Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 19

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Village pump (miscellaneous) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous). 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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Need advice on article content

At the PlayStation 3 article there has been discussion and back-and-forth about what to list as the "Best Selling Game" in the info box. I was sure Wikipedia had some policy or guideline at least that frowned on the inclusion of information that changes too fast to be of use. I need to know the best way to approach this. Padillah (talk) 12:31, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

there is a problem with putting a "best selling game" (it best to see here as it explains the problems putting one in)  rdunnPLIB  13:04, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Is that link relevant? That Zelda link is about Metacritic and heaping praise on an article, not "best selling" which should be very objective by comparison. Anyway, I don't see any reason to avoid use of fast-moving data in an infobox. Just match it to a date there in the infobox (already done) and you're clear. The article is heavily monitored and no doubt will be updated quickly when new data comes out. In-The-News articles have brand-new data slugged into them all the time as fast as it spews out of the media. Tempshill (talk) 17:15, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

"As of 2008"

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 20:52, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

What happened to as of 2007, as of 2008, etc? Tempshill (talk) 17:04, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 February 21. – ukexpat (talk) 17:15, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Also, WP:As of#Previous method ("as of" links)♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 17:16, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The deletion logs in your links point to Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 February 21 which links to Template:As of and Wikipedia:As of. {{As of}} replaces the system "As of year" links was a part of. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:17, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Got it, thanks. Tempshill (talk) 17:21, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

admins - automatic deletion summaries?

Deleting short pages used to automatically place the text "content was '<content of page>' [and the only contributor was <user>]" in the deletion summary field, but this no longer seems to be the case. Leaving the field blank or selecting nothing from the drop-down menu results in an empty summary. Is there a way to make this automatic summary appear, or has this feature been disabled? --Ixfd64 (talk) 00:35, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

What does it say when you click this link [1]? If it has a default summary, the issue stems from javascript found at MediaWiki:Sysop.js which looks for a template containing a delete-reason and adds this reason to the url in the "delete" tab at the top, e.g. [2]. This will override any default "content was..." summary that was there before. If this is the source of the problem you can opt out of it with adblock plus, or add some kind of settings which to users to use their own js to disable it. — CharlotteWebb 01:02, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

The default summary was removed. It rarely provided a useful summary and caused problems when deleting attack pages and the like. Mr.Z-man 02:17, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

I clicked the first link and there is no default summary. --Ixfd64 (talk) 02:17, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Still more useful than the damn code letters. Anyone want a retro-mode javascript? — CharlotteWebb 10:31, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

When should an image be copied to wikimedia commons?

When should an image be copied to wikimedia commons?Smallman12q (talk) 01:31, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Never mind...found the policy at Wikipedia:Moving_images_to_the_Commons#RationaleSmallman12q (talk) 01:32, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

commons:licensing has much greater detail. — CharlotteWebb 01:41, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Announcing Free text time templates

The principle of wikitext was to make editing articles as easy as possible. Unfortunately, some templates are needlessly arcane and serve to reintroduce complexity that wikitext sought to remove. There is new family of date/time templates that use free text dates. The following table is a list of this family of free text date templates and may be compared with those that do not have the dash in the name:

date	templates		wikitext
Birth	{{birth-date}}	{{birth-date and age}}	{{Birth-date | April 3, 1903 }}
Death	{{death-date}}	{{death-date and age}}	{{Death-date | April 3, 1903 }}
other Start and End dates and/or time Space mission launch, decommissioning etc.	{{start-date}}	{{end-date}}	{{Start-date | June 10, 1966 7:26pm }}

Comparison of syntax between old and new

	wikitext	article
Old	{{Death date and age|2008|1|11|1934|5|2|df=y}}	11 January 2008(2008-01-11) (aged 73)
New	{{Death-date and age | 11 January 2008 | 2 May 1934 }}	11 January 2008 (2008-01-12) (aged 73)

Advantages of new version

• Less error prone, easier to spot typos and contradictions
• WYSIWYG- the date appears in the format the user wanted it, accepting a variety of formats: EG:
  • 1963-11-22
  • 22 November 1963 1pm CST
  • Sunday, December 7, 1941
  • Compare to Old templates: Only day first and month first format supported. Time formatting is more restrictive. One way given to express timezone information in "22 November 1963 1pm CST" was:
    • Old Template: "19:00, 22 November 1963 (-07:00) (1963-11-22T19:00-07:00)" is produced by: {{Start date|1963|11|22|19|00||-07:00|df=y}}
• Besides freedom from such highly constrained formatting for times using the old template (24 hour clock only, no am/pm, only located in the first position) with timezones the new template does not require users to calculate the timezone difference from Greenwich mean time, or Daylight savings time.
  • In above example, the user is required by the old template to declare what the local time offset from UTC is for the location, correctly allowing for the dates when daylight savings time is in effect. (-07:00 needed to be given in the above old template example).
• No restrictions on formatting, even allowing use of templates and links. For instance,
  • Templates Birth date of James Cook: {{Birth-date| 7 November 1728 |{{OldStyleDate|7 November|1728|27 October}} }} produces: 7 November [O.S. 27 October] 1728 (1728-11-07)
    • Old templates: use with templates not supported
  • Links Birth date of Peter Drucker, formerly edited to display November 19, 1909 is currently displayed the same way, using the familiar right left format of wikilinks:

    {{birth-date | November 19, 1909 | [[November 19]], [[1909]] }}

    • Old templates: Links not supported, only November 19, 1909 would be displayed.
• New template permits use with Julian dates
  • Old templates: Julian not supported
• Correctly calculates microformat death dates (they must be emitted as day +1 if day is specified, or Year +1 if only year is specified.)
  • Old templates not only do not perform this calculation, they emit nothing for death dates.

The older templates despite their arcane syntax don't support any of these additional functions. Of course, folks may choose to use the older templates if they wish. The new templates offer a second option for easier and less restrictive authoring of dates.

Use of {{birth-date and age}} and {{death-date and age}} is currently recommended as best practice in the Manual of Style (dates and numbers), as the former templates are generally regarded as needlessly complex by the MOSNUM community. The new templates are currently in use in over 1000 articles.

-J JMesserly (talk) 02:19, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

So, what uses these microformats? Is anyone producing a tool to replace the functionality of "whatlinkshere" as more dates are de-linked (getting a list of articles associated with a certain day/month/year, in order to find content for such pages)… — CharlotteWebb 10:37, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

From the context of your question Charlotte, I presume you meant who within the wiki community is using microformats to do stuff like what people used to use date linking for. I am unaware of anyone. The Geotagging stuff uses microformats but they don't rely on it operationally. Para and the geotagging folks are simply scraping the wikitext with perl scripts to create their kml files. Their geohack php code translates the parameters passed from WP to the various web sites. Currently, they bypass the microformats mechanism that internet browsers are promising to incorporate into their browsers as native features. This native feature behavior may be previewed by installing the Operator toolbar if you use firefox. There is an extension for IE but last I checked it didn't work very well. Anyway, what these extensions do is parse the html scanning for inoperative class tags that it recognizes as microformats tags. For example, a start date like a birthday is encoded with a class of dtstart. So when it finds one of those it looks for an ISO8601 encoded string within the cell or span. This family of templates does that span creation and encoding properly. This microformats functionality and wikipedia emission behavior may be verified by following the operator installation instructions and notes I created at here. Anyway, from what I assume people were doing with the whatlinkshere mechanism, this sort of scheme only had a granularity of articles. Microformats allow specification of events at a finer granularity, for example the dates of a marriage in a biography article, or a particular engagement within the context of a military conflict article. For the general internet population, the killer app for microformats appears to be mapping and calendar/contacts applications like google mapquest yahoo maps/calendar/contacts applications. Mapping is of interest to WP users, but I don't see a lot of folks using calendars to store historical events they find on wikipedia. Are folks going to go to USS Queen of the West (1854) and store all the engagements in their calendar? Maybe a civil war buff would, if the calendars accepted those dates, most of which don't. However, coordinates and events tags and the existing and speculative apps that would use them are small potatoes. Due to the connectivity that microformats enable, it is not hard to believe that when folks use disambiguated UIDs for a historical figure or a place that this uid will be a wikipedia article. (See Queen of West events button in data formats mode, and you will see the uid is an en wiki url, following common microformats practice. This is how they bind events belonging to the same thing. This central thing is designated with their uid tag.) Users will employ them without even being aware of their existence because the microformat code will just copy and propagate these uids as part of the normal activities of users on the web. Strategically, that is gold for the foundation, because whoever has the biggest repository of facts wins if and when this microformats trend snowballs. People start using common uids for information, and whoever has largest repository at the start dominates, and this domination self perpetuates. If our url is the UID, then anytime anyone refers to a microformatted fact, the identifier they are using has a foundation wikis as the destination. People will gravitate to the identifiers that deliver the most functionality, so the biggest snowball wins. The various foundation wikis are in the right strategic location at the right time should the microformats thing become ubiquitous. As an aside, it really doesn't matter if the microformat movement fails, because another mechanism will simply fill the same place. Hope this was responsive to the intent of your question. -J JMesserly (talk) 15:46, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

recent change frequency

How many rc take place every minute ? ava. value .User:Yousaf465 (talk)

I just looked at the most recent 500 edits, which occurred in a four-minute period. That's a rate of about 125 edits per minute.

And, in fact, as you can see here, there are about 10 million edits every 50 days, or about a million edits every five days, or about 200,000 edits per day. Which, divided by 1,440 (the number of minutes per day), is 138 edits per minute. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

There is, of course, variation in the edit rate according to the time of day, day of the week, and whether there are breaks going on in universities (as a large proportion of our editors are university students). It would be fun to see an extensive study of these statistics. Dcoetzee 13:42, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

No,tool to montier those ?.User:Yousaf465 (talk)

And whether Wikipedia is working or not. For 40 minutes there were zilch rc/min. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 20:32, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

See: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 62#Error message. – ukexpat (talk) 21:13, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

[3] also gives information on current editing rates and trends. Cool3 (talk) 21:58, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

<geek>Is it safe to assume that edits arrive in a Poisson process? :)</geek> --Ixfd64 (talk) 00:37, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

No. Algebraist 12:55, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

'toon lists

Quick question. I've been watching a steady increase in the size of a number of lists in one article, Spacetoon, of what appears to be the name of every single program that has played (or potentially will play) on this television channel, almost all added by a single editor. My question : is this considered acceptable practise in Wiki; that long lists of TV shows are displayed as they are here? Even when many of them already have their own article? The lists now appear to form the bulk of the material in the article. It doesn't seem useful to me. What's your opinion? Deconstructhis (talk) 04:52, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

This isn't the best forum for this, you might want to try Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Television or if they can't help, try Wikipedia:Editor assistance. --64.85.223.105 (talk) 07:22, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

context/relevance for statistics pages

I frequently look up statistics terms here, and notice that it doesn't help very much. the articles are written by, and apparently, for, people who already know the topic. Especially for elementary stats this is a problem, but even for instance, today when i looked up "Chow Test" it didn't give me anything a layperson might need in terms of context that might help understand why in the heck you might want to use a Chow Test! What are the possible grouping types? How do i know what a "breakpoint" is? My econometrics professor does the same thing. He is brilliant, but getting him to say why a test or statistic matters and what i might use it for is like pulling teeth. How can i know what to do with it without context? I find myself always wishing there was some context there to understand it. Telling me who the test is named for doesn't count as context! This is my sincere plea for the addition of contextual explanation for the statistics project pages. Have pity on those of us who must use statistics but didn't major in it. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lovewhatis (talk • contribs) 22:49, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

You might want to raise this issue at WT:WPSTAT, or post at Talk:Chow test to explain your specific concerns with the article. You'll have to explain more clearly what the problem is, though. As far as I can see, three of the four sentences of the article's lead paragraph are devoted to explaining what chow tests are used for, and the word "breakpoint" you refer to appears nowhere in the article. Algebraist 12:48, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Uh, the lead says "In econometrics, the Chow test is most commonly used in time series analysis to test for the presence of a structural break." ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 21:14, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Can I promote my Website to WikiPedia?? if yes, what is process?

I want to Promote my website on wikipedia, is is possible to do it like Google adword?? Someone kindly guide me. I have a website about [Google Adsense Tips| Tips for New Blogger| SEO| Drive Traffic Tips| Copyright Articals | Sitemap]. So I need to promote it. my website is ^{<spam address removed Julia Rossi (talk) 02:19, 18 March 2009 (UTC)>} —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tiepk (talk • contribs) 21:52, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

If I hear you correctly, then no. See our guidelines on wikispam. MuZemike 22:04, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:VPR#Editnotice_for_creating_new_pages

I'd welcome any comments --DFS454 (talk) 13:03, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Random article selector?

I was viewing random articles this morning. After several minutes I noticed that I had been presented with no less than 6 articles on towns or districts in Poland. Looking back through my browser's history I see that the article selector lead to Adamów, Witów, Ostrzeszewo, Garczyn, Niekazanice, and Grzybowo, out of a total of only 74 random articles. Was there some connection or is this just an odd coincidence? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mixdenny (talk • contribs) 01:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

I've done several such tests over the years using the random article link and something odd always happens like that, sending me to a weird grouping of related articles. I just did 40 random articles and hit 4 Swedish footballers (I guess that's a soccer player or something). I did hit the Polish town of Maciejówka. I also counted 16 articles that should be deleted. Man there's a lot of crap out there. I bet if you did another random 74 articles there's a good chance you would find a different weird coincidence -- something to do with Wikipedia messing with your mind. Seems like a user here did some kind of research on the random article link and presented his findings here a few years ago; interesting read, but it was just plain randomness. --64.85.222.144 (talk) 13:32, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Later the same day I tried again, and quickly hit on Laziska, Zalesie, Lubocie, Skocze, Bruszewo-Borkowizna, Wólka-Mogielnica, and Wesola, all obscure Polish towns, most are stubs obviously written using the same template and extracted from the Polish Wiki. So that is 13 Polish towns out of maybe 200 random articles. During the same time, I had *no* geographical hits from large areas such as South America, Canada, Africa, Russia, all of Asia, etc. One from Great Britain. A couple from the US. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.118.13.250 (talk) 16:17, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Image question

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 20:59, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

I couldn't find a noticeboard to discuss fair use, so I've come here. If this is the wrong place, could somebody point me to the correct place? File:Riste.jpg is from Commons, and is claimed to be the work of the uploader. But there is no evidence that the uploader is, in fact, the copyright holder, it looks like a posed studio photograph. Is this a valid use of fair use? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 05:52, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Media copyright questions is the noticeboard you want. --64.85.222.144 (talk) 13:39, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Great, I'll try to file that away for future reference, if my leaky memory will let me.  :) Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 22:30, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Or just remember to check the "Copyrights" topic in the Editor's index. -- John Broughton (♫♫)

"Retrieved from"

I see "Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchromatic_film"" in every page here. Change panchromatic film to an actual name of particular article. What is a purpose of telling me exact URL that I actually can see in an address bar of my browser? That meant for third party robots? But those robots will add filter for this phrase in no time. Just like they have filter for "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". I mean, what is a an actual meaning of it? And convenience of having that thing in the end of every page for a Wikipedia audience? Vitall (talk) 11:33, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Where do you see this? It isn't part of the default Wikipedia display. Algebraist 13:27, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

• That isn't the purpose, so your question, being based upon a false premise, is unanswerable. Your CSS is faulty, somehow. You've somehow made the class="printfooter" CSS class, which is normally not displayed, visible. I'm sure that, with a few moments' thought about the words "print" and "footer" you can make a good guess as to the actual purpose of that class and the text that it is applied to. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 13:28, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Ohh, Ok. It somehow have gone now. Just disappeared somehow. Was at the bottom of every Wikipedia page. Must have been weird glitch. Thank you and sorry. Vitall (talk) 14:11, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

New pages patrol competition!

I'm proposing a competition to encourage more people to participate in new pages patrol. Come and participate, join Team A or Team B, have fun and help clear the new pages patrol backlog! ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:02, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Template:Copypaste

The copypaste template contains the following sentence:"Please edit this article to remove any nonfree copyrighted content, attribute free content correctly, and be an original source." I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Should it be changed to:"Please edit this article to remove any nonfree copyrighted content and attribute free content correctly."? Charvest (talk) 17:16, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

I think it means "rewrite in your own words". Using a phrase like "original source" opens a big can of worms where we need to explain that the wording must be original but the facts themselves must not be. How about "Please edit this article to replace or remove any nonfree copyrighted content and attribute free content correctly."? That would cover the rewriting of non-free material. --DanielRigal (talk) 17:23, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Fine by me, but I can't edit it, the template is protected. Charvest (talk) 17:27, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Oh, yes. I didn't notice that. I will put the proposed wording and a link back to here on its talk page. --DanielRigal (talk) 21:02, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Adding {{editprotected}} to the template talk page will increase the likelihood that an admin will respond to your suggestion. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:25, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

News News Site Listing

Friends,

we just launched a new site called irishcentral.com for st. patricks day and it's an important resource for the irish community around the world. The founder Niall O'Dowd has a very good listing on the wikipedia. There was a great deal of press around the launch, and you will quickly find reference through a google search and news search on the quality of joournalism here.

Would you consider allowing a wikipedian to research and write our listing?

Thanks for your consideration.

Cheers, E —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.132.151.216 (talk) 19:10, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

You may want to try articles for creation—a workshop for non-autoconfirmed users to get articles created. MuZemike 19:58, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

But please read WP:COI and WP:WEB first. Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 20:57, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

artillery Cannon, not cannons

It seems that many wikipedia users do not understand that the plural of cannon is cannon, not cannons. I see 'cannons' in many articles, and honestly it's starting to drive me absofuckinglutely crazy. Is there anyway I can spread awareness about this, beyond making a post on WT:MILHIST!?!? --AtTheAbyss (talk) 03:12, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

The source used in the Wikipedia article states either form is correct. If there is another reliable source that states otherwise, incorporate it into the article and, if appropriate, address the issue on the talk page. Who knows, maybe that source will predominate the current usage of the term on Wikipedia; but without any backing sources, you are likely to run into a brickwall. --64.85.214.78 (talk) 13:56, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Generally I find cannons and guns being interchangable in historic references to land battles... I dont know if that helps...  rdunnPLIB  15:20, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

It would never have occurred to me that anyone would want to put an s on the end of cannon but my four sources, Langenscheidt, Larousse, Pocket Oxford, and Chambers 20th Century all say that Cannon +s is an alternative plural. The forces of erudition have lost another battle. --ClemRutter (talk) 17:14, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

PROD rationale/etiquette

I was reviewing the PROD list recently and came across this. An article was being PROD'd for containing no information beyond a basic definition. OK. But a review of the edit history reveals that the PROD'er is the one who removed all unsourced and unencyclopedic information (paraphrase) from the article (a month prior to the PROD). Now, I have no problem with that, either. But wouldn't etiquette dictate that the original content be displayed to give people reviewing the PROD the opportunity to find sources for the information? Should the edit history be reverted to the last version of the article that contained content, then PROD based on the unsourced/unencyclopedic rationale? am I babbling, or is this coming across? Vulture19 (talk) 03:13, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

It does seem to be at least bad form for the same person to have removed much content and then prodded based upon little content. Aleta ^Sing 14:07, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

If the first edit was correct at the time it was made, I don't see any reason to revert it. It would be nice if the PROD'er posted a note on the article talk page, displaying the removed text along with a note about why it was removed, so if the article writer doesn't know how to get to an older version of the article, he/she can still find the removed text on the talk/discussion page before the prod kicks in. Also, the editors at Wikipedia:WikiProject proposed deletion patrolling do know how to check older versions for possibly useful text. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:15, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Japanese TV navigational templates

Some user created navigational templates of the Japanese local television stations, something like TV-hokkaido, TV-kanto, TV-kinki and TV-kyushuoki. However, they are, speaking in evil, looks ugly. And for TV-kanto, it is duplicated with Kanto TV. -- JSH-alive ^{talk • cont • mail} 05:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requested templates is where the template guys hang out (and fix existing templates, despite what the page name may imply). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:08, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm Confused

Wikipedia has articles on hundreds of reality TV "contestants" of very little notablity, who only appeared on one season and have not been seen in any form of media since, yet won't allow articles on popular songs by major artists like ABBA, just because they weren't singles? Retro Agnostic (talk) 22:39, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is inconsistent... sadly. In reality, we probably shouldn't have those reality show contestant articles. See WP:ONEVENT and WP:ONEEVENT (yes those two are different). Also, per WP:NSONGS, it's quite possible for a song to be notable even if it wasn't released as a single. Anything in particular you're thinking of? Cool3 (talk) 22:53, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Why "sadly"? "Inconsistent" is another way of "always trying new approaches and figuring out whether they're stupid or good". It's the heart of the whole idea of social media, really. (After all, Britannica is quite consistent.) - DavidWBrooks (talk) 22:58, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I am pretty sure that non-single songs can be included if they have received significant coverage in reliable sources providing something more to say than would be appropriate in the article about the album itself. All the songs on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band have articles, although that is a particularly special case. I am not sure we would want an article on every Abba song but I am sure a case can be made for some of them. As for the reality TV stars, what can I say? I find their notability utterly lamentable but they are covered in great depth by sources reliable enough to know better, at least for a short period, and that is all that is required for notability. We can't let our personal distaste exclude them although we should enforce the rules vigorously to keep the absolute nobodies out and ensure that the other articles are factual, concise and properly referenced. --DanielRigal (talk) 22:59, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that 80% of these contestants completely disappear after their 12 weeks on the air, and often have not appeared in any form of media for 4 years or more. If we were to have articles on everybody who has appeared on national TV for a while, then yes, even my mother would get her own article (which she doesn't deserve, of course). Retro Agnostic (talk) 23:05, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I know, but notability is not temporary so we are stuck with it. At least you can go ahead with the Abba songs, so it is not all bad news. --DanielRigal (talk) 23:14, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Span class=plainlinks

What is the point of putting a <span class="plainlinks"> tag around an external link, to disguise it to look like an internal link? Why does this ever need to be done? Mike R (talk) 18:50, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me that practice should be verbotten- it suggests the link is internal, and it could be purposely deceptive, with the destination of the link actually with a similar look and feel to wikipedia. I don't know how many sites where I have seen text I have written copied over to xyzpedia sites with adverts. Anyway, you probably know this but the rationale given at mediawiki is for internal links, say you have a template with a link that launches an edit session of a page. You have to use fullurl and so this looks like an external link to the mediawiki engine. But you don't want the arrow thing junking up the final result, so you use plainlinks. -J JMesserly (talk) 19:15, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Aesthetics is one key point. IIRC class=plainlinked URLs appear in a different color to internal wikilinks anyway. It's already disallowed in mainspace (articles), per the pages discussing the feature, and is for talkspace(s). I sometimes use it for article permalinks. –Whitehorse1 11:01, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure there are many valid uses. For example: it is used in stub templates; those based on {{MetaPicstub}} use it so that [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} expanding it] does not show the external link icon. What is not a valid use is when a true external link is hidden in such a manner. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 11:09, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Are you asserting that formatting an external link (within talkspace) in that manner – as in my example of an en.wikipedia.org permalink – is misuse, Gadget850? –Whitehorse1 11:50, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

That's not a true external link. Algebraist 11:54, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Arguably. :) To turn to links that we'll both agree are external then, I think the destination content is important—there's a difference between sites linked for 'shock value' or 'browser-crashing' vs., well, others; another important point (if I am recalling correctly that is—haven't checked), is 'plainlinks' do display in a different color and so aren't hidden (presumably the CSS or whatever would allow those using assistive technology for browsing to distinguish, too). –Whitehorse1 12:27, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I sometimes use 'class=plainlinks' on external links because I think the external icon is annoying. Since this is a personal preference, I never do this on articles. --Ixfd64 (talk) 02:55, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Earth, Wind, Fire and Water

I was playing around with the new WikiRanks site and came across something weird. Can someone come up with an explanation for this? I can see how the periodic peaks and troughs are the result of students checking basic info, but am having problems coming up with an explanation of why wind and fire are so much less popular than earth and water. - BanyanTree 22:05, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

'Earth' here is the planet and so is far more useful for data when comparing to other planets, for example, basic geography and is porbably more linked to. Similarly, 'Water' is useful because of its chemical properties and probably humanitarian access as well. Fire, on the other hand, is simply a concept, combustion would be more viewed from an academic perpective. as for 'wind', again another concept and IMO, I can't see why you'd need to view it (relative to Earth and Water). So I think the data are right, it is down to the pages themselves (compare the lengths!). - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 09:38, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

That makes sense. The places thinking of 70s R&B bands will lead your mind... - BanyanTree 05:04, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Use of Quotes in Articles

Is there a polciy or a guideline for the use of loong quotes or excerpts of books in articles? Thanks, CENSEI (talk) 01:35, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Well there are a couple of relevant policies. See MOS:QUOTE , although it's really about how to format quotes, not whether to use. There's also a good essay, though not a formal policy, out there on quotations. See WP:QUOTE. Hope that helps! Cool3 (talk) 03:47, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Quotations#Quoting copyrighted text prohibits this (even though it is just an essay, not a policy). It would probably be best to paraphrase with occasional small quotes thrown in here and there. Even so, attribution is a must. Otherwise, per Wikipedia:Copyrights#Using copyrighted work from others (which IS a policy), you would need to request copyright permission from the author. --64.85.216.213 (talk) 12:13, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Nikolai Gogol's birthday

Nikolai Gogol will have his 200th birthday on 1 April 2009. Are there any preparations at Wikipedia to celebrate that, e.g. by putting him on the front page that day? 78.53.42.204 (talk) 08:15, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Looking at Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries, you can add his birthday to the on this day list on the main page for 1 April (by editing this page). The birthday would be eligible as it's a significant anniversary. Tra (Talk) 09:27, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Using articles with acronyms

Is there a guideline or policy about when to use articles with acronyms? 'The DMV' or 'the FBI' sound right, but I rarely hear 'the NASA' or 'the NPR.' Thanks, Celestra (talk) 21:13, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

We have a rule about "the" in titles (see WP:NC#Avoid definite and indefinite articles at the start of names), but none (that I know of) about wording within articles. The best guide is simply to follow the practice of the sources used for the article - for example, if newspapers say "the OMB", then use that; if they just say "OMB", go with that instead. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:09, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Template for weekly changes

Moved from [4]

I am a sysops from Hindi wiki. Till now we have been changing the featured picture monthly. Now we want to change it on weekly basis. Every sunday. Can anyone tell me about any automated template that keeps the picture for a week. Say e.g. for the daily basis change, we have the Aaj kaa aalekh (Todays feature paragraph) section, that has the template,

{{आज का आलेख {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}}}

this searches for a new dated template, daily. & the old template, goes to archieve. Now for the monthly basis, we just have to remove {{CURRENTDAY}} portion. But what to do for the weekly, sunday to sunday change. Please suggest at the earliest. Its urgent.--आशीष भटनागर (talk) 18:28, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Solved the problem, on my own. Hi wiki running on it.--आशीष भटनागर (talk) 10:22, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

'will probably' instead of 'will likely'

 Done
Hi. I am fairly new to this great Wikipedia, and I admit I'm prejudiced towards British English rather than American English . And you may think that what I'm suggesting is a small point, which in some ways it is ... but the text I'd propose be changed is seen by every editor, every time they create an article. If you go to an article that doesn't exist, for example jasdhfljhasdfk, and click "create this article", a message automatically appears at the top. It says:

• Before creating an article, please read Wikipedia:Your first article, or search for an existing article to which you can redirect this title.
• To experiment, please use the sandbox.
• When creating an article, provide references to reliable published sources. An article without references will likely be deleted quickly.

Now, to me, in that last sentence, the text "... will likely be deleted ..." is over-American, and I'd suggest it should be changed to "... will probably be deleted ...". This would read better for a British-English reader, whilst - I think I'm right in saying - still works fine for our US friends? Again, yes it's a small point but, as I said, it's seen by every editor, every time they create an article. Were the text in a template, I could be bold and change it. However, I don't think it's in a template, but somehow a function of the wiki software. I'd appreciate others' thoughts on this. Thanks. Trafford09 (talk) 10:49, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Better in what way? Likely seems better to me (from the U.S.) but there's also a subtle difference, in that likely doesn't have quite as much finality to it. What's wrong with it in the first place? ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 11:21, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

What's wrong with it is that, in standard British English, it's completely ungrammatical. It uses the adjective 'likely' as an adverb. I think our interface text should be valid in as many forms of English as can easily be achieved, so I'd support this change. Algebraist 13:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Wiktionary suggests "probably" is likely a better choice of a word in this usage. "Likely" is probably regarded as poor grammar, at least to the educated. So, are you saying you're better than me? I, better than I. --64.85.214.236 (talk) 15:05, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I think we should reflect the truth. "... may be deleted ..." solves the problem, and is probably closer to reality. --ClemRutter (talk) 16:52, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

It's not particularly American or British. It's just ungrammatical. It should say...

• When creating an article, provide references to reliable published sources. An article without references is likely to be deleted quickly.

...then there would be no problem. "Probably" is not a good replacement because "probably" means there is "some chance" whereas "likely" means there is a "big chance". -- Derek Ross | Talk 17:03, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

"will likely" is incorrect in American grammar too. I agree that "is likely to" is a preferred usage, and I personally think that "may be deleted" would be most honest. Cool3 (talk) 20:04, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Next steps

Trafford09 (talk) 12:53, 26 March 2009 (UTC): Firstly, a big thank-you to all those who've offered a good spectrum of viewpoints, from both sides of the pond. The contributions seem to be dwindling now (but do please add your thoughts, no matter how late you are to the discussion). So, it's time to reflect. I seems to me that there is now a consensus that

• the existing wording is poor/ungrammatical, and that
• the wording should read: "... may quickly be deleted.".

This being so, if the perceived consensus remains as above after a day or so, then I'll undertake to follow this up on our behalf. I'm not too sure on WP protocol, but I imagine I'll need to raise it from an informal discussion to a formal WP-Proposal. Then I'll hope somebody knows how to make any necessary software change, to effect the proposed new wording. Thanks again to all contributors (and any further ones). Trafford09 (talk) 12:53, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

All that needs to be done is have the text changed for the MediaWiki interface page, which is something any admin can do. The talk page for this particular message can be found at MediaWiki talk:Newarticletext, and I've placed a message at the bottom asking an admin to change this. I think the discussion we've already had here is probably sufficient to establish the needed consensus. Cool three (talk) 14:56, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree it should be changed, per Trafford09. My preference would be; "is likely to be deleted" - which does indeed seem to satisfy everyone above, as far as I can tell. I would also be happy with "may be deleted".

While we're looking at it, I'd humbly suggest that the 2nd sentence would be better as;

• "An unreferenced article..." rather than "An article without references...".

--  Chzz  ►  15:33, 26 March 2009 (UTC) P.S. I am British-English

• The wording "article without references" makes clear the solution: add references. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:06, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
  

All now sorted - thx to all & finally User_talk:Cool3. Trafford09 (talk) 12:00, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Question about 'criticism' of a large UK company.

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 20:49, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Hello all! I hope this is in the right place! As per usual, through a long line of clicks and semi-thoughts ... and more clicks, I stumbled across the article for Npower (UK) and was highly surprised that the article doesn't criticise the company at all! They are at the bottom of a host of power company league tables, have had numerous run-ins with environmental types and are generally hated by a whole host of people! The talk page mentions one of these events (back in 2007) but nothing in the article history seems to have been added about it. Also, anything derisory that is added seems to be removed. I was wondering what the correct etiquette is to proceed? I know I should "Be Bold" and I can easily find sources for all of these criticisms but I didn't want to needlessly piss people off! I've written a bit on the talk page, but it doesn't seem like the article gets many edits, so I doubt it will be seen for a while! Anyway, any help is appreciated, sorry to ramble on! --LookingYourBest (talk) 12:43, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

It looks like someone has engaged you on the article's talk page, but the relevant policy here is Wikipedia:NOTADVERTISING. You can also tag the article with {{advert}}. If you do add info with reliable sources, and it gets reverted, take it to Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard for assistance. --64.85.216.213 (talk) 12:34, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, thank you very much for your help, it seems the ball has started rolling on the article talk page! I'm more than happy for you to add a 'resolved' tag to this question as I'm sure we're well on our way to sorting it now! Thanks again! --LookingYourBest (talk) 14:19, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Vote on date autoformatting and linking

The Vote on date autoformatting and linking is now open. All users are invited to participate. Lightmouse (talk) 14:56, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Copies of deleted articles

Did anyone considered the copyright issues related to a common situation when someone want to have a copy of deleted article? (E.g. to "userfy" it)? Formally the deleted text has authorship. Delete or not it was released under a certain license and the text cannot be used in violation of this license. In other words, when a copy provided, it must go with the whole list of authors. If someone wants to use it for whatever purposes, they must be warned about the authorship/licensing.

It may be not a big deal, but recently I took part of deletion of a rather interesting and valuable original reseacrh, Motif of harmful sensation, and someone was interested in having a copy of this text. I am not sure whether the original contributors will be happy of their hard work (even if misplaced) will pop up elsewhere without their recognition. - 7-bubёn >t 17:29, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

When a deleted article is userfied (unless the admin doing the userfication screws up), the article's history is preserved in the userfied version. See this for a random example. Deor (talk) 00:11, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I suspect sometimes it is simply cut and pasted, e.g., when the deletoin vote starts swaying heavily to "del". - 7-bubёn >t 17:27, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Affiliate links

I've noticed a lot of people posting affiliate links for Amazon recently. Now it may be that they're not benefiting, having had a cookie planted on their machine, or they may be benefiting. In any case a quick search reveals 4,611 such links. Is there a robot that deals with such links ? -- John (Daytona2 · Talk · Contribs) 21:31, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Other than the Amazon.com article, I believe this would be prohibited by Wikipedia:External links#Links normally to be avoided #15 "Links to sites already linked through Wikipedia sourcing tools. For example, instead of linking to a commercial bookstore site, consider the "ISBN" linking format, which gives readers an opportunity to search a wide variety of free and non-free book sources...." So if they are using the amazon link to promote their book and hope for an easy sale, they should instead be using the ISBN template. I would suggest taking this thread to Wikipedia talk:External links where there would be a more knowledgeable audience on this topic. Another page that might be of benefit regarding this would be be Wikipedia:WikiProject Books. --64.85.220.26 (talk) 12:08, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

"/ref=sr_1_1" is a thread common to regular Amazon.com product listings, not affiliate links. They should still be removed on sight, of course, but it's not quite as bad as you think. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:06, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Can someone see these 2 (enormously important today) articles, and see if their differences in topic are of an ancyclopedic nature?

• Financial crisis of 2007–2010
• Global financial crisis of 2008–2009

'Cause I really struggle to keep them separate in mind. --AaThinker (talk) 15:31, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

And then we have this Late 2000s recession

and then we have this 2008–2009 Keynesian resurgence

Should a mega-merge be in order? --AaThinker (talk) 15:37, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Is this wikipedia, the source of funding for Norwegian wikipedia?

Is this wikipedia, a source of funding for Norwegian wikipedia?

The reason I am asking, is that Norwegian wikipedia is at present promoting a competition (on the main page) that is a cooperation with the Norwegian Embassy in Tallin, and the Estonian embassy in Oslo.

(Quote: "Konkurransen er i samarbeid med Den norske ambassaden i Tallinn og Den estiske ambassaden i Oslo".)

Perhaps English wikipedia could arrange similar contests. If it is such a good idea.

Cheers,Litmus Today2 (talk) 05:13, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Note the date OrangeDog (talk • edits) 21:57, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

A worthy undertaking for the holiday

This is probably US Government public domain. Who has the software to download it and kill the watermark? Encyclopedic value for how the good ol' US of A is winning the war. Durova^Charge! 21:51, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

You'd need a claim of authorship to verify that it's US government public domain. Tempshill (talk) 18:54, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Make a Page about yourself

The Founder of Wikipedia once said that he wished there was a biography for every person in the world on wikipedia. Does that mean i can create a page/biography on myself?

No, it does not. And if he really said that, he shouldn't've done. Algebraist 23:09, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

There are alternative venues such as Wikipopuli and Wikibios. – ukexpat (talk) 00:00, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, you cannot make a page about yourself, as expained in WP:COI. All your information can go on your userpage. Cheers. :) -Porchcrop ^{(talk|contributions)} 00:02, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Provided that the user page complies with the user page guidelines. – ukexpat (talk) 01:25, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

External links to umr.edu need to be changed to mst.edu

Missouri university has changed its web address from umr.edu to mst.edu There are 77 wikipedia articles which link to the old address. Could someone write a bot to change these, as links to the old address just produce the error message: "Address Not Found". Charvest (talk) 10:09, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

This also makes me think about when external links are removed for being 404. Perhaps there should be a policy of noting broken links on the talk page and allowing enough time for others to find a new address rather than just summarily removing broken links. Charvest (talk) 10:12, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Post the request at Wikipedia:Bot requests. Kaldari (talk) 16:33, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Charvest (talk) 16:39, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Taking a fortnight off.

I'm taking a break for a few weeks to attend to family and academic obligations. I would really appreciate if the rest of you would buckle down and finish the Wikipedia by the time I get back. Cheers! bd2412 T 23:31, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

A couple days too late, alas. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 00:17, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

We'll do our best. To speed up the rate of article writing, we might have to reduce vandalism patrol. When you return, please do a quick check of each edit made in the article space while you've been away.-gadfium 05:53, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

WP:ER

There's a huge backlog at WP:Editor review that needs to be taken care of. Any ideas on how to get more reviewers? -download | sign! 05:05, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

South Park Featured topic drive

WikiProject South Park participants have started a page at WP:SOUTHPARK/TOPIC to organize featured topic drive collaborations. The primary goal is to improve the quality of articles about South Park episodes, with the ultimate end goal of getting sets of episodes by season to Good Topic or even Featured Topic status. We are starting off by focusing on Season 1, to get it to Good Topic status, see Wikipedia:WikiProject South Park/Featured topic Drive/season 1. Any help is appreciated, and feel free to comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject South Park/Featured topic Drive. Cirt (talk) 22:56, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Article's watchers

Is there any way to find a list of people who are watching a particular article? This will help me find out if an important article is not watched adequately.. --Anshuk (talk) 23:25, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Maybe it would be good if there was an indication of how many watchlists contain a given article. That would give an indication of how vulnerable an article was to vandalism. A number at the top of each article could perhaps indicate the number of watchlists that article is found on. Bus stop (talk) 01:34, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

This has been proposed before (frequently). See Wikipedia:PEREN#Create_a_counter_of_people_watching_a_page. Cool3 (talk) 01:57, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

In response to the above link: I don't think it should be a button. It should be prominently displayed; it should probably not be removable. It should be a basic feature of how Wikipedia works. It is part and parcel of user responsibility to watch for incorrect changes made to the articles they are concerned with, which often corresponds to their interests, or to the articles they've worked on. Bus stop (talk) 02:08, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

I believe the theory is that less watched (and especially zero-watched) pages would make vandel targets. As for 'responsibility', well we're all volunteers here, so noone is technically (or should be) responsible for anything outside of what they actually do, or at least promise to do. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 02:13, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that less watched and zero watched articles are more likely to be targeted. and I also agree that no one has to do anything. I'm sorry if I sounded like I was telling everybody what to do. It was just a way of talking. but my theory is that if a responsible editor notices that an article that they have even only mild interest in is not being watched, that is, is not on many watchlists, and especially if there is some degree of vandalism to that article in evidence, that that would serve as motivation to get them to add that article to their watchlist. That is the way I would think, and I suspect that is the way many Wikipedians would think. But you're right -- my way of wording my above comment certainly could have been better. Bus stop (talk) 02:20, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

See also: Wikipedia talk:Special:UnwatchedPages.   Will Beback  talk  02:39, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Display of date on Merger and Split tags

This is a call for community input about a little corner of template talk page:

Display of date in Merge and Split tags: a discussion about enabling the display of the "date" parameter in all the merge/split templates, such as "Proposed since April 2009". Three propositions:

1. To maintain the current status of not displaying tagging data on the ground that it would make the tag's sentence too long,
2. To enable display of tagging date on the ground that it is standard and prevents tags lingering for months without actual discussion,
3. To have a bot automatically remove merge/split tags after N months.

The change was briefly enabled on 10 templates then reverted and a discussion started: interested partie can continue at Template talk:Merge in sections "Date field broken" (talk side for #1–3) and "Please enable date display" (technical side for #2). — The Little Blue Frog (ribbit) 20:45, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

links to outside pages, but do not want to leave full hyperlink

How do i leave a link to an external website without leaving the entire hyperlink?

julcal—Preceding unsigned comment added by julcal (talk • contribs)

Like this: [http://google.com Google] which renders as Google. – ukexpat (talk) 00:09, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Project to obtain legal photos of people?

Is there an organized effort to contact people listed in Wikipedia to ask them to contribute a photograph? It seems to me that people who depend on publicity (e.g. actors, authors, etc) would want to have a good photo representing them on Wikipedia, rather than a picture taken from a distance at a convention or lecture. Of course, the photo would have to be licensed appropriately, which may cause difficulties (e.g. perhaps it couldn't be a studio photo, but a picture they've had taken themselves). I'm sure other people have done this already: is the response typically positive or negative? (My apologies if I've missed something obvious.) --ScottAlanHill (talk) 03:13, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

See WikiProject Free images and Example requests for permission.-gadfium 07:23, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

• For the people who respond, I've generally found them to respond favorably. Unfortunately, there's plenty of people who don't respond at all. - Mgm|^(talk) 08:13, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

vandalism on Leeds Bradford Airport Article

Massive vandalism to the Leeds Bradford Airport article. cannot find history tab, no idea how to fix it. Thanks. (does this belong here, if not where?) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.6.145.28 (talk • contribs) 17:56, April 6, 2009

It looks Ok now. This revision current when the above message was posted looks Ok, but the symptom sounds like the template vandalism. I just noticed what I thought was template vandalism at 2009 L'Aquila earthquake which overlayed the window with an obscenity when the edit button was pressed but I could not track down which template was the cause before it was fixed. However, after looking at Template:current disaster and other included templates I cannot see any obvious cause. Maybe it was deeper or a short-lived CSS-hack? 84user (talk) 22:32, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Looking at these recent Template changes related to Leeds Bradford Airport it appears there was a series of template vandalisms which was finally fixed at 22:13 today.

Also I see the template vandalism of 2009 L'Aquila earthquake that I mentioned above was also fixed here. Hopefully there won't be much more of this. 84user (talk) 22:44, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia in parliament?

I've seen lots of mentions of wikipedia and potential COI editing in the news, TV et al, but this is the first time I've seen it mentioned in parliament [5]. Has anyone heard of anything similar before? Nil Einne (talk) 00:14, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes :-). See points 1, 2, 4 and the last one at Wikipedia:Wikipedia_as_a_source#2005.--Commander Keane (talk) 06:14, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually having a closer look at your example, the references I gave a merely mentions of Wikipedia, not Conflict of Interest points.--Commander Keane (talk) 08:44, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Source code written by editors

I've noticed that many computing related articles seem to contain source code that is completely unreferenced and obviously written by Wikipedia editors. I feel that including code written by editors is completely against all Wikipedia guidelines, such as WP:NOR. One might argue, that source code is an illustration of the article subject, much like self-taken photographs or self-made SVGs that are widely used in WP. But I think that still does not excuse us from ignoring very basic Wikipedia guidelines.

For examples of what I mean, take a look at [6]. Most of the articles do not mention where the source code is from. A specific example: Bellman-Ford algorithm. Please also note, that copying source code from a non-free source, such as a textbook, is a clear copyright violation. This is why I'd like to propose not including any source code in Wikipedia articles at all, unless it can be directly copied from a free reliable source. Offliner (talk) 22:55, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

(replies moved to Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Computer_science#Source_code_written_by_editors, please reply there)

I see no problems with short snippets of computer code or, preferable, pseudocode. It is trivial to compare it with the referenced algorithm. Complicated (and simply long) pieces of code are probably should not be on Wiki. They are difficult to validate (they even can have malicious insertions) and GFDL license is not designed for practical code Alex Bakharev (talk) 00:08, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki interface to get a facelift- any updates?

In the beginning of January there was a Signpost article on the Stanton project to create a simplified UI for beginning editors [7].

The Stanton Faq page is very unhelpfully on a Wikimedia wiki, so it's not possible to post additional questions on the discussion page. I have seen no further info since the signpost article, and would like to hear an update on what the current thinking is. This information is pertinent to development of templates on wikipedia.

1. Will this be a complexity hiding UI, such as is speculated on this blog page?
2. Assuming the UI example of #1, if the user clicked on the blue text hiding the syntax, would something like a form be presented where the user could type in the link address (in the case of the link example), or the parameters of the template (in the case of a {{citation}})?

In what time frame will #1 come out? #2? -J JMesserly (talk) 23:22, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

AFAIK, the project is still in the research phase. Mr.Z-man 23:47, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't know, but you can find out more about the Stanton usability project here: http://usability.wikimedia.org/ -- phoebe / (talk to me) 04:48, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Back end contributions?

I have an idea to help cut down on vandalism. Basically I'd like to design an algorithm that detects likely vandalism, and requires a trusted user (say, an admin) to approve the changes.

For example, if a proposed edit contains no recognizable dictionary words and wordcount is reduced more than 50%, kick it to an admin. Things along those lines. Basically, it'd entail reading a lot of vandal edits, identifying common elements, and implementing code to detect them.

There are three questions I have about this endeavor.

1.) Would such a filter be well received by the community? I'd be erring on the side of letting malicious edits through rather than restricting legitimate speech. 2.) Is there a central location vandalized pages are listed? Or would I need to download the wikidump and crawl it myself? 3.) Is wikipedia open to such contributions, or do they prefer we only improve articles?

Thanks for the information. I can be reached via my talk page, or at [email protected]

-GregNorc (talk) 13:08, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

That sounds very like the abuse filter. Algebraist 13:10, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikimania 2009: Scholarships

English: Wikimania 2009, this year's global event devoted to Wikimedia projects around the globe, is now accepting applications for scholarships to the conference. This year's conference will be handled from August 26-28 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The scholarship can be used to help offset the costs of travel and registration. For more information, check the official information page. Please remember that the Call for Participation is still open, please submit your papers! Without submissions, Wikimania would not be nearly as fun! --Az1568 (talk) 21:21, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

New proposal for site

Could I ask Wikipedia editors to have a look at this proposal & let me know what they think, would they support it, what would they want in it or would they be totally against the idea etc.? Please let me know on my talk page or on here. Thanks. dottydotdot (talk) 22:27, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

A proposal for a site that would allow people to submit articles they wished to be in Wikipedia but couldn't put in because they had a conflict of interest. Much of the time, these people want to put a neutral article about their notable company up, but can't. Wikipedia editors could then browse through these already made articles & add them to Wikipedia if they thought they were good. There would be no requirement to list the original author or site & editors could make as many or as few changes as they wished. It would be a paid for site, in that if you wanted to submit an article, it would cost you a small fee, less than £5. Editors who put an article on Wikipedia would also get paid for putting that article on.

"Advantages of a paid system"

Firstly, a percentage or revenue would be donated to a chosen charity, voted for by the readers & a percentage would also be donated to Wikimedia/Wikipedia. Having a paid system would stop spam & give people an incentive to write thorough, well researched articles rather than just putting rubbish up. It would also encourage editors to browse through & select articles.

There would be no problem with the payments, because it is not paying editors to submit specific articles. Any article that is submitted will be paid.

This would be a good way of increasing & improving Wikipedia's database, while negating a key criticism of Wikipedia.

dottydotdot (talk) 22:27, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

• There's no need for a separate site. Anything that has the potential to be included on Wikipedia can be submitted to WP:AFC - Mgm|^(talk) 12:41, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
  • I agree that we don't need a separate site, nor do we want one, because we need to keep track of who contributed what wording (GFDL/CC licensing). But WP:AFC, where IP editors post draft articles, is not the ideal place; it would be much better to have COI editors do a draft in their user space, and then engage in some dialog about notability, neutrality, and other improvements. A COI editor is usually pretty motivated to improve a (draft) article, unlike an IP editor; done right, Wikipedia could get some pretty good (and, yes, neutral) articles from COI editors if they had some guidance, and if there were a formal process for a non-COI editor to move acceptable articles from user space to mainspace. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:52, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Discussion of File:Lolicon Sample.png

An editor has brought up a concern that this image is illegal and should be deleted. Please come participate in the discussion. Thank you. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 22:57, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation legal counsel has commented, in that discussion, that there is no problem with the image. Unless editors have some reason to believe that the Foundation's lawyer is wrong on this point, further discussion seems pointless. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:42, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Internet users by language per article on Wikipedia

I've made a chart comparing the rough number of Internet users who speak a particular language as their primary language to the size of the Wikipedia in that language, see:

• User:Dcoetzee/Internet_users_by_language_per_article_on_Wikipedia

It's fairly incomplete, but still interesting. Dcoetzee 05:06, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Poll: autoformatting and date linking

This is to let people know that there is only a day or so left on a poll. The poll is an attempt to end years of argument about autoformatting which has also led to a dispute about date linking. Your votes are welcome at: Wikipedia:Date formatting and linking poll. Regards Lightmouse (talk) 09:05, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Admin coaching

Hallo, is the admin coaching project still active/in use? I was going to sign myself up for coaching, but then noticed that the unfulfilled requests were sitting around for many months without action. Thanks, tempodivalse [☎] 14:31, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I've wondered that for awhile myself. The talk page is so scarce there hasn't been a single thread from March '08 to March '09 and the same question was asked in 2007 with nary any improvement; it appears this was never the springboard that was hoped for. Requests for coaching just sit there and no one really rattles the cage about it. Maybe it needs a call to arms over on Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship where they are currently lamenting the lack of good admin candidates. (If someone really wants to save admin coaching, they should nominate it for deletion: a brilliant way to make a point and everyone will say it is a massive abuse of the system — yet it works every time!) --64.85.214.183 (talk) 18:27, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Since many months, only three "coaches" continued "coaching". Considering the reputation of admin coaching, I'd advise you to not request coaching anyway. The page was marked as inactive, but it was removed. See latest archive (it was broken, repaired). Cenarium (talk) 21:01, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Correct Name of Category?

There is a Category:Industry by country but this only has 6 countries, and it is undecided whether to say “Industry in Fooland” or “Industries in Fooland” or “Industry of Fooland”. (this is not "about" policy, just asking what the policy is! Category is underpopulated, but should be standardised first! Perhaps “Industry in Romania” should replace both existing categories?

Category:Economy of the United Kingdom has subcategories for Banking, Energy, Mining and Tourism; but not for Manufacturing and/or Industries. While there are Company categories for a number of Industries, this does not seem to cover either individual factories or Government factories eg see Category:Royal Ordnance Factories or Category:Government munitions production in the United Kingdom. So perhaps "Industry in the United Kingdom"? Hugo999 (talk) 01:31, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Two new toolserver tools

...for you to try out. They're for finding incorrect uses of needs-infobox and needs-photo parameters and can be accessed fromhere. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 19:24, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Blogs as sources, WP:BLOGS

Since I still keep coming across issues where people falsely say "blogs can't be sources"--an out and out incorrect statement--I've whipped up Wikipedia:Blogs as sources/WP:BLOGS as a quick reference distilled from RS & BLP policy pages to give a quick clue on how blogs are allowed to be used from certain websites, and how on what articles. Any feedback on the talk is appreciated there. rootology (C)(T) 03:08, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Main Page shortcuts

I used MP as the shortcut prefix[1] [2] for “main page” since it is used in the main page’s source code, for example id="mp-topbanner"[8]. I used the prefix with the following shortcuts which I need for my user page : MP:TOP, MP:OTD, MP:TFP, MP:WSP. The prefix is not intended to be a namespace, but simply a shortcut prefix for Main Page with the letters following mp representing a section of the main page. These shortcuts are useful, allowing for example one to go directly to the part of the main page that includes the section “Other areas of Wikipedia“. As I’ve already pointed out, mp is in the Source of the main page and there represents the main page. I’m using the shortcuts and I hope others will find them helpful also. For example, suppose you want to go directly to “today‘s featured picture” from the multilingual portal. You simply use the short cut.Chuck Marean 09:06, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

WikiLog - Wikipedia Blogged

Hi all,

As some of you may know, I've started an unofficial blog about Wikimedia projects (but inevitably focussing more on Wikipedia).

I would really appreciate it if you took the time to pop over, perhaps leave a comment or two... If you like what you see then please subscribe!

I definitely plan to involve the community with the creation of the blog's content - articles focussing on particular WikiProjects, for example. If you're at all interested in working with me, then please do not hesitate to contact me.

Cheers,

--Heebiejeebieclub (talk) 13:13, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Dr Sushil Kumar

Please see the history of the Dr Sushil Kumar article. Directorichr (talk · contribs) continues to edit the article to a non-standard formatting of references. I keep reverting it back to a formatted version, and try explaining to the editor what's wrong with their edits, but they never respond and just keep reverting back. What's my best action? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 01:27, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

The article creator has not made edits except to this one article. I suggest it be nominated for WP:AFD. The user name, Directorichr, suggests he is identifying himself as Director of the ICHR. Notability is questionable given the current references. An arduous negotiation with someone who is unwilling to join discussions might thus be avoided. If relations had started out better, it is conceivable we could work with him to create a keepable article. Against tooth-and-nail opposition I don't think it is possible. EdJohnston (talk) 01:48, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Concur - Pointillist (talk) 12:10, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Article has been nominated for deletion: see the discussion here. - Pointillist (talk) 09:24, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

New fun (and possibly useful!) list

Hi.

New project-space page: Wikipedia:You might be Wikilawyering if...

Please edit, and enjoy. -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:44, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Why AfD frustrates me

I've got a question on Wikipedia policies. More specifically, about how they're applied to AfDs. I'd like to direct your attention to this AfD. The nominator suggested that Susan Boyle does not satisfy notability guidelines as she's just another contender on a TV show. I agree with that, as contenders do not merit their own article. Then came a flurry of 'Keep' arguments stating that as she sang so very well and the judges gave her a standing ovation right after she sang the first note, she deserves her own article. Youtube was also being used as a deciding factor about whether she was notable or not. From my understanding of policy, Youtube should not / cannot be considered. Strong Keep over 250K youtube views already amongst well over 50 videos (edit: now over 350K on one vid alone and While I always strive to maintain a NPOV, I must point out the sheer quality of her performance... standing ovation from the judges, the entire crowd, after just the first vocal left her lips. were some of the arguments used. Also, if she is notable (which I doubt), it would be because of a single performance. Wouldn't that come under WP:ONEEVENT or WP:BLP1E? All the news paper articles talk about that one performance too.

So that is my opinion up there. And yet, I must be wrong. As Looie496 pointed out, 31 people wanted to keep it, 5 people wanted it deleted. So he closed it (non-admin closure). I was rather looking forward to an admin closure, as that admin would decide whether (1) Youtube can be used as a measure of notability, (2) WP:ONEEVENT can be ignored by zealous fans, and (3) whether AfD is really a !vote process or a vote process.

So I want to get your opinion on this. What do you guys think?

On a lighter note, here are some of the more amusing !votes:

Keep - it belongs here because I looked for it here on Wikipedia.

VERY STRONG KEEP - This article NEEDS to be on wikipedia. Without it, wikipedia would be a terrible place! Please, please, please keep it!

Keep (no, that's not a typo). ...

Oh yea, and since I'm posting this anyway, I question the relevance of WP:SNOW in AfDs. It's all very well in RfAs where a minimum % of supports are required, but AfDs require consensus. A hundred people could repeat the same wrong argument and it would still get closed by WP:SNOW. Not fair. Antivenin 08:14, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest taking it to deletion review. For one, it is a non-admin closing by someone already involved in the discussion. It should have been left to an admin. --Farix (Talk) 11:57, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

With my admin hat on, I have reverted the closure and relisted the debate. Fritzpoll (talk) 12:20, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Good deal. I honestly didn't think the closing would stand at WP:DRV because 1) It was a contested debate closed by a non-admin. 2) The closer already commented in the debate. 3) The closer merely vote counted instead of weighing the arguments. --Farix (Talk) 12:32, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, in case anyone wants to know, the reversion ike this is allowable by WP:DELPRO and the advice in WP:NAC, whose contents under "Inappropriate closure" caused me to revert Fritzpoll (talk) 12:40, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

(ec)

Under a literal interpretation of the current rules, as cited by Anti, I'd say it should probably be deleted. However the voting at this AfD may indicate that these rules reflect only the consensus of those most active at AfD - a complaint that appears quite often on various discussion pages. There's been public criticism of WP's current deletionist tendencies, with suggestions that it's driving editors away (one in PC Pro, where a journalist created a stub on a notable subject, Political Quarterly and it was deleted within hours; another in The Economist).

The article Susan Boyle's only content issue is excessive use of diret quotes, although each is attributed and referenced and only short extracts are quoted from each source, so I expect there's no problem about WP:COPYVIO. I'd WP:IAR and keep it. --Philcha (talk) 12:58, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

While there might be ground for a procedural relisting due to the AfD having been closed by someone involved in the debate, and apparent vote counting:

1) We should not be wasting time and effort for purely procedural reasons. WP is not a bureaucracy etc. The debate was promptly snow-closed again.

2) Non admin closure ? So what ? What is the rationale here ? If something does not require admin tools, why insist only an admin should do it ? Unless I've missed something since I joined the project, there is no aristocracy here, no prerogatives, only potentially damaging tools granted to trusted users. I have no issue discouraging inexperienced editors from closing AfD debates, but the essay at WP:NAC is taking it several steps too far in my opinion. If the only thing wrong with an AfD closure is that it was performed by a non admin, then there is nothing wrong with it. Equendil Talk 14:14, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

The main issue is identifying experienced users. Admins are already reviewed for their experience. Ordinary users are not, and require separate review. Dcoetzee 23:26, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

And on the other side of the equasion, why are we always in a rush to close debates? imo, WP:SNOW should only apply after a certain amount of time (i.e.: 3 days) and only if the !voters are unanimous in their views. I don't like policy for the sake of policy, but I hate unnecessary drama, and allowing AfDs like this to be closed early, especially by an involved party, only creates a ton of drama. Just let the damned AfDs run their length. Resolute 13:57, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

NOTE: Due to a cross-posting this is also being discussed at the Help Desk: Wikipedia:Help desk#Why AfD frustrates me. – ukexpat (talk) 14:51, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Afd now reopened per discussion at WP:ANI: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#WP:Articles for deletion/Susan Boyle again. – ukexpat (talk) 15:10, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia under scrutiny WTC collapse

Folks, I do not understand what you are doing. Look at this.

I feel certain that the WTC controlled demolition hypothesis is false, I mean, how could it be demolished? It would take days to prepare. That said, I do not understand why such a large group of editors is concerned with renaming the article, and deleting scientific information which is relevant to the article.

One fact we know about science is, that most scientific facts turn out to be wrong in the end. That's how science works: we do the best we can, find we were wrong, there is more to know, and move on. These partisan battles are unprofessional.

Kaaskop6666 (talk) 16:46, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

It's an issue of undue weight, fringe theories etc. If the "truthers" have a problem with the way Wikipedia deals with these issues, they are welcome to initiate or contribute to relevant discussions and attempt to change the consensus. – ukexpat (talk) 17:00, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Get real, wikipedia should not allow truthers to distort neutrality, but deleting relevant information in order to deny them a voice is going too far. We should be neutral, that is, to both sides. Kaaskop6666 (talk) 17:51, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

I am not suggesting that we allow them to distort neutrality. What I am saying is that rather than them bleating about in a blog, which will just allow them to wallow in self-pity, they should man up and come here to discuss their issues. If they don't choose to participate in our processes, that's not our fault. – ukexpat (talk) 18:34, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, this is what you get for just making one revert and posting two comments on the Talk page:

Blocking a user after one edit and a few comments on the Talk page?

As I noted above, after I returned a reference to the Bentham article supporting the controlled demolition "conspiracy theory" [to a Wikipedia article dealing with the "controlled demolition conspiracy theory"!], I was immediately warned that I could be blocked from Wikipedia. After that sigle edit, I only wrote two comments on this Talk page. After that, I found the following on my own talk page:

I've filed an arbitration enforcement request against you. See

WP:AE. Jehochman [[User

talk:Jehochman|Talk]] 16:42, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

What on earth is going on here? I appeal to all fair-minded editors: do not allow Wikipedia to go down this route.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:World_Trade_Center_controlled_demolition_conspiracy_theories —Preceding unsigned comment added by Perscurator (talk • contribs) 21:49, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Your review in going in your favor. Per Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/September 11 conspiracy theories#Discretionary sanctions, editors continuing to edit a 9/11-related article over an item that has reached an opposing consensus, or under discussion, are subject to administrative sanctions less forgiving in effect elsewhere on the site. I wouldn't continue reverting if I was you... - BanyanTree 22:00, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Heh. The history of World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories is funny: split from 9/11 conspiracy theories as a "Theory" and promptly moved to a "Hypothesis," before making its way back to the characterization used in its parent article as "conspiracy theory" after much argument and discussion. The complaints about "activist editors", as opposed to editors who don't edit I suppose, are a tactic typical of tendentious editing - choosing the revision of an article that you most prefer and then pretending that this revision is the baseline from which any deviation is obvious bad faith. Move along, nothing to see here. - BanyanTree 21:53, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes. I discuss this in the context of the respectful and fact-based coverage of the nanothermite findings in Danmark's TV2 and the country's other reliable mainstream sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:World_Trade_Center_controlled_demolition_conspiracy_theories#Respectful_and_serious_coverage_of_the_nanothermite_residue_article_in_reliable_sources_in_Danmark

Perscurator (talk) 12:38, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Notification of WikiProject Living people

In order to have an organized page centralizing all the tasks relating to biographies of living people, a WikiProject has been created. There are several areas in need of greater attention, each listed on the project page. This is a project-wide problem that needs everyone's attention. Please take a look and help where you can. لennavecia 20:21, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Semi-protection

I don't know if this is possible or plausible, but would there be a way to allow certain IPs to edit semi-protected pages? I know with dynamic IPs it's difficult, but if there is a way it would be smart. For example, see Special:Contributions/74.137.108.115 as someone who deserves it. --99.240.227.108 (talk) 03:01, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but only autoconfirmed users (registered users that are 4 days old and have 10 edits) can edit semi-protected pages. IP users can edit semi-protected pages by requesting an edit by an autoconfirmed user by using the {{editsemiprotected}} template on the talk page of the desired page. -Porchcrop ^{(talk|contributions)} 03:35, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

What would be the point? If longterm IP editors want autoconfirmed rights, they know how to get them. Algebraist 11:45, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Philosophy of article main picture choice

If you are interested please check out the discussion on the talk page at Flag desecration. I might be wrong in my reasoning here but I think it is an interesting discussion. Steve Dufour (talk) 05:06, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Progressive Federal Party's images

Sorry, but can anybody delete these images at last?

• File:Progressive Federal Party causus 1988.jpg
• File:ProgessivereformpartyCausus1976.jpeg
• File:PFPfrontbench1984.jpg

I'm really tired by setting warning templates and watching how they are being removed. Panther (talk) 08:48, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

 Done I agree, almost a month of that nonsense is more than enough. I've left a message with the uploader trying to explain things.-Andrew c ^[talk] 20:58, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Recently unwatched articles, any takers?

I've cut out some articles from my watchlist. These were all put on either due to some sort of dispute or persistent vandalism. I'm not sure if there are any outstanding issues currently, but at the very least, I was wondering if any volunteers out there wanted to add these to their watchlist for at least the purpose of vandal fighting. Here they are A113 Alphabet murders Anti-Zionism East-West Schism Felipe Calderón Han Dynasty History of Japan Ion Antonescu List of The Future Is Wild species Memphis, Egypt Óscar Romero Shang Dynasty. Thanks.-Andrew c ^[talk] 20:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Community votes

Whenever we have a decision to ban/indef-block a user, if the nom has a few diffs, most of the community just sticks with the nom. In fact, almost all of the banning discussions have resulted in the user-in-question banned/blocked. I feel that every Wikipedian of the community isn't speaking his/her own opinion. I think that some users, seeing the first few votes as "ban", don't express their own thoughts. And then a snowball effect happens. We need to change this. (Yes we can!) Comments, please. MC10 | Sign here! 02:24, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Evidence? Algebraist 02:29, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

One example would be this; many Wikipedians opposed to the ban, but were ignored. A later vote had mainly supports. MC10 | Sign here! 04:04, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

A statistical question

Does anyone know what percentage of articles get deleted within 10 days of being created? Within a month? Also, what percentage of all deletions does each deletion process (Prod, AfD, CSD) account for? I think it would be quite interesting to know. Any ideas? Cool3 (talk) 13:55, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Old Man River

Until the 3rd of April this year Old Man River was a disambig page, linking to the Mississippi River, the song Ol' Man River and a couple of other artiles. On this date that page was overwritten by an article about an Australian musician. As I don't believe the artist is deserving of the primary topic title, I moved that article to Old Man River (musician) and replaced the resultant redirect with the old disambig page (with an entry for the musician) by using a copy and paste from the history of the page now about the musician.

Was this the correct way to restore the page? If not what should I have done? Also, I couldn't decide really where this message should have gone - for future reference have I got it right? Thryduulf (talk) 17:35, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

See WP:MOVE for instructions on how to move a page; moves you cannot accomplish yourself can be requested at WP:RM. For future reference, and for other editors who may encounter a similar situation, cut-and-paste is not the right way to move a page back, because it confuses the article's page history and thus violates the GFDL. I have tagged Old Man River for cut and paste history repair. A relatively small cadre of editors do most of the maintenance at WP:RM; they'd probably be happy to answer any future questions you may have on the subject. Baileypalblue (talk) 03:07, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

• Only administrator's can do such moves correctly. I fixed this. First everything that needs to be retained needs to be deleted. Then the proper material gets WP:MOVED then the original gets undeleted. It's the only way to move part of an edit history to where it belongs. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:06, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Forum

Hi all,

I am launching a new forum for Wikipedia users. Please feel free to ask any questions, either on my talk page or to [email protected].

The Wikipedia Forum aims to provide a place where all Wikipedia users can talk, suggest, comment & argue. Wikipedia itself provides no easy & accessible way of doing this-Wikipedia talk pages are confined to topics that directly relate to the article & conversation between multiple users is unwieldy & confusing. Mailing lists are also confusing & do not scale very well to large conversations between many people, resulting in full inboxes containing a large number of emails quoting the previous one & taking up 4 pages. Users are free to talk about anything with very little censorship, yet the aim is not to become a forum for Wikipedia haters. Instead it caters for everyone, from the average user confused about how to add templates, to administrators wishing to discuss complex articles in private. Totally free & requiring no public information that can be linked with your Wikipedia account(unless you wish it to be), there will be a minimal amount of moderation, but only to ensure there are no personal attacks & insults-criticism & complaints are perfectly welcome-they make Wikipedia better for all of us.

The forum is at www.thewikipediaforum.com. Please visit & join in.

Thanks! dottydotdot (talk) 15:37, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

NEW PROJECT

I think that there should be a new project create called the Wikipedia Against Vandalism. Any users (reformed vandals and users with a clean history can join) that want to sign up and help can. Awareness should be raised about vandalism on Wikipedia. People don't seem to get that whatever they write only stays on Wikipedia for about a minute. That one minute of fun that they get just hurts the reliability and public opinion of Wikipedia. There should be a forum for everyone to talk about the subject and publicly state their reformation. The project will do other things, and administrators that have the main goal of blocking vandals can also join. Each administrator that blocks a vandal or users that refer a possible vandal to an admin, can log it into a list. We will update the number of blocked vandals everyday and it might possibly get put on the main page of Wikipedia. I am willing to create this project, but I need someone with a vast knowledge of Wikipedia (preferably an administrator) to guide me since I am very new to Wikipedia. Please spread the word about this proposed project. Thanks. --Thenachoman (talk) 13:46, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, there's already the Counter-Vandalism Unit- you might want to check it out. :-) —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 13:48, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

As I understood the original help request of Thenachoman, the idea was to create a "Reformed Vandals Program". This, I believe, is an interesting suggestion, and warrants further discussion.

I think that Experienced reformed vandals" could well help out newly reformed folk - to help the integrate into the community, and become valuable contributors. I see that this could be an iterative process. I don't know how specifically how Thenachoman could get the idea off the ground, hence I suggested that (s)he ask for input here.  Chzz  ►  19:06, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Each administrator that blocks a vandal or users that refer a possible vandal to an admin, can log it into a list. There somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 vandalizing edits ever day. Hundreds of editors are blocked every day. Let's spend our time improving Wikipedia articles, not trying to count things. Or expecting that vandals will somehow be deterred because of a forum or a bunch of numbers; they won't because vandals don't educate themselves about Wikipedia before they vandalize. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:09, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Raising awareness of vandalism might easily result in feeding the trolls, which we should avoid. It might also result in a sysop-vandal cycle. --Cs32en (talk) 03:01, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Anthropocentrism

IMO too many biology-related articles have been given a severe anthropocentric bias, possibly by medics with limited awareness of general biology. Examples include:

• Anus,where the original content has been moved to Human anus because its sexual content is quite inappropriate to innocent invertebrates.
• Embryological development, which is totally anthropocentric and ignores imprtant general embryology topics like gene expression, the effects on gene expression of chemical gradients (which are the result of gene expression in earlier stages, so it's a feedback loop), cleavage patterns (e.g a spiral deterministic cleavage is a distinguishing feature of the superhylum Lophotrochozoa, the fate of the blastopore and the distinction between protostomes and deuterostomes.
• Muscle - ignores epitheliomuscular cells in cnidaria and myoepithelial cells in ctenophores, and the completely different nervous wiring of muscles in protostomes vs vertebrates.
• Swimming, now moved to Human swimming, originally covered only the competitive sport, see Talk:Human swimming page.
• Kidney, which should either cover vertebrate kidneys in general, or 2-stage waste filtration in general, including the nephridia of protostomes. --Philcha (talk) 07:38, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I propose that top-level titles, without a scope in parentheses (e.g. Embryological development vs Embryological development (human)) be restricted to the most generalised coverage, with X (human) covering human-specific aspects. --Philcha (talk) 13:00, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

AMEN! This sort of thing bothers me, too. Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias deals almost exclusively with cultural/geographical biases, but an attempt was made there in January on its talk page: Systematic bias in articles concerning virology. The discussion you are looking for actually got underway there, before it died out. Topics mentioned were

• articles concerning viruses are almost always centered on human interests
• a few years ago, articles like eye almost exclusively addressed the topic in humans
• extreme human-centric bias will color the attitudes of a great many people

and someone commented: "Whether we want to be the place to address it is one question, but addressing it would be worthwhile and is achievable." That project seems to have enough with culture/geography, though.

Your suggestion about top-level titles sounds good, but the opposite has also been used. For example Sleep is still mostly about humans and Sleep (non-human) is a fork.

The project and work you want, Philcha, might belong within biology, though it is wider than that. It does need some systematic attention. - Hordaland (talk) 16:34, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Welll said Philcha, agree entirely. DuncanHill (talk) 16:37, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I've definitely noticed this bias myself, and I've tried to correct it myself in a few cases. But there's a LOT of it. Mokele (talk) 12:26, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I just wanted to mention that this has been brought up in the past few months at fetus and abortion (and possibly pregnancy). And out of that, Fetus (biology) and Abortion#In_other_animals were created, due to some editors believing the opposite: that articles should primarily deal with humans, and that either a final section "In other animals" be added on to those articles, or a completely new article created to cover non-human aspects. So it appears there are two conflicting schools of thought here, and perhaps a broader discussion should take place between the two camps? -Andrew c ^[talk] 20:49, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I think it's going to depend on the topic. I'm biased, given my background in comparative biology, to think that anything which is a broadly applicable term (Skull, embryo, parasite, etc.) should be comparative, with a sub-page of X (human). In the case of abortion, the term isn't widely used for events outside of humans (though I may be wrong, reproductive biology isn't my field), so keeping it centered on humans is probably best. But I also think those are the exception - with anatomy in particular, there are a LOT of pages which just describe the human example of a bone that occurs in most/all tetrapods. It's important to not just make a rigid rule, but the exceptions shouldn't distract from the reality of pervasive anthropocentrism. Mokele (talk) 21:09, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

An alternative that might be worth discussing is making the unqualified title a DAB page. IMO that would have significant disadvantages, but it might be worth discussing. --Philcha (talk) 21:56, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I am very grateful that you brought this important issue to general attention, Philcha. I agree completely, and would be very happy to go with X (human). I think a more systematic approach to topics in anatomy/developmental biology etc. might also have the benefit of helping to consolidate in a more sensible fashion material spread over different pages based on the approach of the authors e.g. as you point out embryogenesis, human embryogenesis, Embryological development/Prenatal development, Prenatal development (non-human) etc. Celefin (talk) 19:14, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Items disappearing from watchlist

Some items seem to be regularly being removed from my watchlist. Can anyone do this or does anyone have any suggestions as to how this may be happening. Is there a watchlist history anywhere? Martin Hogbin (talk) 22:37, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I find articles being added to my watchlist which I have never edited and in which I have absolutely no interest. DuncanHill (talk) 20:53, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, that shouldn't happen. How do you know they've been taken off your watchlist? - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 17:07, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

When I look at it they are not on there. I have considered the possibility that I might be accidentally removing them myself by inadvertently clicking on the 'unwatch' tab after editing the page for example, but it seems to be happening too consistently for this. Is there any history page for watchlists? Martin Hogbin (talk) 17:26, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

No, there isn't any history page; watchlists are essentially simply a list of entries in the database. You might consider making a copy of your watchlist every once in a while (via the "Edit raw watchlist" option) so that you can identify specifically what has changed; you could then compare this to the current list to see exactly what has changed, and then look at your edits to see if all the removed articles were edited by you.

As for finding out exactly who did what to your watchlist, the problem may be that the such an action would be buried in the middle of a million or hundred million or whatever transactions.

Finally, a suggestion: change your password. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:53, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

User page acceptability

Is this user's userpage OK? User:Zoomzoom1 -- seems like its an ad. I had a revert session against this person, so I am steering clear of this myself... User A1 (talk) 06:53, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Looks like he is just making an article there? dottydotdot (talk) 10:50, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

That userpage looks as advertisement for specific software, it is against our policy--Bramfab (talk) 13:06, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

His userpage looks absolutely fine. Sure, he's writing an article that looks like an advertisement, but that's only a problem when its published as an article, where it will most probably be AfD'ed or rewritten. Show me a policy that says you can't write articles on your userpage. Antivenin 16:50, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

By reading this page Wikipedia:User page and specifically here you can find a lot of considerations about what to write or not to write and what to take in the userpage. Plus you already said that: looks like an advertisement. No pages of wiki are webspace for private advertisements.--Bramfab (talk) 17:18, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

No but all he is doing is drafting an article in his userspace that he is probably planning to put on the main bit some time. If it sounds like advertising then, then it will be deleted, but give him a chance to make it better at least. dottydotdot (talk) 19:04, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

The page already exist: SimApp, and his userpage is also categorised here for example! In the same condition and categorization there are also the following userpages: User:Hedgehog0 and User:Peedeebee/LUSAS. Even assuming good faith it looks as some software developers have found a way to increase a bit their web's visibility. --Bramfab (talk) 22:40, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

It surprises me that pages in userspace appear in categories for articles. Seems to me it would be sensible for the software to prevent that. Surely this must have been discussed somewhere, so why hasn't it been implemented? --83.253.252.220 (talk) 15:56, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Most edited articles

Where can I find a list of the most edited articles on Wikipedia? Some cool guy (talk) 04:04, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/Pages with the most revisions Mr.Z-man 04:28, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Don DeLillo image

I'm searching for a Don DeLillo photo for my hu.wiki article that's not subject to copyright. All the pictures I looked at have the warning: may be subject to copyright. Can anyone find me one that's free? Thanks, 97.112.129.22 (talk) 03:42, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I think you're in the wrong place. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an assistance service. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:43, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Don_DeLillo_image Tra (Talk) 11:32, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Too complicated

I am recently posting many of your definitions, to prove a point when I blog, as your articles are usually full of good information and news, as well as the fact that you don't usually have slighted information without there actually being a disclaimer about accuracy. I always cite your information and the page itself which draws people to look from my blog to your site. Recently I was looking up the definition of the words "liberal" and "conservative". Both used to be (up until recently) rather simple and easily attainable. Someone who is slighted towards the right obviously, has change the definition of conservative, for example, to redirect me to the word Conservativism. Then it explains who wrote what, what year, how that differs from one culture to another. First, I didn't want the definition of Conservatism, I wanted the old version which said Conservative. And, the complication of both articles makes it as if I was looking up automobile and had to sift through all the articles including when Henry Ford welded a crank for the first combustion engine vehicle. I don't need all that. Please try to keep things simpler, and on the definition of Conservative, it starts off saying that it is hard to define. I didn't need to hear that, just tell me what you know. liberal means to use more, conservative means to use less, you know, definition, not an encyclopedia of related and unrelated topics. One would think Karl Rove, the master of misinformation, somehow took over wikipedia. I find instead that they were revised by the same contributor who took it upon himself to get involved with misinformation about Joe Biden during the election. That is like allowing Adolph Hitler to define the will of the German people prior to World War II. If this trend continues I will have to find another site for information. Thank You Steve Walker —Preceding unsigned comment added by Azmildman (talk • contribs) 07:14, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

If you're looking for /definitions/, you want Wiktionary. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 11:20, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Art is back, sort of

See also: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wikipedia Art controversy

This is just a quick heads-up that Wikipedia Art has resurfaced on Wikipedia as Wikipedia Art Controversy 2009. It is nowhere near as bad as last time. It is a reasonably neutral article about the domain name dispute with Wikimedia, which does actually have a little RS coverage, but it probably needs an eye kept on it in case it turns into a coat rack for bringing back all the old stuff that got deleted before. The Wikipedia Art Wiki still says that they hope to get Wikipedia Art back onto Wikipedia. I have no idea whether this is them trying to achieve that, or something else entirely. My view is that it still fails notability however I am not going to tag it for deletion as I might be seen as having a COI in the matter following my not exactly glorious involvement original AfD. I have done a little cleanup on the article but avoided hacking it about too much for the same reason. --DanielRigal (talk) 16:05, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Mediation assistance needed

MedCab currently (23:11, 26 April 2009 (UTC)) has fourteen unadopted requests. Volunteers would be greatly appreciated. There are no particulary requirement, but people looking to help should check out their suggestions for volunteers. Thanks! --Vassyana (talk) 23:11, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Near side of the Moon

If the near side of the moon is full of Maria and always facig earth, whereas the farside doesn't have any Maria, doesn't that suggest that all the impact craters on the moon were formed by bits of the earth bombarding it at a very early stage? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.118.28.130 (talk) 08:41, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

This is not relevant to this page, but you might like to ask at the Science Reference desk where it will be appropriate.-gadfium 09:38, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Expanded input needed

Ahoy! There's been a rather heated debate on Talk:Bill O'Reilly (political commentator) regarding whether Bill O's association with "conservative" should be included in the article introduction, and (if so) how that information should be presented. Unfortunately, we've only gotten one response from editors not previously involved in the dispute, and so I'm posting here in the hopes that more of the community will take a few minutes to read the RFC and respond. Full RFC may be found here. Thanks in advance! //Blaxthos ( t / c ) 16:54, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

New tool for finding pages needing images

I've just finished a tool for finding pages on Wikipedia needing images near a given location – tools:~alexz/coord. You can search near a coordinate, or search near another article (if the article is also geotagged). The results can be exported into a KML file and viewed in Google maps. Please leave bug reports/feature requests on my talk page for now. (P.S., if you know how to replicate the Google maps functionality with another online service, preferably something free like OpenStreetMap, please let me know.) Mr.Z-man 18:59, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Cinablue

I'm seeking some editorial help on an article this user is trying create. The sticking point is that the user is changing a redirect to another article. I left the user several automated messages using HG before I determined that they were most likely editing in misguided, but good faith. I left the user a personal message to try to explain the situation and they have simply recreated the article once more. I'm fairly certain they have not seen the message. I do not want to keep reverting the user until they are blocked as I do not see this as a useful solution. Any ideas? Thanks. Tiderolls 21:02, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Nevermind. The user's article has been tagged for deletion. Excuse the ring. Tiderolls 21:40, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

RFC on the reform of ArbCom hearings

The attention of all editors is drawn to a Request for Comment on a major issue for the English Wikipedia: a package of six proposals to move the ArbCom hearings process away from the loose, expansionary model that has characterised it until now, to a tighter organisational model. The RFC started Tuesday 29 April. Tony (talk) 14:32, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Student project Sslota

Hi,

Re. Sslota (talk · contribs)

In answering a {{helpme}}, it looks to me like this 'user' is a student project (from a comment on the talk page).

I would have thought the correct procedure here would be to raise it in Wikipedia talk:School and university projects; however, I raised another issue there over a month ago, and I note it's had no response; therefore, per guidelines on that project page, I'm mentioning it here in the hope that someone who knows about coordination with student project work might be able to take a look, engage in a dialogue with the users and see how we can work with them.

Cheers,  Chzz  ►  04:40, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Placement of autofellatio photo

I believe it is a general principle that a global consensus of the Wikipedia community overrides a local consensus of the editors of an article. (This seems to be the philosophy behind the third item of WP:CONEXCEPT and seemed to be the consensus in the events that led to WP:ARBMAC2. [9] [10])

There seems to be a local consensus at Talk:Autofellatio that in addition to a drawing of the sexual practice in question, the article must display a photo, which must not be moved away from the very top of the article. Is this at odds with what a global consensus would be? I believe that discussions at that talk page (including two RfCs, currently Talk:Autofellatio#RfC: Should the human image be moved down) may be skewed by self-selection bias:

• regular editors of this article may be less concerned about Wikipedia's reputation than a more representative sample would be;
• advertising an RfC at WP:Requests for comment/Art, architecture, literature and media may fail to get attention from a sufficient number of sufficiently typical editors (all RfCs currently listed there are about relatively trivial, barely encyclopedic topics);
• some editors may not be able to participate in the discussion because Autofellatio is definitely not a work-safe article;
• some editors may not be comfortable editing Talk:Autofellatio (personally I would be embarrassed if this became one of my most edited talk pages).

Or perhaps I am simply much more old-fashioned than the typical Wikipedia editor? --Hans Adler (talk) 00:06, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't think there's a codified global consensus that pertains to this beyond WP:NOT#CENSORED. And as to the RfC, one manner of thinking is that if you can't be arsed to comment on an RfC, the matter probably isn't that important to you. Since it's an RfC on a single article rather than a wider-reaching guideline, it's naturally going to attract less attention. Maybe proposing a style guide for the use of images depicting sexual acts would attract more attention? —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 00:31, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Tool that shows all links in article?

One of my Wiki-hobbies is finding overlinked articles (WP:OVERLINK) and de-overlinking them. This task would be simplified by a tool that produces a simple list of all links in the article, e.g. running this tool on "Here is a sentence about first link, which has been the capitol of second link since third link declared it to be" would produce something like

• first link
• second link
• third link

This would greatly simplify and speed up spotting "low value" links.
Does such a tool exist? If not, where can I recommend that it be developed? -- 201.37.230.43 (talk) 01:47, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

You can ask at WP:SCRIPTS. – ukexpat (talk) 01:56, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Possible Wikipedia trademark violation?

I recently came across an article that was a copyvio from zineziki.com. While on the site, I noticed that their logo contains the text "the independent media wikipedia". Additionally, their ZineWiki:About page states that their site runs "Wikimedia" software (should be MediaWiki).

ZineWiki is powered by the Wikimedia software meaning anyone, anywhere can contribute directly to the site at any time. ZineWiki aspires to the same standards of quality, accuracy and neutrality as Wikipedia. If you are not familiar with Wikipedia, please have a look at its guidelines before contributing. After that, take us to school!

They don't seem to make it very clear that they're unaffiliated with Wikipedia and the WMF. Radiant chains (talk) 07:34, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

It looks like Wikipedia has started to become a genericized trademark. Frankly, their logo seems of worse problem than their about page, to me. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:12, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Indeed, the about page is just one page. Their logo is on all of their 2000+ articles. Radiant chains (talk) 19:46, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to write him a letter and suggest the wording "wiki encyclopedia" instead. Dcoetzee 01:10, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/Tinucherian

This is a 'mandatory' notification to all interested parties that I have accepted a nomination to join the Bot Approvals Group - the above link should take you to the discussion. Best wishes, -- Tinu Cherian - 10:57, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

"Seth Hilton" discography

Seth Hilton is a redlink. There is nothing at Google to indicate that he's in any way a notable singer. And yet we have a discography for him at User:DrVince/Wish Down The Drain and User:Wish Down The Drain Song. The claims of being number one in Australia and number 2 in the US seem to be hoaxes. I'm aware that this is User space, but is this an appropriate use of User space? These users may be socks of User:Seth hilton, although User:DrVince has been deleted from that list. Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 21:53, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Heh. Since I first started writing this, the articles I was complaining about have been deleted.  :) Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 21:53, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Anonymous IP edits by country

Sometime back I think I saw a chart showing what percentage of anonymous IP edits came from each country. Can someone point me back to that chart? Thanks -- Mwalcoff (talk) 02:33, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Death

I'd like to draw people's attention to pages like this and this, and encourage every regular editor to create one. It's a difficult topic, but an important one I feel. Majorly talk 20:07, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Unless, like most of us, you don't really care what happens to some account you set up on some website if you're dead. Gurch (talk) 20:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm more thinking about letting the community know about it. Think of the reaction to Jeffpw's death. What happens to my account and whatever isn't that important, but I know people would want to know if I had died. Majorly talk 20:22, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Officially, when I die, I want people to take any action they deem appropriate without first considering what I might have wanted. I really don't give a shit, and I officially want people to act as if I didn't give a shit, unless they care themselves, then I want them to act however feels most natural and appropriate to them, given no guidance from me. And I also want people to be able to find this post using the archives to get my official position on my feelings towards my death, as I intend this posting to be my Wikipedia Last Will and Testament, and expect all Wikipedia users to follow it, and I will not be posting any follow up to it anywhere, especially in a subpage of my userpage. You are all bound to find this post and follow it when I die. Thank you. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 02:44, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Talk Pages No Longer Being Watched

I'm not sure where to post this. Recently (I think yesterday) Watchlist quit watching talk pages. This has destroyed the basics of communication on wikipedia. If you have a comment on an article talk page you now have to specifically go to the page to see if there are responses. If there are conversations on your talk or somebody else's talk page where you have made a comment you have to manually go to that page to see if there are responses. There are no longer any flags to let you know there have been changes. I can't believe this would have passed any consensus test. I don't know where to register my protest. Americasroof (talk) 13:25, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree this would be quite bad, but I am not observing this. --Hans Adler (talk) 13:35, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick response. Since I posted this, a talk page appeared on my list although other talk pages which I know have earlier activity are not on the list. It's very strange. I do hope it's fixed though. Thanks. Americasroof (talk) 14:00, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

You probably hid minor/anonymous/logged-in/bot/your edits from the watchlist and forgot to unhide them. Gurch (talk) 15:24, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Probably a dumb question: Why !vote not just vote?

I've noticed that people write "!vote" in AfD, RfA, and other discussions a lot instead of using the word "vote". The reason for that may be in a FAQ or guideline somewhere, but I've never seen it. It has led me to ponder the subject, and I've come up with two possible reasons that make the most sense to me. First, since decisions are made by consensus rather than through a democratic voting process, "my !vote" could be interpreted as "my non-vote" (assuming "!" means "not" as it does in several computer languages), or "my advisory vote" or my "non-binding strawpoll vote". The other reason might be a technical one. I installed a JavaScript kludge that added pretty icons in front of words like Keep and Oppose (as well as a lot of other places where it was annoying, thus I disabled it). Perhaps "vote" has a special meaning in some situations, and "!vote" doesn't. It's been bugging me, so I thought I'd just ask and stop living in the dark about it. It's probably been asked dozens of times before (though I couldn't find it after slogging through a few pages of search results), so feel free to just slap me with a trout and point me to an archived discussion is you prefer. :-) Thanks! —Willscrlt ( “Talk” ) 01:07, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

As you guess, the ! is the computer science "not". Thus !vote means "not vote" as in the context of we don't "vote" here on Wikipedia; we discuss. There's not really a word for it, other than "vote", which is what we're explicitly trying to avoid saying, so we use !vote. Personally, I think it's a bit jargony and confusing, but it's become common practice. Cool3 (talk) 02:23, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

A better way to put it is that we do vote, however votes without reasonable accompanying rationales are ignored, so people like to pretend that we don't vote. But we do. Its just that unless you can explain why you vote the way you do, and cite decent reasons for it, its likely that the person making the decision based on the votes will ignore it. Or another way to look at is is that the vote matters a little bit, but the reasoning behind the vote matters a lot so it is very important that your vote is accompanied by reasoned arguements. So people say that we don't vote, and call their votes "not-votes" or !votes as a cute little reminder that its "not the vote" that matters, its the reasoning behind the !vote that does. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 02:40, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses. I think I will update the WP:!VOTE section to include a very brief summary of what you just explained so that others will have an easier time figuring that out. :-) (And thanks also for not trout slapping me.) —Willscrlt ( “Talk” ) 02:51, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I am surprised that WP:!VOTE redirects where it does. I thought it would redirect to Wikipedia:Voting is evil or better yet Wikipedia:Polling is not a substitute for discussion. That target does seem an odd end for that shortcut. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 02:57, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. I used popups to preview the shortcut I found, but since the description of !vote was actually below the threshold for what popups, I didn't see the answer to my question there until I went to the actual guideline to include it. *shrug* —Willscrlt ( “Talk” ) 06:23, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

And thank you, Will, for asking something I have been unable to figure out for 4 years!! Pegship (talk) 18:32, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

We have a pretty complete compendium at WP:GLOSSARY, which is, alas, hard to find at times of need. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 18:40, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Unambiguous disambiguation page

The page notability is structured as a disambiguation page, but has nothing to disambiguate as there is only one article of this title, Notability in Wikipedia. Should that article be moved there, per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, should the page be a soft redirect to the wiktionary entry, or is there some other useful function for it? Skomorokh 01:59, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Do not feed the trolls

Hi. I think we can all agree that feeding trolls is a bad idea. However, I haven't seen much agreement on just what that means. My question, for the community, is this: What kind of food does a troll want, and how do we avoid giving them that?

The question might be easy to answer if there were a clear test to distinguish trolls from non-trolls. Thus, that's also a question: How can we tell when someone's trolling, rather than trying to genuinely ask a question or make a good-faith edit? What's worse: false positives or false negatives?

I've seen little guidance in policy or agreement from the community on these questions. Therefore, I'm asking, and this seems to be a good place to start. Opinions? -GTBacchus^(talk) 04:07, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

My yardstick, and let's be clear - this is completely made-up, is anyone I've explained something to four different times in four different ways and they still have essentially the same question... is acting like a troll. Or, at the very least, can be treated as someone that I'm not going to be able to communicate with. There is a boundary, some abstract point that, when crossed, let's you know you are dealing with trollish behavior. I would avoid calling people "troll" because that asserts a fact you may not be comfortable with (and you may be wrong, maybe the really are that stupid). But that's just me. Padillah (talk) 18:41, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Do Advertisment on Wikipedia, take money to pay OLPCs in third world

Just an idea: Couldn't we do advertisement on Wikipedia like google adsense. The money - may be several million dollars per month - we could use, to buy OLPCs, to spend to schools in third world ? Or support any education-topics in third world. For these OLPCs we could create DVDs which contain Wikipedia. At the moment only people with internet-connection can read wikipedia and can use all these free information in the web. But there are still a lot of people on earth, which don't have any internet and any computer, which can't take part on that. Wouldn't it be a logic consequence, that we try to let join all people on earth on these wonderful new free information ? 95.114.122.39 (talk) 23:20, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Hm. I would have thought that this would have been at WP:FREQUENT, but apparently not. Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 00:11, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

It is. Wikipedia:FREQUENT#Advertising: "To cover server costs, or for some other public good such as charity, Wikipedia should add advertisements to its pages." Dcoetzee 11:45, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

There are all kinds of things we could spend the money on if we had it, but the opinion of the community (not of every individual, but the community as a whole) is that advertisements would compromise our neutrality (or, at least, the perception of our neutrality) and that that isn't worth it unless the alternative is switching the servers off. --Tango (talk) 00:46, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

But in that case, the community should think, what counts more: any assumption of comprimise our neutrality or the help. which could be given to millions of people. I don't understand, how an advertisement-system should compromise the neutrality of wikipedia. May be the community could give it a try let's say of one year. After that, we could decide to continue or not. By the way: I don't like google. It is just an example to understand. I would prefer, that wikipedia would create a very own advertisment-system similar to google adsense with millions of small advertisers, may be with pay per sale. There would be a ranking of adverts, which bring most money on one page. Only the adverts, which bring most money, would be displaid. That would bring more than ten times of money than using the google system. 95.114.112.167 (talk) 11:43, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is volunteer run and supported by donations. Its reputation is of paramount importance. Running advertisements would cause volunteer contributions to drop [b]way[/b] down, as people don't like working for free if the group they're working for is making money off of it. And many people would not feel the need to donate if there are advertisements.

Everyone would see the advertisements, but only a tiny percentage of people would read the explanation that it was going to charity, and many of those people wouldn't believe it, or care where the money was going. Most people would just see that Wikipedia had "Sold out".

I think that advertising would be a disaster. Wikipedia would never recover from it. APL (talk) 18:29, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

below of every advertisment could be a link like 'what happens with the money?' . There could be a big explanation, a lot of pictures and stories, what we are doing with the money. And any cent, which would be earned by advertisment, should be open written on pages, the whole way any cent is going should be written down on pages, means, that anybody could follow the way any cent is going and anybody would have possibility to control. Also all supported projects should be reported very exactly and so on. Of course: no money for any server, no money for any wikipedia-workers and so on, only for that charity-project. I don't think, that wikipedians and reader of wikipedia would ignore that. I think it could increase the meaning of wikipedia a lot, if we use the money, which we earn with our community work, to bring free information and education to all people on earth. 95.114.112.167 (talk) 20:13, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Where do you get free accountants to do all the accounting? Free writers to do all the writing? Free photographers to do the pictures? Free web designers to present it in an appealing manner? And I, for one, would not want any paid, unverified crap to be displayed with the encyclopedic content. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:22, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

accounting ? well we have already computers, which could do it. well for the writers, photographers, designers: there exists for example already a lot of organisations, which do such charity work for free. They just need the money. We just need to find the right ones to cooperate. You could check this, to get some inspiration. Also there are a lot of religious, serious organisations, which do such work for free, or check out this and so on. 95.114.112.167 (talk) 20:35, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree that Wikipedia taking adverts would be the end. It is an idea User talk:95.114.112.167, but not one that appeals to the community of registered editors here. Jezhotwells (talk) 21:16, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm a registered editor since 2004, too. So you can't count for me. And I hope, I'm not the only one. 'You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one, I hope someday you'll join us, And the world will live as one' Wega14 (talk) 22:02, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

There could be three other issues if adverts were allowed here:

• Click-through ads would compete with our own links within articles and at the start of sections ({{main}}, {{see also}}, etc). That would have an unpredictable effect on how we write articles and negotiate about merges, redirects, sub-articles etc.
• Context-sensitive ads might make our readers think we were tracking their researches. That's a particular issue because everything on Wikipedia is served from the same domain, so the usual protections against cross-site scripting don't apply. For example, a subverted monobook.js could tell an advertiser a lot about some of our readers' interests.
• Context-sensitive advertising would also encourage editors to modify articles (or create new ones) to maximise advertising income. The proportion of commercially motivated contributions would increase, and they would become more sophisticated, so harder to detect and challenge.

There might be ways to mitigate these issues, but the the risk of overwhelming Wikipedia's active pool of neutral, experienced editors seems greater than the possible benefit of income from adverts. Bear in mind that as Wikipedia grows it has to replace reliable editors faster than it loses them (e.g. to career and family demands). Any whiff of a commercial model could have a catastrophic effect on the checks and balances that have made this project work so far. Pointillist (talk) 22:10, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Bad redirects from search box - Pond weed, Leading indicator. Singular for article name.

Pond weed - redirects to Elodea when typed in thje search box. "Elodea is native to North America". Other countries have native pond weed too.

Leading indicator - redirects to Index of Leading Indicators "The Index of Leading Indicators is an American economic index". Other countries have leading indicators too. There is an article called Leading indicators but shouldnt the correct name for the article be in the singular? In the same way that it's Interest rate rather than Interest rates? 78.145.24.191 (talk) 14:21, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Search is not entirely case insensitive so "pond weed" follows its capitalised form, Pond Weed, which redirects to Elodea.

Wikipedia does not have articles on everything (yet) so for topics without an article, the term is often redirected to wherever there is the most information on that topic within other articles. This is better than nothing, because at least the reader learns something about their search term.

The singular form should generally be used, except for terms which are always referred to in the plural form, per WP:PLURAL.

Hope this helps, Skomorokh 20:23, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Proposed mergers has a backlog

Wikipedia:Proposed mergers has a backlog - many mergers have very few comments, could folks make some more and maybe alert appropriate wikiprojects? And some admins close some? Will be back later. Casliber (talk · contribs) 06:07, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikimedia and privacy during server failures

On May 7, there was a brief outage, during which I tried to access Wikipedia. The page returned was the usual "Wikipedia has a problem" page. Usually, I disregard it, but this time I decided to view the page source.

The page contains a generic notice of a problem with the servers, and a Google search box. This is not a problem. However, the Google logo is served from Google's servers, which is a problem. (Specifically, the file "http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_40wht.gif".) This allows Google to record an entry into its logs every time I access Wikipedia during a server outage. The Wikimedia privacy policy regarding IP addresses states "When a visitor requests or reads a page [...] The Wikimedia Foundation may keep raw logs of such transactions, but these will not be published..." There is no mention that external parties will also record this information, or how they will treat that information.

I wanted to get the community's opinion about this. I think the easiest thing to do is either replace the logo with plaintext, or host the logo on a Wikimedia server. (I have no problem with the search box, so long as it is explicitly clear that the transaction will be processed by Google, because at that point I can make the decision.) Ideas? Mindmatrix 17:55, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Furthermore, that particular logo appears to match the EasyPrivacy list for Adblock Plus. Kill it. MER-C 03:12, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Report on the current state of bracketed disambiguation

I have just published an up-to-date look at the state of article-name disambiguation via the use of brackets; it include the most commonly used terms, national biases and the trends since the last report on the topic, January 2007.

You can view the report's introduction or jump straight to my findings. I would be especially happy to see others editing the pages, drawing their own conclusions or offering historical perspective - this is a wiki, after all. It's very much a work in progress, and if anyone has any questions, I am watching all the relevant pages. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 18:46, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Hello Im a bit lost

Im wanting to add history Of the New Zealand Miniature Fox terrier How is this done? Is there anywhere where I can get help to write it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nzminfoxys (talk • contribs) 05:39, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Hello :) There does not seem to be an article on the New Zealand Miniature Fox Terrier specifically, but if you go to the Miniature Fox Terrier article you can add some of the history there. For help about editing generally, the Help desk can be useful. If you want to try to find other editors interested in fox terriers, there is a Wikipedia:WikiProject Dogs/Dog breeds task force; you could try adding a section to their talkpage with an outline of what you want to do. Hope this helps, and please ask if you have any further questions, Skomorokh 05:45, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Do any WikiProjects care about talk pages of redirects?

Folks, I know I've brought this up before, but I didn't get any response last time. ANY. So, I'm going to post this question again:

Are there any WikiProjects that care about talk pages of redirects? Or where there's no significant history to the talk page?

For purposes of this discussion, "significant" excludes vandalism/non-constructive edits, pages with nothing more than templates and whitespace, and edits of the theme "this is the same as X, it should be merged/redirected to there".—Preceding unsigned comment added by Mikaey (talk • contribs)

How about WP:WikiProject Redirect? – ukexpat (talk) 18:58, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Well apparently something along these lines was discussed, and someone noted there that the project seems to be inactive. Matt (talk) 19:09, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

If the project banner is on the talk page, and if the project is signed up for ArticleAlertBot, then the project would be auto-notified if there was a prod or AfD on the redirect. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:22, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

(e/c) There are several WikiProjects which, for various reasons, actively tag redirects within their scope. I cannot speak for other projects, but at WikiProject Articles for creation we like to keep track of the redirects that we create on behalf of unregistered users. According to Category:Redirect-Class articles there are likely to be 124 projects which use Redirect-Class (although some of these may have followed other projects rather than actively choosing to ...). Therefore I don't think it is helpful to exclude templates in your definition of "significant", because these banners may be considered important by the projects. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:28, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

All right, let's rephrase the question a bit -- do WikiProjects care about talk pages of redirects where a) there are no WikiProject banners on the talk page, or b) none of the WikiProjects on the talk page have rated the page redirect-class? Matt (talk) 21:17, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Folks, I'm moving the discussion to a centralized location -- User:Mikaey/Request for Input/ListasBot 3. Please provide further input there. Thanks, Matt (talk) 01:23, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thanks for all you do, you've helped me a lot! I really appreciate everyone that helps out! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.230.92.170 (talk) 20:50, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Random article function

This has been brought up a couple of other times, but has not been addressed: A random article function that works within user-defined criteria would be most welcome. For example, a user could see a random featured article, or a random psychology-related stub, or a random music-related good article. This would allow those who want to improve Wikipedia to search for stubs and start-class articles that are in their field of expertise, and allow researchers to find good information on a particular subject. Of course the basic, truly random function should remain available.—Jchthys 20:23, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

If you take a look at the "Random article" topic in the Editor's index, you'll see that there are a few options, but that the built-in random selection from a category has been disabled due to performance issues. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:13, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

DrilBot

I recently proposed a bot and it looks like it will likely be approved. However, it was mentioned that I post here to ensure that the wider community agrees with the proposed use and function of the bot. All comments, for and against, the use of the bot would be much appreciated at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DrilBot (not here!). A trial has been completed so you can look over the bot's contributions. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 16:03, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

The bot has been approved. Any comments or suggestions should be posted on the owner's user talk page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:09, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Wiki!

You have provided me with so much important information, and i appreciate it a lot! thank you every volunteer? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.230.92.170 (talk) 20:52, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Contributor, but, same difference. You're welcome!--Unionhawk ^Talk 23:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Fixing a Marble Crayfish cockup

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 17:17, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure where to ask this... I just created two articles to redirect to the Marmorkrebs article, Marbled crayfish and Marble Crayfish (the common names for the pest). Noting that I screwed up the naming of the latter, I "moved" it to Marble crayfish. Problem is, this creates a double-redirect, which apparently stops the redirect working. How do I clean this up? -- PaulxSA (talk) 01:25, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Just edit the Marble Crayfish redirect page to point to Marmorkrebs. – ukexpat (talk) 01:29, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

{Template:face>palm} -- PaulxSA (talk) 02:36, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

. Marking as resolved. – ukexpat (talk) 17:17, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

JavaScript

I edited all templates in Category:User js. That job was long overdone.

In this category there are two sets of templates ("js" and "JS"). The "js"-templates call the user a "coder" or "programmer" of JavaScript. The "JS" templates call the user a "user" of Javascript.

I feel 2 sets of templates is too much. I'd keep the "JS" set. (It would have to be renamed "js" because that is the default for language userboxes.) I think keeping the "js" set is the most practical and correct solution.

I'd like to know if there are more people who feel this way. Debresser (talk) 12:18, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

I think the editing that you're doing (in general) is great; please keep up the good work. On the other hand, there is so much work that is needed to improve articles that editors tend (correctly, I think) to ignore things like duplicate userboxes; such duplication really doesn't make any difference in the process of writing an encyclopedia. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:28, 13 May 2009 (UTC

I nominated them for deletion here. Debresser (talk) 22:18, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

File talk:H1N1 map.svg

Can someone complete the archive of the talk page? I've been accused of vandalism for archiving a talk page. File talk:H1N1 map.svg, and File talk:H1N1 map.svg/Archive 1. I left the appropriate message in the edit comments ("archive"). 76.66.202.139 (talk) 04:39, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

This archive has been archived, thanks to User:Tothwolf for completing the archival process. 76.66.202.139 (talk) 04:48, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Entire online archive of the International Herald Tribune apparently unavailable

See this story by journalist Thomas Crampton. Have our references to the newspaper been compromised? [11] [12][13] Is there anything we can do about it? Skomorokh 15:59, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

• Well that sucks, however if they are properly formatted, citations using the IHT are not at issue, as it is still possible for someone to access them via library archives, etc. There is no requirement that a source be online, merely that it be verifiable. Resolute 17:02, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
  • They may still be online at Wayback machine or other internet archive sites. – Toon^(talk) 17:06, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
• The fact that this sort of thing happens, regularly, is one of the reasons that the {{linkrot}} template exists. If a citation is a full and proper news article citation, it includes the date, byline, headline, and work, from which information alone it is possible to locate copies of the article, in microfiche archives, subscription archive services, and the like. The URL is a convenience feature. Only if the citation is in the form that you use above is it now broken. What we can do about it is what we already do: encourage people to not use bare URLs, because they rot, and to fix bare URLs into proper citations.

  I've included one of the above as an example at Template:Cleanup-link rot/why, along with an explanation of how, as a proper full citation instead of a bare URL, it is still possible today to retrieve the article. Feel free to fix the article that you obtained the bare URL from. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 17:49, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

• They're not the first -- or worst -- offender in this regard. For example, my homecity newspaper effectively deletes all stories after 90 days. (Actually, they put them behind a paywall, but if you follow the link you come to a page which claims the page does not exist -- so it's the same thing.) The best solution for this is to also cite the source as if it were from the hard copy version -- article title, page, date of the newspaper. The URL is just frosting on the cake. That way, if a bonehead webmaster (or more likely his pointy-haired boss) decides to erase the online archive, then the reader at least has a chance of finding the article in a physical archive of the newspaper. (Same goes for other periodicals.) -- llywrch (talk) 00:18, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

A bot could easily archive all cited web pages using WebCite. (Of course there is no guarantee that they don't go offline, but it would be a good start. The coolest thing would be an own archival service for Wikipedia, but I suppose that would be too much legal trouble.) --Tgr (talk) 06:52, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Like User:WebCiteBOT? OrangeDog (talk • edits) 21:50, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Opinion

Today, I ran into the first conflict I've really ever had on Wikipedia. I Stumbled onto a flame war while vandal hunting. I believe I handled it as best I could and would like some opinions on how I did. After placing the warnings and using WP:TROUT, one was deleted and was given a response and insults on My talk page. I then reported the matter too Wp: Wikiquette alerts. Overall, I felt I handled the matter maturely and thoughtfully. Thoughts? --Skater (talk) 01:47, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I would have gone to WP:WQA sooner. One personal attack on me (or other editor) boom. WQA or RFC time. Personal attacks are absolutely unacceptable in my book.--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail} 03:16, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

In the future, you might want to ask at WP:EA about how you've done, rather than here. This page would be overwhelmed if more people asked here; WP:EA is designed for such questions. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:46, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I didn't think about posting it there. --SKATER ^T. 13:48, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Congratulations to Wikimedia Commons on reaching 4,444,444 files!

Wikimedia Commons now has (over) 4,444,444 files, so here's a big toast to you all! Of course, some of these files will be deleted due to copyright violations and various other issues, but for every deleted file, there will be ten new files to take their place! :D --Ixfd64 (talk) 01:07, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

WP beats the hoax

Well done indeed to the admins who caught the fake quotation added to the article on French composer Maurice Jarre hours after his death March 28. It appears that en.WP is stalked by lazy journalists who will lift anything from the Internet without checking. See The San Fransisco Chronicle. Tony (talk) 06:54, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Better to have them lifting rubbish from the internet than following the traditional, established method of making it up! B. Fairbairn  Talk  10:23, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

BAG nomination for Nakon

Per the required "spamming" of venues, I would like to bring attention to my nomination for the Bot Approval Group, which may be found at Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/Nakon. Thanks, Nakon 01:23, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikimedia Conference Japan

Hello, I would like to let you know about Wikimedia Conference Japan. This is a local version of the Wikimania conference in Japan. It is scheduled to be held sometime during 21-23 November this year in Tokyo, Japan (most likely to be one-day long). The details are being worked out at meta:Wikimedia Conference Japan and the mailing list, and the relevant translations are provided in meta:Wikimedia Conference Japan/en, meta:User:Makotoy/Wikimedia Conference Japan. Although a major potion of the participants is expected to be Japanese, we would like to have non-Japanese speaking presenters and/or audiences as much as possible. For example comparison between different language editions would be a great enlightenment to largely monolinguistic Japanese users. Please feel free to contact us in the talk pages or through wikimail. We are grateful if you could help us spread the word about this conference (translation into different languages, advertisement suggestions, etc.) regards, --Makotoy (talk) 17:17, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

WP:FEED

Hi. I just wanted to remind everyone about our WP:Requests for feedback page. I generally view it as a very lightweight, informal peer review process. I've had it watchlisted ever since I found it several months ago, and I try to respond to as many requests as I can. There's usually 3 or so posts per week, on average, and the users are generally newbies. Its a great way to start helping them and getting them on-track with MOS, policies, etc. Reviewers have been in a demand there ever since I've stumbled across it, but lately its becoming worse. Requests are being archived without any answers... So I decided to make a plea here for more helpers :-) There are currently a couple unanswered ones in the most recent archive, as well as all the requests (I think 4 or 5) on WP:FEED itself. It doesn't take the most experienced editor to answer feedback requests, I started after being around here for 6 months or so. There's also a help page for how to answer requests. I hope this is the right venue for this post, I didn't know where else to put it. Killiondude (talk) 21:15, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Vandalism in a featured article undetected for nine days

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Redwood_National_and_State_Parks&action=history

Wikipedia is losing the fight against vandalism. The community relies too much on bots to detect and fix it. The downside of bots is, that there are so many of them and if the wrong one wins the race, the others only look on the last edit which is legitimate as it came from a trustworthy bot. Obviously not enough real people use their watch list to cover even the featured articles and check article histories. --h-stt !? 07:33, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Though I disagree with your primary analysis that Wikipedia is losing the fight against vandalism, I can see that a pile-on of bots could be a problem. Your example is probably a good example of why some thought has gone into bot creation: the bad revisions stood for nearly an hour before the first automated edit. If ClueBot had been running, it's likely that it would have had a look at those edits within a couple of minutes. "(references removed)" would now of course show up on your watchlist as well. If you want to tweak the way bots work or interact, you're welcome to put your request to WP:BON. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 07:48, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't know anything about bots. What I can tell you is that many of the fixes I make in various error categories connected with references, are the result of vandalism. It is logical to assume that a bot would not recognise the vandalism, and "repair" the error in other ways. Debresser (talk) 21:24, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I gotta agree that we are starting to rely to much on bot's which is why I use Lupins, they are still a great tool but nothing can beat the human mind.--Skater (talk) 01:33, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

We're losing human editors (and human edits); the overall volume of edits is down at least 10% compared to the April 2007 (or so) peak. We don't have any choice but to rely on bots to revert the more obvious vandalism, leaving the more subtle stuff for humans. Moreover, I doubt anyone has any data showing that that the vandalism situation is worse today than (say) three years ago, when there were (I think) fewer bots running; in fact, my sense is that prolonged vandalism is rarer these days. (Note: the plural of anecdote is not data, not that I'm providing either.)

More to the point: it's not at all logical to assume that errors that you're finding, regardless of cause, can't be recognized as such by bots, and fixed by bots. If the errors can be sufficiently clearly defined, which avoids false positives (mistaken corrections), then a bot is perfect. I encourage you to identify higher-volume, clearly definable errors, post at WP:BOTREQ, and see if someone will code up a new bot or modify an existing one to deal with the problem. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:58, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Apart from the "undetected for nine days" issue, which is bad enough, we should not be wasting precious eye and brain time on vandalism. I've advocated toughening our treatment of vandalism, but got shouted down by admins - but not convinced, because there was little in the way of reasoning presented for the current "sentencing policy". The vandals can always do something else, it's not as if we jail them. And if they think a poor-quality but innocent edit was wrongly identified as vandalism, they can appeal. --Philcha (talk) 13:55, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

I have at times reverted vandalism of over a year and a half. I once saw a userpage with a few more examples like that. This is normal and has nothing to do with overly relying on bots, just that you can't notice everything. Debresser (talk) 23:43, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

WikiBiff

Ladies and gentlemen,

I submit, for your approval, a new application for all you WikiAddicts out there -- WikiBiff.

You know it's happened to you -- someone left a message for you on your user talk page. Normally, the next browse to another page on Wikipedia would have alerted you to the new message, but you weren't on Wikipedia at the time -- you were off typing up some paper in Word or playing some flash game on the numerous websites that have flash games on them. You finally saw the message, five hours later, and you realized that the person who left you the message went to bed 15 minutes after they left you the message, sorely disappointed that you never answered them.

Now those days are over, because now WikiBiff is here! WikiBiff will sit silently in your system tray, and alert you with a friendly balloon whenever you have new messages waiting for you! Multiple accounts on the same Wiki site? NO PROBLEM! Multiple accounts across multiple Wiki sites? NO PROBLEM! Just plug your account info into WikiBiff and relax!

Now, on a more serious note, it's 8:25 AM here, and I've been up all night finishing this up, so I'm going to wait on doing things like getting Wiki pages set up for it until later. Also, I'll make the disclaimer -- THIS IS A BETA-QUALITY PROGRAM. However, all the same, I'd appreciate having people who are curious try it out, tell me if it works, and give me their feedback on it. While I await SourceForge to approve the project, I have the binary temporarily posted to http://mikaey.dlinkddns.com:8080/WikiBiff.exe https://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=262865&filename=WikiBiff-0.1.exe&a=25358567 , and the source at http://mikaey.dlinkddns.com:8080/WikiBiff.zip https://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=262865&filename=WikiBiff.zip&a=98717785 . System requirements (I think) are a Windows 2000/XP/Vista computer with the .NET Framework 3.5 installed.

And if you tell me someone else already did this, after I searched all over for it, and spent all this time writing it, I'm going to be really mad. :-P

Enjoy! Matt (talk) 13:23, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

• UPDATE: The SourceForge project is up -- see http://www.sf.net/projects/wikibiff . Matt (talk) 20:09, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia page: User:Mikaey/WikiBiff ...... -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:04, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Navboxes are going too far

Take a look at Malaysia, scroll to the bottom and expand all the navigation boxes. Do we really need every article to link to every other? --Apoc2400 (talk) 17:33, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Just over a dozen, or so I count. That seems a high amount, but what to do? Can we re-write links so they direct people to indexes or lists as replacements? doktorb _words^deeds 17:43, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I've noticed that navboxes enable a person to write an article on a trivial topic, add it to the navbox, and thereby avoid it being an orphan. I don't know if this is one reason for their popularity. In general WP has too many extra things in my opinion. Steve Dufour (talk) 18:11, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I suggest you remove most of them. I suggest that "Languages", "International membership", "monarchies", "government" and at least one of the three "countries..." templates go. It might be sensible to suggest this at Talk:Malaysia first and see if there is any opposition.-gadfium 00:04, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Not just number of navboxes (Toronto Blue Jays is another good example of templatecruft), but quality of navboxes... look at {{Toronto Blue Jays}}... POV sections ("Important figures"), and redundant sections (WS titles, AL titles, division titles, all redundant to the succession boxes), and just a giant mess overall. Nevermind how many of those templates are duplicative of each other. And that's just one example of many... Unfortunately, I think cleanup mostly has to be driven by the projects that support articles. As with this baseball template mess, we at the hockey project often have difficulty with people pushing cruft because "if baseball/football/basketball projects clutter their articles, hockey should too!" Well, no, thank you. But yeah, good luck cleaning up some of these template messes. I give 3:1 odds that if you do remove a bunch of templates from the Malaysia article, someone's going to revert it, and 10:1 says it is reverted as vandalism. Resolute 00:15, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

It seems that since we have many navboxes people think there should be navboxes for everything. --Apoc2400 (talk) 10:19, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I counted 14 navboxes, using just these, it gave me 799 bytes and

Post-expand include size: 648394/2048000 bytes

Template argument size: 460281/2048000 bytes

It might be that Wikipedia appears hard to navigate if it needs that many or people don't use categories. -- User:Docu 11:25, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Too many book reviews

Should an article on an author consist mainly of quotes from book reviews of his books? This is the situation at Frederick Sontag. I think people come to an article to find the basic facts on a person, in this case, not to read other people's opinions. Steve Dufour (talk) 18:11, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

No article should consist mostly of quotes from non-free copyrighted works, as this is not likely to be fair use. However, looking at that article I think it makes an effective balance of quotes and explanatory prose. Dcoetzee 00:44, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

That articles does a fair job of analysing the quotes, so I think it is ok. A simple list of quotes would not be acceptable, but that isn't what we have here. --Tango (talk) 01:21, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I actually wasn't concerned about any copyright problem. I agree that there is none here. I do feel there is an undue weight issue when the opinions of whomever whatever journal gives the job of reviewing a book are made the main substance of an article. Especially in a field like philosophy where there are so many differing opinions. Steve Dufour (talk) 02:55, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Steve, the one section of the article that uses quotes from book reviews is the section titled "Works". The three paragraphs of that section discuss three books that Sontag has written. It seems to me to be exactly right to quote book reviewers as to both the quality of the books and what they are about (or what they say that is important and controversial); how else can the books be evaluated without getting into original research? Or are you saying that all that Wikipedia should say about books written by a notable person is the date published and similar metadata?

One can certainly argue about which book reviews are used, but that gets to the matter of the quality of the publication and the qualifications of the reviewers. You don't seem to want to get into that; rather, you seem to want a blanket rule that forbids anyone's opinion from being quoted. But we quote opinions all the time in Wikipedia articles; it's simply a matter of editorial discretion (on the part of Wikipedia editors) as to how useful such opinions are. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:53, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for responding John. The one section which consists mainly of quotes from book reviews takes up about one third of the article. A list of the subject's books takes up another third. Information about the subject takes up the last third. The section of book review quotes strikes me as a collection of random information. The publishers mailed the books to journals, which gave them to a reviewer to review, who wrote his or her personal opinions about Dr. Sontag's views, a few of the reviews made it to the Internet, a few sentences were picked out by the main editor on the article from these and included. I don't know what that is but a collection of random information. Steve Dufour (talk) 15:43, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I made a small change, without removing any text, that seems to help. Now a person can read about Dr. Sontag's life story without having the book review section stuck right in the middle. Steve Dufour (talk) 16:04, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I think it's a mistake to evaluate the length of a section in terms of the existing length of an article. Rather, a section should be evaluated in terms of what the article would look like when fully fleshed out. Yes, that's more difficult, and certainly more subjective, but it encourages editors to add information rather than trying to delete information which - when the article gets longer - would be appropriate to have in the article. In any case, I'm glad that rearranging the article made it more palatable to you.

As far as the selection of book quotes, I encourage you to find better ones rather than just disparage the information that some editor took the time to add to the article. As for randomness - all information added to Wikipedia has a random aspect to it - not only in terms of what sources are more easily available, but also in terms of what is interesting and not interesting to editors (and, if you will, even who ends up being an editor and not being an editor). That's why the article on Wendel Willkie has so few footnotes, and is "C" class, while John Frusciante is a featured article. Randomness isn't forbidden; indiscriminate collection of (trivial) information is. The two are very different. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:19, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Anyway, thanks for your effort John. I will continue to disagree strongly with the idea that merely dumping a lot of random information into an article will somehow cause it to become a good article.Steve Dufour (talk) 02:13, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Link to Licensing_update/Result

The Link in the Box

Licensing_update/Result

directs to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Result instead of http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Result. The soft redirect is not an appropriate solution in my eyes. There should not be a technical article in the article namespace. Concerns other language versions too--Abe Lincoln (talk) 08:35, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I just posted on ANI about this, on this thread. Killiondude (talk) 08:36, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

bbc

wikipedia still cites it most probably more than any other source.

wtf. it's the british national channel. nothing more, nothing else.

e.g. try hard to find the ratio of articles ridiculing the french over those that don't.

similarly the CIA info, wtf. --AaThinker (talk) 19:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

this is americanbritish-centrism to the bone folks.

Okay, a few points there. Firstly, why not? The BBC have some of the strictest editorial and style guidelines of any organisation anywhere in the world. Their funding is pretty much guaranteed, so they are less driven to be biased. Same goes for the CIA "info" (World factbook, I presume). In fact, even more so, as they don't even pass judgement on their statistics. Secondly, this is the English language Wikipedia, and, for good reason, English sources - particularly those easily understandable - are prioritised, so one is bound to get a tendancy towards English speaking organisations. High quality French and German websites publish in French and German; that's what they're there to do. Thirdly, both the sites you mention are free to view for anyone, anywhere, and not behind paywalls, and are also prioritised for that. Fourthly, I'm not even sure if your statistics are correct. Are they the result of serious study, or just your own impressions? Try checking articles in different categories, and note how the standard referencing varies. IMDB, for example, is used - for better or worse - solely on film-related articles. Fifthly, as has been discussed many times before, a certain amount of Anglo-American centrism is to be tolerated, given the demographics of our audience. I think that summarises it nicely. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 19:53, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Hiding stubs

What do you think about this:

I'm working on an article and the subject of the article falls under 5 stub types. As I don't really want 5 stubs to show up on the article (the sub list would be longer than the article info), is there a way to hide the stub comment but still have the stub be active (not using a hidden comment)? I haven't been able to find any info in a short search. Thanks. OlYeller^Talktome 14:12, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Maybe just adding the category added by the stub would be the best way as the rest of the stub template it just for show anyway. OlYeller^Talktome 14:16, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I have been in such situations also. Why don´t you put scroll-bar boxes or collapsible wiki-templates (like this one) for such cases? - Damërung ^{...ÏìíÏ...}_{_ΞΞΞ_} . --  19:54, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I felt like this was a more appropiate place to put this comment (taken from the Wikipedia talk:Village pump), so.... anybody has an opinion about it? - Damërung ^{...ÏìíÏ...}_{_ΞΞΞ_} . --  20:25, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

The idea of the stub template is to inform readers that the article is a starter. I don't think I have seen more than two or three stubs applied to an article, but I'm sure they are out there. Screen space is cheap and proper stub templates should be classed so they do not print, so this is really an aesthetic issue. The meta-template {{asbox}} is in the process of a major update with the hopes of replacing the other meta-templates. It is certainly worth asking if multiple stub notices could be consolidated in some manner, possibly on one line. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 20:52, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Just pick one stub template. The stub sorting is not very important anyway. --Apoc2400 (talk) 21:59, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, the {{asbox}} template sure helps in what I was thinking about using several stub tags. Actually, my idea was not to have a lot of stub templates in the same page, but to have the correct categorization of the article as a stub (usually more than one category). This way, if (for example) I am looking for Welsh people stubs to improve some stubs about that, I won´t miss the Welsh football biography stubs that also fall into the first category of stubs. So thank you for the information, I think it should be spread. - Damërung ^{...ÏìíÏ...}_{_ΞΞΞ_} . --  01:20, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Featured picture candidates

One has to feel this has become a blistering hive of stupidity. In the past month I've been told:

• A period illustration of a Ulysses S. Grant, made just around the time he published his memoirs, is highly unencyclopedic and should not be used in articles because it shows several inset scenes with his military accomplishments. This kills all encyclopedic value. Never mind that we have no other illustrations for most of the battles shown.
• Illustrations of scenes from a novel by notable engravers are not encyclopedic, because they don't tell you about the novel, just the scene in question.

And the list goes on. Combined with the closing issues - MER-C is hppy to overrule consensus at the drop of a hat, so it's impossible to know if your nomination will pass or not - I think this process is badly broken, and needs a major overhaul, or at least an injection of sane reviewers. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 11:04, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

One time I suggested a picture there and then quickly retreated. In that case it was a picture of Snake handling from the 1930s and the objection was that the article didn't specify a time period. I have never suggested another picture. I guess what's needed is more people to get interested in this project. Steve Dufour (talk) 18:14, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Help w/ POV article on common practice at WP

I just started False title (English usage), which is about phrases such as "United States Deputy Marshal Jim Hall said Tuesday that fatally wounded Lawrence County Sheriff Gene Matthews told him that fugitive tax protester Gordon W. Kahl was dead before other law enforcement officials started shooting." (Reed, Roy (1987), Titles That Aren't Titles, retrieved 2009-05-23. According to that site, a version of the article appeared in the New York Times, July 5, 1987, p. 31. The sentence is quoted from the Arkansas Gazette.)

Unfortunately, everything I found about these phrases criticizes them; maybe only the people who dislike them care enough to comment. (Full disclosure: I agree with every criticism.) So I couldn't even find an NPOV title for the article. This construction is massively popular here, so I'm hoping someone will know a source that approves of or justifies the construction or has a better name for it. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 03:10, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Too bad I am not a reliable source. I use the English language well. That is, I follow my ear. There is nothing wrong with these expressions. They are perfectly natural and easy to understand.Steve Dufour (talk) 17:27, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't see why you chose "false title" rather than "coined titled"; the latter is more neutral, and doesn't require "(English usage)" as part of the title.

I also think that the article steers perilously close to being a WP:NOR violation. Three of the seven citations are examples that you've found, and don't mention the subject of the article at all; three are essentially dictionary/usage discussion, and the seventh is an opinion piece (in the New York Times, true, but still an opinion piece). Putting together information like this is often described as synthesis; among other things, there seems to be a failure here to establish this topic as something notable in an encyclopedic sense. And if the article is not likely to grow behind what it is now (or even is to be trimmed back by removing the three examples), then wiktionary may be a better place. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:16, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to both for the comments. I've replied to John Broughton at the talk page. However, I'd like to say something here that's relevant to my original question. At this point I'd prefer a title that doesn't have "title" at all, since I think the people who use this construction don't think of it as anything like a title. Right? —JerryFriedman (Talk) 04:13, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

What is this? (italian film categori)

Category:Commedia all'italiana. Can I understand this as Italian filmcomedy or a subgenere of that? --Ezzex (talk) 12:42, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

The category page links to the article Commedia all'italiana as the way of explaining what the category means. And the category page is a subcategory of Category:Comedy films by country and Category:Italian films by genre. Plus there is no Category:Italian filmcomedy or Category:Italian filmcomedy or Category:Italian comedy film. Does that help? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:00, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Suspicious editing

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/80.41.42.73. -- Wavelength (talk) 22:42, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Certainly very odd that an IP editor would decide that his/her first set of edits would be to archive various postings on different pages at the Reference desk. On the other hand, I don't see anything destructive (though I've not looked closely); and there is a certain noviceness here, as in this flawed attempt to add a table of contents for May 17th (to a monthly summary archive page); it's not clear why he/she didn't figure out how to simply copy and then modify the TOC for May 16th, for example.

I've asked the editor to stop doing archiving. Another editor might want to make sure that all text deleted from the RD pages was in fact archived, and then clean up mistakes such as the TOC problem that I found. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:48, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps the bot that does the archiving has somehow logged out? I'm pretty sure that happened before and it continued to delete content from the refdesk, but was unable to create the archive pages. APL (talk) 01:20, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Great... So we gotta figure out which bot to shut down... Oh, wait... block the IP until the problem is resolved... (duh...)--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail} 01:29, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

OH, actually, he explained it... The bot that currently archives it is out of commission, so he is merely removing content (which will still be in the history) until the bot is fixed and/or someone else starts manually archiving it (volunteers, anyone?)--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail} 01:32, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

From/since in maintenance categories

Maintenance categories are often called Category:Articles with problem X from/since Month Year. As you can see on User:Debresser/Monthly maintenance categories (which I created for certain wikignome activities), an absolute majority of the maintenance categories uses "from". But not all. I propose that we make that all. Not because "from" is intrinsically better than "since" in my view, but for the sake of having a clearly defined housestyle. Debresser (talk) 21:25, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

I generally agree; consistency is good. I don't particularly care which variation is used. Is there anyone who doesn't think this is a good idea? {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 17:55, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

It looks like you're proposing a change only going forward, starting in June 2009. If so, I agree; doing this retroactively is less clear. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:06, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind doing it retroactively also, but that would be a lot of work, including botwork. So yes, let's start from now on. But there needs to be an admin involved, because part of the templates is editprotected. Debresser (talk) 16:14, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I take that back. It is impossible to do it only from now on. I'll explain. Changes have to be made e.g. to Template:Fix. That changes e.g. Template:Verify credibility. From that moment on, all articles using that template will experience a change in category from "since" to "from" at the first edit (even a null-edit). Even if the tag was added a long time ago. Are we ready for that? Debresser (talk) 21:33, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

OK the solution here is to plan. Much of the apparatus can deal with a general preposition - "from", "since", "as at", and "as of" are I think the only ones in use. Therefore take a "since" family of categories and create the "from" family in parallel. Then migrate the templates you know about. Wait and check if the "since" cats are empty: meanwhile you could be doing a "whatlinkshere" on those cats and updating the bits of apparatus that point to them. Then go through the "since" family deleting the empty cats and chasing down the remaining articles and finding why they have not migrated - more templates will come to light and some subst'ed templates, as well as category lag.

Repeat this until all the cats are "from" cats.

Now go to the list of apparatus you have been building (and maybe putting in a category) while doing the above, the Wikipedia: space index pages, {{Fix}}, {{DMCA}} etc and migrate them. Some will need a transiton plan, for example DMCA could be copied to DMCA2, all calls replaced with DMCA2, then DMCA changed to have one less parameter then the calls fixed up, reverted to DMCA and DMCA2 deleted. Fix can proabaly just have the parameter removed since it is named.

I have thought about doing this in the past, and I would support it.

Rich Farmbrough, 18:59 16 May 2009 (UTC).

P.S. We could also standardise [Wikipedia articles|Articles|Pages]. Rich Farmbrough, 19:00 16 May 2009 (UTC).

That is more or less the way I expected it would have to be. Note that this includes extensive work, because there are many categories with "since". I'd be willing to work on it seriously, but I am no admin, and because many of the templates involved are protected, I'd need to find an admin willing to actively and operatively work together with me on this. Debresser (talk) 19:21, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd love to see the monthly categories for Category:Categories for deletion included in this standardization. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 03:33, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I noticed that this change was made to the CfD categories in violation of the established process to change category names. Since when did the pump become the place to override guidelines and policies? Did anyone even think that if you are going to violate the established process to rename categories you might ask their first? After all many people do not follow discussions her because the volume make it near impossible to see new items or to follow a discussion. I think at the very least this needs to be brought there intermediately for a discussion. I will not be following or responding here but will expect a discussion to be started there. The admins involved should clearly be considering the appropriateness of their actions in out of process deletions. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:05, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

The discussion is at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion#CfD categories renamed. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:11, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for dropping a note. I informed all involved now. Debresser (talk) 21:13, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I saw the first ANI objection to this discussion, but missed what it was about. This is clearly the wrong place for this discussion, and any claim of consensus is clearly void. All changes made should be reverted until it is estabilshed what needs to be done. I think only Rich and possibly Debresser knows all the templates involved. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:44, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Shortest war in history

The Anglo-Zanzibar War was the shortest war in history, 40 minutes, according to the Random article I just read. It seems to me that this is worthing of a DYK nomination, but the process of doing such a nomination seems too hard for me to do this late in the evening. Anybody else?--DThomsen8 (talk) 01:50, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm glad you posted this. DYK's are only for new articles, or short articles that have just been expanded. I often see an interesting fact while reading an established article. I wish there was a way to pass them on. Steve Dufour (talk) 01:54, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I've seen that article on the front page before. I love it, but you can't do a DYK now. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 15:15, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

The point I was trying to make is that maybe there should be a DYK-like section for interesting facts from established articles.Steve Dufour (talk) 17:21, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Anglo-Zanzibar War says it has already been in 3 different sections of the Main page: Today's featured article, Did you know? and On this day... It's still a featured article so it may return for that, and it may return on 27 August 2009 in On this day. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:36, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Prime. "On this day" would work for a lot of interesting fact-ettes. :-) Steve Dufour (talk) 14:49, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

A new Article

I am interested in posting a new article entitled Church of Civilization. It is essentially a description of a Church which I designed and created as a sort of philosophical exercise a few years ago and of which I am a legally ordained minister.

It is interesting and topical because the church has sound historical reasons for recognizing same sex marriage as a sacrament. This is completely tangential to the main purpose of the church, simply an accident of history.

I began to post an article but found that the free file hosting site where I have posted historical materials (the record of posts in the philosophical forum which led to its design), the church design document itself and other materials was on the blacklisted list.

Now, I realize that this might seem like shameless self-promotion. I suppose it would be except that the church design is completely free to anyone to use completely independent of me.

It is both a real legal church with at least one legally ordained minister and an interesting experiment in the relationship between church and state.

I lost all my original article because I could not save it. When I tried it was dumped because of the blacklisted links and all my original work was lost.

Now, is it worth my time to redo my work, incorporate the lengthy details of the church including creed, reading schedule, calendar, holy days, rituals, prayers, and sacrements, all of which are in the church design document, or is it the kind of thing which will automatically be deleted? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stephen Huff (talk • contribs) 11:26, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Unless your church is mentioned in reliable secondary sources (in a non-trivial way), it isn't notable enough for an article here. Have there been any newspaper articles about your church, perhaps? Or has it been discussed in books or academic papers? --Tango (talk) 11:43, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes it will be deleted. To put it crudely Wikipedia is not for things made up one day, even if you find it interesting. I recommend you find some free general webhost. Wikipedia only includes things that are important to the world in general. --Apoc2400 (talk) 11:46, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Regarding seperate articles for songs

As I have no clue where to report this (It doesn't really fit into the 3RR page). There is a struggle going on between people who think every song by a band deserves a separate article, and people who redirect these articles back to the artist/album pages. I really have no big opinion on this, it was just something I kept comming across using Huggle, see here for some of the reverts/edits. Sitethief (talk) 22:57, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

It's been going on for years. Wikipedia:Notability_(music)#Albums.2C_singles_and_songs describes how to determine if song should have a separate article. --Apoc2400 (talk) 10:48, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

frequency of update of something that changes all of the time

Is there somewhere that I can get guidance about something that changes all of the time and how often this should be updated. In particular, an IP is updating the United States public debt biweekly and I wonder: is that a good idea? PDBailey (talk) 00:00, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

That's a very interesting question. Personally, I think that there's no problem with a frequency of less than once per day. We want to present the reader with up to date information. There is of course the worry that frequent updates will clog up the page history and watchlists, so I would suggest that perhaps the figure could be stored in a template and transcluded into the article. There may be some problem with that which I'm not seeing, but I think it's an elegant solution and then people are free to update as often as they like. Cool3 (talk) 00:12, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Cool3, great, is there a template that I can see that does something like that? PDBailey (talk) 02:06, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I've mocked something up at User:Cool3/Debt and User:Cool3/National debt template. So far as I know, there's no standard template that implements this feature, so you'll have to sort of make up your own. What I suggest, is putting the text that changes frequently into the template (e.g., Template:National debt. Then where that text goes in the article, yous simply place instead {{National debt}} and the text will appear as if it is part of the article, complete with your references and everything. To update, of course, you'll have to edit that template directly which may be tricky for people to understand, so you'll probably want to place very clear comments inside the article explaining the situation, and maybe link to the template from the talk page. I'm not sure if there's any precedent for something like this, but it seems like a reasonable idea to me and you may as well be bold and try it. If you need any help, feel free to leave a note on my talk page. Cool3 (talk) 03:09, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Keep in mind that WP is not a news site when considering the application of this template. So don't use it to transclude live weather reports, election result reporting, sports scoreboards, etc. Roger (talk) 06:32, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Cool3. Roger/Dodger67, at what frequency is reporting the national debt at the "news" level? PDBailey (talk) 13:37, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Proposed changes to the Featured picture process

This star symbolizes the featured content on Wikipedia.

Please help determine the future of the Featured picture process. Discussions regarding the current issues affecting featured picture contributors can be found here. We welcome your input!

Maedin\^talk 18:39, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Didn't quite know where to put this, but...

Sorry, just had to share. In my textbook on Napoleon, the following passage appears, describing how he became First Consul of France: A new plebiscite was held and the people were asked to agree to the simple question, 'Should Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?' Men – and it must be remembered that the plebiscites only sought male opinion – were simply asked to sign their names in 'yes' or 'no' columns; there was no notion of a secret ballot. Men sometimes appended comments to their votes and, in 1802, these were largely positive. 'The man who has given us peace, religion and order in such a short space of time,' declared one Parisian, 'is the most capable of perpetuating these achievements'.

And it just suddenly struck me... that was an RfA! We're still using Napoleonic techniques to select our admins. This isn't a criticism, it's just one of those shock-modern-times-are-just-like-the-olden-days moments one gets when studying History. Pardon my little excited outburst! ╟─TreasuryTag►hemicycle─╢ 21:42, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

You're excused for your outburst; on the other hand, that the analogy is so flawed seems less excusable. Comparing a process in which (a) another person can be added to a list of 1500+ admins, versus (b) a process whereby one person is asking for lifetime powers of life and death, is very odd. An admin can lose his/her powers through abuse, which has happened; and the powers granted are hardly compelling (versus, say, running an entire country); a large percentage of admins are inactive because they have decided to do something else with their time.

So no, we never have used Napoleonic techniques to select admins. Putting a person to a yes/no vote certainly didn't start with Napolean; blackballing (requiring unanimous consent, a variant of requiring "rough" consensus) goes back thousands of years. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:31, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I really only meant that the rough technique (publicly putting your name under yes/no and appending a comment about the person in question)... ╟─TreasuryTag►hemicycle─╢ 07:08, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I suspect that a lot of people who considered voting "no" for Napolean's selection, or writing down an explanation, decided against it. By contrast, I'm not aware of any negative consequences here at Wikipedia for those who express their opinion about what they see as negative in a particular candidate's editing experience. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:18, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I only remember one person who voted against my RFA, and it's the person I notified of it knowing that he was going to be a strong oppose. :-)--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 16:35, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

iPhone App?

Does anyone know if there's an iPhone app for pedia editors to more easily browse talk pages & make edits etc. If not, anyone feel like making me one?!! dottydotdot (talk) 10:19, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Oddly, you will find information at Wikipedia:Mobile access. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 01:31, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Removing endings off of every movie article to prevent spoilization

Apols. for adding this above the user's very valid question, but readers will want to be aware of the many pages of pertinent discussion to be found at Wikipedia_talk:Spoiler. Thanks, Trafford09 (talk) 13:34, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

To prevent spoilization, I suggest that we should remove the endings and/or certain climaxes that declare a movie done. The articles on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes were deleted/redirected to prevent a similiar situation. People who read an article on a movie that they haven't seen yet might accidentally spoil the movie for themselves. We should just give them what they need to know about the movie before they see it, rather than give them the ending as well. I have done this on some of the movie articles that I created as well. Would this idea work? Ryanbstevens (talk) 21:43, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

No, this is an enyclopedia, not a cinema advertising outlet. ╟─TreasuryTag►hemicycle─╢ 21:46, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

You should probably go revert those deletions, unless someone has done already. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 22:11, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm a bit slow, so I just realised that Treasury's link was to the article Wikipedia:Spoiler. This guideline suggests that "Spoilers are no different from any other content and should not be deleted solely because they are spoilers.". Trafford09 (talk) 13:27, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

If you read the section called "plot summary" of an article about a movie, you should expect it to contain a summary of the plot... There was lots of debate a while back about whether we should have spoiler warnings, I'm not keen to start that up again. --Tango (talk) 22:33, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Worrying about spoiling people ain't our concern? Well this ain't the first time that an idea or move like this was made. Personally, i think that there's a lot of our policies that need to be changed. The responses made to this means that we should restore those episode articles. Also, i did it on articles that i created, rather than other articles. Additionally, what's the difference between the redirected Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes that were redirected to prevent spoilization, and the reaction that you made on this topic? I'm not saying that i disagree, but i'm just saying that it wasn't the first time that similiar actions were done (by other users over episode articles). What's the main purpose of this action? Your response is clearly like the guy in the Blockbuster online commercial, who manages to look at the couple's movies and he tells them how each of the movies ended. What's wrong about being like a cinema advertising outlet? Besides the fact that we're not one? Or can we find a way to hide the endings somehow, and those who have seen the movies can scroll down and read on? Or is that impossible? Ryanbstevens (talk) 22:54, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia USED to be full of spoiler warnings, but after MUCH talk over many months (and I mean MUCH...well over 1MB worth) it eventually was generally decided -- with many disagreers of course -- that such warnings are against the spirit of the project, possibly not NPOV, not in line with not using disclaimers elsewhere, and so forth. As to why what happened to the aritcles you mean, I dunno...but after all, since anyone can edit pages, it's always possible that the person who did it was wrong. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 00:25, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I have a compromise suggestion, although I imagine that it's been considered before now. That is: why don't we put the Plot Summary (or at least the endings) into a Show/Hide block, with a button to toggle between the two? You know, like those button you see on this very page in the TOC (Table Of Contents) tables at the top? (That's the index to sections, entitled "Contents [hide]"). That way, could we not satisfy all readers? Trafford09 (talk) 11:11, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Because that would still be the equivalent of a spoiler warning. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 11:18, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

I can't see why a reader would object to having to click on a [Show] button?

We can't hide text in the article per WP:ACCESS. Dabomb87 (talk) 12:16, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Hmm that's an interesting link. It lead me in turn to Wikipedia:Spoiler, hence my inclusion now of this article at the top of this discussion. Trafford09 (talk) 13:27, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Most of the debate over spoiler warnings was about spoilers outside of plot summaries. Almost everyone agreed that you don't need to warn people about spoilers in a plot summary because that's what everyone would expect to find in a plot summary - a summary of the plot. --Tango (talk) 11:48, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Are outside forums appropriate in welcome message?

See: [14] [15] [16]. The outside forums are: http://toolserver.org/~bjelleklang/pjirc/ and http://widget.mibbit.com/?settings=89dd50fb10ed1aa09dc3296cf5cf7177&server=irc.freenode.net&channel=%23wikipedia-en-help&autoConnect=true&nick=ZMIB_%3F%3F%3F%3F&noServerMotd&noServerNotices. I would object to this practice 1) it is just one more thing to confuse a newbie, and 2) it excludes the wider community from ensuring the newbie is properly assisted if advice is given on the forum. Thoughts? --64.85.210.19 (talk) 04:06, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Having seen it in practice I can say that it is a very good thing. Being able to talk live to a new user is a massive bonus & I know the editor in question has found it to be very useful for them-having seen many of the messages he gets, so do the users he helps. The problem in trying to explain something in a couple of lines of text that you then have to wait hours for a reply to is massive when you're new & don't really understand wikis-whereas this is something where you click it & you are pretty much logged in & ready to go. Dottydotdot (talk) 07:47, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Using IRC is a great way of helping newcomers, because aside from the above, it allows both the helper and the helpee to communicate in a real-time way. This is especially helpful for those who struggle to use a wiki straight away, we can guide them through the first steps. If they had to use {{helpme}} or the helpdesk, when they don't even know how to edit yet, then I think we'd scare off a lot of newbies just because of how hard editing "correctly" has become, and also you have to remember that some of these people may be technically challenged, or come from another background of forums / online chat, and not be used to the talk pages of Wikipedia. Stwalkerster [ talk ] 16:26, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm in favor of instant communication (IRC, in this example) as opposed to the newcomer having to wait hours or days to receive a talkback, by which time it's very likely that (s)he has given up and won't return. Instant communication is more fluid and can bring a newbie up to speed on the basics much faster than telling them to go read the volumes of intro texts and guidelines of editing. –Meiskam (talk•contrib•block) 17:31, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Also in favor of IRC. You don't have to wait for a response and it is a generally looser atmosphere in which you get help much faster and in a friendly environment. --ZombieCow (talk) 17:36, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Highly in favour of IRC. I benefited from it myself, when I was new to wikis, and found that the #wikipedia-en-help IRC had extremely helpful, patient & committed Wikipedians, who were delighted to help me along the way. I was so impressed with the IRC service that I now go there often myself, to help out & welcome newcomers. Some of the people I've in turn helped have needed a gentle shove to do their first edit - or even their first use of the Talk mechanism. It's rewarding to see them take courage from their success, & go on to be good contributors &/or helpers. Trafford09 (talk) 10:59, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Featured sounds needs YOU!

Interested in listening to some beautiful music? Want to close your eyes and travel history and time? Wikipedia:Featured sound candidates is for you! Whether you want to simply review the proposals of others, or to search Commons' extensive collection of music to find something by your favourite (public domain) composers, featured sounds can use your help.

Come and join us today!

Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 11:36, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Stubs and Galleries

I have a question and not sure where to post it, but this seemed the most likely. I see many places where Wikipedia says "This is a stub, you can make it better by expanding it...." or wording similar to that effect. But, then I see where photo galleries are being removed. The Gallery that used to be in Butterflywas a good divisional display of the main branches of this insect family. Why was it removed? I had 9 images in it, but all the images were helpful. It seems to me that Wikipedia is shooting itself in the foot by asking that articles be expanded, then when they are, somebody comes back in and cuts them back down. I don't know about any of you, but my encyclopedias all have Galleries of images in them. My question is this: Why are the Galleries being removed? Isn't an encyclopedia a visual tool? Why remove the pictures? Why not just convert everything to sythesized speech and do away with all the visuals - text and images? I see policies apparently being interpreted in different places on Wikipedia in different manners. What am I missing? HaarFager (talk) 16:34, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

yeah, i'm with you on this one too. in general, i'm against the deletionists; "if you can't add something to wikipedia, then at least delete something". apparently even if it contains useful information in the context of the article. because after all, nobody will ever want to look up butterfly on wikipedia when they have one to see if wikipedia can help identify it more precisely. Gzuckier (talk) 03:01, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I think the thing to do is to caption the "good" galleries and the individual images in the gallery. The overall caption should explain what the gallery is there to show. That way it should be quite clear when a gallery is showing a valid diversity of species, or color forms, or anatomical details, so that no-one thinks that particular gallery is simply numerous pictures of one kind of thing and therefore redundant. Some galleries are excellent, but others are indeed a ragged collection of bits and pieces which needs to be pruned down. Best, Invertzoo (talk) 19:43, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Acronyms

I see that allot of acronyms are being used on this Wikipedia. Its quiet confusing from time to time, especial if there is no link or proper context included. Is there a list of commonly used acronyms available? That would make things allot easier for people who are new, especially if they are used to other Wikipedias where acronyms are less used. I would also like to make a point to put some context or a linked acronym when you DO use them to make things easier for those that are not (yet) incrowd enough to know them all. Sitethief (talk) 11:36, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

This page has a fairly comprehensive list of acronyms, but normally they are linked when used in discussion. For example, I might say that a message violated CIV. If you click on CIV you will see a full explanation. Hope this helps! ╟─TreasuryTag►hemicycle─╢ 11:38, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

It's WP:Alphabet soup for most acronyms, or WP:Glossary for general jargon. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 12:08, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks guys (or girls) Sitethief (talk) 12:10, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Or WP:ABC for fun ;-) ╟─TreasuryTag►hemicycle─╢ 12:14, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Or Wikipedia:WikiSpeak for more better fun. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:21, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

On the serious side, I do have concerns about this issue. It's important that 'regulars' remember that using abbreviations that seem so familiar to them, such as WP:COI, WP:RS, WP:BAND etc can be confusing and offputting to newcomers. I'm guilty of it myself, and will endeavor to remember to put [[WP:COI|conflict of interest]] and similar. Once you start to sign your name on paper documents with ~~~~, you know it's a problem...

Sitethief, you can use a 'gadget' to display the first part of links when you hover your mouse over it. This is in "My preferences, "Gadgets", "Navigation popups". This might help.

On a somewhat less serious note - as a fully paid-up member of m:AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD - I suggest reading WP:WTF on this subject. Cheers,  Chzz  ►  22:00, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

I think the linking part is the most important. For example, even if I din't know what WP:COI was, the edit summary (eg) Reverted because of WP:COI would give me that information. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 19:48, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Mohamed Altoumaimi and Bernoulli numbers

As of now Mohamed Altoumaimi redirects to the Bernoulli numbers article, yet there is no mention of him anywhere in the article. I am asking if this is enough to merit his own article. I'm sure there is more on this kid, but I just happened to see him on the main page of yahoo, and came to see if wikipedia had more info. I don't want to start an article that isn't notable, and while I know the WP:NOTABILITY policies, I'm really not sure if this qualifies. If given the OK, I would be happy to write the article.Drew Smith What I've done 06:33, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

It has temporary notability but Wikipedia want's notability that lasts more than a couple of days. The formula isn't new, it's a media circus. Uppsala University has had to issue a statement rubbishing the news article. Actually that it has got to the stage that a University has had to issue a press release might have some notability in something about maths media circuses if there is such an article somewhere as it seems to happen every so often. Dmcq (talk) 09:39, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Well it seems to me that the notability would come from the fact that he is not an expert and still came up with the formula on his own. And again, what statement are you refering to? The only thing I've seen on this kid is that Uppsala has verified his work.Drew Smith What I've done 10:45, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

The closest I could find is Science journalism and Science by press conference but the story doesn't seem worth mentioning in either. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:45, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

This from Uppsala University saying No new mathematical solution by Swedish Teen. Just coming up with a formula isn't normally notable, loads of people do that. Dmcq (talk) 14:25, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Loads of people aren't sixteen years old. And this isn't exactly the formula for finding the circumfrence of a circle we're talking about either.Drew Smith What I've done 11:47, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Far, far, far more people have been sixteen than have been thirty. WP:1E. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 15:31, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

XD. I was pointing out that the "loads of people" he was reffering to aren't.Drew Smith What I've done 21:33, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Portal with Rounded Corner

Hello, I just make a little try on the Portal:Lyon. I change all the design, to make it possible to see rounded corner in different sections. But only, people using Firefox can see them. So take a look and write me a message if you like this design. Binnette (talk) 13:14, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

To me - on Windows XP - it looks great under Firefox 3.0.7, but awful in Internet Explodrer 6 0 the boxes aren't round, the columns wrap, and it gives 'errors on the page'.  Chzz  ►  17:35, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Results of the Wikipedia research

A comment above reminded me, that there was a questionarie last year about Wikipedia users that we could fill if we wanted. I think it was conducted by Amsterdam university or something. Does anyone know what the status of that study is? When will we have the results? Offliner (talk) 17:24, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

There is some here. --Apoc2400 (talk) 19:50, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia interface modification (NICE) study

Hello. I am a researcher in the GroupLens lab at the University of Minnesota. As part of our work within Wikipedia, we are conducting a study in which we have developed an interface modification that is designed to help users work together more effectively. The interface modification makes a minor change to Wikipedia's interface for reverting other editors. If you wouldn't mind giving it a try, we'll be very interested in your feedback. See User:EpochFail/NICE. --EpochFail (talk) 20:29, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

TLDR: We have an interface modification that we'd like you to try. Go here: User:EpochFail/NICE. --EpochFail (talk) 20:31, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I've read through your javascript, so I now know what the tool does. Why does your consent form give only a vague explanation of its functionality? Does the research require it to be kept secret until the user tries it out? Seems a silly sort of surprise to me. Ntsimp (talk) 23:46, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Main discussion is at WP:VPT#Wikipedia interface modification (NICE) study. Best to post any further comments there, not here. -- John Broughton (♫♫)

Cataloging offline sources

I've gone ahead and created Category:Wikipedians by access to offline sources as a way of tracking which users have access to certain offline sources. I realize that if we were to list all of the source we have access to, it would get jumbled and useless. As such, if you're interested, perhaps list only the sources you find particularly useful. If enough users do this, it may become a very handy way to find editors with whom to collaborate or seek second opinions. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 04:08, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

This sounds like a really good idea. My only qualm is the name. Way too long. Can we find something alittle easier to remember and type into the search bar? I've got some pretty cool ideas about this and would love to help.Drew Smith What I've done 05:59, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

To anyone else who is interested, discussion has sprouted up at the category's talk page. For the sake of keeping all of the relevant discussion in one easy-to-find place, I'll respond there. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 15:50, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Headline hierarchies

I've seen quite a bit of fragmented discussion about this topic, so I wanted to get all comments out in the open. Are there are reasons why people would want headline levels to jump from 2 to 4, 2 to 5, or 3 to 5, etc, etc? - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 15:14, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Are you referring to a particular discussion or article? As MOS:HEAD says, heading levels should be consecutive. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 22:06, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

No, nothing in particular. Some people might prefer to deviate from the MoS (it's only a guidelines, after all) in certain sisutation, and it's a list of those exceptions I'm trying to extract. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 11:51, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I can only think of personal preference, which would cause me to direct them to edit their own css, rather than breaking content semantics. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 21:16, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I've had a discussion with Jarry1250 about this in relation to the Albert Vanloo article edit [17] made by Jarry's LivingBot. I think it should be left to the editor to decide what level of heading is appropriate (both aesthetically and functionally) to the sections of an article. (===H3=== in particular can be difficult to use because of its relatively large appearing size.) AFAIK MOS:HEAD does not say heading levels should be consecutive. It merely notes that a series of headings are available. (Please tell me if I have missed anything here.) As always it's important that bots are not used to make controversial edits. --Kleinzach 22:49, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

There is an option to show a table of contents to a particular level. If the max level is set at 3, one might want to "jump" levels and place some headers at level 4 to limit the TOC appearance. Gimmetrow 01:17, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

{{TOClimit}}. --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 11:06, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Kleinzach on this one. We are free to skip hierarchical levels if that suits the structure and content. Tony (talk) 13:08, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Jarry1250 has now started a new discussion about this in his userspace and made it into an Rfc, see User:Jarry1250/RFC. Was that a good idea? Wouldn't it have been better to keep the debate in one, centralized place? (Also Jarry1250 hasn't put any notice here about his new consultation. . . .) --Kleinzach 05:27, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't realise there were any replies to this thread after OrangeDog's. The main reply for here is that I found the passage referring to incrementing by only one level; details are at the RFC. And yes, I think one page is better than the replies I have here, on my talk page and on the talk pages of most of fthe people lsited above. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 08:56, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I suggest we keep the discussion here. AFAIK centralized discussions are never held in userspace. So far, there is no consensus backing your use of your bot for controversial editing, but you can explain a bit more about it here if you wish. I assume you have stopped the bot from making these changes, right? --Kleinzach 00:00, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I must say I didn't forsee the location issue (I can move it in WP-space if you prefer). Personally, I find that having a devoted page makes it much easier to follow on my watchlist, rather than on this page, which gets edited for other topics and archived, "hiding" the relevant replies from the watchlist. Yes, I have stopped the bot. You are free to continue discussion here, but I may be a little late in my replies. The majority of developments (pro and contra) are now happening there. What in particular would you like me to explain? - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 09:59, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

One option would be to 'uprate' this into a fully centralized discussion as Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Headline hierarchies. That way the discussion would be accessible to more editors. And that should be the final move. It's unreasonable to expect interested editors to follow this thing around a succession of WP pages. Alternatively we could have the debate here, where you started it on 24 May. --Kleinzach 23:10, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

To explain, user space is like any other space. It does not limit who can view the article or who can edit it; who can comment or whether they support or oppose. Moving to Wikipedia space is optional; as you say, it has already moved around enough. I don't really like the (apparent) tone of your last comment, it makes it sound like some sort of betrayal has gone on. This thread was never intended as an RfC; it was started by me, in good faith, to test the water about the time of the BRFA (hence the later need for a dedicated page). Anyhow, it's getting off-topic, so I'd really like to archive it, if that's fine by you. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 13:53, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Your user page is under your control, so you can delete it if you wish. Re the BRFA, am I right in thinking that your bot is not currently approved for changing headings? If so, can you let people know if you make the request? --Kleinzach 10:31, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I am approved. But as we all know, people that comment at BRFAs (and far too few people do) do not provide a very good representation of consensus. Most developments came after the BRFA, anyhow. I replied to the "delete it if you wish" point on the RFC itself. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 16:01, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Hmm. I see the approval is dated 29 May. In other words the BRFA (Bot request for approval) was concurrent with this discussion but unannounced here or to the various people who objected to the use of the bot for changing headings. --Kleinzach 01:22, 5 June 2009 (UTC)