses won't find it as easily). I did find a handful of references to the group as the Benghazi six, so I created that as a redirect, but I'm uncertain that really covers it since very few people know of the case to begin with. So, I'm open to suggestions (and anyone else jumping in to help). While I'm at it, if you know of an article that should link to this one, feel free; when I discovered it there was only one inbound link. --Dhartung | Talk 18:26, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Greater Serbia

There's a seemingly intractable dispute at Greater Serbia between User:Mir Harven and User:Dejvid. Input from anyone with specialist knowledge would be greatly appreciated. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:36, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

What am I thinking of?

I know there's some project on the German wikipedia creating PDF files of related wikipedia articles. I know there was a proposal on en to implement this. What am I thinking of? Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 16:21, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiReader perhaps? Gkhan 19:44, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

Could use some admin guidance to break endless rev cycles

Dunno if this is the right place for this, but here goes...

If you pay an apparently innocent visit to any of the articles about Lithuania, Lithuanian cities etc. there's a good chance you'll step into potholes that provide a severe jolt to believability.

It has definitely descended at times into a Poles vs. Lithuanians debate, and since both those countries were savaged by at least three major wars since 1900 (WWI, Russian Civil War, WW II, although rarely against each other) there's a lot of bad feeling lying around. Depending on when/where you read it can be pretty one-sided one way or the other.

The net result is that often generally accepted historical facts are revved out, misrepresented, etc. The Lithuania page is locked as a result (good move!) but it affects other pages, and fills pages of Talk.

BTW, as historical background: the two countries were united as one for several hundred years around the time of the Renaissance, so sorting out what is Polish and what is Lithuanian is not neat and tidy. Polish kids are taught that Lithuania was a subordinate partner, Lithuanian kids are taught they were coequal and that Lithuania brought even richer lands into the union. The messy part is that each version has some truth: the Lithuanians had expanded far to the east, over the centuries the two cultures influenced each other, and over time the kings all ended up having Polish names as the Poles assumed the dominant position politically in the union.

Back to the inaccurate articles. It looks like some of the active players are Polish students. I bet they're reporting the news the way they were taught in school, not trying to waylay the wiki. But some of it is wrong: e.g. "Central Lithuania chose to join Poland in 1920" instead of "Polish troops seized Vilnius in 1920." Other parts are literally accurate but the net effect is chauvinistic and provocative: every Lithuanian city named in an article has had the Polish name for the city added to it. I believe you could hear the howl for 3,000 miles if the reverse were done... and almost all these cities have names in five languages. (Sometimes more than one!) Lithuanian, Polish, German, Yiddish and Russian variants of every town name are routine, since the area was a crossroads conquered and reconquered.

Just to keep things even, there are some posters who go overboard on the Lithuanian side of the story, and whose accuracy is inconsistent or who get preoccupied with writing up past injustices. This is a region with more injustice in its history than all the hard drives in the world can hold, so not all of it is useful.

My family is from the area. We lost family members to both the Nazis and the Soviets. As a result, I became a history nut and have studied the area deeply. Not enough to know all the answers, but enough to see a lot of inaccuracies lying around here.

I don't know if the admins have a way to deal with this, but it sure feels like an area where a task force of cooler heads with expertise in ALL the subcultures of the area could go through and review the articles and make a pass on them and then leave them locked until real agreement for improvements shows up on the talk pages. Also get some consistency for such things as which name variants should be in which kinds of articles, and which ones should just be in a table in an article about the (fascinating) parallel names.

I've been trying to urge restraint all around on talk pages, but once I encountered what I assume are well-intentioned students revving pages AWAY from accuracy and endless circular debates among angry people I saw I was over my head.

Anyway, may the next century be kinder to Poles, Lithuanians and everyone else in the area than the last one was! Thanks for listening. Coll7

what to do about a useful blocked link?

I'm not entirely sure if this is the right place for it, but it says Assistance so I'll give it a go.

I was browsing around wikipedia and ran across the Sunset_Thomas article where I noticed the 2nd external link was broken. However, I can't fix it as the domain name appears to be on a url block list. What's the general policy for this sort of thing? I don't think it would be a very good idea to leave the link broken. It seems as though someone else attempted to fiddle with the link in such a manner as to bypass the url filter, but it doesn't function as intended. While I might know that someone was attempting to write an "A" with A I dont think that's common knowledge would confuse most people. The link in question is supposed to be pointing to an outside article on the same actress which appears to be a well written and useful source. I don't think deleting the article is a very good solution either. so, what now? JEther 21:14, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

• It's a result of a spam filter for external links. It's located at meta, so it might be best to ask for its unblocking there. Mgm|^(talk) 07:37, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

Researching an MA dissertation on Wikipedia

Hello there

Apologies for bad text style - I haven't got my head round it yet. I am a student in Media & Cultural Studies at The University of Sussex, Brighton, England and currently researching a 20,000 word piece on the potential for computer-mediated democracy. I am using the Wikipedia, and its associated community as my main case study and, in the spirit of which the Wikipedia functions, would like to involve as many people in my research as possible.

I have decided to focus on the Wikipedia because I am interested to see whether the Wiki structure will facilitate an inclusive community spirit amongst disparate individuals, and particularly whether this may function without traditional hierarchies and modes of authority. I know that the answer to this question may seem obvious to many of you, so feel free to supply me with any examples that you think appropriate.

I would like to demonstrate that, given a certain amount of participation and, perhaps, education, a project of this kind may encourage people to participate in knowledge-projects (if anybody has a better term, please tell me) and actually serve to weaken the ways in which authority is traditionally constructed.

Also, when I say democracy I don't mean in the narrow sense of voting, but rather participating in a group project through cooperation and the mediation between individuals who don't agree with oneanother.

Here are the sections that I've come up with so far:

• Does the Wikipedia (or Wikis generally) offer a suitable model for a participatory democracy?
• What criteria exist for the (successful) participation in Wikipedia?
• How (effectively) does Wikipedia resolve disputes?
• How is the Wikipedia community organised?
  • authority
  • hierarchy
  • personal relationships
  • political relationships

I will add more topics as I think of them (or they are suggested to me).

You can reach me on my user page (Will Lakeman) or via email at williamlakeman at gmail dot com. I'm interested in any stories (good or bad) and am keen to discuss Wikipedia with as many users as possible, primarily so that I don't produce an inaccurate piece of work.

Also, if anybody knows a way in which I might better publicise my research, please suggest it. Thanks.

Will Lakeman 18:31, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments received so far, they have been very useful. I'm still researching teh basic proposal, but I'm getting closer to having a real question to work from, which I will post up in due course. Will Lakeman 12:12, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks also for the person who directed me to the wikipedia: what wikipedia is not page - I should stress that my definition of 'democracy' is much broader than 'a political system'. I'm working on this area now. Will Lakeman 13:23, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

New category

On Byway I have created a new category Rights of way - but having done that I don'tknow what to do to make it a useful category - the link shows as red and nneds a new page creating for it - what do I do now? Help! Brookie:the wind in the grass 19:19, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

• To create the category page click the red link and create the category description page as you would an article.
• If it is a subcategory of something else then just add it to that category as if it were an article (e.g. if it is a sub-category of Category:Roads then just put [[Category:Roads]] at the end of the description.
• Once you have save the category page, you can add other articles to it like you can to any other category. Thryduulf 20:53, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Substituting articles with redirects to other articles.

Can a person take an article, removes its text and redirect it to other articles that has nothing to do with it?

Is not that a type of vandalism as if an article is useless it must be totally removed by an administrator?

I am referring to the article José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, when a user has deleted a series of extended articles, like Zapatero's domestic policy replacing them with Redirect statements to the Zapatero page!!! In my opinion that is a pure act of vandalism as it is destroying information and hampering is reconstruction.

How can User:Zapatencas claim I redirected an article to another articles that had nothing to do with it. How does Zapatero's domestic policy have nothing to do with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. How can redirecting an article to a connected article be considered vandalism. Merciless editing sure. Vandalism? that is what Zapatencas (talk · contribs) and his (blocked) sockpuppet SquealingPig (talk · contribs) did to my User page. there was no unnecessary information destruction. There had been a mass duplication of material in these excess articles that were very POV (our friend does not like Zapatero). As there was no need for these articles, the original not being that long, I edited mercilessly. Result: This user attacks my user páge and has the brazen cheek to call me a vandal (in the wrong place). if you ask me a classic case of someone preferring vandalism and bandying about accusations rather than engaging in the hard work of sorting out any content dispute on the talk page, tryiing to incorporate my work into new edits, etc, --SqueakBox 16:08, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Is this the right place for this squabble? Brookie:the wind in the grass 17:29, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

plzzzzz help i need answers

i,ve had a pic line in me for 3 weeks due to a wound on my foot thats had 2 operations, there running sodium chloride 3 times a day through my veins, but i,m having side effects, 1st one is, this horrible metal taste i can,t get rid off, 2nd is my leg is starting to have a bad case of dry skin, and 3rd is i have hep c#, how good is this treatment for my liver? how does that work? any answers would be aprreciated.

I think it's definitely best to consult your doctor rather than asking for help of people who may be unqualified to give it. -- 09:39, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

(note: I accidently missed a ~ when I signed.) -- Joolz 16:28, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree - this isn't a Wiki-hospital Dr. Burger.

You need to ask your doctor if the metallic taste is due to the antibiotics you are receiving (probably Flagyl), and if so, is there is another antibiotic you can use instead. Nothing you describe is treatment for hepatitis C; you need to ask about whether that needs treatment, or if it is inactive and doesn't need treatment at this time. Saline itself should have no effect, as long as you're not given too much. And you may want the doctor to actually look at the skin condition you are describing, so he can tell you what it is and if there's anything to be done for it. Sometimes knowing the right questions to asks helps you get useful answers. - Nunh-huh 20:07, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Evelyn cotton (vfd)

I thought I followed all the instruction to list on vfd but somehow it hasn't worked or I haven't waited long eneough. Could somebody check it out?--Rjstott 11:10, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

• Maybe someone fixed it, but it looks fine now. Maybe servers are slow again in responding. Mgm|^(talk) 11:41, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

Number of stub articles

To all:

The amount of stub articles has grown expotentially within hours. I sorted over 250 stubs today and yet the amount of articles with the stub tag has grown from about 700 (five hours ago) to over 2000. What the heck happened?! I can't sort stubs alone; I need some help or else my efforts will be about as effective as putting a band-aid on an artery wound. Linuxbeak 01:26, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

Illustration for Phase change heat pump

I have created an illustration for phase change heat pump. I have two requests:

• What colors would best illustrate the changes in state and temperature that happen to the refrigerant?
• Could someone with better technical writing skills and understanding of the concept than I write a caption for each of the four stages?

Thanks in advance. —Josh Lee 01:18, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

Album articles

Can anyone tell me where I can find the tutorial on how to make the nice little information tables that can be found on the right side of most album articles? In this example it's the thing with orange borders--Methegreat 21:24, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

• They are called infoboxes and info about this particular one can be found at its related WikiProject (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Albums). Mgm|^(talk) 21:46, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

Comments on new stubsensor project

As the first stubsensor (removal of incorrect stub templates) cleanup project is coming to a close I am starting to plan the next one. The most conflict came from the ambiguity of when exactly the stub template should be removed from an article. I have come up with some new criteria that is not based at all on length and I'm looking for comments on it. I am also looking for comments on the entire page; the new project is available at User:Triddle/stubsensor/working. Also, does anyone know of official policy as to what constitutes a stub besides Template:stub? Thanks. Triddle 20:54, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub states that "a stub is a very short article, generally of one paragraph or less." This is an old definition dating back to 2002. Over time the definition has expanded. - SimonP 17:37, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

Upper case/Lower case

I am proud to be creating my first young article on wikipedia, but have a question regarding the formating used for searching.

My article, "ServSafe" relates to a regional food-safety certification required by all managers who work for McDonald's. The correct phrasing is "ServSafe" with two uppercase letter S's, however entering that title in lower case or simply as "Servsafe" and clicking go does not take a browser directly to the article but instead to a search which suggests the article. How can I enable a search for "servsafe" or "Servsafe" to link directly to "ServSafe"? --172.132.37.181 19:20, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

• Go to Servsafe and create a redirect to the article at ServSafe. Just create the article with "#REDIRECT [[ServSafe]]" and it will be a redirect to your article and can be searched with either term. --Dmcdevit 19:24, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Redirects

Okay, I'm just wondering if there are supposed to be interwiki redirects. I just stumbled upon letter writing, which is a *broken* redirect to a Wikibooks article. Is this proper policy? And is it supposed to not actually redirect us? I couldn't find any guidelines for this, so, what's up? --Dmcdevit 06:04, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

• Interwiki redirects are generally a bad idea. Where they are really needed, some sort of "soft redirect" (explanatory text with a link) is much more appropriate. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:35, May 7, 2005 (UTC)
• Interwiki redirects are in fact currently disabled, and (as far as I know) likely to remain that way. Even when they were enabled, they didn't work properly; in particular, they didn't show a "redirected from" line, so you could only edit the redirect if you happened to be familiar with the &redirect=no syntax. See Wikipedia:Soft redirect for explanations suitable for redirection from the Wikipedia: namespace or to Wiktionary; I'm not sure if there's anything standard for Wikibooks. In this case, it should probably go to RFD, unless someone feels up to writing something encyclopedic and including a {{wikibooks}} as an external link. —Korath (Talk) 23:19, May 7, 2005 (UTC)
  • Ad if we did write an article, that's certinly not the best name, so I agree then that it should go to RFD. Thanks both for the info. --Dmcdevit 23:41, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Name in Biography of an actress

Erica Mer currently begins Erica Danielle Mer is an actress. So her middle name is Danielle, but she seems to just use Erica Mer when I look at IMDB. Should the intro be changed to leave out the middle name even though it is correct? How does one list the name of an actress? RJFJR 02:01, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

The article title should have the most commonly used name. I assume she doesn't regularly get called by all three names, so the title is probably correct. The first line of the article should list the full name, bolded, together with date of birth (and death if applicable) and the one or two most important reasons why this person has a Wikipedia article about them. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) for more information.-gadfium 02:33, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

In short the article is exactly right as it stands. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:51, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

Nursing Diagnoses

I have a question about copyrights, and someone suggested that I should ask here. There is an organization (NANDA) whose purpose is to develop a standardized language for nursing diagnoses. The wording of these diagnoses is specific. NANDA claims copyright on the diagnoses, is this valid and if so, what does it mean? Can I write articles about these diagnoses or make a list of nursing diagnoses? Some of the diagnoses seem to be pretty uncopyrightable (eg. risk for infection), but others are less clear (eg. Ineffective community therapeutic regimen management). The official NANDA publication states that you must seek their permission to even publish a list of their diagnoses, even without a description. I've already started to work on some of this (as you can see), but I'd like to know what my boundaries are before I start putting too much effort into it. All the stuff I've generated so far was a) generated from multiple sources, b) paraphrased where possible (eg. the actual terminology wasn't paraphrased because the exact wording is important, though there are some variations that you do see from time to time.) If this is not the right place for this question, could someone direct me to where I could get an answer? Matt 22:04, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

• Yes, this sort of thing can be copyrighted. Heck, the Dewey Decimal System is copyrighted. And yes, anything like a comprehensive listing would almost certainly be a violation of copyright. The fair use issues are the same issue as quoting from any other copyrighted work. Sounds like you are going after it the right way. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:48, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

Footnote use/mistagged?

Please see the page Dominance relationship. At the bottom are two notes (numbered 1 and 2, tagged with # each) that do not seem to have referent numbers within the text (at least I can't find them). How do I fix this? What is the correct way to tag notes (referent and note itself)? Thanks. --Samwisebruce 16:39, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

To use footnotes, please see Wikipedia:Footnotes. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 18:22, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I've addressed the issue, but not in a definitive way. It needs checking by someone in the know as to why the text to which the notes referred was deleted. Noisy | Talk 09:53, May 5, 2005 (UTC)

Choosing where to add material

I am a wiki newbie (is there a cute wikinese term for that?)

That's it! Brookie:The grass on the hill 16:05, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I have looked through tutorials, faqs, help files etc. without avail.

I seek guidance on where to add material to an existing subject that is spread over multiple pages.

I would very much like some general guidelines, but in case it's too squishy a subject, here's my specific instance:

Under genetics (or heredity, or Mendelian traits, or somewhere), I wish to add a list of common human traits that follow the classic dominant/recessive pattern (such as the ability to roll one's tongue). It's standard high-school biology information.

But where to add it? It's definitely not its own page.

I'm being timid, I know, but my newness to the community daunts me.

thanks

Sarah

Take a look at Wikipedia:Be bold. --cesarb 16:02, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

If people feel you've put it in the wrong place, it can always be refactored. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:14, May 5, 2005 (UTC)

One possibility is to insert a section on the Human evolution page. — RJH 15:59, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Use/Misuse of data - how to handle conflicts

I'm not quite sure if this is the right place to post this, but I'm worried that the Economy of the European Union is going to descend into some kind of edit war, which I don't want to happen. A user made a chance a couple of days ago which, in my eyes, mixed up all kinds of data, created new regions (such as a "London metropolitan area") using their arbitary definitions. What the table (10 richest areas) used to be was purely from eurostat figures, what the users intention was was to iron out the flaws in the way the data was collected/used but in doing so I think they're simply manipulating data to meet their own liking.

• Am I right in this or should I not have reverted their changes?
• Is is acceptable to mix different data sets together to try to fix problems with the data given? Creating these super-metropolitan areas seems to be original research to me.

I'm not quite sure what to do if the user simply reverts the change I made, I don't want to revert again but I don't want to just leave the article in the mess I believe it would be. I've had problems with the user on another article where they've mixed up statistics from different sources to acheive the results they want to see. Any help or guidance would be good, thanks. -- Joolz 00:34, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Be bold and rechange things to what you feel is correct - and then post a note on the discussion page and/or the other user's user page. Brookie:the wind in the grass 07:23, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

In general the problem with quoting sources in Wikipedia is that it freezes the text. In this case, however, that's exactly what you want. So if the table is purely eurostat figures, let the caption say so; preferably exactly what figures. (I know the introduction talks about this, but the article doesn't seem to say that these actually are those figures.) Of course, if the other set of data is of note, and non-controversial, and there's enough room on the page, than those data could be included as well, under a heading and introduction indicating what they represent. Aliter 14:28, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Incendiary

Currently, the reference for incendiary is redirected to the reference to incendiary device. I'd like to add an actual entry for incendiary, with a link to incendiary device, but want to make sure there is no problem with that. There is a lot more to something being incendiary than the devices people use. catseyes818 20:29, 3 May 2005 (EDT)

Be bold. If it doesn't work out, it can be reverted later. --cesarb 01:14, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Go for it. While creating your article you might take a look at the "What links here" page from the incendiary page to see what else is referenced to incendiary. — RJH 17:05, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Section on HItler

It appears that the Wikipedia section on Adolph Hitler has been deleted or vandalized. [When posting - Please sign your entry with 4 tildas or using the signature button on the edit bar Brookie:the wind in the grass 07:25, 6 May 2005 (UTC)] Please repair this.

• Things like this happen all the time. You (or anyone) can go into the history of the article, find the last good version, select it, choose "edit this page", and save, thereby restoring the good version. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:37, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

Wiki *.OGG files

My computer doesn't associate this file type with an application - what do I need to associate it with so I can hear these files etc? Thanks Brookie 08:37, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• I prefer using Foobar2000, but you might find other applications in .ogg you like better. Mgm|^(talk) 09:06, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)
• I use VLC on my Mac; it is available for Windows and most Unixs too. As a bonus it'll play sound files and video files that come from Wikipedia. Triddle 17:40, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Media help →Raul654 17:45, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

• Winamp for Windows plays OGG files. -Willmcw 01:19, May 1, 2005 (UTC)

We should have wav or mp3 files for people who have trouble with ogg files. - Pioneer-12 01:12, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

You're right... but WAV files are huge and MP3 files have patent issues. See here -- FP ^{<talk><edits>} 01:50, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

Just for convenience purposes, what's wrong with having an MP3 file *and* an Ogg file? If the Ogg file is already there, the MP3 doesn't hurt anyone. (Of course, an MP3 but no Ogg is probably bad because it reduces the incentive to add an Ogg.) Nickptar 19:35, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Because MP3 files have patent issues, they won't be used.... Kiand 19:42, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

I know that's why, but it doesn't make it illegal to distribute an MP3 or anything of the sort. The reason to have Ogg is to let people who don't want to/can't use patent-encumbered software have access. But if and only if there is already an Ogg, giving those people access, what's wrong with adding an MP3 and making things more convenient for people who don't mind the patent? Nickptar 20:46, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Because if the Wikipedia is found to be hosting MP3 files made with a non-licenced app, e.g. nearly every damn encoder around, it could cause legal problems from FhG. --Kiand 21:43, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Entry under Confiscation

Confiscation redirects to Search and seizure, which describes a concept relating to US law. This is only an instance of Confiscation and is therefore too parochial. (Confiscation is a wider concept than Search and seizure). The redirect from Confiscation should be removed and an article created there (the original article restored, if there was one?) or at least a disambiguation page should be created (perhaps also with a link to the Wiktionary entry if that is appropriate). Any Confiscation page can note Search and seizure with a hyperlink. (Don't know how to do this (removal of redirects etc) so can an Administrator or someone who wishes to make a proper Confiscation entry do this?) Eilthireach 00:27, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

Done -- it's currently an inadequate stub. Have at it!

Entry under La Bourdonnais

An entry has at some point been created with the heading (entry point) La Bourdonnais. This heading is not according to Wiki style (it being only a surname). The heading should be changed to give the full name in accordance with Wiki style: Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais, and, unfortunately, I don't know how to do that. Can an administrator take this on? (His name was originally Bertrand-François de La Bourdonnais, comte de La Bourdonnais, but the "Mahé" was added for reasons explained in the entry, and his descendants retained the Mahé as part of the surname (Mahé de La Bourdonnais)). Eilthireach 03:17, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

Observation tower

Could someone check to see if this is a translation from the original source cited? RickK 00:05, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

• I don't have that book around here, but it looks like a babelfish job to me. Also, the content is not what the title indicates. I'd say cut most of the article away, and list as stub. Radiant_>|< 15:10, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)
• Here is the Source [5].-83.129.76.34 20:53, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Help with tex

I'm having trouble with tex in the article Reed-Muller code. Some of the expressions have an error png conversion failed. Can anyone help please? reetep 13:45, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That page uses <math>\binom</math> in each place where the error occurs - example: Failed to parse (syntax error): {\displaystyle \binom}

What does \binom do and can some other mark-up be used instead? -- ALoan (Talk) 14:04, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

\binom is used for binomial coefficients (an AmS-LaTeX extension, though). Try <math>{a \choose b}</math> instead: ${a \choose b}$. Voilà. Rl 18:39, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Great - thanks. I've had a go at fixing Reed-Muller code along those lines - I hope it still makes sense! -- ALoan (Talk) 22:14, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your help everyone. reetep 22:49, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Old revisions of the US constiution?

Are there any online sites that contain the old revisions of the US constitution written by the convention? The ones that were written before the final version, which is the only one I find online.

-naelphin

Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs

Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs was last updated in October, 2004. Though of course we haven't gotten around to un-stubbing all the articles listed since then, it would be nice to have a better idea of what the current top priorities are. If you can update this listing, your assistance would be greatly appreciated. (If you happen to do so, it might be easy for you to update some related pages listed on the navigational template on this page.) -- Beland 07:33, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, Wikipedia:List of blank pages, Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles, Wikipedia:Most referenced articles, and Wikipedia:Longpages are all out of date, too. --Dmcdevit 08:16, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

hi i'm new and i have a problem.

i tried to use the cheat codes for pokemon emerald on the VBA i followed the intsruction s and still noting worked. any ideas on howi might've messed up?

• You'll probably get a better answer on a Pokemon game forum. Alternatively, try posting your question to the reference desk. - Mgm|^(talk) 09:28, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Entry on My Contributions does not belong to me.

I’m a new contributor since June 9, 2005. I joined Wikipedia much earlier. I checked the My Contributions list today and found an entry for a rather dubious article on my list that I had nothing to do with creating. What can I do about this? Can I have it removed? This is the entry:

• 14:50, 23 Jan 2005 (hist) (diff) [Mixedfolks] (?Title)

Osbornb 19:18, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Checking Special:Whatlinkshere/Mixedfolks, I found a discussion about it. Looks like it was the Sandbox which got moved to that strange title by someone some time ago. That edit you made was done in fact on the Sandbox. --cesarb 19:52, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Found the culprit: [6]. --cesarb 20:15, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Cesar! I'm glad to know why it happened. Osbornb 23:00, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

NYT Investigation

NYT Investigation Request info regarding NYT ghost-writing investigation involving Maureen Dowd and Carl Hulse. Supposedly Washingtonian magazine has been sitting on the story for almost a year to keep the Gray Lady from another Jayson Blair scandal.http://journalism.wikicities.com/wiki/Talk:Current_events

Logging in

Why can't I log in? A message "incorrect password" appears, even though the password is correct. Fenice

Why not ask for a new password to be emailed and use that? A curate's egg 10:12, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

the problem has been fixed, see entry in Village pump technical assistence.--Fenice 10:38, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sir George Paget Thomson

I need help in finding out about the family of Sir George, especially his wife and when she died

Apparently she died in 1941. See George Paget Thomson. Bovlb 00:39, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Microsoft notice board created

Figured I'd tell people that this has been created. Anyone want to assist by posting to it? - Ta bu shi da yu 08:08, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

All Ducks on Deck

I found this article while working on uncategorized pages. Its one of 100 episodes listed on DuckTales. It is the only one with a synopsis. I would have listed it on Vfd, but have previous experience with episode synopsis's being notable content. I'm not sure what to even do with the page, there are no categories I see right away to add it to, and I dont see a merger working into the parent article.. Any ideas? <>Who?¿? 08:02, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• maybe merge it into a Duck Tales episodes article, with the stuff we have on other episodes. It wouldn't surpise me if we had a category for lists of episodes. Thryduulf 09:20, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I will do that, although it will be a very small article, sigh. Probably endup on Vfd :) Thanks again. <>Who?¿? 02:51, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Photographs

I submitted photographs in the past, but yet again, I am having difficulty in having them appear online. Is ther an easy to follow set of rules I can use? Also if contributing photographs from another website how do I site my source?

Once you have put up a photo -you need to link it to an article - otherwise it just sits there in the dark. Add a link for the Image name and hey presto! A curate's egg 19:41, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You might also want to read Wikipedia:Fair use to determine whether you're allowed to use photographs from another website. Bovlb 03:40, 2005 Jun 9 (UTC)

Remove items from Watchlist?

Whenever I try to remove items from my Watchlist I get this error:

Sorry- we have a problem...
The wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request.
To get information on what's going on you can visit #wikipedia.
An "offsite" status page is hosted on OpenFacts.
Generated Wed, 08 Jun 2005 14:36:46 GMT by srv5.wikimedia.org (squid/2.5.STABLE9.wp20050410.S9plus[icpfix,nortt,htcpclr]) 

What should I ask of whom? -Splash 14:39, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

Use the back button and try again. This is not an error-message specific to the watchlist, the server simply didn't respond.--Fenice 16:02, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How do I edit an embedded list?

There is a mistake in the embedded Timeline of Muhammad that appears to the right of the Beginning of his prophetic career in the Muhammad article, but I can’t figure out how to edit it and it doesn’t have [edit] button next to it. The list appears on the Editing Muhammad page like this: (two left braces)TimelineOfMuhammad(two right braces), but the list itself is not there. I have searched the Help pages for lists and tables and I can’t seem to find what I need. I know the facts and just want to make a simple correction, but the html is getting in the way. Thank You.

Sorry, I don't need help. I just found out that it was a template and they are are at the bottom of the Editing page. As a relative newcomer not seeing [edit] button just confuses the heck out of a person. I think part of the confusion comes from the templates being listed below the Save Page and Show Preview buttons.

It is in a Wikipedia:Template for no reason as it seems because it is only used by one page. You can edir it here. -83.129.11.231 01:33, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

And I should have read all befor typing my answer. -83.129.11.231 01:35, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Promotion of Wikipedia in Vietnam: Technical Advice

I work in Vietnam in the technology sector and was planning to start promoting Wikipedia Tien Viet as a place for the enrichment of people in Vietnam for technical as well as general subjects. I work with many of the technical universities here.

My question relates to ease of use while in Asia. On a number of occasions I have been blocked from posting on the site when I'm in Asia.

I do not want to promote the site unless I know that posting and editing can be done relatively easy. Does anyone have any experience in this area and what should I do in a stepwise fashion to ensure that editing from an IP block from Vietnam will not be blocked?

Best,

BR

Help me build my page (please)

I would like to help others by writing an extensive study guide that should cover as many IB subjects as possible. Any volunteers for helping me and my project? My current work is located here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IB_Biology

Thanks!

I think this article is better on wikibooks. Study guides are part of that project's aim, whereas they aren't part of this encyclopaedia's. smoddy 19:09, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Exactly what I was going to say. To expand, to be encyclopedic, it should be about the program, not just its curriculum (i.e., history of it, the teaching, the significance, etc.). Also, we spell out acronyms here. --Dmcdevit 19:14, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, read my page and you'll see that its all spellt out there. How would I transfer to wikibooks then?

IFD on image??

Does anyone know why Image:200401-beijing-tianan-square-overview.jpg is up for deletion (and has been for 4 months)? Its a nice picture, and I can't find any reason for its proposed deletion. Can I just delete the {{ifd}} tag? -- Tomhab 21:20, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The {{ifd}} tag replaced the {{unverified}} tag, so I assume it is because of uncertainty about the copyright status. However, looking at the other contributions of User:Nowozin, I think we may safely assume it is GFDL'ed, and I've updated the image description to say so. Eugene van der Pijll 22:40, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Associative_Model_of_Data

I found this article while I was random-paging around. It strikes me as being close to an advertisement:

• the author's name (Simon Williams) in the article links straight to a Wiki userpage
• the userpage itself looks ad-like
• a link at the end points to a downloadable version of a book the topic comes from

However, I don't have any background in database management systems: this may be the current hot topic in DMS and I wouldn't know it. I'm hoping someone can take a look at the article and see if the whole thing is spammy or if there are simply little spam bits in it that could be picked out. Joyous 23:48, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)

I agree, it does look too much like an advertisement for the author's theory. Google test 910 hits, 109 of them in the same domain as the book, and a lot of the other ones referencing the author and/or domain. Special:Whatlinkshere/Associative Model of Data shows Synon, Simon Williams and User:Simon Williams as the only inbound links. I believe you should send it to VfD to sort it out. --cesarb 00:25, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Naming convention for churches (UK)

In the article on Christopher Wren there is a redlink to St James's Piccadilly, in the list List of churches and cathedrals of London there is a redlink to St. James's, Piccadilly, but the article actually exists at St. James's Church, Piccadilly. Could someone please tell me if there is a naming convention for churches so I can fix this? Kjlewis 16:05, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The church seems to call itself St James's Church, Piccadilly (but occasionally St James's or St James's, Piccadilly). I think the existing article is probably in the right place and have added redirects from the other possible spellings. -- ALoan (Talk) 17:30, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• For people outside the UK it's nice to have a descriptive title that says it's a church. ALoan did the right thing IMO. Mgm|^(talk) 11:04, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)

Category:x by name

A newer user interested in opera yesterday created the category Category:Operas by title and quickly added to all our opera articles (over 200). This seems to be a misuse of the category scheme since it isn't a genuine taxonomic classification. Taken to a logical conclusion, we would then have a categories like "people by name," "books by title," etc. It would be helpful if commentary could be directed Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Opera#Category:Operas_by_title, where a discussion about this is taking place. Cheers. --BaronLarf 15:16, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

Archive Current events

The Current events page needs to be archived. I have read Wikipedia:How to archive Current Events but it looks like I can't move the page. Is that restricted to Admins? Cheers, --Jpkoester1 11:17, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

• If memory serves me correctly it's protected from page moves because it's a high profile for page move vandals. Mgm|^(talk) 14:33, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

Protection of my user page

Where can I ask for my user page to be protected? --Fenice 05:45, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Never mind I found Wikipedia:Requests for page protection.--Fenice 06:10, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I was just about to tell you that and got an edit conflict with you.-gadfium 06:14, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thank you Gadfium. I am wondering if I could just block the orange messages somehow, this would also do the job. It doesn't look like it's very common to protect user pages, so they might not do it.--Fenice 06:22, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by orange messages. Do you mean the "You have new messages" notice? That should disappear as soon as you check your talk page. As far as I know you can't disable that notice; certainly protecting your user page will not do so. There is a bug which occasionally occurs which means the notice stays up even after you check your talk page; the solution is to made some trivial edit to your talk page.

I see one instance of a (potentially) unwelcome message directly on your user page. If you were getting these regularly from someone who was harrassing you, we might consider protecting the page, but we'd try other ways of discouraging them first.

If you are actually talking about people leaving messages on your talk page, not your user page: that is to be encouraged, so long as people are reasonably polite. (I've just looked at your talk page; this does seem to be what you're talking about). People communicate with you on your talk page. It's not reasonable to expect you to watch every talk page of every article you've edited, and even if you do, I might want to say "Hey Fenice, I saw your edits on page such and such, perhaps you'd be interested in the debate over on page so and so as well". That wouldn't be an appropriate message on "talk:such and such".-gadfium 09:06, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've looked a little more closely into it, and realise that it's just one or two users you want to ban from your talk page. I only see two edits from the anon there; I'm sorry that they've upset you, but those comments don't seem unreasonable (they're not calling you names or anything, they're just disagreeing with you). I suggest you let the RfC run its course; you have some backing there, and if you don't want the discussion to spill over to your talk page then ignore comments placed there.-gadfium 09:16, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, you are right, it is my talk page, not my user page, and protecting talk-pages doesn't seem to be done. I doubt that anyone will protect my talk page. So I have put up a message so nobody leaves a message there. The orange messages can be disabled, I think, by taking the page off my watchlist. The thing is that there is no way to protect me from the attacks of this person, and I doubt that I will get any backing on the RFC (also what could they do, they cannot stop him from posting whatever he invents all over the place) - on the contrary, what is likely to happen is that other users will buy into the discrediting if I do not answer to the accusations, which I won't. I'd be kept busy forever, he has lots of time to play with me. I will survive the next few weeks by just not looking at the relevant pages and my talk pages and someday the fervor of this person will end. And he has not made any edits for hours now so maybe I can stop panicking now. ;-) --Fenice 09:35, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Protecting a talk page more or less defeats its purpose. -- Cyrius|✎ 17:21, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

link to charles manson supporter website

I was researching Charles Manson and clicked on a link to a website defending manson, to my absolute horror the page opens with a picture of one of the murders. I know there is a warning, i didn't read it and even if i had i'm not sure i would have been prepared for the website. i'm not easliy offended but this was horrible and was really disturbing to see. I'm in support of showing all areas of a subject, ie the support of manson, but this was unexpected and shocking and also disrespectful. i'd suggest taking off the link as it is the most horrific thing i have ever seen.

I suggest mentioning this at talk:Charles Manson (assuming that Charles Manson is the article you followed the link from). If there are good reasons for including it, the people who watch that page will the ones who know them. Thryduulf 14:28, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Good idea - give it a few days and then remove the link - we can do without this sort of thing. A curate's egg 15:45, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I checked the link because I have become somewhat suspicious of what some people consider shocking. I agree with removing the link (note that two days ago, someone already removed the very same link from the external links section of the same article). The picture seems to be on the external site merely to offend people, and I don't see a need to support that by linking to the page. Also, the text on that site is very confused but indicates that the original Manson support page is gone. I went ahead and removed the link. Rl 17:20, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well done RI - be bold! A curate's egg 19:31, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Formatting help

Can someone help me put the image on one side and the text on the other side at User:Neutrality/talk template? I've tried, but nothing seems to work. --Neutrality^talk 06:17, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

my first thought is that you could use a div to create a two-column layout and have one in each. However I don't know how to do that. Thryduulf 07:53, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Tables are your friend. I believe this is what you're looking for? Radiant_* 13:14, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

Good work Radiant! I couldn't get it to work either! A curate's egg 15:46, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

External link verification

Please could somebody check the external links that user:Hosadmin has been adding. I looked at the page linked from Nudism yesterday and although I don't like the site it appears that it is relevant to nudism, however it wasn't relevant to the other pages (e.g. Topfree Equal Rights Association) that he added it to, so I removed it and noted on his talk page. He has since gone through and added links to subpages of the same site from a couple of these articles (see his contributions). I cannot get the pages to load, and so cannot check them for relevancy or apropriateness. I will be online from work later on, but I make sure I steer clear of potentially inapropriate sites there (for obvious resons). I would appreciate it if someone could check them and remove any that are inapropriate and explain on his talk page why you have done so. Thanks. 08:03, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

• Looks like the rest of his edits were either appropriate or reverted. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 21:58, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Don't know what to do

Linuxcunt is repeatedly reverting my cleanup to my Marmot account talk page [[7]]. He knows full well that I am Marmot, and has threatened to use his admin powers for page protection, in contrary to [[8]] ('Do not protect a page you are involved in an edit dispute over'). He claims the page is needed as evidence, but the 'evidence' can easily be found in the history.

Update: Linuxcunt has now protected the page, and has probably violated at least two policies in the process.

For a start, I suggest you try using civility in your edits. Twisting the name of an editor doesn't make anyone sympathetic to your cause.

Secondly, please log in when you edit your user pages.

Thirdly, I suggest you sign your edits with ~~~~.-gadfium 00:54, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Help with image resizing

I'd like the images in my article renewal theory to appear smaller out of consideration for users with a lower screen resolution. I've added the size attribute to the wikipedia image tag, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong please? Many thanks, reetep 20:29, 30 May 2005 (UTC).

I resized one, changing the other is left as an exercise to the reader. Rl 20:43, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks very much RI -that's great. The Wikipedia:Picture tutorial suggested the form: [[Image:Wikipedesketch1.png|500px|Proposed Wikipedia mascotte]] which (as you know) failed when I tried it on my images. Do you know why? Is there an error in the tutorial?

It seems to be an error (or lack of update) in the tutorial or a software bug. I suspect the former. Rl 12:24, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Business Plot: npov and copyvio?

About a week ago, I stumbled upon Business Plot. It was very POV and almost literally copied from this homepage. I added a copyvio notice. However, it turns out that the original author died 6 years ago, and I have no idea about who owns the copyright right now. There's a (c) statement on the homepage:

© Copyright 1996 by Steve Kangas. Text can be quoted freely for non-commercial purposes only, with proper attribution.

I don't know if this is enough to re-include the content without permission in Wikipedia under the GFDL. And in any case, the article needs a "thorough revision" to conform to npov standards, backed up by objective sources. I'd prefer it if it was simply rewritten. One user (I presume; his IP address changes sometimes) has been petitioning me to put the original content back and just add an npov notice, but I'd rather not without consulting more experienced wikipedians. saturnight 22:01, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

No, that's not enough. Non-commercial purposes only is not compatible with the GFDL. Keep marked as a copyvio. --cesarb 22:23, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Help with an article

What do I do with the article Creole English? Is this article not necessary? Should it be deleted? I'm not an expert on dialects of English but I noticed on List of dialects of the English language that there is a section on Pidgins and Creoles. Two articles link to Creole English: Trinidadian Creole English and Tobagonian Creole English. Both articles say that they are both dialects of Creole English. Should we include Creole English on List of dialects of the English language article? Please help. Thanks. ---User:Hottentot

The easiest way to find out is to list it at VfD. If you don't think it should be deleted, contact the Cleanup Taskforce. -- Essjay · Talk 07:34, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

suggestions for dealing with a revert war

I wonder if anyone can give any suggestions for dealing with a revert war that began on Apartheid, and now appears to have spilled over into Johannesburg and South Africa. I am not a party to the dispute, but it's having an indirect effect on the History of South Africa article, which I've done some work on. The situation has some unusual features that are new to me, at least, and I'm not sure what is the best mechanism for handling it. The problem began as a revert war on the Apartheid page, concerning an anonymous editor's addition of a statement that Jews were one of the groups that initially came to South Africa from Europe. Everyone agrees that the statement is factually correct, but the anon's opponents say that it is not notable, and is intended as a way of introducing a certain POV to the article. The Apartheid article is currently protected, but soon after it was protected, anonymous edits were done to the Johannesburg and South Africa articles, with some of the edits involving profanity and anti-semitism. Blocking IPs doesn't seem to be an option, since the anon or anons are coming in from a lot of different IPs; one of the anons insists that some of the other anonymous edits were not done by him, and believes they were a hoax by his opponents in an attempt to discredit him. It doesn't make sense to protect a large number of articles, and it's also getting in the way of attempts to improve the History of South Africa article, which has gotten too long, by splitting off parts of it into Apartheid. Any suggestions?--Bcrowell 15:42, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In my opinion, the vandalism is not related to the Apartheid discussion which has nothing to do with "Anti-Semitism". The vandalism is either being faked to generate emotional responses, or it is random.69.217.123.174 16:31, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

69.217.123.174, it's going to get confusing pretty fast if you post here anonymously, in the context of a debate about which anonymous editors are doing what using which dynamic IPs. Are you the anonymous editor who has been involved in the revert war on the Apartheid article? --Bcrowell 16:40, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Image/editor dispute related problem

We, a few people using a common nickname Gabrichidze have uploaded the number of artworks to illustrate the articles about "Flying Dutchman", "Mermaid", "Limbo", "Geopolitics","Coffee shop", "Online journalism", and some others. The image was also offered to the Plato section, but rejected by some other wkipedians; currently thereis a poll about keeping the image at the Plato page.

In a same time the article "Caucasophobia" was created by one of our group, theme of this article was the prejudice against ethnic Caucasians in Russian Federation. For our surprise this article inspired an outrage from one of the wikipedia admins, User:Mikkalai:see the VfD and talk page of the article for details. Suddenly after aparticularly harsh discussion at the caucasophobia VfD and talk thread the whole graphic content which could be associated with the author of the article(both related and absolutely not related to it) was suddenly deleted by this admin with a small tag saying "Del copyrighted image", dispute he fact that each image had a fair use tag. Admin had not contacted uploaded about this, had not offered any other solution(like change of copyright status if fair use is no longer valid), had refused to communicate about the solution at the talk page so far. One of the images Chess revolution was also removed from Featured picture candidates without consent or warning.

Images are re-uploaded and returned to the sufficient articles, but of course there is a chance that the whole situation will repeat itself. Our question is what the solution might be to avoid the editors war and how can we stop this admin following the wikipedia rules?

Also the account of one of the new user user:elle20 who participated at the discussion against User:Mikkalai was blocked without explanation. What are the strategy to solve the conflict between usial user and admin? Gabrichidze 2 : 44, June 22 UTC

A number of statements above are false.

• The deleted images was tagged "allowed for use in wikipedia".
• And the user was warned at his talk page by at least two persons that this is inadmisible and suggested to read the corresponding policies carefully, which was evidently ignored.
• Only after deletion of images they re-uploaded and tagged them by "fair use".
• User:Elle20 has no contributions.
• The images were not deleted "suddenly". The user was warned well in advance, and not only by me.

I did the deletion after several editors expresset concern that Gabrichidze spams multiple articles with his paintings, which are neither of informative, nor historical value; see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Gabrichidze.

Instead of following the rules of wikipedia the user prefers personal attacks, not the first time. mikka (t) 06:39, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Funny, isn't it, how a self-proclaimed newbie can know the intricacies of VfD, FPC and WP:SOCK, yet can be totally unaware of such basic principles as WP:CIV and WP:NPA. Radiant_>|< 14:52, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Images

• How do you edit a page to replace an image with another of your own images?

Just upload an image with the same filename as the one you want to replace -- however I wouldn't advise this unless you have a really compelling reason why the old image should be replaced. Evil Monkey∴Hello 08:43, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

• Alternatively, you could change the code in the article to point to another image. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:06, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Ethene Industry History

Ethene Industry History

Hi, im doing a chemistry assignment and im having trouble finding information on the history of ethene. I was wandering if anybody could drop me a link or point me in the right direction? Ive been trying different searches in various search engines for hours and everything ive got is off this page, which is only really to do with its naming. Jon tuesday june 21st 2005

try Wikipedia:Reference deskGeni 12:35, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

For starters, you'll likely have better luck searching under the name ethylene. The name ethene is almost unused in industry, and trying to search using it is going to affect your results. -- Cyrius|✎ 18:51, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Account Comprimised

My account was comprimised, along with someone elses I know, over the last two to three days. I would like to find IP logs related to my account. This is of the uptmost importance as extremely sensetive data may have been compromised. Diskadia 06:17, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• If you've got a fixed IP, you could try checking the contributions of that IP. You can find out what your IP is by editing something while not logged in and checking the history. Don't forget to change your password. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:08, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Sock puppet notification

I've added a sockpuppet template to User:Bloghate because I suspect he's one (see his list of edits) but what else can I do to help deal with this user? He hasn't made any contributions beyond Votes for Deletion and is becoming a major nuisance. --TNLNYC 14:25, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You could mention him at Vandalism in Progress. -- Essjay · Talk 01:17, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Transwiki-ing

Going through articles that need to be Wikified, and I'm pretty sure Excel FAQ should be a prime Wikibooks candidate. I've never transwikied anything, so could someone do it, then explain what they did so I know in future? Couldn't find a 'How To Transwiki' guide anywhere. Thanks. Proto 13:07, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Try transwiki. -- Essjay · Talk 01:22, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

identifying someone

I have heard. or read, that Juana D'Armagnac, Princess of Aragon, who married Matthieu de Foix did not, after all, die childless but that there was a son, nicknamed "Juan Franchos", who left for Scandinavia and produced two daughters there.

Is there any verifiation of this highly romantic event?

It is highly conceivable that an heir from the first marriage for political reasons may have been hidden, or other-wise disposed of, in favor of expected heirs from the second marriage with Violant de Bar.

The only information on this that I have found has come fom Finn Asbjorn Wang of Norway but I have lost contact with this source.

I really have no clue. I've copied this over to the Reference desk. Hopefully someone there has the resources or knowledge to answer this question. Hope that helps you! Master Thief Garrett^Talk 14:14, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How to remove a redirect

Someone has created a redirect from the surname (surname alone) of Federer which takes you immediately to Roger Federer who is apparently a tennis player, as if he is the only person with that surname. I was looking for someone else, entered Federer in the search box, and pressed Go, rather than Search, as I suspected that that would take me immediately to the Search mode, but I was wrong in this case. Can someone remove that redirect? There will be other significant people with that surname ... Eilthireach 00:02, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If you want to remove the redirect, type in the name (Federer) and press go. It will redirect you to Roger Federer, and a blue link will appear at the top, under the heading, that says "redirected from Federer." Click on this link, which will take you to the Federer page, then delete the redirect. Make sure you replace the text with something (probably a disambig). If you don't have text to replace the redirect with, then don't remove the redirect; list the page on RfD instead. -- Essjay · Talk 00:41, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

With a redirect already in place, the only sensible thing is to either keep it or to make a disambig out of it. Why lose the link to Roger Federer just to kick in search mode? If you really are disappointed about the redirect (like in this case), you can just search again, pressing 'search'. — Sverdrup 10:43, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 June 19

Why are there no edit links on the Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 June 19 page? RickK 20:48, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)

Solved, see Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Edit links and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Votes for deletion problems. --cesarb 22:19, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Can I translate something from a copyrighted material and put the translation in Wikipedia as a part of an article?

I'm new and I don't know where to find the answer to that question. So please help.

No, this would be a copyrigt violation. -83.129.28.216 14:47, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Not even quoting while stating the reference clearly? sentausa 15:32, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A very small section may be usable under fair use. Remember that giving credit is not a blank check to use any material you want in any way you like. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:53, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As far as I know, we don't do fair use with text at all. You can quote a small passage and mark it as such (say, for a literal quotation of some famous person), but if all you need is the information contained in some source, put it in your own words and credit the source as a reference. Rl 07:15, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sentusa, you can simply reword the paragraph, change the sentences around, summarize it. Short quotes (one to three sentences) are ok but rarely used in Wikipedia. And a word by word translation would be a copyvio. Which article are you trying to work on?--Fenice 09:47, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Fair use is how you can use those small quoted passages. -- Cyrius|✎ 09:51, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Too Much?

I've been working on the Stanley Park page a bit, as you can see in the history. I'm just wondering if I'm flooding the history a bit too much with multiple, minor-ish changes. Should I be doing more work in a word editing program and then entering it all at once or is my method OK? I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I like to fiddle until it looks just right. Zhatt 19:15, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The best solution is to use the preview button. Meelar (talk) 20:30, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

I do use the preview button (quite often in fact), but you will notice some of the edits are over half an hour apart. The edits are unrelated. The time in between is spent researching or time spent not on Wikipedia. Thanks for the tip anyways. Zhatt 21:28, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's a bit much for my taste, but isn't a problem. Things get ugly when people apparently don't know how to use preview. They write a sentence, save. Correct their spelling, save. Write another sentence, save. You saved ten times in two hours where you doubled the length of the article. Don't worry about it. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:34, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

OK. Thank you very much for your reassurance. Zhatt 05:09, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I usually do my major editing in Microsoft Word because it has an auto-spellcheck (and I tend to type very fast, resulting in minor spelling errors). If you're doing research while writing (I do that too), I would suggest an outside editor, but be careful when you post your version that you don't accidentally undo unrelated changes that have been made in the meantime. (If you copy the text to your word processor to make changes, then copy the text back onto the website, any changes made while you were editing would be "covered up" by your copy.) Also, using an outside editor is less likely to cause the dreaded "edit conflict" screen. -- Essjay · Talk 11:48, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)

I urge you use a text editor rather than a word processor, as you could accidentally introduce bastard codes for special characters. I use Word Tab Pro, but there is a freebie version Word Tab Lite. Many of my contributions are new articles created from scratch, and take me several days or week to research and finish before posting, so arfe stored on my hard drive. Keep up the good work! Apwoolrich 12:00, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If you add your code as you type (I don't, I wait until I paste it then use the toolbar buttons, with the exception of brackets) using an editor would be a good idea. I've never had to use special text characters (like Ð, Ç, or É), but if I did, I'd wait to do it with the box on the page. -- Essjay · Talk 13:13, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)

One thing I forgot is that if you use Firefox (Hint, Hint) as your browser, there are plugins for right clicking access to both a dictionary and coding panels for very slick use in editing. Also, there is a plug in for Note Tab with the basic Wiki formating markups. The ASCII special character codings are also avialable as standard in Note Tab. Hope this helps. Apwoolrich 14:39, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I just started using Firefox last week (because of Wikipedia, behold the power of the wiki!), and I downloaded one of those plugins yesterday, but I haven't really used it yet. (I'm stuck on the "old" way, I guess.) I'll go looking for others. Thanks! (And I hope between the two of us we answered the original question, because we seem to have taken over the thread... :-> ) -- Essjay · Talk 16:20, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)

Correction - My brains are addled. For Word Tab in my earlier post, please read Note Tab :( Apwoolrich 18:32, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes. You can consider my original question thoroughly answered. Zhatt 21:13, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)