Wikipedia:Village pump (assistance)/Archive B

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Village pump (assistance) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (assistance).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

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Grammar

I have started the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Grammar but I'm not sure where to link it... or whether I'm doing this correctly. Yes, this is kind of like cleanup... but it's more of making sure the project and the templates start off on the right foot. -- AllyUnion (talk) 20:54, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

External link problem

Here's a strange one: on One-time pad, there's a link to an image in the lead section: [1]. After clearing my cache, when I click on it I get a "403 Forbidden You don't have permission to access /security/computer_security/papers/otp-faq/otp.jpg on this server." message from the off-site web server. However, if I copy and paste the link directly into my browser's address bar — http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/papers/otp-faq/otp.jpg — the image appears without a problem. This is not just me either, judging by the anon's who've been removing the link from the article claiming it to be broken. Could the adminstrator of the web page be blocking requests redirected from Wikipedia? — Matt Crypto 15:24, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Yup. That would be my guess. My suggestion: talk to the site owner: [2] --Tagishsimon (talk)

best practice for article: Dimpled Chads

I was in the process of adding some wikilinks to Dimpled chad when I checked the link to Punch card and decided the material there was better so I changed the heading for 'Hanging chads' to 'Dimpled and hanging chads' and made Dimpled chad redirect to Punch card#Dimpled and hanging chads.

Since then I've wondered if it would have been better to move the material on Dimpled and hanging chads from 'Punch card' to 'Hanging chads' and have 'punch card' reference that.

Advice on best practice? RJFJR 02:01, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure that there is a better way to do it, except to make sure that all bases are covered - i.e. that anyone looking for the subject from any angle will eventually find it. Hanging Chads were flavour of the month in 2000, but their time has passed, I think. FWIW, I'd support your decision to put the article as a section of Punch card. --Tagishsimon (talk)

looking for a song

Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk. Peter O. (Talk, automation script) 01:20, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

Who appoints the head of the IAEA?

If anyone knows, please can they post? I've looked at iaea.org, but there's no info.

See Article VII of the IAEA Statute: "A. The staff of the Agency shall be headed by a Director General. The Director General shall be appointed by the Board of Governors with the approval of the General Conference for a term of four years. He shall be the chief administrative officer of the Agency." — Nathanlarson32767 | (Talk) 04:14, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Images

Please add File:Voll Honig.jpg to honey. Why can't I do this? I tried any conceivable combination. Help is appreciated.

Could someone please add Image:Alcatraz cell.JPG to the article Alcatraz Island? It won't work if I do it. Check my contributions to find the link to the image if the Wiki says it's not there. Thanks,--Gabriel (internal ID number: 118170) 12:51, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Done. Also fixed up the old image markup that was being used in the page. And added a GFDL tag to your cell image. Evil Monkey → Talk 21:59, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)

2000s in music in the UK

This doesn't really fit into PR, RfC or VfD. I'd like some comments about the idea of removing the List of Number 1 singles from the 2000s (UK) article now that 2004 in music (UK) (and the like) have been made. Please see Talk:List of Number 1 singles from the 2000s (UK) for the full discussion. violet/riga (t) 21:53, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Combining two pages into one

Paco de Lucia and Paco de Lucía both have articles. Paco de Lucía (with accent) is the correct spelling. How do you move a page without deleting the old article? Thanks.

--Ebakunin 22:43, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Since these two articles are substantially different but overlapping, one has to do a manual merge: copy from Paco de Lucia anything that's missing from Paco de Lucía, then replace Paco de Lucia with a redirect. —Charles P. ^(Mirv) 00:31, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I've merged Paco de Lucia into Paco de Lucía and made it a redirect. And I've fixed all the links. Paul August ☎ 02:20, Dec 27, 2004 (UTC)

There are instructions on Wikipedia:Duplicate articles for how to merge duplicates. Or you can post a request there if the merge is too difficult for you. Gdr 00:56, 2004 Dec 28 (UTC)

How do the category listing boxes work?

Like if you include something like {{USpresidents}} and it contains all the current US presidents... how can I make one of those? Where is the contents defined? Can it be done on other wikis? Thanks :)

{{USpresidents}} is defined at Template:USpresidents. Templates are created like any other page, and are available on all wikis running MediaWiki 1.3 or higher (which includes all Wikipedias). -- Cyrius|✎ 23:23, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, they were running an older version of MediaWiki but just recently updated, so it works great. --132.162.214.27 17:28, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Images I uploaded

How do I trace all the images I've ever uploaded? (other than wading through all 22500 edits...) I've been getting a few tagging requests (mainly for the bunch of public domain images I uploaded before tags were created). I would like to pre-empt the solicitors on my talk page by making sure everything is already tagged. --Jiang 07:46, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Don't think there is a means by which this can be done, other than rolling your own SQL query against a downloaded copy of the database. It is, for sure, a bit of an omission in MediaWiki design, but forgivable. I'm trying to find someone to regenerate the list of untagged images; if I find such a person, I'll ask them to do two cuts, one indexed by imagename and the other by image uploader. If that happens, I'll get back to you. But don't hold your breath. --Tagishsimon (talk)

MediaWiki 1.4 allows you to list all your edits in the Image namespace, which includes all your uploaded images. Gdr 01:19, 2004 Dec 28 (UTC)

"Only You" .... How do I direct it properly?

Sorry, I began something I didn't have time to finish. I tried to created a main category for the song Only You (called Only You (song)), to separate it from a Harry Connick album (which should not be the main source of info for this title). Not enough time to read up on how to do this properly...HELP. Ideal: someone searching "Only You" will get the info on the original song, with an option to link to the Harry Connick album and the films called Only You.

At the moment, there exists: "Only You (Harry Connick Jr)" and "Only You (song)". Thanks. (unsigned)

I don't follow your question: none of this should involve creating a category. Do you mean just an article? Even then, I don't understand quite what you are trying to do or what you are having a problem with. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:57, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)

I think they were saying Only You should be the song, with {otheruses} to Only You (disambiguation) to offer the album and films, but I don't think any of them have sufficiently common usage to be at the main place (it was redirecting to the HCJr album), especially given that there are also two movies by the same name, so I made Only You a disamb between all four instead of a redirect. Niteowlneils 01:05, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Another copyright question

In Image:MichelineBernardini.jpg it says "If the picture is still under copyright protection in US, the copyright must have either been renewed in 1974 or restored in the 1990s." Does that mean that anything from 1945 had to be renewed at some point to still be covered? Would a state agency renew a copyright on an internal document? Is there any easy way to find out if something was renewed? --SPUI 14:43, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Group Nouns

Does any one know what the group noun for "pints" is, and does it differ according to the content i.e is the group noun for pints of beer different from that for pints of milk?

The four Julio Gervacios who are boxers.......

Hi! I need someone to go to Category:Boxers and fix something for me: I put a link to that category in the Hector Camacho Jr. page, yet his name does not appear on the category list. On the other hand, I saw that the link to Julio Gervacio was somehow listed four times in the same category!!!!

Thanks, and God bless you!

Sincerely yours, "Antonio technically knocked out Martin"

Hector Camacho Jr. shows up in Category:Boxers fine. The reason Julio Gervacio showed up in its category four times it that you managed to create the article four times. When things are acting weird, wait a few minutes before hitting things repeatedly. The secondary databases sometimes need time to catch back up with the state of Wikipedia. -- Cyrius|✎ 23:51, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

"When things are acting weird", I guess that would be most of the time?  ;-) —Mike 03:09, Jan 7, 2005 (UTC)

Problem with Categories and list order.

This is in regard to an issue over at Wikinews regarding the use of Categories. In Wikipedia, alphabetical listings make sense, but for news, there quickly render a category useless since you have no idea which article in Category:Asia is from last year or from last night. We've tried [[Category:Subject:YYYMMDD]] and it lists stories in chronological order - up it lists the oldest stories first. Here is a detailed discussion of the problem over there: n:Wikinews:Water cooler/policy#Subject categories. If anyone with experience with Categories had any insight, it would be much appreciated. DAVODD 07:22, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)

Trying to delete duplicate link in 1964 deaths

At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1964_deaths , Carl Joachim Hambro is listed 9 times. I tried to edit both pages to fix it/ find th problem, but I couldn't do anything. Can somebody fix it and/or tel me how to fix it? --Osfn8 23:16, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The article got itself created about nine times, which causes that problem. It is now repaired. Any admin can repair this by deleting and restoring the page. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:04, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Does anybody know the name of Pomegranate seeds?

Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk. PoccilScript 03:24, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)</nowiki>

Licensing question

I have written an article about Age of candidacy for Wikipedia. I would also like to post portions of this article on the NYRA Wiki. The NYRA Wiki uses the by-nc-sa Creative Commons license (similar to WikiTravel). Is there any way that I can post the article to both wikis without violating anybody's license? I've heard that these licenses are incompatible, but since I'm the original author would I be able to contribute it to both sources (under a dual license)? If not, can I declare it public domain? If so, how do I do that? Any advice would be appreciated. Kaldari 19:51, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

As you're the only author with a copyright interest in the article as it stands, you can relicense the material to them or anyone else under any terms you wish. However, you will not be able to transfer future revisions by other users between the sites without permission.

As I write this, SimonP has also contributed to the article, but I'd argue that his addition of a category does not qualify for any copyright. If it did, you'd either need his permission, or need to simply remove his work. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:10, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

orca

I don't know who to specifically contact about this but someone should edit the Orca link on today's (jan 3 2005)home page .....the image that comes up is inappropriate...thank you

Whatever this person may have seen at some point, it looks to me like it's been fixed. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:31, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)

Which cleanup tag?

Teacher in role has a tag for wikifying already added to it, but I don't think adding wikilinks will save it. The whole article is...odd, and I don't quite know how to approach fixing it. It seems to be referring to role-playing in the classroom. Anyone want to take a look? Joyous 04:36, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

I'd be tempted to use the {{vfd}} "cleanup" tag. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:00, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

New messages

I seem to be getting the orange "New Messages" bar above every page I visit. While it is quite pretty, since I don't have new messages it is a bit pointless. Please reply on my talkpage, not only because I won't see your reply here but also because it will test the "New Messages" bar.--Gabriel (internal ID number: 118170) 08:26, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It should be above every page you visit until you've visited your talk page. If it keeps showing still, you may have a caching issue. Mgm|^(talk) 17:00, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

Does this allow GFDLing?

Someone just uploaded a biography of Samuel Simeon Fels from http://www2.hsp.org/collections/manuscripts/f/fels1776.htm . The source does say Restrictions on use: None. The collection is open for research, but I'm not sure whether that implies consent to license under the GFDL. Anybody have any suggestions or should I just mail them? --fvw* 19:57, 2005 Jan 1 (UTC)

Non-free. The "restrictions on use" section is describing their collection of Samuel Simeon Fels material, not the biography on the page. Their copyright page has the usual heavy restrictions.

I always find it strange that historical societies want to make it more difficult to tell others about history. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:24, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Indian public domain

Are images and information posted by official Indian government sites in Public Domain? I searched quite a number of government sites and all lack a copyright policy. Extensions include *.nic.in ; *.gov.in etc. Nichalp 19:45, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

The best thing I've been able to find is a translation of the 1957 Indian Copyright Act. It grants a copyright on government works for 60 years from publication.

THE LACK OF A COPYRIGHT NOTICE IS NOT INDICATION THAT A WORK IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN! All works in most countries are copyright by default under the Berne Convention. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:34, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I am specifically interested in Indian government tourism sites. So are they copyrighted? Nichalp 18:57, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

The first thing I said was that the 1957 Indian Copyright Act allows for copyright on Indian government works. The second thing I said was that things are copyrighted automatically. So yes, they are almost certainly copyrighted. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:11, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

use of Belorussian or Byelorussian in the Battle of Berlin Page

The start of an edit war here (in page history order) are the entries:

• (cur) (last) 14:54, 1 Jan 2005 Philip Baird Shearer (Reverted to status quo ante please see talk page and try to reach agreement before revering again.)
• (cur) (last) 22:54, 31 Dec 2004 Mikkalai (Sorry; rv back. In this case it doesn't matter what can be found elsewhere. Wikipedia uses the official name of Byelorussian SSR, and there are three Byelorussian Fronts, for consistency reasons)
• (cur) (last) 14:13, 31 Dec 2004 Philip Baird Shearer (Reverted because "Belorussian Front" twice as common as "Byelorussian Front" with google. Belorussian used by A Beevor in Berlin the Downfall 1945 [and by other military historians].
• (cur) (last) 05:29, 31 Dec 2004 Mikkalai m

Please see Talk:3rd Byelorussian Front#Belorussian or Byelorussian and contribute there if you have a suggestion or advice. Philip Baird Shearer 15:14, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Request for help with items in categories

Naimur Rahman is appearing twice in [[Category:Bangladeshi cricket captains]]. I can't see how to make him only appear once. I'd be grateful if someone would either fix it or let me know what I need to do to fix it myself. Cheers, jguk 15:09, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Pronunciations/Phoneticisations - What's Standard Practice?

I've recently been having some trouble when putting IPA and X-SAMPA phoneticisations of people's names up - i.e. they get deleted. I'm wondering what the 'standard practice' is for such information. On the descartes and Puu Oo pages the pronunciation is at the top after the name in various languages' orthographies, but when I attempted to add similar phoneticisations to the adolf hitler, Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych sites they were taken down and accused of not being 'standard'. I don't mind WHERE on a page the phoneticisations should go at all - they can have their own section if they really have to - but I do mind if they can't be there at all, as they are just as valid information as any of the other stuff on such pages. Thanks lots for anyone's help. —Xipirho 12:10, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I would also be interested in a consistent policy for this sort of thing. As far as I know, there isn't such a policy yet. So here's my two cents... In those cases where it is a good addition to the article (and I would think that Ukrainian politicians are a great example), I think that a separate table would be the best way to go. That will maintain the flow of the article, while providing the information for those who are interested in it.

The pronunciation info corresponds with the problem that Korean-related topics faced with alternate forms of names ... Putting all of the alternate forms in the first line of the article made it unnecessary forbidding, but it was very important information for many users. That has been resolved quite nicely, IMO, with the Korean name tables. (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Korean). I think a similar approach would be ideal for pronunciation. However, it would be best to have a standardized format that has received general acceptance. There are potentially a LOT of articles that could benefit from pronunciation info.

--Visviva 14:41, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Copyright question

Can someone look at http://www.floridamemory.com/PhotographicCollection/disclaimer.cfm and verify that it is an "Any-purpose" copyright, in other words it's virtually public domain as long as the source is acknowledged? Thanks.

Why am I blocked?

I've just received a strange message on my talk page. It's from User:PureAfrikaaner and says that I've been blocked for vandalising pages. Now, I've been reverting, reporting and even CSDing a lot of vandalism, but I don't think I've actually done any myself. If someone's been accusing me of being a vandal, why wasn't I told and given the chance to defend myself? And it would also have been nice to find out from one of the admins instead of another new user! Please unblock me, at least until I've been given the chance to see the accusations against me. Thanks. P Ingerson 08:57, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

PureAfrikaaner appears to be a troll. He has warned many users, but is (fortunately) not a sysop, and appears to be just trolling. He cannot block anyone, and you appear not to be (not in the block log). My advice: ignore it. User:Anárion/sig 09:06, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, Anárion. I've jus checked his contributions. He seems to be the same as an anonymous user who did a lot of real vandalism that I rv'ed yesterday. Makes sense, anyone with a potentially racist User name is bound to be trouble... P Ingerson 09:15, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Title of (The) Sage Gateshead article

I moved this article:

The Sage Gateshead

to just 'Sage Gateshead', which I think is in line with naming conventions, having scrutinised same. However I'm not 100%, since the company that named the Sage is The Sage Group plc, with a 'The'. The name of the centre is always 'the Sage' e.g. 'we're playing at the Sage', usually lower-case like that, and the sign on the door says The Sage Gateshead.

Any advice?

Chi Sigma 23:36, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Correcting edit summaries?

Is there a way to correct an edit summary? I made an incorrect link in an edit summary and would like to correct it so it's not misleading. Alanyst 16:08, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Never mind. I found the answer at [3]. Alanyst 16:32, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Improve appearance of pet skunk table

Does anyone have any suggestions for making this table look better? — Nathanlarson32767 | (Talk) 04:17, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Here's my suggestion, sorry if I muck up on the state abbrevs, no offence intended. The full state names can be used, but I think abbreviations would look better. The states should be linked as under legal --Slike 11:20, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Legality of skunk ownership in the United States

Illegal
AR, CA
Legal
AL, IA, ...
Legal with permit
FL, IN
Special case
MI - Legal with permit; outside cage must be built; must be Michigan bred. ?? - Striped skunks illegal; hooded and spotted legal.

Just a note to say it's best to use the full state names: the abbreviations are not well known outside North America, and so will be confusing to many readers. jguk 18:37, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Amani Buddhism

Occasionally I look at Recent changes and I happened to notice the creation of an article for Amani Buddhism. The article is badly written, completely unreferenced and linked, and a google on any of the terms in the article produces nothing related to the topic. I looked at the contributions of the editor who created the article. It seems that a new editor named Luis Alejandro Bustamante arrived today, created an article for himself, then created a talk page for Luis B, tried to add himself to the list of Luis's, meddled with the Houdini article, and then set up an article for this possibly bogus religion. (If it were real, wouldn't SOMETHING related to it show up in Google?) I don't know how to contact this user. His self-promoting page (actor and model!) is already up for deletion. Should we put the Amani Buddhism page up for deletion too? As a Buddhist, somewhat conversant with events in the U.S. Buddhist community, I don't recognize this "group" at all. Nor do its precepts seem particularily Buddhist. Zora 22:25, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This page has been deleted. Paul August ☎ 23:00, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

M Dash and N dash

Should I ALWAYS use "&mdash;" and "&ndash;" as an alternative to typing in the symbols directly from my keyboard? Jaberwocky6669 03:54, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

A hyphen is a hyphen: for example, it is correct to use a hyphen in "Marxism-Leninism". However, if you want to produce an m-dash ("—") or n-dash ("–"), yes, use HTML markup: "&mdash;" and "&ndash;". For example, "1960&ndash;1983" gives "1960–1983", which looks better than "1960-1983" (and makes the MoS types happy). -- Jmabel | Talk 06:39, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

As opposed to typing in "?" or "?". -- ALoan (Talk) 18:42, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Yes, because we are not yet storing Unicode, and apparently there is some inconsistency as to the 8-bit representations of these. I think it's an Apple vs. Microsoft incompatibility, but I'm not sure. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:28, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

Or it might be more of an old computer v. new computer thing. —Mike 04:10, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)

Technically it's a character encoding thing. The english wikipedia is in ISO-8859-1, a character encoding which encodes all characters as a single byte, and has no — and – characters (It does have a hyphen (-) character, which is part of ASCII, which ISO-8859-1 is a superset of). Microsoft Internet Explorer however ignores the fact that wikipedia tells it the page is ISO-8859-1 (this is a bug, though one that microsoft are not willing to fix), and instead uses Windows-1252, a proprietary codepage which does have the — and –. To software that has not worked around this bug these dashes do not display correctly. If someone with a browser that adheres to standards edits the page after you've inserted a single-character —, their browser is likely to correctly refuse to send the invalid ISO-8859-1 data, and instead sends a '?' or something similar to make the data valid.

One day en.wikipedia will switch to UTF-8 and this bug will stop affecting us. &#0xfeff;--fvw* 18:48, 2004 Dec 16 (UTC)

This discussion is interesting to me. I am doing some edits using Firefox and the Windows clipboard, and I have a niggling concern that I might introduce errors. I select the text, copy it to the clipboard, run a Perl script (via a keyboard shortcut) that performs automated transformations on the text, then paste the text back in. I have tested this on accented characters, and it works. Can anyone think of any potentially problematic characters that this might break? I'm not very well-versed in character set issues. I might go and read up on the differences between ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252, and try out a few characters that don't exist in one or the other. Thanks for the info. — PhilHibbs | talk 12:32, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hm. It appears that ÿ does survive the process, but not if I paste it into my editor to do manual changes. I will have to watch out for that one. — PhilHibbs | talk 12:42, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

By the way, besides using an n-dash between date ranges, what are the usage rules for m-dashes and n-dashes? Paul August ☎ 05:11, Dec 30, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of style (dashes). Susvolans (pigs can fly) 11:45, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Frqanlkin D. Roosevelt's Legislation Act of 1935 re; Social Security

Dear Sir or Madam, Allow me introduce myself, my name is Mamie Glorioso and my e mail address is, honeybee12@cox.net.

Perhaps you can help me, I have been trying to find the acutal written contents of FDR's or Legislations Act of 1935 regarding Social Security. By this I mean the actual written contents of this bill as directed under this act word for word. Is there such an animal? and if there is can you direct me to it? I haven't been able to find this anywhere, perhaps I'm not putting in the correct word search. I've tried just about everything.

Thanking you in advance regarding the above request, I remain, Very truly yours,

Mamie Glorioso

The original Social Security Act is Public law 74-271 (49 Stat. 620), approved August 14, 1935. The entire text can be found at this U.S. Government web site: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OP_Home/ssact/comp-toc.htm -- Morris 22:30, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

Voters needed in Wikipedia:Categories for deletion

The Wikipedia:Categories for deletion page needs lot of voters.

Respiration - page fault

I think that there is a fault with Respiration: I have twice tried to look @ it and twice my computer has frozen. Please reply here rather than on my talkpage: see my talkpage for the reason.--Gabriel (internal ID number: <;tt>118170) 11:53, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Come on, I left this message at 11:53 this morning and now it's 21:37. I need to see that page.--Gabriel (internal ID number: 118170) 17:32, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There is nothing unusual on that page. I have difficulty believing that the contents of that page are causing your computer to become "frozen". The page only has a few sentences directing the reader to: Cellular respiration or Physiological respiration. Try looking at one or both of those pages. (Also, you might try leaving less snippy messages. It's not really anyone's job to help you.)Morris 18:09, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

categories question

I'm looking for instructions or guidance, or an overview on putting articles into categories. When I create a new article, what categories should I put the article into? (My new articles are usually biographies of politicians or government officials in the United States). Thanks. Morris 05:35, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

That depends on the article. Given your stated area of interest, you probably want one of the subcategories of Category:U.S. politicians. -- Cyrius|✎ 07:13, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

For an admin: Need some images deleted

I uploaded an image for a DDR (edits to the article are welcomed!) video game, but had the connection timing out, so I continued to save the image and discovered later that there are three Ddrmax2.jpg files in the video game covers category(also, does anybody know how to link to categories and images by way of wikilinks?)! If someone that knows how to get the two extra pics out of the page it would be really helpful. The whole page is a template so I don't know what to do... bernlin2000 ∞ 02:35, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC) You can link to images and categories by using a ":" before the namespace. This way the text turns into a link instead of a category at the bottom or a displayed image. See Wikipedia:Categories. 131.211.210.157 09:13, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Star Trek Starship Template?

Is there a statistics template, akin to the one for real-life warplanes and warships, for Federation starships in the Star Trek Universe?

In case anyone hasn't noticed, there are as many, or maybe more, details available for every one of those ships, down to the smallest rowboat-equivilent, as there are any real craft of any kind in history. And there are trekkies galore desperate to either refer to those details or add them to Wikipedia.

So I get the impression, from the Taxonomy template and Minor Planet template, that there's a standard for creating these things to be stored and referred to as generic scripts, they're not just something one guy put in one article and then other guys copied and pasted, right?

If there isn't a template for Star Trek ships, someone should certainly make one. I'm a longtime follower of the trek universe, but not fanboy enough to be a real trekkie...if no hardcore trekkers volunteer, I've been wanting to learn the whole template creation thing, if someone would point me at the directions for doing so. I just won't be as fast or fanatical as a real trekkie, especially with a whole kids/work/life sort of thing going. Kaz 20:21, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Stealing the source from other templates usually works well. Generally, these things *are* something one guy (or girl) puts in one article and then others copy it. This is a Wiki, what do you expect? :-) If people don't like the format, they can change it. That said, complex templates with lots of info are usually decided upon before semi-final implementation in a WikiProject, because adding or removing information requires updating all articles that use it — no fun. And as it turns out: there is a Wikipedia:WikiProject Star Trek (no, I didn't know that. I just entered the link and saw it was good. Don't you love wikis? :-) Head over there and make some suggestions.
More formal reference material on templates can be found on Wikipedia:Templates, Wikipedia:Infobox templates and especially m:Help:Template (but beware: the latter is unrepetantly precise and technical, the way geeks love their manuals. :-) JRM 20:15, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

NOTOC

Something to do with a bot not being up to date? Found it @ Nakajima_G8N and tried to start the discussion page asking what it does/doing, but that didn't want to cooperate. So here I am. - RoyBoy [∞] 08:15, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The __NOTOC__ suppresses the Table of Contents from displaying in the article. This isn't normally needed unless a specially created table of contents is being used instead (as with the alphabetical lists). —Mike 09:20, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)

Dealing with a special problem user

I don't know what I can/should do with the contributions of User:Jvb (also those under his former anonymous identity [193.190.120.66]) which I consider problematic.

His contribution to the main namespace is almost nil, and consists of links which I don't agree on, but I can move these links to the talk page and we can discuss them in a rather reasonable way. No deep problem there (so far).

What I find problematic is his way to add pages and pages of personal political opinion to talk pages (a quite right-winged opinion, bordering on islamophobia, and Walloon-ophobia), weakly related to the subject of the articles, most of it unrelated to improving the articles themselves, and part of it is already published by Jvb himself in a blog elsewhere (under pen name "Johan Van Vlaams" - similar to his "Johan - Flanders" here, "Vlaams" means "Flemish") -- most of the links he adds are to these blog entries, so follow the links to find them. See, for instance, Talk:Eurabia, and note the similarity with [4]. (And his adding similar stuff on his home page. Part of it, extensive copy of articles in dutch.)

I was heatly involved in the discussion in e.g. Talk:Flemish Interest, but not at all in other discussions (like Talk:Eurabia). (One bad point for me, I admit, is that my first reaction to his opinions was as violent as threatening him of a blow if he dared repeat something in front of me. But since then, I've mostly given up reacting to his propaganda.)

I'd like some advise, support, and/or constructive criticism on what to do here. The lack of reaction of the community bugs me. If there's a consensus that Jvb's behaviour on talk pages should be tolerated, I can abide to that and live with them. But I hope you'll agree at least to some extent with me.

--FvdP 20:35, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Have you started a formal Request for comment? -- Jmabel | Talk 20:58, Jan 7, 2005 (UTC)

It requires two people to have tried reasonable discussion with Jvb on the question (his contribs to talk pages). I'm alone at the moment... and haven't really tried to discuss the matter directly, either. So, any volunteer ? --FvdP 21:03, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

And, before that, what can be done with his contribs ? e.g. the ones in Talk:Eurabia ? Simply delete ? Move to a subpage ? Should I then propose that subpage for deletion ? And Talk:Eurabia is the simplest case. The case of Talk:Flemish Interest is more complex at least for me since I was involved in the discussion and since parts of the discussion has some interest with respect to the article (on the question: should Flemish Interest and Flemish Block stay separate articles ?). How bold can I be ?

Duplicate Sub-Categories

When the Wikipedia editor was totally bogged down this morning, I somehow managed to create multiple sub-categories named Category:Hero System under the super-category Category:Role-playing games. There should only be one such category. Is there somebody who can help me clean that up? Thank you! — RJH 20:24, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Done. For future reference, any admin can repair this problem by simply deleting and undeleting the article. What happened was you literally created the article multiple times. MediaWiki doesn't have good safeguards against that. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:05, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. RJH 22:05, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Copyright status of US legal code

What's the status of legal code in the US, both on a state and local level? I assume that a short blurb would be OK under fair use, but could laws be transcribed en masse into Wikisource? --SPUI 00:23, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Copyright issues involving state and local laws are a bit...confused. I seem to recall there being some fairly recent court cases over it. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:11, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Well, I emailed Florida using the 'contact us' link on http://www.flsenate.gov/statutes/index.cfm?Mode=ViewStatutes&Submenu=-1 and got the following:

It is my understanding that laws cannot be copyrighted.
Arnold Cooperman
Division of Statutory Revision

Should I treat this as the state declaring them public domain, or as an uninformed opinion?

The US Code itself is not subject to copyright (copyright does not apply to work created by the government of the United States of America.) If you want to incorporate all or much into an article, do take care that if you copy it from a commercially published source, any information they add (i.e. page numbers) might be considered to be subject to their copyright. The same applies to court decisions/opinions. Morris 05:31, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

Copyleft question from a newbie...

I hope this is the right place to ask this question...

I'd like to use sections of a few Wiki articles (some slightly altered) as sample reading comprehension passages in a manual that I am writing. After reading the GFDL, I can't for the life of me figure out what I'm supposed to put in my manual to comply. (Maybe I should put the GFDL in the manual as reading comp...:-) )

Everything else in the manual will be covered by standard copyright. The passages I want to use will only take up about 5 of the 300+ pages in the manual. I will almost certainly distribute more than 100 copies of the manual. So...

I assume I need to include author(s) name(s) and a link to the web page where I got the text. I certianly want to give credit where credit is due.

I also assume that I need to state whether or not I altered the text.

I DON'T KNOW how to word the copyright page given the fact that almost all of the book will be copyrighted and only a few passages will be GFDL.

I DON'T KNOW if I need to put the entire GFDL text in my manual. Would a web address to the license suffice? (I hope so.)

I also hope I don't have to put anything on the front or back cover of the manual regarding the Wiki material, but I don't know that either...

Any help out there? Anything I'm missing?

Thanks in advance!

Bonzocat

this is sort of an answer by default, get you going until someone who really knows gets to you. If you do a Google search for, say, Alexander Sterling Calder, you will pull up all sorts of other folks who have used the article and given wikipedia credit. Check out how they have done it and perhaps all your questions will be answered. Perhaps not. Carptrash 18:14, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks for what we expect of sites which use some of our content. Since you will only be using some sections of some articles, you may find that Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia is more appropriate for you.-gadfium 18:43, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Carptrash and Gadfium! I got so wrapped up in the whole GFDL bit I didn't even think about citations... doh! - Bonzocat

Grammar help!

Are there any masters of grammar out there with a few minutes to spare? If so, then could you take a look at Meme and comment on the grammar? I consider myself to be very good at grammar, but this page has become an absolute monster for me to keep up with. I get all confused and overwhelmed after awhile! Any help is greatly appreciated! Jaberwocky6669 04:31, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)

How come this website is so slow? Sometimes the pages don't even load. WildCard 07:24, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Changing username

Could some developer please attend to Wikipedia:Changing username? It looks like this has been backed up for about three months now. Thanks a lot. NTK 08:24, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This may be a problem for a while as most developers are trying to fix the bugs in the MediaWiki update. 131.211.210.157 09:15, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

sharing images across languages

I uploaded my first photo to an English page (Kinuta Park) and thought that I could just paste the code across to its Japanese counterpart 東京都立砧公園 (Kinuta Kōen), but all I get is a "Missing image".

What am I missing? Maynard Hogg 02:05, 2005 Jan 5 (UTC)

You can't use images from one language Wikipedia in another. You can, however, upload the file to the Wikimedia Commons and use it on all Wikimedia projects, including all languages of Wikipedia. —Charles P. ^(Mirv) 02:49, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Your licensing terms are contradictory. The GFDL does not allow for a non-commercial restriction. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:04, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Now I'm thoroughly confused because the text was adapted from one of the Help pages for copyrights. The "Note that the GFDL requires attribution." bit was copied verbatim.—Maynard Hogg 22:47, 2005 Jan 11 (UTC)

2005 in film tables

This article is all tables, which have me completely flabbergasted. I'm trying to add Ruth Warrick to the death table, and I put in the same code as for the line above, but it didn't help. What am I doing wrong?

The problem is that the person who created the table was "clever" and used the rowspan attribute to make that vertical column containing "January". You needed to increment the 'rowspan="2"' to 3 for proper display. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:30, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, Cyrius. RickK 23:25, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Flood of spam from anus.com

I wasn't really sure where to put this (RFC? VIP?), so here it goes.

The article American Nihilist Underground Society was created this evening (19:22, Jan 15, 2005). This is a real website that does review heavy metal and other music, as well as rant about various societal issues, although personally, the ratio of faux-intellectualism and odious "philosophy" to actual useful content is far too high for my tastes.

• • Maybe if your own behavior was better, you wouldn't provoke such a negative response. In other words: grow up, and stop casting stones in glass houses. Prozak 01:58, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • I used the words "personally" and "for my own tastes" to clearly delineate the difference between my own qualms with the organization and my policy-based complaints about the actions of its supporters. Please try to distinguish between your interlocutors here; I support the existence of an ANUS article (though I oppose Shaun 'BRM' Goldstein), and my complaint was only ever with the tactics of Derision, Adroyt, Iconoclast, and others. I think that certain deletionist WP users, irritated by the spamflooding from the ANUS crowd and unfamiliar with metal, have overreacted in voting to delete. Don't attack me for their zeal. -leigh (φθόγγος) 04:13, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

In the few hours since the article was created (and possibly before; I'm not sure), a couple of users (some anonymous and some named) have been flooding metal articles with links to the ANUS site. To get an example of what I'm talking about, check the edit histories of 129.110.240.1, Derision, Adroyt, and Iconoclast. Check the histories of articles like Rob Halford, Shaun 'BRM' Goldstein, or the "What links here" for American Nihilist Underground Society. Initially, their goal seemed to be just to spam for anus.com and drive up their Google rank, but I'm now confident that we're dealing with at least one, and possibly more, trolls. Look at the user page for Iconoclast (their current "respectable, moderate user" sockpuppet), for Chrissakes. This is just the GNAA all over again.

Also, they've taken to AIMing me with

(22:14:52) final world era: Nevermore is for fags [note: Nevermore is a metal band which AFAIK I have never mentioned on WP]

(22:15:17) final world era: come to irc.anus.com #anus

and

(00:52:38) TheGreatApostasy: Why do you hate ANUS? Why not LOVE the ANUS?

(00:53:16) TheGreatApostasy: Some of the things you've posted......are very hurtful.

(00:53:19) TheGreatApostasy: Very hurtful indeed.

(00:55:09) TheGreatApostasy: You've destroyed a lot....but why not create?

I'm sick of cleaning up after this crap. Help? -leigh (φθόγγος) 09:28, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)

21:44, Jan 15, 2005 - Derision vandalized my user page. Swell. -leigh (φθόγγος) 10:05, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)

I need assistance, someone vandalized the ANUS page and removed all the text. THEY KEEP DOING IT. PLS HELP ASAK Adroyt 03:41, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• It's been permanently deleted. See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/American Nihilist Underground Society. -leigh (φθόγγος) 04:13, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Don't tell me I've found a live body!?! I need help in intiating a call from IA to Germany. I have only a cell phone. I have had the same physical address for 50 years. I can find no help on the Internet (I am a dummy). Nor can my cell phone company help me nor the Des Moines telephone book (that I can find). I have only a cell phone. I am single and when I am not home who needs a land line? I used the money saved from slooooow dial-up service to get broad band. And why isn't there an article on "how to" for international calls elsewhere in Wiki? Thank you to anyone out there who can get me started. (And yes, I know: "Dial the int'l op, they will connect you to German op who will get you the number you want and make a connection for you.") So, from a cell phone what number/numbers do I dial? I know 011 is international; I know 49 is Germany and I know one doesn't have to use 011-49--you can dial 1-49-etc directly.

Previous USA to Germany information request dated 2:04 AM Monday 17 Jan 05 from phred8877@yahoo.com

• I'm no expert on this topic, but it seems to me that calling Germany with most cel phones would cost a fortune. I use 10-10-297 when calling the UK, they have a 3-cent-a-minute rate for the UK, Germany, and most of Europe. Or just buy one of those international phone cards that they sell at convenience stores. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 12:57, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Database locking at an article

While attempting to create 1998 in music (UK) I seem to have gotten the database locked:

...function "LinksUpdate::doUpdate". MySQL returned error "1213: Deadlock found when trying to get lock; Try restarting transaction (10.0.0.1)".

Anyone know if there's a lock timeout (and thus how long that is) or if some sort of intervention is required? Cheers. violet/riga (t) 22:02, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Just repeating the same action (trying to create the page again, submitting the edit again) will start a new database transaction. No need to wait, these locks get grabbed and released very quickly (there may be slower locks, but chances are they won't cause deadlocks). --fvw* 22:21, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

Tried, to no avail. violet/riga (t) 22:25, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

And it's released itself after 20 minutes. Hoorah! violet/riga (t) 22:25, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This is odd. I can understand things remaining locked for 20 minutes, but consistently deadlocking shouldn't be happening, no matter what bugs exist in mediawiki (well, barring extreme cases). Special:Newpages says new pages have been created during the time when you couldn't create a new article, so perhaps you were just having very bad luck (or a caching bug I suppose. Is it possible the squids are accidentally caching the error message?). --fvw* 22:29, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

I've been getting that database locked error for days now (including just about ten minutes ago). It comes and goes. It really needs to be resolved. RickK 07:14, Jan 11, 2005 (UTC)

I have it too. Wikipedia also seems very slow lately. Inter 20:44, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Six degrees tool gave error

http://kohl.wikimedia.org/kates-tools/sixdeg.action

Is this temporary? - RoyBoy [∞] 00:37, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

See User:Kate - Kate's Tools are down. utcursch 06:30, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

VfD page problems!

Could someone have a look at Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion, please? It looks messed up - the main text seems to have moved to the left-hand side of the screen!

For your information, I'm using a 17-inch monitor, my browser is Firefox and my operating system is Windows.

--Tracey Lowndes 19:47, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

At least some problems here from earlier today have been fixed. Tracey, is this OK for you now? -- Jmabel | Talk 01:16, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

printing

i need help. i tried to print the list of 500 home run hitters.there was was like 7 pages and i only wanted the first 2. so i hit cancel on my printer. no problem it stopped it(like it usually does). however the printer still thinks i have 5 to go as it won't let me print anything else/i have tried to cancel all print jobs.i will even put a couple extra print jobs and when i hie delete all print jobs it deletes them all but this article. anyone help?
mike

Odd, you should be able to cancel them. What printer are you using? Have you tried switching it off and on? Have you tried to remove the paper and see if it asks you to cancel leftover jobs? Mgm|^(talk) 09:21, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

Henry Ford

Henry Ford needs to be watched closely, as an anonymous user keeps inserting anti-semitic POV into the article. These edits include weakening language which states that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery, and stating that there are "assimilation issues within the Jewish culture". Thanks. Rhobite 00:38, Jan 18, 2005 (UTC)

Connection with Trillian?

Hi

I'm interested in uploading some information to Wikipedia but first I wanted to check which part of Wiki that Trillian connects with?

When you mouseover a word in Trillian it loads a Wiki definition but when you go to Wiki and look for that word the definition doesnt seem to be on the page anyway.

For example I want to upload some info about Dark Age (not Dark Ages) and when I search for Dark Age on Wiki it doesn't exist, however there is a definition available when you mouseover in Trillian.

Hope that all made sense :)

Artemis

You might want to contact Trillian about that, since, as far as I know, Trillian has never contacted Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation about using our content. Rdsmith4— Dan | Talk 17:39, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

On your computer, inside the Trillian application data folder, is a custom static index of Wikipedia article titles with many assigned stop words taken out. As you type with this feature on, it cross references this index, and if there is an article it underlines it. Only as you hover over the word does it attempt to retrieve the definition, from what I believe to be Trillian's servers. It then takes the text of the definition and saves it to its own file on your hard drive for quick future use. The Trillian developers have described the feature as "new" and still under development, so we can probably anticipate enhancements in the future. --Alterego 18:12, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

bad title

I just noticed the Finch band article. Good article, but the title doesn't seem right. However, there's already a (different) Finch (band) article, so I'm not sure what to do. --InShaneee 17:17, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

If they were in (more) different genres, that would be they way to go. Since they're both forms of rock, I went with Finch (US band) and Finch (Dutch band). Now to go update some links... Niteowlneils 21:06, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Trouble editing big articles

In the last week or so I've had unprecedented trouble -- unprecedented for me, at least -- editing long articles. Anyway, I am asking if someone who is not having this problem can help me out. As explained in some detail at Talk:Spanish_Civil_War#How_you_can_help, I have rewritten one section of Spanish_Civil_War at Talk:Spanish Civil War/Staged; the edits should be uncontroversial (mostly copy-editing non-native English), and were intended as something prior to a future effort to reduce POV. I've tried and failed several times to get this edit in there myself. If someone else can do this, I'd sure appreciate it. Just indicate in the comment that you are pasting it on my behalf. Thanks. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:28, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

There, I think I managed to edit it successfully. ✏ Sverdrup 22:04, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

TNX, it worked. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:44, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

COTW image

I've just uploaded image:Cotw.png (used on Template:COTW) and the transparency has failed. Neither MS Image Editor nor Fireworks MX is fixing it for me. Could someone sort it out as I've got no access to anything better at the moment. Cheers, violet/riga (t) 23:12, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Most of the images I've seen used simply are not transparent. (Most of the stub images, for example, only look transparent because they match the background of the page.) My understanding is that you still need to use GIF for transparent images because there's not a lot of browser support for transparent PNGs (it doesn't work in Internet Explorer, notably). -Aranel ("Sarah") 20:33, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • I think internet explorer supports transparancy, just not alpha channel transparancy (which lets you make something half transparent and such). --fvw* 20:41, 2005 Jan 20 (UTC)
  • (Image:Move article.png) is transparent. I believe fvw is correct. violet/riga (t) 20:52, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Indeed, I had no problems with converting the original Image:Move article.gif into Image:Move article.png. Also, I was thinking of converting all other such stub icons to .png. Any problems with it? Halibutt 21:30, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

I say go for it. (It would make them more easily portable if they had transparent backgrounds while you're at it.) I need to get a better graphics-saving program. -Aranel ("Sarah") 01:41, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Revival Of Buddhism In India

While trying to add material from this deleted article's talk page to the vfd discussion, I've messed up the formatting of the discussion in a rather profound way. I don't want to dabble with it more myself, for fear of what mutation I may create next. Could someone please take a look here? Joyous 19:44, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

This has been taken care of. Joyous 13:02, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)

Scott Peterson is a Wikipedian

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Scott Peterson

Probably just a troll pretending to be him; anyway, the person behind that login is now a banned wikipedian... Thue | talk 22:36, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fixing a bot-generated list (like Births of a certain year)

I hope this is an appropriate place to ask this, but after creating a Bio page, I added him to the chronological list of births on the 1937 page. It then automatically put it in the alphabetical list titled "Category:1937 births" that I referenced below the article. The problem is he has 3 names, Rudy Ray Moore and the bot apparently uses the 2nd name to alphabetize by default. Is there any way to correct this so that he is listed under "M" instead of "R"? --PJV

[[Category:1937 births|Moore, Rudy Ray]]. You can do this for any category and it will order it by what is after the | even if that is no part of the article name. I've done it for you in the Rudy Ray Moore article. Evil Monkey → Talk 07:35, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

Stupid spat getting out of hand

A ridiculous edit war has arisen over at Preview (software). This is hard to believe, given the small size and apparently uncontentious subject. But User:Sam999 has reverted this many, many times to attempt to include statements which appear to be part of a grievance between himself and his former employer, Apple Computer. Numerous users have reverted these changes which have no place in the article. I took it upon myself to attempt to explain why his changes won't stick, but now even this has degenerated into little more than name-calling. Perhaps someone could review the history and the talk page and see whether Sam999 needs to be banned - he has already broken the three revert rule but so have several others of us who are battling him. He seems to have no other interest in WP except for this article.Graham 05:11, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Featured article by email needs a volunteer

I need someone to volunteer to replace Kate as sender of the featured articles by email. See User:Raul654/FA. →Raul654 00:39, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

Hello.

Could someone please guide me? If I can help in any way just let me know. If someone would help me around Wikipedia that would be great. Thank you for your time.--Skybirds 22:56, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

How do I get started? --Skybirds 00:17, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hello and most Welcome to Wikipedia! There are lots of people around here, and to track each other we keep User talk: pages. Mine is for example User talk:Sverdrup; use those pages to contact any user you want to ask something. (Do this at will, if they have time, most of the time they help you).

But if you need some pointers, we have an excellent Introduction and a nice Tutorial for newcomers. If you want to kick-start editing articles, the best idea is just to search and find an article you want to improve, or start a new article. There is also the Community Portal for editing projects and for finding pages about Wikpedia.

If you have any questions, just ask; here, or at our Help desk or on any user's talk page. ✏ Sverdrup 23:06, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

On The Up no page?

I would like to make a request for On The Up.

--Neptunemoon 19:27, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What on earth are you talking about? -- Jmabel | Talk 21:06, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Help with Nine Inch Nails

An anon editor (IP - 202.0.62.40) has made a re-direct to the "Nine Inch Nails" page - from it's equivlent in centimeters!!! Please would someone remove this re-direct? ta! Selphie 15:10, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It must have been a joke, and not even an original one. I've deleted it. If you see this again, please place a {{delete}} tag on it, and it will be deleted before long. It doesn't actually hurt anything, so it isn't urgent to deal with it.-gadfium 20:58, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Images of currency

Hi - are there any legal issues concerned with adding images of banknotes to entries concerning currency.

Thanks Mike

Banknotes are copyrighted by the organisations that control them. For € banknotes the copyright statement is © BCE ECB EZB EKT EKP 2002—this is the European Central Bank. Since I'm a normal human and not a lawyer the legaleze is Greek to me, but it seems only images specifically released as specimen are "free" for use, and reproduction of images which may possibly be used to forge actual notes is specifically forbidden: PDF file. User:Anárion/sig 14:18, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

For US currency, there are some very specific rules about what is legal. I am not an expert in the field, but I believe that the general rule is that it is okay to publish gray scale images that are significantly smaller than the size of the actual notes. There are very strict laws concerning producing counterfit currency, which one would want to avoid breaking. I think that the treasury department web site has some specific information, and some images of the new notes (20$/50$/100$) that you are allowed to copy. Morris 14:30, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Do any wikipedians live in the proximity of Central Park, NY?

I just started The Gates as an "ongoing event" marked page.

My information of what is going on in central park of New York in the the first two months of 2005 is limited to what I can find on the Christo and Jeanne Claude website - I'm not sure the info on that website will be updated all throughout the event. Anybody caring to keep the "The Gates" page a bit up to date until the event is over?

--Francis Schonken 13:02, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I put some information onto your page. Take a look and let me know what you think. (I live right by the park, and walk through almost daily). Morris 14:25, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Image Search

How do I do a good image search on Wikipedia? Should I use Google or an internal search to ensure I am not replicating images... just curious, Google does a pretty good job on advanced search. - RoyBoy [∞] 07:05, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There is no perfect solution yet. You could go to the appropriate article and check links to related articles and foreign language articles by hand. This works surprisingly well. Google also works, but make sure to search site:wikipedia.org, not just site:en.wikipedia.org. You should also check the commons. -- Chris 73 Talk 07:31, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Problem with School Use

Not sure if this is where I start. Did create an account also. I teach school and had created a link to the KKK to project for use on a Reconstruction Unit. When I opened it yesterday it was full of very descriptive obscenities. Although, I had linked to you and used you for research before, I had not previously looked at your site too closely, but see that it is editable. Being a bit stunned and using with our new online text books etc... I moved on, but looking at it again last night it was in its contaminated form. This morning it was back to the original. Can you trace the origins of the unique edits??? Possibly one of our students???? My ninth graders were very kind to me as I gapped at it on the big screen.

   Also, do you have a site with simple guides for student/teacher use?

Might be worth bookmarking a particular version of the page in future, if it's going to be part of a live presentation... Look for the "page history" link at the top of each page.

e.g. page history of KKK, and an unchangeable version of that page Ojw 19:26, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

That is good advice. Also, you might want to read Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia. It's not exactly what you are dealing with, but the considerations are similar. If you have some comments specific to classroom use that don't seem to be covered by the discussion there, please feel more than free to write them up at Wikipedia talk:Researching with Wikipedia, and I'll make sure they end up appropriately integrated either as part of the "Researching" discussion or elsewhere. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:37, Jan 26, 2005 (UTC)

1. If you are talking about this version, contributed over a 14 minute period 14:38, 25 Jan 2005 UTC, the IP address for that "contributor", 69.151.180.30, traces to "Aransas County Isd", and I'm guessing "Isd"={something} School District. This vandalism was reverted within 10 minutes. Unfortunately the next day a totally different IP persisently vandalised the article again for almost 30 minutes, despite being reverted four times. As you can probably imagine given the subject matter, it's one of our more frequently vandalised articles. (Ah, it's in the same IP range as http://www.acisd.org/ )
2. There's also Wikipedia:School and university projects. All the ones reported so far have been university students, but with the proper planning and supervision a tightly-focused project could probably work for high school kids. Niteowlneils 03:06, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

sexual abuse in foster home

Could someone please let meknow ifthere is a statute of limitations in sexual abuse cases involving children as at least 3 of us were abused physically sexually this happpenedin winnipeg manitoba canada 1980

If you're still in/near Winnipeg, try here--if not look for something similar locally (although they will probably only know specifics if they are in Manitoba, as provincial laws may vary. Niteowlneils 03:26, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

link to external web site

Will someone please link the Sundance Kid stub to the www.sundancekidhenrylong.com web site

Duplicate material across articles

(Cross-posted to Wikipedia:Help wanted)
Handedness and Left-handed share a fair amount of material (mostly on the theories on the origin of handedness). It seems to me that such duplication is unnecessary and will only drift apart in the future, and the material should only be in one of the articles. I'm not sure which article should hold the discussion, though, or how the material should be divided among the articles. I also don't think they should be merged, so I don't think the {{merge}} tag is apparent; since that seemed about the only suitable tag on WP:CU, I don't know what to do. Perhaps someone could take care of those articles? -- pne 10:21, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Lost my stub

I'm sure I've made some horrible newbie mistake, for which I appologize in advance. In any case, I added an article yesterday (Jan 31st), and now it is gone, though it was apparently working at the time I added it. It was Gunther Blumentritt. After poking around a bit I found the list of recent deletions and looked through it all the way back to Jan 30th. My article wasn't listed as deleted. What gives? Humble though it was, it took me 3 hours to put together.--RevCasy 22:09, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Found, at Günther Blumentritt. --Michael Snow 22:31, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Your stub is at Günther Blumentritt (with an accented second character). To find it, I looked at your User contributions, which you'll see linked from almost any page as "My contributions".

You might like to create a redirect from Gunther Blumentritt to this article to make it easier for people to access. You should also read the Manual of Style and specifically the biography MoS to format the dates of birth and death in the opening sentence. You should also add a category, perhaps Category:German World War II people.-gadfium 22:33, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Gex: Enter the Gecko. (Game.)

If you have any information to start a article that would be great. Thank you.

--Relaxation 22:42, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Warning Sign a song by the band Coldplay.

A request.

--Relaxation 20:31, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

A request for what? -- Cyrius|✎ 23:48, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Judging from the one below, I think these are requests that somebody write an article, as in Wikipedia:Requested articles. --Michael Snow 23:55, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Two requests

I guess this is the right place (or one of the right places) to be looking for help. I have two requests to make:

1. For this summer's upcoming Wikimedia-wide conference, Wikimania 2005, we are working on a press release to help publicize it. More help is needed to write the press release (and eventually translate it), so if you're interested in the conference please help at Wikimedia press releases/Wikimania conference. Even if you know you won't be able to attend but want to support the event somehow, this would be a good opportunity.
2. I just published the latest edition of The Wikipedia Signpost a few hours ago. I know many people are reading and appreciating this effort at a Wikipedia community newspaper (check it out if you haven't seen it before), but it can't continue indefinitely with just me. I appreciate the many people who have been sending me tips about news in the community; now I need more people who can take the time to write an article or two about these events. Please contact me if you're willing to help.

Thanks to everyone for your support. --Michael Snow 18:08, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Removing large amounts of content without even discussing it!

I have noticed a few instances where someone will say something like Sub-Standard information, removing. I think everyone needs to see how an articles content can be expanded upon and edited to bring it up to a neutral point of view! I realize that this is an old subject here at wikipedia but never noticed it until now! Jaberwocky6669 17:32, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

site content

I have a website and would like to know if it would be possible to have the content of this site provided through my website free for my website visitors. If this is possible please I would like to know how this could be done. Thanks

Wikipedia's content is reusable under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. You can download a dump of the MySQL database from http://download.wikimedia.org/ . -- Cyrius|✎ 22:43, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

---

Oktay Sinanoglu and Oktay sinanoglu

Can anybody determine if these are the same people? RickK 06:16, Jan 30, 2005 (UTC)

"Oktay Sinanoglu is a professor at UC Berkeley." does not appear to exist. The other one with an actual bio appears to be real. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:41, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Zero Hour - trying to add article, help!

Hello! I'm brand new to Wikipedia, and I tried adding an article to the encyclopedia. Under a search for "Zero hour" a result comes up pertaining to comic books. I added a category at the bottom relating to the September 11th terror attacks. I clicked on the link to add an article dealing with that article. I added content and then saved the page.

Well, when I clicked on the category link on the original 'zero hour' page, I get a link saying there is no article for this category. I added the content again, and now when I click on the link, it takes me directly to the editing page for the article content (not to the actual article). Does anybody know how to fix this? Thank you.

--Hawks9718 21:07, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There is a Zero Hour article.

--Relaxation 21:15, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think you are confused about how categorisation works. A category is a grouping of related articles, not an article itself.

You have added Category:Zero hour - September 11th attacks to the Zero Hour article, but the article is about a comic series and has nothing to do with the Sept 11 attacks. It seems there is also a phrase "zero hour" which is. Instead of adding the category to Zero Hour, you should add a link in the Zero Hour article referring readers to a new article Zero hour - September 11th attacks, and that new article should be added to an appropriate September 11 category.

You couldn't find the "article" (actually category) you first created because you spelled it in two different ways: Category:Zero hour - September 11th attacks and Category:Zero hour - September 11 attacks.-gadfium 21:24, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ok, did the link... now how do I add this article to the '9/11' category. I see the different articles listed for the category, but I still cant figure out how to add a 'new' article. --Hawks9718 22:42, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Basically, I just want to add a new article to an existing category --Hawks9718 22:56, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

You add a category by editing the article, not the category. For example, if you add [[Category:Foo]] at the bottom of the article, you place it in category Foo. If you want it to alphabetize differently -- for example, if it was called "The Zero Hour" but you wanted it to alphabetize under "zero" -- you'd write [[Category:Foo|Zero Hour, The]]. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:29, Jan 30, 2005 (UTC)

Al Gore running for president in 2008?

Does anyone have any information?

--Relaxation 19:15, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Did you read the "2008 presidential election" section in the Al Gore article? That's got about as much information as I've heard on the subject. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:25, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Question on Editing

I have been reading the excellent material on logical fallacies. I wanted to make some contributions in the area of rhetoric and popular rhetoric from the point of view of logical fallacies. But it is not clear to me how the final editing process works, i.e., what is to stop anyone from changing anything in a prior article?

How does one end up with the excellent content I have seen in the logical fallacy area if unqualifed and ignorant poster can post or edit?

Thanks, CMA

Becuase anyone can post and edit. It sounds wired but for the most part it worksGeni 19:43, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Let me try to give you a little more of an answer. There are several thousand people who maintain "watchlists" of articles and check them with more or less frequency. The working assumption of Wikipedia is that far more effort will be dedicated to this than to vandalism. At any given moment an article may be in bad shape, but the "half life" of gibberish or outright lies in Wikipedia can probably be measured in minutes, certainly not more than an hour or two. However, as that term "half life" suggests, a small amount of bad information will remain even after a long time.

Compared to a more conventional reference work, it is an interesting tradeoff: a lot of bad information gets in (briefly) but is usually quickly gone; in a more conventional reference work, less bad information gets in, but what gets in is much more likely to stay.

In looking at an article, how do you insulate yourself from the bad information? Well, no strategy is perfect, but see Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia for some suggestions (among them, how you can exploit the talk page and the article history for this purpose). -- Jmabel | Talk 00:22, Jan 30, 2005 (UTC)

Procedure for Reporting Vandalism by an Administrator?

In advance, thank you for your help. Could someone, please, describe (or refer me to the appropriate wiki-page(s)) for the standard procedure for reporting a wiki-administrator who has demonstrated a repeated history of editing-out documented facts and vandalizing wiki-articles? JUSTtheFACTS 15:25, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The fact that someone is an administrator has no bearing on his or her functioning as an editor. If you think a user -- administrator or otherwise -- is vandalizing articles, you might want to start a request for comment. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:16, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)

Iranian Architecture

I think the article needs to be renamed to Iranian architecture, then made as a category in Architecture by country, with Kashan and this one as articles in it. Unsure how to proceed on move, and how making the subcategory Iranian architecture would automactically know to go in Architecture by country... hmmmm... well that didn't create a subcategory. - RoyBoy [∞] 03:49, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I went ahead and moved the article for you. (Using the default skin, there's a "move" button at top top of the page to the left of "edit this page" and "history".)

To put the article in Category:Iranian architecture, just add a link to [[Category:Iranian architecture]] and the bottom of the page. Follow the link to create the category by putting it within another category (in this case, [[Category:Architecture by country]] will do the trick). I didn't go ahead and do this because I don't know what other articles to put in the category, and there's not much need for a category with only one article in it. -Aranel ("Sarah") 22:41, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Bombing of Dresden in World War II

If there are any academic historians around with knowledge of the Dresden bombing, help would be very much appreciated at Bombing of Dresden in World War II in order to check for factual inaccuracies, important omissions, and particularly to help with the section on whether the bombing can be regarded as justified. Many thanks, SlimVirgin 14:13, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)

Bear butte

I am seeking a way to capitalize the word "butte" in the subject article.

As you're logged in, hit the "move" tab. It's up there with edit, history, and watch. I've moved this particular one for you, so file that tidbit away for future reference. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:24, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Japanese Wikipedia 100,000th article

The Japanese Wikipedia has just created its 100,000th article. Could someone who reads Japanese please tell us - on Wikipedia:Announcements or here - what that article is, and (in English) which topic it is on? Also, any information on what they are doing to mark this event would be much appreciated. Thanks, Warofdreams 12:49, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The 100,000th article is 鉄鉱石 that means Iron ore. Sylphie 13:11, 2005 Feb 11 (UTC)

Anyone from Chicago and willing to help?

I'm looking for assistance with Double-decker streets in Chicago. Specifically I'd like to create an accurate map of the system, with the separate levels clearly shown. This is something I can't do with aerials or any map I know of, since everything is on top of each other. Any help in the form of information about what lower levels and ramps exist would be very much appreciated. --SPUI (talk) 12:18, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Dassin

No article, but there is a talk page entry.

Curious, most curious. - RoyBoy [∞] 04:26, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The article was deleted nonsense. -- Jmabel | Talk

Question about the use of a photo

I just created Murder by Death (band) and would like to use this photo on the page: http://www.eyeballrecords.com/artists/murderbydeath/MBD_artists.jpg Would a promotional shot like this be considered fair use? --Tothebarricades.tk 20:45, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yes, usually. Tag the image as {{PromoPhoto}}, note where the image came from, and you should be fine. – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 23:31, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)

Copyright in China

Greetings. The Image sleuths and I were investigating Image:China, Mao (2).jpg to see if we could determine its copyright status. We failed to figure out whether the image is in the public domain or not. My question, therefore, is two-fold:

1. Are images taken by the People's Republic of China (or government employees) in the public domain? If not, who owns the copyright?
2. And what is the age limitation on copyright in China? In the U.S., an image is in the public domain if it was created before 1923. In Germany, a non-artistic photograph is in the public domain if it was first published more than 50 years ago. In the former Soviet Union, all works published before May 27, 1973 are in the public domain. How about China? Does anyone know?

If you could respond on my talk page, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks, – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 16:41, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)

New Stub Categories

I'm not quite sure where to put this, and I'm not sure how to go about this on my own, but I wanted to suggest that there be stub catagories for Clothing/Fashion,Archetecture, and Periodicals. --InShaneee 16:21, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria#Proposed new stubs might be what you're looking for.. 68.81.231.127 03:28, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hide own edits?

Is there a way to hide my own edits in the watchlist? Sometimes I'd rather not see my own changes to the articles in my watchlist. --Sketchee 02:33, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

Not that I know of.-gadfium 23:05, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I also wish this were possible. You could request that a developer implement this feature, but it isn't possible right now. – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 16:43, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)

please delete category.

I created [Category:Contemporary_Philosophers], and [Category:Contemporary_philosophers] already exists. Please delete.

Hi, Goethean! Since you're the original author, the only editor, and it's a simple miscapitalization, it easily qualifies for speedy deletion (see Wikipedia:Categories for deletion policies, or WP:DP for more general guidelines). The proper procedure is to add {{db|Explain why here}} to the page, replacing "Explain why here" with a short explanation for why it qualifies. 68.81.231.127 00:46, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Deleted. BTW, do you know that you can sign your edits with ~~~~? Happy editing -- 07:13, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Chris 73 ;) 68.81.231.127 15:24, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Anon editor attacking Islamic articles

An anon editor coming from 62.135.96.169 is visiting various Islam-related articles removing anything critical of Islam. The anon's viewpoint seems to be Wahabi or Salafi. Anything dealing with Sufis, Shiites, liberal Islam, etc. is being removed. In the case of the Ayatollah article, the entire article was wiped. I would regard this as vandalism in progress. Can this editor be stopped? I'm spending too much of my morning cleaning up after him. Zora 19:21, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

He seems to have stopped anyway. The appropriate action to take is a polite notice asking him to stop. The template {{test}} is often used. Probably the majority of people who are making destructive edits stop when they see the "You have new messages" sign, because they see that someone has spotted what they are doing. If someone doesn't stop after such a polite notice, list them on WP:VIP and they'll get attention from admins.-gadfium 23:11, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

And if you need them, there are increasingly more blunt notices {{test2}}, {{test3}}, and {{test4}}, the last of which says "This is your last warning. The next time you vandalize a page you will be blocked from editing." -- Jmabel | Talk 07:06, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

Grandfathers 2 headed penny

Feb. 8 2004 Hello anyone, Recently my grandmother passed away and upon cleaning her house we came across a two headed Penny of King George. There is no date we assume it is from around the 1930's or '40 (based on grandfatehrs age and when my mother recalls last seeing it). I have done some research and i think it is a magicians coin because when you hold the penny with the face vvertical to you and then flip it over the other face is not where it should be it is horizontal. Just wondering if it is worth anything and where I could find out the date of the penny. Thank you TTFN Dee

Need assistance:

Need help for ethnological material, but do not know how to open seperate pages. I am looking for places to palce material for Hehe, Sangu, Kinga, Safwa, etc., and much much more, all from German East Africa. So far your written material is too long and complicated.

             Yours DOAG

ACCIDENTAL vandalism

I destroyed by mistake the English version of page ATC code A02 (overwrite to translate into french; I tought I was in the French section.
Please restore the previous English version
I am very sorry

Eras-mus 23:49, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

No problem. Everybody can revert the page to an earlier version. See the History of the article. You can acess all of the old versions anytime -- Chris 73 Talk 02:23, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks
Eras-mus 01:36, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Copyright translation

Would someone please translate the copyright notice into English for this image? (Leave the original Japanese as well, but I would like an English version available) Image:B_097.jpg -- AllyUnion (talk) 22:50, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

There is a Japanese section at Wikipedia:Translation into English, which may be a good place to ask. 68.81.231.127 23:21, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Great Lakes Storm of 1913

The deadliest storm to hit the Great Lakes. I started this article recently, and have numerous informative external links that have yet to be used, but am not very good at writing encyclopedicaliarilistically and don't have a lot of free time right now, so am requesting help in putting some structure to this jumble, and creating something comprehensive but not overly detailed. --brian0918&#153; 02:47, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

It seems fine now; a quality contribution. Thank you. — RJH 17:58, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Capitalization?

Is AUTOEXEC.BAT the preferred capitalization? Autoexec.bat redirects to the all caps article.

All caps is the DOS standard. RickK 07:05, Feb 6, 2005 (UTC)

problems with deletion

I have tried to follow the instructions on the "Votes for deletion" page in my attempts to delete 2 pages as non-encyclopedic, Glasgow Kelvinhall and Alexander Stuart, Duke of Rothesay. See the page for how far I got. If I can't follow the instructions then it's likely that a lot of other users can't either. PatGallacher 12:48, 2005 Feb 5 (UTC)

Both fixed, and yes, the procedure's kind of convoluted. —Korath (Talk) 15:47, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

Dream Girl

This is a bit much to explain in a {{db}}, but according to the deletion log Dream Girl was speedied by Geni on January 28. The article was recently recreated (it's no longer a CSD), but apparently the talk page was missed because it predates the article. Given the frustrated exclaimation, it might be a good idea to delete Talk:Dream Girl. 68.81.231.127 12:32, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree, and have deleted the talk page.-gadfium 22:48, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. 68.81.231.127 14:28, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

contribution reclaimification

Hi there. Can I reclaim the contributions that I made as IP 205.240.70.10? They were made to the Ken Wilber article on 29 Jan 2004 and 24 Feb 2004 --Goethean 22:21, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Changing attribution for an edit is the place to go. Just read the instructions and it should be pretty obvious. Evil Monkey∴Hello 06:38, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

The article Negro

Unsurprisingly, the article Negro has occasional problems. Right now, as noted in talk, there are at least two dubious phrases in the article: a reference to and "often cited poll", with no citation given (often cited, perhaps, but not by us, it would seem) and the word "jocularly" with reference to Lyndon B. Johnson's use of the word "blacks". If these statements are accurate, they need citations, and I am very inclined to remove them if they don't get citation in the next couple of days.

More than that, though, I'd like to add an appropriate notice at the head of the article explaining that it is an article about a word. Normally, when we do this, we indicate where the article about the thing itself would be. It would seem US-centric to say "see African American"; Negroid is a stub about a somewhat outmoded term in anthropology; African is simply a redirect to Africa. I realize this is an extremely tricky area, and I understand (and generally accept) the notion that racial categories reflect an underlying biological reality, although they played (and play) a large role in people's thinking (including self-identity). Any suggestions on how best to handle this? -- Jmabel | Talk 18:41, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)

Portuguese Wikipedia - Abuse of Authority

In portuguese Wikipedia, the Spiritism article talks about Kardecism is not Cristianism and Administrators does not leave change and correct article. Administrators recuse to accept the correct information and hinders the users to change the page.

English Wikipedia Article Reference:

• Spiritism
• Kardecism

Administrators:

• E2m
• Marcelo Mschlindwein
• Gbiten

• Marcelo and Gbiten makes threats if contest his authority

Mateusc 13:38, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

No one here in the English Wikipedia has any authority over the Portuguese Wikipedia, but I would assume that, like here, when it comes to content of articles, all editors are equal, and the admins have no more authority over article content than any other editor. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:11, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)

If you're having a problem with administrators on another Wikipedia, talk to a Steward. --Slowking Man 06:40, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

OHL (band)

A vandal keeps attacking this page (as well as several others), and I've been rolling back all of the vandalism, but for some reason, I can't roll this back. Every time I try to do a rollback, it says that I can't roll back because someone else already has. But there is nothing in the history to indicate that the anon whose name is mentioned as having rolled it back actually has done any edits on the page. I have to go into a previous version and edit and save. RickK 09:44, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)

Colza

Please see Colza. How can this be copyrighted if it's from "a 1911 encyclopedia"? RickK 06:14, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)

Seems to be from here, which says on the main page that The LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia is based on what many consider to be the best encyclopedia ever written: the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, first published in 1911. The text here is pretty much identical, and 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica also states that LoveToKnow appears to be a raw, unproofread OCR-scanned version. I would say remove the copyright notice. -- Chris 73 Talk 06:34, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)

Absolutely. All LoveToKnow can copyright is their page layout, etc. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:51, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)

Assistance with Move and/or redirect

Two things: I created an entry for Robert of gloucester, but would like to correct the capitalisation error (should be Robert of Gloucester. But there is such a page, which is used as a stub to redirect to Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester, who was most commonly known as Robert of Gloucester. The two Roberts are entirely different people.

Is there some way to correct the capitalisation problem and not automatically re-direct toe Robert, Earl, but instead allow people to choose from Robert (historian) and Robert (1st Earl)? Plus the new entry should be wikified by someone who knows what the heck they're doing...

I moved the Robert of gloucester to Robert of Gloucester. This seems to be his primary name, while the Earl had a slightly different name. I will add a link to the earl on the Robert of Gloucester page -- Chris 73 Talk 04:58, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)

Copyright/copyleft question

I have a web site for guitarists. I wanted to add some extra content to my "artists" pages, and thought of automatically including the first paragraph from the wikipedia text about that artist. Could this legally be done if I tell where I got it from.

I have made a sample page that shows how I was planning to do it: sample page

per--217.8.144.187 19:56, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Sure, no problem. See wikipedia:Citing wikipedia for how to attribute.-gadfium 23:57, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Username search

Is it possible to do a username search on Wikipedia? I want to see if I actually did create an account under the username 'Anycon' and have just forgotten the password, or if my memory is playing nasty tricks. (unsigned)

I'm not sure just what you want to do. The contribution for User:Anycon was to edit his/her own user page. Do you remember doing this? If the user had provided an email address accessible to other users (which he/she did not), it would be possible to send an email and see if it arrived at your address. As it is, proof of identity would be tough, if not impossible. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:33, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

That is indeed my user page and I've been trying numerous possible passwords without success. Is it possible to retrieve a password if you didn't supply an e-mail address when creating the account? Or should I just create a new one? --User:81.156.49.248 / Anycon

Big backlog of German-to-English translation requests

There is currently a very big backlog of German-to-English translation requests, probably the biggest backlog of translation requests we've seen. See Wikipedia:Translation into English#German-to-English if you are interested in helping out. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:20, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

Banning IP 66.46.85.17

As I think is obvious from his/her contributions page, the user at that IP has been engaging in vandalism over the last couple of days. Specifically, s/he attacked the page Temple of Set five times so far and does not seem intent to just stop it. Can someone please do something about that? Denial 23:41, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

These kinds of issues are probably better brought to WP:AN. I've given him a warning, so there will be no excuses next time. Jayjg ^(talk) 23:48, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Actually better to report these at Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. RickK 00:21, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the pointers, I'll know where to go if there is a next time. Also, for the warning - thanks again. Denial 01:38, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Name of The Hacker's ship?

--Neptunemoon 19:16, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Nebuchadnezzar? (no I don't understand this question either!) Ojw 17:45, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Template:Stub

The image Image:Wiki_letter_w.png, which is used with Template:Stub, is showing as blank. RickK 21:52, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)

Hm. Now several images are showing up as Missing image even though they are really there. RickK 22:44, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)

Can't move page

Hi. Following a discussion on this page, I tried to move this other page (an image), but for some reason, Wikipedia won't let me do it. The system returns that "this action could not be performed for this page". What gives? I can't just save the image and reload again, since I'd be messing it's history,and in the process taking away the credit for uploading it from it's creator. There's no explanation on the move page as to why the action can't be performed. Can someone help? Regards, Redux 16:09, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Images can't be moved. It's a MediaWiki limitation. -- Cyrius|✎ 23:29, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Got it. I figured it had to be that. I've already solve this particular situation though. The original uploader has already reloaded the image with the proper name. Thanks for the help. Regards, Redux 02:59, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Getting listed in a general search

When I enter Schneebaum and hit Search I get the "No article title matches" page. Under the "Page text matches" section, there is listed an article that mentions Tobias Schneebaum but not my stub titled Tobias Schneebaum. How do I get my article to show up under the "Page text matches" section? Grika 21:39, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Strong disagreement between people on site

It would be really helpful to have someone (unopinionated) moderate on the allopathic medicine (keyword: allopathy) wikipedia site. There has been an ongoing debate between 4 people, that seems extremely difficult to resolve. A 2004 definition has been posted, as well as an out-of-date 1971 definition (by the same dictionary!), unreferenced arguments are being made about how the term allopathy is used as perjorative, and arguments about how the medical community uses the term are being contradicted without evidence. Thanks! CL

Neither definition presented is entirely clear to me, perhaps because some of the words could be considered ambiguous. I think I prefer the definition from the Cancer Consultants page, which reads: "The term allopathy is derived from two greek words: allo meaning opposite and pathios meaning suffering. The basis of this medical system is to focus on disease and employ methods that oppose it. Within this framework, removing disease returns the body to health. Scientific studies are conducted to determine which treatments are most effective at eradicating particular diseases, or at least limiting their effects." &c. — RJH 15:36, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

People's Army of Vietnam

Hey, I guess I'm fairly new here still (signed up in August 2004), as this is my first post at the Village pump. The article People's Army of Vietnam is in serious need of some TLC. Until now, I've been doing wikification of articles on my own, but this article requires a team.

It's copied from [5], but there is no Copyright notice on the site, and since it's a government website, I'm assuming no copvio.

Right now, the article is heavily POV; actually, it reads like a propaganda paper that American POWs (Vietnam War) would be forced to learn by heart. But I digress; I need some people, preferably not bitter Vietnam vets nor die-hard Communists, to help me wikify/NPOV/append the article. Clearly, if you look at the number of pages that link to it, it's a very important Wikipedia topic.

--CDN99 00:41, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Bad assumption on PD. Only works of the United States federal government are automatically public domain. To my knowledge, works of no other government have that status and are therefore copyrighted. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:03, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Change user name?

Is it possible to change my user name while keeping my settings, contributions, password and homepage?

--Tobymarshman 20:45, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In theory, yes. See wikipedia:Changing username. In practice, such requests haven't been dealt with since about September 2004, so you could expect to wait rather a long time. Most people create a new username, and copy their previous userpage there - you could simply use Move this page' on the old user page once you've created the new username. So long as you're not trying to pretend you're a different user, no one will object. Put the request for change in as well.-gadfium 02:30, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Cannot add picture to article

I have written an article on Wikipedia entitled Isle of Mull Scotland and I have uploaded a picture mull.jpg Unfortunately these are on two separate pages and I would like the picture on the same page as the article. Please could someone tell me how this can be done ? hazel@sitemaker1.com

Add the following to your page:

[[Image:mull.jpg|thumb|left|150px| Mull]]

Mull

Hope this helps Brookie 20:31, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Please also add a copyright tag such as

to the picture page

Have done this for you - but see the merge notice on the site Brookie 14:58, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your help Brookie, I think that merging will be a little too difficult for me. I am hoping someone else might do it

Help understanding the Request for Comment process

(Moved from Wikipedia:Administration FAQ by Denelson83 09:20, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC))

I am currently the subject of an RfC. I can't find anything on to tell me how long this process lasts - is there a time limit before someone makes a decision, or does this hang out there until until someone sees it as stale and then jetisons it? Within 48 hours of posting the RfC I had one person in favor of the RfC and another person who only partially agreed with it (but didn't say what they agreed with or disagreed with) - does that count as two? I have also provided primary documents to support my side of this, and have extended an offer for mediation, however in the 10 days this has been going on, my accusers have not made an effort to resolve this matter and I can find no one willing to act as a third party. There are comments from people all over the place (someone who supports the RfC is now commenting oin the outsider section), and in the last 48 hours there have been comments from people who just opened their accounts. I just feel as if I have played by the rules, provided documentation and citations, offered a solution, and the nightmare continues. Can anybody help clarify this mess? Help? user: stude62 user talk:stude62 22:35, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The RfC process is unnecessarily confrontational - and some see it merely as a process that has to be gone through to get something before the ArbCom, rather than a genuine attempt to resolve a dispute. I understand how you feel (I have had an unsubstantiated RfC raised on me myself). I can only ask you to bear with it and realise that, as long as your behaviour going forward is acceptable (regardless of whether it was acceptable or not beforehand), you will win in the end. Unfortunately, if the other party really isn't interested in resolving the dispute, it will go unresolved.

A way to make RfC less confrontational is being discussed on Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment. Kind regards, jguk 12:33, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I believe that if you are the subject of the RfC, and you have agreed to mediation, and the other side hasn't, that more or less ends the matter (although the page doesn't go away, it should be delinked from the main RfC page, so people only find it if they are actively looking for it). Assuming that you clearly indicate on the page that that is the situation, I don't think much anyone will give their criticisms of you much creedence. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:28, Feb 19, 2005 (UTC)

POV rants by user

I don't know where to report this, but Dangerous-Boy keeps making anti-Christian rants on the Talk:Arunachal Pradesh page. I have warned him on his Talk page resulting in him making a personal attack on me on the Arunachal Pradesh talk page. I would like the community to restrain him. Nichalp 19:15, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

If Nichalp is a Sysop as his user page states -can't he do something directly? Brookie 20:01, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yes I can, but I don't want to book him for a minor transgression. I was looking for people to knock some sense into his head, before blocking him. Nichalp 20:21, Feb 19, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Brookie and Electricmoose for the help. Nichalp 20:14, Feb 20, 2005 (UTC)

Redirecting

I have been trying trying to set up a redirect from Wellingborough School to the Wellingborough School para on the main page for Wellingborough - but haven't had much luck - the best I have managed is to the top of the Wellingborough page - any help would be appreciated. Brookie 18:21, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hash not slash. To add a link to a particular section, the separator is '#'. I've done it for you. Noisy | Talk 19:57, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

D'oh. Well, that didn't work after all. Sigh. Noisy | Talk 20:02, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

• For a redirect you have to add "w:" to make it an interwiki link. Try it now and you will see it works. —Mike 23:49, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks for the tip. Noisy | Talk 11:36, Feb 19, 2005 (UTC)

Euro character

How can I type the Euro character? My US-centric keyboard doesn't have it. Nor the British pound symbol.  :) RickK 06:20, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

&euro; ==> € -- Jmabel | Talk 06:34, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

and &pound; ==> £ for completeness, since having to cut and paste from Character Map is a pain. —Korath (Talk) 15:45, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

Hmph. Shouldaknown. Thanks.  :) RickK 06:35, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

If you're using Windows, you can access special characters by going to Start --> Programs --> Accessories --> System Tools --> Character Map. --Slowking Man 06:38, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

Alt-Graphics (right alt key) + 5 (the top one, which shares its place with %) might also work: €. And then there's (left) alt + 0128 on the numeric keypad: €. User:Anárion/sig 08:36, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Wiki Logo

I want a Wiki logo on my user page and have inserted the following from Metawiki - but all I get is a missing image notice; I am clearly being dim somewhere - but can't see where - any ideas?

File:Nohat-logo-X-en.png

Wikipedia The free encyclopedia

Brookie 10:24, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Use:[[Image:wiki.png]]. utcursch 12:27, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

Great that works! - thanks Utcursch Brookie 14:35, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

How can I remove my email address from the wikipedia account?

Go to Special:Preferences and remove it. However, if you do this and then forget your password, you won't be able to get your account back. You might want to consider simply disabling emails from other users rather than removing it entirely. The option for this is in Special:Preferences as well. Angela. 20:33, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

Permission to use and translate in Arabic a Wikipedia article

February 15th, 2005. Hello, My name is Caroline Hatem, I'm an Editor at SEED (www.seed.slb.com), a non-profit organization that provides scientific articles on the web in 7 languages, and focuses particularly on developing countries by providing computers and internet connections. We have a new system which allows students from all over the world to ask questions to the SEED "experts". A Saudi young man asked about the bi-dimensional magnetic resonance spectrum and before sending the question to the experts I checked out the web to see what was available. Your website gave a long and thorough answer which I thought I could edit and translate into Arabic, while quoting the source, of course. The point is that Arabic speakers do not have access to non-Arabic articles, and are thus limited in their access to knowledge. Can I have the permission to use and translate your article to the strict attention of the Arabic speakers? If it is ever translated to other languages as FAQ, Wikipedia would be quoted as source as well. Thank you for your attention, Respectfully, Caroline Hatem SEED editor.

(CC'd from the other section of the VP) Dear Caroline - All text on Wikipedia, as well as many of the pictures, is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation license. You may copy anything so licensed, provided that you give attribution to the author (we consider a hyperlink back to the wikipedia article suffecient) and if you modify it (such as translating/transliterating it), you agree to license your modified version under the same license. →Raul654 08:31, Feb 16, 2005 (UTC)

Indeed, once translated, you could contribute it back at the Arabic Wikipedia. -- ALoan (Talk) 11:01, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Exactly what I was going to say, but let me expand on that a bit: One of the major ways that Wikipedia grows is for people to translate articles from one language to another. Assuming that the person in question has web access, the best way to serve him -- and any other Arabic speaker interested -- is to post your translation as an article in the Arabic-language Wikipedia. Indeed, translation of almost any article not yet available in Arabic, and placement of that article into the Arabic-language Wikipedia would be very welcome.
  I doubt that there is a project page specifically on translation into Arabic, but you could have a look at the project page on translation into English and the analogy is pretty clear. If someone would like to start something like that in Arabic -- a central place to request translations from other languages -- that would be great! -- Jmabel | Talk 19:20, Feb 16, 2005 (UTC)

In case you want to add the text to the arabic wiki, here is the link to the top page: http://ar.wikipedia.org/ -- Chris 73 Talk 07:59, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

Article on "Protecting the wrong version"

I read an interesting/funny article here once (or was it on meta?) lampooning the way everyone seems to think that whenever an article gets protected, it is always the "wrong version" that gets protected. It's relevant to a debate I'm involved in at the moment, and I wanted to point someone towards it. Unfortunately, now I can't find it, and can't make a guess as to the articles title. Can anyone point me towards this article please? I think it is somewhere in the Wikipedia namespace, but it might have been on Metawiki. PaulHammond 14:26, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)

That would be meta:The Wrong Version. User:Anárion/sig 14:33, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Anárion! PaulHammond 15:35, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)

Stubs

When is a stub not a stub? This may be dealt with somewhere, but I can't find it. I have often made short additions to articles marked as stubs, I'm sure a lot of other people do. When is it appropriate to remove the "stub" marker? Is it simply a question of length, or what? PatGallacher 19:21, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

It's not so much length as completeness. RJFJR 19:50, Feb 14, 2005 (UTC)

"A stub is a very short article, generally of one paragraph or less. Most stubs fail to cover all but the most trivial subjects completely. However, this does not mean the stub is not a legitimate articleit just needs to be expanded." - from Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub. Warofdreams 10:54, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I guess, if you've added enough to the article that you don't feel like it's a stub any more, you can remove the stub tag. If someone else disagrees with you, they can always put it back later. I have removed a couple of stub tags myself from articles that I came across that seem to have expanded beyond that. PaulHammond 14:32, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)

St Andrew

I am 12 years old and i need to find out when St andrew was canonised and why. I have searched many sights on the net and cannot find the answer. PLEASE Help because my teacher is not very happy with me.Can someone email the answer to me as soon as possible my address is deejayess@optusnet.com.au

Is there anything that you think is not covered in the article Saint Andrew? -- Jmabel | Talk 18:13, Feb 14, 2005 (UTC)

I think you may find that St. Andrew was never formally canonised, like some other very early saints he was just generally assumed to be one at a very early stage in the history of Christianity, before a lot of formal structures and procedures were in place.

PatGallacher 19:21, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

Starting Wiki with blank database

Just a small question, but no answer has been found so far...

After installing MediaWiki, I could not find the way to create entries and make new pages. The only thing I could find were the database and how to import them. But I don't need all that data. Have I missed something?

Even as wikisysop, I can not add new data, I can only edit the existing pages...

Thanks in advance Frederic

The wiki-way is to edit an existing page and put a link to where you want the new page to be. Then save, and click the link (which will be red). Then write your new page. Creating pages by other means will often result in an "orphan" page, one with no links to it. That's not good. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:46, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Article history missing

I did a major reorder and addition on Artillery on 10 Feb. I came back today, 13 Feb, to see if it was still there and check for changes/mistakes. The article is still in the 'form' I set, but the article history stops with "18:50, 7 Feb 2005 158.96.191.121." Where has the record of my revision and any subsequent changes gone? 62.252.64.18 00:18, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The edit shows up for me. Perhaps the WikiMedia servers were out of sync at the time you looked (they were definately having problems).-gadfium 00:33, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

July 20

Salve omnes! (Or if you speak Texan, Howdy, y'all!)
I have been laboring to make the July 20 article as comprehensive as possible. Ordinarily, I'd go through the "what links here" page as part of that effort, but there are so many pages that come up, many not relevant (e.g. dates cited in reference sections). I would appreciate Wikipedians who know of significant July 20th events, as well as any births and deaths that day, adding them to the July 20 page. Many thanks. PedanticallySpeaking 16:36, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)

That would be "salvete omnes" for the plural. Zephlon 21:04, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Getting wiki data on mouseover

Hi, I'd like to add wiki query ability to my pages. Basically, I want to emulate Trillian and how it highlights certain words and qweries wiki, then displays the result in a window. Right now I'm using the <abbr> tag, but it's not exactly what I need.

This site project is to get my skills higher, so please don't assume I'm some kind of code guru, though I do understand a good amount of PHP/ASP.

Thanks, Jamalio

My mediawiki does not work.

I am getting mad at this, i can't turn to anyone else. I've tried the technical village pump, i've tried the mediawiki mailing list, not a clue. I tried to install mediawiki in my server, and everything is fine in the installation (see [6] ) but it simply goes no where when I click (see [7] ). No where, no error messages, no error 404, nothing. I've tried the stable and the newer version.

Brion told me that was a php crash. So, what shall I do? change hosts? Kill my help desk? I am in pain... --Alexandre Van de Sande 20:18, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Need help on a redirection

Hi, I wanted to post a redirection to the Rover 400 Series for the Honda Concerto, but I do not know how to create a redirection. How do you do one?

See Help:Redirect. I see you've figured it out in the meantime, but others might like the link.-gadfium 03:21, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Watchlist email notification?

Hi there,

Sorry if this has been covered before... I'm new here and just starting to figure out my way around here.

Is there a way to be automatically notified by email when an article on our watchlist has been modified?

Thanks, Scott

--Scott Rose 17:57, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• I'm not sure, but if the function exists at all, there should be an option to select in your preferences screen. Mgm|^(talk) 19:31, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

• It's in development. It's not in use yet though. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:51, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Help in categorization

Excretion, Defecation and Fecal incontinence are currently uncategorized (stub categories do not counts) and I have absolutely no idea of what the correct categories could be, though a quick research allowed me to tag Urinary incontinence into category:urology Can somebody have a look at it?Circeus

Just stick them in a not-so-refined category, like "human illnesses" or such, someone else will eventually refine category. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:48, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

I was hard-pressed at the time I have since put them into Gastroenteroly and Digestive system. --Circeus 16:31, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

How to edit categories

Hello, this may sound stupid but I can't find any guide for editing categories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Presidents_of_Portugal needs to have António de Oliveira Salazar removed from this list. Although dictator and top man during the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, his title was not President of the Republic, for which he his puppet General Carmona. Salazar's title was Prime-Minister (more specifically his title was President of the Council of Ministers).

Since I can't edit this, I request that someone change it or teach me how to edit categories.

I would also like to add that technical information such as this is not terribly clear or easy to find in wikipedia, you've got loads of FAQs and Help and How-to pages that could all be just one page. Some time ago it took me a lot of time to find out how to edit templates too.

Lord KRISHNA 21:27, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Category listings are automatically generated by tagging the individual pages. Edit António de Oliveira Salazar and remove [[Category:Presidents of Portugal]]. It's near the bottom. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:35, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

thanks a lot for the prompt help, it's all taken care of. :) Lord KRISHNA 23:18, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wildcards in Article Titles, or other way to clone articles?

I just created Redirects for DDS-3 and DDS3 to Digital Data Storage. There are also other numbers of DDS - is there an easier way to create redirects for them than to just manually create each redirect? Or is there some other and better thing to do with them besides creating redirects?

Thanks. Spalding 15:26, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)

Assuming the articles you want to redirect don't contain additional info, you could ask one of the Bots to help out with the redirecting. Mgm|^(talk) 20:50, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)

How to deal with duplicate content

There is a major article that covers Las Vegas, Nevada it appears that someone took the material there and created a very similar page called Metropolitan Las Vegas, Nevada.

I think this will lead to confusion if the later entry is left as a major source of information.

Most locals call the "Metropolitan area" the "Las Vegas Valley" and think they live in the city of Las Vegas! Most addresses with the post office are Las Vegas, even if you do not live in the city of Las Vegas.

So, I wonder if creating this second page is a good idea? Since the Airport is not in Las Vegas, do you move it out of the City page and into the Metropolitan page? I see trying to keep the two seperate becoming a major problem.

Is a stub to define "Metropolitan Las Vegas" and the "Las Vegas Valley" that just defines what those terms mean all that is needed?

The only use of Metropolitan I'm aware of is in reference to the police department. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department patrols an area about the size of the state of New Jersey and much of it is empty desert.

What's the wiki way to deal with this?

Thanks Vegaswikian 06:38, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There are pedantic reasons to separate - one is a "city", while the other is a "region". The best approach is to bring up on the discussion pages for each, or to look at the history to see who created the articles, and leave a question on their talk page. Stan 18:38, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Accessing the test wiki?

Can anyone tell me how I'm supposed to use the test wiki? I get nothing but 403 (Forbidden) errors. -- FP 04:25, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)

You aren't. The test wiki was taken down some time ago due to security concerns about running development code on the same machines as the real sites. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:44, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

New/Adjusted Geo Time Scale

Greetings,

I have something bigger than Chicxulub, which spans the Pacific!

It's the Reason there is a "RING" of Fire. It's the Reason there is a "Europe." "IT" may help solve the Drift/Tectonics theories. This, people, may explain Distributions of Life around the Globe. (Including Homo)

I need the help of a few OPEN-MINDED Geophysicists!

The SIGNS are obvious to ME, but -so far- No one wants to stick their neck out. I will share any fame or fortune with anyone interested in this information.

-My publication will be my copyright.-

Your's- davidrdowner@yahoo.com -I'll check back wtih Wikipedia and the Village Pump.

DRD

What is the Wikipoint requested here? Brookie 08:18, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

WikiProject Grammar

Calling all editors who love fixing grammar errors! The Wikipedia:WikiProject Grammar has been inactive for some time now, and the template has been in use for some time. I kindly ask for the assistance of others to help check the articles in a readable format. -- AllyUnion (talk) 13:50, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'll potter by when I have a moment Brookie 15:52, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I left a note for you in Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Grammar -Zephlon 20:58, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hits to an article page

Is there some clever way of monitoring the number of times a given page has been viewed, as opposed to the number of edits? Brookie 16:03, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Is there an answer to this? Brookie 14:00, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, but it's not used because (I gather) it's too much of a strain on the servers. It would be incredibly useful to have, though. — Matt Crypto 14:48, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Matt Brookie 17:21, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Lost my login

I just did two stupid things one right after another: 1) forgot my password, 2) hit the "new password" button before remembering that my registered email address is one I no longer have access to. I don't have an extensive history in Wikipedia, but I would like to keep my login name. Is their an administrator I can get to change my registered email address so I can reset the password again?

Administrators can't access the database, only developers can. You can register a similar account name and redirect your old userpage there. I'm afraid a developer will be able to help. If you can't access both your old wikipedia account and email account, there's no way you can prove they actually belong to you which is a requirement for such actions AFAIK. Mgm|^(talk) 20:55, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)

I think you mean developers will be unable to help? Ruakh 21:15, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ham County, Germany reference/genealogy

Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk.

You could work through these Google/Wiki results Ham County searchBrookie 16:06, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Biographical Entries (Not) In Alphabetical Order

Hello,

I recently bought a 1GB SD card so that I could download the English Tomeraider Wikipedia to my Palm m515.

I quickly discovered that in this edition, people entries are not in order of surname but in order of first name. So, for instance, Erik Zachte would be under "E" and not under "Z". Apparently the German edition of Wikipedia is in surname order.

A lot of the time I look people up is that I can't remember their first names.

Doing a full search takes far too long.

So, all in all, I think something needs to be done; and I'd be willing to help.

I've had a short e-mail conversation with Erik Zachte about this. He was the one who suggested I raise it here. The conversation is appended to this post (apologies if that makes it rather long but as I know very little about Wikipedia technology I thought I'd better let Erik speak for himself rather than trying to paraphrase him and get it all wrong).

Anyway, I think this is important and am willing to help. Unfortunately I don't speak Python although I have a smattering of Perl and Java.

What do you folk think?

Harold Fuchs, London, England

Here's my e-mail correspondence with Erik.

---

start of e-mails ------------------

From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 11:03 Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries

Harold, what I meant was a project where aliasses would be added manually. The actual term on Wikipedia is 'redirect', an article named 'Fuchs, Harold' that only contains text

1. REDIRECTHarold Fuchs

When you request article 'Fuchs, Harold', you will automatically be redirected to 'Harold Fuchs'.

There are mass updates done by bots, mostly written in Python. But this would need thorough discussion first, and it probably would not qualify for complete automation, as there is too much ambiguity in detecting relevant articles and composing proper redirect. Some bots are half automated, proposing a change and waiting for an OK after manual inspection.

Just drop the question at the village pump and see what comes out of it.

Oh, you can help by improving an article. Below every article there is an edit button so that you can expand or correct the text. That's the core idea of a wiki, where Wikipedia is shining example of. Contrary to intuition this low barrier does not hamper overall quality of the database.

More introductory info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal

Erik

.

---

Original Message-----

From: Harold Fuchs [8] Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 09:43 To: Erik Zachte Subject: Re: Wikipedia Entries

Erik,

You said "If you are really motivated you could start a project to add aliasses for all people articles"

1. Is there a way to identify "people articles"? Or do you just mean an entry that starts with either <letters>[space]<letters>[space}<letters> (name1 name2 name3) or with <letters>[space]<letters> (name1 name2)? This would be very easy to program in Perl using regular expressions. One would have to allow for dots (John F. Kennedy) and hyphens

2. What do you mean by "add aliasses"? I was thinking about the following pseudo code: if the entry starts with 3 names then

   add an entry in the form name3, name2 name1 "see" [link to] name1 name2 name3

elseif the entry starts with two names then

   add an entry in the form name2, name1 "see" [link to] name1 name2

endif

Is this what you meant? Or?

For the 3-name case one could add two new entries. One would be for name3 name2, name1 to cover people with two surnames and the other for name3, name1 name2 to cover people with two "first" names

Unfortunately, The ^&*% English have made it harder. I just found an entry "A. A. B. Bussy" (four names). The complete entry is like this:

---

[M] Antoine Alexandre Brutus Bussy (May 29, 1794 - February 1, 1882) was a French Chemist. He was the first to prepare Magnesium in a coherent form in 1831. [image] - This biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .

---

Unfortunately it doesn't say how I can help Wikipedia :-(

Regards, Harold

---

Original Message -----

From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 12:22 AM Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries

Harold,

You might raise the issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump which is a discussion forum for all kinds of things related to English Wikipedia.

I just realized that the category system offers some clues for which articles are about persons, but I have no idea how complete categorization is. There are also lists of famous scientists, sportsmen, politicians, that offer further clues.

If you are really motivated you could start a project to add aliasses for all people articles. This seems more feasible than the German templates. The hidden template system presupposes automated processing and I'm not sure many people would get enthusiastic to do his just for the TomeRaider version (German WIkipedia is also processed by other publishing software)

If after discussion you decide to give this a chance, you might add a project page, solicit coworkers and you might be amazed how many hands might be on the job, making it lighter work than you would expect, and a project that can be finished in weeks, or at most two months.

You could also discuss it at the Wikipedia mailling list, http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l but I would start with the Village Pump.

Cheers, Erik

-----Original Message-----

From: Harold Fuchs [9] Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 12:56 To: Erik Zachte Subject: Re: Wikipedia Entries

Erik,

Thank you.

Although my surname is German I don't speak enough for the German Wikipedia to be useful to me

It is a shame that the English Wikipedians didn't adopt a more logical template. Is there someone I could talk (e-mail) to about it?

It seems to me that the English Wikipedia has been considerably devalued because of this.

Regards, Harold PS enjoy your Wikibreak

---

Original Message -----

From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 11:56 PM Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries

Hi Harold.

Sorry for late answer. I also think it was a bad choice to use this arrangement for articles about people.

If you were interested in the German Wikipedia I would have a solution: they have a standard template on all people pages, with first name, last name, date and place of birth, etc. It is strictly standardized as it is meant specifically for automatic processing, in fact the template is hidden from view and only visible while editing an article.

Example:

{{Personendaten|
 NAME=Brandt, Willy
|ALTERNATIVNAMEN=Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm (eigentlich)
|KURZBESCHREIBUNG=[[Deutschland|deutscher]] [[Politiker]] ([[SPD]]), [[1969]]-[[1974]] [[Bundeskanzler (Deutschland)|Bundeskanzler]] der [[Bundesrepublik Deutschland|BRD]]
|GEBURTSDATUM=[[18. Dezember]] [[1913]]
|GEBURTSORT=[[Lübeck]]
|STERBEDATUM=[[8. Oktober]] [[1992]]
|STERBEORT=[[Unkel]] am [[Rhein]]
}}

This would have been an ideal basis to generate redirects to the proper article with first and last name reversed. These alias records would have to be stored in a separate file and only added to the output when all input was processed and when no article with that name was already available (there are a lot of manually added 'redirects' already in the database)

However in the English database there is no such standard template (not yet, more concepts have been introduced by German Wikipedians and copied elsewhere).

Many articles about people start with year and place of birth in the first sentence. A script could do some fuzzy searching in the first 200 chars and make an educated guess if this is a biographic article, but of course this will be far from perfect, I think a 50-60% score would have to be called be a sucess.

Also if a name needs to be reversed, how to do that properly?

How to discern <first name >space<middle name>space<last name> from <first name>space<last name one>space<last name two> (lots of last names are made up of separate parts)

Anyway, I will take no action on this. I'm very definitely taking a step back from TomeRaider programming, other Wikipedia tasks are waiting and even more important I need a long wikibreak on the earliest occasion.

So maybe wait for the German concept to spread.

Best regards, Erik Zachte

-----Original Message-----

From: Harold Fuchs [10] Sent: Wednesday, 02 March 2005 02:56 To: epzachte@chello.nl Subject: Wikipedia Entries

Sir,

I have just downloaded the Wikipedia in Tomeraider format. Fantastic.

I'm puzzled though:

People seem to be entered in <firstName>[space]<lastName> format. So, for example, I would be entered as "Harold Fuchs" and not as "Fuchs, Harold".

This means that you have to know the person's first name to look them up - unless you are willing to wait however many hours it will take to search the database using Tomeraider's "Find" facility.

Often I don't know the person's first name and that is why I am looking them up (!!!).

Can anything be done? Obviously a script of some sort but how many "mistakes" would that make, where for example "Suez Canal" would get changed to "Canal, Suez" which is probably *not* what we want ... (not what I would want anyway).

Any thoughts?

Harold Fuchs London, England PS I think I can still remember how to write perl ...

Wikipedian weblogs?

I'm getting the same feeling about Wikipedia that I had about Usenet in the early 90s, and the Web in the mid-90s-- that there's thousands of interesting conversations going on around me, but I have no way of looking for them.

The best solution I found for the web was weblogs-- so are there Wikipedian weblogs that link to interesting debates on the Wikipedia site? --robotwisdom 17:51, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It isn't exactly what you were discussing, but you may be interested in the Wikipedia Signpost, the Wikipedia newspaper. Cheers, Smoddy (_t^g_e^c) 18:15, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I created a page on meta some time ago now that has become pretty comprehensive. check out meta:Wikipedians who blog --Alterego 21:17, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

Semantic search

I've been scouring existing articles for 'bloggers' who haven't been tagged with that category-- I've added about 70.

I've been using the searchpattern "blog -bloggers" but the search process would be a lot easier if I could somehow specify I only wanted articles about people.

Is there already a way to do this? Or is there some way to force new articles to pick a major category, and tag them in a uniquely searchable way? --robotwisdom 15:12, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

See the article below - which might help Brookie 16:10, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

"below"? --robotwisdom 19:01, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Licencing for Images

I appreciate you're all going to jump up and down and scream RTFM, but I did. I uploaded a photo last night (that I took myself) and it's asking me to confirm the licencing on it, but doesn't tell me how to do that. I've spent 45 minutes searching the site for an answer. Shall I just remove my photo? [Posted by User:Matt.Whitby]

If you mean the little checkbox thingy, all you have to to is check it, then go ahead and upload. You'll also want to add a license tag so there aren't questions later -- the standard here is to add {{GFDL}} to the image's description page (where you should also mention that you took the picture yourself). For images with different license circumstances, see Wikipedia:Image copyright tags. --iMb~Mw 13:44, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Don't fret; we're happy to answer questions! If you hold the copyright to the photograph (and if you took it yourself, you almost certainly do), then when you uploaded it you granted permission for it to be used under the GFDL license (just like when you edit the text of an article). So you should probably add the tag {{GFDL}} to the image description page. Some people (like me) put their images in the public domain, in which case, you could add the tag {{PD}} instead. (And others license their photos under several other licenses in addition to the GFDL). I presume the image in question is Image:Turing flat.jpg? Thanks for uploading this — I don't suppose you have a higher-resolution version anywhere that we could use? Or any others of Bletchley Park? — Matt Crypto 13:47, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I uploaded a bigger version as requested and also checked the box when I uploaded it. The image is now way too big in the page and it still says copyright unknown. I don't think uploading images is a good thing for me to do. — Matt

I squared away the license tag for the Bletchley image, based on what you put in your upload summary (public domain). So you don't have to worry aobut that. In the future, you can click on the "edit this page" tab on the image page to change this yourself. It's just like editing a regular article page. Also, you can peek at Alan Turing to see how to shrink images (use thumb instead of frame, and the 300px in there is the width, feel free to adjust to what you think is best!) --iMb~Mw 08:25, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Superimposing images?

Is there any way to superimpose two images? For instance, I'm making maps of the Rhode Island State Highways, with each route highlighted on a map of the network. However, if even one route changes, I'll have to redo every map. But if I have one map for the network, and another with just the highlight and the rest transparent, I only have to change the background. --SPUI (talk) 06:04, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Yes, Photoshop uses layers. You'd have to seperate the routes and highlights on layers of their own and save a merge version, then edit the original if anything changes. Mgm|^(talk) 09:23, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
  • That's not what I'm talking about; I know how to automate the process with photoshop, but there's no automatic way to re-upload those 62 maps. It there any way to superimpose them with wiki code? Setting a table background doesn't seem to work. --SPUI (talk) 10:06, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• No, images cannot be superimposed with wikicode, or HTML for that matter. If you want to make the uploading quicker, maybe asking someone running a bot will help. Mgm|^(talk) 14:00, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
• Yes, images can be superimposed using floating divs, but unfortunately there are limitations and probable portability problems. You can see an example on my user page. In a quick test I see that recent MSIE (Win and Mac), Firefox and Safari do the right thing. Transparent PNG works fine on Mozilla and Safari, but MSIE needs the transparent image to be GIF. This really needs to be tested on more browsers, though. Oh, and I should sign this. --iMb~Mw 15:47, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Actually, MSIE can handle transparent PNGs, provided that they use binary transparency, not alpha transparency. See [11]. —AlanBarrett 18:02, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Table of Content

Can somebody please tell me how can i create a table of content? Im trying to find how to do it but have been unsuccessfull until now. Thank you!

• Tables apear automatically when you add more than three sections (see here. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 19:18, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Section#Table of contents (TOC) for a full explanation. Cheers, Smoddy (t) (e) (g) 19:16, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Charles II of England article is gone.

Charles II of England article is gone.How would one restore it?Tjc 01:17, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It has already been restored, but for future reference, see Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:25, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Input on calendar on 2003

Can I have some comments on the calendar on 2003 (formatting shamelessly taken from Common year starting on Wednesday)? I feel it's useful to have it directly in the article. Should I start adding these to other years? --SPUI (talk) 04:10, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Good idea - how about doing the calenders in Wikisource and then adding a link - it would be a neater presentation.Brookie 08:18, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm thinking it's best to have the bare-bones one directly in the article, maybe with a link to a bigger one (we already have articles like Calendars of 2005 and Common year starting on Wednesday. Maybe it should be split, with each month in the month section; unfortunately that would make it a bit harder to semi-automate. --SPUI (talk) 09:31, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

RfC shenanigans

User:JoshuaSchroeder and User:Ungtss have pending RfCs on each other, and both are pretty shady at this point. Thje one directed at Ungtss was created last Friday, never got the two required signatures in the appropriate time, but never got delisted. As the intended co-complainant, I withdrew it because it was apparent that JoshuaSchroeder had no desire to sign or update the page and it had been stretching beyond any reasonable grace period for him to get his act together. In the meantime Ungtss filed a complaint against him, claiming the other RfC as grounds for that one (ugh), and has gotten an anonymous IP address acting as the second person tosign it and is encouraging that person to register for the sole purpose of bringing the complaint, which also strikes me as severely against the rules and intentions of the RfC process. So now JoshuaSchroeder goes and tries to unwithdraw his complaint well after the time when it should have been closed. I'd appreciate it if someone came in and laid the law down on both of them, yanking the one long-past it's cancellation date (though if JoshuaSchroeder wants to make a brand new one without dragging me into it, fine) and also specifically stating that anonymous users cannot certify RfCs as one of two signatures to make it go forward, nor register for the sole purpose of endorsing. DreamGuy 17:19, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)

Help with revert

I noticed this morning that Academy Award had been emptied out. I tried to revert it to the last full version (following the directions), but I think I got caught in one of the server burps. (The history for the page shows that I made the last revert, but to a version in 2003, which isn't what happened.)

Any chance someone could take a look and try to fix it for real? Jim Huggins 17:04, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I've checked and it has already been done! Brookie 17:07, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hm ... it doesn't look right to me ... especially the History list. I tried clearing my cache ... is it just me, or does anyone else see this problem? Jim Huggins 17:16, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ok, it's weird ... if I'm logged-in anonymously, it looks fine. But if I'm logged in as myself, it looks like a blank page. Help? Jim Huggins 20:21, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Very odd! Brookie

Well, it appears fixed, now that someone else did an edit after me. Still, I've got an entry on my contributions page

that claims I edited the page back in 2003. Whatever ... Jim Huggins 02:00, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Loading images across languages

Does anyone know if I can display a thumbnail of an image in an English-language article if that image is found in the Wikipedia of another language? And if I can do this, what is the syntax? --Dzhebi 16:07, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You may want to load the images to Wikimedia Commons and use them there. You may even find that the images you want to use are already there. Gareth Hughes 16:54, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Systematic bias

I believe systematic bias is being introduced and protected by the author of this quote from his page on wikipedia "I hate white people, most of them can go to hell anyway. Their ancestors weren't slaves and had history, mine didn't. That's why I'm so pissed off at those hungry bloody bastards. I'd like to punch some whites in the face, just for my "mental health."[12]. 4.250.132.254 23:08, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It's a personal user page. They can voice whatever opinion they want on it. The user pages are not part of the Wikipedia encyclopedia project. As long as the user is contributing NPOV to articles, it' s fine. — J3ff 02:44, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I am Deeceevoice, the person whose user page the above link connects to. The poster is an idiot troll. I've never written such things anywhere on Wikipedia -- let alone on my user page. Ignore this ridiculous crap. deeceevoice 03:40, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Deeceevoice: The text quoted is there on your user page. I see it was added by an anon. If you don't want people to think it's your viewpoint, I suggest you remove it or make it clear that you didn't put it there.-gadfium 04:17, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the info, Gadfium, but I wouldn't have seen your note (I didn't plan on returning to this page) at all if another user hadn't alerted me to it via my talk page. There was some earlier vandalism of my page, and I failed to notice the paragraph (perhaps added by the same entity who lodged the complaint?). Just inane. deeceevoice 11:07, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The troll came from the University of California, whereas the person complaining came from Andover, New Jersey, according to my IP locator.--SqueakBox 21:03, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)

How do templates work?

I know the rough idea behind templates - that you make a [[Template:Useful Stuff]] page. I understand that {...} {{...}} and {{{...}}} are various forms and levels of parameter substitution. But I don't know the details os how the { brackets work and how you define the variable data that replaces them. Can someone directme to an overview page whether in wikipedia or maybe in meta? -- SGBailey 08:57, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)

Help:Template. —Korath (Talk) 10:31, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Question about moving an article

I'm currently working on improving the whistleblowing article and thought that the article should be moved to the title "Whistleblowing" from where it is now at "Whistleblower." It seems more appropriate to have the article focus on the idea of whistleblowing and discuss notable whistleblowers secondarily, rather than focus on what a whistleblower is and discuss the idea of whistleblowing secondarily. I looked at wikipedias naming convention and was left somewhat conflicted. It says to use the gerund of a verb but whistleblower is also a noun. Should I go ahead and move it? --Clngre 18:14, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

From a purely practical standpoint, I think editors are more likely to make a link to "whistleblower" than "whistleblowing". 68.81.231.127 00:47, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

editing references and see also list

Hi,

Please excuse my ignorance, this is my first session on Wikipedia.

I manage the Australian Museum's Fish Website at http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/.

I just looked at the Wikipedia page on the oarfish at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oarfish and thought that it would be good to add a link to the Australian Museum's page, which shows lots of colour pics and video of the Oarfish (see http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/rglesne.htm).

I am happy to add the link to the Wikipedia page, but am unsure whether it is ok to add it to the 'See also' section, or if this section is only used for links that point to other Wikipedia pages.

I have prepared hundreds of reliable pages on fishes, and I would be happy to add links to these, but want to be sure that I am doing it properly before proceeding.

Thank you, Mark

mamcgrouther@optusnet.com.au

• I've added the link; it belongs under "External links", which wasn't there before. Unfortunately, I suspect if you were to add a lot of these links, someone will object that you are "spamming" Wikipedia (regardless of your motivations). I suspect we lose a lot of nice references because of such objections. - Nunh-huh 04:41, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for adding the link. I can understand that some folks might think that I am spamming, but as you say, my motivations are 'pure'. The museum's pages have the potential to give Wikipedia users significantly more information via an external link. So how do you think I should handle this? Do you think that I should add the odd link here and there or email for each one, or just not bother? For example, I think that the Wikipedia page on the Fangtooth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangtooth) could be improved by adding a link to the Australian Museum's page at http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/acornuta.htm. I noticed that there is a link to one of the museum's pages already at #Image of a Common Fangtooth's mouth with teeth sockets visible#, which actually is designed to be a popup off the main page. Cheers, Mark

I would say keep adding some links here and there if it's clear that it's guiding the reader to more useful information, and if someone accuses you of spamming refer them to this discussion. As long as you don't create an enormous number I don't think people will be too suspicious. The spamming problem arises when someone adds a link to their online gambling website to an article about online gambling, or something like that. Adding links to pages that are clearly useful and informative is not only acceptable but very welcome. — Trilobite (Talk) 00:48, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

A couple of us recently started a page to try to facilitate this sort of thing. You might sign up at Wikipedia:Museum_projects#People_from_museums. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:14, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you both very much for these useful comments. I normally add a species page most days at work, so I'll make a point of checking out the Wikipedia entry for the relevant fish to assess whether a link to the museum page would add to the Wikipedia entry. If not, I won't touch it. I'll also check out the museum projects page as you suggest. Thank you again for your very speedy and helpful responses. Mark

Odd redirect

Woudlsomeone clever please suss out & kill this odd redirect Image:Esperanto_flag_tiny.png, assuming that's what it is. (The image seems to be on the commons, FWIW. v.confused. Thanks --Tagishsimon (talk)

Blanked it. That's the same trick the vandal used on the Big Bang article a couple of days ago: The page was redirected to another Wikipedia (in this case, the eo: one). Unlike a normal redirect, you can't just click on the "redirected from..." link to go back to the actual redirect. You have to manually enter it, like so:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Esperanto_flag_tiny.png&redirect=no

68.81.231.127 21:01, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Getting Off Clean up

I am new to Wikipedia. Have started editing an existing article called "Self Relationship" I am very excited about this article and want to improve it--believe me. To my great suprise (horror) I find the article is now on a Clear Up order. I found the comments of "Fieldspar" extremely unhelpful in directing me to specific things that need to be cleaned up for the article to be taken off "clean up" I would like to correct any errors or distortions introduced in my attempts to edit this piece. Can someone be more helpful and directive. Please. Strive to treat newcomers a bit more tenderly and respectfully. I believe this is in the spirit of Wikipedia. Signed, Robert. (3/5/05)

1. Look at the various Help files (easily found by clicking on the Help button), such as Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines, Wikipedia:How to write a great article, and the Wikipedia:Manual of Style.
2. Look at other pages. How does yours differ in presentation, structure, style, etc?

Having looked at the article in question (which, incidentally, is also going to have to be moved to Self relationship), there a lot of improvements that should be immediately obvious to you. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 19:45, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You might try asking for input on the talk page of the user who added the cleanup notice.

I found Wikipedia:Tutorial to be a great place to learn how Wikipedia editing works. If you go through the various pages, you will develop a better idea of how things work around here, particularly with regards to basic style and formatting. One obvious need in Self Relationship is for formatting, including bold text for the article title, perhaps some section headings, and definitely lots of internal links.

Also, an extra note, you can sign your comments on talk pages (and on pages like this one) but typing ~~~~. This is considered good Wiki etiquette as well as being a good way to let people know who you are so that they can contact you via your own talk page. -Aranel ("Sarah") 19:39, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Solana

Hi. I could do with some help with the Javier Solana article from someone with a good IP address search engine, and also someone who knows about Sockpuppet|sockpuppets. Leave me a message at user talk:SqueakBox. --SqueakBox 02:25, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)

Missing text in article

The article on Enkidu has a "jump cut" in the text indicating that part of the text is missing - see Talk:Enkidu for details. Someone really needs to rewrite the relevant passage and fix the article - I can't do it because I don't know enough about the subject. Lee M 00:47, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Mathematics illustration request

Hi! Would anyone be able to help me out in illustrating Secret sharing? I'm looking for a diagram that shows intersecting planes, similar to this image: [13]. I was hoping for three images showing one plane, then two planes intersecting along a line, then three planes intersecting at a point. — Matt Crypto 18:02, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'd try posting your request on Wikipedia:Requested pictures. — RJH 02:46, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Good tip, thanks. Someone's helped out. — Matt Crypto 12:18, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Would articles like this be appropriate additions?

To save a great deal of space, I have deleted the proposed article. To see it, visit this diff and scroll to the bottom. Smoddy (t) (e) 16:57, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There is a place for this sort of article, but you're right, it's not Wikipedia. Wikibooks.org would probably be more suitable, jguk 15:43, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. Perhaps a link could be added in an appropriate encyclopedic article (Bookbinding?) to this page, wherever it ends up? — RJH 18:01, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There's a lot of non-wrapping text in this article (eg "Paper drills can go through a stack of paper...") which entails a ridiculous amount of horizontal scrolling. Avoid! Avoid!! Avoid!!! Lee M 00:47, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Agree. (aaagh! >_<) Is it acceptable to edit this oneself? Also, to original poster, please don't post such huge articles in this page itself - link to an outside source... thanks! :) — flamingspinach | (talk) 06:24, 2005 Mar 5 (UTC)

Sorry for the double post..

Sorry for the double post, my browser froze and I didn't htink it posted here so I went ahead and posted it in the wikipedia help desk isntead.

-\

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk#What_.2Aexactly.2A_do_I_put_in_the_footer.3F

What *exactly* do I put in the footer?

I plan on making a site with alot of informatino and sources and I plan on using some stuff from wikipedia.

My question is... what do I put exactly (like can someone give me the HTML) in the footer to make the site OK with wikipedia rules.

I tried finding the exact stuff myself, but there is soooooooo much text and so many different help sections and to top it off I'd dyslexic and have a headache at the moment, lol, so if someone could please just tell me what to put in the footer so I can comply with wikipedia rules, that'd be awesome.

Thanks!

I normally just set up an ==External links== section at the bottom; do a bulleted list using asterisks, then put the URL and a text description in single square brackets after each bullet. Thus, for example:

*[http://www.wherever.org/stuff.html Prince Val's personal secrets]

But there are other formats in the help files. RJH 18:06, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• I think sie wants to know how to cite Wikipedia in an external site... in which case I shall direct hir to Citing Wikipedia. :) — flamingspinach | (talk) 06:32, 2005 Mar 5 (UTC)

• Oops, sorry. My bad. — RJH 02:49, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

My reading of the request is not that he wants to cite wikipedia, but that he wants to lift information from it. My understanding is that he can do that if he includes the "appropriate" public domain notices. But what those notices are and whether they apply to just what he lifts of to the entire page I've no idea. -- SGBailey 09:20, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)

Article accuracy struggle

I spent a good 30 minutes clicking through the many "help" and how to pages searching for instruction on how to disupute the accuracy of an article. This should be a link on every page. "Do you dispute this articles' acccuracy? Click here." I didn't want to edit the article without first proposing the edit, but how? I ended up leaving a comment on the discussion page, but I doubt that will be seen. I really wanted to submit it to some kind of disputed article cue. I think this kind of this exists, but where. It shouldn't be easier to edit a page than question it's veracity.

The entry in question: Wayback Machine.

To dispute the accuracy of an article, put the tag {{disputed}} at the top of the article, and put the reasons for the dispute on the talk page. Of these two actions, using the talk page is by far the most important. If we gave people a single-click equivalent of placing a disputed tag on a page, few would be likely to go to the talk page to explain the nature of the dispute.

Placing the disputed tag will put the article on a list of disputed articles, and the tag will be promptly removed if no reason is given. An explanation on the talk page will be seen by everyone who watches that article.

For everyone's convenience, I've linked the article in your message above.-gadfium 01:49, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I've had frustrations like this at times, too, but you can't believe the number of actions various people want to do. We can't put instructions on every page about how to do everything.

First: have you simply raised your issues on the talk/discussion page? That's usually where to start, rather than a formal dispute. Second, if you want to go the formal route, what you'll want to know is presumably covered at Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute. In general, Wikipedia:Topical index is the most comprehensive listing of Wikipedia-space pages; that, in turn, is the first item under "About Wikipedia" on the Community Portal. If you ever notice one that isn't covered there, it was an accidental omission, and should be added. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:55, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

Personal Sandbox

It seens like it should be fairly simple but after quite a bit of searching I can't find any information on how to add a personal sandbox to my namespace. Any pointers will be gratefully recived. Thanks in advance --ChemRad 21:36, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I just created a page in the normal way (you can call it what you want; you might try User:ChemRad/Sandbox). There might be something more sophisticated, but it works fine for me.

Oh, that's odd; I've just previewed this, and the page I suggested already exists; it seems that you have a personal sandbox already. Perhaps you want it to open in Edit mode (though you could just click the Edit tab); if so, do what I did: click on Edit, copy the address, and make it into an external link like this. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 21:56, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

New template

I would like to request assistance with a new template, Template:onlinesource. We basically need to go through all the old press references and add the template to the pages. - Ta bu shi da yu 02:43, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Update to this: I've made a new template Template:onlinesource2004. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:05, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Permanent 'You have a message'

I recently added a link to my Talk page, which allowed me to go straight into editing my personal test page:

• Personal sandbox

I then discovered that this generated a permanent 'new messaeg' alert; I could only get rid of it by removing the link. Is this a bug or a feature? Is there any way of using the link (apart from putting it somewhere other than my Talk page, I suppose)? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 17:06, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I had this same problem on the foundation wiki. The only thing that got rid of it was going to the history page of my talk page. I have no idea if that will work in your case, but it might be worth a try. --mav 23:43, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for this. I put the link back on my Talk page in order to try your 'go to the history page' trick — and found that it no longer caused the problem anyway. I've no idea what happened, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:06, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

mistaken copyright violation

I've begun an article (Irminenschaft) which was mistakenly tagged for a possible copyright violation. Following, I had followed the instructions to correct this (since, I am both the author and holder of the original copyright to the material), but still- the notice appears, and I remain unable to update the article... how long can I expect this to take in rectifying? thanks! James Hjuka Irminenschaft@aol.com Hjuka 12:27, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)Hjuka

I can't see a copyvio flag - seems to have been removed. If you are the copyright holder make that plain and remove any copyvio tags. Brookie 14:01, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, It's fixed- thanks for the feedback!Hjuka 19:40, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)Hjuka

قناة عربية إخبارية Need Help

Hello I am Tahqiq please answer in the my talk page.

I need help to find what is قناة عربية إخبارية ( Al-Faha Jamal Allah) for the Allah Verse in the Qoran. Thanking. --Tahqiq Halid as Sab al Alami 10:35, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

creating linking pages

I've contributed several articles to Wikipedia, but I have never understood how to do this:

Let's say you want to look for "Fischer Random Chess". Wikipedia has such an article.

But if you just search for "Fischer random," Wikipedia turns up nothing.

How can I make it so that entering "fischer random" redirects to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_Random_Chess

I've searched the faqs, and cannot understand this. I cannot further understand why, when you click on "what links here" there is not a box enabling you to enter various terms that would direct to that page. This would make Wikipedia far more efficient, since after creating a page, an author could list a whole bunch of common misspellings that would redirect to the correct page.

gnossie

See Wikipedia:Redirect. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:46, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

Attributing A Contribution To A User If The User Wasn't Logged In

I recently submitted a Wikipedia edit to Replicator (Stargate). However, I neglected to sign in and the edit was attributed to my network IP address, 138.78.20.2. Is there any way to have the edit attributed to my user name under these circumstances? The IP aforementioned is shared by every user at St. Mary's College of Maryland. --Exaltare 01:11, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The page would be Wikipedia:Changing attribution for an edit. This page, however, has quite some backlog. Also, not sure if it can be done if your IP adress is a shared adress. -- Chris 73 Talk 01:50, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism report (sorry if in the wrong place)

I was trying to find information on Shylock (in the Merchant of Venice) for a school project. The disambiguation page has had all the links replaced with "gooooon". Can someone who knows their way around Wikipedia better than me please dig up all the shylock pages and restore this page? Lexiconius 20:05, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Done. If you run into problems like this in the future, you can fix them yourself, usually by reverting the page; see Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version for specifics. —Charles P. ^(Mirv) 20:29, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Also, the article entitled "Greatest Paintings" is silly. I put my comments up on the Talk:Greatest Paintings page, but someone with more experience than I have should probably go out there and erase the page. Thanks!

Voxexmachina 06:16, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Deleting a category

Help! I can't seem to figure out how to delete a category that I accidentally created and which should not exist. Any suggestions? Please respond to my talk page. Thanks! Mona-Lynn 12:09, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Answered on talk. 131.211.208.49 12:16, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

List of Forks

Hey, I recently listed the website Localcolorart.com on Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks for a vast log of violations. However, I didn't send an email to said site, as I wasn't sure if I should, or if that should be left for an admin/someone who knows what they're doing. Should I go back and handle this still? I really don't want something so glaring to just be left to sit. --InShaneee 04:38, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Boholana who needs to remember some childhood songs

27 february 2005 Sydney, Australia

Greetings. Hi,I love your infos on the visayan dialects; which is an extensive body of work. Well done.

I was born in Agusan del Sur but grew up in Bohol, Philippines. My son, William Luthgard is 15 mos old. I need to teach him Cebuano but I'm facing difficulties as I have very few 'bisaya'friends and we all speak English at home exclusively.

My family has lived in Australia for nearly twenty years and has lost touch sa akong binisaya. Palihug tabangi ko pinaagi sa pagpadala nako ug mga song lyrics sa kantang binisaya,for example, 'paru-parong bukid....ug ubang mga binisayang nursery rhymes nga akong nakalimtan. Daghang salamat.

I only need the lyrics because once I see them, I will remember the tunes. Cebuano is also my son's heritage which is an asset that he will inherit, one day. We need your help because my Australian husband is ambivalent wether my son learns to speak visayan or not but I am determined that billy will understand if not speak his mother's native tongue. Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Send to cleanchatter00@yahoo.com.au

---

or pinoynotes@optusnet.com.au

User talk:Rhobite

Whenever I try to visit this page, either by clicking a link or by typing in the search box, a file download box appears and says that it's an unknown file type. But all other pages are fine.--212.100.250.218 08:53, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Works fine for me and there don't seem to be any odd characters on the page. What browser settings and OS do you use? 131.211.208.49 12:13, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

A few mergers seem in order

Unregistered (on principle) Lynx-user that I am,I can't merge articles,but there are a two pairs I've flagged at least in comments.

• William A. Bootle and William Augustus Bootle (both in Centenarians category but of course one man)
• Ageplay and Age play (one had been flagged for cleanup)

Anyway,I hope someone finds time for these.--Louis E./le@put.com/12.144.5.2 22:51, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Merging involves cutting and pasting and then redirecting. See Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. RickK 23:29, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)

And composing in Lynx,I can not cut and paste.--L.E./12.144.5.2 02:58, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I don't think this is necessarily true - you could use an external editor (such as emacs, which has a nice wikipedia mode available) and cut/paste in there. See [14] Lupin 14:01, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sales redirection

I have been working on an article and suddenly I noticed two phrases had a double-underline. Clicking on either phrase takes the user to a website that is selling items such as those described in the phrases.

The big problem is that I can't seem to fix them. Moreover it seems to be an automatic thing. If I type either phrase anywhere in the article, they immediately receive this attribute. The phrases are:

fine art musical instruments

Is Wikipedia automatically linking these to get funds?

Nope. One explanation is that you are reading Wikipedia articles through a third-party "mirror" site. These sites are allowed to copy Wikipedia's content, and they may intersperse advertising with the article. They're not official Wikipedia sites. Another explanation is that your computer is infected with spyware, which takes over your browser and inserts ads into the pages you view. Be careful editing articles, because there's one package which inserts these links when you edit - so they get into the article and everyone else ends up seeing them. Rhobite 20:46, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)

I thought serverlogic3.com was blacklisted because of their program's nasty habit of mucking up Wikipedia articles with irrelevant spam. If that was the problem, I wonder why it wasn't caught by the filter. —Charles P. ^(Mirv) 09:14, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

How to disambiguate people in the same category

I need some advice. What should I do when there are two people in the same category with the same name. For instance, if there were two people name Joe Blow and one was a soldier and one an author I could do something like this: [[Joe Blow (author)|]] and [[Joe Blow (soldier)|]]. But what do I do if they are the same thing. Here's a real world example, there are two ice hockey players named Petr Sykora. They are both Czech, both have played in the NHL and both are notable enough for an article. Do I make the most notable (he already has an article) [[Petr Sykora]] and the less notable [[Petr Sykora (2)]]? If not, how do I handle this? Thanks Kevin Rector 16:10, Apr 5, 2005 (UTC)

[[Petr Sykora (<Team> ice hockey player)]], perhaps? [[Petr Sykora (2)]] is bad title, unless he is really refered to like that. For historical figures, sometimes you can use the year of birth and year of death as disambiguating term.

I took it to the mail list and the best suggestion (and the one I'm going with was to use: Petr Sykora (b. 1976) and Petr Sykora (b. 1978). Kevin Rector 19:05, Apr 5, 2005 (UTC)

Exactly. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:44, Apr 5, 2005 (UTC)

Tracking down a tag

Ah, mea culpa. This deals with Image:Karakuwa-Miyagi.png: I took the image from the [Japanese page], and neglected to look closely at the copyright tag, figuring something like a city map would have been covered, and also not having Read The Fine Manual closely enough. The Japanese tag doesn't exist, but it is an slightly adjusted picture from the [Japanese Miyagi prefectual site]...which also is untagged. Could someone with better Japanese skills than I have go over and ask where that particular map came from?

The likelihood is that that map is Public domain (a Minnesota county map without a tag on the Minnesota page would be a comparible bet: if it weren't, it wouldn't stand long before being replaced) is quite high, and it's a nice map. I'd rather not go hunting for a similar one if I can help it.

Thanks! William McDuff 11:48, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Spelling Errors in Hindi Language on Main Wikipedia Pages

Spelling Errors in Hindi Language on Main Wikipedia Pages

Hi, in those pages and parts of wikipedia that us normal users cannot edit, like the main page, the languages page, and the languages section on the left panel of every page, hindi is misspelled in hindi itself. So to the admin, or whoever has the control of it, please change it, this is the current spelling: हिन्दी And this is what it is supposed to be: िहन्दी The same error of "accents" was made in hindi all over wikipedia also. Some other people and I have been correcting this. If you have a database of pages that contains individual words in this language, please send it to me so I may have a look and fix accordingly.

For reference, the spelling on the Hindi page has been corrected already.

Added a few minutes later: Actually, I just noticed that the same error persists in Wikipedia Hindi...so is there a way for the admins to change this at all places at once, or will we have to do it one by one as we encounter it? Because the latter is a huge task and for an error this great, the quicker the fix, the better. Please let me know, my e-mail address is abhishekbh@gmail.com --Abhishekbh 18:58, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• We don't have an "ambassador" for Hindi. Is there someone who can take responsibility for this, or knows who could follow it through? -- Jmabel | Talk 02:44, Apr 5, 2005 (UTC)
  • Since no one seems to be stepping up, I will copy this to Talk:Hindi and hope someone will take it up from there. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:07, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

• The reason you think this is a spelling mistake is because your computer has not been set up to render Devanagari and other Indic scripts properly. My computer displays Hindi correctly when written हिन्दी. Indian scripts use complex text rendering with Unicode and if your OS/Browser doesn't support this then you will carry on seeing incorrect text. Please do NOT change what you think is incorrect. Sukh 01:14, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Sukh, I will download the required packages to fix the problem. And Jmabel, sorry for the late reply, but I am ready to take responsibility, if no one else has already done so...--Abhishekbh 19:33, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

wikicommons

How do i include an image from wikicommon in wikipedia? Thanks. Roscoe x 15:45, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Just like any other image. There's no special anything, just include it like it was on en: -- Cyrius|✎ 16:32, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

NAMBLA

North American Man-Boy Love Association is currently a morass of pro-pedophile propaganda. My attempts to fix this are being reverted by User:Corax, who appears to be a NAMBLA sympathiser. Since I am already well over three reverts, I could use some help. Adam 09:16, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Holding nose and poking page with a long pole. Err, not from me. Sorry. — RJH 19:38, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Template:Swatch

I made some changes to Template:Swatch. What do you think? Feel free to fix it. Josh Lee 02:46, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)

• I can't see anything inherently wrong with the page, but what is it supposed to do? Mgm|^(talk) 09:18, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)
  • Check the What links here link. Basically it lets you type in any color and it makes a litle square in that color. In the previous version, the name of the color was not visible enough, and it used a table. Josh Lee 19:03, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)

Need help importing 1000+ law articles into WP

I've been talking with Kevin Boone about the possibility of importing his 1000+ legal articles into WP ; greating expanding the number, depth and breadth of articles here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:English_law

His website with this content is here : http://law.web-tomorrow.com/twiki/bin/view

The problem is that they are in TWiki, and extensively cross linked.

Kevin has said that he will only consider the import if it can be done "relatively automatically".

This collection of articles would *greatly* improve the English law section of WP, so I'm hoping someone can help.

thanks, Darren.kruse 02:36, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• It's probably a moot question, but have you cleared whether it's allowed to copy it all here under copyright law? 131.211.210.15 07:48, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It doesn't look as if the information is copyrighted in such a way that it can be transferred to Wikipedia. Each individual contributor would have to sign up to the GFDL (in which case the edit histories would have to be copied across as well), or fully release all copyright claims. Noisy | Talk 08:19, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)

Good points, I'm currently working on the assumption that 90+% of the articles are written by Kevin, so I'm less concerned about the minority of articles that may not come over *initially*

Of greater concern is finding a technical means to automatically / programatically import the 1000+ articles. Of course if we can muster 20 people, that's only 50 each ! Darren.kruse 23:59, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bots - You might want to place a bot request. Mgm|^(talk) 21:24, Apr 2, 2005 (UTC)

Even better Wikipedia:Bot requests Kevin Rector 16:15, Apr 5, 2005 (UTC)

Obtain a permission to use a praphic and text of a book from Ballantine Books

Dear Ballantine Book: My name is Elizabeth C. Christenson, MD. I would like to have your written permission to use one graphic picture and text from page 50 (The Yin-Yang of the Mountain) of the book entitled "Between Heaven and Earth, A Guide to Chinese Medicine", by Harriet Beinfield et al. This picture and text will be included in a chapter that I write, entitled "Five Element Music" for a book entitled "Harp Therapy". The main author of the book is Christina Tourin and the book publisher will be first at Emeral Harp Production and possible other publisher at the later date depends on the demand of the book. The expecting date of publication is around July 2005. This book will be used as a standard text book for training harp therapist. Please write me back with the exact way it should be credited on the book. Thank you for your assistance. Elizabeth C. Christenson, MD chimedical@doctor.com chimedica@hawaii.rr.com

I'm sorry, but Wikipedia is not Ballantine Books and cannot give permission for the reuse of any of their materials. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:12, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

OK, THAT was weird. How on earth can someone get confused into thinking this has anything to do with Ballentine Books? DreamGuy 05:27, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

That was most definitely weird. A doctor who is so nuts as to confuse a public Web-based encyclopedia with a private publisher of dead tree books is not the kind of doctor I want within 100 miles of me! --Coolcaesar 23:33, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Pornographic image

My user talk page has been hit with a pornographic image and I can't get rid of it. Will some administrator do the necessary please, or I shall just have to leave Wikipedia. This has spoiled the experience for me! Eilthireach 19:16, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Redirects to pages with bookmarks?

It appears that the bookmark doesn't work when used in a redirect. An example is Octane rating. Is there a way around this?

• Do you mean you want to redirect to a subheader in an article? No, that's not possible as editing those would immediately kill such a link and there's no way to determine what's pointing there. Mgm|^(talk) 15:12, Apr 2, 2005 (UTC)
  • Yes, that was what I meant - thank you. So I guess at some point you would possibly just split out a subheading such as this that has grown and is a subject in it's own right? Any opinions on this specific case of Octane rating? Spalding 17:10, Apr 2, 2005 (UTC)
    • Given that half the petrol article is about octane ratings, I think it could be split into two reasonably-sized articles. -- Cyrius|✎ 18:40, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
• Yep, you'd split out an article on Octane rating and leave a link to the new article (Main article: Octane rating) at the top of the section and a few summary paragraphs below that. Mgm|^(talk) 21:12, Apr 2, 2005 (UTC)

help with template parameters

I am trying to create Template:Dichotomouskey (to link to the Wikibooks project Dichotomous Key) but don't know how to use parameters effectively. I copied the code from Template:Cookbook, but that will only work when the Wikipedia page title is the same as the Wikibooks page. The Dichotomous Key, however, is organized by latin name (as in Dichotomous Key:Animalia) and not common name. Can someone change Template:Dichotomous Key so that it uses something other than the page name? (i.e. so I could type {{dichotomouskey|Animalia}} and make a working link) Tuf-Kat 20:06, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

Nevermind, I figured it out using Template:Wikisource. Someone may want to check and see if there is a better way to do it, though, since I only figured out what worked through trial and error. Tuf-Kat 20:33, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

Animalia? Aren't you supposed to use Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life taxoboxes? If not, I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific in what you're trying to get done. Mgm|^(talk) 21:20, Apr 2, 2005 (UTC)

Weirdness

What the hell is going on? Instead of saying "Article" it says "cabal conspiracy", instead of "discussion" it's "groupthink", instead of "history" it's time travel, instead of "move" it's "teleport", and instead of "watch" it's "stalk." Is this the work of a hacker, or is it just an April Fool's Day prank by a developer? → JarlaxleArtemis 05:13, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

• As far as I can tell it was a joke by an admin. But I only checked what happened to the "edit this page" button. Mgm|^(talk) 07:50, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

Admins who think they're funny. -- Cyrius|✎ 12:15, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Of course admins are funny. I should know, because I'm one myself. I didn't find this joke funny, though. Mgm|^(talk) 13:03, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

Image does not exist

Image:Earth.jpg says Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. An image is shown. I wanted to point it out in case there is a DB problem. (I was adding images to Category:Images of Earth) -SEWilco 05:10, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

For some reason, the description page didn't exist. None of the developers cared to comment on the issue. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:54, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Could it be that the person who first uploaded it didn't go in and do the page edit? I'm not sure. It'd be good to have the image source listed. But the image isn't being used anyway, so it will probably get deleted at some point. — RJH 21:39, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's not it, the description page gets created automatically by the software. -- Cyrius|✎ 12:11, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Fortunately, it looks like Cyrius' creation of the description page did not have obvious side effects. I listed the image for deletion so it should soon be a non-issue. (Source of image not specified, image not used, near-duplicate of similar images). (SEWilco 05:07, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC))

RFC in Spanish

Hi! Does anybody know what or where the wiki RFC in Spanish is? (No spanish link, searched hi and low)I need an answer pronto, por favor. I posted a sample of one our native languages Chabacano , the user is saying it is a prayer and we have to be neutral or something like that. I'm in a revert edit war now. Help ! Gracias.--Jondel 08:45, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't see anything obvious. I suggest that you ask on the Spanish Wikipedia rather than here. -- Jmabel | Talk 16:23, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

Please look at this [15](second time already) . He says that this is a prayer and articles have to be neutral (non -religious) . ( no deben contener "Propaganda o proselitismos de ningún tipo". I'm not proselytizing just giving a language sample, the Our father in Chavacano.) Unilateral delete:[16] . No reason given , but a notice that I used an autotranslator. Still that is no reason to unilaterally delete the article. It is hard to believe that the Spanish of Lupang Hinirang is that horrible. In the articles of Jose Rizal, Corazon Aquino, Ferdinand Marcos, he keeps removing the [Categoría: Gente de las Filipinas]. He wants all categories to fit into his. There is only one category available writers(ecritores)

I will be communicating with Angela and asking the Spanish wikipedia. I can't seem to locate the RFC. I'll just go to the administrators or Cafe(the Village Pump equivalent.)--Jondel 00:48, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

---

Draft Articles

Is there such thing as a personal sandbox or some way other than off-line editing that I can work on an article over a period of several days without it being released? Shoaler 15:51, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You could use a user subpage, although it's not really private as people will still see it in Recent Changes. Goplat 16:21, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, that's just what I was looking for. I don't need privacy, just some place to work. Shoaler 17:02, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Need help keeping table from overlapping text

When I view K (New York City Subway service) in K-Meleon (which uses the same rendering as Firefox) at certain text and window sizes, a line of text is behind the table with the blue K and KK. This isn't nearly as bad with images (and is fixed with a refresh). Is there a way to fix this? --SPUI (talk) 20:06, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't have Firefox installed here, so I can't really fiddle with it myself, but does it help to give it a left margin (i.e., {| style="margin-left: 0.5em")? —Korath (Talk) 22:40, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

Aha, that didn't work but a margin-top did. I really should have used a template here. --SPUI (talk) 22:52, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Still a couple minor problems on S (New York City Subway service). First, the first line of text is vertically aligned to the bottom rather than the top of the S in a gray circle. It's much worse in Internet Explorer; the first line is aligned to the top of the black SS/SHUTTLE and green SS boxes! Additionally all the boxes with only SS are cut off at the top - about 1/3 of the letters are simply missing. The box is full size but the letters are being clipped. Thanks for any help. --SPUI (talk) 11:22, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It looks perfect in K-Meleon now; unfortunately there are still a few problems in IE - see Image:SS cut.png. --SPUI (talk) 12:47, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

No idea how to fix the letters. It seems to be a strange css incompatibility; if I cut and paste the html onto another server and look at it there, they come out whole. —Korath (Talk) 12:51, Apr 2, 2005 (UTC)

Any idea about the fake image box overlapping the text? Or is that an IE bug and/or happens with images too? --SPUI (talk) 13:27, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've confirmed that that happens with images too. Oh well. --SPUI (talk) 13:50, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I did manage to fix the cropping of the SS by using an extra  <br> and <br>  before and after. Not sure why, but it works. --SPUI (talk) 13:57, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

missing page how does this happen

A number of weeks ago I searched for "scandals gate suffix" and found a great page that listed all the different scandles that end in gate... watergate, nipplegate, zippergate... etc.

I come back today and this search no longer works. Nor does any other variation...

I tried to search some of the individual scandals and found at the bottom the link to "scandals suffixed with gate" but when I hit that link ... it says wikipedia has no such category.

So the question is... how does a great page like that disapear, why, and how do we get it back.

All best, Rob

I think you may be looking for List of scandals suffixed with gate. Sometimes the built-in Wikipedia search tools don't work as well as they could. To find this list, I went straight to Google and added site:wikipedia.org to the query. --iMb~Meow 07:30, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)